Experiments in Frosting

Velcome to my lab-OR-a-TOR-y!

If you read this blog regularly, you've probably noticed that I'm always fussing over frostings. Frostings are hard, unlike the cakes themselves, which almost always turn out. But matching the correct frosting with the right cake has always been much more difficult for me.

So what's a girl to do when she knows nothing about making a good frosting? She makes three in one night, of course, to teach herself how!

I decided to try my experimental frostings on Magnolia Bakery's Vanilla Cake, which is the cake I used for my last birthday cake. I knew that it would make a delicious base for my frostings without getting in their way.

I decided to make three kinds of frosting: royal icing, "Mom's Chocolate Frosting" from Ann Hodgman's Beat This!, and a chocolate ganache. Unfortunately, my royal icing refused to fluff with beating (pasteurized egg whites just don't work, unfortunately!), and I was left with some sugary glue instead of frosting.

Yummy! Royal glue destined for the garbage disposal.

Fortunately, I had enough butter in the house to make Gale Gand's Quick Vanilla Buttercream frosting instead. That turned out to be a fantastically good plan B.

The drool-inducing, spoon-licking buttercream goodness.

I mean, this stuff was good, way better than the buttercream frosting recipe that Magnolia Bakery uses on their vanilla cake; that frosting was heavy and cloying and crusty. But Gand's frosting, even though it's about 70% butter by volume, isn't overwhelmingly buttery or sugary. Instead, it tastes like fresh whipped cream, only sweeter and richer and, miraculously enough, whiter.

The trick to this amazing stuff is beating the butter and sugar together for three full minutes on medium power. This extra beating time transforms the butter from yellow and clumpy to pale and airy and delicate. And the dash of heavy cream beaten in right at the end makes the frosting taste unusually fresh and smooth. This was so good, that I literally had to stop myself from eating it by the spoonful! And I never do that with frosting (just cookie dough) (and cake batter) (but never frosting, I promise!).

The first nine-inch cake round frosted with buttercream.

The second recipe I tried was Mom's Chocolate Frosting. I had never made a chocolate frosting before, so I felt like I should try a recipe that was simple (Check!), required few ingredients (Check!), and called for a ridiculous amount of pure melted chocolate (Double check! This calls for twelve ounces of chocolate in a full recipe.).

However, besides the royal icing, this frosting was the most touchy one to make. Once the chocolate was melted, I added room-temperature vanilla and refrigerator-cold sour cream to mixture, which caused tiny bits of the chocolate to seize up and solidify--ack! But I whipped the mixture furiously and the ugly little chocolate crumbs melted away to reveal a beautiful, smooth, light brown frosting.

The sweet rewards of my furious beating.

To be honest, I didn't like tasting this frosting without a cake beneath it. It was just too sour for me, due partly to the sour cream base and partly to the Ghirardelli chocolate I used (which, to me, always tastes a little sour).

But once it was on the cake, this frosting was scrumptious and accessible. It's the kind of friendly, palate-pleasing frosting that a batch of ravenous six-year-old birthday party attendees would enjoy smearing all over their faces. (Hence the "Mom's" title, I suppose!) And it would be exceptional on a yellow butter cake.

Mom's Chocolate frosting on its cake round.

The final frosting, the ganache, turned out to be my runaway favorite. It's unbelievably simple to make: just heat heavy whipping cream to a simmer, pour it over finely chopped semisweet chocolate, and stir them together until . . .

 A smooth goop of mind-bending goodness.

 . . . it becomes a smooth goop of mind-bending goodness.

After the ganache cools for a few minutes, you pour it over the cake and smooth it out with a spatula. If you're more patient and less greedy than I am (and if you have a cooling rack to frost on), a ganache can actually turn out beautifully. Done my way, it turns out . . . well, you know:

"I'm pretty on the inside, darnit!"

As I wrote in my tasting notes, this frosting is "the most amazing thing that ever happened to anyone ever." And I made this recipe with cheap old Baker's chocolate--with really high quality chocolate, this would probably make a piece of soggy cardboard taste delicious.

At the end of the night, I ended up loving all of these recipes in different ways. I can't wait to try Mom's Chocolate Frosting on a yellow layer cake, I know that I'll make the vanilla buttercream at every chance I get, and the ganache--oy, the ganache!--will soon find itself smeared on strawberries and spritz cookies and chocolate crisp cookies and very moist and dense chocolate cakes.

