April is Certainly the Cruelest Month

T.S. Eliot said, “April is the cruelest month,” and indeed, this April has been most unkind. It is now nearing the end of April and during the entire month the sun has shone minimally and the rain has fallen seemingly continually. It was raining the morning I began this post, and during what was supposed to be a break in the rain I went out for my walk, but as soon as I stepped out of doors a rain shower began. I pulled up my jacket hood and headed out anyway. Earlier this month snow showers fell insultingly. What is so cruel about April is that it promises Spring here in the Midwest, but here in the Midwest April does not deliver. April dampens the spirit. The forecast announces that thunderstorms will continue for the next several hours! When I was young my mother would explain that thunder arose from the clouds crashing (but she may have said bumping!) into each other. I do not mind thunder; the most frightening thunderstorm I have ever experienced was in Spielberg’s film, Poltergeist. 

            I have spent the past several years reading detective novels and streaming detective shows on the computer screen. I view shows regularly to help me out of my head and away from the dirty world of politics. As I exhaust one series season and when it might hurt too much to think I search for some new program to occupy myself. I have seen a great many shows. I have already exhausted Inspector Lewis, Morse, Endeavor (eighth season to air sometime soon, I hope), Vera, A Touch of Frost, Shetland, Broadchurch, Unforgotten, Prime Suspect, Murder in Paradise, Pie in the Sky, Professor T, The Paris Murders, The Nordic Murders . . .  and a not a few of which I am ignorant and some I’ve since not remembered. I even watched a few I didn’t even enjoy: Bosch, and DCI Banks, for examples, and a few other paired detectives on British telly. This past week I discovered Annika with Nicola Walker. I have always enjoyed her presence on the screen: she was wonderful in The Split.  She was the lead detective in Unforgotten! Annika is a new detective show centered about a Marine Homicide Unit in Glasgow, and Walker is the Detective Inspector. In several ways Annika is typical of detective shows I have been watching obsessively for the past several years and especially since the onset of the pandemic. (Hmm, detective shows, mostly murder mysteries, during the pandemic:  what is that about?). As in so many of these presentations, there is a chief detective—in Annika Walker plays the chief detective—who is supported by a team of young, usually multi-racial and multi-age fast-talking and highly competent associates. Within the team there are conflicts, both personnel and professional, but the comradery is unquestioned. Often in the show the superintendent or commandant is often a woman, as often are the chief detectives, in Annika, that role is played by Nicola Walker. Forensic pathologists, too, have been often female and become love interests of and for the male detectives. In Annika Nicola Walker begins a tentative relationship with her daughter’s first therapist but the conflicts become too great and the relationship is put on pause. We’ll see what happens to the couple if there is a season two, though at the end of season one Annika reveals that one of her team is actually the father of her daughter though clearly of this fact he is unaware. The children of the detectives are often troubled by being singly parented and the consistent danger the job requires of that parent; as in so many of these shows, the detective is divorced, widowed or widowered; as in so many of these shows the detective chooses to be alone rather than engage in a serious relationship, the exception being Midsommer Murders. In that very British show the detective is happily married and their daughter enjoys a seemingly untroubled existence. Of course, there are exceptions to this model, but I have seen few detectives maintain an untroubled relationship for very long. In Vera and A Touch of Frost, the detective chooses to remain isolated and alone. 

But what seems so different about Annika is that Walker (as Annika) breaks through the fourth wall that separates players from audience. Annika talks to the viewer (as did Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag) and in her talking creates a sort of intimacy with the viewer. These addresses are not soliloquies—externalizations of interior thought not meant to be overheard but supposedly private behind the fourth wall—but are, rather, direct communications to an audience, but expecting not an oral but an intellectual response. Annika doesn’t directly talk about the case itself but about the personal conflicts in her life that might include the present investigation. And to do so she references works of literature that present parallel situations and conflicts and that offer commentary on her present professional and personal situation. Norse myths. Greek myths. Homer. Ibsen. Shakespeare. She does not directly draw the comparison between the references and her present situation—her references are not similes— but her direct address to the viewer expects that the viewer will understand the connections. What she appears to announce is that issues such as hers have been considered before, and her references suggest that literature might sometimes offer insight into the situation! When she talks to the viewer Annika transforms the entire murder investigation in any one show into metaphor. She teaches: her literary references universalize her situation, suggesting that her experiences and conflicts are not isolated and solitary. Annika aspires to a modest level of intellectuality!

