Sunday 25 December 2022

Christmas Light

"Garden Aglow" by Me in ME is licensed underCC BY 2.0

When everyone had gone
I sat in the library
With the small silent tree,
She and I alone.
How softly she shone!

And for the first time then
For the first time this year,
I felt reborn again,
I knew love’s presence near.

Love distant, love detached
And strangely without weight,
Was with me in the night
When everyone had gone
And the garland of pure light
Stayed on, stayed on.

“Christmas Light” by May Sarton. Text as published in Collected Poems 1930-1993 (W. W. Norton, 1993).

Wednesday 21 December 2022

Winter happens like a secret

I found this poem in January 2022 and have been saving it to post on the shortest day of the year. For me it captures the beauty in the bleakness of this time of year. And the language! 'Winter happens like a secret we've to keep yet never understand' feels like the core of a fairy tale. 

Beautiful. Happy Solstice, friends.

At the Solstice

We say Next time we’ll go away.
But then the winter happens, like a secret

We’ve to keep yet never understand,
As daylight turns to cinema once more:

A lustrous darkness deep in ice-age cold,
And the print in need of restoration

Starting to consume itself
With snowfall where no snow is falling now.

Winter Solstice 2014
"Winter Solstice 2014" by Jon Bunting is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Or could it be a cloud of sparrows, dancing
In the bare hedge that this gale of light

Is seeking to uproot? Let it be sparrows, then,
Still dancing in the blazing hedge,

Their tender fury and their fall,
Because it snows, because it burns.

Sean O'Brien, The Beautiful Librarians (London, 2015)

Saturday 10 December 2022

Herman Melville and the Merovingians

It's always a delight to find the early medieval kings of France in unexpected places! One place I certainly would not have thought to find Merovingians is Herman Melville's White-Jacket or the World in a Man of War (1850); a rambling, lightly fictionalized account of the author's fourteen months of service in the US Navy. The main purpose of the book is to whip up public indignation against the use of flogging as a method of punishment--the plot, such as it is, is simply to chronicle the USS Neversink's voyage away from the United States and back again. Chapter describing events of the voyage are interspersed with narrative chapters describing the customs of the navy and the quirks of naval personnel. 

One of these quirks is the sailors' treatment of their beards: the narrator, White-Jacket, and many of his fellow sailors, decide to grow their facial hair for the duration of the voyage. The passage describing the results ends with surprise medievalism.

But there were others of the crew labouring under the misfortune of long, lank Winnebago locks, or carroty bunches of hair, or rebellious bristles of a sandy hue. Ambitious of redundant mops, these still suffered their carrots to grow, in spite of all the ridicule. They looked like Huns and Scandinavians; and one of them, a young Down Easter, the unenvied proprietor of a thick crop of inflexible yellow bamboos, went by the name of Peter the Wild Boy; for, like Peter the Wild Boy of France, it was supposed that he must have been caught like a catamount in the woods of Maine. But there were many fine, flowing heads of hair to counterbalance such sorry exhibitions as Peter's. 

What with long whiskers and venerable beards, then, of every variety and cut--Charles the Fifth's and Aurelian's--and endless goatees and imperials; and what with abounding locks, our crew seemed a company of Merovingians or Long-haired kings, mixed with savage Lombards or Longobardi, so called from their lengthy beards. 

~ Herman Melville, White-Jacket or the World in a Man of War (pp 334-335).

I love how neatly Melville explains who the Merovingians and Lombards are. And without losing the lively rhythm of the sentence! How delightful.

Here's a little illustrated glossary to help you enjoy the full picture.

Winnebago locks: Winnebago is an exonym for the Ho-Chunk or Hoocągra, a Native American people whose traditional lands are in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. It's not clear to me whether 'Winnebago locks' refers to a specific hairstyle or whether Melville--using words like misfortune and lank--is stereotyping Native Americans as unkempt. Or both!

Nineteenth century photographs of Ho-Chunk men don't clarify the question of hairstyle but may reveal part of the image Melville had in his mind.

Unnamed Winnebago Man, photographed by E. L. Eaton (1865). Library of Congress.

Huns: a group of people who lived in central Asia and eastern Europe, having migrated west between the fourth and sixth centuries. Scholars have persistently but inconclusively linked them to the Xiongnu, a confederation of central Asian nomads. Despite the terrible reputation of their fifth century leader, Attila, we have relatively little direct evidence from the Huns themselves. Here's a nice nineteenth century representation of that most famous Hun, with excellent hair and beard.

File:Brogi, Carlo (1850-1925) - n. 8227 - Certosa di Pavia - Medaglione sullo zoccolo della facciata.jpg
Medallion of Attila the Hun by Carlo Brogi. Wikimedia Commons.

Down Easter: usually refers to someone from Maine. Can also refer to a person from New England in general or someone from the Maritime Provinces of Canada.

Peter the Wild Boy of France: a feral child who discovered in the woods near Hanover in 1725 by a hunting party led by the English King George I. He was brought to London, where he was the subject of considerable public curiosity. There's a lovely article about him by Lucy Worsley, with some magnificent illustrations, in the Public Domain Review. Why Melville thought he was French is not clear; perhaps he was thinking of another famous eighteenth century feral child, Victor of Aveyron. From a portrait of Peter in adulthood, we can get a sense of the kind of hair Melville had in mind.

"Peter the Wild Boy" by James Cundee, London 1807. British Museum.

catamount: a large wild cat with an incredibly wide range across North and South America. They are known for being solitary creatures and in Melville's day would certainly have been found in Maine. (Debate rages on if they are still.)

Charles the Fifth: Holy Roman Emperor, who ruled from 1519 until his abdication in 1556. He is known for: being a Habsburg, ruling one of Europe's largest empires, and opposing  and later tolerating Lutheranism (his solution was to divide Germany into Catholic and Protestant states.) Most of his portraits seem to show him with a bushy but well-kept beard. This one also shows him with a rather lovely dog.

File:Jakob Seisenegger 001.jpg
Portrait of Emperor Charles V by Jakob Seisenegger. Wikimedia Commons

Aurelian: a third century Roman emperor, know for being the ruler who ended a fifty-year period of succession crisis, civil war, and external invasion. He is depicted as bearded on third century coins and statuary and was represented with a modest, nearly groomed beard in early modern prints.

File:Aurelianus Lucius Domitius.jpg
Copper engraving of Aurelian (1583). Wikimedia Commons  

imperials: according to Dr Alun Whitney the imperial is a particularly luxuriant and bushy mustache. His blog posts on the subject of types of beard is splendidly illustrated with all manner of glorious Victorian advertisements. (Dr Whitney has recently published a book, Concerning Beards, about the history of facial hair in England, which sounds excellent and is available open access.)

Merovingians or Long-haired kings: a dynasty who ruled parts of what is now France, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany between the late fifth and the late eighth century. The name Merovingian comes from their legendary first ruler, Merovech, said to be the son of a sea monster. They are know for being the longest-lasting dynasty of kings after the end of Roman imperial rule in the West and also for their incessant and bloody civil wars. Male members of the dynasty wore their hair long as a sign of their royal status as you can see in the early modern portrait of Chilperic I.

