Snowflakes

Not slowly wrought, nor treasured for their form
In heaven, but by the blind self of storm
Spun off, each driven individual
Perfected in the moment of his fall.

-  Howard Nemerov

This is one of my favorite poems.  I’ve been saving it for today – the first snowfall of the winter (that will stick).  It is so beautiful here today.

Kinda Makes my Holiday Season

So, recently I came across this, the Star Wars Holiday Special, aired in 1978 and quite possibly some of the worst television I’ve ever seen.  But all the more brilliant because of it.  I am completely shocked that I didn’t know about it already.   Since it came out before I was born and in a time before anything but VCRs I suppose its not that hard to believe.  The existing version (available in segments on youtube) is apparently from some one’s taped copy.

The production is more campy than I would ever have  believed and includes the entire original cast (except Alec Guiness).  I had to remind myself that none of them had very much reputation to protect at that point (immediately after the release of A New Hope) but still – its pretty embarrassing.  I don’t imagine Harrison Ford has it on his CV!  Its a variety show with a tenuous plot thread and was ranked number one in What Were They Thinking?: The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History, and described as “the worst two hours of television ever” according to wikipedia’s article on the topic.  Looking at it from the point of view of – is it good to laugh at – I think its a big winner, at least in small doses.  See for yourself with the video below and let me know what you think … Happy Lifeday!

Put the Pumpkin back in Pumkin Pie

I’m snitching a post from my sister’s blog because it describes our Thanksgiving as well as I can and why should I duplicate her prose, pictures or research?  Thus I give you Guest Blogger, KJ:

Thanksgiving was a great success (my family and I even whipped together a repeat performance on Sunday for my grandparents in Racine). Farmers’ Market mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts, cranberries and our main course was polenta dome with yeasty gravy…so tasty. Dessert was my responsibility this year, and I created a hybrid of the traditional pumpkin pie in more ways than one.

Pumpkin praline pie…my sister made the crust from scratch too.

My first change was purely to satisfy my sweet tooth…I added a pecan prailine topping to the pie, which the family agreed takes the whole thing up a notch. But my second tweak was a little more experimental. My mom bought both a pie pumpkin and a pumpkin-like squash (apparently there was a shortage of pumpkins this year)

I was expecting to prefer the pumpkin hands down. But upon taste-testing the two after they had been roasted in the oven, everyone agreed the squash was sweeter and smoother. The pumpkin, while still good is more fibrous and I think I’ll be using it for more savory meals for now.

We used equal parts of both the squash and the pumpkin in our pies. But it turns out I wasn’t cutting back on pumpkin compared to the canned variety. I was adding it in entirely.

Apparently, Libby’s (the main distributor of canned pumpkin) also uses squash that looks more like butternut squash than pumpkin. The squash they use, Dickinson, has been deemed similar enough to pumpkin for Libby’s to still put “100% pumpkin” on their label. Seems harmless enough in this case, but this still makes me question the reliability of food labels.

I’d say both my experiments were a success. The prailine topping was delicious, and I may have to agree with Libby’s on this one…there’s something tastier than pumpkin to put in pumpkin pie. I don’t know that I’ll lose the traditional pumpkin entirely, but it looks like I’ll be adding a little diversity to my pumpkin desserts from here on out.

See more of KJ’s thoughts on food and other goodness here.

