Report: New York Book Launch.

Well, the book was successfully launched, and I am pleased to note that no one broke a bottle of champage over it or me. And no one forgot the launch code, though I did have a moment of panic walking along 21st Street when I realized I had forgotten my talk in my hotel room. The PP and I rushed back to the room, picked up my folder and notes, and reset the count-down. By the time we arrived at Gramercy Park, my co-editor had the launch pad all set up, and we checked that my PC-produced PowerPoint slides looked OK on her Mac, and we were set to go.

I am here to tell you that if you ever have the chance to visit the National Arts Club, you should do it. The glass-case-framed collection of ceramic and glass pug dog statues makes the trip worth it (they and an actual pug dog were the bequest of a member), but take time to check out some of the paintings. The word is that back in the day, member artists were expected to bequeath a painting in lieu of dues. You can learn more about the club's and its building's history here, but let me tell you: that illustration they have of one of the Tiffany stained-glass windows does it no justice. And right near the stairwell is a photograph of Yeats himself, taken when he visited the city in 1933. Apparently the organization can boast to be the only Yeats society in the world that meets in a building where Yeats actually spent any time. Now you know!

I believe the audience appreciated some of my little jokes about the tribulations and trials of textual editing, but I also realized how they did not really believe the details could be true--and also that I had already myself forgotten some of the worst bits, or at least the emotions involved. Perhaps this is necessary, as there is another volume now to be done.

I am happy to report that the launch in Atlanta (well, Decatur, really) at 7:30 p.m. on 17 May will not require a lecture from me. In fact, the folks hosting it have dubbed it a "Yeats Festival"! If you are in the greater Atlanta metro area, and you are inclined to attend, why not plan to recite or read or or sing or even chant a poem?

If. . .

---you are in the greater New York metropolitan area;
---you are interested in the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, and especially his wacky astrological stuff;
---you found yourself captivated by recent posts about editing;

Then . . .
---you might consider attending this event on May 1st: it is a launch party for the book I have been editing for the last (it seems) two-and-a-half years. That's right; it's published!

(But I am sorry to say that our event goes up against several glassy events--this and this and this. Dang--I would have liked to attend them all.)

If you are simply too far away to attend, but too far away in the, say, Atlanta direction, then stay tuned for details about the Atlanta event on 17 May. I believe there will be a launch in Sligo during this too, but details for that have not been worked out.

Sorry to go on about all this: I am just quite excited.

Errors from the touch of God.

If you do not read the comments section here at "The Secrets of Isis," then you have missed one of the most exciting discussions ever, on the topic of error.



In short, Mateen noticed that I had left a verb out of a sentence. I inserted the verb, making the correction visible to all. Then Scott asked how I decide whether to flag an error or not. I tried to determine some kind of principled position from a somewhat unthought-through decision.


Meanwhile, Mateen noticed that he, too, had made an error, this time of spelling. He wished it had been deliberate, but could not so claim it. Scott, based on Mateen's error, had devised his own reading of Mateen's message, only to have Mateen's correction make him realize that he too had been making a long-standing error of spelling, and the whole brilliant image he had constructed based on this small misspelling came crashing down in a torrent of disillusion. Then Mateen, a poet as well as an important Spartan, mentioned a poem by Aaron Fogel, about which more shortly.

Do you see how exciting this is?

Of course, we are hardly the first to have something to say on the topic of Error. To wit, in Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Redcrosse Knight encounters Errour herself, in her very den:

This is the wandring wood, this Errours den,
A monster vile, whom God and man does hate:
Therefore I read beware. Fly fly (quoth then
The fearefull Dwarfe:) this is no place for liuing men.

But full of fire and greedy hardiment,
The youthfull knight could not for ought be staide,
But forth vnto the darksome hole he went,
And looked in: his glistring armor made
A litle glooming light, much like a shade,
By which he saw the vgly monster plaine,
Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide,
But th'other halfe did womans shape retaine,
Most lothsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine.

And as she lay vpon the durtie ground,
Her huge long taile her den all ouerspred,
Yet was in knots and many boughtes vpwound,
Pointed with mortall sting. Of her there bred
A thousand yong ones, which she dayly fed,
Sucking vpon her poisonous dugs, each one
Of sundry shapes, yet all ill fauored:
Soone as that vncouth light vpon them shone,
Into her mouth they crept, and suddain all were gone.

