I entered the Hendrick's gin contest

Captain Tarquin Shakespeare met the great alien Zephirine Felicite immediately upon leaving the galaxy's edge. She was all wings and eyes, and did not understand time. "How is it," she asked, "that your planet, merely in orbiting its star, causes living beings to 'age'?" 

See here.

What kind of balance

Random thoughts, random questions. 

Why do our (mostly) young leftist friends feel free to make grand political statements, context-less pronunciamentos, at family gatherings, or indeed anywhere? I heard a few exasperated oh-God-I'm-sorry-I-brought-it-up Easter survival stories recently. So I heard about people who found it necessary to casually proclaim, for everyone, which of the presidential candidates are xenophobic and exclusionist while handing the ham and scalloped potatoes. It's exactly reminiscent of some very minor P.G. Wodehouse character wolfing tea and sardines and lamenting that the foodstuffs have been "wrung from the bleeding lips of the starving poor." That was already a hundred years ago ("Comrade Bingo," 1922). On other days I have listened to wine seminar leaders brightly yip about climate change, and I've known a gynecologist purr "Thanks to the Affordable Care Act ..." while absolutely attending to his duties. I wonder if it felt like this for centuries while the Christians in antiquity took over. Granted they did far more good than our Comrade Buttses have ever done (though the comrades are certainly plying a religion). I would much rather have lived in a world of monasteries and hospitals than of arenas where slaves fought wild beasts. Still. The time must have come when decent people who happened to be pagan no longer felt free to speak. That willowy triumphalism forever at your elbow can't have been pleasant. 

And where is our modern novelist, our Wodehouse or our Barbara Pym, to chronicle it? This spontaneous scolding is as prime a fact about life in society, which is what novels chronicle, as gaslight in Victorian London or Wodehouse's harmless upper class twits or Pym's postwar spinsters, living quiet lives but yearning for the archdeacon. We want a novelist to immortalize the character of what Rush Limbaugh calls the "millenial snowflake [i.e., each one unique] _________" -- fill in the blank. The reporter, the hipster, your niece's boyfriend, forever performing these little mopping up operations long after their victory. Oh but um, wait. Any novelist chronicling that has to get past the millenial snowflake editorial assistant gatekeepers first, the ones wearing rainbow/Che Guevara t shirts, whom we have already seen give the nod to all the right genuflections in some of our recent, random contemporary reading. The teen boys kissing, the Russian monarchist emigre slamming Margaret Thatcher, the olive oil researcher blessing Mohammed, each in the earliest pages of their respective thick books.   

Now then, re: the jihad murders in Brussels. Or, pick one. Something else will probably happen before I finish this. Did you know that the Jews in Europe held a kind of one-off candle-lighting ceremony in 1942 or '43, to honor Jews who had already been killed by the Nazis? You will find the story documented, I think, in Arthur Morse's While Six Million Died (1967). Of those who lit candles, another million or two were destined for Auschwitz themselves when their own countries fell. Hungary for example. I don't coarsely compare war crimes, I just note a possible pattern in the way prey can't believe predator is serious, even to the end. Even ISIS -- which some observers, writing in financial magazines of all places, claim really is "on the run," picking soft targets in Europe because its commanders are being killed off in Iraq -- even ISIS taunted "what [commemorative] color will the Eiffel tower be next?"  

Let me ask you this. What kind of balance is the aware person obliged to find, between the little frivolities and escapes of civilization -- and the massive threats to it which make one think it's a dereliction of duty not to focus forevermore on politics and war? On the mere survival of human possessions like the Gospels or the idea of murder being wrong? Here are some of the birds of Kenya. For example. 

And yes, I want you to cook amazing food and drink amazing wine. I want you to savor the Turkish rose botanicals in Nolet's gin. Would you believe, once in a while very kind p.r. people still contact me to ask whether my readers would be interested in a certain product? Then, I presume, they open a new tab and get a look at Pluot, and they email again asking, Um, what other publications are you writing for? 

Have you ever read much about astronomy? Have you ever read Astronomy magazine? 

Supermassive black holes blast matter into their host galaxies with X-ray-emitting winds traveling at up to one-third the speed of light. In the new study, astronomers determined PDS 456, an extremely bright black hole known as a quasar more than 2 billion light-years away, sustains winds that carry more energy every second than is emitted by more than a trillion Suns (Astronomy, February 20, 2015).

That's fine. It's also meaningless knowledge, except that human beings know it. And except that knowing it, like knowing a few Kenyan birds, may be more important than anything else. Art and science, escape and frivolity. In order to grasp that, you have to turn around and grasp that there is something better than and outside politics, something a civilized politics should leave one free to know. I think it was John Adams who said he fought the American Revolution so that his son would be free to do politics, and his son devote himself to the arts. But politics -- or whatever it is now, that random triumphalist scolding -- seems to invade all and shrivel all. Your Easter brunch, wine seminars, doctor visits and everything. Even astronomers clamor at the doors of global warming, begging for someone to notice them. For power. 

Here I pipe up about terribly serious things, even though to do so makes me feel like a pill. It seems so  disjointed, so single-issue. The botanicals in gin are more fun. But they do it, they pipe up all the time ....  

I chanced to watch thirty seconds of the movie Platoon recently. It was just at the scene when Willem Dafoe looks up into the murmuring jungle dusk and says, "We're gonna lose this war. We've been kicking other people's ass so long, I guess we got it coming." There, I suppose, lies the entire thrust of American politics for the last forty years. Politics, again, in the sense of your hipster nephew's pronunciamentos at family parties, not in the sense of foreign policy necessarily. Who knew Oliver Stone would have that much power? And I will admit: thirty seconds of Platoon teaches that if nothing else, the beauty of the single life is that you don't have to feign a pleased interest at this, too. And then discuss it. You can switch off the t.v. and go to bed. 

Last, and it is terribly serious, do you think it's likely that Ambassador Christopher Stevens died of something else besides smoke inhalation at the embassy in Benghazi on September 11, 2012? I have Facebook friends who post links attesting that it was worse than that, but I must admit these friends have a rather gamy taste in "likes" and links. No respectable source I know has ever raised the possibility. Still. Is some other cause of death likely? Is it likely we will never be permitted to know? Is it likely that previous generations of Americans would have demanded to know and would have been answered? Is it likely that the woman responsible for broadcasting the ambassador's whereabouts, ignoring pleas for help, and then swearing repeatedly afterward that his killers must have been provoked by an amateur movie, and then for infamously asking What Difference At This Point It All Makes -- is it likely that she will be the next President? Is it likely the ambassador never should have been there, negotiating "freedom fighting" and "nation building" with people who don't want either? Possibly, yes. All of the above. 

