What's archaic about "fret"?

"So honey...
Don't you fret
'Cause you ain't seen
'Nothin' yet."

https://youtu.be/8fS9-Yimdhw

Horde. The Chinese horde.

I've read poetry. This stuff is not poetry.

How in the fuck did you get he misses white american out of this.

You are just making shit up.

"Fret" is a perfectly common word. If you think it's archaic, you may want to take a long hard look at your vocabulary.

This analysis is even triter than the poem.

#7: No kidding. This is like an overwrought term paper, with a whole lot of a paragraphs full of up-to-the-minute theoretical lingo employed to criticize what is essentially a dumb limerick. This is why no one takes theory seriously.

No one under 75 says "fret" as in worry.

#9: Bullshit. I use it all the time, and most of my peers do to. All of us are under forty. None of us are self-consciously doing it because it's archaic either. It's a commonly used word.

to = too in my post btw.

The Stranger is just another college campus alt-lit magazine. Everything is either racism, sexism or homophobia. There is no other way to understand the world. If you don't agree, you're a retrograde who must be purged. Have fun with your cultural revolution, tovarischi!

Has Calvin been to Seattle, excepting the ID? He would be pleased, unless he had issues with being swamped by Thai cuisine.

The Tool song "Aenema" uses Fret a lot in the lyrics.

impressive trolling, even for the high bar the stranger normally sets.

Fret isn't archaic. I know several others have said it but, as a middling poet and writer myself, I've strong feelings about meant-to-be-funny dictums from a writer who doesn't know what he doesn't know.

This *has* to be pure trolling, b/c otherwise it's the single dumbest thing I've ever read on Slog. To think that people complain about Charles. In order:

1) Maybe you want to look up "beguiled" before you use it again; I don't think it means what you think it means.

2) "wonders if there are in fact other Chinese provinces—how could he ever find out" Haha, get it? Because Trillin is OLD, he's never heard of the Google, see? Nostalgia for a young planet, right Rich? (See also, "resting on stereotypes") But seriously, obviously this poem, like so many, was written because Trillin actually didn't know the answer to the question posed.

3) Do let's talk a little shop: "If there's a rhyme that's ever reached harder than "in the loop / whose insides were soup" does, then I don't know it." I take this to mean you've never listened to any pop music. If you want to talk about reaching hard, consider the knot you've tied yourself into to find the most mean-spirited possible way to interpret a light, blandly amusing bit of doggerel by an 80 year old food writer who started his career by writing about the integration of black students in the south.

4) "he does use the archaic word fret in order to satisfy a rhyme request" Hey, a young friend of mine who knows how to use the Google taught me this trick: type "fret" into google search and specify the "news" results. You can totally see how "fret" is archaic and nobody but 19th century Hugh Jackman uses it anymore.

5)"The poem ends by longing for the days when "we"—one has to presume white Americans" I dunno, maybe *one* has to, but *I* was kind of thinking he meant food writers...

6) "does this poem rest on an unexamined racist sentiment?" Does this post rest on an unexamined ageist sentiment? Or just a writing deadline paired with no familiarity at all with Trillin's writing?

Ugh, there's too much stupid here to keep going point-wise. If you want to know what Trillin was getting at, it was in a line Rich chose not to quote:
"Could a place we extolled as a find/Be revealed as one province behind?"

It's the stress of constant change, as the world keeps moving on at its pace while we inevitably slow down and grow tired, expressed here from the point of view of an American food writer. If this poem were written by a tech writer, it could be about DOS and UNIX versus the wide world of mobile apps; if it were by a sex advice columnist, it could be about the days when questions about whether to kiss on the first date outnumbered questions about pegging technique and etiquette. Longing for the *perceived* simplicity of previous times as one gets older is a universal human experience, that thing which both good and bad poets often try to capture. It's a conceit of the young to think everyone at every time should have the benefit of the same knowledge and perspective available now. Check your privilege, Rich!

What #18 said, rather embarrassing thing to post.

I rate this troll a perfect 5 out of 7!

Southerners and others say "fret" all the time, as in, "Don't fret. If you write a mean-ass letter to our despicable governor then throw it away, I promise will feel better."

I think it is appropriate to fret over the Trillin piece, which took up space (in one of the few paying poetry venues) that could have gone to a great poem. Also, it is surprising to find dreck in The New Yorker these days, hence the fretfest.

Is there an editor in the house? This isn't funny enough for parody, or smart enough for criticism. A satire on PC buzzkill? Listen to your prof, you fatuous twit.

I am looking forward to your analyses of Randy Newman songs next.

Y'know, I could do without his poems to be honest, but Calvin Trillin's still a goddamn national treasure and a devotee of all sorts of food.

I went looking for the specimen of white planet nostalgia, but found only a foodie's tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating drollery in doggerel re trendy foodie faddery in the world's largest small town.

As one who was there when our Hunamese overlords landed (who ever imagined shrimp had balls that big?), I enjoyed Trillin's take.

you have to be preeeeeeeetty out of it to be a New Yorker reader and not know who Calvin Trillin is. I'm not a fan of the dude, but he's been around since god was a child.

p.s.-- I was saddened to learn of Trillin's incurable whiteness, and am sure the editors of the arch-liberal Nation (which has published more pieces by Trillin than any other human, living or dead) must feel likewise.

Do you think shitting on other writers will elevate your status?
Is this really the worst racism of the day/week?

reputation, which me and many poets my age seem to be unaware of
Hm. Were those many poets your age educated to the same grammatical level? If so, that might explain the blunt-force conclusions you achieved here. I'm betting you didn't have a college humor magazine wherever it was that you got your MFA.

@28 -- This is alternative journalism. It's their JOB to shit on things most people wouldn't think to shit on.

Sometimes the shit lands horribly wrong, and hilarity ensues.

Rich LOVES to write as if he gives a shit about social justice but will happily make shitty jokes about how drunk Bernie Sanders got on Purim (get it? He's a jew and Purim is a Jewish holiday and who knows what the fuck it's about? Not Rich. But it doesn't matter cause Jews are hilarious, especially when they run for president!) and cry to the heavens about the injustice of one football game a year being shown in the library. Never mind the fact that many people in our city don't have the money for TV or to spend in a bar so they can take a few hours off and enjoy their chosen pass time.

Now, the newest nitwit at The Stranger shows his lack of experience. Calvin Trillin fer chrissakes. Please, someone fire Rich and spare us all his blatant stupidity and deep-seeded classism.

Apparently for the author irony is archaic.

@32 -- Don't ever let 'em see you fret. :-|

"I think that's a bold bit of irony! It requires you to trust the New Yorker wouldn't publish a poem like that (and, to their credit, they have been publishing such good ones lately!) and it rests on Trillin's reputation, which me and many poets my age seem to be unaware of." Yeah and that's somehow Trillin's fault. Next time, maybe study up on someone before you decide to talk shit about him? I guess maybe you were up against a deadline and had to skip the research stage... Oh well. (One more thing: speak for yourself. You may not know who Trillin is, but "many poets [your] age" probably do.)

I don't know if the world is ready for you to kick the straight truth to power like this #staywoke

Haha, dude. Your overwrought, bullshit prose is ten times as excruciating to read as the original author's and you apparently have the reading comprehension of an exceptionally middling middle-schooler. You should thank god every night for the leveling power of the internet, because no matter how many adjectives you might use, you still couldn't write your way out of a ziplock bag with a hole in it. There are ways to legimately criticize this piece, yours is not one. Sweet Baby Jesus on bath salts.

LOL. It's my white friends who eat trendy Chinese food from the most recently discovered province. And my black friends who eat chow mein and sweet and sour chicken. Maybe Trillin is actually nostalgic for a black planet?

I just got here, but I see that in commenting, I'm just piling on. All the same: Geez, Rich. If you think "fret" is an arcane term, you should probably apply your future textual analyses only to pieces that appear in USA Today, or maybe to the transcripts of Sarah Palin's speeches. Reading Calvin Trillin, you are in pretty far over your head.

