Fools Crow

Upon the recommendation of—no, at the imperative of—Charlotte at LivingSmall, I picked up the book Fools Crow at the library before leaving on a quick trip. I had plenty of time whilst waiting in airports and on airplanes almost to finish the book. It is a wonderfully descriptive story of the Northern Plains Indians towards the end of the nineteenth century.

The author, James Welch, died recently. Charlotte linked to an article about his life and writings. I was struck by a quote from one of his neighbors:

His presence was a lovely thing.

Canadian homestead

Yes, I'm taking a break, but I couldn't resist a final (?) post from dervala dot net (via Reading and Writing). Dervala writes about a wealthy, well-educated family who came to live in the Canadian wilderness in the 1920s. She begins her post with a quote:

'Few men had so rational a grip on life as he; few women knew its circle of vicissitudes as she. For three days I lived with Adam toiling and Eve spinning, talking of the poetry of Meredith and getting their reactions on Robert Frost. Enthusiasm, joy, ambition, suffused the hours. Whatever of high things their breeding had begotten, their life had accentuated, and the bush had not broken them to laziness or low ends. They, who enjoyed music, who kept posted on politics, and were determined to see their sons wisely educated, were no malingerers of society. They had decided to know life first-hand, that is all; not to enjoy it vicariously as from a grandstand but to live it wholly, and the fundamentals first.'

From The Lake Superior Country by T. Morris Longstreth (1924) [emphasis mine—jbb]

Dervala then describes in detail the life of a frontier woman:

Catherine was more stout-hearted pioneer than simpering debutante. She quickly learned to feed eight hungry men from a lean-to kitchen with shelves made from wooden packing cases. Her reminiscences still carry the tang of a city girl's shock. She had to knead 36 loaves of bread a week, and split the wood to bake it in the oven too small to hold more than two loaves at a time. She lists with wonder the breakfasts these woodsmen required every single day: eggs, bacon, pancakes, porridge, as much toast as she could feed them, syrup, and fruit. Then there was butter to be churned, water to be fetched from the lake, and boys to be schooled. Sometimes she was so tired she would set her alarm clock for a twenty-minute nap while the bread rose. Eventually Fanny the Finnish cook was hired, and was so indispensable that Catherine chose to overlook her tendency to get very drunk on beer and run off with strange men on the Algoma Central Railway.

Taking a break

Taking a break; be back next week.

Shakespeare on CD

All of Shakespeare's plays—unabridged—have been recorded and are now available for purchase.

From today's LA Times calendar section: "To the Last Syllable" by David Gritten.

In this mammoth undertaking, all of Shakespeare's plays have been produced on CDs in their entirety, without a single word of the Bard's being cut. The plays are now available as a boxed set; it is the first time in audio publishing history that one creative team has achieved such a gargantuan task.

How gargantuan? The set consists of 98 CDs, with a total playing time of almost 102 hours. All of the plays were recorded in studios in London, and almost 400 British actors — many of them members of the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Royal National Theatre — were employed. . . .

Listening to a selection of the plays, one is struck by the clarity of the recording and the precise, thoughtful delivery of Shakespeare's verse. Brill has gone to great lengths to encourage his casts to bring out the meaning of the Bard's words. It's also notable that even actors in minor roles are hugely competent.

Another remarkable aspect of these recordings is the music. Brill was not the only talent who stayed around for all the plays; so did composer Dominique Le Gendre, Trinidadian-born, classically trained and a musicologist who studied at conservatories in Paris.

Growing up at boarding school, we listened to some of the older recordings of Shakespeare, as well as all sorts of other records. Wednesday night was "record night" when we gathered in the sitting room of the dorm parents in our pajamas and dressing gowns and listened to a recorded story.

Cleaning hints

I just turned on the TV to KCET and am watching a program I've never heard of: Haley's Hints. It's pledge drive time so I don't think it's a regular TV show, but here's the website: Haley's Hints. He has a lot of great ideas, e.g., cream of tartar and vinegar to clean stoves; Epsom salts to help set the dye in cloth. And I can hear the phones ringing as people call in to pledge to support public TV.

Commenting

After nearly two years posting here, I finally decided to upgrade the site a bit and add comments. I'd been looking around for a basic commenting system that was still accepting sign-ups. I noticed the HaloScan button on the Pioneer Woman site and thought I'd try it out.

Please bear with me as I try to figure this thing out. My coding "skills" have not advanced much in two years!

What I am going to do this morning

Having just finished my coffee and toast, quickly scanned a few blogs, and deleted all the "Received" notices from two e-mails I sent out at work yesterday, I am now going to clear my desk of its fecund piles of papers and books.

It recently struck me that the reason it's so easy to sit down and spend hours on the internet is that my computer monitor screen is a vertical surface, and, thus, I cannot pile anything on it, obstructing my "workspace." (Which doesn't mean I can't pile things on top of the monitor, but those things don't clutter my view of the screen.)