not a holiday

it was no one's birthday, no remembering anniversaries, no narrow-misses or congratulations, no magnificent proposals, winning exams, awards, prizes or other causes for joy.

there was just cake. and strong coffee. two layers of deep dark chocolate cake, shot through with espresso, bittersweet chocolate and a good dose of cocoa. and billowy clouds of whipped cream, no sugar, no bourbon, no vanilla, no fuss. just cream. because sometimes it's important to realize joy can spark and flare on any day. additionally, seeing a snowy dome of cake in the refrigerator is great for morale.

soon the Work For School will be *done*! (then there will have to be another, more ridiculous, cake.) but as it happens i am on to the lovely part which is composing the written portfolio. upon recommendation of the department head i will hand in this sheaf of my deepest bone-words in conjunction with some images and that of course has caused all kinds of panic. panic like

"i havent' done this in years, what if i fail?"
"remember staying up until all hours of the night in witless exhaustion doing something similar for similar reasons in a similarly educational themed institution?"
"what if they hate it?"
"what if they hate me?"
"what if it's no good?!"

&c.

so i am trying to stay myself against that barrage of uselessness. so far so good. and also! some collecting of material to line the nest, which is the part i like best.

{and by the way, if you require some moved-to-tears photographs with regards to feather lining the nest, look no further!}

some fodder:

soon, soon, it will be over. or at least ready.

we feasted proper

sweet vermouth, angostura bitters, bourbon; proper manhattans

segura viuda dry spanish cava

la turre, a soft rind triple cream french cheese

humboldt fog, a chevre/brie cut with a vein of ash

aged gouda, glassy and brittle

arbequina olives

casteveldrano olives

fig jam

sea salt and water crackers

mer soleil, a butter y oaky chardonnahy

puff pastry cheese straws

turkey rubbed under the skin with a compound butter (sage, thyme) drizzled with olive oil and rubbed with sea salt, perched on a bed of quartered onions, stock drunk with sherry, turkey necks and parsnips,  and stuffed with torn challah, sweet peppers, translucent onions and a dose of strong garlic,
roasted until burnished and heady

brussels sprouts shredded and fried in a swathe of butter, tossed with a shock of champagne, salt and white pepper

yams and white sweet potatoes, cubed; fried hot in butter infused with rosemary, covered with apple cider and reduced into a glaze and then finished with apple cider vinegar and chili

cauliflower au gratin baked with a slick of yellow butter, blanketed with swiss cheese and cream and baked down into an bubbling, ivory heap

cranberries poached in triple sec and orange zest, stewed with orange rinds and orange flower water and doused with bitters

gravy made from the stock of the turkey, sherry, giblets, red wine and butter

butter lettuce salad with paper thin shreds of green apple and leek sprinkled with balsamic vinegar and garlic so strong and bright the hair on your arms stands up

pumpkin creme caramel baked into mismatched teacups and ramekins with a slick of bitter sugar at the bottom and blanketed with a spoon of unsweetened bourbon whipped cream

peach pie shot with blackberries, lemon, ginger and kirsch

mellow vanilla ice cream flecked with vanilla beans

then, flat on the floor, bellies full, eyes closed, completely, graciously happy.

saint days

feasting time approaches.

 plans to be far too full and to lay in a daze in front of a fireplace with a mug of hot whiskey and cider.  this Day is the only one i can truly 'get behind.' to set aside a day to muse on all the things that were are grateful for, and for all the acts of grace we can perform as the frost bites down, this seems to be an act of honor. no obligatory laying down of stocks of gifts, no barricading doors against family tension, no fits to rush about trying to procure menorah candles in a state that has almost no menorahs, or finding an adequately lavish way to spend the last day of the year. just Thanking and heaping up logs and basking in a warm house filled with the hard squashes we have turned patiently in the cellar and apples and pumpkins and midday naps and toasts of all kinds. i would trade all the Holidays for variations on this one. perhaps it is because i have tried to make it a habit to listen to the ringing of the things in my life that make it worth living, and to honor the plain and the humble so i am always overwrought with joy and abundance of some kind or other.

