Sunset, Friday, 27 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Went from here to downtown Staunton, Virginia – the most beautiful urban space in this region (followed by Lynchburg and Culpeper ... according to no less an authority than myself) – and the Blackfriars Playhouse to see the American Shakespeare Center performance of Henry IV, Part I. Then to Mockingbird – “Artisan Fare & Roots Music” – open only five weeks and a nice place to talk after the show. Not quite as many followers of Falstaff. 

Sunset, Wednesday, 25 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

This view is turned a little bit south from the usual perspective ... for those who know the area, looking more or less toward Charlottesville Airport from a mile east of 29.

Now ... in my sincerely misguided effort to be all things to all people, and in the belief that almost everyone who’s on the web at this moment is desperately seeking Thanksgiving dinner advice, I offer a little something culinary to go with the sunset.

After years, many years, of following the family habit of simply serving whole roasted yams, I switched last year to Roasted Yam Puree With Brown Butter, a recipe from the November 2004 issue of Bon Appétit. It was a hit, but probably only because I remembered that Patrick O’Connell, of The Inn at Little Washington (Washington, Virginia), had a Brown Butter recipe (the brown butter directions for the Bon Appétit yams seemed dangerously general and vague). I got O’Connell’s brown butter from The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook, but you can find it here. I think it’s critical to the success of the yams.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been roasting something like 7 or 8 pounds of yams and using more than a cup of butter. This year (I finished them just now, before sunset) I roasted garnet yams a good 90 minutes instead of an hour – a long, emphatic roasting for a sweeter, almost caramelized flavor, which then makes the puree more complex when combined with brown butter.

Happy Thanksgiving and good night!

Sunset, Tuesday, 24 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Depth perception: As previously mentioned, this painter’s is not the best. No need for alarm – my misperceptions were all at a distance of over 70 yards and didn’t involve the traffic I was in – but out on the road today trees and houses exchanged places, distant trucks were in front of, no, they were beyond traffic lights, brake lights were behind a fence, until it turned out they weren’t.

A question is, which came first, the feeling that all things are one, or the visual impression? I have an answer – and it involves more detailed autobiography than anybody really wants to know. But I’d like to think the most acute vision could be consistent with my universalist fuzztone.

On an unexpectedly related note, painting isn’t the easiest just after throwing ten-foot lengths of black walnut out of a shed, running a chain saw, splitting the rounds, and stacking the wood. Call me a 170-pound weakling – my arms are a little shaky. But maybe disability, if we can call it that, offers aesthetic opportunity. Not that these things have to be mutually exclusive, but perhaps any degree of inability to be precisely ‘objectively accurate’ encourages one to try to be honest instead.

Sunset, Sunday, 22 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

I experienced an uncharacteristic twinge of jealousy when I saw that the cover of my November 23rd issue of The New Yorker featured a “Pumpkin Cloud” – a luminous and shadowed cream-like cloud hovering over a mound of whipped cream in the middle of a pumpkin pie. Like so:

In discussing how this lovely apparition made it to the cover of The New Yorker, I said to Laura, “Well, it’s a Wayne Thiebaud.” Then, although I just made this up and it may be way, way off (on the conservative side), I added, “The original of that will cost you $75,000.”

I’ve only ever sent them one cover, a tree with eight suns in its bare branches, for which I got a nice pat on the back from the art director. I’ll freely admit I’d love to get a cloud on the cover – any kind of cloud – a pumpkin cloud, a sidewalk subway vent cloud, a cloud from the stack of QE2 arriving in the harbor, a Staten Island landfill garbage fume cloud, a butternut squash cloud – I don’t care. Maybe someday. 

Sunset, Saturday, 21 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

It takes me the longest time to understand some things, things that are obvious to other people. 

Today I was listening to the Beatles/John Lennon sing “Because” from Abbey Road. 

Because the sky is blue
It makes me cry

That of course is a play on the sky feeling ‘blue’ ... but it was only a few years ago that I finally realized it.

My reaction always had been, “Hey – makes me cry too ... ”

Sunset, Friday, 20 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

I’m happy the sun came back out for my brother Steve’s 60th birthday.

Rain, earth, sun. That’s more or less the theme from a long walk today, although those three elemental words immediately distracted me by making me think of writing about D.H. Lawrence. Another time. D.H. did loop back around to my brother, whose middle name is Lawrence, but I guarantee Steve wasn’t named for any author.

My college roommate recently wrote, “I was raised to consider myself part of an intellectual elite.” That just goes to show what an interesting culture gap we had to deal with in our early days at Hopkins. Steve and I et al. were raised to consider ourselves ... I have no idea!

Steve’s name was inspired by Steve Van Buren (Stephen W.), a pro football hero whose greatest fame came with the NFL championship games of 1948 and 1949. I don’t think Steve has ever given much consideration to the curious fact that he was named after a running back for the Philadelphia Eagles, of all things – not exactly a well-loved franchise in our experience.

Anyway, even though the Van Doren family, at least, had, in previous generations, a pretty strong tradition of preserving and passing names around, I suspect my parents were part of a (possible?) postwar trend toward naming your kid any damn thing you wanted. I’m the only one who got someone’s name – my grandfather’s – which was his grandfather’s, so break out the roman numerals. I think the story we always heard was that ‘Stephen Lawrence Van Doren’ sounded good.

Sounds very good to me.

Rain, earth, sun. But look, before I get there, I have to ask. My wonderful, many-marvel’d spouse, who is hardly ever wrong – as a consequence of which I now owe her exactly $8700 from all the bets I’ve lost with her – thinks that posts like this one – you know, the ones where it sounds like maybe I got only three hours of sleep and then walked seven miles, so that I go off on the slightest tangent through a lack of inhibitory frontal cortex function – anyway, that people might not like such long posts. What do you think? If you disagree with Laura I will be especially interested in hearing from you. There’s no money involved, unfortunately.

At the first stream we (Flint the foxhound and I) crossed today, I was struck by the effects of yesterday’s storms. The stream banks, where they’re normally a smooth, almost shiny sandy clay, had been beaten down into a flat, matte, finely stippled surface much like the beach after a long steady rain. The water of such a small stream, only yards from the source, is usually quick to rise and just as quick to fall, leaving a clear low current just as before – but today, 12 hours after the rain had ended, the water was still somewhat up and, I was surprised to see, slightly turgid. Dead leaves were pasted to the ground, the trunks of beeches, hollies and poplars looked scrubbed and a clearing sky seemed reflected in the field. 

The rain, in short, had washed the face of the earth. (And even though hundreds if not thousands must have written this before, it feels so accurate to my impression I don’t care.)

Thanks to the wash, we could see along the jeep trail that no hunters had come in today. This meant a lot less uncertainty about what was out there in the 1000+ acres, and less likelihood of “Cold Mountain moments.” That’s what I call creepy, spooky feelings like those the reader gets when Inman is up in the isolated deep mountains and you don’t know if the Home Guard is about to find him. In my case, they can come from not knowing where hunters are or not knowing what Flint may be barking at or chasing, off in the distance.

As for Charles Frazier’s intensely wrought creation – I don’t mean to quibble – it’s not every book that earns a place in one’s vocabulary – but I wouldn’t have minded holding it open to the rain and washing out just a little of the melodrama. In a sense I wanted fewer Cold Mountain moments in Cold Mountain. But that’s me. I’m also crazy enough to wonder, quite seriously, if entire novels might be constructed from rain, earth, sun.