GRITS FLASH!!! For all you grits fans, here's a LINKto some great recipes, as well as an explanation of the difference between hominy grits and stone ground.
(Vagabonde has pointed out that these recipes are full of typos -- here's ANOTHER LINK to the place the grits came from and some more recipes -- maybe more usable.)
Now, back to the post of the day.
I have this second picture as the 'wallpaper' on my computer screen and every time I see it, I think of dancing figures.
And some lines of poetry start running through my head.
Here they are, in the final stanza of William Butler Yeats' "Among School Children."
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul. Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Another beautiful morning and time to fry up some leftover grits!
I did a post on fried grits last year but I can't resist talking about these grits. These were a gift from Claui's folks and they may be the Platonic ideal of grits. One catch -- you have to cook them forty-five minutes -- not ideal for breakfast.
So I made shrimp and grits for supper -- and when making shrimp and grits, one embellishes and enriches the cooking grits with butter, light cream, and as much cheese as one dares. I used a particularly tasty extra-sharp Vermont white cheddar.
But I'm not here to talk about shrimp and grits. It's the leftover grits I'm here to praise. Poured in a pan and refrigerated overnight, they congeal nicely so that they can be lifted from the pan in tidy squares to be floured, egged, and fried.
Sausage is a nice accompaniment. And I dump in the leftover egg (which contains Tobasco and seasoned salt --Jane's Krazy Salt, to be precise.)
The presentation isn't elegant but, oh my, it's tasty. And in a nod to John's and my Florida Cracker heritage, I've got a bottle of cane syrup on the table.
Our grandparents would have poured syrup over the whole mess -- too sweet for our tastes. But I do save my last bite of grits and douse it with the delicious cane syrup -- a mini-dessert at breakfast.
The cane syrup was a gift from my brother and I am enchanted by the label he put on it: "Claimed to be pure cane syrup squeezed by a man and mule operation in Two Egg, Florida."
The perfect way to start a day!
UPDATE!!! Follow this link for some great recipes and to find out the difference between hominy grits and stone-ground.
UPDATED UPDATE_ (Vagabonde has pointed out that these recipes are full of typos -- here's ANOTHER LINK to the place the grits came from and some more recipes -- maybe more usable.)
Willow, whose elegant Life at Willow Manor is one of my frequent stops on the blogosphere, has tossed a challenge of sorts my way in a series of questions for writers.
And since her answers to the same questions were so intriguing, I thought I'd try them myself. Like Willow, I won't tag anyone -- I'll just say that I'd really like to see how some of you poets/writers might answer.
1) What’s the last thing you wrote? What’s the first thing
you wrote that you still have?
The last thing was a couple of tankas for tomorrow's post -- oh, and another chapter of Under the Skin, my work in progress.
The first thing I wrote was a poem -- "Oh, moon, moon, way up in the sky/ I love you though you have but one eye." I think I was five or six. The first thing I wrote that I still 'have' is an essay published back in high school.
2) Write poetry?
Yes, but not particularly well.
3) Angsty poetry?
Nope, I did that years ago but I'm afraid my life is too happy to inspire much angst. (Should I be worried about that? )
4) Favorite genre of writing?
Literary fiction -- though I write psychological suspense, I aspire to the finer things in life.
5) Most annoying character you’ve ever created?
Hmmm, possibly Trish Trantham, a self-help pop psychologist type in my book Old Wounds. Writing dialogue for her made my teeth hurt.
6) Best plot you’ve ever created?
The Little Sylvie subplot of my first book Signs in the Blood. It was this story that got me a contract with the best editor at Bantam Dell.
7) Coolest plot twist you’ve ever created?
The end of the Little Sylvie story is a humdinger, in my opinion.
8) How often do you get writer’s block?
Somewhere in the middle of the book in progress. I have the beginning; I have the ending; and then there's the muddle in the middle.
9) Write fan fiction?
What's fan fiction? Probably not.
10) Do you type or write by hand?
