The brutal truth

With a side of quirkiness

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Where have I been?

Leslie Stephens, who also writes interesting things from Portland, Oregon, published Sunday about hunkering down with her pet to enjoy this city’s blizzard.

Would that I could join her! But, alas, I, and the dozens of other residents of Rose Schnitzer Manor were without electricity or heat from midday Saturday until late Sunday evening, as outside temperatures hovered in the low digits.

We’re still waiting for the water to come back on after a pipe burst in the cold.

I release my weekly posting at 7 pm Saturday, so this is coming to you late thanks to my not having Internet access for 34 hours.

As I write and revise, I’m waiting for my apartment to heat up from 50 degrees.

Hours of nothingness

Saturday night was long, starting with the early sunset. I went to sleep at 5, seated upright in my big chair (it needs electricity to recline), insulated by two quilts and a wool-and-cashmere blanket. I draped a warm challis Turkish shawl over my head.

Two small quilts cover a window that won’t close all the way, leaking frigid air as wind gusts outside top 50 mph.

I used gaffer’s tape to stick a bath towel, some batting and a couple of quilts over a leaky window. Staff at my assisted living had more immediate concerns than fixing it, with no heat or water in the building. Photo © Fran Gardner

I can’t read by flashlight, so instead I settle in and drift. I’m in a numinous, pillowy state, neither awake nor dreaming, not thinking of anything. I eventually move to bed, still mindless, waking and sleeping.

A state of no thought

When I first read Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday in my twenties, I was struck by his description of the dim-witted Hazel: “Hazel’s thoughts were not complicated. It was just remarkable that he had them at all.”

How could someone have no thoughts, I wondered. I was always thinking about something.

Now, though, my mind is often clear. I may have trouble sleeping, but it is never because of racing thoughts.

Saturday night, as I drift in and out of slumber, I let images and words form and reform like the snowflakes outside. Those snowflakes coalesced into bigger, fluffy flakes, some of them the size of poker chips, thrust up, down, and sideways by vicious, vagrant winds.

When it is light enough, I read, working my desultory way through Slaughterhouse-Five, which I am reading for a book club. I read a paragraph, lose focus, doze off, revive, and read another paragraph or page.

So it goes.

My mind is a million miles from Substack, dozing and dreaming with little direction. A day and a half of nothing doing, doing nothing. It is delicious.

If only it weren’t so cold.

Three words

Words come to me as triads. It’s up to me to figure how they are related. Today’s trio:

• Brutal

• Annoyance

• Detail

Brutal

I was unprepared for the torrent of ideas that issued from this ugly word. It sounds rough and unkind, and it is the adjective of savagery, cruelty, heartlessness, viciousness and inhumanity.

But what came mostly to mind when I considered this word was “brutalism,” an apt coinage (it dates to 1953) that describes a particular type of architecture. More about that below.

Annoyance

Brutal is the charging rhino, but annoyance is a buzzing mosquito of a word. And like the incessant insect, annoyance is hard to ignore. You want to swat it away, but it keeps coming back.

Does forgiveness have something to do with damping down annoyance? We shall see. I’m still trying to make it work for me.

Personally, I have a low annoyance threshold. Everything bugs me. I’m not proud of that. But it does give me something to work on.

Detail

Annoyance often comes to me because of details. The waiter can’t get my order right, although the meal is fine regardless.

Someone else’s writing (never mine!) has more holes than a wool sweater with a moth issue. Why can’t I just let the words be? They aren’t mine.

I truly wish I weren’t so critical. I think my daughters wish that, too. All my life, my self-worth has been tied up in being right, knowing the answer, fine-combing causes and effects. Nailing down the details.

Enough already with criticism! Time to take a chill pill and put my feet up.  . . . Until I go into battle against the next wrong-headed idea.

Greens in winter

Pomegranates are gone, but it’s high season for winter vegetables. Here is a selection from a local (Hillsdale) farmers market.

There are many more greens than most people imagine. Photo © Fran Gardner

Philomath, a town in Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley, not far from Corvallis, is pronounced Phil-O-meth, with the accent on the middle syllable.

