I just learned about a restaurant whose mission includes “conviviality,” in addition to good food and service. Naturally, the Latin root word came to mind.
Vivere is Latin for “to live.” Think of some other -viv- words, and chances are that most of them will connect to life and liveliness. Vivacity, vivacious, vivid, vivify, the musical notation vivace, and viviparous (bearing live young, as opposed to eggs), are members of the family.
The prefix con- derives from the Latin preposition cum, meaning “with.” When you’re convivial, you’re “living with.” You’re lively along with someone. No doubt the restaurant hopes there will be lots of customers for you to be convivial with.
An exceptionally lively fellow diner might be named Vivian!
My twin grandchildren turn two today, and I got to make the cake for their party yesterday. They don’t eat sweets often, so they were pretty excited. The recipe seems like a good fit for a Monday Meals blog post today.
A little controversy preceded the choice of cake. Among the adults, that is, not the twins. My husband and son are particularly fond of Best Chocolate Cake from Betty Crocker’s Cookbook. It’s their perennial request for their birthdays. A few weeks ago, I baked one for my daughter’s birthday, and the babies (as I’m still wont to call them) enjoyed having some. My husband and son were convinced that if I didn’t bake this favorite for the little ones that the little ones would be disappointed. (Whose actual disappointment were they worried about?)
I replied that if you’ve tasted cake only a few times in your whole life, there’s no way you’re going to be “disappointed” in whatever cake you’re given. I fixated on carrot cake, another specialty of mine that I don’t get to prepare often, since Betty Crocker’s chocolate cake has elbowed everything else out.
To be clear, my interest in carrot cake has nothing to do with health and wellness. I wasn’t thinking carrot cake would be good for the kidders. I like it, I like making it, we haven’t had it for quite a while, and my son-in-law is especially fond of carrot cake. So that’s what I made.
This recipe came from a home-ec teacher at Lake High School in Hartville, where I taught forty years ago. It’s easy, although I’ve complicated it a tiny bit. There are also similar versions online, like this one. The shortcut is that you use baby food carrots instead of grating actual carrots.
3 of these 4-ounce containers
Ruth Kardos’s Carrot Cake
Grease and flour 9 X 13 inch pan. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
Sift or whisk together: Beat together:
2 cups flour 4 eggs
2 teaspoons soda 2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon 1 cup vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon salt 12 ounces baby-food or junior
carrots
Add liquid ingredients on right to dry ingredients on left and beat thoroughly. (Add 1 cup walnuts and 3/4 cup raisins if you like. I never do.) Pour batter into pan. Bake about 50 minutes in 300 degree oven. Let cool before frosting.
My revision is to add an actual grated carrot or two to the batter. I like seeing actual strands of carrot in the cake, and it adds to the texture and moisture. The salt is also my addition to the recipe.
For the frosting, beat together one pound of confectioners sugar (sifted if it’s lumpy), a quarter cup (one half stick) of softened butter, two teaspoons vanilla, and one package (eight ounces) softened cream cheese until smooth. Schmear all over the top of the cooled cake.
The target audience seemed to enjoy the “happy birthday cake.” Daddy’s quiches plus Mommy’s scones plus Grandma’s cake provided energy to play with the new toys, like this raceway from Uncle Doug:
(Readers–I revised this post a little, not realizing that it would have to re-post and re-publish. Sorry you’re receiving this slightly changed version of this in your email.)
Imagination is the beginning of creation. George Bernard Shaw
As I continue to think about Women Talking, the novel by Miriam Toews (rhymes with saves) and the movie directed by Sarah Polley, I read reviews and watch interviews on YouTube. I’ve also checked out some of Toews’s previous books.
Swing Low: A Life (2000) is classified as non-fiction, though it’s unclassifiable. It’s a memoir created by Miriam but narrated (fictionally) by her father Mel. He was a gifted teacher and a quiet, cautious Mennonite man. In 1998, he walked out of the hospital where he was being treated for depression and killed himself. Miriam was 34. The book records his thoughts, imagined by Miriam, during his last hospitalization.
Mel’s voice in Swing Low is earnest, sometimes funny, and self-deprecating to a fault. Miriam seems able to feel, and make us feel, the grief and illusions of his sadness. He could infuriate his nurses, his wife Elvira, and his attentive daughters, but Miriam seems able to transplant herself into her father’s tormented mind.
As I read, I recall that the elders of the Mennonite community termed the sexual violence in their midst“the result of wild female imagination.” Toews slyly steals the phrase to describe her own Women Talking as “an act of female imagination.” That phrase also describes Swing Low, a book unlike anything else I’ve ever read.
March, or Martius, was the Romans’ first month of the year for a long time. Mars received this honor because he was the father of Rome’s founders, Romulus and Remus. (Their mother was Rhea Silvia, a Vestal Virgin raped by Mars, the god of war.) March became the third month of the year in about 153 BCE.
Our month March, with its warlike connotations, is related to martial, as in martial law, when the military patrol the streets. The Romans named the fourth planet from the sun Mars presumably because of its blood-red color.
