Kinds of Poetry - Tolkien vs. Jackson

Jackson apparently thinks the characters Tolkien gives us are too simply good to be fully believable to modern audiences, and so he feels obligated to "complicate" them, to give them internal conflicts other than the ones they actually have, in the hopes that we will better be able to relate to them.

I'm quoting from this article in the Nov/Dec 2013 Touchstone Magazine, in which Donald T. Williams explains how literature, while delighting us with its art, is more powerful than history or philosophy to nurture our moral vision, or to corrupt us with false images.

With the help of quotes from Sir Philip Sidney, who wrote Apology for Poetry in the sixteenth century, he shows how "Tolkien was very consciously and deliberately following the literary tradition that flows down to us from Sidney through Dr. Johnson and C. S. Lewis."

Peter Jackson the filmmaker seems to be flowing in a different stream. But he is an artist, and of course will impart his own soul to his work. I wouldn't expect him to give us The Rings, because that has already been done, and he is not J.R.R. Tolkien. But it is unfortunate that he has changed things to the degree and in the directions he has. Williams points out specific ways in which the characters who inspired us in the books disappoint us in the movies, and makes these general remarks:

By this process of negative moral transformation, in other words, we reach the place where beloved characters are unrecognizable to Tolkien's fans, and those fans feel betrayed. And they are right to feel so, though mostly they do not understand why. It is because the difference between the books and the movies is not just one of necessary adaptation to a different medium. It is that the author consciously followed the Sidneyan tradition while the adaptor is either ignorant of it or doesn't understand it or has rejected it.

Read the whole article here.

Nativity Cake

When our first two children were very little, I wanted to establish some God-honoring traditions for Christmastime. I didn't think that the traditions of our parents were focused enough on the Nativity of Christ.

As an example, no one in our Protestant circles, even we who believed in the reality of the Christmas story, went to church on Christmas Day, and we missed a big opportunity to teach our children, and to know God, by praxis. It's too bad, however it happened, that the tradition of not worshiping and communing on Christmas got started.

In any case, lacking a Christmas Day church tradition, we were on our own. I wanted the children to have more than a Christmas tree and presents, and one thing I contrived was a birthday cake for Jesus. It should be some special kind of cake that we would never eat any other time of year.

I found a recipe in Sunset Magazine for Dried Fruit Loaves, and as I scanned the ingredients list I reasoned, from my young-marrieds-on-a-shoestring perspective, that only Christmas extravagance would make me willing to invest in that amount of dried fruit and nuts.

So I've been adapting it and baking it without fail for about 38 years. Most years I made four times the original recipe and gave away various sizes of loaves. There is very little to it besides the fruit and nuts, and everyone still loves to slice a thin piece or two for a wholesome snack, all through the Twelve Days of Christmas or however long the bread lasts.

this week's loaves

We don't usually sing "Happy Birthday" to Jesus anymore. All those children grew up and are teaching their own children about Christ's Incarnation, and I'm not often with them to light a candle on the cake. But some of us now have the joyous tradition of going to church on Christmas Day.

I was just remarking to my husband that I could even stop including the bread in my baking projects...but it's not difficult to make, so I don't know why I even consider that. I guess because it's more fun to try new things.

When I searched online for this recipe, I found something a bit different from Sunset under the name Western Dried Fruits Cake. It contains raisins, which I think too common for the occasion, and judging from the only picture I saw, and the recipe ingredients, mine is much better all around.

One of my friends makes this bread; she has eaten mine and told me hers is the same, and she calls it California Fruitcake. When I search with that term I come up with something much more like our favorite, also with credit given to Sunset: California Fruitcake.

