1. Vice president of the week. For two election cycles and one complete presidential term, I have been indifferent to Joe Biden. But during the past few weeks, I have become more and more impressed by the deliberate, nonhysterical, non-self-aggrandizing way in which he is handling his task of working out reasonable recommendations for gun control. Whether or not anything comes of his work remains to be seen, of course.

2. Weather of the week. What the hell? Four days ago the temperature was 10 below zero. This is morning it's 45 degrees above zero, with pouring, wind-whipped, October-like rain. Meanwhile, the driveway is a rink.

3. Recording artist of the week. Little Brenda Lee, in the "why haven't I ever paid attention to her before?" category.

4. Literary quotation of the week. "One is given to theories of language, of fiction, of illusion; and also to silly fancies. Like dreaming one is a book without its last chapters, suddenly: one is left forever on that last incomplete page, a loved face kneeling over wild orchids, a voice breaking the silence, a stupid crack--transfixed, for ever and ever, like a bad photograph." --John Fowles, "The Cloud"

Carrot Pie

Yesterday was apply-for-grants-I-won't-get day, but it was also invent-a-new-vegetarian-dish day. Several months ago Paul suddenly decided to stop eating meat, so I have had to completely reconfigure my cooking. This switch hasn't actually been all that difficult for me: I grew up with 70s-style vegetarian parents, which is to say they ate a lot of cheesy brown rice. It's been fun to look beyond that old-fashioned starchiness: I've been learning about basic Asian and North African options and have been reimagining meat-flavored dishes as vegetable-based versions.

Here's what I invented last night: quiche lorraine remade as a delicate winter pie.

Make enough pie dough to fit into a French-style tart pan with a removable bottom. Partially prebake it. (If anyone wants detailed instructions, let me know.) 

For the filling: trim and peel 2 medium-sized carrots, then grate. You should end up with about  3/4s of a cup. 

In a skillet, melt 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter over low heat. Press a big clove of garlic, and add it to the pan. As soon as the scent starts to rise, add the grated carrots. 

Cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally; salt lightly, and then add 3/4s of a cup of freshly chopped parsley. Scrape the mixture into the pie shell. 

Grate 1/2 cup of parmesan cheese over the vegetable mixture. 

Now beat 3 large eggs with 1 cup of milk. Season to taste with salt and black pepper. Pour the mixture into the pie shell, and bake at 375 degrees for 25 minutes.

Unmold on a board or a flat serving plate. 

The result is both pretty and delicious, and your vegetarian son can take the leftovers to school for lunch.

James called home a couple of days ago and mentioned that he was taking a class that required him to read a lot of Marxist theory along with Baudrillard, etc., etc. Later I said to Tom that this must be some kind of liberal-arts-college hazing that every youth still must undergo. Tom, in turn, reminded me that sometimes badly written stuff does have value. And I sighed.

Baudrillard et al. is why I spent so many years believing that I was a non-intellectual idiot. Somehow I had managed to get into a top-notch college, but when I was presented with Foucault and Lacan and Derrida and Cixous and their ilk, I could not keep my mind on whatever it was they were saying. I could not bear the way the stuff sounded in my head. It took me many years to figure out that I read by ear and that badly written stuff is a torment to my perceptions because I am both a poet and a prose stylist.

But James isn't interested in being a writer, I thought. He can probably manage to overlook the awfulness.

And then last night, while I was making dinner, the phone rang. It was James. "Mom, I really hate that class and I need your advice about a literature class to take as a replacement."

Turns out that the boy has decided he'd way rather read Dostoevsky and Dickens than Baudrillard and Foucault. I am ridiculously gratified.

Ode to My Son's Audiobooks

[first published in the Sewanee Review, fall 2012]

My younger son, Paul, is an eighth grader at Harmony Elementary School, a down-at-heels K–8 building in rural central Maine that houses about ninety students and a handful of underpaid staff members. So a few weeks ago, when he carelessly remarked, as he was pacing around the kitchen gobbling a pastrami sandwich, “You know, Mom, I think my writing style is most influenced by Dickens and Twain,” I stifled a laugh. Not much Dickens gets read at Harmony Elementary School. Yet with a second sandwich in hand, he continued to chatter on, cogently discussing the novelists’ variable syntax and sentence strategies, their interest in the minutiae of dialogue, his own dependence on hearing the sound of a sentence rhythm before knowing what he was going to write, and on, and on.