Winter bounty

Everyone wants the produce from Philomath.
Carrots and apples, greens for a winter meal.
Fruit of the soil: potatoes,
Pumpkins and turnips.
Jerusalem artichokes!
Kohlrabi! Leeks!
Try something new,
Eat of the earth,
Buy my produce, trucked
All the way from Benton County.
Kale and chard, turnip greens,
All you can eat! And then some.

Produce from Gathering Together Farm, Philomath, Oregon. Photo © Fran Gardner

About kohlrabi

Not many people are familiar with this vegetable. It’s not a root; the bulb grows aboveground, like cabbage or broccoli, to which it is related.

The stringy stems of kohlrabi are not edible, but the bulbs are crisp and tender, and the leaves are delicious, too. Photo by The Matter of Food for Unsplash

My mom used to cook it, but I prefer kohlrabi raw. It has a pleasing crunch and is sweeter than turnip and less woody-tasting than jicama.

It lasts a long time in the crisper drawer of the fridge. You should give it a try.

Try it with a dip, like peanut sauce.

Miso-peanut sauce

I can’t give measurements, because I’ve never measured these ingredients. I just mix them together until they taste good. Use more water than you think you will need to thin the sauce to a likable consistency. Add even more water if you want to use it as salad dressing.

• Glob of miso (I like red. It has a dark, earthy umami.)

• Peanut butter. Crunchy is better. Or you could add chopped peanuts.

• Lime juice. Fresh is better.

• Ginger. Grate some and squeeze out the juice.

• Garlic. Chop it fine.

• Chopped pickled jalapeños, optional

• Tamari. Or soy sauce, if you prefer

• A touch of honey, also optional

Mix these ingredients. Taste, adjust, taste until you like the result. Thin with water.

Use as a dip with fresh vegetables or to dress a salad. It’s a natural with satay.

Brutal architecture

Here’s something I’ve never told anyone before:

I hate the architecture of Wurster Hall at the University of California at Berkeley.

Wurster Hall, Berkeley. Photo by Hector Abarca

Fresh from high school and a year of junior college in Tulare County, Calif., I was green and clueless when I arrived in Berkeley.

It was the summer quarter of 1969, just a month after the infamous People’s Park protest. A man was killed, another blinded, and Gov. Ronald Reagan sent in the National Guard.

Meanwhile, on campus

A naive sophomore, I had some idea of majoring in English with a minor in music, but I also considered architecture. I was fascinated by blueprints, by the idea of designing places where people would live and work. I had been drawn to the character of Roark in The Fountainhead (while at the same time missing Ayn Rand’s superhero message). I loved his idea for the housing project and couldn’t understand why everyone opposed him.

The building’s the thing

The first assignment in Architecture 101: write an essay rhapsodizing about Wurster Hall, newly built to house the College of Environmental Design. Rhapsodizing is the right word; the professors couldn’t praise it enough. Mighty and grand! An unfinished palette for designers! All those gray concrete walls, a tabula rasa. You could hang bright banners. Or something.

I couldn’t find it in me to rhapsodize. The building didn’t intrigue me so much as it scared me. I dropped architecture without finishing the class.

Brutalism

I could appreciate this building intellectually: strong, unfinished, spare, brazen. But esthetically, it was a concrete eminence with no softness or humanity.

Many years later, I discovered the architectural term that describes buildings of the Wurster genre: brutalism. What a delicious term! And entirely accurate.

Brutalist buildings were rampant in the 1960s, an overturning of the classical style of earlier government and education buildings. And despite my admiration of Roark’s iconoclasm, I still liked regular classical features.

In Brutalist buildings, form was function and function was form. No softness, no decoration. A lot of concrete.

Now Brutalism is out of style. At Portland State University, the inward-directed Neuberger Hall, described by some as brutalist, was transformed a few years ago into Fariborz Maseeh Hall, with a “light well” that brings daylight inside and a fresh, uplifted facade. The Portland firm in charge of the new design was Hacker.

Neuberger Hall at PSU, east facade. PSU archives.

