DUNAWAY BOOKS
NEWSLETTER FOR THE MONTH OF NOVEMBER
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THESE are the folios
of April,
All the library of spring,
Missals gilt and rubricated
With the frost's illumining.
Ruthless, we destroy these treasures,
Set the torch with hand profane--
Gone, like Alexandrian vellums,
Like the books of burnt
Yet these classics are immortal:
O collectors, have no fear,
For the publisher will issue
New editions every year.
--Christopher Morley, ‘Burning Leaves, November’
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The bright cockaded branches will be plucked to their knobby skeletons this month by wind and water, all the better to frame the high moon. The days are shortening, and the displaced daylight so industriously saved in the morning is absent in the afternoons, replaced by a meditative dusk. November is filled with spacious dark hours where once clouds sailed in sun and the whole world gamboled outdoors. Here we are going:
No sun - no moon!
No morn - no noon -
No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member -
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! -
November!
--Thomas Hood
(Some of you may recognize an adaptation of this poem in Robert Wilson and Tom Waits’ brilliantly spooky musical play The Black Rider…)
When the melodrama is cut away from the coming gloaming, however, one can see figures moving through it in preparation for the cold and the holidays it occasions. When it is inhospitable outdoors, there is work to be done within. Many families anticipate working together to produce dishes handed down from places far away now and maybe even half-forgotten. Cooking, knitting, reading, or writing while the world outside is gray builds a connection to all others who have done such things: to create something to be used in daily life that will make it easier, more pleasant, or more meaningful, and to grow in the work as well. In a culture of commodification few know the joy of using a tool made by one’s own hands to accomplish yet another task like rungs rising upward out of self. It is a worthwhile experience. When winter comes, there are so many things to curl up and work on.
We fear some today might see books as a backward cousin to the magical square boxes that emit light in hypnotic patterns of artificial reality, and may have forgotten that stories can be expressed as well as ingested. Stories begin within us, and end only if we close the inner eye and allow them to. Lest any think this is a disparagement of machines such as the one upon which this communication is being typed, we bring your attention to the fact that as well as being feasting time, November is National Novel Writing Month, a phenomenon spawned and furthered by the proper and inventive use of modern technology. Nearly every serious reader has dreamed about burning enough midnight oil night after night after night until a manuscript is born, but the fear of long-term commitment to lost sleep and the pressure of attempting to impersonally process subjective experience keep most people’s novels on the back burner of nonexistence. The 7-year-old so-called contest seeks to burn through those barriers by encouraging participants to write 150 pages in a month, no matter how raw, unedited, implausible or ridiculous. Like the ‘one-day comic,’ the possibility is the point, though several NaNoWriMo entries have later been hammered into publication-worthiness (December is unofficial ‘NaNoEdMo’), and the winners of this contest are simply those who meet the word count of 50,000 by midnight, November 31st. Computers are far from the death of literature; as long as book people participate in the online world, it is a book-loving world, and tens of thousands are working themselves into a typing frenzy at this very moment.
The contest cheerfully encourages bad novels in quantity, but the time limit does not necessarily doom writing to poor quality. Many great and renowned works have been composed in a white-hot and trancelike state; two that come to mind are William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. Some work is a necessity and will be done despite the setting and circumstances. The scene from the film Henry and June where Henry Miller is triumphantly rat-tat-rattling out the last page of Tropic of Cancer while a party rages around him and practicing acrobats contort in the corners of the dingy apartment is undoubtedly a fanciful sugar-coated archetype of the writer’s life, but it is archetype enough to ring true on some level. There is never a better time than the present; there is only a perfect time and place for work in the imagination, where life’s interruptions and frustrations cannot reach. NaNoWriMo may be already half over this year, but its lesson applies to anyone wrestling with important work. The sense of importance can freeze one in place and keep any decisive thing at all from being done! In these long November afternoons, remember that there are really only a few old stories, but innumerable ways to tell and retell them; that no stepping stone is spoiled by having once set foot, and that keeping something going, even through silliness or surrealism, is better than nothing going at all!
There is not a tremendous amount of in-store news this month; we’ve been able to buy a good few batches of Fiction in literary, science fiction, and mystery flavors, and have acquired some more Archaeology, Anthropology, History, and True Crime. We’ve finally put the heat on after a long confusing push-pull between summer and fall. Now even fall retreats, and winter’s approach begins to get serious. People are unpacking the woolens and windproof gear, and will smell of mothballs and cedar for a month or so, before woodsmoke and snow scents take over and we all get used to the cold. The store will be closed on November 24th, Thanksgiving Day, but hours will be otherwise normal.
