November 2015 – Into the Woods

The Tristan chord

The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy. By Bryan McGee, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2000.

When I bought this book, I expected only to browse it. I ended up devouring it. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, you never know where research for a novel might lead you. In this case, I was thinking about musical metaphors and interesting ideas for the Socratic dialogues in Oratorio in Ursa Major.

Truth be known, I am not that great a fan of Richard Wagner. I even have been to a performance of “Tristan and Isolde” by the San Francisco Opera, and that did not win me over to the music. I find the music (four hours of it!) difficult to listen to. Still, the legend of Tristan and Isolde is archetypal in Western culture. Jake, my protagonist and hero in Fugue and Oratorio in Ursa Major, often makes drawings of unusual buildings, and he has a bit of a thing for towers covered with vines and thorns (like the tombs of Tristan and Isolde in some tellings of the story).

Nevertheless, I think it’s very important to know just what a landmark Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” was in the 19th Century. The music was like nothing ever heard before. Orchestras declared it impossible to play. Singers said that it was impossible to sing. There were more than 70 rehearsals of the opera in Vienna between 1862 and 1864, but the performance was called off and the opera was declared unperformable. Finally Wagner succeeded in staging it, in 1865 — 150 years ago.

After 150 years, the debate still runs hot in some musical circles. Just what is Wagner’s Tristan chord? Is it just a modified minor seventh chord? Or is that G-sharp an appoggiatura to the A, putting the chord in a whole different light? (It’s not necessary to understand the music theory here. The point is that the experts have been arguing and disagreeing for 150 years, and there are several theories about what the chord is.)

Here is what the music looks like:

Here it is played on the Acorn Abbey organ:

Stephen Fry did an excellent documentary on the Tristan chord called “Wagner and Me” back in 2010. (More about this Fry documentary in a moment.) Fry emphasizes the unbearable longing that the chord expresses. Our ears want the chord to resolve, but in four hours of music, it never does — not until the very end of the opera. No wonder some people consider the opera to be torture.

What do we mean by a chord resolving? Even if you can’t read music and don’t know a thing about music theory, your ear knows all the rules. For example, if I sing the first line of this ditty:

Old MacDonald had a farm!

Your ear will give you no rest until you hear that musical phrase resolved:

Eee-aye eee-aye oh!

There. That resolved it. Or think of the last note of pretty much any song:

And crown thy good
With brotherhood
From sea to shining —

Your ear will give you no rest until you hear the last note, in which the dominant chord, as it always must, resolves to the tonic:

Sea!

Believe me, even if you think you know nothing about music, if you love music and listen to music, your ear knows all the rules. I doubt that any metaphysical system will ever be able to explain why music has the emotional effect on us that it has, but part of that musical effect, surely, is creating tension — even longing — in unresolved harmonies and melodies, and then taking us along for a nice ride toward the resolution.

In many ways, John Williams (who wrote the music for “Star Wars”) is the Wagner of our time. Listen to this performance of Leia’s theme and think about how the music creates longing and tension and demands that we listen until we hear these tensions resolved. The final resolution comes quietly at 4:11, with a lonely note from the violin, followed by the remainder of the tonic chord in an arpeggio from the harp. Again, it doesn’t matter what the “tonic” chord is or what an “arpeggio” on the harp is. Your ear knows when it has finally got what it wanted. When the final chord finally comes, the orchestra quietly takes over the chord from the violin and the harp and holds the chord for many beats, to let the resolution sink in and to give our ear the peace it was longing for:

You’re not in a hurry, are you?

Here’s an excerpt from Stephen Fry’s “Wagner and Me” documentary:

Part of what makes Bryan Magee’s book so fascinating is his discussion of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, both of whom greatly influenced Wagner. Over the years, I have made repeated attempts to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and each time I have been turned back by the impenetrable density of Kant’s writing. Magee acknowledges that Kant’s writing was unnecessarily turgid and boils Kant down. We are all Kantists now. Magee does the same thing for Schopenhauer. And thus I learned that I am pretty much a Schopenhauerian, though not quite as pessimistic.