Chilperic I, anonymous print from Germany, 1610-1640. British Museum

Lombards or Longobardi: these people invaded and settled in Italy in 568, having moved from the Danube region and Pannonia (modern day Hungary). They would rule Italy until the eighth century, when they were deposed by the Carolingian dynasty (who had gotten practice deposing people by toppling the Merovingians.) Melville may not have known or cared about this history; his concern was with the fact that the Lombards were famed for their long beards, as you see here in this splendid fifteenth century illustration.

Nuremberg chronicles f 147v 1.jpg
King Alboin, from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). Wikimedia Commons    

The men of the Neversink, Melville tells us, have long hair, long beards, long mustaches--or all three. It's great fun how he uses the past to illustrate this.

Wednesday 30 November 2022

Music I Like, #30, Keep Going West (Liz Pappademas) 

If one should admit to having a favourite breakup song, this is mine. There are so many things I love about this song, I have to make a flypaper thoughts style list to encompass some of them.

  • The piano intro
  • In fact, the piano part throughout the song
  • The vocals, opening with a mumbled groan, as though it physically hurts to sing this song
  • The deep huskiness of Pappademas' voice
  • The way the refrain gets progressively more intense as the song goes on
  • This lyric: "I am curled on one side of the bed / in a motel six with my independence"
  • This description: "the low sky hangs in God's own noose"
  • All the lyrics and all the descriptions
  • I love this song

 

Tuesday 29 November 2022

Music I Like, #29, String Quartet in C Minor, Op. 18, No. 4 (Ludwig van Beethoven)

Part of my love of chamber music comes from the fact that I played in a string quartet all through college. This quartet was the first piece I learned with that wonderful group of women and it was of the pieces we performed together on our senior recital, so also one of the last pieces we played together. Even if I didn't love it for those memories, I would still be fond of it for the wonderful weaving of harmony and melody, and the way the instruments call and respond to one another. 

Monday 28 November 2022

Music I Like, #28, This Year (the Mountain Goats)

Another Mountain Goats song which demonstrates John Darnielle's casual brilliance as a lyricist. I mean, just look at the last three lines of the final verse:

The scene ends badly as you might imagineIn a cavalcade of anger and fearThere will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year.

What a transition. Gotta love the Mountain Goats.

Sunday 27 November 2022

Music I Like, #27, Le sommeil de l'enfant Jésus (Henri Büsser)

On the first day of Advent, here is my favourite piece of Christmas music. It is played ever year at end of Central Congregational Church's carol service, so I grew up hearing it played by a fabulous local cellist with the excellent name of Daniel Harp, who would later be one of my chamber music coaches when I was at university. In 2020, the church's carol service was recorded--you can hear it being played at the end of the video of the service (it starts at 53:41). There's something magical about the way it sounds in that space. 


For such a beautiful piece, this seems to be relatively difficult to find on Youtube. Here is another recording.

Music I Like #26, Cynicism (Nana Grizol)

This song has followed me for over ten years because of how I remember two of its lines:

Cynicism isn't wisdom, it's just a lazy way to say that you've been hurt / you'd think that you'd be wiser after all you've ever learned

The actual lines are:

Cynicism isn't wisdomIt's a lazy way to say that you've been burnedIt seems, if anything, you'd be less certain after everything you ever learned

What a gentle, hopeful ramble of a song.

Friday 25 November 2022

Music I Like, #25, He's a Mental Giant (Tech N9ne)

In university music theory classes, you do courses on ear training, where you learn to transcribe the rhythms, harmonies, and melodies of music that you hear. This is as difficult as it sounds (I was always very bad at it), but I loved how it challenged me to pay attention to what I was hearing. My appreciation for rhythmic dictation, in particular, was enhanced by one of our guest lecturers, the incredible violinist and composer, DBR (Daniel Bernard Roumain), who spoke with his violin in hand, playing to demonstrate his points. He spoke passionately and enthusiastically about the beauty and rhythmic complexity of hip hop. Years later, when I heard 'He's a Mental Giant', I thought of that lecture. It was such a joy to experience. So is this song.

Thursday 24 November 2022

Music I Like, #24, String Quartet, No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96 "American" (Antonin Dvorak)

Today is Thanksgiving, so let's have some music inspired by the United States.

The Czech composer Antonín Leopold Dvořák composed his string quartet in F Major, Op. 96, in  the summer of 1893, which he spent in Spillville, Iowa. Scholars have struggled to identify specific folk music or songs in the quartet, but Dvořák himself spoke of his fascination with American music, especially Black American music. The Black composer Harry Thacker Burleigh, who studied at the National Conservatory in New York City, met Dvořák there during the composer's visit to the United States, and introduced him to spirituals, the religious folk songs created by Black Americans during enslavement.

I played this quartet in college--it is some of the most fun I've ever had learning and performing a piece of music. In honour of that experience, here is a performance by an excellent student quartet at the American chamber music festival Kneisel Hall.

Wednesday 23 November 2022

Music I Like, #23, Bay of Fundy (Bill Guest)

This is one of my very favourite contra dance tunes. It makes me think of walking by the ocean on a calm summer's day, watching the light sparkle on the water.

 

Tuesday 22 November 2022

Music I Like, #22, Malo, malo - The Turn of the Screw (Benjamin Britten)

The last live performance I saw before the pandemic shut everything down was Opera North's production of Turn of the Screw. The plot of the opera is based on a novella by Henry James, about an unnamed governess who cares for two children, Miles and Flora, in a house that may or may not be haunted. Ghost stories suit opera and operas suit ghost stories. Turn of the Screw is splendidly unsettling.

Miles' aria 'Malo, malo' is one of the eeriest bits. Enjoy.

 

PS The lyrics Miles is singing are half in Latin, half in English. For an interesting discussion of the meaning behind them, see this article by Valentine Cunningham (which makes me want to listen to the Bad Gays podcast episode on Benjamin Britten.)

Monday 21 November 2022

Music I Like, #21, Edge of Glory by Lady Gaga

My knowledge of popular music is mostly bounded by what was on the radio in the early 2000s. When I was in middle school, one of the bus drivers  always turned it up for Eminem, and in my teens, there was the dance floor at chamber music camp. (Italicized for the hilarity, but in all honesty, the people who controlled that playlist had great taste in dance music.) Further exposure came when I was in university, through the long and varied playlists my frat brothers would put on while we hung out or played pool on Friday evenings. Lady Gaga was usually added to those playlists, and I can never hear songs like 'Bad Romance', 'Poker Face', 'Just Dance' or especially 'Edge of Glory' without thinking fondly of that time in my life.

Sunday 20 November 2022

Music I Like, #20, Violin Sonata No.1, Op.78 (Johannes Brahms)

When I was a young teenager, there would always be a few days each summer where my parents drove to western Massachusetts to attend concerts at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. We would have a family picnic on the lawn and then we would hear some of the world's best classical musicians perform live, which is a good way to fall in love with classical music.