Dunaway Books will be participating in the Dec. 3rd holiday ‘cookie crawl’ on South Grand; between 11:30 and 3:00, many businesses will be offering refreshments and decorated windows as part of a neighborhood-wide event. Certainly hot drinks will be welcome in the weather, and we will try our best to stir up something unusual and tasty. Here are some historical recipes that will enhance your celebrating this season and keep bellies happy, warm and round. We have taken pity and spared you the turducken and the sewing-required cokentrice, though a link to turducken will be given below for those who dare: it is one of those recipes that wants a family or small tribe to prepare, like the apocryphal Arabian Stuffed Camel. All irregular spellings in pre-standardized English recipes: (sic!)
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Excellent Small Cakes-
Take three pound of very find flower well dryed by the fire, and put to it a pound and a half of loaf Sugar sifted in a very fine sieve and dryed; Three pounds of Currants well washed and dryed in a cloth and set by the fire; When you flower is well mixed with the Sugar and Currants, you must put in it a pound and a half of unmelted butter, ten spoonfuls of Cream, with the yolks of three new-laid Eggs beat with it, one Nutmeg; and if you please, three spoonfuls of Sack. When you have wrought your paste well, you must put it in a cloth, and set it in a dish before the fire, til it be through warm. Then make then up in little cakes, and prick them full of holes; you muct bake them in a wuick oven unclosed. Afterwards Ice them over with Sugar. The Cakes should be about the bigness of a hand-breadth and thin: of the cise of the Sugar Cakes sold at Barnet.
--Sir Kenelme Digbie, 1671
To fry Applepies.
Take Apples and pare them, and chop them very
small, beat in a little Cinnamon, a little Ginger, and some Sugar, a little
Rosewater, take your paste, roul it thin, and make them up as big Pasties as
you please, to hold a spoonful or a little lesse of your Apples; and so stir
them with Butter not to hastily least they be burned.
--A True Gentlewomans Delight, 1653
SWEET POTATO PUDDING.
Take half a pound of sweet potatoes, wash them, and put them into
a pot with a very little water, barely enough to keep them from
burning. Let them simmer slowly for about half an hour; they must
be only parboiled, otherwise they will be soft, and may make the
pudding heavy. When they are half done, take them out, peel them,
and when cold, grate them. Stir together to a cream, half a pound
of butter and a quarter of a pound and two ounces of powdered
sugar, add a grated nutmeg, a large tea-spoonful of powdered
cinnamon, and half a tea-spoonful of beaten mace. Also the juice
and grated peel of a lemon, a wine glass of rose water, a glass of
wine, and a glass of brandy. Stir these ingredients well together.
Beat eight eggs very light, and stir them into the mixture in turn
with the sweet potato, a little at a time of each. Having stirred
the whole very hard at the last, put it into a buttered dish and
bake it three quarters of an hour.
--Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches, Eliza Leslie, 1840
ROAST CORN SOUP ('o' nanh-dah) by
Miriam Lee
SENECA
12 ears white corn in milky stage 1 # salt pork (lean and fat) 1 # pinto or kidney beans
Using low heat, take corn and roast on top of range (using griddle if your stove is equipped with one) and keep rotating corn until ears are a golden brown. After the corn is roasted, take ears and put on foil covered cookie sheet until cool enough to handle. Scrape each ear once or twice with a sharp knife. Corn is ready for making soup. While corn is being roasted, fill kettle (5 qt. capacity) approximately 3/4 full with hot water and put on to boil along with salt pork which has been diced in small pieces for more thorough cooking. Beans should be sorted for culls, washed twice and parboiled for approximately 35-45 minutes. After parboiling beans, rinse well in tepid water 2 or 3 times. Corn and beans should then be put in kettle with pork and cooked for about 1 hour. (Note: Beans can also be soaked overnight to cut cooking time when preparing soup).
--Our Mother Corn, Mather/Fernandes/Brescia (1981)
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When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and it is all one.
--M.F.K. Fisher
When the girl
returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming
on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown
on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in it in great golden
drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply
talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of
breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter
evenings, when one's ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the
fender, of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries.
-- Kenneth Grahame, The Wind In The Willows
If your daily life
seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not
poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty
and no poor indifferent place. And even if you were in some prison the walls of
which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses--would you not
then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that
treasure-house of memories?
--Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet
I shall not sing a
May song.
A May song should be gay.
I'll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.
I'll wait until November
That is the time for me.
I'll go out in the frosty dark
And sing most terribly.
And all the little people
Will stare at me and say,
"That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May."
--Gwendolyn Brooks
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NaNoWriMo:
Creating a turducken:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turducken
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Dunaway Books wishes you all a satisfying, relaxing and safe holiday weekend! We will see you for tea and cookies on December 3rd.
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DUNAWAY BOOKS
3111 S. Grand
314-771-7150
dunawaybooks@sbcglobal.net