"Very Peculiar-Looking Creatures"

While preparing to teach next week, I came across this "Painted Poem" by Kenneth Patchen.

I've never read any of Patchen's work, but I'm very fond of this little painting, which he did in the mid-1960s. The little bird-ish fellow on the left reminds me of one of my favorite works of art: Max Ernst's L'Ange du Foyer (1937).
I don't know much about art, by I like the playfulness and color of both of these pieces. Patchen's painting is obviously fanciful, and a little bit creepy, as well. Ernst's painting has the same feel. His "angel of the home" looks joyful, but its head also looks like a bare skull; it sports a pink, happy, sexual-looking flower between its legs, but it's also brandishing some very sharp teeth and claws; it romps freely over the plain, but it also looks big enough to start earthquakes and squash whole towns with one hoof. And what's with the creepy green guy dangling off its arm?

What should I make of this colorful creature bounding across the plain and the painting's strange title?

I don't know, but I sure like to think on it.

"We Have Entered Eternity": Louise Gluck'sThe Wild Iris, Part Two

I finally finished Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris, and I'm completely in love with it. I've already written a bit about it here, but after finishing the volume, I'm even more astonished by Gluck's skill. This is a book that could stand up to Keats or Dickinson or Frost, the kind of book that I think will be read and loved for a very long time.

Here are my reasons for being a total fangirl about it:

1. As a book, it's masterfully conceived. Gluck obviously planned it out very carefully and thought a great deal about her premise and how the poems would speak to each other. The book begins with the first flowers of early spring and ends with the death of the last of summer's blossoms. Each poem is told from the point of view of either a human speaker, God, or a flower. The human speaker calls out to God to be reassured of His existence, God chastises the human about her deafness, and the plants speak to the human to complain about her foolishness.  The book is tight and precise, and I wonder at Gluck's ability to get a whole collection out of such a limited space (a summer garden) and such a limited subject matter.
2. Speaking through flowers? Is she kidding? The book's premise sounds implausible and frivolous and silly, but Gluck makes it feel totally natural. I took the flowers perfectly seriously and found the poems to be surprising, moving, and profound.
   
3. Gluck makes death new again. The fear of death is an ancient theme, and the inability to connect with God is just as old. But by speaking through one garden, a few clumps of flowers, and certain slants of light, Gluck makes the human speaker's angst entirely new again. Her ability to reinvigorate this fear is astonishing.
   
4. The poems are wonderfully simple. Each poem is brief, perfectly executed, and centered around one concept, one nugget of truth. The rest of the poem simply sets up the speaker's voice and prepares us for the poem's real crux. Gluck gives her poems space to breathe, space to luxuriate in their own meaning. I think it takes a lot of skill, self-restraint, and confidence to write this way.
5. This book makes me want to write. Not all poetry does this to me: some poems cow me with their brilliance, some poems bore me with their dullness, but it's a rare and wonderful poem that inspires me to pick up my own pen and write. Gluck is the kind of poet that other poets love to read, and I'm no longer surprised that this book has been recommended to me by so many writers.
   

I could go on and on. I liked the book so much that as soon as I finished it, I turned right back to the first page and started reading it again! But I'll stop with the praising and share a few of Gluck's poems here.

These two poems are the last in the book. After all of the human speaker's yearnings for God, after all of His failed attempts to be heard, after all of the fear of death lurking at the edges of these poems, everything comes to a head here: the flowers die, and it seems that God cannot, or chooses not to, hear them.

These poems are beautiful in themselves, but the impact they have at the end of the volume is astonishing: the phrases "your child's terror" and "we have entered eternity" leap from the final pages, chilling the reader with the harsh reality of mortal life and death.


---------------

The Gold Lily

By Louise Gluck

From The Wild Iris

Taken from Plagiarist.com

As I perceive
I am dying now and know
I will not speak again, will not
survive the earth, be summoned
out of it again, not
a flower yet, a spine only, raw dirt
catching my ribs, I call you,
father and master: all around,
my companions are failing, thinking
you do not see. How
can they know you see
unless you save us?
In the summer twilight, are you
close enough to hear
your child's terror? Or
are you not my father,
you who raised me?

---------------

The White Lilies

By Louise Gluck

From The Wild Iris

Taken from Plagiarist.com

As a man and woman make
a garden between them like
a bed of stars, here
they linger in the summer evening
and the evening turns
cold with their terror: it
could all end, it is capable
of devastation. All, all
can be lost, through scented air
the narrow columns
uselessly rising, and beyond,
a churning sea of poppies--

Hush, beloved.  It doesn't matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity.
I felt your two hands
bury me to release its splendor. 

My Very Homemade Christmas: Gift Baskets, Sore Muscles, and Sugar Cookies

As you may have noticed, over the holidays, I took an accidental week off from blogging. Things just got too hectic, in part because I decided to make most of my Christmas presents this year. Between baking enough treats to fill four gift baskets for friends and family, helping with my mom's Christmas Day brunch, prepping snacks for house guests, and making my gift for the family bottle exchange, I had quite a week on my hands! I spent a total of fourteen hours in the kitchen by the time Christmas rolled around, and I went through almost five pounds of butter and eight pounds of flour!

For my gift baskets, I made five batches of cinnamon rolls, one recipe of dense chocolate loaf cake, one recipe of banana bread, a double batch of puppy chow, and a double batch of sugar cookies.

