Monday, November 30, 2009

ELEGANT THINGS



Click to enlarge.
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Nature often is the best designer.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

SAFETY NET


My old blog and web page were among the casualties of this difficult year. No great loss. My writing about the place where I live elicited peculiarly intemperate responses from some of the local citizens. In the cosmic sense, these citizens matter very little. I reached the age when tilting at windmills becomes a spectator sport. Enough said.
This is a chance to start over. Books, food, and flowers will be recurrent themes in this new venue, as they were in the old blog. Social problems and local politics will not. Those I will save for stories I will be writing this winter unless I spend all my free time reading Balzac, who skewered provincial buffoons, the new rich, bloated bureaucrats with incomparable grace. I am no Balzac, but I know what he meant when he said,
"Madame Bovary, c'est moi. I am Madame Bovary." I also know what Baudelaire meant when he wrote,
"...hypocrite lecteur,-- mon sembable,--mon frere. Reader, hypocrite, my twin."
It is this sense of shared humanity that separates good writers from mediocrities. Good writers may skewer, dissect, laser-cut boors but they never forget that there there is a boor in each of us. I understand that and yet fraternal chumminess, unconditional compassion and kindness elude me at the moment. I am not my brother's keeper and neither do I care to be nice just now. Better to write about food than to put his character flaws under the knife. Trouble is, food writing has its pitfalls. Raymond Sokolov, Calvin Trillin and Jeffrey Steingarten to the contrary, food writers belong in the pink collar ghetto of lifestyle pages. They are known as kitchen table journalists, recipe writers, diletantti.
"I write about hunger," said food writer M F K Fisher to a critic who meant to demean her work. The critic is forgotten while Fisher's continues to enchant its readers. As a freelancer, I was once eager to leave the on the fringes of food writing for the more challenging business of political reporting. I remember only too well the swagger of the hard news guy whose advice I sought. He delivered himself of this pearl of wisdom as we ate a big lunch,
"You wanna write about politics, you gotta toughen up. If you can't play with the big boys, get outta the sandbox."
I paid for lunch, figuring that he had earned it. Sadly, in this implacable new century during which the print media has lost much of its relevance, that big boy bags groceries for a living. I can say, in all humility, that it coulsd not have happened to a better lout.
The political writing I eventually did was all local. I can say now that I am happy to leave the sandbox to the big boys. My needs are modest. The corner of a university library where acquisitive academics stash ethnographic tidbits will suffice for my disquisitions. If, in a century or so, a social archaeology student researching the way we live in this obscure part of the world digs up my notes and has a bit a fun that will suit me fine.
What does not suit me is the crawling pace of this endless year and the heartache it brought me, such as the death of one of my beloved friends. It is no consolation to know that death freed her from the nightmare of being dependent on strangers in a country she never learned to like. I feel as if I will never be through mourning her. Much as I want to reach the stage where I can celebrate all the good memories I have of her, I cannot seem to reconcile myself to her absence. She would have loathed that. She hated sentimentality, self-pity, wimpiness, whining. Whenever I was in low spirits she would command me to snap out of it,
"Sursum corda!"
If that failed to lift my heart, she would say, as if life were a battle,
"Allons, du courage!"
And later,
"Leap!"
The love of good friends, that most reliable of safety nets, was always there. It still is. I shall leap. Eventually.

STUCK IN THE '80s



Better Homes and Gardens magazine has a good website where readers can find useful recipes, learn about garden design, crafts and interior decoration. Unfortunately, when it comes to remodeling projects, BH & G seems to be stuck in the '80s when was conspicuous consumption was comme-il-faut. Its editors apparently value remodeling for the sake and they rely on cutesy headlines such as "Stuck in the '70s" to justify replacing a supposedly outdated look for one that will will most probably be just as unfashionable within a decade.
The transformation of the kitchen pictured above from a cozy to costly exemplifies BH & G's philosophy. Ostensibly, convenience dictated that the eating peninsula be replaced. Multiple people were forced to move when someone sitting on the inside needed to get up. Plus, the bulky dining spot offered little storage space." Well and good. Fake ceiling beams had to be removed and scratched counter tops had to be replaced. But as it happened when the economy was on the upsurge, expenditure called for expenditure and in the end, new appliances seemed to be a necessity. The result is a characterless, glossy magazine editor's idea of how a kitchen should look.
Possibly, the new kitchen is marginally easier to navigate. The new cabinets, however, are already filled with objects not in evidence prior to the remodeling. Nature abhors a vacuum. More is more. Whoever dies with the greatest number of toys wins. This is the message BH & G seems to offer its readers along with crafts and recipes.