The triumverate.

I'll leave you here with one last tasty idea for trying these frostings: cut out the crumby middleman and go straight to the good stuff with the frosting shot.

Sweettarts Chicks, Ducks, & Bunnies

I can't remember a time when I haven't loved them. My grandma used to pack their rattly little bodies into plastic eggs for our annual Easter egg hunt, and my mom used to nestle them in a bed of plastic grass in my Easter basket. I love them because they're nostalgic and delicious and they only come once a year. They always remind me of spending time with my family and the emergence of spring.

However, they hurt my teeth badly. More than anything else in the world, they make my molars ridiculously sensitive. Therefore, during the rest of the year, I have a strict moratorium on Sweettarts of all ilks, along with Nerds, Lemonheads, and Sour Patch Kids (all of which, btw, I love). It's only the week before Easter that I allow myself to have Sweettarts, and then only the Chicks, Ducks, & Bunnies  because their superior size and powdery texture make them absolutely irresistable--I would be a fool to even try! And by "have them" I mean I buy a whole damn bag and eat it in two to three days.

This is, I know, a terrible idea, and a terrible idea that I will have annually without fail. I already have my bag this year, and my teeth are already aching! But I wouldn't give them up for anything.

I think that candy is important. Like really important. It's important to be a kid every once in awhile, to occasionally eat something that induces pure, giddy, stupid pleasure, no matter how bad it is for your teeth or your waistline. And, yes, I believe in moderation, but I also believe that I will only live once, and I would be a damned fool to ever want to let an Easter slip by without a mouthful of tooth-gouging, tongue-savaging, tummy-pudging Sweettart happiness!

Twilight: New Moon--A Review

Last night, I rented Twilight: New Moon and watched it with my mom. It was . . . long. And pretty boring. But it did give us plenty of opportunities to make cracks whenever a character took off his shirt. We could have made it a drinking game: take a shot every time you spy a bare pectoral!

The Twilight: New Moon poster.

I've mentioned before that I've read all of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books, and that I enjoyed them a little too much. Her writing is terrible, her characters are shallow, and her plots are predictable at best and downright silly at worst. But they're also fun: Meyer can entertain an audience nearly indefinitely, dragging out her frivolous storylines and serious sexual tension for thousands of pages. I wouldn't read the books a second time, but they made for one great weekend's worth of reading!

What the Twilight movies miss is just that: fun. They're long (both films run a little over two hours) and exhaustive (they include every minor detail from the novels, necessary or not) and relentlessly serious. Their color palette is muted--all blacks, browns, and silvers, with occasional dashes of red and yellow--and their soundtracks are painfully emo. (I'm not saying that the music is bad, mind you, just very angsty teenager.) The movies show no sense of humor at all. Instead of a gentle awareness of Twilight's innate camp, we get a lot of awkward, twitchy teenage conversations; yearning half-kisses; and lovelorn staring.

 Teenage Bella being moody, missing Edward, and thinking about how all grownups are phony.

While watching New Moon, I couldn't help but wonder where Stephanie Meyer's deliciously silly, hyper-romantic, super-dramatic cheese-fest sensibility has disappeared to? Why is New Moon a meditation on teenage depression instead of a thrill ride of yearning and vampire make-out sessions and unnecessarily frequent werewolf fights?

The only thing that the movies get right is that everyone is incredibly good looking. In the books, the main characters are blatantly shallow, and that blandness if effective if not entirely purposeful: their vapidness allows a reader to imagine herself in Bella's generic little sneakers and imagine her own tasty versions of Edward (the vampire boyfriend) and Jacob (the werewolf boyfriend) to vicariously lust after.

The casting directors have done a great job of choosing attractive young actors who are capable but not too interesting: Bella (Kristen Stewart) is dull, likable, and very pretty; Edward (Robert Pattinson) is dreamy and has the deliciously tortured air of a pouty consumptive;  and Jacob (Taylor Lautner) combines a cute, boy-next-door sort of appeal with a whole heap of well-tanned muscles.

Battle of the beefcakes.

