Evelyn’s iPhone Close Up

The latest iPhone, which Evelyn just received, has many new features, including a very good macro lens.

Popcorn.

Cumin.

Cloves.

Star Anise.

Anise.

Red pepper flakes.

Non-macro photo.

All photos by evelyn sander. © 2021.

A Few Beautiful Places

 

Riding on a Zodiac from our last excursion, which was kayaking and just lovely.
The trip had many really nice parts, as well as the long bus rides that made me complain!

Sunrise on the last morning, just before we left for the bus ride to the airport.
Of  course we are now at home.

Almost Home! A Post from the Airport.

One night on the ship I decided to try an actual cocktail while we went through another set of locks.
The bartender recommended this: “The Bee’s Knees” made with Tanqueray gin. I told him I wanted
something exotic.

The first winery we visited in Idaho was called “Rivaura” — it’s not well-known elsewhere.
The wines were ok but not super memorable; however, the scenery was quite beautiful.
The fields were used to grow alfalfa until around 7 years ago when the owner switched to vineyards.

Another Idaho vineyard, our last stop on the trip. All the grapes have been harvested,
and the 2021 vintage is already fermenting.

The wines from the last vineyard are sold mainly thorough the vineyard’s wine club. This winery uses grapes grown on the surrounding lands (which were formerly wheat fields) and also purchases grapes grown in eastern Washington. The wines were also ok, but we didn’t buy any.

For our taste, the trip included too much time on buses and not enough time outdoors viewing nature and wildlife. We saw only a few birds, and not enough of the rivers, other than from the boat. It was great to get away from home, and there were some fun times and nice conversations, but all in all this week was a bit disappointing. Several of our fellow-passengers agreed with this reaction.

I’ll be back to several of my blogging activities this week, and decided while waiting for the last leg of the plane trip, to feature some drinks we enjoyed on the trip, to share with the bloggers at Elizabeth’s weekly blog party.

Blog post © 2021 mae sander.

The Nez Perce

 We spent the day on the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho, as shown on the map. Before we left, a story-teller from.the reservation sang and told stories in the ship’s lounge. We had a beautiful visit to the tribal museum and surroundings, and then went to two Idaho wineries that are on reservation land. I have many more photos, which I’ll post in the future… meanwhile, we fly home tomorrow.

blog post © 2021 mae sander.

Palouse Falls

 

The Snake River

 

© 2021 mae sander

Photo Class

Today we participated in a photo walk and a nature walk, after a short Zodiac boat ride from the ship to an island in the Columbia River. After going through several locks we are now in the much drier area, this time on the Washington State side of the river.  

The photo leader showed us a lot of great filters on the iPhone, and the nature leaders showed us lots of fascinating high-desert plants such as sagebrush and tumbleweed. We are now continuing up the Columbia towards the Snake river.

Blog post © 2021 mae sander.

Trains!

Train tracks follow the Columbia River on both the Washington and the Oregon side.
They cary miles of freight, including lots of containers, which is on our minds because of the current shipping problems nationwide.

In the town of The Dalles we saw a train up close. Otherwise always from far away.

 

Hood River and The Dalles, Oregon

 

Photos © 2021 mae sander.

The Bonneville Dam

As we came up the. Columbia River this morning, we enjoyed seeing a rock formation, which was
named by Lewis and Clark when they explored the territory in 1805-1806.

Soon everyone came out on the deck to see the famous Bonneville Dam and watch as we went through the locks.

Here: the locks closing behind the boat, with the rock formations in the distance.

Going through the locks.

Woody Guthrie wrote the song “Roll on, Columbia” in 1941, when he was hired for a month to write songs about the hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River. Here are a few verses to go with my photos:

Roll on, Columbia, roll on
Roll on, Columbia, roll on
Your power is turning our darkness to dawn
So roll on, Columbia, roll on…

Tom Jefferson's vision would not let him rest
An empire he saw in the Pacific Northwest
Sent Lewis and Clark and they did the rest
So roll on, Columbia, roll on…

At Bonneville now there are ships in the locks
The waters have risen and cleared all the rocks
Shiploads of plenty will steam past the docks
So roll on, Columbia, roll on

Pacific Ocean

A shipwreck from over 100 years ago. The mouth of the Columbia River is very treacherous.