from → Thoughts on Food

Darwin in the Details: Wives and Daughters’ Naturalist Subplot

I’m honored to be a part of the Classics Circuit Elizabeth Gaskell Tour.  I knew the moment I heard about it that I wanted to be a part of the project.  For more about the tour go to its website here.  The next post (due tomorrow) will be at things mean a lot. I welcome comments and would love to hear what you thought of Wives and Daughters if you’ve read it … or if you’re planning to.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters has long been a favorite story of mine.  I’ll admit that before I read the book I had seen the excellent BBC mini series (1999) but reading it only enhanced my love for the plot.  It has all the “flaws” that some of the previous reviewers have pointed out: dense language, an un-modern languid sense of drama, and many diversions from the main love story.  For me, though these all enhance the pleasure of the story and solidify its atmosphere.  Much has been made of North and South being a reprise of Pride and Prejudice.  If I had to pick a Jane Austen story to match with Wives and Daughters it would probably be Mansfield Park.  They both focus on the question of doing the right thing in small ways throughout your daily life even if you don’t get much credit for it and for the value of loving truly and getting re-paid for it in the end (after the usual amount of heart ache and suffering of course).  (They’re also both shockingly under appreciated as novels.)  It’s a good love story with many twists and turns and misunderstandings.  As much as I love this aspect of the book, it has another facet which much enhances the plot.  The story is thoroughly tangled up with the science of the day and naturalism is involved in characters, plot and diversionary details.  I first read the book in college at the same time that I was taking a biology course focusing on evolution and an environmental studies class covering the transcendentalist movement in America.  I was struck by how much Osborne Hamley’s poetry sounds like Emerson’s (written a hundred years later) and how often Roger reminded me of Darwin (theoretically his contemporary).   As I found out later, I was hardly the first to draw these comparisons.

Elizabeth Gaskell wrote Wives and Daughters at the end of her life (actually she died during the writing and the last few chapters are summed up in a note from her editor at Cornhill, the magazine in which it was being published serially).  The book is set in her youth, however, in the mid 1830s, and she makes good use of her knowledge of the ensuing thirty years to set up her key characters in patterns of future success.  The time period of the book was a transition between the romantic values of philosophy and poetry and refinement into a more “modern” scientific and rational point of view.

Through the book, Gaskell places high value on the characteristics of a good naturalist.  Characters are considered good as far as they might make good scientists– observant, careful, truth-seeking and telling  as opposed to flighty, self-involved, bending the truth to their own ends.  All of the pillars of the book, Molly, Roger, Mr. Gibson and even Lady Harriet are intelligent and observant.  Gaskell specifically sets up the two Hamley brothers as a contrast representing the old and new men of England. She plays a little game with the audience – setting up Osborne, the elder, as a paragon in the eyes of all the surrounding characters.  He is by far the most brilliant, “Roger was never to be compared with him”, he writes poetry and handsome and accomplished and expected to make a name for himself at Cambridge.  Roger on the other hand is considered dull by his teachers and rough by his mother.  But in fact Osborne is self involved, weak in character and constitution and ends up disappointing his family very badly.  The abused Roger is steady, loving and considerate.  In the end its Roger, the man of science, who is successful and happy and his brother fades away into the past where he belongs.

“How Could I Have Missed That”

I picked this book up for the cover art and when I flipped it open and read the flap I dropped it straight in my library bag.  My reaction was the same when I discovered that Aslan was supposed to be a metaphor for Jesus Christ – a totally traumatic blow to my little stolidly atheist heart.  Laura Miller had her childhood love of Narnia shattered when she discovered the Christian subtext but returned to the books as an adult and found there were still many ways to love them.  In The Magician’s Book, she explores the books though a number of lenses and find ways in which they are both more and less perfect than she originally thought.  Reminding me strongly of another favorite, The Child that Books Built, she delves into the background of the stories, picking apart the mythology, the facets of Lewis’s personal life, and the social mores of the time which make up the books.  Reading this I like I was having coffee with a friend who was telling me all about her favorite series.

Miller describes an experience of Narnia so similar to my own its eerie.  Like her I read and loved them as a child.  I watched the (in retrospect) pretty bad BBC adaptations over and over on a home-made VHS.  I imagined myself aboard the Dawn Treadder aimed at the horizon or slogging through marshes with Puddleglum.  Then at some point – I don’t actually remember – I discovered the subtext.  I don’t remember a moment of shock but the aftereffect was powerful.  I took the boxed paperback set out of my room and stuck it in a back corner of the family room book shelf.  I wrote Lewis off entirely – and stopped even wanting to re-read the Chronicles.  When I later found Tolkien’s famous quote on the subject “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence,” I gave a deliberate hmph in Lewis’ direction and told myself I’d found a more grown up Inkling to love.  But much later*, I picked up A Horse and His Boy and found that the sting had gone out of the hoax.  It had returned to its former status as a good yarn, with its fair share of heavy handed morality but more than enough starry eyed wonder and rollicking adventure to satisfy me.  I’ve always been partial to the stiff upper lip, public school sense of fair play and honor.  Lewis simply recasts it in an even more magical fairy land (more magical than between the wars Britain seems to my stolid suburban upbringing) where trees can tell you what they feel and the animals demand respect on an equal footing with people.  In many ways I think there’s a lot more pure pagan morality in the books than Lewis would have wanted to believe.

