Falling

Does anyone else's heart beat faster with the first hint of crispness in the air? Fall has finally made an appearance here in sunny Southern California, and it's lovely and cool and I can finally wear tights and boots and sweaters and scarves. Even better, it's cool enough to bake turning the kitchen into a hothouse, so I can start making shortbread and cookies again on a regular basis. I'm especially excited to try this scrumptious looking recipe for Chocolate Earl Grey Tartlets from this blog. A cup of coffee, a chocolate tart, and a cloudy afternoon- what could be more perfect?

Bluebells

"The house they had built was quite modest--it even had a thatched roof--but their gardens soon became one of the wonders of the land. It was said that Abdullah had help in their design from at least one of the Royal Wizards, for how else could even an Ambassador have a bluebell wood that grew bluebells all the year round?" -Castle in the Sky, Diana Wynne Jones
I know it's fall, and I love fall, but these images from Bright Star and I Capture the Castle keep popping into my head. I love bluebells--I don't even think they grow in this part of California, but they're one of my favorite flowers, and I wish I could have a bluebell wood that grew bluebells all year round. Wouldn't it be lovely to wander about at dusk with a lantern lighting your way and revealing that perfect, autumn-sky blue around your feet?

Kindred Spirits (Time Travel Edition)

Thanks to Ken Burns' new documentary The National Parks, I've discovered another person whom I intend to befriend once I have my time machine up and running. Her name was Margaret Gurkey (I'm not sure about that spelling of her last name), and she and her husband traveled around the U.S. visiting National Parks nearly every year of their marriage, beginning in 1915 and continuing into the 30's and 40's. They began by taking the train, but quickly moved on to car travel and camping. Along with a succession of dogs, they criss-crossed the nation, taking in the scenery from Maine to California. Margaret's goal was always to get away from the crowds and experience what she referred to as the silence of the woods. At times this required a certain amount of adventure- rough roads, no easy access to supplies or assistance in an emergency, being at the mercy of the weather- and Margaret admitted that at times their decisions weren't exactly in line with common sense, but in her words, "to be sensible is to be commonplace, and to be commonplace is unpardonable."

Cheese Festival, Anyone?

The Great British Cheese Festival at Cardiff Castle.

I want to go to there.

And yes, that is a model of Cardiff Castle made out of cheese (via Light Reading).

The Bee's Knees

I may have been incredibly inactive here over the last few months, but the weather is (sort of) cooling down now that September is here, which means I'm back up to my old tricks in the kitchen. I recently checked Richard Bertinet's Dough out of the library, and the first thing I made was his ridiculously good lavender and honey wheat bread. The best part, in my opinion, is that Bertinet prefers to do everything by hand, so I got to play around with a bowl full of flour, rubbing in the yeast and dried lavender. Can anyone say baking win?
And the finished product (which, incidentally, was fantastic with the lovely soup that my sister made the following day):

Come Out to Ramble

It's been a lovely rainy day, with patches of sun breaking through and big heavy clouds. The sweet peas are blooming, the orange blossoms are opening, and I got my lettuces in the ground a couple of days ago. It smells like spring, all green and floral and damp. Here's a snippet of A.E. Housman, because hey, it's Wednesday:

'Tis spring; come out to ramble
The hilly brakes around,
For under thorn and bramble
About the hollow ground
The primroses are found. -from A Shropshire Lad

Of course, with so many nice things growing outside, one simply must bring something indoors. I've been putting little bunches of one kind of bloom (or tree, in this case) into tiny Moroccan-style shot glasses I found at Sur La Table this past weekend, and I bought a gorgeous bunch of ranunculus at the farmer's market that is a perfect fit for the Austrian pottery vase I stole from my mother:

More Midweek Poetry

Here, courtesy of Davey Talbot's PoemaDay, is a portion of a poem by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado:

From Proverbs and Songs (translated by Robert Bly)

XX
Sing on, sing on, sing on,
the cricket in his cage
near his darling tomato.

XXI
Form your letters slowly and well:
making things well
is more important than making them.

XXIV
Wake up, you poets:
let echoes end,
and voices begin.

XXV
But don't hunt for dissonance;
because, in the end, there is no dissonance.
When the sound is heard people dance.

XXVI
What the poet is searching for
is not the fundamental I
but the deep you.

.........................

XXXIV
If a poem becomes common,
passed around, hand to hand, it's OK:
gold is chosen for coins.

XXXVI
Sunlight is good for waking,
but I prefer bells --
the best thing about morning.

XXXIX
Now, poet, your prophecy?
"Tomorrow what is dumb will speak,
the human heart and the stone.

XXXI
Pay attention now:
a heart that's all by itself
is not a heart."