Batch #5 of cinnamon rolls!

Puppy chow, tailgate mix, sugar cookies, chocolate loaf, and banana bread, wrapped and ready to go!

 

The treats nestled all snug in their gift baskets!

As tiring as all that baking was (I thought my arms would fall off from the kneading!), I had a great time doing it! And the house smelled fantastic all week long. 

But the best thing about my baking spree was being able to share my favorite recipes with some of my favorite people. The cinnamon rolls are, of course, a slightly modified version of Paula Deen's recipe, and the dense chocolate loaf cake comes from Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess. 

The banana bread is my Grandma Bill's recipe as it appears in the official Heller-Higgins family cookbook. This is by far my favorite banana bread recipe because it's really more of a banana-flavored cake than a bread--I even use cake flour in the recipe to make it even smoother and cakier! 

But the sugar cookies have to be my favorite recipe. I love frosted sugar cookies, in part because they're such a huge part of my family's holiday traditions. My Grandma Bill always makes a few batches of sugar cookies for Christmas Eve. She also makes something like 300 sugar cookies for my family to frost at Easter time. Some of my favorite childhood memories are of sitting around my grandma's dining room table, surrounded by cousins and aunts and uncles. The table would always be covered with newspaper; mounds of crisp, butter-yellow cookies; crystal mugs brimming with colored frosting and sticky knife handles; and trays of sprinkles in every shape and color imaginable. We would all end up with sticky fingers, clothes speckled with multicolored frosting stains, and wildly colored plates stacked with fresh sugar cookies! 

This Christmas, I got to bake my two batches of sugar cookies with the help of my youngest cousins Tucker, Zoe, and Augie. Zoe helped me roll out and shape the cookies, and all three of the kids helped me frost. We had flour all over the kitchen floor and frosting splattered four feet away from our frosting station, but, heck, any mess is worth baggies full of soft, powdery, sugary, colorful goodness, right?

A gift baggie of sugar cookies.

My sugar cookie recipe is a little different from my Grandma Bill's, however. My recipe of choice combines my Aunt Rita's Sugar Cookie recipe with Nigella Lawson's Butter Cut-Out Cookie recipe. The two original recipes are very similar, but their proportions differ slightly: Aunt Rita's recipe calls for more sugar, more fat, and shortening instead of butter, while Lawson's recipe calls for real unsalted butter, less sugar, and cake flour for added softness. 

I think that my combined recipe takes the best parts of both recipes. And instead of Lawson's hot water and powdered sugar frosting, I use my mom's favorite frosting: a tiny bit of softened butter, a hearty splash of vanilla, a slosh of 1% milk, and a whole lot of powdered sugar. 

This, I believe, creates the perfect sugar cookie: it's soft and pale and powdery, yet crisp at the edges and sturdy enough for rough treatment. And they improve after a day or two of sitting out. As the cookie absorbs the frosting's moisture, the cookie becomes moist and tender while the frosting hardens to form a rich, sugary, delectable crust.

---------------
Lesley's Hybrid Sugar Cookies
Adapted from Nigella Lawson's Butter Cut-Out Cookies and Aunt Rita's Sugar Cookies

Cookie Ingredients

• 3/4 cup softened unsalted butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/3 cups cake flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt

Frosting Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons softened salted butter
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup milk
• 2 to 3 cups powdered sugar

Directions

Combine flours, baking powder, and salt in a small bowl. Whisk together to combine.

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar together until pale. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Add the dry ingredient mixture and beat until smooth. If possible, refrigerate dough for one hour.

Roll out the dough on a floured counter top until the dough is approximately 1/4 inch thick. Cut into shapes with cookie cutters and bake on ungreased cookie sheets at 360 degrees for 8 to 10 minutes (or until the edges are very slightly browned). Allow cookies to set on the cookie sheet before moving them onto cooling racks.

While the cookies cool, begin the frosting by briefly whipping the softened butter with a fork or whisk. Add vanilla extract and a splash of milk. Add two cups of the powdered sugar and mix until smooth. Use the fork or whisk to smooth out any persistent chunks of butter.

Once the mixture is smooth, add more sugar or milk as needed to reach a slightly watery yet spreadable consistency. Spread the frosting onto cooled cookies with a knife.

How to Make Your Own Wrapping Paper

Seven wrapped packages.

Ta daaaa!

I've been wanting to make my own wrapping paper for years, but this is the first year that I've found the time to do so. I was very pleased with the results: I was able to wrap six small-ish packages for less than two dollars, and I created no new waste in the process!

Here's how to do it: First, cut a brown paper bag along two of the longest seams (see below). This will give you one large rectangular piece of paper and one small rectangular piece.

If you have a cat, let her inspect your work frequently to keep you on the right track.

Next, cut off the bottom of the bag, which is too thick to wrap with. Smooth out the remaining sheets as well as you can and trim off the rough edges until you have the desired paper size. You should be able to wrap two small packages with each bag.

Then, draw your chosen pattern on the blank side of the paper using a silver Sharpie. Any other metallic marker will work, as well, but Sharpies are the cheapest and easiest to find (I got a double pack at Wal-Mart for $1.50).

 

My beloved silver Sharpie.

I used three different patterns. Each pattern took only a few minutes to draw on and, luckily, required not a jot of artistic talent:

Swirlies.

Stars.

Spirals.

