posted by Charlotte at
3/09/2003 12:35:00 PM
3/07/2003
Seeds for Hope I sent off my seed orders the other day. Winter came late to Montana this year, but it's here now, and with a vengence. It's been snowing all week, and cold. The kind of grey winter weather where there is no horizon, just blowing white snow broken by the occasional grey-brown windbreak of dormant cottonwood trees. It is most certainly the dead of winter, and for the first time ever, now that I have a yard where I can really sink a garden in, I got to sit down and fill out the seed orders. I've been working on this order for a while, because while I'm planning to build raised beds, and use the French intensive method of cultivation, I also don't want to get too terribly carried away. I want to plant a lot of different things, but not very many of each, and I'm planning to do a lot of succession planting, especially with the greens. So I got a tiny bit ... obsessive perhaps about this seed order. I actually built a little database listing the seeds, planting instructions, where I ordered them from, days to maturity, things like that. I had to, because I was getting confused between the different catalogues, and although I really miss arugula and chinese broccoli, I didn't want to duplicate my orders, nor did I want to forget something I really like to eat.
It's a specific imaginative pleasure, ordering seeds. In the past I've spent far too much money buying started plants, but now that I have the space to grow seedlings, one of my personal goals is to get better at propagation. So this weekend I'm off to Home Depot to buy propagation supplies: some shop lights with grow-light tubes in them, a heating mat, some seedling trays. It feels like an act of hope to start tomato seedlings when the world outside is still buried under two feet of snow, and our president is waving his finger at us on the tv and dodging all real questions about why this war is necessary. I have this vision of my backyard that I'm working toward ... an English-style kitchen garden, a flagstone patio I want to build, roses and iris along the fencelines, and all of us out there sitting at my table in the endless Montana summer twilight, eating out of the garden and off the grill. I'm still not sure that in a time of war this isn't the worst sort of head-in-the-sand behavior, but on the other hand, at least it's something peaceful, and homegrown, and ... I don't know, green.
I used three catalog companies, Nichols Garden Nursery, Shepherds Seeds, and my favorite over in Idaho, a company I've been waiting ten years to have a garden where I can try their Siberian Tomato varieties: Seed Trust/High Altitude Gardens. So because I have an inherent fondness for lists, and for plant names, here's what I ordered: Carrots: Scarlet Nantes, Touchon Tomatoes: aurora, galina cherry, gold nugget cherry, grushovka, Jaunne flamme Greens: Arugula/Italian wild rustic, Bright Lights Chard, Buttercrunch lettuce, Frisée, Merveille des Quatres Saisons Lettuce, mache, Red Sails Lettuce, Salad Bowl Lettuce, Tyee spinach, True French Sorrel, Wild garden chicory, Wild Garden kale mix, Cima di Rapa Broccoli Raab Chinese Veggies: Golden Flower Kale, White FLower Kale, Pai Tsai (short white stalk bok choy), Yu-Tsai Chinese Rape, Endemame Soybean, Chinese Eggplant Beans/Peas: French Flageolet bush bean, Chinese Long Bean, montana marvel pea, Precovelle Petits pois peas, Vernadon Bush Bean Alliums: Chinese Leek, French Shallots, King Richard Leek Herbs: Chervil, cilantro, Italian Mt. Basil, chives, plainleaf parsley, Survivor Parsley ,Thyme,True greek oregano Other Veggies: Brussel Sprouts, Cornichon cucumbers, Early Wonder Beets, Lemon Cucumbers, harris model parsnip, easter egg radish, French breakfast radish, toma verde tomatillo, cocozelle zucchini, Granpa’s home pepper, Gypsy pepper, Aci Sivri Turkish heirloom Pepper, Flowers: Calendula officianalis, Coreopsis tinctoria (plains coreopsis), Cosmos bipinnatus, Safflower, arnica Montana, Colorado Columbine, echinacea purpurea, Iceland poppy, Oxeye Daisy, Bergamot.
posted by Charlotte at
3/07/2003 08:29:00 AM
3/06/2003
Living Small in Eastern Europe My father, Jim Freeman, has lived in the Czech Republic since 1992 or so, and although for a number of years we didn't really hear from him much, over the last couple of years he and I have developed a nice email relationship. Dad sent his last weekend, and since I have a weakness for draft horses, I thought I'd add it to the blog (although be advised, no one calls me "Char" except that handful of people who knew me before I was six):
Dear Char---
Seems I ought to share my day with you. There are days that just call out
for the sharing and this was one of them. It's almost an essay and I guess
I'll keep it as one, but I thought you'd understand it better than anyone.
I walked Barkley late this morning, up along the creek road past our little
local ski area and on up toward the reservoir. We haven’t been this way for
almost a month, our tours instead up past the pension that stands several
hundred yards above us, then circling further up and around on the blacktop
road. It hasn’t been visibly blacktop for months now either, packed snow
instead and well plowed, easy to walk.
Stuart Horwitz asked me just the other day if I wasn’t ready to “retire” to
a warm climate, but I am a winter man in my bones. I enjoy spring, tolerate
summer, love the fall, but my special season is winter and its wood fires,
heavy snows and the solitude of long days dark.
Anyway, Barkley was true to his Labrador spirit today, taking frequent
wriggling snow baths, nosing this and snuffling out that, being particularly
patient with my human requirement that he sit as occasional cars passed.
Beyond the ski lift, there’s no need of that as the road ends and it’s
closed to all but loggers and cross-country skiers from there up. We didn’t
go all the way up, something I reserve for New Year’s Eve and occasional
guests who want to wear themselves out.
But they’ve been logging for a week, five or six hundred yards up and, it
being Saturday, we came upon a solitary man with two lovely draft horses and
his German shepherd, snaking logs down to the road. They still do that here,
when they’re selectively logging instead of the increasingly cost-effective
clear cuts that scar our mountains as they do all mechanically lumbered
areas back in America. We have two men in our little village who trailer out
pairs of draft horses behind their tractors for just this purpose. But I
don’t often see them at work, more usually confined to a wave as I pass in
the car. So, today was a treat and I wished I’d had a camera. Maybe I’ll go
back. It's possible they do this somewhere in Montana as well, but I kinda
doubt it.
He worked his horses down a skid-path, muddied and churned by their hoofs
and the fallen timber they pulled, one behind the other, he and the dog
following and not a word spoken until the bottom. The first time down, he
chooses a sightline path without too many drops, one they can manage and he
leads, chuckling the Czech language at them as they follow. After that, he
merely accompanies to see that nothing goes amiss, chaining up at one end,
unchaining at the other. Once they know the route, the horses know the work
and all follows from there. It’s as amazing to me as watching sheep-dogs
work a flock, this absolute communication and respect between man and
animal.
There were difficulties with the lead-horse log when they got down to the
stack. The butt dug in and caught, this huge chestnut gelding unable to get
footing enough to move it and “stumped.” Maybe that’s where the term comes
from. Man and animal, they worked it out together patiently, neither loosing
their cool, the woodman speaking softly and never touching his horse. The
second horse stood waiting behind, without much interest. If you’re looking
for an inquisitive animal, a horse is a poor choice. A few cross-country
skiers piled up, their run down from the reservoir interrupted by the
blockage. Like me, they watched, fascinated. Like me, they will tell this
story. The gelding turned uphill and jerked, hooves churning in the thawed
ground, came back around and lunged, backed off and waited. Tried a
different direction and the log rolled a half-roll, came free and moved.
Together, they got it lined up with the pile and Barkley and I moved on as
well. This work didn’t need a crowd.
Further up, it flattens to a small meadow and even though it was still
selective cutting, loggers were able to use four-wheel drive tractors. The
area was understandably churned up in wide arcs and cross-arcs. Without
doubt it was a more economic moving of timber, but without romance, without
the quiet words and understanding between man and animal. They don’t work
Saturdays, these machinery guys. When we came back down-trail, it was lunch
break and horses heads were deep within oat buckets, the shepherd worrying
some scraps and the man eating a sandwich, his back turned to the trail as
if he wished to be deeper into the woods.
This small miracle on an ordinary dog walk has stuck with me all day and I
somehow feel compelled to tell you about it. As if the telling will preserve
it in amber, because you and I both know this day is submitting to modern
methods and there are no young men learning the work. As I write “learning
the work,” I’m struck by the fact that this is work at its most honest. Not
the job we do, not the place we put in our hours for a fee, but the
cooperation between man and animal that our great grandfathers would have
instantly recognized.
Four hundred yards toward home, the modern world revealed itself (as if I’d
thought it gone or wished it gone). The parking area jammed with cars, lines
at the lift, skiers carving down the mountain to be mechanically towed back
up for another run. They’ll be high spirited tonight, then relaxed around a
fire or at dinner, eager for tomorrow and totally unaware of what transpired
a quarter mile up the trail. As I might have been, if Barkley hadn’t tired
of the same old walk and urged me elsewhere. I mark it as a wonderful day
and one of the reasons that keep me rooted to this country.
Anyway, I thought you’d enjoy it. Buy yourself a Subaru for those trips over
the pass.
