A Failed Attempt to Prove the Relevance of the Humanities

Anyone who has known me for more than a week understands that I have a deep, warm love of procrastination. So you'll understand why I'm sitting here staring out the window at a sapling when I should be working on the presentation I have to give tomorrow over The Knight's Tale.

I'm getting into a groove here finally and feeling far less anxious (I'm terribly frightened of new people, you see), plus the work load has picked up a bit, so I haven't had time to write the past couple of days. Additionally, I've been deliberating how to report my goings-on here without A) simply walking through every mundane second of my day (e.g., "then I perused junk websites on the internet for an hour while evading my theoretical Freud readings...") or B) boring to the brink of madness any readers this blog might have with horrifying accounts of said theoretical readings ("then Freud spends 3 pages reviewing the definitions of the German words heimlich and unheimlich ..."). You see the perilous cycle in which I find myself then.

I am learning some new stuff though, silly and pointless though it may seem. I guess "gothic" is one of those words you hear a lot without really thinking about what it means. So when you think of gothic literature you probably think of like, Christopher Walken with his teeth filed down:

That's from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In case you were wondering if Christopher Walken really filed his teeth down.

Or maybe this:

That's "The Raven." In case you were wondering why I posted a picture of a guy talking to a raven.

Or...perhaps this:

And to be honest I'm not really sure how that last one fits in at all.

BUT. It turns out that gothic is only about headless horsemen and lunatic opium eaters on the surface. REALLY it's all about American history and our anxiety over our treatment of Indians and black people and whatnot. It's actually pretty interesting. So suck on that for a while the next time you watch The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror.

Or you could check out this insane book we're reading called Edgar Huntly, which is about a crazy white guy who sleepwalks and tomahawks a bunch of Indians to death then sacrifices a panther and eats it. He also kills his brother-in-law. It's nuts.

On that note, I must excuse myself so I can go consider why Chaucer preferred to write stories about knights encountering fairy queens than to write about their exploits of daring in battles against the heathens. And no, it's not because he was gay. Seriously, I took out student loans for this. Please refer back to The Simpsons clip from my first post for relevant commentary.

Cheers!

Just Call Me John Muir

Well, probably not. I'm not about to go charging up a glacier armed with only my notebook and my sense of childlike wonder.

But I did snap this cool picture after a little hike behind the dorms. I saw the clouds rolling in on my way back from the gym and I felt a little inspired to try out some of the new photo apps I got for my phone.

I think it looks real nice.

We have a dance tonight. With a dance contest. I've been told there will be margaritas, so someone had better make good on that promise.

Dorm Tour!

This won't take long. Mostly because my dorm room has usable living space roughly equivalent to my car. It's starting to grow on me a little though. Just a little.

This is where I sleep. And study. And watch movies.

My favorite part is my tiny sheepskin rug from IKEA. Lady tried to eat it twice. I was sort of upset, but she looks like this:

So I forgave her.

Next we have my desk/kitchen.

See? Wine. Coffee pot. Computer. Texas stuff. Done.

Moving on around the room to storage. I'm actually somewhat impressed with the amount of storage in here. I suppose that's a good thing since if I had, say, a dirty shirt thrown carelessly on the floor, I would have nowhere to walk. Plus they have this nifty little medicine cabinet/dresser area that's pretty handy. I threw the prison-issue sheets they left out for us up on the top shelf, and I put the case of wine down below for easy access.

The bookstore here at St. John's actually has a really cool postcard selection with all kinds of new and old postcards, and they're all just 80 cents each (that seems cheap for a postcard, but really I wouldn't know). So today I made myself a little postcard collage to spice things up:

All kinds of stuff in there. A cow, Chaucer, mountains, old washing machines, a dog reading a book...

Now for the best part.

Not too bad, eh? Plus I can climb out my window and run up a mountain. Or rather, I could if I didn't run out of breath after 20 yards.

Happy Friday! Here's Some Dolly to Celebrate

I am often made the subject of fun (by Will) for my love of 80s and 90s country. If you ever watched CMT in the early 90s, then perhaps you'll agree with me when I say that this was a golden age for music videos. If you didn't, well, check out this erudite Dolly and you'll see what I'm on about. High art indeed, my friends.

Literary Term of the Day: Ekphrasis

Did I lose you already? Stay with me; I promise to make it worth your while. First, the boring bits. Ekphrasis is a term that 90% of American students were forced to learn by reading the John Keats poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which is a very dull title for a poem that is actually about ravishing pliant young maidens in a pastoral setting. Ekphrasis, although the definition has become sort of plasticky over the years, basically refers to any art that is intended to describe or depict another work of art (usually visual) thus illuminating and explicating the meaning of both works. So you might have a character in a novel describing a painting that is somehow significant to the plot of the book, like Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. A poem might discuss the scenes depicted on a Grecian urn. You get the idea.

