Christmas cookies

This is the first year that I am reporting on cookie baking progress in real time, posting updates on the successes, failures, and unintended consequences of steps taken by mistake.

As a result, I find myself reflecting far more than I might otherwise on this annual ritual, which is the primary way I connect to family tradition. I say that I am making my mother's cookies. I have never been interested, as others are, in finding new recipes or in changing the recipes I received. Christmas is mom's cookies, and I am intent on re-making Christmas.

But it is more than just making the same kind of cookies as she did. When I make my mother's Christmas cookies, I repeat embodied gestures, the memories of how she did things, of how we did things together. I re-embody her. Now that, every time I look in a mirror, I have a slight shock of recognition, seeing her hair turned white surrounding my face, this sense of bringing back to life a shared experience is ever stronger.

Yesterday, when the Russian tea cakes were in the oven and I began to set up the cooling rack and confectioner's sugar for when they came out, I reached without thinking for a brown paper bag, cutting it open and laying it down on the counter to rest the cookies on, collecting the excess sugar. This is nothing I thought of; it is something I have forgotten to do in previous years; it was simply something that, in a state of exhaustion, came from somewhere deep in my being.

Similarly today, rolling walnut-sized balls of kipfel dough to return to the fridge for two or more hours, I ripped off a piece of waxed paper before I remembered that I use a plastic bag to hold the layer of balls and keep them from adhering. Finding no plastic bags left, I self-consciously pulled out the waxed paper sheet I had folded and put back, and began to line it with the kipfel cookie dough balls.

I learned these things without intent. Baking was the one thing that I did with my mother that I didn't share with other siblings. Why, I don't know. Growing up, cooking was not something I was expected to do: if there was a meal needing help, my job was to run to the store for a loaf of bread or something else needed at the last minute. I think it was when I was in high school that I began staying with Mom in the kitchen when she began to make her cookies.

The memories, like all memories, are unreliable, layered, cannot be sorted into a timeline. They are episodes. Some are funny: the year that we realized too late that weevils had infested the oats, and faced the decision: throw that entire batch of gumdrop cookies away? or keep silent and let them be consumed with a little extra protein? I associate this memory with something read as an archaeology undergrad, a similar joke made by an archaeologist studying early agriculture, and maybe that means this time was on a vacation from Cornell, because I know that after I left home, returning to make Christmas cookies became even more important.

Even when everything else changed, this did not. There were the tools: the sifter (she sifted her flour; I twitch with guilt as I do not); the pastry cutter with wires and a wood handle (now I have my own, found after a brief flirtation with a supposedly superior all-metal, bladed type); wooden spoons for creaming butter, the technique I learned from her and continue to practice, except for one batch this year when my injured elbow punished me for trying (and even so, I am not sure I will resort to the mixer again next year).

Not that nothing ever changed in her repertoire. I do not know when I realized that the big, sugar iced cut cookies we decorated as children were really not all that interesting to her. It seems she had made them so we could be part of the cooking, and once we were grown, there was no special attraction there, even though when she did decorate the reindeer, Santas, bells, and stars, she placed each sprinkle of sugar or silvery ball with perfect care.

But it was the other cookies she loved to make. And unlike me, she experimented with new varieties every year. Kipfels were one of these experiments, from a recipe printed in the newspaper. We made the rich short pastry, rolled out the circles on 10x sugar, and prepared to fill the crescents, before we reached the filling instructions calling for a combination of apricot jam, chopped walnuts, and beaten egg whites. Odd, but still, we combined these ingredients as best we could, and they were delicious. Then the paper printed a correction: there were two fillings, one apricot alone, the other a walnut mixture. After careful consideration, next year, she made her mixed filling again, walnuts and apricot jam-- and I make her version of kipfels every year, aware that it is not Lottie Ketter's recipe anymore, but mom's.