I think that the producers of the Twilight movies know that as long as they produce a set of four decently made movies full of pretty faces and meticulously accurate plotlines, teenage girls (and their mothers) (and 26-year-old bloggers) will show up for the spectacle. But I would have loved to see the filmmakers make Twilight their own, to make a movie with a little lightness, charm, and romance, maybe something with some rock music or characters with actual personalities. Then maybe their films would stand a chance of being watched twenty years down the road.

Instead, these filmmakers are happily raking in the cash by creating a suite of films whose expiration date seems to already have passed. Or will have passed just as soon as Robert Pattinson gets his first wrinkle or Taylor Lautner goes squishy around the waist.

Big, Fat Novels

My limit is one a year. This year, it's Middlemarch.

 The serialized first edition of Middlemarch.

Anything over 500 pages is enough to make me leery, and Middlemarch weighs in at a whopping 800 pages. I've managed to read longer, but not often.

Why do I live in terror of long novels? I fear my inability to finish them (there's nothing I hate like starting a novel and never finishing it!), but I also worry that I've chosen poorly and will find myself committed to a dullard of a novel that I have ceased to enjoy. But I also love finishing a novel and adding it to my "Already Read" list on Goodreads. It's as thrilling as checking off a daunting item on a to-do list!

It's not that I'm incapable of committing to a long book. I read Bleak House (1000 pages) twice in one month for a class, I tackled Anna Karenina (850 pages) over my dining hall lunch tray during one semester at KU, and I worked my way through The Brothers Karamazov (750 pages) while I finished writing my thesis at Penn State. Obviously, I can do it, and, obviously, it's always worth the effort: I loved every one of those books, and Brothers is now one of my all-time favorites. But still, I never look forward to the mental fortitude that big, fat novels require of me!

I'm enjoying Middlemarch thus far--Eliot is scathingly funny, incredibly smart, and darkly satirical--but when I'm not reading it, I find myself daydreaming about reading something really cheap and tawdry and fast. Something with a werewolf in it. Or a dragon!

But I won't. This is my once a year--I'm in it for the long run, even if I find myself panting a little in the home stretch!

100th Post!

To celebrate my 100th post on Poems About Oranges, I wanted to celebrate reading instead of writing. One of the unexpected outcomes of starting a blog is that I've become a fan and avid reader of many blogs that I didn't know existed a few months ago. Now, I read them daily.

Some of my favorites are funny (Cake Wrecks), and some are smart (The Best American Poetry), but my favorite blogs are those that combine funny and smart with a few strong dashes of warmth and personality--Easy Street and That Looks Cozy, I'm looking at you!


Thank you readers, for sticking around, for prodding me to update, and for commenting. And thank you fellow bloggers, for giving me something to look forward to when I open my laptop each morning!

Green Velvet Cake

Red velvet cake is rich, chocolaty, decadent, and ever-so-slightly tacky:

Just look at all that tasty red food coloring!

Green velvet cake is much the same, only way, way tackier:

Now that's class!

The only difference between red velvet cake and green velvet cake is the food coloring. I decided to "go green" with these cupcakes to celebrate St. Patrick's day. Also, I was almost out of red food coloring. (Trust me: there's nothing worse than pinkish-brown "red" velvet cupcakes. I know this from experience.)

I've been looking for a good red velvet recipe for awhile now. I tried one last summer that turned out dry and dull and underwhelming, just like any old box mix red velvet cake. *shudder*

 Trust me: it looks much, much better than it tastes.

Fortunately, I saw the Throwdown with Bobby Flay episode where Bobby takes on Cake Man Raven in a red velvet cake battle. Cake Man Raven is one of the most famous bakers in New York, and, of course, he trounces Bobby soundly in the episode. Since then, Cake Man has very kindly posted his secret recipe on FoodNetwork.com for my pilfering, and I'm gloriously happy about it.


In case you're (pitiably) unfamiliar with red velvet cake, it's basically a very soft, moist chocolate cake that includes vinegar and buttermilk. Apparently, old-fashioned cocoa powder would turn red when it came in contact with acids like vinegar and buttermilk, which is what originally gave the cake its red color. The vinegar and buttermilk also work with the baking soda to give the cake a light, fluffy texture.

Cake Man's recipe is a little unusual in that it calls for very little cocoa powder (only one teaspoon!) and a ridiculous amount of vegetable oil. CAUTION: Scroll down very quickly if you would like to actually enjoy eating these cupcakes.




The recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups of vegetable oil, which is a lot for any recipe. But because this recipe only makes about 30 cupcakes, each cupcake has about 3/4 tablespoons of oil it. Which is why they're so damn delicious.




Aaaaaaanyway. I tweaked Cake Man's recipe a bit. I wanted my cake to have a very fine crumb, so I substituted 1 1/2 cups of cake flour for some of the all-purpose flour. I also wanted a stronger chocolate flavor, so I replaced 2 teaspoons of flour with 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder for a total of 3 teaspoons of cocoa powder. And, of course, I substituted green, blue, and yellow food coloring for the suggested red.

But despite my modifications, the batter turned out beautifully smooth, sweet, and tangy.

"Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!"

The cupcakes took about fifteen minutes to bake. They came out of the oven so deliciously soft and damp that I was glad I had made cupcakes; I don't know how anyone could tort such a cake--I imagine it would just fall apart with the effort!

Tender little green cakes, hot from the oven.

Unlike other red velvet cake recipes I've tried, this one had a very distinct flavor. The cupcakes didn't taste like chocolate, necessarily. Instead, they tasted like vanilla with a touch of fresh cream. But to say that these taste "like vanilla" is like saying that Michelangelo's David is a marble statue or that Sherron Collins is a basketball player: the content is correct, but the scope is utterly lacking. The flavor of these cupcakes is astonishingly complex, despite its prosaic components; the vanilla, chocolate, and buttermilk all play off each other to create a new flavor altogether. And trust me, it's a very good flavor.

I made a cream cheese frosting for these using Nigella Lawson's cream cheese frosting recipe, which is nothing but cream cheese, powdered sugar, and a squirt of lime juice for added tartness. The frosting was delicious as always, but not quite right for this cake.

A cupcake topped with gooey cream cheese frosting.

Next time I make these, I'll pair them with a light, puffy, tooth-achingly sweet buttercream to contrast with the rich pungency of the cake. And I'll make a double batch of both recipes to spread the cake joy farther and longer. I have a feeling that I could eat these cupcakes for weeks, if given the opportunity.

From now on, this will definitely be my go-to red velvet cake recipe, and it's good enough that I would love to make it for birthdays and celebrations, too. So be very, very nice to me, and you might just get a velvet cake in your favorite color on your birthday!

Impatience and Bike Maintenance

Starting tomorrow, I'm working seven days in a row at the cafe. That's an awful lot of time stocking dressings and toasting sandwiches and slinging soups, and I'm not particularly looking forward to it!

So I decided to make the most out of my day off by doing a little spring cleaning on my bike. I've had my Jamis Explorer for a couple of years now, and I'm trying to make it last for years and years to come by actually maintaining it. I let my last bike rust and deflate outside of my dormitory at KU, and it was a bad decision.

Anyway, I've never done any sort of bike work before (unless you count attaching a headlight to my handlebars), so I had to depend on an expert's help. I considered reading Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance (which is supposed to be the best bike handbook you can buy), but Zinn was a little out of my depth: the book seemed to be too thorough and technical for my needs. All I really wanted to know was what I could do with $20 and a few hours to make my bike ride better longer.

Fortunately, I came across Fred Milson's Complete Bike Maintenance at my local library. Milson's text is much briefer than Zinn's. I also has lots of color pictures with little red arrows on them and chapters with titles like "Know Your Bike" and "Instant Bike Care." Yep, I knew right away that this was the book for me! I gave my bike a quick wash, a thorough lubing, and stuck it back in the garage.

Overall, I'm not sure that my work made an immediate difference. My bike was very clean to begin with (I rarely ride off-road or in bad weather), and all its components seemed well oiled (though grimy) before I started. But the process gave me a chance to be outside and listen to the radio and get grease under my fingernails and feel all handy and capable and coordinated. And I don't get to feel coordinated very often.  ;)

So now that my bike's ready, all that I'm waiting for is spring. Real spring, not this misty, gray-skied, dismal, 40 degrees and windy crap we've been having. I'm ready for green fields and warm breezes and flowers and all that good stuff. So get a move on, spring! I'm waiting!

