Mickey, but not a mouse

Emily Hahn

Today is the birthday of the woman The New Yorker called "a forgotten American literary treasure." That's Emily Hahn, born in St. Louis, Missouri (1905), known to family and friends as "Mickey."
In college, she changed her major to Engineering after an advisor told her that a woman's brain was "incapable of grasping mechanics or higher mathematics." The male students and faculty discouraged her, but in 1926, she became one of the first women to get an engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She went to work for a mining company in St. Louis, but they would only let her do menial office tasks, so she left after a year.
Hahn was always on the move -- one of her catchphrases was "Nobody said not to go." After college, she and a friend dressed as men and drove across the United States in a Model-T Ford. She wrote letters home to her brother-in-law, which were later published in The New Yorker. That began a career with the magazine that would last almost 70 years. She was also a tour guide in New Mexico, worked for the Red Cross in the Belgian Congo, lived with a tribe of Pygmies for two years, and crossed Africa on foot.
At 30, Hahn moved to Shanghai, where she lived in a red-light district and worked as the China correspondent for The New Yorker. She had an affair with the poet Sinmay Zau, and took up smoking opium. She once said: "I always wanted to be an opium addict," and eventually she became one. It took two years of regular smoking, but she persisted. And then she kicked the habit through hypnosis.
In 1941, she gave birth to a daughter, the result of her affair with Charles Boxer, who was the head of British army intelligence in Hong Kong. Hahn and Boxer were married four years later and had another daughter together. The family settled in England, but after five years of domesticity, Hahn was on the move again. She got a place in New York City and made frequent visits to her husband and children back in Dorset.
And through all of this, she wrote: 54 books and more than 200 articles for The New Yorker. Her books all got good reviews, but she was hard to pigeonhole, because her style flowed from genre to genre. Her very first book, Seductio ad Absurdum (1930), was a comic look at men's wooing techniques. She wrote about her travels throughout Asia, including her wartime romance with Boxer, in China to Me (1944). She wrote many biographies and a few novels. She wrote books about diamonds, and the Philippines, and apes. And just a couple of months before her death, she published her first poem in The New Yorker. It was called "Wind Blowing."
When Emily Hahn died in 1997, at the age of 92, her granddaughter Alfia Vecchio Wallace gave her eulogy. In it, Wallace said: "Chances are, your grandmother didn't smoke cigars and let you hold wild role-playing parties in her apartment. Chances are that she didn't teach you Swahili obscenities. Chances are that when she took you to the zoo, she didn't start whooping passionately at the top her lungs as you passed the gibbon cage. Sadly for you, your grandmother was not Emily Hahn."

(entry from today's online The Writer's Almanac)

Roberts Burns - An unexpected admirer

Local hero Thomas Telford

We will soon be celebrating the birth of Robert Burns on 25th Jan 1759. One of our local heroes, the engineering genius Thomas Telford (nickname 'the Colossus of Roads') was born in Langholm in  1757 and was therefore an almost exact contemporary of Burns. Telford was not only Scotland's greatest engineer, with a building, now sadly derelict, and other achievements - bridges etc -  near Moffat, Telford was also a poet. He wrote the following on the early death of Burns, aged only 37, in July 1796:

CLAD in the sable weeds of woe,

The Scottish genius mourns,

As o'er your tomb her sorrows flow,

The "narrow house" of Burns.

Each laurel round his humble urn,

She strews with pious care,

And by soft airs to distance borne,

These accents strike the ear.

Farewell my lov'd, my favourite child,

A mother's pride farewell!

The muses on thy cradled smiled,

Ah! now they ring thy knell.

---- ten verses and then ----

And round the tomb the plough shall pass,

And yellow autumn smile ;

And village maids shall seek the place,

To crown thy hallowed pile.

While yearly comes the opening spring,

While autumn wan returns ;

Each rural voice shall grateful sing,

And SCOTLAND boasts of BURNS.

(with acknowledgement and thanks to Wikipedia)

A delicious winter salad

I made a delicious winter salad today, according to the rules of 'real cooking' as set out in an earlier blog. The rules of 'real cooking' that most good cooks instinctively follow is that you use what you have to hand. Today, the ingredients for a stupendously successful salad made, as it were, out of my head were as follows:

A squash roasted in the oven
A bag of kale, steamed
Carrots, part boiled then roasted
A large Spanish onion
4 or five cloves of garlic
Cooked beetroot
Breaded ham (four slices, cut into smaller bits)
Some cold boiled salad potatoes, the sort that do not fall to bits when you boil them
Freshly-ground black pepper.

Method: The amount of each ingredient is to your own particular taste. Note: everything I put in the salad was already cooked, except the onion and garlic.

Fry the chopped onion and the garlic until soft.
Slice or chop all other ingredients into bite-size pieces
Combine all in a large dish.  It is important that the onion and garlic are warm from the frying pan, and covered in plenty of oil to make the salad really delicious.

Season with freshly-ground black pepper to taste.

Serve and eat.

Incredibly delicious winter salad

There is plenty of squash left for (eg) a savoury risotto tonight. Also, the ham was bought last Saturday marked down because the packet said 'best by Jan 5'. The whole point of ham is that it is preserved meat, so I was quite happy to put it in my salad today (Fri Jan 11).

