“Imagine you’re at a bookstore. In one section are time management books that give advice for adapting to a general sense of time scarcity and a world always speeding up: either counting and measuring your bits of time more effectively or buying time from other people. In a different section, you find cultural histories of how we came to see time the way we do and philosophical inquiries into what time even is. If you’re scrabbling for time and feeling burned out, which section would you turn to?” (Odell xiii).
It may be the least understood rhetorical appeal. My students come to class with at least some understanding of ethos, pathos, and logos, but kairos is mysterious, abstract. I sometimes describe it as comic timing, the ability to know when a punchline will land or when to add a joke in an otherwise serious speech. This makes it granular, syntactic, probably reductive.
In the introduction to Saving Time, Jenny Odell distinguishes kairos from its sibling ancient Greek word for time: “Chronos, which appears in words like chronology, is the realm of linear time, a steady, plodding march of events into the future. Kairos means something more like ‘crisis,’ but it is also related to what many of us might think of as opportune timing or ‘seizing the time'” (xvii).
Seizing the moment make more sense to me. Supposedly, Vladimir Lenin said, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” It’s still not clear to me if the quote is accurate or apocryphal.
I bought Saving Time on a whim in a one-room basement bookstore on Independent Bookstore Day. It was in a “general nonfiction” section alongside history, memoir, science, psychology, and self-help.
I only started reading it today (fittingly, May Day), but because I did not manage my time well this month, the one book I finished in April was Alexandra Teague’s memoir Spinning Tea Cups, about family, time, kitsch, tourism, grief. One line that I keep returning to is the first sentence of an essay titled “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” that reads, “The deadest of all the dead people in our family was my mother’s father” (152).
The sentence is syntactically simple, just a subject (the deadest), a verb (was) and an object (my mother’s father). It is the first sentence in an 18-page essay about the narrator’s grandfather, who died in 1944 aboard the USS Mount Hood. The last phrase, my mother’s father, effectively shrinks seven decades and three generations into three words, while The deadest of all the dead people in my family is an epigenetic treatise, a genealogy. But it’s not the construction of the sentence that gets to me so much as the moment, the atmosphere, in which I read it. This, too, is how kairos works. No matter how much time one spends revising and polishing and perfecting, timing, in the end, is everything.
The Lenin quote is easy to utilize for anything that feels momentous. Venture capitalists pushing new tech have even used it to sell their hype. If it’s not apocryphal, it’s probably about identifying resonance, patterns. Seizing the present crisis and holding firm, not backing down. Odell maintains that kairos is more hopeful because, unlike neatly demarcated and sold units of time, kairos allows us space for contingency, for possibility.
That writing moves away from the author once it has an audience is difficult for a perfectionist like me to contend with. Perhaps writing is to chronos as reading is to kairos. On one side is a long, repetitive process of self-interrogation, of trial and error. On the other is the singular opportunity to collaborate with someone else’s craft, to seize the moment and allow oneself to be moved. And being moved, being open to the contingency that other writers open up to me through their experiences, is the reason I want to read so much in the first place.
Here’s what I’m working on lately: a presentation for my university’s Interdisciplinary Colloquium.
Left: Geppetto and Pinocchio, Bemporad & Figlio, Firenze 1902. Right: Jim Henson and Kermit, 1979.
It has not been uncommon for college instructors to repeat, sometimes word-for-word, the same hype around generative AI that the very companies selling AI have pitched to potential investors. Increasingly, though, I share Ed Zitron’s assessment that the internet is undergoing a process of “economic rot” which he describes as “conditions where we celebrate people for making ‘big’ companies but not ‘good’ companies,” or as Cory Doctorow more pointedly calls it, enshittification.
The more I read about generative AI, the more I find myself aligned with pedagogy scholars who have voiced skepticism about the ongoing panic about it. Gavin P. Johnson invites us to “(re)consider a few things we already know about teaching with and through technology” (Johnson 169), most intriguing of which is that new technologies “do not exist in isolation from cultural practices but rather reflect and reify the practices and ethics of the designers” (170), and that “the never-ending, lose-lose arms race to prevent the crisis of (possible) plagiarism” tends to treat students as hostile would-be criminals, and mutates pedagogy into a form of policing (172). Meanwhile, Sandra Jamieson writes that “A pedagogical response calls on us to trust students; to teach them the work of writing and include AI in the process instead of focusing our efforts on ways to catch those who use AI or reject it as unethical” (Jamieson 156). This includes a reframing of form, genre, structure, and convention.
The problems that generative AI present us with are not problems of cognition, but of articulation. Any creative writer knows this to be true. This is perhaps what Kazim Ali means when writing that a “text is a body because it is made of the same flesh and blood and breath as the writer. The ‘mind’ which declares intention is a collection of senses, sense-responses, and memories. Chemically it is invented in the brain. Thought is matter” (28).
Artificial intelligence is essentially a form of branding for the commercialization of a series of genuinely complex, advanced algorithms that are impressive as far as algorithms go, but the word intelligence is too often mistaken as a synonym for cognizant, just as generative is not the same thing as creative. As Ed Zitron has repeatedly pointed out, programs like ChatGPT don’t actually “know” anything. Instead, in his words,
Modern AI models are trained by feeding them “publicly-available” text from the internet, scraped from billions of websites (everything from Wikipedia to Tumblr, to Reddit), which the model then uses to discern patterns and, in turn, answer questions based on the probability of an answer being correct (Zitron, “Bubble Trouble”).
Peter Elbow asserts that “writing with no voice is dead, mechanical, faceless. It lacks any sound. Writing with no voice may be saying something true, important, or new; it may be logically organized; it may even be a work of genius. But it is as though the words came through some kind of mixer rather than being uttered by a person” (Elbow 287-288). I liken this style of writing to a puppet without a human hand. The language is there, the form is there, the structure and shape are all there, but on its own, it is no different from any other iteration of the same structure.
To what extent is all genre, all formula, all socially constructed literary expectation, not just a form of puppetry? AI writing consists of formulaic estimations of correct form and structure that are recognizably fraudulent without the intervention of a human touch.
As an extension of this metaphor, I want to bring in the 2023 video game Lies of P, a gothic steampunk adaptation of Pinocchio in which the player emerges half-formed in a fictional Victorian city that has created animatronic puppets as a servant class. Because of a malfunction, the puppets turn on their masters.
The player occupies an ambiguous space as a puppet capable of the uniquely human skill of lying. To progress through the game, the player must repeatedly lie about his social authenticity to gain access to human spaces, and this is such a central part of the game that telling the truth even once can change the game’s outcome.
I like this metaphor more than robotics or cyborgs because it gets at the technical accuracy of what students seemingly try to accomplish with the use of AI writing, which is to pass off inorganic thought as their own. We should not teach students to simply imitate collegiate writing, but to write as a reflection of their organic thought processes.
After the creator of the Muppets, Jim Henson, died in 1990, another performer filled the vacuum and animated Kermit the Frog in his place, and viewers recognized the obvious distinctions despite the fact that the puppet was the exact same from one puppeteer to the next. Student writing should be, and I use this word intentionally, revered for its originality in the exact same way. The form of a student essay might not change, but the voice a student brings to the form is in every instance unique, and it is that authenticity that we should help to cultivate, now more than ever before.
Ali, Kazim. “Genre-Queer.” Bending Genre, edited by Margot Singer, Nicole Walker, 2016, pp. 27-28.
Elbow, Peter. Writing With Power. Oxford University Press, 1998.
Jamieson, Sandra. “The AI ‘Crisis’ and A (Re)turn to Pedagogy.” Composition Studies vol. 50, no. 3 (2022), pp. 153-158.
