Bread

About that bread - it's the Jim Lahey no-knead bread that Mark Bittman wrote up in the New York Times a couple of years ago. It's the greatest thing ever, of course, especially since I lost the recipe. You don't need the sheet music to whistle 'Summertime' either. This bread is chewy with a great crisp crust, and the longer you let it sit before baking, the more sour it gets.

Here's the recipe in my head - possibly, probably different from the original. Mix flour, salt, and yeast, then warm water - half as much water as flour by volume. Make sure it's evenly wet, but don't worry much after that, then cover it somehow - I have a bowl with a snap-on plastic lid that is pretty airtight. You could just wrap it in plastic, but somehow you need to keep it from drying out over the next 12 hours or so. Let it sit overnight, then preheat the oven and a heavy casserole with a lid to 450 degrees. Flop the dough out and knead - no, sorry, don't knead it - roll it about a little and get it kind of round, then drop it into the hot casserole. You can rub the top with olive oil if you want. You can sprinkle it with salt. You can sprinkle it with rosemary. Cook it with the lid on for half an hour, then with the lid off for another fifteen minutes. Make everybody wait while it cools for 15 or 20 minutes on a rack - luxuriate in the power of making everybody wait. I wouldn't advise sticking too closely to this recipe - certainly not after you've made it once - it's more fun to figure out just how hard it is to screw it up. Don't let it cool too long.

Radio

Here's a good thing not to do again. I was listening to NPR Saturday morning and got angry during a segment where Scott Simon interviewed Judd Gregg, Republican US senator. The senator, a clever and determined liar, made a number of statements that Simon let pass without comment. I don't know why I was so much angrier at Simon than the senator - I think because the job of a GOP senator is to lie, which Gregg was doing perfectly well. Simon's job is to ask questions, which he was not doing so well. My opinion only.

Anyway, I found myself yelling at the radio, and then a bit later writing an email to NPR with the subject line "Tell Scott Simon to pull his head out of his ass". It was quite personal. I had a great time writing it, clicked Send and then took the dog for a walk in this frosty weather we've been having lately. Glorious walk! When I got home and checked my email, maybe an hour and a half or two hours later, there was a reply from Scott Simon.

It sure wasn't a form letter. He replied to my substantive points, alluded to my insults in that way people do when they receive a rabid attack from a stranger, and ended by making me feel about three inches tall. So I have decided not to do that again. I think and read a lot about politics, and while I don't want to renounce my citizenship or stop voting or anything, I know it would be better for my mental equilibrium if I cut back on the blind rage aspect of it. Another thing that I think would be good for the old brain and soul is to avoid insulting people I don't know - maybe even people I do know.

On the plus side - I made a great loaf of bread last night.

Dark Room

I suppose this blog is going the way of most - I haven't posted anything in a week. I've actually made two batches of beer since I last posted, and another sign of progress - I've finally broken (temporarily, I'm sure) the fatal hold P.G Wodehouse had exerted and now have a new obsession - R.K. Narayan. I came across him at random at the library, where somebody sharp and kind had turned a collection of his short novels face out at the end of the aisle. Narayan is one of these kooks who seem set on recreating a particular patch of the world, with all its inhabitants, in fictional form. This is a funny thing to do - I have no idea how it benefited James Joyce to make somebody like me feel I understand an entire city-full of 1904 people, or what advantage Narayan derives from my delight in Malgudi, but I'm happy he bothered.

"Swami and Friends" is a great classic schoolboy story of friendship, jealousy, hatred, daring, despair, bravery, all on the 12-year-old scale (i.e., about 10 times life-size). "The Bachelor of Arts" revolves around a young man's obsession with a young girl, but the relationship that killed me most dead in this book was that between the boy and his father. "The Dark Room" is about a painful situation - the abject slavery of a woman in her marriage with a callous husband - and ends in despair, more or less, but is so vivid that tragedy is eclipsed by pragmatic considerations, such as how to commit suicide; failing that, how to avoid entanglements; failing that, how to find a place outside of the home of her marriage; failing that, how to find enough rice to live. And how to leave young children in the care of an uncaring man; failing that, how to surrender. It's a great book! Still, I didn't name either of the last two beers 'Dark Room' - that would certainly have made them too bitter. Instead I made Swami IPA last weekend and Bachelor of Arts IPA today, and named this post Dark Room. I am unlikely to make an English Teacher ale next weekend, but only because all my carboys are full.

