Literature Day at the Updog Corral.

From Philip Roth's Patrimony:

         "She can't even buy a cantaloupe," he told me in disgust on the phone one morning, and because I had by then heard just about enough on the general subject of what Lil could not do, I answered, "Look, a cantaloupe is a hard thing to buy--maybe the hardest thing there is to buy, when you stop to think about it. A cantaloupe isn't an apple, you know, where you can tell from the outside what's going on inside. I'd rather buy a car than a cantaloupe--I'd rather buy a house than a cantaloupe. If one time in ten I come away from the store with a decent cantaloupe, I consider myself lucky. I smell it, sniff it, press both ends with my thumb, I smell another one, press down again with my thumb--eight, nine, ten cantaloupes I can go through like this before finally I settle on one and I take it home and we cut it open for dinner and the thing is tasteless and hard as a rock. I'll tell you about making a mistake with a cantaloupe: we all do it. We weren't made to buy cantaloupe. Do me a favor, Herm, get off the woman's ass, because it isn't just Lil's weakness buying a shitty cantaloupe: it's a human weakness. She is being persecuted by you for something that maybe one percent of the human population is able to do right--and even with half of them it's probably guesswork."
         "Well," he said uncertainly, taken aback a bit by my thoroughness, "the cantaloupe is the least of it . . ." but for the time being he had no more complaints to make to me about Lil.


A poem by Robin Robertson:

Asparagus

Pushing up, hard and fibrous
from the ground, it is said to be
grown for the mouth:
steamed till supple
so the stem is still firm
but with a slight give to gravity.

Each glistening wand has spurs
that swell in bedded layers
to the dark tip--slubbed and imbricate,
tight-set and overlapping round the bud.
In a slather and slide, butter
floods at the bulb-head.