Busy-ness

I know, I know, I haven't posted here in awhile! My mother is pestering me daily about it. But my bloggerly absence must be forgiven for the following reasons:

1. I'm teaching Othello this week and giving my students their Midterm and reading up on literary criticism so that I can teach my students all about literary theory next week. It's the ickiest time of the semester, both for my students and myself.
2. I just started a new part-time job at a bakery/cafe in Lawrence. I like it a lot, but I'm pretty well whupped after every single shift. I'm not used to being on my feet that long, or carrying large coffee urns and dish tubs, or talking to that many people in a single day. I know that I'll get used to it in a few weeks, once my brain and body have adjusted, but right now, I'm doing a lot of passing out at 10:30. On the upside, I've learned how to use an industrial oven, how to make espresso, the difference between lattes and cappuccinos, and how to make some killer smoothies over the last few days. And that is awesome.
3. I'm finishing up my application for a full-time teaching job here in Kansas City. The job would be a great fit for me, but the application is a pain: it requires a full electronic application, a cover letter, a CV (a resume for academics), a teaching philosophy, and an essay about what a student should expect from me as a teacher. If I get it, the job will be more than worth the hassle of applying, but the process is sucking up all my writing juices right now! And so the blog suffers.
   

So there are my excuses, like them or not. I'll probably be slow about posting until early February, but I assure you that I haven't abandoned you, gentle readers! I'll be back, after many, many hours of sleep . . .

"Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)"

I've been reading a lot recently. Or maybe I should say that I've been reading a lot of different things recently, all at the same time.

As a little kid, I was addicted to books. I couldn't wait to start a new one, even if I hadn't finished the one that came right before it! This meant that I ended up reading four, five, or even six books at a time. I once took a backpack full of eleven books to stay overnight at my cousin's house--I was a fiend!

I liked to jump back and forth between each book, tasting a few chapters of Black Beauty before shuffling over to The Black Stallion (I had a thing for horses, what can I say!) before switching over to one of the Goosebumps books or to a Dr. Seuss book that my mom read to me when I was small, like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.

I'm sure that this ecclectic style of reading was caused mostly by a short attention span and too much enthusiasm for the next new thing. Yet, somehow, I managed to finish almost all of those books, even if I read them in ten page increments!

The last few weeks, I've been going back to my old habits and reading several books at once. I'm still working on Rebecca, but I'm also working my way through another Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novel (I'm on number seven now: Burnt Offerings). I've been listening to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead on my drives to and from Lawrence. I've also been sampling a few books of poetry, including William Carlos Williams's Sour Grapes and Louise Gluck's Ararat.

On top of those, I've also been furiously reading The New Yorker. Charlie bought me a subscription for my birthday, and I've loved every issue so far! The only problem is that there are too many interesting articles in each issue; I usually only have enough time to read two or three before the next issue arrives!

I love my new/old arrangement of reading so many things at once, sampling here and there, feeling edified by my New Yorker articles, excited by the wonderfully extravagant plots of Laruell K. Hamilton, and calmed by the wise old narrator of Gilead. Each thing I read seems to satisfy one part of me that the others cannot. And, week by week, my head is filled with such wildly different stories and thoughts and experiences that I feel enlivened by the variety of it all.

Last night, my class and I read a poem that reminded me of this experience. "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the first poems I read during high school, and it has always amazed me. I love the beauty of its language, the vibrant roughness of its sounds (read it aloud, I beg you!), its joyful message, and the sense of peace that always descends on me when I come to the last lines.

Every time I read this poem, I agree with Hopkins once again: it is the strangeness of this world, its overwhelming variety and frantic richness, that makes living such a wonderful thing.

---------------
Pied Beauty
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
           

    Glory be to God for dappled things—
        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
            For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
            And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
    All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
        Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
            With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
                                                Práise hím.

