So, for Christmas T&N gave me a fun little “Make Your Own Merlot” kit from Lakeview Valley Farms. I tried finding some info about them online, but all my searches keep leading my back to some company that makes candle-making, knitting, scrapbooking, and other craft kits.

At any rate, the kit comes with four bottles, grape juice concentrate, and the various chemicals and items needed to vinify, bottle, and package 1 gallon of wine. The instructions claimed it would take 1 month. I started sometime around Jan. 4 and bottled today. To be fair, I could have bottled right around 1 month time, but I was too busy. So, it’s not their fault.

I now have 4 bottles of vino with thermocap closures. What fun. I thought the little plastic “cubitainer” was kinda cute.

I haven’t tasted the wine, so I don’t know how good it is, but I had fun. The only real downer for the experience was that the plastic tubing they provide for racking the wine from container to container is too short and too stiff. It’s a real bear to manouver. My limited home-brewing experience came in handy to solve some siphoning problems.

I plan on letting the stuff sit for a few months. Perhpas there will be some Thanksgiving tasting notes.

Ever since last summer, I’ve been enamored with the idea of having random header images on truffin.com. So, now, some 8 or 9 months later, I finally got around to acting on that notion–and it only took 10 minutes. Well, 10 minutes to install the necessary code. Selecting, cropping, and optimizing the images certainly took longer, but that work had been done when I was trying to implement another system.

At any rate, as of this morning, you faithful readers should start seeing different images at the top of the page. If you want to see more, press Ctrl-F5. Repeatedly

So, I admit that I sat through all 3 hours and 47 minutes of Oscarcast. I have nothing substantial really to say about who won and who lost. I did find it funny how the host and presenters this year seemed to be more ambivalent this year than others about the terminology used to describe the act of receiving an award. I know that in years past folks were encouraged NOT to refer to “winning” the Oscar since that seemed to denigrate the wonderfullness of the other nominees. And it seemed to me that the Oscar folks had been rather successful in enforcing this bit of PC inanity. However, this year was a mess. Everyone from the host to the presenters were flipping from “the Oscar goes to” to “and the winner is” all night.

The idea that there are indeed winners and losers at the Oscars was no more apparent than when Peter O’Toole did NOT win for Best Actor. The look on his face was so pained that I was happy that the director chose not to dwell on him.

Despite the idiocy of an O’Toole being nominated 8 times without a win, the most painful part of the evening were the acceptance speeches which forcefully and willfully ignored the sage advice of Ellen DeGeneres. She made the very cogent point that no one is really against long speeches; we hate boring speeches. Perhaps she needed to define “boring” for those in the room who have trouble saying something intelligent without a cue card. Even a man described as a teacher and film historian–Martin Scorcese–turned into a dull thank-fest. Thankfully, Forest Whitaker’s speech wasn’t boring, even if it wasn’t always coherent.

My final thought on the Oscars is that–and boy is this a stunner–they’re too dratted long! Really, folks, we don’t care two-bits about watching interpretive dance or clip collections or–duck–live music performances. The only thing anyone really wants to see when they turn on the Oscars is who wins and what are they wearing. Nothing else matters (if any of it really matters).

So, there’s my thoughts on Oscar 2007. Nothing original. Nothing earth shattering. Just like the Oscars.

After a veritable race through the first six Circles of Hell, Dante slows down to spend 6 cantos on the seventh circle of Hell, that one devoted to violence. However, as is the wont when we start categorizing things, we can never be satisfied with a single category for violence. Surely, we think, some violences are worse than others. And so, Dante complicates his simple “circles of hell” hierarchy–or as Dr. W referred to it, “lowerarchy”–by introducing “rings” into the circles. Thus, there are three types of violence specifically ordered: violence to others, to self, to God, art, and nature.

