A New Poet Laureate

I don't encounter many poets any more, except for Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder--whose prose works are among my "usual reads." When I was younger, I read a great deal of Wallace Stevens and Wilfred Owen, and I was introduced to W. S. Merwin by Rainer Schulte at UT Dallas when I was a grad student. We read him in several classes, and studied his translations of others' works--which made them available to those of us who lacked anything but ancient or obscure languages.

I loved the clarity of Merwin's work, and its lack of sentimentality; his poems are personal, but also universal, so I don't feel like I'm reading autobiography. He writes about living in nature as an act of being--not just of observing.

As usual these days, I was surprised to learn that Merwin was still alive (he's 82) when a little pop-up box from the New York Times announced that he had been named the nation's newest poet laureate yesterday.

This news drew me back to his work, and reminded me of my former attachment to his poems. I was disappointed to discover that none of it rests on the copious bookshelves in this house, so to celebrate I'll start remedying that situation. A trip to Half Price Books should turn up a few of the earlier works, at least, and then perhaps I'll treat myself to one of the newer books.

In the meantime, here are some links to pages about him, some with further links to poems. Do try them if you don't already know him; he's well worth reading, especially when he focuses on nature and our life in the natural world. His poetry should resonate with anyone who reads any of the owl blogs.

Modern American Poetry

Dwight Garner, Finding Home and Inspiration in the World of Nature

Patricia Cohen, W. S. Merwin to Be Named Poet Laureate

Poets.org

Random House page on Merwin, with links to works (including poems)

The Mole, a poem that appears on the National Resources Defense Council's OnEarth page devoted to award-winning journalism.

I keep forgetting that the Cabinet is the perfect spot for little gems of information like this. I spend so much time grousing about the human condition on the Farm and the sorry state of education on the Owl of Athena that I neglect the enjoyment of serendipity and gallimaufry--so I'll try to pay more attention.

Image credit: lacking a legitimate source (Wikimedia Commons has failed me!), I've stolen this photo from the Natural Resources Defense Council's blurb on Merwin. I'll take it off if they ask me, but maybe the link to their pages will count for something.

Culinary Meditations, One: Slow Oatmeal

I have always been interested in good, basic peasant food, so as I work harder to prevent further health-related crises, I've been thinking long and hard about more deliberate eating.

People seem more and more inclined to either obsess about food or to simply eat what's cheap or handy. Neither extreme requires thinking through what we eat, or considering what it all means. But since food is one of the few real basic needs (along with clothing and shelter), it's a significant part of what I go on and on about on Owl's Farm: the education of desire.

Seeking to educate my taste buds, I've embarked on a small program to spend time each week cooking and thinking. This morning I wanted something warm and filling to eat, so I decided to make some oatmeal. Sometime last year I found out that instant oatmeal is next to useless as a source of soluble fiber--the kind that helps regulate blood sugar, lower cholesterol, and provide other good things to one's body. After that I bought steel-cut Irish oats, cooked them up in fairly large quantities, and kept them in the fridge to nuke for breakfast. But not long ago, in one of my more nostalgic moods, I picked up some organically grown rolled oats, and these are what I retrieved from the pantry this morning.

In an effort to keep the weevils at bay, I had removed the oats from their package and put them in an air-tight container, but forgot to put the cooking instructions in with them. Since I don't have much of a memory for quantities and proportions, I went to my old copy of The Joy of Cooking to look up oatmeal and found that Rombauer had left oatmeal out of her instructions for cereal grains. But I used her quantities for course grains as a starting point, and began with four cups of water and a cup and a half of oats.

I got the water boiling while I poured a cup of coffee, and added a few grinds of sea salt (probably no more than a quarter teaspoon). When the water hit a rolling boil, I started slowly pouring in the oats, and watched them perform their acrobatic roll around the pot. I held the last half cup back for a few moments, thinking that perhaps these would be a little less "done" in the end, and add some crunch.

Once you get the oats all boiling together, you have to keep stirring them so they don't stick and/or boil over--but you also have to lower the heat a bit.

