Ben: Jaci mentioned to me that there is actual science behind the book club–psychology says that couples that share mental space like this can span long distance relationships and become closer. It was a bit of a surprise, how important this was to me; instead of feeling helpless or separated, I can go grab the book of the week and keep my sanity. It’s more than just something extra to talk about, it’s a replacement for all the little things a person has to do on a daily basis to maintain a relationship.

Jaci: In order to fully occupy the psychic space we’ve set aside for each other, I find myself reading more deeply than I have since I left behind the fortress of academia for my floating fortress. The Lazarus Project was a good choice for book one–both literary and very readable (it’s one of the few on the list we chose without much debate or any sort of trade-off, which was why I placed it where I did).

Ben: It’s also helped my personal discipline! I’m not exactly a morning person, and with my busy days, I find it hard to get up before 6:15, which is the latest I can get up to do my morning routine and get to work by 8. Reading every morning gives me a reason to get up at 5, have some coffee, and get my day off on the right foot. The Lazarus Project was a good start because it’s not putting me to sleep when I’m reading so early and half awake! (Thank goodness we didn’t start with Gogol…)

Jaci: In some ways, it’s as though we are together, in 1908 Chicago or in eastern Europe circa today, or at least in Aleksandar Hemon’s versions of these places. This means, of course, that over the next several months we’ll be traveling to some very strange lands together, including (if memory serves) a few brief trips to Mars towards the end of the journey.

Ben: I’m really feeling connected to Brik (the main character). He has me in stitches, and he constantly says out loud what I’m thinking. His perspective on his marriage with an American, white, Catholic neurosurgeon really reminds me of the things I’m thinking in my own marriage. I wonder if the married life commentary has the same resonance with Jaci. Knowing that we’re reading the same things and at least getting the same input makes me read the book in a whole new way. I’m even embarrassed about the time in brothels because it’s weird to be there with your wife!

Jaci: I also like looking at the notebook I decorated for a few minutes before and after I start reading. The first few pages are already filled with notes, questions, observations. To be frank, however, I live in a paranoic haze, worried that my Kindle will somehow be broken in my semi-rough living conditions.

Ben: Ah, Jaci is going to get a little English teacher resistance from me here. Jaci isn’t in a place where she is reading and taking notes every day… but I am. I’ve been reading for enjoyment rather than taking notes or making observations. I feel like Jaci is going to make me pay eventually when she starts bringing up specifics, but I have a hard copy, so I can always flip through the book, whereas Jaci can’t with the Kindle!

Jaci: Ah, the Kindle. I love the dictionary feature, but I miss being able to flip back and review previously read pages with ease! Especially in a book like this, a book which is constructed as an echo chamber with two stories interlacing in subtle but significant ways, it would be nice to flip back to the third page of the second chapter where I remember seeing something (instead of finding location ####, which I will not remember when I get to it’s twin in a later passage). But it’s compact, it’s simple, and it’s working. Like the bookclub.

Ben: It’s kind of sad that Jaci has better electronics kit than I do, especially in a place without too much network connections. Meanwhile I’m back in the seventeenth century with mine! Someone get me an iPad!

• The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
• Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogal (trans. C.J. Hogarth)
• Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, Lisa Miller
• Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
• A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
• Blue Angel, Francine Prose
• The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir
• Daemon, Daniel Saurez
• A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
• Spies of the Balkans, Alan Furst
• Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky
• Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein

Thirteen books in all: a loose baggy monster* of nonfiction, literary fiction, suspense, science fiction/fantasy, and classics.  By my rough estimate, we have about 5000 pages to read, or, given thirty-five weeks, about 150 pages per week.

I also found the perfect notebooks for the bookclub today on my lunch break: two Mead spiral assignment notebooks, seven-and-one-half by five inches, with forty sheets each.  I’ve dated each sheet for a single week, and to make them more special, I’ll be doing some of my famous collaging.

Next: the syllabus!  And (ouch) the purchase.

