Souvenir Spoons

The very word, "spoon" conjures up visions of pleasure.  Its very presence sets the salivary glands in action.  The gluttonous nature innate in all is aroused at its picture, and juicy ragouts, steaming soups and fricassees, stews and bouillabaisses pass before the vision.  All love the spoon, the emblem of plenty, of fulness and content...The glass, the tankard, the loving cup, bring as much sorrow as pleasure into the world; the spoon all pleasure.  The loving ladle enters into broils, the spoon does not.  The statement may partake of jocularity, but it is truth.

---Anton Hardt, Souvenir Spoons of the 90's As Pictured and Described in 'The Jewelers' Circular' & The James Catalogue in 1891 (1962)

Be Well

Today's entry is taken directly from the Dictionary.Com Word of the Day.  This is a wonderful and absolutely free service---a little bit of knowledge dispensed daily to your e-mail inbox. 

Wassail is both a hearty beverage and a best wish for the recipient---Waes haeil!  Be Well.

Word of the Day for Friday, October 8, 2010



wassail \WAH-sul; wah-SAYL\, noun:


1. An expression of good wishes on a festive occasion, especially in drinking to someone.


2. An occasion on which such good wishes are expressed in drinking; a drinking bout; a carouse.


3. The liquor used for a wassail; especially, a beverage formerly much used in England at Christmas and other festivals, made of ale (or wine) flavored with spices, sugar, toast, roasted apples, etc.


adjective:


1. Of or pertaining to wassail, or to a wassail; convivial; as, a wassail bowl.

transitive verb:


1. To drink to the health of; a toast.
 Intransitive verb:


1. To drink a wassail.


Christmas often means plum pudding, fruitcake, roast goose and wassail.


-- Florence Fabricant, "Recipes to Summon the Holiday Spirit", New York Times, December 21, 1988


But have you ever tried to spear a buffalo after a hard night at theold wassail bowl?


-- Gore Vidal, The Smithsonian Institution


Wassail is from the Middle English expression of festive benevolence, wæs hæil!, be well!, from Old Norse ves heill, be (ves) well (heill).

Dementia

The word dementia has its root in the Latin dementare, meaning "senseless."  Yet I have found my senses heightened folllowing the loss of intellectual force.  My responsiveness to odor is so strong that sometimes I think I've become a beagle.  Intense spices---Indian, Thai, Mexican--feel exaggerated in their richness; I can become exhausted and confused by eating these foods.  My skin often tingles, sometimes for no discernible reason, sometimes in response to the slightest stimulus.  The same process that stripped me of significant intellectual capacity and numbed my mind seems to have triggered an almost corresponding heightening of sensory and emotional awareness.  Sometimes this can be a maelstrom, sometimes a baptismal immersion.  So when "demented" breaks down into "de" for "out of" and "ment" for "mind"--literally "out of mind,"---I interpret the verbal construction as having positive connotations. Not loony, but liberated.  Forced out of the mind, forced away from my customary cerebral mode of encounter, I have found myself dwelling more in the wilder realms of sense and emotion.  Out of mind and into body, into heart.  An altered state. 

--Floyd Skloot, "Wild in the Woods:  Confessions of a Demented Man" in In the Shadow of Memory (2003)

In 1988, Floyd Skloot contracted a virus that invaded and damaged his brain. Here he describes his loss of "intellectual capacity" in terms of a gain in "emotional awareness.""  Skloot's account is not a saccharine one, however, and his description of his enhanced sensorial perceptions and feelings (throughout the book as a whole) is at turns ironic, humiliating, surprising, bittersweet.  I love his attentiveness here to the etymology of dementia and the way that his reading of the word through the lens of his own experience draws our attention to the ways in which we tend to privilege the intellect.  If clarity of thinking illuminates our world, it does so only by limiting what we can perceive. 

