A story suggested by the length and Damoclesian implications of the icicles outside. It transpires in New England. A nod likewise to Calvin and Hobbes.
***
For five weeks the snow had covered the ground and grown to the height where the house's foundation met the weatherboarding.
Leafless beeches, elms, and ash trees grew in the forest round about, and if snow had not been caught in the broad mesh of the wire fence the territory belonging to the house would have seemed to go on forever.
Though the clouds were thick with snow and the air was hazy where the powdery flakes fell like cherry blossoms out of season, the sky was as dark as if it had been clear.
There was a quiet traffic in birds, owls, rabbits, mice, and greater predators.
The movement behind the trunk of the only locust tree was as furtive but very different.
It came from a rounded figure, whose head and spherical shoulder blotted out the background for an instant before melding back into the trunk's shadow.
A strange depression sank into the ground beside the tree, and a strange marking of white was left on the locust bark as a twigged hand slithered, scratchingly, across it.
It was the snowbeast.
*
One twigged hand still bore the scrapings of the tree bark, the other emerged, uplifted, not with a carrot, but with a colourless arm of a like shape.
That arm was an icicle.
It did not drip; it had not cracked; it was not ribbed with the marks of the twig.
In the residual light of the benighted countryside, it reflected an eerie whitish glow and a fleeting watery dissolution.
*
Closer the snowbeast came.
The water-darkened rock which served as its nose twitched.
Two half-rotted beechnut hulls which served as its eyes bristled.
Its mouth, a moribund locust bean, turned upside down.
The twigs were raised; the icicle fell.
*
A lantern sprang apart with a shattering clutter.
The bulb extinguished.
The rays on the snow vanished with the silhouettes of the trees.
A rabbit at the fenceline hobbled away in affright.
The owl hooted and left an elm with a virulent flap.
*
The icicle stabbed and stabbed at the windowpane.
It was double-glazed.
The snowbeast advanced to the door.
The fanlight was single-glazed.
Stab and crash.
*
A great shard of grass settled in the snowbeast's midsection.
Meltwater gurgled up through the snow-wound and dissolved the creature as it thrashed in violent throes.
A bird twittered.
*
In the morning the owner stepped outside to sweep up the glass.
His wife called, "Do phone the insurance people, dear."
FINIS.
Dec. 27, 2010
[It's a dumb story, but maybe amusing. The original title is "Rime of the Snowbeast."]
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
An Imaginary Banquet and Poetics
The snow still lies thick upon the ground, trodden likewise into café au lait tinged slush whose crumbly consistency is owing to its powdery quality and to the continuing frigidity, and from here I can see the deep paw-prints which a child made in the snowbank on the rear windshield of a car presumably on Monday. The trees are thickly clad, though the wind perturbingly wafts drifts of it to the ground, and in the courtyard the dusting against the solid dark ivy and the spades on the bicycle seats and the rampart along the top of the brick wall separating it from the next court have remained intact. The sky is as blank and greyish-white as an old computer screen, though of course unpixelated.
Yesterday Gi. did the first proper installment of our Christmas shopping: sugar, tomatoes, green beans, etc. I have daydreamed about baking Vanillekipferl, Dominosteine and maybe a chocolate or caramel brittle, to give as presents, but haven't found the time, leisure, or will to realize it. The dulce de leche coffee and the seasonal bowl of eggnog have yet to be made. An experiment with dissolved cream toffee, coffee, milk, cocoa powder, and plum liqueur produced reasonable results, and resembled a certain bottled Irish cream. I might make the eggnog today if a kind person would procure the ingredients. The recipe is from one of our Christmas books: you beat together egg yolks and sugar, add milk and heavy cream (I use whipping cream if we have it) and rum, and stir in beaten egg whites. The rum technically decimates germs; we never leave the eggnog sitting around long, though, but at least drink it straight away when it's fresh and before the egg white foam separates as it inevitably and annoyingly will. There might be vanilla extract in it too. In the New York Times food section I noted a butterscotch variant, but it might be too fiddly, whereas I have resolved upon a course of plain (if any) cooking.