Ten Tumbled Tidbits

I don't feel like writing anything sensible today, so here's a list of what's on my mind:

1. Spring begins in less than two weeks. I love that the color of sunlight is changing and that I can smell the earth again. Yes, PLEASE.
2. Easter is one of my favorite holidays. Everyone's joyful, the weather's usually beautiful, and, let's face it, Easter candy is the best holiday candy ever. What can possibly compete with jelly beans, Sweet Tarts shaped like bunnies, malt balls, and Cadbury cream eggs? (Yes, Halloween, I am calling you out, chump!)
3. (Nerd Alert!) I've been thinking about the benefits of AP Style lately. It's unflinchingly in favor of brevity, simplicity and clarity. I think it might be a good thing.
4. I've been in an essaying sort of mood. Writing poetry every day has made me grumpy: I've grown sick of forcing line breaks and of hearing that irritatingly "poet-y" voice I sometimes fall in to. So I've given in and started writing brief lyric essays everyday instead. I like how this is going.
5. Someone recently told me that I have terrible taste in music because I like Lil' Wayne. Are you kidding me?! You can disagree with his persona, his hairdo, his violation of gun laws, and his misogyny, but, good grief, you cannot deny that the man is a brilliant poet/rapper/lyricist. And his music is funny, which I think is a rare and wonderful thing.
6. Project Runway should never have a break between seasons. Ever.
7. I'm finally reading George Eliot's Middlemarch. I love Eliot's insights into human nature, but goodness, it's wearying to read such dry, relentless, scathing satire. Just like someone already, George!
8. I'm a redhead again thanks to the efforts of my cousin Sarah, who is an amazing hairdresser! It's been a few years since I've dyed my hair, and I'm enjoying the change.
9. OmigoodnesssoexcitedwhenwillithappenahhhhIlovebasketball! (Translation: I am suitably enthused for the NCAA men's basketball tournament.)
10. I'm reading a collection of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems very, very slowly. His work is beautiful; each line is stuffed with the complex music of sprung rhythm and constant alliteration. But his syntax is downright tortured by his sound schemes, and it's hard to pick out the meaning of some of his lines. I have to read each poem through a couple of times before my initial response ("Ooooo, pretty!") matches up with my desired response ("Aha! I see what old Manley is getting at!"). Anyway, he's good, so here's one of my favorites. Enjoy!

 ---------------

The Windhover

By Gerard Manley Hopkins 

From PoetryFoundation.org

To Christ our LordTo Christ our Lord This epigraph dedicated the poem to Jesus while echoing the Latin phrase, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, the Jesuit motto meaning “To the Greater Glory of God.”

I caught this morning morning's minionminion favorite, darling; also, an underling or servant, king-

    dom of daylight's dauphindauphin prince; a French historical term, along with “chevalier”, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimplingwimpling rippling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

    Buckle!Buckle! to bend, attach; prepare for flight or battle. The verb could be descriptive of the bird’s action, or it could be the speaker’s imperative. AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!chevalier French word for “knight” or “champion”; pronounced Chev-ah-leer, to rhyme with “here” and “dear”

     

   No wonder of it: shéer plódshéer plód slowly, laboriously, and without break; these accent marks, inserted by Hopkins, tell the reader to place more accent or emphasis on those syllables when reading aloud makes plough down sillionsillion Fresh soil upturned by a plow (“plough”)

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dearah my dear Compare with the same phrase in the poem “Love (III)” by George Herbert, a poet Hopkins admired.,

    Fall, gallgall to become sore, crack, or chafe themselves, and gash gold-vermilionvermilion a vibrant scarlet color.

The Lazy Delight of Burnt Butter Cupcakes

Usually, when I feel like baking, I don't have the slightest problem hopping in my car and buzzing off to the nearest grocery store. But last week, I was tired and it was cold outside and I didn't want to spend any money and, gosh darnit, I was feeling whiny and there was nothing in the world that would set me right but an easy, no-hassle, delicious cupcake.

Luckily, Nigella Lawson came to my rescue with her Burnt Butter Cupcakes from How to Be a Domestic Goddess. Every ingredient in the recipe was already lurking somewhere in my fridge or pantry, so I didn't have to do anything but hike up my sweatpants and bake. I call that a pajama WIN!

The completed Burnt Butter Cupcakes

These sound pretty strange--how often, really, do recipes call for purposefully burning something? But I was intrigued because of an article I read in Vogue last summer. Jeffrey Steingarten, Vogue's regular food critic, wrote an article about the wonders of brown butter and how, if done properly, it can add a rich, nutty, smokey flavor to almost any savory or sweet dish. 

