Barking Kitten

Update (Still Alive)

2011-01-13T22:44:00.000-08:00

Hockeyman here - Barking Kitten, aka Diane Leach, can be found primarily at Popmatters. Her fiction is also available for download or order here.

Be sure to check out Popmatters main page also - lotsa neat stuff there.

Hiatus....

2007-08-18T14:24:00.000-07:00

After much agonizing, I have decided to take a hiatus from blogging. Not that I don't love it. I do. But like most bloggers, I have a necessary day job that leaves little time for writing. And I want to give fiction one more shot before declaring myself a failed novelist.

Thank you for reading. With all luck, I'll be back soon.

BK

Fear of dessert

2007-08-12T09:19:00.000-07:00

In "Waiting for Dessert," Laurie Colwin writes: "It often seems that the world divides (evenly or unevenly) into those who are waiting for dessert and those who have to produce it." (119)

To which I would add: and those able to produce it.

Nigella, Tamasin, Julia, and Alice aside, few are the lay cooks able to move from pie to pork chop with equal dexterity. Many of the cooks I know shun dessert preparation; there's all that measuring and weighing and careful stirring lest the egg white collapse or the cream overbeat. Then the confection goes into the oven, and you, the baker, may only peer through inadequate stove window, hoping for the best. No opening the oven to eyeball your creation--maintaining temperature is critical in baking--no quick taste to determine salt level. No checking for doneness: real bakers use oven timers. As for the toothpick test, I can tell you that a steaming hot cake, moments from the oven, will produce a clean tester. Cool that same cake, and an hour later you might end up with something akin to Play-Doh.

This has happened to me many, many times. Either my oven is hopelessly off or I just can't get the hang of cakes. Further, baking requires a great deal of equipment: pans of specific sizes and/or shapes, scales, a flour sifter. Serious bakers invest in cooling racks and those little turntables that permit smooth frosting action. Oh, and then there's pastry bags and tips, cookie cutters, and molds. Marble slabs for pastry, offset spatulas, mixers. A kitchen large enough to hold all this gear is helpful.
---

I can bake quick breads, muffins, some cookies, and really good brownies. But cakes, pies, confections, or anything calling for egg whites are out. Egg whites scare me.

Fortunately, I am married to a man who is largely indifferent to sweets. Hockeyman likes pies and doughnuts, but not on a regular basis. I doubt I will ever muster the courage to prepare a pie crust, and I take a firm stand against deep frying anything in my kitchen. Combine boiling oil with Barking Kitten and your only result will be a Darwin award.
---

I know two people able to move from mixer to oven with equal skill. Both are trained pastry chefs whose interests shifted toward the savory. More personally, my grandmother, a fantastic cook (at her funeral, all people were able to talk about was her food), was a talented baker who once prepared a yeasted coffee cake dough before taking a nap. When she woke, the dough had overflowed the bowl and was making its way down the hall. By the time I came along, butterhorns and coffeecakes had given way to poppy seed cookies and a chocolate cake with a confectioner's sugar glaze. I have no idea how she made that cake or what went into it, apart from lots of chocolate. One snowy Saturday afternoon when I was seven, we went to visit my grandparents. My grandmother had baked us the cake (that's what we called it: "the cake") to take home. Carefully snugged into wax paper and tinfoil, it had an alluring heft.

"Don't fall on the ice," My grandmother warned.

I promised I would not, made it down the steps and nearly to the car before going flying. In an act of preservation, I stuck cake out in front of me. It landed in the snow. So did I. I looked up to the second floor window, hoping against hope my gaffe had gone uneen. But there in the window stood my grandmother.

The cake was in pieces. This did not stop my family from scarfing it as usual.

---

I had a friend in college who was an amazingly talented cook. I learned a lot from Cecilia (not her real name): how to make risotto, the uses of lemons and garlic, the absolute need for olive oil, which I first tasted in her home. She lent me Mollie Katzen's The Enchanted Broccoli Forest and shared her subscription to Gourmet. She once decided to make some sandwiches that appeared on the magazine's cover. Without benefit of a food stylist, photo studio, or perfect ingredients, she made the recipe look exactly like the cover shot. I begged her to open a restaurant, offering my services as kitchen slave. "We'll make a fortune!" I cried.

But Cecilia only shrugged. She wanted to get married and have babies. In short order, she did.

I hope she doesn't bake her babies their birthday cakes, for wonderful as her pasta en brodo was, her desserts were inedible. Cecilia loved salty desserts, and always increased the salt in dessert recipes. The bottoms of her chocolate-chip cookes glistened with salt crystals; I remember a fruit pie so awful that I brought it to my campus job, reasoning that starving students would eat anything. They wouldn't.

Granted, Cecilia is an extreme example. I do not oversalt my cookies and have the good sense not to bake cakes. But once in a while, I attempt dessert.

---

A few weeks ago we invited friends to dinner. They were entrusted with dessert. A tasty chocolate mousse was presented. It was dense, incredibly rich, and a bit chalky. My friend had used the wrong kind of chocolate--I forget which--dark when it was supposed to be milk, I think. I felt the textural issue was minor: the mousses tasted deeply and compellingly of chocolate, which goes a long way in my book.

----

As Laurie Colwin once said about dinner parties, when you invite people over, they invite you back, and pretty soon what you have is called social life. So it was these friends invited us to dinner last night. This time I was the bringer of dessert. I drove to Andronico's and bought a lovely mixed berry pie. I carried it upstairs, in a hurry, as usual, carrying too much, as usual, and my inner-seven-year old emerged. There being no ice in my kitchen, I did not fall, but the pie did.

After some choice words I inspected the damage. The packaging was intact; a bit of the pie's crimped edge leaked a pretty purple juice, proof, I reasoned, that this was a berry pie. I tucked it into the fridge. This was Wednesday. On Thursday, one of my neighbors appeared with two pints of strawberries. She was going on vacation. Would I please take them?

I cleaned the berries, froze them, then leafed through a few cookbooks. I landed on Mollie Katzen's fresh Strawberry Mousse, from Enchanted. I thought this might be nice to bring with the slightly dented pie.

Provided you have a mixer, a food processor, and time, strawberry mousse is easy to make. Somehow, though, I decided to begin preparations at five p.m. yesterday. Dinner was at seven. What was I thinking? I don't know. I wasn't thinking. Prep--cooking down the berries, stirring together cornstarch, sugar, and fresh lemon juice, combining this with the berries--was simple. So is chilling, when you have four hours. One is then supposed to fold the berry mix into the whipped cream and serve.

Whipped cream is a fragile substance akin to a soufflé: both are all about air. Left to its own devices, whipped cream tends to weep, demanding renewed whisking. It does not take well to being folded with a warmish fruit mixture, then being put into a car for a drive. In fact, both actions cause air loss. Never mind. I spooned the "mousse" into a chilled bowl, wrapped it in ice packs, and stuffed it into a bag.

--

The result was very pink and overly sweet, with a consistency resembling yogurt. Hockeyman and our friends said it tasted fine; they spooned it over the pie, which even I couldn't destroy, and lapped it all up. We agreed that a true mousse is somewhere between the chalky chocolate and strawberry soup. I leave it to the experts.

--

Some desserts even I can make:

Berry Clafouti
This recipe comes from a cooking class I took years ago. The teacher did not say where the recipe came from.

1/2 cup milk (low fat, part skim, or full are all fine)
1/2 cup part skim ricotta cheese (I use full fat)
2 large eggs
1/2 cup sugar (I use a scant 1/2 cup to good effect; consider the sweetness of your berries)
1/2 cup flour
1 tsp vanilla extract (my vanilla is a bean soaking in a bottle of brandy, and I'm generous with my teaspoon)
2 cups or approximately 12 ounces of berries, fresh or frozen.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Combine milk, ricotta, eggs, sugar, flour, and vanilla. The recipe calls for a mixer, but you can do this easily with a whisk.
Mix or whisk until you have a smooth batter.

Using an ovenproof 8-10 inch pie dish, spread the berries evenly over the bottom. Pour the batter over.

Bake about thirty minutes. The clafoutis will appear puffed and golden brown.

Note: having no pie plate, I use a pyrex baking dish with great results.

Chocolate Raspberry Bars
From Gourmet Magazine.

6 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped
12 tablespoons (1 and a half sticks) unsalted butter
1/2 cup seedless raspberry jam
4 eggs
2 cups sugar (I use a scant two cups)
1 and 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup all purpose flour

Preheat the oven to 350 dgrees.
Line a 13x9 inch baking pan with foil. Butter the foil.

Combine chocolate, butter, and jam in a medium saucepan. Stir contantly over low heat until mixture is smooth. Remove from heat.

Whisk eggs in a large bowl until foamy. Add sugar, vanilla, and salt. Whisk to incorporate. Stir in chocolate mixture. Add flour, mixing just to incorporate. Don't overmix.

Spread the batter in pan. Bake thirty minutes, until springy to touch. Tester will not come out clean.

Note: again, I use a Pyrex baking dish. It's 13x9 inches and does the job beautifully.

This recipe comes with a topping calling for whipping cream, raspberries, butter, and chocolate. The brownies themselves are rich and velvety; the jam adds a subtle fruit note and a unctuous texture. I think the topping would push this dessert into the inedibly rich zone.

Alice Waters' Lemon Clove Cookies
From The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook.

1/2 pound unsalted butter
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
1 tablespoon lemon zest
pinch salt
2 and 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves, or to taste (I've gone up to 1/2 tsp, but be careful--clove can overwhelm the lemon)

Cream the butter and sugar in a mixer at medium speed. Add vanilla, egg, and lemon zest. Change to low speed, gradually adding the salt, flour, and cloves.

The dough will be soft. Divide it into two pieces, rolling each into a cylinder. Wrap cylinders in plastic wrap, then foil. Chill 2-12 hours.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Remove wrapping from dough. Slice into 1/4 inch thick rounds. Place them on a cookie sheet and bake 8-10 minutes.

Notes: If Meyer lemons are available in your area, use them.
I freeze the dough, making it easier to work with. I also line the baking sheet with baking parchment.

These cookies freeze well if you actually have any left over.

Sources:

Laurie Colwin: More Home Cooking: "Waiting for Dessert." New York, Harper Perennial, 1995. 119.

Alice Waters: The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook. New York: Random House, 1982. 79.

We are only interested in the upheavals

2007-08-09T19:35:00.000-07:00

The above quote belongs to writer Irène Némirovsky. In its entirety:

"Contrary to what is believed, what is general passes, the whole remains, collective destiny is shorter than the destiny of the simple individual (that's not exactly right. It's a different timescale: we are only interested in the upheavals; the upheavals, either they kill us, or we last longer than them)." (Suite Française, 355)

As we know, the upheavals killed Némirovsky, her husband, and numerous family members; this comes to English readers courtesy of Suite Française, a book translated from the French in 2006. The remarkable story of the manuscript, what it documents, and its singular quality shot it to fame, leading to translations of other works: Fire in the Blood will appear next month, while David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, and The Courilof Affair will be published in January 2008. These novels, with their caricatures of Jews, are certain to cause to a stir.

Amid all the Némirovsky hoopla, Professor Jonathan Weiss has penned a small, brief critical biography. At 173 pages, Irène Némirovksy: her life and works is less an examination of the individual life than of her struggle to reconcile her Jewishness with an acquired French Catholic identity. To this end, Weiss, a Professor of French at Colby College, examined Némirovsky's works carefully, arriving at some forgiving conclusions.

Irène Némirovsky was born to wealthy Russian Jewish parents. Her mother, Fanny, was a beauty interested in jewels and young lovers; when her orphaned granddaughters appeared on her doorstep after the war, she slammed the door in their faces. Léon Némirovsky was a banker. Their only child was raised with governesses, a private education, and seaside vacations. French was spoken in the home; when the Revolution forced them to flee to Paris, Irène was overjoyed, and rapidly threw herself into wealthy French social life, a milieu that largely excluded Jews. The Némirovsky family was not religious; indeed, they shunned their brethren. Despite this, Némirovsky married a Russian Jew, banker Michel Epstein. At age 26, Némirovsky published David Golder, a sensation adapted both to screen and stage. The novel presents a scathing view of Jewish businessmen.

Némirovsky went on to publish numerous novels and short stories in this vein, most, remarkably, appearing in serial form in a variety of politically right publications boasting anti-semitic views. She counted amongst her friends Horace de Carbuccia, Jacques Chardonne, and Paul Morand, powerful writers who openly hated Jews. Her work appeared in their newspapers and anthologies; they paid her handsomely. As a modern-day reader, it is difficult to grasp Némirovsky's thinking: Weiss feels she struggled with her identity as a Jew, her fervent wish to be "French," with its pre-war implications of motherhood, conjugal fidelity, and nationalist feeling, and finally arrived at a sort of acceptance. That is, her earlier works, with their rapacious, hook-nosed characters, give way to broader thinking. All races are capable of greed and generousity, while the very best of us are less interested in acquisition than we are in love.

Nemirovsky never attempted to hide her Jewishness. As the Vichy government made it increasingly impossible to survive, Nemirovksy and her family left Paris for the village of Issey-L'Évêque, where Nemirovsky wrote part of Suite Française, made sketches for the rest of it, and wrote publisher André Sabatier:

"Reading is the only distraction possible. I have written a lot lately. I suppose they will be posthumous works, but at least they make the time pass." (Weiss, 153-4)

Before writing the above quote, Némirovsky and her husband seemed unaware of the gravity of their situation. They were certain their ties to right-wing aristocrats would save them: when Irène was arrested, Michel wrote numerous letters to various French and German officals, including the German ambassador to Paris. Incredibly, these letters survive, and are reprinted in Suite Française, a pathetic collection worsened by our realization that Michel continued pleading for his wife's freedom well after her death in Auschwitz. Evidently it never occurred to either of them that they might attempt hiding or even leaving the country. Instead they applied--in vain--to become French citizens and even converted to Catholicism. From our vantage point, they were shockingly naive. But Weiss takes pains to note that few people realized that the "work camps" were actually death camps and that reports of well-fed inmates who were "treated properly" were propaganda.

----

Weiss writes "Irène Némirovsky's tragic end has obscured any real criticism of her work, as it has masked any real analysis of her attitude towards Jews." (169) While I cannot help but think Weiss saw a critical publication opportunity in writing about Némirovsky's life and work, his assertions are indisputable and ultimately disappointing. For Suite Française is a deeply moving work, managing to capture the complexity of lives caught up in hideous actions seemingly beyond individual recourse. It is difficult to separate Némirovsky's experience while writing the text from the book itself; nor is it possible to read the book without considering its remarkable survival, unread in a suitcase for decades, lugged about by Némirovsky's daughters, who could not bring themselves to read it for years afterward.

Weiss feels Némirovsky's views changed, that she became more accepting of her Jewishness as a part of herself, and thus moved away from caricature as a topic. This is an appealing conclusion that Weiss argues adeptly, one we would all like to accept. Whether we will be able to hold on to this view after her other books appear in English is another matter. Perhaps, though, it is best to forgive Némirovsky, acting as she was in a an era long past. Yet we are simultaneously well advised to hold her confusion over religion, self, identity, and country in mind. Our current circumstances, after all, while different, are sadly analogous.

Irène Némirovsky: Suite Française. Translated by Sandra Smith. New York: Knopf. 2006.

Jonathan Weiss: Irène Némirovsky: her life and works. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2007.

Middle-aged tailgating

2007-08-04T15:18:00.000-07:00

Last night Hockeyman and I went to see Rush at the Concord Pavillion, now known as the Sleep Train Pavillion.

It never fails to amaze me how dramatically the demographic changes simply driving a few miles out. From our place to the freeway, through the Caldecott Tunnel into the East Bay hinterlands, and lo, suddenly everyone was driving a pickup truck. Bright red acrylic nails flashed on steering wheels; large, ungainly diamond rings caught the fading summer sunlight. Those not in pickups or SUVs were astride Harleys. Never Hondas or Yamahas. Harleys. Oh, yeah, and we were all whiter than lilies.

Having realized that we lacked both the inclination and digestion to tolerate the burnt offerings passing as stadium food, we packed a cooler. Thus our hero and heroine tailgated, middle-aged style. That is, our party involved capers instead of chips, a discreet flask of scotch in lieu of Bud. We ate and sweltered and watched our fellow attendees march past us into the venue. They did not make cheering dining scenery. Then again, they weren't there to entertain us, but to be entertained.

So we munched our ciabattas with cheddar and proscuitto, swilled down the Johnnie W, and ate our potato salad, potatoes courtesy of Full Belly Farm. The very act of eating artisanal, locavore foods at a rock concert made us feel old, staid, and slightly silly. We were, however, no sillier than the braless ladies poured into halter tops or the gentlemen whose foreheads had long eclipsed their skulls, leaving long, straggling ponytails behind.

As for the band, they were great, very gracious and politely Canadian and all that. None of them looked young, the crowd didn't look young (Save for a few kids. How's that for hard rock? People brought their kids!), which led me to the undeniable conclusion that H-man and I must not be looking so youthful ourselves.

An Over-the-Hill Picnic for two, with attendant expensive foods kids don't care about:

(Amounts dependent on appetite and weight concerns due to slowing metabolism)

1. The sandwiches

One loaf country bread or 2 smaller rolls

Niman Ranch Ham

Proscuitto, preferably Parma

Sharp cheese of your choice

Butter

Mustard

Olive Oil

Slice the bread lengthwise, leaving one side intact. Hollow out the loaf by pulling some of the bread out.

Spread butter and mustard on the bottom half of the bread.

Layer in the cheese, then ham, then the prosciutto.

Close the sandwhich and gently press down, channeling your inner panini maker.

Pour a little olive oil over the bread, then wrap tightly in foil.

Note: this sandwich has endless variations--turkey, vegetables like lettuce, tomato, onions, sprouts, ect, ect. You can add mayonnaise or get really fancy (and middle-aged) with chutney. This is purely a matter of taste, which age affords.

2. The Potato Salad

This recipe is adapted from the San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook'sInsalata di Patate con le Capperi e Olive Neri, created by Carlo Middione.

One pound French fingerling potatoes from the fancy farm stand of your choice.

One half cup boiling water from the potatoes

3-4 garlic cloves, chopped

One quarter cup white wine vinegar

Scant one third cup Bariani Olive oil. If you can't get Bariani, substitute with the expensive artisanal oil of your choice.

Capers (I used about two teaspoons)

Olives, sliced. (I used around a tablespoon)

If the potatoes are organic there's no need to peel them. Slice into eatable pieces and boil until tender in salted water.

Meanwhile, blend the garlic, white wine vinegar, olive oil, capers, and olives in a heat-proof bowl.

When the potatoes are done, drain them, remembering to reserve the half cup water. Add the potatoes and water to the bowl. Stir gently to combine. It will look very watery. Don't worry. Allow it to sit for at least thirty minutes: as Fergus Henderson would say, it will find itself. Serve at room (or picnic, or tailgate) temperature.

3. Booze

Now that you're middle-aged and responsible, you would never, ever dream of drinking and driving. Instead, you have a flask. Fill this with the liquor of your choice, remembering all the while that you are now officially middle-aged. Your booze of choice should reflect this dismaying fact. Think Johnnie Walker, Stoli, even Ketel One. If you are a hedge fund manager really slumming it, fill your flask with Glenmorangie.

Pack your meal into a cooler. It's damned hot in Concord, and the last thing you want is a dose of food poisoning.

4. Earplugs

No, these are not for dessert. Haven't you done enough damage to your hearing with loud music?

Drive to the show, observing the speed limit. Park. Eat. Drink. Congratulate yourself on avoiding the horrors of stadium garlic fries.

5. Enjoy the show.

Final note: if the above doesn't appeal, you can always try what the guy in front of us did. Let's call him...Psychotic. Early in the show Psychotic produced two boxes of pork-flavored ramen noodes. He climbed over us and vanished, returning with two plastic beer cups filled with water. His buddy protested. Didn't the water need to be hot?

Nah, it'll work. You just gotta give it half an hour.

Psychotic dumped the noodles into the cups. Then, using his palm as a lid, he shook each vigorously and placed them on the concrete. Half an hour later, he handed one to his friend and slurped down the other.

Middle age is what you make of it.

Thursday Friday Cat Blogging

2007-08-02T19:52:00.000-07:00

[We're early this week. Boshko was irrepressible (as you can see). - HM]

Omnivorous, Fat, n' Friendly

2007-08-02T17:11:00.000-07:00

Like all good American girls, I am known to fret about my weight.

No, let me be honest: at times I drive gentle, kindly Hockeyman insane with my weight-related wails.

Skinny Bitch may well be the first (alas, not the last) chick-lit diet book. In coarse, it's-just-us-girls language, we gals are warned off soda, coffee, fats, refined sugars, dairy, meat, and eggs.

In other words, this is a vegan diet book sheathed in swearing and girl talk.

Authors Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, Los Angeles denizens, are, respectively, an ex-model booker and an ex-model. They are thus eminently qualified to weigh in on food fads, extreme dieting, and the anorexic female ideal. We are supposed to be reassured by "Amy Joy Lanou, senior nutrition scientist for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an advocacy and research group that promotes a diet free of animal products...Ms. Lanou said she made a few suggestions about citations and nuance in their claims."

Thank goodness. I just want to be sure skinny bitchdom is healthy before embarking on my end-of-summer regime.

Even more importantly, Posh Spice, aka Mrs. Beckham, was photographed carrying the book in a Los Angeles boutique. In said photo, Ms. Posh, looking all of eighty pounds, holds the book rather like a handbag. But she isn't reading it:

"Whether Ms. Beckham actually read “Skinny Bitch” is unclear; her agent and her publicist did not return calls or e-mail messages seeking comment. In a 2005 interview with the Spanish magazine Chic, she admitted to having never read a book in her life."

Oh. Well, maybe I should check the Atkins diet out instead.

--

I think it's safe to say all but the most uneducated Americans--whose economic problems are arguably more worrisome than their diets--are pretty much up on nutrition basics. Like, fast food is really bad, soda ain't great, and, if you are at all able, you might check out the organic aisle. For those so inclined, moderation in all things is also a helpful consideration in contemplating your next mouthful.

Further, veganism, vegetarianism, and meat-eating are all choices. Veganism, with its heavy dependence on soy products for protein, may not offer the most balanced diet. If you are in an ecomomic bracket where you're able to worry about your weight, a free-range, organic egg is a pretty good deal: high in healthy fats, low in calories (a whopping seventy), cheaper than a chunk of grass-fed cow. Vegetarianism, in its less extreme forms, at least allows this much--along with butter and cheese--sources of fats necessary for human function. Otherwise you are left to combine legumes, seeds, nuts, avocados, and soy-based products with your fruits and veggies and hope for the best.

You don't have to take my untrained word for it. Former vegetarian Jessica Prentice makes an informed argument for humanely-raised animal foods in Full Moon Feast. Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is also an excellent resource with helpful sidebars from Kingsolver's husband, Steven Hopp. Mr. Hopp, regrettably, is not an ex-model, ex-model booker, or former momentary top forty sensation. He is a biologist.
----

But forget a moment about getting a "sweet ass." Put aside your all-consuming desire to resemble a woman who publicly admits she has never read a book.

Stand up.

Now look down. Admire what a fine job your fat, varicose-veined (ahem...) legs are doing holding you up. God, isn't that amazing?

Sit back down. Grab your mouse and scroll down a bit. Your hand did exactly what you asked it to! Whoa!

And your eyes! Yeah, they're imperfect. You need contact lenses, or, like me, trifocals. Still, you're reading my screed. I mean, here were are. We aren't starving in Darfur, or getting shot at in Iraq, or losing our young limbs in a dirty oil war. We aren't--poor souls--at the bottom in of Mississippi River. We're busy worrying about the size of our asses, a body part unseen by us without dint of two mirrors and much neck craning.

We're more fortunate than we realize.

Our bodies, for the most part, are not what we'd like them to be. The media has seen to that nicely. But with $14.99 in hand, you have a choice. You can buy Skinny Bitch, on sale at your nearest Walmart (If you buy in Mexico, remember to tip the bagger on your way out), or you can get yourself a nice hunk of beef. Or an organic chicken. Or some really gorgeous produce, with a runny French cheese for dessert. Now make yourself a lovely dinner, and as you saw through your steak, feel sorry for those poor skinny bitches, whose I.Q.'s are decreasing due to malnutrition.

Annie Dillard: The Maytrees

2007-08-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

Reviewed by Barking Kitten in January Magazine

Nicole Mones' The Last Chinese Chef

2007-07-31T17:45:00.000-07:00

Nicole Mones has written the same book three times. Her first, Lost in Translation, features an American English/Chinese interpreter who accompanies a Chinese archaeology group on an expedition, falls in love with a Chinese man, and must come to terms with her racist father. The second, A Cup of Light, features a hard-of-hearing American porcelain expert with who falls in love with an American living in China. Her father is absent. In the The Last Chinese Chef, our heroine is food writer Maggie McElroy, one year widowed, on a trip to China to resolve a paternity suit against her late husband, Matt. Though raised by a single mother, Maggie doesn't have parental issues. Sam Liang, the love interest, gets those.

(Warning: plot spoilers ahead!)

Maggie has lived in suspended animation since Matt's abrupt death on a San Francisco streetcorner. Now, flying from California to China to resolve the claim against his estate, she must function. Sarah, her editor at Table magazine, has given her an assignment to write about rising chef Sam Liang.

It is here that the problems begin. Maggie is forty (as Mones ages, so do her leading ladies), Sam, we are told, is older. He is the product of an Ohio Jewish mother and a Chinese refugee father, Liang Yeh. Yeh is the son of Liang We, the last Chinese chef, a man famed for cooking in the Imperial Chinese style and penning the great The Last Chinese Chef.

Liang Yeh, fleeing Communism, refuses to cook in the United States. Nor does he want Sam to. Sam attends college and teaches school for a time, eventually deciding, against Yeh's wishes, to live in China and learn classical cooking. To this end, he seeks out his father's great friends, Tan, Jiang, and Xie, now old men who happily take on the task of training the Last Chinese Chef's grandson.

Sam is an immensely talented cook who, we are told, can prepare chicken soup and brisket. Little else is said about a Jewish woman marrying a Chinese national, doubtless an unusual alliance in the Midwest during the sixties. It is also difficult to accept Maggie's profession; a food writer who travels the byways of America searching out regional specialties, she doesn't like Chinese food. Nor does she realize that American Chinese food and the food served in China might differ. Reading a menu on her first dinner outing in China:

"...what he (the man who wrote the menu's introduction) was describing certainly didn't sound like the food she knew from home...Could the food in China be truly exceptional? Well then, she would eat; she would keep an open mind." (28)

Always a good idea for a food writer, especially one this limited. Later Maggie announces to Sam "I never cook." (128) She doesn't: she can't. Nor does she evince any interest in doing so. Of all the food writers I've read, the only ones who never refer to cooking themselves are Jane and Michael Stern, who, I am certain, have the good sense to realize that what often passes for Chinese food here certainly isn't what Chinese nationals tuck into come dinnertime. The final nail in the career coffin:

"Food writers weren't supposed to be fat." (152)

According to whom? Jeffrey Steingarten, Jane Stern, and John Thorne are far from svelte. All are wonderful food writers.

But back to our story.

Magge and Sam meet and hit it off; depsite his misgivings, he agrees to allow Maggie into the kitchen, where he gently questions her and feeds her a "healing" meal for her grief, a poached chicken that, while delicious, vaguely offends Maggie. She does't want food therapy.

Sam, meanwhile, learns he is a contestant in a major food competition, a cultural festival intended to coincide with the Olympics in Beijing. To this end, he must prepare a banquet for twelve, which will be rigorously judged à la Iron Chef. If Sam wins, he'll earn a spot on a ten-man cooking team. If not, he'll still have the publicity from Maggie's article.

--

Prior to writing, Mones ran a textile importing business from China. She is fluent in Mandarin and China's labrynthine culture. She and her husband, lawyer Paul Mones, are foodies with an extraordinary grasp on Chinese cuisine and history. Her sumptuous descriptions of dishes and their attendant meanings are the true reason to read this novel. When writing about food, Mones shines:

"She turned to the second platter, which held lotus root and crisp, strong-tasting yellow celery and sausage...Then the beggar's chicken...A magnificently herbed chicken aroma rushed into the air...it was moist and dense with profound flavor...first marinated, then spiked with bits of aromatic vegetable and salt-cured ham..." (129)

"But best of all was the second soup...The live fish had been transformed into pale, fluffy fish balls, light and airy and ultra-fresh. These floated in the perfectly intense fish broth with shrimp, clouds of tofu, and tangy shreds of mustard green." (153)

Her explanations of Chinese culinary history are illuminating to those of us accustomed to Betty Crocker. The Chinese meal is a complex interplay of texture, aroma, fat, literary allusions, political implication, and wordless communication between diner and chef. Much of this is worked into The Last Chinese Chef, which acts a book within the book.

--

Unfortunately, Mones has opted to hang Chinese culinary history on an increasingly unrealistic plot. When Maggie meets Shuying, Matt's potential daughter, she is almost loving. Shuying, if Matt's child, should be provided for. When Maggie meets Shuying's elusive mother, Gao Lan, her reasonable anger and resentment (Gao Lan admits the suit is a sham) quickly shift into an earnest wish to help no matter what.

Meanwhile, Sam's Uncle Wang Xie lies dying in Hangzhou. Improbably, Sam invites Maggie to join him in the Wang household. Maggie speaks no Chinese and is not even Sam's friend, yet Xie, his wife, and four adult children welcome her warmly. While nice for story purposes, what family dealing with a mortally ill patriarch would wish for a stranger--a person unable even to speak their language--in their home? Never mind. Propped in a chair, Xie harangues Sam into a practice run for the competition. In one day, without help, Sam manages to cook and serve the family a twelve-course menu.

Xie dies on banquet night. Putting grief aside, Sam prepares the festive meal in his empty restaurant (his backer has inexplicably bailed out) with only Jiang and Tan as his assistants. Maggie is invited into the kitchen to watch. Sam chats away with her, taking long breaks to explain various morsels and bits of food culture. Tan, meanwhile, gets drunk. Neither the talkative, relaxed chef nor his elderly, drunken assistants match any real sense of what goes on in a restaurant kitchen, particularly one where a competition meal is being prepared. Tan, sloshed, destoys the signature dish. No matter: Sam's father Yeh appears, and though he hasn't touched a knife in forty years, he saves the day with several complex dishes that keep the judges happy.

---

The plot cries for pruning. There is the crumpled newspaper photo of Matt Maggie carries everywhere--a photo snapped moments after Matt was killed by a car. An unknown woman kneels beside him. Might it be Gao Lan? Well, no. Gao Lan has never been outside China. And what of the shadowy, unnamed man who is Shuying's real father? Is it Carey, Matt's carousing colleague? Nope: Carey may be a cad, but he wouldn't sleep with Gao Lan, and he wants to help his friend's widow before vanishing once more into the alluring Beijing night.

Oh, Great editors of yore, whither goest ye?

"Too little (information about Matt's affair) would disrespect her." (69)

(Is this a rap video or a novel?)

"It (cooking) did what art did, refracted civilization." (123)

"His head made a tick in response." (259)

Worst of all:

"Of course he had pain and remorse in his suitcase." (261)

Anybody else remember Barbara De Angelis' horribly silly infomerical about relationships? The part where she tries to "hide" a luggage cart loaded with suitcases? Maybe one belongs to Sam.

Psychobabble will wreck litertaure faster than an armed Terre Hautian blogging from a grimy basement.

----

Mones' deep knowledge is evident in her well-researched novels and fine journalism for Gourmet. It doesn't require a fictional veneer. There's a terrific non-fiction book in there somewhere--maybe more than one. But first the Maggies and Sams must be put out with the compost.

Nicole Mones: The Last Chinese Chef. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 2007.

Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury

2007-07-24T20:07:00.000-07:00

In this article from the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Noah Feldman laments his exclusion from the Modern Orthodox Jewish fold. Specifically, exclusion from his Yeshiva's (Jewish day school) alumni events and letters. The school's reason, always unspoken, is Feldman's Korean-American wife. A shiksa: a non-Jewish girl. Hence his being cut, along with his wife, from the tenth anniversary reunion photograph. Hence the school's refusal to acknowledge the births of his children--a son and a daughter, luck any Jew would call a mitzvah--in the annual newsletter's Mazal Tov (congratulations!) section.

Feldman takes these slights as indications of Modern Jewry's struggle to exist in an increasingly modern, irreligious society. He is amazingly forgiving, continuing to send the Yeshiva lively updates from his life. The Yeshiva continues ignoring him.

Feldman writes:

"Despite my intimate understanding of the mind-set that requires such careful attention to who is in and who is out, I am still somehow taken by surprise each time I am confronted with my old school’s inability to treat me like any other graduate. I have tried in my own imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me, expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in the public sphere. As a result, I have not felt myself to have rejected my upbringing, even when some others imagine me to have done so by virtue of my marriage.... In the sense of shared history and formation, I remain of the community even while no longer fully in the community."

Feldman, a law professor at Harvard, is measured in his arguments. He understands his classmates and teachers, their difficulty in reconciling faith with modern life:

"The reason for the resistance to such marriages derives from Jewish law but also from the challenge of defining the borders of the modern Orthodox community in the liberal modern state...It is defined not so much by what people believe or say they believe (it is much safer not to ask) as by what they do." (Italics mine.)

----

It is this final sentence--not what people believe, or say they believe, as by what they do--that enrages me. Feldman is a learned man who has made his decisions; he neither asks for nor needs pity. But why does he continue communicating with the Yeshiva? And what about his wife and children? How do they feel?

Not what they say, but what they do.

Feldman's story recalls the insular Jews of my childhood, people less interested in being frum (holy, clean) than being more frum than their neighbors. The families who walked to shul on Saturday morning, the man striding ahead while his wife, a step behind, shepherded numerous children. Orthodox Jews are Biblically encouraged to procreate. Now, with the Jewish birthrate in steep decline, so are the rest of us. Recently I saw an advertisement in an alternative newspaper, placed by a San Francisco temple seeking new members. Those of us with non-Jewish spouses were especially invited to attend, as were Gays and Lesbians.

On one level it's nice. Some Jews are like Feldman: they've married out, but still feel deeply rooted in Judaism. They want to attend services. As for the LGBT community, it's high time all doors opened to them.

I didn't go.

---

My first boyfriend was Jewish. In fact, like Feldman, he hailed from a New York Yeshiva. He was scandalized by my secular upbringing, my inability to speak Hebrew, my bluejeans. This while literally trying to get into those bluejeans and pulling a baseball cap over his yarmulke at MacDonald's.

Was he a bad guy? No. He was young, and uncertain about where Orthodox Jewry fit into his life. But he was certain of one thing: marrying me.

"I'm not marrying you," I'd object. "You're too religious. I don't want to wear a babushka and have ten kids. No."

"You'll change your mind."

"I won't." I said. Instead I went home and informed my mother I wasn't marrying a Jewish guy. "I'm telling you now," I said, "so you have time to get used to the idea."

I married a non-practicing Catholic. My parents, to their credit, were sanguine. But my mother's old friends from home remain scandalized. Fifteen years later, they are still waiting for my marriage to crumble.

---

There were numerous synagogues in my childhood community, from the ardently religious to the "see and be seen by the other machers." Membership cost varying amounts; the more you spent, the higher your social standing.

Synagogues are not like churches. You cannot just walk in. High Holiday services (Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashonah), are like rock concerts, requiring tickets. Like rock concerts, High Holidays sell out. Only there are no synagogue scalpers. No tix, no High Holiday worship for you.

---

I work with a professor who considers himself observant. He keeps a kosher kitchen; he attends synagogue (sometimes). He once asked how I, being "so Jewish" (and I am, I look and sound like a Woody Allen extra), could "stand" being married to a non-Jew. He is not married, but has a longtime girlfriend, who is not Jewish. He wants her to convert. That way he can marry her and have children. Except...except Judaism is matrilineal. Is a child by a convert Jewish? There are two answers to this question. The first is it depends on who you ask. The second is no, with a caveat. Suppose the girlfriend converts, marries the prof, and has children. Every time she enters shul, somebody will whisper "she converted." Translation: shiksa in our midst.

We Jews aren't like Christians. We don't want you to join the fold.

---

I realize how terribly bitter I sound. This after many years of watching my fellow Jews behave badly, and sometimes behaving badly myself. Growing up when and where I did, I divided the world into three groups: Jews (utterly recognizable), Goyim (non-Jewish, suspect), and Blacks (like Jews in many ways, marginalized, surviving by their wits, therefore less suspect). This worldview served me well until I arrived in California, where geography does not divide along religious lines, interracial marriages (at least in Los Angeles and the Bay Area) are the norm, and comparatively few people are observant Jews. Having never encountered Indians, Mexicans, Chinese, Hmong, Vietnamese, Native Americans, or Ethiopians, I lacked available stereotypes. My worldview was turned on its head. With great shame I realized I was nastily cavalier--and often racist-- in my assessments of people. It took a long time to change my thinking.

