Peg Duthie's Blog

pandoro

My first accidental project of the year: pandoro - literally "bread of gold," festively Veronese Christmas cake, and absolutely not what I'd planned to spend the first day of the year on, but having volunteered on New Year's Eve to bring a dessert to dinner on New Year's Day, I wanted to try something new, and its mention in Nigella Lawson's recipe for "Easy Holiday Trifle" (in Feast) caught my eye.

Fortunately, I am at this point experienced enough that I picked up a box of cake mix when I hit the store, and I did indeed end up assembling the trifle with backup cake rather than the pandoro, which was slow to rise and ultimately would have been too dense for a dessert that depends in part on syrup and time melding together stewed fruit and spongy carbs. I will confess to being inordinately pleased with how the pandoro turned out, though -- it smelled fantastic while it was baking, it tastes great, and rolling all the layers into it was a heck of a workout.





The trifle (apricots stewed in cardamom syrup) before the toppings(whipped cream, bourbon honey, pistachios and almonds)were added:



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reading: "Insult to Injury"

This poem appears in George Bilgere's 2024 chapbook, Cheap Motels of My Youth, and also online at Rattle.com. The narrator, a man in his sixties, comes across the air gun he used to shoot at cans when he was a teen, and tries it out on "a volume of poetry, slim,/ but not slim enough,/ by a poet I never liked":

The pellet, as it happens,
made it farther than I ever did,
stopping on page sixty-two

... at which point I cackled at the savagery and decided to post about it here.

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new poems in Tabula Rasa

One fueled by rage over COVID ("Apostate"); the other, AIDS ("A Brief History of 歌 [gē]").

The issue (2024) can be read or downloaded for free at the Tabula Rasa site. (The 2022 issue remains available at that page, and has three earlier poems by me.)

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a 3 x 3 summing up of my summer

3 happy things
1. Autumn Sky Poetry Daily featured my sonnet "Paean to the Pommel Horse Guys" on August 15.
2. I successfully auditioned for the Nashville Symphony Chorus. I'll finally get to sing Beethoven's 9th! (And also some Vivaldi, Ravel, Mahler, and Handel, among other things.) This has been on my bucket list since I was a teenager, and the timing has never worked out before now.
3. Several visits from my honorary big sister, her partner, and their menagerie.

3 vexations
1. I tested positive for COVID for the very first time on July 13. Odds are high that I caught it from the dancers at New London Assembly, as I masked for virtually everything at the festival -- including when singing in performance -- except for meals, and I had lunch with that crew right before five tested positive that afternoon.
2. It's a month and a half later and I'm still coughing violently several times a day. This is not a surprise (this is why I was so bloody vigilant for literal years). I'm on all my usual meds and hopeful that it will be gone by the time I go onstage for the Vivaldi, but it is literally tiresome.
3. Pilea mollis (Moon Valley) is structurally significantly different from Pilea peperomioides (money plant). I did not know this before dividing my formerly healthy Moon Valley plant, purchased a year and a month ago in Philadelphia. It was not an expensive starter, and screwing up is part of the learning curve, but still. *sniffle*


July 2023, in my Muehlenberg College dorm room


The same plant in August 2024, after a year in my sunroom

3 topics I plan to post more about later
1. The 2024 San Francisco Early Music Society Baroque Workshop
2. The 2024 Amherst Early Music Festival Spring Break Workshop and Summer Festival (week 2)
3. The other pilea, which also holds sentimental value (it was a farewell gift from a museum colleague).

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more joy over the water

Joanne moved back to Nova Scotia a few weeks ago. For the send-off, I picked a couple of lines from her work to put on cakes:





It was a fun gathering. A bunch of us ended up in an impromptu knitting/crocheting half-circle at one end of the patio, discussing con-running, costuming goth weddings, and other past and future mayhem.

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sonnets and cake

I don't hop on my personal Twitter accounts regularly anymore (professionally ScienceTwitter is still a thing, but the students are more visible on Instagram, and I'm working out systems to post more frequently on and direct more traffic to the department website), but I peeked in this morning, when Paisley Rekdal posted on what makes a sonnet a sonnet. Tl;dr: it's the volta...

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The discussion naturally brought forward other sonnets, among them Sam Cha's Motherfuckers talking shit about American sonnets.

(  story a-sprawling / cake baked and frosted  )

ETA: today's rabbit hole - discovering how the pinyin for "u" with the third tone will appear with the caron to the right of the u regardless of copy-pasting versions of it with the caron directly over the u, typing in unicodes, etc. Ah, typesetting/coding. And it's good to be reminded that the u+haček in Baltic/Slavic languages is a different critter.

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a fist in the air

Erica Reid's "The Raft" is a banger. Two excerpts:

....we are all drowning these days, are we not? Don't you wake up
feeling you've reached your limit, that the worst must be past,
only to discover you're at the top of a spiritual Guggenheim,
a cool, white spiral of descent still awaiting you?

... No matter who you are, your very life
is rebellion, your love is a fist in the air.

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Komm, Jesu, komm

The most recent project I sang in:



[audio only for the first 7 1/2 minutes, then video-mosaic for the closing chorale]

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"It's plush pandemonium in Hershey!"

"Let the sweet cuddly mayhem commence!"



(Total bears flying: 74,599)

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out there

https://bsky.app/profile/ellenkushner.bsky.social/post/3kehy67jkd42l

(Ellen Kushner quoting Sean Thomas Dougherty's "Why Bother?" on BlueSky; h/t vinia)

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