             

 

I Am Awake

The Republicans have seized on the work ‘woke’ and twisted it out of all shape. The word has become for them the newest expletive. In a New York Times article from May, 2021 Allan Smith and Sahil Kapur write, “Republicans, looking to dent President Joe Biden and win back Congress next year in part by rousing a voting base animated by culture was issues, have increasingly settled on a single word to describe what it is they stand against: "woke." What the word actually means remains vague, but the Republicans seem to consider it a term that refers to a radical socialist agenda proposed by Democrats that advocatse for social justice. The authors write, that the word is “directly linked by the Republicans to language like ‘political correctness’ and ‘cancel culture’ — which are also at the forefront of conservative messaging.” In the meantime these same Republicans have proposed eliminating certain books from libraries, cleansing the language of gender neutral terms, advocating the continual celebration of traitors (Southern Civil War rebels) racist murderers and thugs, and engagement in rude and insulting speech and behavior that no civilized person should tolerate.

             In the recent confirmation hearings for now Justice Jackson the Republicans threw ‘woke’ and ‘wokeism’ about defiling the hearings as if the terms were excrement picked up off the ground or served for them as Molotov cocktails intending to destroy the character of this esteemed justice. To be ‘woke’ was intended as an insult. The article continues: “Woke,” which has a log history in Black culture, was propelled into the mainstream in 2014 by activists protesting after Michael Brown, a Black teenager, was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. "Stay woke" was a warning to be vigilant as Black Lives Matter protests were met with considerable police force. It evolved to encapsulate a broader social justice mantra — to be "woke"is now designed to be cognizant of racial and social injustices."  This is what Republicans choose to ignore: not merely the word but the social injustice it means to combat. But in fact the term appears much earlier in the 1939 novel Whose Names Are Unknown by Sonora Babb. This book narrates the lives of families suffering the Great Depression and the dust storms that swept through at least Oklahoma during the 1930s. The narrative reads, “Was not Christ a man with blood in his veins and a heart for people? He did not die that they might be saved; he was murdered, as good as lynched, for his ideas that woke the poor enduring people like the ones now in this little church in town, he was killed for his ideas that threatened the enthroned greed of the times.” Woke was a term Babb chose to refer to an awareness that somehow things were not just, that some were benefitting from the suffering of others; that while some grew fat others died of starvation. I think here of Ted Cruz boarding a plane to Cancun for a family vacation while his constituents suffered pandemic conditions and lockdown. Now he cannot utter a sentence without the word  ‘woke’ used disparagingly. I will have to say that he does not offer much advertisement for a Harvard law education. 

I wonder what it would mean to not be ‘woke.’ Wouldn’t it mean to accept endemic racism authorized even in the Constitution, growing economic inequality, gender discrimination, anti-Semitism, voter suppression, totalitarianism and ignorance. It would mean to ignore climate change that threatens our survival. Maybe they don’t care. History be damned, they say, and so will we be. 

Oh yes, I am incensed. I watched the Republicans filed out of chamber yesterday insulting the confirmation of a new Supreme Court Justice. Fortunately, their tails were tucked between their legs. I have spent my life in education and would have been castigated for behaviors displayed regularly by Republicans. It is not only embarrassing but infuriating to have to suffer their disgraceful words and actions. May they all go back into the holes out of which they have crawled. And may their children not take lessons from them and not follow their lead.  

