Town Smokes by Pinckney Benedict

Pinckney Benedict's Town Smokes is a collection of his short stories published in 1987, when he was only 23 years old. Pretty impressive to have a collection out at that age, and with praise on the back cover from both Eudora Welty and Joyce Carol Oates. Narrating in first person dialect is a difficult task, not recommended for amateurs, but Benedict pulls off this point-of-view/voice technique effortlessly. 

The Sweet By & By in Bynum

Spending some Mother's Day Weekend time with Alison and Becky in Bynum. Yesterday we enjoyed some Bynum Beverages on the front porch, and listened to the Boys of Carolina bluegrass band across the way, as they kicked off the 2011 Bynum Front Porch Music Series.

We strolled around Bynum and harvested a wee bit of cilantro from Alison and Becky's plot in the community garden, and I was able to get a closer look at some of the Clyde Critters.

The Garden Plot

Two black swans, situated among the raised garden plots at the community garden.

Community garden garnishes

Clyde Jones is a local artist who creates unique critters from scraps of wood and found items. Many Bynum residents have his critters in their front yards, and you can also find Clyde's painted artwork on various surfaces around town. Bynum hosts the annual ClydeFest every April.

Abraham Inc.

Had a great time at the Abraham Inc. concert a couple of weeks ago.  Fabulous sound from an unlikely blend of klezmer music, funk, jazz, rap, and hiphop.
Here's a video of the studio version of "Tweet tweet."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc29Fwz20fQ
Fred Wesley is on the trombone; earlier in his career he was with James Brown and also with George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic.

Moravian Candle Tea

The Moravian Christmas Candle Tea for 2010 concluded last weekend. A tradition in Salem, North Carolina since 1929, Candle Tea is sponsored by the Women's Fellowship of Home Moravian Church. For two weekends following Thanksgiving every year, the women of the church transform the historic Single Brothers' House into a seasonal, sensory delight. Visitors move through different rooms of the Brothers' House and experience much-loved and uniquely Moravian Christmas traditions.

Men, women, and children volunteers, outfitted in eighteenth-century Moravian dress, lead thousands of people through Candle Tea every year. Depending on the day, time, and weather, you might stand in line up to two hours before entering the Single Brothers' House for Candle Tea. Here is an oppportunity for you to get a virtual peek at Candle Tea, with no wait in line. 

When you enter the building, you are first ushered into the Ante Room, where a hostess will tell you a bit of history about the single brothers and this house where they lived in while learning their trades.

Next, you move to the Saal, or chapel, where the beautifully restored Tannenberg organ accompanies carol-singing. David Tannenberg was a Moravian master organ builder who lived in Lititz, Pennsylvania. The organ was ordered in 1794 by the Moravians in Salem; Tannenberg traveled down the Great Wagon Road four years later and installed the organ in the Gemeinhaus, or community house. The organ was used for worship services until 1864, when it was disassembled and stored. In 1964, the organ was brought out, reassembled, and installed in its current location in the Brothers' House.

After singing carols, you are escorted downstairs to watch a demonstration of beeswax candles being made, in what was the dining room for the single brothers. Moravians have used candles in Christmas Eve services dating back to 1747 - a time when Christmas Eve services were almost unheard of. These handmade candles, with their distinctive red crepe paper ruffs, are used at Christmas Eve services throughout the Moravian Church, and they are often seen in non-Moravian congregations as well.

Next, you go into the kitchen and sit on long wooden benches in front of the fireplace, and enjoy some Moravian sugarcake and Moravian-style coffee. Moravian sugarcake is a potato-based yeast bread, with a thick layer of brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter on top. Yummy!

When you have finished your cake and coffee, you proceed downstairs once again, this time to the sub-basement of the building. This is where the single brothers stored their food; it is cold and dark, the walls are over a foot thick, and the floors are large slabs of stone.

