Heavenly Perfume

     . . . . For the third week now, El V and B walked the three miles up and back to the Union Square Farmer's Market this afternoon.

El V asks B, "Why didn't we do this all summer long?"

B patiently answers, "Because it only re-opened a month ago."

I'm really glad for the stuff. But I wish ... el V understood that putting onions and garlic and shallots in the same bag with green stuff that gets washed and refreshed throughout the day is a wrong move. He has just learned that one cannot put away items like onions and so on wet. I will have to inform him of this many times before it penetrates. This must be how my mom must have felt teaching me to cook, garden, laundry, sew, clean house, etc.

So pleased to have local celery. Am really hooked on fresh out of the dirt local celery. Also the apartment is perfumed now by the heavenly basil as the bunch's leaves dry, before I begin dealing with it. Heavenly basil, O O O O! Very Happy with the variety of mushrooms too. With them came a lot of dirt, or whatever the growing medium was.

Now we have all the things on hand for this recipe, which we thought we'd try out early next week.

Gochugaru Chicken With Corn, Mushrooms and Zucchini

9/11 Commemoration Within Pandemic Times

     . . . . Another 9/11 anniversary commemoration has come around, an event that helped the arrival of even worse time we're having now. 

9/11 was our Big Break of Before and After in our lives (there are others too, but this covered it all from public-political, to economic-cultural, as well as personal).  This tore the gates off all our safeguards and protections for everything, allowing the full flood level of 1927 of cruelty, corruption, pillaging and oppression to take-over with no questions asked, as even frackin’ dems and libs bent over for it, behind the utterly transparent veil of patriotism and religion.  IOW, enabling the shoggothdeathcultmurdererinchief and the horrors he's unleashed and broken out from under the rocks to do murder and mayhem and hate with impunity.

To those who say, "I'm so over 9/11. So many are alive now who weren't even born then," I say, FUCK YOU.  You're just like all those who think we should allow everyone who isn't under 50 to die of the pandemic because, you know, move over, you're over, you are nothing, nothing at all compared to us who are under 40.  

Also, SHAME ON YOU. You have revealed yourself to be a self-centered, narcissist pos, like so many, which is why this country can't have nice things.  We're always all about oneself, never about a community, much less, you know, a nation.

Martin Walker: The Shooting at Château Rock

     . . . . Thanks to the opening of the library branch's  Grab 'n Go program, I have received the very last published volume in Martin Walker's Bruno Chief of Police series, published in May (2020), #18, The Shooting at Château Rock. Chief Bruno and the fluctuating cast of St. Denis and the Périgord region have been an ongoing part of my life since the later part of June. There's no gift more desirable to reader, than the discovery of a multi-volume series in which all the titles have already been published.

I wonder if there will be any more Chief Brunos. I can see Walker successfully creating more titles in the series set plausibly in the covid-19 era. his might not be the case for every series going by any means, particularly one with as many titles and regular, established characters and relationships. In this series though, it’s not as if Europe, France and this region of France haven’t suffered dreadfully in pandemics in the past.

One of Chief Bruno's French Basset boys typical positions, requesting tummy rubs from humans they like -- especially women.  Supposedly this is the breed from which George Washington received his own pack of hunting hounds from Europe. Like the varieties of wine that pour through the Bruno novels, so dogs, horses, cows, sheep chickens, geese, donkeys,  even snakes. 

Bruno's Balzac, his second basset, at two years, should now begin his duty to continue the breed, something only Martin Walker would have thought of as part of a police tale's story? Particularly as it seems French Basset males can need some human help in getting 'er done, particularly the first time. (Which to my mind never bodes well for the endurance of a breed of anything when it needs humans to have sex.)

An earlier post brings up the large place in these books taken by agriculture at large, wine making and drinking, and the raising, cooking and eating of food in convivial circumstances.  just the châteaux of the the Loire Valley have very long been the fantasy ideal of fairy tale castles, Walker’s St. Denis of the Dordogne is a French fairyland world, in which a community retains traditional cultural ways practiced 

for centuries, where all its vastly long history exists on top, around and through the present, where so much daily life is good (not to mention delicious), a world that is carefully cared for and nourished by its officialdom top down, from mayor and wealthy residents, to, above all, its Chief of Police, who operates almost like St. Denis’s personal guardian angel. Even so, very bad things happen there.

