Category Archives: old

On fruit cake

Posted on by

A traditional holiday treat that many people don’t like, or at least lots of folks joke about. Sweet, chewy, filled with candied fruit and nuts, encased in a rich spicy cake, what’s not to like? In fact, this treat is so rich that it might not be a good idea to eat more than a small piece at any given moment. If you are watching your weight, forget fruit cake because each piece will have between four hundred and eight hundred calories given all the sugar it has in it. Perhaps it just seems old-fashioned. There are recipes for fruit cake that go back to the middle ages, a fact which opens the door to numerous jokes and lots of ridicule, but I think most of that ridicule is unfounded and based on a biased and uneducated experience as to what this delicious, succulent, treat is really all about. Cake. Who doesn’t like a nice spice cake with lots of rich eggs, flour, and sugar? Walnuts and pecans. Enough said. Candied fruits of all kinds. There are those people who do not like candied fruits, but again, it’s about sugar, so unless you are diabetic, you should love fruit cake which has candied oranges, cherries, pears, lemons, figs, watermelon rinds, and raisins in it. The common denominator here is sugar, and lots of it. Perhaps people fear and loath fruitcake because your strange Aunt Hortensia was the one who gave it to you as a gift, when you really wanted a new video game for your console. You have a natural aversion to your aunt who smells like cats, dresses as if it were 1955, and usually gives you tighty-whitey underwear for Christmas, not a new video game. This time the box weighs several pounds, and you know it’s not what you want. I often think that the presentation and image of fruitcake gives it a bad rap as well: brown and bumpy with strange, muted colors. Fruitcake is also rather massive and somber looking, not at all pleasant or translucent, as if it needed an extreme makeover so that it looked more like a diaphanous piece of sculpted cheese cake rather than something that the cat might have killed and dragged in. If you were to give it to the cat, I’m sure they would make short work of it though. Fruitcake has an image issue which its makers need to deal with. This is a dessert which is just not modern and glitzy, not healthy or holistic, not for losing weight or getting control of your blood pressure. I would suggest, in fact, that if you have any problems related to sugar or fat or weight or high blood pressure or cholesterol, that this is not your ideal food. If, on the other hand, you want to have friends in for a nice hot cup of coffee or mulled wine or aquavit or whatever, you might want to offer small pieces of this delightful, heaven-sent victual that is a delight to eat and wonderful to share. Certainly, you are not going to give this to the younger generation–they want toaster pastries or energy drinks or fast food. They eat with their eyes and fruitcake does not “look” good, so they won’t eat it. Their loss. But if you are having in a few people who have been around the world and eaten a few odd things, then a freshly baked fruitcake from a central Texas location is probably called for. The nuts, the fruit, the cake, it’s a great gift for your favorite teacher, a fabulous administrative assistant, your boss, or just someone you love. Being generous and loving during the holidays is a fine way to cap the year, and God knows, this has been a stressful year. So why not do it with fruitcake?

