Archie

If you too read the Archie comics as a kid:

The Vanity Fair article
The slide show of Archie art through the years
The intro to the show
And Sugar, Sugar!

Dang1 ping1

My brother just called home. From the army. At the pay phone (they give army boys free phone cards; they should really just give them spare handphone batteries). Last Thursday my whole family went with him to Tekong (where all the other boys were accompanied by hordes of family too). At Tekong, after the ferry ride, the parents and assorted relatives have to go one way, to tour the premises, and the boys another, to get their kits and a pep talk. The tour of the bunks and recreation room is conducted by a rather cute army boy, very much like the smiling Sarayon. There is an air-conditioned recreation room decorated with army propaganda and equipped with a TV, some chairs, a fooze-ball table. The guide explains that it's for rest, but since there's one room for each company, 200 boys, the boys will have to ask their commanding officers for permission to use the room. The commanding officers (the guide hastens to say) will generally agree, but sometimes they won't, for example if there's some tough training the next day, and the boys should sleep instead. Not that the training's tough; ok it is tough (tough is good, says a parent), but these boys have all passed their IPPT, so they will be ok, and if they do very well they can win the company awards. (Our guide was the best recruit, or best something, of his platoon.) Then there is a guide to army gear, with a different and less smiling host. He (the different host) has dissected a pack or whatever it's called and pinned its entrails to some billboards. He has also dug up a demonstrator dressed in full battle order (I presume; war paint on his face and unconvincing rag leaves on his helment and the new load-something-something vest on this, though not hung with grenades). Someone asks about the weight of all that gear, and is told that that varies with weapons and the amount of food the boy chooses to bring along (which seems odd). We troop into the canteen to wait (there are many groups of eager relatives shuttling into Tekong). We are called to the auditorium. The commanding officer is a middle-aged man running to fat who takes some pains to explain the training architecture of the army to the parents. An army, he says, marches on its stomach, and so we have improved the army food. The boys sit together in the middle of the auditorium; they all look small and skinny and slight. Too small to wear the army pack and carry 20kg of weapons and ammunition (my father says), to small to be away from home. The commanding officer calls the boys to take the oath, which is flashed on powerpoint (of course). He starts the oath, I, Name, NRIC number, and there is a moment of confusion as every boy speaks his own name and NRIC number, loudly of course, because they've all been told to talk the army way now. I suppose the scene is meant to be touching, and it is a little, because they're so painfully young, but mostly it brings to mind the City Watch taking their oath (I comma square bracket insert name here square bracket comma do swear by square bracket insert deity's name here square bracket...). Then he says to the boys, I want you to promise to call your parents tonight, after 9.30 pm, can you do that? YES SIR! (Their training must have already started.) Now you've promised, you must call your parents first, not your girlfriends, ok? YES SIR! The girlfriends in the audience (not that many of them) shift in their seats. The boys leave first, line up in the corridor. The parents troop out row by row and claim their son. We all go to the dining hall to taste the SAF food. The boys are restless; perhaps a little eager; perhaps a little apprehensive, but not really by much; it's probably all a little unreal at this point, like a massive school camp; there isn't much to do after we've eaten lunch (which was edible); this is just waiting time, like the time in an airport before boarding the plane. We look for the bus back to the ferry. My brother walks us there, and there are hugs all around - my father shakes his hand instead, because he is all grown up now - and last minute instructions on washing clothes, sleeping early, not exhausting the handphone battery the first day. Other boys are hugging their assorted relatives, all a little sheepishly. Call us! we say. And then we board the ferry back.

A Map of Disappointments

There's a Zadie Smith article on why writers often betray themselves in aldaily.com.

The few things I've written have felt like betrayals when I was writing them - felt like I let truth slide away in favour of more familiar phrase or thought, some word or thought that came (too) readily to hand. And after writing whatever it was I was just glad to have written something, and ready to believe that it said whatever I meant to say.

