Historical / Present

Moving Day

2011-06-29T16:37:00.004-06:00

Moving the blog over here, with a new name:

Read, Ramble

Please do stop by the new space soon.

Yes, I do look like a flibbertigibbet, having edited this post three times now. The trials of three new blogging platforms have been educational, and I keep changing my mind.

Daily Bread

2011-06-15T11:03:00.003-06:00

Today's bread comes from The Joy of Cooking, a basic white bread made with a sponge starter. That's flour, water and a little yeast left to develop over a period of 6 hours. Sturdy crust, appealing flavor, sort of like French baguette but not quite the same texture.

Surprisingly, this bread freezes well. Using an instant-read thermometer guarantees doneness at a temperature of 200 F. Then cool completely before freezing. Freezing warm bread can lead to mushiness, as it will be too moist. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap; then place in freezer bag. I cut mine in halves or thirds to fit the gallon bag and take out a chunk every couple of days. At our house, homemade bread does not last long enough to dry out, even frozen bread.

Snooty Chekhov

2011-06-15T09:39:00.005-06:00

Never thought I would meet a Chekhov story I didn't like, but it has finally happened: "A Play." Silly woman writer waylays established male writer and bullies him into listening to her read her drivel. Madcap ending.

The interest of the story, should any be found, lies in belittling and ridiculing the boring woman. The put-upon, genuine writer has our full sympathy, or that is the plan.

Contemptuous laughter at the expense of a self-deceived, arrogant fool can be entertaining. Think of the pompous Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. That was the type of effect Chekhov was attempting, but without contextual richness, without comedic development. Chekhov's lady writer is a flat character, and easy targets do not make good short stories.

I am reminded of the political commentators who think they are making a contribution to the Great Conversation by pointing out the latest gaffe of an opposition nitwit. Slowly, the news stream I assembled on Twitter has been pared down to stop the tedious repetition of reports that cabbage heads are acting like cabbage heads. Of course So-and-So is acting like an ass. He is an ass, a fact established long ago. Same goes for badly behaved celebrities--actors and musicians. Spare me the recitation of their egotistical, self-destructive exploits.

Chekhov published "A Play" in 1887 at the age of 26. During this period he was writing satirical sketches for much-needed cash. This story has something of the callow young man about it. The talented writer suffers no fools, especially not wannabe women writers. Their stupidity throws his own brilliance into high relief, he seems to think. So many people, not just young adults, believe now, as then, that expression of attack dog attitudes somehow enhances their own position of superiority, when it only makes them look small-minded and self-absorbed and elitist and oblivious to the world at large.

I am probably out of step on this. Chekhov was sending up a type, one no doubt worthy of scorn, although the misogynist tone of the story is difficult to overlook. The trasher pundits seem to be doing quite well today, peddling their tales of all the idiots out there. Intellectuals waste their time (and mine) complaining about the babbling of the great unwashed. To my ear, it all sounds like loud, creaking, cacophonous wheel spinning.

Good Bread and Some Cooking Disasters

2011-06-14T15:37:00.005-06:00

Hot from the oven, whole wheat bread from The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook by Nancy Harmon Jenkins:

This bread initiates my new baking tiles, which make possible the shaping of long loaves, baked two-at-a-time, as opposed to round loaves baked one-at-a-time--all that would fit on the pizza stone. Cookie sheets, greased or dusted with cornmeal, could not withstand the 500 degree F. initial bake time. Burned bottom edges resulted. Thus, the baking tiles. This is the most delicious bread recipe I've ever made, and it freezes beautifully. Both the wheat and the rye variations are delicious, with chewy crusts and a firm texture, great for toast, sandwiches, or slices with dinner. Barley may also be used, but I haven't tried it yet.

My sourdough experiment failed. We had some unseasonably cool weather, which could have prevented the starter from fermenting. The kitchen temp never got above 62 F. those few days and fell lower at night. I'm not sure what the problem was, but my dough never got beyond the starter stage. The pleasant tangy aroma did not materialize as expected. What did happen, you just do not want to know. Now I have found a sourdough listserv and plan to ask questions there if my next effort also flops.

The library had three promising bread-baking books, and I also broke down and bought a couple: The Italian Baker (1985) by Carol Field, often called a classic, and Crust and Crumb: Master Formulas for Serious Bread Bakers (2006) by Peter Reinhart. Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread (2001), a library find, has been inspiring to read, although I have not yet attempted any of his recipes. A revised edition of Field's book will be available in November, but I could not wait.

The first recipe I tried from Diana Kennedy's The Essential Cuisines of Mexico did not turn out as hoped. The pan dulce called Conchas (Shells), Mexican breakfast pastries we cannot buy from any local bakery, were a disappointment. I suspect a typo in the cookbook contributed to the disaster, or maybe I do not understand the meaning of "crumbled yeast." Three tablespoons of water and three tablespoons of bulk yeast granules will never make a "thin, smooth cream." Some videos on YouTube demonstrated conchas with much less yeast. Instead of giving up, I tossed the yeast paste glop, tried again, following the remainder of the recipe, but using less yeast. The conchas were more like rolls of a dense, sponge-like texture, with cinnamon or cocoa on top. Husband and son, being gentlemen, ate them and said they were good, just not conchas. They lied.

Then I made a simple won ton soup, with directions to simmer the won tons for 5 minutes, and the won ton skins came close to dissolving. Some online investigation shows that won tons come in different thicknesses, or instead you can use 2 or 3 won ton skins for each packet. Thicker won ton skins have not been easy to find. I'll try doubling or tripling next time.

Those are all the cooking failures for this week. I hope. You can see why this post began with a photo of my latest batch of bread.

On Not Reviewing Books

2011-06-13T09:09:00.004-06:00

The other day I picked up a back issue of the literary magazine Tin House (#28, 2006) and read about a collection of Marianne Moore's literary criticism, Predilections, published in 1955. She is quoted as saying that she decided "never to review a book unless essentially in sympathy with it." Since these past few months I have not even been finishing the blah books, let alone reviewing them, Moore's policy strikes a chord here.

I never much considered my blog posts to be reviews, anyway. Reader response is a more accurate description. Nor do I aspire to be a critic or to set myself up as an authority and arbiter of taste.

Cynthia Ozick, in her comments about book reviewing last month at Pen World Voices, seems to think that the only discussion of books worth heeding originates at an intellectual height beyond the reach of the non-academic reader and blogger.

"It used to be said that one purpose of criticism was to educate taste. The famous Matthew Arnold dictum, which is not much quoted anymore except in derision, was to urge readers toward 'the best that has been thought and said.' It was understood that criticism implied authority." Ozick then goes on to sneer, "We may celebrate it as 'the democratization of criticism,' but one path it has taken is the shallow ubiquity of the customer reviewer."

Yes, the hoi poloi will chatter on, and some of us talk about books. I do not see that we need to be called out for discussing our pastimes online, what interests us, and what does not. If some readers choose only "uplifting" books with appealing characters, why is that of concern to the intelligentsia? Would they be better off watching reality tv?

The "shoddy and amateurish" bloggers are not attempting to speak the language of literary critics or professional book reviewers. The atmosphere is more like a virtual coffee klatch. Why so much resentment about ordinary people discussing books? Many academics talk only to each other and write only for each other. Is it because their pretensions are largely ignored by the reading public that Ozick complains?

I've read a few of Ozick's literary essays, learned from her, and also rejected some of her analysis. She writes powerful fiction. See "The Shawl." Ozick is at her weakest when she makes patronizing and dismissive statements about cultural trends or common readers. Remember her screed against readers of Trollope?

As blogging resumes here, I consider the clueless academics who think we are trying to do the same thing they do, but doing it badly.

Updating the Kitchen

2011-06-12T14:23:00.008-06:00

The college student has returned to Boston to work for most of the summer, and while he was here, he and his dad installed a new back splash above the kitchen counters and stove. I am inspired by the subway tiles--a crisp white transition between blue counter tops and pine cupboards--inspired to spend more time cooking in the renovated space.

You can find a blog for just about everything, including Kitchen Tile Backsplashes! This link shows the type of tiles we just installed in the kitchen. Now I am eyeing the white cabinets in these photos and wondering if we should paint over our old pine for a more contemporary style. This look--white tiles, white counter tops, white cabinets--is appearing everywhere in the kitchen magazines and online design sites. I like.

I used to laugh at the philistinism of homeowners of the 1950s who had covered beautiful natural wood with paint. Now the temptation to do the same, in order to give the room an updated look, has me reflecting on my own changed taste.

Before undertaking a painting chore, first I have to remove the wallpaper border around the top of the kitchen wall. Ten years ago when we remodeled the kitchen, the bursts of big sunflowers on a blue plaid background looked cheering and sweet. I was thinking of a family kitchen that would be fun for the children. Now, in an empty nest, the sunflower border looks dated, even childish. The yellow and blue plaid curtains are still okay, but they do seem a bit boisterous. I am looking to add some sophistication to my cooking and breakfast space, to make it less of a kid-friendly kitchen and more the hang-out of a serious cook.

Memorial Day: "Taps" Audio

2011-05-30T07:47:00.000-06:00

Should you wish to take a few moments today to honor the fallen dead, you can listen to an online audio file of the playing of "Taps," courtesy of the Evansville Courier Press.

Shields River Flooding

2011-05-24T16:17:00.011-06:00

The Highway Patrol just came to the door and left a flooding advisory for the Shields River, which flows into the Yellowstone near Livingston, Montana. The Highway Patrol is saying that a section of Highway 89, between our house and Livingston, is expected to be covered by water tomorrow morning.

The pantry is stocked, and we live up above the flood plain. No worries about our personal safety, but it appears that neighbors on lower ground can expect problems.

The view from our deck, looking north, June 2008.

View from our deck, looking north, a few minutes ago.

View from our deck, looking east, June 2008.

View from our deck, looking east, a few minutes ago.

Beginning Photography

2011-05-19T10:45:00.010-06:00

The intention to investigate another of the food blogs honored by Saveur got derailed at Cafe Fernando by a box on the sidebar. Eyes strayed from the elegant Brownies with Hazelnut Butter and Chocolate Lace to "My Photo Gear", where Cenk shows the camera equipment he uses to achieve his visual effects. Thanks, Cafe Fernando.

I am still at the near-Brownie phase of photography, but it is helpful to see which cameras successful food bloggers are using. The Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond, devotes a section of her blog to photography. Well worth viewing, even if you only look at the pictures.

I have started working through a basic introductory book, The BetterPhoto Guide to Digital Photography by Jim Miotke. Let's hope some of these resources pay off with improved photography here on the blog.

As for the sourdough bread mentioned in the last post, the process had reached the point where the cookbook says, "Re-cover the bowl and let stand at room temperature for 24 hours without disturbing it. Look at the starter. If at this point it has not risen and started bubbling, discard it and start over." Well. It definitely has risen, but only one incipient bubble is showing. An instant read thermometer registers the ambient air temperature as 62 degrees F. It may just be too cool to ferment the flour and water mixture.

In desperation, before tossing out 2-days' worth of rising batter, I looked around and found a sourdough starter recipe that rests the dough for 4 to 8 days, so more waiting seems to be in order. If it turns orange or pink, you must throw it out, says the recipe. Not exactly the subject I had in mind for food photography.

Check Out These Food Blogs

2011-05-17T11:15:00.006-06:00

Saveur has announced the winners of their food blog awards. I expect to be spending some time exploring the website of Joy the Baker. Beautiful photography. Sprightly writing. Tempting recipes, including some gluten-free treats.

I have been baking all of our bread for the past month or so and have now undertaken my first sourdough sans yeast, the good stuff, the genuine. Packing the freezer with baked goods, since the College Student will be visiting soon. Gotta run feed the dough. Ta!

Bookseller Terminology Reviewed

2011-05-15T23:37:00.008-06:00

My current reading stack includes A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books by Nicholas A. Basbanes (Henry Holt, 1995). This history of book collecting has inspired me to explore rare books for sale online, as a window shopper only. Remember that term? That, in turn, led to a review of the terms of the booksellers' trade. Some of these terms I had forgotten, and some I never knew. For a more complete list of terms and abbreviations booksellers use in describing old books, see the Glossary at the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America website.

a.e.g.
All edges gilt, gilt applied to top edge, bottom edge & foreedge of the volume (see also g.t. and a.e. m.).

a.e.m.
All edges marbled, marbling applied to top edge, bottom edge & foreedge of volume (see also a.e.g. and g.t.).

Colophon
A statement occurring at the rear of a volume following the text, relating information about the printing history and physical aspects of the book; often includes name of printer, type of paper, typeface, size of edition, date of printing, etc. Early books often had a colophon instead of a title page imprint and modern private press or other examples of fine printing often use a colophon.

Deckle edge
Natural or sometimes artificial rough edge of page, left uncut (see also cut edges, uncut, and unopened).

g.t.
Gilt top, gilt applied to the top edge of the text block (see also a.e.g.)

Shaken
Indicates that sections (signatures) of a book or pamphlet are becoming quite loose, but remain attached to the binding.

Shelfback
Another term for spine or backstrip.

Signature
A group or gathering of leaves printed together on a sheet of paper which is folded, bound with other signatures and trimmed to form a book or pamphlet; i.e. a section or grouping of pages in a book resulting from printing and binding methodology; also refers to a person's self handwritten name (autograph signature).

t.e.g.
Top edge gilt.

w.a.f
With all faults, indicates a book or other item which is being offered without careful delineation of its condition or without careful collation; usually indicates a less than "very good" copy, which probably does has faults, often including excessive wear or missing leaves, plates or maps.

When the Astors Owned New York

2011-05-13T17:15:00.025-06:00

Justin Kaplan, biographer of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, published his book on five generations of the Astor family and their famous hotels in 2006: When the Astors Owned New York, Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age (Viking Penguin).

As a reader of Edith Wharton, Henry James, and William Dean Howells, I approached the book from a literary angle. Another reader might have a different point of interest: native New Yorker, reader of urban or social or architectural history, follower of fashion. This was a thoroughly enjoyable read, but I do think a reader who brings some kind of agenda to the book will enjoy it more than a general reader.

The family saga begins with John Jacob Astor, a German immigrant to the United States at the end of the Revolutionary War, who died in 1848 the country's richest man, having amassed a fortune in the fur trade and Manhattan real estate. His heirs used their vast wealth to build numerous hotels on a scale of grandeur and opulence never seen before, including the Waldorf-Astoria, the St. Regis, and the Knickerbocker. The Astors were New York's luxury inn-keepers; they were also notorious slum lords of many of the city's tenements where the poor resided.

Family feuds between brothers and cousins were routine. Caroline, wife of a third generation Astor, became New York and America's most famous society hostess, throwing parties remarkable for their splendor and expense rather than for the enjoyment of her guests. She ruled over the elite "Four Hundred" of New York high society and endured no competition from other hostesses, including other Astors. Edith Wharton based her short story, "After Holbein," --an eerily creepy account--on the aged and senile Caroline Astor, who continued to hold imaginary balls and dinners in her empty mansion, accompanied only by servants, long after losing her ability to host a party.

John Jacob Astor IV died on the Titanic in 1912. His cousin William Waldorf Astor abandoned his American citizenship and became a British subject, owner of Anne Boleyn's childhood home, Hever Castle, a member of the House of Lords, and later a viscount. He had first purchased the Cliveden estate but gave it to his son Waldorf in 1906 as a wedding gift. In 1937, Cliveden earned a reputation as the center of a group of pro-Nazi English aristocrats who held policy meetings there, as a kind of "second Foreign Office." Kazuo Ishiguro, in his novel The Remains of the Day, based Darlington Hall and its social set on Cliveden and "The Cliveden Set," the frequent guests of Waldorf and Nancy Astor.

The Astors are not remembered for their contributions to social and economic justice. I leave this book thinking of the way current American tax policy favors the super rich.

Margaret Oliphant on _Hamlet_

2011-05-11T12:19:00.005-06:00

Margaret Oliphant on Hamlet, from her novel Hester (1883):

"... the greatest instance of that disenchantment which is, of all the misteries [sic] in the world, the one most crushing and most general. Disenchantment --disillusionment-- that opening of the eyes to see a world altogether different from the world we have observed."

Image shows early 19th C. Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean as Hamlet.

One Book, Two Book, Three Book ... Four and Five...

2011-05-10T00:26:00.019-06:00

1.) The book I'm currently reading:

Eventually it had to happen: Virginia Woolf's essays. This collection ranges over a broad field of literature, and it may take a few weeks to get through it, reading slowly, at the pace of an essay-a-day or every few days. Woolf's essay on "The Pastons and Chaucer" made me want to revisit Chaucer sometime soon. Her "Notes on an Elizabethan Play" I read with a headache-inducing-type frown. "The Elizabethans bore us because they suffocate our imaginations rather than set them to work." Oh, Virginia. Honestly. What nonsense.

