In Harmony, it's raining and raining and raining, so here is a song for the rain, from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It appears at the very end of the play, and the Clown sings it.

When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,

For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man's estate,

With hey ho, the wind and the rain,

'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,

For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas, to wive,

With hey ho, the wind and the rain,

By swaggering I could never thrive,

For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds,

With hey ho, the wind and the rain,

With toss-pots still had drunken heads,

For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world begun,

With hey ho, the wind and the rain,

But that's all one, our play is done,

And we'll strive to please you every day.

P.S. I don't know about you, but I think the opening of Moby-Dick's chapter 3 is hilarious. Mysterious ugly motel art is timeless.

A cool, cloudy morning here--towels in the washing machine, canner heating on the stove, a blue jay screaming in the apple tree. His voice sounds like a rusty swing chain.

I have much editing to accomplish today. I really need to get this project done because next week I leave for several days at Haystack, where I'm supposed to lead a series of writing workshops for professional craft artists, all of them previous faculty members in Haystack's programs, who have been invited back for a chance to work on their own projects. Along the way, they'll have the option to sit in on a writing class, which I have yet to design. I'm looking forward to designing it, however.

So I'm off to the land of work. Meanwhile, here's a random snippet from The Golden Bough, a reminder that other people have far more irritating job descriptions. (I tell you: The Golden Bough is like the I Ching. Keep a copy handy at all times.)

Among the Todas of Southern India, the holy milkman, who acts as priest of the sacred dairy, is subject to a variety of irksome and burdensome restrictions during the whole time of his incumbency, which may last many years. Thus he must live at the sacred dairy and may never visit his home or any village. He must be celibate; if he is married he must leave his wife. On no account may any ordinary person touch the holy milkman or the holy dairy; such a touch would so defile his holiness that he would forfeit his office. It is only on two days a week, namely Mondays and Thursdays, that a mere layman may even approach the milkman; on other days, if he has any business with him, he must stand at a distance (some say a quarter of a mile) and shout his message across the intervening space. Further, the holy milkman never cuts his hair or pares his nails so long as he holds office; he never crosses a river by a bridge, but wades through a ford and only certain fords.

Oh, the burdens of power.

Canning update: thirteen quarts of tomatoes yesterday, plus a potful of sauce destined for the freezer. As an added bonus, yesterday, during one of my brief forays away from the stove, I found a handful of puffball mushrooms in the yard. We had them for dinner with with spaghetti and some of that red sauce cut with heavy cream.

My red sauce more or less follows Marcella Hazan's "simple, fresh-tasting" recipe, which appears in her Classic Italian Cooking. Peel, seed, and quarter a bunch of tomatoes. Put them into a heavy-bottomed pot with a whole peeled onion and half a stick of butter. Cook till soft. Run through a food mill into another heavy-bottomed pot. Cook till you like the thickness. Cool and freeze. This sauce lends itself to further intensification with meat and/or herbs. Or you can keep it plain and light. Or (as mentioned) you can mix it with cream.

In-between-canning update: I've been reading Larry McMurtry's Texasville, the paperback that wins the prize for possessing the number-1 tawdriest cover illustration of any book on my shelves. This novel is both well written and supremely lightweight and is stuffed with amusing characters. The subject is middle-aged sex, which (if one can take this book as fact) is a busy cottage industry in backwater Texas.

Post-canning update: I'm loving all the book comments you've been leaving. Apparently, the general consensus is that we need to speed up this project. How does three chapters in each book sound as our goal for next weekend? That would bring us up to chapter 4 in both novels. Complain if this seems unreasonable or too easy.

And now I'm off to feed animals and attack Tomato Day, Part 2.

Yesterday I got a call from a farmer in town who said he has canned his final jar of sauce and is now giving me all the rest of the tomatoes in his garden. This is very exciting, but it does mean that I will be canning canning canning far into the hazy future. Fortunately, canning has plenty of waiting-for-the-pot-to-boil moments that I can fill with novel reading; and though peeling all those hundreds of tomatoes will be a drag. I'm hoping to rope a boy into servitude.

By the way, yesterday I made Julia Child's custard apple tart, and you should make it too. It's excellent, and not too complicated. I also made fish chowder, which actually goes remarkably well with apple pie.

Here's a poem that I haven't thought about for a while. It's not in either collection, though it was published once, several years ago, in a lovely but short-lived journal called the Wesserunsett Review. I'm not sure why I left it out of Crimes, except that it's one of those poems I don't always like. Today, however, it doesn't seem too bad, though I should tighten a few grammatical links.

