57 of 100: Grains of paradise

David recently bought a big bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin. On its sides are listed the ten ingredients that go into its special flavoring. I recognized half of them: almond, lemon peels, liquorice, coriander, and of course juniper berries. The other half, not so much: orris root, angelica, cassia, cubeb, and the mysterious grains of paradise.

When I read out these ingredients to David, who was busy cooking dinner (I like to keep him informative company while he slaves away), he asked me to look up grains of paradise, find out if it was real.

And yes indeed! Grains of paradise, aka melegueta pepper, Guinea grains, osame, or fome wisa—or, most reliably, Aframomum melegueta—is in the ginger family and closely related to cardamom. Its seeds impart a pungent, black pepper–like flavor with hints of citrus. It is native to West Africa (as the blue Bombay bottle also indicates), which is sometimes known as the Pepper Coast because of this commodity. Native to swampy habitats along the West African coast, the plant has trumpet-shaped purple flowers that develop into two-to-three-inch-long pods, whence the grains of paradise: small reddish-brown seeds. 

Melegueta—the pods and leaves—makes up 80–90 percent of the diet of the Western Lowland gorilla! Wow! They also use it make nests and beds. Full use of the resource. (The lack of grains of paradise in their zoo diet may contribute to poor cardio-vascular health.)

The spice was traditionally carried by camel caravan through the Sahara up to Sicily, then to the rest of Italy. In the 14th and 15th centuries it served as a popular substitute for black pepper (Piper nigrum). Today, it gives flavor to craft beers (for instance, Silverback Pale Ale out of Austin, Texas), Norwegian akvavit, and, yes, gin.

Wikipedia says, "In West African folk medicine, grains of paradise are valued for their warming and digestive properties, and among the Efik people in Nigeria have been used for divination and ordeals determining guilt. A. melegueta has been introduced to the Caribbean and Latin America, where it is used in Voodoo religious rites. It is also found widely among Protestant Christian practitioners of African-American hoodoo and rootwork, where the seeds are employed in luck-bringing and may be held in the mouth or chewed to prove sincerity."

Book Report: Death Benefit

15. David Heilbroner, Death Benefit: A Lawyer Uncovers a Twenty-Year Pattern of Seduction, Arson, and Murder (1993) (8/7/24)

I was happily engrossed in Lonesome Dove—a quarter of the way in—when a FB friend, John, asked whether, if I wasn't going to read a book he had lent me, I could send it back to him. So, feeling a tad guilty for having hung on to it so long, I took a break from the dusty mesquite plains of Texas (the boys—and Lorena—were just about to leave on their cattle drive north to Montana... which happens to be where John lives, but that's just happy coincidence) and immersed myself in murder and mayhem in Kentucky and California.

I know John from Monterey County Search & Rescue, where I volunteered for a good dozen years, and he worked as a deputy sheriff a few decades ago. That is, we didn't meet on the team, but SAR folks are a family, no matter when our tenure. 

And it turns out, he was lead in the body recovery that kicks off this book. As such he was gifted with an "uncorrected proof" about the five-year story, which is what I read (resisting every impulse to pull out my pen and correct the darn thing: it's riddled with errors).

The story is mostly a legal procedural. It begins in 1987 when a corporate lawyer in Louisville, Steven Keeney, is approached by a woman at church with a question about life insurance: her daughter, Deana, had recently died in a fall from a cliff in Big Sur, California, and she was having trouble getting the proper paperwork from Monterey County to settle. He figured the issue was straightforward enough that he could help her with a little pro bono legal advice.

But as he looked into the matter, he began finding inconsistencies and weird coincidences. Starting with the fact that the couple Deana had been staying with in San Diego, and whom she accompanied on the drive up the central California coast, had helped her take out another insurance policy, with their son—and her supposed fiancé (even though she was married)—as the beneficiary. Not only that, but the policy was issued the day before they started their trip up Highway 1.

As Keeney investigates, he learns of mysterious fires (over the course of twenty years, six of the houses that Virginia McGinnis, Deana's host, had lived in had burned to the ground) and unexplained deaths (Virginia's three-year-old daughter, her second husband, her mother). In each case, insurance policies benefited Virginia. 

Did they push Deana off that cliff?

Keeney starts to build a case, and enlists the help of various investigators and lawyers both in Kentucky and in California. Finally, the case—of murder—is tried in San Diego, and the story becomes a courtroom drama. We remain in the heads of the prosecutors, the ones who are convinced of Virginia's guilt and hope to prove it, despite evidence that the defense, of course, paints as purely circumstantial. 

It's a pretty good book, though not the sort I generally read. But it had the allure of people I know in it, and local geography as well. In the end—I'll just spill the beans: you weren't planning on reading it, were you?—Virginia McGinnis was found guilty on all counts: murder in the first degree, conspiracy, insurance fraud, and forgery, as well as "special circumstances," murder for financial gain. Way to go, jurors! She was sentenced in 1992 to life without parole and spent almost 20 years in prison before her death at age 74. 

And yes, it was made into a TV movie in 1994, starting Peter Horton as Keeney and Carrie Snodgress as Virginia. 5.9/10 on IMDb. I will not be watching it. I know what happened.

And now I can pack the book up to send back to John, and return to the dusty plains.