Image from Science World Report

Who invented the "Blue M----f----er"? You're a poltroon, too

Things have come to a pretty pass since my grandmother's day. I am talking of moral matters, but not perhaps what you think: she was surprisingly blase about the facts of life. She is the one who gave me the excellent bit of wisdom, "You know what they say -- when a couple get married, the first baby can come anytime -- after that it always takes nine months." That's a saw whose humorous decency only makes sense in a culture where people get and stay married. Who cares when babies come now, of if they do at all? Her little saying reminds me of the the Jewish proverb, I think from the Talmud, that since the parting of the Red Sea, God has done nothing else but arrange marriages. In other words, the difficulty of doing that successfully, for all mankind for all time, is as stupendous a miracle as the one by which the children of Israel walked between walls of water to freedom. Again, the proverb, the reflection, only has meaning in a culture of marriage. Try telling it to a group of children in a Sunday school class in an era of divorce, and you will get gales of laughter because God is so stupid.

The birds and the bees, Nana knew and accepted. "Why, 'a man had only to put his shoes under my bed and I got pregnant,' " she also quoted, not in reference to herself I don't think. Just another saw, a humorously decent reaction to life. It was wanton profanity that offended her. Luckily she heard little of it. She never went to the movies post-George Raft, and of course she never lived among foul-mouthed people. The one time she heard the word "s---" in public, she was speechless with outrage.

When I say therefore that things have come to a pretty pass since her day, I am thinking of how she might have reacted to a customer I faced yesterday. Or rather I am thinking, enviously, she would not have had to react at all, because she would not have faced that customer. In a more civilized era he would not have existed.

A man approached me and asked where we keep the mix needed to make the new cocktail, the Blue M ---- f----er. Just like that. He pronounced the whole word. Not "blue." The other one. He felt absolutely no compunction about speaking this word in public, to a fellow human being, still less to a woman -- ah, for the quaint days when men guarded their language around the gentle sex! -- and in a retail setting too, where we are all more or less helpless to defend ourselves in the face of the glorious Customer. I suppose I can count myself lucky that I had at least heard of this new drink a few days before. My son also works retail liquor. He told me someone had asked him the same question. Better to have known what the customer was asking about, than to have had to presume he was simply mad, or being offensive. To Nana, he would have seemed both. Small comfort.

So, as I ask in my title, "Who invented the Blue M---- f----er?" In truth, I don't care. Whoever you are, master Mixologist, you're a poltroon, too. I regret that our society has bred you while my grandmother's did not. But that's no excuse. Even in the midst of decays both major and minor, any human being can still judge very basic right from wrong, dignity from indignity. Judaism's seven Noahide laws pronounced so, and antiquity's "natural law," bequeathed to Christianity through the church fathers, also said so. You, mixologist, human being made in the image of God, you should have had the minor decency not to name your new cocktail that. All you are doing is sending people into retail stores speaking the word, and so ladling another unthinking drop of vulgarity into everyone's day and world. Even my grandmother's little proverbs about sex were clean and decently humorous.

Besides, the drink sounds ghastly. It cannot be other than a potent sugar bomb, combining as it does all the Long Island Iced Tea ingredients, namely gin, vodka, rum, and tequila, plus sweet and sour mix plus blue Curacao plus Seven Up. Our cocktail master, Charles Schumann, refuses even to make the Long Island Iced Tea for a start, because that recipe alone shows such disrespect to the distiller's art in hashing together the four spirits called for, especially gin. It follows, then, how absurd this freak offspring of the hash must be.

We choose to obey Schumann. He -- rather like the ancients, rather like Thomas Aquinas, talking of natural law -- has standards and has thought things through. In his minor sphere, he is civilized. And in this age of moral collapse, we grab onto any civilizational decency we can.

A footnote: twenty English words: Webster's says poltroon comes to us from French, Italian, and Latin words having to do with young animals (poltro, colt, pullus, chick, "see POULTRY") and means "a thorough coward, craven." That is not what I mean by poltroon. I thought the sound of it somehow conveyed, cowardice perhaps, but more importantly utter, boorish ignorance, unmanliness, and juvenility. If we turn back to another master, Dr. Johnson, we find he attests it does just so. In his Dictionary a poltro'n is "a coward," he says, "a nidget, a scoundrel; base, vile, contemptible (Hammond)." We love that "nidget" -- it seems to describe someone who is a a moral midget, but even less so, because he gets an 'n' and not an 'm.' Only why did Webster's truncate Johnson's more full definition? And who was Hammond?

While we investigate, let's try a better cocktail. A colleague of mine told me recently of a drink that a colleague of his either invented, or merely knows. It has no name and I haven't yet tried it, but it sounds intriguing. Bursting with citrus juices plus a dash of pink grapefruit bitters, we can't call it so manly a thing as the George Raft. The Pretty Pass, maybe. Proportions are guesswork, based on long study under our master.

The Pretty Pass

About an ounce (half a jigger) each of --

fresh orange juice
fresh lemon juice
fresh lime juice
Carpano Antica sweet vermouth

1 and 1/2 ounces (a jigger) bourbon
dash pink grapefruit bitters

Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice, shake and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with any small subtle fruit that will pair nicely with whisky, citrus, and high-end red wine vermouth ... pear?

Image from Pinterest

Twenty English words -- apple

The word apple is not on our original list, but we pursue its definition anyway because we have just learned how to drop a slice of apple into a gin sour, and then how, after dinner, to eat the rest of the apple for dessert alongside a tiny, tiny glass of tangy and half-sweet Madeira.

Apples and gin and Madeira. They seem so English, so colonial, so all-around-sturdy 18th century, don't they? It tempts us to set Pandora to harpsichord music -- "dainty Scarlatti," as Lucia would say -- and then to admire the Duchess of Northumberland's witnessing of the royal table, circa 1761. The king was the not quite twenty-three-year-old George III. (Our own George Washington was a young buck of twenty-nine.) The Dss. witnessed mostly meat, meat, and more meat.

Their Majestys constant Table at this Time was as follows, a soup removed with a large Joynt of Meat and two other Dish such as a Pye or a broyl'd fowl and the like. On the side table was a large Joynt, for example, a large Sirloin of Beef Cold and also a Boars Head and a Sallad; 2nd Course always one Roast, one of pastry and Spinage and Sweetbreads, Macaron, Scollopt Oysters or the like. Their Supper consists of two made Dishes usually composed of Poultry as Chickens, smore Turkey a la Bachomel, a Joynt of Cold Mutton, Buttered Eggs, Custard and constantly Veal and Chicken Broth.

Tucked in amid the meats, she saw also custards, broths, "Bachomel" -- bechamel sauce, probably? -- macaroni, butter, eggs. In other words she saw many things creamy and sweet-soft. Perhaps the 18th-century table still reflected the middle ages' enjoyment of pappy foods as a counter to salted meats and fish; note their Majestys eat not a single piscine creature in April 1761. Lent was over, Easter had fallen on March 22 and everyone was very likely still heartily sick of fish. Perhaps also, among those Joynts, the soupy, custardy spoonfuls represented not just a medieval carryover but a (time-honored) relief to weak teeth.

In any case I think food historians and cookbook writers have noticed, when it comes to old menus like this, that our not-too-distant ancestors either did not serve fresh vegetables much, or if they did so, chroniclers considered it too insignificant to mention. Or did royalty not deign to sup on cabbages at all, for instance? In the duchess' paragraph, above, nothing green is to be imagined except "Spinage" and "a Sallad," and even the spinach sounds as if it was part of a "made dish" with the pastry and sweetbreads. Another pye, maybe.

