Christmas Tree Bread, 2015

2015

This past Sunday I baked--once again--the Christmas tree bread that I've baked every year for, oh, too long. (I did a post about this a few years ago with some details--link to 12/12/2012.)

I almost didn't do them this year. It's a lot of physical effort, and I've become something of a wuss in the last couple of years (i.e., my accelerating dotage). Also, I'm not really sure than anyone else in the family (save Joyce) is as crazy about them as I am. (Each year I send the large one--pictured above--to my brothers in Massachusetts, who generally have Christmas together with their loved ones, including my mom.) I don't know how much of it actually gets consumed there.

It was Mom, as I wrote about in 2012, who made the first ones I remember from boyhood. She probably got the recipe from one of those homemaking magazines--but I'm not sure. I am sure that she would not remember now if I asked her: She's 96--holding on, but her traitor memory is being his treacherous self.

I can't remember when I first started baking them. I started baking bread early in our marriage (Dec. 20, 1969), entirely for pecuniary reasons in those days: We were struggling graduate students living on Joyce's $2500 teaching assistantship at Kent State and my paltry public school teaching salary, which was $7506.00 in 1969-70.

Anyway, we got so fond of homemade bread that we've very rarely had "store-bought" bread of any kind in our house since the early 1970s. I cannot remember the last time. (I make loaves, rolls, pizza dough, muffins, scones, etc.)

In the summer of 1986, on a trip to Alaska and the Yukon with our son (who had just turned 14) (I was in the early stages of my Jack London-mania), I bought some sourdough starter in Skagway, Alaska, and I've been using it ever since. It will turn 30 this August. I have baked with it just about every week since then.

I can't remember if I made the tree bread with yeast before I began my sourdough era. I think I did. But I know I've been making it for at least a quarter-century with the sourdough.

The recipe is one I sort of improvised, then tinkered with over the years: sourdough, oat and wheat and white flour, honey, salt, milk, candied fruit, slivered almonds, sliced apricots (my favorite!). Later--after the baking (on the day of consumption)--I heat it a little, spread an icing (looking like snow, of course) over it, sprinkle more candied fruit (tree decorations!) with a maraschino cherry atop. It is a sweet-ish bread but not like a donut or something--definitely not like a fruitcake. It's more a bread--somewhat sweet and fruity and nutty--but not offensively so (to me). Does that make sense?

2011, slightly fuzzy!

You can slice it--or rip away chunks (my favored technique). It re-heats wonderfully well.

This year--as is my wont--I posted pictures (see top and bottom pix) on Facebook--and got some questions from Friends, queries which I hope this post has answered.

I do know this: There are several things we eat here on Christmas that help make it Christmas: one is the tree bread, another is the white fruitcake (from a recipe my grandmother Osborn used--I've posted about it here), another is that same grandmother's steamed pudding, a concoction so sweet that, as I told my mom on the phone the other day, you need to go to the dentist immediately afterwards, for your teeth begin to rot the moment you take your first bite. (Mom was kind enough to laugh.)

Hey, Christmas is for calories, right?

PS--The recipe I now use makes two large trees or four smaller ones or (my custom) one large and two small. As I said, I send the larger one to Massachusetts; we eat one of the smaller ones; we freeze the final one, sometimes taking it to social events in the summer. Just for fun.

2015

Frankenstein Sundae, 187

Valperga

So … Mathilda and Maurice were two of her writing projects during her sad sojourn in Italy, 1818–1823. But these were smaller in scope and required nothing like the effort she expended to research and write a novel published in February 1823 (several months before she left to return to England) as Valperga: Or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca.

