From the Book of Hours of Louis XII of France, 1498. Victoria and Albert Museum.
(Wikimedia Commons)
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Light in Winter
From the Book of Hours of Louis XII of France, 1498. Victoria and Albert Museum.
(Wikimedia Commons)
Monday, December 24, 2012
A Christmas Carol in Theatrical Form
About six years ago I thought of writing up Dickens's Christmas Carol in play format so that we could act it at home, and since I didn't have the story immediately at hand I made it up a little as I went along, thinking very much of the film versions (principally of 1938 and 1951) and a little of the characterization of Charles Montgomery Burns in The Simpsons. Here are the first two scenes, of three which I have already written in draft. It's not a very serious thing; among other things, I haven't thought much about what is required for writing a drama as opposed to any other sort of text, and am quite used to reading plays as fiction and not imagining or seeing them as theatre.
***
Scene One
Cratchit sitting at a desk, writing with a quill in a ledger. He is wearing a coat and a scarf, and is evidently cold.
Cratchit: (trying to cheer himself up by singing) "Joy to the world! The Lord is come! . . ."
Scrooge: (throws open the door and stalks in grimly) There's another coal on the fire, I see. I distinctly remember counting five when I left. How often must I tell you to bring two coats with you to work and leave the coal-pile alone?
Cratchit: Please, sir, you only told me once, and I thought that since the pitcher on the window sill is frozen . . .
Scrooge: What is winter if not the season of ice? Practicality is the key, Cratchit. Do you see this padding in my waistcoat?
Cratchit: Yes, sir.
Scrooge: That, Cratchit, is yesterday's Times of London. Several pages, crumpled up and placed judiciously within one's clothing, are as good as a fur coat. (He takes off his hat and hangs it on the clotheshook; crumpled newspapers fall out. He shuffles across the floor, rustling. Cratchit involuntarily looks at Scrooge's feet, wondering what the sound is. Scrooge notices.) Ah! You are wondering what that is in my shoes. Well, Cratchit, I will also tell you that a double sheet of newspaper serves excellently in lieu of socks, and it doesn't need darning.
Cratchit: Most ingenious, sir. (Writes on some moments in perplexity, as Scrooge carefully removes the extra coal from the fire and drops it into the ash pail. At last he has screwed up his courage to make a humble request.) Please, sir, it is the twenty-fourth of December, and I wonder whether I am permitted to take off the last quarter hour in addition to the day off tomorrow.
Scrooge: A quarter hour off?! The day off tomorrow?! But, Cratchit, it is a weekday tomorrow. Business waits for no one!
***
Scene One
Cratchit sitting at a desk, writing with a quill in a ledger. He is wearing a coat and a scarf, and is evidently cold.
Cratchit: (trying to cheer himself up by singing) "Joy to the world! The Lord is come! . . ."
Scrooge: (throws open the door and stalks in grimly) There's another coal on the fire, I see. I distinctly remember counting five when I left. How often must I tell you to bring two coats with you to work and leave the coal-pile alone?
Cratchit: Please, sir, you only told me once, and I thought that since the pitcher on the window sill is frozen . . .
Scrooge: What is winter if not the season of ice? Practicality is the key, Cratchit. Do you see this padding in my waistcoat?
Cratchit: Yes, sir.
Scrooge: That, Cratchit, is yesterday's Times of London. Several pages, crumpled up and placed judiciously within one's clothing, are as good as a fur coat. (He takes off his hat and hangs it on the clotheshook; crumpled newspapers fall out. He shuffles across the floor, rustling. Cratchit involuntarily looks at Scrooge's feet, wondering what the sound is. Scrooge notices.) Ah! You are wondering what that is in my shoes. Well, Cratchit, I will also tell you that a double sheet of newspaper serves excellently in lieu of socks, and it doesn't need darning.
Cratchit: Most ingenious, sir. (Writes on some moments in perplexity, as Scrooge carefully removes the extra coal from the fire and drops it into the ash pail. At last he has screwed up his courage to make a humble request.) Please, sir, it is the twenty-fourth of December, and I wonder whether I am permitted to take off the last quarter hour in addition to the day off tomorrow.
Scrooge: A quarter hour off?! The day off tomorrow?! But, Cratchit, it is a weekday tomorrow. Business waits for no one!
