The Haruspex

Pilgrim time.

nbmandel — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 19:05:02 +0000

The lights were off in the bus, and my traveling companions and I all seated separately in the dark, and the roadside landscape hardly visible or worth seeing, and suddenly it was a good time to cry. Wait, I asked myself, is my sorrow valid? Yes, I said, it is.

The soundtrack: 275t, Loving-Kindness. My call at the Keystone Convention, from which I was traveling home. It was a great day, don’t get me wrong. More about that here [COMING SOON AT S&G]. (The recording is from an unidentified Southern singing, and uses verses one & two; I called one & three, but I liked the slow pace of this version [and of mine].)

Baking: chocolate walnut sherry cake redux; dark gingerbread

nbmandel — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 01:24:30 +0000

For Lisa V’s (and her mother’s) Christmas Eve party, I made the same excellent and festive loaf cake I’d made last year. And it was just as good. It went well with the homely luxury of Lisa’s Polish bigos and guest Natasha’s Georgian bean dish — delicious though hideous. I’m still puzzled by the call to put the baking soda in the coffee-date mixture. Zach suggested that it might be to get the power of the acid, but you don’t want to exhaust your leavening while your bowl of coffee & dates waits to be added to the batter. In any case I used baking powder by accident and it foamed like mad when I put it into the mixture — the coffee was still warm. I added another pinch of b.p. and one of baking soda to the dry ingredients and the cake rose like a champion.

For Nick & Carlos’s New Year’s Eve party, I made Heidi Swanson’s black sticky gingerbread, which was also very successful although neither black nor sticky, I don’t know why. I made changes to the recipe, but not ones that would have decreased the stickiness. (See my comments dated January 1. I didn’t mention that I also used half white and half whole wheat flour, and that my milk was partly sour.) It was good enough, in fact, that I made another loaf to take to Aldo’s for a house singing on Sunday, where it was received with expressions of pleasure. I’m so happy to have recovered my ability to make a reasonably well-structured cake, perhaps merely by buying a new container of baking powder.

And now I have rugelach dough softening on the counter, so I’d better get on to rolling and spreading.

New Year’s Eve, 2011

nbmandel — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:31:03 +0000

162 Plenary. “Still walking downward to the tomb / And yet prepared no more.” Sacred Harp’s paradoxical blend of cheer and despair. Happy 2012, everyone.

(From the first New Haven All-Day Singing, Oct. 2, 2011; courtesy BostonSing.org.)

Haircut.

nbmandel — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 02:20:00 +0000

At Today’s Cut, a nearly invisible three-chair spot on East Fifth Street, where Mourad cut my hair in the summer. It’s not as spectacular as this summer’s cut — but then there wasn’t five years of seaweed to cut off. Nice, though. To conclude, an Algerian Muslim rubbed “Moroccan Oil” (argan) made in Israel into a New York Jew’s hair, as we both laughed.

New header image, Dec 2011

nbmandel — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:47:24 +0000

I borrowed those beautiful cabbages from a handsome local food blog called Figs, Bay & Wine which is even slower to update than I have been. (Dear FB&W proprietor, I love your pictures, but if you don’t want me to use this clip, just let me know.)

an ambivalent inhabitant of the country Freud discovered

nbmandel — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 23:14:48 +0000

I haven’t noticed a good one of these for quite a while; it’s also true I haven’t been paying much attention. The subject is David Cronenberg’s new film, A Dangerous Method, about Freud, Jung, and the hysterical patient Sabina Spielrein. Review (highly favorable) by A.O. Scott.

“A Dangerous Method” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Eros and Thanatos.

Gifts.

nbmandel — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:11:45 +0000

After three days of either fever or cough I woke up this morning — actually, at 3:43 — with both. So I threw in the towel and stayed home from work. I made oatmeal for breakfast, which I stirred with a special olivewood spoon my friend A gave me, put into a special boat-&-windmill bowl my friend N gave me, and ate with the silver spoon with blue enamel that was my childhood cereal spoon. No, it didn’t cure anything, but I was happy.

Febrifuge.

nbmandel — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 02:04:42 +0000

Word of the day. Two aspirin, and three hours of Sacred Harp.

Reading: David Stacton

nbmandel — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:29:33 +0000

There’s something puzzling and original about the flow of consciousness among characters and aphoristic narrator in this bleak novel first published in 1961. Stacton wrote a number of historical novels set in wildly varied times and places, and several genre potboilers under different pseudonyms. His attention to actors — John Wilkes Booth and his brother Edwin – and to the performativity underlying normal life seems somehow unsurprising.

And at noon President Johnson arrived.

That made everybody feel better. It brought life into perspective again, for Johnson was a man they could all understand, a wily hardbitten rogue with cold eyes and something evasive in his manner. He was, he had said so often, a common man. They had nothing against that. Politicians were always common men who did the work that statesmen could not stoop to do. It was the uncommon attributes of Lincoln that had disturbed them. About Lincoln there was always the reserve of a kindly judge who, kind or not, still sits up there, fingering the dossiers of both sides of the case, whether he admits to doing so or not.

Johnson stepped forward to the bier and looked down at that head from which Willie Wright, in whose bed the President had died, had saved some of the brains in a handkerchief, with the thought of giving them to Robert Lincoln, at the appropriate time. When a corrupt man becomes incorrupt, that merely means he uses the force of corruption for incorrupt ends. Unlike a man born good, he is hard to dislodge. But as yet nobody had had the chance to find that out.

David Stacton, The Judges of the Secret Court: A Novel About John Wilkes Booth. p. 120

And when is the appropriate time to hand to a son the spilled brains of his murdered father?

Reading: Leeches, David Albahari

nbmandel — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:47:59 +0000

The second of my Belgradian books. No one could regard this involuted and unparagraphed meditation on prejudice, madness, and mystic experience as a young adult novel.

That word conspiracy again, except this time it had far more credence. Somewhere deep down I saw the flash of Margarete’s thigh, which I still blame for everything.

Leeches, David Albahari, trans Ellen Elias-Bursac, NYRB edition, p 290

Leeches in a jar, in an apothecary’s window, are among my family’s memories of Sarajevo, circa 1970.