The region is always in flux.  In past it suffered invasions since at least the days of the Phoenicians; these days it suffers -- and prospers -- by floods of outsiders, whether summer residents from England who come to stay, tourists from the entire world or day trippers from Paris. From this flood emerge an endless procession of bad guys, whether as legacy from France's colonial evils, its Nazi occupation, or new ones that have blossomed on their own, such as the Russian oligarchs. Yet, there's always a purely local connection that brings them to Bruno's St. Denis, as befits the pull of the region human beings have inhabited continuously longer than anywhere else in Europe -- and before them, and co-habiting with Neanderthals too.  Whether newly discovered Neanderthal grave sites, the Caves of Lascaux, to what is embedded in the thousands of years of eating and drinking, this is as much a cradle of civilization as Mesopotamia or the Ganges.

The EU almost functions as the highway for the very bad things' presence. I like so much that the EU is a constant reference in the book. Its rules, regulations, trade agreements. and evidently its power, at least as regarded by the residents of a rural community, is in the way of them making a living. It is almost always outsiders that are the actors for the bad events.

The series may not be the best writing or even the best series, perhaps? but it was reliably engaging, and unpredictably quirky through out. The quirks are what makes its formula feel awake, not tired.  Original, yet formulaic enough, new books could trace pathways within the pandemic as it was / is happening in France, to deepen the community's relationships, official and personal, and provide new interests and development in the characters. This isn't literature, but it is terrific story telling, keeping us coming back for more, always wanting to know more.  The reader quite becomes part of the community. If we are fortunate enough to enter into such a community, becomes a part of it, so we are always interested in our friends and neighbors of St. Denis.  That's quite a lot of accomplishment -- the author should be pleased and proud.

Poets As Bookends: Lowells - Longfellow

     . . . .The Lowells of Massachusetts: An American Family (2017) by Nina Sankovich.

Another engrossing book about famous New England families. I will continue to enjoy this one until the 50’s I suppose and that Robert Lowell, who may have been bi-polar but was also a cruel and nasty person. From the very first Lowell in America in the 17th C, Percy Lowell, they were versifiers, even if Percy tended to do it as hymns.  It's a bit disconcerting how poetry, the desire to practice it, and then practicing it, like James Russell Lowell, ran through the various branches and generations, since so many of those individuals also suffered from afflictions that darkened the mind. James Russell Lowell's mother fell deeply into a depression when her daughter died.

But poetry continued to matter to educated readers, all the way through the era of that Robert Lowell then, a/k/a 'Cal' by those who knew him from early years, because he was like Caligula.

John Quincy Adams's life-long desire and dream was to possess the power of a great poet of genius. Yet he recognized that his every effort not only fell far short of genius, but fell far short of the quality he was thought he was creating while in the exhilaration of composition. He had the brilliance though to recognize this, even though he never gave up. This always warms me about JQ, among the many elements of his character that are so far from the received wisdom that JQ was a dull and dreary, dry fellow.

If it was true that the Lowells spoke only to Cabots, it's a wonder they intermarried with them, because in Boston, it was said further, that the Cabots spoke only to God. They also intermarried with the Lodges. There are so many Lowells and Lowell Cabots and Cabot Lowell Lodges, they usually have the same first names too, so I’m having a hard time with who is who.  Longfellow makes a cameo appearance only in this time of public admiration and sales of poets' works. Fanny, Longfellow’s wife, whose father got vastly wealthy working with the Lowells in their mill and factory ventures, isn’t mentioned at all.

