It all started with a Sam’s Club dog biscuit mix, a Christmas gift from my sister Betsey. She knows that I like my dog and I like baking.
Because February 17th is the anniversary of Roxie having been blown into our lives by a winter storm nine years ago (story recounted here), I made the biscuits on Friday to celebrate. To clarify, I made half the biscuits. The mix is in two bags, producing about twenty treats apiece. Forty treats is too many for an eight-pound dog.
Two eggs, a little oil, and a third cup of peanut butter combine with the mix (brown rice flour, oats, flax seeds, pumpkin powder, apple powder, and salt) to make a thick malleable dough. The kit provides a silicone mold that holds about half or a little less of the dough.
The rest I shaped into dog bones or cut with cookie cutters. For this time of the year, I chose bunnies and snowmen, summing up February in Northeast Ohio. They bake for about half an hour. The roundish ones have pawprints imprinted on the bottom.
To sum up, they were fun to make and Roxie likes them. If you’re thinking we’re a decadent culture which provides cute, nutritious treats for dogs while children in Syria and Turkey go hungry, I feel you. Consider donating to World Central Kitchen, founded by Chef Jose Andres, which is already at work in the earthquake zone.
I haven’t posted anything for Monday Meals for a couple of weeks. I suspect my posts on Monday will continue to be sporadic. Feel free to encourage me.
Should I care how Anäis Mitchell, creator of the musical Hadestown, adapts Greek myths to suit her purposes? I shouldn’t. Myths provide us with archetypal stories and characters, constantly shaped and reinterpreted over the centuries. For example, beautiful Helen, the Greek king Menelaus’s wife, caused the Trojan War, but how these events went down depends on the storyteller. In some versions, Helen was Aphrodite’s reward to the Trojan prince Paris, who dubbed Aphrodite the fairest goddess of all. In others, the wanton Helen seduced the hapless Paris. According to others, Paris kidnapped Helen, an innocent victim. Skilled interpreters can make of such stories what they will.
The currently touring Hadestown, which we saw this week, shapes Greek myths for its purposes, just like the Iliad, the Aeneid, the opera Orpheus in the Underworld by Jacques Offenbach, and many others. The messenger god Hermes acts as a kind of narrator. Orpheus, the musician, and Eurydice play out their ill-fated love. Hades and Persephone, king and queen of the underworld, oversee and control much of the action. The three Fates, a soulful girl group, sing the commentary.
Weirdly, although I loved and admired the music, staging, and performances, the tweaking of the myths by the show’s creator left me unsettled. Ms. Mitchell revised some of my favorite parts of the myths, and I departed the theater feeling a little sad that many audience members would believe that her version of the stories was the only one.
In traditional retellings, Eurydice dies from a snake bite, which is how she ends up in the underworld, from which Orpheus attempts to rescue her. In Hadestown, Eurydice wanders off and becomes lost and hungry. Because she’s starving, she succumbs to the god Hades and signs away her life to him. Her decision is forgivable, to be sure, but she has some agency: she’s betrayed her love for Orpheus by yielding herself to this villainous god.
Worse for me is tampering with the story of Persephone. I’ve recounted this favorite myth several times on this blog, using her Roman name, Proserpina. Her mother Demeter (Ceres, in Latin) is essential to most renditions of the myth. Hades grabs Persephone from a meadow, where she’s picking flowers with her friends. Ovid calls Hades (Pluto, in Roman versions) raptor, a word that has the same meaning in Latin and English: Persephone has no choice. She becomes Hades’s “wife,” but not of her own volition. Her mother Demeter brokers a deal whereby Persephone can return to earth for half the year. Demeter’s joy at her daughter’s return creates the bountiful blossoms and fertile growth of spring and summer.
In the musical, Hades and Persephone seem to be in love. When Persephone leaves Hades and returns to earth in the spring, she’s all on her own. No mention of Mom. Her glorious reappearance itself triggers the bountiful blossoms.
I miss Demeter.
Is this because I’m a mom? Sure.
As we leave the theater, I overhear some young people talking about not knowing the story ahead of time. In fact, the two sets of characters don’t usually overlap, except that Persephone rules the underworld, where Orpheus and Eurydice play out their drama. Today’s audience members are encountering an altered, 21st century rendering of some very ancient stories.