BOOK REVIEW

There are those who say that writing is a gift bestowed by divine power upon the lucky few. If so, they  reduce writers to puppets whom a capricious deity manipulates when the mood strikes. When the mood does not strike, happy is the puppet  whose strings keep him  tautly yoked to his work.
There are those who claim that writers must write or die. They exaggerate. I have known writers who became teachers, cab drivers, daycare center aides without suffering any more angst than if they had been lumberjacks manque.
 Then there are those who say that writers open their veins and pour their life's blood into their work. That is nonsense. It is self-evident  that daily  hemorrhages require the kind  medical intervention  few writers can afford.  Nevertheless, there are writers who buy into this moth eaten  mythology.  They talk themselves into a write-or-die state and next thing you know they are unburdening themselves of  stories best kept untold. Oh, I know that they sacrifice for their art. I know that they tell their stories hopeful and  honestly when lesser fools  would  count the number of trees they could save with their silence and turn to a cleaner profession, such as fish mongering.
Alas for me, the writer I am honor bound to review--her publisher sent me a free copy of her book--would have done well to save a few thousand trees.

Friday, November 27, 2009

FINDING BALANCE








These days, there are so many exotic ways of finding balance that to choose gardening and cooking instead of Pilates or Qi Gong may seem implistic. No matter. I find that both are meditative, calming pursuits. They help me reach a place where the clamor of the world around me recedes into a subdued hum. They help see frantic activity as an effort to silence serious questions. An acquaintance's desperate search for public approval, another's relentless social climbing, yet another's quarrelsome disposition recede into the distance. I cannot choose who lives near me nor can I alter their behavior. I can only choose how I react to them and best of all, I can choose productive ways to spend my time. Often I choose to grow something beautiful and to to cook something delectable. It works.






















OAT BREAD



1 package yeast



6 cups unbleached flour



1 cup oatmeal



2 cups water



1 tablespoon salt



4 tablespoons sugar






Mix yeast with three cups flour and oatmeal. Reserve three cups flour. Place water, sugar, salt and oil in a pan and heat to 120F. Combine dry and liquid ingredients and beat, using a dough hook, adding remaining flour as needed. Place kneaded dough in an oiled bowl and cover it. Allow it to rise twice. Shape into three round loaves and bake at 350F for 30 minutes.


Wednesday, November 4, 2009










CLOSING THE GAP OR THE END OF THE HIATUS

Uninterrupted talk can tire both the talker and the listener. Hence the beauty of pauses. In previous posts I talked of town doings and of paunchy buffoons who seek to fill their empty with venomous babble. Then I lost a beloved friend whose presence had enriched my life for thirty some years. I cannot write about her yet. The loss is too recent, the wound is too raw. It is my great good fortune to have a small circle of tried and true friends who help me endure grief with as sensitively as they share my moments of joy. Chief among them is my biological sister, a gifted woman who has transitioned gracefully from practicing law to writing. She, my daughter, another literarily inclined lawyers well as two lawyers of the non-literary variety.
There is no question that lawyers make great friends. Tilting at legal windmills sharpens their minds and talking juries into right wrongs gives them a chance to see problems from many angles. Really good lawyers see all the angles with understanding and compassion.
The predominance of lawyers in my little circle is coincidental. Some of my best beloved are academics, journalists, farmers, scientists, writers and the undecided. What they have in common is huge hearts, ethical thinking and enviable values. Compared to such good fortune, what are the barbs of pitiful provincial buffoons? Onward, then. Da cappo. Allegro man troppo for now, but in time allegretto. Hello again. Thanks for popping in.