I kept stirring for about ten more minutes, turned off the heat, and left the gruel to sit. It was still a bit watery, but I was pretty sure that the remaining moisture would be absorbed if I left it alone long enough to read the funnies and enjoy the rest of my coffee.

The living room, where I read the paper in my comfy chair, is three rooms away from the kitchen, but the aroma of warm oats reached me within a couple of minutes, mingling with the coffee and sending me back to my home town, and winter mornings around my grandmother's kitchen table.

When I returned to the pot, the oats were ready to eat, so I ladled some into a bowl, put a dollop of olive oil/butter spread in the center, drizzled it all with about a teaspoon full of ginger syrup, and added a handful of blueberries.

I sat down and stirred the melting butter into the oats with the ginger and blueberries. I'm pretty sure I've never tasted oatmeal quite as good as this. Whether the brand of oats was particularly well-milled, or whether my method made them better, or whether just paying attention made the difference, they were quite simply the best I've ever had. The flavor was subtly oaty, there was indeed a bit of crunch, and the tiny bit of salt was all it needed to round out the flavor. I got a serving of fruit from the blueberries, and a smidgen of fat from the teaspoon of butter.

At a time in my life when my senses seem to be either dwindling or getting lazy, it was an enormous pleasure to enjoy something so simple so much.

I look forward to the next experiment, in hopes that this marks a way to invigorate my experience of the world. It's far too easy to get lost in the rigors of teaching, grading, and administrating, especially in winter when it's difficult to occupy oneself in the garden. Small pleasures seem to reap large rewards when approached thoughtfully--something that seems far too easy to forget, even when one has teetered on the brink of existence all too recently.

Left Behind

Those of us who are enamored of Wunderkammern often seem to find ourselves drifting--either physically or virtually--into ghost towns and other abandoned spaces. I think my own interest must stem from the archaeologist in me, because I'm equally drawn to unearthed remains from past civilizations--particularly three-dimensional sites like Chaco Canyon, the Labyrinth at Knossos, and the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

I began musing on this topic late last year,* when I picked up a book on sale at the Dallas Museum of Art. It was in Japanese, with very little information in English, so I ended up doing an internet search on Gunkanjima Island, an artificial construction on a small reef off the coast of Japan. Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island (because that's what it looks like from a distance) had arisen in the coal-mining heydey of the nineteenth century, was built up over the next century and a half, and then finally abandoned in 1974.

The book first attracted me because it's about a place in Japan I'd never seen--nor had I (at least consciously) ever heard about it--but it had the mysterious aura of a ghost town, or a place devastated by some Chernobyl-like event (something that's haunted me since talk of a neutron bomb). The photographs are stark and beautiful, in black and white, and seem almost like museum reconstructions of an apocalypse. Here is visual proof of what goes on after we're gone--as recently portrayed in Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.

The web search led me to BLDGBLOG, and the post I found turns out to have been Geoff Manaugh's first on his more-or-less-focused-on-architecture pages. He's since gone on to myriad other fascinating places, and it'll take me a good while to plumb them all. That is, if I don't get lost looking at all the interesting stuff he sends one off to, including BLDGBLOG's sister site, Edible Geography, now linked on the Cabinet's "Wunderkammern: Food" section.

The General Web Directory Journal's pages on Abandoned Places In the World list articles on Gunkanjima and other spots, including one in Taiwan that was built and abandoned after I left. It's not a proper blog, and its home site is more of a clearing house for web information, but I was happy to find it nonetheless.

Of the many web places that deal with San Zhi, the "UFO pod village" originally designed to serve as a tourist trap in a relatively neglected area of Taiwan, Carrie Kellenberger's post on her My Several Worlds blog has the best pictures. She's a Canadian ex-pat living in Taiwan (much like my mother did for most of her life), and manages to transport us to the site through her photos. The place was built while my mother was living in Taipei, so I guess I could expect to find pictures of it among the thousands she left behind for me to sort through. One of these days. At any rate, mystery endures because construction was abandoned due to fatal accidents (or not) and rumors have hinted at nefarious deeds, resulting in another Asian take on the ghost town idea.