(By the by, do you notice how reptilian Errour is? How snake like? Could this--"Snakes in The Faerie Queene"--have been a predecessor to--oh never mind.)

The point is, Error occupies an unfavored place in so many minds. In Latin, the word suggests a wandering or a straying, a deviation from the truth--and Spenser seems to share this feeling. Errors are mistakes, misunderstandings, and no one wants to be the last man to die for a mistake. A person who makes an error is at fault. Computer errors lead to the blue screen of death.


Errors count against players in baseball. Grammatical errors lead to points off on a paper. Newspapers do what they can to correct errors quickly. Errors in judgment, mistakes, accidents--they all can have their cost.

But what messages from elsewhere do we shut down in our urge to correct? The book I have just published (woo-hoo!) is a scholarly edition of a crazy book--one riddled with errors. As editors, we were faced with the questions: Can we make the reading of this book easier without losing the wackiness of the real thing? At what point do our corrections change the text irremediably? If the decision were mine to make alone--if our edition were not part of a series with established principles--I would have said, let's keep it as it is. It is, after all, a book where errors of spelling, numbering, italicization, attribution, etc. are part of the experience. Why lose that? But, the world being the world, I compromised: we made many small emendations (all noted in my extensive table at the back, of course!) and left some errors extant.

Frank Steinman would tell me I am a horrible meddler. He is the speaker of Aaron Fogel's poem "The Printer's Error." Experienced printer that he is, Steinman lays out several kinds of error, ranging from errors of chance, to moments of rebellion on the part of type-setters, to

. . . errors
from the touch of God,
divine and often
obscure corrections
of whole books by
nearly unnoticed changes
of single letters
sometimes meaningful but
about which the less said
by preemptive commentary
the better.

In all cases, Steinman warns editors, especially us academic types, to BACK OFF, because all errors "are in practice the / same and indistinguishable." He concludes:

Therefore I,
Frank Steinman,
typographer
for thirty-seven years,
and cooperative Master
of the Holliston Guild
eight years,
being of sound mind and body
though near death
urge the abolition
of all editorial work
whatsoever
and manumission
from all textual editing
to leave what was
as it was, and
as it became,
except insofar as editing
is itself an error, and

therefore also divine.

Amen, Frank.

And go Heels.

[FL]Insert header here.

In case you did not know, there are more interesting things you could do on a Friday afternoon than proofread the line numbers given in a Table of Emendations to the Copy-Text.

But the fact that I now know this may give some small indication of how bad real-life deadlines are kicking me in the ass right now.

So go forth and be grateful that for this week anyway, you are not me and my new collection of purple pencils.

Something completely different.

Kudos to Scott, for ignoring the Foxy Asso, and going straight for the good stuff. He wrote: And now for something completely different. I stumbled across the 2nd place winner of 2006's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (for the worst unpublished opening sentence written in English during the year) and thought you might enjoy it. The winner was Stuart Vasepuru of Edinburgh, Scotland who won with the submission of

"I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?"

Is being an editor as exciting as it sounds?

Well, Scott, I am glad you asked!

First I should clarify, because I think I have been playing fast and loose with clarity. Sometimes I am an editor, and that can be distinctly unexciting. I am not really the kind of editor that appears in that story, but rather the kind who takes a text but some already acceptable person and makes it more available. The project that I was bemoaning here, here, here, here, here, and here will be published next March, so they say (though they misspelled my first name, dammit).
But other times I am more like Wordy Harry (not as hard-boiled, but still wordy as hell!), and this is one of those times. So, Scott, let me reframe your question to be, "Is being a writer as exciting as it sounds?"