Thursday, December 06, 2012
Horse Chestnut Poems, II
The Horse Chestnut
In May the long and dipping leaves flock
gloriously along the supple branches,
thin and translucent and dark and cool
and veined in lightly threading cords;
and clusters of white pink-specked blossoms
rise in thick and heavy spires on stems
tenderly and freshly green,
beset upon by hordes of bees
who render the magnificent dome
into one great leafy, lovely hive.
In the earth, there sunken lie
the tarnished sombre chestnut hulls
which fell as copper-tinted paeans
to the whorled charm of gleaming wood
and now in death return to dust
or sprout a lingering greyish stem
which a lightless neighbourhood will starve
or which a fortuitous sunlit orifice
will raise and cherish into life.
For now the deep Elysian shadows
spread among the cobblestones
and touch the abandoned windows
high in doors of the archaic stables,
guard from view the burdening growth
of a persistent English ivy
whilst it crowns, as if a laurel,
the crumbling, swallow-harbouring brick.
At a distance and yet in sight,
stranded on the crest of fields
that dive and rise into the hedges
and bathe their feet in unseen rills,
a kindred tree casts far its foliage
in a lonely but grand clump:
a watcher of the meadows
and the shelterer of the horses
when, their loping gambols ended,
and finding the sun's orb too fierce,
they canter flowingly to bask
in the arbour's chilly sanctuary.
***
[Second Version, April 14th, 2009, rev. Oct. 20th and Nov. 25th]
[The other horse chestnut poem is here.]
In May the long and dipping leaves flock
gloriously along the supple branches,
thin and translucent and dark and cool
and veined in lightly threading cords;
and clusters of white pink-specked blossoms
rise in thick and heavy spires on stems
tenderly and freshly green,
beset upon by hordes of bees
who render the magnificent dome
into one great leafy, lovely hive.
In the earth, there sunken lie
the tarnished sombre chestnut hulls
which fell as copper-tinted paeans
to the whorled charm of gleaming wood
and now in death return to dust
or sprout a lingering greyish stem
which a lightless neighbourhood will starve
or which a fortuitous sunlit orifice
will raise and cherish into life.
For now the deep Elysian shadows
spread among the cobblestones
and touch the abandoned windows
high in doors of the archaic stables,
guard from view the burdening growth
of a persistent English ivy
whilst it crowns, as if a laurel,
the crumbling, swallow-harbouring brick.
At a distance and yet in sight,
stranded on the crest of fields
that dive and rise into the hedges
and bathe their feet in unseen rills,
a kindred tree casts far its foliage
in a lonely but grand clump:
a watcher of the meadows
and the shelterer of the horses
when, their loping gambols ended,
and finding the sun's orb too fierce,
they canter flowingly to bask
in the arbour's chilly sanctuary.
***
[Second Version, April 14th, 2009, rev. Oct. 20th and Nov. 25th]
[The other horse chestnut poem is here.]
A Poem from the Archives
Written in Grade 10, a grand effort inspired by a classmate who was being sort of annoying:
Once there was someone***
Whose head was not good;
A crayon he broke
On his head, which would
Addle the wits that were left him
quite good.
In graveyard fields
I, ***, lie
The cricket's chirp
My lullaby.
For restlessly
[in spirit still]
I wander about
Those who see me
Scream and shout
I died at school
Not long ago
[(of boredom)]
At least I now
French can forego.
St. Nicholas, Part I: Philosophical Abstractions
Yesterday was a wearying day and I went to sleep fairly late (or, er, early), so though I had set the alarm clock, I turned it off once it rang (the first class began at 8:30) and thus slept through to noon and later.
The kitchen was still in a mess, but all the shopping had been done. I had the Byzantinian folk literature course at 6:15, so for the next couple of hours I read books online and copied out (by hand) a few more lines of Homer in the Greek original.
TO round out my Greek studies and to relieve my guilt for not doing more in that language, I have decided to read the Iliad and translate it in my head. Surprisingly enough we do not have an ancient Greek text of the Iliad itself wherefore I had to turn to an electronic text, and I am writing it out by hand so that it's easier to consult. About a week ago I looked into the bookshelves, and by grace of my grandfather's and my father's love for ancient Greek, found:
Richard John Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect (University of Oklahoma Press), ed. copyright 1963.
Homer, The Iliad (Penguin Classics) Transl. E. V. Rieu, 1966.
Homer, Ilias, Odyssee (dtv weltliteratur) Transl. Johann Heinrich Voß (Iliad: orig. publ. 1793), edition from 1982.
Homer, Ilias und Odyssee (Rheingauer Verlagsgesellschaft) Transl. Johann Heinrich Voss, edited by Hans Rupé and E.R. Weiß, 1980.
