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People You Know, June through December 2004
Morris T. Worley (58, BS, mining engr.) writes that he has accepted a position as manager of the Manufacturing Sector Development Program at NMSU-Carlsbad. The program administers six industrial technology degree and certificate programs, provide contract workforce training, and manage the area apprenticeship program.
Fritz Wolff (60, BS, mining engr.) is the author of A Room for the Summer, a book about adventures and misadventures set in the mines of the Coeur d'Alene in the 1950s. It is available from Oklahoma University Press at www.oupress.com.
Barney Popkin (65) writes, "After a year of project work in several places -- Egypt for the U.S. Agency for International Development; India for the Food and Agricultural Organization; Iraq for Halliburton/KBR's Restore Iraqi Oil program; and Mexico for the Desert Development Foundation -- I accepted an assignment as senior advisor/ environmental protection specialist for USAID's Bureau for Asia and the Near East's Iraq Team and Environment/Agricultural team. I facilitate the USAID equivalent of the National Environmental Policy Act."
Tousson Toppozada (70, MS, geophysics; 74, Ph.D., geophysics) writes, "I retired on Jan. 1, 2004, from the California Geological Survey, where I have worked as a seismologist since leaving New Mexico Tech in 1974. My experience is with California earthquake hazards and history and emergency response. I have not been back to NMT since 1974, and I hope to visit in the not-too-distant future."
Dan DeMar (71, BS, metallurgy/ceramics) is an insurance agency owner in Albuquerque.
Hugh Giggy (71, BS, met. engr.) writes, "I am currently a regional manager for Lockheed Martin in the Fort Worth area on a support services contract, supporting the Federal Aviation Administration. I have been with Lockheed Martin for nearly 21 years.
"My wife Terry and I met at New Mexico Tech in 1971. We have two sons who are both pilots in the United States Air Force."
Dick C. Engbrecht (71, BS, chemistry) received the 2004 ASTM International Award of Merit, and the title of "Fellow" for his years of outstanding contributions, leadership, and special activities related to developing standards for gypsum products. Engbrecht is a development associate at USG Corp. in Libertyville, Ill. An ASTM International member since 1987, Engbrecht serves on a number of subcommittees and has previously served as chair and vice chair of the main committee. He also serves as liaison for international standards activities related to gypsum.
Bill Fetter (attended 71-73) writes, "I have fond memories of the 2 years at Tech. Would be glad to hear from some old friends." Bill works for Tectonic Engineering & Surveying Consultants in Mountainville, N.Y. He has a degree in geology from CUNY Brooklyn.
Stacy B. Leffler (74, BS, math) retired and earned a law degree. He is now a lawyer and staff judge advocate for the new Mexico State Defense Force.
Dr. Donald Wenner (74, BS, chemistry) was the subject of an article in General Surgery News in November 2004. Don, who is a surgeon in Roswell, is active in programs encouraging youth to choose the medical profession in general, and surgery in particular. participates in the school district's "Super Day," a career program for fifth and sixth graders, works closely with high school juniors and seniors considering medical careers, and mentors medical students.
At home, Don's son Donnie, 21, has been accepted to UNM Medical School. Daughter Andrea, 24, is team leader for account maintenance at Ford. Sons Nathan, 20, and Teddy, 17, have yet to choose careers. Wife Laurie administers Don's medical business and also helps keep him "organized, focused and fed."
Dr. Christopher Duffy (75, BS, environmental engr.; 77, MS, hydrology; 79, Ph.D., hydrology) was in the news for a study he conducted at Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge north of Socorro. Duffy discovered that mountain-front recharge -- ground water from rain or snow that fell in the mountains and then seeped down into the deep aquifer -- takes decades to move downhill to the alluvial fans and then into the Rio Grande Valley.
The study could mean that the lack of rainfall during the drought of the 1950s could add to the impact of the current drought by decreasing the available water in the Rio Grande aquifer.
Duffy is a civil engineer at Pennsylvania State University.
Adel A. Bakr (76, Ph.D., hydrology) has been doing consulting and training in hydrogeology. In addition to his own consulting, since November 2003, he has been with the RCS Corporation, providing geotechnical support to the Yucca Mountain Project. He lives in Las Vegas, Nev.
Sue (Ryan) Langdon (77, BGS) writes to say, "Just a brief note to say "Hi" to all the Techies and Townies we knew. I married Bob Langdon in January 1978, shortly after I graduated from NMT in 1977. Our adventures have taken us to the distant borders of -- New Mexico.
"Actually, we have traveled all over the US, but never moved our home from the Land of Enchantment. We spent short stints in Silver City and Hobbs. We moved to Albuquerque in 1983, the year our daughter, Jennifer, was born.
"Jennifer is a theater and teaching student at UNM. Bob has been on VA disability since the early 1990's. Sue is working for UNM Hospitals as an office supervisor in the Food and Nutrition department.
Susan Ewald Brink (80, BS, geology) writes "After the U.S. Bureau of Mines was abolished, I began teaching Earth science and geology/paleontology at North High School in Mahtomedi, Minn. My husband Steve and I have two children, Katie, 9, and Jeff, 7, both of Korean heritage. I am enjoying life and still love geology and rocks!"
Patrick E. Haynes (81, BS, geology) writes, "After 19 years in Colorado, Mary Anne and I have moved to Las Vegas, Nev. I am still collecting and peddling mineral specimens. In the last few years I have had four new minerals published.
"Our son Aaron, 24, obtained a bachelor's degree in biology from Tech and is now working on a master's degree in environmental engineering, also at Tech. Old friends, please stay in touch!"
Kevin Donovan (82, BS, mining engr.) and Doree Donovan (81, BS, metallurgical engr.) recently moved to the Denver area, where Kevin is a marketing director for Washington Group International. Their oldest daughter, Karen, was recently married and lives in Albuquerque. Their middle daughter, Megan, will be a freshman at Colorado State University this fall, and their youngest, Kelsey, is enjoying Colorado with her Mom and Dad.
Greg Hibbard (82, BS, geological engr.) writes, "I've been wanting to write to Gold Pan for quite some time to update all of the 82-era Techies on my past 22 years. Here's a brief run-down.
After my final semester in December of 1982 (I missed the graduation ceremony in spring of 1983 as I was hard at work by then), I started working for International Engineering Company, a subsidiary of Morrison Knudsen (MK), in project management for hydroelectric and water resource projects. For 15 years, I worked on projects for MK throughout the western United States. By the mid 1990s, I had settled in San Francisco, working out of MK's Engineering Design Office and traveling to project sites as needed throughout the United States.
"In October 1996 Judi Leonard (now Judi Hibbard) and I were married in Sausalito, Calif. Judi works in bio-tech/pharmaceutical industry. She spent 11 years with Elan Corporation before joining Intermune Corporation earlier this year.
"In 1998 I left MK (well, it sort of collapsed out from under me) and joined a small engineering/ design/ construct firm called Academy Studios, in Marin County, California. For 2.5 years, I designed and built interesting and one-of-a-kind structures and interiors. My clients included: Washington State History Museum, Presidio of San Francisco, Lyman Museum of Hawaii, and the USS Arizona Memorial Museum at Pearl Harbor, just to mention a few.
"With the dot-com crash in 2001, I left Academy Studios and took on the position of (San Diego) regional operations manager for PowerLight Corporation in Berkeley, Calif. (PowerLight is a large solar engineering and construction firm.) Judi and I moved to La Jolla, Calif., in October 2001 and spent 2.5 years enjoying the southern California beach life. Unfortunately, this ended in early 2004.
"Over the 2003 Christmas holidays, Judi and I were both offered positions back in San Francisco -- offers we really couldn't refuse -- Judi with Intermune and I with AIG Consultants. So as of June 2004, we find ourselves living back in San Francisco (and really missing San Diego!). Oddly enough my position with AIG puts me back in realm of mining and mine restoration, as I'm now responsible for Investigation, monitoring and analysis of bound insurance policies for mining, environmental, and construction and restoration cost caps throughout the West. It's interesting work and the "time in the field" is substantially more palatable than it was in the construction business.
"So far I've met people who have graduated from School of Mines in Nevada, Colorado and Montana. I'm still looking to run into someone from Tech.
Bryan Ulrich (83, BS, mining engr., 85, BS, geological engr.) writes "After four years in South Africa, working in Knight Piésold's Rivonia office, the Ulrich family returned to their longtime home in Denver, Colo. However, moss was not to grow for long, as the stones started rolling shortly after becoming fully settled. In January 2004, the Ulrichs moved to Spring Creek, a small town just outside Elko, Nevada. Here, we enjoy a different pace of life and the amazing mountain views from our balcony. While not relaxing, Bryan has taken on a new role with Knight Piésold, and is now the principal in charge of the Elko office, and the vice president of the Nevada operations. Ellen and the kids (Stephanie and Timothy) are becoming accustomed to country living."