Love from here---
Dad
posted by Charlotte at
3/06/2003 07:35:00 AM
3/02/2003
Crisis of Faith at LivingSmall Well, I've been having something of a crisis of faith about this whole blogging thing -- not about blogging itself, but rather, about how on earth blogging about my own tiny little corner of the universe could in any way be a meaningful activity in the face of the global crisis into which our government is leading us. I mean really, we're going to war and I'm blogging about cleaning? about floor machines? Compared to really insightful bloggers like Body and Soul, or Rittenhouse, or Blue Streak, or the Nielsen Haydens at Electrolite and Making Light, I started feeling like a total slacker. But on the other hand, those folks are all doing such a magnificent job finding "the goods" and sending the rest of us the news, that writing that sort of blog just didn't feel like my role. I learned a long time ago in my own writing practice that we don't all do the same things well -- for example, I don't write short stories. I've written a few, but they're not great, and it's not a form I feel compelled by -- the novel is my territory, the bigger format is what compels me. (Accepting this was a whole different crisis of faith, because after all, I was in graduate creative writing programs for seven years, and what does one do in workshop if not short stories?) So I stewed about my blogging problem for most of the week without coming up with any kind of an answer, and hence, my blog went untended.
And then Mr. Rogers died. I have to say, this felt like a very bad sign from the universe. If even Mr. Rogers was checking out, if even Mr.Rogers wasn't going to stick around and remind us, in his gentle way that we all live in a neighborhood, and that despite being afraid much of the time, the answer to our fear lies in loving our neighbors, then how on earth were we going to get through this? The thing about Mr. Rogers was, that he was the one guy who never let us down. He was always his same kind, gentle, authentic self and with Mr. Rogers there were no scandals, no latter-day revelations that he was really an evildoer or liar or in any way different than the person he told us he was, than the person he demonstrated to us that he was. He was the guy who told a room full of self-centered television executives to bow their heads for ten seconds of live airtime and think of someone who had influenced them to be good. And they did. And we did at home. Mr. Rogers dying felt like the last nail in the coffin of hope.
Nonetheless, I went about my business. Edited technical docs all day, tried to write another page or two of my novel every morning, and found myself yesterday, on a cold and sunny Saturday afternoon circing around two of the four apple trees in my backyard on an eight-foot ladder doing some serious pruning. Dear departed Mrs. Warnick, who owned this house before me, was quite a gardener, but she was very very old by the time she left the building, and her sons are, from what I gather (it's a small town, remember) something of a shiftless lot. So it had been a few years since the trees were pruned. And it's that time of year here in Montana. So I got up there on the ladder with my hacksaw and my loppers, and I lopped. I lopped off all those suckers that were just going straight up into the sky, all those criss-crossing branches, hacksawed off the dead wood. I kept thinking of my pruning coach in the Bar and Grill the night before who told me "you can't overprune an apple tree." I'd lop for a while, then get down, stand back, take a look at the overall shape of my trees. It's a gestalt kind of thing, pruning. Four hours later, I had a big pile of apple branches, some of which I passed over the fence to my neighbor Paula so she could put them in water inside and force some blooms out of them.
And then I thought, but what? I'm going to blog about pruning my trees? That's sort of boring. Personally very satisfying, especially as the yard is starting to come together a little bit, but compared to the nation going to war, my little tale of being happy in my backyard while pruning seemed, to borrow a word from Jim Harrison, otiose.
Today was the last of the Danforth Film Festival which finished up by showing Bowling for Columbine. To tell the truth, I wasn't as excited about this one as were a lot of people in town. I figured it would just be the same sort of Michael Moore ambush that we'd gotten enough of on his television show, but that's the beauty of buying the pass -- you go to all the films because you've already paid for them. What I didn't expect was Moore's careful dissection of the culture of fear in America and its relation to violence of both the personal and national variety. The South-Park-esque cartoon history of America as a story of scared white men lashing out at others in order to alleviate their fear, which is, of course, bottomless, seemed like a particularly brilliant exegesis of the Four Noble Truths. What I really didn't expect was a movie in which Marilyn Manson is the voice of reason as he deconstructs the cynical sybiosis between fearmongering and consumerism (they make us afraid with sensational "news" broadcasts, then show us seductive ads for products that will soothe us, then scare us again). As the movie progressed, I got thinking about fear. My morning started out with a really angry email in reply to a UN peace petition I'd forwarded (that had been sent to me by my dad). Now, I'd actually sent this to my old boyfriend, with whom I've stayed in touch all these years, and the reply from his wife was along the lines of "how could you send this to me?" and was full of dudgeon about how she was a lifelong republican, and there was lots of of might-makes-right reasoning and arguments about how all the nukes had actually ended the cold war, and how we have a right to go invade all these countries because they threaten us. I didn't actually read it that carefully (since the whole argument just kind of scared me), but since they live in Manhattan, and because this is someone of whom I'm fond, I tried to just say "we respectfully disagree" -- but it rankled all day. It was so full of fear and lashing out. I grew up in a family where when afraid, people lashed out (some of them still do). It took me a long time, and a lot of therapy, and a return to Faith (of my own odd hybrid Catholic/Buddhist variety) to realize that being lashed out at had never actually made me want to be a better person, that it was only those people who had been kind even when I didn't deserve it who inspired me to be kinder, more loving, nicer. Who taught me that being nice didn't mean you were a pushover, or weak.
So I was thinking of this while watching Bowling for Columbine, and it occurred to me that maybe there is a place in the blogosphere for my little tales of pruning, for my little tales of reclaiming this patch of ground way out here in Montana. It occurred to me that one could possibly see building a garden in a time of war as a small act of rebellion, as a way of manifesting hope in a time of despair. And then it hit me, as I was walking home, that Lent begins this week, and perhaps as my lenten practice, I'll concentrate on resisting the temptation to live in fear. It's personal. It's small. But what if I just started here, in my little space in Montana, and went to Mass a lot during Lent (I'm going to try for daily Mass, but we'll have to see), and what if I sat on my zafu and did some lovingkindess meditation? What if, radically, I tried to do some lovingkindness meditation for those people I know who believe in this war? Starting with the wife of my ex-beau? Maybe, although I'm not quite ready to commit to this yet, I could try even to send some lovingkindness energy out toward Cheney and Bush (that would be a lenten pennance!). What if I ordered seeds for my vegetable garden and built the raised beds as a peace protest? Maybe, if I try to be conscious about it, maybe if I try to consecrate my little house as a space dedicated to peaceful thought, to right speech, to growing those things I can grow here, then maybe even if it's a small effort, it can be a place from which good energy can ripple out? I don't know what else to do, really. It still seems like kind of a futile, or potentially self-important kind of project. But it might just be what I can do. I called this blog LivingSmall because I wanted to explore the challenges and ramifications of choosing to keep things smaller, of resisting the American siren call of bigness. So maybe in ways I didn't really understand at the time I was working toward a place where tales of pruning, of growing a backyard vegetable garden, of walking to the movies might be my own small answer to those enormous terrifying forces at work out there.
posted by Charlotte at
3/02/2003 04:03:00 PM
2/24/2003
Temptation strikes at LivingSmall: On Sunday, I clean my house. My brother takes the dogs for the day, and I clean, then go to whatever movie the Danforth Film Festival is showing in the afternoon. It's not a very big house, about 1000 square feet, so it's no gargantuan task, but I have hardwood floors throughout, and two dogs who during the midweek thaw tracked in big globs of mud from the plowed field in my backyard that will eventually be a vegetable garden. I did a little mid-week spot mopping, but by the time I got around to real cleaning, there were actual drifts of dirt in the corners.
My usual process is to vacuum everything, including the couple of kilms I have in my office and the living room, then pull up the rugs and vacuum underneath them, then mop. Here's where I almost fell off the LivingSmall wagon this week. Suddenly, looking at my house I was overcome with dreams of the Hoover FloorMate . I went online and read some reviews at epinions, where users wrote glowingly of the ease of use, of the way their Hoover FloorMates glided across hardwood floors, scrubbing, mopping, squeegee-ing up the water. I read about the trigger feature where, when one encounters say, a muddy footprint, one squeezes the trigger and the machine, the wonderous machine gives the spot a little extra juice and like magic! the muddy footprint disappears. I spent a couple of hours entranced by this dream. I came home from breakfast (sorry dogs, no walk when the temp is below zero) and came this close to walking over to the hardware store on Main Street, a mere 2 blocks away and plopping down one hundred and sixty nine dollars for the promise of effortless cleaning.
And then I remembered the EasyBake Oven. I remembered the weeks before Christmas when I fantasized about how great my life would be if only I had an EasyBake Oven. And I remember my disapointment when I discovered that the guts of the EasyBake oven was a light bulb. It wasn't magical. It wasn't wonderful. I used it a couple of times and then, tired of the rubbery little cakes that didn't taste like anything, it got stuffed in the back of the closet.
Even in my Sunday morning dreamy state, even looking at floors I really didn't want to spend two hours cleaning properly, even besotted by visions of the Hoover FloorMate, I knew that buying another machine was not the answer. I knew, deep in my heart, that the Hoover FloorMate violates the tenets of living small on several fronts: it's specialized, it's another machine, and worst of all, it requires special fluids. Anything that requires one to use manufacturer-specific fluids must be avoided. Standing in my kitchen, fighting the temptation to run two blocks over to the Ace Hardware store where this magical machine was calling its siren call to me, I thought of special fluids and remained strong.