I used to think that what one really required for a great novel, or poem, or any piece of writing, was courage. Throw away the lights and the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

This follows a dinner conversation with xz when he said, I don't think you're happy at your job. What I said then, what I say to these things - I'm not unhappy. It's still interesting. There are good points. If I were better at it I would like it more; it's just a question of working harder. I have to do this, and being unhappy would just make it harder. (The last one on grimmer days.) And I thought this was a sign of growing up, of some kind of maturity; after all, being an adult is all about being sensible and letting go (even of things that used to define you) and doing things you don't want to do, isn't it? But I generally write even less when I'm fooling myself, and I haven't been able to write anything for a while now.

Which disappointments would you put into your map?

Placeholders for memory

1. Christmas was a family affair - I think the first time in 6 years that we were all together for Christmas. We had candles, and flowers, and turkey. (I stuffed it! And cut/chopped stuff and stitched up the turkey and peered anxiously at it and all the things that kitchen helpers do.) Turkey is over-rated; next year we'll do some other meat.

2. New Year's Eve was at Changi Village - Steve reached Singapore very, very early in the morning on the last day of last year; in the afternoon, we took a bus to Changi Village, stopping some way before to peer at the military buildings (where the Changi Murals short film was shot) and walk through the old hospital. Leaving the place later on the first day of the year, we went past another film site - an old, abandoned, army building; probably a training school of some sort - with high archways and long corridors and "for glory and honour" in faded paint in what must have been the hall or assembly room. Steve said, wouldn't this be a good place for a Yo La Tengo music video?

3. Does anyone want to watch Yo La Tengo in March?

4. Dinner at S's place on the day itself, with M and R.

5. My family was in China the week just before Christmas, so I took a lot of time off from work and spent it mostly in bed reading WN's Lucifers, and not thinking.

6. When you were in the States I practised not missing you. I miss you now. (It hasn't yet sunk in that I'm not going to see you any more.)

7. This is what I used to mock: the HDB flat, the 1.25 kids, 0.25 car (or whatever the national figure is). Whether it's the recent spate of engagements and weddings (because I'm at that age now), whether it's my biological clock betraying anything I've learnt over the last 26 years and I'm reverting to type - I do want to move on to a new phase of life. (It's a terrible thing to learn about myself, that love's not enough. Enough for what?)

8. There was something, I think in aldaily.com, a while ago about how nice a person Leonard Woolf (husband of Virgina) was. It quoted a researcher on Virginia Woolf who had Leonard Woolf's photograph on her bedside table and used to write to him, especially when her research was going badly - used to write him "letters for healing, not for reading". Thank you for the letters and the photographs. That I can write to you (though my letters are tardy and uninformed) is healing enough; that you write to me is a gift.

2007

Hope it turns out better than we expect, and better than we deserve.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Two English teachers are walking in the woods

I found a primer on writing poetry, on metre and rhyme and form, by Stephen Fry, of all people. In his foreword, Fry sympathises with anyone who has been traumatised by literature lessons in school:

"The way poetry was taught in school reminded W. H. Auden of a Punch cartoon composed, legend has it, by the poet A. E. Housman. Two English teachers are walking in the woods in springtime. The first, on hearing birdsong, is moved to quote William Wordsworth:

Teacher 1: Oh cuckoo, shall I call thee bird
                Or but a wandering voice?

Teacher 2: State the alternative preferred
                With reasons for your choice."

cp would probably approve - Fry quotes Auden again, this time on free verse:

"The poet who writes 'free' verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor."

Narrativium

I am avoiding work in all possible ways, including reading Wintersmith twice over in a weekend (the NLB came through) and half of Light in August - and fully intending to read the other half, which surprises me, having tried and failed to read Faulkner before (I think it was Sound and Fury - the one with all the different voices going round and round, unless that describes more than one novel). I am emboldened - I have also borrowed Absalom, Absalom (on the principle that once the first Faulkner is breached the second will be easier) and might actually try to read it.

Back from Viking land

A week and a half in Stockholm and Copenhagen, to study the Nordic social security system.