*My professors used to refer to English I and II as “loose baggy monsters” because they were intended to cover…well, everything, with a reading list meant to satisfy everyone a little bit.  I have no idea if this phrase is in wider use.

Mail at sea can be greatly delayed, along with care packages of hopefully well-preserved goodies; email can be shut down or lost for a variety of reasons; and I somehow think Ben would find a “flat daddy” more discomfiting than not.

My solution?

Ben and I are creating a bookclub for two.

I filled out this idea yesterday, while reading about “common reading” programs on college campuses, though some version of it has been percolating in my egghead for months.  The idea at university is that inbound freshman have at least one book in common–something to unite them and serve as a source of conversation.  My idea is that Ben and I, by reading the same books at the same time, will be carrying on a sort of psychic conversation through the nexus of the words we’re experiencing together.  Even if email goes down and it’s a month or more between mail deliveries, even if I can’t make an outgoing phone call or tweet a single word, in some way, we’ll be joined.

Of course, our very different tastes in reading makes picking books a fraught operation.  We want anywhere from eight to fifteen books; right now, we’ve agreed on four (E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, Daniel Saurez’s Daemon, and Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land).  One of our “rules”–that anything we pick must be available on the Kindle due to my space limitations–has only compounded the problem.  We dropped the rule that all books must be new reads for both of us (which allowed two of our choices).  Most likely, it will take a few trips to the bookstore in the end, since we’ve pretty effectively shopped our own shelves at this point.

What else remains to make the bookclub a success?

-More books (obviously).

-A syllabus…I’ll take care of that!

-Notebooks.  We’ll each jot down a few thoughts on the books we read together, especially when our communication lines fail, so that we don’t forget the things we each want to discuss.

-A reining in of my book snobbishness, and a slowing down to savoring speed in Ben’s reading habits.  We’ll meet in the middle.

I plan to post the full list of books and syllabus as a guide for others who want to try this gambit to close the miles during long times apart.  Take that, sword.

My relationship with poetry has evolved over time.  When I was a child, I would take out books of poems from the library and eat–I mean, read–them whole.  I would also leap from my bed on fire with rhymes and scribble verses (mostly about kings and queens, and perhaps animals, if memory serves).  At some point, I entered poems in a couple of those scam contests you run across in newspaper classifieds and ended up begging my parents to purchase the mammoth, expensive, worthless anthologies that are the inevitable result of a contest where everyone wins.  (In a related note, learn about flarfing here.)  In high school, I wrote papers about T.S. Eliot and performed Sylvia Plath at speech competitions.  In college, I memorized Pushkin in the original Russian and wrote spectacularly poor free verse.

In its newest incarnation, my poetry life includes working in fits and starts through The Ode Less Traveled by Stephen Fry, thinking about the structure of the poetry class I would like to teach (hypothetically, if given the chance), and copying out poems longhand to decorate the walls at work.  (Currently, four poems adorn my “office”: “Routine,” by Arthur Guiterman; “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay; “Musee de Beaux Arts,” by W.H. Auden; and “Politics,” by W.B. Yeats.  There’s also a bit of Doris Lessing’s prose from The Golden Notebook, but that’s another post.)

For Poetry Month, I expanded.  I’ve been wanting to find a path into reading more contemporary poetry, so I signed up for a month-long Poem-A-Day email from the Academy of American Poets.  I also stumbled on the Seattle Times Twitter poetry contest and submitted (to date) four poems.  You can read them on my Twitter page, posted April 2 and April 24, and check out the competition by clicking on #STpoem while you’re there.  Finally, I started listening to Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac as a podcast, since my local public radio station doesn’t play it.  To be honest, I’d been downloading it for a while…but Poetry Month gave me the push I needed to press play.

With only one fleeting week left to celebrate, I’m on the prowl for a few more ways to insert poetry in my life–not just in April, but every month.  There are some strong contenders.  Poetry Speaks is one, a website where you can listen to poems and even download poetry ala iTunes for a small fee.  I’m also considering convincing my parents to become “vectors” for Broadsided, as North Dakota is one of the few states that hasn’t yet experienced guerilla-style public poetry sharing.  If anyone has any other suggestions, please comment!