I came to my senses. I got over it. I have a perfectly good vacuum cleaner. I have a bucket and a couple of different mops. I vacuumed. I pulled up the rugs. I mopped with a little Murphy's Oil Soap in a bucket of hot water. The sunlight came through the windows and turned my douglas fir floors a lovely honey yellow. The house smelled good. It was clean. I went to the movies one hundred and sixty-nine dollars less poor than I would have been had I succumbed to the seduction, the oh-so-professional seduction of the American advertising machine.
posted by Charlotte at
2/24/2003 07:03:00 AM
2/20/2003
Sylvia Plath, Baking and Feminism: There have been a number of articles on the web lately about Kate Moses new book Wintering, a fictional account of Sylvia Plath's last months when she was writing Ariel. The piece that got me thinking was the essay Kate Moses wrote for the Guardian called "Baking with Sylvia". In this essay, Moses talks about how for both herself and for Sylvia Plath, baking was a way of creating order out of chaos, and how as she found herself up against her deadline for the book, Moses also found herself baking on a near-daily basis, much as Plath had those last months while living in London and writing Ariel.
Baking is one of those things that tends to sort cooks into categories, because in order to be a good baker, you have to be able to really follow the directions. I'm an okay baker -- I have a couple of standbys -- simple fruit tarts, a fluffy yellow sponge cake filled with fresh fruit and iced with whipped cream that I cribbed from Dom Deluise's fabulous cookbook: Eat This...It'll Make You Feel Better:.... But even that cake, a cake so good I've had strange men look up at potlucks and say "who made this, I want to marry her," belies my essential inability to follow a recipe with exactitude. Dom's sainted mother, whose recipe this is, uses canned peaches with heavy syrup, and sliced almonds; I like defrosted frozen raspberries and mint leaves, and sometimes I put custard in the middle like Dom's mom, sometimes I don't. Real bakers don't improvise like this. Real bakers weigh the flour. Real bakers actually take the knife and level off the flour in the measuring cup. My brother is a real baker, and has wowed Christmas crowds with stunning renditions of Jacques Pepin's Paris Brest. In high school, we could always tell when my beautiful cousin Dede was having trouble with food again because she'd start baking, turning out exquisite cakes that she wouldn't dream of eating. Me, I'm a sloppier cook -- which is why I bake bread. Bread is forgiving of improvisation, even the sourdough bread I've been experimenting with the past couple of months. There were a few brick-like loaves, and the round loaves keep coming out too flat, but for the most part, it's all bread. Nice clean wholesome bread made with sourdough starter, locally grown and milled wheat, and a little salt.
So what does any of this have to do with Plath? Nothing I guess, except that it struck me as I read Moses' essay about her own baking, and its relationship to the inevitable tension between writing and family life ("As I neared the end, my husband and two children were getting used to my conspicuous absence, or my thousand-mile stare when I was physically present ... My five-year-old was sometimes heard muttering in the hallway, 'Mommy's behind the door.'"), I became sad for Plath, sad for Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich, sad for all those women who lived in a world where baking and intellectual activity, where home life and poetry were considered mutually exclusive. I remember my own terror, my own worries that if I got married, had kids, had a domestic life, I'd never be a writer -- and this was thirty years after Plath, Sexton, Rich, Lessing. Despite my fears, I was living in a world where this juggling act was at least possible. How much more difficult must it have been for them? The continual juggling between family life and intellectual life?
Salon ran an excerpt from Wintering, and it looks interesting. I seem to keep blogging about books I haven't read yet, and neglecting the ones I have read.I'm not sure what that's all about -- as I work my way through the pile I'll try to reoprt back more regularly.
posted by Charlotte at
2/20/2003 01:06:00 PM
2/18/2003
Living Small in my Small Town I've been home since Friday night and I'm only now beginning to recover enough to even think about adding to the blog. Five days in San Jose was simply draining ... aside from the work things, which are too boring to blog about, just being around all those people, all that traffic, just the feeling of being in public for five days absolutely wore me out. Getting home was a trial, since there had been fog or snow or something in Salt Lake City that morning, which, since Salt Lake is the Delta hub, screwed up all the Delta flights. I flew from San Jose to Salt Lake sitting beside a nice man whose pregnant wife had gone off to the hospital that morning, and he was worried and trying to get back to Colorado Springs. Funny how sometimes travelling just seems like such a bad idea, how we get so used to the fact that we can cross the country in four or five hours that we forget that sometimes you just can't get from here to there. (I hope he got home and everything was okay with the baby.) I got back to Bozeman just in time for another fun drive over the pass through heavy sleet and trucks in the ditch. I finally got back to town, and stopped in for what was left of happy hour at the Bar and Grill. There was my brother, my friends Scott and Jennifer, and the usual Friday evening characters (the nice lady who talks way too much about nothing, the talented cabinetmaker who drinks and becomes unreliable after about four in the afternoon). Glen the bartender made me a nice big gin and tonic and just knowing that people had been discussing the fact that the pass must be bad because it was taking me over an hour to get back from Bozeman made me feel happy, and home. I was back in my small town, where I'm known, where I'm not just one more anonymous person. That's why I moved here, why I wanted a smaller life, a life small enough that I could know its contours.
posted by Charlotte at
2/18/2003 06:44:00 AM
2/10/2003
Even cafeteria Asian food tastes amazing after four months in southeastern Montana, which despite its many many charms is an ethnic food wasteland. I'm in San Jose for work this week, and today was something of an epic. I left Livingston at five this morning, only to run into whiteout conditions on Bozeman Pass. Who needs coffee before an early-morning flight when you can have a big old jolt of adrenaline? (Don't worry Dad, I'm fine.)
So, by the time I got to Cisco, I was hungry, but I had a lot to do, and about fifty emails to answer, so I just popped down to the cafeteria in my building, where I had the "bento special". This wasn't real bento, it wasn't even particularly great bento ... it was just a plate with rice, a couple of potstickers, some fried tofu, and some kimchee ... but after months in Montana, where even this very ordinary, not very good Asian food would be considered hugely exotic, well, let's just say I was a happy girl and got through the afternoon just fine. If I have to leave Montana for a week, just when we've finally gotten snow, I guess staying in a hotel surrounded by two enormous malls full of Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants sort of makes up for it.
posted by Charlotte at
2/10/2003 04:52:00 PM
2/05/2003
To Blog or to Ski? Blogging has been hampered by the belated but beautiful snowfall we've had this week. I bought a season's pass for Bridger Bowl this fall, but I haven't gotten as much use out of it as I'd hoped. I thought I was going to be able to sneak out a little more during the week than I've managed, and I might have been more inspired to make the drive over the hill had our friend Bill Campbell not lured me up to Suce Creek for some cross country action earlier this week. I haven't cross-country skiied since I came west in 1988, but I did a fair amount of in in college because, well, it was the midwest and it's flat. But I kept my old skis, which my grandmother gave me ages ago (she bought them thinking she'd ski around our farm, but decided it was too much work and went back to her snowmobile). They're nice old wood skis, so when Bill called on Monday and said he was taking the dogs up in the afternoon, I dusted them off (literally), stopped and bought some wax on the way out of town, and decided to give it a whirl.
It was great! Twenty minutes out of town we were at the bottom of the road. Confronted with a foot of fresh powder, the dogs went wild with joy. I strapped on my old woodies, laced up my lovely, beat up old leather telemark boots, and off we went. About forty minutes later we'd skiied up through gorgeous pine forest, dogs romping up and down the hillsides, tunnelling through the snow and then bursting out with a big Broadway-baby ta-da as if to show us how unbelievably clever they were. It was a workout to be sure, but even someone as aerobically-challenged as myself could keep up and have a good time. And then we got to ski down the road ... which on skinny little wooden skis with no edges, and four dogs, some of whom didn't really understand the concept, romping in front of me, well it was as much challenge as anyone could want (although I did collide with my Raymond, my 2-year old dog. He just freaked out and panicked when he saw me coming up behind him ... but what's the fun of skiing if you never fall down and roll around in the snow?).
I love downhill skiing, because I'm essentially lazy and appreciate having a lift to haul my sorry ass up the hill, and because I have a bit of the speed freak in me, and I really love the sensation of flying down the hill, making good turns, that feeling you get when you fall in with the right rhythm and it's all coming together. But I have to say, as someone who has to work more than I did when I was in my twenties and could ski every day, I really like the option to sneak out of the office and be back at my desk two hours later, having had a great time outside, having gotten a little exercise and some astonishing views of the Paradise Valley, with tired dogs flopped on their beds, redolent with that smell only happy wet dogs give off. I've been up there every day this week, seduced by the light equipment, the easy access, the exercise for me and the dogs, the happy faces of my fellow neighbors who have also bugged out of work a little early to catch the last daylight up in the mountains.
posted by Charlotte at
2/05/2003 11:12:00 AM
1/30/2003
White House Postpones Poetry Symposium
Both MobyLives and Blog of a Bookslut have blogged this today, but what really struck me was the following statement from the White House: "While Mrs. Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum."