Stockholm. It gets dark here (and across the Strand) by 3 pm, which is invariably depressing, even with christmas lights sparkling over the street in the old city and from every christmas tree propped up against storefront or drainpipe. We have most of one day here, to walk around the charming and deeply-touristed medieval city (Gamla Stan), which offers candles, crystal ornaments, delicate wooden ships in a bottle, plastic horned helmets. We look in vain for a Swedish restaurant; evidently, when Swedes eat out, they eat Italian or Japanese. An ostensibly Italian restaurant has a Swedish special - fried potatoes with bacon and lingonberry sauce: breakfast tastes. We take a ferry across to the Viking Museum, where the Vasa ship is housed: built by Gustavus Adolphus in the midst of the Thirty Years' War to be the pride of his navy, sunk off the cost of Stockholm after a shamefully short period of sailing, dredged up in the 1960s. There was an inquiry after the sinking: the balance of evidence suggested that the King's ambitions were too much for the ship's design (two gun decks instead of one, too little ballast for so heavy a ship), but no blame was formally assigned.

Copenhagen. I guess the Swedes and Danes can tell the difference, but I can't really. More grime than Stockholm (or the part of Stockholm we saw), more neon, more rudeness, in consequence seemingly more interesting. We spend a good deal of time wandering, often inadvertently, up and down Strogen, the pedestrianised shopping street. A mandatory trip to the Little Mermaid, a surprisingly thoughtful statue posed on a rock, the waves breaking at her feet/flippers, juxtaposed against the powerhouses and chimneys on the other side of the shore. There is time to go to the Viking Museum at Roskilde, which houses five Viking ships salvaged in the 1950s/60s. The Museum staff have reconstructed the ships, using the same tools and materials the Vikings did, and will take the warship sailing (with a 120-man crew) to Dublin next year, after the winter. Imagine that heritage.

We go to Tivoli, which is a theme park right in the middle of the city and prettily, magically lit up at night (and not even the obvious Disney comparisons can spoil the mood). There are rides even in winter, perhaps because this is the warmest winter in 40, 50 years (above-zero temperatures). We ride the flying carousel, something Turkish; we get glogg (mulled wine), hot dogs; we take pictures of the light and sound show at the lake.

We go to Christiana, which is on the edge of the city and must be a relic of the 1960s - a small piece of land that claims to follow its own laws, primarily one that allows the sale and use of soft drugs (but not hard drubs). A wooden sign at the entrance says "Welcome to Christiana"; leaving, the same sign says "You are now entering the EU". The same trappings in every hippie or hippe-type place: cafes offering beer and hash, a "free Tibet" photographic exhibition, stalls selling Bob Marley posters, bongs, colourful striped made-in-Nepal scarves. A few grubby, sad-looking men in parkas in the backyard of a closed bar. A few dogs running with the bicycles. Mostly tourists here, though there are houses further back, away from the bars and cafes and shops (they say there are a hundred families living here). It feels like Camden Town, but on a much smaller scale. What one imagines the Village might have been like, but without the energy. You would recognise it if you were there.

The Nordic social security system. There is an aesthetically pleasing correlation between the policy and its price: high taxes to pay for comprehensive social security in case of unemployment, disability, illness, retirement...though this isn't something we didn't know before. The mystery, which no-one seems to be able to solve, is why the system works at all. Or perhaps we're asking the wrong questions? The Nordics seem to have made a necessity of virtue; perhaps that should not seem as odd as it is?

On poverty

In her latest collection Decreation, Anne Carson reproduces fragment 31 of Sappho:

He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing - oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead - or almost
I seem to me.

But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty...

After discussing the first four complete stanzas, Carson moves on to the last line, which seems to be the beginning of a fifth stanza:

"All is to be dared because even a person of poverty...," says the last verse. It is a new thought. The content of the thought is absolute daring. The condition of the thought is poverty. I don't want to give the impression that I know what this verse is saying or that I see where the poem is headed from here, I don't. Overall it leaves me wondering. Sappho stages an event of ecstasy but that's not what the poem is about either, ecstasy is just a means to an end. Unfortunately we don't reach the end, the poem breaks off. But we do see Sappho begin to turn towards it, towards this unreachable end. We see her senses empty themselves, we see her Being thrown outside its own centre where it stands observing her as if she were grass or dead. At which point a speculation occurs to me: granted this is a poem all about love, do we need to limit ourselves to a reading of it that is merely or conventionally erotic? After all, Sappho is believed by some historians to have been not just a poet of love and a worshipper of Aphrodite on Lesbos but also a priest of Aphrodite's cult and a teacher of her doctrines. Perhaps Sappho's poem wants to teach us something about the metaphysics or even the theology of love. Perhaps she is posing not the usual lovesong complaint, Why don't you love me? but a deeper spiritual question, What is it that love dares the self to do? Daring enters the poem in the last verse when Sappho uses the word tolmaton: "is to be dared." This word is a verbal adjective and expresses a mood of possibility or potential. Sappho says it is an absolute potential:

pan tolmaton: all is to be dared.