The last two years I have decreased the amount of my recipe, for some reason to one-third of the quadruple-batch, but for your convenience I will post here something close to the original version. And how about a Christmasy name as well:

California Nativity Cake

2 cups flour (I've used part whole-wheat)
1 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 cups lightly packed dried fruit. I like to use half dried apples, and the remainder dried apricots and dates, sometimes with some pears or figs in the mix. Cut the larger pieces of fruit into 1" pieces.
3 cups whole nuts. Usually our cake is heavy on the almonds, lately with some pecans as well.
5 eggs, lightly beaten
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1/4 cup water

Prepare six mini loaf pans or fewer larger pans by greasing and lining with waxed paper or parchment paper. Stir the dry ingredients together and mix about 1/2 cup of this mixture with the fruit and nuts. While mixing I make sure to stuff an almond into each date. Stir the eggs, vanilla, and water together and blend with the flour mixture, then add the fruit and nuts.

Spoon into the prepared pans, and if you want to minimize the rockiness of the terrain of the finished loaves' tops, use your spoon to push pointy edges of apple down into the sticky dough. Bake at 325 degrees for 50 to 75 minutes depending on the size of pan, or until well browned. I usually have to put some foil over the top of large loaves after an hour.

Let cool on a rack for about 10 minutes before turning out on to racks. Pull off the paper and let cool thoroughly. Wrap loaves airtight and refrigerate or freeze for at least a few days before serving. Aged loaves can be cut in thin slices.

our youngest celebrating at Grandma's house 20 years ago

What you put in the dough you'll find in the cake.

So much talk about education...It's a theme of many Internet articles that have come my way in the last couple of weeks, and I'm trying to pull them together here. If education is about the forming of a person, about what children learn and about how they are prepared for whatever we consider to be a successful life, then it's not surprising that I see nearly every little thing in the world as related.

"What you put in the dough you'll find in the cake," is a proverb that speaks to me metaphorically of the growth of a person. A real cake is also affected by things you don't consciously add to the mix, such as the temperature at which it's baked, and the moisture of the air, and whether you can prevent someone from opening the oven door at the wrong moment. Human beings are much more complicated than cakes, and only God knows everything about us and what influences and ingredients through the years are making us who we are. Even so, He has given us a lot of wisdom and common sense about how to nurture our young and facilitate healthy growth.

One part of our education is what we learn in school. Though only a smaller fraction of that part is formed by the curriculum and the teachers' efforts, it's usually what people mean when they talk about the subject. Lately it's the Common Core goals of our nation's Department of Education that are in the news. Janet wrote on the subject and how the goals might be contrasted with some words from Wendell Berry on what education is.

One of her concerns stems from the fact that private businessmen are supplying a lot of funding and ideas to the program. She writes, "The fact that millionaires, rather than respected educators, are developing the educational plan for the next generation feeds my cynical belief that it’s all about creating good consumers, dependent on a host of intermediaries between themselves and everything they want."

(That cake-baking metaphor could apply to a blog post, and in case you haven't noticed, this one is turning into a sort of lumpy Dump Cake, and you're not halfway through. If you've already had enough of my unique concoction, I invite you to eat the rest later, or skip it entirely. I don't want you to get sick.)

Another article I ran across treats the Orwellian tendencies of the Dept. of Education, which wants to create a huge database using statistics about our children and their test scores and jobs from birth on into the future. This discussion may seem tangential -- but don't you think that children learn something a bit skewed about what it means to be a person, when their privacy is diminished and their labors and accomplishments are reduced to measurable facts that will fit on charts and graphs in the service of The State?

And that's just one questionable ingredient in the cake I am envisioning. So many things our children learn may as well be molecules in the air they breathe, they are so unconsciously incorporated into their philosophical selves. Since most children spend much of their time at school, many of these unhealthy ingredients first enter the dough during those hours, as ideas, assumptions, or practices. Everything that goes in contributes to what they come to think of -- or to live -- as normal.

The perspective of this man (who has very good sense considering his youth) on relationships, specifically how "the fullness of another person’s identity is a secret between them and God," fits in here. That's a truth that The State does not take into consideration or encourage anyone to explore personally. But what sort of education would leave out God? It's from Him we get wisdom and understanding.

If your children must go to a public school, and you believe that God is real, then you better explain to them that every school day they are going into enemy territory; isn't it the work of our enemy the devil to make us think that we can leave God out of everything for several hours of the day and call it "neutral"? Warn them that much of the "food" that will be offered them during the school day is poison. Or if at all possible, follow the example of the writer of my next linked article.