This quick overview of 4 centuries of Lowells does make clear the division that rose among Lowells by the 1840’s and 50s, and why it came about. The wealthy Lowells (such as Fanny's father) wanted no interference with slavery and the south. They tried always to shut down talk and literature of abolition. Their mills thrived the south's cheap slave produced cotton for the tariff protected textiles they produced.  After the initial success of the Lowell mills, during which the farmers' daughters labor force were well-paid, well-treated, well-housed and well-fed, they became like their southern cotton suppliers and cut wages, created dangerous working conditions, increased the hours, overcrowded the dirty and vermin-infested houses,  and relied on punishment to speed up work.

The poor Lowells, however, were anti-slavery activists. Before the Lowells who got crazy rich from the Lowell factories, the Lowells all had tended to anti-slavery from the first days they arrived in the colony.  Judge  Lowell who, using the template of the Someset Decision by Judge Mansfield in England prior to Independence, declared it wasn't possible to keep someone enslaved who is brought into Britain. John Adams called these cases "The Freedom Cases"  this lawyer Lowell argued for -- and conducted successfully within Massachusetts, arguing that since in England a slave brought to free Britain could no longer be enslaved, and as Massachusetts was part of Britain, a slave brought to Massachusetts couldn't be a slave either.  This couldn't have worked in Virginia courts Virginia juries.

But the best part of this story of Judge Lowell is that it divided him from his family and community because he began as a Loyalist in the agitation that led up to the colonies declaring for independence, during the Stamp Act etc..  Because of the Somerset Decision he was sure that Britain was fair-minded and would decide in favor of the colonists' distress swiftly and effectively. He was shunned by family and community -- and lucky not to be tarred and feathered, stoned, or beat up, or his home burned, which happened to many who were labeled Loyalists.  That didn't happen, and he returned to the family as a full-blooded Patriot, who helped write Massachusetts' constitution, that overtly prohibited slavery within her borders.

Among the multitude of fascinating anecdotes the author has culled from the cache of Lowell letter quite lately discovered is this on. It was customary for upper, ruling caste, wealthy, Bostonians to send their girls and young ladies to the Ursuline convent in Charlestown for education. One of them, who would marry into the Lowells, experienced the terrifying end to this convent. The good men of Boston mobbed the convent because the Irish Catholics and the nuns had WHITE Puritan girls chained in the basement and whipped them and did Other Worse Things.*  They burned it to the ground. The nuns and their students fled out the back for their lives, hiding in fields of the farms, and gardens of the houses around the convent -- utterly terrified. Thus we see Pizzagate is baked into the USA DNA.

