Margotlog: Giving Thanks Today
For sadness because my oldest lovely is gone, yet looking through the trees out back, I see her face hovering in the pine branches...
Thankful that she, Eleonora, had such loving care in Delaware, even through a topsy-turvy break, six months before she died when she stopped taking her anti-depressants and because rough, loud, nuts, kookie!
Grateful that her dear friend Jo was with her at the very end, when she stopped eating for a week, and finally expired. That's the word--wind and life left her body.
Sad that so many I love are far away on coasts and across oceans. For instance, Diane and Clare who from their front step, glimpse a creek leading to a harbor and finally to an ocean. I worry sometimes that their coast may soon be under water. And I wonder, should we wish not to live to see it, or admit that ocean rise is happening faster and faster and we must adjust and change?
Across the miles, I salute Diane in her red coat, that's winter red, to match the berries on Carolina trees when all the leaves (except the live oaks and evergreens) are gone. And Clare with her jaunty smile.
Grateful for their friendship over the years, as they introduced me to Mepkin Abbey near Charleston, where I've spent several peaceful and demanding periods, writing, walking a garden labyrinth and trying to get used to being a lone woman among monks of all ages.
Grateful for Pope Francis, whose humble face and demeanor (I see him driving a little car through Roman traffic) bespeaks his care for multitudes of less fortunates who mean more to me because he is their champion. Strange twist. When we are led by selfish tyrants, we become self-centered, frightened and tyrannical!
Grateful for winter sun in the Christmas cactus lining my south window whose blossoms blare brighter than Christmas trees and provide hope for safe passage through another winter.
Grateful for the twelve "white-footed three, aka Julia, Tilly and Maggie," even when they wake me up at 4:30 a.m., especially Tilly of the soulful green eyes who walks on my body but will never sit in my lap.
Grateful, immensely, practically grateful that pulling up the new bathroom carpet (corn-based!) on which Tilly peed more times than I could count, and replacing it with linoleum (yes it looks like tile but it ain't), helped stop this outrage. Along with Felliway spray and diffusor. That was a siege I hope never to repeat.
Grateful for good neighbors and friends here and abroad, for work I care about and that ends each semester, and writing that continues when all else fails...
Grateful for relative good health and only occasional excesses (read chocolate, vino), for enough to keep and enough to give away, for signs that humans the world over are working to change behaviors that ruin soil, water, air, forests, that kills bees and ravages bird and mammal populations. For human action that says we are not alone here. And the longer we act as if we are, the more we ultimately damage ourselves.
Thank you friends and fellow sufferers. Happy Thanksgiving.
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Friday, November 22, 2013
Margotlog: Documentary Excellence
Margotlog: Documentary Excellence
I've been struck by what I call The Documentary Impulse and now, I'm trying to inspire masters students to allow themselves to do the same. This is creating something of a quandary. What worked for Daniel Defoe in the early 1700s documenting a London plague, and for the writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans in the 1930s (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), seems fraught with new-fangled difficulty today. Can you imagine today, for instance, being welcomed into the makeshift homes of three share-cropper families in the deep South, especially if you're from the Northeast elite? I suspect before you got to the door, you'd be peppered with buckshot. Or try replicating the "eye on the street" of many early 20th-century photographers.
One of my white, middle-aged male students did exactly that on the Lake Street bus. He pointed a new digital camera ar a crown on the bus and began clicking. Americans and work was his subject, and here he was surrounded by them. Suddenly behind him an African-American women began to scream that he had no right to take photos, Suddenly a Somali woman was trying to wrest the camera from him. The photographer stretched out his arm and edged her back. He threatened to call the police if she didn't stop. Finally the woman's husband came between them.
"You must ask permission," I said softly, remembering what our class visitor Wing Young Huie said about his Lake Street, USA project. Get friendly with people, go with them to their hang-outs. Have tea, a beer. Then ask for permission.
There's been a lot of damage done to privacy in the last twenty years. We are full of newcomers, many of whom have suffered through profound terror. Their culture or religion may frown on photographs as a theft of sacred space.
My photographer friend Linda Gammell reminds me of a case that went to the Supreme Court--a street photographer charged with invasion of privacy by an orthodox Jew who insisted, "It's against my religion to have my photograph taken." Ultimately the highest court decided that a street is public space, and given this photographer's body of excellent work, he did not constitute a threat to peace and security. Some may disagree.
How often photographs are used to demean and embarrass--think Facebook and postings of semi-nude photos of teens by their so-called friends. How often photographs diminish the vibrant flux that is a constant. We see glossy photos of penguins and think all is well with them. Ditto marine animals like manatees, severely endangered by run-off chemicals from Florida lawns. If we see a photograph, and the bird or mammal looks healthy, we do not question. We assume this is an accurate and enduring representation.
Photographs smooth and arrange what is rough, wild and uncouth. Holly Newton Swift's painting show currently at the Macalester College Janet Wallace Fine Arts building is full of works that began as photographs. Holly tells us how she struggles to avoid replicating the photos, how she wants memory and mystery to take over from a simple rendition of what a camera has captured. What is truer, after all? A rendition of flux and rough ugliness or a deep woods photo where shots of sun fall through tall trees.
I love old photographs. They capture what was evanescent, and we know it's gone. Bathed in the glow of nostalgia, the figures in these old photographs stare out at us like full-bodied ghosts, begging to be let back in on life. I miss them as if they belonged to my family. I itch to tell their stories.
