Two thoughts occur to me.

1) This might be a good strategy for a book trailer. If I can’t afford a high-class production, I shouldn’t settle for mediocre. I should go for atrocious. The problem: if the trailer is terrible, the audience may assume my novel is as well. Never mind.

2) The reason bad movies–and other creative works–are amusing is that most are not intentionally bad.

The, er, contributors to the Annoying Music Show are sincere. Pat Boone, for example, was serious when he covered heavy metal songs. His endeavor sounds exactly as you would expect. Just listen to his version of Crazy Train.

When I listen to a song or watch a movie or read a book, I want to feel like the creator made their best effort, even if it flops. I would feel cheated otherwise. Or maybe I need a little guilt with my laughs.

A scene from Plan 9 From Outer Space (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain image).

Citing medieval manuscripts, New York Carver estimates spectacles were invented between 1268 and 1289. A 1306 sermon makes a reference to meeting the man who created glasses less than 20 years before and praising the invention’s profound impact.

How profound? Sandra di Popozo wrote in a 1289 Florentine manuscript: “I am so debilitated by age that without the glasses known as spectacles, I would no longer be able to read or write. These have recently been invented for the benefit of poor old people whose sight has become weak.”

On Medieval Technology Pages, Paul J. Gans writes that glasses helped only the farsighted. It would be another three centuries before the invention of lenses to help people like me, the nearsighted (my eyesight is so bad that if my glasses are misplaced I call on my husband to find them).

According Glasses Crafter, spectacles were two framed glass or crystal stones, held up to the face with a handle. In 1300, the crystal workers guild in Venice, famous for glass, adopted regulations for the manufacture of “discs for the eyes.”

When I am reminded that glasses were made of, well, glass, I feel like a wimp when I use the weight of my plastic lenses as a reason to wear contacts. Yet I think I would have tolerated the weight if it meant being able to function.

I have sometimes wondered how eighth-century people as nearsighted as I am lived in a world of blurs. The vast majority were illiterate, so they didn’t need glasses to read, but they could not have appreciated artistic details in murals and statues or known what they looked like (assuming they had a mirror). And hunting and war, already dangerous activities, would have been even more so.

So even as I enlarge the type on my screen and try to avoid bifocals, I am grateful to whoever invented glasses. Too bad he won’t get any credit.

Detail of portrait of Hugh de Provence, 1352, the first known artistic depiction of glasses (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain image).

March 2009–Husband hospitalized for five days with breathing problems. I bring printed pages of my manuscript and scribble on them during those few hours he sleeps.

February 2012–My father-in-law dies after a battle with cancer. Two days later, I post a blog.

What these three incidents have in common is that they reveal a trait of my personality. When crises strike, I need a good cry. Then, I am seized with an overwhelming urge to do something. I need my work, that sense of normalcy, the feeling of one thing being in control when I’m powerless to stop anything else.

Julia Child in 1988 (Photo by Elsa Dorfman, posted from Wikimedia Commons, permission granted under terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

“As always, my work gave my life form, forced me to be productive, and helped me to keep a good balance,” she writes. “… Without a challenging project like a cookbook to work on, I could well have gone cuckoo in those dark months of Paul’s hospitalization.”

I keep writing because I must, because it gives me something else to think about, because it lifts a corner of the shadow.

Writing helps me get through the crises as they pass. 9/11 did not destroy America. My husband recovered. And although I miss my father-in-law, I take comfort in that he is no longer suffering and that he lived longer and better than I expected.

That trusty Food Timeline has the answer, using information from Peanuts: The Illustrious History of the Goober Pea by Andrew F. Smith. South American indigenous people first used ground peanuts. European explorers brought a few peanuts to the Old World, but no one even hears of peanut butter for a while.

Fast forward to the 19th century, when nut butters are considered a health food and served at spas. Sales were targeted at the upper class, but in the early 20th century, the market became saturated. Add sugar to make it more appealing to kids, and it becomes a staple.
Only one problem: peanut oil. At room temperature, it separates from the butter, oxidizes, and become rancid. Grocers had to stir frequently. The addition of hydrogenated oil in the 1920s solved that problem. (For a thorough explanation, see Food Timeline.)

