The ‘girls’ refuse to sleep in, reflections on Laocoön, chores and more, and using up ingredients.
I.
Ms. S. and I turned in early Tuesday evening after a long day about town, but it was hard to get a good, solid eight hours of sleep when the cats chose 4:30am as a good time to get up, prance about the bedroom, and generally make noise. Only A was a real nuisance; E is silent by comparison, though both bump into Ms. S.’s bottles of perfume, rattling them and causing a ruckus. A scratches at one of the bedposts, causing no real damage, but instigating noise.
Of course she does this on my side of the bed, and Ms. S. is not disturbed from her sleep.
When I did finally get up, after feeding the girls and returning to bed for a few more hours of slumber, I was in the mood for a more savory breakfast, and so potatoes it was. A comfort food and filling. They’re a wonder I often forget about.
II.
The other night I was re-reading passages from Lessing’s 18th-century masterwork, Laocoön, or the Limits of Painting and Poetry.
Relatively early on Lessing compares the possibilities of painting and poetry — as genres or media — with respect to representations of wonderful beings and events from ‘The Illiad,’ generally giving preference to Homer’s poetry over visual depictions based on the events described. I write about this more elsewhere, but to summarize a few points so I do not forget them:
- It appears for a moment that Lessing is just repeating the naive rationalist critique (applied to drama) that Gottsched championed, a rule-based approach (a “Regelpoetik,” a rules-poetics) — who justified forbidding certain kids of portrayals or plots based upon social norms and common sense notions of what was appropriate or absurd (such banishing the fantastic, limiting the tragic to the nobility and comic to ‘low characters’, etc.) — when he discusses the proper way to portray, say, Athena battling Mars/Ares.
- More interestingly than Gottsched, though, Lessing does not rely blindly on social norms and the like, but makes use of reasoning and aspects of physics (given how strong he was, how strong a Greek hero would be, and then by comparison how strong Athena would have to be, depending on her size).
- But for Lessing here it is less about ‘believability’ (either possibility or probability) and more about how we would perceive and judge. In particular there is the matter of dimishing a Greek deity if she is merely the size and strength of a human; if in a painting she is just portrayed as proportionally larger the majesty and wonder is diminished; and if in throwing rocks/boulders at Mars/Ares the latter is no or cannot be harmed — that is, if the violence is too reduced — then, so Lessing, it would just appear as if large children were tossing clumps of earth back and forth.
- Lessing’s poetics here is “pre-semiotic”: although he talks of signs, it is less about a full-fledged theory of arbitrary signs and “how they work” than it is about specific kinds of representations and representationalism. In particular for him there is the ‘sign’ and there is what is ‘signified,’ what a given word or image refers to; it’s a naive theory, given what comes later, but it’s a start, but his observations about poetry and painting are still insightful, especially with regard to poetry (linguistic representation) being able to suggest — metaphorically — that which cannot be seen, such as using clouds or fog to hide a hero from prying eyes and suggest invisibility, whereas in painting these layers are ‘flattened’ and the poetic/symbolic is lost when clouds and fog are actually portrayed as literal elements of the scene.
But I digress. The point I was making for myself was that I need to remember that Lessing is hinting at the poetic’s ability to suggest the wonderful, majestic, and grand; that through the layer of the ‘invisible’ it leaves things open to suggestion and imagination; and that this has on the one hand to do with Kant’s notion of the sublime (though obliquely) and on the other, in a darker sense, with what we’ve come to call Lovecraftian horror.
III.
Ms. S. went to work; I remained home this Wednesday afternoon and evening, though I tried not to remain idle.
There were dishes to clean, floors to mop, a bathroom to tidy, and carpets to vacuum. It’s the world of the mundane and I vacillate between loving and hating it. Hating it for reminding me of all the more important things I am not doing, not by what it is by what it isn’t (hello, Lessing!); loving it for its calming, repetitive routine, for being, almost, a form of menial and mobile meditation.
Dirt, dust and grime build up slowly; you barely notice them and cannot, in seeing them, precisely remember what the original surfaces were like. But the reverse is not true: you wipe away a layer and reveal the pristine in an instant (metaphorically … it make take elbow grease and minutes of scrubbing …) In its sudden absence rather than its presence its force is felt.
IV.
I prefer to make my own pie crusts. Usually I make two crusts (such as for a top and bottom): 2 cups of flour, 2/3 shortening (divided and added in two stages), 1 tsp salt, and 6-7 Tbsp ice water. The usual method with a fork or pastry cutters is employed, and so on. It never fails me.
But some time ago I purchased some premade refrigerator crusts — perhaps we had coupons — and i used one for … something. The remaining crusts have just languished in the fridge, taking up space and look sad.
I decided to do something about that tonight when I blind-baked on in the oven and did a more or less double batch of my vegan chocolate pudding, this time with some pseudo-espresso (about 1/2 a cup of coffee from my Moka). End result? 2.5 cups of filling … which was a bit much, so the remainder filled a custard cup and is setting up in the fridge. Perhaps it will be dessert. The restulting pie, at eight slices per pie, is only about 166 calories per slice. Not bad.
I hope to host Thanksgiving dinner here again this year, and reading through a cookbook last night I was reminded how much I love plum dumplings, which I first had for my birthday in Budapest all those years ago. They would make a wonderful Thanksgiving treat, don’t you think?
Footnotes/Appendix
For more pie goodness:
- Dark Chocolate Espresso Pudding with White Chocolate Whipped Cream
- In Flora’s Kitchen: Chocolate Espresso Pudding & Whipped Cream
- Chocolate Mocha Pie Recipe
- Triple-Chocolate Pudding Pie with Cappuccino Cream Recipe
Other food:
- Low Fat Vegan Polenta … a good idea? I don’t yet know
- Meatless Mondays: Lentil Fritters
- Chana Dal Recipe
- Hearty Sweet Potato & French Lentil Stew
- French Lentil and Swiss Chard Risotto … um, yes?
- Kitchen Window — Dals: Simple Indian Comfort Food
- 25 Tasty and Cheap Lentil Recipes … a number of good ideas in there, mostly obvious, but seemingly tasty
- Cooking with Cabbage: Ten Cheap Meal Ideas … I have a head of red in the fridge
General cooking:
- ‘Test Kitchen’ Chefs Talk The Science of Savory … a few years too late on a number of things here, like searing meat, but still good material
We can get to ‘Binders of Women’ later …
A number of my undergraduate math texts, including one for an analysis course, had Mir as their source …
- Mir Books (“Books from the Soviet Era”)
Art: I distrust any “what art is all about” statement, and when it comes to giant puppets, I want Bread and Puppet … but this will do for now:
- ‘Beauty is Embarassing’: Giant Puppets, Painted Words, And What Art Is All About … ‘painted words’ recalls Lessing and the pre-Lessing ut pictura poesis