The Land of Spices

Dawn Potter

In the 1970s, what seeker ever laid

eyes on a nutmeg grater? Something called

nutmeg leapt fully formed

from red-white-and-black Durkee boxes,

a harmless grist, innocently beige,

dry as the moon, sandy as kibble,

which mothers tapped by scant

teaspoons into One-Pie pumpkin and scattered

thriftily onto skim-milk Junket.

“Makes food look pretty!”

vowed the label, but nutmeg

wasn’t meant to be anything;

and if a child fell asleep on the sofa

with the library’s black-leather

Dickens flung open on her chest

and dreamed of Peggotty’s

red forefinger, rough as a nutmeg

grater, smelling of lye and ancient

floors, she dreamed in similes

vague as chivalry.

Then how was it that this child

born to inherit our Age of Convenience

felt so exactly the pine-cone

scrape of that phantom finger

against her sunburnt cheek?

Had callow Shelley turned out to be right

after all, blabbing his shrill claptrap

at Godwin’s high-toned soirée—

“My opinion of love is that it

acts upon the human

heart precisely as a nutmeg

grater acts upon a nutmeg”—

and was the dog-eared, grade-school

social studies book just as true,

chanting its ode of immortality for those

glory-hunters . . . da Gama,

Magellan . . . who bartered

their souls for cumin and cardamom,

vanilla and myrrh, for rattling

casks of seed more precious than prayer?

Because if the Land of Spices

is something understood,

a dream well dressed,

a paraphrase,

a kind of tune, brown and sweet,

round as earth,

ragged as our laboring flesh,

then even in 1975, in the empire’s

smallest outpost, in a kitchen

pure as Saran Wrap, the slow palms sway

and the milky scent of paradise

lingers on the clean south wind:

our ordinary heaven,

this seven-day world,

transposing in an hour, as a child

snaps her flip-flops against a chair,

gobbles saltines and orange soda,

and grates away at her own

hungry heart—word, after word,

after sounding, star-bent word.

Great Expectations, chapter 1

Probably all of you noticed this as well, but I must say I was jolted to discover that both Moby-Dick and Great Expectations begin with versions of "Call me this name." Moreover, in both cases the names are single words, without surnames. So here we have two characters, each rootless in his own way: one a wandering sailor, the other an orphan in a marshy graveyard. Yet in both novels the name is the first and most vital point of conversation and connection: "this is who I am."

What are your thoughts about this name issue--or about anything else in GE chapter?

And now, regarding our reading schedule: several of us seem to be hamstrung by our slow progress, so I'd like to negotiate a new schedule. Do you want to read the books simultaneously or continue to alternate? And how many chapters could you consume in a week? In both novels, the chapters are fairly short, although the Melville is dense and the Dickens is busy.

A site called the Bronte Blog has excerpted the opening of my Sewanee Review essay about Charlotte's novel "Shirley." You may be amused to note that the piece is highlighted as a "recent Bronte scholar paper." Hah! The excerpt itself proves otherwise. I mean, really: how can an essay that starts out by referring to Aeneas as a "pious sap" have anything to do with scholarship? Equating "writer about famous books" with "scholar" is just plain silly, and reductive too. And embarrassing. What would Foucault say? Oy. [Actually he wouldn't say, "Oy." But he might say, "Chut!"]

Dinner tonight: oven-fried chicken, dill and yogurt dumplings, coleslaw. Possibly a custard pie, if the hens can drum up the willpower to lay a few eggs. These freeloading chickens are starting to get on my nerves.

Of course this Moby-Dick/Great Expectations reading schedule needs to suit your time constraints, but I have to admit that I am finding the project very difficult. It's way too slow for me. Despite my well-mannered intention to parallel the group's reading speed, I am already a chapter ahead in MD; and I had to hide GE in the car in order to avoid sailing into it full tilt.

On an average day, I do manage to accomplish tasks other than reading novels. But my book habit fits in so snugly around those tasks. For instance, making polenta or risotto or chocolate pudding or bechamel sauce is much less boring if I read while stirring. It's easy to shell peas or trim green beans while reading. Naturally every trip to the bathroom involves a book, as does every blank moment during a kid's sporting event, piano lesson, or orthodontist appointment. The books I'm reading seep into the spaces of everything I do; and the only reason I didn't start this conversation while our group was undertaking A Winter's Tale is because I was reading the play out loud with Paul . . . a torturously slow process that was steadily driving me crazy. I do love that my 12-year-old wants to read Shakespeare, but reading these books is my private vice, like chocolate bingeing is for other people. I did not enjoy waiting for him.

Yet I'm also loving the novelty of sharing a common project with all of you, so I will try to persevere at this slow speed, meanwhile hoping you will forgive me for any page-turning impatience that erupts.