Kenneth Mekani (87, BS, metallurgical engr.) writes, "After graduating from New Mexico Tech, I came back home to Zimbabwe and joined Lonrho Mining as a graduate trainee metallurgist. The group, which is now known as Indepgold, currently produces about forty percent of Zimbabwe's gold. I head the metallurgy department on one of their five mines. I am married to Connie, and we have two kids: Haleema, a 12-year-old girl, and Simba Sean, a five-year-old boy."
Tim Stirrup (88, BS, chemistry; 88, BS, biology) has been promoted to executive vice president at Outrider Environmental Planning and Technical Services in Albuquerque. In addition to his technical responsibilities providing senior-level ESH consulting to clients, Tim has taken on business functions for the company.
Barbara (Serna) Stirrup (89, BS, technical communication) has started back to work by supporting Outrider with her exceptional technical writing and editing expertise. Barb is pulling together complicated safety and hazards analyses.
"The Stirrup Family is doing well and is still enjoying life in Corrales, New Mexico. Barbara and Tim have their hands full with Darby Patrick, 4, Kerry Ann Megan, 7, and Emily Kate, 9. Both Barb and Tim volunteer in the Corrales community and have no free time whatsoever."
John Oelfke (90, BS, biology) works at Sandia National Laboratories in the Thermo-fluids Group. He also works with his brother Scott Oelfke (87, BS, geological engineering) in a small publishing business started in 2001. They publish poetry, literary fiction, and non-fiction.
Karl Tonander (92, BS, general engr.; 93, MS, mineral engr.) has been promoted by Souder, Miller & Associates to vice president of operational support services. Tonander, a principal geoscientist and regional manager of the company's southern service region, has worked for the company since 1993.
Syed Redzal Hisham (93, BS, petroleum engr.) is working for Weatherford Oil Tools in Dubai. He is the region technical manager for Tubular Running and Mechanization Systems for Middle-East and North Africa.
Syed writes, "Been here since Jan 2003. My wife and I have five kids now: three boys and two girls, from a new-born to a nine-year-old. My wife is Rina Abdul Razak (a UMSL alumna, Class of 94). Things are good in Dubai. Even during the war life is normal; however our travel obviously is limited and with caution."
Cory Stevens (93, BS, chemical engr.) writes that he and his wife Tammy (Rutledge) Stevens (92, BS, biology) have relocated to Thatcher, Ariz., where he accepted a position as manager with the Phelps Dodge Process Technology Center. Cory adds, "Tammy is currently staying home with our son, Jack, age 3, and dog Joey."
Robert TerBerg (94, MS, hydrology) and his wife, Shikha Jain, are the proud owners of a 4-bedroom house in the San Francisco Bay area. Robert is working 65+ hours per week on the Yucca Mountain Project as a principal research associate for Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in both Berkeley and Las Vegas. The project is nearing license application as the first high grade nuclear waste repository in America. Shikha is preparing for a post-baccalaureate Clinical Lab Scientist certification.
Robert adds, "We are making and finding time for each other. The 13-year old cat seems to be OK. Lots of lizards, raccoons, deer, skunks, squirrels, and small children nearby. I play hockey twice a week in downtown Oakland. I scored the game-tying or winning goals three games in row, in the last two weeks, so I'm feeling pretty good."
Dr. Michael Sehorn (95, BS, biology) was the co-author of an article published in Nature. The article, titled "Human meiotic recombinase Dmc1 promotes ATP-dependent homologous DNA strand exchange," appeared in the May 24, 2004 issue.
Michael earned his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University Health Science Center at Shreveport in biochemistry and molecular biology. He is a postdoctoral associate at Yale University School of Medicine, Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry.
Beth (Parker) Salvas (96, BS, geology) writes, "I received my master's in hydrology from the University of Arizona in 1998. In 2001, I married Scott Salvas (97, BS, environmental engineering). I'm currently working for the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission in Albuquerque. Scott received his PE in June 2003 and is an engineer in Albuquerque for ASCG."
Neal Tapia (98, BS, electrical engr.) and Penny Gomez (97, BS, environmental engr.) are married and living in Santa Fe with their son Dylan, born in January 2003.
Daniel Mendoza (99, BS, materials engr.) is a technical staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has a master's degree from the University of Alabama.
Kyle Lamb (02, BS, electrical engr.) married Rebecca Telles of Las Cruces on July 24, 2004 in Las Cruces. Kyle is employed by White Sands Missile Range, and Rebecca, who has a master's degree in counseling and guidance, works for Las Cruces Public Schools.
Shawn Irvin Toni Smith (02, BS, environmental engr.) married Melanie Darcy Sanchez, a biology major at Tech, on June 19, 2004, in Albuquerque. Shawn is employed with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Natural Resources Division, in Crownpoint.
Lane Thompson (03, BS, computer science) spent the six months after graduation living in Scotland.
Lorraine Sanchez (03, BS, biology) is attending UNM to get a master's degree in Theater Education. She says she misses Tech an awful lot!
Kim Haulenseele (03, MS, engineering mechanics) married Steve Dowling on Feb. 14, 2004, in Albuquerque.


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Tours and Skiing
Prison Library Tour
The Colorado State Library Institutional Library Development Team and the Colorado Department of Corrections cordially invite you to join us for a rare glimpse into prison librarianship. Tour the Denver Women's Correctional Facility and library on Monday, 1/26, 6:30-8:00p.m. Participants must provide name, birth date, and social security number for a criminal background check. Some transportation may be provided. Tour is subject to cancellation depending upon facility needs.
For more information about the tour and transportation, and to RSVP, please contact Erica MacCreaigh at 303-307-2654 or 303-503-3821, or firstname.lastname@example.com by JANUARY 15. You must be a registered ALA Midwinter attendee. Space is limited to the first twelve respondents who pass the background check.
Bicycle Tours
Current info for all Colorado ski resorts and snow conditions http://www.coloradoski.com/
Historic Districts
Lower Downtown Denver Historic District - LoDo http://www.lodo.org/
Near Downtown Denver
Denver Botanic Gardens http://www.botanicgardens.org/
Denver Museum of Nature and Science http://www.dmns.org/main/en/ Mizel Museum http://www.mizelmuseum.org/
Museo de las Americas http://www.museo.org/
Farther Afield
Downtown Boulder (Downtown Boulder, accessible on RTD bus B or BX) http://www.boulderdowntown.com/
Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse (Downtown Boulder, accessible on RTD bus B or BX) http://www.boulderteahouse.com/
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Downtown Boulder, accessible on RTD bus B or BX) http://www.bmoca.org/
Celestial Seasonings (Boulder area) http://www.celestialseasonings.com/visit-us/index.html
Leaning Tree Museum of Western Art (Boulder area) http://www.leanintreemuseum.com/
Garden of the Gods (Colorado Springs)
United States Air Force Academy (Colorado Springs) http://www.usafa.af.mil/
Wildlife Experience http://www.thewildlifeexperience.org/
Forney Museum of Transportation http://www.forneymuseum.org/
Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum http://www.wingsmuseum.org/
Argo Gold Mine & Mill http://www.historicargotours.com/
Boettcher Mansion http://www.jeffco.us/boettcher/
Buffalo Bill's Museum & Grave http://www.buffalobill.org/
Colorado Railroad Museum (Golden) http://www.coloradorailroadmuseum.org/
Dinosaur Ridge (Golden) http://www.dinoridge.org/
Golden Pioneer Museum (Golden) http://www.goldenpioneermuseum.com/
Mother Cabrini Shrine (Golden) http://mothercabrinishrine.org/
Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum (Golden) http://www.rmqm.org/
Red Rocks Park and Ampitheathre (Golden) http://www.redrocksonline.com/ . Open-air ampitheatre built with the aid of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Work Projects Administration (WPA). Site of the June 5, 1983 U2 concert that became "Under the Blood Red Sky" http://www.denverpost.com/ci_9337548

subset: commoncrawl


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Lighting Work at Taylor Interchange
Weather permitting, MODOT crews will work on interchange lighting Tuesday at the entrance ramp to US 61 north at Taylor at the 24/61 interchange. Work will be along the right shoulder with one lane traffic on the entrance ramp for the Canton exit. Traffic will be reduced to one lane between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. MODOT says that extra caution is urged because of tight confines on the ramp.


text: Not sure if this is the best place to post but I have ispconfig 3 installed so worth a try. I got my first site up and running which was "just" a case of setting up ispconfig and then uploading files to my server via ftp. The site fired up nicely and once configured all works ok. Now the problem is this site benefits from using memcache so I've installed that and it appears to be running but in the admin area of the site it tells me that memcache is not installed. I then decided to create a small php file to gather all the php info. Like this:- Code: <?php // Show all information, defaults to INFO_ALL phpinfo(); ?> Saved it as test.php in the root of the site the same as index.php. But the problem is, when i go to view test.php I get an error 500 but not when I view index.php. Could anyone enlighten me to what's going wrong here?


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She took her time going down the stairs, carefully taking each step and swaying her hips seductively for effect.
But she had to be careful not to sway too much down the long staircase for she had the symbol held out before her outstretched arms. And the symbol was almost important as who she represented in this ancient celebration of spring, for held out before her was the egg from heaven that had fallen into the Euphrates and pushed to the shores by the fish,which had given birth to the goddess.