While I appreciate that the First Lady is at least interested in books, and in promoting literacy, one has to wonder where on earth she got the idea that the "literary" is not political. Please. Good for Sam Hamill, Rita Dove, and Stanley Kunitz for leading the charge and refusing to be co-opted as some kind of safe, "nice," "literary" sideshow.
Sam Hamill and Poets Against the War are calling on American poets to make " Feb. 12 a day of Poetry Against the War. We will compile an anthology of protest to be presented to the White House on that afternoon." Come on all you poets out there, let's show the White House that poetry is not some nice safe occupation for an afternoon, no light diversion from the events of the day, but is, in the immortal words of Adrienne Rich, something "You must write, and read, as if you life depended on it." (What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics)
posted by Charlotte at
1/30/2003 03:03:00 PM
1/28/2003
Sometimes all you can do is iron the napkins. I've discovered that of the blogs I read daily, the ones I really look forward to are the domestic blogs, particularly Julie, and Leah who Struggles in her Bungalow Kitchen. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've been thinking a lot about domesticity lately, and the unexpected pleasures I've discovered in domestic life. I've come late to this, having spent much of my twenties and thirties avoiding domestic entanglement. I had one of those childhoods that make one want to get out of the house as soon as you can, and never come back (if you can get away with it). I have always been an instinctive feminist, wanting a life out there, not wanting to get stuck in the house with kids and sticky surfaces to wipe. The core image of domestic life in my head was my Aunt Lynn, standing at her kitchen sink, staring blankly out the window and secretly drinking herself to death while we all swirled around her, while she shooed us out the door with a popsicle so she could go back to standing there, staring and hopeless. All I knew was that wasn't going to be me. I was out of there. I was going to have a free and adventurous life.
And yet. A few years ago, when I moved back to the Bay Area after finishing my PhD, I was not in great shape. My free and adventurous life had left me at 34 with a mountain of student loan debt, and unpublished novel manuscript that none of my thesis advisors even liked. I had mananged to finish my degree, but I was looking at a very bleak academic job market, where as an unpublished novelist, without the long list of requisite publications, well, the prospects were pretty grim for finding anything other than an adjunct position. Frankly, I thought I'd failed. Totally failed. Hence, I figured it was time to try something new, time to just find a "real job" and get on with my life. So my brother and I agreed to be roommates. Neither of us could afford a place on our own, and we've always been close, so we thought we'd give it a shot. And little by little I discovered that I liked domestic life. I liked making a home. Of course, it was a little odd that I was making a home with my brother and not a boyfreind or husband, but on the other hand, since neither of us had ever really had a home, not since our parents divorced when we were quite young, we figured that an unconventional but pleasant home was better than no home. I discovered I had a talent for it, that keeping a house didn't have to be a task that was so overwhelming that you might, as my mother too often did, take to your bed in a satin bathrobe. I discovered that you could devise a system, pay the bills, do the shopping, cook dinner at night. That in doing these things one could create a place that was safe and welcoming, a place you could come home to and feel relief and happiness walking in the door. A place you could rely on to be the same today as it was yesterday. That having a home makes taking other kinds of risks possible, that it gives you the emotional space to perhaps sit down and think about what kind of life you'd like to create for yourself. I eventually picked up a second job, teaching in the Creative Writing Program at St. Mary's, which was a great experience, and which allowed me to stockpile a little money. That, combined with the fact that I had also managed to find a corporate job at Cisco Systems and they were willing to let me telecommute full time, well, for the first time ever, I discovered I had the ability to choose what I wanted to do next. For the first time ever, I wasn't running away from something. It's been a year this week that I first came up here and saw my little house, saw that although the living room had horrible green carpet, it also had great light through the southern windows, that although it needed a roof, and wiring, my little house hadn't ever been remodeled, so at least I wouldn't have to pull out a lot of bad 1970's cabinetry. It was a blank slate, but it turned out to be my blank slate.
A year later, I'm in my little house. I never thought I'd own my own home. For most of last year, while I was trying to pull this deal together, there were times I thought I'd never get this deal done. It still needs a lot of work, but it's a safe and welcoming home. People like coming over for dinner. I'm planning the garden. And yet amidst my little tiny domestic island, I found myself last night, in the basement doing laundry while watching the news. There's all this terrifying talk of war, we have this ridiculous President and his henchmen who represent all that is wrong with our culture, and I find that all I can do is iron my nice clean napkins that have just come out of the dryer. Ironing napkins somehow seems to sum up how far I've come in some odd way. First of all, cloth napkins are an essential element of Living Small -- paper napkins are both wasteful and aesthetically horrible. Cloth napkins do cost a little bit, especially if, like me, you have a weakness for Williams Sonoma French prints, but over the long run, since you use them over and over, they make more sense. And ironing the napkins is both easy and incredibly satisfying. They're square. They come out so nice. And in the face of this madness, madness over which I have no control at all (I've written the letters, I've made the phone calls), all I can really do is to try to create this space. This space that makes sense. This space where I can have people over and we can at least discuss our horror, our opposition. That maybe a nice dinner, an ironed napkin, can help create the kind of space where we can shore one another up during this terrifing time, where we can plan the resistance.
posted by Charlotte at
1/28/2003 09:23:00 AM
1/22/2003
Small Town Life Here's what I love about living in a small town. My block has about six houses on each side of the street. Ed is my neighbor across the street. He's an older gent, and he was in flooring for his working life. When I first moved in, Ed brought me a trivet he'd made from leftover flooring samples ... it's perfect to go under my rice cooker. Well, Ed owns a snow blower, and it snowed last night, about a foot and a half. Now Mike lives on my side of the block, two houses down from me. He's my hippie housepainter neighbor, and the first person I met here. When the weather is nice, Mike sits on his front porch in the morning drinking coffee and saying hello to people. For the first week or so that I was here, Mike and the guy at the hardware store were just about the only people I spoke to all day long.
Here's how the neighborhood works when there's snow. Ed snowblows the sidewalk on his side of the street, and then hands the snowblower off to Mike, who does our side of the street. While Mike was snowblowing over here, I looked out the window and there was Ed, shoveling the steps for his next door neighbor, Minnie. Well, actually it looked like he was expending as much energy convincing Minnie, who broke her hip last year, not to shovel her own steps as he was in getting this little chore done for her. We worry about Minnie, she's gettiing quite frail, but there she was in her little pink parka and a stocking cap, with her shovel in one hand, ready to take on her front steps. And there was Ed, who is no spring chicken himself, chatting her up to keep her safely on her own top step while he cleared the snow to the street for her. It's a nice way to wake up in the morning, watching Ed and Mike taking care of our little block. .
posted by Charlotte at
1/22/2003 09:03:00 AM
1/21/2003
Bookslut notes that The Lovely Bones story lives on, and points to this totally inane conversation on Poynter which seems to argue that David Mendelsohn's review could only be motivated by "backlash" against the book's commercial success, and that critics should go easy on first novels, particularly if they are heavily promoted. There are so many holes in this argument that I don't actually know where to start, so I think I'll just start by saying, as an author, that any review which surpasses the level of "liking/disliking" and addresses the artistic ambition and accomplishment of a work is so rare that, once one gets over the shock, it must be a relief. I'm sure that if I was Alice Sebold, I'd be completely dismayed by the NYRB review, but on the other hand, who else is going to challenge her to set the bar higher with the next book? Sebold's no frail flower, she's certainly survived worse than one serious but critical review, and I have every expectation that her next novel will be interesting, and perhaps will avoid some of the pitfalls of the first one.
What I found useful in the NYRB review, however, was the way he used The Lovely Bones as a jumping-off place for a discussion of our current cultural mania for pablum comfort, for our desperate need to believe, in Mendelsohn's words, that "we needen't really be sad, that nothing is, in the end, really scary." As one who wrote a dark novel, a novel in which everything does not work out okay, and everyone does not come out at the end feeling that chimera emotion "closure," I can testify to the force of the cultural backlash against this particular idea. (At my 20th high school reunion last summer, you would have though from the reaction of the suburban moms, that I had actually taken a small child out into the woods and lost her myself.) Somehow in America, we have become incapable of acknowledging that things, more often than not, do not work out well, that life can offer up events from which we may never "heal," that "closure" is a myth.
Which brings me to the inimitable Jeanne d'Arc and her discussion this morning of how prosecutors and the media have tapped into this powerful myth, how they have held the death penalty out as a carrot to the survivors of murder victims and have promised them that if they press for the death penalty, they will achieve this mythical state of "closure" upon the execution of their loved one's murderer. Now, maybe it's the Catholic in me, but I've never understood why, as a nation, we seem to sanction revenge in this way. Haven't any of these people ever read the New Testament? Isn't Jesus the guy who makes the radical argument that it is only in forgiving those who have trespassed against us that we are sanctified? But I digress, what I really wanted to point out here is the manifold nature of this myth of "closure."
There is no closure.
People never "get over" heartbreak and grief. We simply learn to live with it the way one eventually accepts that the broken leg will always ache when damp weather moves in. It was the Buddha who taught that the First Noble Truth is suffering, and that it is our resistance to and denial of suffering which causes more suffering. Suffering itself isn't "bad" -- suffering just is. It is our attachment to the idea that suffering is bad, our attachment to the idea that suffering is to be avoided or denied, our attachment to the idea that suffering shouldn't be happening to us, because we are such nice people, we did everything right, it isn't fair that is the problem. As a nation, as a culture, I'd like to respectfully suggest that we all just grow up please.
