Monday, March 18, 2024

Corn or Clam Chowder

 I have half and half and need to use it.

https://www.culinaryhill.com/corn-chowder-recipe/

https://www.culinaryhill.com/new-england-clam-chowder-recipe/

Shepherd's Pie & Colcannon

Shepherd's Pie Recipe from Recipe Tin Eats 

Colcannan recipe (friends used buttermilk in place of half and half)

John Birt's Irish Soda Bread 2024

4 c. Einkorn flour
1 T. Salt
1 t. Baking soda 
3/4 t. Baking powder 
1/4 c. Coconut sugar
4 T. Butter
1/2 c. Currants
1 1/2 c. Buttermilk 
 Bake @ 375 (F)  35-45 mins.

Fault Lines by Karl Pillemer

Achieving the reconciliation taught her critically important lessons about how to meet her own needs while accepting differences and showing compassion to others.

 
The premise is that real people who have been through a challenging experience are extraordinary sources of advice.

Human nature is such that our happiness depends on reliable, secure, and predictable social relationships, and without them we feel lost.
Karl Pillemer, Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Interview Dany Laferrière: a life in books

 Article

(excerpts)

Laferrière was back in Haiti for a literary festival in the capital Port-au-Prince when the earthquake struck on 12 January 2010, killing tens of thousands and reducing the city to rubble. He was waiting for lobster in a hotel restaurant, and began scribbling "15 minutes after the first tremors," he says in French. "It's not often you see your city falling down in front of your eyes. People are screaming in pain all around you. Children are running in the streets. Some people start talking about the end of the world. But writing, for me, was as important as taking care of the injured." Though he believes the great novel of the Haitian dictatorship was Graham Greene's The Comedians (1966), he says, "I didn't want it to be an American or British writer bearing witness, because they'd see the dead, but not know how they were when they were alive." He adds: "It's not all authors who get a chance to test literature and their relationship to it. I no longer ask myself if it has any use."

***

For him, moving between the two biggest French-speaking populations in the Americas was a revelation. French, he says, was the "language imposed on Haitians, whereas it's what Quebecers want to preserve as the core of their identity … It showed it's not the language that's the problem. That freed me in my own relationship to French."

The Enigma of the Return moves fluidly between free verse and prose, partly in homage to the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire. It begins in 2009 as the narrator, Windsor Laferrière Jr (the author's real name), receives a phone call about his father's death in a Brooklyn hospital. Windsor had moved from one island, Hispaniola, to another in the St Lawrence river ("We always forget that Montreal is an island"), from fire to ice. As he journeys to New York, then Haiti, the book reflects on the father "whose absence shaped me," and how both their lives were rent by the Duvaliers, father and son.

The novel is "not only my return, but the return of all those who had to leave because of the dictatorship; those who could return only in their dreams; and those who hope their children will return in their stead. Many people had to leave – those who opposed the Duvaliers and, after the dictatorship, those who were for them. I don't deal with the reasons, but the fact of being away." In his books, "almost all details and anecdotes are true. But what's important is to communicate what I felt at the time, and what I feel as I'm writing. Writing, for me, is the layering of these two emotions."

His own father didn't really interest him in real life. "He was the most important person in my mother's life, but he left when I was too young. I was brought up by seven women: my mother, her mother, and five aunts. I didn't feel I was missing anything. But I thought it was important to dig into this emotion, because many people in the same position as me had an absent father." The true exile, he says, is the "one who stays behind, with the absence of those they love".

It's not often you see your city falling down in front of your eyes

It's not often you see your city falling down in front of your eyes. People are screaming in pain all around you. Children are running in the streets. Some people start talking about the end of the world. But writing, for me, was as important as taking care of the injured.

On writing immediately after the 2010 earthquake in “Dany Laferrière: a life in books” in The Guardian (2013 Feb 1)

it was important that someone who knew them write about the event…

They were human beings who had a life, who had a lineage, who had parents, who had children, who had lives. They were not poor or rich. They were people and these people had humanity. So it was important that someone who knew them write about the event…

On reporting about the 2010 earthquake in Haiti in “An Interview with Dany Laferrière” (WWB Daily, 2016)

How I began to write is different than how I became a writer. They are two different things.

How I began to write is different than how I became a writer. They are two different things. Many people write but they do not become writers. To become a writer is a job. It involves planning and it affects all parts of your life. Even what you eat—being a writer means not eating food with too much rich sauce to avoid taking a long afternoon nap! It’s like being a professional athlete. And a writer must choose between being a sprinter who writes a book, and being a writer who creates an oeuvre. If you want to create an oeuvre, you have to be careful not to put all your energy into the first book. You have to have a vision for the long term...
On how he became a writer in “An Interview with Dany Laferrière” (WWB Daily, 2016)

The Dictionary

The dictionary doesn’t have individual contributions. It’s like building a cathedral. The workers are unknown. But one of the things I tend to do is suggest that it might be interesting to have examples of things that aren’t from France. 

If it’s a wind, which we worked on recently, does it always have to be the mistral? What about the winds of elsewhere? How about zephyrs or siroccos? 

In French, there exists an enormous variety of classifications, proverbs, and witticisms about winds. There are winds that push ships as well as winds that come from the gut—the noisy, bodily winds of Rabelais. 

All shadings have to be in the dictionary.

On working on a French-language dictionary as part his duties at the Académie française in “Dany Laferrière, The Art of Fiction No. 237” in The Paris Review (Fall 2017)

Dany Laferrière OC, OQ (born Windsor Kléber Laferrière April 13, 1953) is a French-writing Haitian-Canadian novelist and journalist.

The cold numbs before it kills.

 Dany Laferrière, L'Énigme du retour

The wounds of which we are ashamed cannot be healed.

 Les blessures dont on a honte ne se guérissent pas. Dany Laferrière, L'Énigme du retour 

I could never share the fate of a civilization that ostracizes rice. In no way could I trust people who believe yogurt is superior to rice.

 Dany Laferrière, How to Make Love to a Negro

But I treasure those nightmares. They’re the only thing that’s left of my life from before. Dany Laferrière, L'Énigme du retour

To Learn

I admit that it’s easier
To learn than to relearn.
But harder still
Is to unlearn.
Dany Laferrière, L'Énigme du retour

Lost to the North

I felt
I was
Lost to the North when
In the warm sea
In pink twilight
Time suddenly became liquid
Dany Laferrière, L'Énigme du retour

To Blend

I would like to lose
All awareness
Of my being
To blend
Into nature
And become a leaf
A cloud
Or the yellow of the rainbow
Dany Laferrière, L'Énigme du retour

We always think of what’s missing. ― Dany Laferrière, L'Énigme du retour

 L'Énigme du retour

The Riddle of the Return

People are unhappy when they get something too easily. You have to sweat--that's the only moral they know.

 ― Dany Laferrière, I Am a Japanese Writer: A Novel

Illness is a luxury you can't afford

“Before the earthquake, medicine was hard to find. When you went to the hospital, you had to bring your own. In this country, you don't go there until the pain becomes unbearable. Otherwise, you don't consider yourself sick. It's better not to be sick if you can't pay for the medicine. That way, you go from being in good health to being dead. Illness is a luxury you can't afford if you don't have the means. So you die without ever having been sick.”
Dany Laferrière

J'écris à voix haute dans mon coeur. Dany Laferrière

“I write out loud in my heart.”
― Dany Laferrière