The Babylonian goddess of fertility, love and sex. The queen of heaven.
It is she that the young woman portrays as she slowly descends the Ziggarut with the symbol of her divine birth in her hands. And her descent down the stairs ended the 40 days of weeping for her son Tammuz, who had been slain by a wild pig, and began the festival in her name in which the whole country celebrated the wondrous resurrection of Ishtar's son through the divine power of the egg of life.
When the young priestess of Ishtar completed her descent the crowd gave up a wild cheer of abandonment and started the festival in the queen of heaven's name. They would venerate the egg and other fertility symbols, feast on wild pig and with the assistance of the temple priestess and the temple prostitutes abandon themselves in an orgy to commemorate life and resurrection.
Sound familiar?
Ishtar. Easter.
Well except for the temple prostitute part and the wild orgy.
The Easter Holiday we celebrate is an ancient and old one.
We get the word from this most sacred of Christian Holy days from the ancient pagan celebration of Vernal Equinox, or the spring solstice. The fertility festival of Ishtar.
Almost universally celebrated among primitive cultures the spring solstice was chiefly a celebration of fertility. After the cold dead of winter the ground once again opened its nurturing womb for the seed that would eventually sustain life, birds and other animals began the mating process. It was a time of life after seemingly unending death, the death of winter.
If you do a search through the Internet about the origin of Easter, many sites will have you assume that the tradition has arisen within the Christian Era. The modern word Easter came from the Old English word ?astre or ?ostre or Eoaster which originates within the first century A.D. This is the name of the Anglo-Saxon pagan goddess ?ostre the goddess of the dawn who also had a celebration during the Vernal Equinox which also incorporated fertility symbols such as the egg and the hare.
But the Easter tradition goes farther back than the time of Christ, it even pre-dates much of the Old Testament. The symbolic imagery of the Babylonian cult of the fertility and Ishtar, their queen of heaven echoes back far into pre-history. Some of the first religious idols we find primitive man fashioning is that of a mother goddess who is endowed with supernatural sexual power to help the procreation of those who revere it.
We 21st century humans are used to controlling our surroundings. But even we with all our marvelous modern marvels are still bound by the forces of life and death. And to primitive man the dual Equinox both literally and symbolically portrayed the power of life and death over our human condition. But whereas in the Autumnal Equinox man has no power over the death of the earth that encroaches upon him, he can participate in the spring by rebirth by reveling in his own fertility. I think that in essence is why these symbols have lasted so long.
They are empowering.
We have no control over death.
But we can participate in life.
And through the multitude of generations that have passed since the high priestess has last walked down the Ziggurat's stairs in ancient Babylon, mankind is still the same. We abhor death. It is a constant reminder of our own mortality. But we have power in life. And every spring we can celebrate it.
It would seem that Easter is just a continuation of an age old festival, a festival of new life. It is easy to say that Christianity in its infancy adopted this pagan holiday and its similar theme of rebirth and fashioned a synthesis of ideas from antithetical ideology.
But I see it a bit different.
With Christmas we have a similar problem, for Christmas takes many pagan symbols turns them into Christian ones. But the one problem for Christmas is that even though we celebrate December 25th as the birth date for Christ, most scholars say He was born either in late summer or fall.
But the time of Jesus death and His resurrection is not one of conjecture.
Jesus was crucified and died over the Pesach, the Jewish Passover. And He was resurrected three days later. There is no ambiguity over the time frame according to the scriptural records.
So in my world view the resurrection of Jesus and our celebration of Easter is miraculous in a multifaceted way. Not just for its Theological significance in New Testament Theology. But in that God used the imagery that was already there, in a time celebrated since the first twinkling of man's intellectual assessment of the relation of himself and his universe. God used this ancient ceremony to show a deeper truth and to reach out to mankind in love and hope.
God met mankind where he was.
Just as today, no matter how desperate the hour for us personally, God meets us where we are. He stands along side us, acknowledges our desires and needs, and gives us hope.
And no matter what you call the time, Easter is above all, a time of hope.


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There's a great movie out now about magicians, sleight-of-hand maestros, illusionists, card and coin tricksters.
Now You See Me is not that movie.
If you're so inclined, check out Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay, a wonderful and illuminating documentary about the veteran prestidigitator. It's playing in select theaters, and will no doubt be available on DVD and VOD.
As for Now You See Me, it's a slick and kind of smirky entertainment in which a quartet of street charlatans-turned-Las Vegas stars pull off an epic heist, using the tricks of the magic trade. But where a deft magic act turns on the performer's ability to make the impossible appear completely real (after all, you've just witnessed it happening right in front of you), in Louis Leterrier's film, the presto changeo business is done with mirrors, so to speak. And with a flashy whirl of visual effects that undermine the experience, rather than enhance it.
The movie wants to be Ocean's Eleven with top hats and wands, but the rapport between Now You See Me's principals doesn't come close to approximating Clooney and company's (or Sinatra and company's) cool. Instead, we get Jesse Eisenberg, tightly wound and talky as J. Daniel Atlas, a cocky card and coin hustler who finds himself banding together with three other characters: Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), who does Houdini-like escapes; Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), a mentalist, and Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), a pickpocket. Assembled by a billionaire businessman (Michael Caine), they become a kind of instant supergroup, billed as the Four Horsemen and headlining on the Vegas strip.
Their showstopper: robbing a Paris bank vault - by teleportation - and showering its bounty of bills down on the audience. They're Robin Hoods, these four - bent on redistributing the wealth, and making fat cats pay for their greedy ways. And so the FBI, in the person of Mark Ruffalo, is on the case, assisted by an intrepid French Interpol detective (Melanie Laurent). She says, "We are dealing with something far bigger than us" in an accent to die for.
Morgan Freeman, as is his wont lately (see Oblivion), shows up to make meaningful pronouncements in a voice that could sell credit cards or gay marriage (he's done ads for both). He is cast as a kind of professional debunker, and casts a cynical eye on the Four Horsemen and their high-stakes shenanigans.
Leterrier, who directed the instant classic Clash of the Titans, thinks himself an action director, and so much of the time Now You See Me jettisons all pretense of the illusionary arts to devote its time, its money, and its stunt team to high-speed chases and car crashes.
Maybe Now You See Me really wants to be Fast & Furious with top hats and wands.
Directed by Louis Leterrier. With Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Isla Fisher, and Woody Harrelson. Distributed by Summit Pictures.
Running time: 1 hour, 52 mins.
Parent's guide: PG-13 (profanity, action, sex, adult themes)
Playing at: area theatersEndText


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On "At the Fishhouses"
Lynn Keller
"At the Fishhouses" begins, as a poem by Moore might, with a description of a scene that seems eternally suspended. The verbs in the opening section are stative -- "the five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs," "all is silver," "the big fish tubs are completely lined," "on the slope . . . is an ancient wooden capstan," etc. Yet what Bishop chooses
to describe differs from what Moore would present. When Moore tells us, for instance, that "eight green bands are painted on the [plumet basilisk's] tail -- as piano keys are barred by five black stripes across the white," we know that both lizards and pianos have always looked like that and will continue to do so in the future. But Bishop's description insists that the scene she observes is the product of continual changes caused by both people and nature: The man's shuttle is "worn and polished," the ironwork on the capstan "has rusted," the buildings have "an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls." Such details make us aware that a future visitor would find a different scene in which these processes of erosion, decay, and growth were further advanced.
The fixity of the scene at the fishhouses is further undercut as the speaker becomes an active participant, offering the old man a Lucky Strike and engaging him in conversation. Reminders of historical process now become more overt; "he was a friend of my grandfather" implies her grandfather's death, and "the decline of the population" tells of broader changes. Moreover, Bishop's enchantment with this place emerges as a fascination not so much with the visible world people inhabit as with the unknowable sea it borders. She is attracted to this silvered village because it bears so much evidence of the sea's touch, while her real desire -- like that of her "Riverman" or of Lucy in "The Baptism" is for "total immersion," though she admits that would be "bearable to no mortal." Drawing a message from the scene very different from any Moore would offer, Bishop presents the sea as a symbol of "what we imagine knowledge to be: . . . drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world, derived from the rocky breasts / forever, flowing and drawn, and since / our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown." In suggesting that our knowing anything is itself imaginary, in adhering to a vision of unending process, in believing revelations in this harsh world fleeting and costly, Bishop stands firmly in the mainstream of contemporary art.
From Re-making it new: Contemporary American poetry and the modernist tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by Cambridge University Press.
