salt & paper

2011-04-17T16:38:00.000-07:00

Making Room

Even though it makes me sound kind of cranky, I’ll be totally honest: I used to wonder why some expectant parents put so much time into decorating their babies’ rooms. Spending weeks preparing a nursery seemed sweet and all, but also sort of frivolous. Why go to the trouble of endlessly pondering paint colors and “themes”? Does a newborn notice, much less care, if her room is rose or coral, or if you’ve stenciled stars or seagulls over the crib? Why not just get a few workable basics and then spend the rest of the pregnancy reading some good novels and getting actual work done?

I’m still sympathetic to this perspective, but I’ve also been drinking liberally of the expectant parents’ Kool-Aid. Decorating for a new baby is basically unnecessary, but it’s a great way to bond with your fellow decorator and build your shared anticipation for the new family member. And anything that builds anticipation (anticipation being one of the life's supreme joys) has to be a good thing. Besides, arranging cute toys on shelves is way more fun than scrubbing bathroom grout at 4am or cleaning behind the stove with a Q-tip, or whatever it is that Very Pregnant Women possessed by mystical Nesting hormones supposedly do. (I wouldn’t really know, since my cleaning sprees lately have consisted of doing the dishes for approximately 4.2 minutes and then flopping dramatically on the couch to recover.)

Point is, Justin and I had a great time decorating the wee bedroom/walk-in closet that our baby will occupy. We thought a lot about how to combine items we already own with a few new objects to make a cheery space that still manages to be restful and serene. We wanted something that she can grow into, but that we can also enjoy. We’re not quite there yet—we still want to hang a large, colorful geological map over her crib and replace the rocking chair cushions with a neutral shade—but we’re liking where things are at the moment.

The crib has three nifty features: it’s a mini-crib, which means it's small and can fit through doorways; it rocks (literally); and it comes with attachable wheels. It'll be great as we gradually transition the baby from our bedside into her own room. (Our room is just through the door.)

The rug, from Anthropologie, was our one splurge. I knew I wanted some bright splashes of color to offset the cool grays and whites, and the rug helps accomplish that. It's actually brighter than the pics suggest.

My favorite corner of the room is this Eames “hang-it-all” rack (a cherished Christmas gift last year from Justin) combined with a framed print we bought at a comics and graphic arts festival in Brooklyn several months back. The instant I saw those plump, Matisse-like baby-ladies, I knew this picture had to go in our kid’s room.

Early on, I also knew I wanted the baby's room to have a cuckoo clock. I picked up a mousy brown one on ebay and slathered it liberally with magenta paint. Turns out, the color matches the rug perfectly.

This little gent is my first and only venture into stuffed-animal making. To protect my ego, let’s describe him as “rustic.” Despite lumpen, ambiguous appearances, he was supposed to be a rabbit (witness the tail below). But he might just be a cat. Or a gourd.

The felt pockets over the changing table (below) were a stroke of genius from Justin. They’re actually intended for hanging indoor plants, but they’ll work great as holders for diapers and toys. The thought of hanging heavy shelves over the changing table scared me, but these containers are soft and hard-working. It's hard to tell from the photo, but the blue shade is really vivid, and the felt fabric is sturdy and soft.

Voila! Now if only the human baby would arrive so I can stop test-driving the crib, swaddle blankets, and changing table with a sock monkey.

2011-03-07T19:15:00.000-08:00

Such a good read

Promises I Can Keep is easily one of the best books--fiction and nonfiction included--I’ve read this year. When I first saw it cited on a blog, my interest was piqued by the subtitle: "Why Poor Women put Motherhood before Marriage."

I instantly had to know the answer. Why do they?

Why indeed when study after study shows that having a baby when young and single impairs a woman's career prospects and earning potential. And yet many poor, unmarried women decide to have babies while in their teens or early twenties. Why do something so obviously self-defeating? To answer this question, the authors conduct in-depth interviews with single mothers from eight poor Philadelphia neighborhoods. Their research offers some very convincing answers and, in the process, they help restore the humanity of the women involved-- humanity that gets obscured when the "unwed mother” becomes a political flash point. The book quotes heavily from the interviews, so we really get to hear the women's voices and see them as individuals. And because the authors are so explicit about their research methods, the book is also a great window into how sociological research is conducted.

While I don’t want to give away all of their conclusions, I found it fascinating to read that for many of the mothers, having a baby meant having an opportunity for meaning and self-worth where other forms of meaning (professional, educational) were all but absent. Contrary to stereotype, nearly all of the mothers surveyed say they enthusiastically anticipate marrying someday. In fact, they see marriage as a sacred institution and they disdain divorce, but, for them, a wedding is the culmination of years of hard work --a picket-fenced dream that comes only after one has saved money and established a career and yes, become a parent. After all, good men are in short supply, and few can be depended on for happiness or security. Raising a child, though, gives a young woman a chance to form emotional bonds and do something that really matters.

2011-01-31T16:45:00.000-08:00

28 Weeks

Two things:

1) It's been one of the snowiest winters on record in NYC. Perfect for staying inside and consuming chocolate and episodes of Downton Abbey.

2) When I emailed this photo of myself from my iphone, autocorrect changed the word "preggers" to "prejudge."
Pfft.

2011-01-21T14:39:00.000-08:00

Thinking about Denial

So I was lying on my back today, watching my belly take on weird, sculptural shapes as my unborn baby decided that she preferred my right side—no, my left side, before she finally settled somewhere in the middle under my belly button. Like most pregnant women, I really like these unmistakable physical signs. The wooshing heartbeat, the fluttering and more ferocious kicks, the smooth proof of the ultrasound screen, the shifting topography of my belly as she flops around—all help me know that I didn’t just imagine her. Maybe it’s because I like my truths nice and literal, or that I have an unlimited imagination and might otherwise wonder if I’d made the whole thing up, but I do like the basic reassurance of these cumulative symptoms.

Weirdly, as I’ve been consumed with tracking the physical evidence of pregnancy, I’m also finding myself really drawn to accounts of women who are pregnant without knowing it. I keep thinking of stories I’ve heard of women going to the hospital complaining of strange abdominal pains only to find out, surprise, it’s labor time. This is the stuff TV writers fall all over themselves for. Think of Peggy’s little surprise in the second season of Mad Men. Her only proof (and grasped only retrospectively, at that) seemed to be her mysterious fatness, a symptom that seemed almost preposterous in both its theatrical execution and its uniqueness. Really, Pegs? Nothing else going on in your body to clue you in? And if there were other clues, why didn’t the writers let us in on them?

Then there are those true, sad stories of real women shocked by the discovery--often under the florescent lights of the ER--that they’re mothers. And what in the world does it mean to be a mother in the biological sense only-- before the awareness kicks in?