 

Morning, Astoria, OR

© 2021 mae sander

 

Flying to PortlandI

A long walk illustrated with murals about the construction in the Portland airport.

On our long cab ride to the waterfront hotel, we saw a shocking number of homeless tents and
campgrounds, and many beautiful murals. This photo illustrates both features of t he city —
where we’ll see very little, because we are about to board the National Geographic Quest for another expedition!

 

Living things around me

Two dinosaurs live in a natural meadow in a garden near me. Seems like a natural place for them to hang out.

This creature made of screen wire and driftwood lives in a front yard
on a busy street.

I wonder what animal this is.

Our neighborhood is full of squirrels, which I usually think aren’t worth photographing.

A few days of rain has brought out mushrooms everywhere.

At first I thought these puff balls were large white stones.

Blog post © 2021 mae sander.

Kitchen History

In today's Guardian: a fascinating history of modern kitchen design and ideology. Yes, ideology is really part of kitchens, because it's inextricable from the role of women in modern society. The title of the article, by Meg Conley:

Invisible fridges and cooling cubbies: how kitchens have been designed for the rich

The starting-off point in the article is the current trend of very high-end kitchens to have cabinet-fronted refrigerators so you can't see a recognizable appliance. (I've been seeing these custom-panel-covered fridges in design articles for a while, but they strike this writer as a novelty.) On the whole, the article seems to me a bit weak on the pre-20th-century history of kitchens, stating that back then: "kitchens were just random bits of furniture and a stove shoved in attics, basements and poorly ventilated back rooms. Architects didn’t care about kitchens because their high-end clients’ kitchens were filled with servants." This is far from complete or accurate, but never mind. Conley's focus on post World War I kitchens is interesting enough in itself.

Quite a lot of detail is included about Grete Schüette-Lihotzky (1897-2000), the first female architect in Austria. She designed a modern kitchen called the Frankfurt kitchen in the 1920s with "an orderly layout of storage, appliance and work surface." After her success in Frankfurt, Lihotzky went on to work on domestic architecture in Communist countries, for example: "Lihotzky helped design Magnitogorsk, an industrial city built around steel production. Magnitogorsk served as a shining example of the supremacy of the Soviet Union." During World War II, Lihotzky was in the resistance to the Nazis, and went on to work in various Communist countries. Kitchens throughout her life were a way for her to contribute to women's role in society: "Lihotzky believed the work of the home was real work. She thought it should be treated with professional dignity."

From another version of the article: A Frankfurt Kitchen at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
I'm pretty sure I have seen this installation, as well as one in the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna.

The MAK installation of a Frankfurt kitchen (Wikipedia)

Another kitchen theorist was the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). Conley explains how Gilman's approach to domestic labor was interesting -- but incredibly racist.  Gilman proposed a hideous and shocking source of labor for domestic and other purposes: Black people. As the solution to what she saw as a problem: "Gilman wrote that the mere fact of Black people in America caused 'social injury.' Her 'suggestion' for that 'problem?'A forced labor corp, complete with uniforms and bases. She argued that Black people 'should be taken hold of by the state' and 'enlisted' into forced labor." I knew of Gilman only as a leader of early-20th-century American feminism, so I found this section of the kitchen design article very educational.

After a discussion of various issues of American consumerism, Conley concludes her interesting history lesson thus: "White communists, white socialists, white feminists, white capitalists and white supremacists were all hoping to engineer whole societies by designing the kitchen. Each saw kitchens as permanently fitted with women – they just disagreed over what that meant. All kept the footprint of patriarchal understanding and most anchored deep into racist foundations. None of their blueprints made room for the meaning of the work in the kitchen. Forget the meaning, they could hardly be bothered with the function."

There's also a longer version of Conley's article -- with really good illustrations -- at the blog Home Culture here. If you are at all interested in the subject of kitchen design, it's worth reading one of these versions, though I think they are quite incomplete and driven by ideology.

Blog post © 2021 mae sander.

“The Book of Form and Emptiness”

Ruth Ozeki's new novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, is fascinating and hard to grasp. It's very fun to read and very hard to write about. Ozeki has wonderful powers of observation, and writes very beautifully. There are even birds in the novel: crows, to be specific, play an interesting role in some of the characters' lives.

