Chronicle of Peanuts

The average American boy eats 1500 peanut butter sandwiches before reaching the age of eighteen. It may be peanut butter and jelly or a dozen other spreads including honey, jam or preserves. Might even be peanut butter and banana, which isn’t uncommon in southern states. In the early 1930s peanut butter and mayonnaise spread on saltines was popular in Georgia, and all of us have probably known a goofball or two who liked their peanut butter in some other disgusting mix. At the bottom of it all is the huge popularity of this American tradition, one that has its roots south of the border.

Despite the name and what many people assume, peanuts are not nuts but legumes. They were known in South America, likely Brazil, as early as 950 BC. The Incas grew peanuts and made them into a paste, though it’s doubtful their peanut paste was anything like Skippy. Peanuts reached the United States via Africa, where they were carried by early explorers of South America. From Africa they were later traded to Spain, and from there to the American colonies. Commercial peanut farming began in North Carolina around 1818 and by the 1840s had spread to Virginia. During the Civil War years peanuts were being made into a kind of porridge, experience proving that peanuts were a valuable source of protein and perfect for soldiers in camp or on the march.

Crop wise, one acre of peanuts yields 2860 pounds of peanuts, enough to slather up 3000 peanut butter sandwiches. The typical jar of peanut butter that we buy in the supermarket requires about 850 peanuts. Compared to others, Americans are rather singular in their taste for this spread. It doesn’t enjoy great popularity outside the US, but Americans eat 700 million pounds of it a year, which is about three pounds per person, and an amount large enough to cover the entire floor of the Grand Canyon.

In 1890 a doctor in St Louis came up with the idea of packaging peanut paste for people with bad teeth. At the time it was selling for six cents a pound. A few years later the Kellogg brothers patented a process for making peanut butter with steamed peanuts. The Universal Exposition of 1904 introduced peanut butter to the world. By 1922 Joseph Rosefield was churning peanut butter in California and received the first patent for a spread that could stay fresh for up to one year. One of the first companies to adopt Rosefield’s process was Swift & Company, later renamed Peter Pan. A few years after that Rosefield founded the Skippy label and in 1934 produced the first crunchy-style peanut butter. Proctor & Gamble got into the game in 1955 and in 1958 introduced Jif. Now owned by the J.M. Smucker Company, Jif is made in the world’s largest peanut butter plant, producing 250,000 jars a day.

Peanut butter is made with oven-roasted peanuts, most of them grown in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Once roasted the peanuts go through a process of rapid air cooling to prevent further cooking. The outer skin is removed with belts or brushes and the waste (skins and hearts) from this process is passed on to farmers and manufacturers of bird food. In the factory the peanuts are then split, cleaned and sorted before going into a grinder where they are pulverized before other ingredients such as salt and sugar are added. A stabilizer is used to prevent the oil and peanut butter from separating.

Even skunks like peanut butter, though the video clip below shows it’s sometimes a risky business. As for me, I’m getting tired of just thinking about it, so will head to the kitchen for a crunchy-smooth peanut butter and dill pickle sandwich.

Another Thousand Words

With a full-blown HOA meeting hangover and too many barbs and arrows in my thoughts to enjoy uninterrupted concentration on pleasanter themes, giving in to late afternoon sloth and parking myself on the patio with a tumbler full of rum and Coke helps a lot. Catch it at just the right time and the view from my weathered old Adirondack chair is on a par with chemical tranquilizers. This time palm trees and near golden light cutting through an overcast sky made for another of those pictures that rouse a calm thrill at the way Nature reveals itself.

I read a book once called Patches of Godlight. This must be a picture of that.

And then there were two.

Crooked yeah, but the angled horizon line gives it an interesting tilt.

DVP-Lemon500H

Next to Apple, no other brand name has had my loyalty as long or as completely as Sony. I have done my share of supporting Sony products because they’ve proven their quality again and again. Great track record and always a good experience. It’s disappointing to find there is a chink in Sony’s armor.