As for the medieval repast, it is unlikely to be made but I've been thinking about it. If relevant Guardian articles and my recollection are correct it turns out that for a British Christmas the main dish was once boar or peacock, which became a swan in the 17th century up until the Victorian Age, when goose and turkey became popular. But I have been thinking more of the desserts. The question is whether anyone will eat apples and oranges and nuts if they are presented on the table. Watching another food documentary this time set in the Provence, I was thinking that the 13 Desserts seem somewhat medieval, so I could arrange a plate or two with raisins, nuts, dried apricots, prunes, figs, sliced nougat, etc., as the lady did, also with marzipan. I thought of making apple dumplings but they seem a lot of work, and straight roast apples with raisins in the middle are never accorded the affection which they deserve in my point of view, though to be fair the last round which I made was blackened (and in the case of exposed raisins, charred). I was thinking that it would be nice to press marzipan into a little cake or tart mould (we have two little ones), lined with ground or chopped almonds so the marzipan doesn't stick, and then to decorate it with pieces of glacé cherries or the like; or to make a Middle Eastern plate with halva, pistachios, dates, etc. Blancmange seems a little of a bother, but it is mentioned *pedantic cough* in the prologue of the Canterbury Tales. Besides, and of course not related to desserts, I have a hankering to make Yorkshire pudding once.
Unrelated to the Middle Ages and to British cuisine, I was thinking of putting together a fruit bowl as I did for my birthday, and which was much appreciated; the way it was special is that the fruit was more varied than ordinary, I washed and dried it very carefully, let it ripen in the early autumnal warmth for a day or two, took out our silver or pewter dish as well as a grand pottery dish to arrange it in, and of course spent much more time thinking how best to present it than customary. But what's nicer is the basket which we have every year on Christmas morning, most often containing a pineapple, a coconut, and a package of figs and of dates, besides the slew of mandarin oranges and apples.
Anyway, now I have had the enjoyment of imagining all this excellent food without having to shop for it, pay for it, wash dishes for it, prepare it, or dispose of any disasters (my rule of thumb is that if it's edible I must eat any remainders of my cooking, and I believe have only had to concede inedibility twice, though the improvised pumpkin pie I finished on this principle at the age of fourteen or thereabouts, with its hardbaked shell and stringy and savourless filling, will likely haunt me far into adulthood), so I am content.
As for the bookshop, three gentlemen have come to pick up their orders and one lady came in, first of all to point to the audiobook in the window and ask me if I knew what "On Civil Disobedience" was about. Whereupon I said, I think justly though maybe naming the date might have helped, that Thoreau was against the Spanish-American war and therefore refused to pay taxes, and was therefore locked up in prison, where he wrote this as a plea for non-violent resistance through non-cooperation with the government, and that it influenced among others Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. This disquisition comes courtesy, I believe, of an introduction to that essay, which is one of those cases where after reading the thorough and unobjectionable introduction the tiny flame of curiosity for the book proper has extinguished itself. She ended up buying a different philosophical work and intermittently commanding her little white-and-orangey-brown dog to staaayyy. As she paid and received a little bag for her purchase and I asked whether she would like a receipt, the dog growled here and there, and she cheerfully remarked to him in an aside how nice it was of him to protect her. Which is in retrospect kind of funny; at the time I was thinking absentmindedly that his growling sounded like mild disembodied thunder so that one couldn't really tell where the little dog left off and the noise beyond the shop began.
One of the ordered books was the Nicomachean Ethics, so I asked the customer whether he was reading it for a course, but he said just for leisure and seemed to genuinely enjoy looking forward to the prospect; he wondered why I was surprised at the purchase and I said that I'd tried to read the Poetics and found it very tough going, and mumbled something about laconic language. He said that he had to check the glossary for practically every page but otherwise it was fine. So I'll take his word for it and admire a better man than I.
In German translation and likewise in a R*** edition (I mention it culturally and not advertisingly, hence the asterisks) the Poetics weren't so bad, however, though I never finished it or indeed broached more than a fourth or so of it, and I think the point is mainly to describe what plays were like in Aristotle's time and a major point in reading it is to see which blueprints playwrights have followed or sworn off following ever since. The stuff about poetry being like dancing in rhythm, etc. and so forth, didn't seem all that interesting. The true ordeal was when Papa and I once started the beginning of his Metaphysics in the original, and despite our Greek courses had to look up terms constantly whilst my not so carefully cultivated grammatical knowledge unravelled at the critical junctures, and I still have no idea what the words with half a dozen definitions like thymos exactly mean. Doubtless it would be better today, but I still think that Aristotle dominates the fine art of making one feel that one has made no progress in grasping anything.