The sub-basement is where visitors see the putz, which is a German tradition of creating a miniature scene. The first room you come to features the Salem Scene: a miniature replication of the village of Salem, circa 1900. The scene is over thirty feet long, and eight feet wide. The village is built on HO-scale. All of the structures are handmade by volunteers in the church. The buildings are made of balsa wood and art poster board, and each one is handpainted to reflect the actual structures of Salem, even down to the number of slats on the sides of the buildings. The oldest buildings were built in 1949. In October of each year, a group of volunteers unpack and re-create the scene; every bit of the scene is packed up and stored after Christmas.

The second room in the sub-basement, and the last room you will visit in Candle Tea, features the Nativity Scene. Different scenes of the birth narrative from Luke are displayed in a cave-like setting (again, a food-storage area for the brothers), and the overall effect of a grotto on a cold winter night is very effective. The wooden figures in this scene were made in Oberammergau, Germany, over fifty years ago.

Book Stew

I think I am just a sucker for stacks of books. After completing my research on Virginia Woolf and To the Lighthouse, I wanted to take a picture of some of the friends who have accompanied me for the last two months, before I return them back to their homes (the libraries of the University of Tennessee, University of Miami, and Wake Forest University). What a miracle inter-library loan is. In this photo, leaning happily on the scholarly works is, of course, Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I prepared Boeuf en Daube for the class, and I relied on Julia's recipe as a starting point for my 21st century crock-pot version of the dish.

Who's Afraid....

This semester I was enrolled in a class which discussed the nature of happiness, joy, sorrow, and melancholy, and how these states relate to ethics, aesthetics, and knowledge.From August to December, we worked our way through various works of philosophers, poets, novelists, and filmmakers. My personal focus for the class was on Virginia Woolf, and specifically her novel, To the Lighthouse. Having never read Woolf previously, I will say that To the Lighthouse was not an easy read the first time through. However, after plowing through a fair amount of supplementary readings, both in books and journal articles, and frequently revisiting the text, I found To the Lighthouse offers a rich and satisfying literary experience. Woolf was born in London, in 1882, to a well-to-do, educated family. Her mother died when she was thirteen, her father died when she was twenty-two. To the Lighthouse was published when she was forty-five; it was her fifth novel; she completed nine. She was very clear that To the Lighthouse was where she laid to rest the ghosts of her parents. The work is complex; in it, one can find meaningful and interesting parallels to any number of themes: feminist theory, aesthetics, societal issues, gender roles, theology. The two papers and class presentation that I prepared on the novel looked at the symmetrical structure of the novel, the ways in which Woolf placed dichotomies together, and in particular the sacramental symbolism of the important dinner scene at the centerpoint of the book. In the dinner scene, the primary figure of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay reaches a moment of transcendence as she serves Boeuf en Daube (a rustic French beef stew) to her dinner guests.

"Just now she had reached security; she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly...Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all around them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity" (To the Lighthouse, 104-5; Harvest/Harcourt edition).

Here, Woolf is drawing out a beautiful polarity between the everyday act of serving beef stew and an ethereal, meaningful moment. If you read the sentence carefully, you will see what else Mrs. Ramsay is serving. When I realized that this passage sits at dead center in the book (page 105 out of 209), I had my own little moment of transcendence.

For me, the most lovely passage in the book follows on page 106, as we are drawn from the dinnertime chatter and clangor into Mrs. Ramsay's inner thoughts: "...her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling. So she saw them; she heard them; but whatever they said had also this quality, as if what they said was like the movement of a trout when, at the same time, one can see the ripple and the gravel, something to the right, something to the left; and the whole is held together...For the moment, she hung suspended." I think Woolf does a marvelous job of immersing the room into eternity.

I like this quote about the dinner scene, from Mitchell Leaska in Virginia Woolf's Lighthouse: A Study in Critical Method: "Like a kaleidoscope being slowly rotated, each piece - each thought, each reverie - slips into its appropriate place to design a poised pattern of stresses and strains, an exquisite balance of human relationships" (107).