David Kalstone (1989)
[Robert] Lowell, when he read the poem in The New Yorker, recognized immediately the "great splendor" of the descriptive part, but questioned "a little the word BREAST in the last four or five lines a little too much in the context perhaps; but Im probably wrong." What he picked up, of course, was the flicker of human drama, of a vestigial implacable female presence behind the scene as in The Prelude when the young Wordsworths landscape is suddenly and unintentionally shadowed by feelings which have to do with his dead parents. That, no doubt, is why Bishops poem has often been felt as Wordsworthian in its evasions and circlings. Originally, "At the Fishouses" began with more details about Bishops grandfather, but her revisions suggest the degree to which she chose not to overstress the poems human and personal center. Here eye, as Howard Moss suggests, is a dramatic eye; yet she often experiences traditional dramatic problems character, comic or tragic action by fitting out a stage for them, a stage upon which the protagonists will not necessarily appear. By the end of "at the Fishhouses," Bishops own place as protagonist is apparent; her sense of being an outsider is powerfully banished at the cost of identifying herself with severe, if universal, natural laws.
David Kalstone, "Prodigal Years," Chapter 1 in Part II of Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,1989), 121-122.
Brett C. Millier (1993)
[This excerpt from Milliers biography of Bishop centers on a 1946 trip taken by Bishop to Nova Scotia, her first return in 15 years to her home village, occurring just after the publication of her first book.]
From the many notebook entries of this summer, and the poems that grew from those notes, it seems clear that the trip was both deeply disturbing and deeply significant to Elizabeth in ways that it would take her years to articulate.
At Lockport Beach on the Atlantic Ocean, she made a note to herself: "Description of the dark, icy clear water clear dark glass slightly bitter (hard to define). My idea of knowledge. This cold stream, half drawn, half flowing from a great rocky breast " [the underlined words have been crossed out]. Earlier, in the evening sunlight at Ragged Islands, she had noticed
A million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas.
I know how they feel
The seals play (their barking)
between 2 rocks
leaping out of the calm water with small splashes
you can see where theyre going to come up
the water is so clear
the sun slides over their wet fur
Surface of water swelling slowly as if it were thinking of brimming over.
from Brett C. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 181-182.
Susan McCabe (1994)
[McCabe quotes the last six lines in "At the Fishhouses"]
In usurping and reversing the usual functions of tenor and vehicle, deliquescence becomes the central term and knowledge a way to convey it. Bishops epistemology makes knowledge "utterly free," makes it a diffuse and unlimited entity. The juxtaposition within the phrase "forever, flowing" heightens our sense of endless solubility and flux. And what force is "drawing" the paradoxically "dark" and "clear" water of knowledge? The only agent in this stanza is our imagination, which is deferred through the introductory "It is what." We only have approximation in time, not possession or final certitude; all knowledge is "derived." If our experience links up somewhere, it is with those "rocky breasts," the originary source of our knowledge, both feminized and resistant. The "cold, hard mouth" tells us nothing. Our language and imaginative act shows us ownership only in fluidity: Bishop has us flowing and flown at once.
From Susan McCabe, "A Conspiring Root of Desire: The Search for Love," Chapter 3 in Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 136-137
Albert Gelpi (1995)
[I]n the last lines of the poem the absolute is mythologized not as the spirit Father whose Christmas Son seems not yet to have redeemed nature but as Nature the Terrible Mother whose "rocky breasts" feed her offspring chilling fire, whose "cold hard mouth" engorges what her womb has birthed. [Robert] Lowell tried to convince Bishop to excise the image of the mother, and in the journal notes of "Geographical Mirror" [working title of an earlier version of the poem] she had herself canceled out the phrase "a great rocky breast." By the time she was finishing the poem, however, she realized that she had to have as an image of the absolute fact of nature and mortality an image that was not just "awful but cheerful" but also sublime and awesome. In time and history the knowledge of the absolute is rendered in the elision from the present participle to the past: "flowing and drawn" becomes, in the metamorphosis of an internal rhyme, "flowing, and flown," knowing and known.
From Albert Gelpi, "Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop at Key West: Ideas of Order," in Wallace Stevens Journal 19.2 (Fall 1995), 163-164.
James Longenbach
The final lines of Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" articulate the notion of historical understanding on which her poems, early and late, come to rest. Bishop speaks here of a sea so cold that, should you dip your hand in it, "Your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn."
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, dear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
These lines offer a charged metaphor for the origins of knowledge, the rocky breasts, an image Bishop often associates with the Nova Scotia landscape where she lost her mother. At the same time, the lines caution that, like all metaphors, this one is made and therefore provisional--doubly so: "It is like what we imagine knowledge to be."
The realization that "knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown" raises not only questions of poetic structure but questions of value. In "At the Fishhouses," Bishop links the Nova Scotia landscape with the female body but reminds us at the same time that the equation is historically contingent.
From Modern Poetry after Modernism. Copyright © 1997 by James Longenbach.
James McCorkle
At the end of "At the Fishhouses," the narrator moves from the shore and its human population, to the seal, and finally to the elemental, the water itself:
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Knowledge for Bishop comes to be "derived" from concretes and is itself phenomenal: "dark, salt, clear, moving," the sea itself, the primordial grounding of form, formlessness, and life. In the phenomenal resides mystery: the constant and erosive flux; thus, the object can never be simply objectified or held fixed and distant. Likewise, our knowledge is "flowing, and flown"; subject to change and decay, knowledge is temporal and governed by linguistic constructions. The relation between things, such as knowledge and sea, rather than distinctions, is expressed in the final repetitive and connective music of "flowing and drawn ... flowing, and flown."
Definition exists only in terms of relation, where each thing is linked to another, shadows the other, ebbs from the other, and overflows with the other:
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
The scales plaster everything here, and everything turns iridescent. Seeing links things physically and syntactically with the repetition of "iridescent." The connectedness blooms etymologically, for "iridescent" links with the iris plant, the iris of the eye, and the rainbow. The rich descriptions link the narrator to the world described as, analogously, seventeenth-century Dutch paintings re-present the world. Taxonomic detailing draws the narrator (or viewer) into the landscape and begins the process of meditative self-reflexivity--where, as Merleau-Ponty writes, "the perception of a thing opens me up to being." Everything resides in the events of being, in the commonality of the perceptual field of one another. Thus, Merleau-Ponty continues, "the perception of the other founds mortality by realizing the paradox of an alter ego ... by placing my perspectives and my incommunicable solitude in the visual field of another and of all the others." The solitude of the poet, mapmaker, and traveler necessitates not only active looking but also the lucid regarding of the copiousness of others. The visual description in "At the Fishhouses," and throughout Bishop's poetry, insists the observer enter into the perceptual field and come into relation with others, and thus, however provisionally, stave off isolation, silence, and death.
From The Still Performance: Writing, Self, and Interconnection in Five Postmodern American Poets. Copyright © 1989 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia.
Timothy Morris
As so often, the most discerning discussion of a poet comes from more negative assessments. Edwin Honig, reviewing Poems for the Partisan Review in 1956, finds the same surface qualities that appeared to Hall and Nemerov but fails to discover refreshing universals beneath. "The poems arrest one by their brilliant surfaces and transparency. But underneath is a curious rigidity, a disturbing lack of movement and affective life, betraying a sprained and uneasy patience." We are verging back on "frigidity" here, but Honig elaborates his argument in other kinds of terms as well. From the last line of "The Map" ("More delicate than the historians' are the mapmakers' colors"), Honig deduces "the poet's aim--a scrupulous representation of the world reduced in scale and line to something like a cartographer's depiction of geographical areas. It is a plan for suppressing rather than compressing contours, dimension, tonality, emotion. A slow hard gaze moves behind the deliberately drawn-out ironies.
Honig knows that he is begging the question whether a poetry based on suppression might not be just as valid as a poetry based on the more traditional lyric virtue of compression. His comment that Bishop's verse plans systematically to suppress the usual poetic qualities is highly suggestive. It offers a way to read behind and around the surfaces of the poems, to arrive at a sense of them as correlatives--though maybe not objective--for emotions that are at least the reader's if not reliably the poet's. Honig does not go as far as making that transvaluation; he sees the typical Bishop poem as "a baneful asking of meaningful questions of a meaningless or essentially unmeaningful object.... She fails with the image when trying to make it over into a symbol because the nature of the precise image is to defy symbolization. For similar reasons, her forced synaesthesia reduces reality not to poetry but to a dressing up of coy attitudes.... Instead of relieving, the devices call attention to, the flatness of her prosaic lines." From the perspective of the 1990s, Honig seems largely accurate in his characterizations; the question, of course, is whether Bishop's texts are to be read as exploiting, or as immured in, the limitations of their lyric method. As Honig himself says, "I recognize that what I have called her risks and failure may all be understood precisely as her successes by another kind of reader."
Indeed, it can be instructive to read a text from the 1955 Poems in Honig's terms, but with the value sign reversed. "At the Fishhouses" seems promising for the experiment, because it is prosaic, ironic, synaesthetic, and, starting in imagery, ends in symbolism. It is also characterized by what Honig particularly likes about Bishop's work, "good camera-eye realism":
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
But even that camerawork is prosaic; and the poem promptly wanders into glaringly flat passages:
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
Coming from a poet who is supremely attentive to detail, this poem is one of an inability to pay attention, to concentrate. (Robert Bly would choose these very lines as the epitome of the flatness of modern American poetry, neatly ignoring the rest of the poem.)" Instead of compression/concentration, we sense suppression. The bloodstain-like markings on the capstan are suppressed in banal conversation, but the speaker's attention is then caught by the fisherman's knife--and keeps being drawn back to the water. The lyric necessity, which keeps butting up against the suppressions of the prosaic voice of the speaker, is to invoke the sea, to come to terms especially with its power to drown and its incipient fascination for the one who might drown in it. The lyric voice comes up momentarily, to be suppressed partially by a humorous aside:
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals ... One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
The sea continues to exert a fascination upon the speaker that ultimately purges her voice of anything but the lyric:
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown.
