Um, I'll Get Back to You on That (Fall Edition)

I confess, I've not made good use of the day; the doldrums of Autumn are upon me, the instinct to puff up and hibernate. Pumpkin/corn/black bean soup? Check. Project Runway? Check. Overdue work? Not so much. After a week that's included a good deal of frantic energy spent grading midterm papers, proofing my Washington Post article and the second pass of I Was the Jukebox, and sending applications out, I feel slightly numb.

If you are similarly looking for an excuse to procrastinate, here's the simple soup recipe:

Pumpkin, Black Bean and Corn Soup

2 slices bacon - slivered (optional)
1/2 onion - chopped
1/2 red pepper - chopped
1 clove garlic - minced
4 cups chicken broth or stock
1 can black beans - cooked and rinsed
1 can corn kernels
1 can pumpkin puree
1 teaspoon ground cumin (heaping)
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger (heaping)
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg (heaping)

1. Cook bacon in a pot until crisp. (If vegan, heat some olive oil.)
2. Add garlic, onion and pepper and sautee for 2 minutes.
3. Add remaining solids, spices, and broth, stirring to mix.
4. Bring to a boil and reduce to simmer.
5. Simmer for 20 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste.

I've upped some quantities from the original recipe, because who wants to chop only a 1/3 of a pepper? Who needs 1/4 can pumpkin puree left over? A big part of the appeal is that I'm always looking for soup recipes that don't require a food processor or immersion blender. Those must be things acquired upon marriage.

Anyway, if I don't get a bit more done, then I won't be able to properly enjoy what the weekend holds: a drive to little ol' Scottsville, Virginia, for a "Haunted Trail Walk"--then visiting long-lost college friends in Richmond. That'll be a kind of abstract halloweeen celebration, yet it is enough for me. I've had two friends ask for advice on costumes this year. Eh. My sister was far more adventurous--zombie bride, man holding his own head in a box. I was always a simple kitty/witch/fairy kinda girl, more worried about looking cute than scary. Here's a photo of me from college days, living on the Lawn at the University of Virginia...



That's me with the looong hair. All the parents in Charlottesville would bring their kids to trick or treat at UVA, so the Lawnies were explicitly asked to host. (We were not explicitly asked to chalk the wall. That little bit of inadvertently catastrophic defacement was my bright idea.) 3 hours = 2,000 pieces of candy!



Have a happy all's hallows eve, folks. See you on the flipside of November. I'll have recovered my motivation by then, I promise.

The Muse Wore Orange

--> First, a bulletin for Virginia fiction-lovers: if you live in Charlottesville or Richmond, within the next 48 hours you have a chance to hear the amazing Dylan Landis read. (I have raved about her book Normal People Don't Live Like This on this blog on previous occasions.) She will be accompanied by the equally amazing New Yorker Joanna Smith Rakoff. Here's a fancy write-up, and here are the bare bones details...

Wed., Oct. 28, 5:30 p.m. / Dylan Landis & Joanna Smith Rakoff / New Dominion Bookshop / 404 East Main Street (Downtown Mall) / Charlottesville, VA 22902

Thu., Oct. 29, 7 p.m. / Dylan Landis & Joanna Smith Rakoff / Chop Suey Books / 2913 West Cary Street / Richmond, VA 23221

..okay, back to our regularly scheduled post.

I'm very excited to join the ranks of the Norton poets over at the blog Poems Out Loud. Don't worry--Chicks Dig Poetry isn't going anywhere. But this will be a venue for longer think-pieces. Here's the opening snippet from my first post, "The Muse Wore Orange." For those who followed my Jentel posts, this was an essay I wrote during my June-July residency in the hills of Wyoming....

She stands by our front door: a painted cutout of a winged woman, complete with red spirals of hair. Angel, muse, safety monitor, she models the bright orange vest that each of us must wear if we venture into the hills surrounding the Jentel Artist Residency Program.

“So that you don’t get shot by hunters,” was the friendly instruction. “Or run down by truckers.”

You'll find the whole post here.

From the Fever-World

Today I was back at the Writer's Center to hear the 2009 winners of the Washington Writers' Publishing House Prizes: Calvin by William Littlejohn and From the Fever-World by Jehanne Dubrow. I love the concept behind From the Fever-World, which is being published as Jehanne's second full-length collection. The conceit is that the book is actually a translation from Yiddish of the life's work of Ida Lewin, who lived and died in a pre-WWII Polish town of "AlwaysWinter." All a fiction, of course.

Here's a brief excerpt from a longer Q&A in which Jehanne reflects on the creation of AlwaysWinter and Ida:

Q: You’ve lived so many different places across the world. Is the town of AlwaysWinter based on any of the places you’ve lived or is it a product of your imagination?

JD: Poland is one of the central landscapes of my imagination. But the Poland that lives in my head is a mythologized version, not only of my childhood but also of my studies and scholarship in Jewish and Holocaust literature. From the Fever-World is set in AlwaysWinter (or Zawsze-Zima in Polish), a fictional town in the region of Galicia, which we would now call southern Poland. AlwaysWinter is modeled on the many small towns that existed in interwar Poland, places of incredible cultural, political, and religious diversity. When I was inventing AlwaysWinter, I relied both on recollections of the seven years I spent in Poland as a little girl and on my research of yizkor books, witness testimony, historiography, and Yiddish literature.

Q: How did you come up with the character of Ida Lewin. Was there any real life inspiration for her?

JD: In my “translator’s note,” at the end of From the Fever-World, I write that “Ida Lewin (or someone like her)” must have existed. I believe that to be true. Cynthia Ozick’s wonderful short story, “Envy; Or Yiddish in America,” describes the great sadness of being a Yiddish poet who writes in an exterminated mothertongue and is unable to find a translator. There are so many real Yiddish poets who have disappeared or been forgotten, simply because no one has been able to bring their work into a living language like English. I don’t know Yiddish but, through Ida Lewin, I found my poet and my job as a translator.

*

This is a daring premise for a book, and it allows Jehanne to do some bold things--things we don't always give ourselves permission to do with our own voice. She writes as a mother mourning a lost child, though she is not a mother. She articulates observations of prewar Polish culture drawn from her fellowship at the Holocaust Museum that might seem dry and academic if shoehorned into her own poems. Perhaps most enviable, she includes two or even three poems that echo an earlier poem--a retread, a re-approach to a metaphor or theme already used. As a poet and implied self-editor, we'd call this cheating; as a "translator" and curator of Ida's work, it's called respecting the organic attentions of Ida Lewin. This is a rangy, sensual, surreal book, and I can't wait to spend more time with it.

Want the chance to judge for yourself? Go hear Jehanne read at Politics & Prose, next Sunday at 1 PM. I'd be there if I could--but I'll be on the road, returning from Scottsville, Virginia, by way of Richmond. I decided to spend my Halloween on a Haunted Trail Walk. It'll be quite a change of pace from the usual glory of angels in assless chaps, trick-or-treating through Dupont Circle....