A couple of months back I bought a new television and figured it was a good time to upgrade the old DVD player as well. Ignoring the hype that comes on every DVD these days, Blu-ray wasn’t what I had in mind for a couple of reasons. The salesman recommended a Sony player, the Upscaling Player DVP-SR500H, explaining it was good for boosting picture quality. Good price, slim, lightweight, so I bought it.

The paperwork that comes in the box describes the player’s features this way: See movies with 1080p upscaling; upgrades DVDs to near high definition for improved picture quality. Features Precision Cinema Progressive™ technology for sharper and more vibrant images, as well as the Precision Drive™ 3 system allowing playback of damaged or warped DVDs without any degradation of picture quality. In addition to watching movies the DVP-SR500H can play CDs, MP3s and also view digital photographs. Sounds pretty good, right?

Hard to comment on what all that means in terms of performance, and for all I know it may be the bug in the works. After a month of use the DVP-SR500H began freezing in the middle of playing movies. It started small, then gradually reached a point where nothing could prompt the machine to resume play. So, I boxed it up with the receipt and took it back to the store. No problem there and they gladly exchanged it for a new one—same Sony model.

Unfortunately, relief was short term. Within three weeks the NEW Sony DVP-SR500H was doing the same thing. A quarter of the way into a movie everything stopped for a minute or two and then resumed. A few days later the freeze time was longer, and a month after the exchange it was useless.

And once again the store happily exchanged the DVD player. Could I trade it for another model, either one made by Sony or another manufacturer? Nope, but I was welcome to buy a different DVD player at full cost if I wanted. Not liking the sound of that I brought home my third DVP-SR500H hoping for the best. It's hooked up now but hasn’t yet had a trial run. Can’t say I have high hopes. I’m of a mind now that Sony should rename this model, maybe something along the lines of DVP-Lemon500H.

Ghost in the Closet

First time novelist Lorna Graham moved to Greenwich Village in 1988, but it wasn’t until 1994 that she realized her apartment was the one-time home of late postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme. From that connection Ms Graham began to imagine conversations with Barthelme about writers and literary movements of his day, and about some of the famous names connected to Greenwich Village of the 60s. The outcome of those imaginings is a just released novel called The Ghost of Greenwich Village.

The book would have flown right past me had an Amazon promo not announced its release. The hook was a blurb saying, ‘For Eve Weldon, moving to Greenwich Village is a dream come true. She’s following in the bohemian footsteps of her mother, who lived there during the early sixties among a lively community of artists and writers.’ The front cover of the book shows detail of a painting of Bleecker Street that could easily be a picture of my own early sixties Greenwich Village neighborhood. A book about that place and time, and about some of the artists and writers who were my neighbors sounded strongly like a book to read.

Had I read the cover blurbs more carefully I might have guessed that The Ghost of Greenwich Village is a story that could stack comfortably in the ‘Chick Lit’ section of the bookstore. And by categorizing the book that way I imply no slight or disrespect. Ms Graham’s book will probably enjoy the wide readership it deserves.

Soon after landing a choice Perry Street apartment for a less than exorbitant rent, Eve Weldon discovers that she is sharing the apartment with the ghost of a man who lived there until his death some years earlier. She can’t see him and he can’t see her, but it is a voice in her ear, and one that can read her thoughts as well. His name is Donald Bellows and in his day a known writer always just shy of great success. Grumpy, demanding, often insulting and just as often fascinating in his stories, Eve is not always happy to have this ghost as a roommate. Such are her feelings, but the talks with Donald, the writer and ghost are easily the best sections of the novel.

Eve lands a job writing for a Good Morning America type of news program called Smell the Coffee. She manages to screw it up and just barely escapes being fired on her first day. She is however quick to learn and in a couple of weeks settles into what most writers might find to be a thankless type of work, subject to the whims and tantrums of media stars. The TV writing is almost all trivial, revolving around lightweight Regis and Kelly-type subjects which Donald the ghost calls a temple of mediocrity. The job represents the other side of Eve’s New York life and though she does make one or two good friends, most of it is a nasty business of squabbles and frustration. In the end, the connection at least pays off in an unexpected way.