The price of the lyrical "knowledge" that is drawn from this final symbolization is silence; the poem ends--and maybe the speaker too, if the poem is read as a dramatic monologue; the poem's dramatic situation ends in sleep, or trance, or suicide. But the poem's dialogic qualities make it hard to read as either prose sketch, lyric, or drama. Any of the genres that participate in it throw the others into disquieting perspective. If "At the Fishhouses" is its final lyric summation (as, for instance, Stevens's "Sunday Morning" in its final version is the passage beginning "Deer walk upon our mountains"), then the prosaic, ironic passages that proceed it are just so much waste of time (as the dialogue in "Sunday Morning" between speaker and questioning woman is not, being instead a productive dialectic). If the poem is essentially its "accumulated details," as Nemerov thought, then the final lyric summation is a false note, a "gnomic antictimax." And if the poem is drama, it is not very well realized drama; it is static and impertinent. "At the Fishhouses" is, then, something different, something created out of a dialogic confusion of genres; and Honig's sense that Bishop's "risks and failure" in such a poem could be revalued by other reading strategies seems to be borne out.
From Becoming Canonical in American Poetry. Copyright © 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
Robert Dale Parker
The rhetorical strategy of "At the Fishhouses," with all its uncharacteristic bravado at the end, is inductive. It begins with details that slowly accumulate as if to build up to and justify the broad concluding assertions--to justify them rhetorically, though never with the close logic of argument. For the logic of syllogism Bishop substitutes the enticement of atmosphere, of description that coaxes us to the strange from the perspective of one who knows it familiarly, yet is not entirely of it, who is both of the strange described world and of the ordinary world she describes it for.
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
Immediately, the poem sets us into a deserted and distant place, and yet it sets us there as casually as if its world of seaside decay were our own world. It is not the world of many readers, and not even, any more, the world of the writer whose origin it evokes. The old man's world that fades into the metaphorical sunset (the gloaming) may come back the next morning, and for a few mornings after that, but its metaphorical morning is gone for ever. And yet the fading world comes across as if familiar, because words like "although" and "the" suggest in medias res that we already know about "the" fishhouses and about what fishermen do on cold evenings. The phrase "in the gloaming almost invisible" gives a sense, then, of something reduced to a latency that always has been and always will be. Though it refers to the net, it seems also to refer to the fisherman. Subject and object (fisherman and net) have both nearly evaporated into a nostalgic, twilight glow, leaving only activity itself. The activity they leave is the Fates' ancient metaphor, the transforming of time into culture, of the eternal into the temporal, whether by the fisherman's craft of tool building (net weaving) or, here, by the literary weaving of verbal art, the yet more fundamental medium and content of culture.
Such activity has gone on for a long time; the shuttle is "worn and polished." Bishop's presence will not change it, at least not for the fisherman or his world, which goes on, however fadingly, regardless of her. She feels immersed in his world, with its strong smell. His world affects her, making her "nose run and ... eyes water"; but she cannot affect it. She has changed from the earlier poems where she projects her imagined world out from herself and celebrates its imaginative power, as in "The Map," "The Imaginary Iceberg," "The Man-Moth," "The Weed," "The Unbeliever," and so on. Now, instead of projecting her mind onto the place, she tries, at least, to see the intransigent resistance of place, for it seems on the verge of overflowing in an unrestrained flood: "the heavy surface of the sea, / swelling slowly as if considerable spilling over."
[. . . .]
"At the Fishhouses" (1947) and the placce-obsessed poems of Bishops middle career grant or submit to the authority of external place. They identify the issue as where we are: we are at the fishhouses. A somewhat later poem, "Questions of Travel" (1957), concludes by backing away from the turn to place only enough to reaffirm that the only place we ever see is that we project from within. In "Questions of Travel" Bishop looks back nostalgically toward wish, but with a jaded sound. Her opening words ("There are too many . . .") complain of the old where, by contrast, an early poem like "The Map" or "The Imaginary Iceberg" sounds excited to discover the new. Even there, though, she continues the preoccupation with where that dominates "At the Fishhouses."
Who she is, she implies in "At the Fishhouses," has grown out of where she and her people have been. But the place where they have been is about to disappear, which will transform their sense of origin into a memory forever severed from the actual place remembered:
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
Everything here appears on the edge of the end. The old fisherman is not a friend of Bishop's grandfather--he was a friend of him. That is gone now, the grandfather and the friendship with him, and the old fisherman seems about to follow. He acquiesces to the poet's distant manner of closeness, her friendly purchase of rapport. The bribe shows her distance from his world, even as his willingness to accept it shows her connection to it, an ambiguity that she presumably appreciates, setting her poem, as she does here and so often, on the edge where two worlds meet and overlap and never join. She gives him almost a parody of his professiona lucky strike, as if to imply that is the only way he'll get any luck. In name, her little gift belongs to the sport-fishing world of "The Fish," where she can toss back her prize and feel heroic for it. It has nothing to do with this fisherman's fishing. In his commercial, unheroic, blue-collar salt's world, he must wait for his fish, for his "boat to come in"; and in some sense the boat he now waits for most, looks to and expects the most, is the soon-to-come ferry of death, his and his world's. He is almost worn away, like his knife, like the population that declines, as if in mores as well as in numbers, so unlike the unnumbered fish, which are always the same,
The unchanging world of the fish, finally, intrigues Bishop more. But she cannot turn to it easily. She spends half the poem working up to it by describing the land, then the fisherman, then, in a conspicuously transitional stanza, actually describing the ramp that descends from land to sea, as if she needs to find some feature in the physical landscape to draw her into the water, like a timid bather stepping in slowly. Then at last, and with tones of self-conscious profundity, she dives in:
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals ... One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
. . . . .
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water... Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
She introduces the water in an atmosphere of all-encompassing yet unspecifiable mystery. Its depth suggests an ultimacy, almost a ubiquity; yet it is also distantly cold, too dark and clear to see. She so romanticizes, on the one hand, the ocean's grandiose allure and, on the other hand, its ominous invisibility that the combination of almost opposed extremes implies that ordinary ocean has little to do with what so attracts and intimidates her. Instead she puzzles over the role that ordinary ocean can somehow figure in her own partly private and partly representative array of fears and wishes.
The impulses to such figurings are vague but threatful, and hence not easy to own up to. Every time Bishop gets a start at them, she soon backs away. If the element she ruminates over is "bearable to no mortal," then what draws her to it? Hence the glibly cliché evasion, "to no mortal," lets her rationalize a further evasion. She slides into an ellipsis and changes the subject to animal--that is, to unambiguously mortal--comic relief, nervously relaxing with a little satire of her immersion in place and her preoccupation with water. Then she can move on. Moving on, therefore, means moving back to the words she left off with, the words before her ellipsis that supposed to introduce her direct turn to the water, and that she left when she got fearful and distracted. But instead of returning to those words, she slides into yet another ellipsis, turning "Back, behind us" to the land of trees.
All this looping back adds up to a startling hesitation, as if both the length of her reluctance and the piling up of her repetitions measure the force of what she hesitates before. They evoke the sea's awesome breadth and uniformity; she can go back to it forever and always it will be "the same":
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
The land changes, the sea stays the same. Both evoke her past, one a fading past that soon she will recover only through memory, never through immediate sensation, and the other a past she can always recover. Strangely, because the sea's past never varies, it is somehow almost cosmically more capacious, and therefore less tangible than the past that escapes ubiquity to lodge in memory. That cosmic suggestiveness exacts from Bishop an awed humility, in which her repeated words and phrases ("the same," "above the stones") build an incantatory sound that culminates in the closing lines:
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
These lines define the difference between wish and where, a difference that shows in the way Bishop uses them, in effect, to revise the concluding vision of "The Man-Moth." The earlier poem ends with a melodramatic litany of ifs and a tasting of primeval waters, cool and pure. Here Bishop again closes with a sagacious-sounding if and a tasting of primeval waters. But this time the waters appear on an oceanic rather than a quaintly miniature scale, and they taste--or would taste--bitter. The change signals a movement from the nervous thrill of fantastic, individual wish to the settled disillusion of ordinary, public place. The public knowledge celebrated in the final line is historical, received, in contrast to the asserted, original knowledge of "The Map," in which the printer's excitement reveals emotion that "exceeds its cause," tempting Bishop to think that the "countries pick their colors." The wished-for open sesame of imagination in early poems like "The Map" and "The Man-Moth" thus gives way to a resigned-to satisfaction at natural specificity in the poems of Bishop's mid-career. In "At the Fishhouses," the final, cadenced hush before "it," before the ocean, betrays how desperately in the first part of the poem Bishop strives to keep the evanescent place from slipping away before she can trap it in poetic capture. She apparently hopes to arrest its elusiveness simply by surrendering to her grandfather's and her childhood's world at its last tide of fullness.