We went to a number of BSO performances (one of those concerts was the first place I heard the Dvorak violin concerto, though I can't remember who was playing). But the performance that stands out in my memory was a chamber music concert. One year, my family and I were in the audience when the violinist Christian Tetzlaff and pianist Lars Vogt played an all-Brahms programme. It was one of those magical performances where time stops and everything but music ceases to matter. It made such a deep impression on me that I was saddened to see Lars Vogt's obituary in the New York Times earlier this year.

Two weeks before he died, Vogt played Brahms' first violin sonata with Tetzlaff, on an electric piano in his hospital room. In a beautiful tribute to his friend and collaborator, Tetzlaff said,

For both of us, Brahms felt so close. He was there in moments of deep emotion. Maybe because he doesn’t seem as superhuman as some other composers, or as addicted to desperation, but instead—to quote his requiem—says, “I will console you, as one is consoled by a mother.” It’s something that resonates even in the darker Brahms works. He isn’t trying to be bigger than us; he wants to be with us. Brahms is the composer who connected Lars and I the most all these years and who allowed us to say goodbye in such a beautiful way.

Tetzlaff and Vogt recorded the Brahms violin sonatas in 2016, and their label has released the recordings on Youtube. Here they are, playing that first violin sonata.

The first movement, vivace ma non troppo (lively but not too much)

 

 The second movement, adagio (slow) 

The third movement--allegro molto moderato (very moderately fast) 

Saturday 19 November 2022

Music I Like, #19, Scheherazade, Op. 35 (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov)

The possessor of an extremely euphonious name, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote extremely euphonious music. Scheherazade is a three-movement orchestral suite based on One Thousand and One Nights; I had the pleasure of learning and performing it when I was a member of the Oxford University Orchestra, in 2009-2010. 

It was one of the best orchestras I've ever played in, and consequently one of the best musical experiences of my life.What I particularly remember is that the OUO woodwind players (that is, the instruments who sit at the middle of the orchestra--flute, clarinet, oboe, English horn, bassoon, etc) were excellent. Student and amateur orchestras will often have a lot of decent string players (enough to drown fumblers like myself out) by virtue of the fact that lots of people learn to play these instruments. (To be fully accurate, I should say that lots of people learn to play the violin; amateur orchestras typically aren't overrun with violists or double bassists.) Fewer people have the opportunity to learn to play woodwind instruments, they are difficult to play well, and orchestral woodwind sections are usually very small. Which is to say that any mistakes of timing or intonation woodwind players make are much, much more exposed than similar sloppiness by string players. Classical composers often write important melodies or harmonies for woodwind instruments, so it really makes a difference when the players are good

There's so much amazing writing for woodwinds in Scheherazade and for the whole orchestra. I love the violin solo in the first movement...the whole piece is just so fun much to hear. It's even more fun to play. When I was in OUO, the viola section sat in the middle of the stage, between the cellos and violins, and in front of the woodwinds. Being a violist in our performance of Scheherazade was like being in the centre of the sea.

Friday 18 November 2022

Music I Like, #18, Let All Mortal Flesh (Anonymous) 

It's not Advent quite yet, but the Christmas lights lining the High Street were turned on this week and are brightening our long, dark evenings. That makes today a good day for a carol.

"Let All Mortal Flesh" has good memories associated with it. I was in a literary fraternity in college and we had a beautiful grand piano in our common room. In the lead-up to the winter break, some of us would get together to sing Christmas carols, including this one.

The original text is Greek, and late antique, and the melody is a late medieval French folk song. The English translation is from the nineteenth century. Together, they make a magical combination.

Music I Like, #17: Oblivion by Astor Piazolla

Astor Piazolla's Histoire du Tango (arranged for piano trio) is a piece I learned and played at the Apple Hill Summer Chamber Music Workshop in the summer of 2007.

Apple Hill is a place that is very, very special to me, in a way that's hard to put into words. Madeline L'Engle, in one of her published journals, describes playing the piano and writing stories in her first studio apartment as part of her deepening. It's hard to say just what exactly she means by that--on the surface of things, it's simply growing up, but also growing up in a way that leads towards curiosity and empathy and love of beautiful things. And Apple Hill was for me a place of deepening. It was where I learned to make music with other people, and music played with other people is always more than music.


Oblivion always brings to mind the following poem.

Special Glasses

I had to send away for them
because they are not available in any store.

They look the same as any sunglasses
with a light tint and silvery frames,
but instead of filtering out the harmful
rays of the sun,

they filter out the harmful sight of you --
you on the approach,
you waiting at my bus stop,
you, face in the evening window.

Every morning I put them on
and step out the side door
whistling a melody of thanks to my nose
and my ears for holding them in place, just so,

singing a song of gratitude
to the lens grinder at his heavy bench
and to the very lenses themselves
because they allow it all to come in, all but you.

How they know the difference
between the green hedges, the stone walls,
and you is beyond me,

yet the schoolbuses flashing in the rain
do come in, as well as the postman waving
and the mother and daughter dogs next door,

and then there is the tea kettle
about to play its chord—
everything sailing right in but you, girl.

Yes, just as the night air passes through the screen,
but not the mosquito,
and as water swirls down the drain,
but not the eggshell,
so the flowering trellis and the moon
pass through my special glasses, but not you.

Let us keep it this way, I say to myself,
as I lay my special glasses on the night table,
pull the chain on the lamp,
and say a prayer—unlike the song—
that I will not see you in my dreams.

PS I'd forgotten until wrote this post but that same summer my sister and I were playing tangos, a delightful and charming group of women were celebrating their fiftieth birthdays at Apple Hill--one of them wrote about her experiences here.

(My sister and I are the twins playing violin and piano with daylilies in our hair--though I don't remember seeing the bat!)

Wednesday 16 November 2022

Songs I Like, #16, Le Gorille by Georges Brassens

Peter S. Beagle is probably best known as a fantasy writer, the author of The Last Unicorn and many other delights. His short story "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" is one of those pieces of writing that makes me think of what the Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler allegedly said after hearing the young Jascha Heifetz play. "Well, gentlemen, shall we all break our fiddles across our knees?" It's an impossibly perfect story.

I read it in, together with the essay, "My Last Heroes" in The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances, an anthology of Beagle's essays and short stories. One of his last heroes is Georges Brassens, and he writes so passionately about about falling love with Brassens' songs that I promptly repaired to Youtube to discover them for myself. The songs accompanied me all through my PhD and I still put them on every so often, in the right mood. In truth, my French is exceptionally bad; I depend on translations to understand the lyrics of the songs. A great resource for appreciating Brassens is a wonderful blog by David Yendley, which offers English translations and commentary on the songs and what they mean.

There are a few songs that I could share in this month--La mauvais herbe, with its abrupt changes in mood; and Les amoreux des bancs publique, because it's sweet (or as sweet as Brassens ever gets). But I'm picking a third song instead: Le Gorille, which was banned on French radio from its first release in 1952 until 1955.

Le Gorille is an obscene song about a lot of things, among them opposition to capital punishment. The contrast between the between the lively, cheerful music and the acid-black humour of the lyrics amuses me greatly.

