Hmmmm

The Joy of Cooking is in many ways my all purpose cookbook. It is the repository of wisdom that I consult over and over, even when I am actually cooking from another cookbook entirely.  And it has my favorite easy chocolate cake recipe (make it with whole wheat flour and skip the frosting, and it makes a nearly respectable breakfast).  It contains my favorite piece of wisdom on dinner parties:

We can offer reasoned counsels and repeat the lessons of experience and tradition, but the truth is that tif the table is attractive and clean, the food and drink honest and good, the company amiable* and interesting, and the host generous and calm, an affair can be a resounding success no matter where the glasses go or who is sitting where. And that is our last word on entertaining. 

However even Joy sometimes falters as I discovered this afternoon.  A recipe for a soup contains this ingredient: One 14-ounce can whole tomatoes, with juice, crushed between your fingers... (pg. 310, 1997 ed.) How, I ask you, am I supposed to do that?  Is this a seventh degree kitchen black belt thing?

Fortunately the recipe doesn't contain kale so I won't try to make it today.

*"Amiable" is high on my list of favorite words.

More of this Miscellany Business

Edward Hopper, Rooms by the Sea. 1951

Happy Saturday!  Have some Edward Hopper. 

I love Edward Hopper's use of light in pretty much everything he painted.  He uses light as means of revelation.  In many of his paintings the light reveals human loneliness and the fragility of human connections but it can also illuminate the beauty in a couple of ordinary shop girls having lunch or a deserted city street. 
 This is my favorite of his paintings, one that seems to move away from his ordinary realism. Here the light streaming through the open door invites the viewer into the mysteries that lie beyond our carefully constructed comfortable lives. 

1. I intend to revisit the rhubarb custard question this weekend.  I'll see if I can materially improve the texture.  (Rhubarb, still one of my basic food groups.) So maybe I really will get around to posting a revised recipe.

2.  For my local readers -- QFC has Breyer's ice cream on sale for 2.99 a container.  In the words of Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything but temptation." 

3. This poem has been much on my mind of late:  "Otherwise" by Jane Kenyon.  It's been a spring of a lot of quiet happiness.  I'm doing well at school, making friends, settling more into the life of the city around me.  It's tempting to think that this must all go on indefinitely, but one day it will be otherwise.  I do realize that this sounds kind of grim, but it's Lent, and those of us observing are told to "remember that you are dust." It is a fruitful thing to reflect on.  And if I am going to link to "Otherwise" I should post "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop" by W.B. Yeats, thereby perpetuating what one of my friends refers to as the Ervine Yeats Infection.

4.  One of the things about moving to a new place is that the seasonal progression of plants changes.  All sorts of things are blooming right now.  Some of them I can identify or guess at, but many things are entirely new and unknown to me.  Many of these things smell absolutely fantastic.  I look forward to a day, when I can wave a smart phone in the direction of the shrubbery that has captured my undivided attention by reason of it smelling like jasmine and lemons, and google the scent, and so get an identification.

5.  Possibly the best cellphone ad ever.   Even though I don't speak Japanese.

On the color of subjectivity

Franz Marc, Large Blue Horses

Our color theory teacher discussing the particulars of an assignment:

If you interpret tranquility as lots of reds, blacks, and yellows, I can't really disagree, but I will send you to the school nurse.

I do actually have strong comforting associations with red -- strong enough that it would make sense for me to include them in the color palette of a room in which I wanted to feel tranquil.  Note also, that the reds and yellows give the painting above a sense of voluptuous abundance, while the symmetrical composition gives it stability.  This abundance and stability provide the perfect setting in which the blue horses can rest tranquilly. Or, at least, I see it that way. However the assignment was to communicate beyond the confines of my skull, so I sidestepped the issue by not illustrating tranquility.