But photographs of scenes I know intimately from daily walks strike me as reductions. They don't carry my experience of layered memory and perspective--how I saw the snow yesterday, how a huge cottonwood shaded a back yard five years ago, how furious I was when it was cut down. How other years, trees retain their winter skeletons far too long. How already I'm longing for leaves, but accepting that "certain slant of light" which Emily Dickinson named as the oppression of fall. It's oppression and strange antic joy.
I've been struck by what I call The Documentary Impulse and now, I'm trying to inspire masters students to allow themselves to do the same. This is creating something of a quandary. What worked for Daniel Defoe in the early 1700s documenting a London plague, and for the writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans in the 1930s (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), seems fraught with new-fangled difficulty today. Can you imagine today, for instance, being welcomed into the makeshift homes of three share-cropper families in the deep South, especially if you're from the Northeast elite? I suspect before you got to the door, you'd be peppered with buckshot. Or try replicating the "eye on the street" of many early 20th-century photographers.
One of my white, middle-aged male students did exactly that on the Lake Street bus. He pointed a new digital camera ar a crown on the bus and began clicking. Americans and work was his subject, and here he was surrounded by them. Suddenly behind him an African-American women began to scream that he had no right to take photos, Suddenly a Somali woman was trying to wrest the camera from him. The photographer stretched out his arm and edged her back. He threatened to call the police if she didn't stop. Finally the woman's husband came between them.
"You must ask permission," I said softly, remembering what our class visitor Wing Young Huie said about his Lake Street, USA project. Get friendly with people, go with them to their hang-outs. Have tea, a beer. Then ask for permission.
There's been a lot of damage done to privacy in the last twenty years. We are full of newcomers, many of whom have suffered through profound terror. Their culture or religion may frown on photographs as a theft of sacred space.
My photographer friend Linda Gammell reminds me of a case that went to the Supreme Court--a street photographer charged with invasion of privacy by an orthodox Jew who insisted, "It's against my religion to have my photograph taken." Ultimately the highest court decided that a street is public space, and given this photographer's body of excellent work, he did not constitute a threat to peace and security. Some may disagree.
How often photographs are used to demean and embarrass--think Facebook and postings of semi-nude photos of teens by their so-called friends. How often photographs diminish the vibrant flux that is a constant. We see glossy photos of penguins and think all is well with them. Ditto marine animals like manatees, severely endangered by run-off chemicals from Florida lawns. If we see a photograph, and the bird or mammal looks healthy, we do not question. We assume this is an accurate and enduring representation.
Photographs smooth and arrange what is rough, wild and uncouth. Holly Newton Swift's painting show currently at the Macalester College Janet Wallace Fine Arts building is full of works that began as photographs. Holly tells us how she struggles to avoid replicating the photos, how she wants memory and mystery to take over from a simple rendition of what a camera has captured. What is truer, after all? A rendition of flux and rough ugliness or a deep woods photo where shots of sun fall through tall trees.
I love old photographs. They capture what was evanescent, and we know it's gone. Bathed in the glow of nostalgia, the figures in these old photographs stare out at us like full-bodied ghosts, begging to be let back in on life. I miss them as if they belonged to my family. I itch to tell their stories.
But photographs of scenes I know intimately from daily walks strike me as reductions. They don't carry my experience of layered memory and perspective--how I saw the snow yesterday, how a huge cottonwood shaded a back yard five years ago, how furious I was when it was cut down. How other years, trees retain their winter skeletons far too long. How already I'm longing for leaves, but accepting that "certain slant of light" which Emily Dickinson named as the oppression of fall. It's oppression and strange antic joy.
Friday, October 25, 2013
Margotlog: Margaret Hasse's Poetic Exuberance
Margotlog: Margaret Hasse's Poetic Exuberance
Sometimes in a schematic mood, I divide poets into Emilys and Tennysons--Emilys belong to the pare-it-down, nail-it-tight school of poetry. Tennysons to the broader sweeping, celebratory school. Their music is different. They look different on the page--Emily's tiny explosions, Tennyson's ranging and gathering, examining and weeping.
The title of Minnesota poet Margaret Hasse's newest collection--Earth's Appetites (Nodin Press)--suggests the enjoyment and range of her verse. I like her best when she focuses closer, as in "Consideration for the Feet," when an inspection of feet above the bath water, "rosy as babies" becomes "They have been wild to waltz./ They march when I'm mad." Or in a tea garden, after naming and sampling teas, she and a friend remember "threshold events" and she gives a haunting rendition of a dying brother's request that bits of his ash be put in things he liked: "his banjo, top drawer of his desk, the garden." Such poignant specificity is hard to forget.
Those of us around her age flinch as she does, climbing down the ladder to a swimming pool, worried people will notice "her thighs wrinkle like crepe." Or appreciate the methodical, tender way she folds away things her visiting son has left, ending with "I wander around the house, visit his empty room,/ nothing to fold except my hands." This is giving raw power to a time-honored religious phrase.
Speaking of endings, a poem titled "Grave" goes entirely against the notion of death, as she describes love-making on the grave of her family. This poem ends wonderfully: A light joy talcs my body as if
I were abandoned as a child, then
fell into good hands. (27)
It's odd that her poems about childhood and youth resonate less with me than the more up-to-date renditions of experience. That is, all except the first poem in the book:Truant. I never left school in the middle of the day, as she describes doing, tooling around with a guy, but the joy of remembering "a meadowlark's liquid song" sets us up for a sassy, prophetic ending that sounds just the way a principal should:
"This will be part of
your permanent record."