(of course, companions help, love and heat and hair. these are the vital things.)

blindered, blinkered

"...although new studies have shown that some insects can on occasion strike out into new territory, leaving instinct behind, still a blindered and blinkered enslavement to instinct is the rule, as the pine processionaries show. Pine processionaries are moth caterpillars with shiny black heads, who travel about at night in pine trees along silken roads of their own making. They straddle the road in a tight file, head to rear touching, and each caterpillar adds its thread to the original track first laid by the one who happens to lead the procession. Fabre interferes; he catches them on a daytime exploration approaching a circular track, the rim of a wide palm vase in his greenhouse. When the leader of the insect train completes a full circle, Fabre removes the caterpillars still climbing the case and brushes away all extraneous tracks. Now he has a closed circuit of caterpillars, leaderless, trudging around his vase on a never-ending track. He wants to see how long it will take them to catch on. To his horror, they march not just an hour or so, but all day. When Fabre leaves the greenhouse at night, they are still tracing that wearying circle, although night is the time they usually feed..."

{--Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek}

that scientist goes on to discover that the caterpillars continued this trek for a week, battling heaves and swoons of temperature, lacking food or rest. he concludes,

     "...the caterpillars in distress....starved, shelterless, chilled with cold at night, cling obstinately to the silk ribbon covered hundreds of times, because they lack the rudimentary glimmers of reason which would advice them to abandon it..."

and today,  effectively snowed in (!) i am wondering just how apt that scientific nomenclature is, not just to describe the weary caterpillars but my own state as well. (or, collectively, the state festooned on us all.) it is not uncommon to feel my peripheries have begun to narrow, malleable but firm, as brass. as time lurches on it seems technology and its ability to daze and strand us before glowing lights, screens and rectangles of all kind, has a tighter grip than ever before. only, so immaculately engineered is it that one does not even realize until they squirm, just slightly, in their chair.

a few things were stirred in me as i read Annie Dillard and her showcase of J. Henri Fabre. mainly, was Fabre's conclusion, that the caterpillars are denied "any gleam of intelligence in their be night minds." were the caterpillars truly experiencing a deficit of intellect? or was it merely that they could not perform their intrinsic life work when wrested from their 'silken roads' and set to perform on the vase of the palm plant? and so with humans, while we are embroidering, knitting, baking, running, feeling, opining and creating with less tenacity than ever, we are spurred by a Faceless Many to type, text, message, display, project and worry more. (excuse the irony of this, while i put these words into virtual space but virtue of a kind of tool i am rebuking.) at times i feel i am one of those shiny-headed caterpillars, responding to what is before me without leaning away and looking down and all-around.

what empowering tools can we wield? are all honest creative gestures remedy for this? does laying one's face in the snow and tasting the ground nullify that terrible Wanting feeling we often experience when we scroll through the internet? it seems my own intellect lacks any rudimentary glimmer in my wider and more complicated version of mr  Fabre's vase.

a stand-in chemist

as it turns out, sickness happened. bust.
last night during a waning last quarter moon snow fell and disrupted everything: my sinuses, the back roads, the volvo and my ankles. in a mouthful: the first snow in a mountain town is the only allowable night on which one can drive like a maniac (or in my case, be passed by a maniac), imbibe great lungfuls of panic at the carnival ride the road has become and cuss at the general state of things: namely clogs full of snow and cold ankles, a car that won't hump up over the last hill before home and losing a glove. and thus today, plied with tissues and wrapped in a sleeping bag, this lady has presided over the couch and set only two goals for herself.
i. resting
ii. making soup