Tuesday 15 November 2022

Songs I Like, #15: Dialudid by The Mountain Goats

This song contains several of my favourite things:

  • lyrics which are half-sung, half-spoken
  • a minor key
  • use of an orchestral instrument in a non-classical context
    • specifically, a cello
  • rhyme, deliberately broken
  • a story

Gotta love the Mountain Goats.

Monday 14 November 2022

Music I Like, #14, Se vuol ballare, The Marriage of Figaro, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: child prodigy, scatalogical letter-writer, and astonishingly prolific composer. 

There's nothing like the pleasure of watching a Mozart opera and the Marriage of Figaro is such fun. This particular aria is sung by the title character, Figaro, on discovering that his employer, Count Almaviva, plans to trick him and assert this feudal right to sleep with women on his estate. This is a problem, since the woman in the count's sights is Figaro's finance, Susanna. In Se vuol ballare (which translates to "if you want to dance") Figaro sings about his determination to thwart the count's plan.

Operas: long on hyperbolic silliness, not long on realism. People really do sing about being mortally wounded for fifteen minutes before expiring, it's glorious. Or they sing gleeful, bouncy, incredibly catchy tunes while plotting the downfall of their enemies. Like so.

Sunday 13 November 2022

Music I Like, #13, The World is in A Tangle by Jontavious Willis

This song became one of my favourites during the period of the coronavirus pandemic, from early January 2020 to late December 2021, when I was unable to go home and see my family. Jontavious Willis is a multi-instrumental musician and songwriter from Georgia; I first encountered his music on The Blues is Dead? episode of The Bitter Southerner Podcast.

This song makes me so happy. If you can, I urge you to watch the music video too.

And then, if you enjoyed it, go listen to the entire album, Spectacular Class.

PS I've written about both Jontavious Willis and Mississippi John Hurt before in a post about listening to the blues during the pandemic.

Saturday 12 November 2022

Music I Like, #12, You Got to Walk that Lonesome Valley by Mississippi John Hurt

I love sad songs in a major key. It doesn't get much grimmer than the message that everyone dies alone--yet this message is transformed into something hopeful, even joyful, by the quiet beauty Mississippi John Hurt's singing and playing.

It's hard to write about this song. I first encountered it in 2020 and it means a lot to me.

Music I Like, #11, Last Kind Words by Geeshie Wiley

The road to me hearing and loving this song involved the first several months of the pandemic and a Bitter Southerner podcast episode on the blues. Listening to the artists and songs mentioned in the episode led me to Last Kind Words. I can't fully explain why it grabbed me and would not let go--part of it is Wiley's incredible voice and the expressive, rhythmic, and complex guitar accompaniment. The lyrics are part of it too--transcriptions vary but the story haunts.

Wiley, with  guitarist and singer L.V. (Elvie) Thomas, recorded six songs for Paramount Records, in Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1930.

Last Kind Words, in particular, is widely regarded as one of the great classics of early American blues, and a number of blues historians, musicologists, and music critics have written about it. I would recommend the following two pieces to anyone who wants to learn more: 

  • AnneMarie Youell Cordeiro's 2011 MA Thesis Geechie Wiley: an exploration of enigmatic virtuosity; which offers a transcription and analysis of the songs, as well as historical context and information about the recording process.   
  • The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie, a 2014 New York Times Magazine article by Jeremiah John Sullivan, an intriguing account of working with blues historian Robert 'Mack' McCormick and researcher Caroline Love to find out more about the lives and stories of both women.

Thursday 10 November 2022

Music I Like, #10, Scaramouche, Op. 165b by Darius Milhaud

Classical music has a reputation as elitist and inaccessible--and so it can sometimes be. But I also wish that people who felt that classical music isn't for them had the chance to engage with the tremendous variety of classical music that exists: there's such an abundance of genres and instruments. Some music is literally meant to tell stories, to respond to particular events, or evoke particular visual or natural phenomena. Compilations of 'easy listening' classics are a great gateway--and there is so much more to enjoy.

Here is one of the pieces I would share with someone who was curious to learn more about classical music. Scaramouche is a duet for two pianos. The French composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), composed this piece at the request of his piano teacher, who wanted something for her students to play at the 1937 International Dog Show in Paris. (This is one of those facts that raises Many Questions. I'm not able to answer them, but I swear I'm not making this up.)

The piano piece is actually a reworking of incidental music Milhaud and written for two plays, one of which featured characters from the theatrical tradition of commedia dell’arte, a form of European theatre in which the actors, playing stock characters, improvise a show. In the eighteenth century, French playwrights such as Molière started to write out parts for stock characters like Columbine and Pierrot and Harlequin--one of my favourite historical novels, Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche, is centered around this change. As Maureen Buja writes about the character of Scaramouche:

[He] is a stock clown, serving sometimes as the servant and sometimes as the henchman. He usually appeared in black clothing and was often beaten by his master, Harlequin, both for his boasting and his cowardice.

Milhaud's piece seems to take its title from the place where the plays he was writing for were first performed, the Théâtre Scaramouche, but I think the commedia dell'arte character also factors in.

My twin sister and I played piano from the time we were six until when we graduated from college--as pianists of similar age and ability we played a lot of duets. So many duets. Milhaud's Scaramouche was one of them. I have a photo of us performing this piece inside my violin case--it was a joy to learn and a perform together.

Here's a recording by the pianists Martha Argerich and Evgeny Kissin.

Music I Like, #9: The House Carpenter (Mountain Songs, Robert Beaser)

Robert Beaser's Mountain Songs--an arrangement of Appalachian ballads for flute and guitar--is probably my favourite work by a living composer. It was commissioned by Eliot Fisk and Paula Robison, who gave its world premier at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1985. Fisk and Robison recorded the piece a year later, and as a teenager I stole my mother's copy and listened to it over and over again.

One of the things that makes the recording so wonderful is the incredible vocal quality of Robison's performance--her flute sings. I loved what I heard so much that the fortuitous discovery of anthology of Appalachian ballads in my undergraduate university's music library led to me spending a semester break teaching myself to sing as many of the ballads in Mountain Songs as I could. The House Carpenter is the only one I can still sing today.  

Anyway, Robison and Fisk's recording is on Spotify, here. Should you lack access to Spotify, Youtube has a few recordings, too.

Tuesday 8 November 2022

Music I Like, #8: Rare and Precious Chain, by Jethro Tull

One of the mindblowing things about teaching university students in the year of Our Lord 2022 is that many of them are too young to remember a world without social media. Meanwhile, I was a few years younger they are now when Youtube was becoming a Big Thing, and I remember the first time I encountered a fan vid for a TV show. The combination of music and clips from the show was absolutely perfect.

The song was Jethro Tull's 'Rare and Precious Chain' and the TV show was Robin of Sherwood. Such a good show, such an excellent song. Here it is.