The resulting wrapping paper has its benefits and its drawbacks. Obviously, it's very strong, so you don't have to worry about it tearing during wrapping or under the tree (unlike Hallmark wrapping paper, for example, which is terribly cute and about as flimsy as tracing paper).

Also, this is a good way to get a second use out of your old paper bags. The resulting wrapping paper is completely recyclable, as well, unlike commercial wrapping papers, which many cities won't accept for recycling. By making your own paper out of reused materials and then recycling it, you can avoid contributing to the four million tons of wrapping paper waste that ends up in landfills each year.

And, most importantly, it looks quite pretty, understated, and chic once the wrapping is done.

A few small packages with swirl and star designs.

A bag with the star design and a box with the spiral design.

The drawbacks are that that paper is quite thick and doesn't always want to stay folded around its intended package. I solved this by creasing the paper as much as I could before wrapping the package, and then by crimping the edges of each wrapped package so that the paper kept its shape. Most importantly, though, I used the strongest tape I could find, and plenty of it!

In keeping with the earth-friendly theme, I reused an plain old gift bag (see above) and tissue that I had received with a gift earlier this year. Drawing on the bag made it look quite new again, and tissue paper is always so crumpled that it's impossible to tell that it's been reused!

If you've done your job properly, your kitty will show her approval by blinking sleepily.

I'm baking most of my other presents this year, and I'm trying to figure out equally environmentally friendly ways of wrapping delicious baked goods. This, I fear, will prove a much harder challenge: not only does my paper need to be food safe (which prohibits most recycled paper), but I'll probably need to use cellophane to keep the food fresh. But I'll do my best, and if I get any bright ideas, I'll be sure to post updates here!

"You Go Where You Are Sent": Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris

This week, I'm reading Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris. I'm a little late to this poetry party: the book was first published in 1993 and received that year's Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and people have been recommending Gluck's volume to me for years.

But late is certainly better than never! So far, The Wild Iris is one of those rare collections where every poem is breathtaking. The collection as a whole is tightly woven; each poem is either a) told from the point of view of a flower (or sometimes a patch of clover or bit of seasonal weather), or b) told in the voice of a human speaker as she roams the garden around her house (these poems are all titled "Matins"). Thematically, the poems are preoccupied with God, human happiness, and the inability to accept death as a part of nature. The flower poems, especially, speak to the all-too-human flaws (the desires for immortality, independence, spiritual connection, etc.) that cause the human speaker's unhappiness.

I can't say enough good things about this book, so I'll hold off on further lauding until I've finished it. In the meantime, here's "Scilla," one of my favorites from the collection. I love how sharp the flowers' voice is in this one ("Not I, you idiot"), and the flowers' message ("to be one thing / is to be next to nothing") is so fresh and surprising to me. Gluck does a fantastic job in this book of imagining herself into the shoes (or perhaps into the roots?) of these flowers so that her dramatic monologues, though fanciful in theory, always come off as startlingly, achingly true.

---------------

Scilla

By Louise Gluck

From The Wild Iris

Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we--waves

of sky blue like

a critique of heaven: why

do you treasure your voice

when to be one thing

is to be next to nothing?

Why do you look up? To hear

an echo like the voice

of god? You are all the same to us,

solitary, standing above us, planning

your silly lives: you go

where you are sent, like all things,

where the wind plants you,

one or another of you forever

looking down and seeing some image

of water, and hearing what? Waves

and over waves, birds singing.

The High School Novel: Books that Everyone Should Read

Do you remember when Facebook let you search for the most popular activities, movies, and books that users list on their profiles? These stats were always fun to look at: you could see just how many young people in the U.S. played frisbee golf and listened to Weezer and were obsessed with the Harry Potter movies.

However, what always impressed me the most was the Favorite Books section. Harry Potter was, of course, always near the top, as were the Bible and The Da Vinci Code. But, surprisingly, the most commonly listed Favorite Books were classic high school reads like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

These are all great books--I know that I enjoyed them--but there are plenty of other books out there that are easier and more fun to read. There are also a lot of books out there that show more depth of thought and literary craftsmanship. Yet people's favorite books are neither the most entertaining nor the most profound novels available. So why are they so universally beloved?

Well, these tested and true High School Novels are wonderfully teachable: they strike a healthy compromise between depth, readability, and age appropriateness. Their ability to provoke thought while remaining accessible and inoffensive has made them the most widely taught and therefore the most widely read books in America. They're our universal texts--even people who aren't avid readers outside of a classroom have encountered them--and so, statistically speaking, these books are the most likely to be considered favorites.

In a very real way, our high school English teachers have placed these books at the center of the de facto American literary canon: everyone is expected to have read them, and they have become beloved symbols of our national culture. In this sense, being a high school English teacher is an awesome responsibility because the texts teachers assign will continue to have a huge impact on students and, arguably, our natural mindset and culture.

I've been thinking about this because I'm teaching an introductory literature course at a business college in the spring. This is the only literature course that my students will ever take at the university level, and I'm struck by the unexpected importance of my task. Statistically speaking, between 1/4 and 1/2 of my students will cease to be regular readers after they've turned in their final papers. The books that I teach them may become their lasting favorites and permanent influences on their way of thinking.

So what works should I choose for them? What books can they grow to love and learn the most from? Should I choose the books I love? Those that are the most emblematic of American literature? A wide, strange array to show literature's scope, or a traditional yet limited segment of stories? Should I choose the most morally edifying books (Huckleberry, I'm looking at you!), or should I choose great literary works whose message is less than inspiring (The Waste Land, anyone?)?

