In 1845,  they wrote 574 letters to each other over the course of twenty months.

They secretly got married in 1846. Right before the wedding, Robert mailed off to Elizabeth a letter that said:

“Words can never tell you, however, — form them, transform them anyway, — how perfectly dear you are to me – perfectly dear to my heart and soul. I look back, and in every one point, every word and gesture, every letter, every silence — you have been entirely perfect to me — I would not change one word, one look. I am all gratitude — and all pride (under the proper feeling which ascribes pride to the right source) all pride that my life has been so crowned by you.”

And she wrote probably one of the most famous romantic poems ever:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints — I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

(info from The Writer’s Almanac)

Today I’m gardening– finally working on the cactus garden, and Ted and I are making a Valentine’s Dinner of martinis, steak, baked Fennel with Parmesan and Thyme, roasted potatoes, and chocolate souffle.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

The scones have been eaten, the presents unwrapped [I got an AWESOME new computer bag], and Troy Patterson of Slate.com gives the 26 Top cultural moments of the 2000′s. Among them:

The design of the jacket of the 2006 Penguin Classics edition of The Portable Dorothy Parker.

*Nifty, to be sure, though I still love the new John Cheever covers.

And, Patterson includes:

…nostalgia for The Free Winona Movement

*I remember–and loved– the T-shirts sold in West Village boutiques

and:

Prince at the Super Bowl XLI Halftime Show. Dolphin Stadium, Feb. 4, 2007.

*It’s a fun, if complex and (at times) obscure  list–read it all HERE.

Sigh.

In the meantime, when i’m not planning/ working on my classes or going to my office a few days a week to work on my book i’m trying to read as much as I can.

I just finished Disquiet, by Julia Leigh, which is getting praised left and right. It’s a novella, only about 121 pages, that’s creepy and beautiful. I loved it.

I also really enjoyed Alice Munro’s short story, “Some Women,” which was in the recent NewYorker Winter Fiction Issue. Unfortunately it’s not online! Drat. I don’t know why the NY’er publishes some but not others online. So stingy. In any case, I often get frustrated at how much Munro, and others, are published in the NewYorker, but then I read Munro’s stories and each time I do I realize, yes, yes, she is a damn good writer. This story is about a young girl who is a caregiver for a dying man and finds herself in the middle of a female power struggle with the man’s wife, mother, and a neighbor.

Here’s a description of an elderly woman’s body:

There I saw Old Mrs. Crozier stretched out on a daybed, on her stomach, her face turned away from me, absolutely naked. A skinny streak of pale flesh. The usually covered length of her body didn’t look as old as the parts of her that were daily exposed–her freckled, dark-veined hands and forearms, her brown-blotched cheeks. The skin of her back and legs was yellow-white, like wood freshly stripped of it’s bark.

I really like how Munro fuses two words together often–  dark-veined, brown-blotched, yellow-white.

There is, however, a cool recent interview with Munro from the October 2008 NYer Festival Blog that has some interesting information including:

• “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories” was the headline that appeared in a local paper when Munro first began publishing.

and

• When she’s at the beginning stages of writing a story, she might sit and look out the window for a week, not doing a word of writing, “just letting things get settled in my head.”

I can certainly relate to that.

So what’s up next on my book queue?

Well, I just read a short story, “Homecoming,” by William Maxwell published in the Jan. 1, 1938 NewYorker– and available here! I read it, though, in the book, William Maxwell: Early Novels and Stories, part of a handsome hardcover, two-book set (the kind with the silk ribbon inside) re-releasing Maxwell’s works, from the Library of America , that Ted’s mother gave me for Christmas. Check out the story, it’s short and very moving.

Besides that i’m reading the essay “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” by David Foster Wallace from a 1994 Harpers. It’s long, brilliant, scathing, funny.

And what are YOU reading?

Merry Christmas!

Happy Holidays!