As, when you burn one end of a green brand,
Sap at the other oozes from the wood,
Sizzling as the imprisoned airs expand,

So from that broken splint came words and blood
At once: I dropped the twig, and like to one
Rooted to the ground with terror, there I stood (xiii 40-45)

The forest of the suicides (violence to self) provides what to me has been the most terrifying image of punishment thus far. Having chosen to escape their human bodies before their time, the spirits of the suicides are transformed into trees. They can only speak when a branch is broken off, which of course is highly painful. One may ask how it is that the branches get broken so often as to be a punishment if everyone in the wood is a tree. And Dante replies, “but of course there are Furies flying about eating the leaves off the trees!” Sorry I asked.

It is perhaps telling that Dante places usary lower than simple slaughter. Perhaps the argument there is that killing a man ends his suffering immediately whereas usuary places that man in servitude for a much longer time. Sayers suggests that

Usurers may be taken as types of all economic and mechanical civilizations which multiply material luxuries at the expense of vital necessities and have no roots in the earth or in humanity

While my mind wants to immediately run to global situations like those depicted in the film Blood Diamond, my sense of Lenten self-examination encourages me to look closer. When we lived in Gergia, a very poor family became part of our church. I would visit them often and was sorely discouraged whenever I saw them smoking or dipping snuff. My concern wasn’t initially that they were doing someting unhealthy, but rather that the funds spent on tobacco could have easily added up over time to allow them to better the quality of their living conditions, of their food, and thus their lives. But even that is too remote. How am I like them? What material luxuries do I develop at the expense of vital necessities? Or rather, what choices do I make economically that have no roots in humanity? What economic choices do I make that deny not only my humanity but that of others?

I know not how to answer these questions at present, but I suppose that’s the point of a season of self-examination. One must take time to meditate on these things.

When I got home from the Glen Workshop last year, I posted a list of the books I’d bought. As we are now six months past the Glen, and as I have just received in the mail the brochure for next year’s Glen, I thought I’d see where I was in reading what I’d bought.

• Out On The Deep Blue: True Stories of Daring, Persistence, and Survival from the Nation’s Most Dangerous Profession, edited by Leslie Leyland Fields. Read most of this on the plane ride home. A great collection although by the end some of the themes seemed to get repeated a bit too much. I found the stories of women most interesting. On the one hand, they were certainly tales of outsiders trying to fit into the fishing life. On the other, they depicted a working life that is very much focused on results. It matters little if you’re woman as long as the job gets done. To put it another way, when you’re hands are full with a ton of fish, it’s hard to really care too much about gender issues.
• The Remarkable Case of Dorothy Sayers by Catherine Kenney. I’m slowly working my way through this academic work. Kenney’s analysis inspired me to read Sayer’s work in toto and in sequence. I was going along nicely until Dr. W. forwarded me his Dante syllabus and I started reading Sayers’ translation of Dante, which came much later in her life. Never fear, however, I soldier on.
• The Crime of Living Cautiously by Luci Shaw. Haven’t started this yet.
• Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest: Poems by B.F. Fairchild. I’ve read most of this. Tried to figure out a way to include some of the works in my Intro to Lit course. Fairchild is wonderous story teller and has an eye for humor that I truly admire.
• Books That Build Character: A Guide To Teaching Your Child Moral Values Through Stories by William Kilpatrick and Gregory and Suzanne Wolfe. This isn’t so much a “reading” book as it is a reference book. I found myself noodling through it around Christmas time when we were looking for things to get the nieces and nephews.
• Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. This has been in the upstairs bathroom for months now. Chesterton is a master, which means that I read a paragraph or two and have to go off and think about it for a week.
• Intruding on the Timeless: Meditations on Art, Faith, and Mystery by Gregory Wolfe. Haven’t started this yet. Strangely, as I read about the flap over at Christianity Today over whether their movie reviews are “anti-evangelical,” I find that I just get tired when I am faced with anything smacking of a defense or attack of Christians in the arts. Even with folks that I agree with, I find the conversation to be so tiring. It’s a settled issue in my mind, and those who are anti-art are quite settled, too. It just doesn’t seem to be a fruitful conversation. On the other hand, without these defenders of the arts, we’d be even worse off than we are. This may end up being a “support” purchase.
• Wood Engraving: the Art of Wood Engraving and Relief Engraving by Barry Moser. I’m about half-way through this handbook. In the midst of truly helpful information on the actual act of wood engraving, Moser tells such wonderful stories that I think anyone would enjoy this book, even if they never intend to put graver to tree.