On fruit cake

Posted on by

A traditional holiday treat that many people don’t like, or at least lots of folks joke about. Sweet, chewy, filled with candied fruit and nuts, encased in a rich spicy cake, what’s not to like? In fact, this treat is so rich that it might not be a good idea to eat more than a small piece at any given moment. If you are watching your weight, forget fruit cake because each piece will have between four hundred and eight hundred calories given all the sugar it has in it. Perhaps it just seems old-fashioned. There are recipes for fruit cake that go back to the middle ages, a fact which opens the door to numerous jokes and lots of ridicule, but I think most of that ridicule is unfounded and based on a biased and uneducated experience as to what this delicious, succulent, treat is really all about. Cake. Who doesn’t like a nice spice cake with lots of rich eggs, flour, and sugar? Walnuts and pecans. Enough said. Candied fruits of all kinds. There are those people who do not like candied fruits, but again, it’s about sugar, so unless you are diabetic, you should love fruit cake which has candied oranges, cherries, pears, lemons, figs, watermelon rinds, and raisins in it. The common denominator here is sugar, and lots of it. Perhaps people fear and loath fruitcake because your strange Aunt Hortensia was the one who gave it to you as a gift, when you really wanted a new video game for your console. You have a natural aversion to your aunt who smells like cats, dresses as if it were 1955, and usually gives you tighty-whitey underwear for Christmas, not a new video game. This time the box weighs several pounds, and you know it’s not what you want. I often think that the presentation and image of fruitcake gives it a bad rap as well: brown and bumpy with strange, muted colors. Fruitcake is also rather massive and somber looking, not at all pleasant or translucent, as if it needed an extreme makeover so that it looked more like a diaphanous piece of sculpted cheese cake rather than something that the cat might have killed and dragged in. If you were to give it to the cat, I’m sure they would make short work of it though. Fruitcake has an image issue which its makers need to deal with. This is a dessert which is just not modern and glitzy, not healthy or holistic, not for losing weight or getting control of your blood pressure. I would suggest, in fact, that if you have any problems related to sugar or fat or weight or high blood pressure or cholesterol, that this is not your ideal food. If, on the other hand, you want to have friends in for a nice hot cup of coffee or mulled wine or aquavit or whatever, you might want to offer small pieces of this delightful, heaven-sent victual that is a delight to eat and wonderful to share. Certainly, you are not going to give this to the younger generation–they want toaster pastries or energy drinks or fast food. They eat with their eyes and fruitcake does not “look” good, so they won’t eat it. Their loss. But if you are having in a few people who have been around the world and eaten a few odd things, then a freshly baked fruitcake from a central Texas location is probably called for. The nuts, the fruit, the cake, it’s a great gift for your favorite teacher, a fabulous administrative assistant, your boss, or just someone you love. Being generous and loving during the holidays is a fine way to cap the year, and God knows, this has been a stressful year. So why not do it with fruitcake?

On leftovers

Posted on by

The day after Thanksgiving, aka, Black Friday, is also the best day for leftovers during the entire year. Not that I want to eat turkey, per se, but the wide variety of leftovers can be stunning, running the gamut from green bean hotdish to sweet potatoes to stuffing to tuna and pasta salad. Now I know that some folks don’t like leftovers, but the microwave and the refrigerator were invented to prolong the life of prepared uneaten food. There is an entire philosophy of economy in the ethos of leftovers that makes eating leftovers a noble cause. For example, some foods get better the second, third, or fourth day out: meatloaf, red sauce, stuffed red peppers, roast beef, paella, meatballs, marinated artichoke hearts. Most tater tot hotdish doesn’t really reach the apotheosis of its true flavor until its third day. Yet, lutefisk should not even be eaten fresh–why is that? A nice collection of little plastic cool whip containers that have been repurposed as leftover storage containers is a wonderful sight to see, lined up like little cold soldiers in the refrigerator, each containing a dab of something, slowly smoldering away a just above freezing, forgotten by all until someone decides to clean the refrigerator. Some people are leftovers hoarders, a strange twist in the OCD world where not even a dab of food might be thrown away. On any given day, if a leftover has not been eaten within a week of its creation, one might safely stop that experiment in the radioactive half life of Carbon 13. In my worldview of leftovers, one must make a concerted effort to consume leftovers in a timely fashion. Leftovers come into their own when they can be repurposed and turned into something else. A creative cook does more than just reheat and reserve. The great advantage of having leftovers the day after Thanksgiving is being able to haul out the repurposed cool whip containers and put on the same rich spread you had from the day before but with no work. I have refrained from discussing turkey because it is one of the foods which becomes suspect after a short while. Unlike a luscious piece of cold fried chicken, turkey becomes even blander than it was in the first place. Perhaps there is something sinister about leftover turkey which no one understands. A sandwich made of leftover turkey white meat is dry enough to choke a horse, that is, if horses ate turkey. Late night foraging into the darkly lit reaches of the average fridge is often successful is someone has been thoughtful enough to fill up the cool whip containers. There a few things sadder than the visage of one who has unsuccessfully rummaged in the fridge looking for that one last morsel of food just after midnight. Leftovers are the stuff that dreams, dark dreams that is, are made of: cranberries, peas, pork chops, mashed potatoes, gravy, carrots, black-eyed peas, rice, garbanzos. In the end, however, things that get left too long become biohazard experiments that eventually walk off under their own power.