Perhaps I'm worrying about this too much. But when I think back to high school, I remember how little I knew and how important each new book seemed to me. What if I hadn't read The Grapes of Wrath as a junior and Jane Eyre as a senior? These are the kind of works that made me fall in love with literature, the books that made me want to be a writer, the books that really made me think.

And that sort of passion is all I want for my students: I want them to fall in love with a book that I assign at least once, in the hope that they'll become lifelong readers and fall in love again and again.

My Christmas Scrooge-ery

When I was little, I loved Christmas. I spent the whole year anticipating December 25th. Now I spend the whole of November and December dreading time's relentless charge toward the mess and bustle of this all-consuming holiday.

Bah! Meh! Blargh!

Well, okay, I'm not as bad as all that. But I do resent the way Christmas bleeds from the 25th all the way into mid-November and early December. I just can't keep my Christmas spirit going for that long. If everyone started talking about Christmas today (December 15th) instead of November 15th, I'd have more enthusiasm for Christmas-time. But instead, retailers insist on pushing the season ever earlier so that I have to see stocking stuffer sales in October and hear Christmas carols in November!

Perhaps this grumpiness is just a result of spending too many years in school. If I were still in college, this would be finals week. I'd be working frantically, stressed beyond the point of sanity as I tried to finish all my papers and tests before the end of the week. During finals week, every Christmas carol is cruel torture to a student: not only do they not have time to enjoy the holidays or decorate their dorms or do their shopping before December 20th, but they're also wallowing in enough anxiety to tinge the season's "joy" with a hearty dose of bitterness and fear. Christmas becomes some unreachable, idyllic Valhalla that can only be attained by surviving the gauntlet of finals.

This year, even though I can regard the approach of Christmas with equanimity in the absence of school work, I'm not yet ready for it. I'm in that in-between place where I've resigned myself to Christmas without yet being enthused for it: my shopping is almost done, yet my holiday baking hasn't yet begun, my mom's decorated the house with Christmas cheer, but I'm not yet listening to Christmas carols, etc.

I know that I won't get excited for Christmas until next week when my out-of-state family starts to arrive. Only then will I be able to imagine sitting in the basement of my grandparents' house with a slew of aunts and uncles milling around, munching on star-shaped sugar cookies, listening to one of my littlest cousins reading the Christmas story. Only then will I abandon my Scrooge-ish ways.

Until then, since I can't enjoy Christmas in earnest, I'll have to settle for reading David Sedaris and enjoying this:

 What fun would the holidays be without a little emotional scarring?

What I Learned from Baking Gingerbread

I learned that I don't like gingerbread.

*Sigh.*

I made Nigella Lawson's Fresh Gingerbread with Lemon Icing because I'd never had real gingerbread in cake form before. I assumed that I'd love this recipe: I have a lot of faith in Nigella, I love ginger snaps, and I love the taste of fresh ginger in savory dishes. So how could I go wrong?

The answer: molasses, and lots of it.

Let me explain: This recipe begins by melting together butter, brown sugar, light corn syrup, and enough molasses to put a small village into diabetic shock. Then you throw in some cinnamon and freshly ground ginger to let the flavors incorporate.

Freshly ground ginger root.

 

The sugary, buttery, molasses-y ginger sludge.

This makes for a very aromatic black sludge. I didn't like the smell of it, but there are plenty of delicious foods in this world that smell just awful while they're cooking. Take Thai food, for example: your whole kitchen will reek of fish sauce for awhile, but your dinner is always ample reward for the stench.

So I dutifully continued. Next, you combine the sludge with the milk, beaten eggs, and dissolved baking soda. Finally, the liquid mixtures gets combined with a bit of flour. This makes for a very thin, wet batter.

The gingerbread batter.

Then it's into the oven. The gingerbread itself turned out to be dark and rich-looking and quite pretty.

The unfrosted gingerbread.

I used freshly squeezed lemon juice for the glaze, which turned out to be very intense (I licked the spoon once and my lips puckered uncontrollably). I'd recommend moderation in application here.

The gingerbread soaked with its lemon glaze.

According to my mother--who, it seems, does like gingerbread--this recipe turned out great. She was quite gaga over it, and even I could appreciate the smooth, damp texture of the cake's fine crumb. I also loved how bright the lemon glaze tasted against the dark gingerbread.

But what I couldn't stomach about the gingerbread was its strong molasses flavor, which overwhelmed everything else about the bread. I don't know why I responded so badly the flavor--I love a nice, chewy molasses cookie--but I couldn't get past it. It made the cake taste bitter and almost burnt instead of rich and spicy.

My wedge of gingerbread, which I only picked at.

I'd recommend this recipe to the hardcore traditional gingerbread lover. But, personally, I'm off to find a ginger snap recipe that involves fresh ginger, no molasses, and a lot of palate-friendly cinnamon and sugar!

---------------

Fresh Gingerbread with Lemon Icing

From Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess

Taken from Epicurious.com

Ingredients

For the gingerbread:

• 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• 3/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon light corn syrup
• 3/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon molasses
• 2 teaspoons fresh ginger, finely grated
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons milk
• 2 large eggs, beaten to mix
• 1 teaspoon baking soda, dissolved in 2 tablespoons warm water
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• roasting pan, approximately 12 x 8 x 2 inches, greased and lined with foil or parchment paper

For the icing:

• 1 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons confectioners' sugar, sifted
• 1 tablespoon warm water

Preparation

Preheat the oven to 325°F.