From NPR The Writer’s Almanac:

On this day in 1666, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary:

25. Christmas day. Lay pretty long in bed. And then rise, leaving my wife desirous to sleep, having sat up till 4 this morning seeing her maids make mince-pies. I go to church, where our parson Mills made a good sermon. Then home, and dine well on some good ribs of beef roasted and mince pies; only my wife, brother, and Barker, and plenty of good wine of my own; and my heart full of true joy and thanks to God Almighty for the goodness of my condition at this day.

It’s raining on Christmas Day here in San Diego, but that doesn’t dampen our spirits–oh, no!

(actually, I hate the rain–especially driving in it).

We opened our presents–so many amazing books!Yay!

And office supplies from Ted’s mom (among many other wonderful gifts from her and Ted’s Aunt Susie– Ted gave me a coffee press for my office.

One of the gifts I gave Ted is this awesome Doodle Frame
get this– you can draw on the frame (it’s a pad of paper around the picture!)

Isn’t it fun?! (no that’s not me in the pic, but it kind of looks like me, right?).

Another gift I gave Ted is this Savitri Sukul Piggybank from the MOMA gift store.

This year I also made marshmallows. Yes, marshmallows. I tried making them last year but they turned out like Taffy– or rather, like caulking.

This time around I found a better recipe. It’s from About.com and in fact was pretty easy. Basically if you have sugar, corn syrup, water, vanilla, and knox gelatin around the house you can make these. Here‘s the recipe in case you’re interested.

And here are photos (for more go to my Flickr–> on the right sidebar).

note to self: one martini makes making marshmallows much more fun…

but they still turned out well

after your pour the MM into a pan you let it set for several hours and then wha-la, you have a slab o marshmallow

you then cut the slab-o-MM into squares and dust them with powdered sugar

I also made cocoa marshmallows (just add cocoa to the water and knox gelatin in the first step)

when you are done you can put them into nifty little mason jars and give them to friends and family.

Speaking of… We are off to The 3rd Annual Christmas game night with Eduardo, Jen, Dave et al.

…and to all a good night.

(coming in the next post: making soap)

latchhook rugs, afghans, puffy fabric picture frames, strawberry jam,  clothes for us (I’m still traumatized by the boxy Hawaiian shirt she made me one year), Christmas ornaments made of walnut shells, sachets.

I was her assistant in most, if not all, of these crafts. (by the way–I have a short story titled “Party Planning” in the forthcoming anthology Fool For Love, from Cleis Press and edited by the lovely Timothy J. Lambert and RD Cochrane, which tells of a young boy and his craft-crazy, party-planning mother).

Anyway, so this year I was all crafty all the time.

It began with my garden, where I grew several kinds of tomatoes, a big batch of Basil, Cayenne Peppers, mint, and Habanero Peppers. In November I made Habanero Jelly– which is delicious. And jam-making is so easy! It took all day to do it but when I was done I had a dozen jars of spicy-sweet Habanero Jelly and three jars of Apple Butter (store bought apples!). Here‘s the recipe I used.

Here’s a funny quote about cooking from Alice B. Toklas:

What is sauce for the goose may be sauce for the gander but is not necessarily sauce for the chicken, the duck, the turkey or the guinea hen.
- Alice B. Toklas, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, 1954

**Is she REALLY talking about cooking here?

I’ve documented the JELLY MAKING process in photos (for bigger, and more pics, see my Flickr page):

note: Habaneros are HOT peppers. Wear goggles and gloves when chopping them and place them in a sealed plastic bag when done.

Make sure to keep all windows of the house open while boiling Habaneros!

just a dab’ll do ya! Habanero jelly on a bagel with cream cheese is pure–and hot!–heaven.

In Upcoming Posts:

Making Marshmallows

Making Soap

My Crafty Purchases This Year

Crafts for the Future

I just pulled a pumpkin cream pie out of the oven.

