radiant fracture

No pressure but

Here's me with my Tablet XII manifesto on the Aurora-nominated podcast Wizards & Spaceships.

(ETA)

Thanks to sabotabby for the invitation -- it was one of the best conversations I've had in a long time. And also just for having a great podcast. They are hard work to keep going. Nomination well deserved.

Further, I forget to cite sovay in the podcast itself for years of advice and on-the-fly translation, but these were and are essential threads of my life, both for scholarship and for sanity.

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It's still weird that I don't have an Epics icon.

I was so loamy with malaise today that when I sat down with K. for an online work session, I was sure that if in our alotted hour I managed to submit my lone request for funding, I would have done as much as I could possibly expect of myself.

(This is the request for funding to take the online course Reading the Odyssey with Bruce King, the same instructor I studied Gilgamesh with last spring.)

I did complete the request, despite many very stupid technical issues.

Somehow this led to my remembering that I'd wanted to write a kind of mock-but-not academic essay about how "Tigger is Unbounced" is an epic narrative.

All this to say that I spent the rest of that hour, and then another afterwards, amusing myself with the following:

( If We Look for this Pit, We Might Find Home: A.A. Milne's 'Tigger is Unbounced' as Epic Narrative )

Notes

1. I apologize profusely for "poohniverse." I couldn't un-hear it.

References

Helle, Sophus. (Trans.) The Epic of Gilgamesh. Yale UP, 2021.

Milne, A.A., "Tigger is Unbounced." in The House at Pooh Corner. Methuen, 1928.

Reitherman, Wolfgang, and John Lounsbery (Dirs.) The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Disney, 1977. Film.

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.

Herewith the Gilgamesh rant I promised / threatened, jasmine_r_s.

This is kind of an outtake from developing my course materials; I may use some of this as an example of thinking about questions in translation, transmission, editing, and the literature vs. orature divide in epic scholarship, but it is ultimately mostly for my own satisfaction.

I am not a scholar of ancient texts, and this is a bit sketchy as yet; such scholars may feel free to drop in and note my more glaring errors or omissions. (Glances over shoulder at jasmine_r_s and sovay).

Okay.

( Tablet XII is canon: Literary elitism and homophobia in translations of Gilgamesh )

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My reading continues fragmented, but I am still, in the mornings and evenings, enjoying the essays in the back of Sophus Helle's translation of Gilgamesh.

He offers details that feel so resonant -- for example, "it is a common feature of cuneiform narratives that they describe their own creation" (Helle 238, footnote 11). I like that for itself and because it provides validation for some of the narrative possibilities in my novel.

Reading some of Helle's observations about the deep symmetry of the epic, I have to restrain myself from trying to rewrite my own story into the same almost fractal symmetry: "the long story of Gilgamesh's triumphs is followed by a tiny mourning, then by a tiny celebration, then by the long mourning of Enkidu's death" (150).

Or the formal observation that the individual tables are often written as standalone episodes within the larger arc, and that "the Akkadian scribes, having no word for 'epic', referred to the story as 'the series of Gilgamesh,'" like a TV show (151).

And the stuff about puns is amazing. In Ea's veiled speech indirectly warning Uta-napishti about the coming flood, (ETA: thanks to sovay for mending my missing diacritics): "šamût kibāti means 'a shower of wheat'; but if it is read as three words, ša mūt kibāti, it means 'that (which will cause) the death of wheat,' with stalks of wheat being a commonly used metaphor for the human race" (156). He makes cuneiform sound ecstatically multivalent.

[ETA] I used, a long time ago -- say second year poetry, or it might have been first if I remember the room right -- to write these poems that tried to be phonetically bivalent. They were not very good. I can remember only this: Idols knot peal leaving... and I can't remember what sounded like "god". (ETA: ingot?)

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I am reading bits and pieces of other things -- back issues of literary magazines I let stack up on my shelves and want to get rid of, odd essays or parts of them, various translations of Rumi -- although neither of the versions I have out now are filling my head with fireworks the way he sometimes can.

But mostly I am listening to podcasts like Behind the Bastards, which is the fault of sabotabby .

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Food is a text, surely. Because I am clever, I had pizza and key lime sparkling water for dinner, zucchini waffles for lunch, and leftover fried rice and smoothie for breakfast.

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[ETA] Oh, and this:

[Our] understanding changes again when we consider that in the ancient world the epic could also be appreciated ... as a performance. In Christian Hess's delightful phrase, Akkadian epics were "songs of clay" (151).

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