Johnson, Gavin P. “Don’t Act Like You Forgot: Approaching Another Literacy ‘Crisis’ by (Re)Considering What We Know About Teaching with and Through Technologies.” Composition Studies vol. 51, no. 1 (2023), pp.169-175.
“To write of the self is to write not the story of one’s journey through the labyrinth—it is to write the labyrinth itself. To write of the self is to write in the shape of a wound that never stops healing” (Tudor-Sideri 125).
The former utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana, is today a living museum of nineteenth century visions of what the twenty-first century could have looked like. It is a time capsule of previous generations’ hopes for the future. It is layered with iterations of its namesake project, a place of harmony. There are centuries-old cabins along the Wabash River, two labyrinths, low brick walls around deliberately patterned gardens. There is a roofless church, a library, a once-futuristic Atheneum.
The Tree of 40 Fruits is one of the newest editions. Created by a sculptor at the University of Syracuse named Sam Van Aken, New Harmony planted (transplanted, installed, relocated) two such trees in 2016. Each Tree of 40 Fruits is grafted with multiple branches from many different stone fruit trees, yielding a wild assortment of plums, peaches, almonds, cherries.
I have visited New Harmony once per season so far, and I will have to come back again to see what fruits the tree will boast. It is too early to show even a hint of its produce, but its branches are already awash with different leaves of lime green, crimson, and eggshell. Some branches are flowering already, while others sprout green-red bulbs.
The tree itself is another vision of the future, a new limb grafted onto the town’s foundation. It fits with many of the other ill-fit features the town has accumulated, the collection of golf carts, the alley-narrow beer garden, the Twin Peaks-themed coffee shop where I get a sunburn reading about theories of tourism and kitsch in Alexandra Teague’s new memoir.
I am still making my way through the pile of books I brought back from AWP. It is a wild assortment of memoirs, chapbooks, zines, slim volumes and limited runs. All of them are from small presses, most of which have been adversely affected (if not outright betrayed) by Small Press Distribution‘s sudden decision to not only shutter their doors, but to, at least momentarily, restrict presses from accessing the books currently in their possession.
Writing that “it is unclear when and how we will be able to access the 18,289 Black Lawrence Press books that were in the SPD warehouse as of last week,” Black Lawrence Press editors created a GoFundMe to cover such an apparent loss of inventory. Elsewhere, presses like Gasher Press and Malarkey Books and Sarabande Books have noted that the best ways for you, as readers, to support independent publishing are to 1) buy books directly from publishers (which ensures writers get a bigger cut of the profit), 2) request independent books at your local library and local bookstore, and 3) support presses and writers by per-ordering books, getting ahold of ARCs to write reviews, and share indie titles and presses with your peers. In other words, you need to participate in the literary community, much the same way you need to participate in democracy and gardens and family.
These are hardly sustainable solutions. If anything, these are only the seeds of a better publishing system that we could build. Usually, such discussions are about procuring the fruits of workers’ labor, so that the workers who produce commodities no longer need to relinquish the majority of exchanged funds to bosses and landlords who produce nothing. Art is slightly different. It is produced to be shared rather than used, not to be eaten or rendered or plastered, but to repeatedly be enjoyed.
One such indie book I have repeatedly enjoyed (or been pleasantly baffled by) is Christina Tudor-Sideri’s Under the Sign of the Labyrinth. Exploring memory, folklore, self, reflection, and probably ten other themes I’m not smart enough to pick up on, I still find comfort in the language she uses to perplex, at one point writing that “if ecstatic blissfulness represents the sole possibility of tending to the ontological rupture between consciousness and life, between the individual and the world, then achieving it can only happen when I have embraced the agony caused by that rupture, for a painless wound does not crave healing” (93).
I don’t know what a utopian vision of indie publishing will look like, but I think it’s imperative to move through the growing pains of web decay and bear markets by enacting, continuously, our own visions of what it can look like. What I do know with absolute certainty is that market forces or big tech will not save publishing, and that venture capitalists who treat presses as “assets” have only ever been, and should permanently be regarded as, vampires on the publishing industry.
Written language has existed for five thousand years, spoken language for about thirty-three thousand. I write and read for the exact same reasons that every religion and every culture in human history is grounded in the cyclical reiteration of our favorite stories.
I think there’s something utopian about fruit trees. It’s not just the biblical imagery of a garden or paradise, but the symbiosis of fruit that has evolved to be delicious to so many species. We get fructose and glucose, fiber and potassium, vitamins and pleasure from eating fruit, and in turn we toss the rock-hard seeds into other meadows and riverbeds or pocket them for other gardens.
Tending to trees is a matter of cycles, not trends or endless growth. There’s no boom and bust market, but the reliable flow of extremes in summer and winter so that atmospheres and organic matter can find harmony in spring and autumn. It’s not utopian to want harmony in publishing, but harmony between writer and reader is, at least, a necessary starting point.
Here’s what I’m working on lately: a paper on folk horror films for the College English Association conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
The Witch (2015)
THE GENRE
Scholarship about horror often highlights the genre’s ability to “render abject the subject of its gaze” (Chambers 12). 1980s body horror resonated with the AIDS epidemic, just as the Saw franchise is best understood in the context of the invasion of Iraq, and the zombie craze of the 2010s in the context of the Great Recession. Despite its rapid cult following, there is less consensus about folk horror.
Jamie Chambers notes that “theoretical approaches to folk horror remain in their infancy” (10) and Paul Cowdell writes that while “clear generic definitions are elusive,” the genre has a distinct atmosphere: folk horror films “rely on location in a landscape that acquires almost the status of an active character” whose influence results in what Adam Scovell calls “‘skewed belief systems and morality’ [enabling] the plots’ actual ‘happening/summoning’” (Cowdell 296).
Others have argued that folk horror exploits rural communities as sensational and backwards. As Chambers puts it, “folk denotes a productive way of seeing with an unstable inference of us and them” (17). Elsewhere, Cowdell argues that folk horror necessarily relies upon interdisciplinary interests in folklore studies, claiming that “The Wicker Man, then, would not exist without the development of an actual discipline of folklore” (309).
Is folk horror merely the abjection of folklore? While I find it admirably subversive to suggest that because the movies we love are just reboots of older folk stories, then we are not, in fact, morally or socially better than our ancestors, I also find this definition limiting. With obvious exceptions (The Witch), the legends in folk horror are usually fictitious. The traditions that drive the imagined peasant communities in Children of the Corn, The Wicker Man, and The Blood on Satan’s Claw are diegetic imitations of actual folklore.
Instead, folk horror is defined by the countryside, historicized between economic relations. Antonio Gramsci’s words on the subject are now famous to the point that they’re a meme: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” The question I want to pursue is whether or not those monsters are the peasants left behind by modernity, or modernity itself.
THE UNHOLY TRINITY
Most scholars agree that three unrelated English films, known informally as the Unholy Trinity, mark the first era of folk horror: Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973).
Witchfinder General is based on the real self-proclaimed witchfinder Matthew Hopkins, who abuses his authority in seventeenth century England. The Blood on Satan’s Claw portrays the satanic influence of Pagan artifacts on rural youths, who can only be saved by a witchfinder-like state agent. Meanwhile, The Wicker Man depicts a neo-Pagan Scottish cult whose mere existence challenges the English state’s internal stability by selecting a devout Anglican police officer for human sacrifice.
The most striking thing about these films is how ideologically incongruent they are. Whatever binds them together, then, is their shared depiction of an unresolved conflict between agricultural communities and an increasingly powerful class of landowners.
ENCLOSURE AND THE COMMONS
A Field in England (2013).