My color associations slip over the borders into synesthesia sometimes. Many, maybe all, scents and tastes have color.  My favorite perfumes smell golden brown and purple.  Lavender is silver.  Eggs are various shades of beige.  I don't like things that taste too beige, unless there is a strong flavor to balance all that mute beige.  Lemon, a bright robin's egg blue, goes with almost everything.  Caraway is a bright springy green, but too bright a yellow green is the color of a headache.  I don't like things that taste like headaches.  Chartreuse' actual color matches the color I associate with the flavor, which should give a nice consistency to the experience, except that it is exactly the color of a migraine. 

And that's just foods and smells.  There is another layer of meaning, color and emotion go together.  Red for joy, protection, comfort.  Dark blue for grief*.  Pink for aggression (positive or negative).  Pale yellow for epiphanies, apprehension of beauty, and power.  Bright yellow green is almost always negative: deceitful, hallucinatory, painful.  Sometimes.  But other people don't see color in the same way. So I try to take into account the commonly agreed on cultural connotations of color.  Or at least not say things like "purple is the color of stability so I chose to use it to anchor this design, as it plays off against the teal of secret growth, and the manic yellow green."  Johannes Itten, the father of color theory, tried to make such personal associations universal.  For example, according to him purple was an ominous, threatening color. That aspect of his work has not aged well, even as his principles for understanding color schemes continue to be taught. 

*Blue is a funny one actually.  My brain tends not to classify many shades of blue as color, but rather as shades of grey with pretensions.   I discovered this in final presentations when someone complimented a student on his colorful composition which took me a moment to understand, because the colors in question were mostly blue.

Design-y Miscellany

So I'm sitting here locked in battle with my nemesis Final Cut Pro, if locked in battle is the right cliche for sitting and waiting for video to render for years.  I am going to have floor length snow white hair by the time this is done.

Time for five more random things while I contemplate the vast yawning chasm of suckitude that is my lack of aptitude for anything to do with editing video.  No really, I'm not good enough to be incompetent.  However, I keep getting paired with people who are scared of their own ignorance. I on the other hand am willing to look like an idiot in public, so I keep editing.  Maybe the next time I get handed the baby, I'll get someone to teach me how to edit audio.  If this keeps up, I may end up being mediocre.  Good seems a bit too much to hope for, as my respect for my friends and family members who really are good at this stuff rises. 

Anyway five things of interest, for loosely defined values of interest.

1)  Even in the midst of editing film, big band still makes me outrageously happy.  The film soundtrack ended up being Glen Miller's In the Mood.  It makes me wish that I were a better dancer. Maybe like this:

2)  Instructions for cocktail making AND any of the creative disciplines at the very same time.  A Twist of Lemon.

3) My color theory teacher discussing the particulars of an assignment:

If you interpret tranquility as lots of reds, blacks, and yellows, I can't really disagree, but I will send you to the school nurse.

I have considered devoting a section of the blog to this particular instructor's gnomic utterances, but type just does not capture the delivery. 

4)  "I'm sort of a god in the Twin Peaks community."  Later the statement was amended to an unequivocal assertion of TP godhood.  However, I think equivocation is funnier. 

5) Lapsang souchong is the best black tea for editing film. 

Poor Kerouac!

I was doing dishes.  Jackie, who was pretending to be a guest, was wandering around the kitchen and had come to rest before the refrigerator.  She was reading the things stuck there on.

"I don't know how I feel about exploding spiders."

I looked up from scrubbing the cookie sheet on which I had baked the evening's bread.  Jackie was reading the Jack Kerouac magnet, the one that reads:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...

"They're metaphorical spiders."

"I know, but I'm still not sure I like the image."

I thought about it for a moment and concluded that I was at peace with the image.  "Exploding spiders will never be in my hair."

Jackie is a more compassionate and enlightened person than I am (AND she reminds me, she used to work at a zoo), "there are lots of things that spiders can do that are not exploding or in your hair."

I once found a spider in my hair.  It was horrifying.  "but exploding spiders will NEVER be in my hair."