Amanda writes at A Chime of Hearts about education, but she doesn't use the word much. In this particular post she tells about the learning she and her brother did in their loving home, learning which to some people might sound a bit haphazard or incomplete, but which consisted of a spiritually and academically rich lifestyle. This education formed an understanding of the world that Amanda now passes on to her own family and even to the blogging world. She has a wisdom beyond her years and I'm personally thankful to her parents for providing the atmosphere and nurturing that contributed to it.

What got me started on this whole topic was Anna (also a former homeschooler and an excellent example of what can happen when God gives a child to a pair of loving and thinking parents), who recommended this article by Meghan Cox Gurdon in Hillsdale College's Imprimus. It is a revisiting of the topic over which Gurdon drew sharp criticism and Twitter-flooding in 2011, with her article "Darkness Too Visible."

Gurdon introduces this recent piece: "...my article discussed the increasingly dark current that runs through books classified as YA, for Young Adult -- books aimed at readers between 12 and 18 years of age -- a subset that has, in the four decades since Young Adult became a distinct category in fiction, become increasingly lurid, grotesque, profane, sexual, and ugly."

For specifics, and for the many specific reasons this kind of reading material is hurting our children, please read the article. The sort of books she writes about I'd like to gather by the dozens off the library shelves and throw into a big bonfire! They seem always to be paperbacks, and would make a good hot blaze.

May the Lord have mercy on our young people -- they are under attack by forces that would like to cripple their souls, turning what might be sweet cakes into bitter. I have to keep reminding myself (mixing metaphors) that God can restore what locusts eat (Joel Ch. 2), but it's painful to watch the destruction.

Children learn other untruths about the world in many of the movies made just for them, as another of Anna's links points out, this one to an article in The Atlantic. Such as: 1) Just believe in yourself and you can accomplish anything -- no limits.  2) Your parents are too old and dull to realize this so it's o.k. to defy their authority, and 3) You have a right to skip over the lower rungs of the ladder of success (and the people who are toiling there) and go quickly to the top, because you were made for greatness.

I'm not disappointed that I've missed all of the film examples of what is called the "magic-feather" syndrome: "Examples from the past decade abound: a fat panda hopes to become a Kung Fu master (Kung Fu Panda); a sewer-dwelling rat dreams of becoming a French chef (Ratatouille); an 8-bit villain yearns to be a video-game hero (Wreck-It Ralph); an unscary monster pursues a career as a top-notch scarer (Monsters University). In the past month alone, two films with identical, paint-by-numbers plots--Turbo and Planes--have been released by separate studios, underlining the extent to which the magic-feather syndrome has infiltrated children's entertainment."

I'm more familiar with Charlie Brown, whom the same Atlantic writer Luke Epplin points out is a fictional character more likely to keep us in touch with the real world. I've so often heard, "It's only a story!" or "It's just a movie, for heaven's sake." Yes, for Heaven's sake, realize that the vicarious experience we get from books and movies is a very potent type of experience.

In just the last month I've heard many stories from teachers and administrators around the nation, of the mixed-up lessons being taught to students by the school policies that stem from something other than a good educational philosophy. I'm not smart enough to articulate all the lessons that I intuit are being learned. They are not always acknowledged as part of the curriculum to be taught, and sometimes the "lesson plans" can only be extrapolated from a kind of Doublespeak. Certain behaviors and attitudes may be subtly or clearly encouraged or discouraged, and too often the treatment of the student is insulting or disrespectful of him as a person made in the image of God.

For example, today I heard from the administrator of a nearby high school that the school is legally responsible for any criminal behavior of the student not only while the student is on campus, but also after school until he arrives home. Theoretically, because "it's all about liability," if at a non-school dance on Saturday night a student gets in a fight, and the altercation can be construed to have begun at school the day before, the school can be held responsible for any damages. A truth that is fundamental to any education, that each person is responsible for his own behavior, is being turned on its head.