Ms. Mitchell has created over two hours of gorgeous music of various genres, filled with wordplay and poignancy. The road show performers are funny, enthusiastic, and virtuosic. I should be elated, but, being me, I’m a tad downcast.
Transforming a book into a movie is a somewhat different proposition, but I bet you can think of examples. When were you disappointed in the transformation? When were you pleased?
The Roman priests called Luperci celebrated the Lupercalia, a fertility and purification festival on February 15 by striking women with goatskin strips called februa. This word gives us the name of our shortest month, as well as its odd spelling and challenging pronunciation.
Why hit women with goat hide? (Considering the treatment of women throughout history, you might also ask, why not?) You strike them with februa to increase their fertility. Why else?
The feast has its roots in the legendary founding of Rome. Twin boys named Romulus and Remus were cast out by their uncle, King Amulius, who feared that the boys would one day overthrow him. They were rescued by a she-wolf, who nursed them in a cave called the Lupercal. A shepherd and his family eventually found and adopted the boys. When they grew up, the fulfilled their fates and overthrew their evil uncle. Then Romulus killed Remus and founded the great civilization of Rome.
That’s a condensed version.
The Lupercalia celebrated the twin boys and the wolf who nurtured them. It involved sacrificing goats, whipping women, and probably a fair amount of drinking and sex. During the festival, men picked women’s names from a jar and were paired off with them for the duration. So mid-February already had a tenuous connection to “romance.”
Later in the Empire, Claudius forbade young soldiers to marry, believing that they would be less enthusiastic about going off to war if they had a wife and family. A priest named Valentine was executed in 270 AD for marrying Christian couples against the emperor’s commands. He was decreed a saint in the late 5th century. February 14 is his feast day.
In another version of the story, while Valentine was imprisoned, he tutored the blind daughter of his jailer. He and the girl, Julia, prayed together that her sight be restored, and God answered their prayers. As Valentine was led to his execution, the (soon-to-be) saint slipped a note to Julia that said “from your Valentine.”
Some Christians frown on Valentine’s Day because of its pagan origins. Maybe we should also, then, change the name of the month? In Old English, February was Solmonath, or mud month, and Kale-monath, named for cabbage. What do you think?
I check out Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea with high hopes. It seems to have everything. It is about words (I like words), and it is funny (I like funny). Shea, a collector of dictionaries, sets out to read the entire Oxford English Dictionary, all twenty volumes. Each letter gets a chapter, with a short introductory essay and then a selection of words that have caught Shea’s fancy.
Let me back up and explain, in case you haven’t encountered this mammoth work. The OED goes beyond a mere unabridged dictionary. The OED strives to include every word that has ever appeared in English. It’s a dictionary for antiquarians and people who have OCD in the verbal department. It’s a wonderful, miraculous human endeavor and contains quirky, bizarre words, such as heredipity, the hunting of an inheritance, and storge, instinctive affection, as of parents for children.
Shea’s little essays are fun, as are his selections of words, but not fun enough for me to continue reading. He provides only a brief definition of his selected words and perhaps an example or comment. Reading a list of words that Shea happens to find interesting is not that interesting for myself, and guess what is missing. Etymologies! The OED includes them, of course, but Shea must have thought his readers wouldn’t care. I care!
The reader should know, for example, that storge derives from ancient Greek and is pronounced store-gay. The context of Greek terms for love is what is most interesting: storge, philia, eros, and agape all describe different kinds of love. Philosophers and preachers have made much of these terms and differences, which our little word love struggles to contain.
Shea also cites hamartia, Aristotle’s term for a tragic hero’s fatal flaw, such as Oedipus’s arrogance and pride (hubris). But Shea doesn’t explain the interesting part. The Greek word actually means “missing the mark,” describing an arrow shot toward a target. The tragic hero fails, sure, but not for lack of trying. Our sins, as well, can be seen as examples of hamartia, trying to hit the target, maybe time after time, and failing in the attempt. It’s a compassionate definition of sin as falling short.
When I read that mumpsimus, for example, means “a stubborn refusal to give up an archaism in speech or language,” I yearn to know why. Where does that strange word come from?
