will read for food

(After seeing the BBC production on DVD)

Oddly enough, King John is nearly the least interesting character in it. He doesn’t really come into his own until Acts IV and V, when things are going seriously downhill for him. But I suppose that’s par for the course in Shakespeare. It is our disintegrations that most interest the Bard.

In the BBC production, the show was stolen by Mary Morris (Queen Elinor), Claire Bloom (Constance) and the guy who plays Philip Faulconbridge, also known as Richard, “the Bastard.”  In fact, in terms of roles he’s the most interesting guy in the play. He’s kind of a running jester/cynic/commentator on what’s going on, although his cynicism gradually gives way to actual sense of purpose. He’s the only person in the whole play who develops as a character.

Mary Morris did a great job as Elinor, coming across as self-possessed and ambitious, and a bit scary–not above using seduction if the occasion calls for it. (Some really strange scenes there between her and the Bastard, who becomes, in effect, her knight). Shakespeare has a knack for writing impressive older women.

So the play was fascinating and frustrating by turns. The best parts and best lines went to characters who just vanish between one Act and the next. Through all of Act III Elinor and Constance rail at each other (and its a thing of beauty), then suddenly, they’re gone. Died, off stage, erased from the story. And suddenly too, the Dauphin–when introduced one might think a wet blanket had more personality than he–suddenly he’s front and center, leading invasions into England, sneering at all and sundry.

I know alot of my complaints are based on a modern sense of narrative and character development, but really, the whole story is so fractured, it’s hard to think about it in its entirety. I keep focusing on small scenes and actions instead. Lovely little bits like Hubert’s description of the civil unrest–of a tailor, in such haste to tell the news to his friend the smith that he put his shoes on the wrong feet before he ran out into the street:

I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus,
The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool,
With open mouth swallowing a tailor’s news;
Who, with his shears and measure in his hand,
Standing on slippers, which his nimble haste
Had falsely thrust upon contrary feet,
Told of a many thousand warlike French
That were embattailed and rank’d in Kent

I love stuff like that in Shakespeare. It makes you realize that he must have absorbed life like a sponge. Nothing seems too small to be unworthy of notice or comment.

King John, then, is a drama where the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. In this play, the men are mostly foolish, the women mostly wise, and the children all are sacrifices.

How is it that I never knew one of the greatest libraries amassed in Europe during the Renaissance–second only to the collection of the Medicis and the Pope,  belonged to an all but forgotten Hungarian king, Matthais Hunyadi, also known as Matthias Corvinus, the Raven King? The man whom Italy looked to keep the Ottoman Turks at bay, whose capital could only be reached from Italy by three months of hard traveling over a bandit-infested mountain wilderness, and who yet drew Italian scholars, poets and intellectuals to his court, (along with certain political prisoners and royalty in exile, such as Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad the Impaler, and sometimes as Dracula). A man who was universally regarded as the ideal philosopher-king.

The King’s Trophy and Sanctuary

Then there was the library, the King’s trophy and sanctuary. Here, Naldo  Naldi wrote, sunbeams poured through high, stained glass windows, casting curious patterns on the vaulted ceilings. Beneath tall lancet windows, light fell on to the King’s couch, a ‘bed with golden coverings on which the royal hero is often wont to snatch some peaceful rest for his limbs.’ Here the King reclined, scrutinising a recently purchased illuminated manuscript, or chairing a debate between rival clerics or philosophers… (p.2)

In reverence of the Goddess of Wisdom

In the library, light also fell on to jewel-encrusted veils, set in place to shield the most expensive and cherished items of the collection from the bleaching sunlight. These books did not lie stacked upon one another in heavy chests like the majority of volumes. They stood upright on snakeskin tripods, waiting for the hand of the King, Queen, or the librarians, to part the curtain and reveal the liquid colors beneath.

According to Naldi, the curious bookrests attracted particular interest ‘because the spotted skin of a snake covered those tripods and a shining gold-colored cloth covered them, adorned with so many heavy gems and sparkling precious stones that you would think Matthias had accumulated whatever the kings of Persia are thought to have possessed.’ The Florentine likened the care lavished on these exotic tripods to Matthias’s reverence for the goddess of wisdom, for it was the tripods that ‘receive the greatest authors’ and wisdom itself that ‘opens the books that ought to be read, which the ancient ones composed, and which taught what wisdom was.’ (p.2)

The literary tastes of an alpha-male

The surviving 216 volumes, containing more than 600 works, show that Matthias had the literary tastes of a classic ‘alpha male’.  It has often been noted that he had a marked preference for secular as opposed to religious works. Indeed, once one subtracts liturgical aids such as bibles, gospels, psalters, missals and brevaries, which in any case belonged in the separate palace chapel library, there are not many books like Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary, now kept in Melk Abbey, Austria, which can be categorised as devotional works. Even within the broad category of secular works from the library it is easy to spot Mattias’s particular enthusiasms: war stories, lives of great rules, and books about inventions, geography, medicine, natural wonders and the stars. (p.7)

–From The Raven King: Matthias Corvinus and the Fate of his Lost Library, by Marcus Tanner (Yale University Press, 2008)

Library Tour from Nicki Leone on Vimeo.