True Story:

On Monday, I was feeling very active and responsible and go-getter-y. I decided to go to the library to check out the rack of work-out DVDs that used to line the back side of the Large Print Mystery section. Then, I was going to go to the grocery store to pick up a few ingredients for a low-fat chocolate-mocha cream pie recipe from my new The Complete Cooking Light cookbook.

Unfortunately, the work-out DVD section has been moved to a different library. So I came home with this:

And this:

There is no excuse for me.Work-out fail, sweet tooth win!

Rebecca

This week, I've been rereading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I first read it my senior year of high school when it was assigned by my fabulous AP English teacher Mrs. Greiner. I loved it enough that I read it again the following year during my freshman year at KU. Both times, I was mesmerized.

First published in 1938, Rebecca is about a young woman who marries a rich widower with a shady past. Maxim de Winter sweeps the young narrator off her feet and carries her away to Manderly, his ancestral estate. Manderly is beautiful, but it's also haunted by the memory of Rebecca de Winter, Maxim's first wife who died only a year before. The shy, nameless narrator is cowed by the sumptuous setting of Manderly, but she's even more cowed by the household's continuing love for the dead Rebecca who, by all accounts, was beautiful, charming, and an elegant hostess. The novel transforms from a romance to a mystery as the speaker begins to suspect that there's something fishy about Rebecca's death.

Rereading this book for a third time hasn't been as rewarding as I thought it would be. The novel, which once seemed rich, multivalent, and romantic, now feels long-winded and heavy-handed. The narrator especially keeps getting on my nerves. I think that I used to identify with her shyness, but now she just tires me. I keep thinking, Just tell the damn servant to bugger off! You're the mistress of the house, and they can't tell you where to put that vase! or, Just ask Maxim what the hell happened to Rebecca! She was only a woman, for heaven sakes! 

Some novels grow with you and offer more riches with each rereading. Rebecca, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be one of them.

What books do you love that stand up to multiple rereadings? What books have grown with you, and what books have failed to stand the test of time?

Avatar: A Review

So here's the thing: earlier this week, I wrote a really long review of Avatar that had links and references and smart words in it and everything. Unfortunately, the more I wrote, the more I hated it.

This has happened to me before: I've written a few long posts that, once I stop typing, strike me as just awful--long-winded, pretentious, and dull. I never post them, and I won't subject you to this one, either.

Instead, here's my review of Avatar in brief Q&A form:

Was Avatar . . .

• Long? Yeeeessssssssss.
• Preachy? Uh huh.
  
• Racist? For sure.
• Moving? Yes.
• Beautiful? Definitely.
• Exciting? Sometimes.
  
• Good? Ummmmm, well, sorta . . .
• Bitchin'? Yes! (Fight scenes + dragons + helicopters = automatic bitchin' rating.)
  
• Worth your $10: Yes. Seeing the world that James Cameron creates is worth the price of admission. Go for the pretty blue people communing with trees in a gorgeous CGI forest, just don't expect too much from the script.

Get Fuzzy Brilliance

Darby Conley just gets me. And cats. And Keats.

(Get Fuzzy, January 14, 2010)

Teaching Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"

Sorry for the long break, folks! I've been unusually busy this week. I just started teaching a class for a local business college, so I've been elbow-deep in syllabi changes and student emails and on-line discussions.

My first class was last night, and it felt really good to be back in a classroom. I've missed interacting with students: the class clowns, the crazy-imaginative readings, the long discussions, and those electric moments of "ah ha!" insight.

We spent a big chunk of our class time discussing Alice Walker's "Everyday Use."  I'd never read much Walker before this class. I enjoyed The Color Purple a great deal, but I'd read it a long, long time ago, so "Everyday Use" was a revelation to me.

Alice Walker

"Everyday Use" is beautifully written, wonderfully smart, and subtle enough to make students really think. Walker's grasp of human nature is extraordinary, especially in her depiction of Dee, a college graduate and social climber who returns to her childhood home in the rural South. It's a story about what "heritage" really means, about embracing one's past honestly instead of exploiting it for social gains.

