The Book.  I'm probably enjoying the serialisation more than anyone; paying it out at arm's length has given me such a new perspective and it's so valuable in preparing for the other half of the story.

But the best thing I've written this year and by far the most difficult was The Stellar Other.
I'd never even attempted a lament.  It feels like a lost art, such a distant and spectral idiom; in practise it was profoundly affecting.  It's not often acknowledged that this time of year is a bitch and a grind for so many of us and we'd like to express solidarity with everyone fending off the old black dogs.  With that in mind, I've just posted a link, rather than assailing you with the text.
It's not exactly festive.  Seriously- if you're struggling, try writing it down.  You've got nothing to lose.

One of the really great things about neither experiencing shame nor being charged with the cultivation of impressionable young minds is the freedom to stop pretending you're an adult.  Mostly, but not always, within the confines of your private residence.  And especially at xmas.
Some people go to the trouble of baking their hams and dressing it up with pineapple.  Maybe some glacé cherries.  They tuck it away in the fridge and rationalize, pretending they're not thinking about it at all and really prefer to be trapped in a hamless state, probably on an uncomfortable chair in an overheated room somewhere listening to Uncle ---'s interminable gout/dementia stories or wishing Aunty --- would drop another Ritalin or three in Little ---'s fruit juice while she bitches
about ----''s ex-wife. 

But for us, life is short.  
Enter the hamsicle.
Comes but once a year.
Fuck smalltalk, and fuck crackers and bread.  Don't answer the phone.  Wedge a shitload of champagne-cured free range ham onto a fork and walk around the house in your underwear ripping bits off  with your teeth and dropping it down the front of you.  The dog/cat will get the stuff that ends up on the floor.  No one will judge you.  Least of all us.

We didn't, you know, farm the prawns, but we did grow the summer garlic and these pink fir new potatoes.  We had some elderly and decidedly unimpressive examples lying around from last season and sowed them in early spring.  They're much nicer as a new spud than a main crop, yielding a very clean, waxy tuber with the famous creepy nodules very much in evidence.  We almost heard screams as we rooted them out of the ground.  Not that that would have stopped us.  They're pretty fucking delicious.

We stir fried the zucchini with some late asparagus and summer garlic, boiled up the spuds and tossed the prawns in butter and garlic.  I usually do a huge turkey with stuffing and enough roast starch to immobilize a small principality, but this year we're on our own and we decided to can the excessive fuckery.  We don't regret it.  Notice how I photographed this shit on an angle; angles make it look more expensive and cosmopolitan- ask a food stylist (because that is a real job now).  You owe me a wine glass, btw.

There was a break in the clouds but it was still thundering almost continuously and spitting whiplash spokes of lightning at the hills over the horizon.  I took the camera onto the road outside our house at about nine pm.
I'm really glad I did.  Breathing this in was a privilege.   I even found some love for powerlines.

Everyone seems to want them felled according to the dictates of the 'uninterrupted sea view', as though these trees posed some kind of barrier to visual possession.  Subtopians will always fear that which is greater than themselves, which is... most things, really.  Almost everything.  I think these black silhouettes must haunt their dreams.

If you're anything like us, the carol mixtape oozing out of the speakers in your local supermarket/mall/cafe/bus/everywhere by now has you thinking some pretty fucking dark thoughts about organized religion, your own species and the Gregorian calendar.  Here's a little something to numb the pain.    

Frustratingly, we could not find the performance that we're sure featured on that Elvis tribute thing Always On Our Mind, or whatever it was.  It is seared into out memory; we were lending half an ear to the TV when all of a sudden Cale sat down at the piano and proceeded to suck the marrow from our very bones with his desolating interpretation.  Neither of us have ever heard a song so deeply gaffed and made to do a stranger's bidding.  It was some deep shit.  Check it out if you ever get the chance.

This is a more contemplative rendition but he's still bleeding it out over a bathtub, transforming the words we thought we knew so well, as if they were just code all along.