Mo' about Molasses and Local Food

The 10% Farm to Fork campaign is an initiative sponsored by the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, the North Carolina Cooperative Extension, and the Golden Leaf Foundation. The campaign encourages participants to pledge to spend 10% of their weekly food purchases on local foods. We now have a local foods and sustainable agriculture advocate in our household, so I've joined the 10% campaign.

Today was a beautiful, sunny fall day in North Carolina, and we made several stops on our way to the mountains. I realized later that every place we visited had resulted in a purchase of local foods. First was the Shiloh General Store, an Amish store in Yadkin County. Not surprisingly they do not have a website, but their address is 5520 St. Paul Church Road, Hamptonville, NC, located off the Windsor Road exit of Highway 421, which is not far from the intersection of Interstate 77 and Highway 421. The Store carries many hard-to-find, old-fashioned type items, bulk grains, deli cheeses and meats, and even Amish hats. At the General Store, we purchased a loaf of sourdough bread (still warm in the bag), a jar of peach jam, a bag of gingerbread mix from the Old Mill of Guilford (near Greensoboro, NC) and a bag of stone ground corn meal mix from the Linney Water Mill of Union Grove, NC.

Next, we were pleased to find our favorite independent coffee/hot beverage shop open - Java Hills Coffee and Ice Cream, in Millers Creek. Judy does not typically open the shop on Saturdays, but due to the Brushy Mountain Apple Festival, she made an exception and was busy brewing up delicious drinks for her customers.

Just up the road from Java Hills, we enjoyed hot dogs at the Igloo Ice Cream & Sandwich Shop, recently written up in Our State Magazine.

After lunch, we headed to the Brushy Mountains in search of local apples. By a bit of serendipity we ended up at Tevepaugh Orchards (800 Vannoy Road, Moravian Falls), where we bought a bushel of wonderful Jonagold apples.

We wound up our local foods shopping at Mr. J.D. Taylor's molasses stand on the side of Highway 16, north of the community of Wilbar, where we purchased a quart of liquid happiness. Mr. Taylor, pictured here, has made molasses for fifty years. He proclaims that molasses is "good for you!" (which we already knew). Wait a minute...maybe he said, "Molasses ARE good for you." He sported a Cleveland Indians baseball cap, though he admitted that his team is "in the cellar" this year. (An earlier post, linked here, touches upon the topic of molasses and grammar.)

I think we contributed much more than 10% of our weekly food dollars to local food purchases for the upcoming week. I did not realize that this would be today's theme, or I would have taken more photos of our stops. I will plan to feature Judy's Java Hills in a future post. In the meantime, buy local!

Get Low, the movie

A few weeks ago at my annual Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Birthday/Girls' weekend event, a friend brought along the DVD of a short film directed by Aaron Schneider, based on Faulkner's story Two Soldiers. It is a beautiful film, and a number of the scenes in it were shot locally. Turns out that Schneider's latest film is showing at our local independent theatre. Get Low, starring Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Lucas Black and Bill Murray, is a story of an old codger in the 1930s who comes out of his hermit-like existence in order to plan his pre-death funeral party. Terrific movie!
Here is a synopsis and review from MSNBC:
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/38431937/ns/today-entertainment/

Back to Widor, slowly

As posted previously, I am a fan of big, booming pipe organ pieces, and particularly of the Widor Toccata. Charles-Marie Widor was the organist at St. Sulpice in Paris from 1870 to 1933. My favorite recording of Widor's Toccata is on "The Sounds of York Minster," a CD recorded in York, England. What is notable to me about that recording is the pace of the piece is much slower and deliberate than what is typically heard in performances of this work. I have gone so far as timing the piece by a metronome, and suggesting to Ray (otherwise known here as Organist Extraordinaire), as I handed him the number on a scrap of paper, that he try the Toccata more slowly. But when you are an Organist Extraordinaire, your artistic interpretation (including the meter at which you play pieces) does not necessarily yield to outside influences. Today, almost exactly one year after my first post about Widor's marvelous Toccata, my husband has sent me the following (from Wikipedia), specifically addressing the meter of the piece:

“Widor was pleased with the worldwide renown this single piece afforded him, but he was unhappy with how fast many other organists played it. Widor himself always played the Toccata rather deliberately. Many organists play it at a very fast tempo whereas Widor preferred a more controlled articulation to be involved. He recorded the piece, at St. Sulpice in his eighty-ninth year: the tempo used for the Toccata is quite slow.”