Much of the book is bogged down by Eve’s ‘search’ for the mother she never knew beyond childhood, a woman who had her own time in Greenwich Village, an adventure seen from Eve’s viewpoint as the pinnacle of romantic idealizations. Granted, the mother does provide an important piece to the puzzle, but Graham weakens her story by making the mother a fairy tale like figure, and also by having her main character mooning over her mother’s lost dreams. The outcome would be much more effective without the romantic delusions. At the heart of Graham’s book is a solid story without need of the schmaltzy memories, segments that are at best a distraction from the narrative line that begins and ends with Donald, the ghost-roommate.

One of the book’s more interesting characters is Matthias Klieg, legendary German fashion designer who comes into Eve’s life through research for Smell the Coffee. Klieg, it turns out is the third point of a 1960s triangle that ultimately answers all of Eve’s questions. Excellent job of creating a multi-layered and deeply sympathetic character with Klieg. When writing about Klieg and Donald, Graham is at her best and one wishes that some of the lesser and trivial characters had been eliminated, with focus kept on those with a direct line to the story’s resolution.

Unsurprisingly the writer is skillful in her depiction of Greenwich Village then and now, and very accurate in her description of community in the 60s as it differs from today. A cover blurb says, ‘community comes in many forms’ and about that Graham is spot on in her illustration of that quality. A small complaint—the manner in which her character Eve walks the Village streets is much like they were a route painted on a map showing which writer lived where. There is enormous character to the straight and twisting streets that define the Village and more about what gives those streets their special quality would have added texture.

On the whole, The Ghost of Greenwich Village comes off as less than I’d hoped, but it would be false to say that the deficit stopped or slowed my reading of the book. A shade too romantic for my tastes, but a story that will appeal to many.

House of Sorrows

Sitting on a spit of land six miles south of Baton Rouge on the Mississippi River, the crumbling ruins of an old plantation house lie in a picturesque field of pecan and oak trees. Because the river wraps around the land and the former plantation, the setting offers one of the better views found along the River Road. Although destroyed fifty-one years ago, memories of the Cottage Plantation still linger in the minds of some living in Baton Rouge—remembered for what it used to be, what it became and for the ghosts who are rumored to still walk there.

Not many years before fire destroyed the plantation, it was a playground of sorts for several of us, and we went there on many nights to ‘walk with the ghosts’ and to sit under its crumbling columns telling scary tales of blood, murder and vengeance. In those days the grounds were accessible, or at least it seemed that way to a car full of teenagers willing to climb fences. We plotted elaborate dramas and scare tactics to spring on friends, the more elaborate stunts requiring some of us to arrive early, set the scene and then hide among the shadows. We laughed as the terrified girls ran screeching from a ‘ghost’ in flour whiteface, arms pinwheeling with glittering butcher knives but in the long run we all once or twice got scared out of our wits.

At the time not many among my ghost story partners knew much about the old house, apart from it being some old place from the time of the Civil War, and that it was sometimes in the movies. I don’t remember it ever being a subject in our Louisiana history classes. But it does have a story, a colorful one that includes fiery steamboats, yellow fever, occupation by Union soldiers, wandering ghosts and finally crumbling in flames.

The Cottage was built in 1824 as a wedding gift to a daughter and her husband. Considered one of the finest houses in the area, it had 22 rooms filled with imported furniture. Operating as a sugar plantation with 250 slaves, the owners were able to accumulate considerable wealth, and in the years before the Civil War, life was good at the Cottage.