Economies in Europe were structurally and politically diverse during the thousand-year reign of feudalism, but were mostly built on social contracts between peasants who lived on the land and lords who held religious and political titles to that land. Peasants were also granted access to parcels of common land useful for procuring firewood, hunting and gathering, and grazing.
As early as the 1200s, feudal lords began violating those contracts by terminating customary rights to fish, graze, hunt, or harvest. Ellen Meiksins Wood writes that “enclosure meant the extinction, with or without a physical fencing of land, of common and customary use rights on which many people depended for their livelihood” (83). A much larger wave of enclosures began in the sixteenth century, placing the means by which one lives to see another day—food, water, and shelter—exclusively under market forces.
“As a result, enclosure could lead to the elimination of small owner-occupiers, who were bought out by large proprietors” (623), writes S. J. Thompson. Meanwhile, Silvia Federici notes the relationship between enclosure and the violence of the witch trials. In Caliban and the Witch, she writes, “women were those who suffered most when the land was lost and the village community fell apart” because “a nomadic life exposed them to male violence” (73).
Folk horror calls back to what capital presumes to be extinct: the practice of holding resources in common. Witchfinder General portrays the agents of enclosure as monstrous, cruel figures. In contrast, The Blood on Satan’s Claw suggests that enclosure is a necessary step in social progress, and The Wicker Man depicts a community struggling to recreate premodern agricultural (emphasis on cultural) conditions.
THE HORROR OF MATERIAL CONDITIONS
One central premise of folk horror is that people and wilderness should be separate, that monstrosity emerges from too close an association with the land. This is the logic of Enlightenment-era liberalism. John Locke explicitly argued that land can only be considered property if the people on that land use it for profit, oras he called it, improvement.
Thompson writes that “improvers defended enclosure on the grounds that it was more compatible with individual liberty than the open-field system it replaced” (639). Employing the rhetoric of natural liberty and natural rights, the agents of enclosure redefined nature itself. Locke argued that “the value inherent in land comes not from nature, but from labor,” which in Wood’s assessment means that, for Locke, “unimproved land is waste” (Wood 85). In the sixteenth century, improvement looked like agriculture. By the 1960s, agricultural spaces had replaced the commons as the imagined backwaters of modernity.
The Wind (2018)
This is much more evident in the US corollary to English folk horror, known as hicksploitation. Ranging from Deliverance (1972) to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), American “hillbilly horror” is arguably more exploitative. In these films, isolated (usually white) communities in overgrown landscapes become monstrous. These films center harsh landscapes that are difficult to “improve,” despite the most industrious efforts of long-gone colonialist projects, which themselves become the subject of more recent American folk horror. The Witch (2015) and The Wind (2018) both emphasize the isolation of frontier spaces.
For Chambers, “the pleasures of the folk aesthetic frequently arise from depictions of cultural-geographic difference” (26). While I think Chambers underestimates the critical thinking skills of horror fans, his observation that the appeal of films like The Wicker Man for western liberal audiences is an imagined rural authenticity seems correct. Folk horror scratches a very particular itch; it confirms about ourselves whatever we want it to.
Today, there are dozens of studies about a contemporary epidemic of loneliness, contrasting a genre of memes about the desire to leave modern society and live in a cabin in the woods, to “retvrn with a V” to “the past,” because “medieval peasants” presumably worked fewer hours and because life was somehow “better” in “the past.” These memes traffic in the same metonymy for “the good old days” that folk horror encodes with monstrosity.
With more scholarship, I want to explore the ways that recent folk horror has reinterpreted landscapes from wastelands into spaces of mystery and open exploration, ecologically but also historically and economically, where present conditions can be seen, with both admiration and disgust, in sharp relief from afar.
Chambers, Jaime. “Troubling Folk Horror: Exoticism, Metonymy, and Solipsism in the ‘Unholy Trinity.’ Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, vol. 61, no. 2, Winter 2022, pp. 9-34. EBSCO, https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2022.0014. Accessed 3 October, 2023.
Cowdell, Paul. “‘Practicing Witchcraft Myself During the Filming.’ Folk Horror, Folklore, and the Folkloresque.” Western Folklore, vol. 78, no. 2, Fall 2019, pp. 295-326. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26864166. Accessed 18 October, 2023.
Federici, Silva. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2014.
Thompson, S.J. “Parliamentary Enclosure, Property, Population, and the Decline of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. The Historical Journal, vol. 51, no. 3, 2008, pp. 621-642. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20175187. Accessed 19 March, 2024.
Wood, Meiksins Ellen. The Origins of Capitalism. Monthly Review Press, 1999.
“The desire to write comes (is the feeling you get) from certain readings: the kind of reading that agitates you into making a trace of itself. Or to put it another way, and reaching a little further for an answer to his outrageous, unanswerable question, Barthes arrives at the following claim: ‘to want to write is to want to rewrite,’ he says. And then: ‘Every beautiful work, or even every work to make an impression, every impressive work, functions as a desired work, but I would say, and it’s here that it starts to get interesting, that every work I read as desirable, even as I am desiring it, I experience as incomplete and somehow lost, because I didn’t do it myself, and I have to in some way retrieve it by redoing it; in this way, to write is to rewrite.'” -Kate Briggs, quoting Roland Barthes, 115.
i
I can’t remember where I heard (a professor, a book, a lecture, hearsay) that creative nonfiction is about distinction.
The genre is trustworthy hearsay, an oxymoron. The phrase creative nonfiction already raises more question than it answers.
I think of distinction as central to observation, and central to questions, the kind worth asking: What am I doing with my day? What makes it different? What distinguishes this breath this meal this prayer this walk from the last?
I’ve always hated February, how eager it is to be finished despite how slowly it takes. In my head, the month is pale blue, like gas station mint gum that loses its flavor as quickly as its shape. How do I distinguish these days beyond shades of murk and rhyme? What makes this February distinct from the previous thirty?
I am writing about February, if translator Kate Briggs (translating Roland Barthes) is correct, because I want to rewrite February.
ii
At a panel at a conference in Kansas City, Lilly Dancyger says that creative nonfiction is about asking questions, which only raise more questions. It’s the act of asking that matters most, not the questions or the answers but this Socratic mitosis. I write this in my notebook, but fail to cite who in the panel said the following: “There are no answers, just a deepening and sharpening of the question.”
In Evansville, a rideshare driver tells me about her life in this city that is actually a town. She tells me about her plans to leave. She tells me that people born in Evansville find themselves stuck because of one of two things: they get wrapped up in the legal system, its labyrinth of parole, fines, probation, and technicalities, or because of poverty. This is not a town anybody wants to stay in.
The west side of town is where immigrant labor built bricks and commerce on the Ohio River. The east side is where the new money pools. The east side of town is a horizonless expanse of malls and chains and products and solutions and parking lots that never reach a quarter of their capacity. Buildings stand apart, hands in their pockets, trying to be noticed.
Driving home from the conference on Superbowl Sunday, the roads are quiet and I have ten thousand things to think about/through/with. I listen to music, podcasts, audiobooks, podcasts, music. I laugh so hard at a podcaster’s stupid joke about the Internet, tears in my eyes, that I almost drive into a ditch. It seals the deal, really, to commit to a decision I had made months before. To get it over with.
iii
It is windy on the Ohio River. On the first Sunday of Lent, a season of repentance, I dress in black for a vigil. I recognize a few faces from the library, from bookstores, from somewhere indistinct. Some wear keffiyehs. Some carry flags. It is too windy to light the candles we hold but we manage. We share the flame from civilian to civilian as the wind snuffs it out. When my candle goes out in a burst of wind, I turn to a stranger and she lends me her flame. I share the fire with someone else after another gust of wind. Our hands numb, I think, but we keep the fire alive together. Is it a different fire from candle to candle? Do we carry the same message, or does it change meaning with every curved hand protecting it from the elements?
