ill-starred summer special vol I

Dear reader,

When I was a kid, our favourite comics and magazines had these big fat summer specials to keep us from whining in the backseat on a long car ride, or to entertain the more introverted children at the campsite while their outgoing counterparts were playing football. It would have puzzles, jokes, riddles, rainy day activities, recipes, car songs etc. Since that segment of publishing is all but extinct, I don’t suppose that sort of thing exists anymore. Think of the following as my tribute to this dying art form. While you’re waiting out the heat with the blinds down, sitting in your tent for the duration of a summer shower, or simply bored out of your mind in a half empty office, please accept this smörgåsbord of distractions. Text and images by me, Kenneth Koch, Gabriele Ornigotti and two special guests: Britt and Gertrude Liebfraumilch.

L’art, mon garçon, est fait d'erreurs, mais d'erreurs qu'il est bon de commettre, car elles mènent peu à peu à la vérité. —Jules Verne, more or less

Gertrude sent me a voice message. Gertrude Liebfraumilch is a performance artist and playwright and my friend for many years. She wanted to do some surrealist cooking. She said: we could try writing a recipe together where the other person can’t see the previous step. Like a cadavre exquis. And then make that recipe. And then eat that food. We think highly of our own cooking, so we assumed that whatever non sequitur ingredients we would end up having to combine, we could probably make them into something tasty, perhaps even delightful. How wrong we were.

Writing the recipe was a lot of fun. To give it some direction, we decided to base our dish around the greek Fanouropita, the cake to invoke the help of Saint Fanourios, finder of lost things. The cake has seven ingredients — for the seven days of creation — all of which are offerings to the saint, so he will help you find the thing you lost. We took the principle of offering and recovering lost things. We wrote down, hiding what we had written:

A DISH TO REVEAL LOST THINGS
ingredients
5oo gr sour cherries
10 gr gold leaf
2 bay leaves
100 ml white wine
7 sheets of gelatine
500 gr lamb mince
100 gr unsalted butter
splash of vegetable stock
1/2 cup liquorice liqueur
a heart (any heart)
a small effigy representing the lost thing

The revelation was a surprise, but we remained undaunted. The combination of lamb and sour cherries might actually be good. And with the liquorice… who knows? Gertrude probably didn’t realise that 10 grams of gold costs around €1200, so we’d scale that back a little. I knew I was being an asshole when I wrote down gelatine (that was me). But all in all: it just might work. On another paper, we wrote down the instructions in the same manner, but checking which ingredients we’d used:

instructions
Add cherries to a pot on medium heat.
To a pot on medium heat, add cherries, bay leaves and wine.
Soften the gelatine and add it to a pot, along with the bay leaf-infused wine. Stir gently and remove from heat.
Brown the lamb, adding in the liqueur after a few minutes. Add gold.
Put the butter in the pan. Once melted, add in meatballs that you have shaped from the mince.
Make a sauce using meat, stock and liqueur. Pour over set jelly.
Once fried, take meatballs off the heat and mix with gelatinous substance.
Ask someone to hide the effigy in the dish in exchange for your heart.
Place the fruit of your labours into a deep dish to avoid splashing. Best eaten on desperately heated evenings.  

In our heart of hearts, we knew we were defeated once we unfolded the paper. The double instructions asked for some interesting choices. Was it a pudding with a meat sauce, or meatballs with a jelly sauce? Neither sounded very appealing. All that fucking butter, plus the fat from the meat. It couldn’t be good. And yet, reader, we made it.

The hearts were a nice touch: we bought liquorice hearts but we ate them all before we finished cooking, so we made paper hearts with poems. I looked in one of my teenage notebooks for a poem that had a heart in it. Gertrude based her poem on one I told her about but could not find, written when I was seventeen, called The White Heart Hotel. Her effigy was a coin, because she wanted to find money. Mine was an googly eye because I can use some vision, or maybe better eyesight. She gave me her heart, and I hid her coin in a meatball (we decided to make both a sauce and meatballs, as the recipe calls for both). She hid my eye and received my heart.

Then there was nothing for it. We had to taste it. It did not look good. The meat sauce was very black because of the liquorice, and very greasy because of 100 grams of butter. We tried to leave most of the fat in the pan. The gold was sad. The cherry jellies, which we let set in little rectangular moulds, were good by themselves, not bad with the meatballs, and TERRIBLE with the black sauce. To be honest, everything was terrible with that. Maybe if the liqueur wasn’t so sweet, it would have been slightly less terrible, but probably still not good. Gertrude: ‘By failing to cast the spell the dish shall undo the magics that drew you to cast it in the first place.’ The moral of this story is Thessalonians 5:12: Prove all things, hold fast to what is good. Please, do not make this recipe.

This game is invented by Jackson Mac Low. It is a very nice way to read any kind of text. Jackson found the phrase ‘ridiculous in Piccadilly’ in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and subsequently looked in that book for a word that started with an r, like ridiculous, then a second word that had an ‘i’ as the second letter, a third word that had a ‘d’ as the third letter, and so on until he had a poem comprised of ten plus two plus ten words. He called this technique ‘diastic’ or ‘spelling-through’ writing.

You can do this with novels, newspaper articles, rap lyrics, whatever you like. You can use a key (the phrase you’re spelling) from the source text, or from another text. Here is one with the story above:

EMPTY SAVE
errand smaller appears empty dirty
story way have vines

The key is ‘empty save’, which I took from the last quarter of the story. I then read through the text from beginning to end looking for each word, and starting again whem I ran out of text before the poem was finished. I think Jackson had his own rules for interpunction and line break but I just did what felt good and kept the lines corresponding with the keywords.

Of course some blessed soul has built a program that can do this for you. You can set up the rules the way you like. I did another one with Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote:

PROVING THAT TRUE FRIENDSHIP CAN'T DIE
polluted troubled along graveyard junkies broken-down scumbag
though though wearing suit
tall grand cause weren't
firm crying this especially beginning beyond increasing friendship multinationals    friendship
city Tatlin wanted left
dress city when

I like to do this when I’m a bit sick of reading, and need a little reward to continue. Better than goodreads. Please send me your diastic poems, I’d love to read them.

by Britt

That’s all for now. In the second volume of this special you may find a horoscope, some ads for rocks, dirty pictures, your own diastic poem, a puzzle, a joke, maybe, who knows! I hope you enjoyed this and that you are having wonderful summer. Let me know if you want to contribute something to vol II.