Reading

The other day I was reading a short piece in the London Review about Google Street view, which has just been put up for the UK as of this March. It's written by a journalist who isn't too keen on the idea of having these pictures up online, which is either ironic or entirely reasonable (take your pick) in light of the fact that there are more security cameras in the UK than anywhere else, I think, in the world. It turns out that wearing a hoodie is actually a practical measure if you're trying to avoid having your profile recorded on camera. I had no idea.

Anyhow, the piece begins with a reference to Stendhal: there's a memorable moment in The Red and the Black where Stendhal describes the novel as a mirror being carried down a road:

"Look here, sir, a novel is a mirror moving along a highway. One minute you see it reflect the azure skies, next minute the mud and puddles of the road. And the man who carries the mirror in his pack will be accused by you of immorality! His mirror shows the mud and you accuse the mirror!"

On Stendhal's account, the man photographed leaving the strip club on Google Street view doesn't have grounds to accuse Google, but this isn't exactly the author's point. I hadn't thought of this passage for six years at least, but it immediately made me remember reading Stendhal in college. I took this one class on nineteenth-century novels, and I was reading, reading, reading all quarter to keep up with it. I'm a remarkably slow reader, especially for a graduate student, and when I had to blaze through Lost Illusions in a week I neglected my other work to get through it. But I really loved those weeks.

Maybe it's something about the French, but I've been thinking about the pleasure of reading more generally of late anyhow because I've embarked on Proust. Proust, for all of his decadence -- it's sumptuous prose, and if you're in the mood for something spartan, it just won't suit -- really understands why we read, and this makes the experience of reading him all the more enjoyable. It's adolescent, I suppose, but how to resist?

"In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and the beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be."

Making jam

Last week, I found myself with another bunch of rhubarb; I have no willpower when it comes to the farmers' market, and the piles of rhubarb looked too pretty to pass up. Since it's not exactly something you can snack on, I needed to come up with something to do with it. I had half a mind to make it into a dessert for Kate's birthday, but I made Kate a chocolate cake instead, so I still had to use it up. This is where Tom's grandmother comes in. I've never actually met her (I take it that meeting Granny is sort of like being allowed into the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City; you've got to be a member, and suffice it to say that I'm not, at least not yet) but I've eaten many of her specialties. Cakes, jams, flapjacks, apple sauce, cabbage, soup, fish pie, entire canisters of chocolate: the whole lot. She seems to be someone who believes in expressing love by feeding everyone around her, to excess. Tom can't visit her without returning with a crate of things she's made. And she's the one who taught him to cook, too, so judging by her prodigious output and the quality of her students, I think she's got some serious culinary prowess.

So when I opened the fridge for the umpteenth time and saw that rhubarb staring at me, once again, I thought: I should make Granny's ginger rhubarb jam. I got the recipe (Tom has access to the temple, you see), and made it on Sunday morning. I haven't tasted the results yet, but I think they look pretty promising.



Rhubarb and Ginger Jam

2 1/2 lb. rhubarb, trimmed and chopped (prepared weight)
2 1/2 lb. sugar
Juice of 3-4 lemons (reserve peel from one lemon and seeds from all lemons)
1 oz. fresh root ginger
4 oz. preserved or crystallized ginger, chopped

Put the rhubarb in a large bowl in alternate layers with the sugar and the lemon juice. Cover and leave overnight.

Next day, crush or bruise the ginger root slightly with a rolling pin and tie in a muslin bag with the lemon peel, chopped, and the seeds.

Put the rhubarb mixture into a pan with the muslin bag, bring to a boil, and boil rapidly for 15 minutes. Remove the muslin bag, add the preserved or crystallized ginger, and boil for a further 5 minutes or until setting point is reached.

Remove any scum, then pot and cover in the usual way.

