The admirable and most famous Snail Water.

Photo by Skippy3E of sxc.hu 

I have been doing a bit of research and feel like sharing this delightful seventeenth-century recipe with you...

The admirable and most famous Snail Water.

Take a peck of garden shell snails, wash them well in small beer, and put them in a hot Oven till they have done making a noise, then take them out, and wipe them well from the green froth that is upon them, and bruise them shells and all in a stone Mortar, then take a quart of earth worms, scower them with salt, slit them & wash them well with water from their filth, and in a stone Mortar beat them to pieces, then lay in the bottom of your distilled pot Angelica two handfuls, and two handfuls of Celandine upon them, to which put two quarts of Rosemary flowers, Bears foot, Agrimony, red Dock Roots, Bark of Barberries, Betony, Wood sorrel, of each two handfuls, Rue one handful; then lay the Snails and worms on the top of the Herbs and Flowers, then pour on three Gallons of the strongest Ale, and let it stand all night, in the morning put in three ounces of Cloves beaten, six penniworth of beaten Saffron and on the top of them six ounces of shaved Harts-horn, then set on the Limbeck, and close it with paste, and so receive the water by pints, which will be nine in all, the first is the strongest, whereof take in the morning two spoonfuls in four spoonfuls of small Beer, and the like in the afternoon; you must keep a good Diet and use moderate exercise to warm the blood.

This Water is good against all Obstructions whatsoever. It cureth a Consumption and Dropsie, the stopping of the Stomach and Liver. It may be distilled with milk for weak people and children, with Harts-tongue and Elecampance.

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Till they have done making a noise...
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A tiny but awful racket, no doubt.

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Holy the whorl and the breath that wells there / The shell's shape fixed in unfurling, and the slow / Worm within. from "The Snail," W. S. Merwin

Summer theatricals

For this family, it is the last of the summer theater season tomorrow. My husband and eldest son were in Arthur Miller's The Crucible--nine wonderful performances over the summer, set in the new amphitheater beside the lake, under the changing moon and the stars--GlimmerGlobe Theatre, sponsored by the Fenimore Museum. On the last night, my daughter's silkscreened t-shirts for cast members, adapted from the poster, went to the theater. The two of us sat in the grass by the stone seats, and ducks flew out of the lake and visited us there. One night an eagle sailed over. Flitterings meant bats. Most miraculous, not one Wednesday night show was rained out, though it did sprinkle a bit one evening.

The two family actors were also Box and Cox in the nineteenth-century farce, performed on Sundays at 12:30 on the outdoor stage in front of Bump Tavern in the Farmers Museum. They have their last performance tomorrow. All these theatricals have made the summer even more busy than usual, but I have enjoyed being an audience to my own family.

Edward Saker and Lionel Brough as Box and Cox, 1883.

Wikipedia: Box and Cox is a one act farce by John Maddison Morton. It is based on a French one-act vaudeville, Frisette, which had been produced in Paris in 1846.

Box and Cox was first produced at the Lyceum Theatre, London, on 1 November 1847, billed as a "romance of real life." The play became popular and was revived frequently through the end of the nineteenth century, with occasional productions in the twentieth century. It spawned two sequels by other authors, and was adapted as a one-act comic opera in 1866 by the dramatist F. C. Burnand and the composer Arthur Sullivan, Cox and Box, which also became popular and continues to be performed regularly. 

Dazzle

"Hell, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant was the subject of this kind of [sf/f/h] community outrage last summer, but it’s the best Fantasy novel I’ve read in years. American poet Marly Youmans’ Thaliad might be the best post-apocalyptic book I’ve ever read. Neither of these writers come from traditional genre backgrounds, but they’ve shown up and produced dazzling works nonetheless." --Tom Atherton (UK)

Love when a book of mine finds an unexpected compliment in a review that belongs to someone else.... Thank you, Tom Atherton.

And here's his first review of Thaliad. And he kindly wrote about the book again in a review of Glimmerglass at Strange Horizons.

How a table named a book--

Almost twenty years ago, I was living in a splendid but somewhat ramshackle Arts and Crafts / Tudor house on South Park Avenue in Greenville, South Carolina. A large house, it had a big, wonderful dining room with high fumed oak wainscoting. We had no table to fit such a large room, and no money with which to buy one worthy of the space. One day I found a table in the alley. Unable to find out why it had landed in the alley behind our house like a welcome UFO or who it belonged to, and half believing it had been sent especially to us because we lacked a table, I eventually helped carry it inside.

The table turned out to belong to the back yard carriage house of a neighbor, Wade Hampton Barber (yes, a descendant of Civil War General Wade Hampton and also an architect and a very kind man.) Not wanting to be table-pilferers, we were quite prepared to lug our two-legged friend back out again, but he told us to keep it. So it became ours. A two-pedestal number with one weak, repaired leg--not right as to house style and marked by many long-ago dinners--the table looked wonderful in the room.

Later on, it moved to a federal house in Cooperstown with us and went through many adventures, the leg breaking and being repaired multiple times, once collapsing under the pressure of our daughter's birthday party (eleventh, I think.) Many girls leaning at one end of the table, plus a major Schneider's Bakery cake, did in that table. Happily, both cake and girls survived. The table was propped and cake happily demolished soon afterward. For some years we relied on clamps and supports (jars, cans, anything stackable) hidden under generous tablecloths, the table sometimes standing on its own, sometimes with help. After multiple rounds of repair by a carpenter, we finally consigned the table to the garage and nabbed a sturdy Hickory Chair table on Craigslist. The new table is quite fine and has strong legs, but I miss the old one.

The table's original owner was Wade Hampton Barber's Aunt Thalia. Her name was pronounced this way: THAY-leeah. We always referred to the wayward table as Aunt Thalia's table. Aunt Thalia's name went back to ancient Greece, where Thalia (Θάλεια) was the name of various mythic figures: one of the Charites or Graces; the Muse of comedy and idyllic or short pastoral poetry; a nymph and goddess of plants who was the daughter of the creative god Hephaestus; and one of the Nereids. I like the link in meaning to abundance, flowering, and flourishing.

One summer day in the village of Cooperstown, I woke up with a long poem streaming in my head, and the name of the heroine was Thalia. And that is how a table named a book called Thaliad.

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Postscript: Sad to say, I just found a mention of Wade Barber's funeral online. His mother is listed as Thalia Chastain Barber. So perhaps the table owner was not Aunt Thalia but Mother. Which is even more appropriate to the book. But maybe this was Great-aunt Thalia, after whom his own mother was named. Given the condition of the table, that seems likely.

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The second printing of The Foliate Head is officially out of print, with no more copies via the publisher, though there are some copies left at online bookstores. In print are: Maze of Blood; Glimmerglass; Thaliad; A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage; The Throne of Psyche. See more links above.