Read, Ramble

Earliest Jazz Recordings, 1917

Slowly, slowly, beginning last summer, some of the songs mentioned in Robert Palmer's Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta (1981) have been showing up here. I took a side trip to check out the musicians who appear on an album Palmer mentions: Let's Get Loose: Folk and Popular Blues Styles from the Beginnings to the Early 1940s (New World Records, 1978). Now . . . back to Palmer.

He says a group called the Original Dixieland Jass Band made the first jazz recording in 1917, but he cares so little for jazz that he does not name the song. It is "Livery Stable Blues," and here is the recording courtesy of archive.org.

The flip side was the "Dixieland Jass Band One-Step:"

The first recorded song to use the word "jazz" was Collins and Harlan's "That Funny Jas Band from Dixieland," which was released shortly before the songs here, but that song sounds nothing like jazz.

Palmer tarries only briefly to nod in the direction of jazz and then returns quickly to blues history.

Classics Challenge: One of Ours by Willa Cather

Willa Cather's One of Ours qualifies as an American classic, and so I am posting a few comments in response to this month's prompts for the Classics Challenge at the November's Autumn blog.

How has the author introduced the setting? What does it tell you about the character? About the time period? What is the mood of the setting?

Over half-way through Willa Cather's 1922 novel One of Ours, the action moves to the battlefields of World War I France, but the first half of the book is set on a Nebraska farm. In 1910, over 30 percent of Americans lived on farms; one history site places the number of farms at 6,366,000 in 1910, and farm products accounted for 45% of total U.S. exports between 1910-1919. By 1990 only 2.6% of the American labor force was employed on 2,143,150 farms, and although agricultural exports reached record highs during the Nineties, the percentage of agricultural exports dropped to 9.5% of all U.S. exports.

Agriculture is still big business, but most of us now are detached from the source of our food. In the early Twenties, many Americans either lived on a farm or were a generation away from farm life, and Cather's setting would have been familiar to her readers. It conveys a life of hard work, a place that may build character but can also produce small minds, and in the case of the hero of One of Ours, a place he would like to leave. The mood of place is constraining for the protagonist, but it is also a setting of great natural abundance and health. The hero is manly and competent within the setting, even as he wishes for a wider world.

Many Americans of the post-WWI generation would have identified with the farmland setting and seen in it characteristics of quintessential American values, in ways that today's urban readers may not. It had been years since I had read a Willa Cather novel, but One of Ours has changed my mind about her writing. This is a great American novel, and I am looking forward to reading some of her short stories, which--I just found out--Katherine Anne Porter praised to the skies.

See my post on the book: Willa Cather's Novel of a WWI Soldier: One of Ours (1922).



Katherine Anne Porter parodies Gertrude Stein, 1928.

Readers who think they ought to get around to reading Gertrude Stein might like to sample Katherine Anne Porter's send up of her style. I am afraid this paragraph is entirely faithful to Stein's work. Porter's piece runs two pages and appears to be a mimetic review of Stein's Useful Knowledge (1928).

"Spirals and corkscrews are whirlwinds if we spin a big top and not stop. Not stop nor drag a herring. She confused them all, yet called every day offering new feather pillows. If you wish to amuse yourself you may have your palm read, or do you drink gin? There is also the flea circus, and there is a Congressman. Romance is useful knowledge; America is romance, but you must first live in Paris. Theaters and ticker tape and the states to escape. Ticker tape and ticker tocker, tick tack toe."

Three of Porter's commentaries on Stein in Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings have cured me of any lingering notion of returning to Stein any time soon. I am more interested in her as an important figure in American literary history and in the history of art collecting. A little bit of her writing interested me at one time as a radical effort in experimental fiction, but now it seems more pretentious and dull than groundbreaking.

Willa Cather's Novel of a WWI Soldier: One of Ours (1922)

[NOTE: This post appeared earlier on my old Wordpress blog, but the import/ export operation did not go entirely smoothly during the transition to the new site, and I am having to copy and paste some entries manually in order to maintain my archive. Bear with me, Gentle Reader. That housekeeping chore is almost finished.]