My hands buried in bread dough, I turned to gape at him. This boy, devourer of every teen dystopian novel that comes down the pike, not to mention The Comic Book History of the Universe and all of John Tunis’s 1940s baseball novels, was speaking of Dickens and Twain as if the sounds of their sentences were a part of his own brain structure, his own progressions of thought. Yet he had never read their books. What he had done was buy recordings of them from iTunes and then listen to them again and again and again.

“Read to your children!” tout the school-library posters; and, indeed, as long as your kids remain literary naïfs, reading aloud is a reasonably good way to lure them into books. Although five hundred consecutive performances of Good Night, Moon can drive a tired father to near-insanity, repetition is what children long for: they need to hear the same words over and over again; and if that comatose parent happens to mumble “fork” instead of “spoon,” his toddler will give him an earful. But as my husband and I soon discovered, a daily read-aloud menu of mediocre children’s literature was rotting our cerebella. And if it was softening our brains, how could it be really be nourishing our children’s?

Herein lies the problem: listening to literature over and over again is invaluable for growing minds of every age, but listening to stupid literature over and over is analogous to existing on a diet of Doritos. Of course Doritos have their charms, just as a certain amount of stupid literature can be tonic and invigorating. For instance, even though my ear finds the dialogue of the Harry Potter novels excruciating (“Harry, don't go picking a row with Malfoy, don’t forget, he’s a prefect now, he could make life difficult for you. . . . ” “Wow, I wonder what it’d be like to have a difficult life?” said Harry sarcastically), it thinks that the dialogue of the Hardy Boys’ novels is hilarious. (Meanwhile, Biff had untied Chet. The heavyset teen had slumped to the ground in a dead faint. “Out cold,” Frank said. . . . Chet opened his eyes and blinked. “I'm alive!” he exclaimed.  “Thanks, guys.”) But how would I know the difference if I hadn’t read both? The issue, then, isn’t having a reading diet that includes third-rate literature but the importance of developing a close familiarity with complex and various writing styles—of gaining an intense familiarity with their sounds, patterns, shifts, and surprises of language, character, structure, and theme—and learning to ask conscious and unconscious questions about those elements.

My children were not reading prodigies. Although they were always at the top of their primary-grade reading classes, they, like most of their peers, struggled with the exhaustions of decoding multisyllable words and tracking syntactically complex sentences. Yet their ears could comprehend those words and sentences—and they were eager to hear them. As their before-bedtime reader, I could not keep pace with their intense interest in stories—particularly Paul’s enthusiasm for repetition. Thus, I latched onto recorded books as a way to keep him not only engaged in complicated tales but also gainfully distracted from me.

I wasn’t altogether comfortable about taking this route. Those pedantic library posters had convinced me that I was probably a bad parent because I would do almost anything to be allowed to read silently to myself rather than aloud to my children. Moreover, I myself had zero interest in listening to audiobooks. I needed my own imagination to invent the sounds of my favorite characters; I didn’t want to poison them with someone else’s voiceover.

If, in the years of my callow new-parenthood, someone had claimed that listening over and over to a recording of David Copperfield would count as rereading David Copperfield, I would have crankily shouted, “No!” Yet the enormous impact of aural repetition on my son’s reading and writing skills has forced me to retract that reactionary shout once and for all. No, Paul hasn’t learned to love sentences in the same way that I learned to love them. If anything, he’s been luckier. When I was fourteen years old, my Dickens adoration was focused entirely on character and plot: it never occurred to me to listen to how the writer had invented them. In other words, I was learning Dickens by eye, whereas my son is learning Dickens by ear. What’s taken me till middle age to absorb he has absorbed before starting high school.

            But a comprehension of sentence craft is not the only gift these books have given him. One day, when he was about nine years old, after a long afternoon spent sorting baseball cards and listening to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, my son walked into the kitchen and said, “Mom, I don’t understand something. How come Jim has to do what Huck says, even though Jim is the grown-up?”