In my more recent travels I discovered a plan to tear it down, which seems to have come to fruition according to this story in the Taipei Times and more recent photos. Demolition apparently began shortly after I started writing about it. (Hear the Twilight Zone theme now, please.)

My fascination with places like these actually began in Taiwan, even though I left a decade before the San Zhi pods were built. Above one of the many houses we occupied in the five or so years I lived there sat a small abandoned house that my brother and I managed to sneak into a couple of times. The place was tiny--only three rooms that I can remember--and may have been a remnant of the Japanese occupation, like many of the homes we rented (all five had at least some Japanese features). My curiosity wasn't confined to Taiwan, however. Whenever I visited my grandparents in the Owens Valley, I would peek into the windows of the empty Department of Water and Power bungalows, since they were seldom occupied when I was there. Empty spaces leave room for growing imaginations.

The latest issue of Orion Magazine plays into all this with an article on Deyrolle, a Parisian taxidermy store that caught fire in 2008. Martin D'Orgeval's story ("Touched By Fire") and photos evoke the same, almost mythic quality that inhabits old, stuffy museums and ghost towns. It's not online yet, but may be later (Orion tends to parcel out its web access between issues). Two of the pictures are, however, available on Jessica Palmer's Bioephemera blog post, Beautiful Decay: Three Collections. The store, which has since reopened, has its own website (in French). The New York Times ran an article, Rescuing Deyrolle, a beloved Parisian Shop, not long after the fire. This is another of those places I most certainly would have visited, had I known about it--even in the diminished state of youth some forty years ago, the last time I saw Paris.

The web is chockablock with blog entries and photo collections of lost places and fascinating collections of odd things. Not at all a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

*While this post was begun last Christmas, it was abandoned, then taken up again and completed on 23 January, 2010. I think there's a metaphor here.

Image credits: The opening photo was taken by a Japanese user and posted to Wikimedia Commons. He/she also has a page of photos of the island. Unfortunately, I don't read Japanese, so I can't name the photographer. The shots of San Zhi (Sanjhih) are from Cypherone's Flickr photostream.

Grandma Clarice's Recipes: Dinner Rolls

I made these, as I usually do, for Thanksgiving, which was otherwise catered by daughter at her loft in downtown Dallas. She did herself proud, with traditional fare like stuffing, sweet potatoes, mashed red spuds, and Dead Baby Chickens (well, traditional for us). Beloved Spouse and I joined three of her friends, and her moose/dog Homer, for a lovely meal and great company.

Which is what Grandma Clarice's Dinner Rolls are all about. They were a staple in our lives while I was growing up, and a perennial request from the children and grandchildren on all sides of the family. If there ever were a holiday celebration without them, I don't remember it.

The exact equivalent is probably not attainable, even with her hand-written recipe in front of me, because she made them without reference to anything written down. I did ask her to record the recipe for all our sakes, but until Thursday I hadn't even come close. I think I've finally nailed it down, needing only to try this version with cake yeast and bread flour to see if that gets me even closer.

If any of my cousins want to try it, resist the temptation to skip any steps. For the sake of authenticity and nostalgia, stick with the white flour and all the beating. Especially the beating.

The verbatim recipe (transcribed from the little notebook in which Gram collected recipes from family and friends):

My Rolls
1 c scalded milk with 1/2 c sugar & 1 tsp salt
Dissolve 1 cake yeast in [1/2 c] hot water--add to cooled milk mixtures
Add 1 beaten egg--beat
Add 1/3 cup oil--beat
Then add short 5 c flour & knead well.
Let rise then make into rolls & let rise again

Gram and I often discussed the changing character of flour. She used plain-old all-purpose, but the gluten content seemed to change over the years. Now flour made especially for bread-baking is commonplace, so I'd suggest using that.

Over time I've tended to mess with the recipe, feeling guilty as I do whenever I don't use whole grains. So it's possible to make them with about 1/3 whole wheat flour, and even honey in place of sugar. Gram insisted on using cake yeast, but when I can't get that I use organic packaged dry yeast.

This year I stayed as close as I could to the original, and took out my whole wheat angst on the pistachio rolls I also made for the meal. These were adapted from a James Beard recipe (from Beard on Bread) and turned out nicely--but everybody ate Grandma Clarice's rolls instead.