That record reverberates through what we are now reading with so much pleasure, honoring Margaret Hasse's powers of description, insight, shaping, and surprise.
.
Sometimes in a schematic mood, I divide poets into Emilys and Tennysons--Emilys belong to the pare-it-down, nail-it-tight school of poetry. Tennysons to the broader sweeping, celebratory school. Their music is different. They look different on the page--Emily's tiny explosions, Tennyson's ranging and gathering, examining and weeping.
The title of Minnesota poet Margaret Hasse's newest collection--Earth's Appetites (Nodin Press)--suggests the enjoyment and range of her verse. I like her best when she focuses closer, as in "Consideration for the Feet," when an inspection of feet above the bath water, "rosy as babies" becomes "They have been wild to waltz./ They march when I'm mad." Or in a tea garden, after naming and sampling teas, she and a friend remember "threshold events" and she gives a haunting rendition of a dying brother's request that bits of his ash be put in things he liked: "his banjo, top drawer of his desk, the garden." Such poignant specificity is hard to forget.
Those of us around her age flinch as she does, climbing down the ladder to a swimming pool, worried people will notice "her thighs wrinkle like crepe." Or appreciate the methodical, tender way she folds away things her visiting son has left, ending with "I wander around the house, visit his empty room,/ nothing to fold except my hands." This is giving raw power to a time-honored religious phrase.
Speaking of endings, a poem titled "Grave" goes entirely against the notion of death, as she describes love-making on the grave of her family. This poem ends wonderfully: A light joy talcs my body as if
I were abandoned as a child, then
fell into good hands. (27)
It's odd that her poems about childhood and youth resonate less with me than the more up-to-date renditions of experience. That is, all except the first poem in the book:Truant. I never left school in the middle of the day, as she describes doing, tooling around with a guy, but the joy of remembering "a meadowlark's liquid song" sets us up for a sassy, prophetic ending that sounds just the way a principal should:
"This will be part of
your permanent record."
That record reverberates through what we are now reading with so much pleasure, honoring Margaret Hasse's powers of description, insight, shaping, and surprise.
.
Monday, October 21, 2013
Margotlog:The Unbelievers - from Orchestras to Global Warming
Margotlog: The Unbelievers - from Orchestras to Global Warming
Every time I try to remember my breakup from my first husband, there are loud voices, the two of us standing in the kitchen shouting, then phone calls when he pled with me not to leave. At least we were communicating!
Lately the Minnesota Orchestra musicians and management have come under more scrutiny than perhaps ever before in their 14-month (?) lockout. Are their patrons becoming restive? Does it look like the organization may disintegrate before our very eyes? I think the chances are good. And I blame both sides.
It's a stretch but I imagine that the musicians, priding themselves on their excellence, can't, still can't believe that their former management could do such a dastardly thing to them. Their audiences have something of the same problem--witness the ploy in the only public meeting I've attended: "Answer the following question in your small-group discussions: "Do we want to have a worldclass orchestra?"
Hmmm! Is that really the question to ask at this juncture, when there's been virtually no negotiation face-to-face except through the mediation of George Mitchell? And even that has fallen flat. As someone said to me recently, "Of course, Mitchell will succeed. He negotiated with the two Irelands." Well, he's just met very stubborn worldclass musicians.
Aren't they hurting financially? Some must be because they've left. But I'm guessing the bulk of the orchestra is still sitting somewhere with their arms folded across their worldclass bodies, a very aggrieved look on their faces.
As to the management--well I can't speculate, though I suspect the management NEVER expected their worldclass musicians to hold out so long. From what I've read in the paper, the offers from management do cut salaries, but as several friends have commented, these are still living wages we're talking about--hovering around $90-100,000 a year. Worldclass by my standards.
Now let's stop to contemplate recent news about global warming. A beautiful and extremely sad article in the Star Tribune Sunday about a search for living coral reefs. The swimmers found many bleached beyond redemption. Gone for good. Another article, also in the Sunday Star Tribune, about forests in N. Minnesota showing evidence of extremely rapid change, either through die-offs of boreal trees who can't tolerate increased warmth, or the appearance in northern range of more southern trees. Some extrapolate a loss of forests entirely along the northern tier of Minnesota within 50 years--only a rough-hewn form of prairie.
I've been convinced of global warming for almost ten years. And I've done things that a single-family can do--put in UV-protective glass and very tight windows, changed almost entirely to compact flourescent or LED lights, led a plan on the homefront to reduce energy use--everything from turning down the furnace AFTER we turn it up in the morning to simply doing without as many lights. Plus both my husband and I drive a Prius, not the only low-energy choice, but a good one.
Still I know it's not enough for one family. The entire neighborhood, city, county, nation needs to make changes in energy production--to wind and solar. In transportation energy use--to mass transit and cars that run far less thirsty for fuel. If we did these two things, and did them very very fast, say within three years, or four, we just might be able to keep from the tipping point, after which there is no return in anyone's lifetime. We are headed for sunstroke disaster.