Moreover she consents to it - or seems to be on the point of consenting when the poem breaks off. Why does she consent? Her explanation no longer exists. So far as it goes, it leads us back to her ecstatic condition. For when an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer:

Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty."

Apples

I read a quarter of Michael Pollan's book, The Botany of Desire - it's about four domesticated species, the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato, and I have only read the bit on the apple - and while I don't much care for his style of writing, which is unnecessarily chatty, he does have an image of John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) wearing a sack for a shirt and a tin pot for a hat, snoozing in one of two canoes lashed together, floating downriver, a mound of seed in the other canoe. Chapman would not graft trees; he would only grow trees from seed; and so his apples were hard and sour, and good only for cider. That's why everyone in the frontier towns welcomed Chapman: not because an apple a day kept the doctor away (a PR slogan thought up by the apple growers later), but because he brought alcohol. Pollan quotes Emerson: "man would be more solitary, less friended, less supported, if the land yielded only the useful maize and potato, [and] withheld this ornamental and social fruit". He quotes a speaker to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1885: "The desire of the Puritan, distant from help and struggling for bare existence, to add the Pippin to his slender list of comforts, and the sour 'syder' to cheer his heart and liver, must be considered a fortunate circumstance". First found in the Kazakh forests. Each apple contains enough genetic material to be entirely unlike its parent, even more unlike than human beings are; but we have deliberately sweetened our apples (through grafting) and the legend of Johnny Appleseed. Pollan delights in the names of apples in the 19th century: the Bottle Greening, the Sheepnose, the Oxheart, the Yellow Bellflower, the Black Gilliflower, the Twenty-Ounce Pippin; the Westfield Seek-No-Further, the Hubbardston Nonesuch, the Rhode Island Greening, the Albemarle Pippin, the York Imperial, the Kentucky Red Streak, the Long Stem of Pennsylvania, the Ladies Favorite of Tennessee, the King of Tompkins County, the Peach of Kentucky, the American Nonpareille; the Baldwin, the Macintosh, the Jonathan, McAfee's Red, Norton's Melon, Moyer's Prize, Mezger's Calville, Kirke's Golden Reinette, Kelly's White, Walker's Beauty; Wismer's Dessert, Jacob's Sweet Winter, the Early Harvest and Cider Apple, the Clothes-Yard Apple, the Bread and Cheese, Cornell's Savewell and Putnam's Savewell, Paradise Winter, Payne's Late Keeper, and Hay's Winter Wine.

Apples remind me of an excerpt from a letter from John Szarkowski to Helmut Wohl, in a book of Szarkowski's letters and photographs, generously given by Dennis: "The apple book is a treasure, and demonstrates what I have long suspected - that the history of art is in fact a branch of pomology. ...There is of course one serious problem underlying the consideration of the apple in ancient times, which is that neither Greek nor Hebrew seems to have a specific word for 'apple', but generic words roughly translatable as 'an edible fruit approximately the size of a tennis ball'. This of course puts a very heavy load of responsibility on the visual record, which - frankly - is a poor place to put it. Those ancient sculptors who did the apples of the Hesperides, etc., felt that the difference between a peach and pomegranate was nothing to worry about, as along as one got the drapery right..." The facing page of the book has a photograph of a wooden wall with two windows (one with a reflection of leaves) and a tiny, brave, young Cox Pippin tree outside. C. 1983.

I haven't yet found a place to hang your gigantic black-and-white print of a hand holding three apples, though I asked for it as a gift.