---

During my mid-thirties I experienced fleeting moments of longing: I wanted to believe. In God, or benign spirits, or something "beyond." But logic prevailed. I can no more believe in God, spirits, or an afterlife than I can believe I will grow wings and fly. Oh, if I could! I could join something! A church, a synagogue, a collection of hippie Universalist Unitarians. I would have, if not explanations, a sort of serenity. Logic is lonely.

---

I could go on ad nauseum about hypocritical Jews I've known. They draw their lines in the sand, some making genuine attempts at negotiating faith in the modern world. Some succeed; others don't.

---

We all make our way. I look Jewish, I sound Jewish, I am Jewish. I was raised by a mother who spoke Yiddish before English and a father who was bar mitzvahed. Ours was a culturally Jewish home filled with Yiddishisms and traditional foods. We lit candles on Chanukah and ate charoset on Pesach. But we did not belong to a synagogue. Being Jewish meant we were bookish, academically inclined, lousy athletes. It implied a sense of service: outgrown clothing and appliances were donated to Jewish Family Services. When somebody died, you made a donation to the Foundation for Jewish Retarded Citizens (in those days nobody was developmentally disabled).

All the pork in the world won't alter the fact of my birth. Yet stories like Feldman's only drive me--and many of my contemporaries--further from traditional Judaism. Who wants to be associated with people who cannot wish a new father mazel tov?

---

The Jews of Feldman's Yeshiva don't recognize Jews like me. Not only did I marry out, I failed to bear children. Therefore I am nothing. I cannot, technically, be buried in a Jewish cemetary.

---

Jews have been hated since the beginning of time. We understand what it is to be driven from home and killed en masse. if anything, this should allow us insight into the isolation and suffering of others. We should work to alleviate it when and wherever possible. Minimally, we shouldn't promulgate it on our own.

So Professor Feldman, mazel tov on your marriage. Mazel tov on your children. And shame on your Yeshiva.

"Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury" is a Michael Franti song from a CD of the same name: Island Records, 1992.

Anthony Bourdain's The Nasty Bits

2007-07-21T12:57:00.000-07:00

Hockeyman is a heavy-metal fan who avidly watches Headbanger's Ball, now on MTV2.

I have fond memories of this often unintentionally silly show, as our courtship consisted largely of watching the orginial Headbanger's, hosted by Rikki Rachtman, an idiot if ever one existed, while lolling in bed and smoking illegal substances. Now, almost fifteen years down the line, the youthful, tattoed toughs we watched have lost hair, gained weight (Zakk Wylde! Dude, we love ya, please lay off the Doritos!), cleaned up, married, and had kids. They are being replaced by a new generation of headbangers who are largely mediocre and amazingly fat. Whatever happened to the starving Guns n' Roses look? I mean, look at Lemmy! He must be nine thousand years old, and he still looks like a teenager.

(Hockeyman would like to add that it seems all that speed hasn't hurt the Lemster one bit.)

Last week offered a breath of fresh air in the form of Dave Mustaine. Mustaine is a bright, articulate guy. He also has the best head of hair in the business. I am a sucker for long hair on men. But a bright man with long red hair? I'm in love. Only Dave and I are both married. To other people. And Hockeyman has a great head of hair himself.

When asked about the current crop of heavy metalers, Dave observed their sameness. You can always recognize Sabbath, he said, or me, or James (Hetfield, of Metallica). You always know when it's AC/DC. These guys all sound the same. They have nothing unique to say.

I thought about this while reading The Nasty Bits, which is a sort of collection of uncollected writings. Bourdain is no Hemingway, but his voice is unmistakeable. No cookie-cutter "I have an MFA from Irvine" for this guy. Here is a swearing, bushwacking, New-Yorkese dude whose is refreshingly unrepentant. He smokes. A lot. He drinks. Even more. He has overcome addictions to both heroin and cocaine. And he's been all over the world, which is what this book is about.

Is there food in here? Yes, but no recipes, nothing twee. His one mention of Nigella Lawson observes that she is not a cook, even if she does advocate pork consumption.

Bourdain, known for his take-no-prisoners, we-are-outlaw-cooks mentality, has softened up some. Seeing the world--and the many starving people and animals inhabiting it--has that effect. When he does rail, which is often, it's difficult to disagree. He is outraged by America's continuing refusal to acknowledge the Latinos that populate restaurant kitchens, doing the day-to-day, physically difficult, often poorly-paid work of serving your food. He is enraged by the fools (I agree with him on this one) who terrorized Laurent Manrique because he served foie gras. These animal rights folk destroyed his restaurant, vandalized his car, then took photographs of his wife and infant playing in their yard. They mailed these photos to Manrique, threatening his family. Manrique caved. Who wouldn't? But Bourdain suggested these well-meaning do gooders apply themselves to something more pressing than geese, like Oakland street crime or the dog and cockfighting taking place all too near my home. But, he rightfully points out, the gangbangers and dogfighters carry guns. Manrique does not, making him the easier target.

Bourdain goes on to say he is not a fan of animal cruelty. Nor am I--just this morning I paid an outrageous amount for a humanely raised pork hock. But terrorizing people? Nope.

As for the Slow-Food, organic, artisanal folks (i.e. liberal tenderfeet like me) he writes:

"There is more than a whiff of dogma in the Blood argument (this being local, sustainable, etc etc food)...The 'slow food' lobby, arguing for sustainable sources of food, organic and free range products, cruelty-free meat, and a return to a photogenic but never-to-be realized agrarian wonderland, seem to overlook the fact that the stuff is expensive, and that much of the world goes to bed hungry at night--that most of us can't hop in the SUV with Sting and drive down to the organic greenmarket to pay twice the going rate." (38-9)

Yep. From here he rhapsodizes about the wonders of ugly food--food that begins as something nasty, like feet or heads or livers, and is lovingly turned into something good. Made a lovely pot of tripe? Bourdain's the man to call for dinner. His travels have led him to any number of things Americans would cringe at: bugs, fish heads, seal eyeballs. But then again, he is at pains to point out that Americans willingly consume "paper-wrapped morsels of gray 'beef' patties with all-purpose sauce. The unbelievably high-caloric horrors of beef-flavor-sprayed chicken nuggets, of 'milkshakes' that contain no milk and have never been shaken, of 'barbecue' that has never seen a grill, 'cheese' with no cheese." (14) Compare this to his loving descriptions of Singaporean or Vietnamese street foods, all cheap, most often healthy, always delicious (his evocation of Viet Nam will make you wish you could get on the next flight to Hanoi), and you can't helpt but feel like an Ugly American indeed.

There are some missteps, invariably when Bourdain tries to veer off into fiction. "A Drinking Problem" and "A Chef's Christmas" would have been better left on the cutting room floor, but rest of The Nasty Bits compensates. it's hard to argue with a guy who dedicates his book to the Ramones, who remained defiantly, skinnily, excessively themselves to the bitter end.

Anthony Bourdain. The Nasty Bits. New York: Bloomsbury Books. 2006.

Friday Cat Blogging: Lord of the Couch

2007-07-20T19:35:00.000-07:00

And you wanted to sit here?
Silly human.

Hilary Mantel's A Change of Climate

2007-07-18T19:29:00.000-07:00

A lazier blogger would direct you here. Joan Accocella says it all with her usual verve and enthusisam. So feel free to skip this blog.

Prior to the above article I'd never heard of Mantel. I lodged her in my mental "to be read" pile, where she resided until I bought Climate used. The book languished for months while I read other works, until BLCKDGRD suggested I check her out.

Warning: plot spoilers ahead. And none of them have to do with that kid from the wizard school.

A Change of Climate is the story of Ralph and Anna Eldred, Low Church Missionaries sent to South Africa in 1956. As Apartheid draws its noose, the couple are briefly imprisoned for consorting with the ANC. Enraged and horrified, they are deported to Bechunaland, now Botswana. There they are forced to take up residence in a rotting backwater populated by sullen, inpoverished Africans who openly resent them.

Ralph and Anna are very much products of their Victorian parents, resolutely small, mean people rationalizing their narrowness in the name of Christianity. Neither family has much use for Darwin, the unsettling truths uncovered by Ralph's interest in geography, or the lower classes. Their hopes for Ralph and Anna are vague--do good, be good--yet immovable. Ralph must not be a geologist, as this goes against all right thinking; Anna must be a virtuous girl, then an endlessly forgiving wife and mother. For this is how good English people behave.

Unable to break from their parents' lives, which are the epitome of quiet desperation, the couple initially view Africa as both an opportunity to help those less fortunate and a marvellously distant escape. But their arrest, followed by their residency in the Bechunaland village of Mosadinyana, are a grim journey into human evil.

The book alternates between the present--1980, where Ralph, Anna, and their children reside in the English countryside--and their time in Africa. Only the brief spells set in the present day alleviate this novel from a nearly unbearable sense of foreboding. Mosadinayana is a waking nightmare of snakes, thieves, and beggars. Dogs and cats are abused; Enock, Ralph and Anna's sullen gardener, kills the plants, poisons their dog, steals Ralph's clothing. When Anna, at her wits' end with his theft, finally fires him, he exacts revenge.

One rainy night Ralph, ever the soul of Christian kindness, opens the door to beggars seeking shelter--or so he thinks--only to find Enock and another man, both armed. Though Ralph puts up a fight, he is injured. Enock and the other man kidnap Ralph and Anna's twin infants, Kit and Matthew. Kit is left in a creekbed to drown, but is found and survives. Matthew, it is surmised, is killed for body parts, popular with witch doctors. His tiny body is never found.

The shell-shocked Ralph and Anna are sent home, where they decide to bury the past. Kit is not told of her twin; their time in Africa is not discussed. Three more children are born. Ralph becomes involved in rescuing the drug-addled children constantly sent out to live with the family (dubbed by their children as "sad cases" or "good souls.") while Anna tries to distract herself with motherhood and the maintenance of their crumbling home. She fails: unlike her husband, she can neither forgive nor forget. Her Christian faith is a sham, her patience eggshell thin.

The children, meanwhile, are aware something is greatly amiss. But they aren't sure quite what; as Kit presses Ralph's sister Emma for information, Ralph begins an affair with a local woman. This brings the book to a climax: Anna's rage, for years repressed, explodes. The marriage and family, it seems, will shatter, yet at the final moments of the book a strange redemption arrives, bleak in its own right, yet suprising even in its existence. Mantel's view of humanity is so terribly dim that the smallest bit of possibility is surprising. And terribly tenuous, for the ending, while comparatively uplifting, promises nothing.

---

Mantel's prose style is densely evocative, particulary of England's often distasteful weather:

"The Norfolk climate gave Anna a bloodless look, tinged her thin hands with violet. Every winter she would think of Africa; days when, leaving her warm bed in a hot early dawn, she had felt her limbs grow fluid, and the pores of her face open like petals, and her ribs, free from their accustomed tense gauge, move to allow her a full, voluptuary's breath. In England she never felt this confidence...English heat is fiful; clouds pass before the sun." (17)

When Emma visits Walsingham Church after the death of her long-time married lover, the weather is again bitter:

"Across the flat fields towers spiked the snow-charged sky, the clouds pregnant and bowed by cold..." (24)

The weather is synonymous with the characters' hearts, for once outside Africa, beyond youth and innocence, Ralph and Anna freeze.

----

So why read this definitively unbeachy, wintry novel? Well, to avoid becoming the sort of person who reads animal books. To read about what happens when well-meaning white people go where they are unwanted. To recall that religion is often used to veil hypocrisy. To know what happens when secrets fester.

To turn yourself over to a fine writer who staunchly refuses to produce a bouncy, idiotic animal memiors while Rome burns.

Hilary Mantel. A Change in Climate. A Marian Wood/Owl Book. Henry Holt, New York. 1994.

early influences

2007-07-15T12:38:00.001-07:00

I'd been pondering the link between music and writing when Murakami beat me to the punch. Murakami writes of how jazz affected his sentences and pacing. I was not influenced by jazz or even the cadences of the music I heard as a child. What influenced me were song lyrics.

While always an avid reader, I can't say Nancy Drew or even Sidney Greenstreet's All of a Kind Family series, which I loved, ever made me wake up one morning and decide to become a writer. I fell into writing much later, almost accidentally. But my childhood was filled with Proustian moments, almost all muscial.

I come from a family of music lovers. My father, dissatisfied with our home stereo system, built a Heathkit in the basement. Then he built some speakers, an amplifier, and a pre-amplifier. I may be getting the order of these wrong. What I do remember is turning on the stereo in my home entailed a specific order of switches I never mastered. Turning things on in the wrong order meant one might "blow something up." We took this quite seriously. I would sooner have piled up the family station wagon than turned on the stereo, though looking back I have no idea what it was we would have exploded. The amplifier tubes? The wiring? The house?

All this tinkering meant much sound testing, usually using Donna Summer's "I Feel Love," a song notable for its extended synthesizer solo. My father and his buddies played this song repeatedly, listening closely for something--I know not what--as the notes blared between the speakers.

I had--and have--excellent hearing. It is the bane of my existence. I know when my neighbors eat, shower, run their dishwashers. It's hell. For all that, though, I have a tin ear. While my siblings went on to become musicians, one professionally, I couldn't pick out middle C at gunpoint.

It may be that my tin ear led me to listen to words more closely than music itself. When we were very small, my parents had an eight-track tape player. They played music before out bedtime: Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel, the Tokens singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." At three, I loved the Supremes. I was also fond of Melanie's "I Got a Brand New Pair of Rollerskates," a song I recently heard covered by Melora Creager on the Rasputina remix "Transylvanian Regurgitations." It's safe to say that at three, I had no idea what Melanie meant by inviting her friend to "get together and try them on and see."

I remember hearing "Big Yellow Taxi" while in the car with my mother. I was beside her in front, big enough to be out of an infant seat, but still too small to see over the dashboard. I remember my feet in their Buster Browns, which did not reach beyond the edge of the car's vinyl seat. I hated Joni Mitchell. Her voice drove me crazy. This amused my parents. Only when Adam Durwitz, another musician whose voice drove me crazy, covered the song, was I able to appreciate the lyrics.

Other memories include Gary Wright's "The Dream Weaver." Besides being the first time we heard Moog synthesizers, it was the first time I saw a man wearing eyeshadow. I was seven. My parents were also early BeeGees fans, listening to "Children of the Night" and "Main Course," albums that unfairly faded after "Saturday Night Fever" came out. "Wings at the Speed of Sound" was big in my house. I was especially fond of "San Ferry Anne" and "Wino Junko."

Cat Stevens, Carole King, Neil Diamond, Andy Williams, Dionne Warwick ("Do you know they way to San Jose" took on a whole new meaning when I moved to Los Angeles, at age seventeen). America, The Doobie Brothers, Carly Simon. Motown, of course. My mother's elementary school classmate, a motherless girl named Aretha. Stevie Wonder, still referred to as "Little Stevie Wonder" by some when I was growing up.

My first real memories of understanding lyrics are associated with a few records: the Eagles' first release, particularly the song "Earlybird." ("The Earlybird will wake one day to find his life is gone.") Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon," the song "Time" being especially nightmare-inducing:

"Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun."

This song scared me senseless; it was arguably a driving force behind the frantic studying of my high-school and college years, words that sent me into overdrive. I was somehow certain that if I did not apply myself relentlessly, I would be that person. I would miss the starting gun.

"Wish you were Here" also had a strong impact. I was too young to remember Syd Barrett. I wasn't, alas, too young to have experienced loss. And songs like "Welcome to the Machine" and "Have a Cigar" were wryly comforting as I grew older and increasingly disenchanted with my peers. Pink Floyd's lyrics were able to articulate something I could not, and offered great succor: somewhere out there, far away, were other people who thought like I did. "The Wall," released in 1979, cemented this notion at a time I needed it most. I was twelve, in the throes of middle school, watching my peers with amazement. They were so...stupid. So worried about blacking out the waist sizes on their Levi's. Carter was finishing up his term, Detroit was a smoking economic ruin, and the nation was about to elect an actor who called his wife Mommie to office. Things were not exactly great, and here was this wonderful, soaring indictment of almost everyone around me. It was simultaneously exhiliarating and depressing. I listened to the entire double album every day after school for a year. My record player was a 1956 RCA Victor with tubes, four record speeds, and a metal tonearm that chewed vinyl. I destroyed my first copy of "The Wall" and had to go purchase another, which I still have.

There were two other lyrical bombshells in my childhood: Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" and the first Dire Straits album. Obviously, I wasn't the only person deeply affected by these records, and likely not the only one to pull out "Rumours" during a bad romantic spell and run the emotional gamut from "Go Your Own Way" to "Songbird." (Though I am far less able to forgive than Christine McVie, who is clearly a better person than I am.)

Dire Straits was a different story. I have never been to London, and in fact understood nothing about East End life at age eight. But Mark Knopfler's lyrics are so evocative that even an urban American child could get a feel for being young, poor, and hungry in a freezing European city. "Down to the Waterline" was an early favorite, a song that would haunt me years later, after a comparable experience:

Sweet surrender on the quayside
You remember we used to run and hide
In the shadow of the cargoes I take you one at a time
And we're counting all the numbers down to the waterline

Near misses on the dogleap stairways
French kisses in the darkened doorways
A foghorn blowing out wild and cold
A policeman shines a light upon my shoulder

Up comes a coaster fast and silent in the night
Over my shoulder all you can see are the pilot lights
No money in our jackets and our jeans are torn
Your hands are cold but your lips are warm

She can see him on the jetty where they used to go
She can feel him in the places where the sailors go
When she's walking by the river and the railway line
She can still hear him whisper
Let's go down to the waterline

There was also "Sultans of Swing," of course, and "In the Gallery"--songs that, nearly thirty years (gulp) later, have lost none of their power.

There were other band that imprinted themselves--Led Zeppelin, J. Geils, Boston, Queen, The Cars. But these came later, when I was a teenager and beginning to read the adult literature that would shape me in turn.

---

I do not mean to imply utter indifference to music: I have a vivid memory of listening to WRIF one winter afteroon; the disc jockey, a woman named Karen Savelley, announced "a band from Canada called Rush," The opening chords to "The Spirit of Radio" blared through my bedroom. I was ten.

I also remember the first time I heard the Police. The song was "Walking on the Moon," and in my naïvete, I thought maybe they were a punk rock band.

---

The impact of hearing music like this at an early age led me to utter impatience with bubblegum. When MTV appeared, I was hooked, but found much of the music trash. Toni Basil, Madonna, Haircut One Hundred, A Flock of Seagulls: drek, par excellence. The musical equivalent of Judith Krantz and Danielle Steel, both beginning their repsective literary ascents at the time.

As the eighties became the nineties and Alternative music became popular, I began losing touch. I hated early REM, with its indecipherable lyrics, and could not understand the appeal of bands like Sonic Youth or Meat Puppets. Clearly I am in the minorty; that's fine. I don't have to get it. But I think much of my not getting it was not getting the lyrics. What in hell did Michael Stipe mean when he sang about throwing the chairs into the fireplace?

----

I began writing seriously in my mid-twenties. Like every other person my age, I was hard under the sway of the Vintage Editions writers. We all wanted to write like Amy Hempel, or, even better, Raymond Carver. But as I have grown older, and written more, I find myself looking back to those early songs: they way they encapsulated a feeling, moment, place, or, at their best, entire stories in just a few minutes. "Down to the Waterline" is three minutes and fifty-five seconds. "Earlybird", three minutes. The stories they tell are no less captivating for their brevity than "Today will be a Quiet Day" or '"A Small, Good Thing."

So even if I don't hear the rhythms as Neil Peart does, or am unable to hold a note like Joans Obsborne or Baez, I can return to their music not only for the pleasures they bring, but the lessons they impart.

"Earlybird" is by Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon, Kicking Bear Music.

"Time" is by Roger Waters, TRO-Hampshire House Publishing.

"Down to the Waterline" is by Mark Knopfler, Straightjacket Songs, LTD.

kitten in the kitchen

2007-07-13T15:38:00.000-07:00

Today I began preparing my fortieth birthday dinner by starting a fresh batch of duck confit.

My birthday is the week before Thanksgiving. This is the beauty of confit: like me, it only improves with age. (Well, we know the confit will, anyway!)

I went to Enzo's butcher shop for the duck fat and decided, in my attempt to be local and pc and low carbon footprint-y, to buy the duck legs there as well. Berkeley Bowl carries Pekin duck legs of unknown origin; that is, they are behind the butcher counter in a tub reading "Berkeley Bowl Duck Leg." Enzo's carries duck legs from Grimaud, which is in Stockton. Not around the corner, but not across the country, either.

I bought Muscovy duck legs, which my cookbooks tell me are bigger and leaner. Not so these Grimauds, which are no larger than the Pekins and only marginally less fat. I trimmed the legs as usual and tossed them into a sauté pan with a little water to render. They are now salting down with thyme, pepper, garlic, and shallots. The actual cooking will happen tomorrow, the eating six months hence, when I will recall the final days of my thirties and the warm July day when I planned my meal.

---

Three weeks ago H-man and I found ourselves with four heads of farm cabbage. I like cabbage well enough, but Hockeyman is indifferent, and I could not possibly get through four heads without them spoiling. So we made sauerkraut (something he will eat) using Jessica Prentice's recipe from Full Moon Feast.

Jessica is an acquaintance of mine and a terrifcally talented chef. So this is a full-on plug to buy her book.

The idea is you shred the cabbage, then pound it until the liquid runs out. You then put the cabbage, liquid, caraway seeds, and enough salted water to cover in a jar or crock. Weight the cabbage with something--I used a glass of water sitting in the mason jar of cabbage--and drape a cloth over all. Allow this to sit at room temperature for three days to a week, ensuring the water level is always above the cabbage.

After a couple days you'll smell a good sour smell when you check your jar. We left ours out a week, then sealed and refrigerated it. Jessica uses whey when she makes kraut--she drains yogurt--which gives a nice tart taste. I had no yogurt, so our kraut is mellower, but still good. Even better, in its fermented state it will last long enough for us to finish it.

Have I mentioned sauerkraut is good for you? Of course cabbage is healthy. But so is the natural fermentation process that transpires during sauerkraut-making, as it allows the development of digestive enzymes and lactic acid, things most of us lack in our modern diets. And for people like me, who suffer from digestive disorders, foods like yogurt, sauerkraut, and kimchi can help keep our guts happier. And if you think I'm just being my usual food weirdo self, take a look at all those "probiotic" supplements in your neighborhood GNC. Myself, I'd rather eat sauerkraut.

----------

Today's final kitchen act was making butter.

Oh, I know. You were with me through confit and pork rillettes and duck au pistou. But butter? Perfectly fine butter may be purchased damn near anywhere. Hell, I bet you can find butter in some gas stations.

The inspiration came from this NYT article, which has since become part of Times Select, meaning if you want the butter recipe you gotta pay money. Hmph! Undeterred, I found Michael Chu's Cooking For Engineers. Very cool. Check it out.

My Mom gave me her Kitchen-Aid stand mixer a while back. Thanks, Mom! So I poured a pint of Straus Organic Whipping Cream into the bowl, screwed in on the whisk attachment, and let rip.

Watching cream progress from softly foamy to thick to I-want-to-eat-this-over-gelato-to butter is hypnotic. It also takes longer than you might think; a good twenty minutes from start to finish.

As I watched the mixer do all the hard work, I remembered Laura Ingalls Wilder's description of her mother making butter. Caroline Ingalls used a churn and dash, which she had to scald. The dash so heavy she needed breaks while churning. Depending on what the cow ate, the butter could be pale. Mrs. Ingalls liked her butter yellow. So she scraped a carrot across a milk pan punched with holes, put the shredded carrot into a muslin bag, and squeezed the juices into the butter. Nowadays we need not color our butter: we have annatto seeds, which are used to add a yellow cast to foods. We also have juicers, food processors, and Kitchen Aid mixers.

So why bother making all this stuff?

Many of us modern first worlders make virtually nothing with our hands anymore. We spend our days seated before machines. We give ourselves repetitive motion injuries typing, then come home and watch television, futzing with a remote control. I think much of the resurgent interest in things like artisanal food preparation, gardening, knitting, and quilting stems from a longing to create something tangible. Something useful. There's a sense of accomplishment in confit absent in adding yet another document to the office server. For the next six months that confit will be in my fridge: I'll see it when I go to make a meal or grab a beer. It'll be there if, heaven forbid, something awful happens and we cannot get to the market for fresh food. (You need not wait to eat confit, and it holds without refrigeration in all but the hottest weather.) The Excel doc, on the other hand, stands an excellent chance of gathering virtual dust.

Sausage: an eater's manual

2007-07-11T17:50:00.000-07:00

My continuing obessession with charcuterie manifested itself in an order to Powell's books for Jane Grigson's Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery. For those of you longing to know the details of boudin noir prep (that's blood pudding sausage) I highly recommend this book. That is, if you have an extra thirty bucks lying around. That's what you'll pay for wanting an obscure English cookbook.

Seriously, Grigson is such a fine writer that she makes even the oft-unsettling mechanics of sausage-making compelling. It is safe to say I will never prepare a recipe from this book, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Why won't I prepare anything? Well, I haven't a cool larder to hang meats, nor stoneware jars, ham kettles, fish kettles, or metal lettuce baskets. I haven't a temperature-controlled cellar, a real estate oversight that continues to haunt me. Nor do I have ready access to snouts, ears, tails, flair fat, back fat, mesentery, green bacon, brains, or tails. I cannot purchase pig blood (maybe in Chinatown...except I'm a white girl...), spleen, lights (them's the lungs and windpipe), or kidneys. But I did once see a package of frozen trotters at Andronico's. They were quite an alarming sight.

Nonetheless, it's fascinating to read about the incredibly inventive ways people came up with to fend off hunger, which is what pork preservation and its friends the confits are really about. Somebody figured out that pig's blood could be mixed with onion, cream, spinach, or garlic and be nutritious. Somebody actually cooked up the pig's testicles (yes, really) and called them a delicacy.

(Should you want to try this, breading and frying are recommended.)

Then, after people figured out this stuff and survived to reproduce, Jane Grigson came along. Originally a translator of Italian, Grigson spent four years researching and writing Charcuterie, which appeared in 1967. The book is laced with suggestions for those without refrigerators and contains this tart observation about offal:

"Organs, offal in other words, or variety meats if you live in the United States, can be a point of prejudice. Before the war I remember hearing 'Ai never eat Offal', spoken with emphasis and pride...yet another pea felt through twenty mattresses. War shortages taught better sense." (286)

Few Americans my age can relate to such shortages, or the suggestions about cleaning pig intestines for those possessing bathtubs with taps. And it is indeed easy to recoil from recipes for blood, spleen, and tongue, a personal, ridiculous prejudice I find myself unable to transcend.

Still, should you ever wonder how a pig is slaughtered and divvied up into parts, this is the book for you. And if you agree with Anthony Bourdain that life resides in the nasty bits, you'll love Jane Grigson.

Here she is on pig's ears:

"Here in England your butcher will very likely give them to you free...If you buy a whole head...ask if you could have some extra pairs of ears as well; then you will have the making of a separate dish for the whole family." (246)

But take care:

"Charred ears are not attractive." (248)

(An observation that leads inexorably to Quentin Tarantino and Steeler's Wheel...along with David Lynch and Hamatramack's finest, Bobby Vinton...)

Like Bourdain, Jane sings the praises of tripe, which she lived on whilst a poor student of Italian. After giving precise preparation instructions and many recipes, she comments that tripe in cream sauce--a blanquette--is possible but:

"...the only word to describe the texture of tripe under these circumstances is slithy." (285)

Slithy! Is that not the greatest adjective ever? Would you ever see it in a contemporary American cookbook?

How about this?

"I find larding one of the most satisfactory of the quieter kitchen occupations. It is a soothing and unhurried performance; and I like being reminded, too, of Perrault's Princess, in Riquet à la Houppe, who saw the ground open before her, and a number of roasting cooks emerge..." (310)

I am a worm who has never heard of Perrault's Princess. Maybe you haven't, either. See what you can learn from a cookbook?

Suppose, though, you are like me, and this blog has inspired a blinding desire for something piggish. Suppose, like me, you lack the necessary equipment, namely, a French farmhouse kitchen or an extraordinarily expensive facsimile thereof. What are worms like us to do?

Make this:

Sausage with Pasta and Tomato Sauce

This recipe, in the spirit of Jane Grigson and her great contemporary, Elizabeth David, does not much bother with measures. You know how many people you're feeding, right? Want to take it for lunch tomorrow? Make extra.

Sausage of your choice, squeezed from its casings. I bought 'Fra Mani, which is made by Paul Bertolli. It has recently become available in the Bay Area. It's fantastic. I used three links of Italian Sausage. I'dve used the spicy, but H-man doesn't like it as much.

Garlic to taste, minced. (I used two big cloves.)

A little olive oil for the pot.

A little salt--be careful, as the sausage is likely salty.

One sliced carrot.

As much diced onion as you can slide past your husband (cough...).

A tablespoon of tomato paste.

Cook the above ingredients down over moderate heat in a heavy pot, breaking up the meat, allowing it to brown a bit without getting overdone.

Add:

One 14 ounce can of Muir Glen (yes, Muir Glen and only Muir Glen) whole tomatoes.

One dried hot pepper, crumbled. (This is optional.)

A little pepper.

A goodly glug of white wine or red wine. I was out of red.

A bit of Armagnac or Brandy. Like a tablespoon. Not too much or it will take over.

Cook over medium-low heat, covered, stirring occasionally. Don't let it get too hot or the meat will become rubbery.

Now boil the pasta of your choice in another pot. I used De Cecco's Spinach Penne Rigate, which gave a the final dish a red-and-green Christmas in July effect.

Boil your pasta. After years of expensive dental work, I like my pasta somewhat beyond al dente. This is up to you. Drain. Add the pasta to the sauce (taking great care not to spoil your Williams Sonoma $48 apron). Stir. Serve with bread.

Try not to eat it all in one sitting.

Jane Grigson. Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery. London: Grub Street. 2006 edition.

Mr. Weinstein kindly responds

2007-07-09T18:00:00.000-07:00

Marc Weinstein, owner of the Amoeba Records chain, emailed me this morning with a kind note of apology. He also corrected me on couple points, the first being a ramp leading to the "jazz room." I've never seen it, but hey, he owns the joint. He also agreed that the narrow aisles do make it diffcult for wheelchair users, so staff often help those in need.

Most importantly, he apologized for what happened. He said he would share my letter with his employees. I appreciate that. Thank you, Mr. Weinstein, for taking the time to respond, and restoring a bit of my faith in humankind.

BK

An open letter to Amoeba Records

2007-07-08T09:06:00.000-07:00

Marc Weinstein, Owner
Amoeba Records

Dear Mr. Weinstein,

Yesterday my husband and I took out-of-town visitors to your Berkeley store. One of our party uses a power wheelchair, which often sets off store alarms. I informed the three young men taking checking bags at the front counter that this might happen.

"We're used it." One drawled sacastically. "We're professionals here."

Uh, right. We wended our way through your store's narrow aisles, reaching down and over for the many items out of our friend's reach. We all politely avoided the vinyl selection down several rampless steps.

We bought a few CD's and one more worked our way to the crowded front doorway.

For those of you unfamiliar with Berkeley's Amoeba records location, it is on Telegraph Avenue. The area is populated by homeless, druggies, skateboard punks, students, and tourists. So the managers of Amoeba are right to be concerned about theft. Hence, once again, I said to our cashier, "the wheelchair will set the alarm off."

Which it did.

"We've been over this already," That voice again, sarcastic, loud, mean. This guy was literally above me, on a sort of platform. Talking down to me.

I was stunned. I was trying to be polite. This guy had no call to be such an asshole. In looking at Amoeba's website, I see the following:

Our staff is an all-star team of music retail veterans, with a collective depth of knowledge that is virtually unparalleled in the business. Many of us are musicians, or make music our lives in one way or another, and we take seriously the importance of our customers' relationship to music. We put customer service first and foremost -- our mission is to bring people and music together and to make everyone feel at home.

Well Amoeba, you failed. Our friend did not feel at home in your store. Your employee, "the professional" (evidently he is an expert on wheelchairs?) made it embarassing and painful.

Our friend's life is hard enough without employees like yours.

I have shopped Amoeba for years. I have avoided the box stores and online retailers in an effort to keep independent stores like yours in business. Now I'm not sure why I made the effort. In Amoeba's case, I never will again.

Should you wish to contact me regarding your employee's appalling behavior, I may be reached at kittenbarking@gmail.com.

Barking Kitten

UPDATE: Mr. Weinstein Kindly Responds

Retirement?

2007-07-05T09:28:00.000-07:00

At the arguably early age of sixty-two, Annie Dillard has announced her retirement.

No tours, no blurbs, no letters, no panels. No writing. She wants to sit and read. This, after all, is the woman who wrote "Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading--that is a good life." (33) I read that sentence over a decade ago in the Humboldt State University Library. I was not a student at the time; only after two applications did the English program deign to accept me. But there I was, reading my used copy of The Writing Life in their decidedly underfunded stacks. Now Annie Dillard wants to retire, depriving me of further memories.

(You can see I'm taking this a little personally.)

Dillard has dozens of magnificent sentences; hence her joking remark to New York about selling off her unused metaphors.

More from The Writing Life:

"A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days." (32)

"Write as if you were dying, At the same time, assume you are writing for an audience consisting of solely terminal patients. That is, after all, the case." (69)

Here are a few sentences plucked at random from For the Time Being:

"An infant is a pucker of the earth's thin skin; so are we. We arise like budding yeasts and break off; we forget our beginnings." (8)

"Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? ... No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other." (30)

I could go on. Better you read her books yourself. Then you can join me in lamenting her retirement.

----------------

Dillard is not the first to announce her exit from publishing: Alice Munro is stepping down, and Stephen King has made some serious noises.

It's understandable that some writers, no matter how successful, grow tired of the head-banging experience known as writing. Writing is exhausting. It never gets easier. Even for Joyce Carol Oates.

Even more exasperating is the business side of writing, which may be likened to a parasite on the writer's time and energy, or more charitably, an octopus.

But--speaking as a little-published, thus-far (don't give up hope yet, kids!) unsuccessful novelist, I can't imagine waking up one morning and just ... stopping. Sure, I've had my moments of desperation, but these were related to external factors. The difficulty of breaking into publishing is enough to destroy anybody's ego. But Dillard, Munro, and King have all paid their dues. Dillard is a Pulitzer prize winner, for heaven's sake. Why stop when you're on a roll?

There's always quitting whle you're ahead. Munro and King both cite declining creativity. In this Edmonton Journal article, Munro noted that "it's rare for outstanding work to be produced in a author's later years." We all have contrary examples, but Munro alone knows her own mind. Let her exit on the strengh of The View from Castle Rock.

King fears--and is often accused of--recycling plots, but in fairness, taking potshots at King's work has become the literary equivalent of NASCAR.

But back to the idea of just stopping. Will these writers unlpug their word processors, cap their pens, box up their papers and sell them off to Thomas Staley?

What then?

Real life, long marginalized: travel, friends, family, golf, reading. All that free time. How liberating.

----------------

Over the past few months several famous ballerinas have retired: Kyra Nichols, Alessandra Ferri, Darcy Bussell, Muriel Maffre. All are in their early-to-mid-forties. A lifetime of standing on their toes has exacted a physical toll.

I studied dance for twenty-five years. I danced the way I now write: daily, obsessively, for hours at a time. Like all dancers, I endured a continual series of injuries, some minor, a few major. In my mid-twenties my left hip began, literally, to go: I had worn away to connective tissue securing my femur in its socket. Below this unstable hip my kneecap, bearing up under the pressure of a failing joint, dislocated. By age twenty-nine, my dancing days were over.

And I was heartbroken. Bereft. Depressed. For years afterward I could not bear anything associated with dance. I threw away my leotards, cancelled my subscription to Dancemagazine. Even watching televised figure skating was impossible. Compounding the loss of my beloved art was an accompanying physical decline: the tiny, solid muscles of my inner thighs softened. My abdomen, still muscular, is now wrapped in gentle layer of fat. Not flab, not a muffin-top, but what was once rock is now pillowy. The continuing instability of both joints means vigorous exercise is out. I am advised to do nothing more strenuous than walking.

This retirement left me without a means of self-expression. Annie Dillard will never again experience "...life at its most free. It (writing a novel) is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself...The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever." (11)

True enough. But nobody ever says that about macrame.

So what happens the next morning, when Alessandra Ferri awakens to a day without class, rehearsal, or evening performance? How does she contemplate her body, with its many injuries? Does she get that wayward hip replaced? Learn to eat breakfast? What, exactly, does she do?

Many dancers become teachers, or coach younger dancers. A few stay around for character roles, which are less demanding: Cinderella's Wicked Stepmother, The Sleeping Beauty's Carabosse. A few open catering companies or attend college. None of these things is remotely like being onstage, holding a bouquet of roses as the audiences calls bravo! Nor do any of these activities encompass the wordless joy of moving well, cradled in music.

Writing is less dramatic, but that study looms. And the public announcement of retirement, heard by the masses, may be missed by the subconscious. What if a gripping idea suddenly leaps to mind? Does the retired writer ignore it, sighing resignedly, muttering go away under his breath? Or does he start making a few notes on the back of the grocery list? Or do retired writers really become what I've always privately called "normal" people? Normal people do not feel compelled to move in ways that lead to arthritis, or write stories nobody wants to read. Normal people do not, as Helena Maria Viramontes did, spend two decades writing a book about their Latina childhoods.

Normal people watch tv. They play golf. They drive their children to soccer games. They never castigate themselves about not writing enough, or compare themselves to other, more successful writers. They do not spend hours trying to capture a fleeting feeling evoked by a certain song.

I have always secretly felt normal people are better off. I wonder if Annie Dillard will agree. I hope not. I hope she finds retirement loathsome, and ends up back in a windowless cabin, living a life..."colorless to the point of sensory deprivation." (44) I hope the writing life continues to hold her down, wringing out those incredible sentences for her greedy audience.

Annie Dillard. The Writing Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.

For the Time Being.New York: Knopf. 1999.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

2007-07-03T19:33:00.000-07:00

Recently I spoke with an acquaintance who brought up a woman we know. The woman’s son, now in his early twenties, is halfway through a prison sentence, serving time for a variety of serious crimes.

He was always a bad seed, my acquaintance commented.

I agreed.

Then she added: His mother never did anything about it when she could.

True. But the boy was always a monster. Even if his mother had acted, she might not have succeeded in curbing his ways. In fact, I doubt she ever had an iota of control.

The conversation was an ironic one, given that I was in the final pages of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin.

-----

Eva Khatchadourian is happily married to Franklin Plaskett. Theirs is a union of opposites: Eva is the fatherless child of an Armenian immigrant, a woman whose relationship to her fellow Americans is an uneasy one. Franklin is a blond, easygoing Republican who loves his country with touching fervor. He likes nothing better than to travel in his pickup, Springsteen blaring, scouting sites for ad companies. Eva, an avid traveler, has a flourishing business publishing travel guides. Together they live a New York life filled with friends, parties, fine food and wine. But as time passes, the notion of a child takes hold in Eva’s mind.

Not that Eva craves a child in the hormone-blinded, madly longing way many women describe. Her desire is a questioning self-examination, fueled partly by her mother, an agoraphobe. In her efforts to be as unlike her mother as possible, Eva has spent her life forcing herself to face down fear. Faced with a challenge, Eva deliberately, incrementally wades in. So it is she becomes pregnant at age forty-one. And is consumed with dread.

Franklin, meanwhile, is overjoyed. So Eva begins sixteen years of lying. Do her lies lead to the devastating consequences? Impossible to say. Narrated in a series of letters to the now-absent Franklin, Eva unspools a hideous family drama.

Kevin Khatchadourian enters the world reluctantly, two weeks past due. He is a screamer who refuses to nurse, a malevolent toddler who terrorizes nannies, is cruel to his mother, to waitresses, to his classmates. Shriver’s evocation of this little monster is chilling. Eva finds herself unable to love this changeling who refuses to speak, toilet train, or even play. He is a child who hates everything, including cookies and television. Eva is beyond horror.

Yet Franklin will not—cannot—acknowledge how terribly troubled their son is. He epitomizes the bluff, hearty father, all too eager to forgive the many “mistakes” that occur whenever Kevin is around: the little girl with eczema, found in the bathroom with Kevin, scratching until she is covered with blood, his taunting remarks to a waitress with a disfiguring birthmark, his amazingly destructive shenanigans with a squirt gun. (Think fresh wallpaper. Now think permanent ink.) Instead, Franklin blames Eva: she is a bad mother who does not love her son, a woman obsessed by her work. And because Eva loves Franklin, she capitulates. Never once, she admits, does she think to leave.

One of the scariest things about this book is its familiarity. Reading Kevin is akin to reading The Shining in that both will scare you senseless. But we know Jack will meet his end in the Overlook hotel. And though we also know Kevin Khatchadourian is behind bars, there’s no comfort in the fact, for there’s a line of Kevins right behind him. And we know these people. The bad seeds. The strange ones. The sibling or cousin or neighbor child everybody regards with such puzzlement, for he or she comes from such a nice family. A family who lives in a nice house with a manicured lawn and a nice mom and dad with good jobs. We cannot push the Kevins of the world to the margins, or explain away their behaviors with socioeconomic factors or absent parents or ADD. Shriver takes great pains with this point: there is no complete explanation for the American proliferation of Kevins. They are the products of a culture lacking spiritual inclinations or especial suffering. Their lives are remarkably empty.

Kevin the teenager is truly frightening. He has no interests apart from archery. He has one friend, a dull lowlife who helps toss bricks from an overpass onto passing automobiles. His only other hobby, if one could call it that, is collecting computer viruses. His speech ranges from the sarcastic to the mean; he affects a bizarre dress style of clothing several sizes too small. His classmates are too intimidated even to make fun of him.

Eva’s protests to Franklin continue being met by increasing resistance: even when Eva has a second child, the docile Celia, Franklin refuses to see the obvious. Celia’s missing pet is dismissed. So is a horrifying “accident” involving Drano. Predictably, the marriage suffers.

Eva is bitterly unsparing: she blames herself, squarely, and metes out the measure of her suffering in her post-Kevin life. She writes her letters with hindsight’s terrible clarity, realizing all the while there was little she might have done to halt events. There are, as some of us are beginning to understand, few means of punishing those who think they have nothing to lose.

---

Shriver takes a risk in writing about ambivalent motherhood. Though optional childlessness is beginning to lose some of its taboo in American culture (at least here in the liberal Bay Area), admitting you are flummoxed by pregnancy, or worse, do not love your own child, is unthinkable. At best, you can love your child without liking him or her, and even that in select company. But the truth remains that many women have children simply because they are supposed to.

Case in point: Hockeyman and I spent last weekend in a large National Park. Hockeyman spent his days fishing while I read Kevin. No fish were harmed during the making of this vacation, though we tender Bay Area folk both acquired hellish sunburns. (Yes, yes, we bathed in sunblock.)

At one point, as my husband was stringing his line, a little boy of six or so approached us. He was entranced by Hockeyman’s Fenwick tackle box, filled with a lifetime accumulation of shiny spinners and lures. He asked to see the box, actually leaned over my husband’s arm to get a better look. He began speaking rapidly, prefacing his remarks with “You know what?”, whereupon he launched into numerous tall tales with great speed. Here was a child nobody listened to, speaking with complete strangers.

From across the lake came “JA—AACK!!!!!” Again. “JACK! GET. OVER. HERE. NOW!”

“That’s my mom,” he informed us, then ran over to where she sat under an umbrella with other family members.

Clearly he was being told to quit bothering us. He obeyed, trotting to another part of the lake, where he approached another man and began talking his ear off.

Two things struck us. The first was this child’s willingness to talk with—even touch—strangers. At his age I was well-indoctrinated by Officer Ron, who visited my elementary school every Thursday afternoon: when approached by a strange adult, I was to take off screaming. Under no circumstances was I to initiate conversation with persons unknown. Granted, I grew up in Detroit during the Oakland County Killer’s reign, but still. The second, even sadder, was this child’s mother. She was bored by her son. Annoyed. She wanted him in her sight but out of earshot. This much was abundantly clear.

Do little boys like this one grow in Kevins or Eric Harrises or Dylan Kleebolds? Not necessarily. But being unloved and unwanted leaves a hole no amount of friendly strangers with tackle can fill.

----------

Thursday arrives, the horrible Thursday. Kevin kills seven students, the English teacher who likes him, and a cafeteria worker in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kevin's plan is meticulous, his use of Kryptonite Locks (this book was written in 2003) painfully prescient. There are lots of Kevins we need to talk about.

I can’t say you’ll enjoy reading this book. My edition has a P.S. section, a sort of reading-groupy thing I normally despise, but the afterword contains an interview with Shriver where she says “writing that novel was slog.” It isn’t a slog to read—anybody who read The Post Birthday World can attest to Shriver’s literary skills—but even as you race through the plot, your heart sinks. And if you're a crier, don't reading the ending in public. But you do need to read We Need to Talk about Kevin, because there will be another Kevin, and forewarned maybe, maybe, might be forearmed.

Lionel Shriver. We Need to Talk about Kevin. New York: Harper Perennial. 2003.

A Hairball: What to wear while you prepare

2007-06-28T18:32:00.000-07:00

I often obsess about my appearance while cooking. It's a meta-experience, thinking of what I look like cooking while cooking. And while I have neither television show nor cookbook, I do have Hockeyman, who relies on me to produce fabulous meals while looking smashing. Just because we are long-married doesn't mean I get to fall into sloth. No way. To this end, I avoid unsightly bulges with a girdle. To ensure my look is, to quote Simon Doonan, "updated wench chic," I wear a Victoria's Secret push-up brassiere. Over all, like Nigella Lawson, one of my many cashmere twinsets. Nigella says she has around 100, at $300 a pop, but we know all girls count their sweaters. I have 103. And spattering tomato sauce over them is one of my favorite activities.

Here is Nigella, commenting on her cookwear of choice:

“I’m pretty bosomy with a very small waist, and if I wear something that’s not tight on the waist, I look like Mama Cass.”

Poor Mama Cass. Though it must be said that Nigella looks nothing like her. Nor, in fact, do I, though like Nigella I am bosomy, with a small waist. But never once have I allowed my Jane Russell build to stand in the way of the good meal.

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Those of us who like to cook generally protect our cashmere with simple bits of fabric called aprons. An apron may be yours for $7.99 at Ace Hardware. But if you are like me (and Nigella) you are short-waisted in addition to being bosomy, meaning aprons don't offer sufficient coverage where you need it--my aprons droop too low, with plenty of material around my thighs, which tend to be out of spattering range.

My wench cook outfit of choice is the sleeveless cotton t-shirt, preferably from Target. I have several of these numbers in a broad palette of grays and blacks. Most are stained. (Like the one I am wearing this minute--black, faded, permamently marked by something.) All are comfortable, cheap, and replaceable. When they become too awful to wear, I recycle them as rags. (Isn't that so pc and save-the-earth of me?)

Granted, my utilitarian sleeveless shirts offer little by way of tits-in-meals à la Giada de Laurentiis, but I try to console myself with the knowledge that I will never burn vulnerable anatomy. Instead, like my sexier sisters, shunning aprons or cook's whites, I am at increased risk of burning my arms, hands, and neck. Though again, like Nigella, I cannot bear "sleeves in food." I actually cannot bear having anything obscuring my wrists and hands while cooking. I remove both my wristwatch and otherwise-constant Ace support. Only my wedding band, a narrow round of white gold, stays on.

But suppose you do want to look nice while preparing sole en papillote, or think precautionary measures wise. What's the fashion-forward cooking female to do?

Williams Sonoma to the rescue with the "Summer Toile Apron," featured in the July 2007 "Southern Cooking" catalogue. Follow me to page eighty, where we are reassured that "Our flattering blue-and-white toile apron is charming attire for baking a summer peach cobbler or chatting with guests while putting the finishing touches on dinner. A delightful combination of down-to-earth practicality and vintage southern style..."

(Somebody wrote that copy. A person with an MFA from Iowa, or Northwestern. A person who comes home to a perfect apartment--all that discounted W-S merchandise, dontcha know--and pounds away miserably at her Great Novel. She drinks too much from her Reidel stemware and eats an entire Assorted Set of croissants (plain and chocolate!) herself. Sometimes she kills the pain by burning herself with her Monogrammed Steak Brand.)

(I know. I'm horrible.)

True, "delightful" and "charming" aren't as much fun as "sexy," "wench chic," or "hootchy," but at $48, the apron is a steal compared to Nigella's cashmeres. Because what you look like in the kitchen is just as important than what you're doing in there. Buy now!

Stumbling over veracity

2007-06-26T19:45:00.000-07:00

I finished André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name a couple nights ago. I'd read extensively about it and began the book eagerly, only to finish it with a sort of puzzled disappointment.

Name is the story of seventeen-year-old Elio, idling away the summer with his parents in their Italian cliffside villa. Elio's father, a famous professor, invites a guest to join the household each summer, invariably a carefully chosen young academic destined for greatness. In return for luxurious accomodations and the opportunity to write, the guest is expected to help Elio's father with paperwork and be witty at meals.

Enter Oliver, who at twenty-four already has his first philosophy book in press. He has taken leave of his teaching duties at Columbia to spend the summer poolside with his notes, his Italian translator, and the many women who come his way.

Handsome, charismatic, arrogant, Oliver all but charms the birds from the trees. And one of those birds is Elio.

The first three quarters of the novel are devoted to Elio's unspoken yearnings, his resolutions to play it cool, and his strained exchanges with Oliver. The amount of game-playing going on between these young men puts adolescent girls to shame. Oliver and Elio are chatting poolside. Oliver and Elio are giving each other the silent treatment. Oliver and Elio are trading verbal jousts about arcane literary figures. When Elio isn't circling Oliver, who ignores him, both are making it with local girls, eating ice creams, and having fun at the discoteque. It's an enviably lazy life.

Yet Elio is consumed with longing. The book is almost entirely devoted to his inner musings; external plot development is light, merely enough to let reader know precious time is passing. Finally, in a moment of boldness, Elio confesses his love to Oliver, who suggests they ignore their feelings. They do not, and have a brief, intense affair, truncated by Oliver's return to the United States. And though Oliver and Elio will meet a few more times, many years later, they will never again be intimate. Oliver, who has married and had children, does not seem troubled by this. Elio, who tells us he has many affairs but, it seems, never marries or meets a long-term partner, is forever marked by his attachment.

Aciman teaches comparative literature; Name is his first work of fiction. His observations on time and the ways we look backward, wondering what might have been, are aching and true. But for each moment of clarity, there are more where the writing is wordy, obscuring Elio's raw emotional state. As the book progressed, I had increasing difficulty staying with it.

The problem is veracity. What twenty-four year old holds a teaching post at Columbia? (I am not taking about teaching assistantships.) Has already written a philopsohical treatise? How many seventeen-year-olds experience a love powerful enough to subsume the remainder of their lives?

It was this, Elio's obsession, that gave me the greatest pause. I thought back to myself at seventeen--experiencing first love and a wrenching break-up whose effects dogged me for years. But had they forever marked me?

At first I thought no. I was young; eventually I recovered. But the truth is the relationship did have a lasting impact. The man I married is much like that first love from so many years ago. I still think about my first love; sometimes I wonder what happened to him. But these are idle thoughts. He does not obsess me. Given the opportunity, I would not resume a relationship with him. Further, did he color my choices, or were my choices inherent, my lover simply the first person who embodied them? Aciman touches on this when discussing Elio's sexuality; Elio likes women, but a brief teenage interlude in an alleyway opened the door to bisexuality. So was Oliver merely the first attractive conquest, invested with all manner of teenage emotion?

Ultimately--and this is completely subjective--I can't believe a seventeen-year-old would cling to a fleeting relationship, as Elio does, for the remainder of his days. Remember, yes. Be saddened, yes. Experience regret, yes. But if such a love is possible at seventeen, it must be exceptionally rare. (Romeo and Juliet notwithstanding. It's a play. Shakespeare made it up.)

In fairness, I must note Aciman's moving writing about the ways love transcends physical gender. At no point does the book read as a strictly "gay" novel. Rather, we understand that Elio would have responded to any person embodying Oliver's traits; it happens that the individual in question is male. Aciman's treatment of this fact is beautifully handled and should give any thinking person a deeper understanding of the many ways love is possible.

My final feeling, then, is I may be blinded by my own biases, and if the book were without merit, I wouldn't care enough to mull it over, or to suggest that others may find it more rewarding than I did.

Andre Aciman. Call Me By Your Name. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2007.

Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

2007-06-25T21:46:00.000-07:00

[Reviewed by BK at January Magazine.]

Dressmaker's Dummies in the Parking Lot

2007-06-24T08:23:00.000-07:00

About six months ago, Hockeyman and I began hearing a strange voice. Female, it loudly issued a disturbing stream of curses, mixed with accusations and incomprehensible babblings. The voice came and went. We had difficulty determining precisely where it came from. Somewhere upstairs. But who? Where?

Half laughing, half distressed, we dubbed her Bertha Rochester.

Bertha rapidly worsened. The babbling came early in the morning, during the day, again around eleven p.m. Sufficiently annoyed, I crept upstairs, where the voice was more than loud: her yells echoed along the building's hallways.

Bertha turned out to be the woman living above us, one apartment over. I telephoned our upstairs neighbors, two elderly ladies. The older one--she's close to 100--answered the phone. I asked what was going on. My neighbor was sanguine. Maybe this comes with great age, or the accompanying hearing loss I know she suffers from.

"She's all alone in there. Nobody hurting her."

"She needs help," I said.

My neighbor demurred. Best left alone. What if something happened and the woman ended up on the street?

This seemed a leap to me; the woman has lived here a few years. Her apartment, my neighbor informed me, is immaculate. "She loves Pine-Sol," my neighbor laughed. "Sometimes we think we'll choke from it!" Her car is nicely kept (we all park in a lot under the building), a recent model. Bertha either holds a job or has some regular source of income. Homelessness wasn't the issue.

The yelling continued. The weather warmed, and people began opening windows. Bertha's screams now volleyed between our building and the one next door, which is about fifteen feet away, separated by a sound-enhancing alley.

I alternated between compassion for her distress and the increasing urge to strangle her. Yes, she was ill, and obviously suffering. But so was my quality of life. Listening to an insane person is not just noise pollution. It's upsetting noise pollution.

I contacted the condo board and very nicely asked for help. My request was hastened by Bertha's decision to put a dressmaker's mannequin in her parking space. This headless object was decked out in a brightly patterned dress and clashing scarf. Once again, we laughed. We also shuddered.

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Bertha came to mind as I read this week's JT Leroy coverage. I felt a little smarmy, as if I had picked up the National Enquirer. But there I was, reading along with everybody else about Laura Albert's "respirator."

I have never read the JT books. I remember when Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above all Things were prominently displayed on the new fiction rack, right beside the too-cool-for-school MacSweeney's. One of the covers--Sarah?--showed a Keanean waif looking mournfully out at the viewer. Oh, please. I remember thinking. Not more whining about bad childhoods.

There were more rumblings about this JT Leroy person, how he or she had blown off Dave Eggers or Daniel Handler. JT lived in the Bay Area, so I heard this stuff and didn't really care, except to wonder why people were tolerating Leroy's bullshit. I put my response down to my notorious impatience and read other books.

Then the story broke. One day, for the hell of it, I checked out JT's website. It was what you might expect from a teenager trying hard to be ironically hip, save for one site link: "Laura Ingalls Gets Wilder." (I just searched, and alas, cannot find it.)

What teenaged male (transgender, whatever) truck-stop prostitute knows a damned thing about Laura Ingalls Wilder? Wilder's books, while filled with wonderful things, are also nastily racist about Native Americans. I doubt they are taught in today's schools. But they were wildly popular amongst the young girls attending elementary school in the early seventies. Girls like Laura Albert. Girls like me.

Truck stop reading for a boy in Appalachia? Hell, no!

And then there were the "appearances" of a clearly female personage whose penchant for black top hats invariably reminded me of Slash (who is totally honest about being a bi-racial male named Saul Hudson). The celebrities, the hoopla.

Then came James Frey and Kaavya Viswanathan.

None of these people behaved honorably. But what interests me is why they lied: to get published. In today's market, writing well takes a backseat to a great publicity hook. Drug addled, abused, or too young, really, to write more than an Econ 1A paper? Do you look like Marisha Pessl? Writing yet another biography about a princess who died a decade ago? Well, come in here, dear boy. Have a cigar. You're gonna go far.

Granted, blaming "the publishing industry" is a broad stroke. Good writing still sneaks through the conventional publishing model's cracks. And let us not forget the smaller publishers, who bring out new work whilst struggling for survival.

Increasingly, though, "big" publishing is less about cultivating talent over the long haul than making a pile of money from a JT Leroy, a James Frey, a Kaavya Viswanathan. How is it that nobody--not the agents, the editors, the PR people, the editorial assistants--noticed something amiss until these books went to press?

Maybe they were so happy they could hardly count.

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Last week a memo went 'round our building, asking residents to clear any debris from their parking spaces. Bertha was not the only person using her spot for storage; shelving, boxes, and garbage cans were cleared away. The dressmaker's dummy vanished.

Bertha is quiet for the moment. A few days ago we met at the mailboxes. She's a shy young woman, always neatly dressed, her hair covered with a bandana. It's amazing that such a voice--another personailty, when you think of it--issues from this tiny, seemingly harmless creature. As we collected our mail and went out separate ways, I felt a rush of pity.

Whatever will become of her?

"Come in here dear boy, have a cigar, you're gonna go far" and being "so happy they (originally "we") can hardly count" come from Pink Floyd's "Have A Cigar," which appears on the album "Wish You Were Here."

What we talk about when we talk about food (II)

2007-06-22T13:46:00.000-07:00

As I was saying... this is where Kamman comes in. Her recipes are possible without multiple drum sieves, endless clarifying, or stone hearths. And while you certainly can clarify your stocks, she does not call for three different kinds of skimming (that's écumer, dégrassier, and dépoullier to you). Hers, in short, is home cooking. Olney's is cooking for show; even reading a menu of crudites, shrimp quiche, chicken in red wine, steamed potatoes, wild green salad, cheeses, and flamri with raspberry sauce ( a fruit dessert with semolina) is exhausting. I can't imagine actually preparing it. Or, for that matter, consuming so many items in one sitting. Let's not even discuss the four wines (!) called for.

I suppose this makes me a lightweight after all. A girl who doesn't grill.

Incidentally, Olney and Kamman met once...here is Kamman in When French Women Cook:

"A few years back I was intriuged by a course offered by Richard Olney in Avignon. I decided to join him on a culinary investigation of Provence. Richard's 'frenchization' proved to be about as successful as my americanization, but I shall be forever grateful to him for introducing me to...Magaly Fabre." (310)

Well, ahem.

Further proof of their disparity (if it's still needed) rests in the traditional trou normand, the practice of taking a shot of Calvados midway through a meal. Calvados is apple brandy, and excellent for what ails you. Kamman, writing of family friend Henriette's cooking:

"Then came the first trou Normand; a nice solid shot of Calvados smack in the middle of the meal, to reopen the stomach to more of that silky-tasting Normand food...Not only were stomachs reopened, but dispositions lifted...Munich, Hitler, and Chamberlain were altogether forgotten, and strength was unknowingly gathered for the war that was to come." (102)

Olney on the same subject, as it relates to the Provençal treatment of a spring vegetable stew:

"...unattended by meat, the palate not distracted by unrelated sauces, their purity and fragrance is thrown into relief...the course is an automatic relaxation point in a meal (perhaps more attractive to many modern-day gourmets than the archaic mid-menu sherbet or the somewhat barbaric trou normand, a straight shot of powerful Calvados thrown down halfway through a meal.) (291)

Hmph. Who would you rather eat with?

This isn't to say Olney's book is bad. It isn't. The French Menu Cookbook is well-written, researched, and entertaining reading. (Mousseline forcemeats! Marsh rabbit! (Muskrat) Fish terrines!) But its strict, almost condescending tone can be off-putting; Olney refers numerous times to the "housewives" he assumed were his audience. The sexual revolution was in full swing when this book appeared in 1970. Further, there is little room for improvisation. If you lack gray shallots, veal sweetbreads, or sheep's brains, forget it. It isn't the kind of book that will send you running eagerly into the kitchen, though it may have you reaching for the Calvados.

Madeleine Kamman. When French Women Cook. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press. 1976, 2002.

Richard Olney. The French Menu Cookbook. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press. 1970, 2002.

What we talk about when we talk about food (I)

2007-06-20T20:18:00.000-07:00

Since the beginning of time, intelligently (or not so intelligently) designed men have killed animals and drug them home to us grateful womenfolk to cook up.

A little further down the evolutionary path, folks figured out how to cultivate land. They collected a few domestic animals 'round the steading and agriculture was born. This allowed the boys to supplement hunting with planting, while the womenfolk continued to cook up whatever their fellows brought home. The womenfolk also kept busy with ducks, chickens, pigs, geese, and babies. Everybody worked really, really hard. There was no Prozac. The word artisanal didn't exist. Back in the day, everything was artisanal, and everybody was too damned busy making bread from the wheat and babying the sourdough from one baking to the next and churning the butter. It was artisanal or starvation.

Let's take a leap here, one traversing nation states, wars, imperialist regimes, mass migrations, and a religious upheaval or two. Voilà, French cuisine is born. And it is, in all ways, the cuisine of men.

This is not a shocking or novel observation. Until quite recently--the past two decades or so--formal restaurant cookery was the province of men. Sure, a few women popped up in four star kitchens, but more often they were at home, doing the cooking for the family, with a kid slung on one hip and another banging pots together nearby.

Another huge jump, again filled with generalizations, to Madeleine Kamman and Richard Olney.

Kamman is a frenchwoman who left France for America, and penned several homesick cookbooks. Olney was an Iowan who built a home in Provence before the region became synonymous with Alice Waters and foodie tourism. He also penned several cookbooks, none of them a bit homesick. And though both write passionately of French food, their approaches are utterly polarized.

Olney's meals, even his "simple" ones, are laughably complicated. There is no such thing as a Tuesday night quickie in the Olney oeuvre. Nor, notably, were there women or children. And while none of Kamman's meals are thirty minute mains (a Gourmet Magazine feature), most are reasonably easy for an experienced cook. Many are "nourishing" or "good for children."

Here is Olney describing one of the few times he worried about cooking for somebody, chef Georges Garin:

"Garin's visit...marked the only time that I have ever been terrified by the notion of preparing a meal. To avoid the possibility of errors, I opted for simple preparations and fine wines." (12-13)

His menu:

Artichoke bottoms with two mousses
A rapid saute: Ortolans
Salad
Cheeses
Tepid Apple Charlotte

I am leaving off the wines.

Anything involving mousses, pastry, and game birds is, by my lights, damned fancy. Olney would doubtles think me a plebe. One imagines him the sort (Paul Bertolli, in his introduction to The French Menu Cookbook, describes Olney as "irascible.") who would despise bloggers.

Kamman is more the type to shrug. While she has her dictatorial moments, they are directed at the poor quality of frozen foods or tomatoes out of season. She is not frustrated with the cook.

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Reading this far you might think I dislike Olney. I have almost finished The French Menu Cookbook, and while I can't say I'd ever have wished to meet the guy, the book is engrossing. He begins with an historical approach to French cooking, explaining the French service, courses, and that dreaded thing, international hotel cooking (Elizabeth David really went on about this, too.) His detailed explanation of French wines, which includes a lesson in label-reading, is an astonishing exercise.

His menus, while fascinating, are nothing I'd ever cook. He's sieve-happy, for one thing. His menus lean inordinately on artichokes and truffles; his "Elaborate Formal Dinner Party" is so complex he writes:

"I feel uneasily almost as if I owed an apology to my readers, who may justly consider it an archaic curiousity but nearly impossible of execution, particularly in a servantless household." (210)

One needs much time, space, and equipment. A large stone fireplace, while not essential, would certainly help. An inheritance would also assist in paying for the truffles, not to mention the wines. This not family cookery, but showmanship. And great showmanship it is. Olney paved the way for Waters and Bertolli, who together changed the face of American cooking. But dining at Chez Panisse or Oliveto (when Bertolli cooked there--he is now involved in a sausage-making venture) is not the same as putting a nice dinner on the table after a long day at the office. And this is where Kamman comes in.

Susanna Moore's The Big Girls

2007-06-17T09:30:00.000-07:00

The Big Girls, set in Sloatsburg Women's Prison, is one of Moore's seamy books. (As opposed to her "lyrical and nostalgic" books--see this Kakutani review). Its characters are reminiscent of In the Cut: those who should be the good guys--i.e., doctors, policemen, the warden--are bad, while the bad guys, or in this case, the bad girls, evoke our sympathy. On the good-who-are-bad side we have Dr. Louise Forrest, chief of Psychiatry, Captain Ike Bradshaw, an ex-narcotics officer and nasty fellow who sleeps with Louise, a staff of doctors with ruined resumes (blood trafficking, iffy degrees), and Louise's ex-husband, Rafael Rivera, now a Hollywood set designer.

The prison population, women incarcerated for hideously violent crimes, is at times quite likable. Most, if not all, are victims of sexual abuse and beatings, which we are meant to understand led them to their current state. Particularly poignant is Helen, a psychotic woman who murdered her two children to save them from Satan. This may sound familiar, as does a cameo from a teacher named Tracy, who had sex with her young student and intends to marry him upon release.

Nothing I've read about Moore's book mentions Andrea Yates. In Helen we have a beautifully imagined version of this obviously sick woman. Raped by her stepfather since childhood, Helen has a long psychiatric history of cutting herself and hearing voices. She is tormented by monsters on horseback she calls The Messengers. For all this, her voice is plaintive: she neither asks nor expects forgiveness. When inmate Wanda decides to protect her, she is pathetically grateful. Prison is actually safer for this tortured soul than life outside.

When Louise Forrest arrives at Sloatsburg, she is given Helen's case and quickly grows unduly attached. Louise is a strange, damaged woman with a mental history of her own. She arrives at Sloatsburg terrified, dreamy, and unprepared. She has an eight-year-old child, Ransom, whom she loves almost to excess but cannot parent. Her relationship with Captain Ike Bradshaw is perverse; he is manipulative and unkind. When Ransom levels an outrageously false accusation at him, Louise refuses to react. A saner man would run, but Ike is drawn to Louise, her chilly, fragile demeanor, her increasingly unprofessional behavior. Neither are what you'd call likable narrators.

Sexual abuse and power dominate the book: in the women's prison "families," in Louise's history of inappropriate attachments, in Helen's terrible life. Are we meant to think sexual abuse is rife, or that we as a population are obsessed with it?

Enter Angie Garbarsky, aka Angie Mills, an ambitious, naïve young actress. In a series of unlikely coincidences, Angie becomes Rafael's girlfriend, whereupon she establishes a warped if well-meant relationship with Ransom. Angie's voice offers a counterpoint to Sloatsburg's battered inmates. Uneducated, often drugged, a devoted shoplifter, Angie relentlessly pursues fame. Her own difficult childhood is best forgotten, as are any people or events standing between her and her goal.

Helen, struggling terribly with her illness, decides Angie is her sister, and writes her to this effect. Angie, touched but uncomprehending, writes back warmly.

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Moore's ability to move between literary styles is admirable, yet her propensity to do so raises questions. Did she write In the Cut, a sexually explicit murder mystery, in an attempt to break from smaller literary circles into the larger (Hollywood) market? Is she, like Joyce Carol Oates, genuinely fascinated by human ugliness manifested in transgressive behaviors? Or is Moore turning the lens back on the reader's fascination with these subjects?

Kakutani, wearied by the graphic nature of The Big Girls, writes:

"Ms. Moore’s willful focus on the brutality that goes on there and the brutality that has shaped so many of these women’s lives begins to feel both sensationalistic and numbing as the book progresses."

Perhaps Moore intended this. Who among us is not increasingly desensitized by the news?

Yet Moore's crime descriptions do more than numb; they illuminate her characters. How could Helen, so gentle and sweet, a woman who loved her children, do what she did? What about Darla, who helped dismember her boyfriend's wife? Her lack of remorse is alarming until we're told she thinks she was instructed by an Owl on Venus. Her actions then become terrifying.

Other prisoners acted under the influence of drugs--crack, meth, heroin. And yes, their crimes are grotesque. But so is our societal urge to plumb their lurid depths while refusing to address their underlying causes. Moore's writing may repulse us, but she is not to blame for holding a mirror to our darker collective traits.

Near the book's end, Angie's implied relationship with Helen takes center stage, with all manner of televsion appearances and competing tell-all memoirs rushed to press. Delighted by the turn of events, Angie hurries to write her own book. And, of course, make the movie.

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I doubt Moore could write badly if she tried. Her prose is fluid and unintrusive, and the plot moves at a rapid clip. And though The Big Girls is flawed, Helen's voice alone makes it a worthwhile, if disturbing, read, as do the lingering questions about our societal fascination--always from a safe distance--with our sickest members.

Susanna Moore The Big Girls.
Knopf, 2007.

Friday Cat Blogging

2007-06-15T19:19:00.001-07:00

Disciplining wayward shoelaces.

Kamman and a crisis of faith

2007-06-13T20:51:00.000-07:00

I was gearing up to write about Madeleine Kamman's When French Women Cook when I had a crisis of faith.

Maybe people are really sick of me yammering about French cooking. Like, enough already! Does this woman read any literature any more? Or has she gone totally Lee Miller?

(After World War II ended, photographer Lee Miller found herself creatively adrift. She took to alcoholism and obsessive gourmet cooking.)

This in turn led me to thinking about writing to please myself vs. writing to please an audience, and the ensuing mental morass led to a migraine aura.

One may write to please herself and let the audience come to her. This view holds reading audiences are like shy toddlers. Act disinterested and soon the cute kid will be in your lap, pulling your hair. Then again (and here is where the crazy-making thinking comes in), shouldn't you extend candy to the toddler to hasten things along? Write what you know audiences will like?

Round-ups, for example. Round-ups, in the right hands, can be an excellent means of finding compelling information or new voices you might never find yourself. Conversely, round-ups can be endlessly self-referential, sending the reader ping-ponging through the same six sites day after day. Either way, the blogger who regularly rounds up will garner hits.

Then there is the popular business of bashing. Richard Ford bashes us, we bash back. Tanenhaus bashes, then sends Dwight Garner (does this guy realize what he's in for?) into the fray, and the blogosphere rocks like a boat upon rough seas.

I could write about all this instead of cooking with walnut oil. I bet I'd have more readers. I'd get ARC copies, and get my name on the NBCC site, and pretty soon I'd be the next fucking Julie Powell, right?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

(Swallow headache meds.)

You see where I'm going with this.

There are some problems, though. The first is inclination. Much as I like reading round-ups, I have no urge to go rounding myself. Nor do I have the time these dedicated souls put in to finding the good stuff. As for the bashing, well, I loathe the entire business. It's idiotic, it's unnecessary, we have enough actual blood on our hands without quibbling over print on trees vs. print onscreen.

(Mildly stoned on headache meds. Scintillating visual disturbance still there.)

And isn't there something a little whorish about "cultivating" an audience with content I personally don't care about?

(Ooh...now she takes the moral high ground!)

I am condemned to the niche. The long tail. Out here in the blogosphere (there are no stars, and we are stoned...oh, 'scuse me...) I will tread my narrow path. Books, cooking, insomnia, migraine. I will not endless scrutinize Google Analytics (whose new verson I cannot decipher anyway.) I will not technorati myself. I will try, try, try not to think about dying an underpublished administrator with an incipient case of secretary ass.

On that note, the Kamman book is excellent, and well worth your blood-for-oil dollars.

A mess in the kitchen

2007-06-10T12:36:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I made pork rillettes. For those of you sane folk who don't like smearing your kitchen with fat, rillettes are like confit: meat, usually pork or duck, is long cooked in fat and then sealed in jars. Rillettes came about as a way of dealing with scraps left over from butchering the pig or dealing with stray bits of Donald. Unlike confit, which benefits from aging, rillettes can be eaten in a few days.

I'd seen several recipes for pork rillettes in my French food reading, and always been interested. But the ingredients are a bit daunting: most call for fatback or pork belly, easily obtainable if you have a farm, less so if you don't. I am on the record as not having enough acreage to support a puppy. And my usual market haunts have neither fatback nor belly.

Undeterred (or quite possibly just foolish), I asked the Berkeley Bowl butcher if there was any fatback or something like it in back. He gave me a funny look. Berkeley Bowl meat guys are accustomed to weird questions. They generally deal with this by acting surly. It is only after my shopping there week in, week out, for years that they will actually acknowledge me. And they do know me. I'm the white lady who buys chicken feet.

The butcher went in back, returning with a plastic bag filled with white pork fat. I thanked him profusely and took my bag home, where it joined the bone-in pork shoulder Madeleine Kamman calls for in When French Women Cook.

Kamman is a Frenchwoman who married an American and moved stateside. She ran a restaurant, then turned to teaching and cookbook writing. When French Women Cook is a memoir/recipe compendium. Each chapter is devoted to a woman she knew and that woman's particular recipes. The women are from all over France, and the result is a compelling work, evoking a time when abundant fish ran in healthy streams and everbody ate lots of fresh, unpasteurized dairy.

The writing is direct, even bossy at times. Originally published in 1976, each recipe gives amounts, seasons to prepare said dish, cost, appropriate wines and difficulty level. Most are difficult. I've had the book two weeks and prepared two recipes so far: the Duck with Basil Sauce, last week's anniversary meal ( A four-hour cooking extravaganza) , and yesterday's rillettes.

Kamman's recipe calls for the following:

--six pounds pork meat, 2/3 lean, 1/3 fat

--two pounds meaty pork bones (we are warned these are essential)

--1/2 pound fatback

--salt and pepper

--one teaspoon dried thyme

--one bay leaf

--1 1/2 teaspoons quatre-épices (a spice mixture of cinnamon, cloves, allspice, nutmeg, and coriander)

The idea is to cook all this down in a pot for eight hours, shred the meat, and pack it into jars.