Midweek Poetry Fix

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring--
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.-- Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worth the winning.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Said the Three-Year-Old Boy

As he colored his map of the United States: "We live in California, over here are the other states, and this one in the middle is Mashed Potato!" Also, "Lions only ride on trains if they can bring their books with them."

Signs of Spring

You know spring is in the air when you spot:
Three boys in aprons (two out of three with flowers!)

Flowering fruit trees (peach and plum, to be precise)

One grey cat dozing amidst the flowers

And daffodils, of course!

I know, I know, it's only February, but in Southern California we have to take what we can get. Days of rain alternating with sunny, breezy days, blossoms and new leaves on the fruit trees, and blooming bulbs are as springy as anyone could wish.

Why Write?

"It seems vain to add to the litter. Who can design a new leaf? The patterns from bud to unfolding, and the colours from spring to autumn were all discovered by men long ago. But that is not true. The seed of the tree can be replanted in almost any soil, even in one so smoke-ridden (as Lang said) as that of England. Spring is, of course, not really less beautiful because we have seen or heard of other like events: like events, never from world's beginning to world's end the same event. Each leaf, of oak and ash and thorn, is a unique embodiment of the pattern, and for some this very year may be the embodiment, the first ever seen and recognized, though oaks have put forth leaves for countless generations of men."
From "On Fairy-Stories" by J.R.R. Tolkien

Regarding Richard Wilbur

For those who want to know more about Richard Wilbur, here's a lovely article from the Harvard Magazine- the author, Craig Lambert, describes Wilbur as having a "Mozartean felicity with verse." Isn't that a beautiful phrase?

The Care and Feeding of Small Children

In true spinster fashion, I have now become a teacher of small children. I'm teaching a pre-school playgroup of three-year-olds two days a week. It is a hallmark of a certain type of spinsterhood to borrow other people's children to make up for not having your own, and these kids certainly are a joy to be around- they are bright, funny, curious, and loving, and they view the world in that astonished, joyful and yet completely serious way that young children have. Because I've been spending so much time with small children, I've been thinking about what a responsibility it is to have the care of young minds and souls. This poem by Richard Wilbur has been on my mind, so I thought I'd share it.

The Writer

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

Dream Theories

Since I haven't written anything on this blog in such a long time, the first new post was going to be a photo montage of all the things I've been doing since I posted last. Unfortunately, all of the photos from the past month and a half were moved to an external hard drive before I got around to posting them, so until I find out how to access them you'll have to be content with text alone.

For the most part, the reason I haven't been posting is that I've been doing other things, such as baking, cooking holiday dinners, catching up with Battlestar Galactica in anticipation of the season 4.5 premiere, writing the middle third of a novel (I haven't written the first third yet- I'm trying not to be bothered by that and not entirely succeeding), and, of course, reading. After tallying up my reading for 2008, I discovered that of the 234 books I read only 18 were non-fiction (I am aware that I have no life). This year my goal is to read more non-fiction, beginning with actually finishing the many non-fiction books I begin and then forget, so in January so far I've read a collection of Patrick Leigh Fermor's writing called Words of Mercury, and I'm in the middle of both Owen Chadwick's book on the Reformation and a book about hedgehogs. Of course, I've also re-read Tender is the Night, finished re-reading Richard Wilbur's collected poems, and finished reading Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes' anthology The Rattle-bag. I've read three books about eccentric family highjinks on the Yorkshire coast (Hilary McKay's Porridge Hall books), three books that are addendums to well-known fantasy series (Philip Pullman's Lyra's Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North and J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beadle the Bard), and two books about alchemical space travel in the Victorian period (Philip Reeve's Larklight and Starcross). On reflection, it's probably no surprise that I have strange and sometimes terrible dreams- what a mish-mash to put inside one head.

At Last

We have rain. Last night our part of Southern California received the first real downpour of the fall. Oh, we've had sprinkles, and drizzle, and even one heavy rainfall that lasted all of two minutes, but last night was the first real, heavy, long-lasting rain we've had in months and months. It was beautiful. Shortly after midnight I went out into the backyard in wellies and my mother's long hooded raincoat and stood on the path while the raindrops drummed on my head and plinked off the copper lamp covers. Everything was fresh and clean and wild; we don't get that kind of weather nearly as often as I'd like, but when it does come it's all the more wondrous because of its rarity.

One-Upsmanship

My mum, my sisters and I thought this hotel in Pilsn, Czech Republic was frightening, with its exposed wiring and unisex shower room that not only hadn't any locks, but didn't even have any doors. (Also it looked to be the perfect place for ghosts- one half expected some Habsburg belle of the nineteenth century to sweep around the corner in crinoline and side-curls).
Apparently we were let off lightly, however, as this account by Robert Byron of a hotel stay in Mazar-i-Sherif in 1934 demonstrates:
"Where is the guest-house?" we asked, using the ordinary Persian word.
"It is not a guest-house. It is an 'hotel'. This way."
It is indeed. Every bedroom has bedstead with a spring mattress, and a tiled bathroom
attached, in which we sluice ourselves with water from a pail and dry our feet on a mat
labelled BATH MAT.... The lavatory doors lock on the outside only. I was about to point
this out to the manager, but Christopher said he liked it and wouldn't have them touched.