2.) The last book I finished:

The editor says Hester (1883) is Oliphant's masterpiece. I had read a couple of her Carlingford Chronicles, and enjoyed them, as well as a few of her critical essays. Hester is a family drama, which includes a Victorian female character at the head of a family bank. Hester is the high spirited teen-aged niece who dislikes the banking auntie, while depending on her largesse. I have not read enough Oliphant to make any sweeping statements about the way this novel stacks up against her others, but readers of Victorian novels will probably enjoy this one. I'll stick my neck out and say that I think it is one of the great Victorian novels. Considering the n'er-do-wells in Oliphant's own family whom she supported by literally writing her fingers to the bone, we can probably assume that much of the representation of snarky, ungrateful hangers-on in the little extended-family community is autobiographical.

3.) The next book I want to read:

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.

4.) The last book I bought:

Historical fiction has been taking up much of my reading time in recent months. A lot of it is pretty bad, but I keep slogging through it in search of the gems. My plan is to write about the worthy books and try to forget the rest.

Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks concerns the first Native American to graduate from H*rvard College in 1665. A few of you may recall that my son is currently an undergrad there, and Brooks's setting naturally strikes a chord. European American depictions of Native Americans in historical fiction can be patronizing or reductive or even over-idealized (a subset of patronizing). I am curious to see how realistically this novelist addresses the story of a 17th C. Native American at H*rvard. Then, of course, I'm wondering how she will present the College, whose student body at that time consisted primarily of future ministers.

5.) The last book I was given:

Recently a show on Spanish-language TV featured a British ex-pat, Diana Kennedy, known far and wide as the go-to cookbook author for Mexican cooking. Then a few days ago she won the James Beard Foundation Cookbook of the Year Award for Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy. Mother's Day was coming up, and I dropped a not-too-subtle hint that one of her older books would be a welcome addition to my cookbook library. Kennedy published her first cookbook 30 years ago, and this book, The Essential Cuisines of Mexico, compiles her first three cookbooks in one volume: The Cuisines of Mexico, The Tortilla Book, and Mexican Regional Cooking. After covering Kennedy's basic techniques, perhaps I can graduate to Al Gusto.

Thanks to Simon at Stuck in a Book for introducing this meme.

New Video from Bassist Esperanza Spalding

2010-08-19T00:29:00.002-06:00

Her latest album, Chamber Music Society, was released this week.

History of Banjo

2010-08-03T13:53:00.000-06:00

The next point of interest in America's Music From the Pilgrims to the Present is the history of the banjo in the colonial period of the United States. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the 18th C. about the instrument brought to North America by Africans and called variously the banjar, banza, bangil, banjer, bangelo, banjor, bangoe, or banshaw. Even someone who dabbles in the history of American popular music is aware of the explosion of interest over the past few years in the African roots of the banjo. Gilbert Chase's book is too far out-of-date to be of much use on this subject, and to try to represent the history of banjo playing here in a short post could only be inadequate and reductive. I have been collecting some banjo resources and hope to return to the topic in some depth after finishing the general historical survey of American popular music. For now, have a listen to some West African akonting, one of the ancestors of the banjo, and see the Ekonting MySpace page for more music.

Early African Music of New Orleans

2010-07-28T09:10:00.001-06:00

The music and dancing in this video recreate the scene at Congo Square, New Orleans, in the 18th and early 19th Centuries. Up until 1820, Africans gathered regularly on Sundays in New Orleans for public musical festivities. Under a law passed in 1817, these music sessions were limited to Congo Square; later the authorities suppressed the gatherings. Drums, important instruments in Africa, were generally forbidden to the African slaves in the British colonies of North America, as they presented a possible means of transmitting communications of uprisings. However, drums were present on Sundays at Congo Square. With French and Spanish roots, as well as migration from the West Indies, the cultural background of Louisiana differed from that of the eastern colonies.

In reading the chapter about the early "African Presence" in American music in Gilbert Chase's America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present, I suspected that musicology had probably made some serious advances since Chase did his research in the 1950s. This book looks promising: Ned Sublette's The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (2008).

Another Cittern Medley

2010-07-26T11:27:00.003-06:00

Still reading America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present by Gilbert Chase. Yesterday's post included a video example of cittern music. Here is another sample of the cittern, the most popular plucked instrument of 17th C. America. The musician is Dante Ferrara.

Popular Instruments of Colonial America

2010-07-25T14:17:00.008-06:00

America's Music by Gilbert Chase continues to give much reading pleasure, a darned good thing, since some of the fiction I've tried has disappointed. Just a plea to any crime novelists who might happen by ...

If your Inspector So-and-So has been wandering up and down the country, with a photo in hand, and cannot identify the victim, then please, please do not have a friend happen by his office, see the pictures on the desk and ask, "Why do you have photos of my ex-lover here?" I just finished the most implausibly plotted novel ever, in which this scene appears.

So now back to the music of colonial America, a much more rewarding undertaking than the flimsy crime novel. According to Chase, the most popular keyboard instruments in Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1630-1730 were the virginals; he says this word always appears as a plural, since they came in pairs. Here is a short sample, just over a minute, in case, like me, you are unfamiliar with the instrument. The musician has been cleverly superimposed over the Vermeer painting shown above, Lady Seated at a Virginal.

The most popular plucked instrument of 17th C. Massachusetts was the cittern, shaped like a lute but with a flat back like a guitar and strung with wire, not gut. In the household inventories of deceased residents from which these numbers were derived, no lutes were found at all. Lutes were expensive and high-maintenance instruments, but the cittern was cheap, stayed in tune for weeks on end, could be hung on the wall, and sounded good whether plucked or strummed.

The Spanish Lady's Love

2010-07-23T05:25:00.001-06:00

Yesterday's post noted three ballads popular in colonial America, including "The Spanish Lady's Love." Here is a recording of it on film. The singing by Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier starts and stops but continues all the way to the end of the video clip from Fire Over England (1937). The voice of Olivier sounds true; it is difficult to tell if Leigh is dubbed or not.

Here is a midi file of the song, with a different melody, different words, same story. While reading about the history of American popular music, I may include some of these music notes from time to time. My main interest in this song is historical. Try to imagine 17th and 18th Century Europeans on the American continent singing this type of song with feeling.

Will you hear a Spanish Lady,
How an English man she woo'd.
Tho' he held her as his captive,
Ever gentle was his mood.
Tho' by birth and parentage of high degree
Much she wept when orders came to set her free.

"Gallant captain, shew some mercy
To a lady in distress,
Leave me not within this city,
I shall die of heaviness;
'Tis an empty mockery to set me free
While my heart in prison still remains with thee.

"It would be a shame, fair lady,
Should I bear a woman hence,
English soldiers never carry
Any such without offense."
"O, I'll quickly change myself, if so it be,
Like a page, whee'er thou go'st I'll follow thee.

"On the seas are many dangers,
Many tempests there arise,
Which to ladies will be dreadful,
Drawing tears from gentle eyes."
"well in troth, will I endure extremitie,
I could find in heart to lose my life for thee."

"Courteous lady, cease to tempt me,
let us end this gentle strife,
I in England have already,
A sweet woman to be my wife."
"Then within a nunnery immur'd I'll be.
Daily pray'rs I'll offer for thy love and thee.

Fare-thee-well, thou gallant captain,
Bear they love this chain of gold,
Tho' I doated on thee fondly,
Count not Spanish ladies bold;
Joy and true prosperity still go with thee."
"May they ever be thy lot, thou fair ladie.

Pop Music in Early America

2010-07-22T14:18:00.025-06:00

First published in 1955, Gilbert Chase's America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present has been occupying my odd reading moments for the past several weeks. A musicologist, Chase took popular American music seriously. He also covered classical music, as it was played and composed throughout the history of the United States. He begins with psalms sung in colonial churches and ends with a chapter on "Country to Rock--with Soul."

In the opening chapter on "Musical Puritans," Chase quotes Cotton Mather on the permissibility of playing instruments for recreation. Early Harvard divines were known to enjoy their broadside ballads, such as "The Lovesick Maid; or Cordelia's Lamentation for the Absence of Her Gerhard" and "The Last Lamentation of the Languishing Squire; or Love Overcomes All Things." What a lot of lamenting and languishing among the young swains and maidens!

In a letter to his brother, Benjamin Franklin referred to three of the most popular English ballads of the American colonies: Chevy Chase, Children in the Wood, and The Spanish Lady. Here is one of those tunes, under its alternate title "Babes in the Wood."

The Spanish Lady Franklin mentions is probably not the Irish ballad but The Spanish Lady's Love, described at The Traditional Ballad Index:

Imprisoned by an English captain, the Spanish lady falls in love with her captor. They exchange praises for the English, and he tells her they are mismatched. This does not convince her; at last he says he is married. They go their separate ways.

The early colonists were not stuffed shirts when it came to enjoying music. Although the Puritans rejected songs they considered immoral, even they enjoyed jolly and wholesome secular music and did not limit their musical lives to church psalmody. Secular songs and ballads circulated throughout New England, both in written form and as oral tradition. This was fun, tracking down some of the old tunes, and I hope to continue finding online resources to accompany a slow read of America's Music.

To Be Read - More Victoriana

2010-07-21T11:13:00.005-06:00

The editors' Introduction to John Marchmont's Legacy by M.E. Braddon discusses some books and authors who appear to be worth investigating or revisiting.

Wilkie Collins established the genre of sensation fiction. If you are in a receptive reading frame of mind, he is the go-to guy. I've read three of his novels and some short stories, and he is usually a lot of fun.

Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne (1861). Started this novel a few years ago. Length was daunting.

Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). OK. I confess. Never read this Gothic classic.

Henry James wrote a review of Braddon's Aurora Floyd. He was something of a fan. Time to re-read his essay "The Art of Fiction."

George Henry Lewes (critic, companion of George Eliot) was outspoken in his dislike of sensation fiction.

George Meredith, Evan Harrington (1860). Remember reading and liking his novel The Egoist years ago but never sought out any of his other work.

Henry Mansel, Oxford don, wrote an attack on sensation fiction in the Quarterly Review of April 1863.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote historical novels, including The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). Braddon admired him and sought his literary advice. Despite his reputation for a turgid style, he was a leading novelist of the time, and I would like to read at least one of his books.

Charles Reade also served as one of Braddon's literary mentors.

M.E. Braddon on Chivalry and the Hero

2010-07-20T13:43:00.003-06:00

Continued from yesterday ... Mid-novel in John Marchmont's Legacy, Mary Elizabeth Braddon includes a note on chivalry.

"Olivia heard his message, which had been spoken in a clear loud voice, like some knightly defiance, sounding trumpet-like at a castle-gate. She stood in one of the windows of the dining-room, hidden by the faded velvet curtain, and watched her cousin ride away, brave and handsome as any knight-errant of the chivalrous past, and as true as Bayard himself."

Bayard lived 1475-1524 and was the model of chivalry; Braddon expected her readers to catch her reference.

Later a catastrophe befalls the young Captain and he stops caring about matters previously crucial to him. "What was it to him if the glory of England were in danger, the freedom of a mighty people wavering in the balance? What was it to him if famine-stricken Ireland were perishing, and the far-away Indian possessions menaced by the contumacious and treacherous Sikhs?"

See what I mean about the M.E. Braddon imperialist newsreel? Other writers of the 1860's may have followed this line of chat, but I am not aware of having read them.

In these brief comments about the heroic, she ties together dissimilar moments of triumph that succinctly represent her imperial outlook. "He waved his hat, and the huzzas grew still louder; and a band upon the other side of the lawn played that familiar and triumphant march which is supposed to apply to every living hero from a Wellington just come home from Waterloo, to the winner of a boat race, or a patent- starch proprietor newly elected to an admiring constituency."

The editors identify the march as probably "Hail, the Conquering Hero" from Handel's Judas Maccabaeus.

One last quote on the born soldier ...

"He was a soldier by the inspiration of Heaven, as all great soldiers are. He had never known any other ambition or dreamed any other dream. Other lads had talked of the bar, and the senate, and their glories. Bah! how cold and tame they seemed! What was the glory of a parliamentary triumph, in which words were the only weapons wielded by the combatants, compared with a hand-to-hand struggle, ankle deep in the bloody mire of a crowded trench, or a cavalry charge, before which a phalanx of fierce Afghans fled like frightened sheep upon a moor! Edward Erundel was a soldier, like the Duke of Wellington or Sir Colin Campbell,--one writes the old romantic name involuntarily, because one loves it best,--or Othello."

Wellington, I think, is still well known among readers of Victorian fiction. Campbell was the commander of British forces in India during the Mutiny; he died in 1863, the year John Marchmont's Legacy was published. Braddon acknowledges the "fierceness" of the foe, which only lends stature to the flower of British manhood who rout them like sheep. Braddon knew how to rile up her Victorian reading public, whether the subject was thwarted love, female repression, or military exploits. In John Marchmont's Legacy, she sprinkles references to intense imperial feeling in order to borrow a reflected strength for the powerful emotions of her characters.

M.E. Braddon's Martial Outlook

2010-07-19T13:13:00.002-06:00

These clips from M.E. Braddon's John Marchmont's Legacy (1863) demonstrate her imperialistic narrative stance, as described in this blog yesterday.

On embarking for his military posting, Edward writes to a friend, "Tell Miss Mary I shall bring her home all kinds of pretty presents from Afghanistan,--ivory fans, and cashmere shawls, and Chinese puzzles, and embroidered slippers with turned-up toes, and diamonds, and attar-of-roses, and suchlike." Loot.

In 2008, the National Gallery of Art in D.C. mounted a show, Afghanistan, Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul. The images are copyrighted, so click to view some of the treasures on display. Scroll through the timeline at the bottom for historical overview.

Little Mary wants the soldier to stay home and cannot believe his mother loves him if she approves of his going to war. "John Marchmont was obliged to explain to his daughter that motherly love must not go so far as to deprive a nation of its defenders; and that the richest jewels which Cornelia can give to her country are those ruby life-drops which flow from the hearts of her bravest and brightest sons."

The soldier returns home after his tour of duty, bringing Mary a gift, a set of chessmen he says once belonged to the ruler of Afghanistan, who was a pro-Russian, anti-British. A British officer's capture of this prize would have distinguished him as a gallant and accomplished campaigner.

The photo of British Officers in 1862 was taken from Stephen Luscombe's excellent website, The British Empire. Thank you, sir, for sharing your collection.

To be continued ...

M.E. Braddon and Visions of Empire

2010-07-17T00:39:00.005-06:00

Just a few notes today on Mary Elizabeth Braddon's imperial tone in John Marchmont's Legacy...

Braddon brings forward attitudes and news headlines that would have dominated the thinking of Victorian readers but which other novelists did not necessarily mention and which a reader of today might overlook. I had read a little Kipling, the old imperialist, and observed the mindset of conquest he represents, but he was born two years after the publication of Braddon's novel. She was extolling the virtues of imperialism just after mid-century, during Kipling's babyhood. I am a little hard pressed to recall one of her contemporaries who did the same in such an overt manner.

The imperial point of view may have informed other novels of the day, but you have to look to general attitudes and the course of relationships and the will to power found in some other stories in order to tease out the imperial tone. Braddon explicitly praises martial virtues and recoils from the conquered peoples, whose territory she sees as needing British military incursion in order to advance civilization. She writes bluntly about these subjects, jarringly to the ear of today's reader.

The publication date of this sensation novel, 1863, follows not too long after two British wars with the Afghans. It is set in the years 1838-55, and a minor thread of the novel--passing references only--involves a young officer who is stationed in India during the later stages of the first Afghan War (1838-40) and the whole of the second (1841-42).

Check back tomorrow for snippets of text, offered for those readers with an interest in social history as well as 19th C. fiction. Before mentioning how thoroughly I came around on this novel, after being terribly bored through the first hundred pages, it seemed worth pointing out some of the elements of the book that do not appeal to me as story or as sympathetic worldview, but do hold great interest as history.

Braddon pursues the emotions and experiences of her characters in this novel with the same intensity she commends in war and warriors. That is to say, the whole business goes well over the top and, after a slow start, it made for an energetic and yes, sensational, read.

On Reader Response

2010-07-15T11:40:00.001-06:00

"On subjects on which the mind has been much informed, invention is slow of exerting itself. Faded ideas float in the fancy like half-forgotten dreams; and the imagination in its fullest enjoyments becomes suspicious of its offspring and doubts whether it has created or adopted."

--Richard Brinsley Sheridan in his Preface to The Rivals (1775).

Earlier this week, in a post on Lispector's The Hour of the Star, I mentioned a floaty mental state while reading. Then the passage above appears in Sheridan. It would be a mistake to claim a mind much informed, but the latter part of the quote feels relevant. Was my response as a reader more a necessary effect of the text or my idiosyncratic and subjective invention of the text?

Sheridan, the writer, wonders if he is creating or adopting, and as readers we might ask the same question, although the writer would seem to prefer creation, and I would like to think I am understanding the writer's intent as opposed making up my own private, possibly misshapen, version.

Occasionally a reader in an online book group or a blogger will post comments that make me wonder if that person read the same book I did. Sometimes reader response appears to be pure autobiography, an unwarranted infliction of personality on a text. An effort to avoid this failing can lead to unacceptably dry commentary, devoid of warmth, but indulging excessively in personal feelings while discussing a book can start sounding egocentric. Book discussion as a pretext for self-revelation can get tiresome.