Magnificent Asparagus Fountain

The care with which the rain is
wrong and the green is wrong and
the white is wrong, the care with
which there is a chair and
plenty of breathing.  The care with
which there is incredible justice
and likeness, all this makes
a magnificent asparagus, and
also a fountain.

---Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914)

To be brief, Stein's off-beat allusion to material objects, weather, colors, foods, bodily functions, and domestic work in this ground-breaking collection of poetry conveys the excitement and pleasure of possession in its deepest and most intangible sense. Vitality! 

[Side note:  observe Stein's use of the word care.  See also this entry, HERE]

One Delicious Compound

We also, I say, ought to copy the bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us...we could so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.

---Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 84 "On Gathering Ideas"

Seneca discusses the art of commonplacing and the alchemy of composition.  His words reassure the shaky and insecure young writer that although he/she gathers pollen (quotes) from flowers (the writing of other authors) the "honey" he/she produces from this raw material will indeed be something new--and more importantly, something delicious. 

[Note Seneca's  reference to the word care in this quote.  The word care and the word curate have the same root. To care for something is to preserve or maintain--but it also suggests selection, arrangement, and exhibition. Thus copying quotes is not meant to be a derivative act but a generative one--much as a museum exhibition makes a new argument through the presentation of pre-existing objects, so too do authors produce new ideas by drawing upon those already in existence. ]

Fortune Cookies Speak Truth

In the spirit of modernist poets and artists such as Marianne Moore and Joseph Cornell who juxtaposed the stuff and substance of high culture with pop cultural treasure, I offer you all of the fortune cookie fortunes that I am currently carrying in my wallet:

Take the advice of a faithful friend. 

You find what you're looking for; just open your eyes!

Look forward to great fortune and a new lease on life!

Do not mistake temptation for opportunity.

Opportunity always ahead if you look and think.

You will always be surrounded by true firends. [sic]

Although a few of these fortunes sound a bit ominous, on the whole they offer solid advice and generous predictions about my future.  Few things are as reassuring as a good fortune, or as disappointing as an unfavorable one.  While some might place the fortune cookie in the realm of superstition, it is uncanny that so many people look for assurance, confirmation, and validation in material signs, whether from a beneficent sky, a successful shake of the Magic 8 Ball,  or the serendipitous find of a four-leafed clover.  Perhaps my favorite example is that of Mary Baker Eddy's reassurance during a troubling time  upon opening a drawer and finding a rubber band that had curled into the shape of a heart. (Mary Ann Caws refers to this in her fabulous book on Joseph Cornell)

Sweet and Sour

 Stick Candy

Traubel records, "Mrs Davis handed him a bag of mint-candy and he at once gave me a stick.  'You favor it?' he asked, and then dilated like a child on his own fancy for it."

Lemonade

While planning the menu for his seventieth birthday banquet, Whitman remarked: 'It's a damnable drink, I wouldn't have it.'

--qtd. in Gary Schmidgall,editor,  Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman's Conversations with Horace Traubel 1888-1892 (2001)

So there you have it.  Walt Whitman loved mints and hated lemonade.  He also loved cheap books, sweet corn, and molasses candy and disliked tobacco, fireworks, comedians, and church.  Little details of this sort--theorist Roland Barthes would call them biographemes--seem terribly important, but not simply because they offer intimate glimpses into one particular famous person's private life.  Rather,  they emphasize private history (as opposed to public or grand history) more generally.  I suspect that private history--and what one loved most or humorously hated most--is most relevant and precious to us at the end of our lives. Our preferences mark our points of intersection with the world--in a sense they are more important than political events, cultural movements, economic changes, scientific discoveries.  Horace Traubel, who visited and assisted Whitman during the last four years of his life evidently recognized their importance as well. 

A Play of Light: The Still Life Paintings of Janet Fish

"When people look at realist paintings, they focus on the objects, which I don't think are the subject at all.  I think the object is one of the tools, like the paint and the brush.  The real subject is the light, movement, and color, and echoes of the objects in one's mind.  All those things are part of what I use to make the painting."