If in the first part of the poem Bishop tries not to lose, then in the last part she tries to recover what is inevitably lost. As "The Sea & Its Shore" is her "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," so "At the Fishhouses" is, more loosely, her "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." For the "it" that she describes takes on a resonance that works for her like a subtler version of the seaside aria that releases Whitman's solitary song. He feels the bird's inspiration, but somehow loses it again until he muses back over his past and recognizes how his song is bound intimately to an enabling vision of tragic loss, to the ancient muse of memory that inspires, that gives, by taking away. For Bishop, "it," as she obscurely pronominalizes her material here, is not a bird's song. It is the ocean, our evolutionary origin, suggestive also of our amniotic origins in our mothers (the cradle out of which we endlessly rock). Yet she stretches "it" out syntactically so that it starts to refer to knowledge as well as to the ocean. That blurring of reference is no coincidence, for knowledge is the earliest reach back of memory, and the first reach forward of ambition, and therefore, mythologically, biblically (the tree of knowledge), and psychologically, the beginning of the guilt through which memory breeds imagination. If Whitman displaces his anxiety over origins onto a pair of birds, as if foisting on them some traumatic but comfortingly distant displacement of the primal scene, then Bishop (coming after Darwin, whom she admired), a little more evasive, sees a more generalized ultimacy of origins in the oceanic waters, in something evolutionarily still more primeval. As Whitman pursues the recovery of his private origin, Bishop pursues the recovery of her public origin.
But it is unrecoverable. It is too "dark," which makes it invisible, and yet too "clear," which also makes it invisible, too fluidly "moving, utterly free." What it is, therefore, she cannot or at least does not say. Instead, she says "It is like what we imagine," and then turns to metaphor. Unable to recover the thing itself, she tries to recover its thrice-removed shadow, removed once by metaphor, and again by metaphorizing not "it" so much as what we imagine that, at the third remove, it derives from. Moreover, she tropes what it comes from in a way that reveals how reluctant we are and, as Derrida might insist, how impossible it is to imagine the independent mystery of our origins. We cannot help projecting onto the ancient past some feature from our present. Here Bishop sees in the past the bodily fears that provoke the very anxiousness that makes us wonder about origins in the first place. That is, she tropes what "it" comes from as what it leads to: the human. She invokes its central features as a mouth and breasts. Still, she complicates that bodily metaphor by pairing it with uncorporeal adjectives that figure its cold inaccessibility. Its mouth is cold and hard, its breasts, even more forbidding, are rocky. The mixed metaphors expose a mixed attraction and resistance to thinking of such elemental sources as human. For if they are human then we might bear more responsibility for them or more relation to them. She thus has a stake in failing to recover the primeval mystery that nevertheless fascinates her.
Hence even as she resorts, in part, to a more or less accessibly human metaphor, she evasively generalizes it in a way that obscures a yet more latent metaphor of the human. That earlier metaphor, suggested just enough for us to glimpse its repression, is of birth. She represses it by confining its expression to features that are not exclusively maternal--a mouth and breasts. But the repression shines through that pretense of generic reference because we associate the feminine and maternal with the idea of coming from something or someone who has breasts and a mouth. The carefully generalized anatomy and the reifying adjectives--cold, hard, and rocky--make the maternal seem irksome and defended against. Such adjectives betray a comfort in projecting onto our origins a forbidding discomfort. If the maternal is so harsh, then perhaps Bishop need feel less burden for the harshness of her own relation to her mother, or the fantasy of some harshness in her not being a mother herself. Her feelings here are as mixed as her metaphors. She metaphorizes maternal origin as something severe, and yet rests in awe of it as something that repeats itself in us but that in some sense we can never fully repeat.
All these complications and their aggrandizingly portentous phrasing lead some readers to dismiss the end of "At the Fishhouses," not implausibly and yet not quite satisfactorily, as a posturing for profundity. Such a response underestimates how thoughtfully the earlier, concrete parts of the poem lay the ground for the more reflective seascape to follow, where Bishop thinks about the water, and, in a sense, sees herself, even if she protectively metaphorizes herself as her origins. As the land calls up the specific associates of her recognizable past, so the water calls up the vaguer associations of a past intensely felt but nevertheless unrecognizable because it is "forever.. . , flowing, and flown." The small things of a familiar place, the wheelbarrows, lobster pots, fish tubs, and herring scales, contain the hard specifiable knowledge she can hold in mind and hand. But the largest things, in their ungraspably oceanic scale, she can never confidently specify and identify. Bishop thus uses the change in the poem both to suggest the specially ruminative aura of the ocean"meditation and water are wedded forever," as Melville's Ishmael says--and to suggest the allure she feels in that reflectiveness. She likes to reflect, perhaps partly because she finds it difficult to know or understand what she sees when (in the other sense of the word reflection) her meditation reflects back on herself. "At the Fishhouses" is thus an intimately self-conscious poem, cautiously feeling out the relation between place and identity, and dissolving, finally, in the watery mystery of its own contemplation.
On its grand scale, then, "At the Fishhouses" does things much like some other poems from the middle of Bishop's career, where she works on a smaller scale geographically but explores just as keenly the relation between identity and place, whether someone else's place, as in "Filling Station," or a public place that corrupts the private, as in "Varick Street," or, as in "Insomnia," a thoroughly and even troublingly private place.
From The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1988 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
C. K. Doreski
In "At the Fishhouses," from her second book, A Cold Spring, the language, having gained a good deal of momentum, becomes increasingly sensuous and specific, and claims, at last, through the trope of the sea, a thoroughly sensate and utterly transparent climax that invites entry, immersion, and transference:
[lines 71-83]
As a descendent of Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Frost, and an antecedent of Susan Howe's New Englandly, noun-driven Language poetry, Bishop has been an (I)witness. Her account of a repeated phenomenon"I have seen it over and over"the indifferent seas slopping over and above the stony shore wholly recreates the implied experience, maintaining the illusion of witness by the seductive staging of the event.
First, the poet tempts her readers into the realm of possibility: "If you should dip your hand in, / your bones would. . . . " She then courts plausibility with the logic of sequence: If one takes the first step-immersion (earlier in the poem Bishop notes that she believes in "total immersion")then one is primed for the tide of events that will surely follow. Her adherence to physical, sensate realities underscores her knowledge, and engenders belief. Though readers may not understand this experience, they feel it; they experience it. In this process of transference, the poet effaces herself by making the moment of perception the reader's own, demonstrating that "It is like what we imagine knowledge to be." What, then, does it refer to? The sea, the water, the tides? Asked to make this metaphysical leap from the physical and sensory knowledge of the sea to the epistemological sense of it, one straddles the yawning chasm between what humans can know"dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free"and that which projects unmoored minds into the "historical, flowing, and flown." This educational disclosure is locked in the language, which reveals itself to be nonrepresentational after all, but a code. Here lies the unnerving power of the reticence that requires interpretation through recognition that language is experience. Like Thoreau's "johnswort spring[ing] from the same perennial root in this pasture," Bishop's slopping sea requires the sight of "infant eyes." Both flower and sea court an original relationship through an infant's expressionless impressions in hopes of rekindling that "visionary gleam."
Natural surfaces, the raw stuff of geography, require a language that mediates between nature and culture and marks their intersections. The surface of Bishop's sea, for instance, like most romantic water views, conforms in verbal purpose to the larger rhetoric of the life cycle. Though not as ominous as the ocean of Marianne Moore's "A Grave," the description of the sea of "At the Fishhouses" conceals through metaphors of precious metal and stone as much as it reveals through its verbs of massive and meditative power:
[lines 13-20]
The opaque but mirroring surface spills from sea to land, obscuring but transforming the shore world. This "mirror" offers no reassurance, no reflection of the meditating narrator. The shattered planes engender no correspondence between land and sea, and cannot function as a trope to link nature and culture. Instead, a counterresponse emerges unilaterally from the cold water. A rather incongruous doppelgangerthe "curious," "interested" sealexchanges "looks" with the poet. Like the exchange between the travelers and the moose, this marks a reflective self-confirmation. Without the penetrating presence of the seal, the sea would roll on without form, purpose, or direction:
[lines 65-70]
The uneasy confirmation of self involves a risk of immersion, an affirmation of faith, an acknowledgment of the efficacy of the metaphor of creation. The seal breaking through the surface of the unknown initiates that which must be completed in experience.
Mirrors, rather than water, offer the most reliable, if most mundane, "silver" surfaces, and keep the poem more safely, if less adventurously, within the bounds of human culture. Bishop's self- reflections, however, even when confined in the mirror, assume a variety of forms and moods.