And here's Widor at the keyboard:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8vz1D_L_OE&p=11AADBF440782809&playnext=1&index=27

Reading Henry James in Venice

While I was in Venice, I read Henry James’s novella, The Aspern Papers. Set in Venice and published in 1888, it is narrated by an unnamed American man who is devoted to the memory of a fictional American poet, Jeffrey Aspern. The narrator comes to Venice in search of Aspern’s long-lost papers, which are reportedly in the possession of the lover of Aspern’s youth, now an elderly woman living in Venice. By placing the home of the woman and her niece in a remote, run down palace on a side canal, James introduces readers to the quiet corners and hidden alleyways of Venice, far from the bustle and crowds of San Marco and the Grand Canal. The idea for The Aspern Papers came to James after he heard a story about an American who schemed to obtain letters of Byron and Shelley, and who became entangled in a marriage offer in exchange for the letters.
James wrote The Aspern Papers while a guest at Palazzo Barbaro, a home on the Grand Canal just off the Accademia Bridge.

James was frequently hosted by the American couple Daniel and Ariana Curtis at Palazzo Barbaro, one of several sites where the American intellectual elite gathered in Venice. The social life that wealthy traveling Americans likely experienced while in Venice in the late nineteenth century would have contrasted starkly to the hermit-like existence James creates in the lives of Juliana Bordereau and her niece Miss Tina in The Aspern Papers.
Here are some pictures I took outside Palazzo Barbaro - the main entrance, decorative grillwork over the door, and even the door knocker. The Palazzo is directly on the Grand Canal, but the rear side of the house, adjacent to the side canal, is a lovely, quiet alcove.

Bella Venezia

I just got back from nine days in Venice. Our group stayed in a house on the Grand Canal. We kept busy covering all of the sights of the city, and also enjoyed times when we could wander around on our own.

And yes, Midge went, too.

Vintage Sewing

Last weekend, I finally finished the two baby quilts that have lingered in my sewing "to-do" stack for over two years. As a reward, I splurged this week and made an ensemble for my Midge doll. For more pictures of Midge, her history, and her escapades in the last year, you can look at my prior posts. I am fortunate to have two vintage Barbie clothing patterns from my childhood, and I used one of them for the dress I made for Midge. Once the dress was complete, it was obvious that some type of accessory was needed, so I designed a little box-bottom tote out of the dress fabric. Midge seems very pleased.

I used the pattern for View A, but I did not make the detachable collar which is shown in this view. (A Barbie-sized detachable collar??? Unbelievable.) The bag was so much fun to make, that I immediatey made a second one for my friend LoLo's Barbie.

National Short Story Month

May is National Short Story month. I didn't realize this until today, but fortunately I happened to bring home two short story collections from the library yesterday. My unwitting salute to NSS month began last night, when I read one story each from the following books.

A friend recently told me how much he has enjoyed reading Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor. In reading about Ms. Ogawa, I was impressed that she has won "every major Japanese literary award." The Diving Pool is a collection of three novellas. The first story, also entitled The Diving Pool, is a coming of age tale narrated by an unnamed adolescent girl, as she experiences the curiosity, angst, and ultimate devastation of a youthful crush.

Press 53 just announced the release of Pinckney Benedict's latest collection of short stories, Miracle Boy and Other Stories. Having never read anything by Benedict either, I checked out Town Smokes, his first short story collection published in 1986 when he was 23. Benedict sets his stories in the bleak, often brutally hard-scrabble rural south. Sutton Pie Safe is the first selection in the book, and contains iconic southern-lit components: a snake, a gun, a beautiful woman, an angry father and his son.