In These Times the most compelling section of The Lowells is the War of 1812, the "southern war", the "slaveholders' war", they called it - which indeed it was.  Lowells were passionate for quite some time about persuading New England to move to secede from the Union and join with England, becoming a new country of new New England.  I confess while reading this, I rather wished they'd been successful. For once I could appreciate the pleasure of alternate history, and this is the only spot in our history where it looked almost plausible, where everything else that came before would have had to change first. Even So, we'd still have had a war about slavery, for the South would never have remained within its borders, and neither would have "New England".

~~~~~~

* Whereas, these same men didn't give a fig about the girls and young women who, not classified as white, who really were confined and chained in basements or sheds or barns or prisons, and whipped, and experienced Other Worse Things.

Basil Not Burger

     . . . . Returned the first library book-books I've checked out since the libraries closed in March; looking forward to my next round of request hard covers, which include a biography of the Black Prince, and the most recent Tasha Alexander Lady Emily action-adventure-mystery-in-upper-class-exotic milieus.

Extraordinarily humid, though not that hot, but soaking wet. The last exhalations of now tropical storm Laura?

Among the extreme change from the last Saturday of August in 2019 and the last Saturday of August 2020: nobody is asking me directions in any language, including English; nobody is pulling luggage along looking for their Airbnb.

Still, here, the streets are filled in the West Village, SoHo, the East Viallge and quite a long ways north – because these are endless stretches of restaurant-bars, who have possession on weekends entirely of the sidewalks and streets -- vehicular traffic blocked off -- except for the killer bikers, killers scooters, killer skateboards.

But once away from this extensive strip – complex (meaning I can walk the extent in any of the four directions, reach the end of that direction and walk back home again within an hour and a half) -- well, once away from these stretches, it’s dead fred, retail all boarded up, until hitting another strip-complex given over entirely to the restaurants. People pouring in from all over the city and the country.

From what I see on people's plates -- we poor pedestrians have no choice but to see it all -- nobody is eating anything except burgers and fries, and occasionally red sauce spaghetti. I really am not seeing salads.  What they are doing in reality is drinking a great deal of alcohol, from wine to exotic cocktails. .... The reek of burger and french fry grease is overwhelming throughout. The uncollected garbage and spillage equally so. Why anybody would want to sit in this miasma, especially in daytime with all the ugly unconcealed, I don’t understand.

There is no glamour here or there. It doesn’t just look trashy, it is trashy,  like the most tawdry end-of-summer street fair you ever saw.  How we’ve fallen since the days of first run Sex and the City, when my city turned into Them and Their city. Now those sorts have turned the entire nation into trash.

Tonight our apartment will be perfumed with fresh, clean and delicious basil and tomatoes, grown outside, in the dirt, when el V makes pasta tonight. That is as far away from the grease-reek of the streets outside as one can get.

Publishing and Eating

     . . . . Publishing jam-up at printers -- NY Times paywall link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/books/printing-companies-backlog-book-publishing.html

[....]

...with September approaching, things are far from normal. Books that were bumped from spring and early summer are landing all at once, colliding with long-planned fall releases and making this one of the most crowded fall publishing seasons ever. And now publishers are confronting a new hurdle: how to print all those books.

The two largest printing companies in the United States, Quad and LSC Communications, have been under intense financial strain, a situation that has grown worse during the pandemic. LSC declared bankruptcy in April, and the company’s sales fell nearly 40 percent in the fiscal quarter that ended June 30, a drop that the company attributed partly to the closure of retailers during the pandemic and the steep fall of educational book sales. In September, LSC’s assets will be put up for auction. Quad’s book printing business is also up for sale; this spring, the company had to temporarily shut down its printers at three plants due to the pandemic.

At the same time, there has been a surprising spike in sales for print books, a development that would normally be cause for celebration, but is now forcing publishers to scramble to meet surging demand. Unit sales of print books are up more than 5 percent over last year, and sales have accelerated over the summer. From early June to mid-August, print sales were up more than 12 percent over the previous 10 weeks, according to NPD BookScan. The surge has been driven by several new blockbuster titles, including books by Suzanne Collins, Stephenie Meyer, John Bolton and Mary Trump. Publishers have also seen an unexpected demand for older titles, particularly books about race and racism, children’s educational workbooks and fiction.

“The infinite printer capacity hasn’t been there for a while, now enter Covid and a huge surge in demand, and you have an even more complex situation,” said Sue Malone-Barber, senior vice president and director of Publishing Operations for Penguin Random House, which is delaying titles at several of its imprints as a result of the crunch.