In spite of her wide use of tropes of knowing, including the journey, Bishop only once defines the "knowledge" of her poems. The final movement of "At the Fishhouses" [CS] risks using the sea, a powerful and ambitious metaphor that postulates knowing as a fluid, expressive, but chaotic, absorptive, and formless process expressed by the modifiers of "knowledge," "dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free." The line that introduces this closing metaphor asserts that the relationship between knowledge and imagination is definitive: "It is like what we imagine knowledge to be." Changed in the third typescript from "This is what I imagine knowledge to be," this line asserts the social, rather than the individual, import of this metaphor. Seasoned by a sensory immersion, the rhetorical flow must now abstract that sensational knowledge into the matrix of a historical yet nondogmatic understanding. Despite the firm antecedent link to the sea, this it shimmers with ambiguity. The poem struggles to remind itself that its ebb and flow of modifiers is securely moored in the sea, the figural, rhetorical function of which is as solid as its literal referent is fluid. The experience generated by the poem is primarily one of metaphor-awareness as a means of warding off or controlling the abstraction toward which all knowledge tends. Beyond metaphor lies metaphysics, in which, as Melville pointed out, it is easy to drown.
The personification of the shore world, immediately following the modifiers of "knowledge""the cold hard mouth / of the world, derived from the rocky breasts"refuses accessibility to conventionally comforting ideas of motherhood in favor of raw origin. The security of the bedrock shore is the viewpoint it offers on origination and the concomitant peace of death, a physical vantage-point and a figurative irony. The sea, too, occupies both a figurative role (as knowledge, chaos, psychic depth, amniotic fluid) and a physically verifiable biological function as originary medium. To expect wisdom or nourishment from the known but imaginatively dead shore-world is an error, but to step from it into the dark, salt, flowing sea is to be a transcendentalist, and suicidal. Not even the language of transcendence, then, can generate a fiction adequate to both the senses (the physical self) and the psyche (which finds its analogue in the sea). Knowledge, that troubling abstraction, leads beyond metaphor, beyond the apprehensible world. The poet cannot follow, but remains on the rocky, unnourishing shore, and gazes at the abstract, unobtainable freedom beyond, and infers, if she dares, the mysteries beyond the range of the senses. Yet it is precisely the act of discovering this limitation that is "historical," accretive, "flowing," organic, and "flown," perishing.
In "At the Fishhouses" Bishop speculates upon the province and parameters of the available language of knowledge and, by extension, the limitations of the role of metaphor and other kinds of figuration in her writing. Unlike the childlike question-and-answer scenario of "Five Flights Up," this meditation defines knowledge (or rather, defines the nature of knowledge) without restricting the source of inspiration. That is, in its act of linguistic and dramatic self-discovery, "At the Fishhouses" privileges the power of meditation and the assertive gaze of the speaker, rather than a particularly configured scenario limited or empowered by the stance, age, or available vocabulary of the speaker. Though Bishop's measured tone and insistence on the social dimension of knowledge bear little resemblance to Emerson's "perfect exhilaration" (an exhilaration that might have thrust Bishop's persona into the cold sea), the return to "reason and faith" resounds throughout the poem. Like those of Emerson's "lover of nature," Bishop's "inward and outward senses" remain "adjusted to each other"she refuses to abandon herself to the enticing fluid vagueness that would extinguish those senses. Her orchestrating personality directs and empowers this scene, and retains control despite the undeniable implications of her meditation. As Emerson would explain this process of discovery in Nature:
Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both . . . Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
The poet of this marginal "Fishhouse" world (and its later companion piece, "The End of March" [G]) engages nature with a full awareness of the problematic relationship between language and the environment. Like Lowell's inchworm, Bishop is always "feeling for something to reach something"; her movement toward knowledge is an associative process. Grounded by her commitment to the figurative language of the senses, she reaches beyond her grasp, but faces the full implications of doing so.
from Elizabeth Bishop: The Restraints of Language. Copyright © 1993 by Oxford UP
Vicki Graham
A single line of perfectly regular iambic pentameter divides Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" neatly in half, separating a detailed and restrained description of an old fisherman, the Nova Scotia shoreline, and the tools of the fishing trade from an equally detailed but more passionate description of the ocean itself. In the opening lines, the speaker's voice is calm, her tone impersonal. An acute observer, she carefully maintains her distance from the static scene she describes. Throughout this section, Bishop uses long, free verse lines of three to six strong stresses. The restraint of these first 40 lines culminates in a line of pure iambic pentameter that describes the old fisherman's knife, "the blade of which is almost worn away." In the second half of the poem, the voice changes markedly. The formal pronoun "one" gives way first to "I" and then to the conversational "you." The speaker puts herself directly into the scene, imagining the sea's cold in her bones. The ocean, which was heavy and almost still in the opening, becomes a "transmutation of fire / that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame." No longer contained, it is, like the knowledge Bishop compares it to, "flowing, and flown."
Bishop's use of a perfectly regular iambic pentameter line to present the old fisherman's knife, an essential tool of the fishing trade, merges one of the poet's tools - meter - with the fisherman's. The line's placement at the center of the poem calls attention to the poem's underlying argument, that the poet, like the fisherman, exercises a difficult craft.
Images of work dominate the first half of the poem. The old man sits by the shore weaving a fish net, his shuttle worn smooth by use. He is surrounded by the trappings of the fishing trade, which the speaker describes in detail, moving from the old man's shuttle to the fishhouses and their "steeply peaked roofs," the "narrow, cleated gangplanks," the lobster pots and masts, the fish tubs which are "completely lined / with layers of beautiful herring scales," and the wheelbarrows, "similarly plastered / with creamy iridescent coats of mail." The scene is static, as though painted. The ocean swells but does not break; only the flies move, minute bits of iridescence crawling over the tube. The carefully detailed description of the scene and its radiance suggests, even this early in the poem, that Bishop wanted readers to see that work makes things beautiful.
Twenty-five lines later the speaker turns back to the old man, a friend of her grandfather's. For the first time in the poem she uses a first person pronoun: "we talk of the decline in the population / and of codfish and herring / while he waits for a herring boat to come in." Through the pronoun "we," the speaker inserts herself into the scene, becoming a participant instead of an observer. "We" also identifies her with the old man, not only through family connections, but through their common interest and shared conversation. The section ends with an image of the old man at work:
[. . . .]
As soon as the old man's knife enters the poem, the poem moves into its first line of pure iambic pentameter. The work of the fisherman scaling his fish becomes an analogy for the work of the poet who shapes a perfectly regular line. This line becomes the poet's knife, a tool that allows her to cut through the surface beauty of the shore to the more substantial beauty of the sea. The line simultaneously closes this section of the poem and introduces the next.
Motion predominates in the second half of the poem. Earlier, everything was still and contained; even the sea was heavy, opaque. Now, everything begins to move. But the line of iambic pentameter marks a boundary between shore and water, stasis and motion, which the speaker is reluctant to cross. She has reached, in the line of pentameter, a moment of closure. To go beyond it, she must invent a new rhythm and enter a new realm with a different order, both poetically and thematically. She hesitates, tensed against immersion in the sea, and focuses the next verse paragraph on the water's edge, the place of entrance and exit. Movement into the water is countered by movement out of it:
[. . . .]
The final verse paragraph opens with an image of the sea, "Cold dark deep and absolutely clear," suggesting that the speaker can finally approach the sea. But still she hesitates. Though her tone has become more personal, she interrupts progress towards the sea, distracting herself with a description of a seal who listens to her sing. Then she tries again, repeating the line, "Cold dark deep and absolutely clear," and adding, "The clear gray icy water . . ." (ellipsis hers). Again she interrupts herself, examining the firs behinds her. But, like the seal to whom she sings Baptist hymns, she believes in "total immersion," and in the last part of the poem she finally reaches the sea.
"Total immersion" in the poem, however, is metaphorical; the speaker never touches the water - she doesn't even dip her hand in. But literal immersion is not necessary; what matters is for the poet to bring the poem into alignment with the sea. Once again a regular line of iambic pentameter breaks suspension:
[. . . .]
The suspension broken, repetition and anaphora set up a new rhythm which is as compelling and variable as the sea's:
[. . . .]
The line of iambic pentameter at the center of "At the Fishhouses" suggests that Bishop intended to direct attention to work and to the mastering of craft. She meant us to understand that we can't get to the sea, to knowledge, without work. Adam's curse falls on fisherman and poet alike. Both must labor. Like the old man working in the twilight, the poet must handle her knife precisely, using her craft to release beauty.
from The Explicator 53.2 (Winter 1995)
Brett C. Millier
The image of water that is flammable, dangerous, about to explode recurs frequently in Bishop's poems. And it occurs most often in her most self-reflective poems, poems whose composition corresponds in time with Bishop's most difficult negotiations with alcohol. This is not to say that those poems are "really" about alcoholism, only that when Bishop assesses herself in her poems, she is extraordinarily honest in that assessment.