Really? This is ridiculous. The poem is a goofy, silly, intentionally inept poem, making fun of someone bewildered by all the newly available variety of ethnic foods, and yearning for a simpler time. Couldn't be more innocent. And ignorance of the style and unique glorious humor of a writer as major as Trillin is no excuse, it's just ignorance.

This is a joke, right? If not it has to be the single dumbest piece of criticism I've read in years. Smith actually uses the fact that he's unaware of a poem's author as a rationale for a critique.

I came here to ask if Rich Smith is really this dumb, but now just kind of feel bad since 42 people above me already said it.

For the uninformed, Calvin Trillin has been writing about many things since before many of you were born. Food is his hobby, doggerel an aside (though he pretty well demolished W and the Chickenhawks a while back in a lovely little book of off-kilter poetry).
Publishers' Weekly has a nice summary of his book on reporting, thinking about, lamenting the condition of race relations in the US for over 50 years:



More By and About This Author
Trillin (Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin), a regular contributor to the New Yorker since 1963, collects his insights and musings on race in America in previously published essays from over 50 years of reporting. They cover events from the 1964 voter registration drives in Jackson, Miss., to a 2006 deadly shooting on Long Island, N.Y., “the single most segregated suburban area in the United States.” Providing abundant context and telling details, Trillin covers the Mardi Gras Zulu parade in New Orleans, the resistance to school integration in Denver, race relations in the Mormon Church in Utah, a stop-and-frisk with tragic results in Seattle, and the confrontation between Italians and African-Americans over the construction of an apartment building called Kawaida Towers in Newark, N.J. Most of these episodes take place in the 1960s and ’70s, so Trillin provides updates at the end of each essay to show how the issues have evolved and what progress, if any, has been made. He also delves into the definitions of black and white in modern-day Louisiana and the qualities of a southern “moderate” in the 1970s, and invites a black civil rights activist to tell the story of her hardscrabble life in Dorchester County, S.C., in her own words. As Trillin notes in his introduction, today’s African-American students are more isolated than they were 40 years ago, education policy makers have abandoned integration as a cause, and a number of states have recently passed laws meant to suppress non-white votes. What’s shocking is how topical and relatively undated many of these essays seem today. Agent: Eric Simonoff, William Morris Endeavor. (June

"...and it rests on Trillin's reputation, which me and many poets my age seem to be unaware of." Have you heard of the internet? It's apparently a great tool for research. It was nice of that grown-up to send you a more informed reading, but ... aren't there any editors working at The Stranger these days? Please try harder.

Trillin's late and much loved wife Alice taught English to many native Chinese speakers. His love of their cuisine led him to suggest that she assign translations of all the dishes described only in characters on the walls of their dozen favorite restaurants. His feared there was an exquisite dish being prepared in the kitchen which might not appear on the English version menu.
What reviewer fails to do even basic research, has a soul lacking any appreciation of whimsy and wit?
"Why would anyone want to get away from a city that has a thousand Chinese restaurants?" C. Trillin

Have they run out of idiots yet / Who flail when a deadline needs met / While we sit in suspense on what next brings offense / Have they run out of idiots yet?

I think I've got it. This entire article is irony. "Ha ha, watch me look at an issue of the New Yorker, just because! I mean, my grandparents used to read that shit! Talk about retro, right? Laugh with me as I find this piece of doggerel verse, and decide to analyze it as if it was real poetry! Watch me use all the current sociopolitical lenses that we use to leach the life out of all contemporary writing, to treat this bit of silliness as a racist screed! Watch me pretend to be a dour, humorless academic who couldn't recognize even the gentlest satire if it bit him on the ass! I know, I'll take him to task over using an archaic word that isn't really archaic, and analyze the living shit out of it --- man, this is hilarious!"

"UPDATE: I even fooled one of my college English professors into thinking I'm the kind of pompous twit that would write this kind of oblivious blather and actually mean it! Now I get to keep the game going by challenging his interpretation with my own critique of his interpretation! It's, like, meta-meta-criticism! This is great!"

