The Perks of Blogging and Living in Hollywood ***

So, if you blog regularly you might get some pretty weird marketing emails in your inbox. Evidently, many people live off of their blogs or at least collect tidy sums from them. In the early days, I responded to a few and got some pretty beautiful Le Creuset pots and pans in the most amazing turquoise. That was worth reviewing weird products like sweat wipes for your adolescent and inserting links to barstool companies. I used to put ads on my blog, too, through the nightmarish mom's blog metropolis, but let's face it -- they're obnoxious and made me feel ashamed to participate in the grosser elements of our culture. Let's not even talk about the phrase mommy blogger. My blog is named after a line in a Yeats' poem, for goodness sake, and I slapped that name on it over six years ago because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. It couldn't be any more ponderous or even, arguably, pretentious, but c'est la vie for a moon, worn as if it had been a shell. I removed all ads from my blog a long time ago, and I just like it so much better. All me, all the time -- like Faye up there, after her big win. I sure didn't think that I'd attract some of the things I happen to attract now. Today, I received -- for the second time -- an appeal that I think you might enjoy.


My name is XXXXXX, and I am a producer for a major network here in Los Angeles.  I saw that you ran the popular Elizabeth Aquino blog and I wanted to see if you or any of your friends would like to be a part of our new TV series. Please see the verbiage below:

NOW CASTING:

Are you and your family terrified of going to the doctor?

Are you afraid of what you’ll uncover?

Are you hiding symptoms from each other… and even yourself?

A MAJOR BROADCAST NETWORK and TWOFOUR AMERICA are now casting families for a radical experiment! This new and exciting show will help change your life and uncover all the things that might be lurking under the surface … ultimately improving your health, happiness, and your life forever - not just for yourself, but for the whole family.

We are looking for families in the greater Los Angeles area who are ready to undergo this transformative experience and face their doctor fears once and for all.

Families of all shapes and sizes are welcome, but families must include children and/or teens.

Good lord, ya'll. Should I respond? Maybe I'll do so in another post.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth, of the popular Elizabeth Aquino blog

*** In case you don't understand this post or are visiting for the first time, think of the word irony.

Reuben Casserole and Yeats

Misery doesn't always reign over here at a moon, worn as if it had been a shell. Since I just had to type out that ridiculous title to this blog, I think I should apprise those of you who are new readers why it's so unwieldy. Then I'll tell ya'll about the titular Reuben Casserole. When I started this blog almost exactly six years ago, I thought it was going to be a little poetry, a little parenting, a little of this and a little of that. I didn't know blogs from War and Peace, so I gave it a line from one of my favorite W.B. Yeats poems. The poem is called Adam's Curse, and I'd venture to say that some of the lines are the most beautiful in the English language, particularly when you say them out loud.

Here, try it:

Adam's Curse

We sat together at one summer’s end,

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,   

And you and I, and talked of poetry.

I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,   

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.   

Better go down upon your marrow-bones   

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones   

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;   

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet   

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen   

The martyrs call the world.’

                                          And thereupon

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake   

There’s many a one shall find out all heartache   

On finding that her voice is sweet and low   

Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know—

Although they do not talk of it at school—

That we must labour to be beautiful.’

I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing   

Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.

There have been lovers who thought love should be   

So much compounded of high courtesy   

That they would sigh and quote with learned looks   

Precedents out of beautiful old books;   

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;   

We saw the last embers of daylight die,   

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky   

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell   

Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell   

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:   

That you were beautiful, and that I strove   

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown   

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

Sigh. 

Did you sigh, particularly after that penultimate verse?

Anywho. This casserole is outrageous, especially if you like a reuben. Vegetarians, vegans and bottled Thousand Island dressing haters need read no further.

Ingredients:

1 32 oz. jar of sauerkraut

2 tsp caraway seeds

1 medium onion, diced

1 pound Swiss/Gruyere cheese, grated

3/4 lb. sliced pastrami (or corned beef), cut up roughly

1 giant bottle of Thousand Island dressing (I got Ken's Steakhouse brand under the illusion/delusion that it's less chemical-y than the standard brand) or 2 cups

6 slices of Rye Bread, cut into 1-inch cubes

1/4 cup butter, melted

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

1. Drain sauerkraut and rinse.

2. In a large bowl, combine sauerkraut, onions, caraway seeds.

3. Spread mixture evenly into the bottom of a casserole dish.

4. Top with half of the cheese, half of the salad dressing and all of the pastrami. Top with the remaining salad dressing and the remaining cheese.