Walker's piece is ideal for a classroom because its characters are challenging and complex enough to inspire discussion, but its structure is simple enough to illustrate the basics of how short stories work. We used the story to discuss the standard elements of fiction (plot, character, point of view, etc.) and how plot is different from structure and theme. We also used it to talk about the importance of context when reading literature (understanding the Black Muslim movement makes Dee's character a little more accessible).

But our best discussions of the night came when we delved into why Dee's mother rejects her: my students were torn between appreciating Dee's desire for a better life and resenting how she treated her family. The complexity of Dee's character forced my students to really analyze her motives and what her past meant to her. They were forced to really focus in on the clues and characterizations that Walker sprinkled throughout the text.

Teaching this story reminded me that I'm at my best as a teacher when I'm passionate about the literature I'm teaching. I love to share great writing with my students, and I love it when I'm able to convey how damn cool a piece of literature is. I mean, anyone can write a story with a beginning (exposition), a middle (rising action), and an end (climax and resolution), but only a great writer can use such a simple form to illustrate how personal ambition and rapid social change can tear families apart. And making my students aware of that skill, aware of a writer's unique art and brilliance, is what makes my day as a teacher.

Chocolate Cake with Homemade Chocolate Frosting

What can you say about chocolate cake that hasn't been said before?

 

"Yum!"?

"I'm in love!"?

"Best dessert ever!"?

"You call that measly thing a slice!?!"?

Cliches, the whole lot of them! There's nothing new to say about chocolate cake, yet, as a blogger, I must persevere. I must say something, anything! I have to make the chocolate cake new again, make it interesting enough to keep a reader's attention for a whole blog post.

But what?

Well, I suppose I can always tell the truth: Chocolate cake is easy. It's the frosting that's the hard part.

We'll get back to that in a minute. Let's start at the beginning: A Christmas present inspired me to bake this cake. The recipe comes from a book called Beyond Parsley, which was published in 1984 by the Junior League of Kansas City. Charlie's grandmother Carol (also known as Grammie O.!) gave me her copy for Christmas this year.

It's a beautiful cookbook, and I was excited to try some of the recipes in it. But I didn't know where to start. So I decided to do what I always do when I get a new cookbook: I flipped to the index and went straight to the entry for "chocolate."

This practice has always served me well before, and it did this time, too. What I found there was a recipe titled "Chocolate Cake with Fudge Icing."

The cake part of the recipe was pretty standard--nothing to write home about, I thought--but the finished cake was truly incredible. It's just the kind of chocolate cake that I always crave: moist, tender, mellow, and dense without being heavy.

The recipe starts with well-creamed butter and sugar . . .

. . . accompanied by all the usual suspects (vanilla, cocoa powder, eggs flour, etc.) and baking soda dissolved in a cup of boiling water.

The resulting batter was smooth and fluffy.

 The baked cakes turned out to be very pretty on their own and tall enough for torting.

What didn't go so well for me was the frosting. Beyond Parsley suggested a scrumptious-sounding fudge frosting that involved boiling butter and sugar and real chocolate. I have no doubt that this would have been the very best way to go with this cake; its mild chocolate flavor would have served as the perfect base for a rich, substantial, uber-chocolatey frosting.

But I was short on both candy thermometers and chocolate, and I knew that, with a shortage of ingredients and supplies, my fudge frosting might turn out to be a gloppy mess.

So I decided to make up my own chocolate frosting to use what little chocolate I had (which was a single bar of Ghirardelli dark chocolate from my Christmas stocking). I consulted some of my favorite cookbooks for chocolate frosting tips: one recipe called for whipped eggs, another for a double-boiler, another for rum and coffee, and another for granulated sugar.

There was no consensus to be found, no sure means of making a great chocolate frosting, so I decided to improvise with my limited list of ingredients and my limited frosting experience. I melted the chocolate bar and set it aside to cool. From there, I combined butter; splashes of vanilla, milk, and spiced rum; and a whole lot of powdered sugar in a bowl. After combining these well, I added more powdered sugar until I had enough frosting to cover both cakes. Then I stirred in my melted chocolate.