Thank goodness for the laptop. I sometimes write by hand -- during our recent power outage I was forced to -- but I think much faster than I can write legibly and the resulting scrawl is painful to interpret.
11) Do you save everything you write?
Pretty much. There are whole chapters that were excised from my last book, existing in a half-life somewhere waiting to be stitched into a new book.
12) Do you ever go back to an abandoned idea?
See above.
13) What’s your favorite thing you’ve ever written?
Oh dear -- like asking a mother about her children! My last published book -- In a Dark Season had some fairly lyrical bits, as does my upcoming The Day of Small Things.
14) What’s everyone else’s favorite story you’ve written?
Anecdotal evidence suggests the aforementioned Little Sylvie story-within-a-story. But the last book, In a Dark Season was short-listed for the Anthony Award -- a prestigious mystery award voted on by fans.
15) Ever written romance or angsty teen drama?
Not I. At least, not knowingly.
16) What’s your favorite setting for your characters?
The mountains of North Carolina are my setting and my muse.
17) How many projects are you working on now?
I have a novel due next month. There's an unfinished play calling to me and a couple of short stories awaiting conclusions. That's just writing projects. There are others...
18) Have you ever won an award for your writing?
So far, always a bridesmaid with several nice nominations and short lists, but nothing to put on the mantelpiece.
19) What are your five favorite words?
I'm not sure they're favorites but I do find myself using them a lot: pale, silver, winding, river, and dark.
20) What character have you created that is most like like yourself?
Elizabeth Goodweather, the main character of my series, while younger, slimmer, better-looking and more fool-hardy than myself, certainly shares some DNA.
21) Where do you get your ideas for your characters?
From fiction, history, and life. And from the mish-mash of memory I call my mind.
22) Do you favor happy endings?
Mostly I do -- not a happy ending where everything is just wonderful but an ending with a bit of room for hope. 23) Are you concerned with spelling and grammar as you write?
Yes, indeed.
24) Does music help you write?
Not as such. ( from "Fawltey Towers" --"Shut off that racket!" "That's Brahms, Brahms' Fifth Racket.")
25) Quote something you’ve written. Whatever pops in your head.
"And then the music grabs me and it seems that my legs ain't my own and that the floor is rising and falling beneath my feet -- and it seems that I am a dancing doll, a limberjack, powered by something outside myself. And my legs rise and fall and rise and fall and I smile and smile and smile the painted smile of the limberjack.
Martin Luther King Day -- and I was thinking about a suitable post. I took a look at my last year's post with the conclusion of King's stirring "I Have a Dream" speech and one bit particularly caught my attention.
"I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."
Some of those vicious racists were probably my kin -- my maternal grandparents both grew up in rural Alabama and had family there. And when the Sixties came, with the push for integration, I was confounded to hear the views held by my beloved grandparents.
They weren't vicious racists, but they were racists nonetheless. We talked and argued and I was baffled by their intractability -- as baffled as they were by my opinions.
But I understand some of this a bit better now -- fifty years after the fact.
This little green textbook -- published in Richmond, Virginia in 1899 -- holds the key.
It belonged to my grandmother's brother -- and I can't resist including the picture he drew (his teacher, perhaps?)
But the thing is, as I began looking through this text book, I saw just what my grandparents learned in school -- and what we learn in school is often hard to undo. (Click on the pictures to enlarge and read the words yourself.)
The text -- a history of the United States -- is 423 pages long. Almost half is devoted to the Civil War (battle by battle) and the whole thing is very sympathetic to the South -- from a denunciation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's ill-informed view of slavery to this sweet picture below of the mistress of a plantation reading to the slaves on Sunday.
"The outcry against slavery had made the Southern people study the subject, and they had reached the conclusion that the evils connected with it were less than those of any other system of labor. Hundreds of thousands of African savages had been christianized under its influence. The kindest relations existed between the slaves and their owners. A cruel or neglectful master or mistress was rarely found. The sense of responsibility pressed heavily on the slave-owners, and they generally did the best they could for the physical and religious welfare of the slaves. The bondage in which the negroes were held was not thought a wrong to them because they were better off than any other menial class in the world."
