I am teetering on the verge of abandoning this daily blog, after a two-month-plus run—but also appreciating the practice of a daily blog, the pleasure of probing my experience, of paying attention to the stimuli, big or small, that come my way over the course of ordinary living (so often, these days, something I stumble on on FB). That practice, that discipline, that business of keeping my eyes (and ears) open, is why I keep coming back with new iterations of the blog. (I think this one is my fourth or fifth? Two of which went for a full 365 days?) I reckon it's good for me, and a few of you readers have expressed appreciation, which certainly helps me keep going.
Anyway, for today, I'm still here! Today's stimulus was an email I received from one of my poet friends, Shirley Brewer, with a link to a USA Today story about "America's last lighthouse keeper... leaving her post." The lighthouse in question is the Boston Light, and the keeper is Sally Snowman, 72, who has served in that position since 2002. Shirley sent it because we've corresponded lately a bit about her own interest in lighthouses, after I forwarded an old photo I took of the Pigeon Point Lighthouse, up the coast from me in San Mateo County:
That got me searching my files for other photos I've taken of lighthouses ("my files" actually being Flickr, where I stopped posting regularly years ago). Which is what this post shall remain, since I'm too lazy to do any research—into, for example, the number of lighthouses on US shores, or what entities oversee US lighthouses, or why Snowman remained at the Boston Light when it was fully automated in 1997 (though obviously, I do have questions!). Here you go, in no order whatsoever:
Makapu'u Lighthouse, Oahu
Boat Bluff Lighthouse, Alaska (yes, that's a lighthouse; and it still has a keeper)
Point Sur Lighthouse, Monterey County
Point Arena Lighthouse, Mendocino County
Assateague Island Lighthouse, Maryland
Kilauea Lighthouse, Kaua'i
Detail of Kilauea Lighthouse
And for a little extra spice, here are three European lighthouses we visited this summer: one on Hornøya in Norway (see yesterday's post), the other two in Brittany:
Cap Fréhel
One of two lighthouses in the town of Bénodet, Brittany
I'm sure I have other lighthouses in the vast collection on my phone, but who knows where... I need to do some cataloguing and culling. This serves as my reminder!
And if Shirley has written any poems about lighthouses, I don't about them. I will ask. If she has, I will append one here. She did tell me, though, that a visit to Pigeon Point and Santa Cruz figures into her beginnings as a practicing poet. She also wrote, "I’ve always loved lighthouses for their great beauty and for their tenacious weathering of storms. In my apartment, I have an entire wall of lighthouse paintings and photos. I‘m proud of serving on the Maryland Lighthouse Commission for several years." So this post is for you, Shirley!
I featured Maya Angelou not too long ago, but today I stumbled on something that led me back to her, so here she is again. The "something" was a photo I took this May on Hornøya, a bird island in the far north of Norway:
It's such a great line, but I didn't recognize it. A quick search found me this, which I will leave you with, for a very simple post for today. The animation is by Sarah Crisp; the voice is Angelou, reciting her poem "Life Doesn't Frighten Me":
The poem was also made into a children's book with illustrations by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Here are a couple of the spreads, though if you'd like to see the entire book (with a different narrator), it is here.
In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.
Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.
Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?
But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.
This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.
He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.
All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside his generous pocket of silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.
After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?
Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck.
and our boots stand dripping by the door.
Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.
—Billy Collins
The Buddha's Last Instruction
“Make of yourself a light,” said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire —
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
Continuing in an artistic vein: I have been considering trying to find my way into the use of encaustic wax. Even though I am by no stretch of the imagination a visual artist. But I do love collage (well, some collage—there's also a lot of cheesy collage), and the look of collage finished off with wax can be really stunning. I posted a few links and examples at the end of 2017—so you can see, I've had this on my mind for a while. But... I'm not a visual artist, and that thought tends to stop me cold.
(If it took me a good couple of months to finally make my first loaf of sourdough bread, after carefully nurturing the starter daily all that time—and this despite the fact that I used to make bread fairly regularly—I guess six years is about right for me to sit on this tiny but dangerously bold ambition to do some sort of visual art. And leave it to me to make it as complicated as possible! Why stop at collage? Let's throw some wax at the whole thing!)