Or. OR. You might have a group of highly trained actors performing in the style of Oscar Wilde depict actual scenes from Jersey Shore. Now before we go on just let me say that if Jersey Shore is art then so is the Port-O-Potty area at a Gathering of the Juggalos. But if anything can make the greased farm animals of Jersey Shore sound charming and witty, it's a bunch of actors from the cast of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Enjoy. You can watch the rest here. Be aware that since this is actually words from the mouths of Jersey trash, some of it is rather profane. But hilarious nonetheless. 

And that, Dear Reader, is ekphrasis.

The Old Santa Fe Trail, Part 2: Them Thar Hills

The drive from Carlsbad to Ruidoso might be well-described as rewarding. By that I mean that the further you drive, the lovelier the setting becomes. When you set out just outside of Carlsbad, most of the road signs indicate one of two things: an approaching landfill or an approaching prison. This is especially marvelous when you observe the amount of garbage that appears not to have made it into a landfill, but is instead sitting in someone's yard while a cow eats some dirt nearby. About half an hour outside of Ruidoso the road wends through the Pecos River Valley, cottonwoods crop up along the riverbank, and charming classic cars even ensconce themselves in front of antique storefronts, as in the case of the cherry Austin-Healey we saw in Tinnie, NM.

As my poor little 4Runner chugged into Ruidoso, which was teeming with tourists, by the way, Will and I took note of a couple of restaurants amid the schlock shops (which abound in downtown Ruidoso). We then checked into our home for the evening, the Shadow Mountain Inn ("a place for couples," says the sign). We unloaded my bags and then, being the chubby Americans that we are, drove .7 miles back into town to find a place to eat. We settled on the Dreamcatcher, largely because it had a patio and beer signs.

We are simple folk.

Not as simple, however, as our waiter. His tiny brain forgot Will's beer three times, forgot my lettuce and tomato for my sandwich, forgot our water, forgot to bring our food after he said it would be "right out," forgot Will's second beer, forgot our check. Mercifully, Will had cash so we were spared from watching him struggle with how to use the credit card machine, if, in fact he could locate it. I'm confident it would have been similar to watching this kitten stuck in a ball, but less adorable:

 The high point of our meal (not the meal itself, which was hugely fine) was solving the riddle wrapped in an enigma seen in the picture below:

I refer, of course, to the delicate flower in the bottom left of the frame. Clearly this is a person (lady? gentleman?) who knows how to roll hair, and also how to wear a set of pearls. I wanted deeply for it to be a drag queen, but closer inspection indicated that it was, regretably, probably a woman. Life is full of disappointments.

After lunch, we went back to the hotel and puzzled for some time over what to do with ourselves next. All the forests were shut down because of wildfire danger, which pretty much axed our plans of a hike. Life thwarts my attempts to exercise at every turn. We considered a visit to the historic frontier town of Lincoln, frequented by this dandy:

He looks like a rapier wit, no? Well, apparently he shot some people and that was the end of him. Young folks.

We opted to forego Lincoln in favor of a stroll around town topped off by a few frosty ones. Our ambulations took us mostly through a neighborhood of log cabins, but one resident had a sense of decorating panache that I have rarely, if ever, seen equalled. Have a look see.

A wizard nailed to a tree? Check. Approaching tiger on a painted wooden panel? Check. LANDSCAPING PLANTER FILLED WITH BOWLING BALLS? Double-check. So much more. This house is like a Dali painting for hill people.

Tomorrow on the blog I'll discuss Taos and Santa Fe. Hippies ask the same question twice, Woody Harrellson stares us down from a Prius, and Will gets spit on by a hobo!

I promise to begin discussing life in the dorms as well. Fear not; graduate school obscurity approaches!

The Old Santa Fe Trail Part 1: The Dirty South

Greetings from Santa Fe!

From this point on all my dispatches will be issued from my impossibly tiny dorm room on the lovely St. John campus. I'm finally all moved in, and somewhat recovered from my first day jitters, so I've got some down time to report on our journey up. It's truly beautiful here, but before you get majestic scenery pictures you must listen to me yap for a little while.

Will and I lit out early Friday morning from Fort Worth. Armed with coffee and no fewer than three GPS devices, we traveled through West Texas and parts heretofore unknown to us. You've probably heard (or perhaps you know from experience) that there is not much to see in West Texas. I know nothing about science, but this is a scientific fact. Our notable sites included a town we had never heard of called Anderson (anyone?), which is surprisingly large and has no fewer than six (six!) Mexican food restaurants on the main drag. Further down the road, great swaths of sleek wind turbines spanned the horizon. They seemed to go on for miles in every direction, fading into the dusty distance. I tried to count at one point, but there were more than I could see clearly, much less count. Plus, I'm an English teacher, so I get stuck at 20.