Is it asking for trouble to say I loved a book that Ernest Hemingway ridiculed? Probably, but Willa Cather’s novel about a Midwestern American farm boy who ships out to the World War I battlefields of France, One of Ours, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Hemingway, who was an ambulance driver in Italy in 1918, said she copied her battle scenes from D.W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film, Birth of a Nation.

With all due respect to Hemingway, he does seem to be laughing at Cather as a girly wannabe in the war novel genre. Since only about three battle scenes occur late in the novel, and the hero does not enlist until the story is over halfway told, Hemingway’s snide remark seems unfairly dismissive of the novel as a whole. He had not yet published his first novel in 1923; could jealousy have been a factor in his comment? I must admit that some soldiers’ behavior in the battle scenes appears unrealistic at times, but the overall choreography of these scenes, the representation of a village sniper attack or men going over the top of a trench, do not challenge credulity. Cather’s narrative voice, her evocation of youthful energy and aspirations and frustrations, her memoriam to the young soldiers who died in WWI–these qualities add up to a classic American novel.

Our hero grows up on a prosperous Nebraska farm and attends college for a few years before his father orders him back to the family farm. Today’s urban readers may think it a chore to take seriously the rural setting of the novel’s first half, but readers who appreciated Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, also set on the Great Plains, should give One of Ours a chance. The two writers are stylistically similar. James Wood includes both writers in comments about “Literary Calvinism” in American fiction, and before you roll your eyes and turn away, Dear Reader, consider the other writers Wood includes in this style: Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, Ulysses S. Grant in his Memoirs, Mark Twain and, amusingly in this context, Hemingway. His simplicity of style--and perhaps attitude--marks him for inclusion on this list of writers, although his spare sentences are nothing like those of Robinson and Cather, who appear lush by comparison. Both are notable for the rhythm of their language, especially on the level of the paragraph or long passage.

One of Ours pays tribute to the WWI generation in a coming-of-age story, a nuanced character study, and is not--as some of her contemporaries said–a pro-war novel. She has not a jingoistic bone in her body, and she takes care to remind readers of the cynicism of some soldiers who fought and returned home, also mentioning the men who could not adjust to their post-war civilian environment.

The book celebrates the lives of all the young American men, including Cather’s cousin, who died in France during World War I, who they were, what they might have been, their sacrifice. With over four million U.S. soldiers having served in the costly war, it is no wonder American readers of literary fiction responded to the book about a young man who dies for what he believes in. The novel does not, however, appear on bestseller lists for 1922-23. I’ll close with a paragraph from the novel. It shows both the quality of Cather’s prose and some typical content. She uses dialog to good effect throughout the book, but her representation of the young man’s inner life drives the novel.

Claude knew, and everybody else knew, seemingly, that there was something wrong with him. He had been unable to conceal his discontent. Mr. Wheeler was afraid he was one of those visionary fellows who make unnecessary difficulties for themselves and other people. Mrs. Wheeler thought the trouble with her son was that he had not yet found his Saviour. Bayliss was convinced that his brother was a moral rebel, that behind his reticence and his guarded manner he concealed the most dangerous opinions. The neighbours liked Claude, but they laughed at him, and said it was a good thing his father was well fixed. Claude was aware that his energy, instead of accomplishing something, was spent in resisting unalterable conditions, and in unavailing efforts to subdue his own nature. When he thought he had at last got himself in hand, a moment would undo the work of days; in a flash he would be transformed from a wooden post into a living boy. He would spring to his feet, turn over quickly in bed, or stop short in his walk, because the old belief flashed up in him with an intense kind of hope, an intense kind of pain,—the conviction that there was something splendid about life, if he could but find it!

World Music: Nominees for Songlines Music Awards 2012

Songlines Magazine has announced their award nominees for albums made in 2011. The Newcomer category is especially strong this year, but to my ear Fatoumata Diawara runs away with it.

See the list of nominees below.

* indicates availability on Spotify.

+ Anoushka Shankar's Traveller is not available on Spotify, but she streams it at her website.

