97 degrees here today. Not nearly as productive today since all morning people kept coming by for this that and other, mostly dealing with the House. el V didn't even get out of here unti 11:30, and then was back-and-forth all day. Things are a bit confused with the start of the academic year, so there you are. But we have the key to the Center. And, did I mention it was 97 degrees today.
I'm in a state of happiness that can only be attained when you're starting a piece of work you've been wanting to do for a very long time and all the tools you need to do it are right at hand, and are first class tools, while you are being provided all the support in every way necessary to pull off the work. Already I'm seeing a pattern of conflict among the writer-historians of Virginia in telling their own story, in the era I call the revisionist era, that goes from the post Civil War period all the way up to what is called the post Civil Rights era (post? after the shenanigans pulled by GB Saturday?); the poster boy for which is Woodrow Wilson. The dismantling of this revisionism only began in the last decades, though still so many adhere to the Wilsonian propaganda, if only because they learned it long ago and haven't bothered to stay au courant with what has been going on in this area for these last decades regarding Reconstruction, President Grant, Jim Crow, etc .
I cannot tell you how this feels to someone like me / us, who are always working with everything stacked against us, starting with having nowhere to do the work even, not really. And then there is the living to make while doing it. How can I describe how I'm feeling today? It's some combination of feeling all one's synapses firing in sync, on point and to the point with giddyness. Fizzy, while grounded, simultaneously.
All right. The Center shares the Custom House digs with the College's Environmental program (thus the gardens in the back). The environment people held a start-of-the-new-academic-year luncheon today. Much was left over. So one of the Center's people filled up a huge plate of the most delicious food and brought it to me here at the House. Just when I realized that breakfast at 8 this AM was 6 hours ago. To make things even more wonderful, another Center person brought us pear-apples from her orchard. Another one brought me an ENTIRE BASKET of basil, rosemary and other herbs, tomatoes and corn from her garden, which she said was infinitely superior to the Center garden's. (People here go home for lunch! When was the last time you lived somewhere that was the case?)
I don't have a blender so I don't think I can make pesto with the basil, though I DO have a lot of olive oil and parmesean, which I brought down with us from Raffetto's (est. 1905). Hmmmmm. I also have several lbs. of pasta, which I also brought down from Raffetto's.
We hooked up a printer to the New Thing. I also hooked up my dvd player to New Thing, since the television upstairs, though huge, doesn't have a usb port, and that's how I do. I suppose a dvd player can be had for the television without much cost though.
Can I, can I, sit prettier than this?
Well, there is this warning about hurricane Earl hitting at least as far up the Atlantic coast as the Carolinas by this weekend. We may forced to stay in the House by rain and wind then, accompanied by the fragrance of basil.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The UK Guardian Rates Our Friends' B&B One of Ten Best in NYC
These are the people with whom we spent our last social occasion before coming down here, who gifted us with Eat Drink and Be Merry in Maryland. Thus I can vouch this place is all and more claimed for it.
Review here for Jumel Terrace Books B&B, Hamilton Heights, Manhattan.
What a day! So many people in and out all morning, I got started late on my work, and so did V. He finally left about 11:30. But I have to go to the Center at 2:30 for a little reception so this doesn't seem like much a productive day.
OTOH, among those in-and-out this AM, was somebody who brought us pear-apples from their own orchard.
Review here for Jumel Terrace Books B&B, Hamilton Heights, Manhattan.
What a day! So many people in and out all morning, I got started late on my work, and so did V. He finally left about 11:30. But I have to go to the Center at 2:30 for a little reception so this doesn't seem like much a productive day.
OTOH, among those in-and-out this AM, was somebody who brought us pear-apples from their own orchard.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
A New Lifestyle
I. Have. A. Study.
With big desk the right height for typing on the New Thing, because it's an old style desk top tilted to create a writing surface for long days' of writing work before typewriters. It has drawers. It is very wide. With this the armed leather chair that matches the desk. This chair is exactly the right height for me, and my back loves it, though, alas, it is not wheeled, not doubt to protect the carpet and the floor boards. These are post Civil War U.S., I'm almost certain (furniture dating isn't one of my strong points).
There are many bookshelves filled with variety of books from abstruse scholarly / academic works to popular fiction, such as Edith Wharton. However, there are many EMPTY books shelves for my own books and papers, as well as a printer.
Behind me is a huge leather couch. On the other side of the room is a matching huge leather wing chair and ottoman. A small end table and reading lamp.