We would work for hours. This year, forced by my recalcitrant arm to delay some cookies for days, I realize that I have taken on not just the responsibility to reproduce her cookies, but the need to make them all at once, in an intense burst of effort over two or three days. It is not as hard to make the cookies this way, spaced out over a week. But there was something about the intensity of baking Christmas cookies with mom that meant this was a special time.

I have recipes for almost all the Christmas baking we did year after year. The Hello Dollies, which I think may originally have been made by an aunt (Virginia? or am I confusing this with her famous Rocky Roads?). The spectacular, universally beloved gum drop cookies (for which I scour stores in these days of Sour Gummi Worms and Fish, pushing the old traditional gum drops off the shelves). The Russian tea cakes, always my favorites, but finicky, ready to break into a million crumbs if I make the slightest mistake in assembly. (I remember the disastrous year when she experimented with an alternative way to cover them with sugar, putting them in a bag and shaking it, opening it to find crumbs and broken cookies-- why would she try that? with my own fingers beginning to show the effects of arthritis, I wonder if this was an attempt to lessen the fine work that becomes harder as my hands become clumsier, or rather, if hers became clumsier as mine are?)

And then there is Stollen. I do not have this recipe. I wonder if it is one she actually wrote down, or simply committed to memory. The German fruit bread with its white sugar icing was often the last thing she prepared. I do not remember the kids liking it; the citrons and citrus zest that accompanied the raisins in her version did not necessarily appeal to the tastes of children. I have not tried to recreate Stollen, because with one exception, it was not something I made with her, not something for which the skill is in my fingers and arms.

But there was one Christmas when I made Stollen. I don't remember when, if it was before I left home or when I returned, as I did for as long as I could, to make mom's cookies. What I do know is that timing did not work that day; we were late into Christmas morning before we wrapped up the last cookies, and she decided not to stay up to make the Stollen. I said I would clear up, and she went to bed. And then I made a Stollen. All by myself, I recreated her steps, ending with the icing, leaving the Stollen for her to see when she came downstairs next morning. My gift to her; the only gift I remember giving her in my life.

So how could I make Stollen now? I gave it to her, as she gave me these other things: the gumdrop cookies, the Russian tea cakes, the kipfels. Her hair, her despair and hope, her magical thinking. Belief. Love. Ferocious love.

Poetry, Flowers, and Other Beautiful Things

Let thought burst into flame...

Two nights ago we saw an extraordinary performance of La Boheme at the Metropolitan Opera. The production was glorious, the singing was beautiful, and the acting was entirely committed.

Because this was not the first time I saw this story of early nineteenth-century artists living in Parisian attics, I noticed things that I would not have previously.

At the beginning of the play, the artist Marcello is painting, and the poet Rodolfo is shivering. The scene unfolds as an interplay of the materiality of the painting and manuscripts, and the reality of the images they represent. Marcello sings

This Red Sea passage
makes me shiver,
I feel as if it were flowing right over me
droplet by droplet.

The image he is painting is so real that Marcello feels what he is painting. Materialization links the artist with the scene.

This interplay between things and the things that represent them continues as, inspired, the pair feed his manuscript to the flames of the stove in their garret:

Let thought burst into flame...
the paper will crackle and turn to ashes,
then the poetry will rise to Heaven...
I find it really sparkling!...
Within that languid blue flickering
flame, an ardent tale of love fades!
A page crackles.
There are kisses in there!

The play burns, and the poetry sparkles, kisses crackle, the emotions become things-- active, moving, burning ardently...

Once my attention was caught by the place things play in this opera, by the interplay of poetry and things, it became impossible to ignore.

Specific items of clothing play active roles, they act independently of the intentions of the humans they connect in a network of humans and non-humans: the bonnet that Rodolfo buys for Mimi, which she leaves him as a memento when they part; the shoes that Musetta claims are too tight to wear, so that she can rid herself of her rich patron and reclaim Marcello; the fur muff Musetta buys to warm the hands of the dying Mimi; and most of all, the overcoat that Colline sells to buy comforts for Mimi.

There is a particular interplay between the images of poetry and flowers that links and yet divides Rodolfo, the poet, and Mimi, the young woman he loves. Rodolfo introduces himself to Mimi, describing what he does:

In my dreams and reveries,
I build castles in the air,
where in spirit I am a millionaire...

Mimi, in turn, describes her own work, echoing the interplay between the materiality of the canvas and paper that Marcello and Rodolfo discussed burning, and their service as media to represent things of beauty:

On linen and silk I embroider,
at my home or away...
I have a quiet, but happy life,
and my pastime
is making lilies and roses....
These things have such sweet charm,
they speak of love, of Spring,
of dreams and visions and
the things that have poetic names.

Mimi is more aware of the difference between the flowers she embroiders and those that bloom in April than Rodolfo comprehends the distance between his dramatic scenes and real life:

In a vase a Rosebud blooms,
I watch as petal by petal unfolds,
with its delicate fragrance of a flower!
But the flowers that I sew,
alas, have no fragrance.

The events that unfold between them will, however, teach Rodolfo what Mimi already knows.

In the second act, things establish the scene:

Oranges, dates, hot chestnuts!
Trinkets, crosses, nougat!
Whipped cream!
Toffees!
Fruit pies!
Finches, Sparrows!
Flowers for pretty girls!

Flowers for pretty girls... flowers like the ones that Mimi embroiders. But what Mimi asks for, and Rodolfo buys her, is not the flower, but one of the items of clothing that circulate through the opera as extensions of the characters:

A pink bonnet, trimmed
with lace, and prettily embroidered.

Embroidered with what? we are not told. But with Mimi's description of her work so recently echoing, and the vendor's repeated cry of "Flowers for pretty girls", I imagine the bonnet embroidered with spring flowers.

When, in Act Three, Mimi resolves to leave Rodolfo to spare him the pain he feels about their poverty endangering her health, she says she

must return
there all alone, to make
imitation flowers of silk.

She describes to Rodolfo where her few possessions are, and leaves the pink bonnet as the remembrance of their love. In a long exchange, interrupted by the arguing of their friends Marcello and Musetta, Rodolfo says

One can speak with Lilies and roses.

Mimi answers

Gentle twittering can be
heard from birds' nests...

And together they sing,

When the flowers bloom in Spring,
we'll have the sun as our companion!...
We'll part when it's the
season for flowers again!

Poetry and embroidered flowers compete here, each a visualization of beauty. But it is the items of clothing that take on active roles in the final act. Rodolfo speaks to the bonnet which is all that remains of his lost Mimi:

And you, soft bonnet,
that she left concealed under the pillow,
you know all our happiness.

The bonnet is invested with a capacity to know, to actively remember.

Also reintroduced is the overcoat worn by Colline, the prime example of an object invested with agency in this opera. We first meet the overcoat in Act Two, as Colline buys it:

It's rather worn...
...but it's dignified and it's a good price.

It returns at the end of the opera, when Colline determines to sell it for the benefit of Mimi:

Faithful old garment, listen,
I'll rest down here,
you however, must climb
the sacred mount of piety.
My thanks you must receive.
Never has your poor worn back
bowed before the rich and powerful.
Deep in your calm cavernous pockets,
you have protected
philosophers and poets.
Now that our happy days
have fled, I must bid you farewell,
faithful friend of mine.
Farewell, farewell.

This faithful friend takes one last action, leaving Colline, the philosopher, to produce funds for Mimi.

Once I began to watch what things did in this opera, if became a different play for me: one where art doesn't just imitate reality, it invokes blooming flowers; where clothing, instead of passively submitting to people, remembers, protects, and takes on the burdens of the people it lives among.

Tracking missions over time

Spanish missions are a visible reminder of a deeper history in states like California.