5. In a large bowl toss the bread cubes with the melted butter to coat. Sprinkle bread cubes over casserole.

6. Bake, uncovered, about 35 minutes or until heated through and bread cubes are browned.

Knock yourself out.

Advice from another century

My friend Jody posted the above page on her Instagram this morning, and I just about fell over laughing. The first two sentences alone sustain me. If I were to court Insanity, what would I wear and how would he look? I imagine I might carry forth the naked metaphor I've played with over the last few months and wear nothing. Insanity, of course, would wear old-school faded Levis and beat-up Converse high-tops. He'd be broad-shouldered and weigh closer to too much than too little. After the courting, Insanity would read aloud to me from whatever fiction he was carrying and pay all my debts in cash. When we needed to get away, Insanity would insist on Bora Bora, a hut with a glass floor over the ocean. I think Bora Bora suits your nakedness, Insanity would say as he helped smear sunscreen onto my back. But listen to this, he'd say, the other hand holding up a scruffy Yeats, opened to Adam's Curse:

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;   

We saw the last embers of daylight die,   

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky   

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell   

Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell   

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:   

That you were beautiful, and that I strove   

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown   

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

Afterward, Insanity and I would dive down under the hut and look upward at the world through the wavy blue.

My Half Century Plan

via apartment therapy

So, in exactly one month, I'll be fifty years old. I love a birthday, mine included. I'm decidedly not the no gifts, please girl. So. This is what I want for my birthday:

1. Two weeks in the above little house on the Isle of Wight.
2. A trip to County Sligo, along the paths that Yeats walked 
3. A paddle board lesson in a slimming wet-suit with a cute surfer guy of any age
4. A tiny, perfect mermaid tattoo on my left inner wrist
5. A car tour through Badlands National Park, perhaps tripping on a tiny amount of an hallucinogenic

Reader, don't you wonder which of these I'll do?

Heart Mysteries and Circus Animals and W.B. Yeats' Birthday

Maud Gonne, the Irish revolutionary and Yeats' unrequited love and me, Elizabeth Aquino, showing my unrequited love for WB Yeats.

It's William Butler Yeats' birthday today, and even though he was born nearly 150 years ago and wrote of a world vastly different than our own, his poetry still resonates deeply with me. As a young woman, I was completely enamored with nearly everything he wrote and struck, especially,  by his unrequited love for the beautiful revolutionary, Maud Gonne. The title of this blog is a line from one of my favorite poems called Adam's Curse, and the recording of his recitation of a very early poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, still gives me shivers, especially when he says and live alone in the bee-loud glade.

Here's a copy of one of his last poems, one of my favorites. If you're not a poetry lover -- or even liker -- or if you're unfamiliar with Yeats, the first two parts of the poem look back on the poet's writing and life, his labors and the things he felt were important. He references a few of his poems and themes, and if you find that language difficult, you might scan all the way down to the last stanza which has, I think, some of the most powerful, beautiful and humbling lines ever written. 

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I.

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. 

Anonymous reminds me of a poem

William Butler Yeats and his wife Georgie, late 1920s

The other day, an anonymous commenter alluded to a Yeats poem that I had not read or if I had, it was forgotten. Strange to me -- that the image of coats and capes and robes and being naked are haunting me of late -- it's all been said before, but there's something comforting about poetry buried deep in the unconscious peering out through my same eyes.

A Coat

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat:
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.

William Butler Yeats

Roses, Wind, Anthem and Yeats

That's a rose that hung over a falling-down wall on my street the other day. I took it with the camera on my phone, and it certainly doesn't do the thing justice, but it was riotously perfect. Despite the profuse rose bloom, it's getting cold here in Los Angeles, some kind of blustery wind is blowing the palm fronds about, we've heard that there's snow in the mountains and tonight is supposed to go down into the 30s. For all those who scorn the "lack of seasons" we have here in Los Angeles, I throw that at you, extra hard. I mean, I'm going to have put on socks with my clogs today!

