Healthy, Wealthy And Wise

[poliphilo]

Here's a sign that I really have left Wicca behind me.

We bought a pumpkin and I was going to carve it into a jack o'lantern and I forgot all about it. So now there's an untouched pumpkin sitting in the kitchen somewhere and I need to figure out what to do with it. Pumpkin soup, I guess, which makes a nice meal whatever day of the year it is.

So Halloween passed me by, but I've been deeply affected by the putting back of the clocks. I grumble about it but I like it really. I get up earlier and I go to bed earlier and feel good about myself.

Early to bed and early to rise
Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

Yesterday I noticed the windows darkening at four and it shot me right back to the winter evenings of my boyhood. I'm sitting at the kitchen table and the window is throwing slanting rectangles of light up the grassy bank outside. And the ragged black silhouette of the wood at the far end of our garden is slowly merging with the sky. Maybe there's a star hovering just above.

Maybe it moves and is an aeroplane.

Or I'm sitting by an open fire and we're roasting chestnuts. (Yes, really.) We line them up along the top of the grate and behind them the coals yawn to reveal great caverns of incandescence and I think, not exactly of hell, but of some mythic otherworld- perhaps of that place in Norse legends (yes, I'd read all that stuff at a pretty young age) where the fire giants live.

Muspellsheim

I had to look that up, of course. I open my copy of Myths of the Norsemen and the information I need sits across from the scary picture of Sutr the giant with the flaming sword who stands at the gates of Muspellsheim and chops up approaching ice-bergs.

He has stiff pointed moustaches and a low sloping brow. He looks like the sort who would chop first and ask questions afterwards. Or maybe not ask any questions ever.

The book was my grandfather's and it still smells of his tobacco. He's been dead now for 25 years.

The chestnuts, anyway, are lined up along the grate and I sit well back because once in a while- thrillingly- one of them will explode.

Pop.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I so much enjoyed these images

...the coals yawn to reveal great caverns of incandescence

and stories from your childhood.

And have you ever roasted pumpkin seeds?

(I certainly haven't, but some people like them, and the kitchen has a nice fall fragrance for the afternoon.)

(I've never roasted chestnuts. I don't think we have any.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I have roasted pumpkin seeds. But they're difficult to get right. There's a very fine line between not cooked at all and burnt- I suppose because they're so small.

I remember them being rather nice.

I've just finished hacking up the pumpkin. I knew I would cut my finger and- sure enough- I did. Nevermind. I've thrown the pumpkin in a pan with stock and spices and a generous teaspoonfull of ginger and we'll see how it comes out.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

If nothing else, your house will have a wonderful holiday fragrance all day!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We ate it (drank it?) for lunch. Ailz went back for seconds so I guess it was OK. Pumpkin tastes of nothing in particular, so it's critical what you put with it. This time the mystery ingredient was apple.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

P.S. My copy of Blackwood's The Centaur arrived this morning. According to the blurb it anticipates Jung's ideas about the Collective Unconscious. I'm rubbing my hands with glee, but- gotta be disciplined about this- I need to finish The Waves first.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

P.S. My copy of Blackwood's The Centaur arrived this morning. According to the blurb it anticipates Jung's ideas about the Collective Unconscious. I'm rubbing my hands with glee

Hooray! It sounds intriguing!

About A.S.Byatt, the Booker Prize author: She writes beautifully, but sometimes goes on and on and on, awash in her beautiful prose. In my humble opinion.

One day, one of the blue veins on her inner thigh erupted into a line of fubious spinels, and she thought of jewels...they glittered as she moved. She saw that her sony casig was not static--points of rock salt and milky quartz thrust through glassy sheets of basalt, bubbles of sinter formed like tears between layers of hornblende.

And that's just one paragraph. When I finished the story, I felt all clanky.

It's just my preference--I love excellent writing, but I finally get impatient: "Where are you going with this? I get it! Move on!"

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear, I was typing while propping up Byatt's book against the monitor, and flubbed at least three words. Her vocabulary isn't THAT obscure!

Here's the translation of my bad typing:

line of fubious spinel = line of RUBIOUS spinels (no help there for me, actually)

sony casig was not static = STONY CASING was not static

Sorry!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I was going to say that "fubious" looks like a Lewis Carroll word.

Rubious? Might it mean "reddish"? But if so, why doesn't she just say it plainly.

I'm with you here. I think she's showing off. One should only use an obscure word where it's absolutely essential.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

One should only use an obscure word where it's absolutely essential.