The door of the study leads into the kitchen, which I also love (and am in the midst of changing the location of the things in the cupboards). I'm currently roasting a chicken with mushrooms. I've made rice and a pot of red beans already. There is a half bathroom in the kitchen. So we have toothbrushes and things of that nature here and upstairs (where there are two full baths; the bathroom that goes with the master bedroom also has a dressing room where the Sotweed Factor's body slave was able to help the master put on his riding boots).
Even with the improvements, the stairs are a pain, for each of us, in a different way. El V is so tall that if he hadn't been wearing his cowboy hat all day he would have cracked himself in the head several times, but each time the hat protected him. We need to tape something at each of these doorways to remind him to duck. El V isn't naturally the ducking sort. We catch on fast, thus, of course, doubling everything like toothbrushes. I brought enough of this sort of item that we didn't need to go to a drugstore, a habit acquired when I lived where it was possible to have guests.The one problem is that this region is the least serviced by T-Mobile, our phone service provider. There's only one spot in the house where we can, sometimes, get connected. Connection in other parts of town is also iffy, particularly indoors. This is a major suckeroo. We don't want to change to Verizon, as everybody has our numbers. It will be worked out, eventually. So right now it's e-mail all the way.
Now that a whole lotta cooking has been gotten out of the way, dinner eaten and all cleared, washed and stored away, time to read some history in The Old Dominion: Her Making. Then a walk to the river, bed and Polk, early rising and off to the Starr Center and then the college for our i.d.s and our introduction to the library staff.
With big desk the right height for typing on the New Thing, because it's an old style desk top tilted to create a writing surface for long days' of writing work before typewriters. It has drawers. It is very wide. With this the armed leather chair that matches the desk. This chair is exactly the right height for me, and my back loves it, though, alas, it is not wheeled, not doubt to protect the carpet and the floor boards. These are post Civil War U.S., I'm almost certain (furniture dating isn't one of my strong points).
There are many bookshelves filled with variety of books from abstruse scholarly / academic works to popular fiction, such as Edith Wharton. However, there are many EMPTY books shelves for my own books and papers, as well as a printer.
Behind me is a huge leather couch. On the other side of the room is a matching huge leather wing chair and ottoman. A small end table and reading lamp.
The door of the study leads into the kitchen, which I also love (and am in the midst of changing the location of the things in the cupboards). I'm currently roasting a chicken with mushrooms. I've made rice and a pot of red beans already. There is a half bathroom in the kitchen. So we have toothbrushes and things of that nature here and upstairs (where there are two full baths; the bathroom that goes with the master bedroom also has a dressing room where the Sotweed Factor's body slave was able to help the master put on his riding boots).
Even with the improvements, the stairs are a pain, for each of us, in a different way. El V is so tall that if he hadn't been wearing his cowboy hat all day he would have cracked himself in the head several times, but each time the hat protected him. We need to tape something at each of these doorways to remind him to duck. El V isn't naturally the ducking sort. We catch on fast, thus, of course, doubling everything like toothbrushes. I brought enough of this sort of item that we didn't need to go to a drugstore, a habit acquired when I lived where it was possible to have guests.The one problem is that this region is the least serviced by T-Mobile, our phone service provider. There's only one spot in the house where we can, sometimes, get connected. Connection in other parts of town is also iffy, particularly indoors. This is a major suckeroo. We don't want to change to Verizon, as everybody has our numbers. It will be worked out, eventually. So right now it's e-mail all the way.
Now that a whole lotta cooking has been gotten out of the way, dinner eaten and all cleared, washed and stored away, time to read some history in The Old Dominion: Her Making. Then a walk to the river, bed and Polk, early rising and off to the Starr Center and then the college for our i.d.s and our introduction to the library staff.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
First Post From Chestertown
We got here about 2, and hour and a half later than planned. This is because we got lost in New Jersey where we always get lost, and because the traffic was fairly horrid in a few spots. Fortunately though that horridness was only in New Jersey. Once we got over the line to Delaware -- a piece of cake.
We brought enough with us that it took 10 minutes to load the car and 10 minutes to unload.
We sped to the Superfresh Supermarket and dropped more money on groceries than we've ever spent at one go before. It took us much longer to load the groceries into the car and unload them in the House than it did with our belongings.
The cable guy who I adore because he has me online without a wait was waiting for us.