Magee is an engaging writer and has written a number of books aimed at making modern philosophy comprehensible to ordinary people.

I thought it was a unicorn

Through the kitchen window, I caught an glimpse of white down in the woods. I had heard rumors of her existence in the woods near the abbey. I quickly grabbed the camera, changed to a longer lens, and went to check. She dashed away quickly, and there wasn’t an opportunity for a great photo.

Some quick Googling suggests that hunters report that only about one deer in 30,000 is albino.

I hope she stays safe.

Sweet potato pie

Here’s a traditional abbey-recipe pie that you can make all winter. A friend gave me some home-grown sweet potatoes, and I resolved to make a pie out of them. I had not made a sweet potato pie in ages, because usually I go for pumpkin pie. But, as I mentioned in an earlier post, proper cooking pumpkins were hard to find this year. But sweet potatoes are easy. Stokes County, North Carolina, is a great producer of sweet potatoes, and the friend who gave me the potatoes knows the good ones — he used to be an agricultural extension agent and helped commercialize our sweet potatoes.

As usual, I study a lot of recipes to get concepts, then I go off in my own direction. I wanted this pie to have a whiff of rum and citrus. Here’s the recipe:


Sweet potato pie

1 1/2 pounds cooked sweet potatoes
1 cup sugar (3/4 may do -- use your judgment)
1/2 cup fresh-squeezed orange juice
2 eggs

1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon rum

Separate the egg yolks and whites. Beat the whites until they are stiff. Add the remaining ingredients and beat like the dickens. Pour the mixture into an unbaked pie shell. Bake at 350 degrees for about 50 minutes or until properly done. The pie will rise like a soufflé while baking, then sink as it cools.

It has been years since I’ve had distilled spirits in the house. I actually went to the Walnut Cove ABC store today and bought rum especially for this pie. I figured it couldn’t hurt to have a little rum around for the holidays.

I would not recommend boiling the sweet potatoes. You’ll boil all the flavor out of them and make them soggy. Baking them, then removing the skins after they’ve cooled, is the way to go.

My pie and quiche crusts are always homemade. It’s just 2 cups of unbleached flour, half a cup of olive oil, and enough cold water (just a few tablespoons) to moisten the dough. You know the procedure for pie crusts, right?

This pie is delicious. I’m going to have a second piece now.

Fiber gets closer

Generally, if I see heavy equipment anywhere within miles of the abbey, it’s a reason for panic. It means that someone is cutting trees to sell logs, or someone is up to some kind of mischief with a bull dozer. But there is one kind of machinery that is a joy to see nearby. That’s the kind of machinery that buries fiber optic cable.

This equipment was parked during the weekend about two miles from the abbey. It’s not clear whether the route of the new fiber will be on the paved road nearest the abbey. The abbey, by the way, is on an unpaved road half a mile from pavement.

One of these days, though I have no idea when, the abbey will have fast Internet.

The moon rises over the woods

Click on image for larger version

Still life with roses

Eight days ago at Trader Joe’s, on impulse, I bought a bundle of 20 roses because the price was agreeable. I expected them to last four or five days at best. But, more than a week later, they’ve opened nicely and are still going strong.

Pots of flowers always remind me of San Francisco. If you rode a bus home from downtown on a Friday, half the people heading home on the bus would have a bundle of flowers in their lap — especially the guys taking them home to their girlfriends and boyfriends. It was a tradition in San Francisco — fresh flowers for the weekend.

I think I will put fresh flowers on my shopping list each week. It’s amazing how they light up the house during the winter.

The just world hypothesis

The Yoda fountain in the Presidio of San Francisco, a place that I used to frequently visit

When you’re writing a novel, you never know what line of research you might get pulled into. Writing Oratorio in Ursa Major required that I think a great deal about justice. I’ve posted previously on this subject in “A little moral reasoning,” about Cecil the lion, and “Should we tolerate the intolerant.” One of the questions that interests me is why we tend to be so bad at moral reasoning and how much harm that does in the world.