People speak. People listen. A man describes his memories of Palestine before the Nakba. Another, his memories as a refugee in Syria. I am glad that there is so much turnout from Evansville. I thought about driving to Louisville or Indianapolis for such a vigil, but even here, there are enough hands to protect the fire from the wind.
iv
I used to think of Sundays as the simplest days. I have used them to do chores, prepare meals for the week, and rest for the next morning. That’s what a sabbath should be, a reiteration of itself, a returning-to. Right?
Briggs likens translation to a group of women dancing in a gym. One line of women cannot see the dance instructor, so they imitate the moves the women in front of them do. Likewise, the women in the row behind them cannot see the instructor, so they imitate the women in the line ahead of them as they imitate the women in the line ahead of them. Each dance move is a translation of the instructor’s through the translation of each concurrent row of dancers.
I go to the library before the screening and help the coalition set up for a documentary. I see more familiar faces. I see colleagues from the university. There is coffee, there are books, art displays about the fact that gauze may originate from the weavers of ancient Gaza City. And there are platters of dates. Once, I worked for a chef who insisted during Ramadan that we, her prep cooks, put down our knives and ladles and join her in breaking her fast at sundown with a feast of dates. That was in May, 2021, during another Israeli bombardment of Gaza, or, as one Israeli official has described it, mowing the grass.
Is it enough to call a sabbath, a sabbatical (a respite, a prepared-for invitation to contemplate) a translation of the previous? Does this mean the dance instructor is God resting on the seventh day and we are all, in some way, trying to imitate the restfulness that follows Creation? And what does that mean for the eighth day? What comes after a sabbath? Is it recreation, a translation of the same creation, an apocalypse of the old to make way for another creation? Are these Sundays a thesis, antithesis, or synthesis?
I like how Barthes (translated by Briggs, one dancing after the other) describes it: “I have to in some way retrieve it by redoing it.” This is about reading literature and responding by writing literature, but I think the same is (must be) true of looking at one’s weekly calendar, at oneself and one’s place in the community. I want to retrieve the previous week by redoing it. I want to find my previous self, shake him like a dusty rug. I want a second chance. Should or shouldn’t doesn’t (shouldn’t) matter. That I can do better is what propels me, what keeps me writing and rewriting and rerewriting.
“On the page, I undergo a change of heart, I return to the past and make something new from it, I forgive myself and am freed from old harms, I return to love and am blessed with more than enough to give away.” -Melissa Febos
Since moving to southern Indiana in August, I’ve kept the refuse from the produce I cook with, storing it in plastic cubes in my freezer. For four months, I added skins, stems, and seeds to the stockpile, until yesterday, when I emptied the freezer-burned garbage into a pot of water, sprinkling in peppercorns and cooking over medium heat to make, approximately, a month’s worth of vegetable broth.
Stock and broth can be used interchangeably when discussing vegetables, but I prefer broth because it describes the process, stemming from the Germanic bru, itself the origin of brewing. That process demands patience. Broth is versatile, a necessary part of soup but useful for plenty of other dishes.
But the main reason I make broth is to repurpose produce that I would normally throw in the garbage. The thawing mess is a grafted-together pile of compost: onion skins, carrot ends, sprigs of parsley I couldn’t find a use for, the top of a butternut squash, the seeds of a bell pepper, wrinkly garlic cloves, kale stems, squeezed lemon rinds, half a jalapeno, tomato innards, stray mushrooms, apple cores. Summer into fall into winter, cooked for hours into a liquid the color of Irish breakfast tea.
The nutrients in vegetable skins and stems are locked within unpalatable textures and disquieting flavors. Cooking broth is a way of transforming endings into beginnings, or at least the beginning of another meal, a way of expanding limits.
What have I accumulated this year that I can’t stomach? How can I be resourceful with the loneliness and anxiety I’ve kept hidden away, shoved deep in the cold parts? What dormant memories can I distill to warm me for the winter? Here at the beginning of 2024, in looking back, I really don’t have much to work with. I am at the cutting board again, still hungry for a better world.
Kristine Langley Mahler writesthat the “ending of every essay is the same ending of every heavily weighted moment: a return to routine with the incredulity that life goes on, as boring and insultingly indifferent as the moment before the change began. It is not a literary trick to revert to banality as much as it is an acknowledgment that epochs end without fanfare; they begin without obviousness; we are meant to pay attention all the time” (27).
Generally, I dislike New Year resolutions. Spring and fall present more obvious opportunities to measure change, but winter is a dormant period. We’re meant to slow down this time of year, stay together, stick to our routines and cook the apples and squash we accumulated during the harvest. This is, of course, an extremely limited experience with seasons, true to just a handful of ecosystems, and even here, in so many thick, leafless forests on the Ohio River, seasons are becoming, if nothing else, false expectations.
The end of predictable seasons has been on my mind all year, but especially this month because I’ve been reading C Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey, a near-future dystopian novel about a professional chef wrestling with her ambitions after a sun-blotting smog causes most crops to go extinct. Shortly after she is hired by an enormously wealthy financier to cook elaborate meals at his private estate, to woo scientists and technologists over the long-gone cuisines of their childhoods, the narrator discovers that her taste in organic produce has vanished after years of flavorless, extinction-resistant monocrops:
“After tasting from my employer’s menu, guts roiling with cream and questions of my future, I found myself craving a dab, a pinch, just a soupcon of mung-protein flour. That metallic tang, like medicine. Without my knowing, it had gotten familiar—a link, as I floated alone through days of terrifying uncertain abundance, to the world of gray plates and empty shelves, of starving children in Louisville and Addis Ababa. I imagined small faces pressed against the glass as they watched me throw out pounds of pommes dauphine. The sameness of the smog, it occurred to me, had also felt safe: it was unchanging” (20).
This metallic tang of gray sameness resonates with me. I’ve gotten comfortable in a sick abundance of distractions, screens, voices. So many of the experiences I’ve accumulated have been blandly scripted, redundant, disposable. Lately, it’s gotten to a point where I’ve forgotten that life isn’t meant to be a numb replication of itself.
My disdain for the Gregorian calendar, rigid and anticlimactic, likely has more to do with my disdain for quantification. I understand the impulse to number one’s achievements at the end of the year, to tally up pages written, books read, publications, rejections. But a fixation on numbers, to me, is unappetizingly stale. I don’t remember the meals I cooked in August, or September, or October. I didn’t keep track of new recipes, numbers of ingredients, nutrient totals. What I know is that the broth I cooked from those meals’ residue is layered, unfixed, earthy the way a body is after sweating in a forest but by some miracle a tiny bit sweet.
If I’m going to look back at the year, I don’t want to measure it by numbers, but by the taste and texture of what the year has made of me. How many podcasts did I listen to? Which ones? Your guess is as good as mine, but I learned a lot more than I used to know about the history of Palestine, the politics of unionizing, drafting novels, the nervous system. I learned that Soviet science textbooks are still used in India because their tone was far less condescending than western textbooks, that Martin Luther was fond of fecal jokes, and that perfectionists tend to engage in more self-harm. I read more novels than memoirs. I got better at cooking spaghetti squash. I spent more time on trains, more time looking at rivers. I talked with different writers. I live in Indiana and I teach with more joy than I used to.
It might not be the case that writing, on its own, can shake me out of my numbness, but when Melissa Febos calls writing a life-saving practice, it gives me hope: She writes, “I cannot imagine nurturing a devotion to any practice more consistently than one which yields the reward of transformation, the assurance of lovability, and the eradication of regret. No professional ambition could possibly matter more than the freedom to return, again and again” (151).