In a saucepan, melt the butter along with the sugar, syrup, molasses, ginger, and cinnamon. Off the heat, add the milk, eggs, and baking soda in its water. Measure the flour out into a bowl and pour in the liquid ingredients, beating until very well mixed (it will be a very liquid batter).

Pour it into the pan and bake for 3/4 - 1 hour until risen and firm. Be careful not to overcook it, as it is nicer a little stickier, and anyway it will carry on cooking as it cools.

And when it is cool, get on with the icing. Whisk the lemon juice into the confectioners' sugar first, then gradually add the water. You want a good, thick icing, so go cautiously and be prepared not to add all the water. Spread over the cooled gingerbread with a palette knife, and leave to set before cutting.

Between the Folds

I woke up chilly this morning, and thankful for my flannels sheets and the warm kitty nestled at the foot of my bed. There's a fine layer of snow outside. It's no more than an inch thick, but it's very pretty and white and clean on such a frigid day.

Since it's nearly the holidays and I have two part-time teaching gigs lined up for January, I'm taking some time off from my job search. Instead of spending another day slogging away at resumes and cover letters, I've spent my afternoon in a very warm kitchen. There's a loaf of white bread rising in the bread machine for dinner, a pan of gingerbread cooling by the stove (expect pictures soon!), and a package of spicy Italian sausage waiting to be cut up and simmered in marinara sauce for dinner.

I've been thinking a lot about how people discover what they really love in life and how they reshape their lives to fulfill their passions. I started thinking about this because of Between the Folds, a documentary that premiered last night on PBS. Part of the Independent Lens series, this hour-long documentary tells the stories of scientists, mathematicians, and artists who have dedicated their lives to origami. Each origami artist tells how he got interested in paper folding, and a few of them describe the fear they felt about abandoning successful careers as engineers and sculptors to pursue origami full-time.

Their work is beautiful, complex, and astonishing: life-like men and gnomes molded from thick, woolly paper; flat flowers that pop up into three-dimensional towers; dragons with a thousand scales made from a single uncut square of paper; flimsy white sheets folded once and twisted deftly to resemble birds and angels; and even simple pleated contraptions that twist naturally into flexible, springy parabolas.

I loved origami as a child and spent hours folding paper, but these men have transformed this seemingly simple craft. Their work is truly art, and, sometimes, it's even a mathematical playground that allows them to study geometry and theoretical algebra.

But what struck me the most about these men is how dedicated they are. Their eyes flash with excitement as their thick fingers crease and crumple sheets of paper. Their pieces show hours and hours of work: each piece requires hundreds of tiny and seemingly irrelevant manipulations that add up to something fantastical, and fantastically delicate--if a single step were missed, the construction would fail.

Yet no matter how complex and beautiful the final objects appear, each piece is still just a sheet paper, hollow and light enough to be picked up by the wind, delicate enough to be mashed by one misplaced elbow.

To live one's life for folding paper requires a passion and engagement that few of us will ever know. Last night, as I watched the documentary, I wanted to be like those men. I didn't want to be a paper folder, exactly, but I did want to be someone who loves what they do, whose eyes shine as they perform the same complex task again and again, endlessly inching closer and closer to mastery in their pursuit of beauty.

(For more on origami, read Susan Orlean's fantastic profile of Robert J. Lang "The Origami Lab."

Book Abandonment: White Teeth and Out of Africa

Have you ever stopped reading a book in the middle?

I've always prided myself on finishing all the books that I begin. I don't like the idea of characters floating around in my memory, half-formed and, to my knowledge, fate-less. Did Dave die? Did Joanie ever find love? Did Xangar III ever return to his home planet? I hate the idea of not knowing, of leaving books and characters incomplete.

But I've been cleaning out my bookshelves and lugging unwanted books to the local Friends of the Library Book Sale bin. I've rediscovered two books that I abandoned over the summer: White Teeth by Zadie Smith and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen.

These are two very different books. According to the official Amazon.com review, White Teeth is about "race, sex, class, history, and the minefield of gender politics." This seems accurate; after reading nearly 100 pages of the novel, I think that Smith writes more about ideas like "race" and "history" than about characters with real emotions and real lives. The novel follows an interracial (and inter-generational) London couple and their Indian neighbors over several generations. This premise sounds like it should make for great fiction (clashing cultures, faltering marriages, alienated children, the ebb and flow of history, etc.), but instead the novel is vapid and slow moving. The characters seem flat as they move through the pages, spurred by unfathomable motives and faulty relationships.

Out of Africa is Dinesen's autobiographical account of her time running a coffee plantation near Nairobi. Dinesen writes beautifully of the Ngong Hills, East Africa's seasons, and the animals that roam her land. But the book never takes off, and it never developed enough substance to sustain me beyond the first 130 pages. Dinesen offers no storyline and no vibrant characters to grab onto, just a stream of vaguely racist observations about her African servants and how deeply different they are from her Danish self. She seems to keep her African "friends" at arm's length, and therefore is incapable of telling us anything about the Africans she meets except that they seem to be stubborn and fatalistic people.