    --Janet Fish, qtd. in the exhibition pamphlet for "The Art of Janet Fish" (October 2, 2009-January 17, 2009, Naples Museum of Art).

Janet Fish is known for her vibrant and colorful paintings which play with light, shape, and texture. Like still-life, many of her works feature glassworks, foodstuffs, cut flowers, and domestic objects--all rendered in jewel-like colors that she suggests are inspired by her island upbringing.  Yet as the curators of this exhibit suggest, Fish is not a "realist" proper, but an artist whose work intersects abstract expressionism with realism to create expansive, bright and "juicy surfaces."   

  As is well-known, the sensory perception of fragrance is closely linked to memory. A familiar fragrance can prompt a mental journey into one's past.  Yet the sensory perception of subtle differences in light similarly draws the mind away from the mundanities of the present and into an alternative dimension.  On my first pass through this exhibition--which was sort of like a domestic coral reef---nothing much caught my eye.  But on my third pass, as I began to linger over certain paintings, I moved into a more meditative state---developing a keener awareness of the possibilities of the present and a heightened interest in the everyday.  The domestic scenery--while exotic--is not unfamiliar.  

 I was most drawn to one painting, "Cracked Eggs and Milk" (2005) featuring some particularly poignantly rendered cantaloupe-orange glass bowls and raw golden yolks set off in morning light.  The preparations of breakfast or brunch (I'm not attuned enough to the subtleties of light to discern the precise hour of the morning that Fish captures but in my mind's eye it is 8 am) appear in freeze-frame---we have no desire to see the ingredients to come together or to watch the meal being consumed.  There is an intense feeling of pleasure in the moment-- taking note of it, being in it. It is a very rare experience to linger over anything, to reflect on anything, to be rather than to do--to experience the luxury of time. Fish's art thwarts our desires to get to the end of things. She captures a familiar reality and yet makes it startlingly unfamiliar in its delicate allusion to what we fail to notice and what we take for granted.    

'A Gastronomic Rainbow': Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from The Bee Dance. Today's quote is taken from a Scribner's Monthly essay published in 1871.  The essay  rues the passing of the traditional Thanksgiving feasts of old even as its exclamatory prose seeks to preserve the excitement of the holiday.  I was very much torn over whether to entitle this entry "A Gastronomic Rainbow" or simply "Ineffable Pork and Beans."  Could pork and beans ever be so good as to defy description?  Apparently so. 

"Who that ever tasted can forget the aroma of those dusk-red depths where yet the fragrance of blazing hickory lingered? What chicken-pies emerged thence!  What brown bread, what unimaginable piglets in crisp armor of crackling, what ineffable pork and beans! [...]  How we longed to eat more pumpkin pie, and more; how, following the advice of our elders ,we stood up and 'jumped three jumps' and then couldn't.  How even our favorite little tarts, crowned with ruby jelly, passed us by unscathed, while we sat, replete and sorrowing!  [...]  Shall we ever again see those marvelous spheres, one for each person, whereon, in many-colored segments, cranberry pie, and apple, mince, Marlborough, peach, pumpkin, and custard, displayed themselves like a gastronomic rainbow?  Shall we ever rove with unsated fork through a genuine, old-fashioned Indian pudding, of the land which in those good days bubbled day and night over wood fires, spicy as Arabia, brown as chesnut, flavorous, delicate?

---"Home and Society,"  Scribner's Monthly: an illustrated magazine for the people, Volume 003, Issue 2 (December 1871), 240-242.

Today, let us celebrate the old rituals and traditions that we have maintained and welcome the new ones that we have infused into this most American of holidays. [Finally, I am thankful for the outstanding Making of America project at Cornell University (and also at Michigan) which enabled me to bring you this quote from the comfort of my couch, and in view of the televised Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.]