On February 27, 1859 a steamboat bound for New Orleans caught fire on the river near the Cottage, burning to the water, with bales of burning cotton floating on the Mississippi, passengers clinging to them as best they could. Plantation slaves helped pull passengers from the water, while the owner of the Cottage had bed sheets laid out with flour on top of them, a palliative for burn victims to be rolled in. One witness later wrote in his journal: ‘One man approached me wrapped in a sheet with flour covering his face and looking like a ghost. Before I could run away from the hideous object it extended its arms toward me and quietly said, “Don't be afraid, Jimmie. It is me, Mr. Cheatham. I am dying—hold my hand!” then sinking upon the turf beside me. The ghost-like man gave a cry which seemed to wrench the soul from his body. He shivered for an instant, and then lay still. A slave passing by pointed to the body and casually remarked, “He done dead.”’

After the start of the Civil War, life on the plantation changed forever. The Union Army took over the property and removed everything of value, including horses, furniture, jewelry and even the children’s clothing. Troops occupied the plantation holding the family prisoner. When the soldiers finally left, the family abandoned the house and it was taken over as a hospital for Union soldiers with yellow fever. Many died from the disease and were buried on the grounds. In the years that followed, the fact that it was a hospital probably saved it from being destroyed by vandals.

Following the war’s end the family tutor returned to the abandoned Cottage, becoming a recluse and spending his time repairing the old house. He was sometimes seen wandering the grounds of the Cottage with a long, white beard. Years passed and the Cottage stood empty, people living nearby calling it haunted. There were reports of doors opening and slamming by themselves and sightings of ghosts wandering the grounds. In the 1920s, the family began a restoration of the house and in the 1950s it was opened to the public, a museum of the Old South. In 1957 it served as a movie set for the Clark Gable and Yvonne De Carlo picture, Band of Angels.

One early morning in 1960, the Cottage burned to the ground. Firemen later reported that while pumping water onto the flames from the side garden, a man ‘appeared’ in an upper window. Firefighters shouted for him to jump, but he stood not noticing them or the fire around him. The roof collapsed and the man was gone. Searching for the his remains, firemen found nothing. Some say a ghostly figure still haunts the Cottage, passing on dark nights among the ruined columns of a former life.

Small Moments of the Ordinary

Yesterday included a couple of memorable moments in the humdrum cycle of hours. Always looking to extract a glimpse of the unusual during these days along the edge of Florida where it meets ocean blue, and more times than not something will arise to banish the mundane. Surprises are not always found at the water’s edge, but now and then popping up in unexpected places on dry land.

Wednesday’s pop-ups were on the beach, in my front yard and at the barber shop in town. With hair hanging around my ears I called the place in town where I get regular haircuts to make an appointment, but learned that my usual barber is on vacation. Too long to wait for her return, I made an appointment with someone unknown. From that moment forward visions of butchered hair haunted me. Don’t imagine that mine is a complicated hairstyle requiring the secret and magical arts of one single wizard barber. Probably the plainest kind of cut on the style chart—short but not buzzed. That said, I worry unreasonably, always afraid that no one but the usual barber can do it to my satisfaction. Now, with the deed done I look back and know the worries were uncalled for.

Out of the barber’s chair my first thought was that it looked better than usual, more to my liking than what I get from the barber now on vacation. Carol Ann is a friendly lady with a good eye for hair who looks more like a soccer mom than a hair stylist. Who knows? Maybe she’s a soccer mom as well as a hair stylist, but she can cut my hair anytime.

Sitting out on the patio yesterday I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to see a black snake only a short slither off the patio, head raised six inches off the ground looking me right in the eye. Maybe three feet long, not even as thick as a broom handle, clearly not a poisonous snake, I guessed it to be a black racer, a type not uncommon to this area. What was he doing in the pitt shrubs by my patio? With the number of lizards scampering in and across the shrubs during this season, it’s pretty clear he was looking for a bite to eat. After a minute or two the snake retreated into the bushes where the hunting is probably better.