Here is a profile of a fantastic writing day:
4:00 a.m. Wake up, go to the bathroom, try to go back to bed, count backwards in Italian, and finally find that I am not falling asleep because there are mad thoughts churning in my brain so I might as well get up.
4:15 a.m. Turn on the computer, wipe the sleep from the eyes, and try to get adjusted to the lights. Convince the cats that I did not get up to feed them.
4:30 a.m. Read other people's blogs for a while and see if anyone other than spam generators has sent me any e-mail.
5:00 a.m. Get down to work: this requires music of course, and what is better than Bach's Art of the Fugue or the new Vivaldi choral music I bought in Venice, or maybe Beethoven's Diabelli Variations or some late string quartets. The important thing here is that the music be complicated enough to engage the mathematical part of my brain and free up the creative and analytical parts to write.
6:00 a.m. Grunt approvingly at the PP as he brings me a giant cup of coffee.
7:45 a.m. Grunt at the PP as he leaves for work.
9:30 a.m. Realize I have not had breakfast, so go into the kitchen and make some and then stuff it down my maw and hurry back to my desk.
2:30 p.m. Can I be hungry again? Scrounge some lunch.
4:30 p.m. Realize I am getting dopey, so move away from the computer and read someone else's book for a change.
5:30 p.m. Greet the PP when he gets home from work and try to come back to planet earth.

Now you will notice that that timeline says very little about writing itself. That is because that part, the actual writing part, is a mystery. There is something that can happen then (on the good days), and if I let it happen it is almost a kind of ecstasy. Athletes out there would be tempted to call it being in the zone, and I suppose in a way it is, but the only sort of: there is a sense of letting one's work-a-day self go, letting worldly concerns go, and even (ideally!) letting anxieties and insecurities go, in order to let the words come. Come on, words! And bring some thoughts with you!

In this state I might fly from working through a translation of an essay to checking up on some information, to meandering through other parts of whatever I consulted to check that information, to going off on some random tangent, to coming back to the translation, to analyzing the essay I have translated, to making a surprising connection to that random tangent from earlier, to discovering that something I had thought was not going to matter matters tremendously, to realizing that the person in one part of my chapter is not the same one as another part, to figuring out how to rectify that problem, to launching into a massive description of something I had seen a few years ago in a site-visit, and on, and on.

Writing for me is about letting my mind spread out, about letting go of whether or not I am sure that what I am trying to do is going to work and just trusting it. It is about loving what I am studying, and loving what I am saying. Gertrude Stein says that the purpose of poetry is to find a way back to the “thrill” that names hold when first learned, now that “the name of that thing of that anything is no longer anything to thrill any one except children.” I do not write poetry, but even in the world of scholarly writing, we have to find our way back to that thrill--or else who would want to read what we write? Trusting your material and trusting yourself to be thrilling--what a leap of faith!

Before I know it, my desk is stacked perilously with opened books and there are piles of other books and xeroxes all over my study. Before I know it it is 5:30 at night and I do not know where I was all day.

Sometimes when the PP comes home at 5:30, I just cannot bring myself back to the modern moment. Sometimes I look at him like I looked around the house when I was first back from Italy, and had woken up from a nap, and was utterly confused to be in my own living room. Sometimes I have to ask him to repeat what he just said because it seems like he is speaking in a foreign language, or about people I have never met, or I have no idea what he does for a living. And luckily for me, he forgives me for this, because I am not always like this and he knows how much I love to write. This is one of many reasons we call him the Patient Partner.

So to come back to the question: is being a writer as exciting as it sounds? It is, Scott, one of the most exciting things I have ever experienced.

Why editing matters.

Greetings! I am back now from New York City, having enjoyed the authentic New York experience, i.e., a mid-March sleetstorm. The joys of such a thing in The City include not having proper footware (I do not recommend Mary-Jane-style shoes, as the snow can fall or seep right in from the top), gale-force winds funneled by tall buildings, and stepping off curbs into feet-deep snow banks which may or may not contain a puddle of ice water at the bottom.

But now that I have spent the better part of the week considering the processes and theoretical backing for editorial practice, I need to comment on this, from the NYTimes:

WASHINGTON, March 19 — A House committee released documents Monday that showed hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industrylobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a humanrole in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.

In a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the official, Philip A. Cooney, who left government in 2005, defended the changes he had made in government reports over several years. Mr. Cooney said the editing was part of the normal White House review process and reflected findings in a climate report written for President Bush by the National Academy of Sciences in 2001.

Well, I am just back from the biennial conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship, and I am here to tell you that neither I nor the STS support the version of editing conducted by Mr. Cooney.