For those of us who want our peanut butters to have only peanuts and salt, refrigeration today keeps this food in good shape.

And so I must disagree with Test Kitchen. They choose a brand with hydrogenated oil.

In the case of peanut butter, I will gladly proclaim myself a throwback. As much as practical, I like my food labels to have ingredients I can pronounce, and I like the peanut butter with only peanuts and salt just fine.

Peanut leaves and freshly dug pods in Stuckey, South Carolina. (From Wikimedia Commons, photo by Pollinator, permission granted under terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.)

This deleted scene is from my second novel, The Ashes of Heaven’s Pillar. I share it here to show how grateful we should be for our washing machines. But this method would have provided quite a workout and maybe a little stress relief.

Some context: Acha, a peasant Saxon woman, and her children, Leofwin and Sunhilde, ages 12 and 9, have lost everything in Charlemagne’s first war in Saxony in 772. Acha’s husband, Derwin, died in battle, her faith lies in the ashes of the Irminsul, and her sister-by-marriage, Ealdgyth, sold her and the children into slavery. The family is then taken into Francia. Here’s the excerpt:

Acha and Sunhilde accompanied other maidservants carrying baskets of dirty clothes and linens to the bathhouse, a wooden structure near the manor. Just outside the bathhouse were wooden troughs, where menservants were adding water to the lye and white clay.

The maids dropped the clothes and linens in the troughs, then retrieved wooden bats to beat the laundry. In Saxony, Acha would have washed laundry at the river, and she did not have the luxury of boiling the laundry in scented water or drying it over rosemary plants. But she was filled with longing for her home and for Derwin. Acha pictured Ealdgyth’s face in the laundry in the trough and beat it with all her strength. Greedy traitor! Herbert’s farm would have been more than enough for you and your sons! You don’t deserve Herbert’s land!

“Mother,” Sunhilde asked over the pounding of the bats, “are we ever going to return to Eresburg?”

“I hope so,” Acha answered. She couldn’t bring herself to tell Sunhilde they might never see Saxony again, let alone Eresburg, that she was now struggling to keep the three of them together.

Sunhilde use her sleeve to wipe her forehead. “Will Leofwin get the land back?”

“Of course,” Acha said, sounding more confident than she felt. “Why do you ask, Daughter?”

“All Leofwin talks about is Eresburg and how he will return and seek vengeance.”

“I know,” Acha said softly, pausing to take a breath.

“I hate them, Mother,” Sunhilde said.

“Who?” Acha asked.

“Aunt Ealdgyth and Cousins Wybert and Ingram. They stole our land. And I hate the men who killed Father and Uncle Herbert.”

“I know,” Acha raised the bat over her head and smacked the laundry again. “I hate them, too. And we shall have our vengeance.”

A page from the Holkham Bible Picture Book, c. 1327-1335, shows a laundress. (image from the Posner Memorial Collection)

Did red berries like these tempt Kaldi and change the way we start our day? (From Wikimedia Commons, photo by Stanislaw Szydlo, permission granted under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

Coffee was a food and basis for wine in Africa at that time, but its use spread to Arabia and through Muslim countries. Roast beans were brewed into a drink in Arabia around 1000. The elixir finally made its way to Europe in the 17th century, more than 800 years after its discovery.

It’s a good thing coffee replaced beer as a breakfast drink. I (slurp) would much rather see someone guzzling coffee during my morning commute.

For an excellent package of stories about coffee, see the National Geographic microsite, which I found through foodtimeline.org.

Bates (1859-1929) was a professor of English at Wellesley College. She was inspired to pen the poem during an 1893 cross country trip, in which she saw the White City during the World’s Fair in Chicago and the view from Pike’s Peak, Colorado, according to the Falmouth (Massachusetts) Historical Society. The poem was first published two years later and was revised in 1904 and 1911. The melody we associate today with “America the Beautiful” was written in the early 1900s.

Citing a book by Lynn Sherr, David Firestone points out in a New York Times blog that Bates might not have been satisfied with where her country was going.

One of the verses ends with:
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

Bates lived during the so-called Gilded Age. Perhaps, she read about industrialists’ lavish lifestyles such as Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish throwing a dinner party to honor her dog who wore a $15,000 diamond collar. The price for that jewelry was more than the earnings of vast majority of Americans–11 million out of the nation’s 12 million.