Fruits make as little an appearance as vegetables. Yet Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking (Scribner, 1984, 2004) says that the Western world has been eating fruit for dessert since antiquity. Apples, pears, cherries, grapes, figs, dates, and strawberries were all "Mediterranean natives, used BCE," he writes (p. 250). I google "English apple" and I find a list of seven just to start with. One variety is called the Codlin, used in a famed baked dish called Codlins and Cream. This instantly sounds lusciously 18th century, but the name now seems to have been bizarrely given over to a purple hairy-stemmed wasteground and swamp flower, Epilobium hirsutum. Nice people in rural Wales who call a blog Codlins and Cream show the flower, not the apple treat, as a header photo. Or used to. Coincidentally she had problems with Blogger, too, and had to reboot -- Codlins and Cream 2, why didn't I think of At First Glass 2? -- and to hope that people re-find her.

Meanwhile, Karen Hess in her great redaction Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery (Columbia University, 1981, 1995), explains briefly that the codling apple, hard, tart, and fit only for cooking, was known at least from medieval times and that its middle English name, querdelynge, may come from quert, "meaning sound or hard" (p. 95, the pertinent recipe being "to make a codling tarte eyther to looke clear or greene"). She thinks the word has nothing to do with codling, the fish, even though the codling apple is rather elongated (fish-like?) in shape .... All in all one hopes that Majesty, or anyone, might have savored once in a while simply a nice sweet apple, with a glass of Madeira.

We return to the second of our twenty English words: apple. Webster's: "from the Middle and Old English appel, meaning fruit, apple" -- I love words that only ever meant themselves -- "eyeball, or anything round; akin to the the Old Irish aball, meaning apple tree, and to the Latin Abella, 'the name of a Campanian town.' " No really? Why would ancient Irish, Latin, and English words all have to do with a fruit, the eyeball, and a town? Is the town the modern Avellino, in a southern Italian subregion of Campania that I'll wager we've never heard of? -- Irpinia? Italian travel websites make the legendary "green Irpinia" sound exquisite. They tell us,

It is best discovered gradually, on a journey through the wilderness that whispers of ancient times, when this land was inhabited by Samnites, Romans and Longobards. Ancient villages are nestled in the green of the valleys that begin at the feet of the Partenio and Terminio Mountains, covered by beech, fir, oak and chestnut. In addition to the archaeological sites, massive castles recall not only wars and plundering, sieges and battles, but also celebrations and elegant courts.

Exquisite. If ever I travel, I want to go to the little obscure places like this. I intend no slur. Since the point of travel is evidently to go and look at people who are home, why not do it wholly, and go see places where the people's home life is presumably not much disturbed by the surreality of visitors anyway? Rural West Wales. Irpinia. And, getting back to apple (again), why doesn't our standby Doctor Johnson know much more than we do? He says only that apple, from the Saxon æppel, is 1. the fruit of the apple tree [Pope's Odyssey], and 2. the pupil of the eye [Deuteronomy 32:10]. That "the apple of one's eye" should mean a favorite, and the aperture at the center of the eye literally, and should have links also to schoolchild, and little doll (pupilla), and the reflection of oneself that one can see in another person's eye -- itself akin to the Hebrew idiom "little man of the eye," which is what Deuteronomy actually says, not tapu'ach, apple -- all this constitutes some interior traveling which we will leave for another day.

Image from lifeinitaly.com

The one-time, irreproducible, crazy-local gourmet recipe: or, I can do that

Make no mistake. I like food magazines. But sometimes they are annoying. For every simple recipe for something good, like say "Apricot Clafoutis" (which sounds mysterious but is essentially pancake batter baked in a pie dish and topped with fresh apricots -- Food and Wine, August 2015) they provide six more which look stupendous in color photographs but which the average cook won't reproduce because she is not inclined to rush out to that organic textile/non-GMO bison farm in upstate New York -- or outside Portland or Seattle or Nashville -- where that up-and-coming Manhattan chef spends his summers getting away from it all and thinking up new "small plates" sourced from his twenty-acre experimental locovore garden. I'm talking about, but will likely never make, recipes like Cherry and spring onion salad with Asian fish sauce, Peach, burrata, and pickled pepper salad, Red cabbage and fried Mortadella Okonomiyaki, Ajo bianco with crab and green grapes. We're getting into the July issue here.

We're also talking about a fussy complaint that the editors of Food and Wine could shoot down in a jiffy. If the magazine annoys you, they would say, 1. don't read it, 2. recognize that it's meant for entertainment, and that's why we have test kitchens, 3. recognize that novelty and creativity drive the restaurant business, 4. recognize that this level of novelty and creativity eventually drives new products down to the supermarket level, which is where you shop for foccaccia and Brie, dear (it's the famous "blue sweater scene" from The Devil Wears Prada all over again), 5. recognize that only a day's -- only an hour's experience transforms an ingredient or a technique from something you consider crazy-progressive-stuffed shirt into something you know and like, a la clafoutis; and 6. then go buy Woman's Day. Rock those hamburger casseroles.   

But you see the reason I bring up the fussy complaint at all is because I think recently, on a small scale, I cracked the code. I did what the chefs and the food writers do: assemble an unusual, irreproducible food or drink item from a handful of ingredients that I happened to buy all at once but that few other souls are going to have ready in their homes. Voila: food as literary and artistic entertainment. The up and coming chef.

Up and coming mixologist, rather. What I bought all at once, and on vacation at local shops, were just sweet, orange-fleshed "Simka" Japanese plums and a small bottle of Spice & Tea Merchant's Blood Orange pepper. What I had ready at home, as who doesn't, were rum, lemons, and sugar. The professionals who relax on the farm by tossing cherry, onion, and fish sauce salads may laugh at my clumsy dumping together of all this... stuff. But I made a new type of Rum Sour.

Simka plum and blood orange pepper rum sour

1 to 2 Simka plums, peeled and sliced in halves
good pinch Spice & Tea Merchants Blood Orange pepper
1/4 teaspoon sugar
juice of one lemon
1 jigger (3 Tbsp.) rum

Muddle one of the plums in the bottom of a rocks glass. In a cocktail shaker, combine sugar, lemon juice, rum, and pepper. Add ice and shake gently to mix. (Too much shaking anesthetizes flavor, which is why, contrary to James Bond's instructions, you do want to shake and anesthetize the flavorless but powerfully alcoholic vodka martini.) Strain into the rocks glass, garnish with a toothpick stuck with the other peeled plum halves rolled lightly in more pepper.