The backlog at the printers is creating havoc for authors and publishers. Reprints for books that are selling well, which normally take two weeks, are sometimes taking more than a month. [....]

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Holy Cow! el V's chopping and slicing some Saratoga basil and tomatoes.  The perfume is -- dense.  They may have the same names as what we've been getting here, but they are not the same at all.  Duh.

Such beautiful stuff.  I wish-wish-wish there were those close enough with whom I could share it out.

Celery!  Herbs like basil and chervil and parsley, onions and unfamiliar varieties of garlic.  Jolly, rotund eggplant. Early  potatoes. Incredible tomatoes. Bushels of corn on the cob. Late August apples, Williams Pride.  Climate change has been good for the state's peaches -- lordessa are they juicy.  S also sent back a buncha of his chicken fricassee sauce. (I have no plans for cooking chicken any time soon, not with all these vegetables, so into the freezer with that.)

Due to the insane traffic of pretend it's post-covid the produce hand-off for pork didn't happen with P, so that portion is here until later. It will be departing though.

S wants us up again in the fall.  I am thinking ... Thanksgiving?

So much wonderful food!  All perfect for meals in the again very hot and humid weather we're having.

Thises & Thatsas Domestika Trivia

     . . . . Been babying the injured sciatic nerve caused by the trip-and-fall that happened 4 Saturdays ago. 

I still have excruciating pain upon getting up if I've sat in the >ergonomic!< desk chair too long and / or not positioned myself exactly right. I still sit far fewer hours than spend stretched on the bed with overbed table -- which is still impossible to perform writing typing upon.  At least the x-rays showed there was no damage to bones, did not break hip or anything. Still haven't heard anything about the MRI I had a week ago.  At least I can still walk the 20 blocks in both directions to the medical complex, and keep working out.  It's sitting to type or do anything for very long I can't do.

Last night my new stupid fone froze up, couldn’t even power it down to reboot, in the middle of a sentence Vaquero was speaking. Such a piece of shyte phone and such a shyte service T-Mobile. We have to get this fixed!

The Horror!  AAAAAAAAAAAARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG.

My God My God My God WNYC just shoved the Shoggoth First Lady's voice into my ears about how much Shoggothinchief* 'Loves this country and people'. Shutting off the radio rushing to to bathroom to vomit up the horror that is her souless pitch perfect nazi who speaks english inspires. Please replace those wonderful creatures, the elephants, as the entirely inappropriate symbol of the rethugs,  with the entirely accurate and appropriate Lovecraftian creature of horror and hatred of immigrants, Catholics, Jews, African Americans and women. Thrown up. Better.  

Laura is a Cat 4 hurricane now. Going to slam into LA and TX today.  4 million have been told to evacuate.  To where? Our New Orleans Reconnect on-the-ground Captain was laying in supplies last week already.

WBGO is alternating the old timey Blues with New Orleans old timey music, leaning heavily upon the catalogs of Louis Armstrong and Mack Rebbenack (Dr. John).  Huh.  They're going to do a Howlin' Wolf set.

I now get up to find my Howlin' Wolf t-shirt acquired at the Blues Museum in Clarkesdale, Mississippi back in 2012, and which I've never worn.

The St. Cyr novels have never had a blank cover before.

Today's perfect weather was perfect for the library run -- both titles I'd requested when Grab 'n Go started here earlier this month arrived to pick-up at my neighborhood Grab 'n Go branch.  One of them is the latest Sebastian St. Cyr Regency mystery -- I enjoy certain aspects of this series very much, though it has sagged at times.  Other problems: in the first books the protag, Vicount Devlin, is hinted to have some special sort of powers, including being able to see in the dark, but that never went anywhere.  The previous two brought it back to form; hope that continues with this latest installment, #16, What the Devil Knows.The author is a New Orleanian, which somehow provides an extra bit of flava to the content, though I'd be baffled as to say how.  It's not as though New Orleans or North America is ever even mentioned in her novels, which are within the era of the French Wars, generally, and which does provide plot points in more than one of the titles. This latest is set in 1814, the "French War" is finally over, and Europe is being divvied up at the Congress of Vienna ....  They think, the wars are over, anyway (1815 is Waterloo).

El V and B drove to 5th pod member S's huge rambling house, in which he lives along, with screened in annex, big yard and swimming pool up in Saratoga. We'd been planning this little vacation get-away for months already.  Due to the fall though, I sadly had to relinquish going myself this year, for I couldn't sit on drive, get up and walk again -- and that drive isn't even really long. But one will avoid that excruciating pain if one can! They are bringing local fresh produce such as sweet corn on the cob (which they been gorging on, grilled, already), blueberries and so on. They will hook up with P on the way back down here to exchange of this for the local Connecticut pork he picked up for us earlier this summer. So, we continue to eat, and eat well.

I am trying to figure out how we can do some kind of Thanksgiving this year, for we'll still be isolating as much as possible.  The schools are reopening in few days, from pre-school, through the universities.  We know what happens then will be what has happened everywhere in this country and other ones when students are brought back in physical space with each other -- and they can't stay away from each other either, nor do they want to.