Anyway, the second pair of people has walked by with a Christmas tree, so on that note (also since Mama has come in) I will end this post!
Yesterday Gi. did the first proper installment of our Christmas shopping: sugar, tomatoes, green beans, etc. I have daydreamed about baking Vanillekipferl, Dominosteine and maybe a chocolate or caramel brittle, to give as presents, but haven't found the time, leisure, or will to realize it. The dulce de leche coffee and the seasonal bowl of eggnog have yet to be made. An experiment with dissolved cream toffee, coffee, milk, cocoa powder, and plum liqueur produced reasonable results, and resembled a certain bottled Irish cream. I might make the eggnog today if a kind person would procure the ingredients. The recipe is from one of our Christmas books: you beat together egg yolks and sugar, add milk and heavy cream (I use whipping cream if we have it) and rum, and stir in beaten egg whites. The rum technically decimates germs; we never leave the eggnog sitting around long, though, but at least drink it straight away when it's fresh and before the egg white foam separates as it inevitably and annoyingly will. There might be vanilla extract in it too. In the New York Times food section I noted a butterscotch variant, but it might be too fiddly, whereas I have resolved upon a course of plain (if any) cooking.
As for the medieval repast, it is unlikely to be made but I've been thinking about it. If relevant Guardian articles and my recollection are correct it turns out that for a British Christmas the main dish was once boar or peacock, which became a swan in the 17th century up until the Victorian Age, when goose and turkey became popular. But I have been thinking more of the desserts. The question is whether anyone will eat apples and oranges and nuts if they are presented on the table. Watching another food documentary this time set in the Provence, I was thinking that the 13 Desserts seem somewhat medieval, so I could arrange a plate or two with raisins, nuts, dried apricots, prunes, figs, sliced nougat, etc., as the lady did, also with marzipan. I thought of making apple dumplings but they seem a lot of work, and straight roast apples with raisins in the middle are never accorded the affection which they deserve in my point of view, though to be fair the last round which I made was blackened (and in the case of exposed raisins, charred). I was thinking that it would be nice to press marzipan into a little cake or tart mould (we have two little ones), lined with ground or chopped almonds so the marzipan doesn't stick, and then to decorate it with pieces of glacé cherries or the like; or to make a Middle Eastern plate with halva, pistachios, dates, etc. Blancmange seems a little of a bother, but it is mentioned *pedantic cough* in the prologue of the Canterbury Tales. Besides, and of course not related to desserts, I have a hankering to make Yorkshire pudding once.
Unrelated to the Middle Ages and to British cuisine, I was thinking of putting together a fruit bowl as I did for my birthday, and which was much appreciated; the way it was special is that the fruit was more varied than ordinary, I washed and dried it very carefully, let it ripen in the early autumnal warmth for a day or two, took out our silver or pewter dish as well as a grand pottery dish to arrange it in, and of course spent much more time thinking how best to present it than customary. But what's nicer is the basket which we have every year on Christmas morning, most often containing a pineapple, a coconut, and a package of figs and of dates, besides the slew of mandarin oranges and apples.
Anyway, now I have had the enjoyment of imagining all this excellent food without having to shop for it, pay for it, wash dishes for it, prepare it, or dispose of any disasters (my rule of thumb is that if it's edible I must eat any remainders of my cooking, and I believe have only had to concede inedibility twice, though the improvised pumpkin pie I finished on this principle at the age of fourteen or thereabouts, with its hardbaked shell and stringy and savourless filling, will likely haunt me far into adulthood), so I am content.
As for the bookshop, three gentlemen have come to pick up their orders and one lady came in, first of all to point to the audiobook in the window and ask me if I knew what "On Civil Disobedience" was about. Whereupon I said, I think justly though maybe naming the date might have helped, that Thoreau was against the Spanish-American war and therefore refused to pay taxes, and was therefore locked up in prison, where he wrote this as a plea for non-violent resistance through non-cooperation with the government, and that it influenced among others Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. This disquisition comes courtesy, I believe, of an introduction to that essay, which is one of those cases where after reading the thorough and unobjectionable introduction the tiny flame of curiosity for the book proper has extinguished itself. She ended up buying a different philosophical work and intermittently commanding her little white-and-orangey-brown dog to staaayyy. As she paid and received a little bag for her purchase and I asked whether she would like a receipt, the dog growled here and there, and she cheerfully remarked to him in an aside how nice it was of him to protect her. Which is in retrospect kind of funny; at the time I was thinking absentmindedly that his growling sounded like mild disembodied thunder so that one couldn't really tell where the little dog left off and the noise beyond the shop began.