In the scholarly edition of the novel, editor Nora Cook notes that Mary had originally thought of the idea before they’d left for Italy, but the idea took shape at Naples in early 1819; but there, reports Crook, the research materials were not sufficient, so it was in Pisa and the nearby Bagni de Pisa (Baths of Pisa—about 3.5 miles northeast) that Mary did the bulk of her work.[1]

It is a long novel—more than 325 pages in Crook’s edition (which features a smallish font!)—and deals with some historical events and figures in medieval Italy. I’ll confess that I didn’t know very much (okay, nothing at all) about these events—and had never heard of Castruccio—before I read her book between March 20–31, 1997, very early in my “Mary Shelley period.” I had retired from public school teaching only about two months earlier and had really just begun working full-time on Mary and her work. So I have to say that I was a bit … ignorant … when I read the novel.

I compensated, though, as I just discovered when I checked my file on Valperga: fifteen single-spaced pages of notes. That’s what one (I) does (do) when one (I) doesn’t (don’t) know very much: Write down everything.

But do not despair. I am not going to summarize the story in detail (something that, I know, is a very powerful narcotic). But I’ll give you a swift, sort of Wikipedian notion of what her novel is about—a novel, I confess, that I read because I knew I should rather than because I was mesmerized.

It deals with the war between the Guelphs and Ghibellines (contending forces in northern Italy … want to know more? Look it up yourself!) and the rise of Castruccio, who would lead the winners (the Ghibellines, defending Florence) and would have relationships with two key women—Euthanasia (scary name—so close) and Beatrice. (Dante, by the way, was living at the time, though he appears only allusively in the novel).

Euthanasia doesn’t fare well. Near the end of the novel (spoiler alert!), sent away by Castruccio, she boards a ship, which encounters a storm with huge, dark columns, descending from heaven and a bunch of other bad stuff. The ship is lost—with all on board. Among the ruins that wash up? A broken mast, round which, tangled with some of its cordage, was a white silk handkerchief, such a one as had bound the tresses of Euthanasia the night before she had embarked, and in its knot were a few golden hairs. … She slept in the oozy cavern of the ocean; the sea-week was tangled with her shining hair ….[2]

Again, let’s be careful about reading too much autobiography into an author's novel. But … only seven months before publication, Percy Bysshe Shelley had drowned during a storm at sea.

And, while we’re at it, a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair survives and was on display at the New York Public Library in 2011 (link to story).[3]

---

[1] The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, Vol. 3 (London: William Pickering, 1996), xi.

[2] Ibid., 322.

[3] Huffington Post, 11 May 20111.

Sunday Sundries, 79

1. AOTW: Please! It's not that hard to use your turn signal!

2. This week I finished Jeremy Lewis' biography Tobias Smollett (2003), a book I decided to read now that I'm nearing the end of all the novels written by Smollett (1721-1771). I had not really known too much about him, and one of the main things I learned from Lewis is that not a lot of other people do, either. Lewis assumes that most people have not read any of Smollett's novels (and other works--fair assumption), so he gives lengthy summaries of them (not my favorite parts), and he also does what other biographers do about folks who weren't kind enough to leave lots of documentation about their personal lives: He tells us  much about the history and politics and culture of the period, hoping, I guess, that Smollett (like Waldo) will come into view. Only moderate success in that regard.

I learned, too, what a ferocious worker Smollett was. He died at fifty and spent almost all of his time researching and writing. Amazing what he produced in such a short career. (Check out his Wikipedia entry.)

Lewis also highly recommended Smollett's late travel book (Travels Through France and Italy, 1766), which I've just ordered. Lewis says it's rude, crude, disrespectful, curmudgeonly--just what I like!

3. I was sad to learn yesterday of the death of Dale Walker, one of the most prolific Jack London scholars. I own and have read many of his books and had great respect for him. Here are links to his obituary (obituary) and to his Jack London books on Amazon (JL books).

4. Last night, Joyce and I went to see the film Brooklyn, based on the Colm Tóibín novel (link to film trailer). I didn't recognize a single actor--except Jim Broadbent, who played an American priest)--but was very impressed with all of them. I had read the novel a few years ago (prepping to review another Tóibín novel), and my memory is that the book had a little darker atmosphere, a sharper edge, than the film--which (except in a few moments) seems a tad too syrupy and romantic. (Lots of lingering shots on blue eyes that never blink.) Still ... I liked Brooklyn a lot and had those buzzing moments common to all who've read a book, then seen the movie based on it. And with the current fierce debate about immigration it was gripping to watch a film based on the story of a young Irish woman emigrating to America in the early 1950s.

