British groceries

The Brits have a bad reputation, food-wise: Americans either imagine that English food is blander than bland, or they think of the ubiquitous celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey and his aggressive snobbery.

For sure, the first time I visited the UK in 1987, the food lived up to stereotype: there were potatoes at virtually every meal, and when I got home I couldn't get enough spicy food. When Tom and I made our first trip to England together ten years later, in 1997, "Cool Brittania" under the recently elected Tony Blair was experiencing a food renaissance: the BBC seemed like it was airing nothing but cookery shows, and the bookshops were full of recipe books for all kinds of ethnic cuisines.

Things have only come further since then, and now it can be hard to find "traditional" British food, though the full English breakfast is still de rigeur. The last several times we've visited, we've opted for "self-catering flat" accommodation, and have cooked for ourselves. This includes the odd pleasures of British grocery shopping.

Here in Cambridge, we tend to split our shopping between the local market and one of the chain supermarkets like Sainsburys, Tesco, or Waitrose. Tonight's dinner is the result of such a mashup: leek and potato soup and salad made with things from the market square, a roast chicken from Sainsburys, heritage potatoes from Waitrose, and local asparagus from the town market, followed by local stawberries with single cream.

There are some groceries that are easily available at pretty much every shop that you'd have to go out of your way to find in the States, if you can find them at all. For example: Balsamic glaze in a squeeze bottle; single cream (thicker than whipping cream, less thick than double cream or clotted cream, all of which you'll find on the dairy shelf here); blackcurrant jam; multiple varieties of asparagus; fresh herbs, including lemongrass, that don't cost an arm and a leg.

Brits are heavily invested in local and organic food, and in a much more mainstream way than most places in the U. S. Organic products are readily available, and usually only at a slightly higher cost than the conventional product. I honestly don't know if a chain like Whole Foods would succeed here, because between the local market (which operates everyday in Cambridge) and the chain stores, there's no lack of organic and fresh food.

So, maybe it's time for us to abandon our stereotypes about English food and instead take a page from their cookbook.

Chice are going to England

A couple of years ago, I was having a very hard time both sleeping well and sleeping enough.  So I started taking Benadryl (or, actually, a generic equivalent) at night to help me sleep, and then this spring, I started taking two pills a night: it's made a big difference, and I get a lot more full nights of sleep now.

For better or worse, the Benadryl doesn't really seem to alter my dreams: I still rarely remember having any, and while I don't recall any recent alien-invasion dreams, I never did have them very frequently.

This morning, for whatever reason (Rosemary diagnoses the reason as anxiety: you can be the judge), I work up with a very clear memory of parts of a dream I had.  In the early part of the dream, I was somehow working as an Antiques Roadshow-style appraiser, where I was supposedly the specialist in identifying medieval things: I remember conducting one appraisal (in French, of course) for a small grouping of children's stuffed-cloth toys, printed on the cloth to look like pea-pods filled with peas.  I told the disappointed owner that they appeared to date from about 1890, and thus were definitely not medieval: I specifically recall saying: "look how these images are printed: if these were medieval we'd expect to see them look more like woodcuts."

Somehow, later in the dream, I was working with a group of students, and for some reason I needed to persuade them of the quality and value of their knowledge of the English pronoun system.  "Who knows all the forms of 'I'" I asked.  "I, me, my, mine?"  Everybody raised their hands.  "Who knows all the forms of 'you'?" I asked and followed it up with "he," she," we," and "they."  Everybody knew them all.

Then one student piped up with a question: "What about 'chice'?"

Of course I was dumbfounded. 

"Chice" I thought; "what the hell is 'chice'?"  But, in that dream way, all the students were looking around and nodding.  "What about 'chice'?" seemed to be a question on everybody's minds.

So I started in on a spiel: "Well, there's an old saying," I began, "that there's an idiot in every crowd, and maybe I'm the idiot here--but I've never heard of 'chice.'  What kind of pronoun is it?"  Of course, there wasn't much clear answer forthcoming, until one student brought me a grammar textbook of some kind, and there was "chice" printed right in black and white in the middle of a table of English pronouns.

Of course when I saw it on the chart I recognized it right away as doing the work of the Old English dual pronouns like "wit" (= "we two" or "you and I"--a kind of plural that can only include two members).  Naturally, I started in on a kind of historical explanation, but with the problem of "chice" apparently solved in my own mind, I woke right up. 