Stories matter. It matters that The Lovely Bones elides the true nature of suffering. It matters because the fact that the book has sold millions of copies demonstrates how badly people want to believe that we can get through life without growing up, without facing the inevitable reality of suffering and injustice. Stories matter because in our desperation to deny that suffering and injustice are real, we promulgate false stories to the victims of real crimes. We hold out hope for a coherent narrative, a narrative in which everything will make sense, in which all the loose ends will be neatly tied together. Stories matter because our desperate quest for a coherent narrative leads us to participate in human sacrifice, to participate in a system where the point was simply to sentence someone, anyone, to death, so that we can claim "closure" and "healing" for the victims of crime.
George Ryan may have been a tarnished govenor (not the first in Illinois, by a long shot) but read the speech. He was willing to stand up and declare that we cannot, as a free society, afford the cost of this false story. That we cannot be a nation that is willing to offer up for public sacrifice the lives of these men and women, too many of whom are not guilty of the crimes of which they have been accused. That we cannot afford to be a society willing to kill innocent people. It was a brave and noble thing to do, and I for one, applaud him.
posted by Charlotte at
1/21/2003 08:14:00 AM
1/15/2003
Marion Cunningham, one of my food heros, has a great piece in today's San Francisco Chronicle about the demise of family cooking and mealtime. I don't get it. My family life as a kid was pretty chaotic, but my mother always cooked, and taught both my brother and I to cook along with her. Most of my happy memories of my Mom's house revolve around days we spent cooking, either experimenting with new dishes, or cooking things we all knew we liked. I'll never forget the first curry I ever made, with instructions from a woman I remember only as Ann-from-Iran. I'd never used fresh ginger before, and when I put it in the blender and chopped it up, well! I think of that moment, that explosive aroma, and turning to my mother and saying "Smell this!" almost every time I cook with ginger.
At my father's house, we ate dinner together, at the dining room table, at least three or four times a week. We were expected to have good table manners, and to make conversation about the events of the day. Throughout most of high school my father and I debated politics at the dinner table, and I still credit him with making me feel comfortable enough with public debate that I was routinely one of the only women in my graduate school classes who spoke up. (And all these years later, when his political beliefs have taken a 180, it's pretty entertaining to hear him rant about the Bush administration. I keep reminding him that when I made the same argument in high school, he was on the other side.)
I don't understand my friends with kids. I know life is hectic, but I have almost no friends whose children are capable of sitting at the table for the length of a real meal without complaining about the food, making a mess of something, or just making polite conversation. I mean, even when I was a nanny, for a four year old with Down Syndrome, we went to lunch on Saturday afternoons to practice manners. Her mother wanted her to have good manners, because this would make her life easier in the long run. Are all these sports and after school activities really more important than family life? I wonder. But go read Marion Cunningham's article. For one thing, she's more articulate than I am and she makes a very salient political point that in a world of scarce resources, "convenience" foods, with their excessive packaging, their expense, and the way they undermine family life are a corrosive force.
posted by Charlotte at
1/15/2003 09:46:00 AM
Snow! For the first time in forty-one days, we have snow. Piles of snow. A foot of snow. Our local ski area is, for the first time all winter reporting powder conditions! Whooo hooo ... of course, I'm working today, which is why I'm here posting rather than up there skiing, but perhaps later this week I can play a little hooky.
posted by Charlotte at
1/15/2003 09:24:00 AM
1/13/2003
Bookslut pointed out this review of The Lovely Bones at the New York Review of Books. I just finished reading Alice Sebold's first book, her memoir, Lucky. The most interesting aspect of the memoir was it's narration of Sebold's changing relationship to her own victimhood, and the ways that her attempts to deny and repress the emotional impact of being violently raped hobbled her emotional and artistic life for many years.
I haven't read The Lovely Bones yet myself, but I want to use Mendelsohn's essay as a jumping-off place for a discussion (which I assume will be ongoing on this blog), about the the ways that fiction, like all art, must not simply reaffirm our perceptions of the world, but rather, must challenge us to re-examine our most deeply held beliefs, hopes, and fears. However, because we live in a welter of narrative, from blogs to television to novels to movies to the stories we tell one another at parties, because we are aswim in narrative constructs that have come to seem "natural," we may not even be aware when we're responding to the fulfillment of a story we wish to be told, rather than the story we must hear.
In his review, Mendelsohn argues that the critics have made precisely this mistake with The Lovely Bones. That after September 11, we were all so anxious to be reassured that we mistook Sebold's story for the "fearless and ultimately redemptive portrayal of dark material" it was touted to be. However, Mendelsohn argues that in fact, "darkness, grief and heartbreak is what The Lovely Bones scrupulously avoids. This is the real heart of its appeal." He argues that "It is hard to read ... The Lovely Bones without thinking of ... those TV "movies of the week" with their predictable arcs of crisis, healing, and "closure," the latter inevitably evoked by an obvious symbolism." He gives several excellent textual examples to support this claim, and goes on to speculate that part of the novel's gigantic appeal is that in a nation traumatized by September 11, Sebold's "fantasy of recuperation" has "a vital subconscious appeal," especially for a "public ... now able to see itself as an entire nation of innocent victims." Finally he concludes by asserting that "Confidence and grief management are what The Lovely Bones offers ... it too is bent on convincing us that everything is OK."
So what, you ask, do I have against redemption? Against being OK? Well, nothing, of course. What I have is a gripe against these stories, these little narrative pills that tell us that "closure" and "healing" can be achieved without the true harrowing of the soul that they demand. What I have is a gripe against is the enormous cultural and professional pressure to create narratives in which "closure" and "healing" can be attained, narratives which posit that, in David Mendelsohn's words, "we needen't really be sad, that nothing is, in the end, really scary." I also have a gripe against the idea that it is the purpose of fiction to explain us to ourselves, to wrap up complex experiences in tidy little packages in which the characters all neatly explain how they feel about the events that have taken place, in which the characters, like good little puppets, step forward and tell us exactly what it all means.
So what's a writer to do? Of course, the only one who can actually answer that is each writer for him- or herself, but the question I'd ask is how can we use language, our only tool as writers, to create experience rather than simply describe it? Of the books I've listed in my Current Fiction Picks section is Mary Rakow's first novel, The Memory Room. Now this is a book that dives deep into the wreck, a book in which it is always in question whether Barbara, the protagonist, will ever be able to make sense of the moral evil at the heart of her childhood, an evil she repressed for a very long time. The book is formally daring, it is utterly disinterested in the usual cause-and-effect conceits of traditional mainstream narration, opting instead for a collage of Barbara's perception, memory, and evasion of memory, interspersed with fragments of Paul Celan and the Psalms. This is a harrowing, stunning novel. A novel that is often difficult to read, and yet is so beautiful that one is compelled to return to the text. This is emphatically not a novel that sets out to reassure anyone that the world is OK. In an interview with LA Weekly, Rakow discusses the form of the book: "I consciously changed the form, several times and quite radically based on my sense of the world. This meant I had to change how the pages looked so that when I looked at it there was no lying going on. For example ... when I heard of these two young boys, a toddler and an infant, thrown over the bridge into the Los Angeles River in broad daylight, I could no longer write from one margin across the page to the right. It felt like a lie. I thought, Is this how the world is? Is this what I can say to that surviving toddler? And the resounding answer was, immediately and radically, No. From that point on, for several years, I wrote in what I called "dots" -- two or three lines of text running across the top inch of the otherwise all-white page. I wrote thousands of these and eventually grouped them by color. I tied the piles with ribbon. Red, blue, yellow, black, white, green, blue, indicating their emotional timbre. ... My ordering of the colored dots was like musial composition. ... That early ordering was a huge task for me to get the sequence right, and took me probably over a year."
It is one of the central tasks of any artist to to cleave to the story that must be told, despite the many many temptations one will encounter to tell the story people want to hear. If that means inventing new forms in which to tell those stories, then so be it. If that means writing odd fragments and spending years trying to figure out how they fit together, then one's task is to have the courage to keep at it. If that means trying to find a path through the constraints of traditional narrative form, then again, one's task is to have the courage to keep at it. But I'd ask you writers out there, to keep asking yourselves at every turn, what am I writing, the story that needs to be heard, or the story they want to hear?
posted by Charlotte at
1/13/2003 02:24:00 PM
The Buffalo Stew went over well ... it didn't in the final analysis taste all that different from beef stew, but it was delicious. Bill and Patrick ate big plates full, and the dogs are happily scrapping over the short rib bones in the living room.
posted by Charlotte at
1/13/2003 10:30:00 AM
1/12/2003
Faith I went to Mass this morning for the first time in ages. The Cardinal Law/pedophilia scandal was the last straw for me for almost a year, and I'm still deeply ambivalent about my future as a Catholic. Somehow, the scope of the molestation, combined with the scope of the cover-up, sort of made it impossible for me, for a very long time, to ignore the clear message from the hierarchy that the Church is concerned first and foremost with it's own power as an institution. This hit all my Big/Small buttons, and I just couldn't go to Mass. Not for a long time. Not even at Christmas. Not even at Christmas when Advent is my secret special liturgical season because it was during Advent that I had my Eucharistic epiphany (see The Stigmata Incident for this particular little tale).