Incidentally the Spice & Tea Merchants' store reminded me a bit of the WineStyles store where I got my start in the wine industry. It's another franchise, each shop meant to look like a local entrepreneur's idea, each shop laid out the same way -- dark and rustic in this case -- and stocked with the same products. The franchise fee to join and get started on the path to opening your own store is $17,500. My question is, who would imagine that demand for these particular spices and teas is such that a store like this can stay in business more than a few months, anywhere, tourist mecca or not? There was small enough demand for the wine, all those years ago, and chances are if you bother buying a bottle of wine, you will use that up faster than you will use a jar of blood orange pepper. Quaint and interesting, to be sure, but next time I'm on vacation if the store is still there I'll buy something different. There must have been a thousand quaint products on the dark, rustic shelves. They've been open a year. The matter in my jar was solidified, to be fair perhaps because, according to the ingredient list, so much of the "pepper" is sugar. Still. I was the only customer in the store. I wonder when was the last time they needed to place an order for re-supply?

And -- startling thought -- could lack of demand and irreproducible, crazy-local recipes have something to do with the fact that so many of the chefs and mixologists in Food & Wine seem to bounce around so from one awesome gig to another? They are all young and happy and at one with the land, but have resumes as long as rap sheets.   

Traffic -- wine notes -- Socrates -- and a supreme beauty (Genevieve Bujold)

2013 Champalou dry Vouvray; a fleshy but not creamy mouthfeel. Drinking the wine is like drinking the flesh of peaches, only in a bracing, stony sort of way. No sweetness. Very good and very gulpable, Retail, about $15.

Just a few other things, my fatheads. I am puzzled to know what explains traffic patterns and traffic congestion. We are driving home, let's say from a professional wine tasting. Let's say also we're driving an expressway crammed full of cars all traveling at 10 miles per hour when they should be going sixty. We see no problems or construction delays in sight. Sometimes the traffic breaks up and we speed along smoothly. Why? More often, we are bumper to bumper, and we speed nowhere. Why not? Do those of us heading to 'Indiana' just huddle in the left lanes, because we fear missing an exit amid all the trucks? Do we thus create congestion ourselves?

Alone in your car you sigh, resigning yourself to the two hour "rush." You look forward to a peaceful patio and a cocktail very soon. My most recent favorite, cocktail that is, is a simple little something that I will call "The Smallest Cocktail in the World." It's equal parts -- let us say, a jigger each -- of iced tea, which you have made yourself from scratch properly of course, and gin. Ransom "old Tom" has a fine effect.

After you get home and sit on the patio savoring your Smallest Cocktail in the World, you begin to look about you. You keep pondering the plot twists of that mystery novel you have determined to write. Why would the murderer sneak into the wine shop in the middle of the night, to correct the grammar of a note left by the stock kid, asking for the next day off? 

And should a magnolia tree throw off freak, April-worthy blossoms in July? It did.

Now, my fatheads, one more thing. About the Socratic method. Our instructor at the wine tasting used it, to ill effect I am sorry to say. This sort of thing aggravated me even in high school, but since I am encountering it more than thirty years later, I feel I must protest.

The Socratic method of teaching -- asking questions of the people around you, in the collegial search for truth -- is fine if you are Socrates, and if you are exploring huge topics. Socrates' point in using it was that the truth exists and it can be found out by anyone, by any group of people honestly thinking questions through and puzzling answers out with friends and fellows. Or among the household slaves, for that matter. This was significant: to get a slave to expound philosophy simply by answering questions was proof of cosmic truths being with the rational reach of all. At the close of one of his "dialogues" Socrates says that whatever answer he and his friends have found for query x, today, might be a very different one from the answer that satisfies them on query x tomorrow. This is not because the truth changes or is unknowable, but because faulty human beings may not be able to arrive at the truth on such and such a day or with such and such companions. Tomorrow, they may do so. It is the questioning that matters, and the understanding -- we'll repeat this -- that truth exists and can be discovered. In our own age of total moral relativism and its accompanying horrors, that must never be forgotten.

The problem is that far too many teachers use the Socratic method, not to unveil truth, but to tease an unprepared audience into spitting out minor information which they, the teachers, have crammed for. Their questions stun the audience and make everyone feel stupid and shy. When Teacher gives the answer, it only seems, in retrospect, that since he knew all along, he has only been withholding information out of spite. This is what annoyed me in high school. Also, I came to know much later, this is not Socratic. This is ... well, fill in the blank. Ever wonder why your classrooms are full of sullen teens glancing at their phones? You must all stop it.
 

2012 Domaine Serge Dagueneau et Filles Pouilly-Fume. Nutty, almost sherry-like. "Nervy"? I wouldn't say that, but a colleague I met at the wine tasting introduced me to that word, nervy, as a wine descriptor. He claimed that all pinot noirs fall into two categories, and are "trying to do" either of two things. (Before we go on, we remark that of course the Pouilly-Fume in the photo above is not a pinot noir. This colleague just happened to start talking about them, because we tasted them next. Also "Jack" tended to ignore Teacher's pointed and pointless questions.) "Jack" nearly broke my hand in his handshake, and then said, "Pinot noirs are my passion." He has worked retail liquor for fifteen years, lives within walking distance of his job, and worked in a California vineyard before that.

What are pinot noirs trying to do? One of two things, Jack said. Either they want to be linear, seamless, seductive, or they want to be slightly unfocused and "nervy." I'm flattered the man spoke to me as if I had experience of that, too. I suppose my reaction means my own "trickle-down," as he put it, from our conversation was basic human self-absorption. Gee, he must think I know wine. And how long is it going to take me to get home?

2013 Stoneleigh Latitude sauvignon blanc. Just what New Zealand delights in being: Steely, limey, and kiwi-like all at once. Few California examples compare, in my view, although French ones certainly do. Remember the time I actually tasted the famed "cat p -- " in a French sauvignon blanc?

Sometimes, you know, when you get home from a long day or a long commute and maybe some frustrations about being delivered the Socratic method by people who don't understand what it ever was, you just relax any old how. The Internet has made it possible to do that, and how. I happened to follow some favorite Tudor-themed links to the old movie Anne of the Thousand Days, and from there to considering Genevieve Bujold.

What a supreme beauty she was in youth. Not only her dark eyes and hair and lovely pert face, but her slight French burr, and that demeanor of bright fearlessness, were all perfect for Anne Boleyn. No other actress has come close to her portrayal in any other production, except the late Dorothy Tutin in the BBC program of the early 1970s -- and though she was fine, Dorothy Tutin was already too old (past 40 I believe) for the part. And nowadays you will see blue-eyed actresses in the role! What, does no one in the "Continuity" department think to budget for brown contact lenses?

Anyway I read in a movie encyclopedia once the assessment that Genevieve Bujold is an under-appreciated actress, and that I believe. She continues to work, year after year "in small independent films," and God bless her for it. If her career has not been all she had hoped after the banner year of 1969, I hope she has been well adjusted and happy nevertheless. Given what Hollywood is, I imagine there is an inverse relationship between surface success and inner peace within the "TMZ."

Image from fanpop

The Red Snapper cocktail

I have unearthed some older photos. Lincoln Park Zoo and Conservatory. Don't worry, you may have a cocktail at the end.

 

Now amid the greenery and the orchids, the spilling water and the lovebirds, the klipspringers and the meerkats, we have also seen a lot of fish. (Is there anything prettier than a koi pond? We think not.) So, let us carry on the theme and make a fish-referenced cocktail. Here is Charles Schumann's Red Snapper, from American Bar. 