Though low clouds hung like smoke about the hilltops, the evening was warm beneath them, darkness settling its folds around the house and garden.  Susan watched William’s car along the road through her bedroom window, the Jaguar passing pools of streetlight like a fish heading downstream.  She took advantage of the solitude to play her own music and wander on another of her expeditions, standing with her arms crossed under the atavistic taxidermy, then on tiptoe to smell the shaggy, disembodied hides and run her hands along the teeth and horns.  Furniture and objet performed a slow, disorientating circuit, shuttling between rooms and floors as though at the behest of some impelling gease.  The mansion stretched its legs in its owners' absence, its stiff, ligneous groans resounding as the night cooled, the structure settling like a giant in its bed.  In its sedate remove the park became an untended wood and the house a summer palace, forgotten for the winter by inhabitants who had taken their gallantries and shortcomings elsewhere, its lustre lost to her amid the tract of lonely chambers.    

Returning to her own room Susan sat beside the casement in her nightdress, the magazine she had abandoned lying open at its first page.  While the house exhaled warmth during the day, sunset drew the night in through the open window, laden with the dark, pagan smell of elms and hornbeams.  She got up and walked to the kitchenette, holding her hair back as she stooped to light a cigarette from the stovetop.  Catching her reflection in the window she pondered it from both sides, then gave up, vanity exhausted, settling on the bed with the quilt arranged about her legs.  Comfortably ensconced, she was reminded of the portable turntable she had dredged from the garage by its needle bumping against the label and convinced herself she could ignore it, flipping determinedly through the magazine until she swore and threw down her feet to obey its tireless summons.

Subordinated beneath the hiss and pop of the oscillating vinyl and the shuddering of the refrigerator cycle she discovered another sound, low and crisp and intermittent, the passage of animate weight through the rugosa hedge embracing the foot of the white plaster wall.  She stowed the needle and stood in silence by the turntable.  A moon outlined the crawling clouds in glowing white and cool perse blue, its slim curve like the blade of an Arab sword.  Cruciform shadows lay on the boards in the passage outside, glimpsed in section through the door that she had left ajar while the restive sounds dragged back the gnawed, demonic utterance she had struggled to efface, the smell of blood rising on steam from the laundry tub filling her throat with a prickling catch.  She swallowed hard, but was forced to cough once into her hands.  

The noise ceased.  A bird called an abortive note from the elm as though startled from a dream.  The sight of her own reflection in the pane over the bed, its pallor and the shadows draped beneath her eyes administered a fright that pressed both fists to her breast; the shuffling recommenced, gathered by a rough, concerted foray into the body of the roses and culminating in the taut crack of a branch, its stiff thorns scraping the parched plaster.  The window stood like a hole gaping in ship plate at the bottom of an ocean.  Susan whispered to herself and crept onto the bed, the old springs groaning underneath her as she leant across the sill to dart a hand toward the casement.  It was achingly distant, her bare skin silvered by the moon over a yawning darkness, silent until an arid squeal was answered by a heavy, rasping slide as something found and began to climb the unseen wall below.

She jerked back her hand and sat on her heels.  Outside, whatever ascended observed the same precipitate silence as though in mocking imitation until she felt that to move was to give it license to do the same and pressed her eyes closed, turning her head from the brass lamp perched before the pane.  When she leant onto her hands, the climber scuffed the narrow oak framing and committed weight to the crumbling black ledge.  Susan screwed up her face and threw herself at the latch, the sill bruising her hip as she strove for it; a gouging shriek kicked off a tight, explosive rush against the plaster and as she cried out and toppled backward a white blur lashed up at her arm.   

THIS PASSAGE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce
IT'S XMAS.  BUY THE BOOK.  $3.99

pbsdigitalstudios:
Norwegian nature photographer Kjell Bloch Sandved has found every letter of the English alphabet on the wings of butterflies, as well as numbers 1 - 9.
(http://www.butterflyalphabet.com/names/index.php

I don't know, dude... looks a little pho-sho'd to me.  You could use it to make the most passive-aggressive extortion letter ever,
but that would be very wrong.

A. consanguineum hails from habitats throughout the Himalayas and is a bit of a chameleon itself, presenting many forms and subspecies to delight the pedantic taxonomist.  Like succulents, if you have a mild or maritime climate they present very few cultural challenges, requiring only a dryish dormant winter in which to die right down to nothing and a sheltered spot, either in a gritty, leaf-moldy mix and pot, or in some well-drained part of the garden.  That's not to say they won't disappear without warning if you have a run of bad climactic luck; shit happens.  I'm building up my stock of bulbs before planting them out.