Just recently at a meeting of the Walnut Cove town board, I heard a bitter old fundamentalist preacher haranguing the board about its prayer policy, saying that atheists have no moral foundation. How strange, to think that a species that can produce a Mozart or an Einstein is unable to grapple with the principles of moral philosophy without referring to ossified old texts.

Just a couple of weeks ago, there were stories in the media about research (also here) showing that the children of religious families are meaner and less altruistic than the children of non-religious families. This obviously is the opposite of what religionists would have us believe.

But religion certainly is not the only factor that distorts thinking. The just world hypothesis is another big one. It might be better to call it the just world fallacy.

It was the social psychologist Melvin J. Lerner who came up with the term, based on research going back to the 1960s. It boils down to a cognitive bias toward thinking that people deserve what they get and get what they deserve. It is particularly damaging to the social fabric when people believe that some people deserve misfortune because they somehow brought it on themselves.

For example, the Republican Party — and many religious people — believe that poor people are poor because they’re lazy, or there’s something wrong with their culture. The flip side of that is believing that rich people possess some kind of virtue that makes them deserve to be rich.

The writer Barbara Ehrenreich has written some popular books that touch on the just world fallacy — for example, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America.

In a YouTube video of a reading she gave at the Harvard book store, she talks about how preachers of prosperity doctrine such as Joel Osteen teach their poor followers mantras such as, “I admire rich people, I bless rich people, I love rich people, and I am going to be one, too.” According to this theology, “God wants to prosper you.”

It follows that, if you’re poor, it’s your own fault. You’re crossways with God. And, if you’re rich, you’ve pleased God and God is “prospering” you. Many rich people seem to believe that. Lots of essays and op-eds have been written about rich people strutting as though they’re the masters of the universe, automatically deserving of our deference and respect.

But the just world fallacy is not by any means limited to Republicans and religious charlatans such as Joel Osteen. New Age types buy into it, too. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for years, this type of magical thinking is everywhere: “Do what you love, and the money will come … You control your destiny.” Think of self-help books such as, How to Get the Love You Want in 48 Hours. Everywhere there is the idea that you always get what you attract to yourself, that your thoughts and attitude have some sort of magical power to reshape the universe according to your desire. To be “negative” is to open the door to the devil. We’re told to avoid “negative” people, because their attitude is holding them back, and it’s contagious.

The concept of karma, actually, in Buddhism and Hinduism is a codification of the just world hypothesis. It helps sustain the Indian caste system.

I don’t know about you, but I hate seeing people get what they don’t deserve when so many people don’t get what they do deserve. Just-world doctrine would say that my attitude must be condemned as envy. Lerner’s big concern about the just world hypothesis is that it blinds us to the real sources of inequality and injustice and stands in our way of being motivated to do what we can to achieve greater justice.

It happens that John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, has a good bit to say about envy. He acknowledges, of course, that envy in many circumstances can be toxic to the social environment. But Rawls describes a type of envy that he calls justifiable envy — envy of goods that some people acquire (and that others are deprived of) because of unjust or unequal social arrangements:

Yet sometimes the circumstances evoking envy are so compelling that given human beings as they are no one can reasonably be asked to overcome his rancorous feelings. A person’s lesser position as measured by the index of objective primary goods may be so great as to wound his self-respect; and given his situation, we may sympathize with his sense of loss. Indeed, we can resent being made envious, for society may permit such large disparities in these goods that under existing social conditions these differences cannot help but cause a loss of self-esteem. For those suffering this hurt, envious feelings are not irrational; the satisfaction of their rancor would make them better off.

Many social movements including the Civil Rights movement have been at least partly driven by justifiable envy for undeserved goods and privileges that some have and others don’t have (and — admit it — can’t get no matter how hard they try). And note Rawls’ references to self-respect and self-esteem. Not only are we blind to ways in which people are deprived of goods and privileges that others take for granted, we also put down the have-nots. We believe in the inferiority of the have-nots and expect them to believe in their own inferiority. They are children of a lesser God, creatures of a separate (and not equal) moral universe. Some will be crushed; it’s just too much for them. Among the stronger, sooner or later, rebellion is guaranteed, even if it’s a lonely rebellion of one.