These reflections lead to a consideration of different styles of book blogging and the bloggers I like to read. They seem to be all over the place in both focus and presentation. Highly subjective and personal. Newsy. Cerebral and analytical. Playful. Serious. Wandering and eclectic. Narrowly addressing special interests. Visual. Plain and simple. Stylish. What they all have in common is clear thinking and good writing about shared interests, and that is about the only similarity among them.

Based on my own experience as a blogger, I'd say an objective and detached approach has been easier for me than one that included more of my own personal stamp. This way of blogging may reflect time constraints as much as temperament. I'll have to give that some thought. The transition from Sheridan's ideas floating in fancy to an examination of what makes a good blog may not be obvious. His writing process, my reading process, sharing of reader response in blogs, what makes me want to read a blog, how to approach writing a blog. It only seems as though faded ideas have floated in the fancy like half-forgotten dreams from the beginning to the end of this post.

More 18th C. Fiction in Sheridan's The Rivals

2010-07-14T10:28:00.004-06:00

Yesterday's post highlighted some 18th Century novels mentioned in Sheridan's play The Rivals, books considered dangerous reading for young women. This passage names a few more offensive novels, as well as a couple of sober tomes more to the liking of the older generation.

When the young women hear Aunt Malaprop arriving, they scurry to hide some banned books.

LYD. Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick,
quick. Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilet, throw Roderick Random into the closet, put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man, thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa, cram Ovid behind the bolster there, put The Man of Feeling into your pocket so. Now lay Mrs. Chapone in sight, and leave Fordyce's Sermons open on the table.

Before the end of the scene, Mrs. Malaprop and Sir Anthony hold forth on the evils of the circulating library, "an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge."

Sermons were good, according to the mature view, and Mrs. Chapone's most famous work was Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1772). The Whole Diary of Man was a popular religious book of the 18th C. Aside from novels by Tobias Smollett (Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, The Memoirs of a Lady) and Laurence Sterne (The Sentimental Journey), many of these overly exciting novels have been forgotten.

The University of Kentucky Press published The Delicate Distress as part of its 18th C. Novels by Women series. I read a couple of books in the series; they were well-written and yes, you can understand why many parents of the day would not have approved of their darlings corrupting their characters with these stories. If your idea of 18th C. British lit is Sam Johnson, these novels by and for women can give you quite a jolt.

Almost a hundred years later, Mary Elizabeth Braddon mocked the novels chosen by adults for the edification of young women. She also laughed at some of the more tenuous plot lines of popular romantic fiction, while using many of these same conventions herself in her popular sensation novels.

In America's Music, From the Pilgrims to the Present, one of my current reads, Gilbert Chase describes the early 18th Century American psalm wars, a fierce battle fought among churchmen over the proper way to sing a psalm in church, which was actually a struggle over whether the educated elites could dictate to the common people their style of psalm singing in rural parish churches. Aside from reminding us that Americans will fight with each other over anything and everything, this passage in our social history also focuses on the idea of popular culture as something threatening to the social order. Lately this notion seems to be popping up everywhere in my reading, making me want to seek out more histories of pop culture, American and otherwise.

18th C. Women's Fiction

2010-07-13T10:45:00.009-06:00

Husband and son sat down to watch some action-adventure guy flick, and suddenly a blast of 18th C. drama seemed just the thing. Well, as it turned out, it was not. Mrs. Malaprop and entourage in Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) would still play well onstage, a laugh a minute, but somehow the play did not suit the reading mood last night. That easy passage through a play on the written page never began; it was all bumps and stumbles. My frame of mind was at fault, not Sheridan's play.

Still, before the first act had concluded, a lively scene explored some romantic novels to be found in the circulating libraries of Bath, books that needed to be hidden from the prying eyes of censorious aunties. A couple of weeks ago, this blog included parts of a 1797 letter to the editor of an American paper: NOVEL READING, A CAUSE OF FEMALE DEPRAVITY. The dates of The Rivals and the American letter to the editor correspond closely enough that the novels deemed unsuitable for young ladies in 1797 are probably some of the titles named in this 1775 scene, copied and pasted from Project Gutenberg.

LUCY. Indeed, ma'am, I traversed half the town in
search of it : I don't believe there's a circulating library
in Bath I ha'n't been at.

LYD. And could not you get The Reward of Constancy?

LUCY. No, indeed, ma'am.

LYD. Nor The Fatal Connexion?

LUCY. No, indeed, ma'am.

LYD. Nor The Mistakes of the Heart?

LUCY. Ma'am, as ill luck would have it, Mr. Bull said
Miss Sukey Saunter had just fetched it away.

LYD. Heigh-ho ! Did you inquire for The Delicate
Distress ?

LUCY. Or, The Memoirs of Lady Woodford ? Yes, in-
deed, ma'am. I asked everywhere for it ; and I might
have brought it from Mr. Frederick's, but Lady Slattern
Lounger, who had just sent it home, had so soiled and
dog's-eared it, it wa'n't fit for a Christian to read.

LYD. Heigh-ho ! Yes, I always know when Lady Slattern has been before me. She has a most observing thumb ; and, I believe, cherishes her nails for the convenience of making marginal notes. Well, child, what have you brought me?

LUCY. Oh ! here, ma'am. [Taking books from under
her cloak, and from her pockets.] This is The Gordian
Knot, and this Peregrine Pickle. Here are The Tears of
Sensibility, and Humphrey Clinker. This is The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, written by herself, and here the second volume of The Sentimental Journey.

A few of these novels are still read today, at least in English departments, while most of them are lost and forgotten. To be continued.

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

2010-07-12T15:40:00.007-06:00

The first book chosen for the PEN American Center's online reading group, Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star (1977), has drawn some mixed reactions at the PEN Reads site. Responses range from love-it to hate-it, or more to the point I-don't-get-it. I fall in the love-it camp but want to be cautious about recommending the novel, especially if rambling, impressionistic, experimental fiction that flirts with philosophy is not your cup of tea. Auster, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Kafka? Yes? Then proceed. She has also been compared to Virginia Woolf, and that works too.

When Benjamin Moser's acclaimed biography of Lispector was published last year, her fiction was unknown to me. Her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (1944), purchased at that time, still sits on the shelf. Then PEN announced the reading group, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín, and the time seemed right. The book arrived, and since it runs under 100 pages, including translator's afterword, it looked manageable in one sitting. Then that thing happens that so often happens when a stream of writing encourages a susceptible reader to lose track of time and pace. The reading slowed down. Re-reading certain passages was rewarding. A sentence would stop me in my tracks, and I would put the book aside, not wanting to fly forward. This little book took a week to read.

The story, if you can call it that, focuses on an impoverished and ignorant anti-heroine from northeastern Brazil, who becomes a kind of everywoman figure. Her experience mirrors the struggles of a writer trying to find the right words. The opening segment, in which the narrator struggles to find a starting point for the story, goes on and on, pleasingly, and it looked for a while as if the writer's inability to get going would constitute the entire narrative. The male narrator does lift off with a character and something of a story, at last, but plot is definitely not the reason to read this novella.

Translator Giovanni Pontiero identifies the main character as a stereotypical "loser," but he says, "The magic begins when Clarice Lispector starts to investigate the psychological consequences of poverty." With surprising resilience, the protagonist awaits her destiny, he says. Pontiero remarks on Lispector's interiority as a writer, her process of narrating "from within." We go inside the mind of Lispector as well as the mind of her character, as the writer explores the absurdity and arbitrariness of the character's experience.

The narrative suggested floating, drifting. Was the spaciness of the reading experience Lispector's intention or my response to it? Either way, the "Brazilian Kafka" is a newly acquired taste that I want to indulge further.

And more pics from our local parade.

2010-07-06T08:16:00.013-06:00

Back to our local 4th of July parade. These look like employees of Yellowstone National Park (and family members) on the horse-drawn carriages used for sight-seeing tours.

Not sure what this character has to do with health care, but the float represented a local clinic. The crowd liked it. Someone near me said, "It's just like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade." Well, sort of.

Let us not overlook the dudes.

Cute toddlers.

I was not nearly as worried about the skateboarder flying off into the blue as I was about the children who were kicking around the soccer ball on the back of a flatbed truck. Everyone survived intact.

Horses, of course. Horses from beginning of parade to end. This is Montana, after all.

Another horse-drawn wagon.

And what would a parade be in farm country without an impressive display of agricultural equipment?

Some of the classic cars were younger than I am, so we will skip that bit.

Cast of Fame in 4th Parade

2010-07-06T07:34:00.005-06:00

Here is another snap of the 4th of July parade: the cast of Fame, in costume and singing, dancing, and playing their way up the street. Efforts to get a good picture of my son came to nought. He is wearing the turquoise bandana around his forehead. As the most dynamic performers in the parade, this bunch pleased the crowd.

Old-Fashioned 4th

2010-07-05T10:12:00.006-06:00

The population of a nearby town in south central Montana is 7500, and our neighbors do know how to put on a 4th of July parade. It looked like everyone in the town was there. Here is one of my favorite groups in the event, on account of their garb. How do you like the sun hats? Authentic Montana Celtic. This area was settled by Norwegians, but the oofta element is so much taken for granted around here, they do not need any special representation in the parade. But we saw some different kilt colors on display.

Searching for more melodramatic Victorian novels.

2010-07-03T08:32:00.005-06:00

Once again, in John Marchmont's Legacy, Mary Elizabeth Braddon describes some preposterous scenes to be found in the popular fiction read by young women of the 1840s. What novels is she describing? I cannot come up with titles, probably because the books are deservedly forgotten. The young man tells his wife:

"We have outlived our troubles, Polly, like the hero and heroine in one of your novels; and what is to prevent our living happy ever afterwards, like them? If you remember, my dear, no sorrows or trials ever fall to the lot of people after marriage. The persecutions, the separations, the estrangements, are all ante-nuptial. When once your true novelist gets his hero and heroine up to the altar-rails in real earnest,--he gets them into the church sometimes, and then forbids the banns, or brings a former wife, or a rightful husband, pale and denouncing, from behind a pillar, and drives the wretched pair out again, to persecute them through three hundred pages more before he lets them get back again,--but when once the important words are spoken and the knot tied, the story's done, and the happy couple get forty or fifty years' wedded bliss, as a set-off against the miseries they have endured in the troubled course of a twelvemonth's courtship. That's the sort of thing, isn't it, Polly?"

Misadventures before the wedding ceremony? Forbidden banns? Interrupted weddings? Bigamy? What are these pre-1848 novels Braddon makes light of? Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre includes a couple of the plot points mentioned, but the novels Braddon is mocking do not sound like classics. What else? Her own Lady Audley's Secret involves bigamy but not as an obstacle to young love. She appears to be heading for a bigamous twist in John Marchmont's Legacy, but that remains to be seen. Still reading, with pleasure now.

The paragraph above gives a good sense of the musicality of Braddon's writing; her subjects are oh so exciting, by Victorian standards, and her language is consistently rhythmic and punchy.

Victorian non-classic novels?

2010-07-02T08:22:00.002-06:00

If other readers can identify the novels Mary Elizabeth Braddon refers to in the following passage of John Marchmont's Legacy, the help will be appreciated. You are aware of Braddon's reputation as a writer of sensation novels? Get a load of this.

"At home the young lady did what she pleased, sitting for hours together at her piano, or wading through gigantic achievements in the way of embroidery-work. She was even allowed to read novels now, but only such novels as were especially recommended to Olivia [her step-mother] who was one of the patronesses of a book-club at Swampington: novels in which young ladies fell in love with curates, and didn't marry them; novels in which everybody suffered all manner of misery, and rather liked it; novels in which, if the heroine did marry the man she loved--and this happy conclusion was the exception, and not the rule--the smallpox swept away her beauty, or a fatal accident deprived him of his legs, or eyes, or arms before the wedding day."

What are these novels? Who are their authors? Braddon can be rather a wit when she gets started on a favorite hobby horse; here she takes on sentimental novels chosen by the older generation for the moral uplift of the young. Braddon's novels were the pulp fiction of her day, and here she identifies a level of low-brow fiction--very likely less well-written than her own--, Victorian morality tales for the improvement of young ladies. I would love to read a few of these. With Google Books, all kinds of out-of-print originals are available online. Where should a reader begin? Examples? Has a good literary history of the genre been written? The Victorian Web posts a good article, "The Victorian Sensation Novel, 1860-1880 — "preaching to the nerves instead of the judgment," which discusses the principal authors of the genre, but I am looking for pre-1848 melodramatic novels for young ladies, not quite the same thing.

After complaining at first about John Marchmont's Legacy , I noted that the novel has picked up considerably. We can easily understand why the Victorian pulse was racing. Patience rewarded.

It looks like my blog is tending toward the M.E. Braddon Quote-of-the-Day. I am tempted to keep that up until the conclusion of John Marchmont's Legacy.

Novels of Wall Street

2010-07-01T07:53:00.017-06:00

As promised, here are some novels reflecting American--and British--attitudes toward Wall Street. These books were mentioned by Steve Fraser in Wall Street: America's Dream Palace.

Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44) by Charles Dickens.
The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857) by Herman Melville.
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner.
The Financier (1912); The Titan, (1914); The Stoic (1947) by Theodore Dreiser.
Democracy: An American Novel (1880) by Henry Adams.
A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) by William Dean Howells.

I did not notice a reference to Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country, which I read not too long ago. The action takes place against the backdrop of Wall Street.

Non-fiction accounts that look good are: American Notes for General Circulation (1842) by Charles Dickens; New York by Gaslight and Other Urban Sketches (1850) by George Foster; and A Backward Glance: An Autobiography (1934) by Edith Wharton.

Napoleon: Views from Two Sides of the Ocean

2010-06-30T07:19:00.005-06:00

I was particularly struck by Steve Fraser's description in Wall Street: America's Dream Palace of 19th C. America's infatuation with those financial Titans who appeared to resemble Napoleon. Readers of Victorian fiction will be aware that 19th century British readers generally regarded Napoleon as a devil. Not so the Americans.

"Napoleon gripped the popular imagination all through the nineteenth century. His legendary status naturally was largely owing to his military genius and imperial omnipotence. But what also counted heavily in the way people reacted to men like Vanderbilt or Fisk was a plebeian assertiveness that was also part of the Napoleonic mystique. Their unprepossessing backgrounds, their earthy irreverence toward established ways of doing things or established social authority, their audacity on taking the law into their own hands, their fearless embrace of the risky and the unknown reminded people of the French emperor. Napoleon, that Corsican upstart risen out of social obscurity, was after all a hero of the democratic revolution, his whole life a monument to a supreme act of self-creation."

This vignette typifies the storytelling and cultural analysis of the book and suggests its overall appeal. I liked the reminder of an important difference in outlook between English speakers in America and Britain.

A Social History of Wall Street

2010-06-29T07:25:00.000-06:00

When you finish a book and realize that your favorite section was the footnotes, that probably indicates you chose the wrong book. I cannot review Wall Street, America's Dream Palace (2008) by Steve Fraser, because my summing up would be to say this is not the book I thought it would be. It is not about what I thought it would cover. A book cannot be faulted for exploring different territory than the reader was expecting. That would be not only unfair but also foolish. An audience exists for this short pop social history. Bill Moyers included it on his "Be a More Engaged Citizen" book list in 2008.

I did cull a lovely list of fiction and non-fiction for further reading, so I end up a happy reader if not a well-satisfied reader. It was pleasing to find that years of reading American history made much of the narrative review for me. If you have never looked into Hamilton's goals for the federal government, or Jackson's attack on the Second Bank of the United States, or the biographies of the Robber Barons, then this might be a suitable read for you. Not to overstate the case, I learned a lot from the book, just not in much depth.

Instead of a history of Wall Street, the book delivers a history of America's relationship with the idea of Wall Street. America's image of the Street has always been ambivalent, as reflected in the section headings, representing the types of larger-than-life players who have captured the public imagination: The Aristocrat, The Confidence Man, The Hero, The Immoralist. Fraser is especially good at showing the overlapping of images, as when the hero is part con man, or the immoralist is partly admired.

My slight discomfort with the book lies in its emphasis and tone of essay, as opposed to rigorous history. On the other hand, the book is part of a series of pop histories from Yale University Press on subjects ranging from the history of the hamburger to the Empire State Building to a biography of famous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. If the book turns out to be Wall Street Light, nobody should be surprised. The histories in the series target a wide audience. Popular histories can be fun to read, and a couple of other books in the series look promising: a biography of Fred Astaire and Molly Haskell's reevaluation of the film Gone with the Wind.

Fraser referred liberally to novels depicting Wall Street characters and American and British attitudes toward the Street. I've drawn up a list of those novels from Melville to Dickens to Wharton to Dreiser and will post soon.

M.E. Braddon Picks Up the Pace

2010-06-28T08:18:00.001-06:00

Not long ago I was moaning about the weary work of reading Mary Elizabeth Braddon's John Marchmont's Legacy (1863), but Braddon had delivered some fun reading in the past and I stuck with her. It took over a hundred pages for this novel to get rolling, but we are now underway. Sensational!