Anyway, this got me searching the internet for instructional or demo videos on encaustics and collage. And man oh man, there is no shortage! Which means I will need/want to take a bit of time to find some artists whose aesthetic speaks to me. (Since as I mentioned, there's also no shortage of cheesy art. Go ahead, call me a snob. I do like the above image, by artist Lynn Larkin.)
The first video (or set of three) I stumbled on is by Ivy Newport, who shows, step by step, how she created a small piece from scratch. Right up until the application of angel wings I was pretty wowed. Even the wings are pretty wow, but they were, in my view, unnecessary—except insofar as they fulfilled an aspect of the thing that kicked off her project to begin with: a box she received in the mail containing a stencil (of the doorway), a rubber stamp (on the back of the piece), some rustic wire (the wire is why the wings), and a Liquitex paint marker (Prussian blue).
The box was sent by artist Donna Downey, as part of her year-long collaborative enterprise Find Out Fridays. And I thought I'd just include a few YouTube videos from other artists who have been the lucky recipients of such boxes, because I find them so interesting in revealing process, from start to finish. (All the resulting pieces do not necessarily involve collage or encaustic.) First up, the Australian artist Tracy Verdugo:
Denise Alloca:
Kecia Deveney, creating a cute 3D piece (a two-parter, of which this is the first):
Claire Desjardins:
And finally, Annie Lockhart, with her colorful palette:
I selected these totally randomly, simply by going to YouTube and searching for Find Out Fridays. I imagine there are 40-odd more such videos out there. I may not be in love with the finished products exactly, but I do love watching an artist in the throes of creative thought and making.
Though I am also daunted by all the stuff one needs to create all this beauty. Maybe I'll stick to words. They only take up psychic space.
Simply art today, by British-Australian artist Rachel Newling. Known mainly for her linocuts, she focuses on the wildlife of her adopted country, where she has lived since 1982. If you are interested in her process, she provides a detailed illustrated description of the making of a linocut on her website, as well as many more examples of her work.
Red-tailed black cockatoo
Pandanus kakadu
Major Mitchell's cockatoo
Regent honeyeater
Sacred ibis
Sacred lotus
Three waratahs
Yellow-tailed black cockatoo with banksia
And she does other creatures than just birds:
Even still-life:
And not only linocuts:
Kookaburra
Tawny frogmouth
I very much enjoy the way she sees—and then renders. She makes me want to go to Australia and see all these plants and birds, and other animals, in person.
I am noodling on a piece (an essay) that has to do, in part, with mirrors. But I'm too lazy to figure out something coherent to say on that subject here, and searching for images of mirrors—going back to ca. 6000 BCE—was likewise daunting, though I can say that the earliest mirrors were no doubt made of obsidian (like the one pictured here, from the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia), before polished bronze and other metals came along throughout Eurasia, ca. 2900–2000 BCE.
The first, very small, convex glass mirrors were from the third century (or maybe earlier, but not a whole lot). The craft of plane glassblowing and silvering did not arise until the twelfth century, and then was taken to an artform in Venice. Mirrors became more common generally simply because of their fragility: if people (starting with the nobility) were to be able to regard their own countenances, the mirrors doing the reflecting had to be manufactured locally. Which made them more accessible. (The illustration here is from Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait of 1434.)
In any case, I didn't want to go into all that history. So here's a poem, by Sylvia Plath—for something completely different:
Mirror
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
We had our friend Nina over for Christmas dinner. It wasn't anything elaborate—roast beef tenderloin, scalloped potatoes, roasted green beans, popovers, and for dessert, apple crumble pie, with our very own apples (yes, there are many still on the tree)—but it took much of the afternoon bustling around in the kitchen. Time well and enjoyably spent!
When I search for recipes online, I'll often include the qualifier "best"—but in the case of today's popovers, what turned up came with the qualifier "perfect." Okay. Even better!