I find it astonishing that someone could go month after month and not perceive the wild factory of person-making happening just below her skin. But I also can guess how it’s possible. These symptoms, so factual and convincing to me, seem so not just because they are real, but because I’m paying attention. If I weren’t paying attention—if I decided to explain them away out of fear, distress, or ignorance—I could probably make them all but disappear. Denial is a powerful thing. It’s not the case that my symptoms mystically Summon me to Motherhood. They don’t command my attention and thereby make me a better, more conscious person than I already am. My attention is already there, and these bodily clues are just meeting me half way.

I also know that in a very basic way class plays a role in my feelings about pregnancy. The luxury of paying attention, of exulting in physical symptoms rather than fearing or repressing them, is related to my security about bringing this kid into the world. Because I’m not terrified about how I’m going to feed her and because she’s arriving as a very wanted little person, I can cherish the weird changes she’s putting me through and all the traces of her existence I have already. I can meditate on her for hours, and in so doing, make her more real than she otherwise would be.

“Pregnancy denier” is the oddly political-sounding term that medical researchers use for women and girls who remain unaware of being pregnant throughout the period of gestation. Deniers are different from concealers—those women who know they are pregnant but hide the fact from others. Sometimes this lack of awareness has basic physical roots. A young girl who has just entered puberty might misinterpret pregnancy for something else. A woman who experiences irregular or non-existent periods could understandably go nine months not knowing she’s pregnant, especially if she has other medical conditions that make her body seem opaque to her or her. In one study of pregnancy denial, an obese 32-year-old woman showed up at the ER complaining of urinary problems. A sonogram revealed a live term fetus. She had an emergency c-section and delivered a live 9-lb male baby. The study described the infant, with troubling vagueness, as being “in poor condition” and closed with the recommendation that physicians screen for pregnancy all adolescent girls and women who present in ERs with abdominal complaints.

Unsurprisingly, pregnancy denial can also be associated with psychological disorders. According to some research I looked at, many women who deny pregnancy suffer from dissociative psychopathology (though having this disorder doesn’t necessarily mean a woman will deny her pregnancy). Other illnesses that can lead to denial are schizophrenia and Cotard’s syndrome, a frightening neurological condition in which patients doubt their very existence. But researchers who have tried to pinpoint a single pregnancy denier profile have come up empty. One study that set out to seek a “type” concluded that the group of women involved was “heterogeneous, and a clear-cut typology of a 'pregnancy denier' could not be established.”

A sad and rather obvious fact is that women who don’t know (or accept) that they're pregnant tend not to receive prenatal care. One study of two hundred women who didn’t seek care found that the main reasons were, in order of frequency, substance use, denial of pregnancy, financial reasons, and concealed pregnancy. It's also no surprise to learn that women who don’t know they are pregnant deliver babies that are smaller and less healthy than average.

Interesting, women who showed up at hospitals just in time to deliver or shortly afterward tended to take responsibility for their infants once they were born. This is very good news, but I doubt that “taking responsibility” and bonding always go hand-in-hand.

All this leaves me with the feeling that I’m lucky to be in a place of awareness and readiness. It’s sad to think that for whatever reason (financial, medical, psychological) all pregnant women don’t have this luxury.

There's a lot more to say on this topic, of course, but there are other things I also want to research. I’m really interested, for one, in how very young teenage girls process the experience of being pregnant. Guess I need to start watching more reality TV?

2007-10-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

Stylin' Aslan's Mane

In her review of the new Narnia illustrations, I'd say Jessica Crispin gets it right.

2007-10-02T17:29:00.001-07:00

Finally! Paris photos

2007-08-14T05:39:00.000-07:00

Kitchen Tech.

In preparation for my older sister’s baby shower this Sunday, I’ve been envisioning possible dishes and recipes: a fruit salad of blackberries and fresh pepper, mini-lemon cakes and smoked salmon canapes, and even a fussy, flaky biscuit recipe I once made that calls for frozen, stamp-sized pieces of butter to be pressed one by one between thumb and forefinger.

Food has also been figuring into my research lately. (It's a rough life, I tell ya.) I’m preparing a paper on 19th century American mourning rituals for a conference this fall, and I've let the cultural net lazily drift to include Victorian shopping, reading, eating and just about every other ritualized 19th century activity I can think of. Everything I've read this summer about early American cooking discusses the changes mass production brought to the kitchen. The marketplace of the late 1800’s was flooded with more home goods than any cook really knew what to do with. Housewives of the previous century would have ordered select iron utensils from the local blacksmith, but a new wealth of factory-made shiny peelers, trimmers, and graters promised to simplify the Victorian woman's work and make her kitchen sassy and modern.

Some of these products came with names that just beg to be read aloud:

Heads and eyes, shakers’ swifts, beefsteak pounders, faucets and bungstarts, bootjacks and leg-resters, salt and spit-boxes, Chinese swings, Chinese punk in boxes, sillabub-sticks, oven peels, allblaze-pans, ice cream pagodas, paste jaggers and cutters. (The World of Antiques of Victorian America).

I don't know what they are either, but I want them.

My own grandmother, like her Victorian mother before her, was concerned with culinary correctness and the use of appropriate dishes and utensils. Her cabinets boasted cups for soft boiled eggs and fine china cups for our milky, sweet Earl Grey. At the end of dinner she'd open a rectangular box of Borden’s Neapolitan ice cream, overturn the brick onto a gilded platter and slice off servings for her rows of impatient grandchildren). When I was little, I saw this refinement as a natural expression of her gentle and decorous love for us. In studying Victorian culture I better see the threads that connect this way of life to one that thrived in dining rooms a century before.

Now a word about Victorian food molds. As someone who has never really seen the point of jello, I was fascinated to discover the Victorian rage for these odd metal structures . At the height of their vogue, they were regularly stuffed with jellied veggies, meats, and fruit and overturned onto serving plates (the ancestor of my grandmother's ice cream brick). Cooks embraced these food-contouring devices so zealously that a fancy dinner may well have featured all three courses— appetizer, entree, and dessert—served in molds. While Victorian etiquette manuals warned against such basely sensual displays as remarking on the tastiness of the meal, it was thought perfectly acceptable to marvel at the sculptural heights of the dessert jelly (or, for that matter, the appetizer, the salad, or the entree jellies).

Writing this, it occurs to me that by reducing many different foods to a single texture, the mold represented a very specific way of flaunting abundance. The diet of frontiersmen and early American pioneers rested on one key task— deriving as many recipes as possible from a single food: corn. Corn cakes, popped corn, corn bread, etc. The mold goes in the other direction, flaunting plenitude by homogenizing it into smooth, wobbly uniform shapes.