After about 6 and a half hours we made it to Carlsbad, NM and checked into the Trinity Hotel. If you find yourself in Carlsbad I highly recommend, nay, insist, that you stay there. The beds are giant and fluffy, and the bathrooms are really something else. I could bathe all three of our dogs in the bathtub, EASY. And by easyI mean they would all fit, not that they would sit like placid little supplicants while I sprayed them with soapy water.

We ate lunch at Cortez Mexican Restaurant. Will had a sopapilla stuffed with ground beef - a New Mexico specialty. It looked quite epic. Then we headed back into the desert to check out Carlsbad Caverns. This is one of those things that you must do. Even the surliest of teens would drop his Gameboy (insert relevant modern equivalent), suspend texting behaviors, demonstrate genuine interest and awe upon entering. First, I give you the unassuming wrappings:



A lovely view, I grant you. Stark, dramatic, emphatic about where one may not park. But in no way indicative of the things below. Here is the entrance to the cave:

  It is steep, but not quite as perilous as it appears in the picture. What is perilous about the descent into the cave is the throngs of cave swallows flitting about. The birds, accompanied by an ominous pungency, prevent one from lingering too long to snap photos, lest you find yourself walking through the remainder of the cave with bird turds in your hair.

As we wandered through the caverns, I had to remind myself periodically that I was looking at entirely natural creations. The vast strangeness of it is really difficult to describe, so I will let Will's photos speak for me.

Amazing that all of this was created just by water and dirt:



Nature really can do things no human could ever even attempt. And with that thought, I conclude this chapter of my puny little blog.

...And now for something completely different!

Cabrito!

These guys know what I'm talking about.



I had a flash of inspiration at Central Market a couple of weeks ago when they had cabrito at the meat counter as part of their Celebracion de Espana or somesuch. For those of you who lead lives in which Outback Steakhouse represents an adventurous culinary challenge, cabrito is kid goat, usually 3-4 months old. Roughly the goatier equivalent of lamb.

Now, if you've ever smelled a goat, you may find it surprising that anyone would want to eat one. They have a sort of earthy pungency, and I don't mean that in anything resembling a positive way. Curiously, I'm not the first person to think of eating goat. It's very popular in Mexico and Greece, among other places. In fact, the goat has quite the storied history in Greece, dating back to this guy:

That's Pan. He's half-goat, half-god. He's the god of shepherds, hunting and folk music. His name is where we get the word panic, describing the effect of his music on Arcadian yokels. Tim Robbins says, "there was a sort of hippity-hoppity bunny rabbit quality to Pan's erratic melody, but also a roaming goatish quality, stubbor, rough, and lean." That's from Jitterbug Perfume, a book that talks a lot about goats. And also about beets, another underappreciated food that I love.

But back to the cabrito. It started off like this, and let me tell you. It smelled like a goat.

That's actually after I marinated it in apple juice, lime juice, garlic, cayenne pepper, and a Bud Light. Because I keep it real. Then I dried it off and threw this stuff on it.

Salt, pepper, chile powder, cumin, thyme and dry mustard. It looks pretty in the bowl, no?

Will Atkinson, keeper of the fire in my heart and in our smoker, created a nice smoky place for the goat leg to sit for about six hours, while I basted it with some reduced Bud Light marinade and a stick of butter. Butter is the answer.

Here's the finished product:

Wantsit.

And here's what it looks like in taco form. Before I devoured it like a crazy person.

Special thanks to my dear friend Taylor Strong for the peppers and onions from his garden. A taste sensation.

So the moral of the story is, you should try some cabrito some time. It's leaner than chicken and has more protein than beef. And it tastes like a goaty miracle. I leave you with a farewell toast from Pan, via Jitterbug Perfume.

 "For you sir, may the jaws of death have cotton teeth."

Bienvenidos!

Welcome to the blog! I've created this little thing as a way to chronicle my adventures this summer in Santa Fe. As you already know (if you are here), I'll be studying through the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. I'll defer to The Simpsons for commentary on my choice:

Yeah.

Ennyhoo, I'll be living in the dorms (JEALOUS?) at St. John's College, discussing nerdular topics such as Chaucer (yay, British people!) and Gothic literature of the nineteenth century (yay, insane people!). As such, readers of this blog will likely be subjected to a modicum of tedious pedantry (see the preceeding phrase), but I'll try to entertain you with my wacky shenanigans and goings-on as much as possible. Also, since the title of the blog is "Books AND Butter," you should expect some food-related posts as well. There are two major reasons for this. 1) I think about food a great deal, so the subject is bound to figure into my ramblings at some point, and 2) I'll be living in the dorms eating dorm food, so I may indulge in a rich fantasy life of culinary wonders. Consider yourself warned.

Will and I will be leaving for Santa Fe on Friday morning, with stops in Carlsbad, Ruidoso and Taos along the way. We'll provide some travel updates along the way, likely accompanied by pictures of majestic Southwestern scenery. We'll be the chubby people standing next to the stalagmites.