Yet, bigger and bigger cars (really they're small fat trucks) idle daily in my neighborhood for no apparent reason, spewing CO2 from their tailpipes, Here are houses lit up like carnivals. Here are traffic jams that boggle the mind. Isn't being stuck in a jam every day of the week evidence enough that something is truly wrong with the way we've orchestrated our cities?
I've very very pessimistic that we can change our tunes, step up to the plate and actually play the game we are supposedly interested in playing - let's go all the way and saying, interesting in staying alive in relative comfort and handing over a decent world to our children and grandchildren.
Every time I try to remember my breakup from my first husband, there are loud voices, the two of us standing in the kitchen shouting, then phone calls when he pled with me not to leave. At least we were communicating!
Lately the Minnesota Orchestra musicians and management have come under more scrutiny than perhaps ever before in their 14-month (?) lockout. Are their patrons becoming restive? Does it look like the organization may disintegrate before our very eyes? I think the chances are good. And I blame both sides.
It's a stretch but I imagine that the musicians, priding themselves on their excellence, can't, still can't believe that their former management could do such a dastardly thing to them. Their audiences have something of the same problem--witness the ploy in the only public meeting I've attended: "Answer the following question in your small-group discussions: "Do we want to have a worldclass orchestra?"
Hmmm! Is that really the question to ask at this juncture, when there's been virtually no negotiation face-to-face except through the mediation of George Mitchell? And even that has fallen flat. As someone said to me recently, "Of course, Mitchell will succeed. He negotiated with the two Irelands." Well, he's just met very stubborn worldclass musicians.
Aren't they hurting financially? Some must be because they've left. But I'm guessing the bulk of the orchestra is still sitting somewhere with their arms folded across their worldclass bodies, a very aggrieved look on their faces.
As to the management--well I can't speculate, though I suspect the management NEVER expected their worldclass musicians to hold out so long. From what I've read in the paper, the offers from management do cut salaries, but as several friends have commented, these are still living wages we're talking about--hovering around $90-100,000 a year. Worldclass by my standards.
Now let's stop to contemplate recent news about global warming. A beautiful and extremely sad article in the Star Tribune Sunday about a search for living coral reefs. The swimmers found many bleached beyond redemption. Gone for good. Another article, also in the Sunday Star Tribune, about forests in N. Minnesota showing evidence of extremely rapid change, either through die-offs of boreal trees who can't tolerate increased warmth, or the appearance in northern range of more southern trees. Some extrapolate a loss of forests entirely along the northern tier of Minnesota within 50 years--only a rough-hewn form of prairie.
I've been convinced of global warming for almost ten years. And I've done things that a single-family can do--put in UV-protective glass and very tight windows, changed almost entirely to compact flourescent or LED lights, led a plan on the homefront to reduce energy use--everything from turning down the furnace AFTER we turn it up in the morning to simply doing without as many lights. Plus both my husband and I drive a Prius, not the only low-energy choice, but a good one.
Still I know it's not enough for one family. The entire neighborhood, city, county, nation needs to make changes in energy production--to wind and solar. In transportation energy use--to mass transit and cars that run far less thirsty for fuel. If we did these two things, and did them very very fast, say within three years, or four, we just might be able to keep from the tipping point, after which there is no return in anyone's lifetime. We are headed for sunstroke disaster.
Yet, bigger and bigger cars (really they're small fat trucks) idle daily in my neighborhood for no apparent reason, spewing CO2 from their tailpipes, Here are houses lit up like carnivals. Here are traffic jams that boggle the mind. Isn't being stuck in a jam every day of the week evidence enough that something is truly wrong with the way we've orchestrated our cities?
I've very very pessimistic that we can change our tunes, step up to the plate and actually play the game we are supposedly interested in playing - let's go all the way and saying, interesting in staying alive in relative comfort and handing over a decent world to our children and grandchildren.
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Margotlog: Dickens' Divine Extremity
Margotlog: Dickens' Divine Extremity
For sheer outrageous characterization, Charles Dickens has no match. It helps that his England was rife with class divisions (probably still is). Whereas US novelists play around with outlaws, hoodwinking innocents with snake oil and motley, Dickens almost always draws a firm line between haves and have-nots, between the benign and the criminal, and then dares one or the other to step across and challenge the other. It's a fight within a tight arena, and the players remain vividly recognizable, until the mean crumble under their own weight.
Hard Times, one of the master's most extreme satires, gives us two extraordinarily bad (often ridiculous) men: Mr. Josiah Bounderby, and Mr. Grandgrind. Coke Town where these two preside is filthy with fumes and poverty. And though we soon meet one of the mill hands, a mild-mannered sort named Stephen Blackpool, most of the action centers around these two giant malefactors sounding off in various locations, including a circus.
Usually I wait at least six months before listening to a book on disk again because I have to forget the story as well as the reader's voice. But for Hard Times, I'll probably have to wait twice that long. Not that I can quote much verbatim, but I can still hear the reader Patrick Tull announcing, "I am Josiah Bounderby of Coke Town," as if Bounderby were Moses reciting the Ten Commandments. Tull has a deep, incredibly variable voice, and to portray Bounderby he puffs up with swaggering self-importance, which includes a ready reminder that "I, Josiah Bounderby have come from nothing," an orphan who fed on offal, raised by a snarling she-wolf of a grandmother.