 

I should also add: rather unusually for a rock band, Jethro Tull includes a flutist (the flute part is one of key ingredients that make this song so excellent). My mother is a professional flutist and I grew up reading her Flute Talk magazines. One of their issues in the early 2000s had a fabulous profile of the flutist of Jethro Tull, Ian Anderson. He seemed amused and delighted to be speaking about his music and career to a bunch of classical musicians.

NB: I'm trying to make sure that all the recordings I'm sharing are from the artists' official channels or have been licensed to Youtube by their record companies--that way they make money from engagement with videos and ad revenue (also, it respects their copyright rights as creators!) However, I want to share the Robin of Sherwood fanvid that introduced me to this song because I enjoy how the creator of the video has matched lyrics and footage from the show. Here it is.

Monday 7 November 2022

Music I Like, #7, Salut d'amor by Edward Elgar

In her book, Heifetz as I Knew Him, Ayke Agus writers about the great violinist's love of 'itsy-bitsies', short but musically rich pieces that could be played as encores or at the end of concerts. There is a great interview where Agus speaks more about these short pieces and her love of them here.

Edward Elgar's Salut D'Amor is one of my favourite of these. It has a lovely story behind it, too: the composer wrote it as an engagement gift for his wife.

Sunday 6 November 2022

Music I Like, #6: Step by Step by Pete Seeger, arr. John McCutcheon

Being introduced to great music by a friend is one of the true pleasures of life. When I was in high school, our friend Catherine introduced me and my sister to one of her favourite artists, the incredible American folk musician and songwriter John McCutcheon. I left my CDs at home when I moved to UK, and hadn't listened to McCutcheon for years--until the coronavirus pandemic hit and he played a regular concert over Facebook Live. The three of us got together to listen from three time zones and two countries, sharing our delight in what we were hearing by sending each other text messages.

Today is the New York City Marathon, and so this one also comes with a dedication for everyone who had a difficult day in today's hot and humid weather, and most especially to the back of the back runners finishing in the dark. Step by step, you got this!

Saturday 5 November 2022

Music I Like #5, Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better) by Irving Berlin

No lengthy reasons for my love of this one. Some of the songs and storylines from Annie Get Your Gun have aged rather badly, but not this one.

Also, Ethel Merman's voice could bring down the walls of Jericho.

Friday 4 November 2022

Music I Like, #4, Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, K. 478 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Chamber music is a glorious subset of classical music written for small groups of instruments, meant to be played by small groups of friends and family in homes and other intimate spaces. Seeing it performed in a concert hall by professional musicians is one of my favourite things to do. I also adore playing it myself, though I haven't made the opportunity to do so in many years.

There will be more pieces of chamber music to come but let's get this started off with a Mozart piano quartet. The Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, K. 478, is something I first heard as a teenager, when I attended a summer camp called Apple Hill. The camp focuses on bringing together people of a ranges of backgrounds and ages to play music together, on the theory that the sort of listening, openness, and responsiveness one learns through making music with others can be applied to making the world a more just and peaceful place. This piece always brings back memories of being fifteen, sitting in the hayloft of an old barn, legs laced through the railings, listening in spellbound wonder as my fellow campers made their instruments sing to each other.

 

Music I Like #3, All Star by Smash Mouth

Sometime in the early 2000s, I borrowed a CD of the soundtrack for Shrek (2001) from my local public library. I no longer remember how and why this happened--I'm not sure I had even seen the movie itself at that point--but it's how I first heard this song. It makes me laugh.

Thursday 3 November 2022

Music I Like, #2: Passacaglia in G Minor by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber

One of the things I love about classical music is the complexity and beauty of its structure, and the piece I choosing to share today requires some explanations of those structures. The word passacaglia comes from the Spanish words pasa calle, to walk down the street. It first appears in seventeenth century instrumental music as an interlude between dances or songs and often has the form of a set of variations over a sustained bass line called an ostinato.

The Austrian violinist and composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704) is known for the way that his music expanded and explored the possibilities of the violin as a musical instrument. This is especially apparent Biber's fifteen Rosary Sonatas, each of which was written to illustrate a different meditation on the life of Christ or the Virgin Mary. Many of them use a technique called scordatura, in which the violinist tunes the strings of their instrument to non-standard pitches in pursuit of different harmonies and textures. The series of sonatas ends with a sixteenth piece, one of the most famous Baroque passacaglias, and one of my favourite pieces of music.

I learned and played this on the viola, so I am giving you a link to a recording by the violist Wenting Kang.

Tuesday 1 November 2022

Music I Like #1, Sea of No Cares by Great Big Sea

November is National Blog Posting Month! This year, inspire by a wonderful series of posts on John Scalzi's blog Whatever, A Personal History of Music, I'm going to be sharing a song or piece of music that I like each day of the month. Sometimes I'll say something about where I heard the song and why I like it, sometimes I won't.

First up: 'Sea of No Cares', by the Canadian folk rock band Great Big Sea.

This is a song that has been a favourite of mine since, I don't know, 2009? More than ten years, anyway. I first heard it at University and its gentle, lovely melody and message of leaving fear behind have always stuck with me.

Tuesday 18 October 2022

The walking-weaver and the word-writer

I recently read Hana Videen's lovely book The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English. Old English is special to me: it's the second foreign language I studied, the first I learned as an adult, and my first inflected language, a phrase I always think should describe something rather more poetic than it actually does. My teacher, Geoffrey Russom, taught the language with infectious delight and a philologist's deep curiosity about the way a language works. At the end of the semester, possibly inspired by his retirement, our class threw him a party where several students performed a memorable heavy metal rendition of Caedmon's hymn. The experience left me with a great fondness for Old English and it was a pleasure to revisit it. 

As a beginner in the language, I struggled with grammar and vocabulary, puzzling out heroic verse line by line. The great fun of returning to Old English through its words was the way this makes visible the intersections between language and culture. The Old English word for pen, wrīting-feþer, literally translates to a writing-feather (p 64). Of course--what a logical, yet unexpected name for a quill pen. I found myself fascinated by other compound words for ordinary things: gongel-wæfre, the word for a spider literally translates to walking-weaver (173); hrēaðe-mūs, a bat, is an 'adorned mouse' (177-8). 

Ordinary objects and small creatures are not what early medieval English culture is most famous for: one of the major themes of surviving Old English literature is warriors and their deeds, the most well-known of these being the story of the monster-slaying hero Beowulf. The violence of heroic culture is suggested by the language itself: in Old English, the body is the bone-house (bān-hūs) or bone-vessel (bān-fæt) or bone locker (bān-loca), which is also a word for muscles (p 141). There is a specific word, wæl-mist, which is supposed to have covered those who are slain in battle (p 149). It translates literally to slaughter-mist. Our surviving Old English texts where written centuries after the end of the heroic age of legends, but these ideas lingered in their language: a wyrd-writere, which literally translates to word-writer (or more literary, the fate-writer), which we would now call a historian (p. 248). Morþor-hūs, murder house or torment house, is the world used to describe Hell (p. 191). If the word morþor looks familiar, Videen tells us, it is because  of its similarity to the place-name Mordor, a similarity intended by its creator, J.R.R. Tolkein, a noted scholar of Old English.