The centre of the universe

I am going to bring you, Steve says, to the centre of the universe. The centre of universe is a little Hindu shine next to the railway tracks near Outram Park. The shrine has a tiled floor and roof, with no walls; the railway tracks end in grass and a wire fence and stacks of cargo; workers from the tracks cut across a corner of the shrine to climb up the stairs to the pavement ahead, removing their shoes as they cross the shrine. There is a tree at the entrance of the shrine, gnarled roots wrapped around in a white cloth; there are benches at the side, for old men and a cluster of women; there is a fire pit at the front of the shrine, beside the statue of Shiva and the golden feet on a pedestal, near a garbage container full of firewood. Devotional music fills the air. A friendly Indian woman tells us that today is the bathing of the god. This is the only shrine where the priest will have the bathing of the god for twenty-four hours, non-stop, all by himself. It is also the only shrine where the priest will let devotees bathe the god. We watch a devotee approach the little enclosure with the statue of Shiva and the feet. One of the priest's helpers keeps a bell ringing and the oil lamp lit for the appropriate parts of the ceremony when she has to wave smoke in the statue's face; the other helper hands her jars of water, henna, milk, honey, a white powder, a reddish-brown powder, which she pours nervously and solemnly over the statue and the feet. The helpers irreverentially remove blobs of paint or powder from the crooks of the statue. Then the bathing is over, and the Brahmin priest steps forward to dress the god in white cloth and flowers and give him a bindi. There are more oil lamps and smoke, and chanting; the devotee throws flowers at the statue, then walks around the shrine with a plate of fruit and flowers, leaving them at a different statue's feet (there are seven reincarnations of Shiva here, the friendly Indian woman says) and pressing her forehead to the ground. The sun is setting behind the shrine and the light cuts through the smoke from the fire pit, cuts through the devotional music and the ringing of the bell, the chanting of the priest in his green-and-gold sarong and string across his chest, the devotee pouring water, henna, milk, honey onto the statue. The friendly woman says that in times past there used to be five or six shrines along the tracks; the rest have gone off to be big temples elsewhere, and only this one is left.

Later, we head for the Roof Bar in Chinatown, which is as its name says (on a roof) but spoiled by loud radio music, and then the French Corner on Serangoon Road for fish and wine and dessert.

for Julian

My dear, we've been saying goodbye for a while now (all those cookouts!) and we've not really said goodbye, and perhaps that's a good way to have done it? After all, there's the road trip to plan, and the trip to China, or was it Tibet, or was it a beach somewhere, or someone's house, or any place with wine, or brownies, or potato in three different forms, or laughter, or books, or Stephen Fry, or whatever it is that our companionship does come from. Su-Lin said it first, but there doesn't seem anything else as apt - go well. When you come back we'll go looking for the Swedish restaurant at Clark Quay again.

Marking time

1. The day before National Day, we wandered to Home, wandered off to Lau Pa Sat for satay, back again for the S.A.D. show, which was remarkable chiefly for a video of one or other of the Little Red Dot posse wandering around Singapore with a huge white-faced paper mask over their head and your energetic dancing.

2. Last Thursday, we went to the Arts House to watch Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which seemed to begin with the intention of showing the, well, unbearable lightness of being, but drifted despite its best intentions into sentimentality (if not kitsch) by the end.

3. There was a BBQ and housewarming at I and D's new place at Joo Chiat (a few sausages, lots of drink), which is exactly where you imagine it to be. Dinner and drinks and Little Britain at YS's place the day after. J's BBQ the next week - a BBQ! With chipolatas and hamburgers and satay and kebabs and potato salad (not grilled, though there were roast potatoes) and stingray and prawns (courtesy of SL's parents). And then QI, which only the British (and Stephen Fry) could do.

4. I have been falling into books lately, which is less pernicious a form of escapism than some I can think of, but no less escapist for that. One of them was John Gregory Dunne's Nothing Lost, the first John Gregory Dunne I've read; it's exactly right on the ways in which people use one another, and the real tenderness among people. Steve found a second-hand copy of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and gave it to me; like all Ishiguros (or the few I've read, at least) it is very well done and faintly horrifying. Also We Need To Talk About Kevin, which is entirely horrifying but at the last shies away from concluding the discussion of evil.

5. The problem with code-switching is, of course, that after a while it isn't code-switching any more.

[to hold the title line thing in place]

At the end of the tax form, right after it tells you how much you have to pay and by what date, it says, "Thank you for your contribution towards nation building!".

So.