His sidekick, Mr. Grandgrind, is not much better, though he is capable of affection for his children, Dickens tells us. Strange how he shows it, drilling them with "facts" until he drills all sentiment, frivolity, imagination, sympathy, desire, enjoyment out of them, leaving his eldest daughter Louisa to sit for long hours in silent contemplation of the fire. He's ground down her surface with "facts," but she has kept an inner life burning. We suspect intelligence is her fuel.
His son Tom, Louisa's childhood playmate and her fondest friend, hasn't been ground down enough, it turns out, but I won't give the plot away, for it is a splendid plot, involving Mrs. Sparsit, a "lady of the highest gentility," who places herself under Bounderby's thumb. With her "Coriolanian eyebrows" and sharp nose, she has powers of discernment far beyond the pliant female she pretends to be. Eventually this discernment and indefatigable industry do Bounderby harm. By then, we're rubbing our hands with glee. We couldn't be more delighted to see class snobbery unseat self-made snobbery.
But Dickens has a huge heart, and the suffering and desires of those mill hands, ground down by facts and greed and snobbery, deprived of joy and hope, even food and drink rouse us to ire. We applaud the storm that drenches Mrs. Sparsit. We cheer Sissy, the daughter of a circus performer, brought up by Gradgrind's facts, who yet can detect the true nature of crime and goodness, and helps set things right in the end.
Hard Times is not fall-down funny, but it is full of wicked self-revelation, where we join league with the author to cheer his nasty fictions to self-immolation. We also weep at the pain they cause to the well-meaning and innocent, and are entirely happy to have Tom Gradgrind forced into the circus for disguise, his face blacked, with his job something to do with a horse. This, prefatory to his being shipped off to the colonies. I do wonder what horrors await him in Canada or in a Kansas prairie snowstorm.
I don't know of any other author who enjoys criminals so hugely and who paints their false denominations with such fervor. The fervor of a convert who himself suffered in working poverty until he gave himself over to practice the literary faith.
For sheer outrageous characterization, Charles Dickens has no match. It helps that his England was rife with class divisions (probably still is). Whereas US novelists play around with outlaws, hoodwinking innocents with snake oil and motley, Dickens almost always draws a firm line between haves and have-nots, between the benign and the criminal, and then dares one or the other to step across and challenge the other. It's a fight within a tight arena, and the players remain vividly recognizable, until the mean crumble under their own weight.
Hard Times, one of the master's most extreme satires, gives us two extraordinarily bad (often ridiculous) men: Mr. Josiah Bounderby, and Mr. Grandgrind. Coke Town where these two preside is filthy with fumes and poverty. And though we soon meet one of the mill hands, a mild-mannered sort named Stephen Blackpool, most of the action centers around these two giant malefactors sounding off in various locations, including a circus.
Usually I wait at least six months before listening to a book on disk again because I have to forget the story as well as the reader's voice. But for Hard Times, I'll probably have to wait twice that long. Not that I can quote much verbatim, but I can still hear the reader Patrick Tull announcing, "I am Josiah Bounderby of Coke Town," as if Bounderby were Moses reciting the Ten Commandments. Tull has a deep, incredibly variable voice, and to portray Bounderby he puffs up with swaggering self-importance, which includes a ready reminder that "I, Josiah Bounderby have come from nothing," an orphan who fed on offal, raised by a snarling she-wolf of a grandmother.
His sidekick, Mr. Grandgrind, is not much better, though he is capable of affection for his children, Dickens tells us. Strange how he shows it, drilling them with "facts" until he drills all sentiment, frivolity, imagination, sympathy, desire, enjoyment out of them, leaving his eldest daughter Louisa to sit for long hours in silent contemplation of the fire. He's ground down her surface with "facts," but she has kept an inner life burning. We suspect intelligence is her fuel.
His son Tom, Louisa's childhood playmate and her fondest friend, hasn't been ground down enough, it turns out, but I won't give the plot away, for it is a splendid plot, involving Mrs. Sparsit, a "lady of the highest gentility," who places herself under Bounderby's thumb. With her "Coriolanian eyebrows" and sharp nose, she has powers of discernment far beyond the pliant female she pretends to be. Eventually this discernment and indefatigable industry do Bounderby harm. By then, we're rubbing our hands with glee. We couldn't be more delighted to see class snobbery unseat self-made snobbery.
But Dickens has a huge heart, and the suffering and desires of those mill hands, ground down by facts and greed and snobbery, deprived of joy and hope, even food and drink rouse us to ire. We applaud the storm that drenches Mrs. Sparsit. We cheer Sissy, the daughter of a circus performer, brought up by Gradgrind's facts, who yet can detect the true nature of crime and goodness, and helps set things right in the end.
Hard Times is not fall-down funny, but it is full of wicked self-revelation, where we join league with the author to cheer his nasty fictions to self-immolation. We also weep at the pain they cause to the well-meaning and innocent, and are entirely happy to have Tom Gradgrind forced into the circus for disguise, his face blacked, with his job something to do with a horse. This, prefatory to his being shipped off to the colonies. I do wonder what horrors await him in Canada or in a Kansas prairie snowstorm.
I don't know of any other author who enjoys criminals so hugely and who paints their false denominations with such fervor. The fervor of a convert who himself suffered in working poverty until he gave himself over to practice the literary faith.
