To Indiana and Back Again

 We made a quick visit to my sister Elaine and brother-in-law Larry in West Lafaytte, Indiana this week.

Waiting for a pizza — interesting murals on the walls of the pizza place.

At Elaine’s, we always use this beautiful quilt.

In Our Garden

We’ve had a very extended growing season this fall, but the vivid red of the Japanese maple is a sign that it’s about to lose its leaves, and the beautiful geraniums look as if they won’t last much longer even without deep frosts.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Looking Back

Murals in San Cristobal, Galapagos

Going back a few months, I wanted to share some street scenes from Puerto Ayora in the Galapagos — photos taken from the moving bus in which we rode through the small city, so I have no information about the locations. Our ship’s destinations were almost all uninhabited islands — we visited only this one inhabited area, which is the location of the Darwin Research Station. I have not yet posted all of these photos, so now I’m sharing this look around the very obscure town with Sami’s Monday Murals. The rest of this post after the Galapagos images contains a variety of photo memories.

In the Detroit Institute of Arts

Behind a “Do Not Enter” sign at the DIA: a mural hidden by cleaning equipment.
It appears that this was once a classroom of some kind behind the momentarily open door.

Salt Springs Brewery, Saline, Michigan

Katrina and Jason’s wedding site intrigues me, and I hope to go back for dinner sometime.
Shared with Elizabeth’s Tea Party. (Combination of my photos & web search.)

Saturday Night at Carol’s

No Comment

From an Instagram post discovered with google.

The Berlin Wall Fell on November 9, 1989

From Deutche Welle

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Hanging in There

Two of the many self-tamed Sandhill Cranes in Kensington MetroPark.
This is an iPhone photo taken from a few feet away from the bird.

Len’s photo of a Wilson’s Snipe, a normally shy marsh bird that was out in the open in the late afternoon.
This photo was taken with a telephoto lens — the snipe aren’t as bold as the cranes!
And yes, snipe are real birds as well as the subject of 200 years of practical jokes.

Not much consolation for this week’s debacle, but beauties of nature are probably our best hope.

A Good Read by Louise Erdrich

The Mighty Red is a long book full of rich details, and typically of Louise Erdrich’s books, also full of historic and cultural background: just the right amount to make it interesting, though. The book’s focus is on farming, especially all the issues and challenges of raising sugar beets in North Dakota, and especially on the extreme dangers of pesticides. One of many lists in the minds of the farmers whose lives are being affected: “Dual Magnum. Roundup. Warrant. Outlook. Chloroacetamide. Betamix. Ethofumesate. UpBeet. Gramoxone.” (p. 220) At the end, two of the farmers (both having been harmed long ago by their work and exposure) are talking and one summarizes their lives: ‘Nobody ever said farming was easy.” (p. 369)

I enjoyed the food descriptions — one of my favorite parts about good books about ‘real” people. Here are three of them:

A favorite food of the mother and daughter, Crystal and Kismet, whose stories are at the center of the book: “Crystal put a pot of water on to boil and peeled some carrots. She’d boil the carrots in salt water, mash them up with fried garlic and onions, add some basil, oregano, a can of tomatoes, a few spoonfuls of tomato paste, red pepper flakes, a dash of cinnamon. Voilà. Sauce. They almost never ate meat because meat, even misery meat, cost more than carrots.” (p. 208)

Another passage about Kismet and her mother-in-law: “Winnie and Kismet drove over late in the afternoon with two versions of potato salad. Winnie swore by her mother’s warm potato salad, made with red potatoes, a dressing of white vinegar, bacon fat, bacon bits, parsley, salt, pepper, sugar. Kismet swore by her mother’s recipe: golden potatoes, parsley, sliced boiled eggs, chopped onions, and a dressing of mayonnaise, oil, vinegar, yellow mustard, salt, pepper, and cayenne. Paprika to decorate. The bowls were covered with Saran wrap.” (p. 235)

And a description of lunch-making by a landlady in an oil-field area: “Janice did not prepare just any lunch. Cold pop swaddled in Ziplocs of ice when it was hot. Hot chocolate and coffee in a thermos when it was cold. Sandwiches with cheese, heavy on the meats, the lettuce kept separate and crisp. The bread thick and soft. Squares of cake in a Tupperware box, a dozen boiled eggs, cookies. Sliced apples with lemon squeezed over them and cinnamon sugar to dip them in. Peeled oranges, baby carrots, ranch dip. Home-canned pickles. Janice was a goddess.” (p. 269)

To me, these descriptions and many others are indicative of the author’s eye for the details of her characters lives, and the way she uses these details to show character. I also loved this description about a bookseller who is another key character:

“One of the best things about selling old books was going through them before they went onto the shelves. She tried not to buy marked-up or underlined books, but there were other ways books were personalized. People kept or left things in books—quotes, clippings, often about the author, letters that arrived while they were reading the book, bills they didn’t want to pay, foil gum wrappers, bookmarks from now-closed bookstores, funny drawings from their children, dry autumn leaves, grocery lists, complaints. She stored these scraps in a manila envelope marked Ephemera. From another time, another place, the bits had come into her hands. Some were personal. A bookmark made from dried yarrow flowers arranged between pieces of clear packing tape had kept the reader’s place in Rosemary’s Baby. Later, when she looked it up, she found that yarrow was a banishing herb against evil. In a copy of The Aspern Papers, she’d found a lock of dark brown hair.” (p. 319)

As usual, I  haven’t written a review of this book — lots of those have already been published. I’ve just tried to show you some reasons why I enjoyed the book.

A Murder Mystery

Everyone in my Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson is what I would call a meta-mystery. I view a book as meta when the text constantly talks about how it’s a text and self-consciously over-shares what the author is doing. In this example, Stevenson begins with a list of rules for writing a mystery, which originated with a writer named Knox, a member of a famous mystery writer’s club. (For nonfiction details and the original of these rules, which I looked up, see Ronald Knox: 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction.)

The fictitious narrator then comments throughout the book about his writing decisions, his writing methods, his choices about Knox’s rules, and the comparison of his mystery to those of other writers, like Agatha Christie. The narrator himself is deeply involved with the mystery at hand; that is, with several murders from the past and present, while telling the story. I assume that this is all fiction — and that all of Stevenson’s family members have not actually killed someone. Making things even more meta, the narrator also talks about the reader, specifically about how he’s sure you are reading an e-book, not a paper book.

All this digressive stuff works ok but gets tedious. It begins in the Prologue, when the narrator explains that he himself is a professional writer of advice to writers — and thus has his own rules about how to write a mystery, going back to the basics of Agatha Christie and all that. He promises to make it all come out correctly according to his rules, and lists the chapters where he describes various victims’ dead bodies: “I promise that’s the truth, unless your Kindle or whatever device you have mucks with the pages. There is only one plot hole you could drive a truck through. I tend to spoil things. There are no sex scenes.” (p. 2)

Here are a couple more meta passages, then I’m done:

“Police officers in these books, while being Last Resorts or Only Hopes, can also have character traits such as By The Book or Screw The Rules.” (p. 103)

 

“A lot has happened, so I thought I’d jump in here with a quick recap. I know: it’s a bit weird. But I want us all to be on the same page. (Figuratively: I know you bought the e-book.) If you’re confident in your cognitive abilities, you can skip ahead. Books like this generally tease out the backstory of an ensemble of reprobates, lock them in a singular location, and then present a body that can be linked to parts of each player’s backstory as possible motive. I’ll try that.” (p. 105)

“In a mystery like this one, there are clues in every word—hell, in every piece of punctuation. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, think about the device in your hands. If a killer is ever revealed and your ‘percentage read’ isn’t at least in the high eighties, they cannot be the real killer; there is simply too much of the book still to be read.” (p. 231 or 62%)

“On the other hand, suspicious as I was of Gavin, it’s simply unfair to introduce the killer this far past the midpoint. Knox would have me drawn and quartered—that’s his first rule. And, reader, your ‘percentage read’ should tell you there is just too much to go.” (p. 282) 

The only classic mystery trope Stevenson seems to miss is describing food, but I guess he’s afraid of being accused of coziness. He does mention instances when the characters eat. The sequence of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners contributes to the passage of time as is usual in classic detective fiction. Here’s a sort of anti-food breakfast description as an example of his writing: “I joined the line, shuffling past the bain-maries, and filled my plate. The bacon was untouched, assumedly because people were confronting their own mortality and avoiding saturated fats.” (p. 60)

If you like this sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge writing, I recommend this book. Although the actual suspense and plotting are pretty good, it’s too precious for my taste. 

On TV

Watched the first two episodes of The Marlow Murder Club, Season 2.
It’s ok, not great, but we’ll keep watching.

New York Times Cooking

We have been using many recipes from the New York Times cooking archives. I believe between the two of us, Len and I have tried something like 50 of the recipes, which number over 22,000, they say. We figure we have a few hundred years left to get through the ones that appeal to us. Here are some of the recipes that we have liked:

 

Blog post and original photos © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Deb’s Sunday Salon and Eileen’s Saturday Critters

The Four Freedoms

 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt defined “The Four Freedoms” in a speech in 1941. These images by Norman Rockwell were used in the War Bonds campaign in World War II, when the freedoms were jeopardized. We still have to fight for them.

The Fatal Moment

 

We voted early, but walked by the polling place to see what was happening.
Amazed at total lack of a line: I guess EVERYONE voted early!

Photos © 2024 mae sander

Magic

 

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke,
illustrated by Portia Rosenberg.