Chapter XIV begins: "[Young Woman] and [Young Man] were happy. They were happy, and how should they guess the tortures of that desperate woman, whose benighted soul was plunged in the black gulf of horror by reason of their innocent love?"

Thus the melodrama unfolds. Braddon shows herself at last to be the masterly entertainer of Lady Audley's Secret. She just took a long while to ratchet up the intensity level of jealousy, despair, revenge, passion--her specialties. The first part of the novel was dominated by the character of a typical Victorian "Angel in the House." Now the focus appears to be shifting to the villain, a woman frustrated by the effects of her own character flaws, but also chafing under the limitations set on her personal development by the strictures of Victorian society.

Now settling into a good read.

American Histories of 1776 from Two Contemporaries

2010-06-27T08:38:00.003-06:00

Although my reading of American history has involved dabbling in the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, an excerpt of Mercy Otis Warren's 1805 history inspires a wish to return to those founding documents of United States democracy and republicanism. In Creating an American Culture, 1775-1800, Eve Kornfeld includes a clip from Warren's History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution. Jeffersonians praised the work, while Federalists disliked it intensely.

Warren's style strikes me as Latinate but fluid, and she writes confidently and well. The chapters presented by Kornfeld tend toward a Great Man idea of history, common at the time, of course. Warren offers an encomium to her late brother, represented as a martyr to the Revolution. She also writes about the commotions in Boston leading up to the war, including the tossing of a shipment of tea into the harbor. It was illuminating to see a description of events written by a chronicler who lived through them. I would like to read all three volumes of her history of the war. She is known as the leading American woman writer of the period, and it is absurd that I made it through some graduate courses in American history, including a course in colonial history, without hearing her name. That was years ago. I hope the curriculum has changed.

A book to pair with Warren's would be David Ramsey's The History of the American Revolution (1789), also excerpted by Kornfeld. He runs through various interest groups and reports who supported the revolution and who did not. New York City was a hotbed of royalists; the Irish favored independence; often the Scots in America supported the Crown. Germans were split, as were the Episcopal clergy. Presbyterians, fearing establishment of state religion by the British, supported the revolutionary cause. Settlers on the western frontier of the southern colonies opposed revolution. Some of them were vigilantes who had taken the prosecution of justice into their own hands in remote areas, resulting in reprisals by royal governors. Convinced of the danger of opposing royal colonial power, they were reluctant to join the revolutionaries. And so it goes. Quakers opposed, as, in general, were the elderly, set in their ways.

Whether or not these observations hold true under contemporary historical scrutiny would be an interesting follow-up. Although he examined differences among colonists, he was a "staunch Federalist" who contributed to the unifying myth of the American Colonist, "young, ardent, ambitious, and enterprising," according to Kornfeld.

Shifting gears to the topic of education and the role of women, I just want to mention Judith Sargent Murray, a prolific essayist and fiction writer, whose "On the Equality of the Sexes" (1790) appears in Creating an American Culture. Having just ordered a biography of Murray, I'll no doubt have more to say about her later. For now: readers who enjoy 18th C. texts but are unfamiliar with Murray will probably want to read some of her work.

18th C. Attitudes of Jefferson and Bartram

2010-06-26T08:58:00.004-06:00

Thomas Jefferson's only published book was Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), which Eve Kornfeld excerpts in Creating an American Culture, 1775-1800. As we know from the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson writes eloquently. His ideas on race, however, today seem hopelessly muddled and wrong-headed. Racist, we would say, although compared to some of his contemporaries he looks like a progressive thinker.

Ironically, some of Jefferson's Enlightenment ideas are the ones that plunge him into positions we consider barbaric. While trying to mount a defence of the humanity of Native Americans, he demeans them. He wanted to free slaves, eventually, if a way could be found to send them away somewhere. His unquestioning attitude of racial superiority looks grim from today's frame of reference. Even more sobering is the realization that his views are still held by some Americans today.

Naturalist William Bartram's 1791 book, also excerpted in Creating an American Culture, takes a more nuanced view of Native Americans. Although mired in the language of the 18th Century, Bartram considers the men and women of the tribes he encounters in the American Southeast with a detachment from the usual European pre-existing prejudices. He appears to have an uncluttered mind, an independent observer's openness to new experience.

His book has been sitting on my shelf for some time now. I was more interested in the history of the tribes he met on his travels than with the nature writing for which he is famous. Now it appears that the book has something to say to a contemporary reader regarding the complex and conflicted history of European ideas about Native Americans--another reason to read the book, Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws (1791).

Some Perfectly Awful Poets of the Early American Republic

2010-06-25T09:03:00.002-06:00

The flowery poetry excerpted in Creating an American Culture, 1775-1800 by Eve Kornfeld is entirely forgettable or, as she warns, possibly unreadable. If you have never read "The Poet of the Revolution," Philip Freneu, or the others in this brief anthology, count yourself fortunate. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Timothy Dwight, John Barlow: not household names even in the households of English literature majors.

Self-consciously attempting to be visionary, these poets aimed to represent the spirit of the new nation in suitably epic form. The poetry lacks literary merit, and the earnest sentiments sound jingoistic after a couple of hundred years. As historical documents, the poems represent the hopes and pretensions of writers trying to express the full hearts and the dreams of the new American nation. Contemporaries warmed to some of this tripe about as much as I did. Dwight and Barlow's poems never achieved any popularity among readers, probably reflecting either innate good sense, or a familiarity with earlier colonial poets, such as Anne Bradstreet, or with the superior British poets, who left this lot looking amateurish and bombastic.

18th C. Novel-Reading Females, Continued

2010-06-24T08:37:00.002-06:00

[A continuation of yesterday's post: letter to the editor, 1797, on the evils of American women reading novels.]

And yet this, bad as it is, is not the worst result of such pernicious reading. It is no uncommon thing for a young lady who has attended her dearest friend to the altar, a few months after a marriage which, perhaps, but for her , had been a happy one, to fix her affections on her friend's husband, and by artful blandishments allure him to herself. Be not staggered, moral reader, at the recital! Such serpents are really in existence; such daemons in the form of women are now too often to be found! Three instances, in as many years, have occurred in the little circle I move in. I have seen two poor disconsolate parents drop into premature graves, miserable victims to their daughter's dishonour, and the peace of several relative families wounded, never to be healed again in this world.

"And was novel-reading the cause of this?": inquires some gentle fair one, who, deprived of such an amusement, could hardly exist; "was novel-reading the foundation of such frail conduct?" I answer yes! It is in that school the poor deluded female imbibes erroneous principles, and from thence pursues a flagrantly vicious line of conduct; it is there she is told that love is involuntary, and that attachments of the heart are decreed by fate. Impious reasoning!

[This letter to the Monthly Mirror, November 1797, continues for a few more paragraphs, but you have received the message of the indignant author. I found it in The New England Quarterly Magazine, Vol. I, on Google Books and did some speed typing to place it here for ... the moral instruction of today's readers.

1797: Ladies, stop reading those trashy novels.

2010-06-23T09:27:00.006-06:00

NOVEL READING, A CAUSE OF FEMALE DEPRAVITY

Mr. Editor,

I now begin to hope I shall see good old days come round again--that moderately stiff stays, covered elbows, and concealed bosoms, will soon be prevailing fashions; and, what is of far greater importance, that chastity--pure and spotless CHASTITY!--will once more be the darling attribute of women. Had fashionable depravity been confined to the higher circles of life, I think I should hardly have troubled you with these my sentiments; I should have concluded it the offspring of idleness and voluptuousness, and have despaired of effectually deprecating a vice which not the happy example of conjugal virtue held forth from the throne could discountenance. But, like every other fashion, a little day hands it down to the million, and woman is now but another name for infamy.

I have been at some trouble to trace to its source this great calamity, in the middling orders of society--for fashion of itself, even if it was introduced by a prince, and his dulcinea's trains were held up by every peeress at court, could never have so unhappily corrupted the female world--and I find those who first made novel-reading an indispensable branch in forming the minds of young women, have a great deal to answer for. Without this poison instilled, as it were, into the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves of vice. The plain food, wholesome air, and exercise they enjoy, would have exempted them from the tyranny of lawless passions, and, like their virtuous grandmothers, they would have pointed the finger of shame at the impure and licentious. But those generous sentiments, those liberal opinions, those tender tales abounding with fine feeling, soft ideas, fascinating gentleness, and warm descriptions, have been the ruin of us. A girl with her intellectual powers enervated by such a course of reading, falls an easy prey to the first boy who assumes the languishing lover. He has only to stuff a piece of dirty paper into the crevice of her window, full of thous and thees and thys and mellifluous compounds, hyeroglyphically spelled, perhaps, and Miss is not long in finding out that "many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it;" so as Master is yet in his apprenticeship, and friends would disapprove of an early marriage, they agree to dispense with the ceremony. Nay even when brooding over a helpless base-born infant, and surrounded by a once respectable and happy family, now dejected and dishonoured, too often does the infatuated fair one take pleasure in the misery she has created, and fancy floods of sorrow sweetly graceful, because, forsooth, she is just in the same point of view as the hapless, the distressed, the love-lorn Sappho of some novel or other.

[Eve Kornfeld in Creating an American Culture, 1775-1800, says that this letter was widely reprinted in the 1790s. It exemplifies a common attitude. Don't you like the way the anonymous author uses italics? Boy is good.]

Creating an American Culture 1775-1800

2010-06-22T08:53:00.008-06:00

On a trip to Boston last fall when Clever Cloggs started college, I spent an afternoon at the Museum of Fine Arts and was much taken with the portraits of some of the key figures in the colonial and revolutionary periods of American history. The works of John Singleton Copley made a vivid impression, and that day at the museum planted a twinge of reader's desire to focus on the art, literature, and history of period.

My first action on that vague intention has been to read Eve Kornfeld's Creating an American Culture 1775-1800: A Brief History with Documents (2001). This book turned out to be the most satisfying read of recent weeks, and with its presentation of both high culture and pop culture, it has expanded my view of late 18th Century America. Although the book runs a short 260 pages, it will be the focus of the blog for a few posts.

As the title says, the book contains both historical summary and original sources. Of the seven short essays on topics from language and literature to education to images of "The Other," that is, Native Americans, my favorite is "Contesting Popular Culture." In imitation of British models, an American pop culture began to emerge in the 1780s and 1790s. "The intellectual elite viewed the rise of this popular culture as a crisis." Among the dangers they identified were, gasp, novels and plays, even though many of those works appear to us today as moralistic, didactic, and entirely non-threatening to the social order.

A 1797 pamphlet--Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity--opines about the threat to virtuous women, especially those of the "middling" sort. See excerpt in next post (tomorrow, I hope).

The American novel that probably brought forth this diatribe was Charlotte, a Tale of Truth by Susanna Haswell Rowson, first published in London in 1791, followed by a Philadelphia edition in 1794. Until the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, Charlotte was the bestselling American novel, with more than 200 editions printed. It sold about 40,000 copies its first decade. The excerpt shows a shocking--shocking!--tale of an innocent girl seduced and abandoned, who eventually dies of grief and shame. That about sums it up. Pretty hot stuff for 1794 America, and you can see why the gentlemen in charge of moral uprightness were aghast. Also published as Charlotte Temple, the book is in print and also available at Project Gutenberg.

Kornfeld makes the point that many intellectuals regarded the dangerous American popular culture as women's culture, and they feared an undermining of patriarchal authority. They even feared for the stability of the new Republic.

Eat, eat. It's good for you... Maybe not.

2010-06-21T12:35:00.013-06:00

"We've turned food into a health hazard." --Frances Moore-Lappé.

This video runs about an hour. Frances Moore-Lappé and daughter Anna Lappé discuss food policy, democracy and the environment. In light of the recently published Dietary Guidelines for Americans, this discussion is timely and topical. The Guidelines--which I chuckled over a few days ago, focusing on the suggestion to eat more dark chocolate; have a cocktail--have been generally pooh-poohed by knowledgeable foodies.

A few books on food policy have been added to my virtual stack:

Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System by Raj Patel
Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health (California Studies in Food and Culture) by Marion Nestle
Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do about It by Anna Lappé

For more information on the work of Moore-Lappé and Lappé, visit The Small Planet Institute. See also Marion Nestle's blog: Food Politics.

At Crighton Abbey by M.E. Braddon

2010-06-20T13:05:00.000-06:00

Although novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) was a prolific writer of popular sensation fiction such as Lady Audley's Secret and The Doctor's Wife, she also wrote short stories. At Chrighton Abbey and Other Horror Stories was a quick read, and even though scary stories are not my favorites, much of the Victorian reading public loved a ghoulish spine-tingler. Just as Braddon's popular novels sometimes present a different view of womanhood and a different frame of mind than we see in much of the Victorian fiction that is still read today, so do her short stories give us a sense of the kinds of special effects appreciated by Victorian readers of pop fiction.

The personable narrator of the title story is herself a Chrighton, a poor relation of the old family. Visiting the ancestral manse at Christmas, the spinster governess has a ghostly encounter, hears a local legend from a servant, and sits back helplessly watching and waiting for the curse to descend again on the family. The reader is told fairly early in the story that one of the family members meets a bad end, and we are unsurprised when the worst happens. The point of the exercise is not to turn the pages to unravel the plot. In approaching this genre of fiction, readers are interested in the storytelling process and in the chills-and-thrills excitement we know is ahead.

John Marchmont's Legacy, my current read and also by Braddon, continues to be a long row to hoe. Although on the sentence level, her writing is fine, the characters leave me cold and a plot lacks what the Victorians called "incident" and "mystery," features that make her other novels I've read charge steadily ahead with page-turning velocity. In the novels mentioned above, Braddon at least considers alternate versions of Victorian womanhood, but a central character of John Marchmont's Legacy adorns the pages with a cloying Little Nell sweetness and idealized virtue that I find hard to take. Trying hard to finish this one. Wish me luck.

My introduction to Braddon, The Doctor's Wife, retells the Madame Bovary story for a British reading public expecting titillation but not ultimate shock to their middle-class moral sensibilities. It is a rollicking good read and highly recommended to readers of Victorian fiction, as long as you can tolerate its sentimentality and silly ending.

Dark chocolate is good for you.

2010-06-19T13:13:00.008-06:00

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have published recommendations for soon-to-be-adopted Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

News Flash: Both dark chocolate and alcohol are good for you, in moderation, they say."What are the Health Effects Related to Consumption of Chocolate?

"Moderate evidence suggests that modest consumption of dark chocolate or cocoa is associated with health benefits in the form of reduced CVD [cardiovascular disease] risk. Potential health benefits need to be balanced with caloric intake. [Oh, heck.]

"Chocolate as currently consumed is a small component of the total diet, and benefits or risks will likely be minimal. Potential health effects need to be balanced with caloric intake, as chocolate is a calorie dense product. The predominant fat in chocolate is stearic acid, which has been shown to not raise blood cholesterol. Different formulations of chocolate vary in their content of dairy fat, with darker chocolate containing less dairy fat. Beneficial effects of chocolate have been attributed to polyphenolic compounds, in particular flavonoids. Many plant-based foods contain polyphenolic compounds and chocolate is a minor source. Formulations of chocolate are known to have different polyphenolic profiles, and, if this is the mechanism of chocolate’s beneficial actions, different forms of chocolate may confer different benefits."

So, OK, I exaggerated: moderate evidence, minimal effect, but it was fun while it lasted. How, I wonder, can you consume the good dark chocolate without also consuming the dastardly cream and butter in those delicious Belgian truffles?

See also: the report's findings on alcohol consumption. The skinny: Moderate alcohol consumption slows cognitive decline with age and lowers risk of cardiovascular disease. Drink too much and you will probably get fat and/or end up in an accident.

Hit and Miss

2010-06-14T10:20:00.004-06:00

Having enjoyed a couple of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Victorian sensation novels, I picked up John Marchmont's Legacy. What a turgid bore so far. I suppose it is worth following through to the end for its value as social history. As fun fiction, skip. This is work.

Amusing, because I wanted something brainless and breezy to counter-balance a steady stream of unsatisfactory contemporary fiction, both literary and pop. I am also reading old cookbooks and may resort to reviewing those!

Ready to Rock with the Wok

2010-06-06T12:24:00.009-06:00

Many thanks to the family members who shopped at a Chinese grocery in Salt Lake City last week and brought home most of my requested items. The fresh vegetables on the list were not available, and, unsurprisingly, the Utah state liquor store did not carry the Shao Hsing wine (although they did sell saki). My husband bought a bottle of the stuff at the grocery. It was labeled "rice cooking wine" and "not for beverage" and cost just over $2. After expressing my reservations about cooking with vinegar labeled unfit for drinking, I asked him on the phone to check at a liquor store. Hope I don't sound ungrateful; he was trying to follow the list, and that product is the one he found first. He bought my suggested substitute, a nice bottle of sherry. We will probably use the Chinese "cooking wine" as lighter fluid for the grill.