The average income of the bottom 92 percent was $380 a year. Bates must have known of tenements teeming with crime and filth. (My source for conditions of the Gilded Age is American Experience.)

Today, it’s not difficult to imagine why Bates would have penned those lines. I feel that same anger when I see hard-working people struggling to pay their bills and keep their homes while executives are paid hundreds of millions of dollars after ruining their companies.

Despite the song’s popularity, neither Bates nor Samuel Ward, who composed the music, profited from it. Bates gave permission to anyone who wanted to use the poem, as long as they didn’t change the words.

Bates’s poem shows that one can love one’s country deeply and still say where it can do better.

Katharine Lee Bates (from Wikimedia Commons, photo believed to be in the public domain.)

But this cat-induced break gives me a chance to ponder a poem I stumbled across in Pierre Riche’s Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne. This ninth-century piece is about a cat named Pangur Ban, written by an Irish monk and found in a monastery in today’s Austria. In the poem, the author compares his hunt for knowledge to the cat’s hunt for mice and describes the satisfaction both get from their arts.

The poem reveals the affection the poet has for his pet, so much that he’s given his animal a name, and he refers to his cat as “he” rather than “it.” “Pangur Ban” is also relevant to those of us who write and research today. Do we not rejoice when we capture that elusive piece of information we’ve been stalking? Are we not so proud we want to meow and drop the prey at our companion’s feet, I mean show it off?

This delightful poem shows a universality in affection for our pets and the pure joy of learning. In many ways, we’ve not changed much from our ancestors, but in this case, it’s a good thing.

His biography is more legend than fact. New Advent says the only historic certainty is that he was bishop of the city of Myra, Lycia (in modern-day Turkey) in the fourth century. Even the year of his death is uncertain. Lives of the Saints author Omer Englebert has his death year as 324, while New Advent says it was 345 or 352. His feast day is December 6.

Yet the legends show why Nicholas, patron of sailors, children, and lots of other people, is beloved from the Netherlands to Russia to Sicily and many places in between. He is credited with many miracles, including bringing murdered boys back to life and thus converting the murderer.

One of the best known legends of Nicholas is associated with generosity. A man could not marry off his three daughters because he was too poor to pay dowries. Desperate, the father was about to sell the girls into prostitution. This is where Nicholas changed the daughters’ lives. He threw a purse laden with gold into the man’s bedchamber through an open window, and days later, his eldest daughter was married. Soon, another bag of gold landed in the man’s room, and his second daughter was married. When it was time for Nicholas to throw in a bag of gold for the third daughter, the father saw him and fell at Nicholas’s feet, repentant and grateful.

What is striking about this tale is that not only did Nicholas save the innocent, he provided the guilty with a means for redemption.

A 1294 Russian icon from Lipnya Church of St. Nicholas in Novgorod (From Wikimedia Commons, this work is in the public domain in the United States.)

Somewhat trickier, though, is portraying what the food looked like then. Take cabbage, for example, which many of us will eat for good luck in the new year. As a 21st century American, I took for granted that green cabbage always formed a head. Not so, according AgriLife Extension (affiliated with Texas A&M), which I found though a link on www.foodtimeline.org.

“‘White’ (hard-heading) cabbages were apparently unknown until after the time of Charlemagne, who died A.D. 814,” says AgriLife. It would be another four centuries before a mention of a heading cabbage, this one by Albert of Cologne.

So what did cabbages look like 1,200 years ago, the period in which I write? Probably a rosette like the wild cabbage pictured below.

Food is a good way for an author to set time and place, but describing vegetables can be a challenge. To us, a cabbage forming a rosette of dark green, deeply lobed leaves resembling kale is unusual. Unless the characters are time travelers, to them it’s just cabbage. Unless it’s rotten or bitter, what is there to notice? In their world, everyone knows cabbage has dark green, deeply lobed leaves and grows in rosettes.

Cabbage during the days of Charlemagne might have look more like these plants growing on sea cliffs below a mediaeval monastery at Tynemouth, Northumberland, U.K. (From Wikimedia Commons, permission granted under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.)