This book was one long biblio-fantasy: great literature, re-bound with a writer’s love for the story within, an artist’s eye, an artisan’s care and feel for the beauty in the volume, seeded with secret messages, stories and codes, all written from one disappeared lover to the man she left behind. How can you resist? I couldn’t.

There are quite a few rooms full of books in this novel…nearly every scene is somehow described as a setting for one of Irma Arcuri’s beautiful books. But here are two of my favorites from the novel.

The arrival of Irma’s books:

The books arrived in one week, two refrigerator-sized boxes with protective packaging. They were packed alphabetically, impact-guarded, and marked fragile. He shelved them the way she shelved them–alphabetically, with no consideration of history, nationality, genre, or theme. They transcended these divisions, and Philip knew–somehow understood–that this was why she’d had them. They were splendorous together, in their cloth and leather bindings of jewel toned yellow, green, red or blue, or the more austere black and burgundy. No jackets, with titles embossed in gold, silver, brass, or iron. Most she had re-bound or restored herself, using period materials and tools. This was easy, she told him, because we use tools similar to those used since the fifteenth century. I could walk into an eighteenth century bookbinder’s shop, she explained, and have no trouble sewing up Defoe’s first volumes. Her shop and her mentor’s shop looked like museums, with their mallets and presses, awls and knives. Their work floors held the smells of old leathers, parchment, and linseed. Sometimes in their dark corners he would find a jar filled with a petrified volume soaking in amber linseed, the book’s fused pages beginning to separate like petals. If he lingered too long by one of these jars, she would crouch behind it and peer at him through the xanthic oil, her face magnified, tinted, and swirled around sharply focused eyes. Eyes aimed at him, not the sloughing book fossil. If we stir it softly with a wooden spoon, she taunted, it will all dissolve like a sugar cube in tea. (p.10)

The book collector and her husband:

Miriam Haupt loved Irma. She brokered antiquarian books, but in her retirement had become exclusively a collector. She and her husband owned a small apartment building, painted blue alongside the many other apartment buildings mortared together, all left to face to the colors of again paper along one continuous wall. Each flat in the Haupt building was filled with books. The Haupts themselves dwelled on the second floor, every room lined with bookshelves. The other floors were occupied exclusively by books and a wandering cat to fend off mice. Each decade of Miriam’s retirement seemed marked by the ousting of a tenant and the designation of another floor for books. Her husband Vlad Ballestreros, a professor of mycology at the university, often got himself lost in the stacks. He loved their smells, the breath of the molds and fungi he studied. Whenever Philip went with Irma to visit, Senor Ballestreros could be heard thumping around on one of the floors and he would eventually call down, or up, in his shaky Castilian croak and say he would be right there to join. He would only appear hours later, blinking and out of breath as though he had just surfaced from a dive or dream.

The man stands in the empty lot,
practicing his casting.
He looks like the dictionary
definition of fisherman—
old trucker’s cap, heavy
flannel shirt, muddy jeans—
work boots, though, not waders,
planted on the earth.

His fly fishing pole gleams,
it’s the shiniest thing about him.
His arm draws back, his wrist snaps
forward, his shoulders roll and his torso
twists fluid and smooth, over and over,
like dancing with your feet braced.

The line arches out, floats over the dirt
comes gently down and pulls
back a breadth before it can land;
the pole bends, whips, draws infinity
symbols in the air above his head.

Behind his back, traffic mutters
ignored and ignoring.

In front of his feet, the dead
winter grass doesn’t stir.

Before his eyes, river water
rushes, sun bright on its racing,
tumbling surface and fish hide
unseen in the calmer eddies
behind the rocks.

Okay, this doesn’t really qualify as a “room full of books.”  It’s more of a “what books are in the room?” post. But I just spent approximately 24 of the last 48 hours on airplanes and in airports (note to self, Vegas is too far away to be a “day trip”). Naturally, I found myself peering at all the books people were reading. With somewhat surprising results:

Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen.   Really, since this was the very first book I noticed someone reading, I thought it was a good omen.