West facade of Neuberger Hall before being remodeled into Fariborz Maseeh Hall by the Portland architectural firm Hacker. I think of this style as “girders and panels” after the building set my brothers had in the 1960s. PSU archives.

Fariborrz Maseeh Hall at PSU, Northeast corner. Photo © Fran Gardner

Fariborrz Maseeh Hall at PSU, Southwest corner. Photo © Fran Gardner

Meanwhile, at Berkeley, Wurster, now renamed Bauer Wurster Hall, still crouches, squat, monolithic and weather-stained. It is routinely voted the ugliest building on campus.

Winter poetry

Lost in the thicket of words and desire
Waiting for ideas to reform.
Impatient, I know
Time and tide won’t wait. 
Nor will my rhythm,
Bumping along.

Bury my pleasure in meter and words.
Lift me up slowly with sighs of the world.
Symbols are strewn alone for my choosing,
Ready to weave in the garment I wear,
Clothing my nakedness in metaphor.

What rasps against bare skin, soothing or rough?
Linen and cotton, rayon and wool.
Fabric of my weaving, quilt that I sew:
Wrap around tightly, sing to my ear.
I’m part of the Universe, single, myself.

Coincidence? Or synchronicity?

This week, a man found the “door plug” that fell from an Alaska Airlines’ Boeing 737-9 jet in his Portland backyard. That was a coincidence.

But the fact that the man, Bob Sauer, is a veteran high school science teacher (over 40 years!) who used his discovery to spark a class discussion of the principal of terminal velocity*—well, that is synchronicity.

*These details about Sauer come from a story by Maxine Bernstein in The Oregonian.

A more unsettling coincidence: Sauer is not a common name, but former President Donald Trump’s lawyer, who appeared before the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit this week, is also called Sauer. First name John. He argued that Trump is not liable to criminal prosecution because he was acquitted by Congress after he was impeached.

If I married a guy named Sauer and had a son, I think I’d name him Dino.

Another brutal truth

Tracey-Ann Nelson, the executive director of the Oregon Education Association, spoke to Rose Schnitzer Manor residents about her experiences registering voters in her home state of Georgia, where she worked with Stacey Abrams in her run for governor in 2018.

The week before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, she shared a receipt from 1955. It states that Lee Carr, a “colored” man from Grayburg, Texas, had paid his 1954 poll tax of $1.50.

In the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s gutting of the Civil Rights Act, this reminder is especially chilling.

News from the frozen north

International Falls, Minn., (my home town) has a winter festival. It’s called Icebox Days, and this year it’s January 19-28. I got most of this information from the Rainy Lake Gazette.

The big event is the Freeze Yer Gizzard Blizzard Run, 5K and 10K. Other activities include a moonlight snowshoe hike in Voyageurs National Park, boot hockey (no skates), frozen turkey bowling, a toilet seat toss, cornhole competitions, line dancing, a sloppy Joe feed and cribbage tournaments.

Another Minnesota institution is “smoosh” races. These involve teams of four racers and two 2x4s. The racers’ shoes are affixed to the 2x4s, and they must all move together to slide down the course, around a pylon and back to the finish line.

This footage is from the I-Falls smoosh race in 2013.

Oh, to be in the frozen north for these fun festivities!

Wait. Do we really want to a hang out in sub-sub-zero weather? Well, maybe, if it means playing cribbage in a cozy cabin by a roaring fire with a steaming hot chocolate on the side.

Checkout

I don’t have much more to say other than please keep writing. And if you are not writing, please start.

Why am I always harping on the writing thing? Because it works. It makes you a better writer, more creative, more fulfilled. It gives you confidence.

And the other thing

Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Please consider paying for a subscription if you don’t already. Think of all the hungry writers in China. You can’t really help them, but you could help me.

More than the money, paid subscriptions tell me that what I do is worthwhile.

If I read the stats right, several hundred people read my posting every week. I am flat-out grateful for that. So whether you pay or not, thank you.

I’ve said it so many times: I love to write. But I also love that you love what I write.

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Thanks, and until next week.

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