If writing doesn’t change the writer, how will it change the reader? Writing this ridiculous blog post after over a year of adding nothing to this silly little website has been, if nothing else, a taste-test of who I am right now.
I want a life of textures, a year of multitudes. I don’t want abundance; too many Americans have too much of that already, to the detriment of the planet. What I want is a more precise way of being. I want smaller numbers and slower minutes. I want to pay attention to everything, for attendance to become a devotion all its own.
My neighbors are letting their fruit rot. For weeks, I have walked by a house with three bountiful peach trees at the edge of the sidewalk, spilling fruit onto their lawn and gravel driveway, where it has turned into a mash and rotted under October’s weekly record-breaking temperatures, leaving a smell like stale beer in the air.
I’m tempted to nab a few good ones, take them home, can them or make a pie to bring back to the neighbors. But they have boarded their home with PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. Sometimes a man uses a chainsaw on the lawn to cut large chunks of wood next to the peaches. POSTED: PRIVATE PROPERTY. DO NOT DISTURB. This is Eastern Washington. This is the American West. I leave the wasted fruit alone. THIS LAND IS MY LAND.
I try to eat with the seasons. Eating locally, eating fresh, is easiest in the summer and fall, when fruit plummets freely from the trees with the evolutionary expectation that animals will eat it and take the seeds to flourish elsewhere. Taste is a necessary part of a thriving ecosystem. As Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it, “food arises from partnership” (126).
Winter is a different story. Without natural abundance, I try to choose to refuse unseasonable produce. Frances Moore Lappé wrote, back in 1982, that the American diet, defined by “unbridled freedom” to eat, grow, and sell whatever, whenever, is “a frontier concept” that has led to lasting damage: “There’s only so much farmland in the United States, and it’s shrinking, not growing. Yet we give some the right to own 100,000 acres when we know this denies dozens of farm families the right to own any land at all. Is this democratic?” (Lappé 110-111).
I love fall, and all the food associated with it, from peaches to winter squash. Thanksgiving and Halloween both derive from western European harvest festivals—Harvest Home in England, Samhain for the Celts of Ireland and its Welsh equivalent, Nos Galan Gaeaf. As much a way to prepare for winter as to celebrate the harvest, what remains of these old festivals today are the stories they associate with changing seasons.
While agriculture shaped a city-centered and often vegetable-based diet along the Mediterranean, the “modes of production and cultural values” at the edges of the Roman Empire—Celtic and Germanic—“had for centuries criss-crossed the great forests of central and northern Europe,” which shaped food access, and therefore cuisine: “Hunting and fishing, the gathering of wild fruits, and the free pasturing of livestock in the woods” made wild meat the primary dish for many Celts (Montanari 6).
Agricultural development was not necessarily absent, but less structural. Roman colonization “forced the Celts to start growing wheat on a large scale; once the wheat had been reaped and threshed the grain went to Rome,” and after the Romans fell into decline, a series of “invasions and poor or failed harvests sent people back to wild cereals” throughout the early Medieval period (Toussaint-Samat 129). Likewise, after the relative climatic stability of the Bronze Age, “the weather took a turn for the worse towards the beginning of the first millennium” across much of Europe, when “heavy rainfall and strong winds impoverished the soil, peat bogs proliferated, deforestation was rife and upland farms were deserted with alarming swiftness” (Jenkins 15).
Far from reliably cyclical, agricultural development experienced constant disruption, and as farmers adapted, so too did the culture. The harvest festivals of the Celts focused on bonfires, harvesting and storing barley and other wild cereals, apples, turnips, and ale brewed with wild hops. The prime feature of the feast was whichever animals could feed the most people, while guaranteeing they had enough cattle and pigs to make it through the winter.
After Julius Caesar led the first Roman invasion of Britain, he and others claimed that the Druids committed human sacrifice for religious purposes, for which there is modest archaeological evidence. While that evidence does notsuggest the sacrifices coincided with the Celtic harvest festivals that predated Halloween—the period of human sacrifice may have been over long before the Romans arrived, who had a vested interest in portraying the Celts negatively anyway—legends about rural pagan sacrifice for mystical purposes have persisted. In The Wicker Man (1973) the residents of Summerisle endure failing harvests, either because the gods are unhappy or because the GMO fruit strains the island’s leader brought from the mainland are unsustainable in northern Scotland. Likewise, an elder in Midsommar (2019) introduces an isolated Swedish village’s festivities by remarking, “And what poetry that it’s now the hottest and brightest summer on record,” in a cheerful voice.
The 2021 Welsh language film The Feast is more overt. The film follows a wealthy, politically powerful family in the Welsh countryside who want to throw a feast for a traditional farming couple, Mair and Lori, whose land Gwyn, the head of the household and the local MP, wants to open up to oil drilling. Mair is angry at the prospect because it’s her farm, but also because of an old, vague legend about a goddess locked where the oil is, a hill called the Rise. Unfortunately, Gwyn and his business partner Euros have already started secretly drilling.
The family hires a maid from the countryside, Cadi, to help cook the feast, consisting of wine, a seasonal but tropical fruit salad, and rabbit. Cadi is mysterious, quiet, horrified at the death of the rabbits but fascinated by the people in the house, especially two spoiled sons. One, Guto, asks her for drugs, and she takes him to the woods to find psychedelic mushrooms. Another, Gweirydd, is a disgraced doctor known for his sexual aggression.
The film has a somewhat obvious ecological message (drilling for oil will incite the revenge of the land), but I think that’s the most surface-level interpretation. Read as folk horror, it’s about a working class woman whose presence disrupts and uncovers a wealthy family’s secrets, her labor in the kitchen an infiltration of the natural world into the enforced order of the aristocracy.
Glenda, Gwyn’s wife, helps Cadi prepare the feast. Early in the film, she praises herself for using local ingredients but complains about the local market’s limits while opening a Styrofoam package of mail-order produce: mangoes, pineapple, and pomegranate. Gwyn comes in with two freshly shot rabbits, casually dropping them onto the counter for Cadi to skin. The food is a mix of local and imported ingredients, all of which the family can access with their wealth and the scale of their land for hunting.
As a food movie, The Feast does something surprising: Every scene of someone eating is utterly disgusting. Euros eats with his bare hands, jamming rabbit deep into his throat, at times sliding his fingers well past his teeth. Gweirydd brags about his special diet of raw game meat, a version of the paleo diet, while the mushrooms Guto mashes into his food cause him to hallucinate maggots in his leg, which Cadi (either in reality or as another hallucination) graciously licks from his leg to devours in front of him. That leg is eventually severed in the woods by Gweirydd, which Glenda, in a trance, cuts into bacon-thin strips while Euros fills his jaw with unidentifiable meat.
The Feast is an eco-Gothic parable that ties together the rural symbolism of folk horror, the class anxieties of Gothic literature, and the environmental terror of ecohorror. Director Lee Haven Jones has explicitly stated that Cadi was inspired by the Welsh story of Blodeuwedd, in which two magicians create a woman from flowers and oak to give the legendary hero Lleu Llaw Gyffes a wife. Much like Frankenstein’s monster, though, Blodeuwedd is angered at her creators for bringing her into their world to serve someone else’s needs, and takes revenge on them.
With rural, agricultural settings as the backdrop and harvesting a common plot device, folk horror often calls back to premodernity. Many classic English folk horror movies—The Witch, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General, and A Field in England—take place in the seventeenth century. Starvation is a looming threat in folk horror, before something even worse emerges from the woods, the same woods the ancient Celts used to scavenge freely for their food. Horror often reflects broader social anxieties—body horror mirrored the AIDS epidemic, ecohorror reflects climate change. What secrets buried in the woods does English folk horror seek to uncover?