Killer Angels by Jeff Shaara

Santa Fe Rules by Stuart Woods

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.   I have a private theory that in any given group of people reading books, one of them will be reading this one.

Three Cups of Tea

Olive Kitteredge

Great Expectations (Penguin Classics edition) Which begs the question, why, o why would anyone want to read a Dickens novel sitting in a center seat near the engines on a four hour flight that was over-booked?

Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. That would be me. The guy two rows up may have been trying to escape the crowded conditions by reading Dickens. But I, on the other hand, was reading about Joseph Banks in Tahiti. He was having a really good time.

I didn’t see a single Kindle or other eReader, and I was looking. Even the folks with iPhones seemed to be mostly playing games and watching videos. I’m not sure what it means that the books I saw people reading on a plane trip to Vegas included Dickens and Tim O’Brien, but I found it oddly comforting.

So one day North Carolina poet Laura Hope-Gill was wandering around the Internet and she came across the Blue Ridge photographs of Asheville photographer John Fletcher.  She was so moved by what she saw she sat down and wrote poems about each of them, right then and there. Then she emailed the poems to Fletcher (and what a gift that must have been to find in his inbox the next morning). He sent her more photos. She wrote more poems. And naturally, like grass growing tall in the summer, the poems and the photos came together to become a book.

Conversation

The tree said to the sunlight:
How is it I do not grow tired?

The sun said to the evergreen:
You are what I turn into

When I want to touch the earth.

The Soul Tree ended up as an Okra Pick from Southern indie booksellers, despite its list price of $49.95. (We used soy ink and environmentally-friendly printing methods, said the author, because we couldn’t do a book celebrating nature and destroy it in the process). But what I like about the poems is their immediacy, against the eternal feeling of mountains and old trees.

A River Dies of Thirst, Mahmoud Darwish

Sometimes, when I feel overwhelmed by life, I’ll pick up random books from my shelves and open them to random pages.  It’s a habit I’ve had since I was a very young girl and I’m sorry to say that it originally came from reading Richard Bach’s Illuminations. But now, I’m not looking for messages from the universe. It is more like having a mental reset button, or seeking a change of internal scenery. If I’m lucky, I’ll breathe in the words, and life will be a little bit different when I look back up from the page. If that happens, I’ll post it here.

Summer and winter

There is nothing new. The seasons here are two:
a summer as long as a far away minaret
and a winter like a nun praying
As for spring
it cannot stop
except to say: ‘Greetings to you
on Ascension Day’
While autumn
is merely a place of seclusion
in which to contemplate how much of our life we have lost
on the return journey
‘Where did we leave our life behind?’ I asked the butterfly
circling around in the light
and it burnt up in its tears.

-Mahmoud Darwish, A River Dies of Thirst (Archipelago Books, 2009)

Tomosas

I’m in the middle of a small war right now with the neighborhood stray cat. He has decided that the best place to hang out while stalking rabbits is in the middle of my tomato plants. This is an issue for me because a) I like to see bunnies on my lawn and I don’t particularly want them killed and b) the cat does a little more than just sit in the garden, if you know what I mean. And while I’m all about homegrown food and organic gardening, finding cat droppings in the middle of my tomato patch is a little TOO organic for me.

My mother has always been an avid gardener. I’ll never forget the year she planted–in a fit of misguided enthusiasm–not one, not two, but SIX hills of zucchini. I believe our backyard accounted for about 5% of the world’s production of zucchini that year. But once I left home I lost whatever skills I might have gleaned. I lived in a series of run-down and dark apartments and tended to be more concerned with finding the money for dinner than trying to actually grow it. My thumb never got any greener than a few pots of herbs on a kitchen windowsill.

This changed when I moved south. Suddenly I was living in houses, not apartments, and living in a climate with a 286-day growing season, not a 120-day one. I became what you might call a “Darwinian” gardener–the plants in my garden must survive in a climate of benign neglect, with rare attempts at weeding or pruning, and only infrequent watering. Lettuce is allowed to bolt and re-seed. Compost is left to its own devices. I currently have a rather vigorous pumpkin vine growing where last year’s jack-o-lantern fell from the porch and was allowed to return to the earth unhindered. But there is one type of plant that is exempt from my general mistreatment–the tomato.