For starters, Mr. Cooney appears not to have included any kind of note on the text, indicating what he used as his copytext, what his principles for emendations were, and what his editorial perspective was. And where was his table of emendations, indicating modifications made to support 2001 knowledge in favor of more up-to-date information? Furthermore, any good textual editor (and I do have some experience here) knows that rather than modifying the text to suit a particular point of you.

How many times must we tell you, Mr. Cooney: Follow. The. Text.

Life's little injustices.

Remember how much fun I had back in May 2006, trying to get used to using British style for the edition I am editing?

Guess what: it was all a big fat waste.

Yes, that's right: the British press whose stylesheet we were told to use is actually not the primary press with which we are working. Instead, everything goes to an American press, which uses--say it with me--AMERICAN STYLE.

Well, fuck me.

Snow day, part 2.

So what does a goddess do on a snow day, you may be asking.

Well let me tell you.

For one thing, she takes time away from her exciting life to write to you about it. Lucky you.

For another thing, she lets her eyes wander to the massive snowball fight that erupted in her neighborhood. It is interesting to live in a city neighborhood because you do not own your snow. For instance, our goddess found herself at one point asking, Why is my neighbor stealing the snow off my car to throw it at his child? Who does he think he is? I had plans for that snow! But really, because the snow is outside (just as well), it is communal snow. Redistribution of snow from those who have plenty to those who need some. She likes her city neighborhood.

For another thing, she trolls the internet for updates about the weather. Here is helpful advice for you from WYFF4 news.

For another thing, she wonders whether her day would be going better if she had bought the required bread and milk yesterday. Or what the lack of weather stripping and storm windows will mean for inside temperatures if the power goes.

For another thing, she does not go to swim practice, because it has been cancelled.

And for another thing, she reads the copy-edited manuscript for the edition that she spent the better part of the last couple of years working on. You may not realize how fascinating that kind of work is. For instance, how frequently have you had the chance to respond to such captivating questions as "Not in abbreviations list--add?" or "appositive comma >> only one associate OK?" or "page 4 of YVP 4, yes?" or "Harun al-Rashid or Harun-Al-Rashid?"

I know: you envy her. You should. This is the life, really.

Go jump in the lake.

I am sure that you had all been going crazy, wondering how the textual editing was going, sad not to be receiving daily updates. I know that this is the blog that people come to for the cutting edge of emendation methods, for breaking news about the use of copytexts.

Well good news!

I can tell you that one of the real pleasures of textual editing is trying to make the text itself (apart from any annotations or apparatus) as perfect as possible (or "apap" as we in the business might say). Making a text apap is an endurance event. It requires proofreading, re-proofreading, getting your friends to proofread, paying your students to proofread, and then—everyone’s favorite—pair-proofing. That is when one poor soul looks at the text you have prepared while another soul (really and truly, on the precipice of purgatory) reads aloud from the copytext, being sure to note capitalization, formatting, page breaks, etc.

That task, my friends, is DONE, but it did take about 100 hours. (I am not making that up.)

But NOW, I am in the enviable position of regularizing terminology. You see, the text in question is a wacky one, having been produced by a poet known for his poor habits of spelling and punctuation, and then published by a small house which seems not to have sprung for a proofreader. Or a copyeditor.

So the question facing me was, how many of the erratic capitalizations should I emend? How many leave, in order to allow for expression? How many variations in whether a particular term—especially a term used in a specific, technical way—is capitalized, abbreviated, or italicized can I allow?

The answer (and I am sure you are dying to know) is that this specialized vocabulary is being regularized, but all the other craziness will stand!

So now I am doing search + replace + emend (in my fancy dancy table) on all those terms. And this process, friends, is why I get paid the big bucks. It is dizzyingly boring work, and yet I must use my ultra-super powers to keep focused and not let a single instance of uncapitalized or unitalicized Daimon get past me.

It makes me think of the difference between swimming in a pool with lanes and swimming in a lake. In the pool, especially when you are swimming for a coach, and especially if you are doing a set of technique drills, everything has to be apap. Like today: we were doing a truly sadistic drill for freestyle, where you recover underwater (kind of like doggy paddle) but also where you keep your hands in fists, so that you practice the difference between having and lacking a feel for the water. (Guess which one it is when you are swimming with fists.) This drill is TIRING, and it also requires tremendous focus because you are not supposed to allow your elbows to drop.