Cover of The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English
Hana Videen, The Word Hoard: Daily Life in Old English (London, 2021)

Old English was a culture with a rich tradition of storytelling and wordplay. For the people of early medieval England--guests and ghosts could be closely linked. Gyst (guest or stranger) and gāst (ghost or demon) can both be spelled the same way: gæst (p 87). Happy Halloween! The full meaning of some of their wordplay, beautiful in its literal translation, is now lost to time. What, for instance, is a mere-candel? It literally translates as sea candle, and could be just another poetic word for the sun, but scholars don't know for certain (p 151). Nor is the definition of a wulfhēafod-trēow, a wolf's-head tree, entirely clear. The word appears once in an Old English riddle of the tenth century (159-160); for which scholars have proposed various solutions, none of which seem to have been entirely accepted.

Some words I learned from Videen's book are simply lovely. Ūht, predawn, is followed by dæg-rēd (day-red), the word for when the first light of day comes into the sky. To describe the transition from light to darkness, a person might also speak of the dæg-rima (day-rim or day-border), the space between day and night (p 44). From a modern perspective, this seems like an abundance of words for a time of day and type of light I rarely see. But the abundance of words for dawn and its colours suggests the importance of the coming of the light in a world before electricity, and the difference between Old English of rhythms of daily life and mine.

Further Reading 

Hana Videen (2022). 'Why I Hoard Words'. Princeton University Press. [blog] 9 June. https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/why-i-hoard-words [accessed 12 October 2022].
 
The Word Hord grew out of Dr Videen's work sharing an Old English word every day on Twitter (@OEWordhord). For those who don't do social media, she also posts her daily word on her website: https://oldenglishwordhord.com/, where if you have you can also find details of an app to bring the daily delights Old English to your computer or phone. How cool is that!

Saturday 8 October 2022

#AHAReads 2: The Dark Queens by Shelley Puhak

Between June and September, I read three books for my AHA summer reading challenge but posted about only one of them. I have copious notes on the remaining two books and it would be a shame to waste them so let's dive in!

The first challenge I completed was to 

Read a piece of historical fiction (novel, story, poem, play) set in the time or place you study.

which I met by reading Stella Duffy's novel Theodora. As you can see, I appreciate the novel's approach to its time and place (and particular its depiction of late antique Christianity), while being skeptical of some of its character development.

My second challenge was a twofer--by reading Shelley Puhak's The Dark Queensread a history published in the past 2 years AND read a history written by a historian who who works in a day job different from your own.

To set the scene, here is the blurb of the book.

Brunhild was a Visigothic princess, raised to be married off for the sake of alliance-building. Her sister-in-law Fredegund started out as a lowly palace slave. And yet - in sixth-century Merovingian France, where women were excluded from noble succession and royal politics was a blood sport - these two iron-willed strategists reigned over vast realms for decades, changing the face of Europe.The two queens commanded armies, developed taxation policies, established infrastructure and negotiated with emperors and popes, all the time fighting a gruelling forty-year civil war with each other. Yet after Brunhild and Fredegund's deaths, their stories were rewritten, their names consigned to slander and legend. From the tangled primary evidence of Merovingian sources - the works of the chronicler Gregory of Tours and the Latin poet Venantius Fortunatus - award-winning writer Shelley Puhak weaves a gripping and intricate tale, its characters driven by ambition, lust and jealousy to acts of treachery and murderous violence. The Dark Queens resurrects these two women in all their complexity, painting a richly detailed portrait of a shadowy era and dispelling some of the stubbornest myths about female power.

the cover of the dark queens, showing two women wearing crowns and long dresses on a purple background, surrounded by weapons and men on horseback
The cover of the UK edition







As I mentioned in my post introducing my approach to the AHAReads challenge, this book provoked some lively and amused email chatter among my university colleagues, largely due to this overwrought blurb. On the one hand, because Merovingian history is one of my areas of interest and expertise as a scholar, I was thrilled to see a proper popular history of this amazing period being published at last. The Merovingians--who ruled the largest and longest-lasting kingdoms established after the fall of the western Roman Empire--are absolutely fascinating, but scholars have put little effort into making them accessible to wider audiences. To my knowledge, this is the first English-language trade book about the Merovingians ever published. Puhak, a professional writer and poet with an academic background in literature, approaches the sixth century with a fresh perspective and a deep knowledge of the sources.

Opening her book for the first time, the biggest thing I was afraid of was that it would take the common tack that popular histories often do, of emphasising the lack of attention to their subject. Truly, there is little more irksome than some journalist's claim that they are the first to bring to light something that scholars have been studying for decades. There was some discussion of such neglect at the beginning of the book--the author's note begins by emphasising how erased and forgotten Brunhild and Fredegund, the titular 'dark queens' were from history (xii). Puhak describes the Merovingians as obscure--which of course, to everyone other than the tiny number of us who are fascinated by them, they are. I appreciated the way Puhak grounds her exploration of this not just in the usual hyperbolic claim of rescuing people or events from the obscurity of history, but instead in a thoughtful introduction to the way these stories have been used:

This dynasty’s name is associated with secrecy because very little is, or was, known about the Merovingians. They left few traces in part because they adapted so well to the exisiting landscape, like hermit crabs, making their homes in the shells cast aside by Rome. Much in the same way, there are few traces of the queens: the abandoned shells of their biographies have been inhabited by others. Their lived experiences have been set dressing not just for opera leads, but also for fairy-tale villans and folk tale heroines, comic strip and anime characters and even, more recently, Cersei in Game of Thrones. (xiv)

I confess, as someone who isn't a particular fan of Game of Thrones, I did heave a bit of a sigh when this was used to hook the audience at the start of the book, but it's an intelligent choice for engaging readers who are attracted by the blurb's description of medieval politics as a blood sport.

I disagree with a few points of fact or interpretation (show me a historian who says they've read a book, not written by themselves, with which they agree from start to finish, and I'll show you a liar). As these points of difference interest me, I want to go into detail about them.

The biggest contention the book makes that is slipped in casually and never explained or substantiated comes in the opening Dramatis Personae (a clever way to introduce historical figures as characters), where Radegund, a nun, saint, and former queen who is one of the sixth century's most compelling women, is casually described as the unnamed mother of the bastard pretender Gundovald (xix). This seems like a contradiction in terms: Radegund was once married to the Merovingian King Chlothar, from whom Gundovald was alleged to derive his royal ancestry. She never, according to all surviving sources, had children. This is clearly a misprint--elsewhere, Puhak refers to Chlothar's penchant for sexual misbehaviour and describes Gundovald's mother as 'the wife of a mill worker.' (37) Elsewhere, Puhak describes how Radegund ‘had been at court at the time of Gundovald’s birth and had first-hand knowledge of the king’s extramarital dalliances. Radegund, in particular, had kept her husband under surveillance in order to avoid his sexual advances, so her testimony carried great weight’ (181). Indeed, Radegund’s extreme pursuit of a rigorous Christian lifestyle is  convincingly framed as both a shield and a weapon against her husband (36-37). The assertion that Radegund was Gundovald's mother was such a surprise to me that I kept hoping to see evidence for it, but such was not to be.

