Maddening Middens

Another repeat performance with an Auden crib for title: "Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden." Had most of this blog done, forgot to hit Save before I looked up another blogging entry, and, whoops, I lost it. But I'm not going to have a third try. Beginning a second time, my theory of options was to combat student laziness for simplistic true-false living, but I realized it was also my impetuous impatience with comfie conformity. (A bit of alliteration there rubbed off from Auden and a recent re-reading of Beowulf, that literary device one of the most notable of our ancient Anglo-Saxon literary heritage.) So my easily bored optionism is why I've bogged down in nine books, wanting to read at least three others, and so spend too much time with computer games because it's hard slogging through a surfeit. But optionism also has practical applications as when I recently discovered I preferred cheddar and Swiss on my homemade pizzas, the cheeses I had on hand when I didn't want to supermarket on an ugly day, and when I also discovered I could tweak [Great] Aunt Myrtle's "Bread" recipe to make wheat instead of white. I had asked her for the recipe when I was teaching at WIU in Macomb, Illinois, and I'll let you detect why my first effort was a messy disaster. Aunt Myrtle was the youngest of the Peters quintet, i.e., Grandma K.'s sister, briefly married to a Wefso from Stuart and quickly divorced (he remarried), leading a long spinsterish life as an elementary school teacher addicted to history (her birthday present to me once was a biography of Alexander Hamilton, one of her heroes), spending most of that life in Randolph where her only brother, Uncle Glenn, was the town doctor for decades and looked after her leukemia. She moved to Center, where Mom could give her her shots, for which she baked us excellent bread. Aunt After a period at a Pierce rest home, at 77 Myrtle died in a Norfolk Hospital in 1968 from a growing tumor that looked as if a giant alien basketball had lodged abdominally in her harsh bony thinness. She is buried on the south border of the Randolph Protestant cemetery, the one closest to Highway 20 northeast of the town; her brother, Glenn, and his wife, the parents, Ed and Mary Peters, are next to one another in the north central area in the Randolph Catholic cemetery farther north. Here is what her clear Palmer penmanship wrote on the recipe card:

Bread
2 cups milk scalded
1 T salt
3 heaping T brown sugar
1 rounded T crisco
Cool with 2 cups cold water
2 package[s] red star yeast dissolved in 1/2 cup water and 1 t sugar
Use enough flour to dandle it and knead
Let rise in warm place, work down and let rise again
Put in greased pan let rise and bake 1 hr in 350 degrees oven.

The scalded milk and brown sugar with the three risings must be the secret (love that old-fashioned "dandle") for my three fine loaves (she usually baked two loaves). You have spotted, I'm sure, why I had to make two or three trips back to my Macomb Krogers and quiz my familiar female checker and why Aunt Myrtle was surprised by my later testy question. I also learned the hard way to grease my hands to work with, in this instance, first slop and then finally dough. With 4 1/2 cups of liquid, "enough flour to dandle" means 10-11 cups never itemized, while I had started naively with 4 and worked up, between trips for more flour. My recent optional innovation was simply to use wheat flour and some wheat germ, too, for half the amount, with an excellent result so that I don't have to stay with white bread.

Back to options: as I've mentioned, I have a bad habit of juggling several books to keep eclectic interests electric and in the last month and a half waded into nine: Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones; Gary Gach's The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Buddhism, Second Edition; James C. Davis' The Human Story: Our History, from the Stone Age to Today; Seamus Heaney's Beowulf: A New Verse Translation; Henning Mankell's Sidetracked; Robert Tewdwr Moss' Cleopatra's Wedding Present: Travels Through Syria; Bernd Heinrich's Mind of the Raven; Archaeology Magazine's Secrets of the Bible; and Jack Turner's Spice: The History of a Temptation, while I was buying still more, anxious to get on to the two latest Mankell mysteries, with a new Ystad detective and then with Kurt Wallander and his daughter pairing up, and Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Suceed (having loved his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, which should be a required high school-college text). But when I overload my circuits, I tend to watch too much television and play computer games compulsively, while I also have magazines and newspapers additionally to read and, obviously, afternoons of baking/cooking.

Stuck sinking in my stinking swamp, I've finally shut off the TV for the most part and tried to limit my 21 Blitz, Collapse, Letter Linker, Jewel Quest, and other beat-the-machine games, futile human pride. At least I didn't miss the wondrous ending to That 70s Show last week when, after a disappointing effort to eat out at some place different from the usual diner, Kitty and Red end up yet again at Phillies, sitting glumly at the counter; she asks him to put his fedora back on, the camera pulls away, and they're part of Hopper's most famous painting, Nighthawks, as I said, wondrously. (I had forgotten the darkened facade even had the diner's name in the upper shadows.)

And, after cataloging some of the index items in the various songbooks I have from Mom and Grandma, in the "Vocal Ease" blog, for the same reason lists accumulate in almanacs, to memorialize cultural change as clocks tick on (as well as almanac records of what's biggest, smallest, fastest, slowest, the mostest, the leastest), I was naturally interested in the March Smithsonian Magazine's list for "Top TV Shows of 1970: 1. Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In 2. Gunsmoke 3. Bonanza 4. Mayberry R.F.D. 5. Family Affair 6. Here's Lucy 7. The Red Skelton Hour 8. Marcus Welby, MD 9. Wonderful World of Disney 10. Doris Day Show." What hath Popular Culture wrought? Disney is still on, and some of the list rerun on such channels as TVLand. But House is a far cry from genial, fatherly Welby, ER decidedly grittier, HBO's Deadwood too vulgar for me (I liked Ian McShane much better in the much earlier Lovejoy and Dick Francis detective series), and I don't see anything on that list that could engender my shock at the NCIS episode, "Meat Puzzle," on February 8th, the viewer forced to look at length at three dismembered bodies chopped into bloody roast-sized segments, with skinned faces and fingertips to prevent easy identification, the vulgarly named morgue "meat puzzles." As DNA proves, these are the detective, prosecutor, and judge in an old case for which the best prosecution witness was pathologist Ducky (David McCallum--and Gibbs [Mark Harmon] gets to make an inside joke about Ducky's looking like Illia Kuryakin in his youth, alluding to McCallum's role in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. series). This was even worse than some of the top CSI: Crime Scene Investigation TV show's grim gore and heightened by the hair-raising threat to Ducky's life, the desperate ending having him strapped down, his blood being drained away--"in four minutes"--in a mortuary by the vengeful psychotic mother-son murderers. But our only native criminal class, according to Mark Twain, Congress, wants to impose $500,000 fines against "indecent" broadcasting performances, still obsessed with Janet Jackson's little boob, these boobs apparently going to judge what is and what isn't "indecent" when the Federal Supreme Court has difficulty defining pornography. Twain also said, "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." I envision George A. Romero's filming zombie Joe McCarthy lurching up out of his grave, without pinko commies to blame this time, probably SpongeBob SquarePants and Will & Jack to be called before his ghoulish committee. And the gore goes on.