I met David in San Francisco in the late 1970s, when we were both campaigning against the Briggs Initiative. He was like a brother to me in many senses of the word: protectorate, champion, critic, entertainer, court clown. I was young and careless, so when I left California in 1979, David and I fell out of touch, and I was unaware of his death until decades later.

I wrote about our friendship in an essay, “David, Just as He Was,” which was published in the Summer 2007 issue of White Crane, a small, elegant literary journal. In this essay I tried to capture our friendship, but I also pushed beyond this to describe the Castro in the 1970s — a sui generis, painfully brief Atlantis that rocked gently between the closeted past and the fearful future.

(When filming began for Milk, friends who knew of my writing excitedly wrote me to tell me how the Castro had been remade to resemble this era — I wish I could have seen that.)

If I could have just one visit with any of the world’s departed, I would ask for one more afternoon at the Cafe Flore with David, sipping coffee as we argued about life. That won’t happen, but what I could do tonight is donate to the institute that publishes White Crane, a journal that has played a crucial role in recording the lost worlds, and like most literary journals survives largely on love and determination.

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New Leaf now has wine tastings on Friday night. The first time we went to a wine tasting at New Leaf, some months back, it was supermarket wine. Very sad. There was a long pause, they renovated, and a week ago some burly guy with tattoos was chatting me up about Cote du Rhone. I thought, this place is arriving.

When we asked where the pates were, the same burly guy paused. “We’re looking for pates that are good to eat,” he said very carefully. “Organic, good sources…”

I know exactly what he means. I even had to stop myself (I told myself it was the Cote du Rhone talking) from volunteering to make a pate for Burly Guy this weekend that would represent what he was looking for. (I have this hunch Burly Guy is pretty high-placed in New Leaf.) I knew it would take a little more time than this to line up the right sources, and I’m off to Norcross this Sunday. But even as he was talking, my brain was running over the ingredients — a little humanely-grown pork, some juniper seeds, some regional chicken, and could we find a rabbit..?

If you think “pate” means a dish made from grossly engorged bird livers, you need some edumakayshun. (I have an essay in the crucible about my first and last experience with foie gras — a phrase that literally means “fatty liver,” which for humans is a chronic disease.) “Pate” is not a synonym for a meat spread made from animal liver. It’s a dish that relies on bits and pieces of flavorful meat, lots of fat, spices, attention, and patience. Pate is both rustic — found in burgs worldwide — and chic, the epitome of gastronome noshery.

If you’re exploring meat that is local/sustainable/humane/seasonal, pate to me seems to be a natural objective — a way to preserve great meat so you can experience it at least a little beyond its season. The two cookbooks that come to mind are Fancy Pantry and my venerable 1961 New York Times Cookbook.

I have a lot of work to do between now and mid-December, but after that, I’m hoping to have at least two or three cooking sessions that produce my efforts at Righteous Pate: a delectable comestible based on animals who had mostly pretty good days except for their last ones — a dish that represents food production and consumption patterns that are sustainable, respectful of our planet, and forward our planet’s global interests.

If you can recommend sources for Righteous Pate, I’m all about it — not just the meat, but the spices, fats, and even the cooking materials.

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There are many things to be grateful for this Thanksgiving, but high on my list is no longer having to pretend to be Canadian when I travel overseas.

Happy day, one and all!

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Maybe my parents were bored by the soon-quaint recipes for Pot au Feu and Chicken Kiev, or perhaps they were put off by the indulgently carb- and fat-heavy recipes for souffles and pasta. No matter, I love this cookbook, which has followed me overseas (three times) and back again, and has now lived in six states.  I run my hands over its wrinkled, stained pages and see the spaghetti dinners of my teens, the quiches of my twenties, the mousses of my thirties, the baked squash of my forties, the bouillabaise of my fifties, and all through these decades, off and on, when time and resources allowed it, this wonderful fruitcake.

For Fiona, who took time from her work day in Sydney to share a real pub lunch with me and her friends, I say since you’re allergic to nuts, leave them out. The nuts add a nice meaty crunch, but the real trick of this cake, like any good fruitcake, is the complex melding of moist dried fruit bound together with the thinnest neural network of batter and the sparking synapses of frequent and regular applications of hard liquor. (For those of you who don’t drink, I have a date cake and a cranberry cake that will make your socks roll up and down, but this particular cake really won’t be the same without the hard stuff.)