And may the poets be with you.

Winston- A Staffordshire Bull Terrier

As some of you already know, last fall we had quite a different family project from the beer that recently stopped bubbling under the kitchen table–our 2009 project was a photo shoot for Pinups for Pitbulls.  While a combination of contractual obligations prior to the calendar’s release and pure laziness ever since has allowed us to put off publishing the pictures until now, my goal this evening is to correct this discrepancy!

It all started a year or two ago, when we were first taking flak for Winston being an adorable Staffordshire bull terrier and my mom found an article about a pitbull-themed calendar in the Fargo Forum.  The calendar was called Pinups for Pitbulls, and it was produced by an organization of the same name, dedicated to rehabilitation of the pitbull image and the protection of abandoned pitbulls.

Soon, I had the calendar on my wall and was a regular visitor to the website, www.pinupsforpitbulls.com.  Being incredibly vain, and thinking modeling couldn’t possibly be hard (even after several cycles of America’s Next Top Model), I watched carefully to find out how I could get involved…

…and soon had an answer.  As luck would have it, last year was the first year that Pinups for Pitbulls went nationwide, accepting photo submissions for the 2010 calendar from women and dogs everywhere.  I excitedly ran into the next room and quickly talked Ben into busting out his fancy camera and photography skills.

Within a week, we were putting together a portfolio of photos.

And selecting a Gil Elvgren classic pinup to emulate, from a selection provided by the ladies at PFPB.

In short, we were off to the races…

NOTICE: No one believes modeling and photography are hard.  They hold this belief because they’ve never tried either on any serious scale.  We thought we’d spend a few hundred bucks and bust out a hundred fabulous shots.  About a thousand bucks later (yes), we ended up with only a handful of usable snaps, even with the much-needed assistance of my mom and a work friend I’d conned into helping!  There’s costuming, make-up and hair, props, equipment…and other variables, like a model who spent the hours between 2 AM and 7 AM standing watch with a 9mm pistol, a surprisingly hot sun and its attendant semi-naked sunbathers, and a dog who turns out to be a diva.  Not to mention that, this being Seattle, we had to plan for rain: Ben and my mom worked throughout the night to create an indoor studio in what had previously been our garage.

For all the difficulties, we did get a few nice shots, before both model and dog model were spent and melting.

Jaci’s favorite:

Ben’s favorite:

PFPB’s favorite and our final entry:

Ben used his mad Photoshop skills to sharpen the already bright and shiny images, we signed the contracts, and we sent off the pictures a few days before the final deadline.

The end result: we didn’t make the final cut.  But we had a great time, and felt like at the very least we were supporting a cause that we became believers in thanks to our “accidental pitbull.”  Pinups for Pitbulls, by the way, has achieved official nonprofit charity status and has frequent events in Pennsylvania and across the eastern seaboard.

Would we do it again?  I don’t know.  Compared to brewing beer, modeling/photography is considerably more expensive and frustrating as a family activity.  Maybe not this year…but watch out, 2012, you might see a return of the Tipsy Bear Studios!

However, every once in a while, there are nice things about living where we do.  I may be developing an ulcer from the stress of just walking Winston around this neighborhood while enduring the sometimes hostile stares of neighbors and watching the earth-movers dig up wetland in favor of low prices, but occasionally I find gems, like the produce place down the road that sells a large variety of competitively-priced fruits and veg, as well as hard-to-find items like tamarind pods and coconut juice.

Or like the beach that Ben found, just ten minutes away.

When I got home on a Saturday morning after duty and my first-ever stop at the produce place to pick up strawberries for a surprise pancake breakfast I wanted to make for Ben, I found him with a haircut and a tip from his barber: there are dog-friendly public beaches all along the Puget Sound.  And he had found one, just minutes away.  Over our breakfast of fruity flapjacks and varicolored hashbrowns (made with the last of the Ballard potatoes, including the oddball purple ones) we made plans to make like explorers and head West.  After all, I would be gone out to sea for the next week, and he would be traveling to set his small-business plans in motion, and Winston would be spending part of the week in the kennel.  We had to make the two short days of brilliant February sunshine that we would have together count.