i have learned quite a few things about soup, i think it's because my brain is spongiest when it comes to combining snacks and philosophy. soup benefits from slow consideration, patience, intuition and the simmer burner. there are no rote instructions to go through mechanically, no alchemical proportions, just attentiveness. further,  you don't have to peel or even cut up the vegetables, you simply tip everything into a pan, cover it with water, and see how long you can fight the soup smell before you ladle yourself a mugful. there are of course some common sense parameters that no one would find surprising:
-if you wouldn't eat it out of your fridge that ingredient is not soup fodder
-if you wouldn't eat that ingredient with the other things you put in your soup pot, that ingredient probably won't taste good in the soup. (for example, chicken, parsley, carrots, celery, onion and parsnips would likely not taste good with olive juice or cottage cheese.)
-leave your spices out until the soup is completely done; additions like peppercorns or cloves if left in for too long will impart bitterness
-the longer the cooking time the better the soup.

so this is all well and fine, every can understand the base appeal of soup. but. the old 'jewish penicillin' tag frequently affixed to chicken soup is not as hokey as it might sound.

the long slow process of boiling a whole chicken, and if you're lucky enough a few other chicken or turkey bones especially the backs, promotes the release of nutrient rich gelatin into the broth.

gelatin is a superfood. though low in the crude protein we look to for building muscle, it contains proline and glycine, two 'essential' amino acids. of course, when we refer to an 'essential' nutrient of any kind we are simply acknowledging that it necessary for good health but is not produced by the body. (to be sure, both proline and glycine are produced by the body but not, accordingly to clinicians, in amounts sufficient for the body's daily requirements.)

proline and glycine (and gelatin as a whole), have a range of uses in the body. primarily they are involved in the integrity of joint tissues. however they are also able to
-aid in detoxification by aiding in the export of toxins such as benzoic acid, a common food preservative
-encourage the secretion of gastric acid, thus improving digestion
-aid in wound healing, due to their function in skin and joint membranes
-act as a remedy for those with 'sour stomach', by virtue of its colloidal properties
-aid in the digestion of milk and milk products (especially useful for babies)

in addition to gelatin, a traditional chicken soup recipe will provide a good dose of antimicrobial palmitoleic acid (from chicken fat), substantial hits of vitamin c (in the form of carotenes) from parsley and carrots, and additional butt-kicking, antiviral, antifungal and antimicrobial compounds found in onions and leeks. 

nutrition aside, sitting in a house that is slowly filling with steam and good smells, boiling off a pot of the widest, chewiest egg noodles you can find, and sitting in front of the fire with a deep bowl of soup while the snow falls is way more healing that bundling up to wipe your nose and sniffle in line at the pharmacy for a bottle of god-knows what. 

(a whole mouthful of goods on gelatin and broth-rich diets in this article)


while i am fending off the sniffs, the chills and the swoons, i am still thinking about seeing and trying to differentiate between 'looking' and 'seeing'. for me, 'looking' is a responsive, reactive sensation while 'seeing' is voluntary, dynamic and unique to each set of eyes. being in a newly colored world (white from brown) the exercise for the day has been re-orienting to Place using only the covered contours and quiet of the day.

architects of the deep chest

much sniffling today despite some warm breezes that have come up from somewhere. many contrails slicing up the sky and a lead weight keeping me from starting anything properly. a small headache, i think, is beginning to fringe along the backs of my eyebrows in a way that makes me think i should retire to bed, or at least to the couch, wrapped in a quilt and scalding my tongue on a hot toddy. but alas,  Progress must be made.

it's not that i don't have enough ideas. (i am trying to put all of my best writing bones on to construct a convincing paper for the Perusal of school.) it's that once i unravel the skein into manageable ideas i cannot put the first words down. (but i can put many other words in many other places, no problem.)

instead i am feeling mostly seized up.

