culture

Seasoning


"One should never make a show of having a deep knowledge of any subject. Well-bred people do not talk in a superior way even about things they have a good knowledge of. It is people who come from the country who offer opinions unasked, as though versed in all manner of accomplishments. Of course some among them do have a really enviable knowledge, and it is their air of self-conceit that is so stupid. It is a fine thing when a man who thoroughly understands a subject is unwilling to open his mouth, and only speaks when he is questioned.

...there must be no talk of moods in things they must need accomplish. They must be free from this care and that they must not let their feet linger. It does not turn to summer after spring has closed, nor does the fall come when the summer ends. The spring ahead of time puts on a summer air, already in the summer the fall is abroad, and soon the fall grows cold. In the tenth month comes a brief space of spring weather. Grass grows green, plum blossoms bud. So with the falling of leaves from the trees. It is not that the trees bud, once the leaves have fallen, but that because they are budding from beneath, the leaves, unable to withstand the strain, therefore must fall. An onward-urging influence is at work within, so that stage presses on stage with exceeding haste."

Yoshida Kenko, 14th century


Pizza Sukkah


Yesterday, I took the bus down to Avenue J, on my way to a bus to the Rockaways. As I strolled down the avenue, I noticed many Orthodox Jewish men selling the sprigs of a plant. I decided to ask what kind of plant it came from. It looked a bit like Oleander to me, sensible to my mind knowing that it is native to the middle east and Mediterranean. But no, the man told me he thought it was willow. He was a little suspicious of this camera wielding gentile, and I was asked to disclose my purposes!

I was well aware that it was the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, and everyone who has lived near or in Orthodox neighborhoods is aware of the temporary huts or booths that sprout up at this time of year. Sukkah, the singular, means booth. Sukkot, the plural, is a holiday of pilgrimage and feasting, coming as it does at the end of the agricultural season. The willows belong to a group called the Four Species. Read those linked Wikipedia articles so I don't have to write about it here, pretending as if I know what I'm talking about.

My purpose on Avenue J was a pilgrimage of sorts, however secular. I certainly had feasting on my mind, and was prepared to enter the ramshackle booth of Di Fara pizza to do so. Much has been written and said about this pizza and pizza in NYC in general. I will not get into it. I was happy to arrive just after opening; there were seats and no line. His prices have risen again, to $5 a slice. No one should pay that for a slice of pizza, but here, every so often, yes. I ordered a slice of round (regular) and square (Sicilian), my usual no matter where I go. The round was regular Di Fara and good. The square, which I had to wait for, was phenomenal. The sauce was meaty, rich, and anyone who knows pizza knows the sauce on Sicilian must be different from the round. Two guys came in, ordered a whole square, uncorked two bottles of wine, and feasted.

I hesitate to order pies and bring them home, they need to be eaten right out of the oven. But the place is a dump, which is okay by me. Dom De Marco has always understood that renovation can destroy the work. Kahlil Gibran wrote that work is love made visible. I go to see this man work as much as for his pizza. Its a privilege to see and enjoy his work, his love.

My grandfather, Carmelo Di Maio, who I didn't know as well as I could have, making pizza 40 years ago.

After my pizza feast, I ran across the street to get some Challah. Then to the bus to the Rockaways. The only people on the beach were Orthodox families celebrating Sukkot with an outing -allowed on this holy day because it does not belong to the category of work. May I assume that this work is work not of love, but distaste?




The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round...


We don’t really know, it’s not
easy to say
What happens tomorrow, what happens today
The wheel of fortune is a crazy thing
And it can make you cry and it can make you sing.


Recently finished Ordeal by Hunger by George Stewart, the harrowing tale of the fate of the Donner Party. I recently was speaking about it with NPS ranger Emily and another woman from San Francisco. All of us had read the book at some stage in our lives. The woman (excuse me as I do not remember her name, lets call her Ruth), Ruth, was in her late sixties and she said the story was all the rage when she was a kid. Emily is in her mid-twenties and she read it in high school. Having just finished the book, I began asking around, "have you heard of the Donner Party?" Every person I asked said in return, "Jeffery Dahmer?" Which is funny, because he is not it at all, yet Dahmer touches on the tabu at the heart of the story. Anyhow, Ruth says she thinks it's odd that there is a diner at Donner Pass and every year her family would eat there on their way to Idaho. It doesn't escape Ruth or I that our current Interstate 80 occupies much of the same route as the Donner Party trail. Interstate 80 cuts through the Wasatch Mountains, a path the Donner Party cut with brute force and determination. The exact same path that, one year later, Mormon pilgrims would follow to Salt Lake, Utah. Ranger Emily mentions that the artist Mahonri Young had included a depiction of the Donner Party in his most famous work, This Is The Place monument, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Young lived on Weir Farm here in Connecticut because he married Dorothy Weir, daughter of artist J.A. Weir -the namesake of this National Historic Site. Mahonri Young just happened to be the grandson of Brigham Young, the man who lead the Mormon pioneers to Salt Lake and proclaimed that this was the right place for their settlement in summer of 1847, just months after the close of the Donner Party tragedy.

So there the circles closes. One other thought about 1846-47: it was in this exact period of time that Henry David Thoreau was having his nature experience on the opposite coast, an experience of self-proclaimed self-sufficiency while under the spell of the morning star. Now there's a fictional work I'd like to see: Thoreau, aspiring Emersonian writer, journal-keeper, and member of the Donner Party.



Gross Indifference to the Suffering of Others

I'm one full week into my stay at Weir Farm. I've not left the site since arriving. I brought my food with me. I've used enough to think am I using too much. You think about food differently when there isn't a store around the corner. And what am I reading while pretending I can't get food from town? Reading Ordeal by Hunger by George R. Stewart. Written in 1936 by a man obviously enthralled with 1846, it is full of all the bigotry of its day. Yet still it rapidly reads like a transcription of a campfire story told by a veteran story-teller. Its a gripping tragedy, gruesome in a way that is unfathomable. I've spent a good amount of time traveling the western states, and its first hundred pages seem all too possible to me. A party of farmers and merchants in a mountain and desert landscape follow a shady salesman's new route to the Sierra Nevada. Lost time saved none, and imagine the feeling of being trapped between a snow bound route over the mountains and the desert before it through all of winter. Food low, animals starving, most possessions dumped. Men, women, and children stuck on a trail with no way of surviving on their own. Meanwhile, the terribly depicted tribes are all around, and there is no communication, no ability to find out how they survive the climate. The party is trapped by their own relationship to the world. As Stewart ominously puts it "the trap has clicked behind them."