BEST ARTIST

Abigail Washburn (for City of Refuge on Rounder) *
Anoushka Shankar (for Travelleron DG) +
Hossam Ramzy (for Rock the Tabla on ARC) *
Ry Cooder (for Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down on Nonesuch) *

BEST GROUP

JuJu (Justin Adams & Juldeh Camara) (for In Trance on Real World) *
SheʼKoyokh Klezmer Ensemble (for Buskerʼs Ballroom on ARC) *
Tinariwen (for Tassili on V2/Co-op) *
Watcha Clan (for Radio Babel on Piranha)

CROSS-CULTURAL COLLABORATION

The Bollywood Brass Band and Rafaqat Ali Khan (for Chaiyya Chaiyyaon Felmay Records)
Dub Colossus (for Addis Through the Looking Glass on Real World) *
Kronos Quartet, Kimmo Pohjonen, Samuli Kosminen (for Unikoon Ondine) *
Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer & Chris Thile (for The Goat Rodeo Sessions on Sony Classical) *

NEWCOMER

Bombino (for Agadez on Cumbancha Discovery) *
Fatoumata Diawara (for Fatou on World Circuit)
Khyam Allami (for Resonance/Dissonance on Nawa Recordings) *
Trio Tekke (for on Trio Tekke)

Teju Cole's Open City

A young man walks around New York City and records his observations and experiences. Add a couple of side-trips to Belgium and Nigeria, and view the whole through the lens of an immigrant's identity and of an individual's distinctive personality, and there you have the bare bones of Teju Cole's debut novel Open City (Random House 2011).

Memory and personal history affect the narrator's running commentary on the present. The novel explores consciousness, streaming the thought of a fictional medical school graduate, now completing his training in psychiatry. While he studies behavior and the mind, the narrative demonstrates the working of one man's mind and gives the reader--misleadingly it turns out--a sense of understanding Julius's character. As Julian Barnes did recently in The Sense of an Ending, Cole introduces new information near the end of the book that jolts readers out of any complacency concerning our understanding. We may think we know Julius, but how well do we ever comprehend the personhood of another human being? The complexity of the human personality defies understanding. Despite sharing in the meditative recollections of an articulate, thoughtful narrator, the reader learns that significant elements of psychology or experience remain hidden from view, perhaps even from the narrator himself.

Open City celebrates solitude, although the distance of relationships from the center of the story also suggests loneliness. The novel also celebrates a highly personalized experience of New York City. This is not the exciting, fast, energized, super-charged Manhattan. If you choose to spend your time observing birds in flight, you can find life in the slow lane anywhere, even in New York.

A young man who has completed medical school and now cares for troubled patients is accustomed to operating at a high level of intensity in his professional life. In this narrative, we mostly see another side of Julius, not the high-powered doctor but a man, in all his individuality, experiencing his environment. One reviewer compares Cole to Camus, and I can see that connection. My thoughts turned to Paul Auster and Robbe-Grillet, not for stylistic similarities but for object of focus--a solitary, alienated man immersing himself in the world around him, the workings of the mind of a peripatetic observer.

One of the narrator’s more absorbing pastimes is listening to classical music. Quite early in the novel, Cole makes a powerful impression with his description of the effect that a piece of music has on Julius. He hears Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde playing on the speakers at a record store and immediately recognizes the performance: 1964, Otto Klemperer conductor, Christa Ludwig soloist.

"Mahler’s music fell over my activities for the entirety of the following day. There was some new intensity in even the most ordinary things all around the hospital: the gleam on the glass doors at the entrance of the Milstein Building, the examination tables and gurneys down on the ground floor, the stacks of patients’ files in the psychiatry department, the light from the windows in the cafeteria, the sunken heads of uptown buildings from that height, as if the precision of the orchestral texture had been transferred to the world of visible things, and every detail had somehow become significant. One of my patients had sat facing me, with his legs crossed, and his raised right foot, which twitched in its polished black shoe, also somehow seemed a part of that intricate musical world."

Julius shifts the musical experience to a personalized creation of observed reality as a list poem. This way of relating to his surroundings is typical of Julius, and if this pivotal passage intrigues you, Gentle Reader, as it did me, then you will probably want to read the novel. For once the reviewer comments on the cover are not hyperbole but accurate reflections of the beauty and flow of the novel. Among those praising it are writers Colm Toibin, Rawi Hage, and Anthony Doerr.

Open City has been showered with recognition in the form of glowing reviews and book prize consideration. Teju Cole was awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction. The novel was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and is currently a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award.

After starting and giving up on numerous, highly-regarded contemporary American novels in recent months, I read Open City with great appreciation and satisfaction. This a very fine debut from Teju Cole.

Katherine Anne Porter on Cather's Short Stories

From "Reflections on Willa Cather" by Katherine Anne Porter, 1952:

"I had liked best of all Willa Cather's two collections of short stories. They live still with morning freshness in my memory, their clearness, warmth of feeling, calmness of intelligence, an ample human view of things: in short the sense of an artist at work in whom one could have complete confidence: not even the prose attracted my attention from what the writer was saying--really saying and not just in the words. Also I remember well my deeper impression of reserve--a reserve that was personal because it was a matter of temperament, the grain of the mind; yet conscious too, and practiced deliberately: almost a method, a technique, but not assumed. It was instead a manifesting, proceeding from the moral nature of the artist, morality extended to aesthetics--not aesthetics as morality but simply a development of both faculties along with all the others until the whole being was indivisibly one, the imagination and the expression fused and fixed."

Does it jar your ear for a serious writer to be talking about morality in relation to aesthetics? These days in the United States people who speak in public about morality tend to be self-righteous, reactionary politicos with a vicious agenda, who have claimed the word for themselves, declared their opponents immoral, and poisoned the word for general use. Today I wonder if Porter would have used a word like "ethics" instead of "morality," in order to avoid the stain of intolerance now associated with those who preach morality. In 1952, a concern with morality in literature did not necessarily raise questions of politics or priggishness.

I am not sure which short story collections Porter had read, but two of Cather's early collections are The Troll Garden (1905) and Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920). Both of these are included in a Cather collection available on the Kindle for $.99. Last summer I read my first Cather short story, “Neighbor Rosicky,” and was amazed by its power and beauty. Then I read her Pulitzer Prize-winning WWI novel, One of Ours (1923), and became a Cather convert. The Cather short stories have now moved closer to the top of my to-be-read pile, to follow completion of the Porter short stories and essays. Why did I wait so long to read Porter! She is a marvelous short-story writer, one of the best ever. Presently I am reading my way up to Pale Horse, Pale Rider but will probably not stop to comment further on her work until completing several hundred more pages of the collection. Library due date looms.

NOTE: No more short stories through inter-library loan, and a quote from Mavis Gallant tells why. "Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait."

Congratulations Kyung-sook Shin, Winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize

After reading the shortlist for the Man Asian Literary Prize (and almost all of the longlist), I picked South Korean author Kyung-sook Shin's Please Look After Mom for the award, and now I am delighted to hear that she won last night at a ceremony in Hong Kong. Here is the statement from her American publisher. I was wondering if they would have time to get those prize stickers ready for the American paperback edition that will be in stores in a few weeks. It appears so.

“We are thrilled that Kyung-sook Shin’s PLEASE LOOK AFTER MOM has won the prestigious Man Asian Literary Prize. PLEASE LOOK AFTER MOM was a New York Times bestseller for Knopf, and widely reviewed and acclaimed. It went into 10 printings in hardcover. The paperback release from Vintage Books on April 10th comes on the heels of the award, an honor we’ll feature in our editions. Ms. Shin is coming to the United States and will be speaking in New York, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. The Prize is a tremendous honor for our author, her book, and the Korean community; this is the first time a novel from Korea has been awarded this important international prize, and the first time a woman has won. This important prize will go far in helping to bring the novel into even more lives and hearts.”

—Robin Desser, Vice President, Senior Editor, Alfred A. Knopf, The Knopf Doubleday Group, Random House, Inc.

Early Jazz/ Blues: Harlem Hamfats, "Mellow Little Devil" (1930s)

The Harlem Hamfats, actually Chicago musicians, played a style somewhere between jazz and blues. The vocalist, Joe McCoy ("Hamfoot Ham"), had been married to and recorded with Memphis Minnie before they split up in 1934. He formed the Harlem Hamfats in 1936.

 

I discovered the band on the liner notes of Let's Get Loose: Folk and Popular Blues Styles from the Beginnings to the Early 1940s (New World Records, 1978). According to those notes, "The Hamfats did occupy a position between blues and jazz, as they consisted essentially of a Mississippi string band centered around the brothers Joe and Charlie McCoy and a New Orleans jazz section of four or five pieces."

Another fun fact from those liner notes . . . "Most of their live appearances were in taverns operated by Chicago gangsters, where they played mainly polkas and Italian music." Based on this sample, that repertoire is a little hard to imagine, but of course a string band would know the polkas. I am curious about what comprised "Italian music" at the time. My knowledge of Italian-American music of that era comes excusively from Francis Ford Coppola soundtracks, which would suggest that the clarinet came forward during those gigs. Just guessing.

Alsace-Lorraine Region in The Food of France by Waverly Root (1958)

The chance that I will start cooking with lard or goose fat is exactly zero, and so Waverly Root’s chapter on Alsace-Lorraine in The Food of France (1958) does not inspire main-dish cooking in my home kitchen. Alsace, says Root, takes its culture from Germany, “which has given Alsace its customs, its domestic architecture, its eating habits, and its language.” Sausage, sausage, sausage, and pâté de foie gras.

The more historically and culturally French region, Lorraine, gave the world quiche lorraine, that lovely, simple dish of eggs and a bit of bacon baked in a pastry crust. I make quiche about once a year, usually spinach, not the simple original version. It was a cheap and filling street food when I visited Paris as a student tourist but not a heart-healthy dish to be eaten very often now.

A short paragraph on Alsatian pastry made me question whether these recipes would include lard instead of butter. That is Root's descriptor for the cooking of this region: "the domain of fat." However, I am finding butter in the pastries instead.

Tarte alsacienne recipes are easily found online. Root describes it as "a custard tart with the custard studded with the excellent local fruits--mirabelles, cherries, etc." The recipes I've found all use butter.

Ditto kugelhopf, "a large, light cake baked in a mold, usually with a central hole." Here is a Dorie Greenspan recipe for kuglehopf that looks enticing.

Birwecka, "a rich and heavy small cake." Coming up empty on this one. Cannot find a recipe.

Kaffee krantz, or coffee cake. One recipe from an antique cookbook combines butter and lard. All the other pastries Root mentions rely on butter only.

Also: "Good gingerbread is made in a number of towns."

Well, there was a speed read through the food of Alsace-Lorraine over fifty years ago. I wonder if they have lightened up their cooking in the intervening years. Next up from Waverly Root: "The Central Plateau."

Visit Beth Fish Reads for a round-up of other food-related posts by bloggers participating in "Weekend Cooking."

Blues: Early Boogie Woogie Pianist Walter Roland, "Jookit Jookit"

Still exploring the old blues musicians who appear on Let's Get Loose: Folk and Popular Blues Styles from the Beginnings to the Early 1940s (New World Records) . . .

Walter Roland played boogie woogie piano and recorded over three dozen songs between 1933 and 1935, but not much is known about him. He played in the Birmingham, Alabama area beginning in the '20s. Here he plays "Jookit Jookit." 

 

 

Bloggers Pick a Favorite Asian Novel 2011

A group of bloggers in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States have been reading the Man Asian Literary Prize finalists with the aim of picking a reader's favorite. The "Shadow" Man Asian Literary Prize jury have made their choice, and the clear favorite is South Korean Kyung-sook Shin’s Please Look After Mom. In English-speaking countries aside from the USA, the novel has been published as Please Look After Mother.

The American paperback edition will be released in a couple of weeks, and the official Man Asian Literary Prize jury will announce the winning novel  on March 15th.

Lin Zexu - Chinese National Hero as Seen in Current Fiction

Before reading Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke a couple of months ago I was unfamiliar with the name Lin Tse-hsü (1785-1850). Now Lin Zexu shows up again fleetingly in Teju Cole's novel Open City. The sweet serendipity leads me to share a couple of quotes here from the two novels. First Cole. The narrator is walking through Chinatown in New York City and comes across "a busy square on East Broadway."

