auld lang syne
I’m curled up under the covers feeling sorry for myself because I wont be spending the weekend with Flynn and attending her legendary New Years Eve soiree. I’m tempted to head this post the same as I headed my RSVP but my mother will call and make that clicking noise she makes with her tongue whenever I say or write something she thinks my grandmother would disagree with – even though my grandmother is beyond disagreeing.
christopsomo
It was Christmas. I was twenty three, trying to make The Euro jealous and dating a man named Alex. Alex was from Volimes, a village on the island of Zakynthos. He was six years older than me, brain crushingly beautiful and an absolute ass. But he was a fantastic cook when I could only afford supermarket ramen.
In Greece the Christmas Fast is broken on Christmas Eve with Christopsomo, or the “bread of Christ.” It’s meant to be a round loaf with a very subtle licorice flavor but I use standard loaf pans and, not being a fan of licorice, I leave out the mastic gum (the dried resin of a Mediterranean tree which gives it the licorice taste) and add currants. (Recipe)
Traditionally the bread is decorated with strips of dough in an early form of the cross, or X, with ends that split or curl into circles. The Greek letter X, or chi, is the first letter of the Greek word for Christ and was used as an early abbreviation. Hence the word Xmas. The baking of the bread is a sacred tradition in Greek Orthodox homes and the care with which it’s made is said to ensure the well-being of the home in the year to come.
Read: The Odyssey, Homer
escorting elizabeth edwards
Elizabeth Edwards had been abandoned at a venue by her handlers and needed an escort. One of the event organizers caught me rummaging through the craft service, otherwise idle, and asked if I would be so kind – I certainly would.
Edwards didn’t look sixty. Or sick. And more than anything, I remember being taken aback at how present and content she seemed, despite her circumstances. I called her Elizabeth when introducing myself and cringed at my own informality.
She noticed and laughed, “Buffy is an old English nickname for Elizabeth, you know.” I said I knew and mentioned The Queen Mum. Edwards asked about my accent, “Kentucky or Northern Ireland?” I said she was very nearly spot-on, on both counts, and told her the story about how I came to be where I came to be.
We chatted briefly about the health care system in the UK. The need for improvement and expansion at home. About literacy in the mountains. And about Eudora Welty. I gushed about southern gothic, its influence on me, and my own ambitions.
“Don’t wait.” That’s what she said to me. “You’re never too old. But don’t wait.”
Elizabeth Edwards waited thirty years, after studying literature at UNC Chapel Hill in the seventies, to return to her writing. When we met she was promoting her second memoir, “Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life’s Adversities”. I apologized for not having read it, admitted my embarrassment. She smiled and told me how much she loved the campus we were on.
That was last year.
I’ve thought about our brief encounter often. Edward’s advice, ‘don’t wait’, and how loaded that phrase must have been. Her passing really does sadden my heart.
dickensian days
Last night I went to Trader Joe’s and brought home a dozen bags of asparagus. And a sausage substitute. I’m having a hard time finding proper British bangers. If anyone knows where I can find a nice cumberland type, or anything that isn’t seasoned to death, do let me know.
Pork may not be the most flattering of foods, but I’ve gone mostly meatless for two months in anticipation of that yummy yule tradition that is sausages-wrapped-in-bacon and it’s just as well because my first Christmas present this year was a ham.
I joke about growing up in the coalfields in the 80s, how it was kind of like being a war baby, when the miners went on strike. But strike our not, every year around this time our dad would bring home the most massive ham. It obviously had more of an effect on me than I imagined because because here I am, twenty years later, ham in hand, getting all giddy with that same kind of Now You Know It’s Christmas feeling I got whenever our dad drug that particular piece of pork through the door.
Tomorrow, wassailing and bûche de noël.
only after a writer is dead: the recorded voice of virginia woolf
“Only after a writer is dead…”
If you enter the John Ritblat Gallery in the British Library from the upper level and turn left to the first list of recordings, you can listen on headphones to a short extract from Virginia Woolf’s only recording. Part of a BBC radio broadcast on 29 April 1937, the recording was only a short part of ‘Craftsmanship’ (reprinted in The Death of the Moth).
Interestingly, it starts one sentence earlier than we usually hear, with: ‘Only after the writer is dead…’
pinkie brown
Listening to Joy Division and chatting about Sam Riley, the brilliant actor who played Ian Curtis in the 2007 movie “Control” and more recently, Pinkie Brown, in the film adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock. (Also, Sal Paradise in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.)
If I’ve never gushed over Brighton Rock it’s only because I don’t know how. I feel the same about Greene as I do about Faulkner, neither knew how to mislay a word. Much as I rate Sam Riley, I can’t imagine he’ll do justice to the character created by Greene. (Though I’d happily be proved wrong.) But when it comes to Brighton itself, John Mathieson, the film’s cinematographer, has done more to turn the place into a living, breathing being than Greene ever did…at least for me.
Christmas Wish List: Brighton Rock (2010)
a little space, you know
by Walt Whitman
OUT of the rolling ocean, the crowd, came a drop gently to me,
Whispering, I love you, before long I die,
I have travel’d a long way, merely to look on you, to touch you,
For I could not die till I once look’d on you,
For I fear’d I might afterward lose you.
(Now we have met, we have look’d, we are safe;
Return in peace to the ocean, my love;
I too am part of that ocean, my love—we are not so much separated;
Behold the great rondure—the cohesion of all, how perfect!
But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us,
As for an hour, carrying us diverse—yet cannot carry us diverse for ever;
Be not impatient—a little space—Know you, I salute the air, the ocean and the
land,
Every day, at sundown, for your dear sake, my love.)