I’m thankful for the coming new year. a year of change. A year of hope. A year of dazzling prolificacy.

I’m also thankful for this:

**this was one of those cheesy products advertised in the sidebar on Facebook.

You know how much I love monkeys.

It’s actually pretty damn funny, and only $9.95 (not including shipping). Click on the banner and watch the little movie. Hilarious. (I promise i’m not getting paid to endorse this product). Banner courtesy of Inonline.com.

Should I add it to my Christmas list?

It’s wonderful. Full of sinful, fatty recipes (butter is the most frequently used ingredient), but also witty commentary, musings, profiles of people, made by Alice B. Toklas.

Apparently, writer Monique Truong, came up with the idea for her excellent novel The Book of Salt– about Alice and Gertrude’s Vietnamese cook– after reading the recipe for Hashish (spelled Haschich in the book) Fudge (it’s on pg. 259). According to Truong:

It didn’t sound tasty to me, but I read the rest of the book anyway and found that it was less of a cookbook and more of a memoir. In a chapter called “Servants in France,” Toklas wrote about two Indochinese men who cooked for Toklas and Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus and at their summer house in Bilignin. One of these cooks responded to an ad placed by Toklas in the newspaper that began “Two Americans ladies wish . . . ” By this point in the cookbook, I had already fallen for these two women and for their ability to create an idiosyncratic, idyllic life for one another. When I got to the pages about these cooks, I was, to say the least, surprised and touched to see a Vietnamese presence—and such an intimate one at that—in the lives of these two women. These cooks must have seen everything, I thought. But in the official history of the Lost Generation, the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, these Indochinese cooks were just a minor footnote. There could be a personal epic embedded inside that footnote, I thought. The Book of Salt is that story, as told from the perspective of Bình, a twenty-six-year-old Vietnamese man living in Paris in the late 1920s. I have imagined him as one of the candidates who answered Stein and Toklas’s classified ad.

The cookbook is so rich with stories like this, and fantastic descriptions. Here Toklas talks about the hired help again– this time their housekeeper Caroline:

Caroline was not pretty, attractive and charming, but she certainly had a heart of gold. We always spoke of her to each other as Heart of Gold. She was perpetually sacrificing herself at the expense of her state of mind or her pocketbook.  Their prettiest sister, it had been discovered, was living with a married man. The family was outraged. Such a thing had never happened amongst them before. Caroline persuaded one sister and brother after the other to forgive her. [...] She told many stories of the life of the Breton village where she had been born and raised, of what could and did happen to the boys and girls and the married couples and the aged. She said the solutions of these stories was a question of the souls or sous.

The cookbook also gives insight into the relationship between Alice and Gertrude.

It’s a terrific, fun read. Full of history and characters.

And did I mention the book has recipes?

You must get it now.

I think it possibly inspired my recent dabbles into baking and preserving.

A week ago I baked a Banana Cream pie, including the crust and the meringue topping, from scratch.

And, you may notice that in the blog i’m trying to focus on writing (and my writing) more often– in the hopes that it will spur me on to finish this draft of my book. Not that I won’t still muse about T-shirts and movies and gardening and food and postcards…

Right now i’m reading 1919 by John Dos Passos.

Ted introduced me to it. It’s an historical novel about the years right after WWI. 1919 was the second book of a three part series called the U.S.A. Trilogy.

I was not familiar with Dos Passos at all until Ted told me about him. The book is fascinating, if rather dense. Dos Passos was called “A Witness To Our Times,” because his books, specifically the U.S.A. Trilogy, contain fragments of popular songs, news headlines, stream-of-consciousness monologues, and naturalistic fragments from the lives of a horde of unrelated characters. This book was written in 1932.

