Seven Days in April
21st - 27th April - featuring Gamaliel Bradford, salad, a bath In Japan, lunch on Mount Athos, books, a haiku and other miscellanea.
Gamaliel Bradford
I feel a kinship with Gamaliel Bradford1. Not only do we share a birthdate (separated by 100 years - 9th October 1863) but we also experience a similar horror when faced with an empty substack page.
Salad
I took out a subscription to
’s substack as her salads look lovely and I need to improve my diet. My appreciation for salad began during my first visit to Barcelona at the start of the 1980s, and since then I have been an ardent fan. In the Plaça Reial the salads were big and hearty, flavoursome tomatoes, crisp lettuce, black olives and no-nonsense slices of white onion, very simple, very tasty and utterly unlike any of the sad, droopy stuff on offer in England at that time.Words
I learnt a new word: adamantine
By 1959, Jack Kerouac was living steadily with his mother, except for the occasional, brief trip, but this did not diminish Gabrielle's resentment, the source of which, apparently, was her inability to accept writing as a respectable, manly profession. In a diary entry of October 1961, Kerouac complains bitterly about her attempt to undermine his confidence, though he maintains his adamantine resolve to continue to write.
from Beatific Souls by Isaac Gewirtz
From my reading
On taking a bath in Japan
At 6 p.m. I am called for the first dip in the bath which is, in these parts, an iron cauldron set in concrete, large enough to sit in comfortably up to the neck, squatting on a protective wooden board tethered (not always) to the bottom.
A maid comes and calls from outside ‘how is it Leachsan?? If I answer, ‘rather hot’ she pumps and a flow of cold water rushes through a bamboo pipe until I cry ‘stop’.
If it is not hot enough, I soon hear the crackle of more wood underneath my stewpot. Of course one washes before getting in, sitting on an upturned tub and splashing ad lib. One washes more thoroughly after the first dip and then sits and simmers and all the worries and strains of the day float away with the steam.
from A Potter in Japan (1952 - 1954) by Bernard Leach
On meeting people once only
I liked to meet people whom I would never meet again. I found no one boring whom I could expect to see but once in my life.
from The Summing Up by W. Somerset Maugham
On lunch at a monastery on Mount Athos
The coffin-shaped dining-room looked on to a wooded hillside. I sat down, the single guest, to a cabbage salad, stockfish2, macaroni, salted herrings, slabs of white cheese, brown bread, fried potatoes, and a decanter of wine, any one of the dishes enough for a man.
The guestmaster fingered single hairs in his black beard and offered suggestions in what order to take items. The traveller may occasionally strike a plate of cold, clammy beans as the guestmaster’s sole offering, and when this happens in two or three successive monasteries, as it may during a fast, he usually flees the Mountain and touches on his sufferings in his resulting books and lectures; but most meals are of this substantial kind, and occasionally impressive ones have been put on in my honour.
The good bread and invariable presence of wine usually unite a haphazard assortment of edibles into a meal for a hungry man. The custom of spreading the entire offering on the table at the same time gives the sense of dining off hors d’euvres.
from Athos : The Holy Mountain by Sydney Loch (1957)
Music
Salad
Looking through the archive of
I suddenly remembered the band Salad from the 1990s and the track Taste the Elixir which took me right back to 1995, Britpop and all that. To my ears the track still sounds fresh and very good for you.Cape Town Flowers
Also last week I dug the 1997 LP Cape Town Flowers by South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim. It’s an enchanting album, a trio setting featuring 11 original compositions. Each of the pieces is understated, lovely, and somewhat dreamlike.
Books - finished
Typhoon by Joseph Conrad, furiously dirty weather, a frantic crew, a human cargo. Superb from Conrad.
The King Must Die by Mary Renault, a re-telling of the Greek legend of Theseus, who slew the Minotaur of Crete, escaped the Labyrinth by Ariadne’s thread, abducted and abandoned the unhappy girl, and caused his father’s suicide by a mistake in signals.
Books - reading
The Greek Revolution by Mark Mazower
The Republic by Plato
The Alley Cat by Yves Beauchemin
The books by Renault, Mazower and Plato are all part of my background reading for a grand trip to the Peloponnese in October!
Haiku
Flowers of wild cherry trees!
Very fine to look at,
no less time to see them scatter
Seikuh Andoh
Maps in Books
On my other substack, Maps in Books, I posted two pieces.
The purpose of Maps in Books is to highlight obscure, forgotten books and the beautiful maps therein.
The entry is from The journal of Gamaliel Bradford, 1883 - 1932
The internet tells me that: “Stockfish, a dried fish product, is produced from cod without the addition of salt. It can also be made from other white fish species, such as pollock or haddock.”
“Oh how fond they are of the book of Esther, which is so beautifully attuned to their bloodthirsty, vengeful, murderous yearning and hope.” — Martin Luther
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Zelensky, Biden, Satanism, War, Greed, Theft, Propaganda, Domestic Spying, International Intrigue, Treason, Sedition, FTX, Ukraine, Israel . . . https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/zelensky-biden-satanism-war-greed
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Ukraine’s Azov Regiment Visits Israel: ‘Mariupol is our Masada’ . . . https://nationalvanguard.org/2022/12/ukraines-azov-regiment-visits-israel-mariupol-is-our-masada/
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Documents leaked from Soros’ “Open Society Foundation” show how the Jewish billionaire behind Hillary Clinton gave orders to the State Department and manipulated media coverage of events in Ukraine . . . https://nationalvanguard.org/2016/09/documents-show-soros-ran-us-foreign-policy-on-post-coup-ukraine/
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How Christine Lagarde, Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland Funded a Massive Ukrainian Ponzi Scheme . . . https://russia-insider.com/en/how-christine-lagarde-clinton-and-nuland-funded-massive-ukrainian-ponzi-scheme/ri27390
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Jewish Corruption in Ukraine . . . by Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.
❝. . . the present conflict is a huge distraction from the fact that, for decades, the biggest threat to Ukraine hasn’t been Russia, but financiers and speculators operating with impunity within Ukraine’s borders to exploit ethnic Ukrainians and plunder their resources.❞ . . .
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2023/02/17/jewish-corruption-in-ukraine/