Since Gram didn't write out instructions about how hot the oven should be, or how long the rolls should bake, I've had to improvise. In my electric oven set to 375F, I bake them from 15-18 minutes, but 16 is probably exactly right. For oil I used a canola/light olive oil blend, but plain canola is probably better (she undoubtedly used Crisco or corn oil--or whatever was on sale that week at Joseph's Buy-Rite market).

Butter muffin tins and put three one-inch balls of dough in each space for clover-leaf shaped rolls. I brushed them with melted butter before and after baking, but that's not necessary if you're keeping fat content down. We also used to make these as crescent rolls (triangles rolled up from large end to small) and occasionally cut rounds out of rolled-out dough. I like the clover-leaf shape because it's easy and they pull apart like monkey bread. The recipe makes exactly two dozen in this shape.

These rolls are rather sweet, but go really well with holiday foods. I love them the next day, warmed over with unsalted butter and good home-made jam. Their aroma while baking is a sure-fire way to nip back into my childhood for a few, sweet minutes.

Happy Birthday, Origin of Species

This has been a banner year for Charles Darwin: the 200th anniversary of his birth, and today the 150th anniversary of the book that changed the world.

I've been posting about Darwin and his work all year, but couldn't let the day go by without saluting (and later raising a glass to) the best literary/scientific book I've ever read.

Thanks, Mr. Darwin. And may the fruits of your labor continue to inspire scientists and lay folk alike.

Photo credit: HMS Beagle in the seaways of Tierra del Fuego, painted by Conrad Martens during the voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836), via Wikimedia Commons. I've already posted pictures of the book itself, and I love this painting, so thought it would be a fitting image for a birthday greeting.

Art and Evolution: More Darwiniana

Beloved Spouse was on his way to work today, listening to XM radio (my gift to him when he bought his "Galapagos Green" Element a few years back), when he heard Margaret Wertheim's TED lecture on hyperbolic geometry and her Crocheted Coral Reef project. He sent me the link, and I spent the next few minutes getting inspired to pick up my crochet hooks again.

The project itself is fantastic, and since she mentioned Darwin's bicentennial, I decided that the Cabinet needed a post on some of the art Darwin has inspired over the years, either directly or indirectly. The opening illustration is from Wertheim's photostream on Flickr, and I hope it's okay to use it. I posted here on Darwin back in February, in honor of his birthday, but I keep happening on things related to him and thought it time for another visit with Darwin in Cyberspace--so Wertheim's amazing project offered an excuse to return to the topic.

Another notable, if not nearly so ambitious, project is Jessica Polka's wonderful Voyage of the Beagle finger puppets. She also crochets natural objects, and when I saw the TED video on the Coral Reef effort, I immediately thought of her blog, and her recent contribution to the world of Darwiniana.

Last spring I started reading Robert Charles Wilson's 1998 novel, Darwinia, but had to stop because it was a bit too intense for someone on the threshold of heart surgery. I finally finished it this summer (and went on to read The Harvest and Mysterium) and recommend it enthusiastically. It combines some of my favorite elements of speculative fiction: true alienness and good science. His stories frequently involve dei ex machina that spark the fictional equivalent of punctuated equilibrium, forcing characters to adapt precipitously to new situations.

While I was looking for a link to Wilson's book, I came across a game by the same name, which might be interesting if you're a video gamer. This one looks mildly entertaining (at least as much fun as shooting down snaking lines of scarabs, which is what I do in my off moments), although only marginally involved with Darwinian processes; it does, however, seem to resemble Wilson's scenarios in the sense of requiring a kind of evolve-on-a-dime-or-die situation.

Yet another contribution to the cabinet of Darwinian curiosities, combining media arts, science, and literature, is the amazing new addition to English Heritage's website devoted to Down House, Darwin's home: "Explore the manuscripts" includes entire virtual copies of four of Darwin's field notebooks, plus highlights from the Beagle voyage notes. I posted about the software that makes this possible yesterday on the Owl of Athena, but wanted to mention the site here, because the ability to view these notebooks in as much detail as the "Turning the Pages" application allows is just priceless for Darwin devotees.