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Margotlog: Grass-fed Beef and Ladies Plates in Amsterdam and Bologna
Margotlog: Grass-fed Beef and Ladies Plates in Amsterdam and Bologna
Three thousand miles up, I'm sometimes at a loss for things to do. Recently, flying home from Italy via Amsterdam, I started reading the KLM packaging. Not only did the flight magazine tell me that Amsterdam's Concertgewau orchestra hall is one of the finest in the world, along with Boston's Symphony Hall, but that the beef served on board KLM planes comes from a cow first bred in the Middle Ages, the blaarkop. Not only do these feed on nothing but grass, herbs, and wildflowers, but some actually are stationed near Schiphol airport.
As we came down for a landing, I spied plots of corn and other crops, but no cows. Using every inch of land makes sense in a country mostly claimed from the sea. I also applaud the raising of beef cattle on essentially wild grasses and flowers. Yes it take longer than the horrible methods of feed lot concentration and fattening on corn in the US, but feeding cattle grass and making them more around to get it, is far better for the environment--no lagoons of sludge from cow feces and urine (in some cases so huge that they dwarf what some major cities) but also no fast-fattening on corn which bulks up cows but riddles their meat with fat. Seems to me I remember the highly enjoyable documentary "King Corn" mentioning that corn-fed beef is around 98% fat, versus 15% for grass fed. Why anyone with any sense would buy corn-fed beef is beyond me, but then I don't much like beef anymore, and our family has the bucks to purchase grass-fed.
As a whole I'd say that the Europeans in Holland and Italy eat better food than do we in the US. And the KLM airplane paper cups tell us (in very fine print along the side) that they are made from 100% renewable resources, and the inside is coated with Inego innovation, made from plants not oil. Hurrah, say I, blinking to readjust my eye sight. Then my heart sank. Four months ago we purchased new bathroom carpeting (it's a bath plus dressing room) made from corn. There I was strutting my environmental green, while the cats (heaven help us) were sniffing themselves into new places to pee! Slowly the lovely new carpeting began to smell suspiciously of a piss pot. Soon I was rendered frantic as I tried all sorts of products shy of sending the offending cat (we have three but were pretty sure the culprit was Tilly, the oldest and most aggrieved) to the rendering plant. After weeks of denial, hope, disgust, more hope and finally resignation, we visited the carpet/linoleum dealer yesterday and selected an oil-based linoleum replacement. There's no telling how Tilly will react, but even if she continues to pee on the floor, not in the litter box, there will be hard, impermeable oil-based linoleum under her. Fingers crossed. As the lovely dame in the carpet store said, "They're family." Yup, she's got that right. Pretty hard to put down a critter who's survived tornadoes, flu, children leaving home, spousal disagreements, aging joints, dashed hopes, and loves you so intensely she walks over your sleeping body for comfort.
As I say, the Italians (and probably the Hollanders) eat better than we do in the US. Food for us is often something to be downed fast and furious. In Europe, it's something to savor well into the evening. My favorite meal in Italy was the first night in Florence when my friend the artist Patricia Glee Smith (check out her website) and I went across narrow Borgo Pinto from our convent hotel to Accadi, a family-run small restaurant. That night huge mushrooms (porcini? morels?) were on the menu. I had pasta with them and Pat had rice. The smooth sauce, just piquant enough for the delicious earthy taste of the mushrooms, was divine. The pasta cooked to perfection, just enough, and the portion not too large or too small. As we ate, we were grinning ear to ear.
Then visiting in Bologna, I encountered a series of plates on the wall of our hostess. Turns out the plates are made by a Bolognese artist Angela Lorenz, or to use her professional name, "L'Aura," the Wind. The images on each plate are of women in antique Renaissance head gear, puffed sleeves and swooping necklines, i.e. "Babes" from 450 years ago. Of course I don't need to mention that women have been in charge of food preparation for millennia. These dames, slyly and in concert, suggest something different. Here, in order of the plates, reading left to right, is their message:
She is round.
She is idealized.
She hangs on the wall.
She is not to be used.
She is not disposable.
She is a dish.
By the end, I was laughing out loud, highly entertained at the simplicity and sly resistance of these plates.
Three thousand miles up, I'm sometimes at a loss for things to do. Recently, flying home from Italy via Amsterdam, I started reading the KLM packaging. Not only did the flight magazine tell me that Amsterdam's Concertgewau orchestra hall is one of the finest in the world, along with Boston's Symphony Hall, but that the beef served on board KLM planes comes from a cow first bred in the Middle Ages, the blaarkop. Not only do these feed on nothing but grass, herbs, and wildflowers, but some actually are stationed near Schiphol airport.
As we came down for a landing, I spied plots of corn and other crops, but no cows. Using every inch of land makes sense in a country mostly claimed from the sea. I also applaud the raising of beef cattle on essentially wild grasses and flowers. Yes it take longer than the horrible methods of feed lot concentration and fattening on corn in the US, but feeding cattle grass and making them more around to get it, is far better for the environment--no lagoons of sludge from cow feces and urine (in some cases so huge that they dwarf what some major cities) but also no fast-fattening on corn which bulks up cows but riddles their meat with fat. Seems to me I remember the highly enjoyable documentary "King Corn" mentioning that corn-fed beef is around 98% fat, versus 15% for grass fed. Why anyone with any sense would buy corn-fed beef is beyond me, but then I don't much like beef anymore, and our family has the bucks to purchase grass-fed.