My second sticking point, like my first, also features Radegund. A central contention of the longest chapter of my book, Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms, is the argument that Radegund, as a woman with considerable authority derived from her position as a former queen and living saint--was the literary patron of a young Italian poet, Venantius Fortunatus, who composed some of the most significant Latin poetry of the sixth century on her orders, and for the purpose of achieving her diplomatic, cultural, and spiritual aims. My conclusion, which draws on the manuscript transmission of these particular poems and work of Latin philologists, is that Radegund did not write these poems herself, but that she was deeply involved in their composition. My principle interest is not Radegund's authorship but her power and authority--and the poems provide ample demonstration of the latter.

For Puhak, the question of authorship is much more important and she disappointingly dismisses the case against Radegund's authorship as typical sexism on the part of historians:

...naturally, the poem’s authorship is still in question, since, clearly, a woman with a spectacular education and a sharp mind, a woman who regularly wrote poems, couldn’t possibly have written this one. Instead, historians have long claimed that it was written by Fortunatus, even though the voice and tone and markedly different from his other work. In recent years some have reconsidered and now fully attribute the poem to Radegund, or at least acknowledge that she must have had significant input in its composition, even if Fortunatus later helped with the form and metre. (41)

This is defended in more detail in the notes (see p 340), where Puhak writes that she draws on her academic background in literature to judge that the difference between the depiction of emotions in this poem and Fortunatus’s other poems is significant even when compared to Fortunatus’ other poems in the voices of women (6.5 and 8.3). This does not fully address the issues raised by the evidence of the Latin vocabulary, with its clear parallels to Fortunatus' other writings or the manuscript evidence, which demonstrates that readers saw the poems as his, not hers, even while they noted the prominence of the poems' evocation of Radgeund's voice. The argument in favour of Radegund as a collaborator and literary patron harmonises extremely well with Puhak's overall thesis about the significance of Merovingian women. Commissioning works of literature was a sign of power and authority--and discussion of Radegund's involvement in the creation of the three Byzantine poems would have added a welcome subtlety to her portrayal of the different kinds of clout Merovingian women could wield.

They are known as the Byzantine poems because of their audience. Radegund commissioned Fortunatus to write three long, elaborate poems-- a description of the destruction of her homeland, a letter to her cousin Artachin, and an extremely elaborate thank you note--as a cornerstone of her strategy in an act of international diplomacy. She was an avid collector of the relics of saints from around the Mediterranean world, and wanted a piece of the cross on which Jesus was crucified for her collection. A piece of this precious relic was held by her world's most powerful empire--Byzantium, which ruled what had been the eastern half of the Roman Empire, a domain covering Anatolia, stretching through Palestine and Syria, and including, tentatively, North Africa and scatted parts of Italy and Spain, reclaimed in bloody and financially ruinous wars in the first decades of the sixth century. 

In this period, religion was never separate from politics, and Fortunatus' poems served to prove that the Merovingians were a force worth reckoning with. The mission required the approval and support of Sigibert and Brunhild, the king and queen of the Merovingian kingdom in which Radegund's monastery was located. Radegund's way in to the Byzantine court was through her family connections--after her future husband, Chlothar, wiped out her family and their kingdom, her cousins who escaped the slaughter took refuge in Constantinople. The Byzantine Empress Sophia (and her husband, the Emperor Justin II), were successfully persuaded to grant a relic of the cross. I was disappointed in Puhak's discussion of the messengers who delivered the relic:

Legates usually handled only serious diplomatic matters; they were not average deliverymen for gifts from one woman to another. While the jeweled Bible was being delivered to Holy Cross Abbey, the legatarii were clearly conducting other business. (43)

The idea that the delivery of the relics was a departure from the legates' usual serious business doesn't make sense. Gifts between a queen and an empress were serious business. Especially if they were spiritually significant relics which served to cement a diplomatic relationship!

the cover of the dark queens, showing two crowned women in long dresses, the queen on the left facing sideways holding a scroll, the facing forward holding a sword
The cover of the US edition

In short, I appreciated, but did not always agree with Puhak's handling of Merovingian sources. Mostly, she avoids the mistake, commonly made by journalists and writers who lack historical training, of ascribing modern morals and motivations to medieval people, whose values and frames of reference are not ours. One area in which this slips a little is her approach to medieval religiosity. For instance, the deeply religious bishop and history Gregory of Tours is described as credulous and naïve. (309) Not words I would use to describe a man who survived and made a highly successful career through decades of volatile Merovingian politics!  Similarly, Gregory’s account of the religious motivations behind civil strife in other parts of the early medieval world is dismissed out of hand ‘Gregory, though, found religion at the heart of everything; he had no contacts or special knowledge of Visigothic Spain.’ (142). It would be more accurate to say that Gregory’s position as a metropolitan bishop (a role which put him in charge of other bishops in his district) gave him unique access to regional and international networks of communication.

While Puhak underestimates ability of the church and its officials to communicate across distances, it sometimes seems that she overestimates these powers when they were in the hands of secular noblemen. I was intrigued but not entirely persuaded by her hypothesis that messengers helped disaffected Merovingian nobles who wanted to exploit the inefficiencies that were routine in ruling and administering a premodern state (56-7). Similarly, I wondered about the assertion that Merovingian nobles launched ‘whisper campaign’ in favour of the bastard pretender Gundovald and against the kings Chilperic and Guntram. (134) How successful would this haven been in a world where communication across distances was difficult and fragmentary for everyone without significant political power and social position?

On a more positive note, I was fascinated by Puhak's creation of figures from the pages of the bishop and historian Gregory of Tours' Histories as characters. Arguably, this is actually closer to Gregory's biased, gossipy, and eminently readable style of describing his contemporaries than the often desperately dull dissection of noblemen like Guntram Boso or Dynamius in academic scholarship (I number myself among the guilty here!) Puhak's style and approach open up other perspectives. Her history-writing, because of its focus on narrative and character, has a much easier time breathing life into the motivations of people of the past. I enjoyed the portraits of the nobleman Mummolus as ambitious (139) and the bishop Edigius as cautious (58-59). I also enjoyed the characterisation of the turncoat nobleman Guntram Boso (173-174). The story of the doomed Merovingian prince Merovech, Brunhild's second husband, is told with drama and accuracy (112). In sum, Puhak's handling of the minor characters of Merovingian history is enjoyable and persuasive.

I was less convinced by the characterisation of Fortunatus. In particular, I wondered at the description of him as ‘increasingly repulsed’ by female bodies and sexually attracted to men (118). To a twenty-first century eye, excerpts from his poems to men are certainly suggestive, but his informal poems to Radegund, and her adopted daughter Agnes have a tone of genuine affection and delight in their company. They are among my favourite poems in his collection and I wish more people knew them. Yet even on a subject I know incredibly well, Puhak still taught me something new. From her notes and bibliography, I learned that several of Fortunatus' poems have been excerpted in anthologies of poems about same-sex desire from the Middle Ages. How did I miss that? The discussion of affection between men in my own book is limited and incomplete without taking this history into account.