On leftovers

Posted on by

The day after Thanksgiving, aka, Black Friday, is also the best day for leftovers during the entire year. Not that I want to eat turkey, per se, but the wide variety of leftovers can be stunning, running the gamut from green bean hotdish to sweet potatoes to stuffing to tuna and pasta salad. Now I know that some folks don’t like leftovers, but the microwave and the refrigerator were invented to prolong the life of prepared uneaten food. There is an entire philosophy of economy in the ethos of leftovers that makes eating leftovers a noble cause. For example, some foods get better the second, third, or fourth day out: meatloaf, red sauce, stuffed red peppers, roast beef, paella, meatballs, marinated artichoke hearts. Most tater tot hotdish doesn’t really reach the apotheosis of its true flavor until its third day. Yet, lutefisk should not even be eaten fresh–why is that? A nice collection of little plastic cool whip containers that have been repurposed as leftover storage containers is a wonderful sight to see, lined up like little cold soldiers in the refrigerator, each containing a dab of something, slowly smoldering away a just above freezing, forgotten by all until someone decides to clean the refrigerator. Some people are leftovers hoarders, a strange twist in the OCD world where not even a dab of food might be thrown away. On any given day, if a leftover has not been eaten within a week of its creation, one might safely stop that experiment in the radioactive half life of Carbon 13. In my worldview of leftovers, one must make a concerted effort to consume leftovers in a timely fashion. Leftovers come into their own when they can be repurposed and turned into something else. A creative cook does more than just reheat and reserve. The great advantage of having leftovers the day after Thanksgiving is being able to haul out the repurposed cool whip containers and put on the same rich spread you had from the day before but with no work. I have refrained from discussing turkey because it is one of the foods which becomes suspect after a short while. Unlike a luscious piece of cold fried chicken, turkey becomes even blander than it was in the first place. Perhaps there is something sinister about leftover turkey which no one understands. A sandwich made of leftover turkey white meat is dry enough to choke a horse, that is, if horses ate turkey. Late night foraging into the darkly lit reaches of the average fridge is often successful is someone has been thoughtful enough to fill up the cool whip containers. There a few things sadder than the visage of one who has unsuccessfully rummaged in the fridge looking for that one last morsel of food just after midnight. Leftovers are the stuff that dreams, dark dreams that is, are made of: cranberries, peas, pork chops, mashed potatoes, gravy, carrots, black-eyed peas, rice, garbanzos. In the end, however, things that get left too long become biohazard experiments that eventually walk off under their own power.

On used books

Posted on by

Very few of the books in my library were bought new. Most have a history of multiple owners, multiple readers, multiple histories. Is there anything sadder than a pristine copy of book that has never been opened? Digging through the stacks of a used book store does not always pay dividends, but it often offers up a surprise or two, something you never thought you’d find, or better yet, something you never knew existed. A used book carries its history written, literally, on its sleeve. A little tattered, perhaps, some accumulated marginalia, random underlining, dog-eared, yellowing, a used book has given up its information on more than one occasion. Used books are all different–sizes, heights, colors, widths–and form an odd collage of shapes, patterns, and textures, misfits, as it were. Used books from a variety of times and places populate a bookshelf in an original way that is unique to my collection. Perhaps there is something aesthetically appealing to having a set of books which are all bound in the same way, but it’s not as interesting as a haphazard grouping of used books acquired over a number of years in a variety of places. Used books have character, a back-story, history, an aroma which new books do not have. And used books don’t just come from used book stores. They come from other book collectors, garage sales, random antique stores, a stray vendor on a street corner. Obtaining used books is almost as interesting as having them. Building a library of your own books is satisfying and personal because you know that no one has what you have. Old books are about nostalgia, familiar stories, coming-of-age, epiphanies, research, writing, and meaning because books “mean” on a couple of levels: books are about knowledge, the accumulation of wisdom, commentary, communication. Books stand for the tradition of passing on knowledge, for the aesthetics of the word, for naming and signifying, infinitely as signs are passed from one generation of writers to another as they read their used books, make their marginal notes, form their new sentences, focus on the ideas that percolate up through the words that leak from their pens. Used books speak to an intentionality beyond the purposeful act of writing that will be the source and root for countless other writers and their new books. Old books, used books speak to reading and research, pleasure and discovery, contemplation and examination. Each book contains its own unique form and sign which also makes it like all of the other books, so the group melds and blends, juxtapositions of words, signs, and signified that create something new. So used books are much more than just books, but they were never just books in the first place. Their very presence is about our own curiosity about the world, ourselves, and the universe. Used books, new readings, old ideas, all meld in the imagination of the writer/reader/owner who is just trying to resolve the meaning of life without starting at the beginning again.