So what does burnt butter taste like, exactly?

Toffee. That's it. I'll admit that I was surprised by this when I first sampled the batter, but then I had a total *duh* moment: what else is toffee but burnt butter and sugar? Of course these would taste like vanilla toffee!

The very first step of the recipe, burning the butter, was its most nerve-wracking part. Burning butter just doesn't seem like a wise thing to do. What if I burn my butter beyond repair?, I worried. What if my burnt butter tastes terrible because, well, it's burnt, even if Nigella's tastes mind-bendingly good?

But the process was actually quite simple, and it was easy to tell when the butter was properly burnt. (I couldn't take a picture of this, however, since the butter was too foamy to tell that its oil was turning brown!)

The unsalted butter melting over medium heat.

The butter bubbling and foaming mid-way through its burning.

The finished burnt butter, with the sediment strained out on a piece of cheesecloth.

As always, Lawson's recipe was very easy to follow. My only hiccup was that, even after thirty minutes of sitting out/in the fridge, my burnt butter would not solidify like it was supposed to. So I just threw it in my batter as a liquid, and it didn't seem to do any harm. In fact, it possibly improved the airiness of the cupcakes' texture!

The mixed batter.

The recipe produced very few cakes (only eleven very tall cups), and they baked very quickly, so the most time-consuming part of this recipe was prepping the butter. The cakes turned out to have a fine, tender crumb and to be light golden in color. They reminded me of cornbread, only sweeter and without that unpleasant density and dryness common to most cornbreads.

The high domes on the baked cakes.

 

If you look closely, you can see the fine crumb.

The frosting was the only thing I didn't like about this recipe. It was far too sweet for me, and a little heavy, to boot. After the light, sweet, mellow burnt buttery-ness of the cupcakes, I didn't enjoy how sweet the frosting was or how strongly it tasted of burnt butter (you burn even more butter for the frosting recipe!). It was kind of like eating caramel frosting --ack!!! *cough, hack, pitooey*--only grainier. I would have much rather topped these with a puffy whipped cream frosting or some mild cream cheese frosting.

The super-sweet, super-smoky frosting.

However, others disagreed with me. My mom liked the frosting as-is, but thought it was very rich, and Charlie downright loved the frosting. I think my dad was fond of it, too.

Aren't these purdy?

At the end of the night, happily stuffed with buttery, toffee-flavored, crumbly-rich goodness, I would definitely recommend these burnt butter treats to anyone. These were easy-to-make, but they possessed a certain sophisticated je ne sais quoi after a lifetime of boring old white cake recipes. So go ahead: burn it, baby!

Neil Gaiman's Sandman, or Why I Read Graphic Novels

Since I've been able to read, I've been reading comic books.

I loved the Wonder Woman series as a kid. When I was eight, I bought copies of her 1980s and early 1990s issues on sale for ten cents apiece at my local comic shop. I loved her character--she was tough, kick-ass, selfless, and, well, pretty--and her life was a fascinatingly bizarre mix of superheroes, characters from Greek myths, and regular folks. In fact, I credit Wonder Woman with my passion for Greek mythology.

I admit it: I wanted to be Wonder Woman when I grew up.

Ever since Wonder Woman, I've read the occasional comic book and graphic novel, hoping to recapture my love for the genre. But all the Batmen and Supermen and X-Men have fallen flat, as have most of the graphic novels I've read. I covered classics like Ghost World and Watchmen and a spate of dull, narcissistic indie graphic novels, and they all fell short of their hype.

But a few weeks ago, I stumbled across Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes at the library. I remembered The Sandman series being very trendy among adult comic geeks in the 1990s, but I had never thought of reading it. I had some serious doubts about a comic book whose main character was a dream god/super hero who looks like the The Crow, tromps through people's dreams, and sports a real-life bag o' magic dust.

Dream and his sister Death, chillin'.

 

But I decided to give Gaiman a chance, mainly because he is known for writing the young adult novel Coraline. I saw the movie last year and loved its visual creepiness. Then, earlier this year, I read the graphic novel version of Coraline, which made me appreciate Gaiman's writing much more, especially his use of common childhood fears and desires in his truly frightening fairy tale.

So based on the strength of Coraline, I gave the first collection of The Sandman series a try, and boy, was I glad.

 

The cover of The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes.