Arisaemas grow from corms that range in size from peanut through to car tyre, some of them being used as commercial sources of edible starch, others in traditional medicine; consanguineum is one of them but its bulb is chock-a-block with oxalic acid and raphides and is therefore pretty toxic without expert preparation.  Don't grate it onto your salad.

Viva aroids.  I grow a few species, but I wish they were more readily available here in New Zealand.

www.robertnorbury.com

Fan of monochrome?  His work is epic.  Check it out.

Opal looked back at Edward as though fearing he would not follow her.  She glared pointedly at the wet brick leading down into the tar-black mouth of a loading bay and waited for him to precede her.  Its sickly rust and iodine odour was born in its proximity to the waterfront at the eastern end of Avalon, amongst the unflagged fishing and smuggling fleets becalmed at the head of the tide.  He stood in the midst of the lane, gazing down at the water tonguing the bluestone.  It had always impressed him darkly that the ocean could hold black as nothing else, wholly swallowing and espousing the reflected night.  Drizzle like the exhalation from some gaping maw wafted and clung to their clothing; Opal hissed to herself and humped her way down the broken steps without him into the vault beyond, where brick walls wept slime and a tin roof admitted streams of water that soaked into snaking cracks in the concrete floor.  Two caged utility lights beamed a white circle in the midst of the warehouse, steam rising from their housing before a curve of folding silver chairs.

A refrigerator truck had deposited its cargo of hungry bodies, still clad in the filthy sweats that had crossed the Mediterranean and Atlantic with them, a few clutching knotted plastic bags and water bottles.  They were younger than the usual trade, uniformly teenaged or just beyond; three dark-clad minders kept them together, punishing intransigence with stock prods and the foaming mouths of mastiffs held on stout, clattering chains.  Catchlights flashed in the back of the animals’ eyes as their great heads snapped at the foul air, the same dull flare written on the glasses overlaying the gazes of the more circumspect trio standing aloof by the truck.  Their habiliment and manner could not have presented more of a contrast to the battered vehicle or its cargo, turned out with the heartless, faceless polish of a luxury-brand catalogue.  Opal chose a chair and Edward sat down slowly beside her as still more of her nocturnal ilk arrived, complaining of the rain.  

Siobhan descended the steps on towering wedge sandals, draped in red feathers the weather had pasted into drooping tufts, face screwed in a pinched moue of suspicion.  It spat a cackle at the back of Opal’s head as it passed behind her and was lost amid its cronies while the smuggled youths were driven to the margins of the spotlight, their handlers using the dogs to push them, blinking and reluctant, before the arc of seated observers.  With the prods they singled out the first selection, a slight young man who might have fled Khartoum or Mogadishu, his red T-shirt sporting the name of a popular softdrink in a stroke of horrible irony.

"So much better than the local garbage, my god... it all comes though Italy, apparently.  How much would you love access to this every day?" Opal murmured, unwittingly rhetorical, craning her head toward the guesting Continental procurers in the hope of conveying some sort of acknowledgement.  It was obvious to Edward that their superlative supply chain had overcome much of the loudly-stated objection to their presence, at least amongst those susceptible to the persuasion penned in the glare before them.  The leathery reek of fear and slavering dogs dragged him back to a hundred such scenes of his own remembrance, from the dust-blown, mud-walled pens of oasis towns to the black filigree cages of French and Ottoman brothels, their inmates regarding him with the same voided expression.  His own eye made a dispassionate assay of the faces beneath the lamps, imposing criteria infinitely refined by repetition.  “I’ve made some calls on your behalf." Opal remarked.  "They're more than happy to set up a meeting and I would seize that day if I were you.”

She leant out from her seat to examine a girl shoved forward for consideration.  Having fled the Caucasus, she possessed the dark-eyed parochial beauty discerning princes had once sought for their harams; one of the gangsters groped his way into the spotlight and took hold of her head, prising back her lips and revealing her teeth as evidence of her robust wellbeing.  When she kicked him and almost wrested free the guard strapped her with a short black length of hose.  Edward tasted the ground with her, knowing every inch and moment of the cut dealt to her shoulder, blinking against the tail end of the blow that lashed around and caught their faces, the cold, remembered burn turning him toward the rain that wept in the doorway.  The brindle canine lunged, seizing the girl's thigh in its mouth and wrenching her on stiff, splayed legs across the concrete, her complaints climbing into high-pitched screams.  Opal sat back and muttered beneath the gurgling laughter from Siobhan’s contingent.  
“I'm sure you're aware the police are looking for Ms Frost as we speak over the small matter of mordida failure, in addition to the recent disappearance of her manager...”  Her eyes puckered into slits.  "Astonishingly stupid of you at this point in time.  So, to recap... dump the callgirl in a waste station somewhere, issue your brother with a trespass order and I want you to get rid of that maid... I don't like the eyes on that one.  She was a mistake."  Edward did not have to speak over the look he gave her, and Opal shook her head.  “That’s a shame for you, it really will be.  Expensive, too.  I've never liked the police... they're so difficult to manage once they're involved in anything... but sometimes we must do evil to effect good."