I'd like to think that my position re: exploding spiders, metaphorical or otherwise, is unassailable, but I have a feeling that Jackie may have the moral high ground here.

Severely Miscellaneous

Franz Kine, Painting Number 2

 This appears to be the sort of blog post where I end up quoting dead white guys and philosophizing.  You probably ought to practice your omelet making technique instead. 

It has not been a week wherein I felt like writing about food.  I do need to write up and post the banana upside down cake recipe.  I think I need to tweak a couple of things first though.   Unfortunately I'm short on excuses to make a banana cake at the moment.  So, by way of apology, have a link to a recipe for a plum upside down cake.  I have never made it (and if I did, I would probably make one cake rather than individual ramekin cakes), but it looks delicious.  I'm mad for upside down cakes and have been for years.  Last year I started experimenting with not-pineapple cakes and so far my favorite is rhubarb -- although wild blueberry comes a close second.  Which reminds me that I have seen new rhubarb shoots coming up in gardens around Cap Hill.  This climate!  I live in the tropics!

I spent most of last week in a sleep deprived fog, because the occult operations of my hind brain decreed it to be a week of not sleeping.  That meant a lot of things out of boxes for meals (including a moment of weakness that saddled me with a box of breaded fish filets: a trial served to prove that growing up in Alaska has probably ruined Van De Camps for me for life*).  There was one problematic exception, a pot of squash soup.  I left it out on the counter overnight.  I blame the bad sleep brain fog.

Unfortunately I love squash soup the way many people love chocolate -- not wisely, but too well.    I find it irresistible, especially when made with homemade chicken stock (which this is).  So after some internal struggle, I decided not to pitch it.  Tonight I heated it to a rolling boil for twenty minutes and am now eating it.  Hopefully I won't wake up puking tonight.  If I do, it's all because of love.** 

None of this was really what I was thinking about when I began this post.  Perhaps you're wondering about that spare painting that heads off this blog entry.  I am too.  Franz Kline always resisted the comparison of his work to Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, but I find the parallel hard to resist.  To some degree, a work of art exists between the intention of its creator and the understanding of its viewer.  Despite Kline's protests, I cannot help seeing his austere black and white compositions as the calligraphy of his soul.  Of course, it is in a language I don't speak. Do we remain largely unintelligible to each other?  If the calligraphy of my soul were written, it would have more colors and maybe some gold and silver leaf, but the meanings would be equally obscure.

However even as I was thinking these isolated thoughts,  I was walking home carrying a rather large and heavy care package from Alaska.  This tangible burden of love did not feel like the product of a careful truce and years of fraught translation even if there were occasional moments of incomprehension in the friendship.  I walked on.  I considered turning the mute calligraphic image of the soul into poetry to send off to another friend, one more email in a friendship that has been almost entirely conducted by email for six years.***  This friendship ought to feel more tenuous than it does.  Thousands of words arguing about books and critiquing each other's writing creates a density and heft to a relationship that inspires confidence.   If my soul's calligraphy could be translated, those two friends (with the help of a few others) have a better than average chance of producing a useful lexicon.  Likewise, I flatter myself that I could contribute a word or two to their own dictionaries.  It's both comforting and discomfiting to be so well known. -- decidedly more the former than the latter.  Although at times more privacy to dissemble seems a luxury,  these friends who read me so well can do so because they love me.  There is an alarming sort of safety in that. 

Maddeningly John Donne appears to have got here before me in Meditation XVII from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.****  Or at least he anticipated my conceit of the soul as a book in some strange language. 

...all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

Or possibly, because it's an image I love, I subconsciously remembered it when confronted with Kline's expressive yet unspeaking austerity.  John Donne's measured words incorporated into the calligraphy of my soul (if I am going to insist on the metaphor). 