What would 19th century cooks have thought about this great old American recipe?

“Indian Pudding”
From The Plimouth Colony Cookbook (1964), a collection of 17th and 18th century cooking lore

Take the mornings milk and throw into it as much corn meal as you hold in the palm of your hand. Let the molasses drip in as you sing “Nearer My God to Thee,’ but sing two verses in cold weather.

I have no access to “mornings milk," but I like the idea of timing recipes by song. The closest I can recall to this is singing all the verses of “American Pie” while doing dishes with Em back in the day!

2007-07-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

Funny Little House in the Big Woods

I decided a month ago or so that I needed to hide out in the woods for a few days. Not to escape the law, do yoga, or anything like that. I just felt, like my fellow poseur Thoreau, that I’d gone too long without laying eyes on a woodland trail. But sifting through dozens of Adirondack rental websites just left me faintly depressed. It’s an unfortunate truth that people who own vacation properties tend to be very aware of their value (either that, or they considerably overestimate them). It’s a rare thing to find an owner who thinks, “You know, I could charge market rate for my amazing mountaintop bungalo, but you know what? I’ll just ask $12 a night. No, I like the sound of $10 better. It’s a nice, tidy, round sort of number. Let’s go with that.” Maybe there are people like that, but they don’t live in the state of New York.

But it’s more than just the prices. The presentation at most hotels, and even budget B&B’s and cottage rentals feel too self-conscious. The websites promise and purr about serenity. From the potpourri to the towels, you are guaranteed to love it. And while you are there, you obligingly gush about how great the place is, and usually that gushing is in direct proportion to how much you're forking over.

Then I discovered this cool cabin. The website made no extravagant promises. It didn’t call to me by my given name or sing out in velvety tones. In fact, with its manic fonts, it reminded me of the side of a Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle. So of course we had to take it.

It’s up in the Adirondacks Mountains, five hours north, where the time between towns starts to stretch. There aren't many cars passing, and the mountains perform that slow dance with the highway, rising directly ahead and then stepping aside just in time to let you pass. With the windows down, we exclaimed several times about how good the air smelled. I do this without fail whenever I set foot outside New York. I even started to do it in Newark recently before I caught myself! We ate pistachios and and listened to a reggae mix that Steve gave us for our Jamaica trip last year. The music clashed with the geography, but I kind of liked that. Hey, Adirondacks. Meet Bob Marley.

When we were nearing our destination, I dug out the detailed directions that had been provided for “checking in” to our cabin. We were to turn off the quiet highway onto the owner’s property—a swath of land about as big as Central Park and home to two mountains, a handful of rental cabins, including the one where he resides with his dog and the one that would be ours for a few days. We were then to pull up to a small, rusty trailer by the roadside where we would locate a telephone, which we would use to call the owner and receive further instructions. Finally, we were to drop off our bags at our cabin and then head over to the owner’s place to check-in. It was fun—like wilderness espionage.

When we were too slow to perform that last step (heading over to the owner's cabin), he came to us. He was somehow just what I had expected—a man who had transcended the pettiness of mirrors and sworn off the society of shampoo. With one sleeve rolled up and other down and bellowing for his sociable golden retriever to get back in the car, he squinted into a small stack of 3X5 card and proceeded to grumble the instructions for lighting the gas lights, locating the outhouse (no!), and otherwise laying to rest our city slicker ways for a few days. Then he eyed us doubtfully and demanded whether we had any questions. We didn't.

Later that day, Justin was looking over the bookshelves in our cabin (there were several) and noticed a narrow yellow spine bearing the owner’s name. It was a book of his own poetry, dedicated to his two daughters, who were depicted in a photo on the first page as two grinning teenagers. I steeled myself for the poems, but they turned out to be good— melancholy and prosy. They revealed that the owner had spent his early years in Manhattan. There was also a blunt publisher’s note on the flap explaining that the book was priced at just $5 because readers shouldn’t be expected to pay $12 for a book by someone they aren’t sure about. Deeply impressed by this logic (and pretty sure it was written by the author himself), I resolved to leave a five dollar bill on the kitchen table the next day and take the book when we left.

But for some reason, which I can’t seem to pinpoint, I didn’t end up doing this. Maybe I was embarrassed to claim I had been reading the man’s poems, even though he was so obviously inviting us to do just that. Or maybe I was afraid that they wouldn’t stand up if I brought them back into my world and put the book side by side with my other books. Or maybe—I swear this will be the last maybe—I was disappointed to learn that the owner is an ex-New Yorker. I had expected his poems to be folksy knock-offs of “Mending Wall” and “Apple Picking.” Instead, they suggested that he was someone who had led different lives, who had ended up in the woods not simply by birth or romantic accident, but by choice.

Later when the owner told us that the land on which our cabins stood was the size of Central Park, I was pulled again into that inevitable comparison of Home and Away. I imagined the mountainous Adirondacks property going head-to-head with that orderly park in the middle of Manhattan. I don't have to tell you who'd win.

2007-06-03T07:21:00.000-07:00

Look Ma, I edited Wikipedia!

I knocked boldly at the gates of the Wiki gods, and they let me in. Or, more accurately, I exercised my democratic right to make stuff up, take stuff out and potentially alter the research papers of legions of undergraduates (more another day on how freshmen looove to quote Wikipedia and assume their professors are incapable of using google).

Anyway, I changed an entry. And it felt very good. You should try it sometime.

I was checking out a page on the little known 19th century journalist Nelly Bly and noticed that preceding a section on Bly's career were three mystifying sentences: "Doughnuts were popular in Bly's day. She was a reporter. So she reported about doughnuts." Despite their compelling, syllogistic reasoning, the sentences had no relationship to the paragraph that followed, nor to anything I know about Bly's career (as a journalist she went undercover to expose conditions at a mental hospital, and was not, to the best of my knowledge, a doughnut reporter. But it gives me shivers of happiness even to imagine that such a career might exist).

Because the sentences were so obviously a prank, I clicked the edit button and deleted them. It was very satisfying and took all of ten seconds. Now I'm a little sad that they're gone, but I'm not about to put them back in. Take a look at the entry. The sentences used to appear directly under the section head, "Asylum expose." That section (now freshly delivered of doughnut references) still needs work. It appears to be missing a transition sentence or two; more than likely they were deleted by The Vandal.

What kind of doughnuts did Bly investigate?

This morning I was still wondering why anyone would bother to "doughnut bomb" an obscure Wikipedia page, and I just so happened to click over to my favorite food blog and discovered that Friday was--drum roll--National Doughnut Day!

Of course! What better way to celebrate the day than by sprinkling (I can't help it-- I'm picturing rainbow sprinkles) random doughnut references all over Wikipedia.