I had tried the local groceries and health food stores and had found many of the ingredients required for the recipes in my Chinese cookbook, but these items were purchased in Salt Lake:

mung bean starch
dried prickly ash (Szechuan pepper)
dried black fungus (mushrooms)
cloud ears (mushrooms)
red Thai chiles
pickled mustard
sesame seed paste (NOT Tahini, Chinese import as specified by cookbook.)
wet bean curd, both red and white
winter bamboo shoots
preserved black beans
Madras curry powder
dried red dates
mung beans (for sprouting)
black sesame seeds
hot bean sauce
pickled cabbage
Chinese sausage
preserved turnip
double black soy sauce
light soy sauce
soy bean sauce (canned)

An attempt to locate these and other items from several online vendors resulted in a food and equipment cost of $103 and a shipping charge of $109. One enterprising business slaps a $15 surcharge on each order sent to a P.O. box. Decided to pass on mail order.

The pantry is as well-stocked as I can manage from rural Montana. Let the cooking begin. And I promise not to publish another grocery list for a good six months. At least.

Photo by Jan van der Crabben was found at WikiMedia Commons. Thanks!

Checking In

2010-05-24T11:08:00.003-06:00

Yes, I am still reading, but four books in a row have been neither good enough to inspire comment nor bad enough to need a warning word. My interest as a book blogger is evolving. Instead of reviewing every book read, I am more inclined to recommend wonderful books and skip commentary on the rest.

Clever Cloggs is home from college, and family-style cooking continues apace. Middle Eastern, Italian, Chinese, and high-altitude baking dominate our foodways here, along with the old family favorites. Light has been bad for food photos, at least with my little camera. The garden is on hold until we get a change in the weather. Forecast for West Yellowstone today is 12 to 20 inches of new snow. Here we are just getting drizzle at this point--another good day for baking.

Lena Horne, RIP

2010-05-22T10:32:00.001-06:00

Not To Be Read

2010-05-16T10:38:00.007-06:00

Literary fiction about people hurting people, damaging each other, behaving despicably at every opportunity, may or may not be realistic, but I am getting heartily sick of it. Call me shallow, but history (often a narrative of institutionalized bad behavior) and biography (individualized bad behavior in many cases) look increasingly appealing for the summer bookshelf. Add some light historical fiction, carefully selected mysteries, traditional music surveys, film history, classic poetry, and foodie tomes, and that should keep me busy reading for the next few months. I'll save novels about suffering humanity for the winter months. A few short stories mixed into the reading should provide sufficient literary seriousness for the time being.

Plantagenet Palliser, Trollope's Coalition Prime Minister

2010-05-06T23:49:00.009-06:00

With the UK election yesterday ending in a hung Parliament, and a coalition government to follow, Anthony Trollope's novel The Prime Minister comes to mind. His character Plantagenet Palliser, the diffident, high-minded, impolitic aristocrat who heads a fictional coalition government, bears some resemblance to another British politician of today, as an Oxford professor noted recently in the blog of the Oxford University Press. The blog post "Plantagenet Palliser vs. Gordon Brown" summarizes the parallels rather nicely.

It is still unclear who will lead the coalition government in the UK, but if Palliser's unhappy fictional example offers an accurate glimpse of the experience of a coalition leader, it is not an enviable position.

James Beard Cookbook Awards

2010-05-03T08:56:00.015-06:00

Congratulations to Serious Eats on winning Best Food Blog and Best Video Webcast last night at the James Beard Foundation Awards. The Greek Orzo Salad recipe they post today will end up on our summer picnic table for sure. Kalamata olives and artichoke hearts and feta cheese? Yes. Chow.com won the website award.

The culinary world anticipates the chef and restaurant awards, but out here in the boonies, a thousand miles from any of the nominated eateries, the blog and cookbook awards hold much more interest. The only nominated cookbook I own was in the International category, but it lost out to The Country Cooking of Ireland by Colman Andrews, which was also named Cookbook of the Year.

Another winner worthy of serious notice: A Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden. This classic cookbook, first published in the UK in 1968 and now revised as The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, was named to the James Beard foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame last night. One look at an article Roden wrote about this cuisine, accompanied by recipes and pictures, and I was sold. "Take the Spice Route" features an Egyptian Lentil Soup that looks about as easy as cooking gets.

During my college days, I took a cooking class from a Lebanese caterer and have been cooking Middle Eastern food on and off ever since: stuffed grape leaves, pine-nut stuffed chicken, baklava, pickled raw vegetables, pita bread, lentils, stuffed squash. The photos with the Roden article remind me to pull out those old recipes again. This style of cooking presents maximum flavor with few ingredients and these dishes have been popular family fare.

A complete list of last night's winners is posted at the James Beard Foundation blog, Delights and Prejudices. Other cookbook winners include:

American Cooking: Real Cajun by Donald Link with Paula Disbrowe
Baking and Dessert: Baking by James Peterson
Beverage: Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology by Randall Grahm
Cooking from a Professional Point of the View: The Fundamental Techniques of Classic Pastry Arts by FCI with Judith Choate
General Cooking: Ad Hoc at Home by Thomas Keller with Dave Cruz

The James Beard Foundation Awards continue tonight.

Zucchini Cheese Drop Biscuits

2010-05-02T08:31:00.011-06:00

These Zucchini Cheese Drop Biscuits are without a doubt the best biscuits I've ever made. We do not eat biscuits very often; they seem fattening and associated with an old style of cooking left over from the days when most Americans lived on farms and needed to pack on the calories in order to do strenuous labor. When we do occasionally have biscuits for breakfast, I have relied for years on the same old dependable recipe. The zucchini in this recipe made me curious. Why would anyone do that to a biscuit? The result was a surprisingly flavorful, rich biscuit, much better than my old stand-by.

This recipe contains a little butter instead of the usual shortening, and the biscuits are rich enough to eat without spreading any additional butter, depending on your taste. No rolling or cutting, just drop a heaping tablespoon of batter onto a lightly greased baking sheet for an attractive macaroon shape. They are crunchy on the outside, while the zucchini and cheddar cheese impart a moistness and sturdy chewiness inside. I did not taste the zucchini as zucchini. It adds more texture than flavor. Ground red pepper to taste gave me pause, and I timidly added 1/4 tsp. Next time about 1/2 tsp. should do it.

The biscuits went well with U.S. Senate Bean Soup, a dish we had for the first time at a Capitol Hill restaurant during a trip to Washington, D.C. when the children were little. Although the recipe is widely available online, I used a basic version from the Joy of Cooking. The soup has been served in the Senate Dining Room for over 100 years, and a couple of versions of it can be found on the Senate website. To achieve a desirable thickness and creaminess, ladle a few cups of the soup into the food processor and puree, or crush with a potato masher. Then return to the pot.

This hearty soup is filling. I'm thinking it would work well on a camping trip, made in advance and frozen for the cooler. Advanced camp cooks do make biscuits in the Dutch oven, but it would be a new cooking experiment for me. The zucchini cheese biscuits could probably be made in advance and heated up in the Dutch oven at the campsite.

Now Reading: The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

2010-05-01T09:55:00.012-06:00

The Ghost Road (1995) by Pat Barker is the third novel in her Regeneration Trilogy and winner of the Booker Prize. She captures the atmosphere in Britain during World War I, the devastating effect of the war on men at the front and everyone at home. It is a grueling read, as were the first two novels in the series. The psychological realism revives, at a great remove, the pain of the participants but commands our attention and empathy. I read Regeneration several years ago and needed to wait awhile before re-engaging with that searing vision of the times. Powerful.

A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, set mainly in the years leading up to WWI, reminded me of Barker in many ways. I knew that upon completion of Byatt's novel, the time would be right for finishing Barker's trilogy. Then the first thing you see upon opening the paperback edition of The Regeneration Trilogy is a quote from Byatt's review of The Ghost Road.

"A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and civilians. Constantly surprising and formally superb."

Barker's WWI novels express precisely the tone of the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, a character in these books, alongside poet Siegfried Sassoon. Several of Owen's poems are available at poetry.org.

Anthem for Doomed Youth
by Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Award-Winning Food Blogs

2010-04-27T10:59:00.003-06:00

The James Beard awards will be announced May 2nd - 3rd, and among the nominees are three food blogs worth checking out.

The Hunter Angler Gardener Cook blog sounds like it would tilt heavily toward venison and trout, and those recipes are represented, but as a reader of Victorian novels, I was pleasantly surprised to see the post on Preserving Lemons. Hunter Angler has already won this year's blog award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals.

The other James Beard Award nominees in the blog category are Grub Street in New York Magazine and Serious Eats. The pig's head rising from a pot in the latest Serious Eats post is not the most appetizing food photography of recent memory, but the blog is always worth visiting.

Other blog nominees this year in the International Association of Culinary Professionals competition included:

Eating ... Our Words in the Houston Press and

SFoodie in the San Francisco Weekly. SFoodie has been taking a culinary tour and naming favorite dishes from 92 favorite eateries. The latest featured dish is a dim sum soup dumpling.

These blogs written by foodies in major cities make this dweller in the rural Rockies want to hop on a plane and take a culinary vacation. Short of that, they inspire me to get more creative in the kitchen.

Reviewers writing about themselves, not the book

2010-04-26T06:04:00.009-06:00

When did you last see a reviewer in a traditional publication say, "Because of who I am, this book does not speak to me." No, they have made a commitment to evaluate the novel and meet a deadline and so will make negative comments, when they would have liked to put the book aside after a few pages and turn to some other book they prefer. Reviewers usually adopt the stolid tone of objective experts, but a few of their negative reviews look like emotive outpourings by highly subjective readers who have prejudices and presuppositions like those of any reader. (Best not to get started again on the laziness of reliance on plot summary in mainstream reviews.)

My point is not to dismiss readers who find a book I enjoyed distasteful. Instead, I take note that it is refreshing, occasionally, to hear a book blogger admit a lack of interest.

I frequently reject films on account of their excessive violence. It does not mean they are bad films, or badly made films, or unintelligent films, or anything of the sort. They are just not films I watch; that is all. But to say this is to offer autobiography, not film criticism. How refreshing it would be if a reviewer would send an assigned novel, for example, A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, back to the editor and say, I am a big, tough guy and I do not read books heavily populated with women and children and informed by the decorative arts.

Photo: the Gloucester candlestick, an emblematic object in The Children's Book. It is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt

2010-04-24T08:04:00.027-06:00

The Children's Book (2009) by A.S. Byatt is a brilliant, magnificent, large, rich novel, and I expect to read it again one day. Perhaps a recent reading of Orhan Pamuk's latest novel The Museum of Innocence put me in an especially receptive frame of mind for Byatt's work. In radically different ways, the two writers cover some overlapping turf in their latest novels, with their focus on the development and legacy of material culture, and on the shapes and psychological influence of narrative. Hold that thought. For now, I would like to spend a little time to comment in a subsequent post, without naming names or rehashing plot, on some of the reviewer response to the book. To read an excellent discussion of the novel right now, see Lisa Hill's blog post on The Children's Book.

IACP 2010 Cookbook Awards

2010-04-23T11:09:00.010-06:00

Usually these days I relegate book awards to the sidebar, but the International Association of Culinary Professionals has announced their annual cookbook awards, and they have named some beauties.

Cookbook of the Year is Rose Levy Beranbaum's Rose's Heavenly Cakes. I just added a sidebar link to her blog, Real Baking with Rose Levy Beranbaum. Not all of her cakes are gooey sweet, if the recipes at the blog are any indication, and I hope to try some of her lighter cakes.

Baking and Pastry: Mastering the Art and Craft by The Culinary Institute of America was added to my wish list. With several high-altitude baking books on order from inter-library loan, it would be weeks or months before I could try anything from this book.

I did order Gourmet Today by Ruth Reichl, with recipes from the now defunct Gourmet Magazine and the winner in the Compilations category. Some time spent with this book in a bookstore, poring over the recipes, had already convinced me of its value. The Gourmet website is still up and running. I was amused that the first recipe on their "Mom's Favorites" page was caviar pancakes. Not this mom! But the Spiced Applesauce Cake with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Frosting looks good.

The only cookbook among the IACP award winners already on my shelf is Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo. The start-up process of stocking pantry shelves and adding some cooking equipment was daunting without a Chinatown market anywhere nearby, but I do hope to search online for necessary condiments and gear and get busy with this book soon. The food looks delicious and healthful.

A break, a few finds

2010-04-09T16:24:00.005-06:00

Dear Readers:

I plan to start book blogging again after finishing A.S. Byatt's novel The Children's Book. It runs to almost 700 pages, and I am adapting the blog to my reading, rather than my reading to the blog, so the blog suffers for a while. About half way in, I am loving The Children's Book.

Thanks to SAVEUR's 1st Annual Food Blog Awards, I've found some luscious blogs to add to the sidebar and have been inspired to spend more time in the kitchen.

Today I pre-ordered Natalie Merchant's new CD, Leave Your Sleep, a 2-CD set of classic and newfound children's poetry set to music. Below is a sampling of the songs from an appearance at a TED conference. At her website, Merchant posts some of the poems she uses as lyrics. That link also takes you to audio and video of songs on the new CDs. I am eagerly anticipating her interpretation of Christina Rossetti, whose poems are now sitting on my bedside table. It has been some time since I read Rossetti. Near the end of this video, you will hear her version of Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child," which almost made me weep.

Music Writers at SXSW

2010-03-18T18:00:00.007-06:00

Music writers and filmmakers have been active on panels and at the on-site bookstore at the SXSW festival. Passing over the technical, how-to, business books for new bands as well as the celebrity memoirs, I picked a few To-Be-Read (or viewed). Check out the full schedule of appearances at the SXSW bookstore.

Music journalist Amanda Petrusich. It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music. This book received some positive reviews and was already on my wishlist.

Rock photographer Bob Gruen. I'm reading Patti Smith's memoir now, which piques my interest in the few pics of her at his website. Gruen has been taking intelligent photos of famous musicians since Woodstock, and some of his portraits have become iconic images.

Guitarist, composer and writer, Lenny Kaye. Patti Smith band member. You Call It Madness .

Alan Govenar, a folklorist, writer, photographer, and filmmaker. Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound . "Blind Lemon Jefferson and Aaron 'T-Bone' Walker of Dallas, Delbert McClinton in Fort Worth, Sam 'Lightnin'' Hopkins in East Texas, Baldemar (Freddie Fender) Huerta in South Texas, and Stevie Ray Vaughan in Austin."

Writer, photographer, and editor, Steve Appleford. American Youth . First step, read his blog.

DJ Spooky has worked on a number of interesting projects from the book he edited, Sound Unbound to CDs to a DVD, Rebirth of a Nation, a "DJ mix applied to history." In this film, he remixes D.W. Griffith's classic and racist 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. The viewers at Netflix either loved it or hated it, but the voices of the haters raised some flags about themselves rather than about the film. The Museum of Modern Art in New York screened it last summer. I want to view it side-by-side with the film it takes apart.

British author and journalist, Will Hodgkinson. The Ballad of Britain, "a humorous and insightful work of scholarship that examines the state of song in Britain." Reviews have been positive.

Holly George-Warren, music writer. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: The First 25 Years (HarperCollins, Sept. 2009).

Mac McCaughan & Laura Ballance, co-founders of Merge Records. Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small.

First Impression of SXSW from Afar

2010-03-18T17:15:00.004-06:00

The South by Southwest Festival continues through Sunday in Austin. As many as 2,000 bands are in town this weekend, and a local TV station reported that 41,000 hotel rooms have been booked. Wednesday night National Public Radio streamed a showcase of five bands live online, giving those of us who live thousands of miles away a sampling. It was an impressive evening of music, and NPR's All Songs Considered has already posted podcasts of a few live sets on their website.

Spin Magazine is also broadcasting a live stream online. Both sites have posted their bands to watch at the festival, complete with sample songs. The quality ranges from the first-rate performances of Sharon Jones And The Dap-Kings, Spoon, and The Walkmen to some whiney white boys playing today who cannot carry a tune in a bucket. The downloaded Spin sampler plays in the background here, and it must be said that I have no ear for electronica, which is well represented on the playlist.

Fortunately, the music at SXSW ranges all over: indie bands, classical, punk, folk and singer-songwriter, rock, blues, Latino, old-time acoustic, world, jazz, bluegras, edgy pop. Hearing the garage band, surfer sound much in evidence this year has been amusing. Those bands sound so wholesome and bouncy and cheery, not at all what I was expecting to hear.

Spider Woman Stories: Legends of the Hopi

2010-03-15T13:06:00.006-06:00

A few books can speak for themselves. One is Spider Woman Stories: Legends of the Hopi Indians, University of Arizona Press, 1979 by G.M. Mullett.

If you like this introductory paragraph from "The Youth Who Brought the Corn," then you will probably enjoy all of these tales. I did.

"Time was when the ancient people had dwelt in a wonderful land in which there was an abundance of rain and the corn was lusty and plenteous. But they wandered forth from this paradise and found themselves in the Land of Little Rain where there was neither stream nor spring, though, to be sure, the uprooting of a tuft of grass revealed water just below the surface. Besides this, food was scarce for they had no seed for corn, squash or other garden plants they needed. The gods, withholding their favors, seemed far off. Only Masauwuh was ever close because of the ever-threatening famine, and though they entreated him to be merciful and leave them he paid no attention but continued to skulk around their borders snatching whom he could."