I could not tell you why I decided to reread Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, except that its uncanny magical universe has something to do with a short new book by the same author. It’s a very long book: 850 pages, and it took me around a week of reading and being rather engaged with the history of the Napoleonic wars as experienced — and altered — by two English magicians and their circles of friends, relatives, acquaintances, and enemies. The magicians’ main enemy is a Fairy, a malevolent and self-centered creature. The fairy appears to many characters in the novel, and never means any good to them.

 

The fairy was described at his first appearance in the novel:

“a tall, handsome person with pale, perfect skin and an immense amount of hair, as pale and shining as thistle-down. His cold, blue eyes glittered and he had long dark eye-brows, which terminated in an upward flourish. He was dressed exactly like any other gentleman, except that his coat was of the brightest green imaginable – the colour of leaves in early summer.” (p. 90)

In the illustration, you can see the fairy who is obviously up to no good. Specifically, the magician Mr. Norrell has summoned him from a fairy realm beyond England to bring a beautiful young girl back from the dead. The bargain that’s made between magician and fairy is at the heart of many of the events in the novel. If you’ve ever read a fairy tale you wouldn’t be surprised at the consequences of such a bargain.

Another of Portia Rosenberg’s illustrations.

Mr Strange and Mr Norrell Take Tea

There are many plots and subplots about the two magicians Strange and Norrell and the magic that they do for the government of England, for individual noblemen, for their own interests, and in the case of Strange, for his wife. A number of other Englishmen want to be magicians as well, and they also play a role in the elaborate plot of the novel. All is tied together by the personalities of the magicians.

Both magicians are fond of taking a cup of tea, which is viewed as part of their deeply rooted Englishness. Being both typical and loyal is important to them and to the atmosphere of the novel.  When Mr. Norrell tries to offer his services to a Captain Harcourt-Bruce, the captain expects magical drama, troops of enchanted soldiers and swashbuckling magical victories. Instead, Norrell is rather an ordinary Englishman, not the leader of ideal fairy knights imagined by the military man: “That was Captain Harcourt-Bruce’s idea of a magician. That was the sort of thing which he now expected to see reproduced on every battlefield on the Continent. So when he saw Mr Norrell in his drawing-room in Hanover-square, and after he had sat and watched Mr Norrell peevishly complain to his footman, first that the cream in his tea was too creamy, and next that it was too watery – well, I shall not surprize you when I say he was somewhat disappointed.” (p. 107)

There’s even a reference to the supposed civilizing virtues of tea, concerning a captain who was  “entertaining the American savages and teaching them to drink tea (presumably with the idea that once a man had learnt to drink tea, the other habits and qualities that make up a Briton would naturally follow).” (p. 477) 

Mr. Norrell loved the comforts of his well-appointed home, and didn’t go out if he could help it. He preferred to stay in and read one of the thousands of books of magic in his collection; for example: “On a day in late December when storm clouds made Alpine landscapes in the sky above London, when the wind played such havoc in the heavens that the city was one moment plunged in gloom and the next illuminated by sunlight, when rain rattled upon the windowpane, Mr Norrell was seated comfortably in his library before a cheerful fire. The tea table spread with a quantity of good things stood before him and in his hand was Thomas Lanchester’s The Language of Birds.” p. 127.

Strange also finds comfort in his tea when he has some difficult issues that he calls “a wretched business from start to finish.” As he considered them, “he sipped his tea and ate a piece of toast.” (p. 441) Later when Strange is on the battlefield in Spain, he finds some Scots military men, and gives them some hard-boiled eggs he was carrying: “The Highlanders gave him some sweet, milky tea in return and soon they were chatting very companionably together.” (p. 473)

All this is in deep contrast to the foods that the fairy with thistledown hair has to offer his captives: “Here is a haunch of roasted wyvern and a pie of honeyed hummingbirds. Here is roasted salamander with a relish of pomegranates; here a delicate fricassee of the combs of cockatrices spiced with saffron and powdered rainbows and ornamented with gold stars! Now sit you down and eat!” (p. 500)

The famous military leader Wellington interacts with both magicians, especially with Jonathan Strange. He too enjoys English comforts even in the battlefield areas of Spain where the war is going on. His servants make sure to feed him properly: “As Wellington and his companions rode up to the castle they had just begun to lay it with plates of bread rolls, slices of Spanish ham, bowls of apricots and dishes of fresh butter. Wellington’s cook went off to fry fish, devil kidneys and make coffee.” (p. 347)

The appreciation of a typical English meal is shared by other English magicians, for example a man called Secundus, whose landlady brings him “a breakfast of two freshly grilled herrings, tea and fresh milk, and white bread and butter on a blue-and-white china plate.” (p. 26)

A woman in a weakened state begins to recover: “It was soon learnt that Miss Wintertowne had left her bed and, leaning upon Mr Norrell’s arm, had gone to her own sitting-room where she was now established in a chair by her fire and that she had asked for a cup of tea.” (p. 96)

Aromas and Odors

Now I’ve indulged myself by describing the way the author uses food and tea to create an atmosphere around the characters and their unusual lives. I should get down to business and actually review the book, but that’s been done by lots of other people. So I’ll just keep telling you a few things I found amusing.