Oh, dear. I read this and am outraged. Over a hundred years ago, young Claude Wright (and probably my grand mother and grandfather as well) read it and believed it.
Never mind that his family had not been slave owners (only a small proportion of Southerners were.)
The glorification of the Noble South is the sub text that runs through these pages.
"Women of every degree shared the enthusiasm, and courageously, though sadly, sent their loved ones to the army."
The ruined plantation house . . . Reconstruction . . . Oppression and Tyranny . . . the Ku Klux Klan . . . it's all here in this textbook.
A text book for racists.
It reminds me of the song from "South Pacific"
You've got to be taught To hate and fear, You've got to be taught From year to year, It's got to be drummed In your dear little ear You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made, And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade, You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught before it's too late, Before you are six or seven or eight, To hate all the people your relatives hate, You've got to be carefully taught!
If you can find 15 minutes somewhere in that time frame to watch and keep track of the birdies outside your window, you can play too. (If you live in the USA or Canada, that is.) Put it on your calendar!
Crows, Red-Bellied Woodpeckers, Cardinals, Roufous-Sided Towhees, Blue Jays . . . they're all waiting for someone to add them to the list.
Check out the site for lots of interesting bird info and some wonderful bird photography. (All my pictures today were taken through not-so-clear windows, alas!)
As the temperatures soared into the forties and I drove toward Asheville, I saw any number of frozen waterfalls and stalactite-like ice formations on the rocks of the roadside. But then I spotted this beauty and had to stop and get a picture.
I'm guessing it was over twenty feet tall.
As I was returning, in the western sky I spotted a sun dog to the right of the sun and I had to pull off and try to capture it. Further on, where there was an unobstructed view, I could see sun dogs on either side of the sun -- but couldn't capture them and the sun on one shot.
Sun dogs are reflections on one or both sides of the sun, always at the same distance as the sun from the horizon. The ones I saw today were fairly vague -- click on the link for pictures that make it look as it there were three suns in the sky.
Yesterday Herself (my redoubtable editor) sent me preliminary cover art for the Miss Birdie book, The Day of Small Things!
I've been wondering what they would come up with as this book isn't part of the Elizabeth series -- and also because Jamie Warren Youll, the talented woman responsible for my previous covers, is no longer with Random House. Jamie always read (and said she enjoyed) the books before designing the cover and I think it showed.
But I was delighted with what Herself sent . . . as was my agent. It's a striking image -- a photo showing a young girl in a white old-fashioned dress, balancing barefoot atop a rail fence and looking at a misty pasture and deep woods beyond. You don't see her face but her long dark hair tumbles down her back.
As I said I loved it immediately. There was just one little problem. In the Birdie book, the young Birdie has pale blond hair -- moony . . . silvery-gold -- were two of the ways I'd described it.
But this cover was so compelling . . .
I immediately emailed Herself, pointing out the problem and offering to change the young Birdie to a brunette.
Herself responded by asking Art (a department, I believe, not a guy) if the image could be manipulated to make the hair blond.
But not too blond, I cautioned -- not golden blond!
Herself responded that they'd do the best they could but I might have to accept a compromise if I didn't want the figure on the cover to look like an old woman with long white hair.
Meanwhile I was skimming through my copy of the manuscript, trying to see just how much would have to be changed if Birdie went dark-haired. About six or seven references were all I found -- not bad.
I had a feeling that a blond girl on the cover wouldn't have near the impact that the dark-haired one had, that she wouldn't stand out against the muted background -- but I was certainly interested to see what Art came up with.
A few hours later Art emailed Herself to say that the change to blond looked too manipulated and Herself asked if I was willing to bring the text in line with the picture.
Out went the silvery-gold hair, in came a shining dark waterfall; out went pale, in came dark.
Herself said that this was the first time she'd asked an author to change the text to fit the art but she thought that it was worth it.
And so do I.
Of course I wanted to show you the cover but for various legal reasons I'm not allowed to just yet. But I really think it's a goodie.
