From Prayers from the Ark, by Carmen Bernos de Gasztold, trans. by Rumer Godden. (click to read)
This little book has been on my shelf since my mother died and it came into my possession. I hadn't looked at it until this post. The author of the poems was a Benedictine nun in France, but, according to Godden, the poems "were written long before she came to the Abbaye, in a scant hard time . . . of enemy occupation, hunger, cold, frustration. . . . The Abbaye has only endorsed what she knew a prayer must be—if it is to have any meaning; not something dreamy or wishful, not a cry to be used in emergency, not even a plea, and not necessarily comforting. A prayer is a giving out, an offereing, compounded of honest work and acceptance of the shape in which one has been created . . ."
Rumer Godden herself is an author I read and reread. Taken from her Web site: "One of her favourite axioms came from an Indian proverb that says
everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.
* * *
Seaweb is a proponent of ocean conservation. Its monthly e-mail publication, Ocean Update, is very worthwhile. I've learned quite a bit over the years I've been receiving it.
Going on a college tour of Ohio and one school in Indiana with L. I'll have my Theme Thursday post up. Bringing the camera. We'll see what I can do on the road . . .
I'm not the most willing of highway drivers, so any positive thoughts sent my way will be duly appreciated.
One of my friends who is Indian let me borrow this movie ("Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam" or "Straight From the Heart" according to Wikipedia) after I went to her house on Friday. I watched some of it Saturday after I took the ACT and I really like this song best so far. I haven't gotten through the whole movie because it's 3 1/2 hours long, and the plot line isn't the greatest. But the music and dancing is so good! This song is called Nimbooda. She's singing about the "sour lime" and the "sour lemon" as metaphors for something, but I couldn't catch what. Anyway, who cares! Look at the coordination and saris!
-L
P.S. I am so excited to meet Mouse AKA Kimmy later this week :)
P.P.S Re: The Title. I translated Music Monday into Hindi via a translator, so I hope it didn't translate it into anything terrible that doesn't mean music monday!
e has given me the letter Y to write about ten words beginning with that letter that have some meaning for me. They are in no particular order.
Yeast: Since L was a tiny girl, D has been baking our bread around here. No other bread, besides hard to make, complex European style breads from Niedlovs, will do. I occasionally make some too, usually pita. They never come out round, though.
Yankee: Yes, having been born in Vermont, and living in western Massachusetts as an adult until ten years ago, I guess you could say that I'm one. I miss the small towns, the maples, the rhubarb, the barns listing into the earth, the crisp air that, in winter, can be so cold you gasp when you first step outside. I do like it here, but when we moved, someone said to us, "You'll be back; eventually, you'll be back." It looks like he might be quite right. We'll see.
Yoga: Well, I don't think of myself as a yogi, a true spiritual practitioner of yoga, but I do love it, and miss the aching muscles after a session if I have to skip one for work at the computer. The people at Clear Spring are so inviting and encouraging. I don't think I would have taken that first class without them.
Yard: I love my yard; D is the one who does the most work in it, though. He created the herb garden, which was just a funny 1-foot-wide bed bounded by a railroad tie. Now it's quite a beautiful and useful big bed. We have to figure out how to get a rain barrel into it. We are going greener than ever here. There is even a movement afoot up here to allow us suburbanites to have a chicken or two.
Yoke: (e, this isn't easy to find y-words) So yoked as in married, which doesn't sound very complimentary, does it? With all the ups as well as the downs, D and I have been married for 22 years come August. Where did we meet? At a Christmas party eons ago. He gave me my engagement ring in the bar at the old Ritz-Carlton in Boston one Christmastime. As a matter of fact, from time to time we used to have lunch at the old Copley-Plaza, where often Gus Saunders would be hosting his radio show, Yankee Kitchen, at the next table.
Youngster: L has been a really wonderful one. I couldn't imagine life without her. It seems that in the blink of an eye she is a teenager who drives herself around, plays the cello, and takes a demanding course load as an 11th grader. I never believed people when they said the years would fly by, but they really have. Next week we are looking at (gulp) colleges in Ohio and Indiana, staying a night or two with kim!