And wow, they were really good. And since I want to keep the recipe within reach, I'm including it here. Prep time: 5 minutes; cook time: 30 minutes; rest: 15 minutes; total time: 50 minutes.
{Perfect} Popovers
Ingredients
4 large eggs, room temperature before cracking 1 1/2 cups whole milk, lukewarm (about 125°F) 3/4 tsp salt 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, spooned and leveled 3 Tb melted butter, cooled slightly
Instructions
1. Using a blender, blend eggs, milk, and salt; add flour, blending until smooth. Add the melted butter, and continue blending until frothy. Let the batter rest for 15 minutes while oven heat. 2. Set oven temperature to 450°F. Place rack in the bottom third of the oven and another rack in the top position. The popovers will rise, so make sure there is plenty of room between the racks. 3. Place a 6-slot popover pan on a baking sheet, and place on the lower rack of oven while it heats. 4. Spray the hot pan with nonstick cooking spray, then pour the rested batter evenly into the muffin slots, almost to the top. 5. Bake for 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 350°F and continue baking for 10 more minutes, until the popovers are a deep golden brown. Do not open the oven door. (In the last few minutes, if they are browning too much, quickly open the door and put a cookie sheet on the upper rack to shield from direct heat.) 6. Remove from oven and pierce the top with a paring knife to release steam and help prevent sogginess. 7. Slip the popovers out of the pan, split open, and serve with butter.
For something a little more savory, stir in 1 1/2 teaspoons of your
favorite dried herbs, or mix in a cup of shredded cheese with the flour
mixture.
Although fresh out of the oven is the preferred mode of consumption, they can be made in advance (as we needed to today, since oven space was at a premium). In that case, rewarm/recrisp at 350°F for 5–10 minutes before serving. They can also be frozen, in an airtight bag; again, to reheat, take straight from the freezer and pop into a 350°F oven for 8–10 minutes.
We've become serious TV watchers in the evenings—something that I'd like to change once the new year rolls around. Maybe. Then again, it's comforting to dig in with some good storytelling, especially in the dark of winter.
Recently we wrapped up the fifth season of Six Feet Under. Such a good show. And then we cast about for what to watch next. I mined some old recommendations from here and there, and came up with an eclectic list that we are now watching in a revolving fashion, starting with the newest (seventh) season of Justified (which is confusing enough that I may not see it through) and including the old-ish (2009) Men of a Certain Age and 2022's Somebody Somewhere, funny and poignant both. But mixed in there, too, is the new (also 2022) show Julia.
How in the world did Julia Child (1912–2004) become such a cultural icon? She's so unlikely, really. And yet so delightful.
I won't detail her life here—it's all on Wikipedia and elsewhere. A few interesting facts, though:
Child, née McWilliams, grew up in Pasadena, CA, in a well-to-do family. When she graduated from Smith College in 1934, her initial ambition was to write novels and magazine pieces. Her first job, in NYC, was as an advertising copywriter.
She perhaps got her "start" with cooking during WWII, when she worked for the Office of Strategic Services (at six foot two, she was too tall to join the Women's Army Corps [WACs] or the US Navy's WAVEs]). For a year during that time she worked with the OSS's Emergency Sea Rescue Equipment Section, trying to develop a shark repellent to keep the fish from detonating underwater explosives. The resulting concoction is still in use today.
Child did not become interested in cuisine until she married her husband, Paul Child, who had a sophisticated palate and loved fine dining. They met in the OSS in Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and in 1948 they moved to Paris, where he worked with the US Information Agency.
In 1951, Child graduated from the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. Around then she joined the Cercle des Gourmettes (established in 1929), where she met Simone Beck, who was working on a cookbook. The two of them, along with a third gourmande, began teaching French cooking to American women in Child's Paris kitchen. This ultimately led to the 1961 publication of the co-authored 726-page Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
The TV series The French Chef followed in 1962. That's more or less where the series Julia begins. I remember my mother watching that show, and using Child's cookbook. She (my mother) enjoyed cooking, and I think the "fine cuisine" aspect of the book appealed to her—something more haute than meatloaf and potatoes.