Seventeenth century England saw another round of political disruptions to established agricultural practices. Parliament began passing a series of laws known as the Acts of Enclosure, which codified “the abolition of the open-field system, an arrangement by which villagers owned non-contiguous strips of land in a non-hedged field. Enclosing also included the fencing off of the commons and the pulling down of the shacks of poor cottagers who had no land but could survive because they had access to customary rights” (Federici 69).
The Enclosure Acts allowed English lords to privatize the commons—the woods and fields that peasants had used to freely gather food and firewood for centuries—as well as state-owned and communal Catholic land. Previously, King Henry VII had propped up individual peasant families by mandating that small-scale farmers possess a minimum standard of sheep and acreage, the effect of which, according to Francis Bacon, allowed English farmers to “keep the plough in the hands of the owners and not mere hirelings.” In Marx’s formulation, the destruction of the commons and often violent privatization of state land, “given away, sold at ridiculous prices, or even annexed to private estates by direct seizure,” coincided with the expulsion of peasants from their familial estates. With nowhere to go, they became the first proletariat, a class of workers who, for the first time in history, were legally required to purchase the privilege of shelter (Marx 884). Building on this analysis, Silvia Federici looks at the effect of enclosure on women through the lens of Europe’s witch hunts, which “destroyed a whole world of female practices, collective relations, and systems of knowledge that had been the foundation of women’s power in pre-capitalist Europe” (Federici 103). By privatizing state and common land, by legislating away centuries of agricultural relationships to reclassify as “private property” as many forests and lakes as possible, the state-sanctioned beginning of capitalism marked a severe turning point in people’s relationship with land, and therefore food.
Nia Roberts as Glenda in The Feast (2021), making a good case for vegetarianism.
Horror has plenty of gastronomical elements: Dracula drinks blood, zombies eat brains, and cannibalism appears in everything from Silence of the Lambs to Sweeney Todd. In ecohorror, as in folk horror, food is understood to be a collective problem that dwells on contamination. Food is poisoned, crops fail, or we bring into the kitchen something unwanted. Food in horror is often a reminder of how fragile we are to interruptions in season, diet, and health.
Gwyn’s motive in The Feast mirrors the enclosure acts, and Cadi reflects the classed, gendered, and ecological consequences of enclosure. English folk horror calls back to a world that was understood to be held in common. Anyone could fish, hunt, or pick fruit in the wild forests, so starvation was primarily a concern during winter. A successful harvest, after all, was an important communal affair.
Maybe I’m a coward for not picking those peaches. The warm months are finally over in Spokane, and the fruit is no longer falling from the trees. I could have baked a late harvest pie, a dozen pies even, but instead I stick to what I have from my grandparents’ little garden, carrots and tomatoes and buttercup squash, making chili and roast squash. I cook for myself. Private property has broken so many people’s brains out West that it’s become a kind of religion. It can turn people into outright monsters. If there’s one lesson horror movies have taught me, it’s that you never, ever, leave the group and set out on your own.
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2014.
Jenkins, Geraint H. A Concise History of Wales. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Kimmer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweet Grass. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Lappé, Frances Moor. Diet for a Small Planet. Ballantine Books, 1982.
Marx, Karl. Capital Vol. 1. Penguin Books, 1990.
Montanari, Massimo. The Culture of Food. Blackwell Publishers, 1994.
Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne. A History of Food. Blackwell Publishing, 2009.
A late spring frost followed by a heat wave suppressed most of my grandparents’ garden this summer. The weather stunted their otherwise abundant fruits, their berries and apricots and grapes. Some crops made it through, though, a steady supply of carrots, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and lots of squash.
The last few times I’ve visited, I’ve made them food with the same combination of ingredients: roasted squash and carrots in a tomato sauce, ratatouille in a cast iron, pizza with beet greens and thinly sliced yellow squash, and most recently tomato soup, which was probably the best meal I’ve made for my grandparents.
Soup becomes a daily meal for me in winter. Starting in November, I make a pot of soup every Sunday to last through the week: Lentil tomato, cream of mushroom, leek and potato. When there isn’t a readily obvious protein, I throw in beans or lentils, catered to my own vegetarian needs and wants.
M.F.K Fisher writes on the subject, “As a steady diet, plain water is inclined to make thin fare, and even saints, of which there are an unexpected number these days, will gladly agree that a few herbs and perhaps a carrot or two and maybe a bit of meager bone on feast days can mightily improve the somewhat monotonous flavor of the hot liquid. Soup, in other words, is good” (209).
Soup is intuitive. Soup is ubiquitous. I almost never use a recipe these days, instead relying on basic soup principles (start with onions and garlic in oil, evenly cut vegetables, simmer with broth, salt along the way) and different combinations of the ingredients I have, the nutrients I need, and the flavors of the season. Soup is necessary. Soup is forever.
Goodness aside, Fisher is right that soup connotes simplicity, even meagerness. During the Irish Famine, Irish farmers mockingly referred to famine relief measures as the Soup Kitchen Act (Preet). In western cuisine, soup is a side dish, essential only as a complement to other dishes. Frances Moore Lappé writes in Diet for a Small Planet that her soup recipes are based on ingredients she usually has on hand: “carrots, potatoes, canned tomatoes, and onions” (289). She even titles her soup chapter “A Meal in a Soup Pot.”
However good it might be, to live on soup alone is considered foolhardy martyrdom. Here, I think of the “bread ale soup” in the 1987 film Babette’s Feast. In the film, two sisters named Martine and Philippa keep the modest traditions of their father’s pious Protestant congregation alive on the Danish coast, whose typical meal is a brown viscous soup possibly based on Øllebrød, a Danish porridge of rye bread, dark beer, and honey.
Babette, a friend of a former suitor of one of the sisters, seeks refuge with them after fleeing political violence in France. She, like the audience, is unsettled by the blandness of the sisters’ food. As their new cook, she adds simple ingredients, an onion, sugar. The whole congregation comes to appreciate the small additions. When Babette receives an immense fortune from France, her decision to spend it on a feast for her hosts is an act of grace (for Protestants) or sacrifice (for Catholics).
Scene from Babette’s Feast
Culinary traditions are historically and culturally informed. Babette brings to the modest piety of small-town Protestants the traditions of upper-class Catholic French society, two unique styles that come to benefit from one another as the congregants’ modesty playfully competes with the cook’s exuberance. The film is not about a snobby French chef looking down on peasant food, nor is it about salt-of-the-earth farmers turning their noses up at pretentious gluttony, but about characters whose trajectories require them, simply, to try new things.
I think one of the reasons I enjoy cooking with and for my grandparents is that our cultural contexts for food are quite similar: We both learned to cook during financial crises that coincided with national obsessions over health and nutrition.
Nutritional science is a relatively recent field. The first isolation of a vitamin was only in 1926, and post-WWI crises sparked greater interest in food efficiency to combat scarcity. The 1933 Federal Emergency Relief Act, for example, included the distribution of household nutritional guides. One such pamphlet, Food Budgets for Nutrition and Production Programs, detailed nutritional estimates for a “liberal diet,” an “adequate diet,” and an emergency “restricted diet.” However, nutritional standards were still highly experimental at the time. As Ziegelman and Coe put it, “the scientific precision of federal food relief was illusory” (174).
Food pyramids and panics over nutrition shaped my childhood in an inverse way. In middle school, we were required to watch Supersize Me multiple times, were regularly shown “got milk?” corporate ads, and the standard 2,000 calories per day we were told we needed is actually a very rough estimation. Budgeting wasn’t our concern. Instead, as public schools installed soda machines, we were told to take personal responsibility for our own healthy decision-making.