So: there it is--antiques and valuation, English linguistics, the value of knowledge about medieval matters and Old English.  I guess that's what's on my mind these days. 

But I think Rosemary and I may be using sentences like "Chice are going to England" for the next few days, perhaps.  Wish us luck!

Some Early Influences

Last Fall, when I was wrapping up the comics course, a student asked me what the first comics I ever read were. I hemmed and hawed for a minute and said I'd have to give a three-part answer. First, I remembered reading the occasional Archie or Richie Rich comic book when my brothers and I were kids, though I have no idea where they came from; we never had superhero comics to read, that I recall. Second, I remembered loving Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong (in the 1963 Dell paperback edition); I taught He Done Her Wrong in that class, so the students knew just what I meant. Third, I recalled how thoroughly my brothers and I had read the old Mad Magazine paperback reprints my dad had kept from when he'd bought them in the early 1960s: we read those books over and over, until they were probably entirely worn out.

For those of you who don't know He Done Her Wrong, it's a brilliant 1930 (almost) wordless comic (and comics) novel, telling the tale of a Great Northern woodsman, his flapper girlfriend, and the slimy, mustachioed villain who aims to break them up. The woodsman chases the villain and the girl to New York City, various adventures and misadventures are had by all, but ultimately the hero gets the girl, is discovered to be the heir of a lumber magnate, and the villain's most dastardly plan is stopped by the timely intervention of a friendly moose. It's brilliant and hilarious and it deserves to be better known.

But I assume everyone knows about Mad Magazine. The 50s Mads that we read were reprinted in The Bedside Mad, Mad in Orbit, and Son of Mad (and there must have been a fourth volume we had, I think). These old Mad stories have, in the meantime, become recognized as classic, influential comics, fueling virtually the entire Underground comix movement of the 1960s and 70s, and cited as a formative influence by major figures like Art Spiegelman, among others. 

When I look at them now, and remember the Wacky Packages stickers I used to collect in the early 70s, I am not at all surprised to remember that Spiegelman worked on those Wacky Packages: much of the silliness and the anti-commercial, anti-Madison Avenue aesthetic of the Wacky Packages comes straight from those old Mad Magazines

Over the years, I've picked up my own copies of these books, and I glanced through them recently and could hardly believe just how much of them had remained—somewhere—in the back of my brain. 

Any number of lines, I am sure would easily count as 'kernel stories' among me and my brothers: “Bumble—fumbled” and “Plastic Sam” and “Billows, not Pillows!” 

 This last phrase, from the Mad comics version of Longfellow's “The Wreck of the Hesperus” echoes in my memory as much as certain lines of the poem (“Last night the moon had a golden ring, And tonight no moon we see” says Peg-leg Popeye to the captain). 

 And I have to confess—I know this poem only from this version, and I really can't imagine it without the Mad panels, which make the tragic, sentimental story into a comic romp, complete with an amazing formal passage without drawings at all: comics without pictures, a perfect counterpoint to Gross's wordless novel. 

Thirty-five years ago, when I was reading these books for the first, and second, and umpteenth time, I had no idea what sort of impact they would have on me, even though I know that then I didn't get all the jokes. But having recently written extensively on the necessity of seeing as well as reading, I can't help thinking that it was the dense joke-packed illustrations of these old comics that trained me early to look closely at what I was reading.

It is often said that collectors are driven by the powerful force of nostalgia, and I usually don't think that's at all what's behind my kind of collecting. But I have an affection for these books, and even for “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” that can't be explained in any other way.

Endings and beginnings

Spring is the season that reminds us that each new beginning is the ending of something else.

When I'm walking to campus across the High Street bridge, seeing the trees on the banks of Decker's Creek leafing out and catching a glimpse of a moutainside painted in shades ranging from the palest green to russet, Robert Frost's lines "Nature's first green is gold/ Her hardest hue to hold" often run through my mind.  In April, every day brings the emergence of some new wonder even as yesterday's fades.

Can you tell I'm feeling sentimental lately?

I spent this afternoon at the annual conference the College of Education holds where the graduating class from the 5-year teacher education program presents on their classroom research projects.