Compare this with swimming in your average lake, where you don’t have a lane line, and no one can really see what your hands are doing, and you really cannot be certain how far you have swum. The sky is blue with little fluffy clouds and there are birds flying around. You are inside some boat-excluding buoys, so you don’t need to worry about being run over. The water temperature is perfect, and the fish are not biting.

How I long for a good lake swim! Yesterday I swam masters in the morning (3700 yards) and then swam in the lake. The person who organized the swim speculated that the distance was about 800 yards. At each buoy we waited for everyone to catch up, and enjoyed just being in the lake.

Luckily, if I can get this search + replace + emend task done by noon tomorrow, I get to swim in the lake.

Friday Random 10: Editions Edition

I know you have been wanting to ask: O Mighty Isis, what are some of the most rewarding aspects of textual editing? Well, it's your lucky day!

First, there are the stylistic conventions that a series might silently adopt. That might mean, for instance, that although you have never written anything that adopts British standards of spelling and punctuation, you must use them. Never mind that the conventions of quoting seem counterintuitive, if only because you are not sued to them. Also note that titles of books, operas, periodicals, long poems, statues, plays, paintings, and drawings are in italics, while titles of stories, poems, and songs are in quotation marks. For you, that means identifying the nature of the work for each title that appears in the text. Should a philosophical treatise go in quotes or italics? How about a fictional book?

Then you get to decide which of your author's innumerable errors (well, maybe the author's, maybe the publisher's) to emend, and which to leave, in order to retain the sense of the crazy book that was privately published, only to be fixed up in its later edition. Sometimes special terms are capitalised. Sometimes they are italicised. Sometimes they are italicised and capitalised. Sometimes they are randomly abbreviated. And which of the author's favourite specialised vocabulary should you also capitalise in your own annotations, when you know full well that this guy capitalised all over the place? You May Find Yourself Deciding That It Is Easiest To Capitalise Everything. And Also To Italicise Everything.

How about page references in annotations? For which should you use roman numerals and for which arabic? How do you distinguish a reference to volume + page number from one to book + chapter + verse? Act + scene + line? And what about classical texts that are routinely cited by paragraph numbers?

Drinking, people. That is the only cure.

This is definitely the kind of rewarding work that led me to choose this profession. And it's why I get the big bucks. Or excuse me, British Style, I should say the supreme quid.

Please note that this week's random 10 is presented in British style (insofaras I am capable), and that all ampersands have been expanded to 'and':

1. 'Exactly Like You', k. d. lang and Tony Bennett (A Wonderful World)
2. Vivaldi: 'Magnificat, et miericordia', John Alldi Choir and the English Chamber Orchestra, cond. Vittorio Negri (The Great Choral Masterpieces, disc 1)
3. Bach: 'O Sacred Head', Richard Stoltzman (Spirits)
4. 'Sad, Lonesome and Blue', Queen Ida and her Zydeco Band (Caught in the Act)
5. 'Dead Letter', Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet (The Juliet Letters)
6. 'Free Your Mind', En Vogue (Funky Divas)
7. 'Airport', dZihan and Kamien (Gran Riserva)
8. 'Smoke Rings', k. d. lang (Drag)
9. 'Maria Moita', Rosalia de Souza (Garota Moderna)
10. 'The Hero's Return', Pink Floyd (The Final Cut)

Friday Random 10: "Whistle While You Work" Edition

I was going to call this the "Early Morning Edition," but then I realized that some people could rightly point out that if that's what I think of 8:35 a.m., I don't know from early morning.

All I meant was that this is earlier in the day that I would normally endulge in the random music fest that I look forward to every week. You see, usually I'll wait until I hit a lull in my work, then come on air, announce the aforementioned lull, hit the RANDOM button my player, and list away. But not today. Today I am doing it as I sit down seriously to work. I justify this by pointing out that the PP and I are heading to Atlanta this weekend for a swimmeet, so this afternoon will be spent in more entertaining ways than punching buttons. And by adding that fixing errors in an editted text is even MORE captivating than textual editing itself.

Furious multi-tasking!

So there. It is not your job to ask any more questions, but just to accept it.