The Book of Form and Emptiness can be viewed as a perfectly clear narrative about a fourteen-year-old boy, Benjamin Oh, his mother Annabelle, his late father Kenji Oh, and a few other people, many of them quite colorful. Or maybe can be viewed as something else, more ponderous. It's hard to explain, and it's hard to describe these characters, who are very complex and quite far outside of expected social norms.

Benny hears the voices of many things that don't talk to most people. These voices are not always speaking in English, but sometimes just making sounds. For example: 

"He opened the refrigerator door again, just a crack, but wide enough to allow the interior light to come on and the cold air to escape, bathing his face with a sour exhalation, and then he heard the sounds again. They were faint, but now he could tell them apart: the groans of moldy cheeses, the sighs of old lettuces, the half-eaten yogurts whining from the back shelf where they’d been shoved and forgotten. 

"'Stop it,' he whispered." (p. 48).

Things of many types don't stop making noise when Benny asks them to be quiet, and he soon clearly seems disturbed to his mother, his teachers, and the authorities at his school. So he's first assigned a shrink, and eventually put in the Pediatric Psychiatry Unit at the local hospital, which its inmates call "Pedipsy." While Benny has no relationships with the other kids in his school, who sometimes bully him, he meets another patient, a troubled older girl named Alice who becomes a friend and object of his love. Alice prefers to be called "The Aleph," because she identifies with a short story called “The Aleph,” by the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges.

Books and writers are a key to the whole novel, and in fact, much of the narrative is by a sort-of-character called "The Book," which is writing itself. The Book chronicles the lives and memories of the characters, especially Benny and Annabelle, as well as the memories of Kenji's life as a jazz musician and his tragic death. Yes, this is complicated to explain but not that hard to follow in Ozeki's novel. 

Consistent with the role of books and The Book, Benny's favorite place to be is a huge labyrinthine library which is a short bus ride from his home in Chinatown in an unnamed city in the Pacific Northwest (sort of Seattle-like but not named). After his stay in Pedipsy, Benny skips school and spends all his time there, and sometimes meets The Aleph and her friends there. For Benny, the library is full of strange finds such as a postcard with the following image:

On a postcard that Benny finds: this image, Angelus Novus, or
"The Angel of History" by Paul Klee, 1920

"It was the sort of postcard sold at museum gift shops, depicting great works of art, only this one just had a drawing of a stick figure, scrawled on paper that was stained and brown around the edges. The figure had a mop of curly hair and was wearing a skirt, but after studying the long face and square jaw, Benny decided that it was a man in spite of the skirt. His widely spaced, almond-shaped eyes were staring past Benny’s right shoulder, in the direction where the voices often came from. He turned and looked over his shoulder, but all he saw was a row of books." (pp. 170-171). 

Written on the back of the postcard that Benny found: 

"This is how one pictures the Angel of History. His face is turned toward the past. Where we see a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurling it at his feet. The Angel wants to stay, to awaken the dead, to make whole what has been smashed."  (p. 171). 

Although not so identified in the book, this quote is from Walter Benjamin's 1940 essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History." At that time Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) owned the print. Ozeki, by this point in the novel, has been introducing the novel's chapters with Walter Benjamin's aphorisms:

"(According to the capabilities of the reader) books have their own destinies. —Walter Benjamin, 'Unpacking My Library,'” (pp. ix-x). 

"Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order. —Walter Benjamin," (p. 133).

So you see: The Book of Form and Emptiness is full of references to rather obscure literature. But it's also full of details about another book titled Tidy Magic: The Ancient Zen Art of Clearing Your Clutter and Revolutionizing Your Life. This is Ozeki's fictitious version of the major best-selling book by Marie Kondo that was published with great success in the US in 2010. The fictional book and its author, a Buddhist monk and rather complex woman, also play a role, especially in the life of Annabelle, who is trying to deal with possessions that have essentially possessed her and taken over her house.

Naturally, as I read, I was mindful of the way that food in this novel indicated a variety of character traits. Benny and his mother particularly remembered eating Chinese take-out with Kenji before his death -- and they eat take-out often: "Tonight, she declared, they were having a banquet. In addition to the spare ribs, she’d bought egg rolls, steamed dumplings, pork buns, Chongqing chicken and house-special fried rice." (p. 62). 

