“…With art comes empathy. It allows us to look through someone else’s eyes and know their strivings and struggles. It expands the moral imagination and makes it impossible to accept the dehumanization of others. When we are without art, we are a diminished people — myopic, unlearned and cruel.”
(Dave Eggers, NYTimes)
JMN2017 Woman Hugging Boy, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in.
Fungi on the Rind
A Camembert’s a cheese whose claim to fame
Involves a smelliness that’s hard to name.
Mushroom aromas with a barnyard twist,
Hints of ripe laundry by garlic kissed,
This is how the cheese’s loving hordes
Try to put their passion into words.
Who, after all, could possibly not savor
The scents these connoisseurs insanely favor:
Dirty t-shirts, sweaty pants, and cow pies,
Toadstools blooming next to fragrant pig stys.
But let us let that be just as it may.
About this cheese there’s even more to say.
Camembert, while young, lives in a rind.
A nicer cover would be hard to find.
A living surface, not unlike our “peau,”
(That’s French for “skin” in case you didn’t know),
The rind provides a shelter good and moldy
To help the cheese become a golden oldy.
The cheese in turn feeds fungi on the rind.
Help me, it says, and I’ll repay in kind.
And here’s what seems well nigh incredible:
This rind for you and me is edible.
Atop the gooey goodness that comes out
The rind rewards our tastebuds with tart clout.
Come shed with me some tears of gratitude
For Camembert, a cheese with attitude,
Born in France’s Normandy, it’s said.
You bring the cheese and wine. I’ll bring the bread.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
“When football club directors are in a bind all they want is someone to lie to them offering a version of events that is optimistic and irrefutable, based on “scientific” evidence. (Speech marks are vitally important every time the word science is used applied to football.)”
(Jorge Valdano, “I love football because it’s the opposite of science: contradictory, primitive, emotional,” The Guardian)
I cite this snippet because it’s my first encounter with the term “speech marks.” I know them as “quotation marks.” Another datum to feed my anglophilia.
As to sport, I like to say I follow jai alai and bocce.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Dead cat bounce
Catch a falling knife
Bum luck Egypt
Seven large going spare
Bespoke zoots
Pasta puttanesca
War and Peas
Puckish truculence
Warp speak
Aloe, Vera!
Circular humanism
Caveat empty
Flag elation
Mass turbation
Con stir nation
Absolute shun
“The more you fail the more you succeed.” (Alberto Giacometti)
“For whom (left) am I first?” ( Lucy Brock-Broido)
“This Door Is Alarmed” (British “No Exit” sign)
“Death is not failure.” (Atul Gawande)
“At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves.” (George Orwell)
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
This is Spot.
This is Spot’s sister, Bess.
Spot is fourteen.
Bess is four. Yes, the age gap, you say — large for siblings. So much for family planning.
When Bess came…
Spot was placed in the position of being not just a big sister but also a quasi-parent.
Bess…
has emerged…
from a tempestuous…
adolescence.
Bess has a 54-pound advantage over Spot, but the power dynamic between the two sisters favors Spot.
I love my girls equally. I see aspects of myself in both of them.
Bess fills the paw prints left by Cookie, shown napping here.
Cookie’s ashes. She died suddenly at the vet’s during a routine physical. Chaga’s Disease — a parasite that attacks the heart, introduced by the bite of the kissing bug.
“It’s not just writers. It’s everyone. The writer is just an extreme case of something everyone struggles with. ‘On the one hand, to function well, you have to believe in yourself and your abilities and summon enormous confidence from somewhere. On the other
hand, to write well, or just to be a good person, you need to be able to doubt yourself — to entertain the possibility that you’re wrong about everything, that you don’t know everything, and to have sympathy with people whose lives and beliefs and perspectives are
very different from yours.’ ”
(Jonathan Franzen, quoted by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “Jonathan Franzen Is Fine With All of It,” NYTimes Magazine)
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
The Windsors are richer than Croesus and cosseted in indescribably privileged circumstances, lavished with lifetime stipends for performing ceremonial chores, kowtowed to and fawned over by legions of adoring subjects who may or may not have a recently purchased pair of shoes in their closets (“These will see me through…”). And this bird’s nest on the ground lands in the royals’ lap by virtue of their having chosen their parents felicitously. A signature accomplishment, indeed.
God save England, rather!
That said, I vitiate my regicidal rant by confessing that this bumpkin from the colonies enjoyed both seasons of “The Crown” immensely. Chalk it up to an unabashed crush on Claire Foy rather than to monarchical leanings. Also, this GOB* is a sucker for pageantry, bawls unmanly over it. Give me fanfare and crescendo.
Ms. Foy was the breath and life of the series — her eyes are like crater lakes, her Queen’s dialect has the ring of fine crystal — as against the pallid impersonation of Prince Philip by Matt Smith. To be fair, the character of the Duke of Edinburgh doesn’t leap off the screen even in real life. It was disheartening, however, to learn that Smith was paid substantially more for his work on the series than Foy was for hers.
I look forward to seeing the terrific Olivia Colman play Elizabeth in the next installment of “The Crown.” I’ve admired her acting in “The Night Manager” and “Broadchurch.”
*”Good Old Boy”
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
I’ve spent some of my life working with (for?) adolescents. We were told their behavior and dress, especially the parts adults liked to fret about, were attributable to hormones. I don’t know. Hormones weren’t my field.
However, I think of my students and the choppy seas they navigated when I hear a certain bird in my neighborhood. I don’t know his name. He may be a she. Bird’s aren’t my field either. But the song I hear conjures for me a young stud bird just entering his lovesick prime, a cocky dude, not quite sure of himself, but definitely on the make.
Here verbatim is his call:
Are ya ready? Are ya ready? Are ya ready?
I’m heeeeeere! I’m heeeeeere!
Are ya ready? Are ya ready? Are ya ready?
I’m heeeeeere! I’m heeeeeere!
Repeat a zillion times. He does.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
EthicalDative 
Counterintuitive
I’ve had little training as a painter, but one tenet I’ve tried to honor is the one that says, “Choose a brush you think is too large, then start your painting with one size larger.” However, human likenesses are comprised of so many fussy details — a slant, a crease, a ripple, a glint, a bulge — I’ve found myself resorting to smaller brushes.
The tenet is still useful, however, for whatever else may be in the picture. When I’m stuck trying to capture the minutiae of an artifact (today it’s rifles), overcoming reflex and falling back to a bigger brush often gets me into less trouble.
One day, aged nine, I couldn’t draw a satisfactory breath. The more I gasped, the worse it got. I lay on the cool hardwood floor with one of my books, “Mister Revere and I.” It was the tale of Paul Revere as told by his horse — familiar and comforting. For some reason, I decided to go against what my body was screaming to do, and hold my breath for a moment instead. It worked. I was hyperventilating. Trying less hard to breathe returned me to normal breathing.
I spent ten days in my uncle’s hospital room during his last illness. Besides lymphoma he suffered from COPD. A nurse would come in twice a day with a breathing treatment for him. Once he said, “I can’t get enough food in my lungs.” The nurse laughed indulgently. I knew she thought he was addled and talking irrationally, but in his agitation my cowboy uncle had stumbled upon an apt metaphor.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)