It's very pretty, quite bucolic. Things are going to go well, if this little jaunt to get here is any indication. We couldn't have had a nicer day. When we got up at 7 it was 63 degrees, pure blue above and that slant of light we've come to call 9/11 Sky. By the time we got to the House -- which took J all of 60 seconds to show up with the keys -- it had gotten hot. But inside the House it was so cool as to be almost too cool.
They've put in the handrails on the dangerous stairs. Everything is clean and waiting for me to make the traditional pasta for Saturday night. But that may be a bit. I'm tired. We have all the clothes and towels and sheets and things for upstairs to deal with.
The book collection in here is unbelieveable and the new collection coming is will make it even more so. It's all materials that apply to our project.
I think we'll eat our pasta in the pretty little back yard tonight. Which we'll appreciate as we have not eaten today yet.
However, I don't believe in any of this. It's all a dream. Haven't been here long enough, am very short on sleep and not eaten, so it will take a bit for this to be reality.
We brought enough with us that it took 10 minutes to load the car and 10 minutes to unload.
We sped to the Superfresh Supermarket and dropped more money on groceries than we've ever spent at one go before. It took us much longer to load the groceries into the car and unload them in the House than it did with our belongings.
The cable guy who I adore because he has me online without a wait was waiting for us.
It's very pretty, quite bucolic. Things are going to go well, if this little jaunt to get here is any indication. We couldn't have had a nicer day. When we got up at 7 it was 63 degrees, pure blue above and that slant of light we've come to call 9/11 Sky. By the time we got to the House -- which took J all of 60 seconds to show up with the keys -- it had gotten hot. But inside the House it was so cool as to be almost too cool.
They've put in the handrails on the dangerous stairs. Everything is clean and waiting for me to make the traditional pasta for Saturday night. But that may be a bit. I'm tired. We have all the clothes and towels and sheets and things for upstairs to deal with.
The book collection in here is unbelieveable and the new collection coming is will make it even more so. It's all materials that apply to our project.
I think we'll eat our pasta in the pretty little back yard tonight. Which we'll appreciate as we have not eaten today yet.
However, I don't believe in any of this. It's all a dream. Haven't been here long enough, am very short on sleep and not eaten, so it will take a bit for this to be reality.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Sign of the Times
Returned my borrowed materials to the library.
I did not take out anything else in their place.
I sent out a mass e-mail with change of address.
We poofed our landline phone number, the number we've had for all the time we've lived here.
I did not take out anything else in their place.
I sent out a mass e-mail with change of address.
We poofed our landline phone number, the number we've had for all the time we've lived here.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Maryland, Land of Superb Eating
This is Maryland's reputation since at least the 1600's. It is based in very real resources and the achievements of what the region's variety of people accomplished with these resources. You find salivating descriptions of how people ate there in novels like Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722), for instance.*
When we made our farewell-for-now visit uptown one of our friends made me a housewarming gift for our 1735 house in C'town: Eat, Drink & Be Merry: An Anthology From A Great Tradition, compiled by Frederick Philip Stieff, illustrated by Edwin Tunis, published in 1932 by G.P. Putnam's Sons, is an historical compilation of Maryland cookery. The b&3w illos are of the state's great families' great houses where these foods were eaten. It has quotes from a variety of Maryland's favorite sons, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes. Funny, though, since the recipes come from women, and women of color staffed so many, if not all, of the kitchens, there are no quotations about Maryland's food by women of color or otherwise. The colored illos, however, are all of men and women of color, and, to be charitable in description, lean toward the all too common caricature of until very recent times, and that in certain quarters has been enthusiastically resurrected with Barack Obama's residence in the Oval Office.
C understands me well -- this volume is a window that reveals a vivid display of history that until relatively recently hasn't been written into the historical narratives of the state.
For instance, the official Maryland Historical Society history of Maryland (in association with the Johns Hopkins University Press) still remains the 1988 Maryland: A Middle Temperament 1634 - 1980. As the title indicates, the approach is that Maryland and her history are the mediating history of the United States, more balanced and less extreme than either the "North or the South." Funny that. Because you have to read hundreds of pages to find even a single oblique reference to the historical fact that Maryland provided, with the port of Baltimore as their point of departure, large numbers of slaves to the interstate slave trade, whose labor was demanded for opening the the fertile, virgin regions of the Louisiana Territory to the plantation form of agricultural economy.