William Bishop Owen and Edgar Johnson Goodspeed, Homeric Vocabularies (University of Oklahoma Press), revised by Clyde Pharr, ed. copyright 1969.
J.E. Zimmerman, Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Bantam), 1980. [This has a label bearing my grandmother's name and our Victoria address on the title page.]
The kitchen was still in a mess, but all the shopping had been done. I had the Byzantinian folk literature course at 6:15, so for the next couple of hours I read books online and copied out (by hand) a few more lines of Homer in the Greek original.
TO round out my Greek studies and to relieve my guilt for not doing more in that language, I have decided to read the Iliad and translate it in my head. Surprisingly enough we do not have an ancient Greek text of the Iliad itself wherefore I had to turn to an electronic text, and I am writing it out by hand so that it's easier to consult. About a week ago I looked into the bookshelves, and by grace of my grandfather's and my father's love for ancient Greek, found:
Richard John Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect (University of Oklahoma Press), ed. copyright 1963.
Homer, The Iliad (Penguin Classics) Transl. E. V. Rieu, 1966.
Homer, Ilias, Odyssee (dtv weltliteratur) Transl. Johann Heinrich Voß (Iliad: orig. publ. 1793), edition from 1982.
Homer, Ilias und Odyssee (Rheingauer Verlagsgesellschaft) Transl. Johann Heinrich Voss, edited by Hans Rupé and E.R. Weiß, 1980.
William Bishop Owen and Edgar Johnson Goodspeed, Homeric Vocabularies (University of Oklahoma Press), revised by Clyde Pharr, ed. copyright 1969.
J.E. Zimmerman, Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Bantam), 1980. [This has a label bearing my grandmother's name and our Victoria address on the title page.]
St. Nicholas, Part II: Eats
Ge. and I prepared the St. Nicholas plates just before I left for university: milk and dark chocolate-covered gingerbread, clementines, domino stones coated in milk and in dark chocolate, tree tips or Baumkuchenspitzen which are tiny pineapple-fragment-shaped pieces of layered sponge cake (the layers being light with dark edges like the growth rings in a tree, or the layers of a French bûche de Noël) once again covered in chocolate, Spekulatius biscuits, and marzipan potatoes which Ge. bought after I'd left because they were manifestly missing. (c:
The rest of the menu was:
The potatoes were intended to be lemon potatoes, which I had eaten and enjoyed at a Greek restaurant on West Broadway in Vancouver over six years ago, but the time ran out.
As for the coleslaw salad, I julienned red tomatoes by cutting the peel into slabs and deseeding it and then slicing it into strips, then thinly cut up a quarter of a red cabbage, yesterday. I left these in the fridge overnight so that the cabbage would grow milder, and I hoped the acid in the tomatoes would have a similar effect. What was tremendously cool was letting the tomato juice come into contact with the cabbage juice, because obviously the pH (acidity concentration, I guess one could say) of the tomatoes made the cabbage juice turn pink from its lovely aubergine colour. This afternoon I grated in a carrot on the coarsest holes, sliced in half of an oval lettuce, and sprinkled pomegranate seeds on top; then after the Byzantinian literature class I chopped in some parsley and julienned a little cucumber. Except for the quartered tomatoes which I added and the pomegranate seeds, and the relative scarcity of cucumber and lettuce, it was pleasingly like the salad which normally comes with our favourite takeout döner kebabs. Finis.
I sprinkled aceto balsamico over the cauliflower, cut into small chunks, so that it would become less cabbagey; I think it worked, and fortunately nobody minded the dark vinegar watermarks.
The other salad was of leafy lettuce, of which I had arranged intact leaves around the perimeter of the bowl, which looked very festive; I sliced cucumber over it, put chopped parsley in the middle, quartered some of the tomatoes and removed the greeny stem bits, shook over more pomegranate seeds, and then prepared my dressing.
The sugared oranges were a monumental pain in the neck, also because I thought they turned out too sour though everyone else was happy with them. Removing the pith was difficult, slicing them was difficult because the knife didn't like becoming wet or working with a soaked wooden cutting board or who knows what, so I ended up smushing part of the orange rather than slicing it. The clementines which I mixed in also refused for the most part to slice properly, falling into the disarray of their individual segments instead. I sprinkled sugar in between the layers and added some brandy, but I didn't taste the brandy and thought that more sugar would not have come amiss. The thing is that I have sentimental reminiscences of sliced oranges infused with sugar and kirsch which my father made, and have tried to emulate them; only I was too cheap to buy a 10 euro bottle of kirsch from the store and too demanding to buy a cheap bottle.