Both of these books have undeniable merits (Dinesen's eye for detail is enthralling, and Smith has a vibrant imagination for characters with colorful backgrounds), but neither book delivers the kind of soul that, to me, makes a book worth reading. Dinesen can't depict anything beyond landscapes and caricatures, and Smith's characters present fantastically interesting surfaces that cannot disguise the fact that they, ultimately, are bores.

Out of Africa is considered a classic, and White Teeth won a slew of awards when it was released in 2000, so I felt obliged to give both of these books a fighting chance. But, for me, they were both unfinishable.

So what is my punishment for abandoning these books? I'm sure to be haunted by them every time I wander into a Barnes & Noble. They'll leer at me from the shelves, taunting, "Now you'll never know what happened in the end! You'll never know what happened to meeeeeee!"

How to Snickerdoodle

I think that "snickerdoodle" should be a verb. Whenever I hear it, I don't think of delicious cookies covered in a fine dusting of cinnamon, I think of someone doing the twist with great vigor while giggling uncontrollably.

The Snickerdoodle looks like this, only sillier.

This may be a result of some crossed wires in my brain, or maybe it comes from how darn much I love snickerdoodles; they make me prone to boogieing.

There are two types of snickerdoodles in this world:

1. The Soft Variety: These snickerdoodles are soft and chewy and vanilla-y. They're basically sugar cookies rolled in cinnamon and sugar. I'm a big fan of these, but I've only ever found them at professional bakeries.
   
2. The Crispy Variety: The equally delicious crispy snickerdoodles make a pronounced "crunch" as you bite into them. The uncooked dough is more like that of a butter cookie (dense, smooth, and a little sticky) than the dough of a sugar cookie (dry and sort of flexible). These are what the below recipe makes.

This recipe comes from Emeril Lagasse of "BAM!" fame. I never would have thought that Emeril, king of beefy sandwiches and Cajun cuisine, could dream up such a delicious cookie, but these are just about perfect. My only change was to add a little more sugar to the coating mixture for extra sweetness.

These are easy that I don't know why I've never made them before. All you do is mix the ingredients as directed, scoop the dough into rough 1 1/2" balls, roll them in cinnamon and sugar . . .

flatten them into chubby little pucks . . .

and bake. You don't even have to worry about making the flattened pucks perfectly round--the cookies rise and spread into perfect circles all on their own.

The recipe suggests that you take the cookies out of the oven when just the edges are browned, but that's pretty much impossible since the cookies are covered in brown powder. The way I could tell when my cookies were done was that they looked like the above picture: the centers were still puffy, but the edges had gone flat and crispy.

These are the first Christmas-y thing I've made this month. Here's the rest of my to-do list:

• gingerbread (the cake-y kind, not the cookie variety)
• soft and puffy sugar cookies
• puppy chow
• peanut brittle
• something involving Red Hots
  
• cinnamon rolls (and lots of them!)

Wish me luck! 
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Snickerdoodles

By Emeril Lagasse

From FoodNetwork.com

Ingredients

• 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon fine salt
• 1/2 cup shortening
• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
• 1 1/2 cups sugar, plus 3 tablespoons
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Sift the flour, baking soda, and salt into a bowl.

With a handheld or standing mixer, beat together the shortening and butter. Add the 1 1/2 cups sugar and continue beating until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the flour mixture and blend until smooth.

Mix the 3 tablespoons sugar with the cinnamon in a small bowl. Roll the dough, by hand, into 1 1/2-inch balls. Roll the balls in the cinnamon sugar. Flatten the balls into 1/2-inch thick disks, spacing them evenly on unlined cookie sheets. 

Bake until light brown, but still moist in the center, about 12 minutes. Cool on a rack.

The Joy of Reading "Bad" Books

Last Tuesday, I felt quite good about myself as I walked to the front desk of the public library. I plopped my fat tome on the check-out counter and waited as an older librarian wandered up to the counter, flashing me his quiet librarian smile. I pushed the hefty copy of David Copperfield closer to him and laid my card on top of it. That's right, I was committing myself to hours and hours of Dickens, and I was proud of it, proud of myself for being such A Serious Reader.

As he scanned my card, the computer beeped. "Oh, did you get your hold?" he asked.

"No, I didn't think it was in yet!" My pulse raced with excitement. Was it true? Was it finally here? The book I had been waiting weeks for?

"Well, if it's not on the hold shelf, it must be in the back. I'll go get it for you," he said. "Just let me check the name . . ." He squinted at the screen for a moment. "Circus of the Damned," he said slowly, his voice faltering into surprised disapproval as he looked from the screen to me. I could imagine what he was thinking: But I thought you were one of us! You brought me Dickens, but now you want, what?, some book about devil-clowns?

"Well, I guess I'll get to read my cheesy novel before I get to read my good one!" I giggled lamely as the librarian turned away from the counter and headed back to the returns bins. He returned with a small, pulpy hardcover whose cover showed a woman's hip with a cobra gliding along her curves.

Yikes, I thought, smiling politely as I took my receipt, stuffed my books into my backpack, and snuck away toward the exit.

Obviously, I read "trashy" novels as often as a read "good" ones. I've read all the Harry Potters, all the Twilights, and enough Goosebumps and Christopher Pike books and Sookie Stackhouses to build a small fort with (you know, something to hide in when I got scared of all the ghosts and vampires).