IOW, the presentation of this cookery anthology is idyllic, a rich land filled with slow moving, happy co-inhabitants of white and black, where everyone ate well and enjoyed each other's company in gracious hospitality and convivality. The illustrations tell a different story, but the illustrator, the author and the publisher didn't realize they were displaying a disregard and contempt for the very people who did so much to bring this good eating to the tables. Rather they are devising a sentimental, fairytale of historical nostalgia by leaving out the foundation of the foods' raising and preparation and what that meant. It's perceived through the gauzy sheer curtains of the white folks' summer living room or the screens on their columned verandas.
I'm fascinated by the juxtaposition of documented historicl fact and gauzy nostalgia in terms of historical study. Without it, you can't get to the full truth of things -- not that it's ever 100% possible of course. The past is the past and the amount that is forgotten and the rapidity with which that happens has always been the case, even before the acceleration of the process by the digital technology era switch.
Thus the ever growing historical value of artifacts like Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland.
We are looking forward to our culinary adventures in the next 10 months in Maryland, Land of the Best Eating.
______________________
* The detailed, enthusiastic listing of what Moll and her family ate on their plantations in and Maryland -- with 50 'servants' to do the work -- is my most vivid memory of the novel, which is interesting in light of how my life turned out. She ends the book in Maryland. I haven't read Moll Flanders for at least 30 years, and I still recall this.
When we made our farewell-for-now visit uptown one of our friends made me a housewarming gift for our 1735 house in C'town: Eat, Drink & Be Merry: An Anthology From A Great Tradition, compiled by Frederick Philip Stieff, illustrated by Edwin Tunis, published in 1932 by G.P. Putnam's Sons, is an historical compilation of Maryland cookery. The b&3w illos are of the state's great families' great houses where these foods were eaten. It has quotes from a variety of Maryland's favorite sons, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes. Funny, though, since the recipes come from women, and women of color staffed so many, if not all, of the kitchens, there are no quotations about Maryland's food by women of color or otherwise. The colored illos, however, are all of men and women of color, and, to be charitable in description, lean toward the all too common caricature of until very recent times, and that in certain quarters has been enthusiastically resurrected with Barack Obama's residence in the Oval Office.
C understands me well -- this volume is a window that reveals a vivid display of history that until relatively recently hasn't been written into the historical narratives of the state.
For instance, the official Maryland Historical Society history of Maryland (in association with the Johns Hopkins University Press) still remains the 1988 Maryland: A Middle Temperament 1634 - 1980. As the title indicates, the approach is that Maryland and her history are the mediating history of the United States, more balanced and less extreme than either the "North or the South." Funny that. Because you have to read hundreds of pages to find even a single oblique reference to the historical fact that Maryland provided, with the port of Baltimore as their point of departure, large numbers of slaves to the interstate slave trade, whose labor was demanded for opening the the fertile, virgin regions of the Louisiana Territory to the plantation form of agricultural economy.
IOW, the presentation of this cookery anthology is idyllic, a rich land filled with slow moving, happy co-inhabitants of white and black, where everyone ate well and enjoyed each other's company in gracious hospitality and convivality. The illustrations tell a different story, but the illustrator, the author and the publisher didn't realize they were displaying a disregard and contempt for the very people who did so much to bring this good eating to the tables. Rather they are devising a sentimental, fairytale of historical nostalgia by leaving out the foundation of the foods' raising and preparation and what that meant. It's perceived through the gauzy sheer curtains of the white folks' summer living room or the screens on their columned verandas.
I'm fascinated by the juxtaposition of documented historicl fact and gauzy nostalgia in terms of historical study. Without it, you can't get to the full truth of things -- not that it's ever 100% possible of course. The past is the past and the amount that is forgotten and the rapidity with which that happens has always been the case, even before the acceleration of the process by the digital technology era switch.
Thus the ever growing historical value of artifacts like Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland.
We are looking forward to our culinary adventures in the next 10 months in Maryland, Land of the Best Eating.
______________________
* The detailed, enthusiastic listing of what Moll and her family ate on their plantations in and Maryland -- with 50 'servants' to do the work -- is my most vivid memory of the novel, which is interesting in light of how my life turned out. She ends the book in Maryland. I haven't read Moll Flanders for at least 30 years, and I still recall this.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
"There are in this world only two earthly Paradises ...
" ... . . . Provence . . . and the Reading Room of the British Museum."
The world according to Ford Maddox Ford:
The world according to Ford Maddox Ford:
Provence was not only itself, but also the absence of the north, where most human vices accumulated. The north meant aggression, the gothic, the "sadically mad cruelties of the Northern Middle Ages" and the "Northern tortures of ennui and indigestion".
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