The resulting frosting was just what I expected: it was smooth, chocolatey, and very, very, very sweet. I licked the spoon and gagged a little. Oops!

To get the proper texture, I had added far too much powdered sugar. Perhaps if I had started with more chocolate or more butter, things would have turned out differently, but who knows? Perhaps without whipped eggs or cream of tartar or double boilers, great chocolate frosting cannot be created.

Still, when spread thinly and with restraint, my frosting was quite serviceable. The frosting's sweetness worked well with the understated darkness of the cake layers, especially if the slice was briefly microwaved so that the frosting turned all liquidy and limp.

So what can I say at the end of yet another battle with chocolate cake? "Yum," of course, and "Thank you Grammie O.!", and "Who has a candy thermometer that I can borrow?"

All these would make fine morals for this blog post, but what I really learned was that if your cake is good enough, your frosting needn't be more than an afterthought--and only a pretty, fluffy, mouth-achingly sweet afterthought, at that!

Cold Weather and Winter Poems

It's cold today, in Kansas. Very cold. We have a few new inches of snow on the ground and awful, blustery winds bullying it into drifts. It should be even colder tomorrow, with a high of only one degree.

Yes, ONE.

So I've had winter poems on my mind. One of my old favorites is Stevens's "The Snow Man," but I was hoping to post something here from Ted Kooser's Winter Morning Walks. Kooser wrote the book as a series of dated postcards which he mailed to his friend and fellow poet Jim Harrison. The poems tell the story of Kooser's battle with cancer, and each poem is short and sad and quite beautiful.

But I couldn't find any poems from this book on-line. Instead I found this one: "Daddy Longlegs" from Flying at Night. The first two lines alone make it worth a read. No one could describe a daddy long-legs better: "on fine long legs springy as steel, / a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill."

Kooser's a great poet for stating the obvious in a beautiful way. I read this poem and thought, of course this is how I always feel when I come across a lone spider! I'm always a little sad at the smallness of its life, how contained it is within its tiny self, but I'm always a little happy, too, with a sense of wonder that such a small contraption could live. But this is a cocktail of emotions that I've never tried to put into words before. But Kooser does that job for me here, and he does so wonderfully.

I'm also interested in how the spider changes throughout the poem. At first, the spider is just himself. Then his legs become ribs, and those ribs become a web (how strange to compare a spider's body to a spider's web!), and then the spider becomes Kooser himself in all its solitude and minute containment.

The way Kooser uses his spider reminds me of how John Donne uses the image of a flea in "The Flea": the critters transform again and again, mirroring the poets' mental gymnastics until, metaphorically, they are much, much more than themselves.

 

---------------
Daddy Longlegs

by Ted Kooser

From the Poetry Foundation

Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,

a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill

that skims along over the basement floor

wrapped up in a simple obsession.

Eight legs reach out like the master ribs

of a web in which some thought is caught

dead center in its own small world,

a thought so far from the touch of things

that we can only guess at it. If mine,

it would be the secret dream

of walking alone across the floor of my life

with an easy grace, and with love enough

to live on at the center of myself.

Goodreads: Are Book Recommendations Doomed to Failure?

I've been a member of Goodreads for a few months now. It's a popular social networking website with 2.8 million users, and it's based primarily on books. It allows people to list books they've read, to review books, and to recommend books to their friends using a variety of features.

But I'm not entirely sure why I use Goodreads. I don't use it as it's meant to be used: I never take book recommendations from my friends, and I rarely use the lists or reviews to discover great new books that I want to read. I don't even pay attention to the News Feed, which shows what my friends are reading on a daily basis.

To be honest, I'm constantly confounded by others' reading selections. My grad school friends are busy listing every tome of critical theory they tackle. My high school and college friends are reading mostly popular contemporary fiction, which I rarely attempt. And my writer friends are reading very impressive novels and short story collections by very famous writers; their selections make me feel impressed, ashamed, and a little bit sleepy.