But I had one of those dark nights last week, you know the kind, where you lie awake worrying about someone you love and all the scary things that could happen, and I sort of answered my own question. If anything happened, I knew I'd be back on my knees in Mass, not because of the Church, or the hierarchy, but because in ways I still don't understand, the Mass is my practice, and the Mass is my home.
But I'm still not sure if I'm going back next week. I'll let you all know.
posted by Charlotte at
1/12/2003 02:49:00 PM
Book Alert For the past couple of weeks I've been reading Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch, by Dan O'Brien. He's one of those writers who other writers rave about, but who isn't well known to the general public, but he should be. This is a terrific book about O'Brien's long struggle to keep his ranch afloat, and the huge leap of faith he took in the early nineties when he converted the ranch from cattle to buffalo. It's also about the ecosystem of the great plains, and how we've messed it up, and the hope that by re-introducing native wild herbivores like buffalo, perhaps we can not only restore the land itself, but figure out a way to live there that makes any kind of sense at all.
Since I'm interested in the meat issue, I bought some buffalo short ribs last time I was at the Co-op. I'll have a full report later as whether the Daube with Wild Mushrooms and Orange worked (from another essential cookbook, Patricia Wells' Bistro Cooking. I have never cooked anything out of this book that wasn't wonderful, easy, and came out exactly like I'd hoped it would. A bombproof cookbook). But I have to say, just cutting up the meat, it was clear that this is wild meat. It's much darker than beef, a deep brownish-red, and a completely different consistency. It makes beef seem pink and mushy. And browning it up, there was none of that tallow-y scent you can sometimes get from beef. I'll be curious to see, as I get a better source of local grass fed beef, if they're more similar than the buffalo is to regular supermarket beef. Atr the moment, the stew is in the cool-it-off-and-skim-the-fat stage, and I haven't decided whether we're having it tonight or tomorrow. I'll let you know.
posted by Charlotte at
1/12/2003 02:35:00 PM
Vegetable Experiment of the Day -- Braised Endive One reason I'm experimenting with vegetables is that I'm planning my garden for next summer, and I don't want to wind up with a freezer full of fine organic veggies that I don't like to eat. Also, I've been living the past couple of years with my brother, a guy who won't eat "wet leaves," so now that we're no longer roommates, I've been going to town with wet leaves. About a week ago, I bought some endive. At least I think it's endive. It's a variety that isn't as curly as frissee, but isn't in a head like Belgian endive. I couldn't find an exact match in the indespensible tome: Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini (this book was really expensive, but worth every penny. Especially for Asian and Latin American vegetables).
But I went with one of the basic cooking methods described in the book (well, I went with my memory of the basic cooking method, which means part of it was probably in the book, and some of it I made up). Here's what I did: washed the endive well, it was organic, and a little gritty. Then I cut the leaves in about thirds lenghtwise, so there were big chunks, but so I wouldn't have long, drippy, stringy leaves at the end. I have a prosciutto end in the freezer that I got somewhere on sale, so I cut about 1/2 inch off of that, and diced it (about 1/3 cup). I covered the bottom of the pan with olive oil, and sauteed the prosciutto with about three cloves of garlic, minced, and a generous pinch of red pepper flakes. When the garlic was just beginning to color, I threw in the wet endive, 1/2 cup of chicken stock, and 1/2 cup of vermouth. I brought the liquids to a boil, then turned the whole thing down to a very low simmer and cooked it for a whopping hour and a half. I kept poking at it about every half hour, but the leaves were still really hard, so I just made sure there was liquid in the pan, and kept braising. Like the cauliflower gratin, I didn't have much hope for this dish, but it was delicious. The prosciutto and chicken broth and vermouth added a nice smooth depth of flavor that offset the nice bitterness of the greens. I now understand why Southerners cook greens with pork for a long long time. I ate this with some roasted chicken and rice and the bitterness of the greens worked really well with the richness of the chicken and sauce. A new veggie for my repetoire.
posted by Charlotte at
1/12/2003 02:17:00 PM
1/08/2003
Cauliflower and Carrot Gratin Who would have thunk it? This was outrageously delicious -- and to think, I'd been about to write it off as a disaster. Here's the deal, I'm trying to widen my veggie repetoire, and I seemed to remember an entry early in the Julie/Julia Project about cauliflower gratin, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. I added carrots to mine because, well, it was a small cauliflower and it was so white ... I like a little color in my food.
Here's what I did: cut the cauliflower into florets and cut one big carrot into those ovals you get when you slice on the bias. You want about the same amount of carrot and cauliflower, enough to cover a baking dish in a nice even layer. I put them in salted water and blanched for about five minutes, then drained and dumped into the buttered baking dish (mine is an oval one, about 11 inches long).
Then you make the sauce (any decent cookbook can tell you how to make this sauce -- Fannie Farmer, Joy of Cooking, etc ... so if you need exact directions, I'd go there). You'll need to grate about 1 cup of cheese at this point and put it aside. I used half cheddar and half swiss, because that's what I had in the fridge (and the cheddar was getting old). In a small saucepan you want to bring 2 cups milk, 2 cloves, a bay leaf, and a smashed clove of garlic just to a simmer. When the milk simmers, you need to make the roux. In a separate pan, melt 2 tablespoons of butter, and add 2 tablespoons of flour. Stir around on low to medium heat until it all clumps together and starts to smell slightly toasty. At this point, you want to fish the spices out of the simmering milk (I left the garlic in, because I like garlic) and slowly pour the milk into the roux while whisking. I tend to add about 1/2 cup of milk at a time, and whisk until smooth before adding the next 1/2 cup of milk. Then I added a hefty shake of cayenne pepper (probably 1/4 tsp. but as cayenne varies widely in potency, use your own judgement), and grated some nutmeg in (again, I just grated until it smelled right. I think the proportion was about 1/2 as much nutmeg as cayenne), and added about a teaspoon of salt. The recipe I was (sort of) following said to add 1 tablespoon of cognac or brandy at this point, but I didn't have any, so I added a slug of white wine out of the glass I was drinking from on the theory that cheese fondue often has white wine in it, so it would probably work in this recipe. All the while I was stirring and waiting for the white sauce to begin to thicken, when it did, I started adding the cheese, a little at a time until it was all incorporated and smooth Then I poured the sauce over the vegetables in the gratin dish, and sprinkled with a pretty generous topping of bread crumbs. I dotted it with butter and into a 400 degree oven it went. I cooked it about 40 minutes, until the whole thing was bubbly and the sauce had reduced.
This was where I thought the recipe had failed. There seemed to be way too much sauce, so I cooked it longer, and then I thought "those vegetables have cooked for 45 minutes, they're going to reduced to mush." But I was wrong. The veggies were good. There was just enough spice. The sauce was all custardy and quiche-y. The breadcrumbs were crunchy. It was buttery. It was delicious. With a green salad, this is a great dinner all on its own. Who knew? Cauliflower no less ...
posted by Charlotte at
1/08/2003 12:16:00 PM
Since Jeanne d'Arc was nice enough to post my response to her blog on the Vatican's rush to cannonize Mother Teresa, and since I did say in the header that this blog would be partially about faith, you may want to look at The Stigmata Incident, a piece I wrote for the Salt Lake Acting company a couple of years ago. (Sorry about the inelegant HTML, I'm still new at this.)
posted by Charlotte at
1/08/2003 09:13:00 AM
1/07/2003
Bookslut has a surprising conversation about the independent bookstore issue. I must say, I agree about the clique-ishness of too many independent bookstores. If they want to survive, they need to stop vibing people
posted by Charlotte at
1/07/2003 11:51:00 AM
The Meat Problem The problem for me is not whether one should eat meat, but how to eat meat without supporting factory farming. Here in Montana, several of my neighbors accomplish this by only eating wild meat, which aside from raising your own animals, does seem to like one of the least hypocritical paths out there. When it's a deer, or elk, or antelope one has killed and butchered oneself, there's no denying that death is an integral part of the cycle, nor that we can eat meat and retain our innocence of this fact. It's been years since I've eaten a factory farmed chicken, but it's taken longer to wean myself from supermarket meat. Call it denial, call it convenience, I fudged that issue for a long time by claiming to myself that I don't really eat that much meat anyway. Somehow though, I've hit the point of no return. I can't buy meat in the supermarket any more (don't even get me started about those terrifying five-pound tubes of ground beef that seem popular up here). It all looks sad to me now, and when I see those Hormel stickers slathered all over the pork case, I can't help but feel implicated in the terrible lives not only of those factory pigs, but of those farmers who have been convinced to build factory pig sheds that they must know, deep in their souls, are just wrong (but the kids need clothes and the mortgage has to be paid, and it's hard just to stay on the land), and for the workers in the abbatoirs and packing houses, all those Mexican immigrants who have migrated to central Iowa where they're, as usual, doing the work none of us want to do. It just looks ugly to me, and I can't buy it any more.