In the world as it really is, most of us will never be rich. Sometimes what goes around does not come around. Sometimes what comes around is not what is fair and just. This is one reason we love stories — stories are a compensation for an unjust world. Stories (this is especially true of science fiction) are a vehicle for trying out ideas about how things might be otherwise.

In fiction and in stories, the just world hypothesis usually applies. In the end, protagonists get their heart’s desire, but not until they have striven and suffered to get it — not until they deserve it or have defeated the forces that stood in their way. And at the end of the story, bad actors get the punishment they deserve. I realize that there are dissident or experimental forms of fiction in which the just world hypothesis does not apply, but in “classical” form storytelling, the just world hypothesis applies. The justice we find in stories serves as an escape from, and a compensation for, our inability to write the story of our own lives however we please. Yoda was right about the Force, but only because Yoda lives in a story.

There is a substantial body of academic research and literature on justice and the social psychology of justice. Lerner’s books, for reasons I have not been able to figure out, are very expensive. As far as I can tell, though, this material is scattered and is often behind paywalls. Though Barbara Ehrenreich’s books have helped bring the just-world fallacy to our attention, I’m afraid the world is still waiting for a popular book that pulls all this research together and shows how it affects our world.

Casserole? Or terrine?

It’s casserole season. I wanted to experiment with the casserole’s layered French cousin, the terrine. What I ended up with was a bit too rustic and Irish looking to properly be called a terrine, but it sure was good.

I used a layer of peas, a layer of carrots, a layer of kale, and a layer of breadcrumb dressing similar to holiday dressing. I used grated cheese to hold the carrots together, and some beaten eggs to hold the pea, kale, and breadcrumb mixtures together. I used a lot of celery and onions in the dressing, and a bit of sage.

If you use nice ingredients for your layers, and if you season everything nicely, you can’t go wrong. Casseroles take time, but they make fine leftovers, so all things considered casseroles probably cut down on overall cooking time.

Bread never goes uneaten. Either it’s made into toasted bread crumbs or French toast, or the chickens get it.

Cupcakes and beyond

Is it just the time of year? For some reason, I had been thinking a lot about hearty dessert breads — things with carrots and pumpkins in it. I saw some carrot cake sitting on the counter in a country restaurant, and it almost overcame my will power. But I resolved then and there to make a healthier version at home.

As usual, I looked at a lot of recipes for ideas and inspiration, then came up with my own recipe. I call these treats cupcakes because “cupcakes” is a nicer word than “muffin,” but in truth they’re probably muffins, because they’re a bit heavy to be called cake. However, add a little cream cheese icing (I did, with a whiff of nutmeg in it) and the difference between a muffin and a cupcake fades.

I also confess that I splurged again on equipping the abbey kitchen. I have never owned a stand mixer, though I have always admired the design of the Kitchenaid mixers. They’re beautiful machines. In the past, I’ve felt that I couldn’t justify the cost of a Kitchenaid mixer (or find the counter space for it). But I finally deceived myself into believing that the purchase was justified. For one, I make pretty much all my own bread. That’s a lot of kneading, and a heavy-duty mixer does a fine job of it. For two, I wanted to be able to make good homemade mayonnaises with home-laid eggs and good olive oil. And a little whipped cream every now and then never killed anybody.

Then I learned that Kitchenaid makes a shredder/slicer attachment, so that sealed the deal. Previously, I have sworn by the Wear-Ever hand-cranked shredder (no longer made, but often available on eBay, where I got mine several years ago). Since the Kitchenaid follows a similar (though motor powered) design, I had high hopes for the Kitchenaid shredder.