Meanwhile, although I am not throwing up, there is some internal unrest that suggests that the best course of action is pitching out the rest of the soup and fetching some ginger ale.  Alas.  (With the caveat that boiling the soup resulted in some significant scorching, rendering it less delightsome than it might otherwise be.) 

*What's even weirder?  I claim not to like fish with some very carefully circumscribed exceptions (which mostly involve smoked salmon† or fried rock fish).  I have no idea why the frozen fish fillets suddenly seemed like a good idea, except that it was on sale and I'm temporarily sick of eggs as my primary protein source. 

**A survey of world literature clearly demonstrates that love is at the bottom of many a plot complication.  

***What wouldn't I give to have all the people who matter within fifty miles of me?

**** Despite various misinformed web based idiocies this is neither a poem nor in Old English††.  It's definitely prose, and the language while archaic is distinctly Modern English (Early Modern English if you want to nitpick).  I'm even using a text with regularized and modernized spelling.

†I get alarmingly enthusiastic about homemade smoked salmon, especially if belly meat is involved. 

†† Entirely unintelligible to modern English speakers. 

Worth Doing Well?

To my considerable annoyance, I am still sick. I'm not as feverishly wobbly as I was two days ago which is a blessing that I should be more thankful for, but less feverishly wobbly still implies a degree of fever and wobbliness that fails to please me. After two days of resting, whether I like it or not, I need to go into the studio and make another stab at my design final. I am not sanguine about the outcome.

Design school is the most difficult academic type thing I have ever done. This is speaking as someone who sailed through the upper division classes for her major and minor in college. I sometimes got stressed out or managed my time badly, but I never doubted my essential ability to do research and write a readable paper or draw interesting conclusions from my data. Academia holds very few terrors for me, but I do not love it enough to spend the rest of my life teaching and writing about 17th century literature, even though John Donne occupies a central place in my shrine to Dead White Guys I Have Loved.

Introduction to Design on the other hand makes my blood run cold. I think I might be in love. I have taught myself daunting computer programs and figuratively beat my brains out on my desk trying to do better. My self definition as a competent artist* is in tatters at the moment, and I would care more if I were not so determined to work my way to mastery at this. So far my efforts have met with far less success than another paper about the male gaze in the poetry of Elizabeth I's court.

So I have a standard of perfection that I am aiming at, and I keep missing it. It is frustrating. I want to get an A on my final. No, not just an A, I want a 4.0 on it. Losing that Saturday means that I lost a day of elaboration and thought. Even knowing that I had no choice -- I could not have physically got myself to the studio**-- does not help as much as I wish it did.

I want to be perfect, and knowing that I am not going to be calls up the insidious spirit of perfectionism. It says, "Why bother if you know you won't succeed?" There have been periods in my life when I would rather not turn in anything at all, than turn in what I thought was bad work. It doesn't help that this is the dark time of the year, and I always struggle when the days grow short. The voice of perfectionism says, "Anything worth doing is worth doing well." And I chime in with the chorus, "if I can't do it well, I won't do it."

This is not helpful. Somethings are too important to be held hostage to an unrealizable perfection. A couple of years ago, I heard someone I respect said, "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." It took me a moment or two to work it out. I know her writing and art. From my point of view she does not do things badly. It occurred to me that maybe things worth doing are worth doing as well as I can whether or not I think that "as well as I can" is terrible. This was revelatory.

Unfortunately it's a lesson I have to keep relearning. Oh well.

From the commonplace book:

"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft [or final project in design]. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it." -- Ann Lamott

“No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” -- Samuel Beckett

*My self-definition as an artist has never been in doubt. If I can't paint well, I shall paint badly. If I can't paint at all, I shall write. If you take my pen and paper away, I will cook. If you take my kitchen too -- I will sing my head off, even if I have a sore throat. But really, why is this hypothetical "you" so determined to stop me making things?

** I managed to run a load of laundry on Saturday. I had to take a nap after I took the hamper down the hall. Walking a mile, or even just walking to the bus stop, was right out.