Many missions are still in use as parish churches, while simultaneously offering a more-or-less sanitized history of Spanish colonization. Yet the historicity of many of these missions-as-heritage-sites is questionable: often they were reconstructed by groups less concerned with questions of authenticity than with creating concrete visible symbols of a romanticized "Spanish" history. Think Zorro, with its oddly baroque clothing and seemingly infinite number of wealthy hidalgo families.

I wasn't aware of the number of missions that existed in other states of the Southwest (or the Southeast, for that matter). A trip to Tucson a few years ago gave me the opportunity to visit San Xavier Bac, probably the most beautiful mission church in the entire Southwest, and started me on an ongoing mission hunt. Now, everywhere we go in the Southwest, I check to see if there are missions and push to find a way to visit them.

San Antonio, it turns out, was the center of an unusually dense cluster of missions. The Alamo (which, ironically, we did not succeed in visiting) was originally one of them, San Antonio Valero. South along the San Antonio river are four more. The National Park Service administers them, with local parishes continuing to use three of the intact churches.

Mission Concepcion was founded in 1731. The church that was completed in 1755 still stands, and is beautiful. Remnants of original paint are preserved in the rooms of the convento. The interior of the church preserves a section cut through to the original paint at one point, as an evident warrant for the contemporary painting of the church interior.

It is these mixtures of contemporary use-- here and elsewhere including refreshing of the paint in the church-- and a kind of bow to historical preservation that makes missions temporally complicated. I need a word here like Foucault's heterotopia: heterotempora? for a place that contains, not many places, but many times.

Even the name "Concepcion" has interesting temporal dimensions. It is a reference to the Immaculate Conception, the feast day that falls on December 8. It was not until 1854 that the Roman Catholic church declared as official dogma that Mary herself was born without original sin, so the question for me is, what did it mean to dedicate a church to Concepcion in 1731?

Among other things, it leads to a consideration of the differences between different orders of missionary priests. The three main orders responsible for missions in Latin America, the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits, were competitors, and differed fiercely in how they understood theology. These differences led to approaches to missionization that could be dramatic. (The movie The Mission represented some of the difference between Jesuits and Franciscans through the history of missionization of Paraguay's Guaraní).

(A less well known order, the Mercedarians, who were responsible for missions in Honduras in the 16th and 17th century, provide another, even better example. Unlike the dominant model in the US, which is associated with the Franciscans, Mercedarians did not bring the native people into a centralized settlement. Instead, they established a central church, and daughter churches in Indian towns, which they visited to administer sacraments.)

Reportedly, St Francis of Assisi, founder of the order, designated the Virgin Mary as "Advocate of the Order":

the Third Order Regular of Saint Francis is placed under the protection of the Immaculate Virgin Mary, its heavenly patron.

The Dominican Order also had an early history of Marian devotion. But the two orders differed on specific aspects of Marian practice; as one Dominican source says

The two Marian devotions represent in the minds of the faithful two different floods of light.

The Dominicans promoted the Rosary as a means of devotion to Mary. Veneration of the Virgin Mary as conceived without sin was advocated by the Franciscans; the Dominicans did not observe this feast until it was made universal dogma of the Roman Catholic church.

Approved as a "pious belief" in the early 15th century, the doctrine of "immaculate conception" was long debated. The feast day was officially recognized as a holy day of obligation only in 1708-- less than two decades before the establishment of the mission of that name south of San Antonio by the Franciscan order.

A second Franciscan mission dedicated to the same manifestation of the Virgin Mary exists in central California, named in full Mission La Purísima Concepción, although founded much later (1787).

Dedicating these mission churches to the "pure conception of Mary" served as a way to advance the doctrinal argument. At the same time, the Franciscans were advancing, knowingly or otherwise, veneration of the only American manifestation of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, who appeared to Juan Diego on the feast day of the Immaculate Conception in 1531. According to tradition, the apparition declared herself “the ever virgin Holy Mary, Mother of the True God”.