I facilitated a couple of sessions for the English education soon-to-be grads, and realized while I was sitting there that this is really the first class of students that I've seen through their entire program, since I'm finishing my fifth year.

The students in the photo, Brent and Carrie, were both students in one of the best sections of the young-adult lit class I've taught thus far.  It was one of those classes full of amazing students who collectively create something even greater than the sum of their individual parts.

We initially bonded over our mutual disdain for Sharon Draper's Tears of a Tiger, a book I didn't really care for but had included because it's required reading at both of the high schools in town.  It was one of the first novels we read, and after about half an hour of discussing it, someone finally asked, in a tentative voice, "Why did you choose this book?"  Suddenly we all heaved a mutual sigh of relief, realizing that we all felt the same way about it.  From then on, there was no holding back.

That was in fall 2009, the semester my father died.  In fact, the only things I remember about that fall are Dad's illness, and specific moments from the young-adult lit class.  I missed a week of school right after Thanksgiving for the memorial service, and I was anxious about going back to work afterward.  But every one of the students in that class sent me an e-mail while I was gone to offer their condolences and to express their sympathy, and when I went back, I almost cried, I felt so much like I was back home.

(And then Emma played guitar and sang a very funny song she'd written about Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak [believe it or not], and I laughed until I almost cried again.)

A couple of the folks in that class have graduated already, but most of them will be graduating in May.  Brent, on the left, has been in at least three of my classes, starting in the fall of 2008.  Writing a letter of recommendation for him recently, I thought about how lucky I am to be able to be a part of some students' lives for these particular years.  A music-teacher friend of mine once remarked that middle-school students were her favorite to work with, because they were just starting to figure out who they are.  I love working with college students for the same reason--and because they're so full of potentials and possibilities for the future.

I never thought I'd be the kind of person to say this, but what the hell: it's true.  Not having any children of my own, some of these students truly come to feel like my kids.  The love and pride I feel for them is overwhelming at times.  And many of the WVU students I've grown to feel that way about were in that fall 2009 class:  Brent and Carrie, but also Emma and Jake and Paige and Rachel...you get the idea.

It's been a long, hard semester, and I'm not going to be remotely sorry to see it in my rearview mirror.  And I won't be sorry to see these students graduate and take their gifts into the world.  But I will be sorry not to see them around.


(As long you're reading such schmaltz, you might as well listen to some, too, right?)

Good Girl 2.0

Years ago, when I was still a grad student at Ohio State, I baked some cookies for my Introduction to Folklore class.  It was the last day of the quarter, and we were watching a movie.  Plus, the class started at 7:30 a.m., and those folks deserved a reward for having dragged themselves to campus at the crack of dawn for the previous ten weeks.

When I got out the cookies, one of the students said, "I knew you'd bring cookies.  You've just got a cookie personality."

I wasn't really sure how to respond, because the comment was delivered in a positive way, so I decided not to ask too many questions about what it means to have a "cookie personality."  And I wasn't sure I wanted to hear the answer anyway.

This line turned into a running joke, and several years later, after I told that story to a class at the University of Northern Colorado, a bunch of them got on RateYourProfessor.com and left comments about my "cookie personality." 

A colleague at UNC was always kind of snarky about the "cookie personality" thing, referring to it sarcastically on a number of occasions.  It clearly irritated her, and she remarked more than once that she envied the label, even as she coached me to "grow a set," in her words.

More recently, I've run into a similar situation here: a former student told me that when my name came up in a conversation she was having with another professor, the other prof said, "Oh, Rosemary.  She ought to have little birds fluttering around her head." 

I can't tell you how much that irritated me.  Being a "good girl" is a double-edged sword.  Yeah, I'll be the first to say that there are a lot of benefits to it.  My longtime friend Christina and I are sometimes astonished at the stuff we got away with in high school because we were considered to be "good girls" and "good students."  (Don't worry, Mom: it was nothing dire!)

But when you get tagged that way, and--admittedly--when it's important to you personally to be thought of that way, it's a very restrictive and even a dangerous label.  