It soon became evident that my little bag of fat would be insufficient. Nor, I realized, was the bone in the roast going to provide enough gelatin. I consulted Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of Southwest France, the bible of such matters, and found a recipe for pork confit. Wolfert advises making the confit with mostly duck fat. Relieved, I pulled the leftover duck fat from my last confit adventure from the freezer, then moved on the to bone problem. I had some chicken bones. I'd use them. I worried that French women were spinning in their graves from my heresy. I worried about combining chicken bones, duck fat, pork fat, and pork. There was a possibility this combination might not taste good.

It might be awful.

But then again, what are rillettes? For millenia, foods like rillettes and confit were an economical way to utilize scraps. A way not to starve during the winter months. They were not snobby, pickled ramps sorts of foods until the foodies got their snobby, moneyed, never-been-in-barnyard hands on them.

I decided to live on the edge.

I threw the fats into the pot to render. Sliced the fifteen-dollar Niman Ranch roast. Carefully added it to the gently bubbling fat. Skimmed. Added the meats. Took this picture:

Damn, that is scary ugly, eh?

Kamman instructs you to add the spices, which turned everything a muddy brown color, and let it simmer four to five hours.

I did so, but also consulted Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. Bourdain calls for similar ingredients--the same meats, the fatback, but no quarte épice. He says cook six hours.

I started at noon. By two the house began smelling good, a reassuring sign. I plucked some meat from its fatty bath and fed it to Hockeyman.

"This is awesome. Taste it."

"I can't. I have my retainers in."

"Take them out!"

I declined. After four to five hours one is supposed to uncover the pot and allow the liquid to absorb until "there is no more than one inch at the bottom of the kettle." (190) This would take an additional three hours.

By seven the liquid had barely reduced. I took the pot off the heat, waited until the mess had barely cooled, then began picking the meat out. It was so hot I more dropped it into the jars than shredded it. Then I made a mistake: I treated the meats as confit, ladling the fat through a strainer to cover. I let this cool, then sealed it up with duck fat:

Bourdain advises waiting three days to eat this. I reason that although there's lots of duck fat in there, we don't have to consume it all, and besides, how can you go wrong with duck fat?

The kitchen, meanwhile, was a disaster. Splotches of fat on the stove, the countertops, the floor. Three coffee cans filled with sludgy stuff, including much the Berkeley Bowl pork fat, which stubbornly refused to render. Two very slimy dishtowels, one gritty skimmer, one sweaty, unshowered cook. I did what any reasonable person would do under the circumstances: I opened a beer.

Thus refreshed, I tackled cleanup, wondering yet again what how those French farmhouse ladies kept their stone kitchens, with their enormous hearths, so nice and spotless (all these books say things like: "In Mme Reblonchette's immaculate stone kitchen, hung with her Grandmére's copper pots..."). I also contemplated how a huge pot of stuff could cook down into two small jars.

"Are you serving it next week?" Hockeyman asked. In an attempt at social life, BK has invited a couple over for dinner.

"No! God, no! They'll take it the wrong way! It's so pickled ramp!"

"They will not."

It's true. The couple in question are unpretentious people. But the husband is a highly accomplished cook.

"No way."

"You're crazy."

No argument there.

Friday Cat Blogging

2007-06-08T20:21:00.000-07:00

An action photo (or not) of Boshko. Photography by Hockeyman.

Lydia Davis: Disturbed at Disturbance

2007-06-08T19:57:00.000-07:00

Known for her upending of traditional narrative in favor of pieces she calls "stories" and the rest of us have no name for, Lydia Davis has finally arrived at genius status. Just ask the MacArthur Foundation, or consult her many fine reviews.

Some Davis pieces are one sentence; others run forty pages. All are unified by a unique take on the world and the language best chosen to depict it. Her latest, Varieties of Disturbance, is no exception. Take "How Shall I Mourn Them?" a piece comprised of sixty-one questions.

"Shall I have problems with typewriter ribbons, like K.?"
"Shall I admire the picture of the beautiful President of Iceland, like R.?"
"Shall I speak against my husband to the grocer, like C.?"
(183-5)

There is no narrative, beginning, middle, or end. Davis seems to collect random moments for later formulation into contexts that mildly warp reality. In "The Senses," Davis writes:

"Many people treat their five senses with a certain respect and consideration...But most people make their senses work hard for them day after day...The senses get tired. Sometimes, long before the end, they say: I'm quitting--I'm getting out of this now...If it all quits on him, he is really alone...He asks himself: Did I treat them wrong? Didn't I show them a good time?" (26)

Other observations, while more widely applicable, must be extricated from Davis' hallmark sinuous sentences:

"What was happening to them was that every bad time produced a bad feeling that in turn produced several more bad times and several more bad feelings, so crowded that almost nothing else could grow in that dark field." (20)

While the book is indisputably able and innovative, Varieties has a detached quality that chills the pristinely sculpted prose. In "Burning Family Members," a nameless person is interrogated about the death of his or her father in clinical, detached sentences. The elderly man lives in a nursing home. It is decided that he will be starved to death, then cremated. The interrogator is less interested in the person than the details of death and cremation:

"They will put him in a coffin?
No, actually it's a cardboard box.
A cardboard box?
Yes, a small one. Narrow and small. It didn't weigh much, even with him in it." (132)

"Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality" is formulated as a scientific analysis of two aged, healthy women and the factors contributing to their long lives. It is nearly Jane Brody-like in its solemnity: the benefits of long walks, fresh air, and healthy food are all noted, along with church involvement and supportive family members. "Helen and Vi" is unique its character development; Helen and Vi are minutely dissected, their personalities positively lush compared to the disembodied, nameless voices populating the rest of the book. The piece could be read as instructive were it not for the eight brief sections dedicated to one hundred- year-old Hope, whose ways often contradict Helen and Vi's wholesome existences. Hope is grumpy. A picky eater, she wears a green tennis visor at meals to shade her eyes from the chandelier. As a younger woman she took lovers; she has always partaken of alcohol. Older than Vi or Helen, her lifestyle destroys any notion that Helen and Vi's preventive measures are truly effective.

-----------

Davis is also a well-known translator from the French, particularly Proust. In "The Walk," she puts her linguistic skills (or perhaps it's revenge?) to sly use: two translators meet at an conference in Oxford. One, a rather surly academic, dislikes the protagonist's recent Proust translation. After a presentation where he manages to insult nearly every translator in the room by criticizing examples of their work, the two find themselves on an improbable evening walk. As the they explore the ancient town, the protagonist thinks of a parallel that might contest the academic's dislike of her work. She offers the reader the examples: two longish passages from Proust, one rather old-fashioned and flowery, the other succinct but still flowing. The second is Davis', though she doesn't tell the reader.

-------------

I am on the record as liking Davis' work, which is all the more reason my lukewarm response to Varieties surprised me. The book's chilly tone, shot through with moments of pain ("Head, Heart," Traveling with Mother", a few references to deaths of parents) bothered me. What something different? Some pieces aren't as strong as others, but none are so weak as to make Davis fans shy away. Yet the book displeased me. Why?

In true blogger-in-a-Terre-Haute basement style, I gave it a couple days. And I arrived at an explanation.

All last week, while reading Varieties, I was involved in an event at work that gave somebody great power over me, which she took advantage of. As any objections were likely to lead to negative fallout, I behaved politely. Actually, I was friendly to this person, as I felt circumstances dictated I must be. Now the event has run its course, and I understand that the next time something like this happens--and there will be a next time--I need not be so kind. But reading a book about faceless, nameless people coming at life from weird angles only reminded me of the known people coming at me.

So the fault lies not with Lydia, but with me. If you like Davis, you'll like this book. You might even like it if you are currently experiencing a traumatic event; people are all different. That's what makes us so exciting.

Lydia Davis:Varieties of Disturbance. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. 2007.

Bill Buford's Heat

2007-06-07T22:31:00.000-07:00

[Reviewed by BK at January Magazine. - HM]

Hairballs in the kitchen

2007-06-06T13:53:00.001-07:00

Ah, Wednesday. If you are from the Midwest and of a certain age, Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti day. It's hump day. It's the Addams family's daughter's name.

It's the New York Times' Dining and Wine day. Of the many reasons to look forward to Wednesday, this certainly ranks highly. Especially when there are articles like this one.

I am an admitted food snob. I love cooking. I love eating. But I also try to avoid the behaviors that make people hate food snobs. After all, food snobbery is a luxury. Many people don't have enough to eat. It behooves all of us to remember this.

So what should we do when faced with friends the like the sausage makers? How do you handle people who treat pickled ramps with the reverence once reserved for BMW convertibles? People who invite you to their homes and serve foods you might otherwise expect from Chez Magnifique? People who might be your friends (sort of), meaning you must invite them back?

Surely these are questions for some modern-day Emily Post. Barring that, bloggers rush into the void.

Hockeyman and I know a woman who acquired both a house and a do-it-yourselfer husband in short order. They turned their aging home into a showcase, right down to the Ralph-Lauren-painted walls and the wine charms. Their large yard, perfect for entertaining, boasts a goldfish pond, a barbecue, and lovely outdoor seating. At their summer parties, one is served mushrooms in puff pastry, which the husband has made himself. Skewers of marinated steak, chicken, and shrimp await their turns on the grill. Jewel-like mezze are arrayed on a long trestle table, along with a variety of chic Napa wines.

I am not making this up.

I fear all pastry. I forgot to buy a place with yard. How can I possibly turn round and volley back a wonderful meal from my tiny kitchen? With nary a wine charm in sight?

We know another couple who, like us, inhabit an apartment. Unlike us, they have a gas stove and a large kitchen, which they use to turn out an amazing spreads of Indian food. At least a dozen elaborate dishes regularly grace their table. No wine charms here, but they own more than seven dinner plates.

Then there's Hockeyman's colleague, an avid cook. We invited him to dinner with his partner. He looked up from the simple bowl of pasta I served him and said with genuine amazement "This is really good."

He expected merely an edible meal, but no more. He expected food that would be merely decent, food he could pass judgement on, only to be surprised by a good, plain meal. "This is good!"

Well, yeah. I'm a good cook. But let's stop a moment and parse that. How did I become a good cook? Why?

I never did much cooking until I moved in with Hockeyman. I was twenty-six, and could sort of navigate a kitchen. I took it up without a thought. Hockeyman was always hungry in those days. He was also extremely skinny. So I cooked.

And I liked it. I could come home at the end of a frustrating day and chop things into nice, organized piles. It was creative. It smelled nice. Hockeyman gratefully consumed my efforts, even the lesser ones.

I began reading cooking magazines and acquiring cookbooks. I branched out. My skills increased. Then we began grad school. I became adept at pasta: cheap, nutritious, and filling.

We graduated, moved the Bay Area, got real jobs, and began earning real money just as the organic food movement was taking off. My nascent snobbery, fed by availabilty and increased income, mushroomed into full-blown CSA/organic/how-far-did-that-lamb-travel to-reach-my-table lunacy.

-------------

I am not much of an entertainer. We have people over occasionally. This most often involves watching hockey, by definition an informal activity. Nobody cares about pickled ramps when Ottawa has blown Canada's chance at a Cup. They just want more beer.

[Beer? Make mine hemlock. - HM]

Most of the time, though, I avoid dinner guests. If people are judging me based on whether or not I made the tortillas, they need other friends. Take Alex Birsh:

"'As soon as something becomes overpopularized, I don’t want to serve it anymore,' Mr. Birsh said. 'I wouldn’t want anyone to be able to identify something I made as being from a book or a restaurant. I don’t want anyone to be able to say, oh, I see where he got this idea to put microgreens on top of his fish fillets.'"

Jesus wept.

-----------------------------

So what's a sane person to do? Four options:

1. Arrange to meet your friends in a restaurant.

2. Try to compete, making yourself crazy in the process.

3. Prepare extremely simple foods for guests. A plain roast chicken. Rice (not risotto). Pasta with something easy--basil and cheese, fresh spinach, olive oil (which need not be artisanal) and garlic. Green salad with olive oil and red wine vinegar. Buy the bread and the dessert.

4. Opt of the entire business altogether.

Why cook, after all? If you and the people you eat with are engaged in some unspoken version of Iron Chef, well, more power to you, but is that what you call friendship? Are your buddies the ice-cream makers, so critical of your bottled catsup, the people you're gonna call when the chips are down? Or are you going to telephone your friend who sat drinking Pilsner Urquell and weeping with you while Mickey Mouse skated the Cup?

---------------------

Food writers talk about nourishment, love, the love that goes into the food. I see none of that in the competitive cookery amongst our acquaintances or the folks chronicled in the NYT.

------------------------

Last Friday was our eleventh wedding anniverary. I had the day off, and had come across a Madeleine Kamman recipe for duck au pistou. The pistou, a heart-stopping basil-butter infusion, called for duck giblets, broth, wine, a bouquet garni, garlic, and butter. Then there was the basil to contend with, not to mention the duck itself. There were numerous steps involving browning, reduction, chopping, creaming, and roasting. I used every dish in the house. Bits of basil migrated far and wide.

I would never make this dish for company. It's too complicated. Then there's eating it. Unless you are picking daintily, there is nothing neat about duck with a stick of butter. And those flecks of basil were no less unruly for being incorpporated in the sauce. We won't even discuss the need for dental floss, or the way kitty inserted himself in the proceedings, loudly demanding his share of the bird.

The recipe required four hours of sustained cooking. The resulting dish was one of the best I've ever made. We opened a white Bordeaux, purchased specially for the occasion, and had a wonderful meal. H-man, worried he'd get pistou on his work shirt, stripped to his undershirt. I wore a stained, sleeveless tank top from Target. We were decidedly inelegant.

Neither of us missed the pickled ramps.

Dani Shapiro's Black and White

2007-06-02T13:07:00.000-07:00

The bad book mentioned in Friday's post.

Black and White opens with thirty-two year old Clara Dunne receiving a phone call from her sister, Robin, summoning her home to New York, where their mother Ruth, a famous photographer, is dying from lung cancer.

Clara has spent the last fourteen years in Maine, married to jeweler Jonathan Brodeur. The couple have a daughter, nine-year-old Samantha. Domestic life is uneventful, if fraught, for Clara is a disaster area. She is a woman constantly battling back tears, clenching her hands into fists, experiencing so many episodes of pounding heart and thrumming blood that you expect her to have a heart attack at any moment. She is "foggy," the memories placed "on the high shelf of her mind" falling into her consciousness. Throughout the text Clara "really needs to focus." Until the entirely predictable, earthbound ending, she spends much time "floating". You get the picture.

And pictures are indeed the trouble. For glamorous, selfish Ruth settled on Clara as her sole subject, creating a series of technically gorgeous shots whose content is disturbingly intrusive. Clara is three when the photos begin, fourteen when they end. The photos bring Ruth fame and fortune. They also wreak havoc within the family: husband and father Nathan is enraged by his wife's work, and his failed attempts to halt it, while Clara's older sister, Robin, ignored by Ruth, is deeply resentful. At eighteen Clara leaves home, hiding out in a Yale dorm room with a former Brearly classmate. Not that Clara is a student. She is too damaged and adrift to do more than hang out in the library, where Jonathan finds her and strikes up a conversation.

The plot--daughter suffers at the hands of a greedy mother--is nothing new. Were Shapiro a better writer, this wouldn't matter. But Shapiro's characters have all the depth of an Ann Geddes card, minus the cute factor. Ruth is talented, gorgeous, and imperious. Art dealer Kubovy Weiss is a caricature of the smooth European businessman, delighted to be avant garde while raking it in. Nathan, the book's honorary Jew (how a Jew ever got the name Dunne is beyond me), is a hard-working lawyer and loving father who dies at his desk (thus neatly excised from the proceedings). Robin, the brainy older sister, emulates Nathan, becoming a high-powered lawyer whose life is lifted straight from a New York magazine article: three children (Harrison, Tucker, and Elliott, a girl), a pristine apartment filled with Murano glass, a nanny/housekeeper, personal trainers who keep her whittled into size two Prada dresses. Clara's husband Jonathan is handsome in a craggy, L. L. Beanish way, and adores Clara, though it's hard to understand why. Her refusal to discuss her past upsets him, but not enough to take action. Samantha, who knows nothing of her mother's past or the existence of an extended family, becomes sullen and anorexic until Clara takes her to New York. And though the visits with the obviously dying Ruth and the tremedous family stresses might upset another child, Samantha is enthralled by this shriveled, witchlike granny.

How long does Clara plan to keep her past secret from her child? We don't know, because Clara doesn't know. Clara spends her waking hours willing away her past, stupidly hoping it will stay on that high shelf forever. Early in the novel, you want to shake her, hard. You have a nice husband, a sweet daughter, a Victorian home in Maine with a kitchen straight out of Good Housekeeping. Get over yourself!

In lieu of depth we have brand names: Duane Reade, Essentials Plus, Prada, Costume National, Rick Owens. We also get name names: Timothy Greenfield-Saunders, Ingrid Sischy, Gary Indiana, Irving Penn, Cindy Sherman. This facilitates envisioning a certain echt New York without adding much to Clara's personality. We also get pat metaphors: Nathan managed to stop Ruth's work for one year, when Clara was nine. Now Samantha is nine and bears a strong resemblance to her mother at the same age. Yet when Clara takes the child to MOMA to see the infamous Ruth Dunne photographs, Samantha is unfazed. She thinks it's "cool" to see her mother in a museum and asks, in an unwitting Tarantino moment, if they can get something to eat.

Therapyspeak, that insidious replacement for genuine communication, is everywhere:

"He's quiet on the other end. Waiting. Giving her the space to say whatever it is she wants to say." (39)

"'I can't accept it,' Clara fills the silence. 'It's too much.'
'What are you saying?' Kubovy asks." (80)

"'I know what you meant,' Robin says. 'It's all about you, Clara. It's always been all about you.'" (90)

"Ruth and Nathan Dunne did most of their fighting outside of the house...their arguments, which, though rare, could spiral into a place full of scalding rage." (196)

Worse are the clunky sentences, inexcusable from Knopf Books:

"If only she had a mantra, something she could repeat to herself right now, over and over and over, a calming phrase to hold on to if all else fails." (11)

"A huge, hardy rubber plant spills out from behind a bald girl in her twenties." (56)

"She is living on Tamara Stein's floor. Tamara had been a year ahead of Clara at Brearly, and honestly they hardly knew each other." (108)

"Nathan had to go away on a business trip, is all." (165)

Lest you still want to read this book, I'll spare you the treacly ending. Suffice to say Clara's sudden recovery into a whole, happy person (wearing a little black dress, natch) is unearned.

--------------

Shallow storyline and bad writing aside, somebody else already wrote this book, and did a better job of it.

Kathyrn Harrison's 1993 Exposure is about Ann Rogers, daughter and subject of famed photographer Edgar Rogers. Like Black and White, Exposure deals with the death of a photogpraher parent, moving betweeen past and present. Both Ann and Clara are damaged, poorly functioning women married to kind men who work in the arts--Ann's Cal restores houses. Both are dealing with uwanted legacies in the public eye. Both endure protest movements: Clara's Angels deface Ruth's photographs; a young woman sets herself afire outside an Edgar Rogers exhibit.

Is Black and White a ripoff? Yes and no. Harrison got there first, but there are significant differences: Clara has a child, Ann is a diabetec drug user. None of Harrison's pristine sentences appear anywhere in Shapiro's clumsier attempt. Cal and Jonathan are similar--handsome, kindly, artistic--but where Jonathan caves to Clara's feeble excuses, Cal threatens divorce. And he means it.

It is also notable that while Shapiro's book is inspired by Sally Mann's photographs, Harrison's work appeared well before Jessie Mann, now an adult and "professional muse," began her collaboration with photographer Len Price. Further, Harrison's obsession with absent parents and painfully documented incestuous experience with her father lead naturally to a book examining photographic exploitation. Shapiro, by contrast, takes an obvious question about an artist's child to a predictable, sanitized conclusion.

Read the Harrison.

Examples of the Prince/Mann Collaborations may be seen here.

Kathryn Harrison: Exposure. New York: Random House, 1993.

Dani Shapiro: Black & White. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

Bad Books

2007-06-01T20:11:00.001-07:00

I'm reading one right now. I almost stopped, then realized how few bad books make it into my personal corner of blogland. I like most of what I read, but then again, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, as I tend to acquire books I know I'll like.

The last book I read and disliked was Harrison's Returning to Earth. And though I found it flawed, nobody could argue that it lacked originality. The plot, setting, and characters were uniquely realized. The sentences read like a pileup on Interstate Five, but hey, Harrison is famous without me.

The book I am currently reading is so close to another writer's novel that I'm surprised there haven't been rumblings. The characters are annoying, thin, stereotypical. The sentences clunk. Many all but weep for commas. Metaphors repeat, an unforgivable sin. Never, ever repeat an adjective on the same page. Avoid doing it through the entire chapter. Hell, English is rife with adjectives. Don't repeat them at all!

I'm halfway through: things are crashing along unevenly. I want to smack the protagonist, which means perhaps the author was successful after all: she has elicited a response.

------------

Yeah, I know. You want to know the book. I'm almost done and will talk about it this weekend. Try to quell your excitement.

What struck me in reading this particular work, with its spectacularly awful sentences, is how my reading tastes have changed. And I blame the blog.

Once upon a time I was able to read a lesser book--i.e., a novel by somebody besides Atwood or Oates or insert your fave writer here--and enjoy it. Something lightweight, with a few off-key sentences, was okay. Now I am Ming the Merciless. Missing comma? Therapyspeak? Unreal (to me) situation trying to pass itself off as reality? To the gallows, or at least, the resale pile. Give me Irene Nemirovsky! Lionel Shriver! Trillin's beautifully economical sentences!

Why the blog? Because blogs are nothing without fresh content, and that means a lot of reading. Because blogging eats--no, devours--time. And that means the media feeding it better be worth that time--mine and yours.

Because life is just too short for bad books.

More on Lionel Shriver

2007-05-29T19:57:00.000-07:00

In preparing to write about The Post Birthday World, I read the Powell's interview cited in my last post and this interview by Robert Birnbaum.

I was fascinated by Shriver's thought process when it comes to writing fiction, and found this Powell's interview quote so refreshing:

"I don't necessarily pride myself on formal innovation. That's never been my interest. I'm perfectly happy with the forms that are available. I don't feel constrained by the form of the novel; I don't mind other people who are into that, but I'm just not into that. Certainly, I'd seen Sliding Doors, for example, so I had an immediate model in film. But I had a thematic reason for doing it. It wasn't to execute a gimmick, because I'm not into gimmicks. They don't interest me, and they don't get me to read other people's books."

For somebody like me, who has endured a fair amount of abuse for my disinterest in pomo forms, this is giddily permissive.

Shriver is interested in writing that upends cultural norms--the mother-son relationship, the good wife and daughter. She pushes permissible boundaries. Even writing about a mother-son relationship is risky for a person who doesn't have children. (If I had a dime for every pitying "you just don't understand," from a parent...) Yet Shriver did it successfully.

At one point in the Birnbaum interview, which appeared after the publication of We Need to Talk about Kevin, she says:

"There were certain scenes that I was writing up to that I dreaded, partly because I knew they would be technically difficult."

This was interesting to me because, for whatever cockeyed reason, I've long felt I shouldn't know what I'm writing about, or that while foreknowledge was nice, it wasn't necessary to write fiction. That is, I rarely "write up to" anything. What I thought necessary was the imeptus, accompanied by little more than a shadowy idea. I wrote my first manuscript that way (as it is unpublished, I am hesitant to call it a novel. It just seems too pretentious.) The words flowed; rarely did I struggle for ideas. It was as if, to borrow an image from Annie Dillard, smiling angels were holding an open folio before me, and all I had to do was copy. I haven't had the experience since, doubtless due to agonizing self-consciousness.

Later Shriver says:

"I have painted a couple of incidents that deliberately cast doubt on her version of events, and that's for the naive reader. I am trying to circle that in red."

Hmm. Again, this goes against some falsely delivered wisdom I had about writing, that this sort of "planning" was impure: one had to write from inspiration. Even those rare people who outlined every sigh were suspect. Where did I pick this up? Grad school?

"So I decided to head my reader off at the pass. To also facilitate putting it on the book jacket. It really is a problem marketing a book where the hook is a secret. I thought that was tactically wise."

My God! To admit you're thinking about what goes on the jacket! How many people would confess to thinking about that? Maybe the very published, or the certain-of-being-published. The rest of us are so groveling and stupidly cow-grateful if anybody will even bother looking at our stuff. Suggesting jacket copy? Please.

In this article, Shriver talks about winning the Orange Prize, admitting she wanted it badly. This is an amazing statement from a woman. Oh, I know, we're liberated and all that. But we're supposed to be modest about our talents. It's unseemly, unwomanly, to admit wanting something like a huge prize, even in our modern world. Take a conversation I had with my real estate agent. In the arduous course of buying our condo, it somehow emerged that both of us were erstwhile writers. We traded material. She was complimentary; fortunately I was able to return the sentiment in kind. She told me about her writer's group, an assemblage of widely known writers. I secretly hoped she might ask me to join. We arranged to meet over coffee to discuss "the work."

"So what's your goal?" She asked me.

"To make as much money as possible writing," I replied. This was a few years ago; I was working on that first mss. I was full of confidence. I knew it was good, was certain it would be published. I didn't expect it to make me rich, but was hopeful about the possibility of being launched on a writerly course.

My realtor was horrified. She literally leaned backward in her booth. What was I supposed to say? I am not a Natalie Goldberg writing-is-a-journey type. I never assign myself exercises to see "what will happen." I don't have that kind of time. But anybody who spends as much time writing as I do doesn't qualify for membership in the Mothers of Invention.

Suffice to say I never got invited to her writing group. One of the members went on to write a bestseller, which was dedicated to my realtor. She, meanwhile, remains a real-estate novelist. As for blogging, it's safe to say she'll never read this. I emailed her recently to inquire about the housing market (about as realistic as purchasing Sony). She inquired about my writing. I happily told her about the blog. Her reponse was cool, her implication that real writers are too busy creating litterchure to mess about on the internet.

So she's a real-estate novelist, I'm an administrative hack, and Lionel Shriver, who plans her novels, seeks commerical agents, and admits she really wanted to Orange Prize, has written a bestseller.

Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World

2007-05-27T12:02:00.000-07:00

In short: a great novel. Go out and buy it at once.

For a fine explication by the writer herself, see this Powell's interview.

For a longer, more thoughtful, public-discourse-destroying analysis, keep reading.

In Birthday, Shriver employs what seems like a writer's trick to devastating effect. Irina Galina McGovern, daughter of a Russian mother and American father, is happily living in London with her partner, Lawrence Trainer. Irina is a children's book illustrator, Lawrence, a terrorism expert at a think tank. Their near-decade long partnership--somehow, they have never gotten around to marrying--is stable, soild, settled. If Lawrence is emtionally limited, he is also immensely supportive, helping Irina with her career, chiding her about smoking, encouraging her frugal lifestyle. Their domesticity is mostly pleasant, their flat homey, Irina's lovingly prepared meals delicious and wholesome.

Enter Ramsay Acton, famous snooker player, known for his dashing good looks and inability to win the Grand Prix. He and Irina meet through Jude Hartford, Ramsay's wife and Irina's collaborator on a children's book project. When the foursome meet for dinner, all manner of sparks fly. Soon afterward, Jude breaks with both Ramsay and Irina. At Lawrence's urging--he is an avid snooker fan--the couple cultivates a friendship with the lonely Ramsay. Irina begins battling her ferocious attaction to Ramsay; when the two meet for Ramsay's birthday dinner alone (Lawrence is away on a business trip), the book forks into two narratives. There is "good" Irina, playing it safe, staying with Lawrence, watching Ramsay a bit wistfully from afar. Then there is "bad" Irina, acting rashly on her attraction, leaving steady Lawrence and their quiet life for a crash course in sexual gluttony.

Life with Ramsay is tulmultuous, a whirl of endless snooker tournaments, eating, drinking, and sex. Lots of sex. Ramsay, by his own admission, is not an educated man. The politics that obsess Lawrence are little more than meaningless to him; his lifework is snooker and Irina. He is jealous, socially unreliable, and drinks to excess. When Irina feebly attempts to reassert herself by staying off the endless snooker tour to work, Ramsay throws amazing scenes. Yet Irina is powerless in her consuming sexual attraction to this one man. Their fights only lead to more intense sexual encounters.

In her other life, with Lawrence, Irina is diligent, productive, and driven to sneaking cigarettes on the sly. If she is sexually frustrated, she buries it, for Lawrence is so many other things. Brilliant, handsome in his way, Lawrence can be something of a bully; his favorite epithet is moron.

One of the great pleasures of Birthday is its capaciousness. At 517 pages, Shriver can both burrow into her characters and slide in a great deal of commentary about Americans both home and abroad, Irish politics and the deadly ignorance accompaying them, and the niggling what-ifs most of us harbor.

Shriver has a perfect ear for language. Irina, daughter of a Russian dancer, is fluent; Russian winds its way through the book, a reminder of the good wife and dutiful daughter she is expected to be. Irina is also occasionally prey to Britishisms invading her speech. Lawrence derides her use of words like "gobsmacked" or the verb "to rubbish." While Irina weakly defends her right to incorporate what she endlessly hears around her, Ramsay uses the antithesis of American English. Spannered, gobsmacked, ducky, pet, oi, shite, bird. Here he is, at dinner with Irina and Lawrence, holding forth on snooker balls:

"'Plastic,' said Ramsey, spewing smoke. 'It's thanks to snooker that plastic were invented. Changed the face of the world, this game did. Though some would say'--he clicked a nail against the Perspex salt cellar--'not for the better...Them ivory balls was so bleeding dear that the sport were desperate for a substitute, and put out a reward, right?'" (215)

Shriver's ear for Americans abroad is no more forgiving, with our shouting, long vowels, and honking mispronunciations of ancient names. Nor does she spare us a long windup to 9/11: Lawrence, from his vantage point at London's prestigious Blue Sky think tank, saw the disastrous day from long off. Shriver's handling of this most-dfficult-to-write-about event is admirable. She does not allow two Americans living in Europe to assume ownership of the catastrophe; the careful noting throughout of African, Irish, and earlier American (the first World Trade Center attack, Oaklahoma City) political woes points up 9/11's place in a long series of international crises many Americans tried to ignore. And though 9/11 could serve as a neat pivot point, Shriver doesn't linger unecessarily. Irina, like the rest of us, is swept inexorably forward.

The novel's close is masterful, suprising, and beautifully wrought. I won't spoil it here. Go read this book, and revel in its excellence.

Lionel Shriver: The Post-Birthday World. New York: Harper Collins. 2007.

Dark Neural Corners

2007-05-26T08:41:00.000-07:00

I developed insomnia in my late thirties. After four sleepless nights, I placed a crazed call to my doctor's office.

"Are you feeling suicidal?" The nurse asked.

"Yes."

I meant it. Hours later I was given a prescription for Temazepam, a sort of Valium lite, and sent home. The pills helped for awhile. Then I developed a tolerance and they didn't. I became an official insomniac.

-------------------------------

I have a friend who had a benign brain tumor on her pituitary gland. For years she lived with it. But then it began leaching calcium from her bones, and doctors removed the tumor. She survived, but her ability to sleep did not.

She described the horrors of not sleeping to me, the passing hours, the growing inability to think clearly. I did not understand. I equated not sleeping with being awake. "Can't you write?" I asked (she was working on her doctoral thesis at the time). "Or read until you're sleepy?"

No, and no. She tried to explain the awful state of muddled wakefulness that is insomnia. Like all champion sleepers, I didn't understand.

"I'm taking Halcion," She told me.

"Doesn't that stuff make people psychotic?" I asked, remembering a Presidential episode of erratic behavior ascribed to the drug.

"Not sleeping makes people psychotic." She said.

A few months later she called me with wonderful news. A new drug called Ambien had come to market. She could finally sleep again.

------------------------------------

My insomnia comes and goes: I can sleep well for weeks, then suddenly begin waking with a jolt at three a.m. Always three a.m., precisely, as if my body possessed some demonically programmed alarm clock. I jerk awake. I am hot. My hands, encased in their carpal tunnel braces, are aflame with pain. If I was sleeping on my right side, my shoulder, also affected by CT, will join the chorus. Restlessly I try to find a more comfortable position: my back? the left side? Nothing doing.

Now my mind begins speeding along in its private version of night terrors. Work, health worries, excruciating examinations of situations where I might have acted differently, said the right words.

Four a.m. In an hour, my alarm clock will go off.

Sometimes I doze, dreaming nonsense dreams. Sometimes I can calm myself by thinking about whatever I'm reading, or mulling over things I might like to write. This can lull me back to sleep, only by now it's four-thirty on a Thursday morning, so what's the point? Might as well get up and start the coffee.

The very act of standing upright sends the night terrors scuttling back to their dark neural corners. I make the coffee. I feel awful, as if I were coming down with the flu. My head aches. I must carefully attend to the task at hand: fitting the filter into the coffeemaker, measuring the coffee, counting each scoop lest I lose track, pouring the right amount of water into the machine.

The day unspools before me: getting our breakfasts, packing a lunch, driving the car to work. Then work itself, demanding accuracy and even more unthinkable, civility. Any plans for postwork errands are scuttled; anything beyond the bare bones of surviving the day must wait. No working on the blog, or the promised book review, or the essay so happily begun a few weeks back. I can't string a coherent thought together. I am depressed enough to understand why people commit suicide. Only by now I am also familiar enough with insomnia to recognize my mood is mercifully transient, and will lift after a good night's sleep. What I don't know is when that sleep will come.

-----------------------------

Like Joan Didion searching out the causes of Quintana's illness, I studied the literature. That's what bookish types do. We read. We work it up. I learned all sorts of useless things. Keep your bedroom quiet, use your bed only for sex, reading, and sleeping. Don't engage in heavy exercise just before sleeping. No heavy meals before bed. Cut down on alcohol, which might make you sleepy in the short term, but wake you in the middle of the night. Eat properly. Exercise regularly. Avoid naps, which will only throw off your body further. Reduce stress.

Yeah, right. I wasn't doing any of the dont's already. I cut my Excedrin intake, which was alarming anyway. No effect. I returned to the doctor, who gave me a few Ambien to try. I hallucinated, then fell asleep with the lights burning, a book in my lap, my hair still pinned back in metal barrettes that should have been uncomfortable enough to wake me. I don't remember how I felt in the morning.

I went back and got a prescription for Lunesta, which isn't any better than Temazepam. Taking it is a hollow gesture, a comforting ritual. I could just as easily burn sage, drink valerian tea, throw the I ching. I might sleep. I might not.

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In my previous life as a sleeper, I did not understand the difference between being awake and wakefulness. My copy of the The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines awake as "cease to sleep; become active; become conscious of; rouse from sleep."

Wakefulness is defined as "unable to sleep; night passed with little or no sleep; vigilant."

Now, in the land of the sleepless, I am often fogged. I am not vigilant; I am too tired. But being tired is no promise of sleep.

-------------------------

There are two solutions, both difficult. The first would be ameliorating stress. For various reasons--my economic well-being, a passing effort to remain acquainted with reality--this is unlikely to occur. The second is to take stronger sleeping pills. Certainly taking Ambien or an equivalent would at least get me some rest. But I fear that sincere efforts to curb my intake would collapse after a couple sleepless nights. Or that the threat of insomnia after an especially difficult day might send me into the medicine cabinet whether I'd been having a bout or not.

Normally I am not an addictive personality. But my friend is right: not sleeping makes you psychotic.

---------------------------

Yesterday my office was quiet: many had begun their long weekends. At noon one of the faculty appeared at my desk. "Go home," he ordered, smiling. "Get out of here."

I thanked him. I drove home. It was a beautiful day, sunny and cool. "Try and get some rest," My husband urged when I called him. But the laundry had piled up. The apartment was dusty. And if I spent the afternoon asleep, what would happen come night-time?

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There is a certain quality of mind that accompanies sleeplessness. The aforementioned depression, the inability to think, linked to a kind of feverishness. Sunlight looks thinner, yet yellower; distances appear curved, bent, further than I know them to be. This makes driving especially dangerous; I once almost hit a pedestrian while underslept. When he saw how upset I was, he, poor man, apologized to me.

Time warps. Long periods of wakefulness make seven p.m. feel like midnight, while outside it is the cusp of summer, daylight barely fading.

I cry more easily, like a child who has missed her nap. Last night we watched a PBS presentation about China. This third episode of the four-part series was about pollution. We gasped at the footage of filthy waterways. But it was the dead frogs, choked by poisoned water, that brought me nearly to tears. I sniffled discreetly, embarassed by my uncontrollable emotions.

