radiant fracture

Does anyone know of any good online instructions for laying out a chapbook in Word or Canva, or even Google Docs?

I say good because I have found several bad ones that I thought would confuse my students or that were specific to platforms they're probably not using.

Obviously, none of these applications are much good for book layout, but they are the ones my students are most likely to have access to. I don't want to ask students to download any new software for the purposes of this assignment.

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Aurora

Night fell.
Half a moon loomed
and shrank.

The stars bloomed
and I was still transfixed
by the thought
that I could never repair
the mistakes of even
this afternoon,
let alone the year.

I would have liked
to throw myself away
and start over.

I stared at my phone
until photographs appeared.

I put on my shoes.
I went outside.

The sky
was dancing.

Harbinger
Violeta Garcia-Mendoza

What does it mean that I’ve been dreaming
about sunlight moving through old houses

again? Vine-shadow on wood floors, endless
rooms, the sound of wingbeats without birds.

Pittsburgh wisdom says you need a week in Florida
when you can’t get out of bed. I up or down

my dose of antidepressants when the clocks change.
In the dreams, I wear a white dress, dust dragged

along its hem. The houses are dis-inhabited
but I know I've lived in some version of them.

In real life I try to leave the past empty, open;
a good mother haunts her life only in forward motion.

When the nerves at my right hip shriek down my leg,
I know it means my body needs to stretch.

I should exercise, drink more water, rest—
but I get through winter reading Gothic horror;

I trust myself with only so much selfishness.
In this city, potholes become a sign of character

as much as of neglect. I remind my children all is still well
when the bridges sway. In traffic, we count turkey vultures

circling in the steel gray and call it soaring.

+ + + + + +

This poem came as a prompt in my inbox, and I liked it. The language is quiet; I keep feeling that it might drift towards prose, and then the images will arrest that: "I wear a white dress, dust dragged / along its hem."

I like the play of line breaks: "I up or down / my antidepressants."

I felt this: "I should exercise, drink more water, rest— / but I get through winter reading Gothic horror," only I think if I took up more Gothic horror it would probably improve my winters remarkably.

What do you hear here?

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Just putting this here so I can find it again -- someone did a really nice markup of John Reed Swanton's versions of Haida stories, one of which I often teach:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74172

A propos of nothing other than that I was looking at their videos for creative writing, here is Alok Vaid-Menon.

Content notes: Mentions of transphobia, internalized transphobia and homophobia, bullying, suicidal ideation​


Alok Vaid-Menon Finds Freedom In Body Hair

In a literary article that has drifted too far downstream for me to be likely to find it again, I found a quotation from this Rilke poem I had not known before, and was smitten -- I think by the final lines.

I wanted to write a Very Clever comparative analysis of two different versions, but I am tired. Maybe I'll just post the versions and invite comments. Let the analysis be emergent.

( Original German )


(Stephen Mitchell translation)

To Music

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?—: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,—
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

(Scott Horton translation)

To Music

Music. The breathing of statues. Perhaps:
The quiet of images. You, language where
languages end. You, time
standing straight from the direction
of transpiring hearts.

Feelings, for whom? O, you of the feelings
changing into what? — into an audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You chamber of our heart
which has outgrown us. Our inner most self,
transcending, squeezed out, —
holy farewell:
now that the interior surrounds us
the most practiced of distances, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
enormous
no longer habitable.

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Or, a history of substitutions.

Pursuant to my attempt to cook more, ursula brilliantly suggested I try ancient Babylonian recipes.

Tonight, despite my marking load and a possibly busted hot water heater, I decided to make tuh'u.

This stew is pretty well-known as ancient Babylonian recipes go -- it comes from the Yale Babylonian collection. Here's a tiny 2019 interview on NPR with Assyriologist Gojko Barjamovic.

(The accompanying article mentions the deeply frustrating and familiar history of a woman suggesting the right answer to a puzzle and male scholars ignoring it for decades.)

I used the version of the recipe from the Yale Bablyonian Collection site here.

I also watched along with this cooking video, which adds a little bit of history around the Babylonian New Year, and uses slightly different proportions (more vegetables).

This is a lamb stew, but I think you could easily make it with just the beets, like a kind of proto-borscht, or with some umami alternative. If I make it for a class one day, I'll do the beet version.

Here's the Yale recipe:

Ingredients:
* 1 pound of diced leg of mutton or lamb
* 1/2 cup of rendered sheep fat
* 1/2 teaspoon of salt
* 1 cup of beer
* 1/2 cup of water
* 1 small onion, chopped
* 1 cup of chopped arugula
* 1 cup of Persian shallots or spring onions
* 1/2 cup of chopped fresh cilantro
* 1 teaspoon of cumin
* 1 pound of fresh red beets, peeled and diced
* 1/2 cup of chopped leek
* 2 cloves of garlic
For the garnish:
* 2 teaspoons of dry coriander seed
* 1/2 cup of finely chopped cilantro
* 1/2 cup of finely chopped kurrat or ramps/wild leek

In brief, you sear the meat in the fat, then add the onion and cook until transparent, then more or less dump everything else in except the leek and garlic. While you mash the leek and garlic in a mortar and pestle, boil the rest, then add your remaining alliums and simmer for an hour.