I still remember the first time I ever tasted southern Sweet 100s cherry tomatoes as one of the defining foodie moments of my life. Tomatoes that you could eat like candy! I was beyond shocked, and immediately went looking at farmer supply stores for plants. In an unconscious imitation of my mother’s earlier enthusiasm, I bought six. I think I was responsible for about 5% of the world’s production of cherry tomatoes that year. Since that time, I have always had tomatoes in my southern garden–in a full vegetable bed if I had the space and time, or in large pots on the porch if I didn’t. I grew Sweet 100′s for their taste and Better Boys because that is what the neighbors grew. And then one day I saw a picture of a Costoluto Genovese in a seed catalog. It was a princess of a tomato, an heirloom with a lovely lobed shape so that when sliced, each slice had beautifully scalloped edges. It was supposed to be an excellent slicing tomato, and an excellent sauce tomato, but not a tomato with a long shelf life. This last caveat did not phase me because I lived, at the time, in a tiny house with no air conditioning. So in the summertime nothing had a shelf life longer than about six hours.

For the first time in my life, I fell in love with a food–with a specific kind of food. With a specific variety of a specific kind of food. It was the mere sight of the Costoluto Genovese tomato that made me decide to try growing tomatoes from seed. I started combing seed catalogs for other heirlooms. Suddenly tomatoes were not those mushy, watery, tasteless things you slid off your burgers. They were fun and exciting and pretty and–oh yeah–tasted good. I tried a rainbow of cultivars from Yellow Pears to Brandywine Pinks to Cherokee Purples (which get my vote as the ugliest tomato ever). I grew San Marzanos and Principe Borgheses with the idea that I’d do a lot of canning (I never got around to it). I grew a few yellow and orange tomato varieties and ended up with the most lovely tomato salads. I toyed with the idea of growing “Green Zebras” and “Russian Blacks” but lost my nerve.

It isn’t always clear what the term “heirloom” means. In general, the term implies that the cultivar has been around for more than fifty years. It also implies that the plants are open-pollinated (you know, by bees and things). But this isn’t always the case–some hybrids (which require controlled pollination) like yellow pears are considered heirlooms, possibly because they are simply so pretty. Open pollination comes with its own set of considerations. Heirloom tomatoes can’t be bred for disease resistance, for example. Their yield is more unpredictable since they depend on a supply of willing and happy pollinators. Heirloom varieties also must be picked before they become fully ripe, since they are not bred for long shelf lives and once ripe, must be eaten almost immediately.

There are an astonishing number of “heirloom” tomato varieties available–some of them with stories as colorful as their skins. My favorite is the “Mortgage Lifter”, aka “Radiator Charlie.” It sounds like a thug from a Chicago mob but it was so named, apocryphally, by a man named MC Byles, who sold the cultivar for a dollar a plant to pay off his house when his radiator business went under during the Depression. Alas, Mortgage Lifters and Brandywine Pinks–the two heirlooms that may be responsible for the current craze in heirloom varieties–defied my gardening skills. They are “beefteak” tomatoes–the kind with very large fruit that is very solid and meaty, with small seed cavities. I learned after several frustrating years that I did not have the mentality to grow goliath-sized beefsteak tomatoes–I invariably lost them to the bugs, worms, moths and caterpillars that flourish in the south as easily as do the plants. I also found, through trial and error, that cultivars that tend towards odd shapes–the pointed San Marzanos, for example, and even my lovely lobed Costoluto Genovese–often developed cracks and spots if, as often happened, I was not too diligent about watering.

The tomatoes the neighborhood cat finds so useful for stalking (among other things) are Tomosas and Sweet 100s; what I think of as my “old reliables.” (A term I adopted from a children’s book called Junket about a city family that buys a farm without knowing anything about farming).  I planted them because it is a new house and a new garden and there was nothing established. They are more forgiving about watering (or the lack thereof) and they are quite forgiving about wildlife. It is a struggle just to keep the beds relatively cat- and rabbit- free without fussing over a tomato that came from a plant someone found in a holler somewhere in the Appalachian mountains.

Heirloom Tomato Patch, June 3, 2009

Although, I believe I have one of those, because this year a good friend dropped off a flat of 16 different heirloom tomato plants–no single one alike.  They were the leftovers from some “combat obesity” drive, if you can believe it, although by the time they got to me they were all looking a little spindly and forlorn in their red plastic beer cups. Here’s a list of the plants:

Black (deep red)

Black from Tula- regular leaf, 8-12oz., purple-black, great flavor, loves heat

Black Cherry- black (deep red), regular leaf, abundant

Bicolor, white, green-when-ripe, yellow, or orange

Big Rainbow- regular leaf, deep gold with red splashes, good flavor, fair yield

Earl of Edgecombe- regular leaf, orange color, big producer, 6-12oz, grows in clusters, heat and humidity tolerant