Bizzare Coincidence

Moments after posting about The Magician’s Book, I checked what was new on my favorite webcomic, xkcd, and found this.  The title is “Prudence.”

Mozzarella Adventures

The big excitement this past weekend (which is a bit of a sad commentary on my weekend but we’ll let that slide) was my first attempt at cheese making.  Since hooking myself up with a regular delivery of fresh milk, I’ve already experimented with separating cream from skim and with making my own yogurt and buttermilk.  The next step in the annals of dairy chemistry seems to be simple cheeses.  And since I’ve made panir in the past I decided to skip directly to cultured cheese.

The results were very satisfying.  Mozzarella is amazingly simple to concoct.  It seems to be much more a matter of having a few of the right ingredients on hand than skill (at least to get as far as a basic lump of cheese).  I’m sure that there is a lot of nuance possible and the right skills could vastly improve on the process but I found my amateur efforts well rewarded.  Its basically as easy as heating the milk up to specified temperatures, adding citric acid and then later vegetable rennet, cooling it down, pulling out the separated curds (from the whey) and then heating and kneading them until they turned, by some magical property, into fresh tasty mozzarella.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in want of brains must be in want of more brains.”

I just finished the latest Jane Austen novel.  Not that she’s writing from the grave (although, come to think of it, that would be a good subject in light of this latest development); she simply has a new co-author, Seth Grahame-Smith who’s come out with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a mashup of the classic tale with the classic zombie details of gore, beheaddings and rapidly rotting malefactors.  The premise is simply that over the last 50 years England has been terrorized by a plague of zombie undead attacking the countryside.  Gentlemen and Ladies alike have trained in the Orient to be able to fight off these attacks.  Other than that the plot is the same.  The book is about three quarters original text with occasional interventions and digressions to include musket fire from speeding coaches and daggers snatched from ankle holsters in order to repel the undead from a public event.  The contrast is very amusing.  For example, Mr. Bennett, in his opening statement of intent not to visit Mr. Bingley, dismisses his daughters as “silly and ignorant” but recommends Lizzy as having “something more of the killer instinct than her sisters.”  Darcy’s definition of an accomplished young woman is likewise familiar and yet … strange.

Levity in Politics

In honor of the fact that the only people I’ve heard speak on the issue of raw milk who have explicitly stated their political views … have been republican.  I guess its a genuinely bi-partisan issue.  Yay raw milk!

Milk Crusader

So yesterday I pulled kind of a ridiculous stunt.  I cut work and drove half way across the state to be present at the bi-monthly board meeting of the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection or DATCP.  Why would I do such a thing?  Well … for raw milk.  The oddest thing is that I don’t even care that much about raw milk.  I’m not really sold on the health benefits, it may or may not be a miracle cure and panacea – I haven’t seen any evidence either way.  But I do care about small farmers.  And they are the ones who are getting stepped on in this whole Raw Milk crackdown.

This all started (for me) when about a month ago I heard that the farm where I recently started buying my milk (un-homogenized and in the most picturesque glass jars) had received a letter from DATCP telling them to cease and desist and threatening them with civil fines and a revoked milk license if they proceeded.  A couple weeks later the farm sent out an email asking us to advocate for them, call our representatives, make our love of the milk heard.  My first step was phone calls to Governor Doyle’s office.  Next I found myself at the meeting last Friday with Dan Kapanke (my republican representative) and this week its snowballed into an un-planned dash over to Madison to state my case.

