The Lady and the Lion - Faerie Queene - Book 1, Canto 3

After I published my post on the second canto of The Faerie Queene, I realized I forgot to mention one other monstrosity. Poor Fradubio himself, the tree that cries and bleeds, has been turned into a monster by the wicket Duessa.

I found myself hoping that we weren't going for more monstrous women in the third canto. I got my wish. And, since Spenser had left the fate of Una up in the air, resolves some of that dramatic tension, by turning to the fair Lady who got largely ignored in canto 2.

Our synopsis:

Forsaken Truth long seeks her love,
and makes the Lyon mylde;
Marres blind Devotions mart, and falls
In hand of leach our vylde.

So Una is looking for the Redcrosse Knight when all of a sudden "out of thickest wood" comes "a ramping Lyon." Happily, instead of the expected great peril (I was wondering if someone noble would come up and rescue her), it turn out that the lion becomes her protector. She then sees a woman carrying water "on her shoulders sad." Spenser makes the woman carrying water deaf, mute, and lacking understanding ("she could not heare, nor speak, nor understand). I'm making note of this only because feels significant at the moment.

Una follows the woman, seeking lodging for the night, but theman carrying water deaf, mute, and lacking understanding ("she could not heare, nor speak, nor understand). But when you have a lion with you, a barred door isn't that much of a trouble. And there she finds Devotion, as promised in the quatrain.

Shee found them both in darksome corner pent;
Where that old woman day and night did pray
Upon her beads, devoutly penitent:
Nine hundred Pater noshers every day,
And thrise nine hundred Aves she was wont to say.

We recently watched the film Don Jon, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a man with a steady diet of online porn and casual sex. In his weekly confession, he tallies up each to the priest who gives him a few recitations "Our Father" and "Hail Mary." In one scene, he is irritated that a week of premarital sex without porn doesn't actually offer him much reduction in the prayers. Gorden-Levitt's character was given prayers in sets of ten, twenty, or so.

But Devotion says the "Our Father" nine hundred times a day and two thousand seven hundred times for "Hail Mary." I doubt she has time for much else. As her daughter is a deaf mute, Devotion is blind. But Spenser doesn't make Devotion a nice character. She is not to be confused with piety. Devotion and her daughter live off the earnings of the thief. Worse, he is

Wont to robbe churches of their ornaments.
And poore mens boxes of their due reliefe,

He robs churches, even taking the vestments from the priests and statutes of the saints. His name is the quite appropriate "Kirkrapine." He gives this plunder to the younger woman, now identified as Abesssa, so that he can have sex with her.
With whom he whoredome usd
Unfortunately for the thief, Devotion, and Abessa (undoubtably meant to slander Catholic nuns from Elizabeth's Protestant court), there is a lion outside the door, which kills the thief.  By that point, Una and the lion have left, and so the two women pursue her. When they catch her,

Shamefully at her railing all the way,
And accusing her of dishonesty,

Which is sort of ironic, given that they live off of stolen goods that have been transferred to them. And she is rescued, or she thinks, by the Redcrosse Knight, except it's really the Enchanter.

From our point of view, it's handy when Sans Loy shows up. We know it's him, because he has his name written on his shield "in bloody lines." He's quite angry with the Redcrosse Knight, even though he's now facing the counterfeit one.

Life from Sansfoy thou tookst, Sansloy shall from thee take.

Too late Sansloy sees who he has struck, and leaves the Enchanter with "the cloudes of death" in his eyes. That leaves the lion as the lady's last (and true) protector, but the beast is not able to withstand Sansloy who takes the lady off.

We have our break from the monstrous, in that our beast is quite gentle to the lady. She is, as a good heroine of a chivalric romance, dependably in peril as we close the canto.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

Just how would Julia Child prepare grubs?

"Hello, and welcome to The French Chef. Today we're going to prepare beetles bourdelaise." Okay, she probably wouldn't have gone there.