As for thought, that running narrative we all carry within, well, it takes on a distance. I am not thinking, as I most often do, about reading or writing or whatever daily task is at hand. Instead I am off to the side, removed. At best I am coasting, the way one might feel while driving a familiar route and listening to music. Suddenly you return to yourself: five miles have passed, and with them, a small bit of your life. Where did it go? It doesn't matter: it's irretrievable.

And that's the worst part of insomnia. Ironically, all those waking hours, and the many hours required to recover from them, are time lost.

----------------------------

In the end I did the housework. I prepared a nice dinner. I watched the special on China. By then it was nine-forty-five. I brushed my teeth, taped my hands into their braces, and lay down. I slept. Not perfectly: from two onward I woke several times, but was able to sink back down. I slept--lightly--until seven. And today I am tired. But not as tired. I am able to think. I can write. Tonight, or in three days, or in a week, I will begin sleeping normally again. I will recover my mental stamina. Until the next bout. There is nothing I can do but abide it.

Hairball Roundup

2007-05-24T21:00:00.000-07:00

One: Karen Hess has died. The NYT obit is here. Food historians owe their professions to her trailblazing, incisive study of American foodways. The rest of us have masterworks like The Taste of America and The Carolina Rice Kitchen, the book on how slaves influenced lowcountry cookery.

Two: Miss Snark has called it quits. Apparently she's said her piece, and is now returning to a life of Agenting, Gin, and George Clooney. Hapless writers everywhere will flail once more.

Three: Newt Gingrich has "written" an "active history" novel. Remember, this guy was an elected official. Recall also that he left his first wife as she lay in bed, battling cancer. Think cobwebby thoughts about his efforts to impeach Clinton, only to be found screwing around himself and booted out by his own party.

Now he thinks he's a writer, grammar and historical veracity be damned.

I think we've located the spring from which all lowered public discourse flows.

An ecological footprint

2007-05-23T20:43:00.000-07:00

I'm halfway though Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the latest dispatch from the world of ecologically sustainable eating. The book is excellent, highly readable even if you flunked biology and can't tell a rosebush from a rototiller.

The book includes some scary sidebars by Kingsolver's husband, biologist Steven Hopp, and some charming essays by Barbara's nineteen-year-old daughter, Camille.

If, like me, you're a longtime Kingsolver fan, there's definitely a moment where you freak out--Camille is nineteen! Whoa! Once over that, you realize she is a gifted writer who, unlike many people her age, is passionately involved in, and knowledgable about, the natural world.

Having spent thirty-six of my near-forty years in urban settings, I know nothing about gardening. For all my kitchen expertise, I am so bad with plants that I've pretty much given up trying to grow anything. My current abode offers nothing more than an enclosed patio. I've nowhere to transplant or deal with dirt without making a huge mess. So it is that my gardening fantasies are just that. Fantasies.

The Kingsolver-Hopp clan, by contrast, has a huge farm where they grow most of their food. The family also raises chickens and turkeys, bakes their own bread, and makes their own cheese.

And people think I'm weird for making confit.

All this reading about oil guzzling, empty calories, and the horrors of modern chemical farming sent me into my supposedly pc kitchen. Guiltily I began opening cupboards, pulling down cans and bottles, reading labels. I dove into the fridge, rooted through the freezer, skidding ice across the floor in an effort to read the back of a tortilla bag. I stared at the plastic grocery bags I hoard for cleaning Kitty's box, the paper towels, the napkins. What was I doing right? What could I do better?

Well, there are those paper napkins. The paper towels. The plastic bags, which Oakland may soon outlaw, saving me the trouble of my conscience.

Back to the food. I should be buying local, organic, grass fed, etc., etc., you know the drill. Mostly I do. But there are definitely some cans around.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that most of my pantry staples come from California. The Juanita's canned hominy, something I expected to be a major offender, contains hominy, water, and salt, and hails from Santa Rosa, fifty miles north. Though on further examination, I'm not sure where the hominy itself comes from.

Thai Kitchen Organic Coconut Milk says California on the can, but coconuts don't grow here. The Barilla Rigatoni is from Illinois. The actual flour that went into the pasta? God knows. My pure cane white sugar is Hawaiian and probably really from beets. The Muir Glen canned tomatoes are from Washington.

The real offenders:

La Tortilla Factory Tortillas, which are from Santa Rosa but have an ingredient list longer than Remembrance of Things Past. These must go. Either I need to find a locally-made (and healthier) brand or make them myself. Tortillas are one of the easiest breads to prepare: water, oil, salt, flour. Mix. Allow to sit for thirty minutes. Roll out thinly. Heat your comal or cast iron pan. Toss a tortilla on the hot surface. Allow to cook until browned and puffy on both sides. Then, if you can stop yourself from eating them all immediately, freeze them. You don't even need yeast, and believe me, you will be amazed by how good they are.

Cascadian Farm Organics tater tots. I am embarassed to admit how much we like these. Cascadian Farm is huge, with a rather capacious definition of organic. These frozen morsels are wondeful popped into a hot oven and served with hamburgers, one of my default hurry meals. Where the actual potatoes come from, and what happens to them on their journey from potato to tot is, well, worrisome. The chicken McNugget sequence in "Supersize Me" comes to mind.

Even worse than the tortillas is the bag of hamburger buns. Close inspection reveals them to be Sara Lee. (Gulp. The pc police are on the way.) Like the tortillas, they possess a daunting ingredient list and come from St. Louis, Missouri.

Again, I can make hamburger buns. Or I can buy a reasonable local approximation from any of the four supermarkets within a five mile radius of my home, where the shelves are literally stuffed with a variety of wonderful, locally made breads, rolls, and English muffins.

I realize many people don't have these kinds of options. But I do. Meaning I should exercise them.

----------------

What about meat? I am able to get local, ecologically raised red meat at Berkeley Bowl. I can get Niman Ranch pork. But poultry is a whole other deal. Berkeley Bowl carries Happy Dan, Rosie Organic, Rocky Natural, Coastal Range Organics, and Empire Kosher. I grew up eating Empire and adore it, but I doubt the chickens have a happy life. I've heard Coastal Range and the Rocky/Rosie people fall into the "expansive" use of organic labeling, but don't know enough to make an informed judgement. I've been buying Happy Dan, which tastes fine. A quick internet search reveals Happy Dan is a subsidary of Martinelli farms. I don't know much else.

As for some of my other favorite foods, the duck legs and chicken livers I purchase from Berkeley Bowl sit behind the butcher counter in unmarked bins. Where are they from? What's in them? Couldn't tell you. The quail we're so fond of comes from Montréal. The packaging says nothing about happy quail roaming little bits of quail real estate, watching the Stanley Cup playoffs.

[Of course not. Montréal didn't even make the playoffs this year. - HM]

So I'm stuck. Had I endless time, I could forage for Hoffman poultry at various butchers. I could haunt farmer's markets. Only I don't have the time. What's a well-meaning person to do? Give up poultry? Do as much as I can, and let the rest slide?

One thing is certain: CAFO (That's concentrated animal feeding operations) meats are out. Read Kingsolver's book and feel ill. Eat the meat coming out of these places, and get even sicker (other fun reads along these lines include Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats and Michel Faber's Under the Skin.) At this moment, I am not sure how--or even if--we will be able to continue our love affair with chicken livers. Which sucks. So many things must be relinquished these days: world peace, voting rights, free speech, a woman's right to choose, recreational drugs.

And now chicken livers.

Hairballs: A Sequel

2007-05-16T19:56:00.000-07:00

Lucky, lucky American public: the second sequel to Gone With the Wind is on the way. Life as we know it--in all its denatured, ParishiltonAnnaNicole glory, can continue.

America, we need a sequel to Gone with the Wind. After all, don't all perfect books demand encores? Specifically, sequels?

From the article:

"Most of all, readers will get inside Rhett’s head as he meets and courts Scarlett O’Hara in one of the most famous love affairs of all time."

I don't know about you, but I've been just dying to know what Rhett was thinking. And I don't care, nosiree, not a whit, that the person telling me what Rhett thought is not Margaret Mitchell, but one Donald McCaig, an advertising exec/sheep farmer/civil war writer, found after a desperate editor wandered into a bookstore.

More from Motoko Rich, who must write this stuff:

"But the new book is also, in some senses, a bid for redemption by the estate of Margaret Mitchell, who died in 1949 and steadfastly refused to write a sequel to 'Gone With the Wind' herself."

Gee, why'd Mitchell have to go and leave perfection alone? The nerve! Maggie, your estate needs the money! C'mon!

"Mr. McCaig took on the commission, he said, out of 'six parts hubris and four parts poverty.' He declined to disclose how much the estate was paying him."

Uh-huh. At least he's being honest about the money, though he leaves out the getting-real-famous part. As for hubris, I'd feel pretty weird taking on a sequel to, oh, A Farewell to Arms, or Oliver Twist. Real weird. As in weird enough to refuse.

Yeah, it's easy to sit here in obscurity, railing. But I did have a comparable experience. I wrote erotica, of all things, for a popular, well-known publisher. Not only did I make a fair amount of money, I received fan mail and numerous offers to write more. Had I kept it up, I probably could have earned quite the living. Only there were a couple problems. One was how strange I felt penning graphic sex. I have nothing against erotica or the writers who create it. The genre just wasn't for me. And while some of the industry folk were friendly and professional, many were not. So I stopped. The fame, letters, offers, and money dried up. But I felt much better in my mostly unpublished, literary wannabe state.

And this never happened to me:

"He delivered chapters to his editors as he finished them. Occasionally the lawyers for the Mitchell estate would be invited to weigh in as well."

Writing by committee. Writing sequels to a book you didn't write by committee.

To borrow a line from Miss Snark, dear dog in heaven.

--------------------------

I have trouble with the entire sequel business. That is, sequels akin to Labradoodles: forms never intended by their orignial authors. Imagine what Jane Austen would think of the industry grown round her books. Margaret Mitchell is on the record saying she didn't want a sequel to Wind. As for Sylvia Plath, if she knew of all the books falsifying, analyzing, and fictionalizing her short life, she'd likely gas herself all over again.

And I wouldn't blame her. Certainly the lives of our fellow humans are rich fodder for imagination. Take The Sun Also Rises. Brett Ashly is based on Lady Duff Twysden, but you don't need to know that to enjoy the novel. And we all know that unlike the besotted Jake Barnes, Hem was, ah, intact. See, he made some stuff up. And wrote a great book. See also Kathryn Harrison's Exposure, about a woman who must survive the legacy of her father's famous photographs (Sally Mann, anybody?), or Susan Choi's American Woman, which turns the Patricia Hearst story sideways.

My point is while people succumb to herd mentality, writing up sequels or barely fictional versions of real life events, they could be writing fiction. Or non-fiction. Whatever. Just not taking up a dead writer's leavings and making money off them because publishers think Sylvia, Margaret, and Jane are safe bets.

I can't stop this idiocy. None of us can. What we can do is vote with our buying dollars, and leave this derivative stuff on store shelves, virtual or otherwise.

--------

On that note, BK, Hockeyman, and kitty will be off the air for a week, giving public discourse an opportunity to resume its former stratospheric heights.

Monday Catblogging

2007-05-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

'Cause we'll be out of town Friday. This is Kitty, captured by our new camera. Note how he parks himself on the couch rather than the sheet (the bit of white above him), which is spread out expressly for his shedding benefit.

Destroying public discourse, one blog at a time

2007-05-13T18:13:00.000-07:00

Two caveats before beginning my rant.

The first is I don't want to become a shrill, screaming blogger who shrieks every time somebody takes a potshot.

The second is I am a big fan of The New Yorker. I've subscribed for years and have no intention of stopping.

In the May 14th issue, writer Lauren Collins has a feature on the English graffiti artist Banksy. Banksy has been around awhile. His m.o. is to drop into a location in the dead of night, leaving a politcally scathing painting on a building, or perhaps on some of the wall dividing Israel from Palestine. He declines interviews, hides his identity, and has cultivated an enormous following. He is now very, very rich, and feels hugely guilty about moving from the fringes to the hot art mainstream. He continues to hide his identity, even as Brad Pitt and Keanu Reeves attend his openings.

Banksy is a talented guy. Nobody is arguing that. Some people are little pissed about his choice of medium--buildings that, um, arent't his. And though he's a great artist, I can sort of understand people being upset....kind of how I feel when I see graffiti all over my city. Only we Oaklanders don't have guerilla political artists. We have gangbangers conversing amongst themselves in an ugly, violent territorial scrawl.

This all by way of background. Fine, okay. But then:

"The graffitist's impulse is akin to the blogger's: write some stuff, quickly, which people may or may not read. Both mediums demand wit and nimbleness. They arouse many of the same fears about the lowering of the public discourse and the taking of undeserved liberties.'

I'm feeling a little shrill.

I never write on buildings, or anything else that might be construed as another's property. Nor do I write quicky. How I wish I did. In terms of people reading or not, we can safely say that about any writing. I mean, nobody reads everything. Some people don't read anything at all--not The New Yorker, not me, not even goddamned People.

Wit and nimbleness. Yep, I do strive for those. What writer doesn't?

In terms of lowering the public discourse, in reviewing my posts over the past ten days, I see entries on trashy writers like Wendy Lesser, Jim Harrison, Calvin Trillin, and Anna Gavalda. I see I've neglected some of the more popular current celebs, classy folk like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Brangelina.

Stupid me.

I forgot to watch CNN last night, or check in for a dose of reality with Fox News.

I haven't listened to Michael Savage.

I think Wolfowitz is a public embarassment and should be fired.

I guess I've taken some undeserved liberties.

As for you, my kind, wonderful readers, well, you're complicit in this lowering of "the public discourse."

What are these people so scared of? Don't worry, Lauren, most of us bloggers still need our day jobs.

Necessary Expenditures

2007-05-12T19:39:00.000-07:00

I read Mark Bittman's article with a combination of amusement and mild indignation. What, he asks, are the most important tools to outfit any kitchen? He answers his own question with a trip to the restaurant supply house, where he furnishes a kitchen for $300, eschewing good knives, heavy pots, roasters, or immersion blenders. On the need for quality equipment, Bittman writes:

"Like cookbooks, kitchen equipment is a talisman; people believe that buying the right kind will make them good cooks. Yet some of the best cooks I’ve known worked with a battered batterie de cuisine: dented pots and pans scarred beyond recognition, an old steak knife turned into an all-purpose tool, a pot lid held just so to strain pasta when the colander was missing, a food processor with a busted switch."

He's right, and I would extend this obsession to all material things: Americans want the best object of its kind, regardless of how much they'll actually use it. Hence the need for Hummers in urban areas with little or no parking, McMansions, and the Williams-Sonoma inventory.

And yes, it is possible to prepare good food with flimsy pots and cheap knives. I did it for years, and it was a hassle. I slowly collected a few high quality knives (and yes, they cost more than $100), All-Clad pots (not the top of the line, but still), and one Le Creuset roaster that set me back $220. Breathtakingly expensive, I know, but since that pot's arrival in my kitchen two years ago, it has seen almost daily use. It is far better than the $6 sheet pan Bittman suggests.

Of course good cookware will not transform an inept cook into Jean Troisgros, but it sure as hell improves things if you are halfway adept. Sharp knives allow better control and neater slices, while heavier bolsters lessen the chances of slippage. Heavy pots and pans both hold heat longer and distribute it more evenly, meaning the food cooks when and how you want it to. Thinner cookware causes hot spots, warping, and, in the case of non-stick pans, disintegration of the coating. Who wants Teflon in their food?

Citing poor knife skills, Bittman splurges on a Japanese mandoline. I am no Morimoto but have managed just fine without one. Yet he is dismissive of lids, objects I always, always use (and unlike Bittman, have no trouble finding. My kitchen, to paraphase Laurie Colwin, is the size of a postage stamp.) Bittman likes cast iron, which is cheap, safer than nonstick, and holds heat until Christmas. Unfortunately, you need to be the California governor to heft a cast iron pot filled with hot food, and like copper, cast iron needs a lot of babying. I have neither the wrists nor the time.

Bittman advises purchasing a food processor (from Amazon, natch)--another item I've done without--and a salad spinner. My salad spinner comes from Target, and as far as I can tell, lettuce emerges from it no less sodden or muddy than before. I do have a Microplane grater, a fun tool, but as for "oft-used asafetida," well, not in this house.

He describes blenders as "a bit more optional." I disagree; at some point anybody cooking beyond the Swanson dinner stage will wish for one. Blenders fall into a category I'll call necessary evils. That is, unless you are Mollie Katzen or a smoothie freak, you won't use your blender daily. But when you want to make margaritas, or puree the soup, you really need a blender. Nothing else will do.

And there's the rub. Many kitchen tools are expensive, take up space, and don't see daily use. But they are the exact tool for the job: the immersion blender, the cleaver, the standing mixer. Even worse, you will indeed get what you pay for. Le Creuset costs a fortune, but will last not only into your lifetime but your grandchild's. Kitchenaid is the queen of standing mixers for good reason: mine is about ten years old and behaves like a frisky teenager.

And knives? Here is Anthony Bourdain on the subject:

"You need, for God's sake, a decent chef's knife...Please believe me, here's all you will ever need in the knife department: ONE good chef's knife." (76)

Bourdain goes on to wax dreamily about Global knives, allowing that blade-happy cooks might also want boning knives, a serrated knife, and a paring knife. But it was his simple plea that sent me to my first serious knife back in 2001: a six-inch Henckels chef's knife that never sees the dark of a drawer.

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Is Bittman wrong? No. But cooking is so personal that creating anything beyond the most rudimentary kitchen inventory invites debate. Cookware is also subject to the idiosyncrasies of personal taste. Bittman sees no need for a roaster. My cooking style, which leans heavily on roasting and braising, requires one. Bittman makes no mention of slow cookers; mine is crucial for preparing decent meals on busy weekdays. He dismisses stockpots "until you start making gallons of stock at a time." I don't make gallons at a time--hell, there are only two of us--but I cook and freeze a pot of stock nearly every weekend. A stockpot also serves as the pasta pot, the polenta pot, and, of course, the soup pot. As for rice cookers, I don't use one. But as a starving grad student, I worked as a maid in student housing. I always knew the places where the Asian students lived; they all had rice cookers.

------------------------------------

In "The Low Tech Person's Batterie de Cuisine," Laurie Colwin weighs in on kitchen equipment. She had little, and like Bittman, advocated a minimal approach. Neither have much use for microwaves. I only use mine for a few things, and could live without it, but it's nice to have when confronting a frozen bagel at five a.m. Colwin didn't have a toaster. Neither do I--the broiler does a nice job, and what little counter space I do have is taken up by a number of things Bittman says I don't need: wooden cutting boards, expensive cutlery, the blender, the standing mixer. Colwin was a big fan of mixing bowls. I have several, too, and would like a really large one for bread dough.

Colwin's list of necessary items departs from Bittman's in the areas of roasting and casseroles, but she acknowledged "special interests that must be catered to." (18) She had a chicken fryer, used only twice yearly but "...the right tool for the job." (18) She also wanted a lemon zester for her madeleines.

I have a few items like that: a marble mortar and pestle, bought expressly for pesto-making but used for all sorts of spices; the aforementioned Le Creu pot; the Wüsthof cleaver, which I use (with great gusto, I must add) to hack up poultry bones for stock; the immersion blender, which I dithered over for months before breaking down and buying the damned thing.

That said, I will never buy an enormous suite of All Clad pots just to have them; my six-pot set serves me quite nicely. I love big bad knives, but if I buy more it will be sheer indulgence.

-----------------

Well then, what should a person furnish a kitchen with? You won't go horribly wrong with Bittman's list, at least in the short term. Realistically, many of us start with a motley collection acquired from parents or picked up during the transient housing situation known as young adulthood. From there American kitchens branch out: there are the people who want the good stuff and the people who don't care and never will. Within the don't care, never will group is a subset of people who have Viking kitchens they never set foot in. Factor into this the many ethnic cuisines in our diverse land--with their woks, griddles, comals, and kimchee jars--and it becomes nearly impossible to create a universal kitchen list.

---------------------

Yesterday we got the first basil of the season. Hockeyman is official pesto-maker in our home. I asked whether he preferred the automatic chopper, which is a sort of baby food processor, or the mortar and pestle, a handsome, heavy marble set my mother-in-law gave me last Christmas.

He decided to test drive the mortar and pestle. "Wow," he said. "Smell that! Look at the leaves!"

We watched the fluffy emerald mass collapse into a soft paste. We added cheese, garlic, pine nuts. The smell of garlic and basil rose, demanding several taste tests, scientifically carried out with our fingertips.

We mixed the pesto with rigatoni and ate the entire bowlful.

"Which would you use next time?" I asked. "The mortar and pestle or the chopper?"

"Definitely the mortar and pestle. I'm a slow food kinda guy."

This from a man who, when I met him, didn't know basil from barware, and further evidence that kitchen accessories are truly a matter of taste.

Anthony Bourdain: Kitchen Confidential.New York: Ecco Press. 2000

Laurie Colwin:Home Cooking. New York: Harper Perennial. 1988

Wendy Lesser's Room for Doubt

2007-05-09T19:15:00.000-07:00

Wendy Lesser is editor of The Threepenny Review and author of eight books. Apart from The Pagoda in the Garden, all her work is nonfiction. She is, in her own words "an eighteenth century man of letters who happens to be female and lives in twentieth century Berkeley." (The Amateur, 5)

This inclination toward scholarly work outside academia brings us Room for Doubt, three extended essays. In this era of linked short fiction, postmodern fantasia, falsified memior, and cheesy self-improvement, Lesser is an anomaly. Reading her work is like brain floss: thanks to her thoughtful arrangement of words, sentences, and ideas, the world is suddenly (briefly, alas) a clearer place.

Part One, "Out of Berlin," discusses the Jewish reaction to Germany. Germany, Lesser realizes, remains a forbidden, frightening place to even the most deracinated Jews. Lesser herself is a vehement atheist whose relationship to her Jewish roots is akin to her having red hair: no more than a simple genetic trait. Yet she is in her fifties before a fellowship leads her to spend several months in Berlin, a city she comes to adore.

Lesser makes some excellent points about the tendency of some Jews to view the Holocaust as especially horrific, somehow worse than other genocides, of a more serious magnitude than the Armenians or Native Americans or Darfurians. Of course the Holocaust was horrific, but we Jews haven't cornered the market. And Lesser's very lack of religious feeling makes this clear to her perhaps sooner than to other Jews. Germany has compounded the Jewish inclination toward prioritized suffering by filling the nation with any number of wrenching plaques, museums, and memorials, not to mention the preserved camps themselves. Yet Lesser also find the German way of recalling human capabilty instructive:

"There is a level of moral awareness that invades everything in the country's daily existence, from the way it is governed to how people act toward each other on trains...what it has done is to produce a nation of people who are very much alive to their own capacity for unforgivable behavior--a capacity, they have learned, that is completely in keeping with being a nice, civilized, conventional sort of person in ordinary life." (13-14)

It is impossible to read these words without thinking of American culpability in certain international arenas; indeed, Lesser makes short work of the current Adminstration. Visiting the Reichstag, which is filled with artwork symbolizing the Final Solution, she writes:

"And I couldn't help thinking, as I looked at them, how differently we do things in America, where oblivion and cultivated ignorance are the government's chief mechanisms for getting through the day, and where commemoration of our national misdeeds--espcially through any kind of publicly funded art--would seem to be unthinkable." (16-17)

Lesser goes on the comment on the quality and availablity of German artistic performance. Because the arts are funded by the government, the insane ticket prices to the opera, concerts, or ballet that Americans endure are nonexistent in Germany. For twenty-five dollars, one may purchase an excellent seat, then go out to eat afterward. (Restaurants stay open late, and the reservation games we play here are nonexistent in Berlin.) The irony-laden pretension dicating the New York art scene is absent; people from all walks of life partake of cultural life the way Americans shop at Target.

The second essay, "On Not Writing about David Hume," documents just that. At one point Lesser set out to write a short, accessible biography of Hume. She failed, and the unwritten book followed her spectrally. She describes the sick feeling only a dead book can give a writer (and all writers, I think, have at least one dead book buried someplace). Hume appeals to her innate orderliness: by her own account, Lesser is impatient, given to polar thinking, honest to the point of brusqueness. Hume's decency appeals to what she calls "this lack of inherent kindness" in herself. (85)

Hume reminds Lesser of her friends, especially the poet Thom Gunn, who went to great lengths to conceal his own mania for orderliness. Gunn, like Lesser (and like me) was intolerant of spontenaity, a manic planner who always had a backup plan lest the worst occur and things go awry. While Lesser doesn't speculate on the origins of this mania, I suspect it has to do with a chaotic childhood--or a perceived one. Planners are hedging against the uncontrollable, which remains, for all our careful planning, uncontrollable.

Hume lamented what he saw as the division between society and scholarship, writing that "Learning has been as great a Loser by being up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company." (Quoted from Essays Moral, Political, and Literary) This in 1742; what would Hume make of the blog wars, the Mendelsohns and Tanenhauses and Fords aligning themselves against the hoi polloi? We'll never know, though Lesser agrees with his assessment:

"We too are starved for intelligent conversation-" (109)

We are, and arguably this starvation has given rise to fools like me, who are compelled to read and write critically for no other reason than community with fellow travelers, nasty critics be damned.

The final essay, "Difficult Friends," is a tribute to the writer Leonard Michaels, who died 2003. It seems I keep finding myself in the midst of elegies. Lesser's is most unusual in its honesty: Michaels was a difficult man, stubborn, prickly, quick to seek out enemies. By Lesser's account the two had numerous serious fights leading to periods where they did not speak. Yet they always reconciled; Lesser, notoriously unforgiving, always forgave Michaels. She even introduced him to his fourth wife, her best friend Katharine. Lesser's clear-eyed account of the normally composed Katharine disintegrating as Michaels lies dying in Alta Bates Hospital is painfully affecting. At one point Katharine wants to block the door to the waiting room, as if this futile gesture will somehow keep bad news out, even if the room's inhabitants suffocate in the heat.

I found this final section difficult for an odd reason: the events take place in Berkeley, in restaurants and hospitals I am intimately acquainted with. When Lesser discusses meeting Michaels in their regular café, or her wish that he like the painting she's hung in her Victorian dining room, I can all too easily envision the places she describes. Ironically enough, I recently began Bill Buford's Heat, a book that could not have less in common with Lesser's text. Yet:

"I was living in Berkeley as a student until 1979 and now appreciate that the revolution had begun only a few blocks away at Chez Panisse...I had two meals there and two recollections...a specific one of Leonard Michaels, a fiction writer and English professor, eating at the next table. Michaels had grown up on New York's Lower East Side, had an urban, jaded manner, and was refreshingly suspicious of wacky California enthusiasms. But on this occasion, Michaels, surrounded by three rapt disciples, was holding forth with uncharacteristic animation on a piece of food--an asparagus spear." (Heat, 22)

I say ironically because I have also eaten at Chez Panisse in the company of Berkeley faculty, though my experience did not include analyses of aparagus spears. Nevertheless I can see the tiny dining room; only this morning I drove past Alta Bates, my car inevitably slowing to accomodate the never-ending march of pedestrians to and from its buildings. While doing so I recalled Michaels' absence, and realized that Lesser had been successful in her wish to record him, lest anyone forget.

Bill Buford: Heat. New York: Knopf. 2006.

Wendy Lesser: The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters. New York: Pantheon Books. 1999.
Room for Doubt. New York: Pantheon Books. 2007

Laura Shapiro's Penguin Lives biography of Julia Child

2007-05-08T19:51:00.000-07:00

[Hockeyman here again. BK is a book reviewing machine lately. Her review of Laura Shapiro's biography of Julia Child is up here, at January Magazine once again. Have a look.]

Alternative realities

2007-05-06T17:48:00.000-07:00

Jim Harrison’s Returning to Earth is the most troubling book I’ve read this year. Troubling because it began so strongly, sucking me in, then gradually spit me out, character by character, until I closed the book in bewilderment.

Set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Returning to Earth is narrated by four voices. The book opens with forty-five year old Donald, a half-Finnish, half-Chippewa man dying of ALS. Having decided to end his life on his own terms, he first dictates to wife Cynthia his family history. Donald is a strong character, literally a huge man—280 muscular pounds before illness devastates him—who talks to us about fishing, his love for his wife and family, and his deep seam of Native faith, which carries him past conventional "white" notions of illness and death:

“I won’t go into this because it’s religious. I saw this evangelist on television and it embarrassed me that this man could talk about God as if he was a buddy next door.” (41)

Donald and Cynthia have been together since their teens. They have two children, Clare and Herald, both in their early twenties, sharing an apartment in Los Angeles. Other family members include Cynthia’s brother David, David’s ex-wife Polly, Polly’s son Kenneth, who goes by “K,” and Flower, Donald’s cousin. Cynthia’s parents, the Burketts, play a large if offstage role, as does Jesse, their former caretaker, and Jesse's daughter, Vera.

Donald’s voice carried the greatest veracity. Even as his body weakens he is clear in his wishes—to be buried in the Canadian wilderness—and asks for nobody’s pity. His portion of the book closes with his impending death.

K opens the next section, and here the unrealities begin to accrete.

K is about 24, a drifter moving around Michigan. Unable and unwilling to settle into any semblance of study or career, he survives as a handyman. His work on a University of Michigan Dean’s Ann Arbor home affords him access to any University course that might interest him. He spends much time in the woods, fishing or wandering around thinking. His taste in women, while widely democratic, is one of the major failings of the novel. He says “I still think Dietrich’s left thigh in The Blue Angel is sexier than any photo I’ve ever seen in Penthouse or Playboy.” (77)

I work at a University and spend a great deal of time with men in their twenties—people born in 1985 or thereabouts. Most are fine, open-minded people who have never heard of Marlene Dietrich, let alone watched The Blue Angel. And while it’s nice to read about men who appreciate a variety of women, K is unconvincing. His tastes are those of a man in his sixties--that is, the author's. K is also in love with forty-four year old Cynthia. She tells him to buzz off, so he moves instead to Clare, who is his age. And though the two are not blood relatives, they were raised as cousins. This neatly avoids incest but remains disturbing as the novel piles on more sexual strangeness.

David is just plain annoying. Like K, he is functionally unable to do anything but read, write, and wander around a great deal. Though middle-aged, he is paralyzed by “Certain problems of late trying to force pieces of U.S. and world history into logical constructs.” (147)

“Again, how do we manage to live with what we know? ...my mind wanders back to my dithering obsession with the destructiveness of history.” 149

How do we manage? We haven’t much choice. And unlike David, most of us do not have family money. We haven’t time to dither. But David cannot wrench himself free of his childhood, especially his monstrous father, a drunk with a dangerous taste for young girls. David ties himself in knots trying to make amends, pouring the family money into survival packages for Mexicans trying to sneak over the Arizona border. Besides trouble with coyotes and US police, he loses a great deal of money for his sufferings, largely because he ignores his lawyer’s correspondence. Instead he naps three or four times daily and contemplates various women: Polly, whom he slept with long past their divorce, Vernice, a poet living in Iowa, and Vera. David and Cynthia grew up with Vera, Jesse's beauiful daughter. Unfortunately, the senior Burkett raped Vera when she was barely out of her teens. Jesse and a pregnant Vera returned to Mexico, where they built a coffee farm. Vera’s child, a boy (whose name we never learn), suffers a childhood head injury that leaves him permanently impaired; his violent behavior lands him in a criminal institution.

None of this curbs David’s abiding love for Vera, now a Mexican businesswoman in her forties. Initially it appears Vera wants nothing to do with David, which makes perfect sense, but she suddenly agrees to go to a hotel with him. Which doesn’t. Why would a beautiful woman with money and numerous suitors take up with the son of the man who raped her? A son who has no job, no sense of reality, and by his own admission is a slob and lousy cook? More older man’s fantasy. Sorry. And once again, though these two are unrelated by blood, Vera is the mother of David’s half-brother. Sex between these two is strange.

After David’s section we have Cynthia. By this point I was hoping for some kind of redemption. None came. Cynthia moves through life mechanically, reading a great deal and shuttling between her parents’ home, a small house purchased after Donald’s death, and various trips to Chicago, New York, and Au Train, where the aging Flower lives a traditional native American life.

All the characters are in constant motion. They go here, they go there. There’s a lot of hiking, a lot of stopping at cabins, small diners, bars. Cynthia is worried about her daughter Clare, who has come home from her job as a wardrobe stylist in Los Angeles and fallen into a deep depression.

Though we see Clare only through other people’s eyes, her character represents another set of problems. Despite what we’re told is her interest in clothing, she is described as a tomboy who loved fishing with her father and copies his habit of wearing bib overalls. You show me a Los Angeles wardrobe stylist who wears only bib overalls and I will produce a talking frog. Compounding this is Clare’s announcement to K that she may leave her work to attend grad school in Berkeley that fall to study Human Geography. The University Administrator in me popped up immediately. It’s June, you’ve been working in the wardrobe business and you think Berkeley’s gonna take you just like that? In fall?

At this point I began doubting myself. Certainly writers are permitted liberties. (Anne Tyler's geographically altered Baltimore comes to mind.) Nor should they be intimately acquainted with Berkeley’s admissions system, as I am. But by this point in the book—not even halfway through-- the accumulation of strange plot twists and warped relationships were beyond my ability to suspend belief. I had overlooked the way Donald’s decline was written—by the time of his death, he has difficulty breathing and swallowing, but is still able to barely hobble with a walker. Sadly, I have a close relative with neuromuscular disease. A person with advanced ALS cannot walk. In fact, walking is one of the first things to go. I had overlooked David’s interest in his half-brother’s wife and Clare and K’s relationship. I found both K and David puzzling, but pushed on until Clare made this announcement, following it up by saying she wanted to get pregnant with K’s child and have him join her in Berkeley.

Do people like this exist in a reality I am too narrow to accept? People who sleep with family members when a larger population is available? People who wander and take four naps daily?

Clare does not get pregnant. Deeply depressed, she takes to her room and reads books about bears. Bears play an enormous role in the novel as native American totems and beings in the landscape. Donald loved bears; Flower does not eat them for religious reasons, and Clare, in her grief, hopes to become one. She seeks out Flower’s wisdom in this effort. The two women decide to build a sort of rough shelter on Flower’s land, where Clare hopes to “hibernate” over the Michigan winter. Given Northern Michigan’s freezing temperatures, Cynthia has good reason for concern.

To this end Cynthia hangs around Flower’s place, eating the venison mincemeat pies Flower is renowned for. Harrison loves to write about food, and there’s no shortage of male cookery here: venison, bear, a squirrel tail, and pot roasts washed down with plenty of whiskey. And though Cynthia is constantly shown eating Flower's mincemeat pies, we are told she is losing terrible amounts of weight.

Even stranger is Cynthia’s profession: she is a schoolteacher who is doing sub work after Donald’s death. Nothing is said of the tremendous strain of this job; after tossing her schoolbooks down the basement steps she says:

“It had become quite evident I didn’t want to teach in Marquette ... The smallest possible light bulb went off in my head when I remembered that in late September a young man who taught human geography at the college had suggest I might tutor some native students who tended to get lost out of shyness.” (250)

Maybe they got lost in the thicket of that sentence. But enter Vincent, a handsome, strapping young Native American with reading difficulties. Cynthia does more than just tutor him: she offers him the apartment out back and then seduces him. Nowhere is it suggested that a forty-four year old tutor working with a younger student might think twice about this behavior; instead we are led to think the young man is delighted with his good fortune.

“Before dipping into the hell of grammar study I led Vincent out to Jesse’s apartment ... I felt a little wobbly on the way up the stairs and wondered if my butt was worth looking at. In the apartment were standing next to each other and he looked around and said ‘I can’t believe my luck’ and gave me an impulsive hug. I didn’t let go and he looked at me oddly as if making sure of himself.” Afterward, studying, “We laughed quite a bit during our lessons.” (264)

Putting aside the teacher/student relationship, I wonder at Cynthia's choice of partner. We are told she was fourteen when she took up with Donald. The two married young and had children by the time Cynthia was twenty. This makes it reasonably safe to say that prior to Vincent, Cynthia had slept only with Donald. Would a grieving, sexually inexperienced woman choose a twenty-one year old dyslexic as her first sexual partner after her husband's untimely death?

Uh, no. At least, it seems a bit off to me. I mean, will Joan Didion, who said recently that she could see herself in a relationship again, take up with Ashton Kutcher's little brother?

Uh, no.

A little while later Cynthia lands in the hospital with double pneumonia and falls into a semi-coma, dreaming about moving to Lame Deer, Montana to teach (her term) “Indian Kids.” Upon waking and recovering, she does just that. David and Vera, meanwhile, have decided to adopt a child. Herald has married his girlfriend, a Mexican stripper attending community college. (Oh, please.) Clare and K wander off together.

In sum, a book with precious little basis in reality. And that was my biggest problem: the book is intended to represent reality. Returning to Earth is not The Time Traveler’s Wife, or a Lethemesque fable where the unexpected is set into reality like a ruby in a ring. We are told this is a family coming to terms with an early death; we are given a real and beautiful Michigan landscape, some excellent asides about the disasters of modern life, and wonderful insight Native American life.