If I haven't already mentioned this, I'm remiss--but the Darwin Online site provides the texts of everything he published, plus a list of supplementary works that include Emma Darwin's Recipe Book (with the recipe for boiling rice in her husband's hand). The technology isn't as sexy as Turning the Pages, but it still makes it possible to read exactly what Darwin wrote.

Finally, I'd like to mention a treat I bought myself when I had a 40% off one item coupon at Borders: The Beagle Letters, edited by Frederick Burkhardt--a marvellous volume illustrated with watercolor sketches and pencil drawings by Conrad Martens, who was for a time Darwin's fellow passenger. The book's publication is a product of the Darwin Correspondence Project, another noteworthy effort to get Darwin's works online--this one focusing on the full texts of more than 5000 letters.

Although I'm not a great fan of biographies, I love to read other people's mail, at least when the correspondence is as lively and as interesting as Darwin's. One gets a better sense of the person in a letter, and since nobody much writes them anymore, epistolary insights into the characters of great writers and scientists may be fewer in the future.

Before the year is out I expect I'll come across more to add to this list, but I do have to get back to work. As the rain drips off of every surface outside my window, though, sifting through the web for things Darwinian provides a nice respite from gloom and chill.

Image credit: Hyperbolic crochet corals and anemones with sea slug by Marianne Midelburg. Photo © The Institute For Figuring (by Alyssa Gorelick). Downloaded from Margaret Wertheim's Photostream on Flickr.

Grandma Clarice's Applesauce Cake Revisited

I didn't realize, when I split The Farm into three pieces, that it would be so hard to post regularly on all of them. The Cabinet, thus, suffers from chronic neglect. I'm hoping to rectify the situation as I get myself more organized, and this is my initial attempt.

Last weekend, when it was cold and damp and I was cranky and homesick, I did what I usually do in such situations: I baked Gram's applesauce cake. But because the applesauce I had on hand was Santa Cruz Organic Apple Cherry Sauce, I used that instead of the usual plain, unsweetened, natural variety. I also decided to make some flax meal (by grinding flax seed in a coffee grinder) because I'm trying to increase my Omega 3 fatty acid intake, and part whole wheat flour to lower the impact on my glucose levels. And I used butter (organic sweet cream, unsalted), mainly because I didn't have any canola oil, but also because Gram sometimes did and it always tasted a bit richer than usual (her fat of choice was margarine). For grins (and because of the apple cherry sauce) I used dried, unsweetened sour cherries instead of raisins.

The original recipe's on my Grandma Clarice's Recipes, Part 1 post from June 2008. The modified one goes like this:

1 cup organic cane sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 cup unsweetened applesauce (or apple cherry sauce)
1 3/4 cup flour (1/4 c. flax meal; 1/2 cup whole wheat flour; the rest unbleached all-purpose)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
dried sour cherries
1 tablespoon (or so) cocoa powder
1 teaspon baking soda dissolved in 1 tablespoon boiling water

Cream butter and sugar, add applesauce, spices, cherries, and dissolved soda. Then add flour. Bake in moderate oven (300F) until top springs back.

I frequently double the recipe, as Gram did. If you do so, bake it at 350F for about 45 minutes. It can be baked in a loaf or shallow rectangular pan--or an 8x8 inch glass pyrex dish-- if you're making a single batch. The doubled recipe needs a 13x9 inch pan or pyrex dish.

The cake came out a little denser than usual because of the flax meal. It would be moister and more nutritionally valuable if canola oil were substituted for the butter; or, I might try the new 50/50 blend of Smart Balance and butter next time. It's salted, though, and this is normally a good cake for folks on a low-sodium diet. I'm not sure that the tiny bit of salt in the butter would be bad for the cake itself, however.

When it was warm from the oven, I had a slice with a bit of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream for extra mood enhancement, and it was luscious. Just what I needed to make it through one more rainy day.

Image note: Beloved Spouse has the camera in Alabama for a tennis tournament this weekend, so the fuzzy shot is the fault of my iPhone.