1. I took out three quart-sized containers of crab shells I had brought home in February from the annual Kellogg Elks Crab Feed, dumped them in the crock pot and added a couple of onions chopped up, a handful of celery leaves, and a couple of stalks of celery chopped. I added in Old Bay seasoning, salt, and pepper and turned the slow cooker on. Early on, all I could smell in the kitchen were the greens and onions cooking, but, about four hours later, not just the kitchen, but the house filled with smell of crab. I would let this stock bubble away all night, guaranteeing that I this coastal aroma would be with me all through the night and bid me good morning when I awakened.
By the way, I still have a couple zip lock bags of shells in the freezer, good for at least one, if not two, more batches of stock sometime in the future.
2. Until July of 2018, I hadn't had a television for anything other than watching DVDs and videotapes for over twenty years. At some point, definitely before moving to Maryland, I didn't have a television at all. I used to hear about a lot of programming, especially shows available on cable, that I didn't have the means to watch. One of those shows was an HBO adaptation of Richard Russo's novel about life in a fictional broken down small blue collar town in Maine, Empire Falls.
Empire Falls is a two episode mini-series. Its cast is packed with superb actors: Helen Hunt, Joanne Woodward, Robin Wright, Estelle Parsons, Ed Harris, Paul Newman, Aidan Quinn, Dennis Farina, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, among others.
I watched the first episode today and enjoyed the experience of the story unfolding as if I were viewing a novel: it has a narrator, it moves fluidly between the story's present and then into the past as things that happen trigger memories, and, with the freedom of a novel, the movie transports us into different time frames and different places.
At the heart of Empire Falls is the fact that obscure lives in a run-down, once thriving small town play out stories that are everyone's stories and involve the common human experiences of death, love, mendacity, vanity, cruelty, aging, and power, to name a few. Empire Falls, to my way of thinking, takes us into the American experience in a way that resembles Our Town or Death of a Salesman. In the experiences of common American families, we see not only the particular difficulties family members struggle with, but we see the larger, even universal, stories of hope, joy, disappointment, delusion, and tragedy. The characters in Empire Falls don't see themselves acting out these larger stories, nor, so far, do they see themselves and their lives as uncovering the illusions of the American Dream. But as a viewer watching these stories unfold from the distance of my comfortable chair in my little television room, I see larger stories unfolding, the ideas and the integrity of the American Dream being called into question.
I finished episode one and I didn't launch right into the second episode. Much of Empire Falls hit me hard. I needed to live overnight, if not longer, with what pained me before returning to see how its different stories do or don't get resolved.
3. Back when I was a composition teacher, again and again and again and again I stressed to students in the courses I taught that what I'd like to see them take charge of in their writing is the movement of their essay from one part to another - whether it's the movement from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph or section to section of their work. I tried to help students recognize the ways the writers we were reading moved their works along. Sometimes the movement was by contrast, sometimes by drawing a comparison, providing definition, repeating a key word or concept and riffing on it in a different way; sometimes the movement was from exposition to narration, illustrating a point with a story. This was my way of trying to impress upon these writers that the ways of holding a piece of writing together arise out of the piece itself. It's organic. Structure is largely shaped by movement. Anything can work, but not everything does. A writer can do anything to move things along, keep parts connecting, but it must work.
I was thinking about teaching composition this evening as I watched Dave Chappelle's Netflix special, Equanimity. Now, I never, not in a million years, could have played this comedy show in class. Dave Chappelle's comedy thrives on transgressions. His work his vulgar, sometimes grotesque, charged with all kinds of language, images, and stories that I think people should freely choose to listen to and it just isn't the sort of thing I would play in class.
But, if I could have, I would have asked my students to marvel at the ways Dave Chappelle structures his storytelling, jokes, and his commentary. I would have said, "Let's examine how Dave Chappelle moves from joke to joke, how he holds things together within a story, and how he even moves between a character (or persona) he's created named 'Dave Chappelle' and the Dave Chappelle he invites us to believe is the real Dave Chappelle." I would have invited these students to try to understand what Dave Chappelle's purposes are, in addition to making us laugh, and how the way he moves the parts of his show from one aspect to another serves his purposes, to arrive at his understandings of how things are in life, his truths.
He's an ingenious composer, a superb writer.
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