Akerman love

So as of last night I have a huge brain crush on Chantal Akerman. She's a Belgian director, and Emily and I went to see her movie Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) at Siskel. I guess it's not in wide release, but if you ever get a chance, you must see it. It's a meditation on boredom and routine with very little dialogue and even sound. The shots are long and stationary -- the camera is positioned as habitually as Jeanne herself, who goes through the patterns of her day so obsessively that you're shocked when, after watching her wash and dry and put away the silverware relentlessly slowly, she finally drops a spoon. The structure of the movie follows her through three days of her life -- she's a single mother who takes one client a day as a prostitute to support herself and her son, but the bulk of the film is concerned with her domestic routine, and sex stays off screen until the very end. So mostly you see her walking down the hallway, turning on the light in the bathroom, washing her hands, turning off the light in the bathroom, walking to the kitchen, turning on the light, putting the kettle on to boil, grinding coffee, pouring water through the filter, setting out bread and butter, going to wake her son, coming back into the kitchen, and so on. It sounds impossibly boring, and in a way it is, but it's also captivating, and it makes you as a viewer attached to her habits and the objects she uses so carefully (the thermos, the cubes of sugar). This means that when the habits start to come undone -- first she burns the potatoes, then dinner is late and everything starts to happen out of order -- you switch from this hypnotic vacancy (your state is just like hers, you realize) to mild distress, because you no longer have traction on what's going on. The transition the movie accomplishes at this point is impressive, because you move from feeling this vacancy to recognizing that you haven't had any idea all along what she's thinking; she's hardly spoken, and you've just been watching her wash dishes and fold and unfold the tablecloth for two hours now. And then the thought you have is that you don't know whether she feels nothing or whether she's entirely mad. At no point do you identify with her: you see her as a figure of domestic labor, and as a commentary on how housework can be like prostitution (or prostitution a form of housework), but you don't know what it's like for her. And the radical opacity you recognize towards the end, when she makes the first facial expressions of the film (which has been going on for three hours at this point) is all the more powerful in contrast to the peculiar thoughtlessness that the film forces you into initially. Visually it's a beautiful piece, a study in miniatures and interiors that shows you all the things Hollywood films don't, like an extended scene at the sink when her back is to you the entire time. Psychologically it's amazing: it produces a new kind of boredom, but more than that lulls you into a state where you find yourself finally surprised at how inaccessible someone else's experience is, even though you've just been (or so you think) feeling a version of it.

Radio career fail

'Come on baby play me something, like here comes the sun' sings Metric on her new album, Fantasies. I went into Reckless last Tuesday to pick it up after I heard this track. Before I could even make it to the counter to ask the record man for the album, a woman came up to me and asked whether she could ask me a few questions. Turns out she was from NPR and doing a story about Record Store Day, so we went to the back of the store, by all the classical records, and she proceeded to ask me about whether I bought my music on vinyl (no, not really, only when I buy for Tom), whether I spend all my money on records (no, again; clearly losing coolness points here), what I'd come in for (Metric! that amazing Canadian band, I said), and what I thought about the scene in Chicago as opposed to New York (very vague answers here). The whole experience was a bit odd because I had the distinct feeling of speaking into the future even as I was looking at her and talking into the mic. This made me say embarrassingly stupid things like, "I'm not really into material objects, but I like records." I didn't even know I could utter that platitude, but apparently I can. Anyhow, I ended up on the cutting room floor, I discovered when I heard the piece on 848, but it was still fun to be interviewed, and I'm glad that NPR cares enough about local record stores to do a piece on them.

Metric's lyrics keep running through my mind -- 'Would you rather be the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?' -- in very peculiar combination with lines from the Milton sonnets I just taught. Very different sounds! So, guys: Beatles or Rolling Stones?

If this were a Facebook status update, it would say "Andrea is rhubarb tart and Hello Saferide"

Ever since I saw bright pink stalks of rhubarb arrayed on a table in Borough Market, I've been wanting to make something rhubarb-y. Apparently the rhu doesn't go with strawberries in Old Blighty -- for reasons that remain unclear to me -- and so taking this to heart, I was thinking that I'd make something just with rhubarb. Unadulterated, tart, etc. When I arrived back to my apartment in Chicago about two weeks ago, I had three sorts of mail, more or less: bills, academic publishing catalogues, and cooking magazines. (What this says about me I'd rather not consider, but there you go.) In the April issue of Gourmet, there was a quick recipe for rhubarb tart. It's a bit like tarte tatin, in that you slice the rhubarb wafer thin and lay it flat, overlapping a bit, on the pastry. After you bake it you glaze it with a reduced orange glaze. The results are pretty spectacular, and they actually taste like rhubarb, which made me realize that I didn't know, until now, what rhubarb tastes like. A bit like a tart apple with an unidentifiable punch. And pink, to boot!