The best-known fiery body of water occurs in Bishop's great poem "At the Fishhouses" (1948). Conceived during her trip "home" to Nova Scotia in 1946, the same trip which produced "The Moose" and the inspiration for The Prodigal," the poem records a visit by the poet with an old fisherman "netting, / his net, in the gloaming almost invisible," outside the fishhouses of a small port. After nearly fifty lines of luminous description of the physical scene, the poet is tempted to personal or philosophical speculation, but retreats from it:
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals ... One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
She goes on to describe her humorous encounters with the seal but is drawn again to the meaning of the scene, only again to retreat: "Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / the clear gray icy water... Back, behind us, / the dignified tall firs begin." And then, unable to avoid the pull of the water any longer, she mentally plunges in:
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
The water so cold it burns is first, of course, a physical description of the icy cold water of the North Atlantic. But at the same time, in a poem in which Bishop is considering her origins--on her first visit to her mother's home since her death in 1934--the cold water reflects the absence of maternal warmth in her life, and perhaps the drug with which she medicated that sense of loss. The shifting sea of knowledge is both general, communal ("It is like what we imagine knowledge to be") and highly personal, as the startling image of rocky breasts makes her speculations suddenly physical again. The fleeting nature of both kinds of knowledge remind one of the "shuddering insights, beyond his control" of "The Prodigal," and we see that this is another exiled figure, trying to make her mind up about her place in the world. Here she contemplates the choice between the impoverished but beautiful land and the tempting oblivion of the paradoxical, and alcohol-like, sea: cold but burning; like knowledge, but promising death.
[. . . . ]
One sees imagery related to fiery water in a few other poems of this period; but the image all but disappears from Bishop's poetry during her happy years in Brazil, and by the time she came to write the poems of Geography III in the early seventies, the cultural revolutions of the sixties had made it possible for even Elizabeth Bishop to make explicit reference to drinking in her poems.
"Crusoe in England"'s home-brew comes to mind, and the "grog a l'americaine" of "The End of March." But several critics have noted the startling and ubiquitous presence of volcanoes and lava-like substances in the poems of Geography III, and we are once again in the realm of "fire-water"-in the deeply self-assessing "In the Waiting Room" (1971), "Crusoe in England" (1971), and "The Moose" (1972), at least.
from "The prodigal: Elizabeth Bishop and alcohol." Contemporary Literature 39.1 (Spring 1998)
Return to Elizabeth Bishop


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Two days from now in an example of profligate marketing, Audi, Chevrolet, Ford, Hyundai, Jaguar, Kia, Toyota, Volkswagen and others will expend an estimated $72,000,000 – yes, that's seventy-two millions of dollars – to run their latest 30-second commercials on the Fox broadcast of the 48th Super Bowl. Which means the time is costing $130,000 per second.
Oh, and did we mention what Chrysler is likely to be investing if, as TheDetroitBureau.com has reported, they go ahead with another two-minute spot featuring the legendary Bob Dylan?
Add to this bare bones (ha!) media buy the cost of creating and producing these mini-movies. We're talking sets, crew costs above the line and below the line, talent fees, editing, post production, travel, craft services, drivers, misc. incidentals, guaranteed residuals, special music and computer generated graphics. Add that in and you're talking chump change in the neighborhood of $750 thousand to $1 million for each commercial, or anywhere from $18 to $25 million overall. (more…)


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text: Summary/Annotation -> Regan's brother Liam can't stand the person he is during the day. Like the moon from whom Liam has chosen his female namesake, his true self, Luna, reveals herself only at night. For years, Liam has transformed himself into the beautiful girl he longs to be with help from his sister's clothes and makeup in the secrecy of their basement bedrooms. Now everything is about to change - Luna is preparing to emerge from her cocoon. But are Liam's family and friends ready to welcome Luna into their lives?


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A little blog about life, family, food, and living in the beautiful Pacific Northwest
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Great Eggs-pectations! Bacon and Cheddar Deviled Eggs!
Eggs are a big part of my diet. Not only do I love their flavor, but they are just so accommodating in the recipe department. Don't you love it when your ingredients cooperate with you?Take today's recipe for example. I love deviled eggs. I've posted about them. I've read your posts about them. Is there such a thing as a bad deviled egg? Not in my house, there isn't. Okay, okay so my kids won't touch them. Hubbyman and I more than make up for the non-eggers' lack of enthusiasm.
Actually, the yummy stuffed egg recipe I'm sharing with you today is a good one to serve to those a little shy about eating deviled eggs. This recipe does NOT have any vinegar in it, so it's milder than traditional deviled eggs. Plus it contains cheese and bacon. I mean, come on, who doesn't like cheese and bacon? Um, besides my children, that is. Oh, they like cheese and bacon and eggs, they just prefer that all parties remain in their respective, designated, separated areas on a plate. *sigh*Anywhooo, these are super simple, and really do taste great. These little stuffed gems are a fun twist on the traditional omelet. They would be perfect at a tailgate party, football buffet, or holiday gathering.
Bacon and Cheddar Deviled Eggs
6 Hard boiled eggs, peeled and split in half
3 Tablespoons Mayo
1 heaping teaspoon grainy, Dijon, or regular mustard
2 Tablespoons grated Cheddar cheese (grate it yourself!)
4 strips bacon, cooked crisp and crumbled
1 teaspoon dried parsley
Salt to taste
White pepper
2 green onions, sliced both white and green parts
Separate the hard boiled yolks from the eggs,
and place the yolks in a large mixing bowl. Place the egg whites, cut side up on a plate. I usually put a paper towel down on the plate first ~ it keeps the whites from sliding around while you stuff them.Mash the yolks with a fork. Add the mayo and mustard, and stir well.I like this kind of mustard, but Dijon would work great, too. Regular mustard would be just fine as well. Stir in the cheese, parsley, salt, white pepper, and most of the bacon. Keep a bit of bacon to garnish with later. Using a small spoon, fill each half of the egg whites, really mounding it high. A spoon works better than a pastry bag because the bacon would clog the tip. Garnish with the reserved bacon and the green onions.Eat. Devour. Make yummy noises. Protect your portion from your egg stealing hubby. So, what great eggs-pectations have you created lately?
PS: Naturally, these are gluten free, too!
16 comments:
- Robynn's Ravings said...
Yay!! I got to *see* you! Oh you are such a sweetheart. Don't worry about visiting me. You come when you can. Just wanted to be sure I didn't stick my ample foot in my mouth.
These eggs look so incredible. I have never even THOUGHT of something like this. It's going on the recipe list this week along with the tomatoes. MMMMMMM. I'm so hungry right now!
- October 3, 2009 at 9:49 PM
- Mickle in NZ said...
Mmmmm, guess what I'm having for lunch tomorrow! My only difference would be to use fresh parsley - it is right beside my front door.
Apart from the bacon is food Zebbycat isn't into, always a bonus here.
- October 4, 2009 at 2:40 AM
- Grace said...
i've only ever had deviled eggs at potluck dinners (and occasionally the leftovers of said potluck for breakfast the next day), and i just love them. they're usually plain, though, so the thought of tossing in bacon and cheese is amazing to me!
- October 4, 2009 at 5:32 AM
- Cathy said...
My family loves deviled eggs. They are quickly gobbled up when I make them. You've really kicked them up a notch, Paula.
- October 4, 2009 at 6:55 AM
- Manggy said...
Kids don't know what they're missing!!! What I'm missing is the cayenne pepper ;) but it does look magnificent. Save some for me!
- October 4, 2009 at 7:08 AM
- noble pig said...
I love deviled eggs! These look sooooooo good!
- October 4, 2009 at 8:01 AM
- George Gaston said...
An old Proverb says, you can't unscramble an egg ~ but who would want to when making these incredible edible Deviled Eggs. Like you, eggs are my favorite… no matter how they are prepared. Great recipe, thanks!
- October 4, 2009 at 11:38 AM
- Aggie said...
Oh I love deviled eggs! But why don't I ever make them? Your photos look delicious!
- October 4, 2009 at 12:00 PM
- Pam said...
I actually used to make things on purpose that my kids didn't like, just so there would be more for me. That wouldn't work with these eggs though, I'd be lucky to get one.
- October 4, 2009 at 12:10 PM
- Marjie said...
I do adore deviled eggs. But mine must have pickles. It's the law. I have to make about 3 dozen for one meal (snack or appetizer, really).
- October 4, 2009 at 1:54 PM
- Lynda said...
I love deviled eggs, but adding bacon and cheese to them has me drooling! I hadn't ever thought of this- great job, Paula!
- October 4, 2009 at 2:19 PM
- Cheryl said...
Yum yum yum! I happen to have some bacon in my fridge! Those are beautiful and making my mouth water!
- October 4, 2009 at 4:21 PM
- Bellini Valli said...
Devilled eggs have been a favourite for years and always welcome at any gathering.
- October 5, 2009 at 7:39 AM
- Pam said...
I love this! Why haven't I ever thought of adding bacon and cheddar to my deviled eggs.
- October 5, 2009 at 9:40 AM
- The Blonde Duck said...
Would anyone judge me if I ate these for dinner? And only these?
- October 5, 2009 at 12:42 PM
- Deborah said...
I have a weakness for deviled eggs, and I have a feeling I could eat a whole tray of these!
- October 7, 2009 at 8:14 AM