Back in those days, pilot episodes were taped over, so Child's first three appearances—featuring the French omelet, coq au vin, and onion soup—no longer exist. Ultimately, the show ran for ten seasons, until 1973. Here's coq au vin from season 2:
In 1964 she received a Peabody Award; as the citation put it, she had done "more than show us how good cooking is achieved; by her delightful
demonstrations she has brought the pleasures of good living into many
American homes."
She went on to host various other cooking shows, including several with other chefs like Jacques Pépin, and to write several other books. But for me, it's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and The French Chef that made her the icon she obviously remains today.
In 2001, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History acquired Child's original kitchen, built in 1961 in their Cambridge, MA, home and designed by her husband, Paul. The counters are two inches higher than standard, to accommodate her height. It was the setting for three of her later cooking shows.
Here's what Julia had to say in 1990 about modern-day nutritionists and their objections to ingredients like butter and cream: "Everybody is overreacting. If fear of food continues, it will be the
death of gastronomy in the United States. Fortunately, the French don't
suffer from the same hysteria we do. We should enjoy food and have fun.
It is one of the simplest and nicest pleasures in life."
And yes, that would have been a good quote to end on, if it weren't for the fact that my friend Nina mentioned a Saturday Night Live skit with Dan Ackroyd as Julia Child, from 1978, and... I can't not end without sharing it. See? American icon!
Last May, we visited our friends Jan and Catharina in Copenhagen. While we were there, Jan made at least two, maybe three loaves of sourdough bread, one of them full-on rugbrød—delicious! (The bread in this photo: Jan's.)
He recommended a book to me, The Perfect Loafby Maurizio Leo,and when I got home, I started making sourdough bread myself.
Well, I made some starter. And let it mature. For a couple of months. But eventually I got my courage up, and started making bread.
Meanwhile, my friend Miranda, who also makes sourdough bread, mentioned a FB page, Sourdough Geeks, which I subscribed to. I find it amusing. First, there are the people who post photos of what appear to be perfectly beautiful loaves of bread and ask, "What did I do wrong???????" Sometimes people respond, Oh, you overproofed—or, Oh, you underproofed—though mostly people say, What's wrong? Nothing's wrong! It looks perfect! And then there are all the helpful recipes, which appear to be infinite variations on a simple theme of starter, flour, water, and salt—though of course, it's not the simple ingredients that make a loaf of bread, it's the entire process: mixing, stretching, folding, sometimes slapping, bulk fermenting, shaping, scoring, baking. It is not for the faint of heart.
Here's the first loaf I made that departed from the basic recipe. It's rosemary olive, and I think it may have been overproofed?—but what the heck, it tasted really good!
Anyway, for today's q&d post, I just wanted to save links to a few of the websites that the Sourdough Geeks keep mentioning—with recipes, techniques, and advice.
The Perfect Loaf, which on its homepage right now features a Kernza Sourdough loaf, as well as Walnut Cranberry; Spelt, Rye, and Whole Wheat; and Cardamom rolls. And the other day I wrote to the site's proprietor—and author of the book I mentioned above—with a question about a weight (for lemon peel) specified in a recipe, and he replied right away and at length. I am a fan!
The Clever Carrot (this site is half sourdough, half tasty-looking recipes), which on its homepage features, as well as a beginner's guide, sourdough popovers. I'm making popovers for our Christmas dinner! They might just have to be sourdough!
Little Spoon Farm, featuring all sorts of cookies right now, but otherwise devoted to sourdough, sourdough, and more sourdough.
The Pantry Mama, featuring "easy sourdough baking on any schedule!"
Make It Dough, a baking blog for sourdough bread and sourdough discard recipes.
I'm sure there are more... Sourdough has an enthusiastic following, that's for sure. During the early days of the pandemic, for example, Ziploc bags of starter (named Godric) started appearing on telephone poles and bulletin boards all over San Francisco. Part of the motivating factor for this popularity was the absence of yeast in the supermarkets—and of bread on the shelves. So people took things into their own hands. Good for them!