As a whole I'd say that the Europeans in Holland and Italy eat better food than do we in the US. And the KLM airplane paper cups tell us (in very fine print along the side) that they are made from 100% renewable resources, and the inside is coated with Inego innovation, made from plants not oil. Hurrah, say I, blinking to readjust my eye sight. Then my heart sank. Four months ago we purchased new bathroom carpeting (it's a bath plus dressing room) made from corn. There I was strutting my environmental green, while the cats (heaven help us) were sniffing themselves into new places to pee! Slowly the lovely new carpeting began to smell suspiciously of a piss pot. Soon I was rendered frantic as I tried all sorts of products shy of sending the offending cat (we have three but were pretty sure the culprit was Tilly, the oldest and most aggrieved) to the rendering plant. After weeks of denial, hope, disgust, more hope and finally resignation, we visited the carpet/linoleum dealer yesterday and selected an oil-based linoleum replacement. There's no telling how Tilly will react, but even if she continues to pee on the floor, not in the litter box, there will be hard, impermeable oil-based linoleum under her. Fingers crossed. As the lovely dame in the carpet store said, "They're family." Yup, she's got that right. Pretty hard to put down a critter who's survived tornadoes, flu, children leaving home, spousal disagreements, aging joints, dashed hopes, and loves you so intensely she walks over your sleeping body for comfort.
As I say, the Italians (and probably the Hollanders) eat better than we do in the US. Food for us is often something to be downed fast and furious. In Europe, it's something to savor well into the evening. My favorite meal in Italy was the first night in Florence when my friend the artist Patricia Glee Smith (check out her website) and I went across narrow Borgo Pinto from our convent hotel to Accadi, a family-run small restaurant. That night huge mushrooms (porcini? morels?) were on the menu. I had pasta with them and Pat had rice. The smooth sauce, just piquant enough for the delicious earthy taste of the mushrooms, was divine. The pasta cooked to perfection, just enough, and the portion not too large or too small. As we ate, we were grinning ear to ear.
Then visiting in Bologna, I encountered a series of plates on the wall of our hostess. Turns out the plates are made by a Bolognese artist Angela Lorenz, or to use her professional name, "L'Aura," the Wind. The images on each plate are of women in antique Renaissance head gear, puffed sleeves and swooping necklines, i.e. "Babes" from 450 years ago. Of course I don't need to mention that women have been in charge of food preparation for millennia. These dames, slyly and in concert, suggest something different. Here, in order of the plates, reading left to right, is their message:
She is round.
She is idealized.
She hangs on the wall.
She is not to be used.
She is not disposable.
She is a dish.
By the end, I was laughing out loud, highly entertained at the simplicity and sly resistance of these plates.
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Margotlog: Hummers
Margotlog: Hummers
What inspired me to hang the humming bird feeder in the crab apple tree, early August? Maybe the dismal showing of those helicopter birds during my stint at the North Shore/Lake Superior? It was such a cold spring, then summer, here in St. Paul, and north too, near Lutsen town. Hummers had stalled, no doubt, further south. When I hung the feeder on the deck facing the Big Lake, mid-July, it took days for any to find it--probably still raising broods. Finally when one or two showed up, they were so skittish, they disappeared if even a shadow flickered nearby. Then distracted by a house-mouse invasion, I lost track of hummers.
What I really know about humming birds could make ten drops of red liquid in a hummer feeder. Why they are attracted to red, I don't know. How far south they migrate, I don't know. Why they like northern Minnesota for summer baby-making, I can only guess since red flowers don't predominate in the mid-summer landscape. More like gold and pink--golden rod, golden tansy and sunflower varieties, pink roadside roses, pink fireweed. Why hummers are so feisty when they're so small, and have never heard of Napoleon, I don't know. But for sure, they are fast.
By early August I'd installed the feeder in the crab apple tree just beyond our backyard deck. Finally the weather was warm, even hot. Cloudless days when I walked early morning because it got too hot in the afternoon. Plenty of chickadees, in fact more than I'd ever remembered, ate sunflower seeds like there was no tomorrow. Two kinds of woodpeckers--hairy and downy--went after the solid suet/seed mix in the hanging net bag. Pigeons and European sparrows galore, but what wasn't surprising. Goldfinch on the thistle feeder in front, then goldfinch babies, all tan, on the sunflowers feeders in the back.
One heart-stopping few days of concern for a fledgling blue jay--all puffy feathers, and big eyes, staring at us from the deck railing, then attempting flight, and finally making it half across the yard to the entwined small spruce, its parents rattling and calling it ahead. Our neighbors with the two elderly cats agreed to keep them in--I trust no wandering feline, even deaf and arthritic. Last summer there was a dead baby blue jay waiting for me when I came home from the North Shore. I felt as if I'd failed the bird kingdom.
It's amazing how we humans can come to feel we're in charge. Nature's salvation is up to us. Now, after years of preferring cat lives over bird lives, I've switched my allegiance. I'm all for the winged tribes--butterflies, bees, moths, lady bugs and yes, birds. We used to house two famous outdoor cats years ago, Archie and Justa, but no more. Our cats now stay indoors , with an occasional foray to the deck, held tightly in my arms. Too much evidence that cats kill the birds I am attempting to feed, plus too much expense from menaces like bee-bee guns, vicious dogs, and the cats' own preference for attempting to leap ten times their height in a single bound.