Actually, I can think of one way, and it usually sets you back 50 cents and 300 odd calories. Yum.

2007-05-17T03:49:00.000-07:00

I'm done my semester!

So: apropos of nothing (since when does anything on a blog need to be apropos of anything?)-- how about a little post about music?

1. Here are the songs that saw me through a marathon of paper writing. Each one deserves special thanks, and if you haven't met them yet, you should. Thanks, friends.

Gravity, The Handsome Family
So Much Wine, The Handsome Family
Loves Comes to Me, Bonnie Prince Billy
By My Car, My Morning Jacket
Monster Ballads, Josh Ritter
Belle Star, Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris
Black Wave/ Bad Vibrations, The Arcade Fire
Hard to Find, American Analog Set
Low, Cracker
Cold Cold Water, Mirah
She's a Jar, Wilco
Baby in Two, Pernice Brothers
Our Anniversary, Smog
Moonshiner, Cat Power
Heart of Gold, Cash

2. Here are the far cooler songs that will be the soundtrack of my summer:

Brother John
Good King Wenceslas
Tisket, a Tasket
Mexican Hat Dance
Cockles and Mussles
On Top of Old Smoky
A Friend Like You!
Thumbs on C!
Rockin' Intervals

That's right. I'm teaching myself to play piano using this book. Look past the aristocratic cover-- it's kind, welcoming and encouraging, and the first lesson even contains a diagram with arrows explaining--were you aware of this?-- that keys on the right side of the keyboard create progressively higher sounds and notes on the left produce lower sounds. Wild!

3. Check this enlightening article at the Times about musicians and blogging. I heard a radio interview not long ago with the chap who's discussed at the top of the piece. His music isn't exactly my cup of tea, but he does have a very funny song about zombies.

4. Do u any music recommendations for me?

2007-05-06T17:57:00.000-07:00

Skype Rhymes with Hype. But it's actually cool.

Ever notice that all the good user names are gone? Apparently, someone else using Skype also likes the name “Fennoscandia.”

Skype video, by the way, is weird. That’s my assessment to all you who have probably been using it happily and unfazedly for years now. But it is weird. When you’re finished staring at your husband’s pleasing, albeit grainy face (so far he’s the only person I’ve called, so I can’t imagine anyone else there) and the call ends, it’s so decisive. The face just zaps from the screen—poof. Fortunately, he was in the other room alive and well with his laptop during the call and was content that it all went according to plan, and strode out into the kitchen in a ho-hum-I-just-set-up-some-rad-new-technology-thing-and-it-works sort of way. Yeah, future!

2007-05-02T05:51:00.000-07:00

"Young, Gifted, and Not Getting Into Harvard"

I don't know if it's just my inordinate stress level these days (even car commercials are seeming especially moving), but this New York Times article about ambitious high school students nearly made me cry.

2007-04-22T13:23:00.000-07:00

Anti-epic poems

Wars, calamity, ships a-sailin', Trojan horses, Grendel's mom, songs of yourself, cyclopses, burning cities, swords.

Ho-hum.

Don't get me wrong. Big poems on big themes are wonderful. But sometimes don't you just have a taste for a poem about something very small? Like a twig? A freckle? Or a cat's paw? How about an atom?

A fellow student just turned me on to these great atom-themed poems by Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673):

The Weight of Atomes

If Atomes are as small, as small can bee,
They must in quantity of Matter all agree:
And if consisting Matter of the same (be right,)
Then every Atome must weigh just alike.
Thus Quantity, Quality and Weight, all
Together meets in every Atome small.

What Atomes Make a Dropsie

WHen Atomes round do meet, joyne in one Ball,
Then they swell high, and grow Hydropicall.
Thus joyning they come strong, so powerfull grow,
All other Atomes they do overflow.

The joyning of severall Figur'd Atomes make other Figures.

Severall Figur'd Atomes well agreeing,
When joyn'd, do give another Figure being.
For as those Figures joyned, severall waies,
The Fabrick of each severall Creature raise.

2007-04-01T05:39:00.000-07:00

Smokin’ Tomato Sauce

Justin is a cautious, yet deliberate cook. On the rare occasion that he makes dinner, all the clocks seem to grind to a halt as he measures and slices, tests and adds. Since I do most of the cooking, I have become very proficient in the quick meal. When I’m making something to eat, especially if it’s just for me, salad greens fly every which way, a pan of olive oil is invariably sputtering in the background, anticipating the burst and pop of a handful of mushrooms. One of the cats is likely dashing around the house, batting at a wayward green bean or redskin potato, while the other is lapping noisily from the faucet, baptizing the dirty dishes with water. I actually like the chaos and rush. I also do love to slow cook, but I know the difference between a weekday meal and a weekend one. Under pressure, I can whip up a breakfast burrito in four minutes flat and throw together a salad in seven (including homemade tahini dressing). Then again, on a Saturday, I like to shove my books off the counter and happily spend an hour slowly nestling layers of lasagna into a baking dish, listening to whatever happens to be wafting from NPR.

The other night I got home from my class and discovered Justin standing over the stove quietly stirring a pot of tomato sauce. He takes himself very seriously when he cooks and won’t abide uninvited sampling or cheerfulness. If I’m too upbeat or happen to burst into song--perhaps an innocent line or two from a Beyonce song that was blaring at gym that morning?—heaven help me, he narrows his eyes and returns to the slow, maestro-like work of stirring. Well, the other night, I took off my coat and threw down my bag, and he condescended to offer me a bite. The spoonful of tomato sauce looked like any ordinary marinara, but I was startled to discover one of the tastiest red sauces I’ve encountered in a long time—and that includes the sauces at Roberto’s, Frank, Palma, and some of the other beloved Italian restaurants in the city.

I managed to convince him to reveal the recipe. I think I'll call it...

Belgian Red Sauce (Come on, isn’t that better than “Flemish Sauce"?)

28 oz can Italian Style Peeled Plum Shaped Tomatoes in Juice (We love Tuttorosso brand)
good olive oil
sea salt
3 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp. truffle oil
1/4 cup sweet vermouth (or other white wine)
handful of yellow foot (or other variety) mushrooms

Add olive oil, tomatoes, garlic and salt to a medium heat saucepan. Cut tomatoes with a spoon or kitchen scissors into small chunks. Simmer for a few minutes and add truffle oil and vermouth. In a separate medium heat pan, warm olive olive oil and add mushrooms, stirring occasionally until they release any liquid (the amount will depend on the variety of mushroom). Salt and cook until lightly browned, but not crispy. Stir mushrooms into tomato sauce and simmer for a while, until sauce has a pleasant, even consistency.