In the middle of the square itself, a square that was hardly more than a traffic island bounded by the crossing of seven streets, there stood the statue that, from a distance, I guessed was of an emperor or poet but that turned out to be Lin Zexu, the nineteenth-century antinarcotics activist. The severe monument commemorating this hero of the Opium Wars--he had been appointed commissioner in Guangzhou in 1838, and was much hated by the British for his role in impeding their drug traffic--was the one around which now pigeons flocked.

 

Ghosh devotes the third section of River of Smoke to Commissioner Lin. We hear of him first by reputation.

So he is to be the next Governor, is he?

No, Sethji. He will be much more powerful than the present Governor. His position is that of "Imperial High Commissioner"--"Yum-chae" in Cantonese. He will be more like a Viceroy than a Governor--he will be above the admirals, the generals and all other officials.

Now skip to Commissioner Lin's entrance into the city by boat.

The stories being told were such as to make people wonder whether the Yum-chae might not be the last of a breed of men that had long been thought to be extinct: an incorruptible public servant who was also a scholar and an intellectual--a state official like those memorialized in legend and parable.

While other mandarins travelled with enormous entourages, at public expense, the Yum-chae was travelling with a very small retinue--a half dozen armed guards, a cook, and a couple of servants--all paid out of his own purse. While the retainers of other officials freely extorted money from all who wanted access to their bosses, Commissioner Lin's men had been warned they would face arrest if they were found to be taking bribes.

As the boat moves by, Neel sees Lin's face.

He had expected a frowning, stiffly dignified personage--but there was nothing stern or stone-faced about the Commissioner: he was looking from side to side with a lively and curious expression; his face was full, his forehead high and smooth; he had a black moustache and a wispy beard; in his eyes was a look of keen and active intelligence.

Since Ghosh lives part-time in Brooklyn, New York, I wonder if he has seen the statue. River of Smoke and Open City are very different novels that I enjoyed for different reasons, and it was fun to find this link between the two. Now I wish the Chinese films about Commissioner Lin were available here, but none of the three seem to be listed on Netflix.

Book Awards Galore

Just in time for International Women's Day, the Orange Prize longlist has been announced. It is a good year for historical fiction. 

And if that is not enough to inspire you, Gentle Readers, The Independent newspaper in the UK has announced the longlist for their Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012. I have reviewed two of the longlisted books, both excellent novels:

Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke.

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin.

Tonight the National Book Critics Circle will announce their awards. Fingers crossed for Teju Cole's Open City. Review to follow soon.

Juno Nominees 2012: The Wailin' Jennys

Canada's music awards, the Junos, will be given later this month, and the Roots & Traditional Album of the Year: Group category is sounding especially competitive. The Wailin' Jennys are nominated for Bright Morning Stars; here is a sample.

Fans of traditional music can probably think of at least six female vocalists who would have done a baby-doll, whispery delivery of this song and ruined it completely. The clarity and brightness of this performance set them apart.

Another Canadian vocal group I've been listening to a lot recently, The Good Lovelies, are also nominated in this category for Let The Rain Fall. Other nominees for Roots & Trad Album: The Deep Dark Woods for The Place I Left Behind, The Once for Row Upon Row Of The People We Know, and Twilight Hotel for When The Wolves Go Blind. So much good music coming out of Canada these days.

Reading Doldrums and To Be Read

Trying to read adventurously on a regular basis results in some disappointing selections, and the books do not merit the time it would take to write lukewarm or negative reviews. Rarely does lightning not strike twice in a row, but this was one of those weeks.

On a cheerier note, Inter-Library Loan just came through with The Library of America's 1000-page Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings. To get through this book by the due date will require focus and a tilting of the blog in a Porterly direction. Reader be warned. On the other hand, I am trying to complete Teju Cole's Open City before the announcement of the National Book Critics Circle awards this week, and two of the non-fiction nominees were irresistible--and not yet available at the library: Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World by Maya Jasanoff and A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman. Both of those are now on order and should arrive shortly.