Paean to Pies

Today, I offer you yet another quote from A Modern Instance-- one that is straightforward yet still delightful in its humorously extended reference to savory pies. In an ode to a pastry that sounds suspiciously similiar to its twentieth century cousin, the Hot Pocket, the speaker posits pie as a rival to fish in its power to nourish the brain and feed the imagination.  Only a reference to pecan pie could improve this paean to pies. As the expression goes, The Pies Have It. 

     "He turned round, and cut out of a mighty mass of dough in a tin trough a portion, which he threw down on his table and attacked with a rolling pin.  'That means pie, Mr. Hubbard,' he explained, 'and pie means meat pie--or squash pie, at a pinch.  Today's pie-baking day.  But you needn't be troubled on that account.  So's tomorrow, and so was yesterday. Pie twenty-one times a week is the word and don't you forget it....they say old Agassiz recommended fish as the best food for the brain.  Well, I don't suppose but what it is.  But I don't know but what pie is more stimulating to the fancy.  I never saw anything like meat pie to make ye dream.'
     'Yes,' said Bartley, nodding gloomily, 'I've tried it.'
     Kinney laughed. 'Well, I guess folks of sedentary pursuits, like you and me, don't need it; but these fellows that stamp round in the snow all day, they want something to keep their imagination goin'.  And I guess pie does it.' "

---William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance (1882)

Decomposition, Or, "Maggots Already"

This blog showcases composition and seeks to foster creative activity through the reading, collecting,  exhibiting, and curating of "pollen"  as food for thought and the inspiration for future productions.  It is therefore quite odd to be offering a quote that showcases decomposition and yet may still inspire the same sort of reflections.   

Today's quote is taken from Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild (which was also made into a film released in the fall of 2007) which documents the life and untimely death of the young Christopher McCandless, who ventured into the Alaskan wilderness in the early summer of 1992 and died three months later.    Krakauer's book offers deeper insights than the film into Chris's own writings.  In this scene, Chris describes his futile efforts to preserve a moose that he has killed. The appearance of the maggots indicates his failure and he second-guesses his slaughtering of the moose. In these diary entries he appears as earnest yet youthfully idealistic.  The maggots appear as a naturalist convention in this work, underscoring the harshness and struggle that survival in the wilderness entails--and, perhaps, the inevitability of our own decomposition.    The selection begins with Krakauer's words and moves into the diary entries:

"Alaskan hunters know that the easiest way to preserve meat in the bush is to slice it into thin strips and then air-dry it on a makeshift rack.  But McCandless, in his naivete, relied on the advice of hunters he'd consulted in South Dakota, who advised him to smoke his meat, not an easy task under the circumstances.  'Butchering extremely difficult,' he worte in the journal on June 10.  'Fly and mosquito hordes.  Remove intestines, liver, kidneys, one lung, steaks.  Get hindquarters and leg to stream.' 

June 11: 'Remove heart and other lung. Two front legs and head.  Get rest to stream.  Haul near cave.  Try to protect with smoker.'

June 12: 'Remove half rib-cage and steaks.  Can only work nights.  Keep smokers going.'

June 13: 'Get remainder of rib-cage, shoulder and neck to cave.  Start smoking.'

June 14:  'Maggots already! Smoking appears ineffective.  Don't know, looks like disaster.  I now wish I had never shot the moose.  One of the greatest tragedies of my life.'    "

---Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (1996)

Bonbons in Abundance

Today's quote is rich.

     "A few days later, a box arrived for Mrs. Pontellier from New Orleans.  It was from her husband.  It was filled with friandises, with luscious and toothsome bits--the finest of fruits patés, a rare bottle or two, delicious syrups, and bonbons in abundance. 
     "Mrs. Pontellier was always very generous with the contents of such a box; she was quite used to receiving them when away from home,  The patés, and fruit were brought to the dining-room; the bonbons were passed around.  And the ladies, selecting with daity and discriminating fingers and a little greedily, all declared that Mr. Pontellier was the best husband in the world."

---Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)

Potatoes = Buried Treasure

One good turn deserves another and so today's brief quote will once again showcase Tasha Tudor's Garden, this time in a self-explanatory quote that illustrates the role of the imagination in enlivening daily chores:


" 'I love to dig potatoes.  It's quite satisfying, you know, like searching for buried treasure.  Although it can be irksome when your spade slices a plump, promising potato in two.'  The naughty corgyn, always out for a lark, go running off with potatoes in their mouths and gnaw them ruthlessly to pieces before rushing back to steal more tuberous victims. But there are plenty of potatoes to spare..."

--Tasha Tudor's Garden, Text by Tovah Martin with Photographs by Richard W. Brown

Hair Part V: Big Hair/Bald Head, Or, An Allegory

Today's quote comes from Charles Chesnutt's short story "The Goophered Grapevine."  This story was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1887, and was reprinted in Chesnutt's collection The Conjure Woman (1899).  In this tale, a plantation owner has the conjure woman, Aunt Peggy, put a "goopher" on his scuppernong vines to prevent them from being eaten by slaves from other plantations in the vicinity. The "goopher" is supposed to cause those who pilfer the grapes to die within twelve months.  Unfortunately, one of his own slaves, Henry, eats the scuppernongs.  While the overseer takes Henry to Aunt Peggy to remove the goopher, she is only able to partialy remove it.  Henry's state of heath begins to follow the life cycle of the grapes--he waxes in the summer and wanes in the winter.  His master, seeing an opportunity to capitalize on this new situation, begins to sell him during his waxing period and re-purchase him during his waning months.   Gradually, Henry begins to fade away in a story that is an allegory of slavery's misuse and destruction of both land and bodies.  This quote describes Henry's new life cycle in terms of the growth of his hair.  While initially "bald as a sweet potato" as the story goes, he begins to exhibit hair that resembles the grape vines--unmanageable "grapy hair,"  the "biggest hair on the plantation":

"So Henry 'n'int his head wid de sap out'n de big grapevime des ha'f way 'twix' de quarters en de big house, en de goopher nebber wuk agin him dat summer.  But de beatenes' thing you eber see happen ter Henry.  Up ter dat time he wuz ez ball ez a sweeten' 'tater, but des ez soon ez de young leaves begun ter come out on de grapevimes, de ha'r begun ter grow out on Henry's head, en by de middle er de summer he had de bigges' head er ha'r on de plantation.  Befo' dat, Henry had tol'able good ha'r 'roun' de aidges, but soon ez de young grapes begun ter come, Henry's ha'r begun to quirl all up in little balls, des like dis yer reg'lar grapy ha'r, en by de time de grapes got tipe his head look des like a bunch er grapes.  Combin' it didn' do no good; he wuk at it ha'f de night wid er Jim Crow, en think he git it straighten' out, but in de mawnin' de grapes 'ud be dere des de same.  So he gin it up, en tried ter keep de grapes down by havin' his ha'r cut sho't [...]

But de mo's cur'ouses' thing happen' in de fall, when de sap begin ter go down in de grapevimes.  Fus', when de grapes 'uz gethered, de knots begun ter straighten out'n Henry's ha'r; en w'en de leaves begin ter fall, Henry's ha'r 'mence ter drap out; en when de vimes 'uz bar', Henry's head wuz baller 'n it wuz in de spring, en he begin ter git ole an stiff in de j'ints ag'in, en paid no mo' 'tention ter de gals dyoin'er de whole winter.  En nex' spring, w'en he rub de sap on ag'in, he got young ag'in, en so soopl en libely dat none er de young niggers on de plantation couldn' jump, ner dance, ner hoe ez much cotton ez Henry.

--Charles Chesnutt, "The Goophered Grapevine," In The Conjure Woman, Ed.Richard H. Brodhead

Cornell Part I: Sweet Dreams

In Mary Ann Caws' superbly edited volume, the boundaries between Joseph Cornell's dream world and the space of the street begin to blur....Note especially Cornell's passive voice construction in his entry on March 1, 1947 which suggests his receptivity to his environment. This is the first part of a multi-part series which will focus on Cornell and his world....to be continued at a later date.