Suddenly two weeks ago, I spied two green mighty mites in the crab apple tree--hummers. For two weeks, they buzzed in and out of the tree, picked invisible insects from the air, dive-bombed chickadees two or three times their size, and sucked at the sugar water in the hummer feeder which I refilled three or four times. Every spare minute I stood at various windows looking out on the yard and watched for them. They were my talismans of summer delight. My connection to hope, joy, and the belief that nature was boundless in its abundance and mystery. Then two days ago, after a very chilly night, I searched the tree and air for them, but they were gone.
Just as the internet information I consulted said they would be. They knew when to leave and they left without a goodbye, without a thank you. For several weepy hours, I was sure I had failed. Maybe my last filling of the feeder had gone awry? I took the feeder down and very carefully calibrated: one cup water, boiled three minutes then cooled, and 1/4 cup of sugar. Even with the new elixir to temp them, they did not return. They are so small, after all, and their metabolism must be enormously fast. They probably can't survive in cold below 45 degrees Fahrenheit. I would not want them to die, still I am sad, very sad. They pierced the membrane of my complacency with an acknowledgment that my place was good for a stopover. They charmed me with their antics, speed, agility, and yes their metaphoric resemblance--green back, oval shape, to green crab apple leaf, oral shaped. They belonged here with me watching for a while. It's probably all we can ask of ourselves and the truly natural creatures we let return us to humility.
What inspired me to hang the humming bird feeder in the crab apple tree, early August? Maybe the dismal showing of those helicopter birds during my stint at the North Shore/Lake Superior? It was such a cold spring, then summer, here in St. Paul, and north too, near Lutsen town. Hummers had stalled, no doubt, further south. When I hung the feeder on the deck facing the Big Lake, mid-July, it took days for any to find it--probably still raising broods. Finally when one or two showed up, they were so skittish, they disappeared if even a shadow flickered nearby. Then distracted by a house-mouse invasion, I lost track of hummers.
What I really know about humming birds could make ten drops of red liquid in a hummer feeder. Why they are attracted to red, I don't know. How far south they migrate, I don't know. Why they like northern Minnesota for summer baby-making, I can only guess since red flowers don't predominate in the mid-summer landscape. More like gold and pink--golden rod, golden tansy and sunflower varieties, pink roadside roses, pink fireweed. Why hummers are so feisty when they're so small, and have never heard of Napoleon, I don't know. But for sure, they are fast.
By early August I'd installed the feeder in the crab apple tree just beyond our backyard deck. Finally the weather was warm, even hot. Cloudless days when I walked early morning because it got too hot in the afternoon. Plenty of chickadees, in fact more than I'd ever remembered, ate sunflower seeds like there was no tomorrow. Two kinds of woodpeckers--hairy and downy--went after the solid suet/seed mix in the hanging net bag. Pigeons and European sparrows galore, but what wasn't surprising. Goldfinch on the thistle feeder in front, then goldfinch babies, all tan, on the sunflowers feeders in the back.
One heart-stopping few days of concern for a fledgling blue jay--all puffy feathers, and big eyes, staring at us from the deck railing, then attempting flight, and finally making it half across the yard to the entwined small spruce, its parents rattling and calling it ahead. Our neighbors with the two elderly cats agreed to keep them in--I trust no wandering feline, even deaf and arthritic. Last summer there was a dead baby blue jay waiting for me when I came home from the North Shore. I felt as if I'd failed the bird kingdom.
It's amazing how we humans can come to feel we're in charge. Nature's salvation is up to us. Now, after years of preferring cat lives over bird lives, I've switched my allegiance. I'm all for the winged tribes--butterflies, bees, moths, lady bugs and yes, birds. We used to house two famous outdoor cats years ago, Archie and Justa, but no more. Our cats now stay indoors , with an occasional foray to the deck, held tightly in my arms. Too much evidence that cats kill the birds I am attempting to feed, plus too much expense from menaces like bee-bee guns, vicious dogs, and the cats' own preference for attempting to leap ten times their height in a single bound.
Suddenly two weeks ago, I spied two green mighty mites in the crab apple tree--hummers. For two weeks, they buzzed in and out of the tree, picked invisible insects from the air, dive-bombed chickadees two or three times their size, and sucked at the sugar water in the hummer feeder which I refilled three or four times. Every spare minute I stood at various windows looking out on the yard and watched for them. They were my talismans of summer delight. My connection to hope, joy, and the belief that nature was boundless in its abundance and mystery. Then two days ago, after a very chilly night, I searched the tree and air for them, but they were gone.
Just as the internet information I consulted said they would be. They knew when to leave and they left without a goodbye, without a thank you. For several weepy hours, I was sure I had failed. Maybe my last filling of the feeder had gone awry? I took the feeder down and very carefully calibrated: one cup water, boiled three minutes then cooled, and 1/4 cup of sugar. Even with the new elixir to temp them, they did not return. They are so small, after all, and their metabolism must be enormously fast. They probably can't survive in cold below 45 degrees Fahrenheit. I would not want them to die, still I am sad, very sad. They pierced the membrane of my complacency with an acknowledgment that my place was good for a stopover. They charmed me with their antics, speed, agility, and yes their metaphoric resemblance--green back, oval shape, to green crab apple leaf, oral shaped. They belonged here with me watching for a while. It's probably all we can ask of ourselves and the truly natural creatures we let return us to humility.
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