Recent events at work have left me feeling like being anything but a good girl.  I've been, by turns, enraged, depressed, astonished by people's short-sightedness, and just plain cranky.  I haven't wanted to be nice, or be a team player.  To do so would be to deny my very real, very powerful feelings.  And yet, I worry that if I show my true feelings, speak my mind, people will think that the "good girl" thing has all been an act--that I was just waiting to get tenure so that I could revert to my true, bitchy self.

I posted this image to my Facebook profile,
and a former colleague commented,
"Rosemary! This doesn't sound like you at all."
But it's what I'd like to say sometimes.

Those of you who know me are probably saying "Not bloody likely."  I know.  If only I could say what I feel, be bitchy, pitch a fit, sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of Morgantown.  Instead, the arguments, the sassy comebacks, the bitchy asides just play on a continuous loop in my head.  I'm not a nice person; I just hide my inner mean girl a little too well.

In the wake of all of this, I've been contemplating what "Good Girl 2.0" might look like, since "Good Girl 1.0" is so obviously an obsolete and buggy piece of software.

Good Girl 2.0 would maintain its signature features: trying to be kind, compassionate, reliable, helpful, and thoughtful. 

However, while these are integral parts of the Good Girl programming, they need to not be automatic functions in Good Girl 2.0.  Perhaps the new interface should have a series of pop-up dialog boxes: "Are you sure you want to say yes to that request?"  "Does what you're about to say reflect what you actually feel?" "Can you tolerate disappointing or angering this person?  Because it's OK if you do." 

That last one's tough, since Good Girl 1.0 has a tendency to crash if she thinks someone is mad at her.  And she's also worried that her niceness is an effective whitewash to hide her incompetence, so that without it she'll be revealed for the fraud she is.  Or perhaps the better analogy would be to liken niceness to a bunker:  "If I'm nice [or cooperative, or silent, or invisible], people won't hurt me."

How do you beta-test a new attitude? 

Well, one way is graphically.  Here's how I'm reframing the "fluttering birds" comment:

Any good student of fairy tales knows that in many older variants, the heroine isn't always sweet and docile.  Often, she's wily and intelligent--a trickster.  She often plays into the villain's idea that she's naive and powerless specifically to put herself in a more powerful position.  Folklore reminds us that there's always been a subversive element to good-girl behavior; in Good Girl 2.0, I think that feature needs to be more robust. 

But here's the thing: it's not about the program's interface.  It's about being more user-friendly--the user being me.  In short, I don't necessarily have to change how I respond to things, but where I respond to them from.  If the response comes from that automatic, Good Girl 1.0 place, then it's likely based in fear, or shame.  The 2.0 response might might look the same to another person, but feels entirely different to me because it comes more directly from my feeling in the moment.

Cinderella may still be smiling, but she's not doing it because she feels like she has to.

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Jiggs and Stinson Reliant

Spring Break just ended here, and we got away for a few days, staying in an out-of-the-way Inn in the middle of Ohio's Amish country, where we saw all the horses and buggies we might wish, as well as seeing Amish kids playing baseball at the schoolhouse. While we were there in Holmes county, we couldn't stop ourselves (maybe I should say Rose couldn't stop me) from visiting a couple of the local antique malls, where, of course, we found some things we couldn't resist.

The first thing I picked up (and didn't put back down) was this interesting little pencil and watercolor drawing of a Stinson Reliant airplane, probably dating from the middle 1930s.  It was stashed in a box full of old postcards.  Of course, it's painted on the very worst sort of acidic paper, and it already has one corner off and other creases separating. Rose really loves the inscription on the back, identifying who drew it, and who he drew it for.


Later, I ran across an entertaining wooden cut-out and painted figure of Jiggs, from Geo. McManus's long-running comic strip, Bringing Up Father.  Sawn from a wooden plank and painted, Jiggs has a stake for planting him in the ground, though he's only about eighteen inches high. The buttons on his vest are actually decorative round-head nails or tacks, giving it a little three-dimensional effect. And since this guy is right at the boundary between folklore and comics, we literally couldn't turn it down.

Of course, I didn't pick him up when I first saw him, and I dragged Rose twice around the mall trying to find him back--unsuccessfully.  I finally gave him up as sold in the meantime.  But, luckily, when I went back the next day to pick up a couple other items, there he was, and I snapped him up straightaway this time.