I've done my daily Anthem Blue Cross chores, talked to the lovely Natasha at the California Insurance Commission, folded some laundry, procured a plumber for the broken toilet, caught up with my friend D who has been itinerant of late (we discussed why his dear friends shouldn't move to Ireland, especially because of the weather), neglected to go for a walk, eaten a bowl of cereal with frozen Trader Joe's blueberries, made a few telephone calls for my job and am now off into the big, wide world.

What are you up to?

The Irish might not have good weather, but they sure have a monopoly on poets, and here's one of my favorites:

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W.B. Yeats, 1865

Now that my ladder's gone

William Blake

I rode down 5th Avenue at three in the morning in a taxi, new to the city and enraptured, already. Much was broken but much was beginning, and when the taxi came to a stop, I peered through the windshield from the dark back of the car and wondered aloud what was going on. The circus is in town, the driver said, in a thick accent, and just then I saw them, the animals, giraffes and elephants, some horses, a zebra, walking across 5th Avenue in an orderly line, making their way toward Madison Square Garden, horns honking, lights shining, eyes blinking, a fantastical mirage.

This morning, I'm thinking that we make art and beauty, literally, out of shit. That that is my impulse and, I imagine, many others'.

Here's a Yeats poem that I haven't thought about in a while.

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I.

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, I sought it daily for six weeks or so. Maybe at last, being but a broken man, I must be satisfied with my heart, although Winter and summer till old age began My circus animals were all on show, Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what. II What can I but enumerate old themes, First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams, Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose, Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems, That might adorn old songs or courtly shows; But what cared I that set him on to ride, I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride. And then a counter-truth filled out its play, 'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it; She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away, But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it. I thought my dear must her own soul destroy So did fanaticism and hate enslave it, And this brought forth a dream and soon enough This dream itself had all my thought and love. And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea; Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of. III Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.  -- William Butler Yeats

RUN!

Most mornings, I lie in bed, the sun slanting through the blinds and muster the will to not so much get up, because I'm not depressed and actually love the morning, but, rather rise and go, now -- move my body, get up and go, you have to exercise, you have to start, again. It's an irritating dialogue that I have each morning with my deep heart's core, and nearly always, the indefatigable one is the voice that takes its cue from the ticking clock, the smell of coffee, the arthritic big toe, and I don't get up and go. 

So.

I downloaded an app on my Android (who knew I'd be typing sentences like these when I learned to type in the ninth grade from Senor Martinez, my pinky poised delicately over the p on the black, manual typewriter, waiting for his soft-inflected Spanish p,f,p,f,p,f,p,p,f,p) that is going to coach me toward a 5K. I'll type that again, my fingers flying: I downloaded an app on my Android that is going to coach me toward a 5K. A nice woman named Alison starts me off with a warm-up walk of about three minutes and then suddenly urges me to RUNNN! and I pick up my feet and my thighs, thighs that haven't lifted into the perpendicular in quite some time, and I ru -- well -- shuffle. I do this for about thirty seconds or so until Alison mercifully tells me to WALK! and I walk until she pipes in, again to RUNNNN! and her voice is lilting, she is encouraging me to RUN! as if there were a deep, green Irish meadow in front of me, the great Yeats beckoning me to the Lake Isle of Innisfree, we will arise and go there, the poet says, so I lift my feet, my thighs, and ru -- well -- shuffle until the poet is blurry and Alison tells me to WALK, and I do. I walk, my face on fire, sweat running into my eyes, perhaps they're tears of relief, really, and right now the walks are much longer than the runs, and I'm doing it, I'm going to do it.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning, to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day,
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

William Butler Yeats (1864-1939)

Treading Softly

I nearly missed my favorite poet, W.B. Yeats' birthday (June 13, 1865), but as the night gets darker, I'll pull down my collected poetry and dip in.




He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven


Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light.


I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.


William Butler Yeats


You can listen to Anthony Hopkins read it:



And if you're a real Yeats aficionado, check out this site.

The Beast in the Backyard

Take it, take it, take it now, he said, jumping, grinning, a blur.
The beast in the backyard didn't slouch toward us
but stood tall
and round
and high
You only have one childhood, she said.

Small Stone 10

My Friend Missy

Yeats Tower

One of my oldest friends in the world, a dear and beautiful woman who I went to college with (nearly thirty years ago!) has just moved for a period of time to Ireland with her academic husband and their three children. She has started a blog, and today's entry was what I would call ENCHANTING.

I needed the escape, to tell you the truth, and so might you.

Find it HERE.