And I have to give him credit: this is one of the best ideas Ben has ever had for how to spend a weekend.  We had wanted to try to head to Vancouver on Sunday to watch some curling, but the ticket prices were prohibitively high; the beach cost only five dollars to park, and we could stay as long as it was light.  And so, we did.

One of the advantages of the Puget Sound area is that it is both wooded and watery.  We got to hike some short but lovely trails that looked like they belonged in an Olympic Peninsula temperate rainforest, but we also got to watch the water lap the rocks along the Sound and hop from log to log of stranded driftwood.  Winston had never been to the beach before and ran along excitedly taking in the new smells, sights, and sensations.

After a few hours, in mid-afternoon, we decided that we had to obey our stomachs and head out in search of food; we batted around the idea of returning that same day, but February sun is fickle and sets quickly, so we decided to come back the next day instead.

Sunday found us still attached to the plan, so we packed our picnic basket and books (Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke for me, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age by Kurt Beyer for Ben) and spent another afternoon basking in the warm, if wan, winter sunshine.  We stayed until the sun was nearly ready to set, walking along the shell-strewn beach, enjoying the sights of families out playing or sitting around fires talking.  It was another perfect Pacific Northwest day.  On some days, the sadness of suburbia is soul-crushing; but once in a while, we escape and find blissful beaches on which to rest, frolic, and dream.

Last weekend, Ben and I were stumped as to how to celebrate St. Valentine’s Day.  My gift was lost in Package Limbo, and all I had gotten for Ben were some Twilight-themed chocolates in a heart-shaped box.  Then, as so often happens, it was NPR to the rescue.

Specifically, it was Food for Thought, which was baby-themed for V Day.  One of the foods cited in this celebration of that term of endearment was a Dutch Baby, a type of pancake that can be found at the Original Pancake House.  I was intrigued, and, knowing how much Ben loves breakfast, began to set my plan in motion.

Since my gift was decidedly uncool, I decided that the rest of my gift would be to make a list of options from which Ben could choose as ways to spend our Sunday together.  (One of our biggest troubles seems to be getting out of the dinner-and-a-movie rut…also, making decisions.)  I included the Original Pancake House, the Crab Pot, P.F. Chang’s, and a variety of theatre/museum/film options.  (Okay, so this is obviously not a major step away from our normal weekend routine, but since all of them required driving to Seattle, it was a step in the correct direction.)  Stuck on the ship on Saturday duty, I emailed him the list.

He chose pancakes, and a stop by a market to get fresh seafood.

Arriving home early Sunday morning, I used the powers of Internet and found the nearest Original Pancake House.  There’s one in Ballard, in the northern part of Seattle, across the 5 from the University district.  In a flash of pure brilliance, I recalled the existence of the Ballard Farmer’s Market, and with some savvy Googling found it was five minutes from our chosen restaurant.  In a few mouse clicks, I had not only found a way to justify driving 45 minutes for pancakes but also obviated the need to drive to downtown Seattle, pay for parking, and battle the Pike Place crowds.

The Original Pancake House is everything that other pancake houses aspire to be: hip, crowded, and delicious.  I went with the Dutch Baby that had inspired the trip, while Ben chose a massive five-egg Spanish-style omelette topped in marinara sauce.  Our waitress forgot to bring our banana appetizer and so knocked the cost of our beverages off the bill.  And we were entertained by the incredibly colorful patrons (although Ben was a bit concerned that one of the hipster breakfasters had chosen to wear his plum-colored tights sans culottes).