Right! I love her rich descriptions, but I kind of get tired of sensing this heavily breathing writer hovering over her thesaurus.

It's not useful to stick in words that don't provide imagery. She began to sound a little like my geologist nephew when he shows us a fine rock specimen.

I'm not through with her, though. My next stop is her Booker prize-winner with the intriging title "Possession."

I'll be very interested in your take on Blackwood's The Centaur.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I refuse to use a thesaurus. I think it's cheating.

I'm reading Woolf. Sometimes she gets very flowery and I think "Oh Virginia, don't be so bloody Victorian", then she'll straighten up again.

I guess floweriness is inevitable if you're pushing at the limits of what language can do. That's why I don't hold it against Woolf. For every passage that goes over the top there'll be several that express a thought or perception so subtle, fugitive, unusual that it's an absolute marvel that she's been able to pin it down.

[ksp24.livejournal.com]

I had not thought of the Norse myths in quite a while.

Thank for reminding me!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's been a while since I got that book off the shelf.

H.A. Guerber's Myths of the Norsemen. It's a big, heavy old book (must be a hundred years old) with lots of black and white plates. I loved it when I was a kid.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

I first learned my first Norse myths in the perfect way; by having my grandmother tell them to me as bedtime stories. Not read them, but tell them. Since then I've read a lot of them, especially as a kid, and many of them are just fantastic. To me they are sort of comforting; a reassurance of a national and regional indentity within myself. Roots that one can return to at will inbetween forays into cosmopolitanism and globalisation. I might be a (willing) European, but I am also a Speardane, and shall remain that for the rest of my life. That's nice to know; permanence seems so very rare these days.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

England doesn't really have a mythology of its own. There are odd medievalized fragments of things and that's about it. If we want something systematic we borrow yours, or we borrow the Greeks'. I guess the nearest thing is the Arthurian cycle, but it's very late and very French.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

I know; English literature begins with a Norse tale, doesn't it? Gosh; you're such a young country... And yes; Arthurian legend is not really the same; there isn't the same cosmic system, first of all, and secondly most of it seems to have been written in French. For some obscure reason I cannot help but think that Arthur might have a lot more to do with Britanny that Britain. (This might be because I have mainly read Crétien de Troyes tales of the Arthurian court; Lancelot du Lac, Le Chevalier au Lion and so on, and only in French. It makes it hard to transfer into an Anglosaxon (or pre-Anglosaxon?) realm...)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

You mean Beowulf? Yeah, it's a Saxon mini-epic. I confess to my shame I haven't read it.

There are Arthurian stories in the (medieval Welsh) Mabinogion. Then there's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight- an Arthurian poem set in the badlands south of Liverpool- which is thoroughly English (and mythological) and owes nothing (so far as I am aware) to the French.

The guy who did most to shape the Arthurian material into a single whole was Sir Thomas Malory. He was working with French material (Cretien de Troyes et al)- but did a grand job of Englishing it.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

You ought to read it some day; it's great, or at least this Speardane thinks so... -And if you're not up for the original (brilliant as it is, though!), there is a very good translation by Seamus Heaney.

-And I've only read one The Green Knight, and that was by Iris Murdoch... :-P

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Murdoch's Green Knight is one of her best. At least I think so...

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

My clearest memory of it is the walking scenes through London; beautiful...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I remember the girl with the stone and how she develops a conscience about it and has to take it back to the place where she found it.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

Another time you might want to try a gratinéed pumpkin mash; boil the pumpkin pieces with a few potatoes and some herbs (rosemary is always a classic...), mash it all and whisk in some cream and eggs 'till it's nice and light, then throw it in a dish in the oven at gasmark 7 or something similar (Celsius, Fahrenheit, whatever...) untill the surface takes colour and becomes slightly crusty. (You can also mix in some cheese or just grate it on top before sticking the dish in the oven...) It's really a very good alternative to roast potatoes for a traditional roast!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That sounds really good.

Pumpkins only appear in the shops here at Halloween- and I suspect very few of them are actually eaten.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

-Same thing in Denmark, but this was a recipe I picked up in Paris. Don't know if it's particularly French, though.

[four-thorns.livejournal.com]

how does one make pumpkin soup?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I improvised this one.

I cut up the pumpkin flesh, put it in a pan with a couple of litres of stock, added garlic, cumin, salt, pepper, ginger and coriander and cooked it up till the pumpkin was soft then blended it.

It didn't taste of much so I added a spring onion and a chopped up apple, blended again and was pleased with the result.