Here’s the answer, from a quick Google search. Mumpsimus is a mid-16th century English word erroneously derived from the Latin phrase, “sumpsimus in quod in ore,” which occurs in the Mass after communion. The phrase means “that which we have taken into the mouth,” referring to the Eucharist. An illiterate priest, in an apocryphal story, mistakenly read “quod in ore mumpsimus.” When corrected, he replied, “I will not change my old mumpsimus for your new sumpsimus.” So mumpsimus means clinging to an outdated or incorrect word.
To me, this illiterate priest makes for a far more amusing story than the mere word mumpsimus. But maybe it’s just me.
What’s your favorite weird or quirky word, and why?
What does the word tawdry have in common with the name Ned? Care to hazard a guess?
Ned is, in a way, a misunderstanding. According to folk etymology, the name derives from the common usage of Mine Edward as an affectionate form of address. The usual nickname Ed gradually became Ned, as the N sound carried over to the beginning of the name.
Tawdry is an adjective meaning “showy but cheap.” For example, Mitt Romney seemed to find George Santos’s behavior at the State of the Union Address tawdry. He reproached the beleaguered Congressman in the Capitol last night for trying to hog the limelight instead of modestly sitting in the back row.
This unpleasant word tawdry derives from the lovely name Audrey. It takes its initial consonant from the word Saint. Saint Audrey’s lace was sold as cheap ribbon necklaces in the English town of Ely, where Saint Audrey was the patron saint. Pilgrims purchased them in the town fair long after they went out of style, and they were considered gaudy and cheap.
Say Saint Audrey a few times and you’ll hear tawdry, just as chanting mine Edward eventually sounds like my Ned. The nickname Nell supposedly derived similarly–from mine Eleanor or mine Ellen.
The word nickname itself has a similar etymology! The original word, ekename, first appeared around 1300, with eke meaning “an added on piece.” Ekename, with its initial vowel, would be preceded by the article an. You would refer to Ned, for example, as “an ekename.” The final N of an became attached to the word following. By the 1600s, ekename had become nickname.
Do you have a nickname? Do you like it, or do you consider it tawdry?
Governor Ron DeSantis’s website includes a page devoted to his proposed Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act. Florida’s tax dollars are paying for courses that make kids hate America, he says. Critical race theory has invaded our elementary schools, taking away our kids’ ability to think for themselves, indoctrinating them with racial hatred and even communism.
The page includes a series of examples of what the Governor calls critical race theory. These include a Philadelphia grade school where students were forced to celebrate “Black communism” and perform a mock rally to free Angela Davis, the activist jailed for a year (and then exonerated) in 1971-72, and the Buffalo schools, which forced kindergartners to watch videos of dead Black children. Each item on the list ends with a “More here” link. Those links take you to somewhat hysterical articles describing these outrages.
Notably, all the articles appear in the same publication, City Journal, published by the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, most of them written by Christopher Rufo, who conflates nearly all references to race in education with critical race theory and references to LGBTQ persons as “grooming.” Rufo’s Wikipedia page quotes Kimberle Crenshaw, a critical race theorist, as saying, “what Rufo and Republicans ‘are calling critical race theory is a whole range of things, most of which no one would sign on to, and many of the things in it are simply about racism.'”[5]
I scurried down this rabbit hole today after reading the poem below by Nikki Giovanni. I realized that readers and students would not understand Giovanni’s poem unless they understood the history she alludes to: Pullman porters, Black newspapers, Thurgood Marshall, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Rosa Parks. Most importantly, Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African-American boy who was tortured and murdered by white men in Mississippi in 1955. If I were teaching high school now, I would think twice about sharing this poem, and I would take care in teaching my students about lynchings like Emmett Till’s. Certain authorities would be quick to label such a lesson “critical race theory,” because it’s about ugly aspects of American history. I never learned about Emmett Till in high school, but I should have.
Here’s what I want to ask Governor DiSantis, Christopher Rufo, and Marjorie Taylor Greene: Should public school teachers be allowed to teach high-school students what happened to Emmett Till? If not, our students will not understand this poem, they will not understand the Civil Rights Movement, and they will not understand much of the pent-up anger and grief that erupts every time a Black male like Tyre Nichols, George Floyd, or Tamar Rice is killed. As Giovanni eloquently shows, there are connections to be made.
Rosa Parks
This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said
they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the ChicagoDefender to the Black Americans in the South so they would
know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who
helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight
the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because
even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birth-
place of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The
Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the
Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both
the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would
know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled
when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954
when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “sepa-
rate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in
1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a
doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood
why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer
when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps
and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways
when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the
Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while
the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to
St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept
him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all
summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly
lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grand-
children on his knee telling them about his summer riding the
rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money,
Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unac-
ceptably murdered. This is for the Pullman Porters who, when the
sheriff was trying to get the body secretly buried, got Emmett’s
body on the northbound train, got his body home to Chicago,
where his mother said: I want the world to see what they did
to my boy. And this is for all the mothers who cried. And this is
for all the people who said Never Again. And this is about Rosa
Parks whose feet were not so tired, it had been, after all, an ordi-
nary day, until the bus driver gave her the opportunity to make
history. This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama,
who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the
moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods
aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in
Money, Mississippi, who had been so well protected by the
Pullman Porters, would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks
said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. No longer would
there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs.
Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system,
the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and
the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young
men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No. Great
voices would be raised singing the praises of God and exhorting
us “to forgive those who trespass against us.” But it was the
Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it
was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not
being able to stand it. She sat back down.
Gum-chewing drives some people to distraction, while split infinitives irritate others. One idiosyncratic bee in my own bonnet is the meaning of casualties.
I’ve even taken a stand on the issue. Some years ago, I wrote a letter to National Public Radio correcting an exaggerated number of dead from some Civil War battle. The person had quoted a figure in the hundreds of thousands, assuming that casualties meant “deaths.” Casualties include the dead, wounded, and missing. It’s true that many in the latter two categories would eventually join the fatalities, but not all of them. I was invited to read my letter aloud on a feedback segment of All Things Considered.
A recent example. I loved Yiyun Li’s story Wednesday’s Childin the January 23 New Yorker. In an author interview on the New Yorker website, she says that over a million young people died in the World War I battle(s) around Ypres, France, a comment that set off my casualties alarm. Turns out it’s very difficult to ascertain online how many people died at Ypres, because four or five battles took place there. As far as I can tell, the appalling number of casualties is in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million or more, but the number of actual deaths, while also appalling, would be far fewer.
Upwards of nine million military personnel died in World War I in total, while casualties may have numbered over twenty million.
As you might imagine, the Latin root of casualties helps clarify this distinction. The verb cadere means “to fall”; its participle casus would mean “having fallen.” Not to be flippant, but someone can fall without dying. Casuality differs from fatality.
Cadere also gave us cadence, cadaver, casual, incident, accident and many more.
I still like Yiyun Li and her story, so much that I am reading her recent novel The Book of Goose.
Share your own pet peeves below. The weirder the better.
A disadvantage of book groups is that sometimes you have to read books that you never would have picked up on your own and that you don’t enjoy. The upside is that sometimes you have to read books that you never would have picked up on your own and that you end up loving.
Tonight, my book group is discussing Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert, with the help of a Tufts philosophy professor, Erin I. Kelly. This Pulitzer Prize winner falls into the latter category. I had never heard of Rembert, but after reading the book and watching the 2011 documentary film All Me, I know and appreciate Rembert’s work and his humanity, and I comprehend better than before the atrocities and horror of Jim Crow, lasting well beyond the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s.
Like many trauma survivors, Rembert (1945-2021) worries that other people are not going to believe his stories. (Think of Holocaust survivors like Primo Levi, and many sexual assault survivors.) The stories are almost unbelievable. He was nearly lynched at around the age of nineteen, taken to a remote woods and strung up by his feet. One of his white attackers almost castrated him, and he would have been killed if another man hadn’t intervened, saying, “Carry him on back to the jail. He gonna die anyway.”
Sent to prison, he worked on a chain gang. He spent days in a sweat box, unable to stand or sit. The miracles he experienced are just as incredible as his suffering. He learned construction and engineering skills while in prison. He was released early on parole, while others rotted in jails for a lifetime. He had a long, loving marriage with a stalwart woman named Patsy. And, luckily for us, he learned to emboss and dye leather, his medium of choice.
His stunning works of art chronicle the experiences described in his book. Some of the most beautiful reveal agonies, like sharecroppers bent double over stylized rows of cotton, a white overseer with a scale standing in their midst. Others depict a mosaic of black-and-white striped uniforms of men on the chain gang.
Everyone should read this book, every American, anyway, of say, high-school age and over. It disturbs the reader, yes. That’s our history, and too bad for us. As Memphis shows, it’s our present, too. Rembert’s story is filled with horrors, but also of resilience, hope, and love. Watch the film, too, All Me, available on Amazon Prime. You can also see Rembert in Ashes to Ashes, available on YouTube.
On this last Wednesday of the month, we’re finally getting around to January, whose root is Janus, the Roman god of doorways, beginnings and endings, and transitions. His face appeared on either side of a door, so that he could look both in and out. He looks ahead to 2023 and backwards toward 2022, as we are also doing.
The Roman door, ianua (pronounced yah’-niu-ah), derived from Janus, which the Romans spelled Ianus. A janitor was originally a porter or doorkeeper, developing into the caretaker mode we recognize today.
My students sometimes wondered why boring doors needed a deity. Janus was certainly not as exciting as Apollo, god of the arts, or Mars, the god of war. No interesting or scandalous stories about him remain. But I’d propose thinking about doors opening onto opportunity or closing a phase of life behind. Thinking about movies focusing on a door. There’s the arrival home of the wandering hero, the bride being carried over the threshold, the slamming door, the creepy turning of the doorknob as the babysitter watches anxiously. Columbo was known for almost exiting the door before he turned and asked the key question that would nab the killer. Remember Dorothy and her friends banging on the great door of the Emerald City?
And who can forget Jack Nicholson breaking down the door in The Shining? You can bet Shelley Duvall was praying to some deity or other!
Doors are rich symbols. Doors have a metaphysical vibe. They’re holy, or at least woo-woo. The Romans weren’t crazy to ascribe a supernatural being to them. While you’re thinking of more movie examples, I’ll share this Ursula K. Le Guin poem, which my friend Mara recently posted on Facebook.
January Night Prayer
Bellchimes jangle, freakish wind
Whistles icy out of desert lands
over the mountains. Janus, Lord
of winter and beginnings, riven
and shaken, with two faces,
watcher at the gates of winds and cities,
god of the wakeful:
keep me from coldhanded envy,
and petty anger. Open
my soul to the vast
dark places. Say to me, say again
nothing is taken, only given.
My husband is reading one of my favorite books, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831). He’s been tackling classics in recent years. I thought that was the reason for this choice, but just discovered he’s showing the 1939 Charles Laughton film version at the Cleveland Cinematheque in a few weeks. Movies often motivate his book selection, as in his last choice, White Noise by Don DeLillo, recently adapted by director Noah Baumbach.
Hunchback provided me with one of the most memorable reading experiences of my life, and it always brings to mind this Emily Dickinson quote: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it.”
I was sitting in a study carrel in the Kent State library in the mid-70s, reading the novel for a Comparative Literature class. I won’t describe the passage to you, because I have a mortal fear of spoilers, but let’s just say there are a few epically suspenseful pages in the middle of the book.
As I sat alone, huddled in the carrel by a window, I clutched the book, swept up in the dramatic action. My feet began to move, eventually stamping the floor, pumping away to dispel the anxious energy building inside me. When the passage ended, I laughed with relief, closed the book, and put my head down on the desk. I believe I was breathing hard.
In case your mind goes in this direction, there is no sexual innuendo going on here.
I didn’t feel cold, and I didn’t feel as though the top of my head was taken off, but I felt caught up in Victor Hugo’s imagination, present with his characters in Paris in 1482. It actually took me a few minutes to recover my equilibrium.
I can think of a few other examples, but probably none so dramatic. It’s awesome, isn’t it, how words on a page can make us laugh or cry or worry? That they can affect us physically, making our hearts pound or our stomachs clench?
Share your experiences in the comments. I want to know when you felt so cold no fire could warm you, or, at least, when a book overtook you.