I have more than one blogger to thank for a link to this article pointing out that in schools even reading is actually discouraged, no matter what the posters and slogans might lead you to believe. Why should that surprise me? Reading is a wonderfully private encounter with whole worlds that you can explore -- and yes, where you can have life-changing experiences.

The word privacy comes up as part of the debate about what our children experience in the restrooms at school, and we have a new law in California about that. The bigger question I ask is, what are they learning about life and God in this strange world where it is widely believed that your sex is only a matter of your feelings about yourself at a given moment in time, a kind of consumer's choice that each of us autonomously determines? In the past everyone knew who was a boy and who was a girl, and that there was a restroom designated for each group. If you asked a child of my era, "Why are you a girl?" (or "Are you a girl?") she would find it nonsensical, but she might say, "I just am!" or if pressed, perhaps, "God made me a girl."

Now, in California, a boy student need only say that he feels rather more like a girl, or a girl might express that she really, deep down, is a boy, and he/she can use whichever restroom she/he wants. That's what they are teaching them here. (Many people don't like it and are working on a fix.)

My last link should not be heavy or discouraging, because it's about play. Unfortunately it's about the deficit of play in the lives of many 21st-century children. Their hours and days are overly managed to the point where even activities that used to be play have become work. When some of us were discussing this problem I found out that at the school that one of my grandsons attends, there is a rule against running on the playground. Every day at recess the children are lined up so that this rule can be explained to them once more.

Having raised a couple of boys myself, and having eight grandsons -- and being married to a boy! -- I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at this idiocy. It's insane, and yet, it's an inhumanity of sorts that these children have had to receive in a daily lecture and get used to, to learn and accept as normal.

Again, it must be all about liability. And they may run on the soccer field, so perhaps it isn't as bad as it sounds? Except that it is! It's hard enough that little boys should have to sit at desks for an hour or two at a time, but then, when they go out for recess, what do they get? It sounds like the prison yard. I'm sorry, but this last story has put me over the edge and is the cause of my cake (blog) also overrunning the pan very messily.

At least I do know that all my grandchildren have excellent parents who have always provided for plenty of play time, so in their case I don't worry. I just fume, and grieve for the children of our society who have so much to put up with. I pasted in pictures of my children and grandchildren playing, to cheer us all up.

I lie down in a pasture.

As my last post was contrary to my blogging principles, describing something Ugly, I now feel it urgent to put up Something I Especially Like.

Last night was one of those when I lie awake for hours in the middle of the time when I want very much to be asleep. (This morning I realized the problem stemmed from drinking very strong tea at an afternoon wedding.) Sometimes while in this predicament I manage to stop grumbling and to pray instead, and my favorite thing to pray is the 23rd Psalm.

20 to 25 years ago and even earlier I used to have the children copy out and learn a poem every month, and I ran across some of their work yesterday. I get sentimental looking at the handwriting and printing, knowing right away what poem was copied by whom. But I won't reveal that information. I'll just say for the record that this psalm was printed by a boy! (Click on the picture if you want a more readable version.)

Limón in the Cazuela

 

The Cazuela That the Farm Maiden Stirred by Samantha R. Vamos is a delightful Hispanic incarnation of The House that Jack Built. It tells the story of a rice pudding from the farm to the table. The reader is introduced to two new words, first in English, every time he turns the page. From then on, those key words are only written in Spanish. 

Before I opened the book, Mr. Glad was enjoying it and noticed that the word for lime was much like our lemon. That made me wonder what the word for lemon is.

A New World Spanish-English Dictionary sits on the reference shelf here as a leftover from the days when four of our children in turn studied Spanish. Even though their father and I never did study that language that is so useful, almost essential, in California, we've lived here our whole lives and have picked up some vocabulary, sometimes by consulting this word book, as I did on this occasion.

The hen helps by grating the limón

I don't know why, but my dictionary is wrong about limón. It says that it means lemon, and that if you want to talk about a lime you say lima. I found it hard to believe that this book written by a woman with a Hispanic name, illustrated by a man with a Hispanic name, with the intent of teaching 21 words, would get any wrong.