5. We've started streaming (Netflix) the 2nd season of Broadchurch, a Brit-mystery series that we liked a lot last year. Dark, dark, dark. A child's murder, etc. We had to pause episode 2.1, though, because we couldn't really remember how the 1st season had ended. So we watched 1.7 again. The male lead is David Tennant, who appears in Shakespearean roles (including a recent Hamlet--2009--which I didn't really care for (sigh)), and he comes off well as a troubled detective, darkened and nearly broken by Experience.

The woman--Olivia Colman (whom I don't recall seeing before)--is strong as a former local detective whose life is shattered by the child-death case. (I see that she was in Hot Fuzz, 2007, which I liked--but I don't remember her.)

Season 2, so far (we've watched only 1 1/2 episodes) deals with an earlier case that Tennant had solved (did he?), and the decision of the confessed murderer in Season 1 to change his plea to not guilty.

Here's the trailer for Season 1.

I see that there's a Season 3 that has just started (not available yet for streaming).

Cards & Notes & Such

When I was a kid, here's what I hated about Christmas (not counting my certainty that my brothers' presents were better than mine--hey, I am the Middle Child--I have a syndrome named for me!): writing Christmas cards.

I hated wrapping, too--but that's another story.

Oh, hell, I'll say a little about it. When I was student teaching (11th graders, West Geauga HS, Jan-March (?) 1966), my supervising teacher (in those days very appropriately called a "critic teacher") introduced me to a concept he called "the tyranny of the weak." (Don't know if it originated with him. Probably not.) He told me that in just about any group, the "strong" have to do more work because the "weak" either can't or won't.

It's kind an offensive social theory, but I found that it worked beautifully with wrapping Christmas presents. I was so bad that my mother would stop me and do it herself. While I feigned dismay.

Anyway, Mom and Dad (I say "Dad," but he was not really in the forefront of this) would give us some cards and some addresses and set us to work. I can't in all honesty say that my messages were very festive--more perfunctory, if not rude, is more accurate.

But even worse? The thank-you notes we had to write after Christmas (and birthdays). One of our Christmas "gifts," in fact was always a little set of cards, each of which bore the message, often in gold script: Thank You!

My mother was not amused when I suggested that all I needed to do is, you know, sign the card, for the message was on the front for all to see!

So ... we either went to our rooms and wrote them and then gave the little bundle to Mom. Or if we were dilatory (hmmmm ... who could that be?), we had to sit at the dining room table and not arise--bladder issues or no--until we'd finished.

This technique, by the way--the sit-there-until-you-do-X--was common practice. My older brother, Richard, who despised green peas, speaks with pride to this day--well over a half-century later--of the time when he sat at the table until bedtime, his green peas untouched. Score one for intransigence.

I couldn't stand lima beans but had not yet honed the Martyr Complex practiced then by my brother. I could not eat them. But I also didn't want to sit there at the table until I fully understood that there were "starving children in China" (give them all the damn lima beans, then!).

And so I "took" the lima beans like pills--swallowed them whole like large green aspirin with gulps of milk.

(By the way, there was also a no-dessert-until-you-clean-up-your-plate commandment in our home.)

So ... the thank-you notes. I'm afraid that I remained my perfunctory self--writing as little as I thought I could get away with (Mom checked our texts--for length, for sincerity, for solecisms).

Dear Grandma,

Thank you so much for the package of thank-you notes. You can see that I am using them! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas.

Love,

Danny

The whole thank-you-note thing has sort of evanesced, at least in our experience. We still have a few (older) friends who continue the practice. Joyce still does it with a devotion and regularity that shame me. Deeply shame me. Though not enough that I'm going to sit down at the dining room table and crank them out.