Red Snapper

2 ounces (a little more than a jigger) cream
dash grenadine
1/4 ounce (1 and 1/2 teaspoons) Galliano
1 ounce (about half a jigger) white rum

Shake well over ice cubes in a cocktail shaker, strain into a cocktail glass.

Wall of fish, and the Chicago cocktail

From Lincoln Park Zoo. It's meant to represent life in the waters of Lake Victoria.

You may have a little drink, too, since it's ages since we tried a new one. Here, from our Calvert Party Encyclopedia (1960), is the Chicago Cocktail.

Chicago Cocktail

1 and 1/2 ounces (1 jigger) brandy
dash curacao
dash bitters
champagne

Stir all ingredients well with ice. "Frost" the rim of a champagne flute by dipping it first in water, then in sugar. Strain the drink ingredients into the flute, then fill with more champagne.

Admire the view. 

The beautiful simplicity of the Orange Blossom (cocktail)

It was such fun rediscovering some photos from the Lincoln Park Zoo/Conservatory/Schiller Park area that we decided to rediscover, or recover or uncover, a few more. Mostly orchids, plus an orange in winter.  Then, the Orange Blossom.

Orange Blossom.(from the Calvert Party Encyclopedia).

2 ounces (a little more than a jigger) gin
1 ounce (a little less than a jigger) fresh orange juice

Stir well with cracked ice, and strain into a cocktail glass.

New cocktail: MAILER-DAEMON failure notice: "Mailbox full"

Why on earth anybody responds to a famous author's writings is beyond me. I guess we all think we're going to give the great man pause in some superb way, or we're going to be discovered, too. All we get is a ding in our inboxes, encouraging us to subscribe to whatever online magazine the famous author writes for; or we get a MAILER DAEMON failure notice. This time it was "mailbox full," which I gather is unusual in these post-floppy-disk days. Oh well. Here's what I wrote him. His groupies, know him as VDH.  

Dear Mr. Victor Davis Hanson,

Every once in a while, I think your editors ask you to write something optimistic, and the "Still Dazzling" article seems to me to be the latest. Right on schedule too, around Christmastime. They always seem to follow a more heartfelt (and depressing) piece chronicling the disintegration of life in rural CA. Anyway thank you for the dose of good cheer.

You're right, it's all about ordinary people carrying on, the trouble is it's also the ordinary people who foot the bills, and I sometimes think authentic crisis will come when ordinary people figure out they have no voice left except tax revolt. Then we may see what the government is willing to do to get their hands on the money.

I also agree with something Dennis Prager said years ago, that liberalism is a religion. Using politics to fight it does not work. Eighteenth century political cycles, i.e. voting every two years, move too slowly to keep up with 21st century, left-wing compassion tyranny. Or royal edicts, for that matter. I sometimes think a true opposition leader, when he comes, will be a religious figure -- not even necessarily a pastor or Bible-thumper, but someone with some kind of inner core that will be impervious to the weapons of the entrenched media/academic elite. I look forward to the first president who does not have a White House press corps, and sends no representatives to "the Sunday morning shows." I think maybe he'll choose to live in Detroit, or Branson, or maybe even (if he has a lot of imagination) Mexico City. Why not? 

You said the ordinary American keeps on working, taking care of his family, ignoring pop culture, and doing what he excels at. Good for you, yes, I think you're right. Years ago when I still read the Chicago Tribune I read an article of yours in which you wrote that what distinguishes today's America from earlier, declining empires was the presence in our midst of an elite which loathed the country and fought hard for its worldwide contempt and collapse. Even the Romans, you said, did not have that. I've always thought that was the best thing you have ever written and the thing historians will remember you for. 

Thanks again for the dose of Christmas cheer. Looking forward to next year's version.

Best



Drown your frustrations with a little something from a very pre-floppy-disk era. We're going to resurrect and re-christen the Calvert Party Encyclopedia's [1961] "Princeton cocktail," a delight not only from 1961 but from the early 1900s. Paul Clarke at Serious Eats records that the Princeton was created by "New York barman George Kappeler, who mixed it [ca. 1900] along with other Ivy League-named drinks at the Holland House bar." It must be true, since our Encyclopedia lists the recipe for the Yale on the very next page. The Princeton is simpler. It requires two of our favorites, gin and port, plus orange bitters.

Specifically it requires Old Tom gin, a style sweeter than today's usual gins. Mr. Clarke says that if you can't find new makers of Old Tom, the flavor can be approximated with a mix of regular gin and a bit of simple syrup. I suggest regular gin and -- why not? -- a bit of apple cider, or possibly even apple cider liqueur. Let's try Journeyman Distillery O.C.G. (Old Country Goodness) apple cider.

Therefore, our new cocktail becomes --

The MAILER-DAEMON

1 jigger (1 and 1/2 ounces) gin
generous dash -- say, 1/4 teaspoon -- apple cider liqueur, such as Journeyman
1/2 ounce -- a little less than half a jigger -- port
2 dashes orange bitters

Stir all ingredients in a mixing glass with 4 ice cubes. Strain into a cocktail glass. The usual garnish is a twist of lemon peel, which seems to me a jarring note. Port and lemon? No. A little cube of apple with peel seems better. Mr. Clarke by the way says the gin and bitters only should be mixed together with ice; after they are strained into the cocktail glass, the port is poured carefully down the side of the glass, so that it  may settle prettily at the bottom. Kind of like voters.  

Retail rant: among the top 5 worst Christmas songs (plus a cocktail)

They used to play over the radio at a former workplace, you see, and so one became slowly irate. I am sure I could make a new list for the new workplace. And why yes, these are in order. 

1.) Etta Jones, "It's Christmas time." A maundering voice screeches and drones on, rather like a vaguely lecturing teacher, about "peekin' out the window," ting-a-ling-ling. Maundering trumpets try to make some sort of desultory melody to fill in the blank spaces. Very, very bad.

2.) Lena Horne, "Jingle Bells" -- Lena of the fierce smile, fierce eyes, hard face, harder voice. When she sings about not knowing where she is going on her sleigh ride -- "with my baby by my side, I don't really cay-uh" -- one is reminded of wintry Russian stories about the bride being thrown off the sledge to the pacing wolves. In this scenario, Lena is the fierce-eyed chucker-out, not the bride.

3.) James Brown, "Santa Claus (go straight to the ghetto"). Tough call. What he does isn't music, yet one can't ignore the screams.

4.) Brad Paisley, "Santa-looksa lot like Daddeh." Santa-wasa much too thin. And he didn't come down the chimney, so momma must have let him in. As Miss Mapp would say, such a new idea.

5.) Brenda Lee, "I'm gonna pop-pop Santa Claus (with a water pistol gun)." Squirt, squirt! Storied career or no, in my house we call this performer "the swamp child in a bottle," because that's what the voice sounds like.

I feel better. Enjoy a new cocktail, the Honeysuckle. The honey does give the drink an unusual flowery character.