On the whole, Goodreads reminds me how impossible it is to match your reading interests up to those of others. Even with good friends, it's an incredible challenge: have you ever met anyone who shared your reading tastes exactly? I mean, someone who could recommend books to you that, 85% of the time, you just love, and vice versa? Even for close friends, family, and former classmates, the best I can claim is about 35% shared tastes, and that's with my mom and boyfriend!

For some reason, reading tastes, unlike musical tastes or movie tastes, are nearly impossible to match up. Perhaps this is because reading a book is a real commitment. Reading one takes something like 8-10 hours (depending on the book and the reader). That's the kind of commitment that can deter someone from trying a novel outside of his/her known interests, preferred genres, and comfort zones. I mean, I respect, admire, and commiserate with the intellects and tastes of my Goodreads friends, but I wouldn't take one of their recommendations blindly without already feeling some strong interest in the book's subject matter, author, style, etc.

Even though I doubt the plausibility of building friendships through reading lists, I'll probably keep using my Goodreads account. I'll probably never use it for its recommendations or reviews, but I'll use it to keep myself honest: once I've posted a book on my profile, I feel compelled to finish it or face the shame of everyone knowing that I stopped in the middle.

Speaking of which, William Carlos Williams, I'm coming for you! I am determined to see your Sour Grapes through to the end!

I've Been Doing It Again: Rereading Pride and Prejudice

I have a problem: Ever since high school, I've been compelled to reread Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice every three or four years. And that doesn't count how many times I've seen the A&E miniseries version of Pride and Prejudice, which is six hours long and takes most of its dialog directly from the original novel.

I've even seen that silly Keira Knightley version where Darcy and Elizabeth make-out like a couple of randy teenagers at the end.

The number of hours I've dedicated to this book is a little silly, but I know that I'd do it again in a heartbeat. It's a book that keeps on giving, no matter how many times I've read it. I'm always surprised by what I've forgotten, and I'm captured completely anew.

The Mr. Darcy-Elizabeth love story is always titillating, of course, in its restrained 19th-century sort of way, and the main characters' struggles, triumphs, and transformations are enthralling every time.

But the most impressive thing about Pride and Prejudice  is that there's not a single character in the book that goes to waste. No one in Austen's novel is ever flat or one-dimensional. From Mr. Collins to Lydia Bennet to Lady de Bourgh, no one is spared their displays of silliness and buffoonery, yet all of these characters seem familiar, too, and a little bit vulnerable, and incredibly lifelike. They're ridiculous, but they're intensely lovable, as well. It's kind of like finding an old friend's flaws endearing instead of off-putting, and loving them a little more for having them.

I think that, like Dostoevsky and Dickens, Austen's brilliance comes from the world she creates. Sure, the novel's plot is good, and the ideas behind the characters are certainly there, but it's the rich array of side characters that makes Pride and Prejudice such an enduring pleasure to read.

This time, I read Austen's novel aloud to Charlie. This was both a challenge and a pleasure. When reading Austen's sentences, which are quite long and well-packed with meandering asides, commas, and stray phrases, I had to start each sentence with a deep breath and blind faith that it would go somewhere grammatically correct, even if, in her typically circumspect manner, Austen had buried the object of her verb half a paragraph away!


[ GASP! ]

But, around Chapter Fifteen, I got so used to Austen's voice that I couldn't stop talking like her. I kept pestering poor Charlie about "the renewal of that gentleman's addresses" and being "quite set on" reading another chapter and wondering if Lucky Charms for breakfast was considered "keeping a good table." Eventually, I had to ask Charlie why on earth he was "regarding me with a look of such vexation!"

Anyway, classic literature like Pride and Prejudice often gets a bad rap for being old and having funny words in it and being pushed upon you by high school librarians who wear those long, beaded eyeglass dangles. But Pride and Prejudice is one of those books that justifies all librarians and English teachers alike: it has the potential to show students that classics are classics for a reason.