So there it is. Actually, it’s not as bad as I thought. Even though I’ve finished precious few of the books, there’s only two that I haven’t touched.

Well, five weeks into the project, and I’m already a week behind. But I’m sure I can catch up during the approaching Spring Break.

I wrote Dr. W that I’m finding this reading of Hell to be much less intriguing than my past reads. I don’t know if it’s Sayers’ translation or that I’ve somehow become more mature. But it just doesn’t seem to be as much reading about folks being tortured for their sins as it used to be. Instead, I find myself having greater sympathy for Dante (the poet in the story) when he writes

It [the dark forest] is so bitter, it goes nigh to death;
Yet there I gained such good, that, to convey
The tale, I’ll write what else I found therewith.
How I got into it I cannot say. (1.7-10)

or he is deciding whether to go on this journey with Virgil

As one who wills, and then unwills his will,
Changing his mind with every changing whim,
Till all his best intentions come to nil,
So I stood havering in that moorland dim,
While through fond rifts of fancy oozed away
The first quick zest that filled me to the brim. (2.37-42)

Who of us hasn’t found himself in some awful place without really knowing how we got there? Of course, the Greek tragedians would have it that until we recognize the errors that got us into such a mess we haven’t really felt true tragedy, but the sufferer suffers no less without the recognition. And who among us hasn’t quailed at the thought of seeing the terrible reality?

On an entirely different note, I have found the first cantos of Hell to be an interesting devotional exercise (more…)

I’m snowed in with you
I’m gonna make every effort to
Be so good to you
That when the snow melts away
You’ll want to stay
Snowed in with me
–Over The Rhine

Earlier this season when we were enjoying downright balmy weather in December and January, I said, “Yeah, this is nice, but we’re going to pay for it.” Well, now we’re paying. For the first time since we’ve moved to Tiffin, TU closed yesterday afternoon and is closed today. We’ve got about a foot of snow, but it’s hard to tell since it’s blowing all over the place. The TV says winds are at about 16 mph; I won’t argue.

The upside is that Sherry and I get to spend Valentine’s Day with little to do but look at the snow (well, there’s the shoveling. And the grading. And taxes.) But we’ve got hot coffee, warm blankets, good food, and cuddly kitties. So we’ll be good.

Stay warm!

I don’t know why, but I like that Dorothy Sayers chose to entitle the first volume of her translation of Dante’s Commedia Hell rather than Inferno. Certainly the two terms refer to the same place of torment, and certainly in Italian Inferno probably has the same weight as Hell, but being an English speaker, Hell seems to be both ancient and modern all at once: ancient since it’s not something that mainstream thinkers and writers ever really talk about any more, modern because it does away with the pretense of sounding poetical and simply states what it is that the first volume is about. And it is, perhaps, that blending of ancient and modern that makes Sayers what she is, a woman who speaks very bluntly and clearly about realities people don’t much want to deal with.

My friend Dr. Don Williams is teaching this semester a semester long course on Dante’s masterpiece. Having seen the reading schedule, I thought, “Hey, I’ve been wanting to read Sayers’s translation for some time now, and here’s a very reasonable schedule for doing so. Besides, if I have any questions, Don will already be in Dante mode and won’t need to go about interupting other work to think of an answer.” With that in mind, I printed out the schedule and promptly proceeded to get behind. However, with the weekend ahead, I feel that I can get back into the groove.

However, before entering the work itself, Sayers provides a wonderful intro. She gives a brief overview of Dante’s life and times, explaining why it really isn’t all that important that Dante got some of his history wrong. She presents a fine argument against those folks who (more…)