My walk on the beach came late in the afternoon on Wednesday, a time when some of the heat had passed away with little worry about slogging though sledge hammer glare. The weather forecast predicted rain and I was almost disappointed it never came. Walks in the rain are often exhilarating as long as lightning is not a threat and the day before I met a downpour as refreshing as a desert oasis. But Wednesday’s post-snake walk was one without the predicted rain. Water temperature being what it is in mid-summer (70°-75° F) dead fish on the beach are a rare sight. Little but sand, water and people in mid-July, with even small numbers of jelly fish washing up. The hefty half-fish I came upon yesterday was a surprise. Looks to me like it was in the wrong place at the wrong time and met some hungry jaws out there in the blue. Not altogether sure my guess is accurate, but I think it is one called a jack fish. An hour or two prior to the photograph here, it was a fish at least fourteen or fifteen inches long. Can’t be very pleasant to suddenly be bitten in half, even for a creature without a central nervous system.

Tsuguharu Foujita

“I lived in Tokyo until I turned age 25. I spent the next twenty years in Paris. I became a man in Japan, and I became a painter in France. I would like to live in the world as a Japanese.” — Foujita Tsuguharu

Another of the book-finds I bagged at Bright Light Books over the 4th of July weekend was a biography of Japanese painter Foujita Tsuguharu. The book is Glory in a Line: A Life of Foujita, by Phyllis Birnbaum who describes Foujita as a man caught between East and West. Let me be honest from the start about my attraction to this artist. Much of his work is of a kind that fails to move me, while on the other hand I can see in his paintings or prints the flash of genius that may have been his gift. I am more interested in his lifestyle, a style outrageous, full of poses and brilliance and not unlike a later Japanese artist, Mishima Yukio, the writer who in 1970 killed himself with a sharp sword across the belly. Like Mishima in the 60s and early 70s, Foujita in the first half of the century was fond of making appearances in odd costumes, avant garde or otherwise. He wore hoop earrings below a jet black bowl haircut, circular black framed glasses, a Hitler-like mustache, married several times and with the occasional lover. He was an interesting man who more often than not left me uncommitted to his talents.

Painter and printmaker Foujita Tsuguharu (born Fujita Tsukuji) was born in Tokyo in 1886. Second son of a doctor from the samurai class, Foujita graduated from the Imperial School of Fine Arts in 1910, where he studied under Kuroda Seiki, an artist well known for his Western style of painting. Oddly enough, Kuroda was critical of young Fujita, though Fujita had already received several medals and prizes, and one of his paintings even purchased by the Japanese Emperor. In his early years Fujita seemed slated for a painting career in his native country, but with an itch for foreign styles he traveled to Paris in 1913. Once settled there he began applying Japanese ink techniques to Western style painting. Changing his name to Tsuguharu Foujita he quickly became friends with Modigliani, Picasso and Matisse among others of the Paris School.

His first exhibition was in 1917, but he achieved fame a year later with a Paris exhibition of his work featuring beautiful women and cats, painted in what was seen as a very original technique. He made his reputation with his use of white paint, a self-mixed and spectacular pearlescent white which he drew on with Japanese sumi, or India ink. Others tried to learn the secret of Foujita’s white but the artist remained closed-mouthed about his ‘recipe.’

By 1924 his name had become so familiar he was one of the most important exhibitors at the much respected Salon d' Automne in Paris. With his fame established he began traveling to different countries, including the US and South America. At one exhibition in Buenos Aires 10,000 people lined up to get his autograph.

He returned to Paris from his travels during the early stages of World War II, but soon embarked for Tokyo, staying there until 1949. Once more in Paris he continued to paint, by then an established and respected figure in the European art community. Later in life he changed his name to Leonard and converted to Catholicism. He died in Zurich in 1968.

The photographs from top to bottom:

1. Two photos of the artist separated by his signature, Tsuguharu (Japanese) Foujita (English); undated

2. Foujita and one of his many cats; sepia photograph signed and dated 1927

3. Quai Aux Fleurs; lithograph, 1950

4. Woman and Cat; Japanese watercolor over pencil dated 1937

5. Two Cats; watercolor, date unknown

6. Nina Hamnett Having a Bath; woodcut, printed in red-brown ink on Japanese paper, 1917