The difference between the two shredders is a wash, really. The Kitchenaid shredder cones are slightly larger, and the Kitchenaid is probably safer because of its feed system, but the Kitchenaid blades aren’t as sharp as the Wear-Ever blades, and when making slaw with the Kitchenaid the cabbage is a little bruised and crushed (not necessarily a bad thing). Then again, it may take me some time to figure out the best way to cut cabbage in chunks and feed it to the shredder. Carrots, however, shred beautifully. The Kitchenaid shredder attachment (sold separately) comes with four slicer/shredder cones. I’ve tried only two of them so far.

Here’s my recipe for cupcakes with shredded carrots, apples, and coconut.

Heavy but reasonably healthy cupcakes


1 1/2 cups grated carrot
1 apple, peeled and grated
1/2 cup dry, unsweetened, store-bought shredded coconut

1 cup stone ground whole wheat OR sprouted whole wheat flour
1/2 cup unbleached flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon

2 eggs
1/2 cup oil (I used olive oil)
2 tablespoons milk (if needed)

Sift the flour and combine all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Set it aside.

Whip the egg whites until they’re stiff but not dry. Add the other ingredients including the egg yolks except for the milk and dry ingredients and mix well.

Add the dry ingredients to the mixture in portions, mixing as you add. The batter should be pretty thick, but if it’s too thick, add the milk.

Put the batter into a cupcake pan (I used paper liners). Makes about 10 cupcakes.

Bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes, or until the cupcakes pass the toothpick test (about 205 degrees F internal temperature).

I feel guilty and acquisitive and materialistic for spending money again on the abbey kitchen, but I do like fine machines. And I would like for the abbey kitchen — a serious and well used kitchen — to be able to do everything that a commercial kitchen can do, though in a smaller way.

My old way of making slaw, and still a fine machine

A different — and not necessarily better — way of making slaw

Cabbage shredded with the Kitchenaid shredder

A plague of inedible pumpkins

The pumpkin above is a proper “pink pumpkin” for cooking.

I have never used canned pumpkin and never will. It has never made sense to me to open a can for something that’s so easy and fun to work with. However, it’s getting more and more difficult to find cooking pumpkins. Increasingly in the fall, the pumpkin market is flooded with the bright-orange, ugly shaped, so-called Halloween pumpkins.

A friend who works for the county’s agricultural service had posted a photo on Facebook of a bunch of Halloween pumpkins. That seemed like a good opportunity to ask a knowledgeable person why old-fashioned cooking pumpkins have gotten so much harder to find. He posted this, which perhaps was copy/pasted from elsewhere. I apologize for not knowing the original source:

“The bright orange non-edible pumpkin is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the 1960’s Massachusetts farmer John Howden wanted to breed a pumpkin that was easy to carve (Jack-O-Lantern). The criterion — thick stem (lasts longer), shallow ribs, and thin flesh relative to its size (easier carving) — resulted in the Howden variety pumpkin. The Howden totally dominates the Jack-O-Lantern market today. The public desire for other decorative pumpkins led to the proliferation of bright orange pumpkins that dominate roadside markets, grocery, and big box stores.”

So there you have it. I needed a cookable pumpkin for a pie this week, and I finally found one at one of our local treasures, Priddy’s General Store.

If I had a field (and I don’t), I’d love to grow pumpkins. They need more space, though, than I can provide.

And here’s a bit of pumpkin trivia. While writing Oratorio in Ursa Major, I wanted to light an outdoor festival as it might have been lit in 48 B.C. Knowing that jack-o-lanterns come to us from Europe and that pumpkins didn’t, I wondered how all that worked. The research was clear enough — the early Europeans used turnips for lanterns the same way we now use pumpkins. Once pumpkins became available, pumpkins ruled.

Above, rolling out the crust after the pumpkin flesh had been cooked in the steam oven. Pumpkins produce a lot of juice when they’re cooked, and the pumpkin flesh needs to be well drained before making a pie. I always save the pumpkin juice for soup stock.

A field of the wrong kind of pumpkins, near Bell Spur, Virginia