On used books

Posted on by

Very few of the books in my library were bought new. Most have a history of multiple owners, multiple readers, multiple histories. Is there anything sadder than a pristine copy of book that has never been opened? Digging through the stacks of a used book store does not always pay dividends, but it often offers up a surprise or two, something you never thought you’d find, or better yet, something you never knew existed. A used book carries its history written, literally, on its sleeve. A little tattered, perhaps, some accumulated marginalia, random underlining, dog-eared, yellowing, a used book has given up its information on more than one occasion. Used books are all different–sizes, heights, colors, widths–and form an odd collage of shapes, patterns, and textures, misfits, as it were. Used books from a variety of times and places populate a bookshelf in an original way that is unique to my collection. Perhaps there is something aesthetically appealing to having a set of books which are all bound in the same way, but it’s not as interesting as a haphazard grouping of used books acquired over a number of years in a variety of places. Used books have character, a back-story, history, an aroma which new books do not have. And used books don’t just come from used book stores. They come from other book collectors, garage sales, random antique stores, a stray vendor on a street corner. Obtaining used books is almost as interesting as having them. Building a library of your own books is satisfying and personal because you know that no one has what you have. Old books are about nostalgia, familiar stories, coming-of-age, epiphanies, research, writing, and meaning because books “mean” on a couple of levels: books are about knowledge, the accumulation of wisdom, commentary, communication. Books stand for the tradition of passing on knowledge, for the aesthetics of the word, for naming and signifying, infinitely as signs are passed from one generation of writers to another as they read their used books, make their marginal notes, form their new sentences, focus on the ideas that percolate up through the words that leak from their pens. Used books speak to an intentionality beyond the purposeful act of writing that will be the source and root for countless other writers and their new books. Old books, used books speak to reading and research, pleasure and discovery, contemplation and examination. Each book contains its own unique form and sign which also makes it like all of the other books, so the group melds and blends, juxtapositions of words, signs, and signified that create something new. So used books are much more than just books, but they were never just books in the first place. Their very presence is about our own curiosity about the world, ourselves, and the universe. Used books, new readings, old ideas, all meld in the imagination of the writer/reader/owner who is just trying to resolve the meaning of life without starting at the beginning again.

On creativity

Posted on by

Now I’m stumped. I have no idea where creativity comes from, much less what it is. This has to be one of the advantages of having a big, complex brain. Birds have tiny brains and are hard-wired for certain behaviors–nest building, food gathering, reproduction, defense–but they aren’t very creative. Creativity suggests coming up with new ideas, new forms, new plans, thinking outside the box, and not just doing things the same old way because that’s the way you learned them in the first place. Creativity also suggests innovation and novelty, thinking up new ways to do old things. Yet, creativity also means coming up with completely new and iconoclastic ways of seeing the world, being a rebel, not accepting things the way they are, promoting anarchy and fueling revolution. If it were not for creativity, for example, we would still be writing on stone tablets and sleeping under bear rugs. Creativity is linked intimately with progress. Often creativity is met with a certain amount of push-back because humans often become complacent and comfortable doing a thing just one way. We are inherently disorderly creatures, however, and are almost always open to doing things differently if it makes our lives better. All of that said, I still don’t know why we are creative. Perhaps creativity is a behavior which made our species more adaptable to changing conditions, giving us a greater chance of surviving into the next generation. All those people who were not creative, died out long ago, so being creative is a pro-survival characteristic that is hard-wired into our genetic structure: big creative brains equal species success. I’m sure that my analysis would not hold up in a neuroscience conference, but I am probably not too far from the truth. Creative people are great problem solvers, can readily recognize abstract patterns, and are fueled by more and greater sensorial inputs. The more that goes into the brain, more comes out. I suspect that all humans are very creative if we just let ourselves be creative. Yet, turning off the internal auditors and censors is just impossible for many people who fear making a fool of themselves or who fear they have nothing to share. I suspect that if encouraged, all people can be creative. All cultures, whether they are prehistoric rupestre cave cultures or contemporary urban graffiti taggers, fight to express the creativity that hums in the frontal lobe of the brain. Writers write, painters paint, inventors invent, sculptors sculpt, thinkers think and so on to the next generation that starts all over again with the crayons and finger paints. Tragically, somewhere along the line, someone tells the child that they cannot draw, or paint, or sing, or write poetry, and a nasty sword chops the head off of creativity. Conform, says the world, conform. Well, I guess I stopped listening to that voice a long time ago.