I've gotten a lot of flak for reading cheesy horror/fantasy books, and I've offered a lot of excuses about why I read them:

1. They take me back to my childhood, when I read every neon-covered horror novel in my library's Young Adults section. It's nostalgia that brings me back!
2. Horror novels satisfy my morbid imagination--"Alas! Poor Yorick" and all that.
   
3. They teach me the essentials of plot and tension, so reading paperback fantasy novels has, ultimately, made me a better writer.
4. I just got out of grad school, gosh darnit, and I don't have to spend every day of my life reading Christopher Marlowe and Bleak House! Not anymore!
5. I'm being ironical . . . ?
   

None of these excuses really hold up. The fact of the matter is that I love cheesy horror/fantasy novels and I probably always will. I like reading about worlds that include vampires and wizards and zombies, and I like becoming absorbed in wildly imaginative storylines where, outside of the bounds of realism, literally anything can happen. These books offer exciting plots and great storytelling. Their prose is quick and clean and easy: the words get the job done and then get out of the plot's way.

These books represent a style of writing that is, I think, very underrated. "Light fiction" like this inspires what is called ludic reading. Psychologist Victor Nell defines ludic reading as reading that is done purely for pleasure; it is effortless and completely absorbing and almost trance-like. It's what happens when a great storyteller grabs hold of a reader completely, immersing her in the plot and making her desperate to find out "what happens next."

This type of reading is what English teachers across the nation hope to inspire in their students, and yet the fiction associated with ludic reading is often considered low-brow. I think it's unfair to writers like Charlaine Harris and Laurell K. Hamilton. Harris and Hamilton may not have the cache of Literary Fiction writers, but they are experts at crafting galloping, imaginative plot-lines and lively characters.

Being a great storyteller is a unique gift that not all writers have. I've been in enough writing workshops to know that being a good writer and being a good storyteller are not necessarily the same thing. There are plenty of brilliant wordsmiths in the world who can make you weep at the beauty of their sentences and tremble at the tastefulness of their semicolon use. But these are often the same people who can't cobble together a life-like character or a rising plot line to save their lives.

And that's fine. Different styles of books exist for different readers, different moods, and different needs. This week, I needed the enthralling, gruesome, morbidly funny world of Hamilton's Anita Blake series. I read the first 270 pages of Circus of the Damned in one night and barely noticed; if I hadn't looked at my phone and seen it was after 1:00 a.m., I probably would have finished the whole thing!

This week, I've been grateful for cheesy novels, even though my librarian gave me the stink eye. I needed to be swept up in Hamilton's vampire-filled alternate universe. I needed to read my nights away, enthralled and entertained, before slinking off to bed, happy and a little creeped out by the thought of a zombie sneaking through my bedroom window.

How to Prepare for an Interview: Four Tips No One Tells You

As I've prepared for interviews over the last few weeks, I've done everything I'm supposed to: I've practiced answering common interview questions, practiced my behavioral interview stories, and learned a great deal about the companies I'm interviewing with.

But I've also learned that, no matter what answers I prep, the most important part of a successful interview is being mentally prepared. Here are my five most important tips for mentally preparing for a great interview:

1.  Loosen Your Tongue: Whether you're an extrovert or an introvert, it's important to get yourself warmed up before the interview. Talk to yourself out loud, practicing your answers to common interview questions again and again. This will loosen your tongue and prepare you to think on your feet. Remember that interviewers will remember your conduct more than what you say: no matter what, being eloquent and quick will make your answers have a lot more impact.
2. Adjust Your Attitude: You should always approach an interview with the attitude that you're visiting the office to meet potential colleagues and friends. If you go into the interview thinking that your interviewer is trying to test you or find your flaws, you can become overly nervous, quiet, and even defensive (and these are never good traits for an interviewee to have!). Go into the interview room wanting to build a relationship with your interviewers; doing so will help you reduce your anxiety and come off as confident and personable.
3. Be Yourself: Focus on showing the interviewer that you're a real person. Feel free to tell a story, tell a joke, and be friendly. If you keep the conversation positive, light, and sincere, your interviewers will see you as more than just a job candidate--they'll start to see you as a real person and potential co-worker.
   
4. Stay on Message: No matter what questions you're asked in an interview, you should have a message that you're completely focused on delivering. That message pertains to why you're different from all the other applicants: do you work harder than anyone else? do you have unique ideas about how you could improve the company? will you do a great job because of talents X, Y, and Z? No matter what questions your interviewer asks, you should take any opportunity to relay your message about what makes you unique and desirable. Not only will this ensure that your interviewer knows exactly what you're about, but "staying on message" can keep you focused during an interview.

If you follow these tips, you're sure to come off as the confident, prepared, and positive employee that your interviewer is looking for!

Learning HTML

When I was in junior high, my gifted class teacher was always trying to make her students into amateur computer programmers. In 1996, she thought that computers were The Future (and she was right, of course), so she thought that all of us smart little kiddies should go out into the world and become rich computer programmers. She made us all spend one period a week writing DOS programs on an ancient green screen Apple computer.

It looked something like this.

I staunchly repressed any memory of this time of my life, except for how much I hated it.

But I've been learning HTML for a few weeks now, and, surprisingly, I sort of love it. HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Language," and it's the language that most Web pages are written in. If you've never messed with it, it sounds really impressive and complicated and fancy, but it's really not. It's fun and pretty intuitive, once you know the basics of the language.