The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

2010-03-07T16:55:00.010-07:00

Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country (1913) is not a book to sail through but to approach thoughtfully and at a leisurely pace. Lacking a sympathetic lead character, the novel generates interest through the representation of a social milieu and of some of psychological patterns at work within it. Wharton shows the impact of economic change and the arrival of out-of-town, new rich within the atmosphere of the old New York City social establishment.

Spoilers can be irritating, and this story is difficult to discuss without giving away key plot developments. The novel follows the career of a young and grasping social climber. The protagonist schemes and lies her way from one soulless adventure to the next, ruthlessly using any person susceptible to her beauty. The usual human feelings appear to be mostly lacking in her. She is not very bright but possesses an animal sense of herd movement within whatever social set she inhabits at the moment. She usually shows enough intelligence to know where she stands in the pecking order, but she is devoid of the curiosity that might lead her to read a book or think about anything outside the material realm of her immediate circumstances. Clothes and fashion capture her attention.

In the early chapters of the novel, I was reminded of the old New Yorker cartoon, showing Manhattan as the center of the universe and everything west of the Hudson River as details. Wharton always casts a critical gaze on her world of Old New York, but in this novel she writes even more scathingly about the upstarts from the Midwest who would place her castle under siege.

The Us versus Them mentality of the novel occasionally gets tiresome. Wharton shows the WASP prejudices of her class and time with one offensive anecdote about a person who turns out to be a Jew. Anti-Jewish commentary appears with regularity in Victorian novels; I have not read enough pre-World War I American fiction to know if it is common there. The passage surprised me, but considering Wharton's background, it probably should not have done. Her peers traditionally had shunned most people not of their exclusive set, and Wharton sometimes reveals the extent to which she shares the mindset of the very people whose foibles or narrow-mindedness she portrays.

So the book can be recommended with a few reservations. If the reader needs to identify with the protagonist in order to enjoy the read, please skip. If the reader suspects, as I do, that in this novel the author distrusts anyone outside the tribe of upper-crust, Old Money New York, then that reader may not relax into this read. Also, several other novels would make a better first Wharton for general readers. Try The Age of Innocence.

Despite these reasons for hesitation, The Custom of the Country is a must read for those who already know and appreciate some of Wharton's other work. It is a major fictional achievement, with its anthropological analysis of disparate human groups in contact and conflict. I do not mean to leave the impression that only the outsiders are crude and despicable. The established order offers plenty of opportunity for its members to carry on, especially in the realms of marital infidelity and financial malfeasance. The Old Money types misbehave as often as the new arrivals, but Wharton gives many of her minor characters qualities with which we can empathize.

Wall Street plays an important role in building or ruining the fortunes of the novel's characters. Corruption and a general lack of integrity are represented in numerous characters, but most of all in the odious protagonist. Wharton examines her shallowness in depth, with a creepy result.

The Custom of the Country presents a stinging analysis of the amoral, greedy interloper who arrives in NYC and proceeds to rip the social fabric. As social history, it is the best of her novels I have read.

_Garnethill_ by Denise Mina

2010-02-23T15:13:00.009-07:00

Writing about Denise Mina's Glaswegian crime novel Garnethill (1998) presents some difficulties, because my goal is not to give a book a thumbs up or down. I want to direct people to books they will enjoy and steer them away from books they will dislike, knowing that my common ground with some other readers may be narrow. If the writers you share in common with my taste, Dear Reader, are Trollope and Jane Austen only, then listen to the details of my positive report about reading Garnethill.

The protagonist was a victim of child abuse, who years later suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized for mental illness. She drinks too much, too early in the day. She works a low-paying, mindless job. She struggles. She is angry and emotionally exhausted, but also relentless. She lets fly the f-word with ease. She is genuine and, in some impossible way, strong. Maureen O'Donnel is a complete mess, and I was thoroughly involved and sympathetic with the character.

Populating this book are a dysfunctional family--with an alcoholic mother, a brother whose source of income is criminal, and a Thatcherite (the worst of the lot)-- and some minor characters who thrive by behaving despicably. Among the topics considered are rape, wife-beating, drugs, sundry forms of inter-personal exploitation, abuse of the weak. The list could continue.

The skinny: the world of the novel is vibrant. The characters are true. If you do not reside in such a world, then inhabiting it for the length of the novel takes a moderately thick skin.

By way of comparison, I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson and decided my exploration of that author would end there. Perhaps his rough scenes became too much for my delicate constitution, but I sailed through Garnethill, which also depicts much pain and pathology. The difference lies in Mina's purposeful, not sensational, storytelling. Bringing this environment of despair and confrontation to fiction serves a political purpose, giving realistic voice to a group of people underrepresented in crime fiction, except as incidental background color.

Mina writes powerfully, and she could not have successfully portrayed the chosen situations and characters without conviction. I find her voice to be highly principled, even or especially when she is representing anti-social behavior. At times a tart, dark sense of humor distinguishes Mina's heroine, and I imagine a reader tone-deaf to Maureen's sarcasm and irony would find Garnethill a steep climb.

Garnethill won the Crime Writers' Association John Creasy Dagger Award for the best first crime novel. It is the first in a trilogy of novels, and I plan to continue with the next book in the series, Exile. One reviewer said, "you can't look away" from her compelling writing. Wrong. I looked away fairly often but always returned to the book.

_Ransom_ by David Malouf

2010-02-17T12:07:00.009-07:00

Floating on the dream of David Malouf's storytelling in his novella Ransom (2009), you may want to run, not walk, to find a collection of his poems. Alternately, if you appreciate Malouf the poet, you will enjoy Ransom, a recasting of a portion of The Illiad. The language of Ransom could have been assembled on the page as free verse, and the effect would have been equally powerful. More readers come to the book as fiction than would buy a volume of poetry, but the clarity and strength of the writing gave Malouf a choice about presentation. This was a swift read. The book is short and I could not put it down.

Ransom retells the episode in the Trojan War when King Priam of Troy approaches the Greek warrior Achilles to ask for the return of the body of his son Hector, whom Achilles has slain in battle. A background in the legend of the Trojan War is helpful but certainly not necessary. The story stands on its own legs. The versions of the story in Greek literature rely heavily on the machinations of the gods as drivers of the action, and Malouf has retained that element by briefly introducing a god character. The appearance of Hermes, the messenger, casts a brightness and inevitability over the tale, in the same way that writers of magical realism use inventive, sometimes fantastical, patterns to develop their narratives. The luminosity of this section seems highly contemporary to me.

The involvement of a god changes the flow of psychological anticipation, adding an other worldliness that lingers beyond his exit. That shifting of sensibility endures throughout the encounter of Priam and Achilles, enriching the believability of its outcome. Having a god enter the picture heightens reality and makes our experience of the characters more intense. The profound moment of communication between Achilles and Priam, in which perceptions are sharpened, makes more sense following the shattering of the reader's expectations by the introduction of the god character.

By distancing us from the present, Malouf can explore a psychological realism that would be difficult to portray in contemporary characters. He uses the tools of the poet to displace and then to reassemble human experience, giving Priam's story an immediacy for the reader, just as a fine poem might do. Malouf's storytelling technique places the reader squarely in each moment. The experiential identification of reader with the tale takes hold on page one and continues to the end. He achieves this feat through a powerful simplicity of language.

Read this book for the quality of the written language but also for the impact of the storytelling. Malouf succeeds in convincing us that a bond of fatherly fellow-feeling could be shared even between enemies, and in our cynical times, this is no small accomplishment.

A few of Malouf's poems can be found online at Poetry International Web.

A Robert Burns Poem for Valentine's Day

2010-02-14T14:12:00.001-07:00

A Red, Red Rose

O my Luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June:
O my Luve's like the melodie,
That's sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare-thee-weel, my only Luve!
And fare-thee-weel, a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho' 'twere ten thousand mile!

Robert Burns, 1794

The Macdermots of Ballycloran, Continued

2010-02-13T13:00:00.001-07:00

Trollope's first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847), is a great lumbering thing, not as well organized as it should have been. He could have successfully cut 200 or more pages. In fact, for a second edition, three chapters were deleted, and the cuts took nothing away from the story. If the book was as big a flop with the English reading public as some critics report, then how did the novel reach a second edition?

I ended up enjoying the book, despite its ultimate spiral into despair. The Irish dialect, with its distinctive accent and diction, as well as the atmosphere of a rural area in the west of Ireland in the mid-Nineteenth Century, are beautifully realized. Trollope took the pulse of history in his account of the lives of common people, accurately predicting more suffering to come, based on insuperable political tensions between the governors and the governed; the wretched poverty of the populace; and the greed and corruption of some of the powerful. His literary abilities are already highly developed on the level of the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter. The overall architecture of the novel needed tightening; a couple of plot moves occurred rather too abruptly.

Still, some of the writing is fine, especially when Trollope is representing the ambiance of a scene: the wedding party, or the gathering of betting men at a tavern prior to a horse race or, in one of the deleted chapters, the journey of a party of strangers on a crowded coach. As a longtime reader of Trollope, I can happily lift these passages from the novel and read them as successful, independent sketches of Irish country life. Another reader could be annoyed by some of the aspects of the novel I like best, those parts that sound of Thackeray.

The novel is sometimes more boisterous or violent than we associate with the later Trollope. The depth of feeling, the young Trollope's own emotional intensity in response to Ireland and the Irish, are noteworthy.

Read the Barsetshire novels; read the Parliamentary novels; read half a dozen more Trollopes and after you have become a devoted reader of AT, turn to The Macdermots as background and context for Trollope's development as a writer.

The novel should also interest students of Irish history, as it reflects the attitudes, the social conditions, the poverty, and the unsettled political atmosphere of rural Ireland on the verge of the potato famine. Trollope completed the novel in 1845, just months before the famine began to make its deadly impact.

Trollope's First Novel, Set in Ireland

2010-02-13T10:45:00.007-07:00

The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) follows the decline and destruction of an old Irish family, small landowners in debt, trying to collect rents from tenants who cannot pay. The squire's daughter is consorting with a hated revenue officer, who scours the countryside for illegal stills and imprisons the law-breakers. The ageing father has lost his wits. In a hopeless effort, the son tries to maintain their property and the honor of the family. Thady is a complex character who makes some serious mistakes in drunken or confused moments, but he is caught up in historical circumstances, a pawn in the fateful events overtaking the Irish. One major character, the parish priest, and several minor ones contribute some optimism to the narrative, at least about human nature if not about the outcome.

Grumbling locals are meeting in banned secret societies and hatching plots. Although the underground groups in this story devote themselves to the illegal production and sale of distilled spirits, the mood of discontent mirrors the more highly political movement of opposition to the English rulers that Trollope must have seen all around him. The powers-that-be correctly associate the bootleggers with outlawed ribbonmen who would rid the country of the English occupiers if they could.

The story reads as if Trollope arrived as a Post Office employee in Ireland, looked around him and thought, "This can only end badly." Then he wrote a novel cataloging the distressing conditions he observed.

Trollope's _Macdermots of Ballycloran_

2010-02-12T11:48:00.008-07:00

Reading several back-to-back doorstop novels temporarily interrupted the blogging here. Anthony Trollope's The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) runs over 600 pages, and while I am glad to have finally read his first novel, set in Ireland, it does not make a good starting point for new readers of Trollope.

Although critics say the novel was not a popular success with the reading public of Trollope's day, I have read a couple of positive reviews by his contemporaries. However, dismissal by general readers would have been understandable. The story is gloomy, justice does not prevail, and goodness is not rewarded. Nor do the actors conform to the proprieties of the English middle class.

The Victorians of England were notoriously contemptuous of the Irish and unconcerned with conditions of poverty in the country, even prior to the famine. The Anglo-Saxon and anti-Catholic reading public was also unaccustomed to seeing a priest depicted favorably in fiction written in English, and Trollope presents the priest in The Macdermots as a genuinely good and well-intentioned man.

Overall, I liked the novel and will have more to say about it in a subesequent post.

Orhan Pamuk's Favorite Writers; The Museum of Innocence

2010-02-02T16:06:00.007-07:00

My initial response to the first hundred pages of Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence was to consider it somewhat baggy and beyond my attention span. That first impression was wrong. Is Proust baggy? No, and neither is Pamuk. I was just a little slow to come around.

Doing justice to the novel in a short blog post is simply not possible. Although some of the reviews were dull and inadequate, the reviewer in The New York Review of Books wrote one of the best I've seen. Curious readers should go there for an excellent review of the novel.

In a witty and playful move, the author of The Museum of Innocence introduces himself as a character, fleetingly early in the book and as a narrator at the end. He begins the "Orhan Pamuk" passage with, "Hello, this Orhan Pamuk!" That exclamation point caused me to smile. One trait I do not associate with the Nobel-Prize-winning author is bubbliness. Funny. Funny. With ambiguity and irony, Orhan Pamuk becomes a fictional character in his own book and introduces a clever brightness and good cheer to the culmination of the story. Can an ending have an introduction? Well, this one did.

Before arriving at that last passage, the fictional narrator mentions a number of Orhan Pamuk's favorite writers. Fiction presents a non-fictional collection of reading memories, displays in the Museum of Innocence. How does the narrator know who OP's favorite writers are? Well, uh ...

The narrator pays homage to these writers, identified as OP's favorites: Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Proust, Spinoza, Tagore, Pirandello, Strindberg, Edgar Allan Poe, Mario Praz, Flaubert. (Art and literature critic Praz wrote The Romantic Agony.)

Pamuk's obvious invitation to compare him to other literary masters could be taken as pretentious, except that he is writing auto-biographically and giving the reader a guide to understanding the novel he is about to complete. Besides, as John Updike wrote in his review of the novel, The Museum of Innocence does resonate with the "dispassionate intelligence and arabesques of introspection" we associate with Proust. Pamuk acknowledges his literary mentors. He is not bragging, but if you want to compare him with those writers, he seems to say, bring it. I first sussed out the clear Nabokov genealogy of this novel, but the comparison to Proust probably comes closest to representing its tone and its quality.

In the closing chapters, Pamuk, allegedly writing now as Pamuk, although he reports his meetings with some of the fictional characters, rattles off names of painters and other creative people in his own collection of memories. He includes thinkers, architects, historical figures, actors.

I have probably missed a few, but here are some of the exhibits in Orhan Pamuk's personal museum of innocence: Édith Piaf, Maurice Ravel, Proust, Rembrandt, George Sand, Sigmund Freud, Florence Nightingale, Carlo Scarpa, Martin Gropius, Caravaggio, Sir John Soane, Frederic Marès, Ava Gardner, Jayne Mansfield, Aristotle. Obviously, this list is fragmentary, but beautiful. The people, and their art or ideas, are strewn in a context of objects, both of junk and of treasures, with the understanding--the insistence--that the detritus of human lives, and the memories they represent, are also to be treasured.

Without actually writing a review, I have tried to represent the book in such a way that those who would appreciate the novel can find their way to it. If you are willing to take my word for it, go read The Museum of Innocence.

Lit Love

2010-02-01T12:31:00.003-07:00

Is it not hilarious that the love life of Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk and Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai makes news in India? They are hounded like film stars.

Goa retreat for Pamuk, girlfriend Kiran Desai

I have almost, almost finished Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence.

Picking the Grammys: Win Some, Lose Some

2010-01-31T22:43:00.006-07:00

Earlier today, just for fun, I posted the names of Grammy nominees in several categories and picked some winners. Here is a cut-and-paste of the earlier post, showing the ones I got right. These are not necessarily the ones I like the best but the ones who seemed likely to win.

Album Of The Year
Fearless: Taylor Swift

Best New Artist
Zac Brown Band

Best Female Pop Vocal Performance
"Halo," Beyoncé. Track from: I Am... Sasha Fierce.

Best Pop Instrumental Performance
"Throw Down Your Heart," Béla Fleck. Track from: Throw Down Your Heart: Tales From The Acoustic Planet, Vol. 3 - Africa Sessions.

Best Pop Instrumental Album
No idea of who will win, but I like Potato Hole by Booker T. Jones.

Best Country Instrumental Performance
Cannot choose a favorite here. Three of the 4 are not really country, which means Steve Wariner's tribute to Nashville guitarist Chet Atkins will probably win.

Best Traditional World Music Album
Douga Mansa by Mamadou Diabate. Liz Carroll & John Doyle are well-loved at our house too.

Best Historical Album
The Complete Chess Masters (1950-1967). Little Walter.

I probably should not count Booker T. Jones as one of my correct picks, but it was such a pleasure to see him win on the internet broadcast of the afternoon show, where quite a few awards were presented. Potato Hole is his first solo CD in almost 20 years. Who remembers all the great music from Booker T. and the MG's? Steve Cropper? Duck Dunn?

My 18-year-old college freshman is a music major, which may help to explain my keen interest in the business side of music, including the Grammys. He is talking about a double major, music and something-to-be-determined.