Ars Technica has an article on an Icelander who has come up with a method of growing insects for food. Búi Bjarmar Aðalsteinsson, talking to Wired.UK, noted that he's making pâté from black soldier flies. Yum.

The process works like this:

A glassed-in box contains Black Soldier Flies, which are fed on organic waste —the everyday vegetable and meat cuttings you'd dump in your food bin (though Aðalsteinsson is researching whether seaweed can also do the trick). The greedy flies become rich in fat and protein, says Aðalsteinsson, and then they can be "harvested for human consumption". Their waste produces a "nutrient-rich soil" that is drained into compost canisters to be used in spice production. Spicy. "This idea of a wasteless production will hopefully inspire others to rethink linear production, which produces great amounts of waste and unused byproducts," Aðalsteinsson explains.

Sitting across the dinner table, the resident scientist wondered if flies fed on garbage would have the same problems as pigs fed on garbage, that is, picking up pathogens. Admittedly, we're not going to see flies become hosts to the trichina worm, and the flies (unlike pork) get pureed, but there are other, smaller things.

I was more concerned with Aðalsteinsson's pâtés, which were all cracked on top. Julia would not approve and neither do I. No amount of aspic is going to rescue these.

Aðalsteinsson notes,

"I think food is highly dependent on trust and when you make new types of food you have to make people believe in it. My inspiration for the fly factory came from the industrial kitchen. They just look so robust and you really believe they will keep on working for a long time. Another big element is to embrace the existing food culture. Western society is dependent upon processed food and I am not about to change that with one project. So rather than fighting an existing culture I made processed insect food."

Me, I'm not so sure I want to look at the industrial kitchen as a model. I understand it's efficient, but I just wonder if more processed food is the answer.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

Marriage equality - maybe I was prescient

A couple days ago, when I tallied up the number of states that neither had marriage equality nor had a marriage equality lawsuit, I made a mistake. I missed one and accidentally assumed it was already in the lawsuit category.

I have corrected the error in my post. Reality, however, has made what I had written correct. Since it's now correct, I'm going to recycle what I wrote as I originally wrote it.

There are only six states that neither permit same-sex marriage nor have a case that an existing ban is unconstitutional. (Kansas, Mississipi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota). 

Counting only the states where all litigation has effectively ceased (someone could file a lawsuit challenging same-sex marriage in Massachusetts tomorrow; it just wouldn't have any chance of success), there are seventeen states where same-sex couples have a continuing right to get marriage licenses. After all, it wasn't long ago that Utah was the eighteenth state with marriage equality, but same-sex couples can't get licenses in Salt Lake City currently.

Including Arkansas in the group of states with current litigation, there are twenty-seven states in which it's still working its way through the courts. Or, to put it another way, there are twenty-seven states in which a court has rejected bans on same-sex marriage. Most of these were automatically granted appeals (and so we didn't get the situations as in Utah and Arkansas).

Today, Alaska joined the litigation club. That was the state I missed on Saturday. Joe Jervis has the details at Joe.My.God.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

Many a knight and more ladies fair and monstrous - Faerie Queene - Book 1, Canto 2

In case you were curiass

Spenser continues with themes of duplication, dissimulation, and transformation in the second canto. We've got four knights and three ladies, except that one of the knights is a fake, as are two of the ladies. Just for balance, we have something that looks like a false squire.

We get some clues in the introductory quatrain. Spenser says,

The guileful great Enchaunter parts
The Redcrosse Knight from Truth :
Into whose stead faire falsehood steps,
And works him woefull ruth.

From whom does the Redcrosse Knight become separated? The lovely Lady, and it the quatrain is an indication, she is Truth. No wonder she so quickly recognized and disliked Erreur. We even get a name for her, which had been mentioned before. Her name is Una of the

black stole, most like to seem for Una fit

in the 15th stanza of the first canto. And due to the Enchanter's arts, we soon have

Una wandring in woods and forrests

The two get separated. After Enchanter failed to divide the knight from his lady by lust, he makes a squire for the false lady (which seems to make her fair Falsehood of the quatrain), and alerts the knight so that the he will see how they have "knit themselves in Venus shameful chaine."