The other thing that I feel like evangelizing about is my new favorite album. I was listening to it all day yesterday, and my neighbors are probably ready to take their broom handles to the ceiling (in fairness, it was only my old neighbors who did that; these neighbors are perfectly nice). It's called "More modern short stories from Hello Saferide." It's not quite out here, I don't think -- I bought it at a record store in Berlin called Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free -- but it's the best thing I've heard in a long time. Have a listen!

Full circle

I know that I was a bit remiss about posting during the final weeks of my time in England. In part, that's because I went to Berlin (which is my new favorite city), and in part that's because I was so occupied with the idea of having to leave, and not wanting to, that I didn't have much to say. But now that I'm in Richmond, and I've just come back from a British-style pub with Beatles albums, illustrations of men in full tartan dress, and football scarves on the walls -- a pub where you can go to watch football matches, no less -- I feel as if I should write a final installment about the UK. I was there for long enough for it to start to feel like home, long enough that when Kristian picked me up from the airport and we were driving down 90/94, I found that the highway signs looked strange and the cars seemed big and the facades of houses and buildings just seemed different. There's something to be said for this, for the experience of perceiving the place where you've been for quite a long time as if you have just arrived: it's defamiliarization, I suppose. I was at this party in London, in fact, where I was having a conversation about Shklovsky with a composer who turned out to know much more about him than I did, and we were agreeing that it's valuable to see things that are familiar as if they are strange. And now that I'm in a gigantic hotel in the middle of a city I don't know, I could be anywhere, really. The self-sufficient convention center is a world unto itself. In a way it feels like a buffered transition back to life in Chicago. But then again, it's just another place. A place where everyone is giving papers about the eighteenth century, mind you, but just a place. And so in the past week I've walked up Parliament Hill, come back to Chicago, left again; in the process, I've seen the dials of spring turned up and down and up again. If I kept it up it might begin to feel like time travel, but for now it just seems like I've got an established relationship with my suitcases. And after I've soaked up all the eighteenth-century talks I can, I'll saddle up and head back to the midwest for a spring of teaching Milton and getting work done. I look forward to cooking for all of you within range soon!

Old school

There is, on the way to Norfolk, a town called Little Snoring, and next to it, a town called Great Snoring. In fact, there is one intersection where the signs point to both: head left, you're on to Great Snoring; head right, Little Snoring. Perhaps snoring meant something different in Anglo-Saxon -- like great warrior of the night -- but these days, the jokes about sawing wood must get old quickly. Along the coast in Norfolk, there's a whole scattering of towns, separated by only a mile or so, and there are old pubs and inns in almost all of them, plus the odd windmill, smokehouse, and so on. There's a farm shop that sells only real ale, a man who smokes all his own fish, and a small shop where the labels on the strawberry jam are hand-printed and the flour for sale is ground at the local mill. There are also larger towns with three ice cream stands per block and an arcade on either side of the street -- more familiar beach-side fare, at least for American eyes -- but the rest of the villages, which are still largely original in the sense that many of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings are still standing and only slightly modified, are unfussy and quiet. If you go to the village where Nelson was born (Nelson didn't always stand on top of a column in Trafalgar Square, it turns out), and go to the pub called the Lord Nelson, and ask the proprietor how old the place is, he'll tell you 1637. Almost older than the Mayflower, but not quite. The doorways are so short that you have to be careful of your head as you pass through. Not every town along the Norfolk coast boasts a naval hero, but even so, there are stone beaches and windy quays and all manner of good, unpretentious food. If you ever find yourself in Norfolk, you must, must go to Morston Hall, where you will be fed an alchemical set menu made by Galton Blackiston. All of the food comes from the area (maybe even the hedges outside!), and I can't remember a better meal. Plus some of the last steam trains run through that part of the countryside, and if you're lucky, you'll see one puffing along a bridge near the sea. The spectacle attracts hobbyists with impressive cameras who follow the trains as they pass: these are the trainspotters. I'm probably the last one to learn the origin of the term, but there you go.