on a slightly different note i have been enjoying Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars, a book describing case studies of patients with various neurological deficits. in his book Sacks seeks to illuminate the space where such patients (a colorblind painter, a Tourettic surgeon, a man newly gifted the ability to see following a cataract couching, an autistic savant child with immense graphic ability,) excel rather than focusing on their limitations or problems. most recently Sacks discusses Temple Grandin, a well-known high-functioning autist who has gone on to receive a Ph.D in animal sciences, to design feedlots and animal holding pens and, more strangely, to develop a (becoming more and more well-known and implemented) device known as the Hug Machine. (these folks will give you the transcripts from her interview with them as well as links to her websites.) the Hug Machine was developed by Grandin to provide a space where she could get physical contact she required (and longed for) without compromising her sense of well-being or causing a flare up of anxiety she associates with being held. the machine allows the user to exert exact pressure with an array of adjustments to simulate the gesture of being embraced without the need for physical contact. while this may, of course, be strange for a person who has no issue with the idea of being touched it has proven to be massively therapeutic to other autists or other similarly socially inhibited users. in keeping with the previously mentioned goal of understanding before wrinkling my nose i was glad to have thought it out deeply before judging. for aren't well all often hungry for a sense of touch and pressure at times when we are lonely? and further, if a person can construct a space that simulates affection and intimacy what other kinds of emotional architecture has yet to be built?

certainly a Hug Machine of any kind (wooden, flesh, down) could cure my inertia.

variations on visual hermitude

"the visibetics of this world have to learn the visual language; it does not speak for itself."

this word switched on and glowed for me this morning (which i could use, since the banks, the sky and the horizon were only variations of the same dull gray that seemed to pull light into instead of pouring it over us.)

that text (found here) comes from a paper aptly titled Icons: Support or Substitute? in which a larger question is addressed: are we visually literate? this is a difficult question, not because the answer is written in some kind of inaccessible nomenclature, but because it is asked by so many interested parties from so many disciplines. 

the questions of visual literacy have plagued the aesthetic and design world for quite some time, demanding prototypes and models from which a consensus could be reached regarding efficacy and potency in visual communication. but outside any formal sector, visual literacy now pertains to the education of a younger generation and perhaps a revision of sensory prowess for the generation that is trying to deal with more visual stimuli than ever before.

 definitions for the term visual literacy are as varied as the genres in which the eye is used. indeed contributions come from fields ranging from archaeology to museology and from anthropology to video game design. one writer has defined it as "a set of vision-competencies a human being can develop by seeing...and integrating other sensory experiences... [and that] enable a visually literate person to discriminate and interpret the visible actions, objects, symbols, natural or man-made, that he encounter in his environment."

so, more succinctly, what makes a person effectively visually literate? (versus, of course, literate in written language in a more traditional sense.) tomes have been written on this (Johanna Drucker, James Elkin, Paul Gee,) and what they are all asking is how we can refine our visual sensibility to be as comfortable dissecting a painting as we are in, say, breaking down abstract poetry.

Peter Felten suggests we are living in the 'pictorial age', that is, one where we communicate with each other predominantly through the use of image. photographs, icons, internet browsers, video uploads, we don't think twice about navigating through these means of communication and yet when the majority of us are placed in a formal aesthetic setting- museum, gallery, film screening, we renounce participation by saying "i don't get this," or "this is so arty and out there." why is this? where was the line drawn? why is there a kind of atrophy in our ability to exude confidence when viewing dada performance art or Ad Reinhardt's black on black paintings?

it seems there is a disparity between our ease with implementing technological advances in design (anyone interested in the efficacy of one Steve Jobs should certainly read this (possibly for a good laugh as much as anything)) and our capacity for analytical observation in visual world.

all this technical writing aside, i think the push of this concept is asking oneself to disengage from the technological auto-pilot we have switched on for ourselves to try to critically evaluate our natural and visual world. this doesn't mean to opine academically and immerse oneself in art critical theory per se, but rather putting one's nose to the glass to see what moves outside, to admiring a sunbeam traversing a wall, stopping everything and put all of one's attention on a bowl of soup and engage all the senses in the ritual of eating. anything loose and without a correct answer. 

i am trying for a small gesture like that every hour, or, at the very least, to look for some gesture of humanity in every situation where i wrinkle my nose in distaste.