I have plans to make tzatziki, and two aubergines to use up, tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes. (c: My attempt yesterday to make baba ghanoush with a third eggplant was a bit interesting, though not in disastrous wise.
At any rate the beef was excellent and so were the platters full of gingerbread and chocolate, and the rest was fine, so I think it was a good day from the culinary front. We also brought some extra festivity into the evening by singing 'Lasst uns froh und munter sein' and, in Mama's case, tootling out Advent songs on the French horn.
THEN we watched a books television show with Dieter Moor and his guest Franz Müntefering, whom I did not greatly admire as a politician but had to admit is rather charming and not without thoughtfulness and humour as a private individual. I had considered him unoriginal and complacent.
Lastly, Ge. and J. and I watched the Daily Show and the Colbert Report together. So now I feel greatly relaxed; the question is whether I will make it to my 8:30 a.m. class tomorrow.
The rest of the menu was:
Sweepsteak
(Beef roast with onion, recipe from the I Hate to Cook Book)
Boiled potatoes
Coleslaw salad à la döner kebab
Cauliflower
Salad with aceto balsamico and quark dressing
Sugared oranges in brandy
The potatoes were intended to be lemon potatoes, which I had eaten and enjoyed at a Greek restaurant on West Broadway in Vancouver over six years ago, but the time ran out.
As for the coleslaw salad, I julienned red tomatoes by cutting the peel into slabs and deseeding it and then slicing it into strips, then thinly cut up a quarter of a red cabbage, yesterday. I left these in the fridge overnight so that the cabbage would grow milder, and I hoped the acid in the tomatoes would have a similar effect. What was tremendously cool was letting the tomato juice come into contact with the cabbage juice, because obviously the pH (acidity concentration, I guess one could say) of the tomatoes made the cabbage juice turn pink from its lovely aubergine colour. This afternoon I grated in a carrot on the coarsest holes, sliced in half of an oval lettuce, and sprinkled pomegranate seeds on top; then after the Byzantinian literature class I chopped in some parsley and julienned a little cucumber. Except for the quartered tomatoes which I added and the pomegranate seeds, and the relative scarcity of cucumber and lettuce, it was pleasingly like the salad which normally comes with our favourite takeout döner kebabs. Finis.
I sprinkled aceto balsamico over the cauliflower, cut into small chunks, so that it would become less cabbagey; I think it worked, and fortunately nobody minded the dark vinegar watermarks.
The other salad was of leafy lettuce, of which I had arranged intact leaves around the perimeter of the bowl, which looked very festive; I sliced cucumber over it, put chopped parsley in the middle, quartered some of the tomatoes and removed the greeny stem bits, shook over more pomegranate seeds, and then prepared my dressing.
The sugared oranges were a monumental pain in the neck, also because I thought they turned out too sour though everyone else was happy with them. Removing the pith was difficult, slicing them was difficult because the knife didn't like becoming wet or working with a soaked wooden cutting board or who knows what, so I ended up smushing part of the orange rather than slicing it. The clementines which I mixed in also refused for the most part to slice properly, falling into the disarray of their individual segments instead. I sprinkled sugar in between the layers and added some brandy, but I didn't taste the brandy and thought that more sugar would not have come amiss. The thing is that I have sentimental reminiscences of sliced oranges infused with sugar and kirsch which my father made, and have tried to emulate them; only I was too cheap to buy a 10 euro bottle of kirsch from the store and too demanding to buy a cheap bottle.
I have plans to make tzatziki, and two aubergines to use up, tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes. (c: My attempt yesterday to make baba ghanoush with a third eggplant was a bit interesting, though not in disastrous wise.
At any rate the beef was excellent and so were the platters full of gingerbread and chocolate, and the rest was fine, so I think it was a good day from the culinary front. We also brought some extra festivity into the evening by singing 'Lasst uns froh und munter sein' and, in Mama's case, tootling out Advent songs on the French horn.
THEN we watched a books television show with Dieter Moor and his guest Franz Müntefering, whom I did not greatly admire as a politician but had to admit is rather charming and not without thoughtfulness and humour as a private individual. I had considered him unoriginal and complacent.
Lastly, Ge. and J. and I watched the Daily Show and the Colbert Report together. So now I feel greatly relaxed; the question is whether I will make it to my 8:30 a.m. class tomorrow.
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