 

 

 

The Careless Cook VII

Sometimes I can measure the degree of my anxiety by the number of home-baked breads I have stored in my freezer. This past week proved to most difficult: six baguettes, and what King Arthur Flour refers to as Bag-of-the Bag Oatmeal loaf bread baked and frozen. In the freezer already were baked hamburger rolls (for veggie burgers) and two Italian loaves. And Passover approaches! Two of the baguettes are always dedicated to Amelia and Lilian, the ladies who every two weeks clean my apartment. At the onset of the pandemic, I had stopped their service but I continued to pay them. Every other Monday Amelia would arrive masked to the entrance way to the building, and I would head down masked and gloved to meet her and hand her a check for her usually fee. On one of the first mornings of this arrangement she sighed sadly that many of her clients were canceling her services and she was unable to sleep from worry. I commiserated with her but what could I do? But I decided that I would add to her salary loaves of my home-baked bread. In the beginning the delivery was whole pan-baked loaves. At this distance I recognize what a very, very small gesture this most certainly was, but I really didn’t know what else to do to relieve her worries! And when she and Lilian returned to clean my space again—again, fully masked—I raised their payment and continued to offer them the bread. I continue to bake baguettes for them. And then serendipitously our condominium was looking for someone to clean the public spaces and we hired Amelia and Lilian.
            As for the other loaves . . . well, the baguettes not dedicated to Amelia and Lilian I can eventually consume . . . but dealing with my anxieties is not as easy, and I recognize that a return to the bread-baking will certainly occur. But Passover approaches and I wonder what I will do with my anxieties during those eight days.

            I wonder what the relationship might be between the rise of my anxiety and the rising of the dough. I feel somehow accomplished when I peer into the bowl and the dough has doubled or even tripled in bulk. Perhaps in part the bread preparation is effort without thinking. I am a careless cook and so though I follow a recipe I do not do so precisely. I am careless. King Arthur tells me to measure my flour by weight . . . but that only dirties another dish I will have to wash and the few times I attempted to follow their advice I did not like the quality of the dough. Mea culpa, I am certain I did something incorrectly. And so as I have always done I take the cup measure and dip it into the flour container and sometimes scrape the top level and sometimes don’t bother to do so. I forget to add the salt and I I carelessly follow the recipe though I have been baking for thirty years, albeit somewhat carelessly. Perhaps the carelessness reflects my anxiety, (a topic I’ll not pursue here) but I feel calmer as the bread forms and when it does so my anxiety recedes. Sometimes, however, the effort only increases the anxiety and as I fret, I tell Alexa to raise the volume on the music. This helps. Sometimes the recipe calls the bread to be baked in a 9x5 pan but every time I have attempted this the loaf doesn’t rise over 1 inch above the pan’s edge as it should and actually falls back shrunken flat. I eat this loaf anyway, but I do not serve it to company, and in my solitude I grumble. Once or twice I have thrown away the misshapen loaf in frustration but this waste makes me too guilty on top of the anxiety. Oh mother, things aren’t going well. 

            When I began baking almost thirty years ago—I baked loaves, muffins, scones, pancakes and waffles, and pizza for the children—everything would be eaten though sometimes a single loaf remained stored in the freezer. Some recipes produced two loaves and we could only eat one at a time though eventually both loaves would be consumed, and then I would bake again. There were then in my life other means besides baking to reduce my anxiety: I had a full-time job at the University and the classroom usually calmed me though it did produce another medley of frustrations. These were manageable. But baking then was an act of love, and my anxiety did not enter my motivations. But now in my retirement there are no classrooms to relieve my anxieties. And the world keeps getting more and more dangerous and the doom scrolling depresses me and I don’t seem able to stop reading the bad news. I know that to fill the paper editors have to invent situations and stories but why am I reading them? 

Well, it is not yet Passover, the war in Ukraine continues, the Republicans continue to lie and deceive, and climate change threatens the planet and our civilizations. I think of Tom Lehrer’s sentiments in the The Merry Minuet: “The French hate the Germans./ The Germans hate the Poles./Italians hate Yugoslavs./ South Africans hate the Dutch/and I don't like anybody very much!”

            Okay, I’m off to the kitchen . . . today’s unnecessary baking will add sourdough baguettes to the store.