One of the ordered books was the Nicomachean Ethics, so I asked the customer whether he was reading it for a course, but he said just for leisure and seemed to genuinely enjoy looking forward to the prospect; he wondered why I was surprised at the purchase and I said that I'd tried to read the Poetics and found it very tough going, and mumbled something about laconic language. He said that he had to check the glossary for practically every page but otherwise it was fine. So I'll take his word for it and admire a better man than I.
In German translation and likewise in a R*** edition (I mention it culturally and not advertisingly, hence the asterisks) the Poetics weren't so bad, however, though I never finished it or indeed broached more than a fourth or so of it, and I think the point is mainly to describe what plays were like in Aristotle's time and a major point in reading it is to see which blueprints playwrights have followed or sworn off following ever since. The stuff about poetry being like dancing in rhythm, etc. and so forth, didn't seem all that interesting. The true ordeal was when Papa and I once started the beginning of his Metaphysics in the original, and despite our Greek courses had to look up terms constantly whilst my not so carefully cultivated grammatical knowledge unravelled at the critical junctures, and I still have no idea what the words with half a dozen definitions like thymos exactly mean. Doubtless it would be better today, but I still think that Aristotle dominates the fine art of making one feel that one has made no progress in grasping anything.
Anyway, the second pair of people has walked by with a Christmas tree, so on that note (also since Mama has come in) I will end this post!
Thursday, December 09, 2010
A Winter's Peroration
Snow is falling again, but this time as a dust. The tree branches are still highlighted in white, curves of snow slide along the street lamps, icicles hang from the radiators of cars, and many cars bear a fleecy hood. Along the streets it has been threshed into grey lumps, and on the sidewalks either stomped into an uncomfortable hard carpet or marked sparingly in footprints and lone tire treads, or scraped and mixed with gravel and sand. It has slumped on the apartment roofs and left the topmost tiles half-bare, crowding at the gutters.
I've been here at the bookshop for an hour or so, and so far have had little to do except pull out a letter from the mail slot and record its arrival in my chronicle of events. There is a bag of gummy bears which accompanied a past shipment from the book delivery service which we use, and I have been profiting by that, and I read a small portion of The Age of Napoleon, lit a cone of incense, and began revising the beginning of a blog post about Persuasion. Altogether I have done a lot of draft work for the Lighthouse blog, but after spending much time over The Canterville Ghost yesterday decided that it would be best to write about it when I'm older, because my insights seemed neither very original nor very profound, I wasn't quite reading the story in the spirit in which it was written, and besides the draft post itself didn't correspond to my ideal of a book review. Whether rightly or wrongly I have had the sense in the past months of having to write anything I write ex cathedra, as it were, and not to publish anything which I wouldn't still find reasonably accurate, good and worthwhile in ten years. What this partly means is to write a good deal and follow trains of thought as far as they go before deciding to remove unimportant or imperfect passages and to boil down the rest, or to abandon it entirely as a sacrifice on the altar of literary judgment.
Where writing is concerned the historical tales are dormant. The newest incarnation of the one set in the time of Henry VIII began well, but I felt that I had reached not the 16th century but rather an odd intermediary point, and besides there were still a great many details to research and character traits to figure out. Only the plot could come on its own, since I have blatantly filched the outline from elsewhere and as for the rest have no reason not to think that the story will come of itself as I write, which has been the case in the past and is much more enjoyable through the element of surprise than most things my plodding brain could evolve. Recently I started a scientific book by Marat, in which he describes the origins of the modern understanding of electricity, and though not disposed to like him politically found myself liking the book. Other than that I have done precious little for the French Revolution research. The Age of Napoleon has reached the Age of Napoleon and mostly left behind the Revolution, so its continuing pertinence is slight.