Picking some favorites for the Grammys

2010-01-31T13:49:00.003-07:00

The music industry's Grammy Awards are underway. The more marginal, that is, less commercial, categories are being awarded right now. Here are some predictions and some favorites of mine. Later tonight, I'll see how my choices fared.

Best Traditional Folk Album
Singing Through The Hard Times: A Tribute To Utah Phillips
(Various Artists)

Album Of The Year
Fearless: Taylor Swift (I would vote for Big Whiskey And The Groogrux King, Dave Matthews Band.)

Best New Artist
Zac Brown Band (My pick: Silversun Pickups)

Best Female Pop Vocal Performance
"Halo," Beyoncé.
Track from: I Am... Sasha Fierce

Best Pop Instrumental Performance
"Throw Down Your Heart," Béla Fleck
Track from: Throw Down Your Heart: Tales From The Acoustic Planet, Vol. 3 - Africa Sessions.

Best Pop Instrumental Album
No idea of who will win, but I like Potato Hole by Booker T. Jones.

Best Rock Instrumental Performance
Have not listened to all nominees and should not say, but...
"Warped Sister," Booker T. Jones.
Track from: Potato Hole

Best Rock Album
No prediction, but I like Big Whiskey And The Groogrux King, Dave Matthews Band.

Best Alternative Music Album
Cannot guess. My pick: It's Blitz!, Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Best Country Instrumental Performance
Cannot choose a favorite here. Three of the 4 are not really country, which means Steve Wariner's tribute to Nashville guitarist Chet Atkins will probably win.

Best Improvised Jazz Solo
Not knowledgeable enough about the nominees, but I like Villa Palmeras, Miguel Zenón, soloist. Track from: Esta Plena.

Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual Or Group
You mean Gary Burton is still going strong? First jazz album I ever bought, on vinyl, was Gary Burton. Also like The Bright Mississippi, Allen Toussaint, but not having heard all of the nominated CDs, I should probably pass on this one.

Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album No clue about winner, but I notice that the University Of North Texas One O'Clock Lab Band is nominated. North Texas State has a reputation as one of the best jazz programs in the country. Musicians here in Montana asked if my son had considered North Texas when he was investigating schools.

Best Latin Jazz Album Again, in my relative ignorance of the nominees, I'll go with Esta Plena
Miguel Zenón.

Best Gospel Performance
No opinion. Interesting that guitarist Jonny Lang has gone a) vocal, b) gospel. Kid could always sing, but I like his guitar work best.

Best Americana Album
It would be nice to see Lucinda Williams win for Little Honey, but I do not really have a pick. Too many good choices.

Best Bluegrass Album
Almost Live, Bryan Sutton And Friends. Again, hard to choose.

Best Traditional Blues Album
Cannot choose. Chicago Blues: A Living History? John Hammond?

Best Contemporary Blues Album
Have not heard them all. The Truth According To Ruthie Foster sounds good.

Best Contemporary Folk Album
Middle Cyclone Neko Case, although I like Tracy Chapman.

Best Native American Music Album
Only group I've listened to: True Blue by Northern Cree. I like. [Folk Alley just tweeted the winner: Bill Miller wins for Best Native American Album for Spirit Wind North.]

Best Zydeco Or Cajun Music Album
All good. Every one of them.

Best Traditional World Music Album
Douga Mansa by Mamadou Diabate. Liz Carroll & John Doyle are well-loved at our house too.

Best Contemporary World Music Album
As much as I've enjoyed listening to Throw Down Your Heart: Tales From The Acoustic Planet, Vol. 3 - Africa Sessions, Béla Fleck, it is impossible to pick a favorite in this category.

Best Historical Album
The Complete Chess Masters (1950-1967)

Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical
T-Bone Burnette. He's nominated; he wins. Probably. Deservedly.

Early American Novels, 18th C.

2010-01-27T18:45:00.001-07:00

My reading of American fiction begins with James Fenimore Cooper, but a couple of the novels mentioned below look interesting as social history, if not as literature. If these works are any indication, American readers of the early republic delighted in melodrama. I wonder if some of these works have fallen from the national memory because they do not represent the buttoned-up morality we generally, and sometimes imaginatively, associate with our founders. You know, George Washington and his cherry tree, everything prim and proper.

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21) features some unfamiliar American writers. Sarah Wentworth Morton (1759–1846), a poet, is falsely credited in that book with writing the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789). This portrait of her by Gilbert Stuart is on display at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The plot of that novel, correctly attributed to William Hill Brown (1765-1793), told the story of a family scandal involving Morton, her sister, and her husband.

"Its two volumes of stilted letters caused a scandal and were promptly suppressed, but they called forth a much better novel, The Coquette (1797), by Mrs. Hannah Webster Foster (1759–1840). Based upon the tragic and widely known career of Elizabeth Whitman of Hartford, it saw thirteen editions in forty years, but it was still less popular than Mrs. Susannah Haswell Rowson’s Charlotte (1794), one of the most popular novels ever published in America. Mrs. Rowson (1762–1824), an American only by immigration, had indeed written the novel in England (1790?), but Charlotte Temple, to call it by its later title, was thoroughly naturalized. It has persuaded an increasingly naive underworld of fiction readers to buy more than a hundred editions and has built up a legend about the not too authentic tomb of Charlotte Stanley in Trinity Churchyard, New York."

A hundred editions? OK, who in bloggerland has read this sensational bestseller?

These early American novels also look promising: Modern Chivarly (1792) by Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Alcuin (1797) by Charles Brockden Brown, "a dialogue on the rights of women which took its first principles from Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin."

Trusting a Master Novelist To Deliver

2010-01-26T13:23:00.006-07:00

A slow read of a long novel does not make for steady book blogging, but I want to stop and comment on Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence. Others must have had reactions similar to mine in reading through the first chapters. The duplicitous "love" life of a spoiled, self-indulgent, wealthy twit did not speak to this reader. Why am I supposed to care about any of this stuff, no matter how well-written?

However, a couple of Pamuk's other books had established a bond of trust between author and reader. I continued reading, albeit grumpily, and now am glad I did. It took me about a hundred pages to accept that the masterful telling of the tale was going to have to substitute for any interest on my part in the story itself. After another 50 pages, Pamuk completes the long set-up, and the heart of the novel begins.

No longer a novel about an egotist's philandering, it becomes something else, something stronger and more complex, an engaging literary experience. I will probably have more to say upon completion of the book, but for now, hang in there, readers. Museum of Innocence takes off, and the mid-section of the novel depends on a lengthy wind-up. Patience rewarded.

Sunday Salon: Olympe de Gouges, the Rights of Woman

2010-01-24T11:28:00.012-07:00

Today I read Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, (1791) by Marie Gouze (1745-1793), who wrote under the name Olympe de Gouges. Although she had been an active supporter of the French Revolution, the Revolutionary leadership executed her as a royalist. She regarded Marie Antoinette with affection; she opposed the bloodshed; she criticized Robespierre and Marat; and she advocated women's rights. All of these stances contributed to her condemnation.

The Declaration of the Rights of Woman lifts language directly from The Declaration of the Rights of Man, issued by the French National Assembly in 1789. Writers of this document conferred closely with Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence and U.S. Ambassador to France at the time. Consequently, the Declaration of the Rights of Man reflects many of the ideas of the American Revolution.

De Gouges castigates men of the Revolution for excluding women from their program of change. "Man alone has raised his exceptional circumstances to a principle. Bizarre, blind, bloated with science and degenerated - in a century of enlightenment and wisdom - into the crassest ignorance, he wants to command as a despot a sex which is in full possession of its intellectual faculties; he pretends to enjoy the Revolution and to claim his rights to equality in order to say nothing more about it."

She then recasts the seventeen Articles of the Declaration to include women.

"Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good."

... becomes ...

"Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common utility."

She follows with a Postscript, calling women to "Wake up!"

"The tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights. The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and lies. The flame of truth has dispersed all the clouds of folly and usurpation. Enslaved man has multiplied his strength and needs recourse to yours to break his chains. Having become free, he has become unjust to his companion. Oh, women, women! When will you cease to be blind? What advantage have you received from the Revolution? A more pronounced scorn, a more marked disdain."

The Declaration of the Rights of Women ends with a call to end slavery in the colonies. The French call De Gouges "the first feminist."

Instead of gaining civil, political and economic rights as a result of the French Revolution, women were subjected to new oppression through Napoleon's legal code. The Revolutionary slogan of "Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood" applied to the brothers only. Napoleon's first principle was this: “Women ought to obey us. Nature has made women our slaves!”

The spread of the Napoleonic Code across parts of Europe led to a repression of the rights of women as citizens that lasted for 150 years. Not until 1965 did French women gain the right to undertake employment without their husbands' permission.

Enlightenment: Some Not So Casual Reading

2010-01-23T10:00:00.001-07:00

Scanning a world history text earlier this week, I realized that a long time had passed since I had taken a serious look at the thinkers of the Enlightenment. With so much irrationality passing for political discourse these days in the the United States, writers who celebrate reason sound refreshing. The books named below may languish as a wish list rather than blossom into a reading list, because previously unread fiction of the period, much of it not reasonable at all, looks more inviting.

College reading involved a little Descartes and more Hume, and that will suffice. Descartes lived and wrote before the period under consideration (1750-1914). Hume's An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding rocked my world at age 18, but how many times do you need to read it? Once. OK. Here goes.

Rousseau: The Discourse on Inequality (1754)
Voltaire: A Treatise on Tolerance(1763). Already read Candide, so this is the one.
Montesquieu: Spirit of the Laws (1748)
Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88)
Wollstonecraft: Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Olympe de Gouges: Declaration of the Rights of Women
Thomas Jefferson: The Political Writings

Cannot find an appealing biography of Catherine the Great. Will try Potemkin: Catherine the Great's Imperial Partner by Simon Sebag Montefiore, which was shortlisted for numerous biography awards.

To counterbalance the hard-headed, masculine rationalism of most of the works noted above, I also want to read a few more of the series of Eighteenth Century Novels by Women, published by the University of Kentucky Press. The few I've read were page-turners.

The new biography of Abigail Adams has been favorably reviewed. A. Adams, Enlightenment Woman?

Some 18th C. Books To Be Read

2010-01-21T15:27:00.015-07:00

This fall in Boston, a portrait of Mercy Otis Warren by John Singleton Copley caught my eye at the Museum of Fine Arts. Warren was the leading female writer of the American Revolutionary period. Otis Warren belongs on an American woman's reading list of Enlightenment thinkers and writers, especially since the majority of those writers are men. The Copley portraits led me to read some American history.

In contrast to those thinkers, fiction writers of the day took some fanciful turns. Novels of sentiment. Novels of romance. Novels of terror. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne. Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Clara Reeve’s Old English Baron. Gothic.

Fanny Burney's novels. Johnson's essays. Boswell. Oliver Goldsmith. William Bertram's travel writing about the American southeast. Johnson and Boswell I've read in the past, and they go to the bottom of the stack. Uh oh. My Enlightenment reading list has teetered dangerously toward 18th Century fiction. To be continued.

World History: 1750 - 1914

2010-01-21T13:31:00.008-07:00

After reading Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, I recognized a gap in my knowledge about the period leading up to World War I in Europe. Consequently, my reading took an unusual turn, to a world history text that my children used: Traditions & Encounters, a Global Perspective on the Past. In about 150 pages, the text covers "An Age of Revolution, Industry, and Empire, 1750-1914." The superficial textbook sweep across world history serves as an annotated timeline against which I can evaluate my past reading and study. The publisher, McGraw-Hill posts a useful world history timeline, as well as a few primary sources to accompany each chapter of the text.

With relief, I found that much of the material had been covered in greater depth by books I had already read. At present, there is no need to revisit the following topics that have featured prominently in my reading of years gone by: French Revolution; Napoleon; Wars of Independence in Latin America; Emergence of Ideologies of Conservatism (Edmund Burke) & Liberalism (John Stuart Mill); Abolition of Slavery; Industrialization, Women's Rights.

On the other hand, my understanding of the decline of the Ottoman Empire is embarrassingly meager, and everything I know about the Haitian Revolution I just read in the textbook. The rise of nations and nationalism in Europe, including the unification of Italy and Germany, is a major gap. Although at one time I embarked on a course of reading Japanese literature, especially the history of the Japanese novel, I never undertook a similar project of reading Japanese history up to and including the rise to empire. My knowledge of China in the 19th C. is weak, with most of what I do know involving Western incursions and conflict. I've seen some art of the Qing dynasty, but my historical knowledge of those centuries in China is pretty pitiful.

The next post will address that gray, middle area of competence in my past reading and study of the period of world history from 1750-1914. In history, a little knowledge is probably about as useful as no knowledge at all, and a wide range of topics from the Enlightenment to Imperialism are worthy of further attention. After trying to establish my gaps in knowledge, I will try to come up with a realistic program of reading that includes both world history and literature.

Mixing Easier Chinese Recipes with the Complicated Ones

2010-01-16T14:40:00.003-07:00

Last week I used celebrity chef Martin Yan's recipe for steamed buns from Yan Can Cook and prepared his Chinese cole slaw and fried rice as sides. The buns are a long-time favorite here. Unlike Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, who aims to teach a laborious process of authentic Chinese cooking, Yan adapts dishes to an American audience, streamlining and simplifying them. Working through Yin-Fei Lo's Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking, my plan is to turn to Yan's easier recipes for accompaniments, even though Yan's recipes reflect the cuisine of Shanghai on China's east coast, and Yin-Fei Lo grew up in Guangdong in southern China, the province highlighted in red below.

Once the pantry is stocked, and a few basics--such as seasoned oils--are prepared, I'll be ready to start stir-frying. My Chinese cooking project this week-end is to re-season my wok and order a few items from an online international grocery.

Some recipes from Eileen Yin-Fei Lo are posted online at Food and Wine Magazine.

Preparing to Cook Chinese

2010-01-15T13:49:00.000-07:00

Further reading and a little research have left me feeling a bit more optimistic about making progress through Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's book of recipes and cooking techniques, Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking.

Instead of being daunted by her description of six types of bok choy on display in a Chinese outdoor market, I choose to celebrate finding two varieties at my local supermarket in the Northern Rocky Mountains. Instead of worrying about the absence of boxthorn seeds--also called wolfberries--on local store shelves or in the inventory of online stores, I did a little research and found that in the USA these seeds may be called goji berries. Under this name, they were easily located for sale online. This photo shows a boxthorn plant with ripe fruit.

Yin-Fei Lo includes food lore and food history in her cookbook. In the opening chapters, I've already learned that pork is the meat of choice in China; that chickens have been raised there for seven thousand years; and that a variety of black chicken is steamed to produce a health tonic, and then the meat is discarded. Foods can carry symbolic or homonymic significance; a food may be chosen because its name sounds like wisdom, good luck, or prosperity.

Publishers: Enough of the Plot Spoilers on Covers

2010-01-08T12:38:00.005-07:00

Yesterday I finished reading a novel by a popular Dutch writer, but before addressing the book, I want to repeat my plea to publishers and reviewers. Stop giving away the plot in blurbs, cover art and reviews.

Not that I expect anyone to listen, but this book's packaging represents an especially egregious interference in the exchange between writer and reader. Instead of allowing the author to tell his story, the publisher used cover art and text to give away the key plot move, which does not show up until page 87 of the 192-page book.

Maybe they sold more copies by putting a picture of Hitler on the cover, but the publisher went a long way toward ruining the reader's experience of the story as related by the writer. In fact, it took so long for the highlighted storyline to appear that the first 20 or 30 pages of the novel were confusing. Finally realizing that the protagonist had nothing to do with the cover and blurb, I settled into the read.

Not to be coy, I was reading Harry Mulisch's Siegfried, a fictional consideration of the nature of evil, especially as embodied in the leader of Nazi Germany. Good book. Quick read. I disagree with the idea that the entire German nation was duped by Hitler and led to their destruction by him, as if the horrors of that era were the work of a solitary, inhuman monster. Is this a common European vision of those years? Aside from that peculiar interpretation of history, the novel offers insight into how we go about achieving understanding, as well as some creepy first-hand fictional scenes of life in Hitler's inner circle.

OK. Protest registered on the packaging of the book, I'll mention once again that I have more or less stopped reading those book reviews and blog posts that consist almost entirely of plot summary. Do the newspaper reviewers need to prove to their editors that they read the book? I read the first evaluative paragraph, start to skim or skip when the blow-by-blow plot summary begins, and pick up again in the last couple of graphs when the reviewer gives a sense of whether the book is worth my time.

More often I skip book reviews entirely and seek out books of established writers I already know and appreciate, or wait for the book prize announcements, or pick up leads from book bloggers, or choose a classic over a new book. My book-buying budget is limited, and being first out the gate with a new novel is not one of my reading values. Newspapers shutting down their book departments was a big story last year, but if the professional reviewers are going to serve up plot summaries as if they are writing book reports for a class, who needs them?