 When a rural fourth grader in one of the whitest states in America is able to pinpoint, with a single, wide-eyed question, a central theme not only of Twain’s great, complex, ambiguous novel but also of our national history, of the terrible immoralities embedded in the human condition, then technology has done the author an immeasurable service. For it has helped my young child to learn, in the words of essayist John Berger, that “the boon of language is not tenderness. All that it holds, it holds with exactitude and without pity. Even a term of endearment: the term is impartial; the context is all. The boon of language is that potentially it is complete, it has the potentiality of holding with words the totality of human experience. Everything that has occurred and everything that may occur. It even allows space for the unspeakable.”

If it takes an iPod to deliver that message to our children, then so be it.

Instructions for Foreigners

                        1914

Dawn Potter

Eloquence is not required;

we explain every word that you say.

There is no charge to enter,

merely a charge to stay.

A nail in a hoof is worth two in a hand.

Thoughts are like men in a boat.

If a sentence is trapped on a sandbar,

only its bones will float.

As melodies flit, you should count them

before you prepare to cry.

For lack of a nail, your horse was shot.

Burn the barn, and your eyes will dry.

[first published in Hawk & Handsaw, issue 5 (2012)]

A Visit with Godey's Lady's Book

I spent time yesterday with the January 1851 issue of the influential and ubiquitous Godey's Lady's Book, a Philadelphia women's magazine that is mentioned over and over again in 19th-century fiction . . . although interestingly, when I told my husband, "I'm reading Godey's Lady's Book!" he had no idea what I was talking about.

I have always thought of it primarily as a fashion magazine, so I was surprised to discover that clothes ("Figs. 3 and 4 are some of the new fashionable undersleeves. It will be noticed that they are very full, and edged with double frills.") and household hints ("The practice of boiling arrow-root in milk is at once wasteful and unsatisfactory.") are merely the frosting on the cake. The journal overflows with poems ("Her eye of blue, like azure sky of clear pure light above, / With soft silk fringes on the lids, shading the deepest love"), stories ("The voice of the speaker sank into a low moan, and was lost in a stifled sob."), musical selections ("We may not on the green-sward dance as in the summertime, / But there our horses proudly prance, as in Arabian clime"), inspirational prose ("The ever-flowing spring, whose heart was never dried up either in summer or winter, had murmured to her of—'Faith.'"), and historical essays ("It is commonly said, and appears generally to be believed by superficial students of history, that with the reigns of the Plantagenets, with the Edwards and the Henrys of the fifteenth century, the age of chivalry was ended, the spirit of romance became extinct.")

Moreover, it includes a very peculiar set of reviews, under the heading "The Editor's Book Table." Here is just a sample of the riches therein.

THE POETICAL WORKS OF JOHN MILTON. Edited by Sir Egerton Brydges, Bart. Illustrated with engravings, designed by John Martin and J.W.M. Turner, R.A. We noticed an edition of "Paradise Lost" in our November number. Here, however, we have a complete edition of the modern Homer's works, including "Paradise Regained," and all his minor poems, sonnets, &c. These editions are pleasing testimonials of the renewed interest which the public are beginning to manifest for the writings of standard English authors, in preference to the light and ephemeral productions of those of the present day, who have too long held the classical taste and refinement in obedience to their influences. The illustrations of this edition are very beautiful. [The "light and ephemeral productions" of 1851 include Moby-Dick, The House of Seven Gables, and Cranford.] 

THE RACES OF MEN. A Fragment. By Robert Knox, M.D., Lecturer on Anatomy, and Corresponding Member of the National Academy of Science in France. The character and tendency of this "fragment," or "outlines of lectures," to use the author's own terms, are such as cannot be suddenly determined upon or understood. This will appear the more evident to the reader from the assurance which he also gives, that his work runs counter to nearly all the chronicles of events called histories; that it shocks the theories of statesmen, theologians, and philanthropists of all shades. He maintains that the human character, individual and national, is traceable solely to the nature of that race to which the individual or nation belongs, which he affirms to be simply a fact, the most remarkable, the most comprehensive which philosophy has announced. [Oy.] 