I send a few Christmas cards, mostly to family and people I've always sent them to--like an old college roommate. But mostly I do the grim thing my mother would not approve of: sending them only to folks who sent me a card.

And there are fewer and fewer of those.

Wonder why?

Frankenstein Sundae, 186

It’s always risky to look at a writer’s work in search of autobiographical shadows haunting it. Most biographers say something like this—then go right ahead and speculate anyway. Which is what I’m going to do right now.

I’ve written earlier—at some length—about Mary’s deep girlhood affection, even adoration, of her father, William Godwin. Their relationship seemed impossible to fracture. But, as we’ve seen, it was far more fragile than either of them had thought. When she ran off with the already married Bysshe Shelley in July 1814 (she was only seventeen years old), Godwin was horrified. And when the impecunious couple returned not even two months later, he refused all direct contact with Mary—a situation that would endure until near the very end of 1816 when, now a widower, Bysshe married Mary. Now Godwin was all smiles—and eager to drink from the faucet of Bysshe’s (potential) fortune.

But, as we’ve also seen, Bysshe’s own father, Sir Timothy, was likewise horrified by the behavior of a child—his eldest son, who, under English law, would inherit the lion’s share—and wanted as little as possible to do with Bysshe and Mary. The money spigot from the Shelley fortune merely dribbled to Bysshe, who, although he’d promised to share generously with Godwin, was unable to do so.

But Godwin didn’t care. Bysshe had promised him money (and Godwin was a horrible home economist—continuously in debt), and he wanted—no, demanded—it. In fact, one of the reason that Bysshe and Mary fled to Italy so eagerly was to avoid Godwin’s endless pleas for funds, pleas that didn’t stop when they were far, far away but continued to compose much of the content of the letters he sent them. It got annoying, to say the least.

Anyway—this did take a bit of explaining, didn’t it—Mary, since the beginning of her elopement, had deeply felt the estrangement from her father. She had thought—based on his liberal writings about personal relationships, based on his own experiences with Mary Wollstonecraft (they had lived together before they were married), that he would be … understanding.

Not.

Funny how our philosophies alter when our own children are involved.

So, to me, it’s not at all surprising that in Maurice she would write about the emotional, rich reunion of a child and father, a father who had long searched for the son he loved, a son who had been stolen.

Sound familiar?

1400

Well, there's a hint at the top of the page. The is my 1400th post on DawnReader, and (is my wont) I'll pause today to write a little about reaching yet another milestone. Speaking of which, if 1400 were actual miles, and if I'd left from New York City on I-80, I'd be about halfway across the USA now--somewhere just east of North Platte, Nebraska. So look out ... there's more to come!

I started this blog back on January 6, 2012, with a post called "I Am Born" (link to it). I have to say that I've done some of what I said I'd do, and in other cases not: Liar! Liar! Pants on Fire! As I said (I think) in Post #1300, I've not written as much about education as I'd thought I would. And the reason? I retired from public school nearly nineteen years ago (January 1997), and from private school in June 2011. I don't really know what it's like to be teaching during this Testing Craze, though I can (sort of) imagine: Ohio began its proficiency-test phase a few years before I retired--and I have to say that those tests accelerated my desire to retire asap. Suddenly, all anyone seemed to care about were scores.

As this blog has evolved (if I dare use such a word), I've written more and more about personal history, about books, about silliness--and I've used it as a place to serialize rough drafts (sometimes very very very rough drafts) of things I will eventually publish on Kindle Direct.

By the way, I did an early post here (Feb. 19, 2012) about why I had decided to publish on Kindle Direct (link to it). The main reason? I'm older (71) and not all that healthy (I've posted about that), and don't have time to fool around with the commercial publishing industry, not the way I did years ago when I thought I would never die. Oh, I could tell you stories about delays following on delays of delays. And lies. And broken promises ... but I won't.

