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Warning: The following post contains photos of unbearably adorable rabbits capable of blatant emotional manipulation.


Emma, Madeline, Nancy Jane, Nettie, Eloise, and Sylvia don their bonnets and bows for Easter tea.

Well, it's happening again.

My ears are growing, and my nose is twitching. That can only mean one thing.

It's carrot time!

photo mosaic from mkasahara's photostream

Wait a minute. Wait a minute! Don't you mean rabbit time?

photo by S. Das

Time for all of us soft, cute, furry bunnies to melt hearts everywhere?

photo by Madeleine

I don't know about you, but here in New Hampshire it's not even spring yet.

photo by Madeleine

Carrots? Did someone say carrots?

photo by faisalee

Bleckk! I'd rather have cake.

photo by jpockele

Here's one with marzipan veggies and everything.

photo by Cake Doctor

Oh, this one looks nice.

photo by atnaturesmercy

I know! Let's make our own Easter cake. Miss Potter will help us.

First, we'll go to her garden:

WE HAVE A LITTLE GARDEN


Garden at Beatrix Potter's Hill Top Farm, Near Sawrey, England
photo by gobucks2

We have a little garden,
A garden of our own,
And every day we water there
The seeds that we have sown.

We love our little garden,
And tend it with such care,
You will not find a faded leaf
Or blighted blossom there.

I'm sure carrots are growing there. Oh, who's that?

THE LITTLE BLACK RABBIT


photo by Martin Sweeney

Now who is this knocking
at Cottontail's door?
Tap tappit! Tap tappit!
She's heard it before?

And when she peeps out
there is nobody there,
but a present of carrots
put down on the stair.

Hark! I hear it again!
Tap, tap, tappit! Tap
tappit!
Why -- I really believe it's a
little black rabbit!

Be a bunny this year, and bake a cake for those you love. Here's my favorite Easter cake recipe. We like to serve ours on Peter Rabbit plates, and don't mind getting frosting on our whiskers!

14 CARROT CAKE
(serves a bunch of bunnies)


Beat together:

2 cups sugar
1-1/2 cups oil
4 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla

Sift together:

2 cups flour
1-2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
1-1/2 tsp. baking soda

Combine egg mixture with flour mixture.

Then, combine:

2 cups grated carrots
1 (8-1/2 oz.) can drained pineapple
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Add this to the batter.

Place a paper towel on the bottom of a  9" x 13" pan.

Add batter, then bake at 350 degrees for 45-50 minutes. Cook until slightly pulled away from the pan. Cool completely before frosting.

CREAM CHEESE FROSTING

1 1b. powdered sugar
8 T soft butter
8 oz. cream cheese
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

*Alternately, you can bake this in two 8 or 9" round cake pans.

NOTES:

This cake is almost foolproof, unless you overbake it. Otherwise, it's moist, moist, moist.

It's so delicious that hundreds of rabbits (or people dressed as rabbits), may follow you everywhere, twitching their noses and begging for more.

                       

Have a Hippity Hoppity Easter! I'll see you next week!

To read my post, "Tea with Miss Potter," click here.

*Poems are from Beatrix Potter's Nursery Rhyme Book (F. Warne & Co., 1984).
 

Philip Davis professor of English literature at Liverpool University, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, and editor of The Reader is fed up! This post originally appeared on Moreover.

It is probably because when I was a young beginner, trying to write about literature, I did not feel encouraged or appreciated. Those were days of high theory in literary studies: it was naïve to be interested in realism, in emotion, in the human content of literature as I was. “Nobody came,” says Thomas Hardy of the plight of his own young idealist, “because nobody does.” (more…)

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Philip Davis professor of English literature at Liverpool University, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, and editor of The Reader is back with another fascinating blog post. This post originally appeared on Moreover.

Come the last week in October, my wife and I will be flying to New York, to do publicity work for my biography of Bernard Malamud. Last time, we travelled in from Boston by train, which was a mistake. We came to a halt for a long hour and a half, just outside Queens. It felt just like the words of the song: if we could make it there, we could make it anywhere - but we couldn’t. (more…)

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Philip Davis professor of English literature at Liverpool University, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, and editor of The Reader is back with another fascinating blog post. This post originally appeared on Moreover.

It was 30 years ago in the bookish front-room of a house off the Chesterton Road in Cambridge, England.

It was the home of Muriel Bradbrook, a Shakespearian scholar, and I was the most junior lunch guest, literally sitting in the corner on a stool, chewing and chewing away on a piece of home-made liver-pate, with muscle. (In the end I found a flower pot, or else I might still be there, chewing and chewing.) I was among some of Cambridge’s finest golden-oldies of the literary-critical world. (more…)

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Last week we posted a series of articles by Philip Davis, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life. Today is the final piece in the installation. To see the previous posts click here. This post originally appeared on Moreover.

In the beginning dogs, it is written, were the first creatures domesticated by human beings. And when the humans saw the difference between themselves and the dogs, they knew more about what being human meant. (This is the true Gospel of Otherness.) Then the humans, being more than their dogs, began to domesticate other animals, to lie amongst them. And so in time what became pastoral agriculture was born. (more…)

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Below Philip Davis, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, combines science with literature to convince us to read out loud more often. To read his other blog posts click here. This piece first appeared in Moreover.

I have just launched a new M.A. course in bibliotherapy—by which I mean to ask, What help can reading provide for people? But I am not allowed to call the course “M.A. in bibliotherapy” because some of scientists at my university were not too keen on the word, accepted though it is in the States. I think they confused it with aromatherapy, when in the great words of the poet Gray, on the neglect of lowly human worth:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air. (more…)

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I simply cannot encourage you to read Philip Davis’s blog series on Moreover enough. I love it. Davis, the author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, also seems to be a born blogger. Below is part three of his blog series, which originally appeared in here.

I thought I would get braver as I got older but (aged 54), not so. I remember the poet Joseph Brodsky saying to me, near the end of his life, “I used to be one of the Strong”—it was across a drink in a Liverpool bar—”but not now.”
(more…)

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Yesterday we posted Philip Davis’s first post for Moreover and today we are happy to post number two. Davis, the author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life is a natural blogger so be sure to keep checking back for more of his insights. This post first appeared in Moreover.

In Joseph Hellers novel, “Good As Gold”, Gold the youthful protagonist and his hapless friend each decide to send their poems to the New Yorker magazine. If I remember rightly, Gold submits 6 poems and, a month later, learns that he has got 2 published and 4 returned as rejected. Not a bad result.

But poor talentless Levinson, as I’ll call him, is much more ambitious. He decides that he will submit 12 poems. He then has to wait twice as long as Gold. And when finally he does hear back, two months later, Levinson has got none published—and, for his pains, 16 returned. (more…)

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Philip Davis, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, is a professor of English literature at Liverpool University and editor of the Reader magazine. Davis has written the first full-length biography of Malamud, a self-made son of Jewish immigrants who went on to win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Come hear Davis speak at New York’s 92 Street Y on October 31st at 7:30 pm. This post originally appeared in Moreover.

The academic conference season is ending here in England. If you ever have the misfortune to find yourself in such a setting, you only need one word to get by. The word is “Otherness”, and it has been in tarnished vogue for some time now. If you are feeling really out of place, then try saying Alterity as well. Means the same, sounds even better. You sit in a conference room and you hear so many of these notional terms replacing the reality they purport to describe. (more…)

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