However, not only am I not a vegetarian, I believe in farming and ranching, and believe that one indicator of a healthy society is a heathly agricultural sector. Family farming in America is under attack on so many fronts: from land developers, from agribusiness, and most painfully from the cultural denigration of rural peoples by environmentalists and urban dwellers, a denigration which serves only to divide people who have common enemies. (For example, had some environmentalists not been so contemptuous of ranchers and ranching, perhaps it might not have taken so long for the ranchers of Wyoming's Powder River Basin who are watching their wells run dry and their streams destroyed by coal bed methane drilling to unite with environmentalists to fight this practice.) My concerns fall along the Small/Big divide -- not ony are our food crops being endangered by the consolidation of seed stock and farmland by multinational agribusiness corporations, but farm animal species diversity has also been dangerously depleted over the past century.
Which brings us back to the problems of buying meat. I live in the middle of ranch country, and I can buy local meat, although it's kind of a hassle. Buying local meat here means a trip to the Co-op in Bozeman, or to one of the local butchers who may or may not have what I'm looking for. It also means buying frozen meat, which I'm not so keen on, especially since some of the local ranches pack in butcher paper. I like to see what I'm buying before I buy it, especially considering how much more expensive organic, local meat is, and I must admit, I waffle and backslide. So this week I picked up a Hutterite chicken (brining reccommended, these are chickens with actual muscles -- yummy, but different than what you might be used to), some lamb shanks on sale, and some bison short ribs (more on the beef/bison issue shortly). I realize that buying local meat is really difficult in most parts of the country, and that it's expensive, and often has to be mail ordered. But I also can't help feeling that this is like the early days of organic vegetables, when people complained that they were too expensive, that the quality wasn't good, that the organic vegetable movement was impractical, and it would never work. And fifteen years later you can now find at least some organic produce in nearly all supermarkets (and like bison, I'll get to the agribusiness-ification of organic produce in the future). I can't help but feel that if consumers begin to demand healthier, cleaner, leaner grass fed organic meats, they will become more available. So maybe we should all start by just asking, asking our supermarkets and food co-ops to order some, and then supporting those businesses with our dollars.
posted by Charlotte at
1/07/2003 11:06:00 AM
1/05/2003
How to Save a Soup Because I am a slightly obsessive person, once I discovered Julie Powell's amazing blog, the Julie/Julia project, I went back and read the entire thing (thank goodness she only started in August, but on the other hand, the writing is so terrific, that I wish there had been more). As I was driving back from Bozeman with a carload of groceries and organic meat (more about that later) I became fixated on the memory of a garlic potato soup with saffron she described on November 20 and decided I had to make it. I have this great Mexican bean pot that I make soup in, so I went to town. I did the part about boiling the herbs and garlic and smashing it all through the sieve. Then I added potatoes and saffron and began to cook it down. The only problem was I clearly hadn't added enough potatoes, and so, because I was addled from the Bozeman Experience (really! I moved here to get away from obnoxious yuppies. Why then do I even bother with the food co-op. And if you're the smug woman who was glaring at me as you used your recycled bread bags for your vegetables, while I, heathen that I am actually used the plastic baggies provided by the co-op, well, you are not a part of the solution), anyway, since I was rattled by shopping, and having a small blood sugar issue, I decided that rather than adding more potatoes to the soup, I'd boil it down. After an hour of the soup not reducing much, I gave up, put it up in quart mason jars, and had a sandwich.
So, this morning, I had these two quarts of pale yellow, watery potato soup to deal with, and at some point it came to me. Curry! Curried potato garlic soup. I chopped up carrot, some celery, some more onion and some ginger and started sauteing. Then I added curry powder, a couple of cloves, some coriander, some cumin, and a hefty dash of red pepper flakes. Meanwhile, I peeled and chopped one more potato, and drained a can of tomatoes in the sink. I had a vision of a smooth yellow soup with red chunks of tomato floating in it and a garnish of green onion. After the vegetables sauteed for a while, I added the jar of not-quite-soup and the potato and simmered it for about twenty minutes. Then I got out my Cuisinart wand. Like Julie, I too am absolutely in love with the "boat motor" as Emeril has been wont to call it. I fished out the cloves, but decided to leave the ginger in and see what happened. I pureed. It was lovely. I added the drained tomatoes and decided they looked odd, so I cooked them down for about ten minutes, then pureed again. I now had a soup that was a lovely orangey red color, that was redolent of spices and deeply layered. It was perfect. I ladeled some into a bowl, garnished with green onion and a dollop of Straus Family Creamery whole fat yogurt (which is amazing wonderful stuff). It looked like something out of Martha Stewart it was so beautiful. It tasted great. And I have a whole jar of it in the fridge still to eat for lunch all week (I work at home so things I can microwave are good). It's what I love about soup; soup can always be fixed...
posted by Charlotte at
1/05/2003 04:30:00 PM
1/02/2003
I spent New Years Day gardening. This would be unremarkable except that I live in Montana. Livingston, Montana. Where it is supposed to be winter, real winter, not like the fake winters when I lived in the Bay Area. Don't even get me started on my season's pass to Bridger Bowl ... that pass has yet to make it off my bulletin board and onto my jacket.
So, I'm a little superstitious about New Year's day, and I think you should start the year out right. Since, in the brave new world of global warming, it was 40 degrees and sunny (and for once, there was no wind. We've had 50-75 mph winds most days since early December. I'm told this keeps up until at least April.) I decided to finally attack the bed just alongside of the living room windows, and to move the rocks from where the vegetable garden used to be, over to where the herb/rock garden will be. The bed along the south side of the house has kind of defeated me since I moved in in August. There are some wonderful overgrown rose canes, and way way too much mint, and a lot of slightly scary debris -- old seashells and roofing debris and weird stuff that accumulated during all that time since 1903 that the last family lived here. I don't know why it was scary, but it seems like that bed in particular held Mrs. Warnick's ghost longer than some of the others -- it just hasn't seemed like it was my bed to mess with until now.
But suddenly, on New Years Day, it was time. So, I got out the clippers and lopped down the now-dead mint, and raked out all the vegetative debris -- mint, weeds, some grass, and some old flat dianthus that didn't look terribly interesting. By the time I got all that stuff cleaned out, I could cope with the roses. Clearly, they needed pruning, and I briefly considered cutting them all the way back, but I really want to see what they look like next summer. So I sort of topped the tallest ones (way over my 5 foot head), clipped out the dead wood, clipped out a few extraneous suckers, and we'll have to hope for the best. I got a whole quart jar of lovely fat rosehips out of it, so that was something. After some vigorous raking, and much sorting of rocks from leaves, and roofing debris from rocks and leaves, I had a pile for the trash, a pile for the compost, and a pile of rocks for the herb/rock garden. I want to put a cold frame there by the back door, and although the soil is going to need some serious amendment, because it's hard as concrete now, I can see where this might work. Also, if the roses are swell, I may put more in later, but first I need to see what color they are.
My rock-moving project was enormously satisfying. The tire has gone flat on my wheelbarrow, which was a problem, so I had to use my hand truck. It was Fun with Levers and Fulcrums ... I've been remaking this yard all fall. It was cut into all sorts of fussy little spaces, so I've been pulling out weird little fences and trying to open it up. There's a vegetable patch that is approximately 20 by 30 feet, which even as enthusiastic as I am about my future garden, seems excessive. The plan is that I'll have about a 12 x 12 raised bed vegetable garden (in a sort of classic kitchen garden configuration), a flower bed along the fence that separates me and my neighbor, Paula, and then I'll seed the rest with grass. The vegetable garden had a very old rock border, so I spent my day digging the rocks out of the southeast corner of the garden and hauling them over to the southwest corner. There were a couple of really big ones ... like the biggest pumpkin you've ever seen, but rock. The hand truck was essential ... but it felt so good to do something real. So I now have a pile of rocks, organic matter, and dirt in one corner which I need to cover with plastic to start solarizing (and to keep the dogs out of it), and a big bare patch of soft dirt that the puppy thinks is his new sandbox.
It was nearly a year ago I saw this house for the first time, and although it's been slow going, I'm beginning to see how the yard and gardens are going to shape up. There's part of me that feels like I've lived here forever, and part of me that stands out in that yard and still can't believe that I pulled this off. I bought my own house. By myself. And if I can come up with the mortgage payment every month, I never have to move, ever ever again. That felt like a great way to start a new year.
posted by Charlotte at
1/02/2003 09:48:00 AM
12/31/2002
Book Alert Although this summer was a tough one for the UC Davis Creative Writing community, as we lost both Walter Pavlich and Louis Owens, one happy result was that I found my old friend Margaret Young again. I ordered her first collection, Willow from the Willow months ago, but for some reason I'm still not able to pin down, I've been unable to read poetry for a couple of months. It happens sometimes. My brain just won't work for poetry and it all just sits there on the page looking like words that have been arranged, words that fail to cohere. This never has to do with the quality of the work, just some strange thing in my brain. The other day, while waiting for a friend to come pick me up to go hiking with the dogs, I opened Margaret's book and found myself transfixed. I spent half an hour standing in a doorway reading these poems. And then I came home and read them all again, slowly. They're beautiful and tough, full of vintage dresses and inconsolable grief, food and landscapes. This is a collection deeply engaged with the beauty and heartbreak of the Ten Thousand Things. This book is a treasure and my heartfelt thanks go out to Margaret for not only writing it, but for opening up my poetry-head again. Check it out.