Yesterday evening Ge. and Papa prepared a large dinner of Indonesian noodles, as it is termed in our family, and I helped cut up the leeks for it. My latest method is to remove the outermost layer or two, rinse the leek, chop off the stalk to be sliced, then to remove the outermost leaf or two, rinse it, chop off the stalk, and so on and so forth, and if it falls apart to "reconstitute" it. I was worried that the purple-silvered leaves would be tough, but they melted away. It was delicious and I had two large portions of it. Other than that I made carrot cake twice in the last week of November, once with a cream cheese, butter, and icing sugar frosting which was to my dismay yellow and fluid instead of white and stiff, and once with thick icing concocted of icing sugar, warm water, vanilla extract, and Cointreau. The second icing was fiendishly saccharine but I had no objection.
The next project I am meditating is a dulce de leche coffee: hot coffee, dulce de leche dissolved in it, kahlua, sugared whipping cream, and grated chocolate. I believe that would be called "moreish" in the British jargon. I found it on the website of a famous cooking blogger from, I think, Oklahoma, whose website is recommended on Jezebel quite often and which quite reliably has recipes for things my siblings would actually eat. Then there is a butterscotch eggnog recipe from the New York Times's food section. Besides I have been thinking of cooking a Scottish meal with a cranachan for dessert, and a medieval banquet with beer and things served on our wooden cutting boards (to be rechristened "trenchers"), and a French breakfast with croissants and delicate meats and brie and jams and hot cocoa (er, chocolat frappé) or tea or coffee or a combination thereof. But since the dishes have been piling up into a species of kitchen Mordor and I am still very antsy about washing the dishes in wintertime after the way my hands blew up and sprouted hives three or so winters ago, these may remain daydreams.
This year the Christmas season has been relaxed and low-key. St. Martin arrived quickly in the midst of other occupations, so I didn't even think of working on a lantern until the day had arrived and pretty much gone; the first Advent Sunday came in with some fanfare; and we celebrated St. Nicholas on the day before, which is to say that I slept in while some of the others had breakfast, and showed up in the early evening to find a lot of chocolate on my plate. When Papa was travelling in the U-Bahn a BVG Nicholas was on his rounds and so he ended up with a teddy bear key chain, and at work Mama received a package containing the Ferrero triumvirate of Rocher, Küsschen, and Mon Cheri. I've been thinking that maybe Christmas is more a holiday for children, which to put it baldly makes theological sense because of the "child" in Christ Child; but though in past years I have felt that I could hear the creaking and groaning of the industrial Christmas machine winding into gear around September and then cranking out a deluge of advertising into January, this year I am an insider at least in the book industry and therefore don't find it so artificial or overwhelming. So I'm not particularly grinchy and, though still inclined to be gloomy about selfconscious, intentional (the German word "vorsätzlich" popped into my head; can't think of the right English term for now) dogoodery and benicery, don't devote that much time to thinking about it.
On television in the past week there was another cooking documentary on Arte, one of my favourite genres. This time the protagonist was a French woman who hunts for truffles with her pig — quite a nice, tidy-looking pink pig as pigs go — and makes black truffle omelette, truffled boiled eggs, chicken stuffed with truffles, and rabbit, and serves the latter to a round of friends each in their own way carrying on a local tradition, for instance hunting truffles with hounds (more expensive than pigs, since they must be trained, and prone to distractions, whereas as long as there are no acorns nearby pigs are apparently exemplary in their devotion to the task at hand) and tending the rabbits.
On the piano I have been looking at Schumann's piano concerto again. I liked it and didn't love it at first, and maybe the same holds true now, but the more I work with it the more I like it and the deeper I dig into its substance. It is teaching me to take time with the music, to tie the notes together better in a legato and to tackle specific scales, and so on. Of course there is a value in playing it as slowly as I am, because it leaves me more time to notice things and because it is much easier to solve problems that crop up at a mild speed than at a furious one, though one can play absentmindedly as easily in one mode as in the other, and I think it is good mental exercise to find enough in the music that one isn't frustrated by the length. I think playing a passage quickly and discovering a macrorhythm or macrophrase is more of a trick than a true enrichment of the music, though of course it is often integral to the music, in composers like Liszt and Bach (where the melody is sometimes very well hidden amid the counterpoint, I think) the music is practically devoid of sense without it, and if one wants to play professionally people demand that one observe it.