He stood and drew his coat together.  

"Don't ever come to the house again." he told her.  Glancing at Siobhan as the latter strove for a better view of their dispute, he departed alone, glad of the empty night that met him in the lane outside.

C O N T I N U E D   N E X T   W E E K
© céili o'keefe do not reproduce.
Enjoying it so far?  Spread the love- tell a friend and/or tip me.  Buy the book.  $3.99

Incredibly purple pollen.  Must get the microscope out.
pic our own

Gooseberries are possibly my favourite berry of all, from a lazy ho's horticultural POV.  They will fruit happily in a shady, rubbishy spot (along with blackcurrants) and don't need to be sprayed or even really netted, unless you have some very determined avian bandits in your vicinity.  My own long-suffering bushes have been unceremoniously relocated for the umpteenth time and we've had one of the driest Novembers on record- I still get enough fruit to make a good batch of jam.  So yeah.  If you have room for them (a big m2 for each bush), look into gooseberries.  Particularly the 'Invicta' variety; they have proved entirely resistant to the mildew that has wiped every other kind I've tried to introduce in this high-humidity garden.

I know it's getting into winter in the northern hemi, but this stuff's pretty quissmassy- go buy some frozen gooseberries if necessary.  And aren't they draping Spain in polythene specifically so you can buy shit out of season?  Tuh! 

Below are the very weedy and completely neglected bushes from which we will wrest today's materials.  Note the horrible fucking thorns.  I'm wearing gloves, but there will be blood.
If you're in a hurry/already know how to make jam, scroll past the pastoral shiz for the recipe.

Gooseberries are high in both acid and pectin and are thusly the jam queen's friend.  You don't really need to acidulate with lemon juice but I find it supports the tartness of the fresh fruits' flavour, especially if your berries are all at the raw-eating/dessert stage and have lost their green bite.  My fruit are a mix of ripeness.  Some are hard and very green, some are turning golden and easily compressable.  Before you do anything else, wash the jars and lids thoroughly (and the funnel if you have one), in the sink or dishwasher, set your oven to around 100˚C and set them up in there on an ovenproof tray to dry and sterilize.

Keeping it off the heat, stir the mixture until you're sure the sugar's dissolved, otherwise it might stick and burn.  Return to the heat and bring it back to the boil, keeping it stirred and skimming off the white foam that rises to the top now and then.  If you've added currants, the liquor will start to turn pink.  Otherwise, you'll have a nice kiwifruit-green/gold baby jam happening at this point.

E D I T : This has been a really dry year and both my neighbour and myself have found that our gooseberry jam has set like a mofo so if you're using a lot of unripe fruit or it's been hot and arid, add a bit more water or cut back your cooking time if you'd like to avoid a rock-hard set.

Seal jars while still hot, set aside to cool.  Twist the lids on hard to make sure you've got a good seal.  I got three big jars and two small from this amount of fruit.  This jam is delicious in so many contexts; everything from trad toast and muffins to flavouring gravy and sauces and pouring on icecream.  Its pretty colour (pink or green) tends to impress the hell out of the culinarily-declined, so dress up the jars and you've got some presents to pass around.
S T I L L   B O R E D ?   M O R E   K I T C H E N   B I T C H   R E C I P E S   HERE

Alliteration is perhaps the most noble of all literary embellishment and metaphorically speaking, it is the tinsel stuck to Santa's sweaty balls, so let's do this in the spirit of xmas.

Patriarchal pudenda-pounding poltroons pontificate profusely, pointless peregrinations pestilentially prolonged per pedestrian parameters.  Wearisome wenches wither winsomely within whiny fuck it, nobody cares.


You're welcome.