But I have a friend who is married to a Mexican man and teaches at a bilingual school, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to ask my local expert. She wrote, "Okay babe. Limón means lime and limón agria or limón Amarillo can mean lemon. There is a lemon-like fruit called Lima limón. There are not lemons like we have here in the U.S. in Mexico." That seemed a pretty authoritative word on the subject.

This is a picture book, an Easy Reader, so I must not forget to mention the illustrations, which as you can see from these sample pages I photographed are party-bright, full of the joy and fun of cooking together. 

At the back you will find a glossary with pronunciations, in case your Spanish is rusty, and best of all, a recipe for rice pudding. What I would love to do with a young child is read the book, make the pudding together while using the English and Spanish words to talk about the ingredients, and then read the book again while the cazuela simmers.

I would rather one of my grandchildren helped me in the kitchen, while we keep the animals outdoors or in the pages of the book. But an arroz con leche pudding with plenty of crema and some zest of limón would suit me just fine.

Goldilocks and Jim

Goldilocks is the nickname I am giving to the little girl who had her first sewing lesson from me yesterday. I was very nervous leading up to the appointed time. She's only six years old, for one thing, but she's been using a needle and thread (and even Scotch tape) to construct clothes for her stuffed gorilla toy and a naked doll she inherited. I hadn't had a look at her stitches until our first class, by which time I had come up with a few ideas we might pursue. It seemed wise to have a few projects in case her attention span was as short as I imagined from what I know of her from church.

I picked Goldilocks up at school and brought her here, so we needed to have a snack before beginning our work. Offering a child cake and milk sounds like something a woman in a storybook would do, so I felt very romantic about it, and I didn't mind changing the liquid offer to hot cocoa, it being a rainy day and all. This yummy marzipan cake came in a heavy foil wrapper all the way from Germany so that our Czech friend Jerry could give it to us for Christmas. I had stowed it in the freezer for such a time as this.

As it turned out, my student didn't yet begin any of the projects I had in mind, which included a 9-patch potholder, a hat for her, a blanket for her gorilla, and embroidering a dish towel. She seemed to want to get some clothes on that doll (poor doll doesn't even have a name), so we started on a skirt. I showed her how to plan for the right amount of fabric based on measuring the doll, and she took home a rectangle of flowered cloth which she had started basting along one edge. I will show her how to pull up the gathers and sew it to a waistband.

Earlier in the day it was raining when I first came downstairs and found "my" feral cat Jim sitting outside the sliding door with his fur getting sprinkled as he waited for me to feed him. I thought perhaps he would be willing to stick his head in out of the wet this time, so I set the bowl just inside the door, and went away a space. After some deliberation he did partly enter the house, so I took his picture.

I hadn't put quite the usual amount in the bowl, though, so he waited outside again after finishing it.  I added more food and set the bowl even farther into the kitchen. The temperatures have been higher lately and I hadn't turned on the heat yet, so I didn't mind leaving the door open for Jim for a little while. He came in again, and I busied myself building a fire on the other side of the room.

When I turned back around, he was sitting all the way inside on the rug, while he ate. But when he saw that I saw, he was greatly embarrassed, grabbed one more bite of food and ran out the door with it.

The sun is shining today, but again, the air wasn't too cold, so I put the bowl inside, and once again he came part way in and ate it. When he had finished and was walking around the corner through the gate, I looked out the door, he looked back at me, and I told him to have a good day. He switched his tail. So we have leaped a great hurdle, Jim and I.

This morning I've been researching flights to take me across the continent in about two months to visit Pearl and family. It seems that the two airports I want to use have almost no direct flights connecting them. I had thought that if I paid enough money or reward miles I could make the trip less exhausting. Now I find out that not much can be done to make traveling easier, and I'm suffering a temporary setback in my excitement. I will have to focus on taking healthy snacks, and on the wonderful reading I can do. But for now I'll just be glad I don't have to go anywhere today.