Healthy food is what Annabelle, who has gained enormous amounts of weight after her husband died, is always thinking about. Here's an example that illustrates her very erratic way of thinking and getting things done (or not getting them done):  

"The chips and salsa failed to satisfy. What she really needed was a salad. A nice big salad with tomatoes and carrots and avocados and other healthy things. She could take the bus over to the Whole Foods Market and get a salad from the salad bar, but this would mean taking off a whole hour of work, ... and besides, Whole Foods was ridiculously expensive, and the people who shopped there always made her feel bad about herself. Unhealthy. No, just say it, Annabelle: fat. They make you feel fat. Fine, she thought, sitting up and emptying the chip bag, shaking it to get the last of the crumbs. Whatever. She headed back downstairs. She didn’t need the Whole Foods salad bar. She could buy perfectly good lettuce at the cheap, unhealthy, discount supermarket and make her own salads. She could go today after work. She would need a salad spinner, too. She used to have one around the house somewhere, but she hadn’t seen it for a while. Well, she could always buy another one online." (pp. 162-163). 

Annabelle was always trying to do the right thing, but she can't ever get the house cleaned up or the pantry properly stocked. After forgetting to buy a variety of things one day, she decides:

"She would take a little walk and buy trash bags, lettuce, and something nice and healthy for his dinner, and then while it was cooking, she would tidy up the kitchen so they could sit down and have a proper meal at the table." (p. 180). 

 Once, her intentions are even realized, and she actually cooked spaghetti: 

"Annabelle was standing at the counter, emptying a quart jar of tomato sauce into a saucepan. A large pot of water was boiling on the stove. 

"'Hi, honey,' she called. 'I hope you’re good and hungry. I’m making spaghetti for dinner!'” (p. 203). 

The Aleph has quite a different relationship to food. She lives on the streets when not in the mental hospital, and interacts with several other memorable characters, especially a poet who drinks a lot. The street people are adept at dumpster diving. Specifically, on a brief camping trip with the Aleph and another former patient named Mackson, Benny observes: 

"...she’d brought more food: more sandwich wraps, and chips, and a plastic bin of salsa. She told him the sandwich wraps were on account of Mackson scoring a whole unopened case of freezer-burned tortillas from a Mexican restaurant dumpster. Mackson’s an awesome gleaner, she said. The chips and salsa came from there, too. Benny didn’t know what a gleaner was, but he wanted to be one." (p. 371). 

Finally, you may wonder: what does the title mean? Well, one of the colorful characters, the street person who is also a poet, lectures Benny on history; on literature, especially Walter Benjamin; and on philosophy. And he says "Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness." (p. 276). 

A central question, Benny's philosophical question as well as that of the poet, echoes throughout the book: "What is real?" This is a major theme of the entire novel, and applies to much that Benny and the others experience. 

I hope I've conveyed some of my feelings about the appeal of this book. For completely different interpretations, see this New York Times review: "Ruth Ozeki’s Borgesian, Zen Buddhist Parable of Consumerism," or this Washington Post review: "If a book could talk, what would it say? Ruth Ozeki has some ideas."

Review © 2021 mae sander.

Moonshiner, 1963

Bob Dylan's "Moonshiner" -- outtake, recorded in 1963. 

 "I go to some hollow

And sit at my still

 And if whiskey don't kill me

   Then I don't know what will"

               

Bob Dylan has evolved quite a lot since 1963, when he was just starting out. We've been listening to a lot of songs from a wide variety of times, styles, and singers, and I was thinking about Dylan and his early days when he recorded this folk song of undetermined origin. Dylan's version has never been released except as a rare/unreleased outtake, and as far as I can tell, he never recorded it again.

I was interested to learn that the American poet Carl Sandburg included this song in his 1927 collection, The American Songbag. I'm always interested in what Carl Sandburg was doing: his accomplishments are so varied! A number of songs from Sandburg's collection are available on Youtube also, here.

I'm sharing this song about drink with Elizabeth and the bloggers who share ideas and images about drinks at her blog AlteredBookLover.

"The Emperor's Feast" or What Did Chinese People Eat

Chinese history overwhelms me! 

The Emperor's Feast, published 2021.

I've tried to learn about the archaeological finds, the invention and refinement of pottery, the territorial conquests and consolidations, the multi-ethnic courts, the political and military rivalries, and the alternating peaceful and chaotic eras throughout the thousands of years of Chinese history. I've tried to grasp the many food innovations and adoptions throughout these varying eras. 