posted by Charlotte at
12/31/2002 11:01:00 AM
Thanks to Blog of a Bookslut for pointing out this terrific essay by Jeanette Winterson on the problems of publishing a posthumous collection of Italo Calvino's nonfiction prose. Considering that he was such a tough self-editor, and non-documentary artist, Winterson ponders the ethical ramifications of the collection, noting that: "The cult of celebrity that surrounds writers now is rather like those sonic frequency machines that force moles above ground. In this collection, Calvino talks enthusiastically about the 'dream of being invisible' and he goes as far as to say that 'writers lose a lot when they are seen in the flesh'. For Calvino, to be 'just a name on a book cover' seems like 'the ideal condition for a writer'."
posted by Charlotte at
12/31/2002 09:09:00 AM
12/30/2002
Book Alert When two writers become friends there's always an interesting moment when you exchange books. It's fraught, especially if the new friend is someone you really like, because there's always that chance that the book will, well, not be quite what you had hoped (we all have writer friends who we like better than we like their books). I spent the weekend totally engrossed in my friend Maryanne Vollers book Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Byron De La Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South (try Alibris since this fine book is shamefully out of print). This is a great book, a book that relentlessly documents the insitutional nature of Southern apartheid, and how this insidious and ubiquitous policy both inspired and impeded revolutionary figures like Evers. Maryanne then methodically and relentlessly traces the evidence against De La Beckwith, the two failed trials, and the dogged prosecutors who finally convicted him. More important though, she documents how the history of apartheid in the South still haunts that country, and the nation. Aside from being a shining example of fine investigative journalism, this book is a wonderful read -- Maryanne captures the character of the place and these people with the kind of vivid characterization one expects from a great novel (and since I know her to be wild about her dogs, and mine, I was quite amused to note her narrative concern for Heidi, Evers German Shepherd). In the wake of the Trent Lott episode, and the current efforts by the Republican Party to portray themselves as a party who have moved beyond racism, this should be a must read for everyone. If you can't buy a copy, go get one from your local library.
posted by Charlotte at
12/30/2002 09:48:00 AM
Amazon and LivingSmall -- what's with all the links to Amazon on the site? Doesn't the behemoth Amazon represent everything that is Big in just the way that this site is seeking to question? Well, yes. I have a vexed relationship with Amazon -- as a book-addict it is almost impossible to resist the lure of their speedy delivery of almost any book one might want. So, more often than I'd like, I find myself ordering from Amazon. However, Amazon's size isn't the only problematic aspect of their business -- their practice of putting links to used book sales for new books is enormously injurious to first novelists like myself, for whom sales figures are crucial. I had a vigorous, if futile email exchange with Amazon over this when my book came out in hardcover, and was told, essentially, to suck it up. So I put the links to Amazon on this site as a convenience to any readers out there, and because as a former bookseller, I love to sell good books. As mitigation, however, this morning I'm putting up links to several great independent bookstores who will ship books to you, and who have good websites for orders. I urge everyone to buy books from their local independent bookstore (if you still have one), but for those times when you just can't wait for a bookstore to order a title, well, there's always Amazon.
posted by Charlotte at
12/30/2002 07:30:00 AM
12/29/2002
It's over, thank goodness. Some years I'm all Christmas cheer, but this year I just couldn't get into it for some reason. Because I'm new in town and don't know when they pick up Christmas trees (and since we've had 50-75 mph winds the past three days) I compromised by taking all the ornaments off the tree and putting them away, but I left the tree, with its white lights, in the living room. It was sort of a Charlie Brown tree to begin with (but once you've walked into the Round Barn at the fairground, you're pretty much committed to buying a tree from our local Boy Scouts who went out into the woods and cut them down) and I think it actually looks better bare ...
I've been feeling sort of kludgy after all this holiday cheer, and thus, when I was in the store yesterday, the kale suddenly looked like just the thing. I'm not normally a big fan of kale, but there it was, all dark green and crinkly and it seemed nearly to wink with the promise of health and well being. So I made a batch of kale and white bean soup. It's one of those slow all-day kinds of soups that fill your house with the rich scent of cooking, a scent that seems like it alone can repel the howling winds that swirl out of the Absarokas. Here's the recipe (which I adapted from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant) :
Step One: The Beans
(If you use canned beans, you can skip this step altogether, but I don't like the tinny taste or mushy texture of canned beans, and it's not hard to cook your own).
In a big pot, bring to a boil, and then simmer until tender:
2 cups small white beans
2 bay leaves
2 cloves
2 or 3 big cloves garlic
1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes
pinch of salt
water to cover the beans by at least 2 inches
Step Two: the sofrito
1 onion, chopped
1 big carrot, chopped
1 heart of celery, with leaves, chopped
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
1 tbsp chopped fresh sage leaves (or 1tsp. dried)
3-4 tbsp olive oil
When the beans are tender, saute the chopped vegetables and spices until the onions just begin to turn brown around the edges. You want to concentrate the flavors of the vegetables, so err on the side of overcooking, rather than undercooking. When the vegetables are colored, add to soup pot with beans. Check the water level, you'll want it to be pretty soupy still. If needed, add more water. Cook on very low heat until about 45 minutes before you are ready to eat.
Step three: finishing the soup
1 bunch kale, rinsed well, stripped of tough central veins, and chopped
1/2 cup fine cornmeal
juice of 1/2 lemon
4-5 cloves garlic
When it's getting close to dinner time, add the kale to the soup and stir it in. (If the soup has cooked down to just beans, you'll want to add more water and bring to a simmer before adding the kale.) Bring the heat up a little to a vigorous simmer, and cook the kale for at least 1/2 hour until tender. When the kale has cooked, mix the lemon juice and cornmeal together, and stir into the soup. Cook for about fifteen minutes, stirring often. This will thicken the soup a little and give it a really nice yellow color. While the cornmeal is cooking, add the garlic to the soup -- I used a garlic press because it's easy, but if you want to chop it very fine, that would work as well. What you want is a nice spike of garlicky flavor at the end of the cooking process.
Ladle the soup into wide plates and top with freshly ground parmesan cheese. Eat with some nice bread (I had some of the sourdough I've been working on, but more about that later) and a green salad and you'll feel virtuous and clean again after all that holiday excess. This serves a lot of people, six to eight, although you can freeze the leftovers. Be careful when reheating this soup as re-boiling the kale will render it unpleasanlty cabbagy -- I reccommend heating up one bowl at a time for a nice midweek lunch in the microwave.
posted by Charlotte at
12/29/2002 09:34:00 AM
12/26/2002
Christmas was perfect -- I got almost no stuff. My brother bought me an adult ed class with a Master Gardener from MSU and a cookbook (well, a gift certificate for The Pleasures of Slow Food by Corby Kummer which is out of stock at the moment). Mom sent socks and PJs. And we all avoided the pile of interesting stuff that no one really needed anyhow. Not that I'm against presents ... I love presents. I just hate the forced nature of Christmas presents ... my perfect Christmas involves a bunch of people sitting around a long table having just eaten a lovely meal, wearing the silly paper hats from the Christmas crackers, playing with the walnuts and chocolates and oranges down the centerpiece, and just sitting back and talking to one another.
I didn't cook this year, since my friends were all out of town, so I'm considering a Twelfth Night party ... I feel the need to cook a goose, which I haven't done in a couple of years. Jeffery Steingarten has a recipe that looks interesting. My other cooking adventure this holiday has been making sourdough bread with a starter I ordered from Sourdoughs International. I ordered the San Francisco Sourdough, and spent much of Christmas activating the starter. My only quibble thus far with the directions that came with the starter is that if I had followed the directions exactly, I'd probably have six or eight quart jars of sourdough starter instead of the mere four that are lurking in my fridge. The first batch of bread is in the oven right now. The sourdough pancakes we had for breakfast were great though ... tangy and chewy and felt like real food.
posted by Charlotte at
12/26/2002 11:19:00 AM
12/23/2002
So, I've been thinking a lot lately about how to live more locally, how to resist the siren call of consumerism, how to build a sustainable life. I bought a house this year, and moved to Montana. It was important to me when I was looking for a place that I didn't buy a "ranchette", that I didn't contribute to the development creeping across the open spaces of the West. So I found a 100 year old house in a funky town, a house with an old established vegetable plot in back. Planning the garden has me thinking about eating seasonally, about seeing how self-sufficient I can be, about how I can avoid buying food at the cost of fossil fuels. We're a long way from everywhere here, and although I got spoiled living in the Bay Area, with its abundant local produce, I want to take the lessons of California cuisine -- eat local, eat fresh, eat in season, and see what I can do with that up here in the frozen north. Because Montana is still largely an agricultural economy, as well as a remarkably beautiful place with viable wild animal populations, the choices about what and how we eat are a little closer to the surface than they are in more urban centers.
I'm a novelist (there's a link to my website in the pane on the right), working on my second novel -- the autobiographical book I'd hoped not to write, so along with musings about food, and gardening, and the environment, you'll also find the occasional report on what I'm reading or attempt to define the aesthetic issues that I'm wrestling with as I work through this new project.
Please feel free to email me, I haven't figured out how to put up a comments link yet, but then again, this blog is all of two days old ...