It works. He's off with his sword and his "eie of rason was with rage yblent." The Enchanter stopped the knight from killing Falsehood. Instead, he leaves at morning light with the dwarf. The Enchanter's real goal seems to be to attack the lady,

For he hated her as the hissing snake,
And in her many troubles did most pleasure take.

The ladies are clearly important. The Enchanter, after some thought, takes the form of the Redcrosse Knight and goes off to find the lady. This is a matter for another canto, because we catch back up with the Redcrosse Knight. (I'm sure we're going to see the Enchanter in the form of the Redcrosse Knight again, as well as Una, though in the remainder of this canto, we don't.)

I really liked the name of the next night we meet: Sans Foy. Sir Faithless. And he has brothers. The middle child is "the bloudy bold Sans loy," or Sir Lawless; the youngest is Sans Joy, and Sir Joyless is probably no fun at parties. Spenser makes Sans Foy (and presumably his brothers) Saracens, which is to say, not Christian. They are the stock villains of heroic romance. Sans Foy attacks the Redcrosse Knight, but the cross on his curiass prevents Sans Foy from wounding him.  Sans Foy is not so lucky and seems to do himself in with his own helmet. Oops.

We have our third knight (Redcrosse, Enchanter in the form of Redcrosse, and Sans Foy), and now we get our third Lady (the first two being the lovely Lady and her false double made from a spirit). Just as the Redcrosse Knight was traveling with Lady and Dwarf, Sans Foy gets his entourage too.

Hee had a faire companion of his way,
A goodly Lady clad in scarlot red,
Purled with gold and pearle of rich assay;
And like a Persian mitre on her hed
Shee wore

In keeping the Saracen knight, here we have a woman in Middle-Eastern garb. Much more elaborate than the Lady who wears a veil and a black stole. Her name is Fidessa, well, kinda.

The Redcrosse Knight and Fidessa seek some shade and here we get our next transformation. The knight breaks a branch off a tree and it starts to bleed and cry. The tree is a man named Fradubio (our fourth knight) who has been enchanted into the form of a tree by Duessa, a sorceress. Like the Enchanter, Duesssa does transformations too, or at least that's what Fradubio tells us.

Fradubio had been in love with Fraelissa when he met Duessa. He dumped Fraelissa because Duessa seemed prettier. but then he found that Duessa wasn't so pretty after all. Okay, so she let herself go a little after she got married, and Fradubio accused her of being an enchantress whose former lovely form was a counterfeit. What an asshole! No wonder she turned him into a tree.

Or, if we believe Fradubio on this, Duessa made Fraeliss seem ugly by an enchantment,

a dull blast, that breathing on her face
Dimmer her former beauties shining ray,
And with foul ugly forme did her disgrace 

But then (too late), Fradubio seems Duessa in "her proper hew," and her own shape is "misshapen, monstrous."

more foule and hideous,
Than woman's shape man would believe to bee

Given that the women's shapes in Elizabeth England were fairly well concealed, though the mind does boggle at the thought of an Elizabethan man so benighted that he's not quite sure what's under that dress. It's too late, since Fraelissa is already "turnd to treen mold." For Duessa has transformed Fradubio right at the spot that Fraelissa has died.

It's Arthurian Romance; there's a way of breaking the spell, though probably not for Fraelissa. Now the bad news for the Redcrosse Knight:

The false Duessa, now Fidessa hight,
Heard how in vain Fradubio did lament,
And knew well all was true.

The Redcross Knight has gone from being accompanied by Lady Truth to being in the company of an hideous old hag in the form of a lovely lady. There are clearly problems ahead.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

What to do with chickpea flour?

We have a glut of chickpea flour. Specifically, two bags.