56 of 100: Slow Horses

I have posted a couple of book reports about Nick Herron's Slow Horses books. The other day the fourth season of the TV version premiered, with Gary Oldman beautifully portraying the crass and burnt-out, but still (because of Oldman) root-for-able Jackson Lamb. I will be waiting until the entire season drops to watch this next season (I'm a 2 marshmallow kind of gal), but for now, here is a link to a conversation with Will Smith, the "showrunner," and, more immediately, the show's theme song, courtesy of Mick Jagger (as discussed in the Smith convo):

Now I just need to be patient. 

And I wonder what the marshmallow test, from 1970, would be if it were updated to now. Because really, it's not so hard to wait, what, two months, if the payoff is four nights of unmitigated pleasure. I don't think marshmallows can begin to compete in that line-up...

Those were different times. For sure. And I'm not just speaking as a 69-year-old.

55 of 100: Photodominos

I used to post to Flickr regularly: it was the place to share photos, to embark on grandiose photographic projects, to enjoy photo friends' pursuits. Now, maybe once every month or two, I'll drop in on Flickr, see what's up.

Today, yes, I had some alerts: on a group that only four of us seem to participate in anymore: Photodominos. It's a visual association game. It's too bad it's mostly died. It's fun.

But today, yes, four alerts: Neverending Domino; Part II – Specialdomino #12 – NO RULES Neverending – Part II; and Photodomino #s 876 and 877. 

Here are the last few entries for Specialdomino #12:

I dunno. I find it amusing.

54 of 100: Rock and stone—two poems

This project of "daily" postings has slowed into every-other-dailies. My time has been consumed by work-work: a slog of an edit, and the necks proofread I've referred to a few times here. But the necks job is now done—I'll send it off tomorrow—which leaves just the slog. (There will be no pithy lessons or fascinating tidbits gleaned from that one, I guarantee.) And so, I'm resolving to gift myself with something stimulating or rewarding every day, to tide me over. 

Today, for example, I started reading Finger Exercises for Poets, a new book by Dorianne Laux (whom I have featured here at least once). She quotes Robert Hass for an epigraph: "You can do your life's work in half an hour a day." Which I do try to do once a week, anyway, in my regular prompt-oriented writing group.

Anyway, her first chapter is called "Look at a Thing," and after she presents the perhaps most famous imagist poem ever, William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow," she zooms out to two poems about rock and stone. 

The first, by Robinson Jeffers, is about the country just south of me, where I have worked as a volunteer wilderness ranger for ten or more years now. The places in this poem are in my blood—and it's a rare thing to have that sort of deep knowledge, understanding, love, for a place that someone else also knows, understands, loves, in their own way, and then describes in a poem. But the heart of the poem is something all of us understand, in our own place, our own time.

Oh, Lovely Rock

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.
The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucias, first that stare up the cataracts
Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.
               We lay on gravel and kept a little camp-fire for warmth.
Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay-leaves
On tthe ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay down again. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son's face and his companion's, and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall
Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire's breath, tree-trunks were seen, it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fern nor lichen, pure naked rock . . . as if I were
Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange . . . I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling child. I shall die, and my boys
Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,
And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above: and I, many packed centuries ago,
Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.

Next, Charles Simic's poem about something you might keep in your pocket and touch, for reassurance, or the simple pleasure of rubbing it, or to be reminded of the mystery of it all.

Stone

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

53 of 100: Horace Pippin, artist

Part of the reason I keep taking editing/proofreading work is to keep learning. I almost always stumble on something I didn't know. Today's example is a folk artist from Pennsylvania named Horace Pippin (1888–1946), who was referenced for his series of three paintings from late in his life called Holy Mountain, a dark variation on the Quaker artist Edward Hicks's Peaceable Kingdom series (ca. 1822–49—of which 62 exemplars still exist). 

Holy Mountain III, 1945

The reason these works were mentioned in a book about necks is present in the forest just behind the ox on the left: a victim of lynching. Pippin's other Holy Mountains also include nooses, cemetery crosses, red poppies—allusions to both racial violence and the violence of war. 

Pippin served in WWI in the Harlem Hellfighters, the all-Black 369th Infantry Unit. A month before Armistice he was hit by a German sniper's bullet, which severely damaged his right shoulder. As part of his physical therapy, he took up drawing, a practice he'd enjoyed as a boy (with a focus on racehorses and jockeys), and by 1930 he was painting on stretched canvas. Ultimately he created more than 140 works and became very well known, especially during the last eight years of his life. Since then he has been the subject of several major retrospectives, as well as a book of poetry and several children's books. The National Gallery of Art has an online 1st–2nd-grade curriculum devoted to his life and work, in which students "will discover how to 'read" the clues in his painting School Studies and write a story about the work. By solving counting and time problems, students will also create their own 'secret number' painting."

School Studies, 1944

Pippin is known for the wide variety of themes he explored, starting with his service in WWI, and branching into landscapes, portraits, still lifes, biblical subjects, and the history of slavery and racial segregation in the US. His first major oil painting was The Ending of the War: Starting Home, from 1930–33:

One of his last paintings was The Park Bench—which may be a self-portrait but more likely depicts a neighbor of his in West Chester, PA, who enjoyed sitting and thinking on a local bench: 

Here are a few more examples of his work (click to see large on black):

Cabin in the Cotton, mid-1930s

The Wash, ca. 1942

Harmonizing, 1944

Victorian Interior, 1945

Supper Time, 1940

Mr. Prejudice, 1943

Domino Players, 1943

The Getaway, 1939