Pierre: a cautionary tale

In the 1960s Maurice Sendak came out with a series of books for children which we have at home, in tiny hardback editions no larger than a school pupil's hand, as the Nutshell Library. A year later, Harper and Row published Where the Wild Things Are, whereupon metaphorically speaking the American illustrator and author's ship set sail.

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One of these Nutshell Library bookins is Pierre: A Cautionary Tale. It describes the travails of a naughty boy who is fond of telling his caring parents 'I don't care.' His apathy is greatly tested, however, when a lion visits in the absence of his parents and (after a polite string of warnings) swallows him entire.

Thanks to the author's humanity Pierre is none the worse for being swallowed; and the lion is not a particularly vicious lion. Pierre's parents are, however, perturbed:

Arriving home
at six o'clock,
his parents had
a dreadful shock!
They found the lion
sick in bed

and fear that he is suffering from indigestion caused by their offspring. After a little battery,

His mother asked,
"Where is Pierre?"
The lion answered,
"I don't care!"

His father deduces, "Pierre's in there!"

Then they must figure out how to get him out again, which (*spoiler alert*) they manage to do. Out pops a  renewed Pierre who declares that he does care, and the humans once again live in harmonious relations with the noble beast.
[To see the hidden text above, use your cursor and drag past it.]

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The lion took them

home to rest

and stayed on

as a weekend guest.

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Illustration: Front cover of Pierre, from the Harper Collins website (edition: HarperTrophy, 1991)

On the Urgent Vitality of Books

"Vous les méprisez les livres [. . .]; mais songez que tout l'univers connu n'est gouverné que par des livres,

You despise books, but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books, writes Voltaire, speaking of the Veda, Koran, and Confucius's proverbs. I like this idea of books ruling the world: constitutions and declarations of independence, university textbooks, a driver's instruction manual, municipal bylaws, and even the phone book. It's certainly easier to argue their effects than to quantify what effect J.K. Rowling or Mo Yan have had on the world.

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Si vous avez un procès, votre bien, votre honneur, votre vie même dépend de l'interprétation d'un livre que vous ne lisez jamais. [. . .]  mais il en est des livres comme des hommes, le très-petit nombre joue un grand rôle, le reste est confondu dans la foule.

In a lawsuit or criminal process, your property, your honor, perhaps your life, depends on the interpretation of a book which you never read. It is, however, with books as with men, a very small number play a great part, the rest are confounded with the multitude.

To the Now-Arrived, Cold Wintertide

A poem by Johannes Rist (with translations interlarded):

Auf die nunmehr angekommene kalte Winterszeit

Der Winter hat sich angefangen,
Der Schnee bedeckt das ganze Land,
Der Sommer ist hinweggegangen,
Der Wald hat sich in Reif verwandt.

Winter has itself begun, the snow bedecks the land entire; the summer has traversed away, the woods turned over into rime.

Die Wiesen sind von Frost versehret
Die Felder glänzen wie Metall,
Die Blumen sind in Eis verkehret,
Die Flüsse stehn wie harter Stahl.

The pastures are by frost consumed, the fields are glistening as if metal; the flow'rs into ice apostate, the rivers stand like hardy

An Enigmatic Verse on Fancy

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Poet and playwright of some note; English.

Tell me where is fancie bred,
Or in the heart, or in the head:
How begot, how nourished.
Replie, replie.

It is engendred in the eyes,
With gazing fed, and Fancie dies
In the cradle where it lies

From the Merchant of Venice.


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I am very fond of the tests of characters which literary figures undergo in imaginary works like fairy tales, since they each have their own ingenious rationality. Sometimes it is a virtue to assist an elderly lady and other times an error, because one is transformed into stone by the lady (i.e. witch!) and must await the rescue of another and probably truer hero. Sometimes it is accounted a virtue to do their best to attempt an impossible endeavour — in one tale a maiden in a paper frock rather sillily goes out into the wilds of winter because her stepmother wanted her to do it — and in others the heroine can look at a pile of straw which is to be spun into gold, sit down and howl, and her fairy godmother or another benevolent entity will arrive shortly. Often the stories are divided upon whether people should deserve things — by means of virtuous positive effort or self-denial — or simply receive things if they have the gumption.