I revisited Bach's Concerto in d minor recently, too, and enjoyed it much more than before, because though this is an undignified metaphor it feels like a very meat-and-potatoes sort of music, nourishing and strong and warm, though I still find the second movement desolate — and technical difficulties no longer interfere so much with this quality. Revisiting a Hungarian Rhapsody by Liszt was not as uplifting, though the tedious clinkery of the Friska and so on went reasonably well for sightreading, and I didn't play through to the end. Then I came across the Satie "Gymnopédie" which I remember playing for an exam, and arrangements of The Nutcracker, and the Christmas songbook which I am playing through a couple of songs at a time. Besides there is a Haydn sonata, and anything else which recommends itself at least for a glance.
On the reading front I began to read romance novels on the internet again. It was much easier to do it bravely and cheekily when the only alternative was to do dutiful things, be bored, and become depressed again, and less easy to do it now. It was a little intimidating when we were forced to pay 500 Euros for bit-torrenting (which has also killed some of my enjoyment of YouTube, because I still fear the day when a long letter of twenty-something pages will come listing all of the films I've watched in violation of copyright and extorting a bullshit — pardon the language, but it is suited to the context — sum for each of them) and when a host of viruses, Trojan horses and rootkits and spy agents, ran riot on the computer where I mostly read them. On Sunday, I think, I copied our files onto a USB stick and then (also with Gi.'s help) reinstalled Windows on that computer, and since then there have been protracted searches for the CD required to install the network driver, the printer, and so on and so forth. The whole has inspired me to learn more about computers and the internet, though so far I have read only a measly handful of pages in a JavaScript textbook from 1997.
I have become so paranoid about the internet that it isn't funny, somewhat justified by a recent problem with Facebook in which my account was purportedly accessed from Munich and I'm not sure whether that is just indirectly our computer or not, and being shut out of my risky Gmail account (which is no longer my risky Gmail account since I used it for Facebook and don't want all those details getting out). I'm sure it takes all kinds to make a world, but I find it increasingly difficult to understand why hackers are willing to waste their time to waste the time of billions of others, in a very invasive way, and to endanger the livelihoods of people who must finish something on their computer for work in a given time, and so on. Even sociopolitical hackery like 4chan's on VISA or whoever in retaliation for barring donations to Wikileaks is in the end a pain in the hindquarters for everyone besides the executives who promulgate such decisions. I find it darnedly tedious to change passwords so often and can't be certain that information recovery, etc., isn't phishing. Besides I hate the laxity with which the sphere of internet privacy is regarded by governments and courts.
Reading the news, listening to music, drawing things, writing things, corresponding with friends and businesses and so on, commenting on things you see and hear or do, are all profoundly private things. Crime, politics, and the intentional offer of goods and services are public things, and even there one has more choices in real life — for example, if one has a shop one can choose its neighbourhood and therefore have a manageable category of customers whose seriousness one can gauge in person, instead of being open to any customer, spurious, honest, or otherwise. Though I admit that here at the bookshop there has been non-virtual spam, too, some of it well-meaning and some of it truly not kosher.
Anyway, this has become a long and fairly indiscriminate ramble despite the ex cathedra principle. But I'll call it stream of consciousness and send it.
*
Words are like leaves, and where they most abound
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
(Alexander Pope in An Essay on Criticism)
I've been here at the bookshop for an hour or so, and so far have had little to do except pull out a letter from the mail slot and record its arrival in my chronicle of events. There is a bag of gummy bears which accompanied a past shipment from the book delivery service which we use, and I have been profiting by that, and I read a small portion of The Age of Napoleon, lit a cone of incense, and began revising the beginning of a blog post about Persuasion. Altogether I have done a lot of draft work for the Lighthouse blog, but after spending much time over The Canterville Ghost yesterday decided that it would be best to write about it when I'm older, because my insights seemed neither very original nor very profound, I wasn't quite reading the story in the spirit in which it was written, and besides the draft post itself didn't correspond to my ideal of a book review. Whether rightly or wrongly I have had the sense in the past months of having to write anything I write ex cathedra, as it were, and not to publish anything which I wouldn't still find reasonably accurate, good and worthwhile in ten years. What this partly means is to write a good deal and follow trains of thought as far as they go before deciding to remove unimportant or imperfect passages and to boil down the rest, or to abandon it entirely as a sacrifice on the altar of literary judgment.