Rilke's Review of _Buddenbrooks_

2010-01-05T10:45:00.003-07:00

The saga of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1902) covers four generations in the history of an affluent merchant family in Lübeck, a port city in northern Germany. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a contemporary reviewer, gave readers an extensive plot summary (which I will eschew), perhaps in an effort to convince them to undertake a an 1100-page novel, the printing format of the 2-volume first edition.

Rilke biographer George C. Schoolfield discusses Rilke's review of the book in Young Rilke and His Time (Camden House, 2008). Rilke praised the novel, saying it "is an act of reverence for life, which is good and just in that it occurs." He admired, according to Schoolfield, Mann's "colossal labor" in writing the book, his "ability to 'see,'" and "the refined objectivity" of the novel.

I cannot say it better than Rilke did. The young Mann at age 26, in writing an autobiographical novel, displayed a visionary understanding of his people and their place in the timeline of history. Mann's near total absence of subjective interpretation through overt narrative devices required instead a reliance on realistic representation.

Mann avoids self-consciousness, rendering the narrator almost invisible. You are aware of the text's powerful effect, but Mann's methods are not present to the reader. I was several hundred pages into the novel before realizing that Mann, the storyteller, had not often crossed my reading consciousness. He created an impressive fictional edifice, leaving himself, as artist, out of it. At the same time, the book is highly autobiographical, with characters patterned on his some of his family members and with plot expressive of their personal, social, political and economic milieu.

Later in life Mann remembered Rilke's review gratefully, but the admiration was not mutual. He wrote of Rilke, in a letter, "His aestheticizing, his noble affectation, his pietizing preciosity were always painful for me and made his prose quite unbearable for me." These observations help us to understand the artistic strengths of Buddenbrooks, by suggesting the opposite values Mann applied to his own early writing, which is notable for its lack of poetic pretension, affectation, moralistic arrogance, or overblown prose.

_Buddenbrooks_, a Classic of the European Novel

2010-01-04T15:47:00.005-07:00

Undertaking a 700-page novel in the weeks leading up to Christmas did not represent exemplary management of available time. I finished Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1902) last week, after lagging well behind an online reading group through most of the schedule. Note to self: save the doorstop-sized books for summertime.

Buddenbrooks shares classic status with some extraordinary European novels: Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov and L'Assommoir. These books comprised the reading list for a course at Harvard this fall, "The Classic Phase of the Novel." I still need to read Zola's L'Assommoir, but Buddenbrooks does match the quality of the other books on the course syllabus. It was easily the best book I read in 2009.

Scheduled for tomorrow's blog post: Rilke's review of Buddenbrooks. He liked it.

Sunday Salon: Learning to Cook Chinese Food

2010-01-03T13:50:00.001-07:00

Today I have been reading the opening sections of Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, who has been called the Julia Child of Chinese cuisine. I cannot remember ever before being so pumped up by a cookbook and am excited about cooking my way through it. The book combines lavish photos with an instructional approach, moving lesson-by-lesson from stocking the pantry to preparing rice to stir-frying, steaming, poaching in a wok, cooking in a pot, barbecue, soups, noodles; and that covers only Part 1. My hopes of learning to cook Chinese were partially dashed by Lo's insistence on the marketplace as the starting point and the central educational center for the student of Chinese cooking. Despite all odds, I intend to do what I can (with available resources) to work through the book and serve some passable Chinese meals.

Living in a rural area of the Northern Rockies, I do not have access to a Chinese market. Even in full summer, we get few locally grown fruits and vegetables. Our local "farmer's market" is dominated by craft booths for tourists, as well as home bakers hawking fruit pies. Members of a nearby Hutterite community sometimes park a truck in town and sell fresh produce from the back. Otherwise, the fresh produce here is often of poor quality, as described by a shopper with a southern accent, overheard in our local corporate grocery store the other day, inspecting produce with her husband: "Their vegetables and things here are really sad." Too true.

Lo emphasizes the context in which food is purchased as an important first step in Chinese cooking. "It is not sufficient to buy a product you have read about, take it home, and cook it in the way a book says to cook it. Foods should be touched, hefted, smelled, tasted when possible, tested for freshness and crispness with a gentle squeeze." Surely she is right. When we lived in California, the farmers' markets offered an embarrassment of riches, bursting with colors, textures and sometimes flavors.

In discussing the great Chinese markets, Lo names cities in China as well as the United States, but she singles out for special mention the Qing Ping market in Guangzhou. Luscious photos of this market are posted online at sites like Flickr, but the photos are copyrighted and not available for posting here. The Flickr photo stream of the Qing Ping market is worth a few minutes. This tourist video shows a short stroll down one street of the market, which consists of over 2000 stalls.

Visits to fish markets in San Francisco and Seattle have given me an idea of the bounty of a well-stocked counter, but the extent of fish available in a Chinese market is something to see.

Through a short armchair adventure, I've seen second-hand the possibilities of a Chinese market in China. If I do, over the next year, become even a second or third-rate cook of Chinese food, my plan is to reward myself with a trip to Seattle or San Francisco to explore, with book-trained eyes, a Chinatown market and to stock my pantry for the next year.

Victorians Preferred "Dressing" to "Stuffing"

2010-01-01T16:35:00.007-07:00

After making cornbread stuffing for the umpteenth time, I looked at recipes in the 1997 edition of that American classic, The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker. Readers of Victorian novels may be amused by an introductory comment on stuffing.

The authors note the interchangeability of the terms "stuffing" and "dressing," although some purists insist on calling stuffing that which goes inside the bird and dressing that which does not. "Stuffing is actually the original name, and the term dressing came from Victorian England when stuffing was thought to be a bit unseemly."

My son took our copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to college. I wish I could confirm this change in usage and pinpoint a date.

Some Recipes Online from _Eat Fresh Food_

2009-12-29T17:25:00.004-07:00

Earlier this week I posted a photo of a grape and pignola-nut breakfast cake, not realizing that the recipe had been published in the New York Times. Also included in that article are five other recipes from Rozanne Gold's Eat Fresh Food:

Very Moist Zucchini-Banana Bread
Avocado Mayonnaise
Steamed Broccoli With Cauliflower-Cheddar Sauce
Juicy Chicken With Roasted Spaghetti Squash
Very Fresh Vegetable Soup, With Pesto Presto

I hope to try them all. We had the apple crisp from this cookbook last night; granola, with a little butter, makes the crunchy topping. Everything prepared so far from Eat Fresh Food has been wonderful. Readers, if you make one of Gold's recipes from the book, please leave a comment and share your cooking results.

Steel-Cut Oats from a Teen Cook

2009-12-29T07:30:00.003-07:00

Oh, dear. The steel-cut oats were a smashing success at breakfast, but the photo is blurry. I'm still working to improve my photography skills. This dish from Rozanne Gold's Eat Fresh Food: Awesome Recipes for Teen Chefs was my son's first try from this cookbook, and it was delicious.

The recipe includes Golden Delicious apples, dried cherries, a little brown sugar, and sunflower seeds sprinkled on top. The only complaints this morning were that the recipe should have been doubled.

The young man is taking the book with him when he returns to college, and I have a choice between furiously typing recipes into the cooking software program or ordering a second copy of the book. Since the paperback is reasonably priced, I opt for my own copy. Although the title of the book addresses teen cooks, an old-timer like me can learn new ways to cook from this collection of recipes: fresh, simple, light, seasonal, healthful. These culinary values are nothing new, but the specific recipes include some innovative approaches. Adding dried fruit and fresh apples to oatmeal? One taste, and the blend seems obvious.

Must confess I had never tried steel-cut oats before. It will be hard to go back to rolled oats. The flavor and texture of the steel-cut are superior. I had the idea that an oat is an oat. Wrong. Love this cookbook. So easy. So good. This is what they call life-long learning.

Declaring 2010 My Year of Chinese Cooking

2009-12-28T10:32:00.004-07:00

Self-interest played no part, I am sure, in El Esposo's gift of Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo (Chronicle Books, 2009). Apparently my mentioning the book to him, along with the rave reviews it has received, caused him to speed to the bookstore. Living in a rural area without a Chinese market could present some challenges, but online groceries sell packaged and bottled foods, and the health food store may stock some of the more unusual fresh ingredients. Substitutions will occur for some items on the shopping lists, even though she says in this video that using the right ingredient is crucial. I'll do my best.

The book is organized as an instructional manual, with detailed lessons and lavish photos. I'm starting the year feeling ambitious about this Chinese cooking project. Mastering the Art is a beautiful book.

Turkey Soup

2009-12-27T13:11:00.007-07:00

These images show my efforts to learn to photograph food. The finished turkey soup:

The photo of soup on the stove is less successful, because the rising steam obscures the food somewhat.

Yesterday's recipe omitted exact amounts of turkey and noodles for the soup. My Italian-American mother-in-law--the best home cook I've ever known--used to drive me bonkers in explaining her cooking techniques. Asked how much parsley one of her dishes should have, she would say, "as much as you like." If I've never made it before, how do I know how much I like? Anyway, now I am doing something similar in expecting people to add as much turkey or as many noodles as they like.

The New York Cookbook follows the broth recipe with a collection of chicken soup recipes, and each of those uses between 4 and 6 cups of broth or water. One recipe calls for 4 quarts of chicken broth. I usually put the chicken in the pot and cover it with water, exceeding the top of the bird by an inch or two. Then it makes what it makes, a gallon or more. In my kitchen, cooking is art and not the basis of technical writing.

I'd guess I used about 4 cups of turkey--part from the stewing turkey bones and part from the separated leftovers. For the noodles, I reached in a big bag from Costco and took two large handsful of noodles for each person. But then, how big are my hands? Just eyeball it. That is not a very helpful step in the recipe. Now I sound like my mother-in-law. That feels pretty weird, but it may just mean that although I have learned how to cook, writing a cookbook is probably not in my future.

Turkey Broth

2009-12-26T16:22:00.006-07:00

The day after a turkey dinner at our house the aroma of turkey soup usually fills the house. Best practice would be to de-bone the turkey the same day it was roasted, but since I am generally tired when the Christmas feast is over, the leftover turkey gets stored in the fridge overnight. Then the bones become the foundation of a rich broth.

My turkey-noodle soup uses the New York Penicillin recipe from Molly O'Neill's New York Cookbook (1992), with the substitution of turkey bones for a stewing chicken.

4 qts. cold water (or more)
1 4-5 lb. chicken
2 chicken feet, or chicken wings, or 1 turkey wing (I skip this ingredient.)
1 clove garlic, peeled & bruised
1 onion, peeled
2 carrots, peeled, cut in 1-inch pieces (or not)
2 ribs celery, cut into 1-inch pieces
1/2 bunch fresh parsley
1 bay leaf
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. black peppercorns

Bring almost to boiling, then reduce heat. Simmer 4 hours, skimming frequently. Strain soup; chop veggies and return to pot. At this point, I add cooked turkey and noodles. Homemade noodles can go in the pot uncooked, since they require cooking time of only a couple of minutes. Store-bought noodles probably should be cooked separately and then added. That way you do not have to boil your soup broth to soften the noodles. I wrecked a turkey soup once by adding fresh pasta from the grocery without cooking it first; the pasta had too much flour left on it, and it thickened the soup slightly and affected the clarity of the broth.

For a clear broth, be sure to skim the foam that rises as the water gets hot, and do not allow the broth to boil. Otherwise the soup will be cloudy. To state the obvious, removing fat through frequent skimming or by refrigerating the finished broth overnight (and then spooning off the chicken fat from the top) produces a better soup. A few novice cooks may need to be reminded of this step.

Now I'm off to skim the broth and toss together a salad.

Christmas Coffee Cake

2009-12-24T23:21:00.004-07:00

The coffee cake is ready for tomorrow morning. I've made this cake every Christmas for the past 20 years. With a marzipan filling and a hint of cardamom in the dough, this rich cake starts off Christmas morning with smiles all around. Happy Christmas!

What's for Supper? - Spanikopita

2009-12-23T20:06:00.004-07:00

If I track my cooking and baking over the next few days, maybe it will lead to a habit of blogging again. Books. Music. Etc.

At present, I am trying to learn how to do food photography, and some time may be required to get it right. Tonight the family had spanikopita, rice pilaf and salad. The spinach and feta cheese pie, made with filo dough, is a favorite. It makes a good cold lunch the next day. Since several appealing recipes can be found on the internet, I'll not post mine now, just to save time.

_Eat Fresh Food_: A Breakfast Cake

2009-12-23T15:25:00.008-07:00

[UPDATE: The recipe for this cake and 5 other recipes from the same cookbook were published in the New York Times.]

Jumping up and down with enthusiasm after reading the table of contents of Rozanne Gold's new cookbook, Eat Fresh Food: Awesome Recipes for Teen Chefs, I tried a recipe today. The Grape-and-Pignoli Breakfast Cake is light, with much of the sweetness deriving from the grapes. The pine nuts deliver a welcome crunch. My skepticism about using olive oil in a treat evaporated on first bite.

Our teen likes eating more than cooking, but he has agreed to prepare a dish or two from this cookbook while home from college. If he does not take to it, I'll keep the book. Experienced cooks, as well as novices, can enjoy preparing these recipes.I went a little snapshot-happy with the breakfast snack cake, so, why not, here is the sliced view.

Online Art History Videos

2009-09-23T10:31:00.004-06:00

Here's another item lifted from my homeschooling blog, the online videos at Smarthistory.org. Smart History posts short art history videos, each featuring one or more works of art with voice over discussion by a couple of knowledgeable art history professionals. These videos usually run under ten minutes each.

I generally find that the commentary on technique is more useful and interesting than the interpretive remarks, but that may be a function of my having looked at art for a long time and having a tendency to rely on my own judgment over the analysis of expert observers. On the other hand, the commentators sometimes explicate a painting in the way I'm more accustomed to seeing critics take apart a literary work, and their insights can offer a fresh way of seeing or a level of detail I had missed. Taken altogether, these art history videos move beyond the merely informational to teach a way of looking at art objects, an attitude of mind or an approach to shaping perception and response that enriches the experience of viewing art. The presenters pack a lot of value into the short discussions.

Harvard Course, _Justice_, Online at YouTube

2009-09-22T10:58:00.004-06:00

The doldrums in book blogging here can be attributed not only to faint enthusiasm for the books I've been reading lately but also to the time devoted to my other blog, Homemade Education, where I have been posting online and other resources collected while homeschooling my teenaged children through high school. The posts have also strayed into topics of interest to a college parent, and when a current homeschooling resource presents itself, that gets added to the collection as well.

Looking over those posts about homeschooling and college life, I see some items that could interest readers who read the same type of books I do. The next few posts here will feature a few of those topics from my other blog.

A famous Harvard University course, known to attract close to a thousand students to each lecture, is now being broadcast in selected public television markets. Those of us whose local station did not pick up the broadcast of Michael Sandel's "Justice" (Moral Reasoning 22) can now view all 12 episodes on YouTube. If anyone had told me I would ever be tempted to read Jeremy Bentham, I would have laughed, but now after viewing the first segment, I am glad to see a Bentham reading posted at the Justice web site.

Sandel kicks off the course by presenting scenarios requiring moral judgments and leads students to consider both consequentialist and categorical moral reasoning.

A Slowed Pace

2009-09-20T17:34:00.004-06:00

Since my last book post I've read several thousand pages, none of which inspired any blog commentary. First it was a long Swedish noir thriller, well written and plotted and with strong characters, but dealing with criminal brutality of a type I do not care to address. I'll not follow up with reading the sequels to that one. Too ugly.

Then I read an even longer contemporary American novel that had its strengths and weaknesses, but I liked the voice of the author enough to seek out another of her books, while preferring to leave my reservations about this one unstated. I'll just skip it.

Several older Irish short stories have offered more rewarding reading, but I'm reluctant to recommend them, since I believe my interest in these stories may be rather idiosyncratic. The fascination for me lies partly in the tension between pagan and Christian elements, that is, I am reading for social history more than for literary value. A general reader, who was not enchanted by the intense Irishness of the stories, with the ornery characters and colorful language, could find them tiresome. I am loving them but am not going to suggest that anyone else follow my reading example.

I flew through another Swedish mystery, an offbeat police procedural that I liked enough to read more by this author, but not enough to write about it.

At present, I am going through a reading phase, where a wish to move beyond my old reliable genres and authors has resulted in some reading that leaves me cold as a blogger. I do not like or dislike most of these books enough to recommend or pan any of them, and they do not seem worth taking the time to describe.

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this reading experiment is that I should stick to the tried and true, if regular blogging is the goal, or else I must accept that the blogging will be intermittent for some time as I try new things, which may not turn out to be workable as blog fodder. It is difficult to work up any enthusiasm for writing about books that I don't much care for or that I only moderately enjoy. On the other hand, when a book turns out to be unsatisfactory, I get this sense of having wasted enough of my time on it already. Why spend even more time writing about it? I'm not writing reviews on a deadline; there is no compulsion about it. As a blogger, I can abstain.

Well, gentle readers, if the blog has been quiet for a while, now you know why.

Simon's Cat Videos

2009-09-07T09:48:00.004-06:00

Thanks to Mary at Mary's Library for pointing out the Simon's Cat videos at YouTube.