2007-03-17T13:07:00.000-07:00

A dark, brainy little thought

I recently heard a physicist discuss the role of unpredictability in science and life. He remarked that someone should do an MRI study in order to determine how the feeling of uncertainty is registered on the brain. His guess is that it is there and that it probably looks a lot like pain.

I've never thought of it this way before, but it makes perfect sense. Uncertainty is a kind a pain.

The trick now is to muse on this rather beautiful, melancholy observation, and not let your mind wander to the fact that it also happens to sound like fab material for a rock ballad.

Pain/Brain...

At least thankfully there isn't much out there that rhymes with "uncertainty."

And just as I type that, I've thought of one: "hurtin' me"

Indeed.

2007-03-09T05:10:00.000-08:00

Back when "Pansy" was a Compliment

[This post is prefaced by a “Nerd Alert.” It's all about flowers, birds, and 19th century book-buying habits. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.]

Greetings and geraniums,
My dear Periwinkles and Zinnias!

Translation: Hey Friends. Fancy meeting you here!

No fooling. That’s me greeting you in flower language. For a fleeting period of history, flower language was real.

Not long ago in my 19th century American poetry class we discussed the immense importance of flowers to Victorian culture. Since it’s just too great to keep to myself, I want to try to reproduce from memory and a smattering of class notes some of that discussion.

We all know that roses mean love, and yellow roses mean something else (I can’t remember what) and that Lilies are for Easter. But, for the Victorians, flowers constituted a veritable language of feeling. Emily Dickinson was known for her extensive herbarium, a collection of pressed flowers, and she frequently mailed poems wrapped in flowers to friends and loved ones. The Victorians linked flowers to specific emotions, and some of the top book sellers of the day were flower anthologies that merged floral poetry and botany. The Lady’s Book of Flowers was typical of the genre, with a format featuring a hand-painted scientific illustration of a flower accompanied by its scientific classification and a poem about the flower. Indicative of their mass appeal, the anthologies featured writers from across the literary spectrum; poems by the mega-poetess of sentiment, Lydia Sigourney, appeared beside "serious" flower verse by such venerables as Edgar Allan Poe.

Besides a floral anthology, a necessary volume in any Victorian library was a floral dictionary, which listed hundreds of flowers, each with a corresponding sentiment.

Some of the definitions are familiar to contemporary ears:
Daisy = innocence
Rose = beauty/love

Some are less obvious:
Honeysuckle = inconstancy
Genetion = death

And some are just weird:
Kingcup= I wish I were rich

Learning the meanings of flowers expanded one’s sentimental range of expression, since the mere mention of a flower could serve as shorthand for a particular feeling. Flower language came in especially handy for writing racy love letters. For instance:

Dear Beloved,
Wormwood can do nothing against the real arcadia of our love! Think, dearest, of the mugwart of our next interview!”
(From The Flowers Personified)

So popular were flowers as stand-ins for human passions that some daring authoresses even went so far as to pen “floral liberation narratives.” These dramatic stories are just about what you'd expect. In one exciting account, a pair of flower sisters determine to leave their dull domestic life and find careers-- related to their floral natures, of course:

“I shall be an author!” said the rose.
“I a trinket vendor,” sighed the daisy.
(From The Flowers Personified)

The Victorian interest in flowers was part of a larger romantic fascination with nature. Books about birds and birding were also popular around mid-century. In fact, the same year Thoreau published his wildly-unpopular-at-the-time volume of ecological meditations, Walden, pop novelist Florence Merriam came out with a novel in the “bird western” genre called Birding on a Bronco. It, by contrast, was a big hit.

Poor Thoreau.

Birdies, flowers, and feelings. That was what grumpy guys like him had to contend with.

2007-02-25T14:48:00.000-08:00

Spines Realigned

You know how when you were little your stuffed animals used to wait until you'd leave for school to hop down from the shelf and lumber around the room, chatting it up?

For some reason I think of that when I see what this artist does with books. She clusters them into groups, and they quickly make friends, and before they know it they're finishing each others' sentences.

As far as I'm concerned, the coolest thing about this project is that it taps into an issue of great importance for bibliophiles, namely how do books feel about being stacked together, spine to spine. Do they prefer to hang with their own kind, or do they like diversity? Case in point: Overhead, Kate Chopin is rubbing shoulders with Oliver Sacks. Now that should be interesting.

Victor, who told me about the book project, notes that the artist has done other fascinating things, including recording the messages delivered in Morse code from popping popcorn!

Mmm... art.

2007-02-11T16:27:00.000-08:00

Philly tofu steak

So what that I've drastically reduced my meat consumption and I now know more about preparing tofu than any mortal really should. That hasn't changed the fact that I still harbor a faint skepticism of the culture that surrounds vegetarianism. It hints at a certain fussiness--a wish to call attention to oneself for the things one doesn't do, instead of all the exciting things one gleefully undertakes. Another part of me knows that's just snobby crap and has happily exploited the carne deficit in my life to become really good at preparing delectable vegetable dishes (Want to know the secret? It's roasting pretty much everything).

Well, dinner at a vegan restaurant in Philadelphia last weekend pretty much put to rest my ambivalence about meatless eating. Horizons has the trappings you'd expect of a vegan place, including the funky decor. But the food was-- phenomenal.

To start, we ordered flaky empanadas filled with hearts of palm & truffle cream, and a fragrant edamame hummus paired with black sesame crackers. For the entrees, we tried grilled tofu with ginger lime butter, hearts of palm paella, and portabella kebabs. A sassy salt-rimmed margaritini with agave, lime and a little wheel of jalopeno was the perfect liquid accompaniment. It was all so scrumptious I briefly thought about moving to Philly. The money we save in rent could go straight to Horizons.

I've concluded that cooking minus meat can, in the right hands, be a little like writing formal poetry. Constraints that at first seem frustrating can actually lead to wonderful, unexpected results, e.g. edamame hummus.

----

Okay, I've just about had it with winter. With all the hard snow and ice on the ground, the bus ride to campus today was slow, and all the passengers in big puffy jackets jostled around like irritable planets tossed out of orbit. What I need right now is summer, and if that's not possible, then a poem about summer tomatoes. This one by Neruda praises the the simple romance of cooking supper as the guests arrive.

From "Ode to Tomatoes"

we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!

2007-02-04T18:51:00.000-08:00

Why We have Round Heads

So my latest quest (no, not for the perfect habanero sauce with which to pulverize my tastebuds; that one's ongoing) is to trace the 19th century literature I'm reading to possible source material in much earlier periods. That was the the idea behind my decision to sign up for Early Modern (otherwise known as "Renaissance") Bodies this semester. I feel kind of like an academic tourist in the class, but the material is proving fascinating. I find I can follow it just fine so long as I remember to shelve my modern prejudices, such as my tendency to assume that medicine is a secular discipline. Not so in ye olde days. Respected Medieval anatomy handbooks attributed, say, man's upright stature to his need to be close to the Heavens. Ideas that we assume were meant as metaphors simply weren't.