Feb 8, 1947


dreamed of vaults with all kinds of whipped cream pastries. Rich
day....layer cake~cherry Danish~calm feeling


Mar 1, 1947


~before going into library a pink icinged vanilla cream-filled
rolled cake had been observed~later when stopping by to purchase
some things its disappearance from its plate glass pedestal in
the window brought a real kind of regret of a delicacy that went
beyond the mere regret~lunch in a diner, banana creme pie, doughnut,
and drink


Feb 6, 1950


lunch of pancakes a complete sense of peace (rare) before leaving
for New York

--Joseph Cornell, Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, edited by Mary Ann Caws (2000)

The Difference Between Jealousy and Envy

In this quote, taken from his autobiographical work, A Small Boy and Others, James helps to explain the difference between two words that we often assume to be synonymous. James identifies his own state of suffering to be one of envy...the slightly less vile version of these two green-eyed evils.


...if jealousy bears, as I think, on what one sees one's own companions able to do--as against one's own falling short---envy, as I knew it at least, was simply of what they were, or in other words of a certain sort of richer consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them. They were so other--that was what I felt; and to be other, other almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window; unattainable, impossible, of course, but as to which just this impossibility and that privation kept those active proceedings in which jealousy seeks relief quite out of the question....It wasn't that I wished to change with every one, with any one at a venture, but that I saw "gifts" everywhere but as mine and that I scarce know whether to call the effect of this miserable or monstrous. It was the effect at least of self-abandonment--I mean to visions.

---Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (1913)

Degenerate Tourists

John Kennedy Toole's novel refers to hot dogs as "gimmicks." Oddly enough this portion of the pollen suggests the broader category of food and its strange manifestations in literature and elsewhere:

     "I'm gonna put you down in the French Quarter."

     "What?" Ignatius thundered. "Do you think that I am going to perambulate about in that sinkhole of vice? No, I am afraid that the Quarter is out of the question. My psyche would crumble in the atmosphere. Besides, the streets are narrow and dangerous there. I could easily be struck down in traffic or be wedged against a building."

     "Take it or leave it, you fat bastard. That's the last chance you get." Mr Clyde's scar was beginning to whiten again.

     "It is? Well, please don't have another seizure. You may tumble into that vat of franks and scald yourself. If you insist, I imagine that I shall have to trundle my franks down into Sodom and Gomorrah."

     "Okay. Then it's settled. You come in tomorrow morning, we'll fix you up with some gimmicks."

     "I can't promise you that many hot dogs will be sold in the Quarter. I will probably be kept busy every moment protecting my honor against those fiends who live down there."

     "You get mostly the tourist trade in the Quarter."

     "That's even worse. Only degenerates go touring. Personally, I have been out of the city only once. By the way, have I ever told you about that particular pilgrimage to Baton Rouge? Outside the city limits there are many horrors."

---John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)

Numbness

Jhumpa Lahiri captures at once the displacement of the immigrant and the enervation and ill-fittedness of modern motherhood:

His mother nibbled Mrs. Sen's concoctions with eyes cast upward, in search of an opinion. She kept her knees pressed together, the high heels she never removed pressed into the pear-colored carpet. "It's delicious," she would conclude, setting down the plate after a bite or two. Eliot knew she didn't like the tastes; she'd told him so once in the car. He also knew she didn't eat lunch at work, because the first thing she did when they were back at the beach house was pour herself a glass of wine and eat bread and cheese, sometimes so much of it that she wasn't hungry for the pizza they normally ordered for dinner. She sat at the table as he ate, drinking more wine and asking how his day was, but eventually she went to the deck to smoke a cigarette, leaving Eliot to wrap up the leftovers.

---Jhumpa Lahiri, "Mrs. Sen's," Interpreter of Maladies (1999)