This leads me to one of my biggest bugbears in popular discussion of the past--the 'historians claim they were just good friends' trope. It is indisputable that historians of the past and present have ignored and elided evidence of historical queerness. At the same time, applying modern labels and identities to the past is not as simple as it sometimes first appears. Fortunatus' expressions of affection for his male friends may look unquestionably homoerotic to us but would medieval readers have shared our reaction? What frames of reference and terminology did they use to articulate and understand their experiences? Puhak inspires me to reread Fortunatus and think about the queer potential of his work in more detail.

There are a number of other points where Puhak brings a fresh perspective to well-trodden ground. Hers is the first work of scholarship I have read which makes the argument that a third of the Treay of Andelot, a significant diplomatic agreement intended to end the bitter civil wars which plagued the Merovingian kingdoms through their history, focused on 'the affairs of Merovingian women.’ (218) Again, this made me want to reread the sources with new eyes.

I conclude this post without much--any--discussion of Puhak's treatment of Brunhild or Fredegund, the two titular queens, and so perhaps this sounds like a disgruntled account of the book I wanted to read (or write myself), rather than the excellent book that Puhak has written. Let me attempt to fix that. A particular highlight of Puhak's account of both queens is her geographic awareness--her account successfully portrays them as real people in real landscapes (pp 67-68 is an especially good example). She makes a convincing case for the importance of Brunhild and Fredegund, not just as queens, but as powerful rulers, arguing that combined they controlled more territory for a longer period of time than any other early medieval ruler (262). Puhak concludes with a discussion of what she hopes her book might mean for her readers:

As a girl, I gobbled up biographies of female historical figures: activists, writers, and artists, but few political leaders, and even fewer from so deep in the past. I don’t know what it would have meant for me, and for other little girls, to have found Queen Fredegund’s and Queen Brunhild’s stories collected in the books I read. To discover that even in the darkest and most tumultuous of times women could, and did, lead. (305) 
Some of my earliest reading about the past was also biographies of women, where I too found few accounts of women in charge. Puhak has made a wonderful contribution towards filling this gap. I will be buying myself a copy of the Dark Queens. I recommend it as a compelling introduction to the Merovingian world.

Monday 29 August 2022

The Year of the Aubergine

Until I sat down to make this list, I hadn't realised just how many aubergine recipes I had tried in 2022. The wonderful farm from which I get biweekly vegetable deliveries has yet to include aubergines in my vegetable box, but luckily for me a new Asian supermarket opened near campus late last year. They have a beautiful produce section, which includes a rainbow of eggplant in different colours and sizes, including the excellently named graffiti aubergine.

I took this picture to amuse students in my class on ancient graffiti.

During Lent, I tried to keep a vegan or vegetarian diet, which explains the large number of vegan recipes I tried in the first half of the year. Despite this, I have yet to find a vegan cookbook I want to buy--even the ones that claim to be 'easy' are overly fussy or full of ingredients that are hard to find in Lincolnshire. Plus, it seems that many vegan cookbook authors try to sell veganism by focusing on creating taste-and-texture equivalents for recipes based on animal products, and pretending to eat meat never quite works for me. So far, I can always taste the difference, and would rather eat tofu or tempeh or legumes because they taste good as themselves and the recipe that uses them exposes me to a new flavour or technique. My absolute favourite tofu recipe from the list below was the Red-cooked Smoked Tofu, Aubergine and Potato Stew from Asian Green by Ching He Huang--red cooking is a new taste and technique for me, and I loved it.

My public library's cookbook section continues to be a wonderful source of ideas. Although I try not to purchase new cookbooks, I am almost certainly going to add Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang to my collection. Her instructions are very clear, all of the recipes I have tried have been excellent, and they usually make two servings, which is perfect for a solo cook. For the number of recipes of hers I've tried, I ought to have called this post the year of Ching-He Huang.

I hope you have been cooking and eating well this year!

January 2022

  • Peanut, Sesame and Coconut Aubergines from Masala by Malika Basu
  • Greek Pumpkin Pie from World Vegetarian by Madhur Jaffrey

February 2022

  • Yuxiang Aubergine and Shiitake Stir-fry from Asian Green by Ching-He Huang
  • Red-cooked Smoked Tofu, Aubergine and Potato Stew from Asian Green by Ching-He Huang
  • Vertuta (Moldovan Giant Cheese Twist) from Mamushka by Olia Hercules 
  • Brussels Sprout Pottage from Twelve Months of Monastery Soups by Victor-Antoine D'Avila-Latourrette
  • Guitaang Mungo (Mung Beans with Coconut) from Sundays at Moosewood
  • Sticky Hoisin Broccoli  from Asian Green by Ching-He Huang

March 2022

  • Shepherd's Pie from Sundays at Moosewood
  • Veggie Ants Climbing Trees from Asian Green by Ching-He Huang
  • Sweet and Sour Cabbage from World Vegetarian by Madhur Jaffrey 
  • Mother Wolff Soup from Sundays at Moosewood
  • Winter Tabbouleh from Easy Vegan Bible by Katy Beskow
  • Soy, Lime, and Peanut Stiry-Fry Easy Vegan Bible by Katy Beskow

April 2022

  • Teriyaki Tempeh with Broccoli from Asian Green by Ching-He Huang
  • Dry-fried Chicken from Hunan by Y.S. Peng
  • Lentil and Rice Mujaddara from Breaking Bread at Central 

May 2022

  • Miso Asparagus with Mushrooms from Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang
  • Cabbage and Sesame Salad from Bazaar by Sabrina Ghayour
  • Kung Po Tofu from Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang
  • Aubergine in Spicy Peanut Sauce from Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang
  • Fish Fragrant Aubergine from Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang
  • Spicy Soy and Oyster Sauce Tofu from Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang
  • Oyster Sauce Chicken from Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang   

June 2022

  • Sichuan Tofu with Celery and Roasted Peanuts from Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang 
  • Spicy Oyster Sauce Squid with Peppers from Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang
  • Chili Peanut Lamb from from Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang 
  • Spicy Honey Garlic Prawns with Water Chestnuts from Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang
  • Vegetarian Soup Kharcho from Supra by Tiko Tuskadze
  • Three Cup Chicken from Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang   

July 2022

  • Spiced Carrot Soup from Ripe Figs by Yasmin Khan
  • Smoked Mackerel, Shiitake Mushroom, Bamboo and Goji Berry Rice from Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang
  • General Tso's Tofu from  Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang 

August 2022

  • Cardamom Egg Toast from Ripe Figs by Yasmin Khan
  • Veggie Dan Dan Mei from Stir Crazy by Ching-He Huang  
  • Besan ka chilla from Masala by Malika Basu
  • Sabzi Bhaji from Masala by Malika Basu
  • Ajadsandali (Aubergine Stew) from Supra by Tiko Tuskadze
  • Anytime Tea from Mind Food by Lauren Lovatt
  • Harak Osbao (Tagiliatelle with Herbed Lentils) from Ripe Figs by Yasmin Khan