Since you've no doubt been lately thinking to yourself, "Self, why don't I devote more of my time to reading 17th century anatomy guides?" why not rememdy the situation by checking out this snippet from Helkiah Crooke's 1615 handbook, Microcosmographia. Or a Description of the Body of Man. In this passage Helkiah investigates the many ways that mankind is different from the brutes. One key factor, oddly enough, is the shape of the noggin:

Of all living Creatures, only Man hath a head made into a round and circular forme, as it were turned on a wheele, both that it might be capable to receive a greater quantitie of Braines and less apt to be overtaken with danger either from without or within; as also, for the more ease in mooving and turning about; and lastly, because it was to be the Mansion-house of Reason, that is, the Soule. Now we know, that the Soule was Infused into us from Heaven, which even to our sense is round and circular: Seeing then her heavenly habitation is round before she is infused, it was likewise requisite that her Mansion here below should be orbicular also.

A guy with braines

2007-01-15T19:27:00.000-08:00

Not a “best of 2006” list (barely even a list)

Really just a few movies I’ve seen in the past few weeks. Forgive me, Justin-- films.

Now, Voyager (1942)
Every so often I get on a Bette Davis kick where I first indulge in a little self-pity that I can’t be Bette and then content myself with watching her sly, soft-filter face and grand, emotional monologues. I especially love 1950’s All About Eve, but this movie’s also a good place to start. Davis plays Charlotte, a young woman who evolves from a frumpy daughter to a svelte woman of the world. In one characteristic scene that is definitely not meant be funny, Charlotte’s new beau, unaware that she was once an ugly duckling, studies her family photograph. “Say!” he frowns. “Who's the fat lady with the heavy brow?” “That lady,” gasps Charlotte, spinning away tearfully, "is me!”

The old Charlotte, apparently hideous

Volver, Pedro Almodóvar (2006)
Speaking of drama, nobody does more to whip the passions of women’s lives into such moving, operatic proportions. If the emotions passing across his characters’ faces could be harnessed, they could power a small continent-- and everyone on the continent would be weeping, laughing, and wearing vivid, low-cut blouses.

Little Children, Todd Field (2006)
I almost hesitate to recommend this film, because I don't much like some of the plot, but it’s an improvement on Tom Perrota’s decent novel (how often can you say this about a film?), and the acting and cinematography are extraordinary. Kate Winslet brings her usual, believable beauty, and when the camera pans quietly over a packed community pool and an empty suburban backyard you feel like you're looking through the eyes of a single riveted observer, rather than a cool, omniscient lens. A few minutes in, it was clear that the subject of the story (suburban malaise) would be treated without irony. A big relief.

More generally: We just got a subscription to Wolphin . The first DVD to arrive is, well, a mixed bag: A few excellent shorts, a couple of oddballs and more than one genuine dud. But if you’re interested in checking out short films (oh, these most definitely are films) that nobody one else has seen, I'd say it's well worth subscribing. Either way, be sure to watch the short clip on the website from A Stranger in Her Own City, an excellent documentary about a seventh-grade girl from Yemen who refuses to wear a veil.

So... I still have a little time before the new semester descends, avalanche-style. I want to squeaze in a few more Netflix and theatre trips, so pass along your recommendations! Then it's back to books.

2007-01-12T09:11:00.000-08:00

Casper & Ferdinand

Alas, this is not the name of a recent Merchant Ivory release, nor of a storybook ghost and his Portuguese explorer friend. No, these are the names of two small boys who happened to be attending the “Story Hour” at a café on the Upper East Side recently. Coincidentally, it was the same day and the same café where I happened to be enjoying a cup of coffee. I had arrived at the café around 9:45, having put in a long walk looking for the place, and had just sat down with my steaming coffee and opened my laptop. Cold Play was crooning inoffensively on the speakers, and all around gentle students and freelancers were softly clicking away, savoring the free wi-fi.

Little did I know that in mere minutes Story Hour would begin (apparently announced to the entire Metropolitan area at a frequency that only parents and small children can pick up), and New York’s Most Fertile (NYMF) and their bundled offspring would be charging the door. Around 10:15, the café staff went into gear, moving furniture, tossing down colorful blankets, and pouring apple juice into what looked like hundreds of plastic medicine cups. Around 10:30 the front door jangled: an imposing woman with curly hair and an ear-popping voice (The Story-teller, I would learn) strode in, issuing commands: “Let’s have that sofa a little to the left! Where’s my marionette?” Ten minutes later the place was brimming with mothers, nannies, massive strollers and fat toddlers barreling around like drunken sailors. I debated whether to stick it out or run (factors: my coffee was still hot and served in such a nice glass mug, and I had overheard someone said the whole thing would be over in an hour).

Amid my indecision, café employees were shepherding the children and their caretakers into a line, so that the lucky pre-schoolers could receive juice and nametags, and enjoy pointless conversation with the employee distributing said provisions (“And how was your New Year’s Eve, Olaf?” Shuffle, shuffle of snowboots. “I don't know!!”) The front of the line was, of course, inches from where I sat, ruefully staring at my computer screen. And if you’re wondering if I’ve forgotten about the two boys in the title of this post, well here they are: smartly dressed in corduroys, the identical twins of a tall woman in a fur coat. They stepped to the front of the line, and pen poised, the employee asked their names. Their mother placed a bejeweled, proprietary hand atop one of their heads, and trilled--so loudly that I’m sure people in New Jersey could hear-- “Casper and Ferdinand!”

I keep mentally reliving this moment (my brain has important work to do, I tell you), and each time her response is more embellished. Now I’m seeing her in a tiara, tossing back her head and replying, “Why, these lads?! They are none other than Caspah and Fah-dinand!” By tomorrow, she'll probably have some guys with horns on hand to toot as she says their names. And soon red carpets and waving flags will fill the café and all of us humble café patrons will be barred from the free wi-fi and the tempting baked goods until we pay our homage to the young princes... Casper and Ferdinand.

“Alrighty,” says the employee, pen in hand. “Is that Casper with a “K”?

"No," she sniffed. "A 'C'."

2007-01-04T17:24:00.000-08:00

Carmelized Endive & Swordfish

Dinner's made, eaten, and now I just have to say that this recipe is delicious. The fish is tasty enough, but the carmelized endive is buttery, sweet, and melts in your mouth. I can't believe it's taken me all these years to discover it.