Although the story of the vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe outside Mexico City dates to 1531, it is precisely during the period when the missionization of the Southwest began that piety directed at this American manifestation of the Virgin Mary was promoted.

And as if to underline this convergence of histories, inside the church of Mission Concepcion today there are two paintings: one, a European-style image of Mary as a young, almost androgynous girl dressed in a pink gown with a blue mantle; the other the familiar image of Our Lady of Guadalupe that is the American version of the Immaculate Conception.

Layers of time and histories converging in this one place.

Writing, reading, and time

I spend too little time reading.

Every night, I manage to read at least a few pages before I fall asleep, usually of a novel, rarely of some general nonfiction (The Botany of Desire most recently). But that's not the place or way to read the books and articles that are being written in my field (with rare exceptions, and those are usually actually outside the discipline: Judith Butler's Psychic Life of Power was bedtime reading...).

For those, I need to be upright, sitting at a desk or in a chair. I read a fair amount of professional literature prepping for classes. If I banish novels from my carry-on, I can read books in my field on airplanes. But more of what I read is simultaneous with writing.

Because in preference to reading something someone else in my field has written, I like to write. I think I write too much; although I also am always painfully aware of what I haven't written, or haven't finished writing.

I feel guilty about what I haven't written, but oddly, I don't feel guilty about what I am not reading. I used to, so this is something that has changed over time. I used to feel a tyranny of the need to read everything by everyone else. But as my interests kept broadening, my ability to read "everything" receded into the distance.

So now I read in motivated ways. When I write, I gather together towers of books, and folders of PDFs of articles, and chains of Google Books links. I like the excuse writing gives me to use article databases and do open-ended searches, to find things I would otherwise never have known existed.

And even though I think of my reading habits as having changed utterly since graduate school days, I recognize these computer-aided searches as the descendants of the way I worked throughout my dissertation writing phase. At Illinois, we could have a locked carrel in the stacks, and I would go there and make neat 3 x 5 cards of notes (all of which I still have) of books I hunted down on my own. Walking to the place on the shelf that was my selected destination, I would read the titles along the way. Of course, this was nowhere near as complete a search as I can do today: for one thing, it tended to be limited to the shelves at my eye-level, just above and just below. But I found things that I would never have in the deliberate way.

So I read a lot, then. And I probably read a lot, now. But I feel like there is some scholarly standard that I am failing to achieve. Nonetheless, any time I read those texts that either are submitted for review or somehow make it into print larded with citations, I hate them. I want your ideas, not a rehash of those of anyone else. And the one thing I can guarantee is that my writing presents my own ideas.

I have stopped agreeing to review papers and manuscripts-- it takes away my own time to write, which means my own time to read. I used to take inordinate time and write long, detailed, thoughtful reviews. At one juncture, my old doctoral advisor told me an editor of a major journal had described me as his "ideal reviewer" and said my reviews would be publishable papers. I was cured of this by the author of the worst book ever written on Honduran archaeology: I kept receiving it, unchanged, from different presses even though I had tried to suggest ways to bring it up to barely publishable status. So I realized that I was wasting my time and decided to stop.

(Nor was my opinion of this wretched book unique; here's what another colleague said in a review on Amazon.com-- a signed review:

Riddled with errors, this gives a highly distorted view of the region. Relies heavily on secondary sources. How in heaven's name does the author dare to claim that "Jorge de Olancho" was the name of a conquistador? Shoddy scholarship abounds in this disappointing work.

Ouch.)

So, I will go back to my office surrounded by books, writing a few pages and then seeking the parts that I know from teaching are buried in the specifics of the author's case study. I will browse my way through article databases in search of the serendipity of a new author, new journal, new interdisciplinary dialogue.

But I read too little. And write too much. Except that I am not writing what I should write. And I will still wake up in the middle of the night thinking that and despairing of ever satisfying that internal critic.