• 1 jigger (1and 1/2 ounces) light rum
• the juice of a small lime (or half a large lime)
• 1 tsp. honey

Shake all ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker, and strain into a cocktail glass. Have two, depending on your schedule. 

A little bit of perfection -- new cocktail -- the New Job

Cocktails, like other good things, must surely have their recipes tweaked and perfected very slowly over the course of time. They must surely change, grow, and come to fulfillment depending on who liked what foundational thing, capital T, and who had what ingredients on hand to improve the Thing. Remember Mrs. Wakefield at the Toll House, who had only to cut up some chocolate bars into a plain butter cookie dough to create the immortal chocolate chip cookie; remember also King Louis XV, who is said to have invented French onion soup from only onions and a bottle of flat champagne "after a joyous night in eighteenth-century Paris" (Madeleine Kamman, The New Making of a Cook). 

When it comes to cocktails I like a sour, like my master Charles Schumann (American Bar). A sour is a large category of drinks, fundamentally lemon juice, sugar, and a spirit. We here at Pluot, by way of At First Glass, have mixed and enjoyed whisky sours, gin sours, Boston sours -- in which we learn that an egg is many things, but it is not refreshing -- and of course our longtime favorite, rum sours. When recently we availed ourselves of a stash of good Calvados, we tried and very much liked the "Arc de Triomphe," or Calvados sour. Once upon a time we even invented -- didn't we? -- something new, the Sour Blossom martini.

Today we tweak again, based on ingredients to hand, and devise a delectable cocktail very much in need of a name and a wider audience. It goes like this.

The __________ 

In a shaker, combine:

the juice of half a lemon
a dash of sugar or simple syrup (perhaps a quarter teaspoon at most -- or equal parts to the juice, if you like your drinks less tart)
half a jigger Calvados
half a jigger good bourbon, plus a tiny extra splash of  it (I used Bulleit)

Squeeze a splash of fresh orange juice into your cocktail glass -- perhaps half a teaspoon or so. Stir all the other ingredients in the shaker with a few ice cubes. (We prefer our drinks stirred, not shaken, because stirring keeps the ingredients a tad warmer and more flavorful. To shake is to anaesthetize.) Strain the lemon-and-bourbon/Calvados mix into the glass with its waiting orange juice. Garnish any way you like, provided it is simple, say a grape or a cherry, or don't garnish at all. The prettiest choice is a blushing yellow Rainier cherry, but they are only in season for a short time, and we must enjoy our new creation, The ____________,  in other months besides May.

Now what shall we call this little tweaking and approximation of perfection? It's tart, it's sweet, it has bourbon's rich fruitiness and Calvados' whiff of the apples of Normandy. For all its homey-ness, the orange juice adds a plump touch of the exotic. Though calling the drink the New Job seems downright prosaic, still we think we'll leave it at that. After all we are about six weeks into this life milestone, and are gratified to have pretty thoroughly learned the fundamentals.

Speaking of which, it's a curious thing -- and I must ask, is your workplace like mine? -- at the New Job, everyone does the same four or five tasks all day. Each task has about four or five components all of which are subject to a specific clerical error. Committing one of these errors, in other words getting one-fifth of any task wrong, nullifies the whole thing and creates cascading problems for everyone else "down the line," which is exactly the right, mass-production metaphor to use. A manager who has done the work for ten years can spot an approaching clerical error long in advance, whether I make them at my six weeks' experience, or whether a colleague makes them at his three or four years' experience. And of course the corrective is to "pay attention" to all things. Only, sometimes, that exhortation seems to backfire. It reminds me of a scene in 30 Rock when boss Jack asks earnest page Kenneth whether he can walk and talk at the same time. "I always could, but now I'm not sure," Kenneth blinks, and then carries on doing both, awkwardly. In order for any workplace ritual to become second nature, you almost have to stop paying attention, don't you? Being New, however, I think I will keep that little bit of perfect wisdom to myself.

Gourmet's Cider-braised pork shoulder with caramelized onions, plus how we're all descended from royalty

My fatheads, you must forgive the quality of the picture. Think of it as rustic and homey, somehow.  Medieval ... Norman.

And what on earth do you say to a very kind young man who is interested in ancestry, and thinks he can trace his descent from the earliest American pilgrims, and English and French royalty, and all royalty going back to the Roman Empire? Apart from the glaring fixation -- no one is ever descended from plumbers, or even artists -- I would think a fourth-grade arithmetic class would disabuse any of us, permanently, of the notion that we get to have our own private family tree, which we can then imagine to be leafed out however we like. Ancestors double, you know, with each generation. You have only to go back a little more than a hundred years to find, already, your 32 great-great-great grandparents. Don't you think it's likely that they were also somebody else's great-great-great grandparents? Maybe even your co-workers', or the man in the street? Step back another generation and the number is 64. And so on. Henry Adams in his great book Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904) mused on "arithmetical ancestors," because he had computed even further.

Since the generation which followed William to England in 1066, we can reckon twenty-eight or thirty from father to son, and, if you care to figure up the sum, you will find that you had about two hundred and fifty million arithmetical ancestors living in the middle of the eleventh century. The whole population of England and northern France may then have numbered five million [note: Fordham University estimates eight million], but if it were fifty it would not much affect the certainty that, if you have any English blood at all, you have also Norman. 

In other words your many-times-great-grandfathers, including the odd, titled roisterer-doisterer who may have visited some humble cottage with a glint in his eye, were your same many-times-great-grandfathers many times over. It's the only way everyone's arithmetical ancestors can fit into population levels of bygone eras. We're all descended from and related to everybody. Far from this news seeming -- to my young royal friend, or to anyone -- therefore disappointing, anonymous and dreary, Adams infuses it with romance:

If we could go back and live again in all our two hundred and fifty million arithmetical ancestors of the eleventh century, we should find ourselves doing many surprising things, but among the rest we should pretty certainly be ploughing most of the fields of the Cotentin and Calvados; going to mass in every parish church in Normandy; rendering military service to every lord, spiritual or temporal, in all this region; and helping to build the Abbey Church at Mont Saint Michel. From the roof of the cathedral of Coutances over yonder, one may look away over the hills and woods, the farms and fields of Normandy, and so familiar, so homelike are they, one can almost take oath that in this, or the other, or in all, one knew life once and has never so fully known it since.

Never so fully known it since!  

My gentleman friend listened to all this and told me I should have tweaked the young royal about his math illiteracy -- innumeracy, do we call it now? -- and his idée fixe. I said, no. I think there is no harm in letting someone natter on about a harmless and pleasant fantasy. Perhaps when he is older a fabulous, fiery girl will give him the rough side of her tongue about birth records from the Roman Empire. He will be much amazed, grow up overnight, and will throw himself into a love affair to astonish them both. Then he can read Henry Adams, and find a truer level of mystic romance in anonymous things. 

Meanwhile, in honor of the Calvados that Adams mentioned -- the region, not the apple brandy, but we're fine with both -- we'll make this delectable winter dish. Pork shoulder, onions, and apple cider. Gourmet does not call it Norman per se, but our arithmetical Normans would have liked it very much.