Moffat Book Events activities for 2013

Ian Mitchell

Garrison Keeler

 Here is a schedule of Moffat Book Events activities for 2013:

1. Website: undergoing upgrade

2.2013 activities:

·      Bi-lingual Editions – in Preparation for UK Year of Russian Language and Culture 2014,  in partnership with All Union State Library for Foreign Literature, Moscow (VGBIL) -. The idea is to run short pieces of writing or poems side by side online (to start with – print may come later) so that the reader can see both the original Russian and the English translation – or vice versa -  side by side and hear the pieces read in both languages as per The Writer's Almanac http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/ where you can click to hear Garrison Keillor reading each entry. The first two short pieces are first hand anecdotes about aspects of British life, a cricket match and a pub. An iconoclastic Scottish author resident in Moscow, Ian Mitchell, has been invited to supply an introduction to the series, as someone who currently straddles these two particular languages and cultures, to ruminate on the nature of culture, language, communication etc, The British press will be alerted to the launch of the series.

•   Weaver Man – Chrys Salt Literature Convener D&G Arts Festival and Artistic Director of The Bakehouse, Gatehouse of Fleet will be in Moffat on Jan 31 to plan a performance of her poems about the celebrated Gaelic-speaking shell shock victim of WWI at Craigieburn later in the year  and have further discussions with the organizing committee of MBE

•  Coffee Morning  Town Hall Moffat March 16

•  Year of Natural Scotland 2013: ‘The Cauldron’ – Dumfries-based artist Matt Baker and others to engage via the arts the sometimes neglected inhabitants of the great watershed (Tweed, Annan, Clyde) at a pinch point marked by road, rail, the National Grid and the biggest landbased windfarm in Europe .  In partnership with Elvanfoot Development Group

•  Murder in Moffat April 20/21 – a celebration of crime fiction led by Moffat book seller Katherine Clemmens

•  World Book Night April 23 – at the Green Frog, courtesy of Kris Allen

•  D&G Arts Festival :

Book launch  June 1  - ‘Jean Erskine’s Secret’ by best-selling local author D E Stevenson, Edinburgh publisher Grey Ladies  at 21 Well Road Moffat

One-woman show:’ Miss Havisham’s Expectations’  June 1                 

 at 21 Well Road, Moffat (both in partnership with Forestry Purposes LLP)

•  International conference 'Translation'  Sept 20-22 at Moffat House hotel

•  Book launch ? Dec Persephone Books D E Stevenson novel ‘The Two Mrs Abbotts’

•  Day of the Region application (in partnership with Old Well theatre/Jim Tildersley)

•  Moffat Old Academy -  ‘The Scottish Genius’

 A destination building at the gateway to Scotland for the arts and associated activities;  'The Scottish Genius', performing an analogous role in the town to that played in Hawick by the 'Heart of Hawick' building. Moffat Old Academy will house Richard Demarco's archive, which spans a lifetime at the cutting edge of the arts in Scotland and Europe,  including  1.2million photographs as well as material from his famous galleries and from his long association with international performance via the Fringe and the Traverse theatre.  This building will also embody, be an expression of, make manifest,  Richard's international outward-looking ethos. Moffat stands at the gateway to the south of Scotland, it is a watershed, a place visited for centuries for spiritual and bodily refreshment, deserving a world class space for the living arts, including from Europe and beyond. Moffat Old Academy will also provide much-needed adaptable and flexible performance and rehearsal space in a building with high 'green' credentials for its many resident creatives, and the local community. It is to be a site of regional excellence and a base for visiting exponents of theatre, music, dance and the visual arts of the highest quality .

Nicholson Baker

It's the birthday of the novelist and essayist Nicholson Baker, born in Rochester, New York (1957). He started out wanting to be a musician, and was good enough at the bassoon that he got into the Eastman School of Music. He planned to become a composer, and then one day he saw his mother laughing uncontrollably at a New York Times Book Review essay on golf by the writer John Updike. At that moment, Baker decided that instead of becoming a composer, he wanted to be a writer.
Baker has gone on to write a book about his love of John Updike, U and I: A True Story (1991), and a novel about a single erotic phone conversation between two strangers called Vox (1992), which was famously given as a gift to President Clinton by Monica Lewinski. He has also written Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001), attacking libraries for getting rid of hard copies of newspapers and old books and replacing them with microfilm. His most recent book is The Way the World Works (2012), a collection of essays published last year. His breakthrough book, a slim volume well worth reading is The Mezzanine - about a man wondering what to do during his lunch hour

Nicholson Baker said, "Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens." - information from the free online Writer's Almanac

Soaping the rope

Translating a text from Russian last week, I learned idioms such as that preparing to hang yourself is known as 'soaping the rope'. I have also learned the Russian for 'knuckleduster' and other expressions unsuitable for a family blog. The text I was translating is an adaptation of T. S Eliot's 'Murder in the Cathedral' telling the story of the murder of Alexander Men, the Russian priest celebrated at the conference in Moffat last September (see www.alexandermenconference. com). A Christmas greeting from a friend in America this morning prompted me to look back at the first few entries of this blog in January 2011. I had attended an event to celebrate the writer W E Sebald, inventor of a unique literary genre that includes semi-fictional autobiography, in his adopted country, East Anglia. A highlight of the event was a concert by the remarkable singer songwriter and author, Patti Smith. Why are so many great artists, of this century and the last, Christians - more often than not, converts in maturity? The roll call includes T S Eliot, Graham Green, Boris Pasternak, Evelyn Waugh, Bob Dylan, Fay Weldon and Patti Smith herself.

Now we know

Smart guy

Every day for the past five years or so I have received an email from a US online news service 'the Daily Beast', named after the newspaper in Evelyn Waugh's classic satirical novel 'Scoop' and edited by British journalist Tina Brown, wife of my former editor at the London Sunday Times, Harold Evans. Today, for the first time in all those years, I opened a link to one of their news stories. It is a remarkable article by the novelist and social commentator Tom Wolfe (pictured above in his trademark white suit). I draw this piece, 'Eunuchs of the Universe' to your attention, because it affects us all.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/01/04/eunuchs-of-the-universe-tom-wolfe-on-wall-street-today.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_morning&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_morning&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet