Monthly Archives: August 2014

Aug 24 2014
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Bartlemas, St. Bartholomew's Day, Wayzgoose

Wayzgoose!

Wayzgoose

If Bartlemy’s Day be fair and clear,
hope for a prosperous autumn this year.

So the saying goes. And so today is St. Bartholomew’s Day, St. Bart being one of the lesser known saints, but a very important one, nonetheless, for bookish types, especially those of us who make books: papermakers, printers, bookbinders, book artists in general. For the printers, St. Bart’s Day brings the celebratory Printers’ Wayzgoose, an English tradition, marking the day each late summer when printers typically returned candles and lamps to the shop for type setting. Daylight is waning, after all: it’s been in steady decline since the Midsummer solstice of June 21. We’ve been losing a few minutes of sunlight each day since then, and by now, just a few short weeks from the autumnal equinox, things are much different than they were at summer’s height in June. We are well on our way toward the dark time of the year.

As for the man himself, St. Bartholomew was one of the Twelve Apostles. Not much else is known about him. He may have traveled to India, to the area around Bombay. Tradition says that he met his end in Armenia in the First Century, and it was a gruesome death, in which he was flayed alive and then crucified upside down. The flaying, naturally, has made St. Bart a patron saint of butchers and tanners. The tanners are our first connection to book artists (think of the leather that fine binders use to bind books). As for butchers, well, we all have to eat. Many of my dad’s uncles and great uncles were butchers in Italy and in this country, and chances are they knew a thing or two about St. Bartholomew and his feast day. An old tradition in England was to make a Bartlemas Beef for the day’s meal, in which brisket was seasoned with wine and spices like ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, and mace, then baked and served cold with mustard and sugar. It would take about three days to prepare, though (much like preparing a corned beef from scratch), so… my apologies, it’s much too late to plan on this for your table tonight. There’s always next year, however.

While the bookbinders were honoring St. Bartholomew with their leather bindings, the papermakers traditionally marked St. Bart’s Day in an “out with the old, in with the new” fashion, using up the last of their summer pulp in the vats by making paper not for the print shops but rather for folks to use to seal off their windows for the coming winter. Glass windows came into vogue much later; it was waxed paper that was used to keep out the elements back then. Once this St. Bart’s window paper was made, the papermakers went back to making paper for the printers, clearing out the vats and recharging them with new pulp made from rags that had been retting all summer.

Then there are the printers: They really took the day to heart, making St. Bartholomew’s Day the big printers’ holiday in England. A celebration was typically organized by the proprietor of the shop, marking this day traditionally associated with the shortening of the days and the need for candles and lanterns once more in the shop. The printers might get the day off and would receive a little extra pay, as well, which was typically spent on a goose to roast for the table (hence the name of the day, perhaps: “Wayzgoose”). Good food going hand in hand with good drink, the St. Bart’s Wayzgoose was also a day for plenty of ale and, in some places, mead, the delightful intoxicating beverage made from honey. Especially in Cornwall, where a Blessing of the Mead ceremony takes place even today. Continuing the road of connexions, our friend Bart is also a patron saint of beekeepers, and it was traditional in England to bring in the honey crop on August 24.

The Jerusalem Post, August 27, 2010, reported that Johannes Gutenberg’s 42-Line Bible, the first book printed from moveable type, was completed on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1454. I tried finding other sources to back up this claim, but had no luck. Still, I like the idea of this and if it is indeed true, this may have something to do with the day becoming a matter of such importance to printers and bookbinders. No matter what is fact and what is legend, our view on the day is simple: It’s a day for celebrating the core traditions of the book arts: papermaking, printing, and bookbinding. If you are involved in these noble arts, as we are here at Convivio Bookworks, we hope you’ll mark the day by making something suitably bookish. And if you are not a maker but a book arts enthusiast, your job today is to appreciate a good book. And no matter what your role, certainly, you can celebrate a day with at least a few delightful names: Happy Wayzgoose. Happy Bartlemas.

 

Image: WAYZGOOSE set in historic wood type from our collection. Nearby, the first line gauge I ever bought. I got it at the supply store at the Penland School of Crafts, July 1994. I also met some of my very best friends there and then.

 

 

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Aug 15 2014
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Feast of the Assumption

Assunta, my Cucuzza

AnnaeVincenzo

My grandmother was born in Italy at the turn of the last century on the Feast of the Assumption, is today, the 15th of August. Her parents named her for the day; they named her Assunta. She was a small woman who was suspicious of most forms of speedy transportation, including escalators, and yet brave enough to leave all she knew to sail to this country with my grandfather and their newborn child, my aunt. They didn’t bring much with them, either: as far as I know, all they brought was clothing and as for possessions, Grandpa brought an old ceramic wine jug and Grandma, a silver serving fork and carving knife. When they came here to start anew, they really meant it.

I don’t know if this is traditional for the Feast of the Assumption or if it was just traditional for Assunta’s birthday, but most years, it seems, we celebrated Grandma’s birthday with a dinner made from cucuzza longa, which is a wonderful pale green Italian squash that is ripening this time of year. It’s not terribly common, but it should be: more difficult children would eat their vegetables if cucuzzi longa were among them. They can grow to be two or three feet long; some are straight as baseball bats while others grow into delightfully twisty shapes, like serpents. Grandma (and now my mom) would cut them into long strips and cook them on the stove with a scramble of eggs and parmesan and lots of Italian parsley, the flat leaf kind. Seasoned with fresh olive oil and salt and pepper and served alongside a crusty loaf, you’ve got a meal fit for a king. Or at least a king with peasant roots. This is the food I grew up with: hearty peasant fare that my more American friends never understood, and that is, very likely, not even familiar to kids in the south of Italy these days.

As for the Feast of the Assumption, it is a holy day of obligation in the Catholic Church. It marks the day of Mary’s ascent, body and soul, into Heaven. The idea behind the day is that if Mary could do it, perhaps so can we. Mary is like us, a mortal born of this earth; she is our link between Earth and Heaven. In Italy, the day marks the beginning of Ferragosto. Most Italians close up shop and head to the seaside for the Ferragosto holiday, a practice dating back to ancient Rome. The name, in fact, is derived from the Latin Feriae Augusti (Holidays of the Emperor Augustus).

And as for the cucuzza longa, if you can’t find it, zucchini will do nicely. You can still use “cucuzza” as a term of endearment, as many Italians do. But if you’re at the farmer’s market this week and see this bizarre vegetable, why not muster up that enterprising spirit and buy one or two? Assunta would be very impressed with your bravery, and will certainly smile upon your culinary efforts. What can possibly go wrong?

 

Image: Anna & Vincenzo, my great grandparents, who named their daughter Assunta.

 

 

Aug 13 2014
11 Comments
Obon

Sail Across the Water

Obon

I don’t think of myself as particularly sentimental, but I do get a bit wistful about Obon, the annual Japanese festival of the dead. Any celebration that honors those who have come and gone before us finds a place in my heart. If you’ve been reading the Convivio Book of Days for a while, hopefully it is apparent by now that I am not coming from a sappy, “happy happy” viewpoint of seasonal celebration. We’ll leave that to the greeting card companies. My viewpoint is that the best seasonal celebrations are homegrown, rooted in tradition, available in the everyday… and that there is very often a dark presence involved. I read a lot of books, and someone, somewhere, in one of those books, spoke of a seat for death at all of our celebrations. By acknowledging that our time on this earth is brief, celebration and ceremony take on deeper significance. The dark guest is always with us, so why not invite him in and celebrate something that is common to us all?

This is at the heart of Obon. So how does an Italian American boy in Florida get wrapped up in and wistful about a Japanese festival of the dead? It is geography that is key: All of my Obon experiences have been at the Morikami, an inspiring local museum of Japanese culture. The Morikami is built near the site of the Yamato Colony, an early 20th century Japanese farming community in what is now Boca Raton. The Yamato farmers grew pineapples, but many misfortunes fell upon the colony, and finally, with the Second World War, the land was taken by the US Government and turned into the Boca Raton Army Air Field. George Morikami was, I believe, the only member of the colony to stay. Toward the end of the war, he purchased land west of Delray Beach, just north of the old Yamato colony, and I have older friends who remember Mr. Morikami farming his fields well into the 1970s.

George did well for himself, and before he died, he donated his farmland to the county. It is this land that is home to the Morikami, and it is the Morikami that is home to my memories of Obon. My first Obon was, I think, with my two nephews when they were little boys, and now they both have children of their own… so that first Obon was probably in the late 1980s. And I know I sometimes toss this word magic around quite a lot, but magic indeed is the great potential that comes out of our celebrations: it is the everyday alchemy that transforms the everyday into ceremony. There was no lack of magic at that first Obon.

In Japan, Obon is a summertime festival that goes on for three days, and as it began as a lunar festival, the dates of the celebration vary across the country depending on what calendar system each municipality adheres to in its Obon celebration. Some prefectures celebrate in July, while others celebrate in August. At the Morikami, it was always mid-August, around the 15th… and so for me, Obon is rooted in August. The Morikami also condensed the celebration into one afternoon and evening, rather than the three days it receives in Japan. Since this is Florida and since it was August, the threat of afternoon thunderstorms was always a part of Obon for me, too, lending a bit of excitement to the ceremony, especially since Obon is an outdoor festival. At the Morikami, as in Japan, the community gathers at an open clearing in the village. There is always a street fair (ennichi) and, at the center of the celebration, the yagura, an elevated platform on which taiko drummers and flutists perform. Lanterns are strung from the yagura and traditional folk dances (bon odori) are performed in circular patterns around it. The dances are communal and have names like “Coal Miners’ Dance.”

As with most ceremonies, the magic gains strength and intensity as night falls. It is the light from within that becomes most important, our own and that of the lanterns. And with nightfall at the Morikami, and with nightfall on the last night of the festival in Japan, thousands of lanterns are illuminated and set afloat upon the water. This is called Toro Nagashi. Each lantern carries the soul of an ancestor, or of many. It is a breathtaking sight as the lanterns sail across the water, off to the distant shore, to the land of the ancestors, back to their homes across the water until they return again next year.

 

Image: Lanterns sailing across the water on Morikami Pond. Part of my wistfulness of Obon is that it is no longer celebrated at the Morikami. The celebration has been moved to October and renamed “Lantern Festival”. Certainly in the years since my first Obon, its popularity grew to the point that the crowds were difficult to manage and staff and volunteers were often short tempered and unpleasant. I made the suggestion numerous times that it should be a three-day celebration, as it is in Japan, to spread out those crowds, but my suggestions fell on deaf ears. And now, Lantern Festival? Well. I wonder if the ancestors were consulted.

 

 

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