Gourmet's cider-braised pork shoulder with caramelized onions

3 to 4 pounds fresh pork shoulder, sometimes sold as "Boston butt" (or, according to Gourmet, "arm picnic")
2 garlic cloves, sliced thinly
2 Tbsp. olive oil -- for a Norman touch, use butter
5 to 6 medium onions, chopped
3/4 cup apple cider
salt and pepper

Score a crosshatch pattern on the meat and insert the garlic slices into the cuts. (Or, simply toss a couple of whole cloves into the pot later, before putting it into the oven.) Season the pork with salt and pepper. Preheat the oven to 325 F.

Heat the oil or butter in a heavy oven proof pot. Brown the meat on all sides, turning occasionally until it is all browned, about 8 minutes. Transfer to a plate.

Add the onions to the pot and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and golden. Add 3/4 teaspoon salt and keep cooking until onions are golden and caramelized, about 10 to 15 minutes total.

Stir in the cider -- or, deglaze the pot with a few Tablespoons of Calvados, stir, and then add the cider. Return pork to the pot. Cover with aluminum foil and the lid, and put into the preheated oven. Bake about 2 and 1/2 to 3 hours. When the pork is tender, transfer it to a clean plate and boil the sauce to reduce it to about 2 cups. 

What wine to serve with this? In her chapter on Norman food in When French Women Cook, Madeleine Kamman often suggests dry ciders to accompany the recipes, including of course those featuring pork and butter. We forget, if we ever considered it before, that on a map of the wine regions of France, Normandy is not set off and color-coded at all. This is a land not of grapes but of apples and dairy cows, of Calvados and cream. So a cider would be tasty. Or possibly a fully dry or "Trocken" German riesling?

And we'll close with a little more of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. (It's a book about Gothic cathedrals and stained glass, but also about much more.) Why did Henry Adams, in 1904, think that in medieval Normandy "we knew life, and have never so fully known it since"?

Never so fully known it since! for we of the eleventh century, hard-headed, close-fisted, grasping, shrewd, as we were, and as Normans are still said to be, stood more fully in the centre of the world's movement than our English descendants ever did. We were a part, and a great part, of the Church, of France and of Europe. The Leos and Gregories of the tenth and eleventh centuries leaned on us in their great struggle for reform. Our Duke Richard-Sans-Peur, in 966, turned the old canons out of the Mount in order to bring here the highest influence of the time, the Benedictine monks of Monte Cassino. ... Our activity was not limited to Northern Europe, or even confined by Anjou and Gascony. When we stop at Coutances, we will drive out to Hauteville to see where Tancred came from, whose sons Robert and Roger were conquering Naples and Sicily at the time when the Abbey Church was building on the Mount. Normans were everywhere in 1066, and everywhere in the lead of their age. We were a serious race ....

A 1960s Zombie cocktail, and the oddness of Halloween

It's a peculiar holiday, isn't it, this Halloween which no one any more spells with an apostrophe. For us moderns it is one word, just a thing like "truck" or "carpet." It is no longer Hallowe'en, the e'en (even, evening) before All Hallows', the feast of All Saints. Choose any saint you like. They each have their own day, but on All Saints Day they are honored in toto, from humble (one presumes) St. Margaret of Clitherow, patron saint of businesswomen, pressed to death in Elizabeth's Merrie Olde England in 1586, to the giants of heaven -- Michael the Archangel, John the Baptist, the Apostles. Everyone.

When we celebrate Halloween, we are not thinking much of a contemplative vigil the night before the saints' day. For us it is all about -- well, we will get to that in a minute. Let's say for us, the roots of it are all about more ancient pagan associations. No less a personage than James Frazier, of The Golden Bough, teaches us. In his section "the Hallowe'en fires" (from chapter lxii, The Fire-festivals of Europe) he says,

...when November opens, the harvest has long been reaped and garnered, the fields lie bare, the fruit trees are stripped, and even the yellow leaves are fast fluttering to the ground. [This point of the year], while of comparatively little moment to the European husbandman, does deeply concern the European herdsman; for it is on the approach of winter that he leads his cattle back to the safety and shelter of the stall. (The Golden Bough, 1 volume abridged, 1951.)

This means Halloween is allied not with farming and crop harvesting, but with animals, with settling in and drawing close. I remember reading once that the holiday may even date back to the days before animals were domesticated at all; it may reflect Man the Hunter's knowledge that deer come down from the mountains in the fall, to the warmer woods and valleys; this is why Halloween has a festive spring corollary, "Walpurgis Night" or May-eve, when (Man the Hunter noticed) deer return to the mountains for the summer -- and must be followed. Frazier thinks that ghosts come into Hallows' eve because, having learned new skills, Man the Herdsman busy putting his cattle into the barn for safety also would have wanted to act as kindly to his dear dead.

Throughout Europe, Hallowe'en, the night which marks the transition from autumn to winter, seems to have been of old the time of year when the souls of the departed are supposed to revisit their old homes in order to warm themselves by the fire ... could the good-man and the good-wife deny to the spirits of their dead the welcome which they gave to the cows?

Add in prehistoric [mostly Celtic] New Year rites, which Frazier thinks are part of the mix and which always include ideas of time-shifting, of protective mask-wearing and future-foreseeing, of the supernatural intersecting with life, and we have more reason to prepare for hauntings and witchery. We have more reason to set out treats of food for lost souls -- dear cow-souls, we might call them -- to light celebratory fires, and to generally savor the night's "glamour of mystery and awe -- attended by picturesque features and merry pastimes -- the gayest night of the year, invested with romantic beauty." 

I hope so, especially the mystery and awe and romantic beauty parts. I find Halloween interesting because Frazier's and all these ideas, if they are right, make the holiday truly a relic, projecting from remote prehistory into our day, carrying a freight of knowledge and rituals which our ancestors took seriously. Seriously enough to still affect us. Note what we still do or don't do, because of them. We don't, for example, make a Halloween dinner. We don't spend long days stewing and braising, and then sit down to a proper family feast in daytime. It is all treats or faux-food, treats disguised. The dead don't really eat.

As for romantic beauty, well. Again I hope so. Driving around and looking at decorations this week, I fear we probably could all take a lesson from our Celtic ancestors, who surely would have had better taste than to strew their homes and yards with pointless mannequins of bloodied brides, or effigies of human torsos hung from trees. Not very welcoming to the cow-souls, or cows for that matter. Aren't a few lights, pumpkins, hay bales, and the occasional black cat enough? Why the interpolation of evil and violence into "the gayest night of the year"? Modern people in comfortable societies might not go in for pretend horror at all, if they had any understanding that such scenes are real sometimes. Remember the four-day jihadi attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi? 

It does seem also that Halloween, Celtic all through, passed via the Celtic countries, Ireland and Scotland, to arrive full blooded only on American shores. If you flit about on the internet googling Halloween in France, Italy, or Spain, for instance, you learn that these un-Celtic countries didn't know it much at all. They have recently begun adopting the American Halloween, complete with quite good-looking Italian zombies in Rome, but had no particular witches-and-broomstick customs of their own for the vigil before All Saints' Day. Curious, by the by, that for all the German immigration in our background, we never adopted Walpurgis Night, April 30. Possibly it was always a minor matter in the old country anyway.