But the plot is simply improbable; the easiest parts to accept are the those describing native American religious experiences, men who fly or become bears, an old woman living in a shack, making venison mincemeat and communing with animals. It’s the white characters, with their poor choices and shambling sentences, that leave me shaking my head. At one point K says:

“She had a sense of reality alien to any perceptions that I had ever had.” (90) that about sums up this book for me.

Jim Harrison: Returning to Earth
New York: Grove Press
2007 280 pp

Fonts

2007-05-03T19:49:00.000-07:00

An argument arose between Hockeyman and BK today. Both were at their respective day jobs.

BK emailed H-Man a handbook draft for his consideration. He telephoned. "This font is awful. You have to change it."

"It's Comic Sans MS! What's wrong with it?"

"It's awful! Horrible! Use Courier!"

"Courier is not a welcoming font," BK said sanctimoniously.

Hockeyman began laughing uncontrollably. "A welcoming font! A welcoming font!"

Bk, miffed, told him he sounded just like his father. He did.

"Use Helvetica, then," he managed between gasps.

Hmph.

The George W. Bush award

2007-05-02T19:51:00.000-07:00

For open-mindedness and fair thinking goes to Richard Ford.

Congrats to Ed, who I suppose is now officially famous, and hometown hero Dan Wickett. We Detroiters do more than build cars.

I realized this week that I'd fallen down on my promise to deliver weekly hairball reports to you, my faithful readers. But Richard came through for me. I may be a dumb blogger without so much as a basement to opine from, but at least I try something before I knock it.

Richard, you're worse than disappointing.

But the best thing to do about disappointment is overcome it, no? We'll make a valiant attempt. To this end, let us peruse Barking Kitten's mail.

Barking Kitten's real name, which is not Diane Leach, has been sold by the New York Review of Books. This is the only possible reason for the shiny folded page advertising Virginia Tufte's Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style.

Oh, no. This is either hilarious, or awful, or both, but in searching for Virginia Tufte online, we find this.

Let us quote BK to Hockeyman upon receiving the mail: "Graphics Press in Cheshire, Connecticut? What, is it a vanity press run by retired people with goats in their yard?"

Basically, yes, only the Press is run by Mr. (Dr?) Edward Tufte.

Never mind. The brochure, which encourages us to purchase the text, tells us Artful Sentences examines:

"...more than a thousand excellent sentences chosen from the works of authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sentences come from an extensive search to identify some of the ways professional writers use the generous resources of the English language."

Notice, friends, the many passive structures of the above quote. Contemplate what sentences might appear. Call me Ishmael. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.

Nah.

Forging onward:

"Both new and experienced writers will find inspiration: the book is not about 'errors' but about successes. If you are already a good writer, Artful sentences can help you to become excellent."

Herman, Ernest, Raymond, buy yours today! www.tufte.com!

Still not sold? Virginia has excellent street cred. She is a distinguished professor emerita from USC. She specialized in Milton, Renaissance Poetry, and (here come them passives!) "the history and grammar of English."

Here is Professor Tufte herself, a woman of a certain age, photographed on a sunny beach. Below the photo we are treated to a pithy quote:

"The syntactic means are relatively simple and few but the stylistic effects are countless."

Indeed.

Five hairballs for Ford. Three for Tufte.

The sentences come from Moby Dick, The Old Man and The Sea, and Raymond Carver's A Small, Good Thing.

Anna Gavalda's Hunting and Gathering

2007-04-30T22:53:00.000-07:00

[Hockeyman here. BK's review of Anna Gavalda's Hunting and Gathering is currently up at January Magazine. Check it out, and poke around the rest of the site if you are so inclined.]

Asparagus: an untitled post

2007-04-29T12:14:00.000-07:00

(After arguing with BK Editing Services, this post is offically untitled. "Asparagus" denotes today's topic. Happy reading.--The BK Crew, aka BK and Hockeyman)

It's springtime in California, or what passes for it in these globally-ruined times. This means our weekly farm box is changing. The months of collards, cabbages, lettuces, and the occasional bunch o' turnips are now leavened by spring onions, carrots, a brief flash of fava beans, English peas, and bundles of asparagus.

Asparagus! One is instructed to cook it immediately, lest it lose its inimitable freshness. Can't cook it now? Place the bundle upright, in water, like a green bouquet.

The only suitable vessel I have for uprighting asparagus is an oversized Detroit Red Wings mug featuring a bleeding transfer of Sergei Federov, skating in his dress reds. He should've never left the Wings, and God knows they need him now. But for the moment, he is static in my fridge, holding up the asparagus.

"I don't like asparagus," I admitted to Hockeyman earlier today.

He looked scandalized. "You don't?"

"I like canned asparagus. Isn't that awful?"

His expression said I married this person? "You know," He said. "Alice Waters is going to take away your secret power ring. Canned!"

I know. I never saw fresh asparagus until my late twenties. My mother bought the occasional can, a luxury, and meted out a few twigs of the khaki stuff to each family member. I especially loved the stalks.

Now I never buy canned asparagus. See, I have this fresh stuff from the farm, and I'm supposed to prefer it. So I've dutifully washed it, sauteéd it, squirted lemon over it, broiled it with olive oil and garlic, bathed it in butter. And I invariably find it bitter, fibrous, even minerally at times.

I don't like asparagus.

-------------

Food dislikes are a funny business. While individual tastes vary--I have always hated hot dogs, and Hockeyman cannot abide cottage cheese--certain foods are meant to transcend. Asparagus, fresh peas, apple pie (another food I am indifferent to), stuffing, fried chicken. If you live in Alice Waters territory, as I do, you are supposed to swoon at the sight of fresh baby lettuces. I don't. Then again, I love a lot of veggies people profess to hate: rutabagas, turnips, celeraic. I like cabbage well enough and have become so addicted to dark greens that if I go without them a few days, cravings set in.

Even funnier is the guilt associated with disliking certain foods. It's okay to shun MacDonald's, but confessing to asparagus aversion is like admitting you don't get Pynchon: you're a fake. Hand over those Berkeley-pc-intellectual credentials now.

-------------

So what's a humiliated palate to do?

Try to like the offending food, of course. Here is Laurie Colwin on stuffing:

"It was years before I could come out and say how much I hated stuffing ... Holiday after holiday I would push my portion around my plate ... Everyone else loved it. It was clear I was in opposition to a national tradition."

After an outing at her home involving an unstuffed turkey, Colwin attempts amends. The perfect stuffing appears to her as she's drowsing: cornbread and prosciutto. Its raging success leads her to conclude:

"After all, an unstuffed turkey is like a jigsaw puzzle of the American flag with a piece missing right in the middle."

Fortunately, asparagus lacks such connotations. But vegetable guilt is a powerful thing. Chef Jessica Prentice, in Full Moon Feast, documents her efforts toward Jerusalem artichokes, or sunchokes:

"I still haven't acheived a fondness for Jersualem artichokes ... (she acquires some from a local farmer and takes them to a catering job) ... I debated whether I should serve the sunchokes as well ... I wanted to like them. I boiled them right there at the catering job and then cut into a steaming hot, knobby little nugget, and plopped it in my mouth, hoping to fall in love. I didn't. Yuck, I thought."

She goes on to say she'll keep trying them, though, in the hopes of acquiring a taste for them.

Both Colwin and Prentice keep trying, as I do--the asparagus keeps coming, and I keep preparing it. I doubt I'll ever come to like it as I do other vegetables. But last night, paging through Chez Panisse Vegetables, I found Green Risotto with Fava Bean Purée, Peas, and Asparagus. It's rather involved, what with peeling the favas, pureeing them, and coping with the whole broth-risotto-experience, so I will tear Hockeyman away from the playoffs to act as sous chef.

The recipe calls for asparagus cut on the diagonal and stirred in the rice toward the end of cooking. But the rest of it--the beans and peas, garlic, butter, broth--looks so wonderul that I think I'll be able to cope.

Or I can direct Hockeyman to slice the stalks into longish lengths. They'll be that much easier to push aside.

Laurie Colwin:Home Cooking. New York, Harper Perennial. 1988: 132-5.

Jessica Prentice:Full Moon Feast. Vermont, Chelsea Green Publishing. 2006: 13-15.

Alice Waters: Chez Panisse Vegetables. New York, Harper Collins. 1996: 143.

About Alice

2007-04-28T08:49:00.000-07:00

Calvin Trillin's About Alice had the misfortune of appearing after The Year of Magical Thinking. This was more than obviously ironic, as Trillin was good friends with John Gregory Dunne. The two attended Yale together, keeping up a lively correspondence thereafter, documented by Dunne in Regards.

Trillin was married to Alice just shy of forty years, and his elegy is as amusing in spots as it is heartrending. While temptingly convenient to compare his book to Didion's, their similarities begin and end at losing a spouse. Trillin, even in grief, quotes the one condolence letter that makes him--and us--laugh. If there's a mite of humor in Magical, I hereby charge the lit crit brigade to find it.

Alice Stewart Trillin's mother was Jewish, a consolation to Calvin's mother. Yet what one notices in the book's two photographs is what Trillin calls her "prettiness" and what the rest of us would call stunning beauty. The Alice shown on the back jacket flap of this slim volume is striding, hand-in-hand, with the man she married moments before. She wears the kind of outfit any woman over age twenty-five recognizes as classic, and very, very expensive: an understated plaid skirt, a matching car coat with 3/4 sleeves, a light turtleneck sweater and beret. Leather gloves, dark pumps. She is that rare thing: a natural blonde. Had she chosen to do so, she could have modeled (she did, a bit, early on) or become one of those actors who doesn't need to act.

But Alice's looks bedeviled her, for "they were exacerbated by the fact that Alice didn't look like who she was." (20) She was an intellect, teacher, and fine writer herself. Trillin describes the sort of people who reacted to her negatively--men anticipating a beautiful woman's haughty grandeur, jealous women. Precisely because Alice was so nice, and because Trillin describes this kindness so well, even those of us with-less-than Alice appearances feel genuinely sorry for her.

Alice was also forthright. One of memior's best moments transpires at a meeting of Yale Alumni. George Pataki has just given a rousing speech about his own Yale experience--that of a postal worker's son. When Pataki returns to his seat at the Trillin's table, Alice turns to him and says:

"That was one of the best speeches I've ever heard. Why in the world are you a Republican?" (43)

She had an ingrained sense of fairness. She taught remedial English in the New York College system, ignoring the outraged shrieks from those who felt people in need of remedial teaching didn't belong in higher education. She believed everyone beyond a set income level should be levied "the Alice Tax." She helped those in need, caring for her ailing, bankrupt parents, writing movingly to a young woman recovering from assault. Her letters to young Bruno Navatsky, diagnosed with a malignant lung tumor, became the book Dear Bruno. Sixteen years later, Bruno wrote: "Thanks for your letter. I really should have answered sooner, but I've been so busy...There was high school to finish, then college. For a few years, I was living in Japan." (72)

Alice was not so fortunate. In 1976, this cigarette-loathing woman got lung cancer. Incredibly, she recovered, but years later--on September 11th, 2001--the damage from radiation treatment exacted its final toll on her generous heart.

At seventy-eight pages, About Alice is a marvel of brevity. Yet the emotional current lends it expansivesess. Trillin deftly sidesteps memoir's worst pitfalls by sticking to the facts. There are four mentions of his sadness: the opening lines, his granddaughter Izzy's resemblance to Alice ("which may be one reason I sometimes have trouble taking my eyes off her.") (12), and this sudden realization in an airport, years after Alice's first illness and recovery:

"I was walking through an airport to catch a plane to New York, when, apropos of nothing, the possibility that things could have gone the other way in 1976 burst into my mind...I think I literally staggered...I was in a condition my father would have called poleaxed. A couple people stopped to ask if I was all right. I must have said yes. After a while, the pictures faded from my mind. I...caught my flight...Alice was there. The girls were there. Everything was all right." (71)

The final moment closes the book. Alice, that incorrigible optimist, would have called living twenty-five years beyond a death sentence meant wonderful luck.

"I try to think of it in those terms. Some days I can and some days I can't." (78)

Calvin Trillin: About Alice. New York: Random House. 2006.

For my neighbor, Ceasar, who died two weeks ago, and his mother, who took such wonderful care of him.

Bad Teeth

2007-04-24T18:38:00.000-07:00

I got my braces off yesterday.

Everybody told me I’d be running my tongue over my teeth, marveling at their smoothness. I’m not. My tongue is busy with the new permanent retainer glued to my bottom front teeth. My mouth aches a little bit. I was warned it might. I’m used to dental pain.

How do I look? Like Carly Simon. Long brown hair surrounding total horse teeth. The orthodontist told me everyone says that—how huge their teeth look. When I relayed this to Hockeyman, he said, yeah, but you’ve never really seen all your teeth.

It’s true. My teeth were so crooked I never knew what they looked like aligned. Now I do, and it’s like somebody else’s teeth are in my mouth, on temporary loan.

I have many habits to break, like the one that surfaced Sunday night, when Hockeyman brought the laptop out the to couch. He had it on the camera setting. “We have to take before and after pictures,” He said. He passed the laptop to me. The camera sized me up. The woman looking back at me appeared every minute of her thirty-nine years and then some. Her mouth was closed, as its been since she was ten. “I can’t,” I said.

“Why not? C’mon.” He was celebratory. I had dreamed the night before that I’d visited the orthodontist and he’d refused to remove the braces. I wasn’t taking any chances.

“No,” I said. My left hand drifted up to my mouth as I spoke, and stayed there. “I can’t,” I said through my hand.

He stared, his smile fading into puzzlement. He has perfect teeth. In the fourteen years I have known him, he hasn’t had so much as a cavity. Whereas I have had multiple root canals, crowns, three root canals on one tooth that failed, removal of said tooth and part of the jaw around it, along with countless little fixes.

I handed the computer back to him.

I have been ashamed of my teeth for twenty-nine years. Since I was ten, and my baby teeth, instead of falling out, rotted and decayed. There wasn’t money for the dentist. My baby molars blackened; I covertly spit little pieces of tooth into my palm when I thought my mother wasn’t looking.

She must have seen me, though, because one day her father called me over to his chair and counted a hundred dollars into my palm.

“Go to the dentist. And if you need more, you tell me.”

“Why are you doing this?” What a question from a ten-year-old! What an odd child I was!

“So you’ll remember me when I’m dead.”

My grandfather lost all his teeth as a young man. He had diptheria. Only now does it occur to me that he, too, knew about the shame and suffering associated with teeth.

Everyone knows there is nothing like dental pain. Perhaps it is the immediacy of pain so close to our brains, the way a sore tooth can short-circuit any attempts at logical thought. The way dental pain refuses to capitulate to all but the strongest medications. The way it stops us from the human necessities of talking and eating.

Perhaps it is a deep-seated animal fear: without teeth we are helpless, like infants. Or, more frighteningly, like the very old. If nothing else, depending on your generation, you remember Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man or the X-Files’ Duane Barry. Nobody will ever forget Steve Railsback screaming “They drilled holes in my teeth!”

Thus the American love of a Farrah Fawcett megawatt smile. Tooth whitening centers spring up on corners like so many Starbucks franchises. Entire supermarket aisles are taken up with fancy whitening systems and special toothpastes.

I say Americans because the many Europeans I work with were amazed when I got braces. They all told me I looked fine. When I explained the braces were for medical reasons, not vanity, I was dismissed. I suppose those who have survived world wars have a different take on trivialities like teeth. But I was American, thirty-seven, and down one adult molar. I was told my nasal cavity was too shallow to permit an implant. There was nowhere to put a bridge. Worst of all, my crowded teeth led to endless infections, no matter how vigorously I brushed and flossed.

With my $100 in hand, I went to a dentist who pulled the rotted teeth and advised my mother to wait for my adult molars to grown in. I have a small mouth—child-sized—with an unusually high palate. This drove those adult molars inward: I could lay a finger between my backmost tooth and its neighbor. This also meant no end of trapped food, no matter how much I cleaned. Meanwhile, my Grandfather died, and I remembered him. I did not see a dentist for another seven years.

When I was seventeen, my father got a new job with full dental benefits. I made an appointment with another dentist.

He was horrified. It took him to two visits to clean my teeth. My gums were so tender that I required massive doses of Novocain. Then came the cavities—five—and a replacement crown for the front tooth chipped in childhood.

Then the first root canal of the right back molar. To gain access to the tooth, the dentist had to tilt the chair until my feet were higher than my head. He prescribed Vicodin for the pain, which is how we discovered my allergy to it. I remember crouching on the floor of his office bathroom, my head between my knees. I thought I might be dying, and hoped so, because then I would feel better. My mother and the dentist stood in the doorway watching me, discussing whether or not I should be taken to the hospital.

Instead I was sent to a specialist, who managed to clear up the infection. A couple years later, the tooth infected again. This time it took a portion of my jaw with it. When I visited my regular dentist to remove the gauze packed into my mouth, he pulled it out, looked inside, and abruptly excused himself. I heard him in his office, on the telephone with the specialist. What happened to all that bone?

Infected. Dead. Had to go.

The crown was gold, and lasted until three weeks before my wedding. I was twenty-nine. “Take it out,” I told the latest dentist. “Just take it out.”

He did, extending the remains of my molar in his palm. A shell, the gold eaten away.

This was my adult mouth: prone to tartar, infection, with crooked, crooked teeth that snagged every bit of food.

I become morbidly self-conscious about eating in public. When out with others I ordered soups, pastas, maybe roast chicken. Never, ever meat. Never corn. Never salads. I always excused myself afterward, pulling out my floss and toothbrush in the ladies’ room.

I was aware—always—of my four bottom teeth, which resembled a broken yellow fence. I noticed everyone else’s teeth, white and straight. Classy teeth.

Although my natural smile is a wide grin, I began smiling with my mouth closed. Especially for photos, which I avoided whenever possible.

Times passed. My husband and I got jobs with good insurance coverage. I asked my dentist about bonding.

“No,” he said. “braces.”

We paid off the car. At age thirty-seven, I steeled myself against the humiliation of being the only adult amongst so many adolescents and visited the orthodontist for a consultation.

I was told my midline—the top of my teeth compared to the bottom—could never be repaired. Too late. But they could straighten me out. Total cost: $5,100. Total time: unknown. The orthodontists—a team of three doctors—worried about my ability to tolerate braces. Just that week a woman had them put on, then removed. She couldn’t stand them.

I was determined to stand them, and did, for thirty months. Yes, they hurt. They cut the insides of my mouth up. Food got caught in them. Eating publicly went from potentially embarrassing to nightmarish. The rubber bands intended to align my bite gave me such severe migraines that I had to give them, and promise of a better bite, up. I tried every brand of floss on the market and destroyed a toothbrush a month. The braces impaired my speech, caused my lips to swell unattractively, and looked just awful.

Now they’re off, and for the first time in my life, my mouth looks decent. Even good. Oh, I still need some work—a cavity is asserting itself, and the front crown has discolored yet again, requiring replacement, which will affect the retainers. But the smile in the mirror is white and straight and belongs to another person.

I have to unlearn habitually closing my mouth, ordering the pasta, and, hardest of all, that migrating left hand, rising to cover my shameful teeth when I speak or laugh.

The saddest part is all these years later, with my beautiful smile, I realize that likely nobody ever noticed my terrible teeth, or even if they did, didn’t really care. And while the rational part of me understands this, the child with the rotting mouth will have difficulty remembering to keep her hand down for a long time to come.

I Wish Someone Were Waiting For Me Somewhere

2007-04-21T08:49:00.000-07:00

I Wish Someone Were Waiting For Me Somewhere is the second Anna Gavalda book to reach American shores. Each of these twelve short pieces packs a sharp punch at the narrator's expense.

The stories concern lost chances for erotic love or missteps with disastrous outcomes. While the first theme offers some rueful amusement, as in "Courting Rituals of Saint-Germain-des-Prés," the misstep stories are the most breathtaking. In "Catgut," a female veterinarian struggles to establish herself in a chauvinistic farming village, only to be raped by locals. Her revenge will have every female reader clapping with glee (and many men too, I'm sure), but her carefully constructed life is over, and she knows it. "Pregnant" centers on woman who, happily with child, splurges on a beautiful maternity dress for a summer wedding several months hence. When the wedding date arrives she must still wear the dress, but no longer expects the child. The narrator of "For Years," abandoned by his lover, marries and has children whom he adores. Yet he remains guiltily fixated on his former lover. One day she telephones, informing him she is fatally ill. Might they rendezvous a final time? The ensuing meeting is a masterpiece of understated writing:

"We told each other the story of our lives. It was somewhat disjointed. We each kept our secrets. She had trouble finding the right words." (136)

Gavalda's writing is elegantly lean, all short, declarative sentences:

“He’s never slept with his secretaries. It’s vulgar, and these days could cost you some serious money.” (31)

"You never know what's going to happen--how things are going to unfold, or when the simplest things are going to take on demented proportions." (145)

"His name is Alexander Devermont. He's a young man, all pink and blond." (101)

Throughout one is reminded that life is short and all too often ruined by missed opportunity. In both "Leave" and "Clic-Clac," men fantasize about women they love only to refuse their real-life advances. "This Man and This Woman" are a long-married, wealthy, loveless couple riding silently to their perfectly restored country home. The ride, alternating between his rage and her loneliness, is a long one. In “Lead Story,” a rash driving decision causes a catastrophic accident, one the perpetrator learns of only later, watching television in the safety of his apartment. The final story, "Epilogue," offers some levity in the form of a writer's visit to a publisher. The narrator, nicknamed Marguerite Duras by her husband, mails her manuscript to a publisher. When he telephones for an appointment, it is only to inform her that she shows promise. Her ensuing paralysis--she literally cannot move from her chair--will leave all would-be authors squirming.

Interestingly, Gavalda's books have been translated by three different women--Catherine Evans, (Someone I Loved), Karen L. Marker, (I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere), and Alison Anderson (Hunting and Gathering). All are able translators, allowing Gavalda's spare style to shine through the thicket of English. Word choices are wonderfully apt: charming, "Madame" instead of Ms., "brilliant," instead of "great." There is no sense of limping through missed meanings or botched glosses than can make works in translation so frustrating. Gavalda is another fine European writer deserving a wider American audience.

Anna Gavalda: I Wish Someone Were Waiting for me Somewhere. Karen L. Marker, Translator. New York: Riverhead Books, 1999.

Reading Anna Gavalda

2007-04-21T08:34:00.000-07:00

French writer Anna Gavalda is the author of three books: the novella Someone I Loved, a collection of stories titled I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere, and the recently translated Hunting and Gathering.

Gavalda's work is concise, elegant, and invariably pointed toward love--familial, marital, erotic. Someone I Loved, her first novel, is a fictionalized account of her husband's sudden departure for another woman. Narrator Chloé, stunned by Adrien's abandonment, numbly follows her father-in-law, Pierre, who insists on bundling her off to the countryside, her two small daughters in tow.

In the family’s remote country house the notoriously reticent, workaholic Pierre lays his life bare to his astonished daughter-in-law. As Chloé moves through her terrible grief, longing once again to be sitting on the Metro, filing her nails and wondering about dinner parties, Pierre divulges a series of shocking revelations. He is sixty-five, his life a “closed fist” whose "strings" he attempts to tug for Chloé’s benefit. His life, he explains, has been one long effort toward safety: a loveless marriage, a demanding profession, emotional detachment from his children. But there is an enormous rent in his life’s fabric: an unexpected love affair, begun at age forty-two. Suddenly Pierre was alive, happy, complete. But he was unable muster the courage to leave his wife and children:

“A thousand times I wanted to and a thousand times I gave it up...I went right to the edge of the abyss, I leaned over, and then I fled. I felt accountable to Suzanne, to the children.” (117)

Later he tells Chloé:

“...I would rather see you suffer a lot today than suffer a little bit for the rest of your life...I see people suffering a little, only a little, not much at all, just enough to ruin their lives completely...Yes, at my age, I see that a great deal...crushed under the weight of that miserable little thing—their ordinary little life.” (123-4)

Chloé, Pierre observes, is full of life, vibrant, talented. Adrien has done her a favor. She is now free to exercise her repressed artistic abilities, to seize her own happiness, to make more of her life than the majority, himself included, who squander their chances.

Initially Chloé resists. She pointedly enumerates Pierre's many flaws and their effects on Adrien. Pierre is stung, but accepts her allegations: he is indeed a bastard. All the more reason for him to tell the truth. At this, all Chloé can do is sit and listen, glass in hand, as Pierre describes a life compressed into series of tiny boxes.

The decidedly French setting moves the story along: much of it takes place at table, with Chloé's excellent meals interspersed, in a small moment of amusement, at Pierre's maiden cooking attempt:

"It says 'cut the carrots in medium-sized rounds.' Do you think it's good like that?" (21)

Much is made of opening fine bottles of wine, of a meal of gésiers confits with spaghetti. Promises to continue seeing one another center on lunching at a fish restaurant. The meals mark time: the pain of the moment, the promise of a bittersweet future.

Finally, after a night of revelations, Pierre poses a final question: aren't children happier with a happier father?

On this quixotic note the novella ends, leaving the surprised reader sympathizing with the villain. The question leads to the author’s implicit forgiveness, a broadness of vision seldom seen in American marriages—or divorces.

Anna Gavalda: Someone I Loved. Catherine Evans, Translator. New York: Riverhead Books. 2005.

Sick Despair

2007-04-18T19:58:00.000-07:00

I often wonder how much commentary about real world events is appropriate here. This is not a news blog. Yet ignoring certain things might imply disregard. Vonnegut's death, for example: of course I was upset, but so was the rest of the world, and everyone rushed in with lovely words and moving tributes.

Now it's Virginia Tech.

I have worked in academia since I was a student--twenty-one years. I am employed by a large university not dissimilar to Virginia Tech: roughly the same number of students, the same diverse racial make-up, the same opportunities for a deranged individual to wreak havoc.

I find myself incapable of pithy comment. Professional insight? Maybe, but I'm not sure which is making me sicker: so many deaths, so close to home, or the media, swarming around like fat happy maggots.

I am thinking about the administrators at Virginia Tech, the ones who will have to fill out the paperwork, close the email accounts, remove names from enrollment lists, ensure report cards are not mailed. The secretaries who will be charged with cleaning out faculty offices. The custodians, and the awful task awaiting them.

It is easier--though not much--to think about them than it is the dead.

Light a candle for the dead children, their dead teachers, their friends and families.

Turn off your television. Stop reading the news feeds. There's nothing more to know. Light your candle, and weep.

Dark Ladies In Translation

2007-04-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

I read these reviews with interest.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/books/review/Agee.t.html?_r=1&ref=books&o

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/books/review/Harrison2.t.html?ref=books

Both are pans, especially the first, reviewing Elfriede Jelinek's latest book, which finally sees the light of day in English.

Reviewer Joel Agee rakes Jelinek over the coals for her former Communist Party membership and extreme feminist views. He excoriates the new book, Greed, as a lifeless and mordant exploration into Austrian society. Interestingly, as he makes his dislike of both book and author plain, he neglects to mention Jelinek's crippling agoraphobia: Jelinek so fears travel she could not attend the ceremony to receive her contested Nobel Prize. Her mother, immortalized in The Piano Teacher, was a monster. Her father died in a mental hospital.

I read The Piano Teacher. While brutal, it is a compelling exploration of the impossibly competitive classical music world and the sometimes crazed parents inhabiting it. The book is also provides a fascinating glimpse into Viennese musical culture. The characters are unpleasant; the novel lacks a happy ending. It appears Greed follows suit. Perhaps it is a bad novel, but if Mr. Agee must skewer Jelinek's character along with her book, he might be a bit more even-handed.

Sophie Harrison doesn't sharpen her knives on Natsuo Kirino, which is nice. Even nicer is looking forward to Grotesque, the second Kirino book apeearing in English. I picked up the first, Out, on a lark, caught cold, and read the book in one sitting, tissues piling up about me. Kirino's work is smooth, cool, her characters sharply ruthless. The world depicted in Out is an unrelentingly ugly reality of necessary, mindless work coupled with barren relationships. Like Jelinek's writing, Kirino's sheds light into a part of the world American readers might otherwise never see, in this case, Japanese working-class women. Even better, it shows these women quietly revolting. And getting away with it.

Both Agee and Harrison take issue with the darkness of their respective authors' themes. Jelinek is especially black-humored, but given the current state of affairs, can we blame her? Neither writer offers escapist panacea: look elsewhere. Read Danielle Steel if you want soft lighting and happy endings. I am content to find these dark ladies available in English, and look forward to both, if only for outside verification of the darkness I see all around me.

Jane, concluded.

2007-04-14T10:04:00.000-07:00

English Food is the only cookbook I've ever read that evoked dejá vu. This because Laurie Colwin, one of my favorite writers, adored Grigson's works. Colwin was a devotee of all things English, and much of her cookery writing sings the praises of teatime and dishes like Grigson's Sussex Pond Pudding, which appears in a Home Cooking essay titled "Kitchen Horrors."

Having first read of Sussex Pond Pudding as a horror--and it does sounds rather awful--it was strange to happen upon the original recipe. Grigson also cites Joyce Molyneaux's Carved Angel Cookery Book and Margaret Costa's Four Seasons Cookery Book, books Colwin loved.

Still, reading a cookbook written by a woman who died too soon--Grigson was only 62--adored by a writer who also died too soon--Colwin died of a heart attack at 48--is deeply saddening. We will never have more of Grigson's tartly amusing recipes or Colwin's gentle exaltations of domestic life. The world is a lesser place for these losses. Yet each woman's words are kept alive by people like me, who, reading one, earnestly seek the other.

Ultimately, it's probably a good thing that Grigson's recipes do not call out to me, as the quest for English cookbooks is an expensive one. My lust for widely available cookbooks is bad enough. Though I must say Grigson's Charcuterie and French Pork Cooking looks terrifcally tempting.

Which brings me back to the idea of cooking styles. After wanting English Food for months, and going to some lengths to find it, I read it through the way one would a novel. I delighted in its prose while benefiting hugely from its scholarship. Ultimately, though, English Food is destined to be a reference text. Not that the recipes aren't excellent; they simply aren't my style. My style, I realized with a shock, was French Farmhouse/California Organic Princess.

On one level this sounds hideously pretentious, and it's a good thing people don't go around asking each other about cooking styles. It's a subject fraught with conceits and crochets, especially here in the land of competitive cookery, where eveybody is busy trying to out-organic-farm-source everybody else.

But I do have a style, and Grigson's recipes, mixing fruit with meats and lard with cream, brought this home. I was reminded of Amanda Hesser, who, in Cooking for Mr. Latte, laments her lack of a cooking repertoire. This is due in part to her work at The New York Times, where she must test drive any number of recipes for publication. Yet she writes of feeling adrift compared to her mother, who cooked nightly for a family of six, and her mother-in-law, whose recipe jottings went back thirty years. These women had set of recipes to work from, bounce off of, improvise with. Hesser felt inadequate.

"For months, with Tad's (Hesser is married to writer Tad Friend) gentle encouragement, I had been trying to distill the mass of recipes in my head down to a manageable stable of favorites, a repertoire I could rely on and that friends and family, and Tad in particular, would look forward to. I wanted to contain recipes that represent who I am, what I find pleasurable, how I live." (190)

I can't say I ever gave style that much thought, though, interestingly enough, Hockeyman had. He noticed my fondness for stews or food with lots of natural gravy. (It's all about sopping up with good bread.) When The Cooking of Southwest France entered our kitchen, he told me I "cooked French." Envisioning haute cusine, or cuisine minceur, all those perfectly sliced, minimalist dishes with coins of sauce, followed by sculpted sorbets, I objected. It sounded so awfully twee. "I don't cook like that. I can't. I wouldn't."

"You cook French farmhouse," He said.

Well. Cough. I opened the fridge and had a look at the duck confit aging in its glass jar, then into the freezer, stuffed with more duck legs, a pound of duck fat, and a whole organic chicken. I considered the lentils and the insanely expensive French butter. My abiding interest in patés, confits, and garbure.

Guilty as charged. But unlike Hesser, who interpreted her lack of style as a kind of willful immaturity, I remain hesitant to label my cooking. My fondness for all things duck grew from my long-term love of poultry, which in turn came from a childhood of Sabbath chicken dinners, matzoh ball soup, and lots of schmaltz. And as much as I've come to appreciate pork in all its forms for what it brings to a soup, stew, or as the main dish, I still dislike lard.

And tastes change. I may be firmly French at this moment, but Asian foods, particularly Thai and Indian, exert an increasing pull.

It is safe to say, though, that I will never prepare Sussex Pond Pudding.

N.B.: Home Cooking refers to this dish as "Suffolk Pond Pudding." The recipes are the same in both books, and as there is no "Suffolk" recipe in English Food, I can only assume this was an editorial oversight in the Colwin book, albeit a minor one.

Suffolk, or Sussex Pond Pudding, given in American cooking measures:

8 ounces self-raising flour
4 ounces chopped fresh beef suet
milk and water (no amount given)
slightly salted butter (see above)
soft light brown or caster sugar (no amount; "caster" is confectioner's sugar)
1 large lemon or two limes

Butter a pudding basin. Make the first three ingredrients into a dough, reserving a quarter for a lid. Line a pudding basin with the larger portion of dough.

Put about 3 1/2 ounces of cut-up butter and sugar into the pastry basin.

Prick the lemon or limes with a larding needle. Lay it atop the butter and sugar.

Fill the remainder of the basin with equal amounts of butter and sugar. Grigson says "another 100 grams, possibly more."

Roll out the pastry saved for the lid. Place it over the basin, sealing it to the sides for a perfect join. Cover this with pleated foil secured with string, leaving enough string to create a handle.

Lower the basin into a pan of boiling water. The water must come at least halfway up the sides of the basin. Cover and leave to boil 3-4 hours. Should the water level drop, add more boiling water to the pot.

To serve, remove the foil lid. Put a deep dish over the top, invert, and slice, giving a bit of lemon and buttery juices to all.

(289-90)

Colwin writes:

"I followed every step carefully. My suet crust was masterful. When unwrapped from its cloth, the crust was a beautiful, deep honey color...My hostess looked confused. 'It looks like a baked hat,' She said.
'Never mind,' I said. 'It will be the most delicious thing you ever tasted.'
...
My host said: 'It tastes like lemon-favored bacon fat.'
'I'm sure it's wonderful,' said my hostess. 'I mean, in England.'
The woman guest said: 'This is awful.'
My future husband remained silent, not a good sign." (143-44)

Laurie Colwin: Home Cooking. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.
Jane Grigson: English Food. Penguin Books, U.K. 1992.
Amanda Hesser: Cooking for Mr. Latte. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.

Jane, Jane, Jane

2007-04-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

Barking Kitten dates herself with a Jefferson Starship pun. When did I become such a nerd?

Jane Grigson, that is. In reviewing my notes and the paperback, bookmarked in too many places, I see that limiting myself may be challenging.

One of the best things about English Food is the terminology: butter paper, cornflour, dulse, fingerware. Bloaters, anchovy essence, ham kettles. Kitchen paper. Tins. Isinglass. Imagine Rachael Ray discussing anchovy essence, or the merits of fingerware, which is a kind of edible sea grass. This is why you need to read Jane Grigson.

The first edition of this book appeared in 1974; the revised version in 1992, Grigson having died of cancer in 1990, before she could complete the project. Her daughter Sophie took up the mantle.

Grigson was declaiming agribusiness just as Alice was getting it together on this side o' the pond. Of the people providing "awful food," she wrote:

"'Let them have trash' seems a far worse attitude than 'Let them eat brioche.' The latter came from a complete lack of understanding; the former comes from a conniving complicity in lower standards...To provide worthless things, or things that are worse than they should be, shows what you think of your fellow human beings." (xiv)

Indeed. Grigson also railed against pasteurization, a popular debate amongst foodies. Many of us think the naturally-occurring flora and fauna in unpasteurized dairy are essential to good health, particularly for the immune and digestive systems. Minimally, we should have choices about our milk and cheese. Grigson was also enraged by the appalling conditions leading to tainted eggs. She called the feeding of dead chicks to their living brethern "impious" (27), an "incestuous cannibalism," we pay for in foodborne illness, a phenomenon that has only increased since English Food appeared in print.

On a happier note, Grigson's humor, writing skills and education make English Food an immensely enjoyable read. The preface to a recipe for Halibut with Anchovies informs us that Joseph Conrad loved good food, and was fortunate in having a wife able to prepare it with little income. Shakespeare is invoked in the discussion of dulse-collecting. Writing of salt pork and hams, Grigson cautions the lazy cook:

"Do not use those appalling bright yellow crumbs sold in some grocer's shops and supermarkets." (179)

My personal favorite appears on page 196. I have never eaten smoked chicken, but should I ever find myself in Bristol, I shall hie down to Mr. Millhouse's shop, where the famed butcher smokes poultry on Thursdays and prepares a "beautifully smoked bacon with beech-sawdust from the local coffin maker."