2007-01-04T10:47:00.000-08:00

Kind of Blue

This method of photo processing may look otherwordly, but Steph claims that cyanotypes are actually easy to make. In fact, you could whip one up right now, if only you had a few vials of green ferric ammonium citrate (insert evil scientist laugh) and some other goodies lying around. What you’re looking at is an "excerpted" version of one of Steph's very lovely pieces (Sorry, Ste. One day I'll learn how to fit large pages into my scanner. Baby steps, baby steps).

2007-01-02T10:37:00.000-08:00

Chair Love

Voila a Christmas gift—an old chair reupholstered!

This reading chair originally belonged to my great grandmother and was a wedding gift from my parents. It came to us in tattered blue fabric with bits of foam popping out here and there, and spent the last five years stored in a Michigan attic, lodged between boxes of Christmas ornaments and old cans of paint. A few months ago, hushed negotiations started behind my back: Justin contacted his friend Tim (who runs a textile design company with his wife) about selecting a new fabric. Then Just’s dad took the chair in to a Michigan reupholsterer, who—I found out later—was thrilled to work with Tim's merry fabric, since his usual orders involve variations on beige and tan.

This pattern is called “Feasting at the Berry Bush,” and reminds me of modern Swedish cave markings + the Garden of Eden (i.e. Sweden-Eden). If you go here and click on the new stuff for spring, you'll see a whole lot of products made with the same fabric.

With the new upholstery in place, the chair awaited Christmas morning (Justin’s whole family was in on the secret). After the blanket that covered it was whisked away, and I had exclaimed my happiness forty or fifty times, Just’s dad helped him carefully crate and pack it for the trip to NYC. Then we hauled the box into a Kinkos/Fed Ex store, where we heaved it high up into the air and down onto a comically miniscule scale better suited to weighing tea cups than 90 lb crates. Miraculously, it made it to our door in the Bronx two days later.

Ever since it arrived, I’ve been standing back and gazing at it, testing it out: it looks cute with cats on it and without. It doesn’t match the rug but that’s okay. Can I read Dostoevsky in a chair like this?

I also keep thinking about one of the papers I wrote last semester. It dealt with a couple of 19th century women writers, who, I pointed out, tend to fetishize the domestic space. By fetishize, I meant something akin to Marx's definition, that to fetishize an object is to value it beyond its utility. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, Stowe spends a breathless passage describing a character’s beloved old rocking chair, and how it is so wise that, my oh my, if it could talk, the stories it would tell!

While laying out my little critique of this kind of unhealthy chair-loving, I had no idea I'd soon be the owner of a wonderful old chair of my own. I was aware, however, of how much I (my unacademic side) love household objects, how much I obsess over them. I remember my great grandmother’s sugar bowl into which we dipped fresh rhubarb from her garden (she was the chair’s original owner!). I forget events and conversations but I have a good memory for trinkets and collections: glass frogs, china figurines, the sorts of things that clutter shelves and make dusting pointless. And bigger things, too: a wooden table whose sharp edges grew rounded by multiple coats of paint, a gold quilt I found at a garage sale when I was in college that I finally had to throw out after the cat peed on it one too many times.

These things sometimes seem more real to me than anything else, and I don't think I'm alone in this feeling. Even the weird popularity of chotzche and kitsch a few years ago—all those snow globes, religious candles and similar clutter—seems less a critique of sentimentalism than an embarrassed confirmation of our need to understand ourselves through accumulated stuff.

I say we need a new vocabulary to talk about our relationship to things. If I were ten and announced that I loved my chair, another kid my age would instantly holler, “Well, why don’t you marry it!” See? Back then we were already trying to figure out what it means to be attached to stuff.

Anyway, I am smitten with this chair, and hope that's not the sign of a character flaw or a frail constitution.

It's officially my new most favorite thing. What's yours?

2006-11-29T19:20:00.000-08:00

Ever since I first read him in high school, I haven't been able to generate much passion for grumpy old Stephen Crane.

Case in point:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation." - Crane

How come the universe has to be so pedantic? I prefer mine warm and breezy, with a slight chance of showers.

It occurs to me that you could rewrite the above poem, substituting the word "google" for "the universe."

Or the words "the Bronx."

Or the words, "3:15 pm bus crowded with people on their cell phones and yelling, hormonal teenagers recently released from captivity."

Yep, I think that pretty much fits.

2006-11-08T21:16:00.000-08:00

Libary Thrills

In the farthest reaches of the New York Public Library is a little room called the "Special Collections Division." I went there today, all the while thinking of it as the “Special Victims Unit.” It’s where the exciting books live, sheltered and climate controlled, under the care of serious, winged librarians whose footfall echoes not.

I needed a book there, and I had to go through yards of paperwork to get it. As I was signing forms, I asked one of the librarians why this particular book (essays by a 19th century New York City journalist) was held under lock and key. He explained that it was part of a private collection of one Mr. George Arants, a successful tobacco executive, who spent most of his adult life amassing books, magazines and advertisements dealing with tobacco. The man apparently loved smoking.

The journalist I was researching (one Fanny Fern) was not, to my knowledge, interested in tobacco, so I wondered what I’d expect to find in this book of hers. Finally, the paperwork was finished, and after much fuss (a librarian carried the volume out on a foam tray!) I opened it and flipped around until, sure enough, I found a short essay titled "Tobacco."

The opening was, well, not subtle: “I despise tobacco!”

I read on: “Men, I deny you the right to smell bad in my presence! I deny you the right to poison our parlors with noxious smoke! I categorically deny it!”

What was this rant doing in the collection of a tobacco mogul? Was he worried that Fanny Fern’s little column would hurt business? Was he putting one of the last remaining copies of the book behind lock and key so that future generations might avoid learning about what a nasty habit smoking is?

A very minor historical mystery, and one probably with a very simple explanation. But guessing's more fun.

2006-10-31T14:13:00.000-08:00

Quiz Nachos

In what was perhaps the most loserly year of my life, seventh grade, I decided to keep a journal, but not an ordinary one full of thoughts and feelings and poems and stories. I already had one of those. I needed a special journal that would be entirely objective-- a bare-bones record of the days’ events, sans commentary. This idea struck me after my dad gave me an extra pocket appointment planner from his work. Never having seen such a creation, I was enamored of its stern, daily columns with spaces for every hour of the day-- perfect for a woman with nary an appointment but a real desire to write stuff down. Every so often I run across one of those old planners as I’m organizing and expect to find useful insights into my 12-year-old mind. I found one recently and opened it at random to November 12, 1989. I'm still puzzling over that day's entry, a cryptic account that I'll reproduce here in full, just as it appears:

Quiz nachos!!!