RESEARCHES ON THE MOTION OF THE JUICES IN THE ANIMAL BODY, AND THE EFFECTS OF EVAPORATIONS IN PLANTS; together with an Account of the Origin of the Potatoe Disease, with full and Ingenious Directions for the Protection and Entire Prevention of the Potatoe Plant against all Diseases. By Justus Liebig, M.D., Professor of Chemistry in the University of Giessen; and edited from the manuscript of the author, by William Gregory, M.D., of the University of Edinburgh. A valuable treatise, as its title sufficiently indicates. [Who doesn't love a book review that's shorter than the title under review?] 

MOSAIQUE FRANCAISE: ou Choix De Sujets Anecdotiques, Historiques, Littéraires et Scientifiques, tirés pour La Plupart D'Auteurs Modernes. Par F. Séron, Homme de lettres, l'un des rédacteurs du Journal Française; Les Monde des enfans, Revue Encyclopédique de la jeunesse de 1844 à 1848, etc.; Professeur de Langue et de Littérature Française à Philadelphie. This work appears to have been compiled with great care, from works by the best French authors. Every subject has been carefully excluded that could in any manner wound or bias the preconceived opinions of the American reader in relation to religious or political freedom. [Thank goodness none of my preconceived notions will be affected by those crazy French writers.]

In addition, the editor of Godey's Lady's Book takes great pains to remind his readers of their "womanly" status. Here is a snatch of his opinion piece:

The female mind has as yet manifested very little of the kind of genius termed mechanical, or inventive. Nor is it the lack of learning which has caused this uniform lack of constructive talent. Many ignorant men have studied out and made curious inventions of mechanical skill; women never. We are constrained to say we do not believe woman would ever have invented the compass, the printing-press, the steam-engine, or even a loom. The difference between the mental power of the two sexes, as it is distinctly traced in Holy Writ and human history, we have described and illustrated in a work soon to be published. We trust this will prove of importance in settling the question of what woman's province really is, and where her station should be in the onward march of civilization. It is not mechanical, but moral power which is now needed. That woman was endowed with moral goodness superior to that possessed by man is the doctrine of the Bible; and this moral power she must be trained to use for the promotion of goodness, and purity, and holiness in men. There is no need that she should help him in his task of subduing the world. He has the strong arm and the ingenious mind to understand and grapple with things of earth; but he needs her aid in subduing himself, his own selfish passions, and animal propensities.

However, he does go on to assure his readers that "the chivalry of the American press will ever sustain a periodical devoted to woman." What surprises me most in this sentence is that woman is not spelled Woman, a form of address that would seem to more or less sum up his attitude to "the fair sex." 

This is the screamer that appeared in the Mount Pleasant Journal, on February 2, 1891. It concerns what became known as the Mammoth Mine Disaster, when, according to the New York Times's "special from Scottdale, Penn.,"

by an explosion of fire-damp in the Mammoth shaft of the H. C. Frick Coke Company 110 sturdy miners were hurled into eternity and a number seriously injured. The explosion occurred this morning shortly after 9 o’clock and it is supposed was the result of the ignition of a miner’s oil lamp. The after damp which followed the fire-damp explosion suffocated nearly every workman. A few men realizing the awful situation fell to the ground thereby preventing the gas from striking them. The persons not killed are in such a critical condition that their deaths are momentarily expected. Up to this writing sixty bodies have been recovered, all without a sign of life. The mine is on fire and it is feared that the rest of the bodies will be cremated.

Almost all of the dead were immigrants, most from Poland and Hungary.

The mine superintendant was the first of the managerial staff to arrive. He and several other managers had previously been up all night at a Robert Burns birthday celebration at a local hotel.

Researching the Mammoth disaster took up most of my day yesterday. Between this festering history and the raw present tense of Aliza's death, my outlook assumed a rather sullen color. Yet late in the day Tom and I went to our first ballroom-dancing class and and were clumsy and stepped on each other's feet and laughed and enjoyed ourselves immensely. Later in the day I was asked to help organize a chorus of local children to sing one of Aliza's favorite songs at her funeral next weekend. Later in the day my son Paul said, "I will figure out all the vocal parts. I will make this happen. I know we can create something beautiful." In other words, it was a ratchety difficult painful dreadful day that nonetheless had its expanses of sunshine.