Of paté, that dangerous dish, she writes:

"Often these meat loaves (she referred to those found in English food shops) are absolutely disgusting in a manner that is shamefully English." (199)

The food itself is heavy going. Nearly every recipe calls for a thick sauce; use of cream, double cream, and butter abound, as does all manner of pork and that peculiarly English creation, suet. Meat is mixed with oysters, brains with curry and grape sauce. Sugars and fruits are combined with meats in the old-fashioned manner, culminating, to this reader, in John Evelyn's Tart of Herbs, a recipe dating to 1699. The tart calls for single cream, breadcrumbs, spinach, macaroons, egg yolks, egg whites, sugar, currants, and milk, all to be folded into pastry. More current is the aforementioned smoked chicken, to be served with three melon salad: Galia, canteloupe, and "pineapple watermelon."

American and French palates never took to such dishes, earning England its reputation for awful food. I would respectfully observe that while many of the recipes in English Food do not strike me a particularly appetizing, their use of available ingredients is admirable, and likely more appetizing in freezing wet weather. The range of dairy available to them is enviable--where can we get unpasteurized double cream, single cream, or Jersey milk? Our options are cream, half-and-half, or a variety of "skim" products. As for powdered creamers and liquid dairy substitutes claiming to be healthier, they are analogous to Grigson's comment on English custard powder: "...one of our minor national tragedies." (246)

------------------

Channeling Iron Chef

2007-04-11T19:51:00.000-07:00

Somehow I became possessed by the idea of making this pate. I was planning a trip to the market anyway, and decided I would relax my self-imposed veal ban. Anthony Bourdain came to mind:

"You've made meat loaf, right? You've eaten cold meat loaf, yes? Then you're halfway to being an ass-kicking, name-taking charcutier. 'Ooooh ... pate, I don't know.' Please. Campagne means "country" in French--which means even your country-ass can make it." The Les Halles Cookbook, 90.

My ass is decidedly urban. I decided to try it anyway.

In perusing the ingredient list you might notice this dish is a heart attack waiting to happen. Barring that, it is very, very un-kosher. Pork and cream. Together. Veal is kosher but no pc foodie worth her organic-free-trade views would be caught within a mile of a dead baby cow.

Never mind. I ordered organic pork shoulder, some veal, bought a bottle of Straus organic cream, came home and cracked open a beer.

I do not have a food processor, but my immersion blender came with a chopper/bowl attachment. It's a plastic two-cup job with a chopping blade. You fit a plastic lid over it, attach the stick, plug it in, and go.

I cubed the meats, hoping the chopper could handle it. It could; everything was quickly reduced to an impressive mush.

The recipe calls for three slices of bacon to be blended with the meats. A shred wrapped itself around one of the blades. I fussed with a spatula: nothing doing. Like a mindless idiot, I reached into the bowl.

The dulcet sounds of my swearing interrupted Hockeyman, who was absorbed in the Sharks/Predators playoff game. Jonathan Cheecho got hurt in the second period. Friends, the Sharks are toast. You heard it here first.

[Final score 5-4 Sharks in the second overtime. Take that! - Hockeyman]

"What?"

"Nothing. I cut myself. Oh, fuck." Blood everywhere. I stood over the sink, surveying my messy domain. I'd slashed my right middle finger, near the nail. It didn't look deep. Just annoying. The counter was spread with dirty cutting boards, knives, garlic. I plastered bandaids over the wound and returned to my meat. It was time to add the cream.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah." I noticed the immersion blender's cord had migrated into the sink, acquiring a soap-bubble sheen. Oops. If I didn't bleed to death I'd electrocute myself. Either God was punishing me for making such a treyfe dish or I was having a Bobby Flay moment. I swore a little more.

"Dear?"

"I'm fine. Really."

I finished blending everything, did a final mix with the spatula, admired my gorgeous handiwork, then poured it into a baking dish. I lovingly spread more bacon over the top and tucked it into the oven. The kitchen looked like a toddler had torn through it. The dishtowels bore alarming pink smears. The chopper's unfamiliar noise had frightened Kitty, who took refuge in the closet.

Never mind. I felt stoked. All amateur cooks are secretly happy when they cut or burn themselves. There we are, manfully holding our maimed extremities over the sink, far from the food, waiting for the dripping to cease so we may resume our culinary handiwork. We can play like the big boys. We're tough. We're Bobby Flay, or even better, Masaharu Morimoto, whose knife skills trounce Flay's. We are Julia Child, smiling as the omelet falls to the floor on live television.

We are Dan Akroyd mimicking Julia Child on Saturday Night Live. O, humiliation.

But, soft! What light through yonder bandaid breaks? Is the bleeding slowing? Might we survive to consume our terribly treyfe, politically incorrect pate?

Bon Appetit!

(Meanwhile, the Sharks, having given up a 4-2 two lead, are heading into their second overtime. Go Wings!)

Metablogging

2007-04-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

Since beginning this blog I've read a great deal about the impact of blogging on media, literature, and the world at large. I've read the recent dustups courtesy of certain literary mags and writers who felt the need to insult litbloggers as fools with Dell laptops. I've read about Kathy Sierra. I've read about self-imposed civility codes and whether or not they impede free speech. I wasn't going to comment, and I wasn't going to comment some more. Then, today at work, I received the April 6th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, where the "Lit-Blog Wars" merited a Critical Mass column. See page B4, if you are interested.

And now I'm going to comment, and I hope this is the only time.

I decided to blog because I wanted to talk about books and writing. Literature is my passion. I look forward to certain books the way other people look forward to opening day or the Superbowl. I reread other books time and time again for their beauty, their comfort, their enlightenment. I also blog because I want to write as well as the authors I love, and blogging is one way to do so. Conventional literary avenues, always narrow, are now all but closed except to a fortunate few. While it's convenient to blame the publishing industry, the reality is fewer and fewer people are seriously interested in reading. I'm not the first to notice the market for literature is shrinking. I think this denotes a poorly educated society.

When I began blogging, literary criticism was the furthest thing from my mind. Contrary to the nervous naysayers, I believe it is possible to talk about literature without framing it in criticism. I say this as a person with a Master's Degree in English Literature. I was trained in Deconstructionism, Marxism, Feminist Readings, New Historicism, the works. I loathed it. Detested it. I will never forget taking a course where all the reading material was criticism of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. None of us had read the book. It was neither required nor suggested that we do so. But we had to read all the critical material, which was of course meaningless without the source literature.

Another class focused on Dickens. The class--all seven of us--fell into arguing about Dickens' lack of feminist sympathies. I raised my hand and asked how we could criticize Dickens, a writer whose writing illuminated the appalling conditions of the poor, particularly poor children, for not being a good feminist in the Steinem/Friedan mold. Further, I went on, this brand of feminism hadn't taken root as a movement until well after Dickens was writing. How could we, as modern readers, blame him for failing to address what had yet to happen?

I stopped talking. I was certain I'd destroyed my credibility.

I never thought of that, the professor replied.

So much for critical thinking in the academy. This is not to say criticism is worthless, or that grad school is a waste of time. But if you sit down and read Dickens, you're bound to learn something whether you're in school or not. And formal criticism will never have the impact that scientific discovery does. Another Julia Kristeva article will never get as much attention as stem cell research; the "unwashed masses" are more interested in reading about potential cancer cures than they are the new Irene Nemirovsky translations. Perhaps this is why some academics are so terribly touchy about their work, and see litblogs as a great target for their anxieties.

Which leads us to civility. It may be observed that we are not especially civilized these days. Road rage, cell phones, blaring radios, unjustified war, and ignoring the Geneva Conventions all come to mind. So the fact that people are badly behaved out here in the 'sphere is sad, but not surprising. I can only say I strive to be civil here, even when I'm criticizing a writer or poking fun at catalogues. I am not a big enough fish to get much real nastiness, and what little I've received has been deleted. You are most welcome to disagree with me, but in my little corner of the world, I'd ask that we treat one another decently. You can go just about anywhere for abuse. You don't need it from me, nor I from you.

Finally, in all the litblog nastiness we forget why we're even doing this. We love books. And there aren't as many of us as there once were. Instead of fighting about mediums or grandstanding about our credentials, we should be banding together beneath the flag of literature. We don't have to like the same books or even each other. But mutual respect should be a given. The energy we're wasting sniping at one another could be used reading, writing, and promoting literature.

We have work to do.

Jane Grigson's English Food, part one

2007-04-07T20:27:00.000-07:00

It took months of searching, but I finally got English Food from Powell's Books.

I am 59 pages into a 373 page book, not including the index. It's fascinating reading. Like Elizabeth David, Grigson is a meticulous historian. If, like me, you were always stumped by Welsh Rarebit, Welsh Rabbit, and pease porridge, this is the book for you. Now good luck finding it. Should you, like me, finally score a copy, feeling like you managed to smuggle Tropic of Cancer through US customs, you'll long for Grigson's full, equally elusive ouevre.

Grigson's discussion of eating habits in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought home what kiddies we stateside folk are. The Colonists arrived at a relatively recent hour in history, and did their best to replicate foods from home. Later immigrants followed suit. Hence our continuing difficulty defining "American" food. Yes, there are the Native American foods: corn, squash, beans, the turkey. Here is an interesting site with numerous Native recipes, divided by region. Few have entered the national cooking repetory. How many of us cook with raccoon, acorns, praire dogs, or woodchucks? And while you're busy cringing, stop and wonder why chickens and cows are considered desirable foods while the foregoing are not. Further, game, once a staple food for Natives and Colonizers alike, has become the expensive province of adventurous foodies or fortunate home hunters.

After a spate of colonialist guilt, I began considering my own cooking style. I grew up eating traditional Jewish foods, along with the limited vegetables available during the seventies in a place with long winters. So: briskit, chicken, chicken livers, cow liver, hamburgers, the occasional steak. Canned green beans, frozen peas and carrots, iceberg lettuce. Ethnic foods like gefilte fish and matzoh ball soup. We cooked in butter or chicken fat.

On leaving home and learning to cook, I acquired Jennie Grossinger's The Art of Jewish Cooking, Mildred Bellin's The Jewish Cook book, and various editions of The Joy of Cooking. I limped along with these for years, using the Jewish books more as touchstones for familiar dishes. Joy guided me in unfamiliar waters.

Then I met somebody who was a wonderful cook. She subscribed to Gourmet, used garlic and lemons, and had one of the most exotic cookbooks I'd ever seen: Mollie Katzen's The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. I borrowed her copy, then went out and bought myself one at Arcata's Tin Can Mailman. My cooking journey, peculiarly American in its global scope, had begun.

I bought my first Laurie Colwin books in the same bookstore, but did not find Home Cooking and More Home Cooking until later. My copies, in constant use, are falling apart. It was Colwin, with her professed love of English foods, that turned me on to both Barbara Pym and Jane Grigson. A quick check of More Home Cooking shows Jane cited six times. Thus, in the grand tradition of reading your favorite writer's favorite writers, I have found Jane Grigson.

_________________________________

There is lots and lots to talk about, and if I continue here, Hockeyman will yell about needing to divide up the post. Thus isinglass eggs, the argument for unpasteurized dairy, the concept of savory (savoury, that is) puddings will have to wait, and stylistic revelations will have to wait.

Anne Lamott's Grace (Eventually)

2007-04-05T21:15:00.000-07:00

From Simone de Beauvior's The Woman Destroyed:

"Anxiety began to mingle with my distress. The friends to whom I had sent my book ought to have written to tell me about it: none had done so...Not one (reviewer) had grasped the originality of my work. Had I not managed to make it clear?
...
'Well, what did you think of it?' (the narrator is querying a young friend)
She answered me in well-balanced phrases...The book was an excellent synthesis; it clarified various obscurities...
'But in itself, does it say anything new?'
'That was not it's intention.'
'It was mine.'
...I went on and on; I badgered her...No, I was producing nothing new...the book was rather a well-based restatement and summing up." (61-62)

Simone de Beauvior's character is devastated, mortified by her oversight. She is unsure whether, at her age, she can attempt something new.

I hope Anne Lamott does not think this, and have no wish to contribute to her well-documented insecurities. Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith is Lamott's third book of religious essays, a collection, like the first two, of amusing, often self-deprecating observations on modern life viewed through the lens of Christianity. Only where Traveling Mercies and Plan B win the reader with laugh-out-loud lines and the author's wry awareness of her own lunacy, Grace takes us nowhere new. Instead we revisit same ground: body image, single motherhood, Lamott's transformation from alcoholic druggie to leftist Jesus freak, her own damaged mother. Where the other books were surgically irreverent (Bush the Second is likened to Yertle the Turtle; of her suddenly teenage son: "Maybe I fed him too much"), this latest is rather like a meringue: all airy white light. I don't doubt for a moment that Lamott has suffered terribly and deserves every moment of what reads like a much easier life. But it makes for lousy reading.

Take The Muddling Glory of God. Lamott, like most American women over the age of three, has struggled with body image and weight issues her entire life. Like many of us, she coped using the usual methods: starvation, exhaustive exercising, falling apart and binging. Over time she pulled it together enough to cope with the fact that she will never resemble Kate Moss. Few of us do. But on this particular day she was in a bad way, and attacked Safeway in a mad search for apple fritters. The first Safeway was out, so she drove to another store, where she purchased the fritters, ice cream, Cheetos, cookies, jalapeno poppers, and a few other deeply scary items. She went home, ate wildly, then began bailing herself out:

"I got myself some cool water, a pair of soft socks...I was finally able to call a couple friends." (57)

Well, good. Really. Except one thing stuck in my craw: how many women have time for this sort of behavior? I understand the self-hatred, the secret eating, the avalanche of loosed feelings. But the time to go not to one store, but two? To schlep it all home, eat it, then get into bed? Sitting up for water, clean socks, and calling a few friends?

Only rich people have this kind of time. Only rich people have free time to drop their kids off at school, then experience a "Holy Spirit Snatch," wherein one swerves back to the main road for a little unplanned hike with the dog.

Perhaps, as a woman forced to work both in and out of the house, I am a not the best reviewer. It could be I'm a little touchy about bikini crises endured on Hawaiian beaches. (See A Field Theory of Beauty.) But there's an awful lot of navel gazing going on, along with an unending wish for rescue. From the woman who dusts her off after a fall skiing, to the insane exchange with a corrupt carpet salesman, Lamott is constantly looking outward for help. She's a one-woman Verizon commercial, followed by a group of friends ever available for a hike or telephone chat. These people, who she dubbed her "pit crew" in Operating Instructions, act as cheerleaders, ego-boosters, reminders of holiness. None appear drained by her needs, or busy doing things like unloading the dishwasher or mowing the lawn. It's a rarefied world over there in Marin County.

The book features many hikes up Mount Tamalpais. Invoked to conclude some of the thinner essays-- Dandelions, The Last Story of Spring, Bastille Day, Junctions-- these hikes don't explain how she came to tolerate her friend's awful husband, or whether anyything concrete arose from her political activism. They are lovely passages in themselves, but they aren't enough.

Worst is the essay At Death's Window, where Lamott describes her active role in assisting a friend's suicide. The friend is terminally ill with cancer, and his decision a carefully reasoned one. I have no trouble with that, but Lamott gets in and out in seven pages, leaving the reader's mouth open. Wait! You drop this bomb and that's all?

I'm being relentless only because Lamott is capable of so much more. Bird By Bird is one of the best books on writing out there. Operating Instructions, alternately elated and crazed, should be required reading for new Moms. Traveling Mercies and Plan B are compelling explorations of the pull to faith. Lamott's political activism and obvious generousity to charitable causes is admirable. And it's really hard not to like someone who loathes Bush with such desperate intensity.

In the end, we're left wondering if Lamott on religion is Smiley on horses, or Kingsolver on the environment--each writer excellent, each giving her best to an obssession, threatening to leave even the most devoted fans behind.

Works cited:

Simone de Beauvior: The Woman Destoyed. New York: Pantheon Books. 1969.

Anne Lamott: Grace (Eventually) Thoughts on Faith. New York: Riverhead Books. 2007.

-----Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. New York: Riverhead Books. 2005.

-----Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year. New York: Fawcett Columbine Books. 1993.

Ignorance

2007-04-03T19:56:00.000-07:00

Thanks once again to Ed for this link, wherein writer Terry Teachout reams the stage adaption of Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking."

We still have freedom of speech in our fine country, all Administration efforts to the contrary. This means Teachout is entitled to his opinion of the play. He loathed it. Fine. Like I say, at this moment, we are still free to express our opinions. Hallelujah.

What upset me were his opening words:

It surprised me when Joan Didion published "The Year of Magical Thinking," for I identified her so completely with California in the '60s that I'd almost forgotten she was still alive. Of course she continued to publish--a fat volume of her collected essays came out last fall--but somehow I had come to see her as a figure from the distant past, a chronicler of strange days for which I felt no nostalgia whatsoever.

He'd forgotten she was still alive? Excuse me? After Henry, with its painful acuity, emerged in 1992. How about the instant bestsellerdom of 1996's The Last Thing He Wanted? Or that other dull little number, 2003's Where I Was From, which hardly sank without a trace. As for The Year of Magical Thinking, was Mr. Teachout on vacation when it won the National Book Award?

A figure from the distant past? Mr. Teachout, do you live beneath a rock?

Don't get me wrong--it's clear Teachout is no Didion fan. Of the book, he writes:

Yet I found it hard to shake off the disquieting sensation that Ms. Didion, for all the obvious sincerity of her grief, was nonetheless functioning partly as a grieving widow and partly as a celebrity journalist who had chosen to treat the death of John Gregory Dunne as yet another piece of grist for her literary mill. All the familiar features of her style, hardened into slick, self-regarding mannerism after years of constant use, were locked into place and running smoothly, and I felt as though I were watching a piece of performance art, or reading a cover story in People: Joan Didion on Grief.

Well, I think he was alone on that one. Ms. Didion's style has served her well over the years: how was she supposed to write? And how many of us would choose to push the boundaries of a searingly successful style once we're past seventy? How many of us--writers, wannabe writers, impassioned critics--could have pulled ourselves together to create such a document?

Oh well, whatever, nevermind. He isn't a Didion fan, and that's okay. I am not a fan of Dave Eggers' writing. I find Pynchon unreadable. This doesn't mean I am free to dismiss them, or their influence, out of hand. People writing seriously about reading, writing, and writers have an obligation to know what's out there. To borrow an analogy from hockey, one of the things that made Gretzky great was his ability to envision the ice surface, and everybody on it. He played center. And he always, always knew where his guys were--Kurri, McSorley, Messier, Coffey. He could pass to any of them without raising his head. He knew all the angles, the give in the boards, the furthest corners of the ice. He hung out behind the opposing net, moving back and forth, until with one sudden move the puck was in the net and the goalie cursing wildly. All this from a physically unprepossing man with the gift of great hands who saw the ice the way we wordy types should view the literary landscape.

We need to know who's publishing, what they're writing about, and who's reading them. Did they get a tour? Is Oprah courting them? Did Michi pan them? Is Starbucks stocking them beside the fair trade organic coffee grown by starving Columbians? What are their angles? Are they working the edges, as Cormac McCarthy does, or hanging out in the center, where the ice is soft? (Mitch Albom comes to mind.)

We may not want to read all these writers, and frankly, there's no way we can. This doesn't give us permission to be ignorant, or arrogant. To think Didion a relic is inexcusable from writer of Teachout's stature. To insult a writer of Didion's accomplishment and indisputable skill is worse than inexcusable: Teachout discredits himself.

No hairball count, as I am still choking.

On Finishing The Lost

2007-04-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

This is the first time I've discussed a book whose author invited me to a public showdown over the state of the novel. I would be remiss if I pretended this didn't affect my approach to the book, which innocently got caught up in this strange, unwanted crossfire. But that's for another post.

If you pay any attention to the lit world, computerized or not, you don't need me to tell you this is a good book. Mendelsohn, a rabid geneaologist, has been keeping records about his family since childhood. I've never known another American Jewish family able to trace European lineage back as far as Mendelsohn can. He has the rare good fortune of knowing real names--something many Jews, with our whitewashed-off-the-boat surnames, cannot boast.

As a child, Mendelsohn so resembled his grandfather's brother, Shmiel Jager, that relatives cried upon seeing him. This resemblance, along with an earful of grandfather Abraham's stories, feeds Mendelsohn's compulsion to know what precisely happened to his Great-Uncle, Aunt, and their four daughters, killed by the Nazis in Bolechow, Poland. This quest takes on near-epic proportions, traveling across the world and time to uncover exactly when and where the Jagers--six of the six million--perished.

Intensively researched (Mendelsohn will abide the internet for this purpose), full of emotional interviews with survivors and graphic detail, The Lost is not for the faint of heart or gut. His description of what happened during the first Aktion--wherein the Nazis herded Bolechow's Jews into local meeting house-cum-movie theatre and tortured them before marching them to the forest and opening fire--will give you nightmares. A book like Mendelsohn's, honing in as it does on the deaths of six people, scales mass murder down, into the uncomfortably personal. The reader following Mendelsohn on his quest becomes invested. What was little Bronia, about twelve when she died, like? Here is her photo, smiling out between her sober-faced parents, Ester who was so nice, Shmiel, who was a little toip (Yiddish for deaf). What of Frydka, who fell in love--God forbid--with a young Polish boy who tried to save her? Did Lorka really hide out in the woods? Mendelsohn wants, passionately, to know what his relatives were like. We do, too.

--------------

I say I had difficulty being objective, but once I began the book it was blessedly easy to put aside the blogging, which allowed in a newer pain: his family was--is--so like mine. He is served the same foods I ate as a child: gefilte fish, kreplach(a meat-filled dumpling), kasha varnishkes (buckwheat groats with bow-tie pasta), matzoh brei. Everybody spoke Yiddish, a language I have not heard in twenty-five years. His deeply religious grandparents, like mine, kept strictly kosher, down to the blue and red striped dishtowels. His description of his grandmother's Pesaydikh (pronounced, in my house, "PAY-sa-DIK-hah") dishes--the set kept separate for Passover, a holiday beginning tomorrow night--could be my Grandma's, right down to the flowered borders with their golden rims. Everywhere he goes--Stockholm, Denmark, Poland, Israel--somebody is bringing out the cake and coffee.

I was also a child who resembled a dead relative, and had the identical experience of walking into a room and causing tears. One person could never bring himself to speak to me. He would appear, at infrequent intervals, and seeing my eight or nine or ten-year-old face, literally avert his head.

Over time I have come increasingly to resemble my mother, but this relative, who never did speak to me, did not live to see my adult face.
------------------

Mendelsohn's writing is unabashedly academic, his sentences long, complex, layered. There are numerous digressions into Torah readings that, while bearing on the story at hand, aren't truly necessary--the story itself, of these six people, fixed in a lost society recounted by elderly people fled to the corners of the globe--stands sadly on its own.

Modern Yentas

2007-03-31T10:01:00.000-07:00

I am three issues into a subscription to The New York Review of Books.

This publication is a terrific way to mine your intellectual lapses. After wading through articles like Jonathan Raban's "The Conservative Soul," or learning that Robert Fagles has yet another translation out--this time of Virgil's The Aenied--you may turn to a discussion of Matthew Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World.

By now, if you are me, you're feeling damned inadequate. Why, in your desperate scramble to find gainful employment, leading to excesses like food and health insurance, you forgot to learn Ancient Greek! And what about schooling yourself in the niceties of the history of Philosophy? You are to be scorned for the sin of poverty, which held you back from these august pursuits. Life is waning! Get busy!

So it is, with a heavy heart, that you find yourself perusing the Classifieds section. And lo, your mood immediately lifts at the sight of so many personal ads.

--------------

Yes, even the NYRB must scrabble for ad revenue, and what better way, besides all those full-page University Press ads, than advertisements from the magazine's target audience?

Full disclosure: I have always loved reading personals ads. When they first began appearing in alternative papers, back in the nineties, I devoured them with great, condescending amusement. All those pretty, wealthy, evolved people. Then, finding myself single, working in a field populated by women, I decided to place one myself.

This was in '92-'93. Fewer women ran ads in those early days, so I was able to place mine free of charge. I avoided cliche; I did not say I was beautiful or wealthy or that I wanted somebody who was. But I lived in Southern California, where appearances and finances are paramount. I received scores of responses from men who rode horses, surfed, and spelled out their physical attributes in great detail. One guy left several voicemails bragging about his Malibu ranch.

The entire experience was excruciating. I would listen to the voicemails, taking notes. I would screw up my nerve (no small task), and call a few guys. I would go on three or four awful dates. I would stop for a few months, despairing, fine-tune the ad, start again. I finally hit on the line "looks and money not important," which sent some of the worst packing. One day I screwed up my nerve yet again. I would make a few calls. The first guy on my list wasn't home. I skipped down to the number below him, a person who had left a one-line message in a very quiet voice. I had not planned to call this fellow, but there I was, sitting by the phone, adrenalin pumping. I dialed, and had my first conversation with Hockeyman.

---------------------------------

So here we are, fourteen years later, on page 84 of the April 12th issue of the NYRB. I count twenty-seven ads. Most are about fifteen lines long; advertisers are charged by how many times the ad is run. One-time: $5.50 per word, fifteen word minimum. Run the ad for a year and get the bargain rate of $4.50 per word.

Twenty-four of the advertisers are straight women, one a GWF, one a SWM, aged 68. The final ad comes from a MWM, aged 69, seeking a female, preferably married, for a "long-term liason."

The straight women are alarming. Seventeen describe themselves as stunners, knockouts, beautiful, thin, slender, fit, pretty, head-turning, with bodies ranging from sexy to fit to elegant. They want you to know they have great legs, are spiritually evolved, gourmet cooks, love opera, theatre, world travel (especially Paris), and Film, as opposed to movies. One is "crazily beautiful," another posses "uncomplicated, sexy style with just a touch of glamor."

So why do they need to advertise? Well, it is hard to meet people these days, what with the demise of the various social institutions where one met mates--churches, synagogues, parents looking to forge imperial alliances. I am entirely sympathetic. But how does the single, NYRB-reading male select an advertiser from this sea of dazzling adjectives? Does he necessarily believe all these women's claims? Are they really all that gorgeous? Is this statistically possible? Yes, the sample size is small, but think of twenty-four women you know. All they all stunners? Maybe a couple. But the rest are, well, the rest. Just like us: average. Well-dressed, well-nourished, well-cared for, succumbing to the depredations of ageing. Shit happens.

Suppose he ventures a repsonse. What does he say of himself to "Appealingly thin, beautiful inside and out...open, deep thinker?" Or the woman with "Garboesque good looks" who "adores reading on airplanes?" What of the one "known to create beauty wherever she is?" How is it possible to approach such people? I, too, am gorgeous, ageless, an Olympian with a command of ancient languages? My favorite place to read, en route to tapas in Spain, in on an airplane? I am looking for a woman who can create beauty while washing my socks?

Do the advertisers really believe these things about themselves, or are they flinging words about in their attempts to hook a live one? What kind of person describes herself as "considered perfect person with whom to be stranded (mind that word count!) on a desert island?" And what sort of person would want to date her?

Finally, do the advertisers actually read the NYRB? Or is it merely a patch of prime hunting ground? And is the hunt successful? Inquring minds want to know!

Crock Pot Cookery

2007-03-29T20:00:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, my mother had a neighbor who had a second wedding. Said neighbor then held a garage sale to unload all the duplicate household items acquired at wedding number two. Amongst the pickings was a new Rival Crock Pot, which my mother bought for five dollars and sent along to me.

My maiden venture was a recipe for beef stew. I didn't really know how to cook yet, but bought stew meat, carrots, and potatoes. If I thought to add anything else, I don't remember now. I suppose there was some sort of liquid, likely wine. I got home from work, arranged all my ingredients in the pot, then stood there, increasingly distressed, as the pot barely heated up. Why, it was five-thirty! Six! This thing worked really slowly!

At that point I must have read the instruction booklet and realized my error. God knows what we ate that night.

Fourteen years along, the metal heating element has grown dingy with encrusted yuck. Yes, I wash it. But it isn't submersible. The insert and plastic lid are going strong. The appliance itself is ugly, a sort of blue and cream "country flower" design that looks laughable beside today's gleaming stainless numbers.

Yesterday, as I turned off the pot for the zillionth time to serve dinner, I realized the cord was tangled and perhaps may be crossing into the frayed n' flammable zone. It may be time for a new one. A troll of the net reveals that money may buy programmable pots, pots with multiple temperature settings, and "removeable stoneware with an easy-clean finish." Say what? My humble cooker boasts two settings: high and low. Low is around 225 degrees. I have no idea what high is; I've never used it.

It's funny, but for whatever reason I associate Crock Pots with right-wing Christian ladies who collect Precious Moments figurines, the provenance of declasse, meals-in-minutes cooking.

I realize my stereotype is inaccurate--no less a chef than Paula Wolfert uses a Crock Pot to prepare confit. I cannot imagine doing this, as confit preparation is all about temperature control. Paula must have the Ferrari of Crock Pots. I do not, and limit my exploits to stews and roasts. I've tried soup, but the long, slow cooking means whatever is in the pot either disintegrates into mush or expands--as in the case of lentils--into stew, intended or not.

Poultry doesn't fare well, either. Both chicken and duck take on an odd texture, almost chalky, if you can imagine wet chalk. Pork also takes on this strange mouthfeel.

The pot really does best with dishes like short ribs or braised beef. All respectable cookbooks instruct one to brown the meat first, but in my view Crock Pots are about easy meals. A Crock Pot is for the weekday from hell. Yes, all weekdays are hellish. I refer here to the hellish days where you know cooking dinner will not be an option. The night before, take out your Crock Pot. Fill it with your short ribs or piece of tough beef or your stew chunks.

Now you have some choices. You can add the usual suspects: carrots, onions, garlic, potatoes. A bay leaf. Olive oil, wine, canned tomatoes. A squeeze of tomato paste. Some celery, if its aggressive flavor doesn't bother you. From here, if you are making beef stew and can afford citrus in our global-warming-destroyed-the-crop economy, trim a piece of orange peel and toss it in to the pot. Yeah, I know it sounds weird. It will be wonderful. Trust me.

If you do not keep kosher, salt pork or some diced smoked bacon will do wonders.

But say you have little. Tomorrow will be long day, because your supervisor, who has a lousy marriage and therefore prefers to be at work, has scheduled a meeting for 4:45. You will deal with the stupid meeting, fight your way through traffic, only to get home to your significant other and perhaps some people under fifteen who want to be fed. Or maybe you'll get home to a wonderfully empty, peaceful home, greeted only by your cat. No matter: you deserve a nice meal after all that hard work.

This is what to do. Right now, or really, really soon, take out your Crock Pot. It you do not own one, Rival Crock Pots may be found at drug and hardware stores across the land. Get your keys.

Back? Fabulous. Make this:

Beef (stew cuts, short ribs, and chuck all work beautifully) with canned tomatoes and mustard.

The original recipe comes from Gourmet's Five Ingredients, a fun cookbook I almost never use. They call it "Braised Short Ribs with Dijon Mustard," and it you want to follow it slavishly, turn to page 96.

Quantities are up to you. This recipe is extremely forgiving. You can make it for a dozen or you and kitty.

Red Wine--2-4 cups.

Cow of some kind suited to long-cooking (see above). You want something heavily marbled, tough, and cheap. I generally cook one pound of meat for two people. This leaves leftovers. Impress your office mates with your terrific lunch.

Shallots (onions work just fine). Amounts to taste.

Coarse grained Dijon Mustard (I've used all kinds of French mustard with success, though ballpark American mustard would be too harsh). The original recipe calls for 1-3 Tablespoons. I never measure. I just slather some on the meat.

4-6 plum tomatoes, halved (I always, always use a 14 oounce can of Muir Glen canned whole tomatoes).

Throw all of the above into your Crock Pot right now. You might think about cutting up the shallot or onion. You might also smash up some garlic cloves and throw them in. Or not. Toss in some salt and pepper. Put the insert in your fridge. Tomorrow morning, while you wait for the coffee to brew, take the insert out, shove it into the heating element, and turn the pot on. Drink your coffee. Put on your work costume. Your sane, I-am-a-contributing-member-of-society uniform. Leave the house.

Now, a few of you are mumbling about leaving the house with something electrical on. Yep, you are. Your tv, microwave, telephone, and home computers are all also plugged in, might spark the towering inferno, and are certainly draining the grid. If you have a gas oven, the pilot is on. Don't forget your little bedside alarm clock, or all those smug surge protectors protecting your expensive media system.

You get where I'm going with this. So quit worrying about it, ok?

Endure work. Come home to find your abode perfumed with the scent of something good. Prepare for Kitty to mew piteously depsite his full bowl of Science Diet (dry food, people!). Pour yourself a drink. Slice some bread. Turn off your Crock Pot. Serve yourself, or the S.O. and the progeny. Bask in the glow of your culinary genius. Consider the cooking life. Perhaps you should give up the corporate grind. Hone your skills at the Culinary Institute of America.

I hear Gordon Ramsay is looking for chefs.

Bon Appetit!

License to Ill (a hairball)

2007-03-28T17:55:00.000-07:00

Thanks much to BDR, who sent this link.

Buford opens his piece with "Gordon Ramsay, the only chef in London honored with three stars by the Guide Michelin, is not a monster." His article appears to disprove this, or at least indicate that Ramsay, if not a monster, is psychotic.

Much of America knows of Ramsay via Hell's Kitchen, his Fox reality show. I have never seen this wondrous media document, but have read widely of the Legend Ramsay. Here is a man famed for his temper; indeed, the article leads us to believe many diners seek reservations at his restaurants hoping to witness an untrammeled display: "One day, a woman shouted from the chef's table, situated just in front of the pass, 'Gordon, tell your cooks to fuck off, and I'll leave a thousand-dollar tip!'" Ramsay demurred, but at night's end, found she had tipped with largesse. "Oh, how funny. I must have lost it and not realized it. At least the waiters were happy."

More temper: calling the cooks (all male) "cunts," reducing a sommelier (later fired for theft) nearly to tears, screaming at his cooks until they are too flustered to move, whereupon he shoves them aside and cooks the occasional dish himself.

---------

Much is made of New York's restaurant culture, the insane pressure to acheive stardom in an overpopulated field, to please fickle critics Adam Platt, Frank Bruni, and Ruth Reichl. Ramsay tells Buford he does television so he can "do New York...Basically I'm a prostitute. I prostitute myself so I can have a restaurant here. But I don't fully take off my knickers." No, and he hardly has the time to cook, either, what with his outposts--I counted thirteen on his website , documentaries, and television shows. His latest television venture? Another reality show, transplanted from Britain: Gordon will come to your failing restaurant, holler obscenities at you, and tell you how to turn things around.

Which begs the question of precisely what Ramsay truly wants to do. Jet around the world to various kitchens, abusing chefs? Attain fame via Fox reality shows? Become excessively wealthy?

There is no question the man can cook. If anything, let us give credit to his disinterest in what Buford calls "the gastro-pseudoscientific trend of the moment." Ramsay is fond of the foods all tony chefs adore: foie gras, truffles, lobsters. His cooking does not attack the diner with foams or, God help us, tobacco infusions. But, to Ramsay's dismay, New York has failed to fall adoringly at his feet. Receiving two starts from Bruni instead of three is taken like a cancer diagnosis.

Does the man want to cook, be famous, run an empire? What would please such a person? He seems far from the pleasures of chopping garlic, or even bossing around a few other guys chopping garlic. What a life.

Alas, it gets worse. Ramsay's charming temperment is enhanced by his paranoia. In 1998, feuding with his backers, he
became certain his mentor, Marco Pierre White, would be called in to replace him at the august Aubergine (that's eggplant to us dumb Yanks). But then, no! The Aubergine reservations book was stolen by a man on a motorbike. This, before the days computerized reservations, was devastation. Ramsay publicly blamed White. White denied involvement.

'"It was me," Ramsay said. 'I nicked it...Because I knew it would fuck him and that it would call off the dogs."'

Maybe he isn't psychotic, but paranoid schizophrenic?

-------------------------------

This story is appalling on a number of levels. That the public wecolmes such awful behavior, even courts it, says little for our species. And why are people willing to work for this guy? Are fame and culinary genius more important than quality of life? What does that kind of behavior do to people over time? Nothing good: one either falls into victimhood or, in self-defense, mimics the abuser.

Finally, this is restaurant cooking were talkng about. Recreational food, when you get down to it. And from my wussy left coast viewpoint, we would be well advised to remember that. Gordon Ramsay may behave like a trauma surgeon stanching a shooting victim's carotid, but he's not. He's a cook. And he's cooking for people who haven't been truly hungry for a very long time.

Five hairballs, truffled.

Citations from www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/070402fa_fact_buford. Author: Bill Buford

Investigating Lulu

2007-03-26T08:09:00.000-07:00

A few kind people have inquired about acquring copies of A Discerning Eye. Hockeyman and I are investigating publishing it either in e-format or on Lulu. Lulu seems a good way to go, but requires "The Creator" to provide cover art and layouts. This saves money, but will take time. We hope to have something available for the masses by mid-April. Thanks for asking, and for your patience as we fumble along in this brave new world.