I don't ever check my sales numbers on Amazon, by the way: I don't care about them. All I care about is that these things are "out there"--available to anyone who has Internet access and the Kindle app. And that's good enough for me. I do get a nice little (I emphasize little) check each month from Amazon. Good for a movie or two, a trip to the grocery store. Fine with me.

I also don't write much about politics. In this Age of Polarization, nothing anyone writes really changes anyone else's mind. Some of my more fiery friends on Facebook (Right and Left) are not about to read a post on DawnReader and say, "You know, he has a point. I'm shifting Right (or Left)!" So I remain a moderate to Lefty Democrat and hope for the best.

Lately, though, I don't see/feel a lot of hope. People who hate Pres. Obama are not going to be swayed by my saying, "You know--I think health care for everyone is a good idea." Just as I am not swayed in the least by stern and certain insistence from them that he is a Muslim who wants to destroy America.

I'm a live-and-let-live guy. Believe what you want--worship whomever you want--vote for whomever you want. Just don't shoot me because I don't agree with you.

It's also been my custom to check my "readership" when I reach another 100-post milestone--and not before. I just this second looked. I've had 250,955 total hits on the site--that's an average of 179.25457.../ post. That's nice. But again, I don't really care. I write for myself--and kind of because I have to--and if there are some folks who keep up with it all (or some), I'm grateful. But I would keep at it even if no one read the entries. (Such is madness, I know.)

I print them all out, by the way, store them in notebooks for my puzzled descendants to discover and wonder what-the-hell-was-wrong-with-great-grandpa?

Anyhow, I'm still having fun. Learning. Otherwise, I wouldn't do it.

Frankenstein Sundae, 185

Okay, enough old-man-getting-off-the-subject stuff (when roads diverge in a yellow wood, I seem, on the page, to be able to be one traveler and take them all). Mary Shelley’s lost children’s story, Maurice, or The Fisher's Cot, written for a friend’s daughter in Italy in 1820, rediscovered (in Italy) in the mid-1990s, published in 1998. So what’s it about?

A traveler enters a seaport in England and sees a funeral procession—just four mourners, one a boy about thirteen who is weeping heavily. In an inn, the traveler asks about the boy’s story. Hears it. A poor boy, he moved in with an old local fisherman (the one who just had the funeral procession), an old man ascending in years as he was descending in his ability to take care of himself. The boy proved an enormous help to him.

Then we learn a bit about the other mourners, relatives of the old fisherman. Cold-hearted, they told the boy he could stay only one more week in the cot(tage). The traveler goes to the boy, says the boy can live with him, and then proceeds to tell the boy his story.

(Mary, Mary, if you’re not contrary, you are a bit complicated! Stories within stories, multiple points of view.)

We learn that the traveler is the son of an Oxford don—a professor of mathematics. He (the son) studied architecture, practiced it, made some money, retired to country labors and all kinds of study, which I liked better than building churches and bridges ....[1]  He married, had a son, a little boy stolen at about age two. The traveler has been looking for him.

And just about two weeks ago, he discovered a recent widow in a cottage, who, after some colloquy with the traveler, confesses, miraculously, that it was she who stole the little boy. And—no real surprise, is it?—we learn that the little boy is the traveler’s missing son.

Henry (that’s his real name, not the “Maurice” the thieves named him) goes back home with the traveler, attends Eton, and the old fisherman’s cot(tage) becomes a vacation spot for the family. Later, a severe storm washes the cot away, but the boy-now-a-man, we learn, …often during his life came to visit the cliff, and the trees, and the rock; where he would sit and reflect on the life he had led while a little boy with old Barnet in the pretty, old, fisher’s cot; and how his father came to visit and assist him when he was poor and helpless, not knowing him to be his son; and how on that very rock he had first discovered that he belonged to good, kind parents; with whom he now lived in content and happiness.[2]

Hmmm … how old were his parents? And why was he still living with them when he was apparently much older?

Never mind.

---

[1] (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 103.

[2] Ibid., 114–15.