Sat on my porch this morning when it was still misty out there and read “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Last time I’d read it must have been thirty years ago and I think I saved my reengagement with her amidst this recent immersion of the veins of African American literature, and I let myself have some new heroes and new points of fascination. Her writing is masterful and her life burns so brightly. And as I sat down to reacquaint myself with Janie Crawford and Jody and then the irresistible Tea Cake, I looked to see if there was any music from Florida in the twenties and thirties I might throw on and sure enough, a wiki on the “Music of Florida” led be to Gabriel Brown.
I can’t read and have music on with someone singing English lyrics, and so I turned Gabriel down low and caught the distant atmosphere which was fine for my immediate purposes. Listening to him now, a second time today I’m marveling at his voice timbre, and the durable beauty of his blues tales. And its only now when I look over the wiki page properly that I see that it was Zora Neale Hurston who is credited for having “discovered” the man in Florida. She had helped him to come to New York and gave him a role in an opera of hers “Polk County.” I should have guessed he was ensconced in the Harlem Renaissance scene. My first glance at the page suggested the photo that’s there was shot by the infamous Carl Van Vechen.
My little one and I are going to make Korean food today. I haven’t really done so before. Last night, late, she sent me a list of what she wanted. I found a few different sources and settled on one woman, who introduces herself as Sue. Sue certainly seems to have mastered Google’s algorithm for the search of Korean food names: “bim bim bab”, “japjae”, “kimbab”, “tteooboki,” “haemulpajeon”, “bulgogi” . . . Sue’s always up top. I consulted Sue before my shop yesterday and was able to get just about everything we need though there was no good way to approximate around the tteooboki, if you ain’t got a bag of that tteooboki, and we don’t. Neither does any market around here. I stopped in Rosendale on the way home yesterday. There’s a lady there who has a pickling shop, which is a fine thing to have in the next town over. But she didn’t have any kimchi to sell. And no, though she had done that in the past, pickled radishes, she didn’t have any now. I picked up a jar of pickled eggs, all the same as it made me think of being in a country pub in border country Wales.
I haven’t had anything to eat this morning and the typing of that last sentence makes me want to rush out to the kitchen and pull one of those eggs out of the jar. And the next thought I had was that if you were going to have a pickled egg, well then you may as well pour out some beer to go with it. “Not now. Not now. Not now baby. I’m going to tell you when.” Gabriel has come back to my consciousness typing this out. Exception to the rule. Wrote just fine with him speaking to me the whole way through.
Saturday, 07/25/20
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