Happy Birthday, W.B. Yeats

I started this blog nearly three years ago, named it a moon, worn as if it had been a shell for a line in one of my favorite poems by William Butler Yeats. It's the poet's birthday, so I'll post it in his honor, again.

Adam's Curse

We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, "A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world."
                                              And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There's many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, "To be born woman is to know --
Although they do not talk of it at school --
That we must labour to be beautiful."
I said, "It's certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough."

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

Culture Vulture

I felt a bit like a vulture yesterday, swooping down and into a local Borders bookstore that is closing and had a big sale on its remaining merchandise. I wandered the fiction and poetry aisles, lured by the 30%-50% off signs, and picked up copies of Yeats' The Tower, Gary Snyder's Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, and Lucille Clifton's Voices. Then I walked across the street and ate crispy onion rings dipped in barbecue sauce at The Waffle while reading Anne Roiphe's memoir Art and Madness on my Kindle (another blow to local bookstores) and then I walked across the street again to see the Danish movie In a Better World. I did all of this after breaking down in my house and running out the door in tears, leaving my children (one disabled, one covered in pox and the other just a pain) with the babysitter who had come to watch Sophie. I gunned my car to Hollywood with the accompaniment of violins, and after four or five hours came home, feeling only slightly chagrined and much relieved.

a perfect re-telling

the moon from my back stoop tonight was exactly as worn as the moon of my favorite Yeats' poem

Adam's Curse


We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, "A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world."
                                              And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There's many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, "To be born woman is to know --
Although they do not talk of it at school --
That we must labour to be beautiful."
I said, "It's certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough."

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

The Willow Manor Ball

This post is going to seem very strange, perhaps even a tad loony and maybe you'll just roll your eyes and think that I've got entirely too much time on my hands, but I'm off to a ball at Willow's Manor. Yes, I've been invited  to attend this annual event of romance, intrigue and dancing -- and I've fallen completely under Willow's beauty and her manor's spell.


I was told to find my date, but my date found me. Mr. Yeats, when he heard of the ball, wrote me an exquisite poem and sent it to me with quite an impassioned request to allow him to escort me. Here's the poem, although typing it out on a blog doesn't do justice to its poignancy and deeply personal intent, and you must, you really must, read it aloud:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

With that sort of stringing together of the most gorgeous words, how could I refuse him (although I'd had my sights set on Michael Ondaatje -- has there ever been a male writer whose understanding of women is more evident in words than Michael's?)? 


Mr. Yeats sent, with the poem, an antique dance card similar to the one that Willow showed us this week, and on every line were the initials W.B. Dear William. Here's the little bag in which I'll be carrying my dance card and pencil:

Attached to the card, too, was this sweet comment:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

And I will be dancing, all night with Mr. Yeats and perhaps he'll leave me for a brief time, as I know he pines for dear Ms. Gonne, who has broken his heart so many times, but my heart strays, too -- I'll see my old and dearest, most morose friend, Mr. Dostoevsky, sitting over in the corner because he rarely dances,  

and he'll kindly enquire about my daughter Sophie, empathetic to her struggles with epilepsy. Dear William Carlos Williams (asphodel, that greeny flower), ever the pediatrician, despite his cerebral poetry, will probably join our brilliant conversation about the strange and wonderful, sometimes terrible, workings of the brain.

So, too, will I make a point to have a few words and perhaps some secret laughs with the dashing Marcello (my god, he always looks good) --

and Virginia and I yes Virginia Woolf and I yes will steal away perhaps outside in the air with flowers in our arms and a line between our eyebrows and knit we will we'll knit our eyebrows expressing how perfect how perfectly perfect it is to be amongst those we love those we admire but how tiresome it must get sometimes the wear, the tear the tear not of the eye but of the heart 

When we come back, we'll pass one of Willow's glorious rooms, I believe a parlor, and see Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, perhaps having had a bit too much to drink and up to their old hijinks, but, really, aren't they truly the most glamorous couple that ever was?

Which reminds me that I haven't even described my dress -- imagine Anita Ekberg in all her voluptuous glory

with very dark hair. 


That would be me. 


Mr. Yeats will be dressed in the appropriate poetic style -- a bit mussed, a bit melancholy, belying his fiery passion.

Please stop by, or stare through the windows, if you'd like --
Now, I'm off to the Ball!

Click HERE to see the Manor and the gorgeous host!