Where writing is concerned the historical tales are dormant. The newest incarnation of the one set in the time of Henry VIII began well, but I felt that I had reached not the 16th century but rather an odd intermediary point, and besides there were still a great many details to research and character traits to figure out. Only the plot could come on its own, since I have blatantly filched the outline from elsewhere and as for the rest have no reason not to think that the story will come of itself as I write, which has been the case in the past and is much more enjoyable through the element of surprise than most things my plodding brain could evolve. Recently I started a scientific book by Marat, in which he describes the origins of the modern understanding of electricity, and though not disposed to like him politically found myself liking the book. Other than that I have done precious little for the French Revolution research. The Age of Napoleon has reached the Age of Napoleon and mostly left behind the Revolution, so its continuing pertinence is slight.
Yesterday evening Ge. and Papa prepared a large dinner of Indonesian noodles, as it is termed in our family, and I helped cut up the leeks for it. My latest method is to remove the outermost layer or two, rinse the leek, chop off the stalk to be sliced, then to remove the outermost leaf or two, rinse it, chop off the stalk, and so on and so forth, and if it falls apart to "reconstitute" it. I was worried that the purple-silvered leaves would be tough, but they melted away. It was delicious and I had two large portions of it. Other than that I made carrot cake twice in the last week of November, once with a cream cheese, butter, and icing sugar frosting which was to my dismay yellow and fluid instead of white and stiff, and once with thick icing concocted of icing sugar, warm water, vanilla extract, and Cointreau. The second icing was fiendishly saccharine but I had no objection.
The next project I am meditating is a dulce de leche coffee: hot coffee, dulce de leche dissolved in it, kahlua, sugared whipping cream, and grated chocolate. I believe that would be called "moreish" in the British jargon. I found it on the website of a famous cooking blogger from, I think, Oklahoma, whose website is recommended on Jezebel quite often and which quite reliably has recipes for things my siblings would actually eat. Then there is a butterscotch eggnog recipe from the New York Times's food section. Besides I have been thinking of cooking a Scottish meal with a cranachan for dessert, and a medieval banquet with beer and things served on our wooden cutting boards (to be rechristened "trenchers"), and a French breakfast with croissants and delicate meats and brie and jams and hot cocoa (er, chocolat frappé) or tea or coffee or a combination thereof. But since the dishes have been piling up into a species of kitchen Mordor and I am still very antsy about washing the dishes in wintertime after the way my hands blew up and sprouted hives three or so winters ago, these may remain daydreams.
This year the Christmas season has been relaxed and low-key. St. Martin arrived quickly in the midst of other occupations, so I didn't even think of working on a lantern until the day had arrived and pretty much gone; the first Advent Sunday came in with some fanfare; and we celebrated St. Nicholas on the day before, which is to say that I slept in while some of the others had breakfast, and showed up in the early evening to find a lot of chocolate on my plate. When Papa was travelling in the U-Bahn a BVG Nicholas was on his rounds and so he ended up with a teddy bear key chain, and at work Mama received a package containing the Ferrero triumvirate of Rocher, Küsschen, and Mon Cheri. I've been thinking that maybe Christmas is more a holiday for children, which to put it baldly makes theological sense because of the "child" in Christ Child; but though in past years I have felt that I could hear the creaking and groaning of the industrial Christmas machine winding into gear around September and then cranking out a deluge of advertising into January, this year I am an insider at least in the book industry and therefore don't find it so artificial or overwhelming. So I'm not particularly grinchy and, though still inclined to be gloomy about selfconscious, intentional (the German word "vorsätzlich" popped into my head; can't think of the right English term for now) dogoodery and benicery, don't devote that much time to thinking about it.
On television in the past week there was another cooking documentary on Arte, one of my favourite genres. This time the protagonist was a French woman who hunts for truffles with her pig — quite a nice, tidy-looking pink pig as pigs go — and makes black truffle omelette, truffled boiled eggs, chicken stuffed with truffles, and rabbit, and serves the latter to a round of friends each in their own way carrying on a local tradition, for instance hunting truffles with hounds (more expensive than pigs, since they must be trained, and prone to distractions, whereas as long as there are no acorns nearby pigs are apparently exemplary in their devotion to the task at hand) and tending the rabbits.
