Something Shiny!

Forgive the lousy picture, but I simply had to share my thoughts on this lovely pear apple cake. I’ve made it a couple times and it’s simply divine. The pears are sliced and fanned out across the top of the cake (technically in the bottom of the pan, before it bakes) and the apples comprise part of the cake portion. After it’s baked, it gets a gloss of caramel sauce:

And although I’m not a fan of caramel, I have to say that the sauce is really nice. Recipe here.

Does it strike anyone else as strange that Haiti isn’t really in the news lately? A massive natural disaster strikes the area, killing hundreds of thousands of people, leaving countless numbers homeless and in desperate need of assistance. And it captures our attention for, what, a week? Two weeks, tops? And now it seems as if we’ve dusted our hands off, said, “well, that’s that,” and turned our attention elsewhere. To the special Massachusetts election, the State of the Union, the Oscar nods, and even the premiere of Lost. The front page of the Washington Post has only one link to a Haiti article, and even it takes an inward look, discussing the Americans accused of abducting Haitian children. The New York Times has a story about food distribution in Haiti, but it’s near the bottom of the page, tellingly under ‘more news’. At top center is a photo of a guy who has had his dog ‘debarked.’ Are our attention spans really so easily diverted? Three weeks after the earthquake, are we really ready to move on? Is it that it’s too onerous to stay focused on one thing for more than a couple weeks? Or is the subject matter somehow too disturbing? I’d love to know how it came to be that our national attention span is so short.

A couple weeks ago, we took up the subject of legalized segregation in the nineteenth-century South. We talked about Jim Crow and how that played out at the time, as well as how the mindset of racism permeated society then and now. We discussed lynching and how it wasn’t just about killing or death, but how it was a public spectacle and how (white) people would come from miles around to watch. I brought in a copy of “White Women, Black Men,” by Martha Hodes, and read part of her epilogue. In it, she talks about how she went about researching nineteenth-century marriages between white women and black men. She recalls a conversation she had with a fellow researcher, a white woman, in which the scholar told Hodes she’d never find anything on the topic. Hodes says, “When I told her that I already had, she admonished me to ‘make sure you say they’re trash’ about the white women involved, thereby helping to prove the legacy of part of my argument.” It’s a powerful and disturbing message that those ideas linger still today. After I’d read that quote aloud in my last class, one of my students, a young white woman raised her hand. For a split second I wondered what she’d say, how she would react to what Hodes had to say, or what about that disturbing idea had moved her to raise her hand. She took a deep breath and began to talk: “Like, when I, like, hear things like that? It, like, I dunno… it makes me, like… sad.” And to emphasize how much racism makes her sad, she… she stuck her lower lip out.

It was one of those, like, profound moments. And stuff.