Hell in a Handbasket, Part II

2007-03-24T17:06:00.001-07:00

Are we not going to hell in a handbasket? Is the internet not facilitating our decline? In this thoughtful article, we read of the cooking revolution taking place via sites like allrecipes.com and epicurious.com. And here the hoi polloi, the terrifying inexpert masses, indeed converge.

"Cheryl Lore of Asheville, N.C., an active member of Recipezaar for six years and now a leader of its beverages forum, said the Web site has encouraged her to explore ingredients and cuisines far beyond the Southern cooking she grew up with.

“A lot of people wouldn’t try something if other posters didn’t say, try this! It’s great!” Ms. Lore said of the site, known for its tightly knit international cooking communities. “You’ve got all their suggestions on what they added to make it even better. It’s like cooking with a friend.”

'I made grilled octopus not long ago,” she added, “and I had no idea how much I liked Lebanese food.'"

Such a comment warms the organic hearts of food snobs (full disclosure: me) everywhere. But Zanne Stewart, of Gourmet, laments the freewheeling attitude home cooks take toward recipes the Gourmet staff have extensively tested. “You see Emeril, the most genial guy in the world, making a U-turn in the middle of a recipe, and people think they should cook like that, too,” said Ms. Stewart of Gourmet. “They forget that he’s a highly trained chef.”

Well, they might forget until serving the altered dish and discovering it, far from the Bam! of television, inedible.

Then we have Debbie Wilemon:

"... an active member of Allrecipes, grew up in Virginia, and spent time in Arkansas and Texas before moving to Larkspur, Colo. Her cooking bears strong traces of her childhood.

'I like lots of flavor,' she said. 'If I’m going to take the time to cook something, it’s going to be good.' Her arsenal of favorite ingredients includes Cavender’s Greek Seasoning, Bolner’s Fiesta Fajita Seasoning and garlic powder. Ms. Wilemon said, 'When we grill a steak, we smear it with liquid smoke, unsalted Cavender’s, Fiesta Fajita, then a little garlic powder.'

Not surprisingly, perhaps, her recipe for chicken and dumplings also includes Cavender’s, Fiesta Fajita Seasoning and garlic powder."

Ouch. Ms. Wilemon is the sort of cook who, were she a reader, would upset Daniel Mendelsohn. Equally dismaying to the snobbish amongst us are the lovers of cheese, who plop it upon asparagus, caviar(!), and pan-fried romaine But the article's author, Celia Barbour, generously notes tastes are not quick to change, and that recipe tinkering existed long before the internet.

A century ago, people cooked badly. They read bad books, and made uneducated observations about them. Many lived without toilet paper. There was no penicillin. They could not opine broadly on a computerized forum.

Annie Dillard writes:

"There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it always has been..." (88)

______________________________

Last Friday the April issue of Gourmet arrived in the mail. April being a holy month, the magazine offers dinners for both Easter and Passover. All I know about Easter is that ham is traditional. But the Passover menu had me shrieking loudly enough to scare Kitty.

My objection, specifically, is to the gefilte fish recipe, tinkered with by New York-by-way-of-India chef Floyd Cardoz. Mr. Cardoz is something of a celebrity chef, owner of restaurant Tabla and author, with Gourmet writer Jane Daniels Lear, of cookbook One Spice, Two Spice: American Food, Indian Flavors.

Let us digress a moment with a discussion of gefllte fish. Gefilte fish is like a quenelle--sort of a whitefish dumpling, bound with matzoh meal, poached in chicken broth. The classic recipe, taken here from Jennie Grossinger's The Art of Jewish Cooking, calls for whitefish, pike, carp, onion, water, carrot, ice water, sugar, and matzoh meal. You chop everything finely, add the carrots, then, with wet hand, form the mixture into balls. Over-handling produces hockey pucks. Jennie poached her gefilte fish in broth made from the heads and frames of her fish; my grandmother used chicken stock. Serve with horseradish.

That's about all the variation I've ever seen with gefilte fish. Maybe somebody bought red horseradish if the white was sold out--a common occurrence during Passover.

Today almost nobody makes real gefilte fish anymore. It can be purchased in glass jars. This should be avoided, as those who have never tasted the real thing will think the jarred stuff the real deal, and not very good. Or, for those who have tasted the real deal, jarred gefilte fish will make them recall the preparer, most likely dead, and then the person will suffer both the longing for the remembered dish and its maker.

It's a no-win proposition.

Enter Mr. Cardoz. His recipe for this traditional food calls for a fish stock using cloves, rosemary, and cilantro. The gefilte fish calls for scrod or hake, rather than whitefish or carp, lime zest, chives, more cilantro, egg, and black pepper. As if this weren't enough, the dish is set in a tomato base comprised of cumin, coriander, tumeric, cayenne, onion, ginger, garlic, and a plum tomato.

I'm certain the dish is excellent. But serving it under the auspices of "gefilte fish" is right up there with piling Boursin on caviar.

Hockeyman objected to my shrieks. What right had I to object to the above? Was I not a pork-eating, Catholic-marrying Jew? A staunch advocate of the new and improved? How could I defend my right to opine on the internet and then yell about an old recipe?

He's right. We all have our biases; some cannot endure the rise of critics everywhere. Others, the deracination of an ancient recipe already in danger of dying out. We all have our sticking points.

I engaged in a little daydreaming about who might prepare this strange gefilte fish. Surely not the handful of observant Jews who will slave over stoves this Passover. No gefilte fish with weird spices, no chipotle or coriander in the brisket. As for the mango chutney suggested as side dish, well, my grandmother is spinning. Mango chutney is great. Just not for the Passover seder. (The traditional meal and reading of the Haggadah, held during the first two nights of the weeklong holiday.)

What came to mind was a Ruth Reichl (Gourmet's editor) sort of person. A Jewish New Yorker, sophisticated, well traveled, a food snob extraordinaire, assimilated. A person who grew up with the old ways, who could tell you what the charoseth and hard-boiled egg dipped in salt water represented at the Passover table, a person who sat through the endless reading of the Haggadah, growing increasingly famished as the night wore on. A person who experienced his or her first moments of drunkenness quaffing the Manischiewitz when it was time to drink the wine. On an empty stomach.

But those days are gone, and the person who prepares this menu is unlikely to read through the entire Haggadah. Instead he or she invites some fellow urbane Jews to dinner, Jews who bring their goyishe spouses, perhaps an adopted child or two, people who won't miss the traditional, for they have transcended it. During the meal their blackberries will beep at them; a cell phone might ring. A lively discussion of the worst matzoh balls might ensue, for everyone has an ancient Aunt Minnie or Ida whose rubber matzoh balls became family lore.

Are we worse off, or better? We are both. Many of us--me, Mr. Mendelsohn, Zanne Stewart--have difficulty with this reality. We want certain things to remain untouched--our personal definitions of what is good, right, necessary. Yet we are pleased with the evolution of things less inimical to our existences. Or, worse, our relationships are mixed. I both loathe this computer and appreciate it deeply. I would vastly prefer to be writing books, spinning 20 lb paper through my mother's IBM Selectric II. But those days are gone, so I write here, and, amazingly, am read. For which I am grateful. The internet brings us too much information. We must sift, and rely upon ourselves to determine what is worthy of sustained attention. Liquid smoke or freshly ground coriander?

In the end, does it matter?

Annie Dillard: For the Time Being. New York: Knopf. 1999.

The Gourmet recipes appear on pages 130-131 of the April 2007 issue.

Jennie Grossinger: The Art of Jewish Cooking. New York: Bantam Books. 1958: page 38.

Hell in a Handbasket, a post in installments

2007-03-24T09:10:00.000-07:00

After my internet tangle with Daniel Mendelsohn, instead of picking up The Lost, I reached for Annie Dillard's For the Time Being. The book is a collection of observations about birth, sand, Hasidism, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, cloud formations, Israel, China, birth defects, and chance interactions with strangers. This sounds bizarre in the listing but adds up to a sustained observation about humanity existing through time. The book was a fortuitous choice, head-clearing in its farsightedness, yet timely.

Dillard writes:

"Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones?...Dire things are happening...People are making great strides toward obliterating other people, too, but that has been the human effort all along, and our cohort has only broadened the means, as have people in every century...Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news?...New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?" (30-31)

Later Dillard quotes an eleventh century Buddhist master, a twelfth century Rabbi, and St. Theresa. All mourn the dereliction of their times and people, who are inferior to those past. Their music is poorer, they are incapable of study, they are obsessed with material wealth. Times past, and their people, were better, harder-working, luckier in their innocence of present disasters.

---------------------

So it was that I read this article.

I buy as much local food as I can: produce from a farm box, meat, bread, and dairy from California. I am fortunate to live in a place that makes such choices easy. I also have the means to purchase this expensive food. Having no children, I have more time to prepare home-cooked meals. I also have the means to purchase carbon offsets for my unavoidable vehicular sins. My family, who live elsewhere, find my concerns twee. Smug. Slightly batty.

Mr. Beavan's work as a writer allows him some degree of freedom, the time to bake his bread and feed his sourdough starter. And though it is never stated, the family must have some cash--their lifestyle experiment is taking place in a Fifth Avenue apartment; Ms. Conlin describes her pre-experiment shopping binge of Chloe boots (one pair underwritten by a parent). Her cosmetics are Kiehls, Lancome (a friend works there: samples or discount?), and Fresh. When the bottles empty, she will give them up, along with the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and spices forbidden by their project. At some point we may read of the entire adventure: Mr. Beavan has a book deal with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. And, naturally, a blog: noimpactman.com, where Mr. Beavan gamely fields dubious people like me.

Of course all right (left?)-thinking folk want to save the environment, leave a lighter carbon footprint, save the animals. We'd better--nobody needs me to discuss the destruction we've wreaked upon the planet. But the Beavan-Conlin experiment has a few holes: a weekly cleaning woman, whose cleaning products are not discussed. The computer. The basement laundry room. The acceptance of gifts. The documentary filmmaker trailing them. The book deal. The peculiar sense that the personal is public. And profitable.

Are the Beavan-Conlins doing a good deed? Yes, on a small scale. But this year will end: then what? Will they welcome the return of Green Forest toilet paper? Allow their cleaning woman her paper towels? Resume consumption of Italian olive oil? Buy another pair of Chloe boots (A quick netsurf pulled up Chloe knee boots at Bergdorf Goodman: $995 a pair)? Will they continue to hew to their "Walden Pond, Fifth-Avenue style" experiment? Or, like me, find livable compromises? For we no longer live in Walden's world, much as we might wish to. So: the local meat, the Italian vinegar. The local olive oil--Bariani, from Sacramento--but Bass Ale, from England. Toilet paper, post consumer use.

Annie Dillard writes:

"A hundred years ago Americans saw frenzy consuming their times, and felt the whole show could not go on much longer...Surely theirs were apocalyptic days...They could, by their own accounts, scarcely bear their own self-consciousness."
(31-32)

M.F.K. Fisher's A Cordiall Water

2007-03-22T20:15:00.000-07:00

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was the original American food writer, the woman who lived and ate in France before the word "Provence" became a tagline for bestsellers about middle-aged writers purchasing charming farms (surely all those farms are bought up? Is paradise paved for a parking lot?). I have a decrepit copy of The Art of Eating, acquired during a time of poverty. I read "How to Cook a Wolf" whilst deadly ill from a virus contracted by one of my stripper colleagues. I lay on the couch, our empty kitchen looming, reading about how to weather the indignities of war rationing. I myself was unable to eat a thing, and after watching me for a week, Hockeyman insisted I visit the local ER.

This connotation having stamped itself into my subconcious, I never sought out the rest of Fisher's works. Occasionally I happened across something in an anthology and read happily.

But a couple weeks ago I found A Cordiall Water in Spectator Books, and as I am a sucker for an interesting edition, I picked it up. The book itself is small, palm-sized, with a sturdy yellow dust jacket. I love books with dust jackets, especially books you don't expect to have them--small paperbacks like this one, cookbooks intended for serious use, poetry volumes. Some of you may find this admission weird, but the bibliophiles are all nodding.

But back to Mary Frances. Orginially published in 1961, Water is a compendium of ancient recipes--receipts--addressing the ailments of animal and man. Many, Fisher notes, utilize alcohol, while others involve warm poultices, fluids, and rest. Others are emetic in nature, or address the need for the occasional "cleansing."

While most of these receipes are charmingly archaic, any person living in California, as I do, cannot read without thinking of the alternative practitioners plying their trades all round. I am a block from a Naturopath/Acupuncturist, three blocks from a tradional Chinese physician. If I am so inclined, I can drive the five miles to Elephant Pharmacy, where the staff will happily lead one amongst the aisles of tinctures, formulae, and pills, explaining the virtues of this or that.

---------

Even those of us outside easy radius of alternative medicines are increasingly aware that the contents of our medicine chests may be doing more harm than good. I write this as a grateful recipient of Western medicine, which has saved my life on more than one occasion. I heartily endorse and participate in much that Western medicine has to offer, and have no intention of abandoning my health insurance program.

But about the Lunesta I swallowed just last night...clearly it's not great stuff. As a sleep aid it helps. That is, if I take it I can be certain of four solid hours of sleep. After that I begin waking, far too early. My insomnia is stress-related, and I am unwilling to clobber it with Ambien, which I have taken a couple times. I am a small woman, and broke the sample capsule given me in half. I was sitting up in bed, reading, when I began feeling the sheets were moving toward me in waves. I woke hours later with the lights burning and the metal barrettes I'd used to put my hair up still in place. This happened before sleep-driving and eating were known about. I refused my doctor's offer of a prescription. Insomnia is horrible. It makes me insane. But which is worse? The illness or the cure?

When my bowel troubles spiraled out of control, I was offered every med in the world except for the ones that ultimately worked--opiate-based narcotics. To put it bluntly, opiates constipate. They also, mercifully, reduce pain. But my doctors were certain amitryptiline, Zoloft, Prednisone, Lotronex, and a host of even more dangerous meds were the tickets. In the end, an aspirin-based drug called Pentasa, coupled with the opiates, changed my life. Both are plant-derivatives. As one pharmacist once told me: "Opium is older than God. It will never, ever hurt you."
________________

So what are we to make of MFK's charming little volume? That at 142 beautifully written pages, it is an evening's enjoyment, a visit to a more primitive time. Or that, like her works on food, it transcends time. Here are her words on growing fat, written nearly fifty years ago:

"In other words, we eat too much...(she was speaking specifically of Americans)...Most doctors, for hundreds of years, have urged people not to get fat...to reduce their weight gradually and sanely...Eat when you are hungry, eat according to the seasons of the year, and always rest afterwards." (101)

We may smirk at the rubbings of animal dung or the ingestion of powdered stag horn. Or we can read the oft-repeated prescriptions for fluids, rest, mindful eating of fresh foods, a touch of drink, and allow, perhaps, the tiniest bit of ancient knowledge in to rest beside our bottles of Vioxx.

M.F.K. Fisher. A Cordiall Water. North Point Press: San Francisco. 1961.

Disagreeing with Daniel Mendelsohn, Part II

2007-03-19T20:10:00.000-07:00

So I was cooking dinner, happily contemplating--I kid you not--beginning Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost when Hockeyman, who was doing some maintenance work on the blog, mentioned there were numerous comments we'd missed. He read a couple nice ones, one from a raving lunatic (all in caps, misspelled) and then he said:

"There's a comment on your Daniel Mendelsohn (see 1/1/07) post."

"From Matt Mendelsohn?" I asked, thinking of last week's discussion with Ed and Sarah.

"No, from Daniel Mendelsohn."

Much swearing ensued as we smote our foreheads and adjusted the blog to alert us when comments come in.

To all of you who commented and never heard back from me, my apologies. I believe in thanking people. Including Mr. Mendelsohn--I'm sorry to have missed your initial comment, which I am reprinting here to make my responses clearer. Thank you for taking the time to read and respond.

I have no desire to devolve into a flame war. I hope you don't, either.

1) The author of the Poets & Writers article was Andrea, not Andrew, Crawford.

Sorry, Andrea.

2) I nowhere said, nor would I say, that the internet *tout court* is "ruining criticism"; like you and all intelligent persons, I recognize--and have often said, in fact, in my various defenses of the internet as a tool for education--that the Internet is merely a medium (like print, or illuminated manuscripts, or oral poetry, or whatever), and that what appears on it is merely as good as the author.

Agreed.

What I did say, and do believe, is that in order to be worth reading, literary critics, like other kinds of judges (I cited Olympic sports judges in the P&W article) have to have deep expertise in their field. (Part of this expertise is to avoid glib second-hand paraphrase and actually to have read what one is critiquing, I might point out.)

For clarity: I wrote in the blog that I didn't care to get in hot water by quoting without permission. My comments were strictly about the PW article.

My point about the internet is that the ease of access to all sorts of online opining, regardless of the value of the source, coupled with the instantaneity and the breadth of the coverage that internet postings have, poses a more insidious threat to a vast audience's appreciation of the dividing lines between expert and amateur opinions on important matters such as literature than was posed by print media, access to which, although broad, was more restricted. In other words, anyone with access to a computer can be "published" on any subject, whether he or she deserves to be read.

Yes, the hoi polloi can, and are, getting in on the act. Would the two of us ever have met in any other arena? Unlikely. Is everyone on the net deserving of readers? Well, that's up to the readers, who can vote with their proverbial feet. In terms of "insidious threat," inherent in this is the idea that people are incapable of formulating opinions without trained critics. Literature is important--essential--to a shrinking group. Those of us who care enough to read the critics, the books themselves, then form opinions and write about them are far fewer than the folks watching "Desperate Housewives." I would argue that the lack of education in this country is where the real trouble lies.

As for your (expertise-laden) "bullshit" in response to my position about the novel as a genre that has reached its end--a position that was reduced to a one-phrase summary in the P&W article, and which, therefore, can't possibly be engaged in an intelligent fashion, as any serious critic would have recognized--any time you'd like to debate this point in a serious medium, and at length, I'm game!

What's a serious medium? The NYTBR? NYRB? Not the internet?

The genre argument is a genre unto itself. Best left to the nitpickers.

Some reasons why I think the novel is alive:

Chimamanda Adichie
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Drabble
Richard Ford
Kent Haruf
Claire Messud
Scarlett Thomas

All writers who published fiction in 2006. Ann Patchett and Lydia Davis both have new books coming out in '07. Oh, and William Gibson has a new one (genre alert!).....Can't forget Michel Faber, Mary Gaitskill, Kathryn Harrison, or Annie Dillard. Hilary Mantel and A.S. Byatt. Kiran Desai. Her mother, Anita. Jonathans Lethem and Franzen. Jeffrey Eugenides. Kate Atkinson. (Fiction or mystery? More importantly, is the book good?)

I could go on, but you get my point. There's plenty of space for the novel and non-fiction to peaceably co-exist.

Along with polite differences of opinion.

Another month, another catalogue

2007-03-18T18:15:00.000-07:00

The ever-faithful Williams Sonoma catalog has arrived. It's like a magazine: Williams Sonoma, The Catalogue for Cooks. April 2007.

Features include Mother's Day, Easter, and elegant brunches.

I have written before (see 9/7/06) about the ways the W-S catalogue alternately angers and unnerves me. I should toss it the moment it arrives. But the lure is irresistible. What are the Spring-must haves for the chic cook?

How about fondue pots? Yes, friends, fondue is back. Some of you may recall your mother's fondue set, the pot and inset dust-covered in the breakfront's recesses, the handy forks used to spear the weekday chicken dinner. Never, ever, did your mom produce sterno, heft the pot out, and actually melt something in it. Your mother, like mine, had small children who made plenty of noise and mess. She did not need a fondue pot to create more.

But those little pots are back, elegantly All-Clad for $150, accompanied by a recipe for blue cheese fondue (which you are warned not to whisk, lest it turn blue), an artisan bread board, and a set of French platters. Now you, who may have small children of your own, can replicate your mother's hostessing, or lack thereof. If you are from California, your fondue experience, differing as it does from your mom's, may qualify as a Healing Experience. Especially if you allow your kids to help you make the fondue while wearing one of W-S's "personalized kids' apron," a steal at $22. You can wear an apron, too, $24-$34, depending on whether or not you monogram it.

Or you could go to Ace Hardware and buy a plain white apron for $7.99. Or you could filch one of your husband's old oxford button-downs, its collar too frayed for formal use, and wear that. Excellent coverage and comfort. Machine wash and dry.

As always, half the joy of the catalogue is its copy. Here, an "An Elegant Brunch:"

"A celebration of the pleasures of fine food and drink, brunch soon became a favorite for sophisticated entertaining on both sides of the Atlantic. Today, we continue this gracious tradition with stylish table-setting ideas and delicious recipes that make it easy to host a sophisticated brunch perfect for Mother's Day or other springtime celebrations." (5)

Sigh. This paragraph, surrounded as it is by photos of expensive French plates, champagne flutes, and two perfect women of a certain age toasting each other in a huge, perfect dining room, is certain to inspire guilt, envy, sadness, and a general sense of inadequacy. I write this on Sunday morning: my husband, exhausted from the workweek, is still asleep. Instead of a skirt and top, I am wearing sweats and a torn shirt. My mother is three thousand miles away; my husband's mother, five hundred miles distant. It is safe to say neither will come for Mother's Day brunch, which is a good thing, as my kitchen table seats only four. I have no dining room. I have no buffet to arrange platters upon, much less that many platters. As for those smiling women, one clearly intended to be the mother, to all of you whose mothers are dead, or maybe not on the best of terms with you, I'm sorry. Please do not take this catalogue to heart.

As for those of us with moms we get along with, well, Sunday brunch ain't it. Most of us work all week. We're tired. We don't want to get up at six a.m. on Sunday morning to produce an elegant meal that will require hours of clean-up. We want to sleep late, or lounge in our jammies drinking coffee. We want breakfast in bed with the cat nosing into our eggs.

We don't want company. We want--God help us--a little downtime.

Okay, enough about brunch. It's Springtime on our beleagured planet! In many places it's already too warm, or farmers are attempting recovery from the freezing temperatures that ruined California's citrus crop. No matter! Let's hop into the SUV and go berrying! When we return, we can prepare crepes with berries and ricotta, using:

"berry colanders: These wonderful colanders are adept at smaller tasks such as rinsing juicy berries..." (10)

Who knew a colander could be adept? Order yours today!

No? How about an espresso machine for $3659? Or the less expensive model, at steal at $1599?

Moving right along to the baking section, full of twee baking pans, molds, and decorating kits certain to frustrate all but the most sophisticated bakers. Three dimensional cookies? Bunny cake molds with smaller egg shapes? How does the larger cake finish baking without burning the smaller egg-shaped cakes? Tears on the horizon, people ...

Then there's the "W-S Kids (tm)" section. Here you can buy a kid's AeroGarden Indoor Garden. If you have the space for this item, I daresay you have the space for a real garden. Or the Salad People Cookbook by Mollie Katzen. Limited edition, signed by the author. We've come a long, long way from Moosewood.

I could keep going--to the Martha Stewart Homekeeping Handbook, complete with hilarious photo of Martha actually holding a spray bottle and paper toweling. I'm certain Martha hasn't cleaned a thing since leaving prison. Or I could talk about the mangle, or the lamb's wool duster. I could tell you all about the decorative bluebirds, which are "so lifelike, you almost expect them to break into song."

Maybe the colanders are adept enough to sing along?

Regards

2007-03-16T20:01:00.000-07:00

I have finished Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne.

It is a fascinating book on numerous levels. In one sense it is foil to Didion's work. The two wrote screenplays together, and her acid observations about the workings of Hollywood are corroborated in his essays. Both were absorbed in the mechanics of dealmaking, the people and places and false fronts. Being writers, nay, married writers, they were like x-rays, seeing through to the bones and reporting, most often witheringly. But where Didion made her name in the definitive if slightly obsfucating sentence, Dunne tells it straight. On Pauline Kael, he writes:

"Reading her is like reading Lysenko on genetics--fascinating, unless you know something about genetics." (253)

Further: "It is this implacable ignorance of the mechanics of filmaking that prevails in all of Kael's books." (255) The monstrous Julia Phillips, producer-cokehead-author of You'll never eat lunch in this town again, exhibited "... a pointlessly agressive verbal style, compounded by a voice that could cut metal." (268)

For those of us endlessly interested in the lives of Didion Dunne, there is much material, here from John's viewpoint. Rare is the opportunity to read one gifted writer's version of domestic events, only to find the spouse's equally deft response. For Joan's famous "In Bed," the primer on migraine, Dunne counters with "Dealing," the story of their ill-starred interaction with director George Hill. Didion and Dunne were called in to write the screenplay of John Le Carre's Little Drummer Girl. Negotiations broke down largely over Hill's notorious parsimony. When the Didion Dunnes refused to budge over what was by then a ridiculous moot point, Hill displayed his admiration of their grit by mailing them a case of wine totaling $756.

Alas, Dunne writes:

"The sad thing is that neither my wife nor I will ever be able to drink a single drop ... We both have migraines, and red wine is a migraine trigger." (64) He later mentions Julia Phillips' raid on their medicine chest. Phillips gleefully thought herself in the company of fellow junkies. Dunne made no attempt to dissuade her; instead ruefully noting the crammed medicine chest is populated with failed headache remedies.

-------------

Covering the Chavez Grape strike in Delano, California, Dunne wrote:

"The insatitable appetites of instant communication have necessitated a whole new set of media ground rules, predicated not only on the recording of fact but also on the projection of glamour and image and promise. The result of this cultural nymphomania is that we have become a nation of ten-minute celebrities. People, issues, and causes hit the charts like rock groups, and with approximately as much staying power." (97)

Incredibly, he wrote this in 1971. He lived long enough to see the internet, the explosion of telecommunications and cell telephones; he wrote of giving way to the laptop. Yet he remained a classically educated man, one of "the silent generation," born between wars one and two, too young to be affected by WWII but too old to catch the youthful fire of the sixites. In a way, he was one of the last of his kind, a writer who noted everything lest the material present itself later, a man of wide curiousity who wrote as engagingly about baseball as he did a trip to the Los Angeles Morgue. The ability to comment intelligently on such a breadth of material is increasingly rare; the writers of his generation are dying off, only to be replaced by niche purveyors.

Whether this is a commentary on education, the nature of media then and now, or the kinds of people we are interested in reading I leave to you.

Hairballs in the Amazon

2007-03-14T19:56:00.000-07:00

Amazon.com, that is. I'm not linking. You all know where to find it.

I can count on one hand the times I've ordered from Amazon. We use them during the holidays, sending e-gift-certificates to distant relatives whose taste we cannot intuit. I've used it when Pegasus couldn't get me something. But I cannot recall when that last was, until Jane Grigson.

Try finding English Food in this country. If you can, please contact me. I will pay you. Really. Black Oak carries a copy of Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery. Or they did; it was a hardcover first edition and cost close to my salary.

So it was I ordered English Food and Good Things from Amazon on January 7th. I was duly informed these items would take time. Then, a few weeks later, I received an email saying the books were futher delayed, and would appear Februrary 28th.

Yesterday, after some struggle, I managed to email customer service. I received the following reply:

Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.

We are very sorry for the delay in completing your order #---
I can see your experience has been far less than positive. We strive for
convenience and efficiency at Amazon.com, but in this instance we
have fallen short of our goal. I'm truly sorry that your impression
of doing business with Amazon.com has been so negative.

I have already contacted our appropriate department regarding this
situation and they have already contacted a different supplier to
obtain this item for you.

I can assure you that we are working hard to obtain these items for
you and we will ship it as soon as we are able to obtain it. This
means that we will ship these items as soon as we receive it from
our suppliers.

Please allow me to explain that sometimes unexpected fluctuations in
supply can add time to our original availability estimate. We have
learned that "Good Things (At Table)", "English Food" are now back-
ordered, and our supplier has not been able to let us know exactly
when they expect to have more in stock.

I'm sorry that you were not notified sooner of this change in
availability.

We will ship these items as soon as we are able to obtain it. You
won't be charged until we ship it to you. On the date of shipment,
we'll send you e-mail confirming the date, contents, and method of
your shipment.

In an effort to compensate for any inconvenience caused by this
situation, I like to give you $3.00 promotional certificate towards
your Amazon.com future order. You'll find all the details below. I
do understand that a promotional certificate cannot really make
amends for this inconvenience. Please accept it as a goodwill
gesture and apology.

This amount has been automatically redeemed onto your account.
You will not receive a claim code.

To use your promotional certificate, follow these steps:

1. Add the items you want to your Shopping Cart and click the
"Proceed to Checkout" button to fill out our order form.

2. You should see the promotional funds listed in the order cost
summary that appears just before you submit your order. As
long as the order qualifies, you don't need to do anything else
to receive the promotional discount.

3. If the cost of your purchase exceeds the amount of the
promotional certificate, you will be prompted to provide your
credit card information for the remaining balance.

4. Promotional certificates are subject to certain restrictions.
Please visit the following link for more information:
http://www.amazon.com/promos/

We would understand if you feel order is too late for your need and
if you'd prefer to cancel your order. You may cancel unshipped
items through the "Your Account" page, accessible at the top of any
page on our web site. To cancel your order, simply click "Cancel
items or orders." After signing in with your e-mail address and
password, you will be able to view your order history and cancel
your order for any item that has not yet entered the shipping
process.

If you have further questions, feel free to visit our online Help
pages:

http://www.amazon.com/help

In addition to a wide selection of items, one of our aims at
Amazon.com is to provide a convenient and efficient service; in this
case, we have not met that standard.

Again, I am truly sorry that we were not able to fulfill your
expectations for this level of service. I hope that you will give
us another opportunity to prove the quality of our service to you.

We thank you for your patience and understanding in this matter, and
thank you for shopping at Amazon.com.

Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:

If yes, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-y?c=bhtchwdu3230139061
If not, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-n?c=bhtchwdu3230139061

Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept
incoming e-mail.

To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help
section of our web site.

Best regards,

Vignesh S.

Still with me?

Though guilty for ordering from one of the behemoths, this rare case felt justified. Nobody in the greater Berkeley/Oakland area seemed to stock Jane. So I swallowed by misgivings and got smacked for it.

Now I have a couple questions.

1. Why didn't Amazon simply take the $3.00 off this order?

2. Where is Vignesh S.? I realize none of this is his fault and that wherever he is, he needs a job. But am I adding insult to injury by ordering from the behemoth who then farms out customer service offshore? Maybe not; maybe Vignesh is down the street. But the phrasing--"please allow me to explain", "I hope that you will give us another opportunity to prove the quality of our service to you"--suggest otherwise. Go ahead and tell me I'm wrong. Make my day.

I cancelled the order. Powells.com carries English Food. They must also order it, and promise delivery in mid-April. At least they are an independent, and that if there is a customer service problem, I can actually telephone Portland and talk to a human. Or Fup.

(Why did I even order from a place that doesn't have a store cat??)

Two hairballs, dropped on my foolish head.

Making Peace with Tamasin Day-Lewis

2007-03-12T20:20:00.000-07:00

In my 1/21/07 post I bring up my mixed feelings about Tamasin Day-Lewis, whose Good Tempered Food is in constant use in my kitchen. So it was I found Tarts with Tops On last week and bought it.

For those of you unfamiliar with Tamasin, here is a breezy link.

Now, if you are at all like me, Tamasin may evince a bit of dismay. Perhaps you are not so very long-legged, slender, and doe-eyed. Or maybe your family pedigree is less ... well ... pedigreed. Perhaps you do not shoot your own grouse or fish for your own freshwater shrimp.

Perhaps you are a poor baker and fear pie crust above all other culinary exploits, excepting anything involving egg whites.

Here you are, reading Tarts with their Tops Off. And you are hating Tamasin even more, because in addition to all her other impossible achievements, she is a terrific writer.

Writing about food has its pitfalls. Namely, adjectives. How often can a dish be delicious, tasty, nourishing, heartwarming, or the ultimate comfort food? Light, fluffy, delicate? Or how about that gloss for heavy meals, "hearty winter fare?"

Enter Day-Lewis, ever the poet's daughter. On gathering summer fruits from her grandparents' garden:

"I remember best the scent of the currants picked warm from the branch, splurting purple juices on fingers and mouths, then stripping the sun-ripened orbs from the stem with a fork, rolling them in the gritty sugar that would breathe its sweetness into their acidity just so, turning the sharpness into a mere undercurrent." (introduction, unpaginated.)

On purchasing salmon:

"Farmed salmon is a sacrilege, a sop to the supermarket mentality that the punters have to have everything they want all of the time." (33)

She'd play really well here in Berkeley. Which leads me to wonder why she isn't more popular here ... more on that later.

On preparing a Layered Ricotta and Feta pie:

"... Brush with melted butter and add another sheet of filo ... Repeat this until your last storey of mixture, then add the penthouse roof of a double layer of filo ... Cut a diamond pattern into the filo roof ..." (40)

Not only amusing, but informative. In context you understand what to do; the preparation of a potentially difficult dish reads as something easy, even fun to prepare. In other recipes, pies are "musky-breathed" (46), cayenne is "a dusky hot hit" (56). Meat loaf pie is "... the culinary equivalent of a stater home." (76) That is, so simple that even her nine-year-old daughter Miranda could make it, and did.

As for the pies themselves, they are largely, defiantly, British. Recipes call for organic green streaky bacon (whatever that is), Rich Jersey Milk, clotted cream, double cream, mutton. Bottles of anchovy essence. Suet and lard. Montgomery cheddar and ox kidneys. Squab. Most dishes are well-suited to their cold, clammy homeland and would set in California-acclimated tummies like so many rocks, but they'd do well in other parts of the United States. We Americans need to shed our seemingly inbred revulsion toward British Isles cookery; then again, this observation may be extended to many other aspects of our conduct on the international floor. But back to food. As insight into another culture, the recipes are fascinating--classic pies that made the most of what was at hand: excellent dairy products, lamb, sheep, pigs, game.

Which leads us back to Day-Lewis' surprising lack of fame stateside. Her cooking encompasses more than pies--she has seven books to her credit, and is an avid supporter of organic, sustainable eating. And she is gorgeous: Americans love a gorgeous girl cook. All I can think is her uncompromising promotion of English foodstuffs has failed to draw American fans. Or perhaps she isn't interested in conquering America a la Gordon Ramsay? Whatever the reason, like Jane Grigson, she deserves more of our attention.

Bastard Garbure

2007-03-11T13:06:00.000-07:00

Garbure, literally, "the whole grab", is a classic French soup or stew, depending on your point of view and your ingredients. Garbure, like bouilliabaisse, gumbo, and cioppino, is a Helen-of-Troy dish: people willingly go to war over what goes in the pot. Elizabeth David lists goose fat, onion, tomatoes, piment basquais, confit, and ham. (46) Paula Wolfert's version takes three pages and nineteen ingredients, calling for, among other things, a ham hock, a duck carcass, pancetta, garlic, duck fat, onions, leeks, celery, and duck confit. (43-45) In The Pleasures of Slow Food, Corby Kummer gives us Georgette Dubos' version, calling for smoked bacon, turnips, and the confit. Her recipe serves ten. (99)

Having no urge to fight, and feeding only two people and one cat, I humbly offer a highly bastardized verson of "La Garbure Landaise." I was inspired by the contents of my fridge: duck confit, aged since December, a huge collection of poultry bones that needed to be cooked down into stock, two bunches of farm carrots, leeks, and shallots. I also have two small cabbages, and as of this writing, remain unsure whether or not to add some. I don't want the cabbage to take over the entire dish, as brassicas are wont to do. To avoid this, I would need to cook the cabbage separately and add it tomorrow, when I intend to serve this. So we'll see.

I began this morning by making the stock: quail carcasses, frozen into one bristling bunch, a chicken carcass, the ends of some leeks, carrots, and garlic. A bay leaf and some peppercorns. I reached into the pot and tried to break up the quail glacier barehanded. A renegade bone slashed the pad of my middle finger, resulting in a shallow cut that bled profusely. I managed not to ruin the stock.

At noon I strained the mess into another stockpot, adding fresh carrots, two shallots, and more garlic. I splashed in a little Armagnac. Then I hefted the duck confit jar out and set it on the counter to warm up a bit. Just now I fished out two legs with a minimum of the duck-fat-everywhere experience inherent in confit. I began tearing meat from the legs only to be rudely interrupted by the cat, who jumped on the counter, demanding treats. I got him down with promises of sharing later, dumped the meat and bones into the pot, and am now contemplating whether or not to add a little rice. I know, this is the bastardized part. But I like a thick soup.

I'll let this go a couple more hours, on a very low heat, then cool it and serve tomorrow. This is definitely the sort of soup that benefits from waiting. It is also a very farewell-to-winter soup, which seems appropriate on Daylight Savings Day. I loathe daylight savings. But we must eat, and why not celebrate losing a precious hour of my weekend by making soup?

Meanwhile, we'll hope the Trojan Horse isn't waiting outside the door.

Works cited:

Elizabeth David: French Provincial Cooking. Penguin Books: New York. 1970.

Corby Kummer: The Pleasures of Slow Food. Chronicle Books: San Francisco: 2002.

Paula Wolfert: The Cooking of Southwest France. John WIley and Sons: New Jersey: 2005.