The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes tells the story of Dream (the immortal god/spirit/anthropomorphic embodiment of dreams) in the 20th-century. After Dream escapes from eighty years of captivity under a glass bowl created by a powerful magician, Dream goes about reclaiming his magical tools, regaining his strength, and rebuilding his dreamworld empire, flitting between the dream world, the real world, and Hell.

*sigh*  

Rereading the above paragraph, this novel sounds remarkably silly, but it isn't! I promise! It's dark, terrifying, haunting, and occasionally funny, but it's never silly. Dream isn't a very interesting character in himself--at least not yet--but it's the places he goes and the lunatics he encounters that are truly fascinating.

What attracts me to Gaiman's work is his ability to combine mythical figures (the Fates, Lucifer, and Death all show up in these pages) with realistic characters and an incredibly dark vision of human nature. His imagination is relentless, and he knows exactly how to work with his excellent team of illustrators. (These books, by the way, are beautiful, from the collection's front cover to its final page.)

Traditionally, comic books are able to combine the imaginative thrill of fantasy writing with the grittiness of film noir and detective novels. Gaiman does just that in The Sandman series, crafting plots that feel real, compelling, and, more than twenty years later, relevant. He's made me glad that I didn't give up my search for a great graphic novel too soon; I've finally found one here.

Poem a Day: Days 3 & 4

The first three days were easy.

Today, not so much.

That's how it always goes. Even though I've never tried to write a poem daily before, I wrote four or five days a week in grad school. So I'm very familiar with sitting down and staring out the window for ten minutes without having a single idea I can stand putting on the page. I know this feeling all too well: the ennui, the dull laziness, and the sense that I have nothing to say and have never had anything to say before.

But I persevered. And that's the whole point, right?  : P

Yesterday's poem is about a pest-infested shed. Today's poem is about the Lazy River water "ride" at Worlds-of-Fun. Enjoy!

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

Day 3

"you find it everywhere, 

behind hollow walls, wriggling

between rotted boards, dangling

from exposed beams--life! 

dark-eyed, glinting things: 

a sea of insects glittering

in soft-sheen shells . . ."

---------------
Day 4

"parched maple leaves clinging to the damp tube,
a rosy pall of sunburn blushing down your stomach
as you bump and swirl your way into the future
on sheer, blue, burbling, bleachy waters . . ."


Copyright Lesley Owens, 2010

Poem a Day: Day 2

Today, I was thinking of the basement in the house I grew up in. We had our washer and dryer down there, and a TV, and a huge wooden desk my mom used for crafting. For a few years, she made wooden Christmas tree ornaments using a jigsaw and acrylic paint. The poem I wrote today was about that basement, how it frightened me when I was little, and how it smelled when my mom was at her work table.

"the crinkle of newspaper
being spread across a table, the smell
of dust and mildew, cigarette smoke, the sawdust
thick upon the air, softening the floor with its powder . . ."

Copyright Lesley Owens 2010

A Poem a Day

I'm finally done teaching my literature course (at least until the next session begins), and I've finally settled into a schedule at the cafe. So what does this mean for this blog, you may ask?

Fortunately, I'll be writing here more often, baking more often, job hunting more vigorously, and writing a poem a day!

Writing a poem a day is not a new idea. I first heard of it while researching David Lehman's The Daily Mirror (1996) for a class in college. He wrote the entire collection by writing a poem a day for 140 days. Some poems, he has said, were awful and were scrapped, but some were good enough to be published in the final manuscript.

Lehman's idea has spread rapidly since then, and writing 31 poems in a month is popular enough to have caught the attention of Writer's Digest and to have inspired at least one independent web site supporting the project.

So I've decided to finally try my hand at the Poem a Day project as a way to make good use of my new free time. And, folks, I'm depending on you all to keep me honest! So I'll post a few lines from each day here. (I can't post whole poems in case I want to publish them elsewhere later!) The lines will be rough, I promise you, and they may not make much sense on their own, but the whole point of the project is to create frantically, joyfully, and consistently, all without paying too much attention to my internal editor!

So here are the inaugural lines of the PoemsAboutOranges Poem A Day project. I hope you enjoy reading along with me in this process!

"This time of year, geese fly overhead,
soft white bellies, brown-black wings,
trailing out flawed V's, branching figures,
aerial charts like family trees . . ."

Copyright Lesley Owens, 2010