Panelle

We think it happened like this: we were shopping and wanted to buy various milled items. I wanted to try a recipe that called for chickpea flour. We needed some semolina. Instead of one bag of each, we ended up with two bags of chickpea flour and no semolina. Oops. Chickpea flour went from "it'd be nice to try this recipe" to "use up this damn chickpea flour."

A year ago, Mark Bittman had written about some dishes made with chickpeas, including a Sicilian chickpea fritter, panelle. He recommended them as an appetizer, and so I tried them.

The first step was easy. Boil two cups of water. I was pretty certain I could manage that one. You then cook the chickpea flour, add salt and pepper, simmer, and add olive oil. Once it's cooked, you spread the stuff out in a sheet pan and let it chill.

Here's where I made my (minor) mistake. Bittman says to cut them up (easy, you can do it with a spatula) and fry them in about a quarter inch of olive oil. Yes, but maybe let them warm up a bit first. I tried this right out of the refrigerator and had a dreadful time because they were just to cold to brown and crisp.

Once I realized my mistake, I sent the earlier batches back into the oil for further cooking. They got brown. I sprinkled them with some salt (I forgot Bittman's recommended pepper). By the time we ate them, they were cool. And still yummy.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

Monstrous Women - Faerie Queene - Book 1, Canto 1

The text

Now into the meat of the poem. Happily, Spenser gives us the Cliff Notes version at the head of the canto.

The Patrone of true Holinesse
Foule Errour doth defeate :
Hypocrisie, him to entrap,
Doth to his home entreate.

There it is in four lines. Now that we know what happens. Which is good, because Spenser starts the canto with the lines

A gentle knight was pricking on the plaine,
Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde,

Which makes me respond, "he's doing what?" But after some verses in which we find that he was sent on an adventure by Queen Elizabeth, or at least her allegorical form as Gloriana, "Glorious Queene of Faery-lond," we are right into the realms of high fantasy.

We have the Knight of the Red Crosse, a Lady, and her servant, a Dwarf. They take refuge from the rain in a wood, that initially seems lovely, but soon becomes a confusing set of paths. Going for the obvious: they are lost.

This means something to the Lady, who realizes that they are in "the wandering wood, this Errours den." It goes from bad to worse. No one told me we were getting a Ray Harryhausen movie. I want to see Errour on the big screen, preferably in 3D. Because Errour is

Halfe like a serpent horribly displayed,
But th'other half did womans shape retaine,

And it only gets better from there. I particularly like how when the Knight is strangling Errour (at the lovely Lady's suggestion), she vomits "books and papers" in addition to "loathy frogs and toads, which eyes did lacke." When Errour dies, her loathsome children devour her, only to then explode from ingesting her blood (saving the knight, as Spenser points out) from having to battle them.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

The experiment was a failure, but the cake was a success

Butter and chocolate

I decided to make a torta caprese for Mother's Day; my mother-in-law likes chocolate. I've been making this for a number of years, but today decided to try something slightly different. Since it is a cake based on beaten egg whites, I thought I'd vary the recipe I've been using to see if I could get a bit more loft. This is not a lofty cake.

The recipe I've been using calls for chopping up chocolate and almonds in a food processor. Ground together, they form a sort of dark, sandy mix. This is added to egg yolks beaten with sugar, to which melted butter has been added. This is not a lo-cal dessert.

Lately, instead of grinding the almonds, I've been using almond meal. It's a lot easier, and the stuff that comes in a bag is a lot more finely ground than I can do in the food processor. But that left me grinding the chocolate still. This time, I wanted to see if melting the chocolate with the butter would improve the cake any.

Melted

I measured out my butter (there's a lot of butter in this cake), and then added the broken up bits of chocolate bar. I used the microwave to melt it all. A few 30-second cycles and the everything was melted. I stirred it together. Mmm. Chocolate butter.

I then made the rest of my cake as usual, beating the egg yolks with sugar, adding the butter/chocolate mixture, and then the almond flour. Finally, I folded in the egg white. It looked pretty good in the pan. The question was, would it bake up any higher?

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!