I have always thought that march, as in a parade and as in what the ants do one by one and two by two*, also derived from Mars. I thought that parades and marches (also march music) have a military origin. You know, soldiers marching along in close order, on their way to war, or, we would hope, on their way back to their barracks.
Thanks to you and our Wednesday Word, I looked up “to march” and learned that marcher is an old French word of uncertain parentage meaning “to walk.” No military connection. Yet more misinformation I have passed on to students over the years.
*This morning, I watched some very militaristic marching ants with my grandchildren in this YouTube video many, many times. If you’ve forgotten that song, it’s actually pretty mesmerizing. Let me know what you think.
I was planning to write my Weekend Editions post (I’m late, I know) about the novellas pictured above, Small Things Like These and Foster, both by Claire Keegan. Then I saw the film Women Talking and also read the novel by Miriam Toews that it’s based on. All these works concern patriarchy and violence toward women.
I procrastinated in writing because I always imagine the impatience of readers, friends, and acquaintances. Kathy, enough already about women!! We know how you feel!! Can’t you write (think, talk, read) about something else??
Then, on Saturday night, I saw the silent version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Lon Chaney, at the Cleveland Cinematheque, after a few weeks of talking about the book with my husband, who was reading the novel. Thinking about how to write this post, my mind zoomed out to a larger view of the issues regarding abuse of women.
Small Things Like These concerns an Irish girls’ school and laundry where young women are exploited and abused. In Foster, a young girl is shipped off to a foster family by seemingly uncaring parents. She has no say in where she goes and how long she stays. (Both books are great.)
Women Talking grew out of an actual incident in which women in a Mennonite community in Bolivia were drugged and raped repeatedly over a period of years by their own male relatives and neighbors. Eventually, in 2009, men were arrested and convicted (though it’s not clear that the attacks have completely stopped). Toews in her novel and director/screenwriter Sarah Polley pick up the story after the arrests. In their fictional accounts, a small group of women gather to decide how to proceed. If the men come back, won’t the violence continue? How will they protect themselves and their daughters? What would forgiveness look like? Is forgiveness even an option? It’s an entire novel and an entire film of women talking.
I saw, of course, the common threads in these works, having to do with who has power and with how cultural conditioning over centuries has shaped our thinking (including women’s thinking). All these works concern power, who has it and how it is wielded.
My epiphany during Hunchback was to realize how integral such questions are to so much great literature and film. Victor Hugo makes sure that your sympathies lie with Quasimodo, the outcast seen as a monster by the world, and with Esmeralda, the powerless but generous girl he loves, who’s a mere object to the priest Claude Frollo and other men. Sure, the novel and film exhibit political incorrectness. Would we make a person with a disability as grotesque as Quasimodo today? Would we refer to Esmeralda as a gypsy and portray the Romani people as kidnappers? I hope not. But Victor Hugo’s heart is with the victimized and powerless. His Romantic imagination created these lowly characters to be the admirable and sympathetic ones.
So many examples came to mind. Like Hugo, Charles Dickens’s works inspire a love and appreciation for people at the bottom of the social ladder, who are frequently women. Same with Leo Tolstoy, whose compassion for Anna Karenina, for example, is heart-rending. (That these men may not have treated the women in their own lives with dignity is the topic of another post.)
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Shakespeare’s Portia and Miranda, Vergil’s Dido, Salinger’s Phoebe and Zooey, Dostoevsky’s Sonia, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Thelma and Louise. These are all strong women, or certainly sympathetic women. And, yes, I’m choosing male creators,* because I realize that this theme is a through line in Western literature, right alongside the misogyny. Artists’ imaginations can encompass experiences different from their own. Artists like composer John Adams, whom I wrote about here, recognize that the best stories, the most engaging and moving stories, concern people who struggle. Those people are frequently women.
What women’s stories have moved you? Please share in the comments.
*A woman, Callie Khouri, wrote the screenplay for Thelma and Louise, but Ridley Scott directed it.
If you live in the Cleveland area, chances are you’ve heard of pączki (pronounced poonch-kee), fried Polish pastries filled with jam or custard. Pączki means “package,” or, more precisely, “packages,” because pączki is plural. Pączek is the singular form.
Cleveland is home to lots of people of Polish descent and other Eastern European nationalities. Our neighborhood bakeries and our media feature these ethnic specialties at this time of year.
Pączki are a pre-Lenten treat. (So today is too late). Their ingredients are, traditionally, all the goodies around the kitchen from which you must abstain during Lent: sugar, flour, jams, and so on. You pack all these things into a doughy package and enjoy them while you can.
In Poland, Pączki Day is celebrated on the Thursday before Ash Wednesday, presumably to give the family a week to consume all the pączki. America’s Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, because we don’t mind devouring all the pączki in a single day.
I can’t vouch for this recipe, but it sounds delicious. How many pączki have you eaten in your life? How many in one sitting?
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?