Yarn: My grandmother taught me to knit when I was about 8 or 9, and I've been knitting ever since. Until I moved here, I was an isolationist knitter who fixed things (or tried to) or garbled patterns on my own. But here I've found a wonderful group to knit with and a great mentor who can just look at something and tell me what's wrong and how to fix it. I get quite a lot out of our Saturday mornings, that somehow bleed into most of the afternoon, knitting, talking politics, trading stories, getting advice.
Yuletide: I LOVE Christmas music. Not so much the getting out of boxes of ornaments, setting up the tree, baking (I'm tired already), but all the different types of music: Renaissance, jazz, old standards, carols. Frankly, I listen to it all year round, and I'm sure people wonder what 's going on when they hear it wafting from my car player in the middle of July.
Yowl: This is a sound I'm very familiar with. Soul often emits them upon seeing Frank, who he just cannot abide. It must be a male territory issue, because Bear, who used to be tolerated, now gets a healthy "hiss" whenever Soul encounters her. Even if I'm patting Soul, and Frank happens to come into eyeline, I get hissed out/yowled at myself. It's not easy being Senior Pet. Here, Frank and Bear try to keep Soul outside by putting the screen back in place.
The statue is therefore nothing but the sum of all it has acquired. May not this be the same with man? —L'Abbé de Condillac
I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one.
—Cato
Guest photographer D braved the bitter cold to capture this public art in a section of Southern City. But after consideration, I believe they are sculptures, not statues. Especially after considering the quotes, above. Frankly, I can't think of a statue around here.
The Bluff View's benefactor, in bronze.
This artist has some work in New York, I believe.
Joggers enjoy giving this Great Dane a high five
The early morning photographer casts a long shadow over all he surveys..
Reya got me pouring over some poetry. Here's one I just discovered that seems apt:
The State of the Economy —Louis Jenkins
There might be some change on top of the dresser at the back, and we should check the washer and dryer. Check under the floor mats of the car. The couch cushions. I have some books and CDs I could sell, and there are a couple of big bags of aluminum cans in the basement, only trouble is that there isn't enough gas in the car to get around the block. I'm expecting a check sometime next week, which, if we are careful, will get us through to payday. In the meantime with your one-dollar rebate check and a few coins we have enough to walk to the store and buy a quart of milk and a newspaper. On second thought, forget the newspaper.
Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl? Who has it, and who doesn't? I keep looking around me. The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus. The swan opens her white wings slowly. In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness. One question leads to another. Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg? Like the eye of a hummingbird? Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop? Why should I have it, and not the anteater who loves her children? Why should I have it, and not the camel? Come to think of it, what about the maple trees? What about the blue iris? What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight? What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves? What about the grass?
it's Theme Thursday, but my Kitchen post is only half-done (I'll finish it; it's more about cookbooks than kitchens at this point). I'm just back from seeing Eileen Ivers's wonderful Beyond the Bog Road multimedia event. I learned quite a bit, too, about the Famine. Interesting that the Cherokees, just before their enforced march known as the Trail of Tears, were able to send $170.00 to the Irish in their time of anguish and need, but the English . . .
In recent years, we've belonged to one or another CSA. Before that, we had a community garden plot at Crabtree, which turned out to be logistically challenging, as it's on the other side of town and lacked facilities to clean up after digging and weeding. I had tried to secure one at the local community center, only to discover that I am seventh on the waiting list. So, this year (mainly for financial reasons) we are going to try to fill the above pots (plus some others) with the seeds below.
I have from Renee's Garden (formerly Shepherd's Seeds):
a lettuce mix, Paris Market Basket
carrots, Bolero Nantes
radishes, Petit Dejeuner
beets, Baby Ball
a container (!) cucumber, Bush Slicer
bush French beans, Rolande
from Seeds of Change:
lettuce, Bronze Arrow
radish, Cherry Belle
from last year's CSA, squash, Delicata
flowers from Helen, Ladybird Poppy, which didn't fare well in 2008, so it's getting another chance
and some lavender seeds from Suffolk Herbs, in England.