I also appreciated the use of aromas and odors in the novel, especially the unpleasant aroma associated with an elderly woman whose cats create a rather potent situation (but I can’t say too much because this is quite a big part of the plot). Or the aroma of land and sea: “Instantly the sea became more ethereal and dreamlike, and the wood became more solid. Soon the sea was scarcely more than a faint silver shimmer among the dark trees and a salty tang mingling with the usual scents of a night-time wood.” (p. 667)

Here is a passage that describes the relief felt when a very dark magic spell is lifted from a city:

“There was a sudden rush of scents upon the air – scents of frost, winter earth and the nearby river. The colours and shapes of the park seemed simplified, as if England had been made afresh during the night. To the poor servants, who had been in some doubt whether they would ever see any thing but Dark and stars again, the sight was an exceedingly welcome one.” (p. 782)

More Magic

1871 Edition of The Princess
and the Goblin

Evidently, I enjoy books about magic. I didn’t give this much thought, but my fellow blogger Deb at Readerbuzz listed some magical fiction she was reading and I realized how much I have always liked certain types of magic in books, such as the magic of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea. Erin Morgenstern’s Night Circus entertained me, as did Harry Potter. (Lev Grossman: not so much.)

In childhood, I enjoyed the Oz books (which Deb is reading this year). I was very fond of The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. I also loved fairy tales such as those by Hans Christian Andersen. And who doesn’t love the fairies in A Midsummernight’s Dream?

Here are a few books from Deb’s list that I have enjoyed reading in the past.

• Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett 
• Babel by R. F. Kuang
• A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

For more of Deb’s choices, see her blog post: Magical Books I Loved that You Might Like to Read.

Review © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Deb’s Sunday Salon

At the Detroit Institute of Arts

On our recent visit to the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) we began with a special exhibit
titled “The Art of Dining: Food Culture in the Islamic World.”

Many amazing works of arts and crafts appeared in the exhibit, which borrowed items from many museums around the world.
I was impressed by the numerous images of birds and other animals on the many art works.
These bird-head jugs are from Iran (around 1200) and China (618-907)

One case featured musical instruments that would have been played during formal dinners.
This instrument was called a peacock, and was made in 19th century India.

This bowl decorated with birds and fish is from 9th-Century Egypt.

Another dish featuring bird images. From Iran in the late 1400s.

More birds on an elegant dish from Iran or Iraq (224-651)

I found this bird-headed spoon made of jade and precious stones amazing! (India, 17th C)

The focus of this exhibition was on the lives of the richest and most upper class people of several Islamic countries and on their possessions, not on the poor or the middle-class. The emphasis was on the art of tableware and presentation, not on the food. However, the food for one banquet was described with recipes for several of the dishes that would have been served (link to recipe page). See the DIA website for more images of the artifacts. 

The Great Hall

The tile work in the main part of the museum is fascinating. The tile was made by Pewabic Pottery, a local studio that has been creating art tile since 1903. This is a small section of the floor.

The entrance to the Great Hall where the Diego Rivera Murals are located.

We always visit the famous Detroit Industry Murals by Diego Rivera; I often show photos of them.

Ofrendas for the Day of the Dead

“The 11th installment of Ofrendas: Celebrating el Día de Muertos 
features 13 ofrendas, or offerings, by local artists and community members”

 

We looked at several of this year’s offerings during our visit to the museum.

Another Day of the Dead Image

A Day-of-the-Dead Cake from this week’s Great British Baking Show.

DIA Puppet Collections

A few puppets from “A Christmas Carol” made by Lilian Owen Thompson.

The DIA has a world-class collection of over 1,000 puppets with state-of-the art storage for them. It also owns many props, backdrops, puppet stages, and puppet heads. Unfortunately, the museum has only one case for puppet display in a hallway near the coffee shop. Each time we visit, we check this out, as the puppets on display are changed very frequently. 

This month, several women puppeteers and puppet-makers are featured. The puppets in the case above are the work of Lilian Owen Thompson, “one of the most innovative puppet makers of the 1920s. She was skilled in sculpting, carving, sewing, and painting, and she used many other methods depending on the character. Thompson was also an engineer in puppet mechanics. A puppet's movements can appear haphazard if it's not created thoughtfully. Thompson attached each string and constructed each joint so that a marionette's gestures expressed its personality-without getting tangled up, of course.” (Quote from the documentation in the case.)

  

Blog post and original photos © 2024 mae sander