cheers

turning the mattresses

it is time to turn the mattresses, heap on another featherbed, soak the tea towels in lemon juice until they ring with whiteness and purge the freezer and larder of all the accumulated bags of bulk goods from the grocery.

our current inventory includes a fistful of goji berries, a clutch of dried sour cherries lacquered and shining in their own sticky sugars, several well-intentioned but nevertheless fairly full bags of raw almonds (but far less than half of what we brought home in our nutty craze), a few twists of medjool dates who will likely never separate from their paper dividers and some stale wild rice sticks that even the birds won't get after. we can (grudgingly) bake these off into rainforest bars. (ugh). sneak them into trail mix (it'll never work.) or try to fold them into something absurdly heavy in butter and muscavado sugar and hope for the best. fingers crossed.
(i'll keep you posted.)

temperature hunkering down close to the bottom of the thermometer today. ice shifting like early morning bones, the gutters gleaming and glutted with it. we are not a place inhabited by ice except in the early winter, when snow melts galvanizes all the walks and steps. the dogs skate over it, their bulk and heave unfazed by loose footing. i clamber over it decidedly ungracefully, arms out, back curled, head down. as usual this is the season to model oneself after the dogs- whose warmth is built in and whose excitement is not snuffed out by windhowls.

still doing deep thinking on language and ways of seeing. and speaking of which, have you ever seen these?

guess!

...

no.

...

no.

...

no!
they are 'investigation of worn-out fryingpans' (other guesses include the many moons of Jupiter, aerial photographs of the earth over major cities and cells.)
an incredible project by christopher jonassen called 'devour'. sourced by the ever inspiring online curatorial skills of these folks.

i was seized in the chest when the understanding of these clicked, a lead warmth (much like that of a hot skillet?) that throbbed pleasantly in my cheeks. how lucky we are that deep thought and clever visions are still being hung out to look at despite the influx of digital-everything, white silicone cords and i_____'s.

it is decidedly good for hearts of all kind.

The Big Switch (or, our own protest regarding the Exchange)

At this time of year there are many pauses and jams. All the ways we feather-line our nests for the impending cold bottleneck in a line as autumn stripes out foreheads and windowsills with warm round light. Too we may start our morning clutching tea and mittens, fiercely curled against ourselves to keep our heat close and end the afternoon basking on the porch drinking off what remains of our taste for summer pilsners, hefeweizens and imperial pale ales....

Still, amidst all this stop and go that chops up our good intentions to bed down and open our mouths into the cold, the thing that has not ceased is our thirst for walking. We will (when batteries and remembering permit) bring along a small sound recorder in one pocket to sop up a swathe of sound- mainly the crackle of marsh grass as they knock their heads together, or the whippy, tinny sound of wind across lead water. Harder though, is the ability to treasure hunt for the season has lain, in ropey  hoops all about her feet, the standing dead growth, bracken and fallen leaf mulch of summer's defeat covering every minute bit of evidence we may otherwise showcase in our Real Science Pile. But this lady was lucky enough to be given the last gift of summer (!), a grapefruit size papery sphere of wasphouse, bedecked in season with a few remaining aspen leaves. After being assured there were no remaining wasps, stubborn and hermetic, holed up in there I was happy to usher in the end of one kind of space-inhabiting for the other. Mainly, giving up heat and haste for cold, wide light.


Additionally, there is for some reason a glut of eggs. Which is nice for those who are not Yolkaphobes to eat fried in a knob of butter with a snowy drift of hard cheese, the yolk still molten and chasing the fork. And nice also for those who are Yolkaphobes and prefer to swoon over the lofty, metamorphic intentions of eggs as they furiously puff up a souffle or a batch of popovers.

In any case, we are never a group that fails to celebrate an abundance of (snack-related) treasure! No matter what form that celebration may take.

 

Here is to hoping your own larder is well stocked for the onslaught of windhowls, that your eiderdowns are well aired and white as bleached bones and that your teapot is ready for a vigorous few months.

Cheers!