We'll also get, as seedlings, tomatoes, peppers, basil, dill, maybe potatoes (which I've read you can grow in a barrel). The garden behind the pots contains a lot of thyme, sage, chives, marjoram, oregano, etc., and the tomatoes and herbs usually go in there. I'm hoping to put in a horseradish root in a corner. There's nothing like the sinus-clearing jolt you get grating a fresh root of it.
I'm eager to see how we do in the hot weather, keeping everything watered. I'm trying to get a rain barrel set up, so am reading up on mosquito control.
I'm also reading up on planting by the phases of the moon . ..
A short view of the sky the other evening . . .
Monday, January 19, 2009
the first video is only funny/understandable if you've ever suffered through the extreme hell that is AP Chemistry.
I'm trying to read Snow by Orhan Pamuk, but haven't been able to find a decent place/time to sit down. And Merisi is who put me on to this book in the first place . . . I didn't get this in first time around.
I also have another of his books from the library: Istanbul: Memories and the City. Last evening, while waiting in the car for L to finish playing with her quartet at a fundraiser for the food bank here, I started it.
I was very intrigued by the following:
In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we've seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we "remember" our earliest life experiences, . . .
This made me think about other complexities of personality and thought process that in English we cannot give voice to because we don't have the tense that expresses them. What are we locked out of because of linguistics?
I have three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
-Thoreau
This is the chair I think of when I think of a CHAIR: Van Gogh's Chair painted in Arles in the winter of 1888/1889, making this its 120th anniversary, if paintings have such things. In reading about it, I've discovered that it is actually one of a pair of paintings. The other is of Gauguin's chair, a painting I hadn't seen until I pulled an art history book off the shelf and then looked around on the Internet.
The art history book goes on a bit, in art historical fashion: "Van Gogh's conviction about the importance of this chair [his, above] penetrates us and holds us, until we feel a mystery in its presence." Well, something like that, I suppose. I just like it, and used to have an art card of his bedroom, which also has this chair in it, up in my dorm room in college. It's interesting paired with its mate, though. Gauguin's looks and feels so much like his paintings:
My chair for reading cookbooks and trying to come up with dinner was rescued for $1.00 from the side of the road in Whitingham, Vermont, years and years ago.
Just another stack of books, but I find lately that I look through them for protracted periods of time, comparing recipes or just reading. The personality of author is so clearly drawn, sometimes, in the explication of the process of making something. Laurie Colwin is just perfect. As are her novels.
A book that I just borrowed from the library is the companion to the dreadful PBS series On the Road Again, Spain, starring a falstaffian, often inebriated Mario Batali, along with Gwyneth Paltrow, Mark Bittman of the NY Times and another actress, Claudia Bassols. This TV series is such a grandiose exercise in self-indulgence, that I couldn't believe it. I kept checking back; surely there would be some real cooking, something for the viewer to grasp on to. No, it was the four of them, sitting around tables in expensive restaurants, eating. Or driving expensive, brand new cars through the countryside to get to an expensive restaurant to be filmed sitting around eating. The book is worse! It seems to have actual dialogue from the TV shows and occasional lists of favorites: Mario's favorite candybar is a Nestle's Crunch, by the way. Just in case you were wondering.
His Babbo cookbook is informative . . . although complicated.
Sorry, any and all. I haven't been around to the blogs I enjoy so much and I haven't been posting. I've been concentrating on a new job for a new client.
I even put D on Period Patrol in the vast undergrowth of footnotes. Each, of course, must end with one.
I haven't even tidied up the side bar; tomorrow is Thursday Theme: Tables!
for some reason only half of the video module seems to show up! I removed the first video because I decided to just keep it to one video like the other posts.