Neither of these items, of course, is anything one would associate with the Amish, and for all I know, both were trucked in by antique dealers from elsewhere to stock the mall. But we were there to relax, not to consume Amishness, and I have to say I'm just as happy that this is the kind of shopping I still like to do for enjoyment.

Cheers! Salute! Proost! A votre santé!

So, we're a little late with the report on our first batch of beer. In fact, of the 46 bottles we put up, there are only about a dozen left in the basement. Before you start worrying, many of them went to Columbus and on to friends and relatives. It's been a rough couple months, but not quite that rough.

I guess the fact that so much of it is gone is the best testimony, though, to the fact that it was (and is) really good! Not just palatable, but tasty: dry, malty without being sweet, a little hoppy, and with modest carbonation that makes it drink like an English draft ale. 

The inaugural tasting happened at my mom's house in Columbus a few weeks ago, where we paired it with (what else?) my sister's fabulous homemade pizza.

The following week we made our own homemade pizza and broke out a couple more bottles: delicious.



I'm afraid Jane may be right: this could easily turn into an obsession.  In fact, we've just received our second and third kits from Northern Brewer. 

Next up: "The Innkeeper," described as being similar to Bass Pale Ale.  Once we get that started, we'll be heading up to South Hills Brewing to get a secondary fermentor so we can make the "Chinook IPA."  And Tom's got a bug to make mead at some point.  Stay tuned! 

Hornbooks

I've admitted to being a collector here before; we have, stashed in various places around the house, all sorts of things roughly organized into loosely defined collections: books, glass and pottery, ephemera, folk art, and so on--even a few paintings.  It's always a great treat, then, to find an object that fits easily into more than one collection, as does the tiny (less than two-inch) late-medieval pewter badge shown here in the shape of a hornbook (complete with "abc"!), which fits both into a collection of books and into my collection of late medieval religious and secular badges. I got hooked on badges after seeing a number of them on display in the Cluny, the Parisian museum of the middle ages. The badges, both secular and religious, were the cheapest sort of personal adornments and/or tourist souvenirs from the late middle ages, and now they are an invaluable record of material culture from the lower levels of society, and they literally survive by the thousands.

Hornbooks, of course, were small wooden paddles, covered on one side with a see-through section of cow horn, behind which lay a printed or manuscript text of some sort, usually an alphabet and the most rudimentary elements of a primer. Hornbooks were often the first book in a child's literacy education. Real hornbooks, of course, like most early books intended for children, are virtually impossible to find these days, both because early collectors did not value them and because kids literally wore them out. If we can judge by an analogous example, the earliest American children's book, The New England Primer, apparently was first printed in 1689 or 1690.  It went through literally hundreds of editions in the next century and a half, and yet not a single eighteenth-century copy is available for sale on the ABEbooks site, and only a dozen or so copies from before 1830 can be found there. Charles F Heartman's bibliography of 1930 could not locate a single copy surviving from before 1727, though providing evidence for at least five earlier printings.

Excited as I recently was to find and buy the horn-book badge (which probably dates from around the fifteenth century), it was an especial treat since, many years ago, at an antique show in Greeley, I had bought a single-sheet hornbook page, although I've never been certain about just how old it is.  About the size of an index card, and printed on only one side, on good old-fashioned laid paper, with visible chain lines and everything, it has all the look of an original from the eighteenth century or earlier, but I've never been able to fully banish from my mind the possibility that it might be a nineteenth-century replica or souvenir of some sort. But the two-forms of the letters r and s, and the treatment of u and v as alternative forms of the same letter (to say nothing of the old-style "and" symbol after the lower case z) give it a very old black-letter look indeed. Early seventeenth century?  Could be, but I can't be at all sure.

And that's one of the great pleasures and frustrations of collecting things so old: they tell us so much with their very presence and realness, but there's often so much that still demands research.

Bottling day

You might recall that Tom and I recently embarked on a home-brewing experiment, thanks to the holiday gift of a starter kit he got from my mom and sister.

Well, today was bottling day.

This required boiling a little more than half a cup of sugar in some water, putting that in the bottling bucket, and then siphoning the fermented beer into the bottling bucket.  Remarkably, when we took the lid off the fermenting bucket, it actually smelled like...beer!  So far, we don't seem to have screwed things up.

The beer, after being siphoned into the bottling container.