On the piano I have been looking at Schumann's piano concerto again. I liked it and didn't love it at first, and maybe the same holds true now, but the more I work with it the more I like it and the deeper I dig into its substance. It is teaching me to take time with the music, to tie the notes together better in a legato and to tackle specific scales, and so on. Of course there is a value in playing it as slowly as I am, because it leaves me more time to notice things and because it is much easier to solve problems that crop up at a mild speed than at a furious one, though one can play absentmindedly as easily in one mode as in the other, and I think it is good mental exercise to find enough in the music that one isn't frustrated by the length. I think playing a passage quickly and discovering a macrorhythm or macrophrase is more of a trick than a true enrichment of the music, though of course it is often integral to the music, in composers like Liszt and Bach (where the melody is sometimes very well hidden amid the counterpoint, I think) the music is practically devoid of sense without it, and if one wants to play professionally people demand that one observe it.
I revisited Bach's Concerto in d minor recently, too, and enjoyed it much more than before, because though this is an undignified metaphor it feels like a very meat-and-potatoes sort of music, nourishing and strong and warm, though I still find the second movement desolate — and technical difficulties no longer interfere so much with this quality. Revisiting a Hungarian Rhapsody by Liszt was not as uplifting, though the tedious clinkery of the Friska and so on went reasonably well for sightreading, and I didn't play through to the end. Then I came across the Satie "Gymnopédie" which I remember playing for an exam, and arrangements of The Nutcracker, and the Christmas songbook which I am playing through a couple of songs at a time. Besides there is a Haydn sonata, and anything else which recommends itself at least for a glance.
On the reading front I began to read romance novels on the internet again. It was much easier to do it bravely and cheekily when the only alternative was to do dutiful things, be bored, and become depressed again, and less easy to do it now. It was a little intimidating when we were forced to pay 500 Euros for bit-torrenting (which has also killed some of my enjoyment of YouTube, because I still fear the day when a long letter of twenty-something pages will come listing all of the films I've watched in violation of copyright and extorting a bullshit — pardon the language, but it is suited to the context — sum for each of them) and when a host of viruses, Trojan horses and rootkits and spy agents, ran riot on the computer where I mostly read them. On Sunday, I think, I copied our files onto a USB stick and then (also with Gi.'s help) reinstalled Windows on that computer, and since then there have been protracted searches for the CD required to install the network driver, the printer, and so on and so forth. The whole has inspired me to learn more about computers and the internet, though so far I have read only a measly handful of pages in a JavaScript textbook from 1997.
I have become so paranoid about the internet that it isn't funny, somewhat justified by a recent problem with Facebook in which my account was purportedly accessed from Munich and I'm not sure whether that is just indirectly our computer or not, and being shut out of my risky Gmail account (which is no longer my risky Gmail account since I used it for Facebook and don't want all those details getting out). I'm sure it takes all kinds to make a world, but I find it increasingly difficult to understand why hackers are willing to waste their time to waste the time of billions of others, in a very invasive way, and to endanger the livelihoods of people who must finish something on their computer for work in a given time, and so on. Even sociopolitical hackery like 4chan's on VISA or whoever in retaliation for barring donations to Wikileaks is in the end a pain in the hindquarters for everyone besides the executives who promulgate such decisions. I find it darnedly tedious to change passwords so often and can't be certain that information recovery, etc., isn't phishing. Besides I hate the laxity with which the sphere of internet privacy is regarded by governments and courts.
Reading the news, listening to music, drawing things, writing things, corresponding with friends and businesses and so on, commenting on things you see and hear or do, are all profoundly private things. Crime, politics, and the intentional offer of goods and services are public things, and even there one has more choices in real life — for example, if one has a shop one can choose its neighbourhood and therefore have a manageable category of customers whose seriousness one can gauge in person, instead of being open to any customer, spurious, honest, or otherwise. Though I admit that here at the bookshop there has been non-virtual spam, too, some of it well-meaning and some of it truly not kosher.
Anyway, this has become a long and fairly indiscriminate ramble despite the ex cathedra principle. But I'll call it stream of consciousness and send it.
*
Words are like leaves, and where they most abound
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
(Alexander Pope in An Essay on Criticism)
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