I like learning HTML for a few reasons. First, the book I'm using is great. Charlie recommended it: it's called Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML. It teaches you all the basics of HTML, CSS, and XHTML, and it does so with lots of exercises, frequent repetition, plenty of diagrams, and a writing style that's humorous and casual.

The awesome Head First HTML book I'm using.

The Head First books are supposed to be "Brain-Friendly" and to make learning a new programming language intelligible, fun, and easy. Fortunately, their system is definitely working for me--I'm actually remembering everything I learn from week to week (which is more than I can say for all those history classes I took in high school).

Second, learning HTML makes me appreciate the complexity of the Internet. I've used the Web for so long that I take most of it for granted. But the more I learn about HTML and the quirks of Web browsers, the more I respect the people who make really good Web sites. To write a good Web site, I think that a programmer has to be both compulsively detail-oriented and capable of planning ahead and seeing the big picture. It's hard to do, and they definitely get paid well for a reason!

Third, learning HTML is a completely different form of mental exercise. I'm used to crafting words into texts that are flexible and depend on themselves for their internal logic. For example, there are no rules about what makes a good poem; the only rule is that each word and line in the poem must contribute to the whole, that each part must follow the rules and structure that the poem creates for itself. So poetry (and most forms of writing) is about relative harmony, not correctness.

My HTML for one of the Head First exercises.

Writing HTML, on the other hand, is about perfect correctness according to what the Web browser expects. Every element and tag has to be correct and without typos (leaving out a single < or " or = or / can make a whole element fail!). It's strict, and I love that. I enjoy it in the same way that I enjoy doing math: it doesn't come easily to me, but it does make me think in a new way, which gives my mind a healthy workout.

Fourth, I love the excitement of loading a new page into my browser. I never know if it's going to look right or not. I type a change into my editor, click the save icon, open the page in my Web browser, and then wait with baited breath: Will it load? Will the images appear? Will the link be active?

One of my Head First projects. Each image is a thumbnail that links to another page.

Having a page open perfectly is kind of a rush. It's like magic: you write this file that looks like a jumble of half-words and symbols, but when the page loads, it transforms into a real live Web site. I love it, and Charlie (who works full-time as a Web developer) says he feels the same way when he tests a site for the first time.

Right now, I've only made exercises out of the Head First book, and I haven't dabbled in style at all. But who knows? Maybe one day I'll get to experience to rush of making an entire Web site that's functional and pretty!

What I'm Reading: McCarthy, Snyder

Charlie recommended Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian to me months and months ago. He's read it three or four times, and I can see why. It's an amazing book.

It's taken me quite awhile to get through it, though. The language is a little difficult (McCarthy is famous for avoiding punctuation), but the book's most challenging aspect is its violence. Set in 1849, the novel is dark and troubling and casually gory; scalps and blood fly constantly as a troupe of hired killers hunt Indians tribes along the Mexican-American border. McCarthy is preoccupied with war not as an incident but as a natural state of man. His characters roam deserts and scrub lands killing and being killed, caring little for why they do so.

But beyond the gore, McCarthy's imagery is startlingly beautiful, and his characters grow increasingly symbolic as the book progresses. In its final pages, the book transforms from murderous picaresque into something more allegorical, more profound. Even though I cringed my way through all 300 pages of its relentlessly senseless violence, McCarthy's novel provides more than enough intellectual heft to make me love it, in spite of its dark view of human nature.

I've also been reading Gary Snyder's Axe Handles. I've never read Snyder before, and, to be honest, I'm not sure that I will again. The book as a whole was disappointing. There were too many flat spots throughout, and too many poems that felt lazy or sentimental. I don't know if this is just one of Snyder's weaker collections, or whether it is characteristic of his usual work.

But there were a few moments in the book that I loved. Snyder is at his best when describing nature's fine, peculiar details. In his nature poems, the writing is precise, moving, and surprising, and without the sentimentality of his poems about family or the painful baldness of his political poems. I was especially fond of Snyder's long, sectional poem "Little Songs for Gaia" and the charming "A Maul for Bill and Cindy's Wedding."

I also loved "Old Rotting Tree Trunk Down," which I've posted below. It seems to have something in common with Blood Meridian: both works confront death and death's purposes, and revel in the chaos of decay.

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Old Rotting Tree Trunk Down

By Gary Snyder

From Axe Handles

Winding grain

Of twisting outer spiral shell

Stubby broken limbs at angles

Peeled off outer layers askew;

A big rock

Locked in taproot clasp

Now lifted to the air;

Amber beads of ancient sap

In powdery cracks of red dry-rot

               fallen away

From the pitchy heartwood core.

Beautiful body we walk on:

Up and across to miss

               the wiry manzanita mat.

On a slope of rock and air,

Of breeze without cease--

     If "meditation on decay and rot cures lust"

     I'm hopeless:

     I delight in thought of fungus,

     beetle larvae, stains

               that suck the life still

               from your old insides,

Under crystal sky.

And the woodpecker flash

     from tree to tree

     in a grove of your heirs

On the green-watered bench right there!

     Looking out at blue lakes,

     dropping snowpatch

               soaking glacial rubble,

     crumbling rocky cliffs and scree,

Corruption, decay, the sticky turnover--

Death into more of the

Life-death same,

     A quick life:

     and the long slow

     feeding that follows--

     the woodpecker's cry.

                                    VII, '78, English Mountain