I am including the ingredients list less to be helpful and more to complain about late-stage capitalism. My local grocery chain, despite being cavernous, is pretty useless, and I had to make a series of more and less plausible substitutions.

First, there was no stewing lamb. I ended up with ground lamb so as not to pay the eye-watering prices for the fancy cuts. If I did this again, I might get it on the bone to add to the broth.

There were also no coriander seeds and no shallots. There was no arugula. (I think it's generally considered a spring green, but the weather here is so temperate that there's also a fall harvest.) I could have used baby broccoli greens, but I went with a different brassica -- Brussels sprouts.

For the sheep fat I substituted olive oil, which the video assured me was a reasonable decision.

I didn't crush any seeds of any kind, so my spices are not very authentic. I do own a mortar and pestle. Crushing the garlic and leek may be the second time I've ever used it?

According to the video host, Barjamovic suggests half-Weiss/half-sour for the beer if you don't have any Babylonian beer. (Wild sour seems like it would makes sense.) I happened to have only Pilsner, so I used that.

In the pot, the stew was a really beautiful mixture of red beet broth and bright green Brussels sprouts.

I think I overcooked the lamb. I'm not sure this needed quite so much oil, though it did make it rich and give nice mouth feel.

Because I had no seeds, I ended up putting the ground coriander right into the stew, which was good, though a little goes a long way.

Next time, I'll try to match the veg a little more closely and get some coriander seeds.

Tasting!

This is good! It's pretty mild -- again, throwing the bone in would probably enrich it. The broth is a beautiful red colour. Cumin's a great support to any umami dish. The earthiness of the beets is of course a joy.

I don't taste the cilantro as a separate note at all, if you're worried. It's just a really nice, slightly aromatic stew. The sprouts got soft in a happy way.

In salt fat acid heat terms, I would be tempted to add some acid to bring out piquancy -- there was mention somewhere about vinegar. (Maybe that's the beer, but I'd like more.)

(Squeezes in some juice from a highly authentic plastic lime) Yep, I think that definitely enhances.

8/10 would make again. I want to make bread to go with it!

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Afterthought: I also should have cut the beets smaller. Mine were more chunked than diced and I bet it meant the flavours didn't combine as smoothly as they might've.

Have you got a favorite in the genre of Literary Cookbooks?

Or -- though this is a separate genre and a bit out of fashion now -- Those Novels with Recipes in Them? (See Like Water for Chocolate.)

I have a cherished book produced two decades ago through the print-on-demand place, called Regional Cooking from Middle-Earth: Recipes of the Third Age.

The cookbook is divided regionally -- Shire, Bree, Regions of Rohan, etc., and also has an Index by Season. I think all the recipes are given both in English and in the local languages. It is the very exemplar of a labour of love.

I am almost certain I have never cooked anything from this book, but I feel happier knowing I could. There are three kinds of lembas. The recipes are simple and practical. There is a rabbit stew. Tarcoron, "high mound" is better know in this age as Yorkshire Pudding.

Why the question

I was thinking of trying to make batch cooking feel more appealing by making it literary-flavoured. I did once make a pretty passable Boeuf en Daube for a party.

(So the Surrealist Cookbook would be unhelpful in this instance. I want to make real food for my real body to eat. I just want to eat some ideas at the same time.)

--any edible and palatable crossover would do, really. Cheers!

(For example, I count New England Spider Cake as literary because I learnt it from a post by sovay .)

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Again, just if you feel a spark of interest or think of a story that did this in a good way for you -- what about when a character experiences personality collapse, more or less?

The fourth character quality in Ten Candles is the Brink, which is a little harder to explain, but is something like the character's breaking point, or rather what they do when they break -- the nastiest version of themselves that they collapse into, often, though I've seen it played for beautiful irony.

It's framed as a statement, "I have seen you..." and then what your character does at the brink -"lie to a friend," "accidentally shoot someone," "run away in fear," "steal from the helpless," etc.

The reward for using this in 10C is to get to re-roll your dice. You're rewarded for story juice by a mechanical payoff.

So, I guess -- what's an interesting state of collapse for you to play?

* * * * * *

Just answer if it's fun, okay? No expectations.

I want a little project to occupy myself in case I need to be away more often in the winter, which I suspect I might.

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Thinking about a thing and looking for some quasi-randomized ideas, if you need a distraction.

What's an interesting strength for a character in an RPG to have -- interesting for you to play?

It can be a strength or skill of any sort, from a standard stat to a mundane expertise like knitting. Spellcasting is a bit too broad. Necromancy is closer to the level of specificity I'm thinking of. Over-specificity is fun (ex. can only reanimate dinosaurs).

What makes a strength or power fun, beyond just "I win all the things"?

As per the question about weakness, I'm currently imagining a mostly-mundane-ish-world RPG like Ten Candles.

Strength we can define in the 10C way as "a quality that helps your life more than it harms it," which doesn't mean it couldn't prove suddenly catastrophic in a final deluge of dramatic irony.

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PS no obligation to answer all of the questions! I'm just free-associating right now.