Each time I read more, I think I understand and grasp a bit more of this history, but I never feel as if I have any real mastery of names, dates, places, and rulers. A new book, The Emperor's Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals by Jonathan Clements challenged me once again. 

The author's focus is broader than just twelve meals: in fact he summarizes food throughout Chinese history, beginning:

"Shennong, the legendary ‘Divine Farmer’, was one of the great pioneers of Chinese food, who fashioned the first plough and taught early mankind how to rear animals for food." (p. 17). 

The existence of food histories that were recorded very early in Chinese eras offers a starting point for the author's work, and I found it quite amazing that there are such written sources. For example, he writes:

"The most widespread dish in ancient China was a vegetable broth (geng), which combined seasonal legumes in boiling water. ‘Soup and boiled grain were used by all,’ says the Book of Rites, ‘from the princes down to the common people, without distinction of degree.’" (p. 19).

The idea that there were five tastes -- sweet, sour, bitter, acrid, and salty -- was a very early culinary theory in China, and seems to come up throughout each era of history. Clements explains much about the food ways and food inventions in each period, right through the colonization endeavors and Opium Wars of the 19th century and the revolutions of the early 20th century. We learn about the Communist era, Mao's great famine, and some of the international political eras seen through the lens of food, such as Nixon's visit to China and what they offered him to eat. There's a detour to the USA and the emergence of Chinese restaurants and their particular brand of Chinese food, as well as information about overseas Chinese influence in other countries. We even learn about protection rackets where Chinese gangs demanded payment from restaurant owners in Chinatowns. 

The author documents his own adventures during many years in China, where he seems to have tasted a wide variety of foods very mindfully. He also tried many fusion foods involving Chinese overseas restaurants:

"I found myself pursuing the strangest possible cul-de-sacs on menus all over the world, not least in Edinburgh, Scotland, where I felt obliged to order the Haggis Spring Rolls on the menu at Bertie’s Restaurant. Much like the cheeseburger spring rolls of Detroit, they seem to me like a pointless gilding of the lily, a clickbaity tricking out of a local food purely for Instagram shares and talking points. That’s the only explanation I can think of. I love haggis, and I certainly don’t mind cheeseburgers, but by what perverse contrariness would you want to wrap them in pastry and deep-fry them?" (p. 169).

The last chapter takes us up to the present moment. We go from Imperial and high-level Communist banquets to widespread misrepresentation of foodstuffs for the common people, including the memorable disaster with adulterated baby formula, and other instances of cynical, profit-seeking poisoning of foods, and ultimately, the question of how food and food markets played a role in the coronavirus pandemic As the coronavirus took hold, the author says, the Chinese tried to reduce the danger:

"The reaction, however, does not seem to have been heavy-handed enough in Wuhan in 2019, where the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market achieved global infamy as the alleged source of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, believed to have reached humans by passing and mutating through a snake, which had caught it from a bat, or possibly a pangolin. A blanket ban on the buying, selling and eating of wild animals, for real this time, was announced in February 2020, although pundits immediately warned that it would merely drive the multi-million-dollar bushmeat industry out of the public eye and back underground. Tellingly, by June 2020 the Beijing Health Commission was proposing severe penalties for anyone who dared to ‘defame and slander’ traditional Chinese medicine, suggesting that any anti-bushmeat legislation might soon be de-fanged by new laws that prevented anyone from complaining about the sale of ‘medical’ remedies." (p. 181). 

Finally, another international policy of the Chinese governrment:

"That food security is an essential element of China’s international outreach makes sense, as a way for Xi Jinping to keep his promise to his people to look after the fundamental building blocks of Chinese society. This has led to a bold and long-term overseas land grab, which has seen, for example, the wholesale purchase of multiple Australian dairy farms to provide milk for the Chinese market, and the cutting of production costs by shipping in 2,000 Chinese labourers to work on them.  ...

"China’s efforts to secure its food supply have led to some scaremongering and doomsday scenarios, but for the Chinese themselves might be considered in context, as the act of a smart leader who understands the true meaning of the phrase uttered to the founder of the Han dynasty: ‘For the people, food is Heaven.’" (p. 188 -189)

As I say, it's an overwhelming book, and I've hardly offered a sampling of the amazing history of food origins throughout Chinese history. Not everyone would find it readable, but it's remarkable in how much information is packed into less than 200 pages of text plus many pages of notes.

Review © 2021 mae sander.