Megan Elias, in an article titled “Summoning the Food Ghosts: Food History as Public History,” describes the disconnect between nutritionists’ emphasis on budgeting the healthiest ingredients and the recipes different American communities were used to. Nutritionists “saw canned tomatoes as a good source of vitamin C” and so they encouraged Americans to buy tomatoes instead of other vitamin C-rich foods. However, most American households “had no idea what to do with tomatoes aside from making tomato soup, which was one of the few tomato recipes to consistently appear in American cookbooks at the time,” most of which called for butter or milk, both in short supply (Elias 26). Nevertheless, Italian-American families fared well with this suggestion because Italian-American cuisine frequently used tomatoes in many recipes, making them “heroes to the relief agency.”
Elias’s point is that “expectations, tastes, and cultural biases do not disappear when the food does” (26). Food is historically informed and culturally interpreted, and therefore cannot be reduced only to its chemical components in a time of food scarcity. When I make soup, I have a bad habit of overvaluing nutritional efficiency. Like the Protestants in Babette’s Feast, I’m slowly attending to taste.
My grandmother tells me that her father’s garden in Kennewick was a lifesaver. This was and is true for many, many families. In a time of crisis, a modest plot of land to grow fruits and vegetables on produced enough to keep the family afloat. My family cooked with what grew best in the landscape, with what would keep well in winter or was easily canned for the pantry.
This fall, I experimented with what was available in their garden. I tested out different combinations of familiar ingredients in a time of relative scarcity, making use of small abundance. I don’t know what ingredients will be unavailable in coming years, as climate change worsens agriculture, but I do know that culinary adaptation will succeed only through a willingness, above all else, to try new things.
Elias, Megan. “Summoning the Food Ghosts: Food History as Public History.” The Public Historian Vol. 34 no. 2 (Spring 2012), pp. 13-29.
Fisher, MFK. The Art of Eating. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.
Lappé, Frances Moor. Diet for a Small Planet. Ballantine Books, 1982.
Preet, Edythe. “The History of Irish Soup.” IrishAmerica Vol. 16 no. 6. January 31, 2001.
Ziegelman, Jane, Andrew Coe. A Square Meal. Harper Collins, 2016.
A few weekends ago, I drove from Spokane to Moscow to see some friends. On the seat next to me was a plate of peach scones, wrapped in foil, sliding from side to side as I curved through the yellow hills of the Palouse, vibrant miles and miles of wheat.
A sign on the last county before Idaho reads “Entering Whitman County, The Nation’s Leading Producer of Wheat.” Most of the wheat in the Palouse is soft white winter wheat, which produces flour with less moisture, making it useful for cakes, pastries, and crackers. On day three of baking school, cake flour was just one of fifteen flours I sifted my fingers through to identify by texture, color, and moisture content, all of us pre-chefs standings around tiny bread pans filled with cake flour, whole wheat, cracked wheat, soy flour, all powdering our fingertips. I’ve only used all-purpose flour for my scones.
This wasn’t the first or last time I baked scones for social purposes. For an English department event I thought was a potluck but was actually just some beers and chips among mostly tenured faculty outside the Humanities Building, I brought a platter of pumpkin scones. Having the excuse of a gift makes it less nerve-racking, these social interactions, and there’s something anachronistic about it, too.
It’s comforting, I think, because of how bad I usually am at building and maintaining friendships. When I leave a place, I leave it entirely, forgetting too soon how lonely my preferred state of aloneness can become. Scones give me purpose, something to absorb my anxiety like a sponge: I promise I care about you, and here’s a plate of fresh-baked evidence that I hopewill speak for me so I can stay quiet.
Supposedly the first recorded reference to scones is from the Scottish bishop Gavin Douglas’s 1513 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid: “On grene herbis and sonkis gres./The flour sconnis war sett in, by and by” (88). The word scone possibly comes from the Scottish Sgonn, which Alexander MacBain’s 1896 Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language defines as “a block of wood, blockhead; sgonn-balaich, lump of a boy, ‘section'” (317). However, the aptly named Dictionary Containing English Words of Difficult Etymology (self-published by the Reverend Thomas Richard Brown in 1843) identifies sgonn as a Gaelic word meaning “a prater; and droll, an idle person: which seems to be synonymous with sgonn-bhalach, a scoundrel” (124).
All western baking traditions are products of modernity, though. The earliest references to scones appear just before the widespread use of ingredients we think of as essential for them. Sugar was one of the primary crops of the slave trade, which the British were in the process of expanding in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century; tea imported from China did not enter conventional British social life until the early eighteenth century; and baking soda wasn’t a household product until the nineteenth century. As Great Britain expanded its reach, afternoon tea time became a form of “participating in the continued success of the British Empire” (Fromer 538), a symbolic act of consuming the fruits of violent conquest abroad.
I don’t know what premodern scones were like, but their etymology (from lump, not scoundrel) could accurately describe many different kinds of bread. In 1999, a team of Oxford archaeologists working in Yarnton discovered what the BBC called the oldest bread in Britain: small burned blobs of 5,500-year-old crushed barley. Plenty of evidence suggests that in Neolithic Britain, “cereals were primarily cultivated on a fairly small scale,” such as “garden plots that would have shifted around with people” (Cummings & Harris 831), so unlike the static winter wheat fields of the Palouse.
I’m drawn to these ancient bits of toast because of their context. The Neolithic period was one of intense climatic change, of chaos and uncertainty. One important note: the barley chunks were also found with apple cores and hazelnut shells. Barley was probably difficult to grow in large quantities, so the first bread in Britain may have been ritualistic, a treat for a special occasion rather than a staple.
With limited resources, one type of probably rougher flour, no baking soda, and only honey as a sweetener, the barley lumps/scoundrels may have looked more the “oily cakes” that the protagonists make in Kelly Reichardt’s 2019 First Cow. Set in 1820 in the Oregon Territory, the characters Cookie and King-Lu begin making a kind of fried dough using milk stolen from the only cow in the region, owned by a British governor known by his title as the Chief Factor. When Factor finally tastes the cakes, he remarks without an ounce of self-awareness for what the cake implies that it “tastes of England.”
The film is ostensibly about friendship, but I think it’s also about the difficulty of an authenticfriendship under capitalism. When the working class must sell their labor—their mind, body, time, and spirit—to the ruling class, it becomes easier to treat one another as mere resources, just as our bosses do. In First Cow, it’s unclear until the final scene how much King-Lu and Cookie’s friendship is transactional, a mere business deal.
A journalist obtained from A24 Reichardt’s recipe for the oily cakes, from co-writer Jonathan Raymond, which was developed “from historical recipes of the time.” Requiring “just an astonishing amount of lard” to cook the yeast, fat, egg, and all-purpose flour, the formula is more like rustic pancakes.
Like a conventional short story, the film coalesces around one character’s final decision to act or to not act: King-Lu could take the profits from the cake sales and abandon Cookie, or remain with him, as Factor hunts them down after discovering their thievery. The friendship portrayed is both sincere and realistically fraught, even doomed, by the social circumstances that originally shape it.
Every time I make scones, I either use a different recipe or a different flavor. This is the opposite of industrial baking for profit, which requires uniformity. I’m glad for the uneven, lumpy, rustic shape my scones often take. I like that no two batches are the same. The pumpkin scones were the best batch I’ve made in a while (an earlier attempt at pear scones were less successful). I shared half of the batch with some fellow humanities adjuncts over dinner after the department event, along with soup made from the produce of a theology professor’s garden.
I don’t know what I’ll bake for the next occasion to share a meal. Maybe I’ll experiment with barley flour. Lumpy scoundrel already sounds like a type of doughnut. Maybe I’ll bake them with hazelnut, local apples, and fresh milk.