--and the icky sludge left over at the bottom of the fermenting container.

Bottles in sanitizing solution, waiting to be filled.

It took us awhile to get the hang of filling the bottles, especially shutting off the valve in time and moving the siphon from one bottle to the next without making a mess.  Well, without making a huge mess.  I'm pretty sure that beer bottling is going to be messy no matter what.  Here are some highlights (?) of the process:

It did get easier, fortunately.

This has been a really difficult and depressing week for both of us--the kind where excruciating, seemingly endless minutes alternate with long stretches of numbness.  An ice storm last night prevented us from getting out of town today, or even out of the house, for a change of scenery.  So what else to do but finally get around to the bottling?

Strangely, it proved to be an ideal activity for the moment.  Bottling is the kind of task that is both mindless and deeply absorbing, and eventually it becomes so mechanical it takes on a kind of Zen-like, meditative quality.  I was almost sorry when it was over.  In the end, we had 46 bottles of beer ready to put up.

The beer has to condition in the bottles for two weeks before it'll be drinkable.  That gives us something to look forward to in a couple of weeks, and with any luck, will also give us a sense of being rewarded for our hard work.  At the moment, I'm deeply grateful for those simple gifts.

Helicopter attack, part 2

Regular readers might recall a post from about a year and a half ago about an encounter that I had with a  helicopter dad who came in to the advising office with his daughter, and the family drama that ensued.

Flash forward to today.  First day of spring semester, and I'm in my usual two-hour Monday afternoon shift doing advising.  It's very quiet--too quiet--for the first day, which probably should have been my first clue that some fresh hell was about to break loose.  I only had one scheduled appointment, at 3:30.

Around 3:15, a middle-aged guy sticks his head in the door, and asks if I can meet with him.  He looks familiar--I've met him before, I know he's been in the office before, but I can't place him until he says he's here to talk about his daughter's schedule.  But she's nowhere to be seen, and he has to call her several times before she finally answers and shows up in the office.  Oh yes: it's that family again.  And Mom's along this time, too. 

The student herself?  As soon as she plops into the chair, she whips out her phone and starts texting.  As the dad starts asking me questions about what classes she needs, I turn to her to get her input, and she's totally tuned out, texting away and clearly expecting mom and dad to do the heavy lifting.

The long and short of it is that the student is expecting to graduate this semester, but she's forgotten to enroll in the last class she needs, and got a D in another required course last semester, which means she'll have to repeat it and get a C or better. 

I could go on and on about the drama, part 2.  I'll spare you the details, and just say that it was very clear that the dad knew the requirements for the English major inside out, and the daughter not at all.  When the student bothered to put the phone down, it was to make snarky, petulant comments about how she didn't care what was required; she just wanted to finish and graduate. 

As before, I was mad at myself for not being more assertive--since, of course, this all took far longer than 15 minutes, leaving the poor guy who had actually scheduled an appointment sitting in the hallway. 

In my dream world, I would have channeled my maternal grandmother and said something snappy like "Young lady, this is your future we're discussing here, and you need to pay attention."  And maybe say something similar to the parents, like, "Tiffany Sue [not her real name] is the person who needs to make these decisions; why don't you wait outside?"

But of course, none of that happened. 

What really strikes me this time around is that this student is a graduating senior.  Presumably, she's on the brink of adulthood and independence.  But there's no evidence that that's even within the realm of possibility for her. 

Even more than feeling angry, the encounter left me feeling sad, and bewildered.  It seems like this child has been permanently damaged by her parents' concern.  And it strikes me as pathetic that any college senior could be OK with having her parents schedule her classes and generally organizing her life for her, much less seemingly expecting them to do it, and behaving as if she couldn't be bothered to worry about such trivial concerns.  Had it even crossed my mind to ask my parents for that kind of assistance, I would have been utterly humiliated to do so.

I just don't get it.

Is being a grown-up that unattractive to this young woman?  Or is it that it's just so, so much easier to keep doing the same old thing?  It just seems to me that by the time you were 21, you'd be tired of behaving like you're 16.  And that you'd want to feel like you were capable of managing your own life (whether you were or not). 

Damn, she didn't even show as much initiative as Veruca Salt.  At least Veruca always knew what she wanted, and asked for it by name.

Sigh.  And so begins another semester...