Naturally I have adapted it — isn’t that the point? Start this cake at least a month before you plan to serve it — the week before Thanksgiving is perfect.

Fruitcake

For the fruit and nuts:

4 pounds total dried fruit: up to 8 oz dried citrus (lemon, orange, and/or citron — preferably not purchased in a mix, as that seems to have a soapy taste) plus golden raisins, muscat raisins, currants, dried mango, candied pineapple, and if you can’t resist them in their dyed glory, candied cherries (hell, it is Christmas, right?). Prunes and other dried fruit are also wonderful.

8 oz nuts — shredded almonds, chopped walnuts or pecans, or just about anything except peanuts (or substitute another 1/2 lb fruit)

For the batter:

2 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon mace

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 cup butter

1 cup white sugar

1 cup brown sugar, packed

5 eggs

Plus: dark rum, cognac, bourbon, brandy, or sherry

——-

A day in advance:

Mix the fruits, cutting into large dice as necessary (think end of your thumb), and toss with 1/2 cup liquor (pick something you like, as you’ll be using it during the seasoning process, too). Cover and let stand at least overnight.

Toss in the nuts, if you’re using them, and then toss the mixture with 1/2 cup flour.

Cream the sugar butter, beat in the sugars, and then the eggs, one at a time. Sift or whisk the remaining 1 and 1/2 cups flour with the dry ingredients and then stir into the egg-butter-sugar mixture until blended.

Preheat the oven to 275 degrees and spray 2 9×5 loaf pans with cooking spray. (You can also bake the batter in other containers, such as smaller loaf pans, but watch accordingly.)

Pour the batter over the fruit mixture and mix thoroughly. Fill the pans and press the batter into the pans very firmly and evenly (spray your hands with cooking spray to make this easy).

Bake loaves about three hours (less if your loaves are smaller). Let cakes stand thirty minutes, then turn out on a rack and cool.

Sprinkle cakes with liquor and then wrap in a thin layer of cheesecloth. Sprinkle the cakes with a little more liquor. Place in a crock or deep kettle and cover tightly. Several times a week dribble more liquor over the cloth — if it’s a tiny bit damp, that’s what you want. The cakes should become aromatic.

To serve, chill the cakes for an hour or two if possible — they will slice better that way — and slice thinly with a long serrated knife.

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Feel-Good Librarian is back with a powerful post about the role of libraries in this economic crisis that should be printed out and slapped on the desks of every state and federal legislator. Get better, Feel-Good.  I’d be hugely flattered to be confused with the likes of your kind of anonymous blogger.

Catching a movie over the holiday weekend? I’ve scratched Cinemark off my list of theaters I’ll attend now that I know that the Cinemark CEO, Alan Stock, contributed close to ten thousand dollars to help pass Prop 8. See the Prop 8 database from SFGate.com, the web portal for the SF Chronicle, to find out who else has been naughty and nice — though tying them to their corporate presence may require a little legwork.

There has been much, much hue and cry about OCLC’s new policy – or really, their clarification about their existing policy, more or less. John Mark Ockerbloom has an elegant series of posts that are worth reading if you’re confused by the issue. He’s partisan, but that doesn’t make his explanation less clear.  For OCLC’s take, listen to this excellent Panlibrus podcast with Karen Calhoun and Roy Tennant.

Hey, ho, SCO’s gotta go! Don’t let the door hit you in the butt!

I listened to the OLE webcast today and was pleased to hear all the comments from Evergreen advocates asking about working with an existing ILS project than diffusing time and talent into another. I heard the word “workflow” used a hundred times in this webcast. But I have been there, done that, got the teeshirt, and I can tell you academic libraries are just not that different, folks. Let’s work together.

Google is laying off lots of folks? Really?  One report estimates up to ten thousand.  That seems extreme, but let’s see how the news pans out.

I know it’s a commercial, but In the Doghouse made me laugh out loud.

On the other hand, this small extension cord–”social hardware,” I called it in this earlier post– is a great Secret Santa gift/stocking-stuffer for your geek or uber-traveler of any gender, and won’t put you in the doghouse with this demographic. I was so happy to have this on my trip to Australia; with one US->AUS adapter, I could charge up EVERYthing. (I see an Amazon review fuming that it doesn’t work with 240V–that wasn’t my experience.) I forgot it yesterday when I went to Panera’s to write, and oh, there was much jockeying around the plug near my table.

Happy Thanksgiving! We are still on track to have oyster stew and pumpkin creme brulee. The idea of cooking a turkey this year reminds me of Joy of Cooking’s definition of eternity as “a ham and two people.” I’ll do a turkey when we have a crowd again — but I may be put off for good by these turkeys featured in this video about our governor from Alaska.

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I get asked how I like being a Community Librarian for Equinox. Actually, the first question I get asked is, “So what is a Community Librarian?” … as if it were listed in the Occupational Outlook Handbook, and not some title I invented because I was avoiding the squinchy-feeling “open source evangelist” title, which would be just a little less uncomfortable than calling myself a Maverick or something like that.

This is a job in the process of invention, and it changes as need be. I do some inward-focused work related to Evergreen timelines, and I’m honchoing a documentation project, but most of my work is outward-faced. The first several months the focus was on catch-up in a few areas related to communications, getting some projecty stuff launched, and outreach to the original PINES libraries — to the point where someone asked me recently if I were “allowed” to visit libraries outside Georgia (since I was in Australia when this question was asked, the answer was a safe “yes”).

Now PINES has a project manager on board, and I can start to reinterpret my job in light of the broader Evergreen community. Yes, I speak, but I think my real outward-facing work (and the truest connection to open source “evangelism” or whatever you call it) is in the one-on-ones (face-to-face, virtual, whatever) and group visits, and even my writing on two blogs as well as the lists, where I’m teasing out community interests and hopes and concerns.

It’s much different than the traditional vendor relationship. This is the moment where some folk out there (not in the Evergreen community, to my knowledge) begin criticizing librarians for being unable to communicate with open source developers, but in my book, it’s a two-way street (if not a complex daisy-chain overpass). Everyone is in the process of learning how to do this, and it’s not simple but it’s very important.

Do I like it? Yes, indeed, and this isn’t just official flak. It’s a fun, dynamic job and I’m always feeling like there is far more to do than I can accomplish, which is how I like things. The Equinox folk are good people, and it’s a fascinating time to be part of all this.

If there is anything awkward, it isn’t related to my job, but my life. It’s that we’re in limbo here, so I am teleworking part of the time and sitting in a motel in Georgia at least one week per month, when I’m not on the road.

There’s nothing wrong with that, except that since I know we’re not here forever, I have this vaguely disconnected sense. I see something in a store, and I think, “But we’d have to move it.” (Note: this is not a bad reaction to acquiring Stuff.)

Places… I’m between them. Perhaps I’m post-geography. I don’t know Atlanta very well, and my only local connection in Tallahassee is with my writing friends. I don’t physically work in the Atlanta office enough hours to even hang a picture over my desk, and yet my home office feels a bit discordant too, since I’m in and out of it quite a bit. My personal writing has gotten off track, though I have the temporary excuse that I’m judging essays for a writing contest, which in addition to our monthly workshop review is more than enough to deal with. The only habit I have kept up is exercising, which I do 5-7 days per week.

Oddly enough, several days in Melbourne only sharpened my dysphoria. Melbourne is a lovely city about as old as San Francisco, with similar Gold Rush origins. It’s the first city I’ve been in for a long time that felt truly sui generis.

Some old cities feel like a set piece, some have had their souls rebuilt into chilly commercial canyons, but Melbourne has kept a lot of character (not without proactive help from its citizens). From the Vic Market (click on photo for a set of my food tour) to the funky little cafes in alleys (see this larger set), Melbourne resists being bottled. Sydney is beautiful and tidier, but Melbourne has broader shoulders and a way of tossing its hair that says, “I’ve been through a lot.”

Then again, life is transient. That may be part of it. Sandy and I have spent a fair amount of time of late reminiscing about life in other places — the churches she’s worked, the jobs I’ve had, the people we’ve shared times with, the places we’ve lived. Last night we couldn’t remember the details of our first Thanksgiving together.  (We spent our first Easter at Fudrucker’s, which is another story.)  Obviously nothing traumatic or amazing happened, or we’d have those details down pat.

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1. Start a professional conversation among concerned colleagues.

2. Publish articles in formal and informal forums.

3. Publish an entire issue of a peer-reviewed journal — the Journal of Access Services — where the sole contributor is the Annoyed Librarian.

The third answer is the correct one, however bizarre it sounds. But it gets better than that, because even though this stunt had plenty of coverage, it turns out that the journal’s editors weren’t in on the joke.

I am not going to dwell ad infinitum on the Annoyed Librarian. As others have observed, he or she (I’m not convinced AL is female) is obviously a well-placed librarian with a lot of pull — enough to bedazzle magazine owners, especially in financially desperate times. She or he has the gift of the gab, and good connections. Plus AL dwells in the dark side, a place that tempts with the glitter of obsidian.

The best we can all do in life is shed the things that give us grief and focus on our own excellence and the excellence of those around us. I have a lot of things on my mind: how to get everything done at work, the full set of memories I haven’t processed from Australia,  the economy, my writing workshop,  Obama’s administration picks, my Thanksgiving menu (which is trending toward oyster stew and pumpkin creme brulee, accompanied by a lovely bottle of wine Doug from CCLA gave me as a going-away gift). I will keep on track, even if the Library Bill of Rights itself gets replaced with the giggling screeds of AL.

I have even pushed away the knowledge that there is a library professor (should I tell you who it is? w)ho has told crowds of people that I am AL. The AL truly is a devil with an MLS.

The one thing that haunts me about Annoyed Librarian is my worry that when we find out who it is, the knowledge will cut like a knife.

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(Do astronauts get jet lag?)

No srsly, not to be missed!

The big thing I want to share is that this Friday, November 21,  there will be yet another one-hour online ALA Connections Salon. This one is hot as a pistol: it’s “Political Connections,” featuring the charming and well-spoken Emily Sheketoff, associate executive director of ALA’s Washington Office, and Vic Klatt, ALA’s political consultant and former staff director of the House Education and Labor Committee.

It’s online, 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. EST Friday, Nov. 21, 2008. Come one, come all!

From the blurb:

“Online Programming for All Libraries (OPAL) Coordinator Tom Peters will begin the hour with an interview with Sheketoff and Klatt. Both professionals will talk about President-Elect Obama’s Administration, the new Congress and what these changes in Washington portend for libraries during a period—a year, a term and beyond—marked by extraordinary challenges.

“Following the interview, participants will be free to ask questions and engage with Sheketoff, Klatt and with one another to discuss the promise and perils of a moment when, as President-Elect Obama said in his victory speech, “there’s so much more to do.”

If you’re a first-time user of OPAL, here’s a webpage containing basic information and tips.

But for now, I’m up very early tomorrow for a meeting in Warner Robins (4 hours north), so I’m taking it very easy and old-ladyish tonight, doing a little work blogging and uploading hundreds of photos to both my personal and work accounts while soup simmers on the stove.

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This has been a remarkable time to be abroad. When I lived overseas in the military — in the 1980s, in England, Germany, and Korea — I became accustomed to a global perspective that you find in many countries. We need that perspective in our own country — that sense of being part of something larger than “We’re Number One.”

It’s not that each country shouldn’t have pride; when someone in Queensland suggested the United States should brag less about its accomplishments, I replied that few countries adopt as their motto, “We’re Not the Best.” But for close to a decade our presence in the world has been increasingly defined by a bellicose, over-entitled persona that should make us all wince.

We have been seen as a violent, aggressive, boorish country using more than its fair share of resources and chronically unwilling to play well with others, and based on global events, it is hard to argue otherwise. Even if many of us individually are good people — and my experience living worldwide is that most people on this planet wish one another well, have a good sense of humor about life’s inconveniences, and loathe airplane food — our performance in the ad hoc global legislature has been problematic at best, and deeply damaging at worst.

After the elections, a friend forwarded the satirical article from the Onion (I point out that it *is* satirical on behalf of my international friends) about a black man being given the worst job in the United States — a cleaning job, at that. I think everyone understands the work ahead for all of us.  As I shared with more than one cab driver worried about the job Obama confronts (and every cab driver had an opinion), it’s like weight gain: it takes a while to pack on all those pounds, and it takes even longer to shed them.  

More later after a long pond-hop.

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I’m very psyched. My  own contribution to this volume was in the lighter zone, as this review demonstrates. I do have deep, serious, reflective pieces… some written and some not… but this was a humorous essay about the positive aspects of military service, and they are legion.

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