On larping and Don Quijote

Posted on by

I learned this really strange word today, “larping,” which means “live action role playing.” “Oh, you mean the problem Don Quijote has?” I asked. Larpers, if I may use the term so loosely, are people that re-enact things like the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, storming the Bastille, the sinking of the Titanic, the running of the bulls (no, wait, that’s real), besieging a castle, dying of the plague, burning a heretic, that sort of thing. These people play these roles and take their “playing” very seriously, almost to the point of absurdity. I understand this perfectly because I have been living with Don Quijote for over thirty years, and he might have been one of the first live action role players in the history of the planet if you exclude Cleopatra, Nero, Caligula and Liberace, who were all doing their best to play real people, but sort of failed somewhere along the way. I digress. Don Quijote, or Alonso Quijano, his real person name, is rather unhappy with his boring life as comfortable landed gentry in central Spain. He basically collects rents, reads lots of books, and gets older. He decides at some point in his mid-life crisis that he wants more–more adventure, more danger, more sword fights, more intrigue, more women. So he decides to play a knight errant. The only problem is that nobody else is in on his game. Larping hadn’t been invented at the beginning of the seventeenth century, so the people that he ran into were rather uncooperative regarding his fantasy world of giants, damsels, knights and magicians. A fiasco ensues, to say the least, but it’s a rather humorous fiasco with a very high entertainment factor. Quijano sets out to be a knight, putting on his great-grandfather’s old rotting putrid armor, because in real life he is socially awkward, a little alienated from society, a natural loner, but he is also someone who really does not control his own destiny. He is stuck being boring Alonso Quijano with no real objectives or goals in his life. Live action role playing is very attractive because for a moment he can step out of character, be someone heroic and valiant, dream the impossible dream, and save the day. He larps, and part of that larping is a pre-arranged bout with insanity, fighting a windmill, attacking some sheep, making friends with some prostitutes, performing a vigil while some pigs sleep. It’s complicated. To make a long story short, he feels like, for first time in his life, he is in control of something. Is that really any different than what any of us wants out of life?

On the fingerpost

Posted on by

The fingerpost is a sign in the shape of a hand with a pointing figure that medieval writers and scribes used to indicate the beginning of a text, the beginning of a new section or story, or that this section of their manuscript was particularly important. Yet, the sign of the fingerpost, though a part of the text, is not a word or a sign in any language, but was used as a universal sign of “interest” or “begin here” or “special” or “pay attention” by the speakers of many languages. Today, in our haste, we underline or use a highlighter—yellow, orange, green, purple. We have no time to draw a small hand to let our readers know that THIS is important. We are only interested in getting to our next meeting, making our next committee, attending our next event, so in our haste, we make waste with our clumsy and anti-aesthetic anonymous marking of texts. Highlighting and underlining are mark by their banal and mundane experience to such an extent that they are empty of meaning and are almost worse than nothing at all. A book that has been heavily marked is ready for the recycling bin—a merciful end. The fingerpost is different in that it took a writer or scribe or artist time to draw the thing. It is a tiny work of art that is meant as a signal to those who will encounter the text down the road when it has been turned into a book, bought, sold, traded, stolen. The fingerpost is a hand which guiltily implicates the artist, the text and itself. The fingerpost is a self-conscious mark which cannot but help drawn attention to itself, and as the new reader ponders the importance of this little hand, their eyes might wander to see if the hand is attached via wrist, arm and shoulder to an actual person. The fingerpost is a personal mark of identity left behind by a scribe who, by leaving the fingerpost, is also critic, artist, and teacher. The fingerpost is hyper-personal in ways that underlining can never be; it is a sign that may transcend its very text, indicating longing, desire, and melancholy; it is a mark that lingers in the mind’s eye, a silent, persistent, and accusing commentary on the text. Yet it is also innocent of wrong-doing, neither good nor evil, adding a new level of meaning to a text. The fingerpost, at once the synthesis and symbiosis of creation, imagination, aesthetics, design and direction, is still a human hand, lent in kindness, friendship, duty and compassion. The fingerpost is about lingering and pondering, wondering about which direction a body should go—it points in a certain direction, it points at humanity, it points at some words.