As for Halloween's American growth, or what it is all about for us, it seems to have morphed strong within living memory. Deep in Project Gutenberg you can find old books for children from the early 1900s, in which an earnest narrator describes fun but odd Hallowe'en parties that call to mind a birthday, or April Fool's, as much as anything else. (Actually the party in Hallowe'en at Merryvale is a birthday, too.) Boys and girls pull taffy, bob for apples, and then sit down before a paper pie which they pull open with colored paper streamers, to reveal paper spiders and grasshoppers within. They eat ice cream and cake. A generation later, my father returned from the service after World War II to learn of a new custom. His mother handed out candy to children at the door on October 31. He had to ask her what was going on. (My mother, however, disputed this. She was six years younger than him. "Of course we all went trick or treating then," she scolded. Perhaps my father lived a rather sober childhood, or perhaps the age gap proved time enough for a new custom to develop sometime in the 1930s or '40s.)   

Today one can speak not only of an American Halloween industry, and of discrete sales of candy and costumes and party decorations and so on, but of such a thing as the Halloween Industry Association. Take a look at its website and be reminded of the way literature has crept into Halloween costumes: there among the stock ghosts and skeletons is Count Dracula, and Frankenstein. The HIA was incorporated in 2005, the same year that President George W. Bush signed legislation extending Daylight Saving Time by one week -- i.e., to barely scoop in the magical day -- after "intense lobbying" from "the candy industry" ("How Retailers Got American Kids an Extra Hour to Trick or Treat on Halloween," by Megan Willet, Business Insider, Oct. 29, 2014). Well and good, I say. Small-r republican representative government in action. If you object, run for office yourself, or form a lobbying group to outlaw businessmens' -- and -womens', à la Saint Margaret of Clitherow -- reacting to incentive, or candy.

An odd holiday. We eat non-meals, and rub shoulders with wraiths instead of people, or hope to do. Now would be the time to close with a typical Halloween treat, a comforting morsel for one's favorite cow-soul. I think you may have a cocktail instead. Below, from my dog-eared paperback Calvert Party Encyclopedia (all of 96 little pages, published in 1960), enjoy the Zombie.

Shake well with ice:

1 oz. dark rum
2 oz. "gold seal" [gold?] rum
1 oz. white rum
1 oz. pineapple juice
1 oz. papaya juice
juice of 1 lime

Strain into a highball glass, garnish with pineapple slice and cherry. Float Demerara rum (very dark, often high proof rum, often from Guyana) on top, sprinkle with 1 tsp. powdered sugar.

Apples and lemons, and events of the day

This will be very unpolished; but you will forgive me I think. Although, spending part of the day driving around doing errands and listening in the car to an audiobook biography of J.S. Bach, makes one tremble at the idea of producing any writing or photos, or doing any activity whatever that is not the most refined and perfect possible. Such a travesty of a waste of the time God gives us. Did Bach ever dash anything off in a hurry, and say, "well, I've just finished a big cantata (or what have you), let this be a tad unpolished"? 

I don't know. I do suspect that the good people at Naxos, who made this Life and Works 4 CD set some years ago, have made a mistake in their attributions however. The narrator, surely, is the amber-voiced John Shrapnel, and it is someone else voicing "Bach" in letters and so on. I was so convinced of this that I felt I had to comment about it on the chat boards at the Naxos site, and only then did I do a bit of perfunctory sleuthing on the movie site IMDB. I learned that I am a little confused as to which amber-voiced English actor named John played a small role in I, Claudius, -- and which did not. Anyway I still think they've made a typo on their CD case and enclosed booklet. [Full disclosure -- they didn't make a typo, this mistake is all on me. You can make yourself look entirely ditzy, sometimes, even though you're really not. Nevertheless -- ] Somewhere in the depths of Angela Thirkell's oeuvre a character says, "My dear mother thought the most extraordinary things and she never dreamed of supporting them with a shred of proof," or something like that, and so I take her as my witness that it's all right to do that. I also like the way she sprinkles her narratives with confident and completely non-sequitir-ish, omniscient-narrator "we's." "We think that was the right thing for Tom to do," and so on. Angela Thirkell in The Duke's Daughter also gives the most perfect description of a baby's skin in all English literature: she compares it to "gossamer jelly."  

Anyway I did better research later this afternoon when it came to the matter of finding out who is the soprano who sings "Bist du bei mir" (Art thou with me) on the second CD of the Life and Works. All sopranos are wonderful as we know. But this voice had such an effortless, eerie, yet strangely metallic quality that, singing as she did after the narrator had just told us of Anna Magdalena Bach's fine soprano, I felt almost as though I were listening to a voice from the remote past. As if to Anna herself, at her harpsichord in a little room in a house in Leipzig. I felt I must know who this soprano is.

If I have researched aright, she is Ingrid Kertesi, born in Hungary. I know nothing else of her that you might not also learn in a few minutes on Wikipedia -- except I suppose that she would not be flattered to know that a musical Neanderthal like me finds her voice eerily metallic.

I've also been exploring the world of e-publishing today. You do find extraordinary things. I am not impressed with Smashword, sorry. Years ago James Michener said that when he was starting out he had no fear of getting lost in any slush pile, because he had worked in publishing and he knew exactly what kind of competition was in the slush pile with him. I don't see Smashword in any fairer light. (I once started a sort of epublishing firm of my own, and it's still there.) HarperCollins' Authonomy seems better, so I chose to upload, ahem, the Whole Thing there. Do you think the people who actually, incredibly asked me to send them "a few chapters" will withdraw the invitation if they learn I've done that? I reason that Authonomy's soup is very thick, and that the chances of simultaneous acceptances are astronomically more remote now than they were twenty or thirty years ago.

Now, re: fashion. I watched Funny Face last night, since my new computer takes in Netflix and everything. If there is a more gorgeous piece of clothing than Audrey Hepburn's first Paris gown in that movie -- the stark floor length white sheath with utterly stark, straight pink velvet cloak -- then I shall be glad to know what it is. It's curious to look at photos of Edith Head's designs, and photos of Givenchy's, and to realize that knowledgeable people consider the one to be much more sophisticated than the other; but which is which? That is a matter for more of your own research.

Finally, apples and lemons. You may call it an "Arc de Triomphe," or you may call it an Apple Brandy (or Calvados) sour. Either way, here it is. "Why does everything have to be sour?" my gentleman friend asks. "Because I like sours," I say.

Arc de Triomphe or Apple Brandy sour

In a mixing glass, stir, with four ice cubes:

the juice of half a lemon
sugar or simple syrup to taste (about half a teaspoon to start, or equal parts to the lemon juice if you like things less sour)
one jigger (1 and 1/2 ounces) apple brandy or Calvados

Stir well and strain into a cocktail glass. Enjoy with your next Audrey Hepburn movie. Or Bach.