1. "Cry Me a River," Griff, Bang All Night (ooooh the back-up singers!)
2. "Hip Hop Lover," En Vogue, Funky Divas
3. "I'm Gonna Live Anyhow 'Til I Die," Miles & Bob Pratcher, Southern Journey, Vol. 3: 61 Highway Mississippi
4. "Piece for Solo Flute," Dead Can Dance, Toward the Within
5. "City of New Orleans," Willie Nelson, 16 Biggest Hits
6. "Primary," The Cure, Staring at the Sea
7. "Serenade No. 11 in E-Flat," K. 375: Adagio (Mozart), Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Wind Serenades K. 375 & 388
8. "Postlude for Piano," Gideon Lewensohn, Odradek
9. "Truth Hits Everybody," The Police, Message in a Box
10. "Without Love (There Is Nothing), Ray Charles, His Greatest Hits, Vol. 2

What the list never quite conveys is what it is like to listen to this, to live it for an hour or so. I'm feeling all cool because I love Griff's rendition of "Cry Me a Lover," when my ego is slapped in the face by "Hip Hop Lover." Then an abrupt change back to roots music with track #3. I remember that for several years I could not make a tape without Dead Can Dance (can you hear me?) but that I never picked up this flute piece. Then I get a little woozy thinking about greatest hits records through tracks 5 & 6, then as I listen to track 7, I wonder how it is that the Random 10 usually picks the slow movements. Seriously. I remember that I should listen to Gideon Lewensohn more, because that postlude knocks my socks off, in its quiet insistence. Then blammo, the truth does hit me too. For a while I consider ending it there, because it is such a fine ending, but how can you resist a quiet reminder from Ray, even if we are back to the Greatest Hits dilemma?

Have a great weekend, everybody, without too much hitting by the truth.

So you want to be a textual editor?

Think again.

Unless, that is, you fancy poring over to a text, just to make sure that the person who keyed in the version you're using as your electronic text, didn't skip a period, and I don't mean the life-generating kind.

Or unless you relish the prospect of trying to find the birth and death dates of obscure folks who make brief and unmemorable appearances in a pretty important text.

Or if you're really jazzed by the prospect of explaining why you chose the text you did as your copytext, and then explaining why it is OK to correct a printer's error.

Or maybe you're the gal who gets off on checking and quadruple-checking page numbers in the annotations you put together?

The precision is enough to make your head spin.

So forget that: after a morning's work, what could be better than

BEANS BEANS THE MUSICAL FRUIT CHILI

This makes a big batch, working on the theory that that is one fewer dinner to worry about this week. You could easily halve it.

And chili is the gods' gift to those who don't want to fuss with exactness. Feel free to improvise to your heart's content.

Start by sauteing for about 10 minutes in a mess of olive oil: 2 chopped onions, 4 chopped cloves of garlic, 2 chopped bell peppers (or the equivalent sweet peppers when they're in season, which they are here, which means I found some mighty fine red and purple ones at the campus farm sale), and however many chopped jalapenos you care to handle.

Then add 2 chopped tomatoes (if you don't have any left in your garden, you can substitute those little salad tomatoes, the only thing in the produce section of the grocery that tastes even remotely like tomato), 2 15-oz cans of diced tomatoes (I like the no-salt no-added-carp variety: add your own crap), and 1 cup water.

And the spice concoction of your choice: I like 2-3 T chili powder, 3 t ground cumin, 4 t oregano, 4 t basil, 1 t fennel seeds, 2 t salt, 1 T black pepper.

Add the heating element of your choice in the quantity that suits you. Heartily recommend sriracha sauce.

After you stir all this stuff together, bring it to a simmer and cook uncovered about 20 minutes.

Then add 4 cans of beans. Why not use a variety for added color? Maybe pinto, black, cannellini, red beans. Or whatever you like really.

Then my recipe calls for 1.5 pounds zucchini, but the students are farming baby eggplants these days, and they're so fresh and nice.

And don't forget the 2 tablespoons of dill, for the added fresh taste. It gives veggie chili a little kick that makes it taste less like chili with no meat.

After this cooks a while longer this afternoon, I'll tuck it in the fridge and then reheat it tomorrow for added flavor, all in time for an afternoon of TV-viewing.

If you're a dairy fiend (who me?) you can add sour cream to your bowl: As Horvus Callithumper would say, Not bad.