The dough in the mixing bowl smells weirdly like Subway, lol

For all the #Bread #Baking that I do, I've never made a milk bread!

So I'm making the shokupan recipe from Clarice Lam's "Bao" cookbook. She uses it in many other recipes throughout the book, so I am doing s double batch and doing her cinnamon-raisin babka as well.

#ClariceLam

@swart

ah, hadn't thought of that. i usually toast my sunflower seeds/sesame seeds/pumpkin seeds, too, if I'm adding (unless they're pre-roasted). definitely makes a difference. thanks!.

@swart

Looks good!

Why don't you soak your sunflower seeds at all? I include them in a grain/seed mix sometimes and usually just soak the whole mix. Wondering if there's a reason.

Or there's "The Lesson for Today," one of the collection's longer poems, and one I found most interesting.

It opens with the poet-narrator seeking to determine how "dark" our age really is, by entering into a dialogue with an imaginary poet of "the world's undebatably dark ages."

The dialogue (which is really a monologue!) winds its way through much terrain - and finds in the present much in common with the past - but ultimately spends a good amount of time questioning whether can really assess one's own time at all.

The concept sounds a little stodgy but unfolds quite easily, with more than a few lines that make you stop and go, "Huh."

All of which is to say: I'm enjoying the Frost so far, even if it feels a little creaky at times, especially in its occasional stabs at subjects of American history. (I'll report on those later.)

But, because he's challenging or at least complicating what might be taken for common sense, the didactic quality is often either ambiguous, or leads in unexpected directions.

So an early poem, "Carpe Diem," questions poetry's insistence on seizing the day, along with the possibility of the act.

"But bid life seize the present?
It lives less in the present
Than in the future always,
And less in both together
Than in the past. The present
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowding, too confusing--
Too present to imagine."

From my reading thus far, Frost's formula seems to be:

Step 1) Take a common assumption/saying/POV

Step 2) Consider the possibility that it is not true

Step 3) Make sure your rhymes are rigorous, and that your meter's not far behind

The result are poems that can sometimes feel a bit Seussian, and frequently didactic or even a little moralistic.

But! There's a but...

My knowledge of Frost is minimal, and I've always sort of written him off for some reason? Or that might be too strong a phrase. I've just never been that interested.

But a few poems have crossed my path recently that made me think of him again, and I had recently received his collected poems. So here we are.

It's been an interesting ride thus far!

Where my imaginary line
Bends square in woods, an iron spine
And pile of real rocks have been founded.
And off this corner in the wild,
Where these are driven in and piled,
One tree, by being deeply wounded,
Has been impressed as Witness Tree
And made commit to memory
My proof of being not unbounded.
Thus truth's established and borne out,
Though circumstanced with dark and doubt --
Though by a world of doubt surrounded.
THE MOODIE FORESTER

-- "Beech" by Robert Frost

----

I've been reading Robert Frost's *A Witness Tree*, the first full volume I've read of his (although as a volume, it's really quite slim).

Thought I'd share a few reading notes here.

#ReadingNotes #RobertFrost #Poetry #Bookstodon

@carrideen this sounds fascinating -- thanks for sharing!

Last night, we went to see Agnieszka Holland's new movie Franz, about Kafka, and it was one of the most surprising and sticky things I have seen this year. Throughout it, I kept thinking, this can't work, this can't be serious, but that's what reading Kafka feels like too. You can't do these things! But in watching our own reactions to aesthetic violation, we go, oh, I am being the police. What if I stop being the police and just laugh? or cry? or feel nauseated?
https://worldliteraturetoday.org/2026/january/agnieszka-hollands-complicated-kafka-grzegorz-kwiatkowski

Have mostly let Kanye go (for obv reasons) but Slow Jamz has been in my head for like three days straight.

Might have to give in and play it to see if I can shake it loose.

(Let's be real, the beat + chorus is the real draw anyway)

"Two or three hours every few nights were hardly enough. I began finding ways to outwit the system during my day job. Books were too conspicuous, so I printed out magazine articles, essays, and book chapters in what was surely unauthorized use of military computers. I shuffled these printouts in with my translation tasks, all practicing, in Gulag slang, tufta — "the art of pretending to work." As long as the papers were in English, the officers didn't notice. Once I'd finished, off to the shredder they went."

Really enjoyed this essay from Sheon Han, "Reading Lolita in the Barracks," about his attempt to turn his mandatory military service into a reading retreat.

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/12-books/reading-lolita-in-the-barracks

#Bookstodon #WhyRead #ReadingNotes

@kbsez Nice. Thanks, and enjoy!

@kbsez that looks delicious! Is that from a book or online?

Thinking about acts from the 90s/00s in R&B/soul/hip hop that should have had a live album, but didn't.

Near the top might be #Jodeci --- their Apollo special was LEGIT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCAG31T1Ebw

I get wanting to keep the narrative brisk, but there's room here for all of this. It wouldn't be superfluous, nor would it swell the work to an unmanageable length. It would only make it better.

Anyhow, happy to continue reading -- learning a ton! -- just wish context was better developed, and deeper historical connections were being made, in some obvious places.

Beef 2) Roberts doesn't do much to contextualize these figures' work against the broader backdrop of 17th/18th c. colonialism.

He's highlighting some of Linnaeus's contributions to the construction of race, but so far hasn't done much to connect, say, the gathering of plants and animals from around the world to empire and colonial interests.

Again, not just an oversight but a genuine opportunity! He makes clear that so much of Linnaeus's philosophical concern was with the proper naming of things, which was a task to be done by the right people in the right language with the right education, and explicitly *never* by indigenous peoples.

Yet even though naming is itself so central to colonial projects, Roberts doesn't explore this connection.

He even uses the phrase "uncharted lands" at one point, to refer to Linnaeus's students heading out into world to collect specimens.

Two beefs so far with the book:

Beef #1: Where are the women? Seriously, they are almost entirely non-existent, even after its two main subjects, Linnaeus and Buffon, are married (respectively).

To whom? I couldn't really say, because neither courtship/marriage gets much attention. Buffon's wife gets slightly more attention/description upon their marriage.

Similarly, I'd love more attention paid to those in each figure's orbit. A few of Linnaeus's student assistants get attention, but so many are given the cameo treatment.

I'll be interested to see if this is tackled at all before the book's end, but it seems not just an oversight but an opportunity. It's 2025! We know now (presumably) that behind so many of these geniuses of eras past were spouses and children and servants, not to mention enslaved persons, that made their work possible, and often contributed even more directly.

How informative and useful would it be to incorporate those around these figures into their narratives more fully.