Visit Project Gutenberg and Librivox for free online versions of Pride and Prejudice.

Infusing Vodka: The Maiden Voyage

For the last few Christmases, the adults in my mom's family have done a white elephant-style bottle exchange in lieu of giving each other presents. We all bring a wrapped-up bottle--which can be anything from a bottle of shampoo to a bottle of Boone's Farm to a bottle of high-priced spirits--and draw numbers. We're ruthless about stealing each others' good stuff, and it's great fun.

It's also wildly unpredictable: Last year, I ended up with a bottle of water (curse you, Aunt Rita!). This year, I had a bottle of Jack Daniels stolen from me, a crystal skull-shaped bottle of vodka stolen from me, and ended up with a bottle of spiced rum, which I then traded for two bottles of wine.

In the past, I've brought over-sized bottles of beer, holiday beer sampler sets, and bourbon to the exchange. This year, I wanted to do something more interesting for my contribution, so I decided to infuse my own vodka.

You can Google "how to infuse vodka" and find a few million sites that will show you the basics of the process. It's pretty simple: put some stuff in a jar, pour the vodka over it, put the jar in a dark place, and wait. You can successfully infuse vodka with almost any flavor, from fruit to coffee to herbs to bacon (yes, bacon! it's supposed to be fantastic in Bloody Marys).

There's a lot of information out there, but every site that I visited said that infusing vodka is a tricky thing: you can follow a recipe exactly and it'll still turn out terrible, or something that tastes wonderful one day will turn acrid the next, and that it all depends on what vodka you're using and the quality of your fruit and where you store your jars and what phase of the moon you're working in and whether or not your ring finger is longer than your middle finger, etc.

You get the picture. Obviously, it's a oft-attempted yet somewhat tricky process. After reviewing a few of these sites, I decided to take my chances without using a recipe. If the infused vodkas tasted terrible, I figured I could throw the half-empty Svedka bottle in a bag and make a joke of it. Heck, a half-liter of good vodka is better than a full liter of foul homemade liqueur, right?

And a couple of times, I was pretty close to dumping the infusions down the drain. I made one batch of cranberry-orange vodka and one of ginger-pear vodka. The ingredients were pretty basic: lots of Svedka along with fresh cranberries, oranges, pears, and ginger.

I cut them up, threw them in a couple of old jars, and waited.

After day one, the oranges had made the cranberry-orange vodka into a bitter mess, and I had to strain the oranges out. Similarly, the ginger had taken over the pear infusion and the stuff reeked to high heck. I took the ginger chips out, too.

After day three, both vodkas smelled like rotting fruit and tasted like rubbing alcohol. I fished out the discolored pear chunks, stirred a little sugar into both bottles, and began to pray.

After day five, the cranberry vodka had taken on a bright red color, had lost a little of its obvious alcohol flavor, and was pretty palatable; I could sip it straight without gagging (something I could never do with plain vodka). The pear vodka seemed like a loss--it felt hot and somehow sickly in my mouth--but I strained both jars anyway and stuck them in the fridge.

Mysteriously, on day eight, both vodkas had developed smooth, mellow flavors. The pear-ginger vodka tasted like sweet, ripe pears but had an intriguing ginger fragrance. The cranberry-orange vodka had lost its bitterness and tasted like a cosmo waiting to happen.

So what happened inside these battered old Mason jars? It seemed like some sort of magic: every day I tasted the vodkas, they were completely different and completely surprising. I waffled between despair and elation with every wring of the cheesecloth, with every whiff that escaped the newly opened jars. If I'd had less faith in the process, I would have thrown them out without giving them a chance to transform themselves into their final deliciousness.

My Uncle Mike ended up with the vodkas in the bottle exchange, and he gave them a very positive review. He sampled them on Christmas day and found them smooth enough to drink straight without diluting them in juice or soda.

I guess that this makes them a rousing success. But what a nerve-racking procedure! I suppose that infusng strong spirits is not for the faint of heart.

And you thought you'd get out of this post pun-free. Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!