How to Suceed in Baking Without Really Trying

I love when one of my weekend baking extravaganzas turns up all new recipes with a one hundred percent success rate. Usually when I try several new recipes, at least one is a dud, but this weekend everything turned out fantastic (as evidence I present the fact that it is only Monday evening and the only thing left from all this baking is a single loaf of bread). The brownies above are just the Baker's one-bowl recipe, which is a favorite in our family, but I added 3/4 cup chopped pistachios and 2 Tbs orange zest, drizzled melted semi-sweet chocolate across the top, and sprinkled them with another 1/4 cup of pistachios. They looked lovely and tasted wonderful.
These cookies were also delicious, and they have the added distinction of being historically significant. They're called Orange-Cardamom Walnut Vienna Crescents (from the Williams-Sonoma Baking cookbook), and as all you fans of the Austro-Hungarian Empire know, most of the crescent-shaped baked goods coming from Vienna date back to the Austrians' victory over the Turks in 1683. Since the symbol of the Ottoman Empire was the crescent, eating crescent-shaped things symbolized their defeat. Wunderbar, nein?
The last new recipe from this weekend was this lovely whole-wheat bread. My mum used to make bread all the time, but as our family grew and she (understandably) had other things taking up her time, we got used to eating store-bought bread. I'm attempting to revert to making all or most of our bread at home, and this recipe may make that possible- it was quick and easy, and has that unmistakable yeasty, hearty, slightly-sweet taste that home-made bread should have. Also, it has character- no bread bought at the store looks this good.
As a bonus, here's a picture of a blackberry-tea bag on an antique plate- I love the rich pink color of the tea against the creamy pottery. ei

Painterly Fashion

I've gotten into the habit of painting my clothes lately- most clothing as it comes from the store is too boring, and since I cannot afford the more interesting designers that I love, I make my own basic clothing into the kinds of things I want to wear. These boots, for instance, I bought from Anthropologie on sale. I love them, but after having only worn them a handful of times over the course of a year, I decided they needed something extra, hence the leaves.
This jacket is from Target, and I was inspired by the pattern on a Leifsdotter jacket in the most recent Anthropologie catalog. The jacket has the added bonus of being somewhat smock-shaped, which I think lends itself nicely to the hand-painted decoration (also, like Hobbes, I just like to say 'smock').
This fascination with painting on clothing is long-standing; in junior high I used to paint on the jeans I was wearing when I was supposed to be helping my mother with her after-school art classes. It seems to have become a habit, and at least I no longer draw on walls (much).

Glazing Over

It becomes clear that you have a problem when you realize that you've been watching the steam from your tea chase up the inside of your stainless steel cup for nearly ten minutes. True, the patterns the steam makes against the steel can be lovely (rather like artsy glaze on pottery), but ten minutes? Apparently sitting in an office all day is beginning to affect my mental processes.

More Lost Things

Continuing in the vein of wonderful things from the 1920's and 30's, I just finished re-reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water, the second volume of his memoir/travel book about walking across Europe in the early 30's. Together with the first volume, Time of Gifts, Leigh Fermor recounts his journey from Tower Bridge in London, across the channel to the Hook of Holland, and across Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. He eventually made it all the way to Constantinople (no, not Istanbul), which was his original goal. The Europe he describes was completely decimated by World War II- it's no longer possible to make a journey of this kind. Leigh Fermor alternated between sleeping in barns, in mayor's homes, outdoors, and in the schlosses and chateaus of a slew of Austro-Hungarian nobles. He struck up friendships with graduates of the Maria-Thereseum in Austria (where there was "only one student who was not noble" in the year of one of his friends), the bright young things of half a dozen Central European towns, woodcutters, innkeepers, rabbinical students, Transylvanian shepherds, and gypsies. On his long walks he kept himself company by singing and reciting poetry to himself, much to the surprise of many he passed along his route, and he read voraciously everywhere he stayed, as well as taking advantage of the knowledge of everyone he met along the way. He writes about everything under the sun: history, art, architecture, politics, nature, parties, and alcohol (there's quite a lot about alcohol). I'm extremely envious of Leigh Fermor, mostly for the fact of his living in such a world. However, since I'm unable to make such a journey myself, I'm glad I can read such a wonderfully wise and amusing account of his. I think everyone should read these books, if for no other reason than that they paint such a poignant portrait of a world that no longer exists, and give one such a powerful sense of how much was lost or destroyed by the second world war.