Hurricane Sandy Apple Pie

Here on the east coast we've been bracing for Hurricane Sandy. I think we've got all the necessary supplies for bad weather: bottled water, cans of tuna, rolls of duct tape, flashlights and extra batteries, candles and matches, extra Cheerios, red wine, and, of course, homemade apple pie.

For the past month I've been imagining a blog post entitled "Suck it, CSA!" more often after I've been unusually successful at cooking and eating everything in the weekly CSA box. It's been a lot of collard greens, kale, green beans, butter beans, cabbage (geez, it's been a lot of cabbage), asian pears, and apples. Every week there are different apples in that box. They are generally very tasty--even the Red Delicious, a variety I'd never buy in the store because they are pretty fecking boring, as apples go. As I am the only raw apple eater in the house, the apples have piled up.

 So last night I put on my brave pants and made a pie. I used this recipe for both the pate brisee and filling.

I should admit that I have not made a pie crust from scratch in many MANY years. While I am not a bad baker, pie crusts were never my thing. Back in Seattle, I had three good friends who took care of all my homemade pie crust needs. Now that they're 3,500 miles away, I have to do it myself. Sniff. 

It was labor intensive. It was time consuming. It was fecking worth it. Oh FLAKEY flakeness. Oh complex, inviting, warm filling. Oh $7.89-a-carton Haagen Dazs vanilla ice cream on top.

Hurricane Tableau: Irony wine, apple pie, and pistols, just in case

Here, by the way, is my child in her cabbage leaf hat, which she thinks is hilarious. How I wish that kid would eat some of the things I cook from my weekly CSA, instead of just wearing it all.

Pure Gold

Preliminary results from tonight's rushed research session conducted at another local university's better-stocked library (God bless them for having nineteenth-century British newspaper databases!):

HARPOCRATES.—Young and pure love is as bashful as bashful can be. Its language is sighs, furtive glances, blushes, and strange, but warm heart-flutterings. It is intuitive, and needs no interpreter. Love on; you are bathed in sunshine, if you only knew it. When the mystic time comes, your tongue will be loosened, and gallop fast enough.

J. N. solicits our advice upon a delicate subject. She says, a widower, about sixty, has paid his addresses to her for some time. He has no incumbrance, but has some cash. Therefore she asks, whether it would be an imprudent match, as she is but six-and-twenty, and considered handsome. Has our fair correspondent any other lover nearer her own age? And if she has not, does she entertain a suitable affection for the old gentleman? If she can answer these two plain questions satisfactorily to herself, and her ancient bean is of good moral character, we don’t see any very dreadful objection to the match. In these economizing days, competence with an old husband is preferable to poverty with a young one. But we must warn her that old husbands are horridly jealous of young wives, and apt to play the tyrant on every trivial occasion. In matrimony all violent disparities are avenged some way or another. Still we do not pronounce against the match. Men are scarce, women plentiful; and no woman ought to refuse an offer at all decent and prudent.

I think the clear disparity of tone is what I love most about these entries in the Notices to Correspondents section of an 1852 issue of the London Journal. To the dude, the editor is like, "keep cool and dulcet locution will follow; the girl is destined to comply" To the gal, the editor is like, "take the old guy--your choices are slim as it is."

Breakthroughs

Courtesy of Wayne Booth's ideas about Tristram Shandy circa 1952, I just realized that matrimonial advertisements must be discussed as a comic genre with a recognizable set of literary devices. Because every time I present my research on "the mats" (as I call them), people find it quite funny. At VSAWC last spring, an audience member asked if I'd ever worked as a stand-up. Perhaps I should quit my day job. More on this later--my conference paper for Victorians Institute percolates.

Mat's many breakthroughs? In one short period of time she's learned how to say no, and to walk away from me. This coincides with a refusal to nurse--and we were down to once a day, first thing in the morning, combined with major family snuggle time. The last time I nursed her was about a week ago. I miss it. But I can be only a little sad about this: my girl has discovered independence. She is hell bent on being the boss of herself, and I can't blame her. In fact I'll help her. She's mini-me but she's Big-Her.

The usual view of the kid these days...

Good thing that fence was there, or we might have lost her!

the joblist

I giggle and groan every time I look at this tumblr.

Moved

Here we are in our new home, new office, new job, new city, new daycare, new used car! Evidently, we still have unpacking to do. Moving boxes really are some of the best toys.

I have a few preliminary notes.

1. There are not enough independently owned coffeehouses in this town.
2. There are NO espresso stands on my new campus.
3. The rain here puts Seattle's to shame.
4. I plan to buy stock in bug repellant.
5. I still have not completed my syllabi*, and school starts in 9 days.
6. I was dismayed at the size of the collection in the library at my new job (spoiled am I thanks to 12 years' access to major R-1 university stacks), but then the awesome librarian figured out how I can get access to the nineteenth-century newspapers I need for my current research project, and I felt better.
6a. When will I find time to write that Victorians Institute conference paper? This is not a rhetorical question.
7. My child took her first steps this week.

*For my composition course, I am planning a research paper unit involving The Lifespan of a Fact but I am bewildered about how to write the actual essay assignment (from which all scaffolding unfolds, so you see the problem, yes?). I am also planning a textual analysis assignment involving The Phantom Tollbooth. This unit offers no trouble at all. 

The Missing Frontispiece

No, this is not a post about Shel Silverstein's book.

Yesterday I went to Suzzalo Library where a librarian from the Maps collection helped me re-scan the over-sized woodcut images for my chapter to be published in a forthcoming collection about material life in the British Empire. To accomplish this task, I had the same bound copy of The Graphic 1869 (an illustrated weekly newspaper) brought out from the Auxiliary Stacks that I had used when I originally wrote the essay about four years ago.

I discovered that the frontispiece to the volume is gone. Where did it go? Was it stolen? Destroyed? Who would do such a thing? Here is what it looked like:



It's beautiful, isn't it? It's a woodcut reproduction of Edouard Richter's "Odalisque." Richter was a French painter of the Orientalist school of art. My essay discusses the figure of the Odalisque in relation to the Angel of the House (linked to one another through a breath mint, of all things--that's what my essay is really about, Victorian Altoids). Anyway, thank God for digital reproduction. A mysteriously missing frontispiece: that's what I get for dithering with ephemera.

Moving

We are moving. Mathilde is moving.

We, as in my family, are moving across the country to the East Coast, to a charming beachy-yet-metropolitan area where I accepted a tenure-track English Literature professor position at a SLAC. I was hired to teach my specializations: Victorian literature, post-colonial theory, women's studies. I have captured a unicorn.

Mathilde, as in the 13-month-old, is moving her body in all kinds of new ways. Here she is trying to sit back down after pulling herself to a stand using her toy bin as an anchor.

This morning, after a physical therapist came to find out why, at the ripe old age of ONE YEAR, our kid still isn't crawling, sitting up by herself, or pulling up to stand, Mathilde decided to start doing all of those things. Little Miss Contrary. Now we have to babyproof the house. The first thing she did after crawling back and forth across the living room floor was make her way over to my laptop cord and wrap it around her neck.

We have four weeks left of Seattle's crappy "summer" weather before we hit the heat. I am packing up my books for the third time in four years. Only this time? Most of them are going to go live in My New Office, on shelves where they'll stay more or less for years (unless I'm using them) to inspire students to read! question! analyze! write! learn! My books are verrrrrrry happy about this (unlike in July 2010).