===================

I think that's a bold bit of irony! It requires you to trust the New Yorker wouldn't publish a poem like that, and it rests on Trillin's reputation, which me and many poets my age seem to be unaware of.

On the remote chance that this was a serious piece of writing: Actually, a lot of us do in fact trust the New Yorker not to publish "a poem like that," for the same reasons we'd trust the Stranger not to endorse Santorum for President; and Trillin's reputation (your unawareness notwithstanding) is such that many readers scroll directly to his work as soon as they spot his name in the Table of Contents.

@40, please contact Rich Smith (rsmith@thestranger.com). I think he would be very successful in your line of work.

Okay, who screwed up and posted an April Fools' Day piece five days too late?

As several above have said, came here to wonder aloud if the author was trolling or just a white-guilt doof, about 50 people beat me to it.
And if you need to parse passages for antique/tortured word use in the service of rhyme, hard to beat the line in Foreigner's Urgent "...but I'm not looking for another lass," presumably uttered outside of Brigadoon.

ha! that's rich -
let me know
. when the fretting over fret
. and the fussing over fressing
is over
and they sack his smithness
in a white paper bag

As a Chinese-American, I don't think Calvin Trillin is being racist. The poem does demonstrate that there are so many provinces in China and they all have wonderful styles of cooking. The poem acknowledges the breadth and depth of Chinese cuisine. Also, Calvin Trillin has a long track record of writing books, short stories and poems and at least for all the ones I've read, they are incredibly funny and ironic. BTW, the poem left out food from the provinces of Hainan and Hakka... but Calvin Trillin will be enjoying that too.

I honestly interpreted this poem as being about the perpetually restless and bored white foodie who manages to know approximately nothing about the cultures he consumes, even as he drones on about the importance of "authenticity." My reading is not particularly deep, but I would like to think that at least it's not as facile and reactionary as the Stranger's reading. Good lord.

It is pointless to complain about humorous light verse. It is there to be enjoyed (or not). It's akin to whining that "Calvin and Hobbes" is too frivolous.

I don't know who should be fired, Rich Smith, or the editor/moderator who allowed this nonsense to sully any positive reputation the Stranger might aspire to. I've seen Stranger articles that took too dramatic a view on a subject, but usually with at least a smidge of style. This is like a drunk adolescent banging on my door in the middle of the night because he doesn't like my pink flamingo lawn ornaments. What a twerp.

It is not just pathetic, but outright scary when a culture loses the ability to recognize (let alone appreciate) irony.

And you're claim you're a poet, Mr. Rich Smith? I always thought that being unable to think in a less than totally literal, concrete way was rather an obstacle to being a poet (or an artist of any kind, or, indeed, a thinking,sensitive person), but perhaps that is not true for poets "your age." Your inability to recognize your own blind spots, even after the gentle nudging of Mr. Cohen (as expressed in your "update"), is nothing less than stunning.

More than outraged, I feel sorry for you. It must be really uncomfortable living with such a narrow mind.

Is the expression "Now ain't that Rich?" archaic?

Mr. Smith got scared and wet the bed. Don't blame him, he was expecting a trigger warning. This is easily the most interesting example of a writer in over his head I've seen in a long time; this stuff isn't Jorie Graham. Why would Mr. Smith explicate poetry when he has no understanding of poetics?

What everyone else said. "Me and many poets my age" did not know of The Stranger until this post was mentioned in the NY Times' article about harebrained misreadings of Trillen's poem, but "me" will not be returning.

Wow. Rarely do I read comments but in this case they far exceeded the article in intelligence and insight. I hope the author is reading these.

Seriously, go read Trillan's "Tummy Trilogy" before you comment on his view of food. He's a guy who would go into Chinatown and ask them to serve the food they don't serve to white people.
Next up: Does Randy Newman really want to Keep the Ni**ers Down?

My lord. The Stranger is really clawing and scratching at the bottom of the barrel these days, isn't it?

Was this poem vetted by the Committee For Social Transformation? It is rife with both micro and macro aggressions.