I'm up reading an article by the European Central Bank on labour productivity in the Nordic countries, and feeling like I'm back in school (to be precise - like I'm reading for Econs S - and a little glad to be able to recognise some of the technical terms still, and a little amazed that we learnt enough in Econs S to recognise these terms, and a little regretful that I never went on to be be able to do more than just recognise these terms) - and remembering that I did like this part of school, did like reading things beyond my knowledge or comprehension, did appreciate scholarly work, did like learning things. It's a strange thing to remember now - and a stranger thing to have forgotten.

Hobson's choice

I think the choice, such as it is, is between working a little harder and not catching up, or working a lot harder and possibly still not catching up, wherever "up" might be.

Best Behaviour

The more I hear about international protocol, the more it resembles nothing more than the rigidly and repressively circumscribed world of Edith Wharton's New York in House of Mirth or any account of the American aristocracy at the turn of the century (I think). I'm also reminded of Joan Didion's (not entirely convincing) essay on 1950s Hollywood as the "last stable society" in the West, with its definite and unquestioned patterns of behaviour. International protocol, as far as I can tell, is based on the distinction between things that are "nice" and things that are "not nice". Crossing your legs and pointing your toes at your counterpart at meetings is not nice. Leaving wine glasses around where devout Muslims might see them is not nice. Kissing or otherwise physically handling the wives of conservative Chinese statesmen is not nice. Not finding out where the toilets are beforehand is not nice. (It's harder to define what's nice.) I'm not often in a work situation where what's nice defines what's correct, but then again, it may be as good a measure as anything we've come up with.

One Art

I meant to do interesting and productive things, but have been looking for Elizabeth Bishop's letters online instead. Perhaps I'll buy her selected letters.

An excerpt of a letter to Robert Lowell:

March 30,1959

I have no news of any importance—but then, I don’t believe I ever have. We had a large dinner party for 20 on Lota’s birthday and it was quite successful, I think—dozens of Japanese lanterns and lots of plants and orchids our florist neighbor happened to give us at just the right moment. We set up five card tables in the “gallery”—all different colors, reflected in the rippled aluminum ceiling—very gay, if modest; and I produced an iced chestnut soufflé with fancy work in whipped cream, etc. It looked almost professional, by lantern light at least. . . .

During the ten weeks I read & read & read—the 3-volume life of Byron, Greville in 3 volumes, Lucan (didn’t you say you were reading that, too?), etc. etc.—and now am finishing the new edition of Keats’s letters—all to what purpose I’m not sure, but all fascinating. At the moment I find the Keats the best of the lot, though. Except for his unpleasant insistence on the palate, he strikes me as almost everything a poet should have been in his day. The class gulf between him and Byron is enormous. As Pascal says, if you can manage to be well-born it saves you thirty years.

inter alia

There are Hassan Massoudy postcards! I saw a copy of the "religion of love" one in the British Museum - it didn't have the bottom swirls and looked like billowing blue-black sails. The British Museum translation was slightly different (and superior): "I follow the religion of love: whatever way love's camels take, that is my religion and my faith."

Other postcards I have:
- Two bold, black strokes (rather like a swan) depicting the letter 'k'
- A fantastic collage entitled "Narkissos" and containing a little bit of all the world
- A row of cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, sporting identical crew-cuts and grey shirts, reading Howl, with their caps and notebooks laid out neatly in front of them
- Drawings of fossils.

This weekend I read, among other things, Caddy Ever After (using the first person singular doesn't work very well, but still a satisfying book) and Joan Didion's heartbreaking The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she talks about the sudden death of her husband and illness of her daughter - part personal memoir, part detached investigation into the aspects of grief (because we are taught, when confronted with the new or the harrowing, to read up, to go to the literature).

Recipe for Amelia Simmons's Independence Cake

Twenty pound flour, 15 pound sugar, 10 pound butter, 4 dozen eggs, one dozen eggs, 1 quart brandy, 1 ounce nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, mace, of each 3 ounces, two pound citron, currants and raisins 5 pound each, 1 quart yeast; when baked, frost with loaf sugar; dress with box and gold leaf.

From American Cookery, 1796; reproduced in Mark Kurlansky's Choice Cuts.