Here’s what one scholar has to say about Dos Passos’ Trilogy:

In the brilliantly-crafted and powerful U.S.A. one can see Dos Passos’ vision and his talent at their finest level of creation. At first glance the trilogy appears to be a series of fragmented sections. There are four elements which intertwine: the narratives of twelve fictional characters, brief biographical sketches of contemporary Americans, “newsreel” headlines, and the “camera’s eye” autobiography. In this last element, Dos Passos renders his own coming of age in America as he struggles to comprehend a nation which seems so at odds with the vision of its founders.

Soon the reader realizes that these four disparate elements are united by the author’s central vision of a society in decline, with little prospect for its rescue. Yet there remains a sense of outrage, of betrayal, which suggests the author’s own hope that a concerned citizenry, through some collective action, might yet find a way to redeem the country.

I’m trying to do something similar with the book i’m working on. And it’s not easy, let me tell you.

Still, the book is intriguing, and enlightening about the years after WWI, and it’s made up of some amazing passages and descriptions, such as this one:

All kinds of things got him terribly agitated so that i was hard not to show it. The wabble of the waitresses’ hips and breasts while they were serving meals, girls’ underwear in store windows, the smell of the bathhouses and the salty tingle of a wet bathingsuit and the tanned skin of fellows and girls in bathingsuits lying out in the sun on the beach.

I love that line: …the salty tingle of a wet bathingsuit…

I’ve decided to title this diary ’39′ in honor of this being my 39th year. I want to see at the end of April (my birthday) what i’ve written in this year.

Last Monday, the 25th, was the first day teaching my Creative Nonfiction class. It was a great first day (night, actually, since it runs from 7-9:50 pm). The last 30 min. I gave the class a writing activity:

Write 2 pages of a memory–something you have to squint to see. (from Abigail Thomas’ splendid book, Thinking About Memoir).

Only I ‘modified’ it– the first assignment, which i’m giving in two weeks, is to write an Entertainment piece (Movie, TV, music, etc.) and so I modified this writing activity like this:

Write 2 pages of a memory–something you have to squint to see– of one of your earliest experiences or exposures to some aspect of entertainment– a movie, tv show, concert, play, song, etc.

At least 5 people read their pieces out loud. All wonderful.

In my moleskin I wrote about me, age six or seven, wanting to stay up late to watch The Poseidon Adventure on television, but I wasn’t allowed. How I snuck out of my room, crawled under the dining room table, through the chairs–much like the Poseidon survivors crawl through the ship– and watched, fascinated, scared, the scene where the ship turns over.

“…crawling on my hands and knees, under the dining room table, through the tangle of table legs and chair legs. I remember the smell of the wood table–was it cedar? cherry? And the feel of our green shag carpet under my hands…”

I’ve got Cayenne Peppers ripening red. I’ve been researching (aka Googling) how to cook with Cayenne Peppers and came across some interesting ideas like this. But if anyone else has some good ideas for what to do with Fresh Grown Cayenne Peppers please let me know.

Here they are:

We’ve been eating the little teardrop yellow tomatoes– boy are they good.

My sister bought us a garden gnome.

We’ve also got Basil and Habanero peppers and Mint, but the Mint’s not doing so well.

Jack feels right at home among the vegetables.

Speaking of growth, our dear friends Sandi and Cheryl are getting married tonight in Corona, California and we’ll be there!

Sandi and I have been friends since High School. She was the shift leader at my very first job– at Weinerschnitzel– in the mid 80s.

(that’s me and a girl name Desiree–not Sandi–below in black and white–don’t you love the polyester visor?)

We’ve come a long way baby.

Sandi came out to NYC for mine and Ted’s wedding in Brooklyn in 2005 and we’ve been waiting for her and Cheryl to tie the knot.

Maid of honor is the wonderful Lolers, our Canadian friend. I’d like to think that it was us that brought Lolers and Sandi together– so they owe us big time! They met the weekend of our wedding (see the pic below of me and Lola) and have been inseparable (well except when they’re apart in Calif and Canada) ever since.

Can’t wait to see them and to celebrate their marriage! Their LEGAL marriage! Woo Hoo!