corn; poems

index.html

@@ -59,6 +59,15 @@
     <section>
 
     <article>
+      <h2>some textfiles</h2>
+
+      <ul>
+        <li><a href="textfiles/corn.txt">a news.tilde.club post about sweetcorn</a> (I
+            hope ~schussat (?) doesn't mind being quoted here)</li>
+        <li><a href="textfiles/vimpoems.txt">about writing poems in vim</a></li>
+    </article>
+
+    <article>
       <h2>Reverse Chronological Dated Entries Are Totally Fine But I Already Do That Elsewhere</h2>
 
       <p>And, thinking that, I decided to make my home on squiggle.city a stack

textfiles/corn.txt

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+> I associate it most strongy with grilling it in the husk in
+> several backyards on the Colorado western slope one summer.
+
+I spent most of my early life in Nebraska and Kansas, and so for
+me the best experience of the stuff has always been summer
+harvests of sweetcorn, ideally prepared shortly after picking by
+shucking, washing the silks off in cold water, & boiling for
+7-10 minutes in a big pot.  Serve with butter and salt (butter
+usually to be applied by rolling the ear of corn lengthwise on
+the stick, though I had an uncle who preferred to apply butter
+to bread first and then roll the corn on the bread).  I remember
+a lot of meals consisting of essentially nothing but sweetcorn,
+half a dozen ears or so to a person.
+
+I suppose this wasn't super healthy, but there's nothing quite
+like the texture and flavor of really fresh corn on the cob, and
+very little that can be done to genuinely improve upon it.  Then
+too, I live in front range Colorado now, and have spent time on
+the western slope.  It always seems to me that the local
+sweetcorn chauvinism is innocent enough, but a little
+inexperienced.  By the time it hits grocery stores and farm
+stands, it's usually tough as nails.
+
+I guess what I'm really saying is:  If you live in a climate
+that supports it, plant sweetcorn.  There's no substitute for
+fresh.  I am often sad that Colorado doesn't seem to be a place
+where I'm capable of growing decent corn (see also: tomatoes,
+carrots which don't taste like dirt, basically anything that
+isn't some kind of kale).
+
+*
+
+Not that grilling it in the husk is bad.  Nice change of pace.
+Great for camping.
+
+I had this really bad experience one time at a party where I got
+yelled at by the older, richer, much more employed host for
+putting out a flaming corn cob in his new swimming pool.  The
+less said about that, the better, probably.  (What can I say; I
+was like 22 and probably kind of drunk.  It was humiliating.)
+
+*
+
+We used to grow a _lot_ of corn, by garden plot standards, and
+we'd usually have more than we could realistically eat while
+fresh.  My parents often still do.  My mom's canned it before,
+but the handiest way to preserve it seems to be to boil as usual
+and then cut off in strips and freeze in plastic bags.  Assuming
+you've got the freezer space, this works out great for soups,
+casseroles, pizza, you name it.
+
+They also make a lot of creamed corn.  It's really good, and
+I'll have to see if I can get the recipe, though I'll bet it's
+just a variation of something they got from Alton Brown.  They
+are way into Alton Brown.
+
+-- bpb

textfiles/vimpoems.txt

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+On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 12:57 PM, Eric Weir <eeweir@bellsouth.net> wrote:
+
+> Wondering if there are any poets here who use vim in writing
+> poetry, either in the messy creative phase or the later
+> refining, polishing, and editing phase. If so, I’d be
+> interested in knowing how you use vim, how you find vim
+> helpful, and whether there are any plugins that you have found
+> especially helpful.
+
+I use vim for most of what I don't write inside a browser, which
+includes a lot of poetry and prose.
+
+I'm not sure if I draw much of a distinction between the things
+that make a good code editor and the things that make a good
+literary text editor.  I can certainly imagine that distinction,
+but I think if you like plain text, filter scripts, the
+coreutils, renderable markup languages, that sort of thing, then
+it all kind of fits together.
+
+I'm slowly writing a book partly about using the GNU/Linux CLI
+for literary things:
+
+  https://p1k3.com/userland-book/
+
+...which doesn't (yet, anyway) touch on vim, but it's sort of the
+environment I have in mind.
+
+As to the editor specifically, I do a lot of pretty intensive
+rewriting, rearranging lines or stanzas, replacing words, and
+experimenting with line breaks and spacing.  Vim's pretty good at
+quickly slicing and dicing text.
+
+I use this binding a lot for chopping lines up:
+
+  " split lines under the cursor (modeled on, maybe, emacs?)
+  map K i<CR><Esc>g;
+
+As far as plugins go, NERD tree makes the whole editor a lot more
+useful for working with a collection of files, and I tend to
+organize projects as flatfiles in a directory, or blog entries in
+a tree of directories named after dates.
+
+Lastly, I have some simple tools for producing markup from a
+source format.  So, for example, the last poem I wrote looks like
+this in source:
+
+  <h1>monday, january 5</h1>
+
+  <freeverse>
+  driving down 36 to see you
+  i grasp at the scene around me
+  trying to fix in mind for you
+  some list or hierarchy
+  of attributes and aspects:
+  snow on the hills
+  snow on the plains
+  the moon on the snow
+  sundown on the clouds
+  the haze over the city lights
+  electricity vivid and gleaming
+  within the field of some
+  greater radiance
+  </freeverse>
+
+...where the stuff inside <freeverse> gets translated to regular
+HTML with linebreaks in the right places.  It's a small thing,
+but it's a lot easier to stay in the flow of writing without
+having to worry about markup boilerplate.  For print output in
+the past I've switched this up to generate LaTeX directly, but I
+think next time I produce something in book form I'll see what I
+can get done with Pandoc.
+
+-- bpb