Super Snow White- ivory, regular leaf, large, ~75days to production

Isis Candy- regular leaf, yellow-gold color, very large, low yield, ~80 days to production

Pink

Eva Purple Ball- regular leaf, deep pink, uniform color, disease and bug resistant

Giant Belgium- regular leaf, pink color, high yields

Good for Tomato Paste/Sauce

Rio Grande- regular leaf, red, very productive, great flavor, good for paste

Marianne’s Peace- dark pink, potato leaf, very productive, good for paste

San Marzano- a variety of plum tomato considered by many chefs to be the best sauce tomatoes in the world, gift from the Kingdom of Peru to the Kingdom of Naples in 1770, thinner and pointier than Roma tomatoes, first grown in volcanic soil of Mt.Vesuvius

Red

Red Calabash-regular leaf, fluted, red color, 69-80 days to production

Camp Joy- red, regular leaf, strong vines, ~60 days to production

Clint Eastwood’s Rowdy Red-really red, robust, 8oz. globes

Tondo Liscio- smooth, round, Italian eating tomato, red color

Cuor di Bue- red color, also known as the ”Bulls Heart” and ”Giant Ox Heart” tomato. Superb tasting, fleshy,”Ox Heart” beef tomato, so called because of its size and shape, a lovely slicing tomato due to it’s meaty flesh, and few seeds, unbeatable in salads or with slices of fresh Mozzarella and basil, fruits typically 150-180g each in weight, but can get much larger.

Heirloom tomato patch, June 27, 2009

Honestly. “Clint Eastwood Rowdy Red?” I wanted to grow these just because of the names.  So far, they are looking pretty good.

If you are interested in growing heirloom tomatoes, you are in luck. There are a couple of local nurseries that grow varieties especially at home here in the hot and humid Southeast. Shelton Herb Farm is where I go for my Sweet 100s plants. (Do not buy six plants unless you are trying to feed a small country).

Shelton Herb Farm
340 Goodman Road
Leland, NC 28451
(off Route 17)

The local farmers’ markets, such as the Riverfront market on Saturdays downtown, or the Pender County market on Wednesday mornings at Poplar Grove also have a few local farms who supply heirloom vegetables (I picked up a gorgeous bunch of multicolored carrots at the Riverfront Market last Saturday that were almost too pretty to eat). And while it is long past the time when you could start your tomatoes from seed, there are at least two seed suppliers that are excellent resources for heirloom varieties if you want to plan for next year:

Seed Savers Exchange
www.seedsavers.org

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
www.southernexposure.com

In the meantime, you can always raid your neighbor’s garden. The tomatoes will still be green for at least another two weeks, but even green tomatoes have their uses:

Fried Green Tomatoes:

2 lb Green tomatoes
4 ea Eggs
1 1/4 c Corn meal
3/4 c Water
1/4 c Minced chives
1 tb Salt
1/4 ts Pepper, fresh ground
1/4 c Butter or margarine

Slice the tomatoes 1/2 inch thick, but do not peel or core. Drain
well between several thicknesses of paper toweling until most of the
moisture of the tomatoes is absorbed. While the tomatoes are
draining, make a batter by beating the eggs until light, then mixing
in the corn meal, water, minced chives, salt and pepper. In a large,
heavy iron skillet, heat the butter or margarine until bubbly. Dip
the tomato slices into batter, and brown quickly on both sides. Serve
at once.

I’ve been re-reading Gatsby. And oddly enough, although I am quite convinced that this is the perfect novel, and despite the fact that I’m on my third or fourth reading, and that I am usually inclined to remember when a book talks about rooms full of books, I remembered almost nothing about this odd little scene in Gatsby’s library.

I suppose everyone who prides themselves on their personal library has secretly imagined their books as a kind of ultra-flattering self-portrait. Who hasn’t gazed at their own bookshelves and imagined, smugly, what impressive conclusions a stranger doing the same might draw about their their owner?  Fitzgerald has a rather biting, unkind comment about this sort of self-conceit in this scene, which occurs before the narrator has ever spoken to Gatbsy. Up until this moment, he knows his neighbor only from a late evening sighting on the lawn, and a collection of wild rumors about his exploits during the Great War.

The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded but Gatsby was not there. She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn’t on the veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.

A stout, middle-aged man with enormous owl-eyed spectacles was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.

“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.

“About what?”

He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.

“About that. As a matter of fact, you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”

“The books?”

He nodded.

“Absolutely real–have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact they’re absolutely real. Pages and—Here! Lemme show you.”

Taking our skepticism for granted he rushed to the bookcasses and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”

“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too–didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.