Jasonoff wrote the brilliant social history Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (2005). Foreman is one of the current Booker Prize judges who is probably best known for Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

In addition, I continue to read and blog samples of the music of Robert Palmer's Deep Blues, a history of Delta blues. Preston Lauterbach's The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll sits here demanding to be read right now, and I still have biographies of two legendary bluesmen on hand: I Feel So Good, The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy by Bob Riesman and Soul of the Man: Bobby "Blue" Bland by Charles Farley.

A collection of short stories by Canadian-Parisian Mavis Gallant; essays by one of the greatest living American fiction writers, Marilynne Robinson; and the slow journey through Waverly Root's The Food of France round out the to-be-read stack. I still have in mind a few books for the Classics Challenge, the Australian Women Writers Challenge, and Simon's A Century of Books Challenge. As usual, samples of world music may appear from time to time.

Except for the emphasis on Katherine Anne Porter, expect business as usual here at the new and improved Read, Ramble.

World Music: Youssou N'Dour (Senegal), "Chimes of Freedom"

For those who missed the latest news on the Senegal elections: Senegal president facing election defeat.

Waverly Root Visits "The Mountains" in The Food of France (1958)

Waverly Root, in The Food of France (1958), enlivens his travelogue with stories about each region he visits, and in some chapters the commentary about geography and life ways is more interesting than the observations about food. In the chapter on "The Mountains" running along the eastern border of France, he characterizes the food as nothing special and makes some sweeping generalizations about the locals that make you question his judgment. "It is a fair question to ask how much the diet of mountain peoples contributes to their sometimes truculent independence." Couldn’t you say the same thing about people living in a desert?

Root vividly describes the mountain gorges of the Juras and says that streams and rivers have a way of disappearing underground and resurging miles away, where the locals may think they are living by the source.

This phenomenon was dramatized in 1901 when dwellers near the ‘source’ of the Loue were delighted to discover that it seemed to have turned to absinthe–weak in flavor, but nevertheless quite palatable. Two days before, the Pernod factory at Pontarlier, where absinthe was made, had burned down, and some 200,000 gallons of it had poured into the Doubs. It was therefore deduced that the Loue was a resurgence of part of the waters of the Doubs. The theory was tested by tinting the Doubs near Pontarlier with a strong green dye. Two and a half days later, the Loue was green also.

Root abounds with vignettes like this one, making The Food of France a picturesque armchair journey through the country. His geographical summary gives valuable information, when he is traveling in some of the lesser known regions. I did not know about the forest of La Joux, where the pines offer "France’s equivalent of the giant sequoia growths of the American Pacific Coast." Although not quite as tall as the sequoias, the pine trees are nevertheless impressive, says Root.

At the time Root published this book, over 60 years ago, winding roads into the high mountains of the Jura were dangerous and difficult to travel, which led to the development of a superior cheese production.

 

The mountain pasturage produces milk that makes particularly good cheese, but the chief reason for disposing of most of the Jura’s milk in this form is the prosaic one of difficulty of transport. To bring milk down from these high fields twice a day and then move it to the distant urban regions where it would have to be sent–for the sparsely settled Juras produce much more fresh milk than their own population could consume–would be an onerous process. So the milk is converted into cheese, and in this more readily transportable and less perishable form finally reaches the city markets.

When Root moves on to the higher Alps he notes that sports tourists from the cities–mountaineers and skiers–actually prefer the hardy fare of the region. Like the locals, they may be more interested in plenty of food as opposed to the refinement of cuisine that Root admires.

Root, as usual, gives generous detail about wines of the region, but since these local wines are generally consumed locally, they are not likely to show up at my local store, and I read these sections with a bit less interest than usual. However, a famous liqueur originates in a Benedictine monastery near Grenoble: Chartreuse. Root reveals that the secret formula for Chartreuse is based mostly on medicinal herbs flavored with saffron, cinnamon bark, and the seed coating of nutmeg.

Well, hooray. I’ve now finished reading the first section in Root’s book about the regions with cuisine based on butter. Now on to "The Domain of Fat," beginning with Alsace-Lorraine. By fat Root means lard, or fat of pig, and also fat of goose. Then lastly, he visits the domain of oil, or the Mediterranean.