Glorious Day, Frustrating Issue

This whole weekend has been spectacular weather – mid sixties and glowingly sunny with a good breeze for interest.  I took advantage of the weather and my relative lack of planned activities to go out and visit my local dairy farm.

I met the couple who operate the dairy side of the farm and got a tour of the operation which was almost to bucolically picturesque for reality.  We hopped a simple rope gate and stood next to the cows as I heard all about their extra stomachs and ruminant daily schedule.  They took a mild interest in our presence and seemed inclined to meander over to us but reluctant to be patted on the nose – which was all I dared attempt.  Then we called them all over to us and Gabe was able to rattle off the names of all the ones in the inner circle.  The picture above isn’t mine – I was too absorbed to take snaps but it is of the self-same cows, taken from their own website.

The reason I’m reluctant to include too many specifics about my lovely farm and the raw milk I may or may not be obtaining from it is all the hassling that small farms in this area have been getting lately from the state.  In fact I was at a meeting on the topic just this Friday.  I attended a hearing with Dan Kapanke in support of the raw milk issue.  Ridiculous as it may sound, here in the Dairy State, its not legal for farmers to sell milk directly to customers from their farms.  Well maybe it is and maybe it isn’t – the statues are frustratingly vague.  But whatever the intention of the law may have been its being prosecuted at the level of persecution by the state regulatory agency DATCAP.  In fact there is currently a law making its way through the state legislature to make sure that the sale of raw milk off farm is (once again) legal (as it is in 28 other states) but even as its being debated, DATCP is issuing cease and desist letters to small farmers throughout the region and threatening them with legal action.

The Germ

A mighty creature is the germ,
Though smaller than the pachyderm.
His customary dwelling place
Is deep within the human race.
I cannot help but wonder at
The oddness of his habitat.
His childish pride he often pleases
By giving people strange diseases.
Do you, my poppet, feel infirm?
You probably contain a germ.

- Ogden Nash

 

A mighty creature is the germ,

Whole Trees in the New York Times

If you have read any number of my previous posts, you’re probably aware that I read the NYtimes online pretty reguarly and quote it with some frequency on this blog.  Well here’s the man bites dog story of the year.  Today the New York Times is covering me!  Well almost … its covering Whole Trees.

Earlier this year Anne Raver, who writes for the Times, emailed our info page asking about what type of wood to use in a greenhouse.  We got into a little conversation and the upshot was that she got pretty excited about Whole Trees and sold her editor on doing an article about us.  She came out and visited the farm for a weekend in October and the long and the short of it is … the article is out TODAY.

Read it here. See the Slide show here. Tell your friends.  I just don’t know how I could feel any cooler today.

Weezer Snuggie?

Marketplace Morning closed today with the following news item about unlikely “couch fellows” … Weezer and Snuggie are teaming up to produce … the Wuggie.  If I hadn’t heard it there first I would have thought it was some sort of prank.  But no.  The ad was on the main page of you-tube this morning.  And here’s a news release about it from way last may on Yahoo Music.  It still kind of has to be seen to be believed.  So … click and see.

Halloween Magic

I managed to have a fun Halloween even though I was afflicted with a nasty flu bug due to the kind ministrations of my sister who visited for the weekend. (In case my dangling modifier made that confusing – my flu was nasty, but the weekend was saved by KJ’s presence.) We had resolved on a no-candy Halloween (who even knows what is in that crap) but by no means did we forswear sweets.  Instead we made our own.  Or actually, since I case a total germ ball and pretty low energy to boot, KJ made our own.  We hit Festival Foods and the Peoples Food Coop on Saturday afternoon and gathered our supplies.  Then we turned them into four types of Halloween themed cookies based on the King Arthur Baking Company recipe page – which KJ had scoped out earlier in the week.  We/she made mini pumpkin cheese cakes, brownies with mint icing and halloween sprinkles, and pumpkin cookie sandwiches.  By far the biggest success was the Magic in the Middle (stupid name, I know, but don’t be fooled) which is basically the cookie equivalent of a Reece’s Peanutbutter Cup.  They are AMAZING.  Try them.