Dracula

I watched a DVD of Dracula with the Philip Glass music last night. I was interested in the music, and the movie was fun. I don't know when I last watched this - probably after school sometime in the 60s - or if I ever watched the whole thing straight through, but it was spooky and dripping with shadows, weird glows, and brooding sounds. The music is best during the long pauses while Bela Lugosi glowers at one person or another, and the slow scenes of hands groping out of coffin lids and so forth - the score oscillates in place while we wait to see what's going to happen next. There are a lot of slow scenes but the string quartet eddies and that's where the fun is anyway, watching the count slowly close in on another neck. Everything is in shadow, we see very little of what happens, and each victim basically ends up being swallowed by darkness. Dracula strangles Renfield, piqued at having been trailed to his lair, but otherwise doesn't even kick when he's staked, off camera. It's all very ritualistic. I don't know why Van Helsing stays in the cellar at the end. The last lines are kind of oddball - "Q: Aren't you coming with us? A: Not yet - presently". I suppose Van Helsing is just the type to seize on an opportunity to hang out in a vampire's lair a bit longer.

Or maybe not

Here's a post that doesn't make sense to me: Glen Branca in the NY times on how Music is At An End, or words to that effect. I don't know very much about music - my art form happens to be beer - but I have ears and it doesn't sound to me as if music is at an end. After all, if there is no new music, why is it that I'm always hearing new music? Plus, I don't like the squishy way this is written - check out the 'Maybe' construction here:

Muzak’s been around for a long time now but maybe people just can’t tell the difference anymore. Maybe even the composers and songwriters can’t tell the difference either.

You see the flaw with the Maybe clause at once, of course, and here it's heightened by the even more revolting 'Maybe even...either' construction. Luckily no one has ever read a Maybe of this shabby sort without immediately, and correctly, thinking to oneself, 'Or maybe not'. Because of course anyone can tell the difference between Muzak and music. Muzak is a protected brand name, for one thing. Ask any lawyer.

On the other hand, here's a post I really liked: Andrew Durkin on music-making as bricolage, cobbled together out of what is at hand. It isn't new, and it is. Roger Corman, quoted extensively in the post, made all those great Edgar Allan Poe movies with Vincent Price - 'Masque of the Red Death', 'Pit and the Pendulum', and so forth - those are going on the Netflix queue immediately. There's a great bit in 'Masque of the Red Death' when the evil prince played by Price realizes who the fellow in the red mask - or rather 'masque', I guess, excuse me - really is, and then flees through all the differently colored rooms of his palace. To no avail. So are those movies new, are they art? Was there any point to making them? God knows, but they are fun to watch. Anyway, it was nice to run into Durkin after Branca, and it had the effect of an antidote.

Here's a pumpkin masque, carved by my wife a couple of Halloweens ago. I inexplicably failed to document her jack-o-lantern activity this year, even though it was a banner year for her, in my opinion. You'll have to take my word for it, but her 2009 efforts were unlike any pumpkins ever carved before. They had a brand new eeriness. They provoked feelings of uneasiness never before provoked. I really should have taken a picture or two, but we'll have to settle for this.

November sun

Fantastic buckets of sunshine today. When this happens any time between November 1 and May 31st in Oregon, you take advantage or regret it for weeks. The river is so different with the rain and the cold. The willows are bare and the nests that have been hidden all summer emerge. The willows that are standing in the current tremble, or sometimes dip out of sight, maybe gone for good. It's been birdy out, as the birders say. Every time you stick your ears outdoors there are 30,000 geese swearing at each other overhead, and flocks of bush tits and chickadees are whirling through the undergrowth in profusion. I saw two hawks chasing each other, or chasing something, on a flat, direct flight through the trees on the east side of the river, then later I saw a sharp-shinned hawk with something limp dangling from one claw, and then later I saw a bald eagle.

I was also buzzed by some kind of big darner (dragonfly), but he didn't come close enough to be more than an impression. In another incident, when I drug myself through a patch of flooded willows, I found tiny spiders and fragile gnats in my hair and lap. A tough time for insects you'd think, but probably they know what they're doing. In memory of the jolly old days of August, here's one of my better dragonfly photos of the past summer.

Bones

Indians having made off with her job, my wife is now studying anatomy and physiology at the community college and the change is all for the best. She's enjoying herself, and eventually the corporation she used to work for will get its comeuppance, and the Indians have the paycheck and the headaches. It's a fine thing all the way around. Anyway, it turns out that there are a devil of a lot of bones within each and every one of us, and I'm fascinated by the names. The coracoid process for instance, up in your shoulder, is named that odd way because the bony protrusion looks beakish (crows and ravens are of the genus Corvus).

I've tried to do my bit to help her studies - singing of Ezekial in the Valley of the Dry Bones mostly, but I also made and shared with her a series of amazing discoveries of my own, clustering around the concept that the skeleton is a series of echoes of itself. For instance, the elbow is the knee of the arm, while the ankle is the wrist of the leg. The finger is the toe of the hand and the hip is the shoulder of the waist. The neck is a kind of tail, the teeth are thick white claws, and the eye is a nostril that inhales light. Every one of us has our own dry bones, and it is possible that at a word these bones might rise and dance.