We then make our way down to the Sunday market, held in the middle of Ballard’s impossibly chic streets full of one-off stores of boggling variety.  While hardly a blip on the map next to the gargantuan Pike Place Market, the Ballard variety is dog-friendly, totally organic/seasonal, and, in short, entirely delightful.  We were able to pick up gorgeous multi-colored potatoes, fresh cod and mussels, liver-and-peanut butter brownies (a treat for Winnie), just-cut pasta, and everything else we needed for Ben to perform feats of culinary mastery.*

Then it was a quick stop at Miro Tea for drinks for the road, and we headed back to our rental in Blandsville.  But I do believe that we will always remember with fondness our Valentine’s day in the land of hippies, hipsters, Bohemians, and poets.

More photos of our day:

*Except for tomatoes, which we could have bought dried but not fresh–that whole seasonal thing.

Salad dressing, that is.  (insert drumroll here)

These crabs come from the sea to be dressed in the delicious flavors of Old Bay.

You may get the impression that here at Bengfort.com we eat all Guyanese, all the time.  In fact, we have a growing collection of recipes from around the world, and we enjoy a great variety of foods.

Preliminaries out of the way, I wanted to share two recipes, one new, one old.

I came up with the first the other day when I had bought a can of crab from the grocery store.  (This can be purchased in the tuna section and is surprisingly good.)  There was a mini crabcake recipe on the inside of the can label, but I didn’t have all the ingredients called for, so I decided to serve the crab on a bed of greens instead.  Using the recipe for crabcakes as a rough guide, I came up with the following deconstructed version:

Crabcake ala Jacquelyn

a salad

Note: all measures are approximate–when I’m making something up, I do a dump-and-taste method.  Which, I guess, means all ingredients are approximate as well…

• 1 tablespoon mayonnaise
• 1 1/2 teaspoon mustard (I used a very liquid gourmet Champagne mustard)
• 1/2 teaspoon cumin seed
• 1/2 onion, chopped
• dash Worcestershire sauce
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1-2 tablespoons olive oil (enough to give the dressing a dressing consistency)
• mixed greens
• 1 small can lump crabmeat
• Old Bay seasoning

Mix together the mayo, mustard, cumin seed, onion, W-sauce, salt, and pepper; add in the oil and stir, adjusting the amount for the desired consistency.  Use this to dress the greens (this will be enough dressing for two medium/large salads–you’ll have to eyeball it).  Dish up the dressed greens and split the crabmeat between the two salads; sprinkle with Old Bay, to taste.

The second recipe is an old favorite of my Grandma Dorothy’s.  The name alone nearly put Ben off of it, so you can call it Catalina or French if you like–but to me, it will always be…

Grandma Dorothy’s Tomato Catsup Salad Dressing

• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 1/3 cup vinegar (I used white rice vinegar–any kind will do)
• 1/2 cup “catsup” (ketchup to you non-North Dakotans)
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 teaspoons dry mustard
  
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper

Blend all ingredients together.  This recipe will make a lot of dressing, but it keeps well for a few weeks.

With these two recipes at your side, not only can you dress your salads, but you can begin to discover the joys of making your own small-batch salad dressing instead of filling your fridge with giant bottles of the stuff–no more race to see whether or not it will go bad before you’re sick of same flavor on salad after salad.  Think of it as couture for your naked greens.  Enjoy!

During our many Christmastime conversations, the question of my graduate thesis came up.  Ben, in an urge to experiment with self-publishing and happening to know I had a fairly polished hundred pages, put this together back in 2008 and made it available via Lulu.  He designed the cover art and wrote the blurbage as well (basically, everything required to make it accessible).

Mom Bengfort, in particular, advocated for making sure that this paper was available to those interested in the topic.  If I do say so myself (and definitionally, I do), while it isn’t groundbreaking anthropology or breathtaking Shakespeare, the extensive bibliography would be very useful to any student of Guyanese anthropology, sociology, history, or literature.

In any case, if you’re here at Bengfort.com, statistically you are here for the cookbook.  So this is, in essence, a classic “But wait!  There’s more!”  Consider this your invitation to sit down with a nice spread of dahl, roti, pumpkin, and armchair anthropology.

http://www.lulu.com/content/2742903