Pan De Siècle

About 20 years ago I bought a set of three cast iron fry pans from Chinatown, one – the least useful size-wise – I gave away to a friend who was undersupplied kitchen-wise. The other two I used for some time, cultivating on each a seasoned surface. At one point I gave the smaller pan to one of my brothers, for some reason I am not quite clear on. I knew it had the makings of a great pan, but I was prepared to share. The pan I kept, by diligent application of oil, avoidance of soap, hundreds of tempering with delicious things, cleaning with hot water and nylon scourers, the pan acquired a patina, intrinsically black, that developed into a very decent non-stick surface. No Teflon, just patina.

Once, sadly, an overzealous friend, scoured off all the black with steel wool, but I started again and gradually the surface regained its equanimity. Perhaps it was even better for the polishing back. The pan builds up patina till it starts to become blackly nacreous, like a bad oyster. The surface starts to acquire too much topography. When the pan starts to leave itself on the food, then the relationship between cooker and cookee has broken down, inexorably. Steel wool, wiry scourers, even, even, paring knifes (only for the underside) might be, or must be, put too. The pan de cycle has come around, and once again, the fry pan must be taken back to metal.

As a child I thought there was a jewel box hidden in my parent's house, I imagined there was a cache of pink cut glass rings - the ones with adjustable soft metal sizing - laid out in pink foam in the nailed tight plyboard box in my brothers' walk-in robe.

Years later, I realised the box was really the back of the bathroom cabinet. I got a lot of enjoyment out of those pink glass jewels that weren't there. Imaginery treasures are curiously satisfying.

Here is a central point where someone who might be interetested can see what bits of words, some links to work published in journals and ezines, and images that I have made.

Absent Knowledge

We are talking about knowing certain facts,

and he says, I know all that or used to,

it is only that I can’t remember.

Is this not knowing or forgetting

what you know? Perhaps the head holds

a trace of what was there,

perhaps it is there but can’t find

the way out; maybe it was there but left,

or there was a rumour that it was coming

but never did,

like the promised holiday ,

in Pennant Hills. At eight years old

I would lie in bed at night a hardly contained

precipice of anticipation that time

would take me to Pennant Hills and a big house

with a swimming pool. I can see

the façade of the house, the curve

of suburban street, where that house

I never went to might be - or even was.

Though I know I never went, maybe

somewhere, there is an unborn memory

of being there, and I am thwarted by absent knowledge

from enjoying what I did not do.

Carol Jenkins

From Voices from the Meadow Wollongong Workshop Anthology 2007 ( Five Islands Press)

Bambiraptor

The Going Down Swinging # 25 -special double CD edition has at last unwrappped itself in Sydney, with a lauch at the Last Bastion of Civilisation last Wednseday 25 September. I still don't know what is in this CD it apart from my spoken word poem Bambiraptor as I was incarcarated in an invention called Good Mummydom. I hope every one else had a good time at the launch party.

The fossil Bambiraptor’s importance in the evolutional of dexterity and the dissonant name gave me this rave by Blanche (Street Car Named Desire) - here she makes a play for Bambiraptor believing his tough and powerful persona is lined with tenderness, like Stanley. This poem is one of my bids to get fossils to colonise and take over the myth as the substratum of literature.

Show Me The Treasure

Pan De Siècle

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