Those days are past now, thank goodness (though Covid will always be with us, no doubt). But me, I have a little more time on my hands. And making a tasty loaf of bread, I'm finding, is a satisfying way to spend it.
I've had this book for a while. The author was, I believe, a faculty member at Antioch University when I was working on my MFA, but I never crossed paths with her, being in the nonfiction strand. This book is also, in part, about Los Angeles in World War II—and that feeds into my own stuttering-along project about a woman in LA during, yes, WWII.
And in that regard, I found this book valuable as a research volume.
The bulk of the book, though, has little to do with WWII specifically, but takes place in 1994 and then, in alternating chapters, leaps forward from the 1930s as the stories of various characters are related.
By and large, the characters are Japanese American—the protagonist is a young Sansei (or posibly Yonsei) woman, a lawyer named Jackie Ishida—and African American—as Jackie enlists the help of a man in the Crenshaw District, James (Jimmy) Lanier, who as a boy knew her grandfather, who once owned a store in the neighborhood. As the story begins, she has just discovered a shoebox full of money in her recently deceased grandfather's things, along with a note saying he wanted his store to go to one Curtis Mayfield.
It turns out Curtis died in 1965—horribly, in the freezer of Jackie's grandfather's store, during the Watts Riots. How did Curtis and three other young Black boys meet their end there? That's what Jackie and Lanier try to find out.
And as they do they—and we—learn about racial relations in central LA, both age-old antagonisms and long friendships, and the shifting fates of various LA neighborhoods over the decades. The story is built on a mystery—who shut those boys in that freezer?—but it's also about people and connections and a desire to get along. And when we can't get along, a desire to understand why not.
Having grown up in LA (well, Santa Monica), I enjoyed all the geographic details. And was struck by the fact that I have absolutely no recollection of the Watts Riots. I would have been ten; we would have been newly returned from six months in Japan. I expect my parents watched the news coverage on TV—since we were far enough away that we would not have experienced the smoke, helicopters, sirens, etc. first-hand. But it feels strange that I have no memory of that awful time.
There are so many little cities in that huge metropolis. Distinct neighborhoods. When the Japanese were removed from the coast in 1942 to concentration camps, the downtown area known as Japan Town was settled by Blacks, becoming known as Bronzeville. After the war, the Japanese returned, and it reconfigured identity again. A similar sort of transformation occurred in the Crenshaw District, in South LA, which over time shifted from mainly Japanese to African American.
Revoyr does well to focus on that one neighborhood, and the one set of racial relations—though white racism, particularly on the part of the police, is always an overlay. She also brings in plenty of human emotion, though: this isn't a sociological tract, by any means. It's a narrative. It's a mystery. Mostly, it's a story of people learning to know and care for and about one another. In that regard, I thought it was quite successful.
I last featured Milo in March (when he was struggling a bit), so it's about time for another post about him—and today he gave me plenty of material because we went to the beach! Which he loves! Carmel Beach, specifically, which means plenty of other dogs to interact with—and people to shower love on him. Here are some photos. The first one was from this morning when, in a very unusual move, he came upstairs to hang out with me. Given his arthritis and the weakness in his hind legs, he doesn't care for stairs anymore. So I was surprised to look up and see him plop down on the floor nearby. Go Milo!
The rest are from the beach, where he had a grand time. He may be an old man, but he's still got plenty of pep. Most of the time he was hanging with his new friend Bragi (2½), visiting from Seattle—while we humans hung with our old friend Thelma, Bragi's person (and my former Norwegian torture partner) and caught up. But there were several other momentary canine conventions, a couple of which featured doodles uniquely. Everyone had a good time! Holiday spirits were high!
Thelma had treats!
Thelma was really slow about handing out the treats...
Bragi loves to dig—among other energetic undertakings
It was a little rainy, but not too bad. And Carmel Beach, with its views of Point Lobos, is beautiful in any weather. It was a nice way to spend a bit of the Winter Solstice.
Speaking of which, I will end with a poem that I shared on FB today, with the following wish: "HAPPY SOLSTICE! And now, as we tilt toward the light again, let us do our best to make our world lighter for all who inhabit it."
To Know the Dark
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