Brown, Thomas Richard. A Dictionary Containing English Words of Difficult Etymology. 1843.
Cummings, Vicki, Oliver T.J. Harris. “The Continuity of Hunting and Gathering in the Neolithic and Beyond.” The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers. Ed. Vicki Cummings, Peter Jordan, & Marek Zvelebil. Oxford University Press, 2014, 825-837.
Douglas, Gavin. The poetical works of Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld; with memoir, notes, and glossary. Edinburgh, 1874.
Fromer, E. Julia. “‘Deeply Indebted to the Plant’: Representations of English National Identity in Victorian Histories of Tea.” Victorian Literature and Culture Vol. 36 (2008) pg. 531-547.
My new apartment is small. People tell me it’s too small and I shrug them off, but when I cook here, I realize how important kitchen space is to me. I stack three plastic bins of books (lacking the shelf space for all my fiction) as a makeshift island. I leave dishes next to my modem to dry on a mat.
I moved to Spokane for several reasons: A fresh start, to teach part-time, to live in a state with (relatively) better healthcare, and to get professional training as a baker. I can write, read, and sleep well enough just about anywhere, but I didn’t realize how precious kitchen space can be.
When I get home with a bag of squash, tomatoes, and onions from my grandparents’ garden after visiting them in Montana, I squeeze myself between my door as it barges against a lamp and my fridge. Here, I feel like I’m in a scene from the 2007 Pixar film Ratatouille, in which Linguini brings Remy to his own similarly tiny Parisian apartment, where Remy takes in the view of the Eiffel Tower from the studio window. My new place doesn’t have an equivalent view, though, no apparent silver lining. I can only make do with what I bring to this place.
As I assemble my ingredients and begin heating oil in a small cast iron skillet for a lone vegetarian dinner, I think about the bright, colorful ratatouille that Remy makes in the film. The premise is much like an old fable: Remy the rat emerges from the sewers, befriends a garbage boy, and reinvigorates a restaurant and the soul of a pretentious critic, Anton Ego, with his cooking.
In the film, the character Colette calls ratatouille “a peasant dish” and Ego balks at it when presented with a plate of it before taking a bite. It’s telling that his first bite transports him to memories of his childhood eating a heaping bowl of stewed vegetables in the countryside, reminding him of what we can assume are the working-class roots he pushes away now as an arbiter of expense and prestige.
The twist is predicated on the dish’s obscurity. Mollie Katzen describes ratatouille as a “Mediterranean vegetable stew” in the original Moosewood Cookbook, to be served “on a bed of rice, or in a bowl” (Katzen 119). Rebecca Seal notes that in the nineteenth century, ratatouille was “a staple for the armed forces and prisoners.” Like other peasant dishes of nineteenth century Europe, it was probably similar to the gruel that Ebeneezer Scrooge sulkily eats in his miserable apartment, alone with his ghosts. Laure Murat makes much of the dish’s obscurity, observing that the Tresor de la langue francaise, a voluminous French dictionary, locates the origins of ratatouille in “a crossing between ‘tatouiller’ which means ‘to stir, to handle a lot; to spill in the mud’ and ‘ratouiller,’ ‘to make murky, to shake, to stir; to make dirty'” (Murat 144).
The dish is broad, flexible, open to interpretation. In fact, what Remy makes in the film is actually based on a culinary variation of ratatouille called confit biyaldi, which the pioneering health-conscious chef Michel Guérard invented in the 1970s during the Nouvelle cuisine movement, which revolutionized what is now an accepted standard in Western cuisine (and partly stolen from Japanese traditions) for culinary presentation, with an emphasis on a smaller quantity of food neatly organized at the center of the plate. What Ego eats—a small stack of carefully prepared vegetables and sauce—is the culmination of cultural changes in Europe that some scholars trace to the May 1968 protests that swept across France. After May ’68, Nouvelle cuisine began as “a bid to enhance the professional control of restaurants by chefs” by transforming cooks into “inventors rather than mere technicians” (Rao et al. 805).
Murat’s interpretation is that the murkiness of the dish is one of several ways that Remy is marked as an outsider generally, as queer specifically. For Murat, the movie “suggests that the culinary work of art implies the transformation of what the norm treats as discarded material. . . it is no coincidence that it is cooked by the ‘rejects’ of society” (Murat 144). The title of the movie could refer to the cast of characters themselves, who come together to form a better community through collaboration, to be inventors rather than rehashing the restaurant’s same old recipes.
This has its limits. The film is not kind to its one female protagonist, Colette, whose hard work in the industry Remy supplants at the last minute. Likewise, Linguini and Remy lose whatever intimate friendship they have when Linguini chooses to be with Colette, who is then expected to let her new lover’s former mentor (or friend or top or something) take the role of innovator, subjugating her again to the role of a technician. The film really only suggests radical shifts against hierarchy without fully arriving at them. It is Disney, after all.
Chefs like Guérard and Thomas Keller (of the French Laundry) popularized ratatouille for their generation, but for my generation, the 2007 film drew attention to the dish in the playful way it deserves. Ratatouille can be made from the detritus of castaway ingredients. Like other stews, it’s useful for getting rid of ingredients before they go bad. It’s a way of making the best of what’s available, easily adapted to new and changing circumstances. It’s a good dish to master in my tiny, viewless apartment. It’s a dish that, literally, anyone can cook, and ultimately, it’s a good dish for the Anthropocene, adaptable to whatever manages to grow in the garden after abnormal weather patterns, drought, smoke, and other effects of climate change. This is true of my grandparents’ garden, which has taken hit after climatic hit this year, and yet they still have plenty of squash.
My version of this dish uses ingredients available at most farmers markets in the Northwest, or from a variety of backyards if you have friends who are homeowners.
Assemble vegetables. Eggplant is traditional but I had yellow squash, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and zucchini.
Add olive oil to a cast iron skillet (the size depends on who you’re cooking for). Chop the onion and mince garlic and add to the oil on medium heat with a pinch of salt and pepper, to brown.
Add sliced red tomatoes and halved cherry tomatoes. Add basil, oregano, and a dash of red wine vinegar or a squeeze of fresh lemon.
Stir occasionally for fifteen minutes. Slice veggies thinly, using a mandoline if available.
Remove the skillet from the heat when the sauce is stewed down a bit. Arrange veggies in a stack on top of the tomato sauce, fitting in as many as possible. You can be fancy and make it a confit byaldi by packing in the slices vertically, or go for a rustic look with something more pile-shaped. You can make it vegan or top with grated cheese, before or after baking. You can garnish with parsley, or basil, or more cherry tomatoes. This recipe is open-minded. It’s up for whatever.
Cover the pan with foil. Bake in the oven at 450 degrees Fahrenheit for 25-30 minutes (use more time for a bigger pan).
Serve with bread, or with wine, or on a bed of rice, or whatever you have available.
If dining alone, watch a movie or listen to the radio while eating. If ghosts or rats arrive, listen carefully to what they have to say.
Katzen, Mollie. Moosewood Cookbook. Ten Speed Press, 1977.
Murat, Laure. “What’s Queer About Remy, Ratatouille, and French Cuisine?” What’s Queer About Europe? Productive Encounters and Re-Enchanting Paradigms, edited by Mireille Rosello & Sudeep Dasgupta, Fordham University Press, 2014, 136-147.
Rao, Hayagreeva, Philippe Monin & Rodolphe Durand. “Institutional Change in Toque Ville: Nouvelle Cuisine as an Identity Movement in French Gastronomy.” American Journal of Sociology Vol. 108 No. 4 (2003), 795-843.
Seal, Rebecca. “Deconstructing Ratatouille. National Geographic, May 10, 2019.
Keene Short 