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Illustration: Portrait of a lady by an unknown Italian painter (Florentine), dated 1475
in the National Gallery of Victoria, via Wikimedia Commons
The sitter is probably nobody's idea of Portia, but I find hers a very zeitgeisty portrait and her optimistic nose and strong chin seem to indicate some apportioned strength of will — and her attire seems to position her in the nobility.

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War and Peace, Piecemeal: Round Four

Fall of the Damned
Hieronymus Bosch
(ca. 1450-1516)
via Wikimedia Commons

THE LAST 'live blog' of War and Peace, translated by Rosemary Edmonds, took place quite a while ago, but we (or at least 'I') reached the 18th chapter. This was just before the death of Count Bezuhov, father of Pierre, who is the well-meaning social dromedary who unwisely dove into Russian society headfirst after he returned from his studies abroad. The death scene itself is impressive, because it is a milder version of a grand Hogarthian display of hypocrisy; its particular solemnity is ludicrous in light of its trivial, baseminded underpinnings. (It is not unlike the deathbed of Peter Featherstone in Middlemarch.) But it makes me a little uncomfortable.

The next scene is in the countryside, where Prince Bolkonsky is living out the rest of his stately aristocratic life in splendid isolation. His son Andrei (the friend of Pierre) has already escaped, and his father is very proud and fond of him; but Princess Maria, being a woman, is stuck in the position of being molded into the male heir whom her father had always fancied he would like to have. At least that's my reading of the situation. This enforced sobriety and manly strongmindedness which Maria is supposed to possess — they are not poor qualities in themselves but qualities which are best acquired or kept on one's own initiative — contrast pitifully with her self-doubt and romantic aspirations.

12:28 p.m. Maria Bolkonsky finds an ally in girlishness in her friend Julie Kuragin, who writes her the sort of youthful, gushing letter which shrivels under the scrutiny of adult persons. Among her maidenly woes is her plain face, which Tolstoy tritely redeems with a 'pair of fine eyes.' In Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the hero is compelled to change his opinion of the heroine thusly:

no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes.

(Vol. I, Chapter 6, at Austen.com.)

In War and Peace, the narrative voice says,

. . . Princess Maria sighed and glanced into the pier-glass which stood on her right. It reflected a slight, homely figure and thin features. Her eyes, always melancholy, now looked with particular hopelessness at her reflection in the mirror.

Her friend had written that she has beautiful eyes, but Maria doubts it. So the narrator steps in to explain,

the princess's eyes — large, deep and luminous (it sometimes seemed as if whole shafts of warm light radiated from them) — were so lovely that very often in spite of the plainness of her face they gave her a charm that was more attractive than beauty. But the princess never saw the beautiful expression of her own eyes — the expression they had when she was not thinking of herself.

and moralize: "Like most people's, her face assumed an affected, unnatural expression as soon as she looked in a glass."

As a former girl-teenager, these cogitations ring true to me; I was told that my eyes were pretty and I liked having long hair and doughty legs, but worried about everything else. But I outgrew it by sixteen and find it, in retrospect, horribly mopy and rather embarrassing. As for Tolstoy, he seems to be sermonizing (not unkindly) that feeling poorly about one's pulchritude is the price of vanity; but that characterization might do him an injustice.


13:45 p.m. Julie Kuragin proffers three important pieces of gossip. Firstly, Russia's war against Napoleon is underway and Nikolai Rostov (at whom she has been casting sheep's eyes, to use an amusingly terrible phrase) has enlisted. Secondly, Pierre Bezuhov is being beset by partis and their parents, who are casting sheep's eyes at his new inheritance. Thirdly, the adult relatives (e.g. Prince Vasili, one of the deathbed harpies) of Anatole Kuragin are thinking of palming him off as a husband on Marie. I don't know if this has been mentioned in the book yet, but Anatole Kuragin is — in modern parlance — The Absolute Worst, a glamorous society creep. So she is in great peril!

Aesop's Fables: Odo of Cheriton's "De Lupo, Vulpe et Asino"

Since I am not well informed, this precis on Aesop is a bit of an 'Aesop for Dummies' case:

AESOP was, according to Herodotus and by way of a certain online encyclopaedia, a slave who lived in Greece in the fifth century before Christ. It is also possible that the fables are cribbed from the lore of Mesopotamia or even more easterly lands, or that Aesop himself did not exist at all. Divers Latin translations already existed six hundred years afterwards, by Phaedrus, Ennius and Aphthonius of Antioch and others.

Open Cookbook: Jerusalem

FOR my birthday I received the new cookbook of the London-based chefs Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi: Jerusalem. It came in the big Ebury Press edition, a picturesque clothbound tome whose dimensions do justice to the big photos within and which is altogether a finely put together experience.

Pomegranate fruit from the Greek island Simi
Karelj, 2008
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

These photos, in their scope of subject and scale, mirror the text. In the introduction and in the little prefaces to the recipes, the authors endeavour to recognize the divers communities in Jerusalem not only for their cuisines, but also as fellow citizens whose rights are sometimes in crisis. Unfortunately, the city's inhabitants and its very character is being threatened — increasingly — by a political and theocratic monopoly.

The truest test of a cookbook — aside from a quick note of its illustrations, difficulty of techniques, fairness to the Queen's English, and the kind of cuisine which it offers  — is, of course, to try the recipes. There are many recipes which look highly tempting: the hot yoghurt and barley soup, the kibbeh, the quinces with lamb stuffing and pomegranate seeds and fractured coriander leaf, the mutabbaq where soft white cheese plumply reposes underneath rectangles of resinous-coloured phyllo pastry, and so on. There are many vegetarian dishes, and in its detailed consciousness of health (implicit in the ingredients) and ethics (free-range chickens, sustainable fish, forest stewardship council seal, etc.) the book brings the caricatured demographic of the Guardian — where some of these recipes have been published — very much to mind. I, of course, approve; and especially in the political aspect I am glad of this thoughtfulness even if I, the consumer, do not practice it.

The "stuffed onions" which I decided to attempt are layers of the root vegetable, which are curled up around a tablespoonful of spiced rice and pine nut stuffing into an oval cigar-like form, then simmered in a pan for an hour and a half to two hours in stock.

FIRST came the shopping, which I did at a nearby Turkish gida. There were dauntingly huge onions, like grapefruits, there; I bought these but found out at home that, these being 450ish to 580ish grams, the 'large onions' mentioned in the recipe should in fact weigh half as much. The shallots were inexpensive; the pine nuts were not there and so I bought cashew nuts instead, which were fairly expensive. But, regarding the costs, I think that Tamimi's and Ottolenghi's recipes are intended to be fine cooking too, hence the relatively long ingredient lists; and the staple/inexpensive foods in an Israeli or British store or market will of course not always be the staple foods in a Turkish and German one.

Photograph: View of Jerusalem, by AlexS (2004)
Licenced under GNU Free Documentation License and CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As for the spices — cloves, cumin, allspice, dried mint, parsley, and fresh mint — they were either easy to find or we already had them at home. The benefit of purchasing the dried mint in form of a large bag of unchopped leaves, from the tea section, was that they have a brilliant, fresh scent when handled which even stands up to the onion fragrance which permeates the kitchen. The pomegranate molasses (the bottle said "grenadine molasses," which I thought was a French cognate, but which might reflect the fact that a pomegranate syrup is customarily called 'grenadine') were in the aisle with orange blossom water, chutneys, etc. I taste-tested them later since they were something new; they are like rose hips or, obviously, pomegranates in terms of taste, runnier than liquid honey, and lovely deep brown.

IT is a tribute to the recipe that despite the miscalculations and adjustments that I made, despite the employment of bouillon powder in lieu of true stock, and despite my scorching the shallots and other ingredients of the stuffing in the pan where they were frying separately, the final dish turned out to be delicious and filling. My family enthusiastically ate it up, too. However . . . there is some hazard that — while the hours of work do not put one off wanting to make the recipe again — one is rather inclined to whimper at the sight of an onion in any shape or form immediately afterwards.

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Yotam Ottolenghi, Contributor page at the Manchester Guardian