IHP’s new website

Pointing out the new website for Boston Universities International Honors Program (IHP) is really just an excuse to rhapsodize about what a great experience it was for me and try to get other people to connect with it.  That said, isn’t the new website spiffy looking, though?

I’ve been thinking a lot about IHP lately (it figured largely in my Fulbright essay).  Its hard to look back and find the moments that set you on your course and changed your life but I see my time on IHP as uniquely formative.  I think all travel is broadening.  A city-hotel weekend in Canada still opens an American up to a few different perspectives on how life is lived.  For me, though, IHP took me out of myself in a way I never could have matched on my own.

To read a longer encomium and see pictures … read on.

Weathers

This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly;
And the little brown nightingale bills his best,
And they sit outside at ‘The Traveller’s Rest,’
And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,
And citizens dream of the south and west,
And so do I.

This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh and ply;
And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.

- Thomas Hardy

* This one is really best read aloud or recited.  Try it.  But go slow because it can be a tongue twister.  Its an excellent elocution exercise.

Visits to site:

WordPress tells me that, since I started posting with them in July, I’ve had a thousand views of the site.  To be precise: 1,036.  I’m not sure whether to be impressed or alarmed but its certainly interesting.  Lost between the Letters started out as a more or less private, academic endeavor and has gradually morphed into a more public venue, but without any specified purpose.  I think of it as something of a one-way mirror I’m on the wrong side of.  Or as a pinup board in a public hallway that I pass by and attach interesting items to, then wander away from.  In many ways I’m still lighthouse keeping.  I think I’ve picked up some readers I don’t know but I’m not sure who or why.  If the fancy strikes you, feel free to comment and introduce yourself.  For instance, one, Vincent, has a wordpress identity I don’t know.  Please, share.

Fog on the Downs

I drove back from Madison to La Crosse this morning, early.  Some weekends I stay over an extra night at home and get up and out by 6:30 in order to be at the office by 9:00 as usual.  Its a bit brutal to drive all that way and then sit in a desk chair all day but it gives a little extra family time.  And its nicer to make the drive in daylight rather than with headlights glaring all along the route.  Its beautiful country between here and there.  Rolling hillsides with pastoral land by the road and tree lined slopes framing them.  And often its mysteriously misty.  The Wisconsin River, which I cross at Spring Green and then follow for a number of miles seems to escape its banks some mornings – covering the low country in fogs and low lying clouds all the way from Madison to the first big hill after Richland Center.  It reminded me today of the River Withywindle, reaching out and influencing the land around it.  As Tolkien describes it, the mist pervades the Old Forest on the edge of the Shire:

“…here and there it lay in the hollows of the wood, and to the south of them, out of a deep fold cutting right across the Forest, the fog still rose like steam or wisps of white smoke.

“‘That,’ said Merry, pointing wit his hand, ‘that is the line of the Withywindle.  It comes out of the Downs and flows south-west through the midst of the Forest to join the Brandywine below Haysend.  We don’t want to go that way!  The Withywindle valley is said to be the queerest part of the whole wood – the centre from which all the queerness comes, as it were.’”

Not that I think the Wisconsin River is queer, or in any way ominous.  But it does seem to exert its influence over the surrounding lands.  And I feel it very strongly when I drive forward into ever thickening mists which concentrate as I pass over the new bridge.  When I pull up the first big hill, angling skyward and see blue in front of me and sunlight following after, I can feel the change in influence.  I love that sense of connection to the landscape.

Classics Circuit

I recently signed up for my first act of group blogging.  A group of book bloggers got the idea to have a tour of blogs.  They would pick an author who was great but under-read and then ask anyone who was interested to sign up to read one of their books and then blog about it on a specified date.  Its set up so that one blog will post about the author each day for about a month.  Each will talk about a different book and from any perspective they fancy and in the end it will be a huge variety of view-points and a celebration of the canon.  My interest was already piqued when I read that the second author to be featured is Elizabeth Gaskell at which point I basically couldn’t type fast enough to email them asking to be included. Click here to see the list of dates. The tour begins on November 16th.  I’ll be posting on November 23rd.