Around that time, I also received as a gift a real diary with a bluish soft-filter photo of a ballerina and a tiny combination lock requiring its owner (me!) to spin through the letters of the alphabet and spell out a secret code. A page of directions ordered me to memorize the secret word and dispose of this instruction sheet immediately. The secret word was “Mum.” That was easy to remember. Mum, after all, was what I needed to keep, as well as being the main reason for the lock.

Over the years I’ve had an assortment of journals. But, more and more, I’m curious about how other people look at the process of writing stuff down--not only what they record in their journals, but when, how and where they choose to write.

Grab Bag 'O Facts:
1. A woman I know writes in her journal the instant she wakes up, so that her entries get tangled up with her dreams.
2. Pepys wrote everyday solid for ten years.
3. Some extremely creative men I know don’t keep journals (I live with one).
4. Some people claim they can’t think when writing on lined paper.
5. Yesterday in class I sat next to a very quiet girl who took notes on our Faulkner lecture in beautiful shorthand.
6. Pepys wrote shorthand in his diaries.
7. Virginia Woolf, inexplicably, referred to herself in the third person as “Miss Jan” in her childhood notebooks.

One last fact: When Theodore Roethke died he left behind 300 notebooks. That’s 300 journals stuffed with scribbled ideas, entries, poetry fragments and aphorisms drawn from his work as a poet and a teacher. How much footage is that in shelf space? Fortunately, all that writing has been edited down into one slim, spectacular volume of poetry and notes entitled Straw for the Fire.

Here are some quotes to tide you over until you can get a copy:

I love how a skeleton looks.

Oh poor words, bear with me.

I stay away from death by turning toward her face.

I am beside myself, sitting by you.

Therefore, I shall get on with the daily business of revelation.

I broke my tongue on God.

Live in perpetual great astonishment.

God, alone, is poor.

We cry against critics: because it’s so important they be better.

May my silences become more accurate.

The splendid irrationality of a peacock’s tail.

Teaching: one of the few professions that permit love.

I trust all joy.

Every sentence a cast into the dark.

Reject nothing, but re-order all.

God give me, not grace, but energy enough to move around!

2006-10-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

Float like a Butterfly

My classmate’s husband works at the Museum of Natural History, and she was generous enough to ask him to rustle up some free passes to the current butterfly exhibit for Just and me. Maybe because it was such a picture-perfect fall day, or because I had just come from annotating a 12-page John Ashbery poem, but the butterflies (sealed in display cases and fluttering in their humid glass room) seemed like the most deliriously pretty things on Earth. Two of them, brown with circular markings, made me want to drop everything and take up a career in textile design.

Ain't they purdy? Sorry, by the way, about the infrequent posts lately. I'm trying to make up in photos what I don't have time to produce in words. I’m also working really hard at the moment to impose some kind of structure on my week: school time (reading, tutoring, classes, commuting, and attending the occasional lecture or conference) and non-school time (everything else). So far, it’s working—well, sort of. I’ve gotten into a fairly comfortable 6:30 a.m. tea-and-books routine, and I try to make some time for dinner (Trader Joe's frozen tomales and shrimp must have been invented by an enterprising grad student) and the occasional non-school book; right now I'm reading Cold Comfort Farm, an enormously hilarious novel that you should buy this instant if you don't already own it. In terms of sheer funniness it ranks up there with A Confederacy of Dunces.

2006-09-30T08:29:00.000-07:00

Sleepy Hollow

Last weekend we rented a car and drove upstate, where we happened upon the village of Sleepy Hollow and its churchyard cemetery. A sign out front promised a Halloween reading of the "Legend," and inside the cemetery, we found Washington Irving's tombstone, where I risked my clean criminal record leaping over a low, locked gate to snap a picture. Oh, and just so you know, I tried to persuade the headless horseman to pose, but he thinks he's unphotogenic.

On a way more serious note, I was really moved by the cemetery. Some of the 18th and 19th century graves are passionate and terrible (in the old King James sense of the word) in a way that stoic, contemporary stones just can't touch.

2006-09-23T06:01:00.000-07:00

Retail Speak

Doctors and lawyers have their own professional jargons, and it seems to me that retail store employees do as well. When they want you to step forward to the register, they rarely just say “next!” Instead they suck in a lung-full of air and call out, “Will the subsequent guest please make their way directly forward to register six under the green sign on the far right, please!” The sheer number of syllables is supposed to sound polite and professional, but instead it just feels scary. You’re never sure if you’re the one being addressed. “Am I subsequent?” you wonder. And when you finally make it to the register, the cashier barks out cryptic questions and commands: “Who was helping you today?” “Don’t you know that if you buy five pairs of socks, you get the sixth free?” “Credit or debit?” “Press the green button!”

All of this is bad enough, but yesterday I was innocently buying catfood and had a brief exchange with my young, female Petco cashier that, I think, takes the prize for weirdness. I can’t make any sense of it, but maybe you can.

Cashier: Will the following guest please step down!
Jane [placing cans of catfood on the counter]: Hello.
Cashier [smiling]: Hi, how are you today?
Jane: Fine, thanks.
Cashier: Your total comes to $9.89. Do you have a Petco card?
Jane: Well, not yet...
Cashier: Okay, let me just give you this application form. You can fill it out and ret—
Jane: Well, I actually have that form at home. I just haven’t filled it out yet. I’ll bring it in next time.
Cashier: [smiling and shaking her head] I’m gonna strangle you! You better bring it next time!
Jane: [gathering bags hurriedly] Ha, ha! Right!

-----
Help! Is this something people actually say to each other? Am I too old and uncool to get it?

2006-09-19T04:32:00.000-07:00

Someday My Prince (and other fables)

Laura Anne is an eleven-year-old girl from the seaside English town of Siddick who falls in love again and again. But the boys she goes for are almost incidental to this story. After all, they’re just dumb boys, and most several inches shorter than her. It’s not them she cares about. (Well, okay, a little.) But mostly she’s in love with being in love. That’s the premise for Someday My Prince will Come, a short indie documentary directed by Marc Isaacs and narrated in rhyming couplets by Laura Anne, whom the film follows over for a two-year period. I saw it recently at IFC and loved how funny and sad it is, how it draws you in without being the least bit cutesy or knowing. I hope it’s released on DVD so you can see for yourself what a lovely job the director has done.

Seeing it got me thinking about how much I appreciate stories about children-- and why I do. Two of my favorite movies fit this profile: Truffaut’s Small Change and Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive. I don’t think it’s purely because I’m a sentimental sap. I hate most media portrayals of kids, their use as parrots or props on television, or dolled up on film like fat robots programmed to giggle. Thank God she hasn’t made her way to the screen, but I refer you to the “work” of Anne Geddes, or to those packs of Hollywood cutie pies with just the right hair and lisp. I’m not even really wild about real children (except when they’re related to me—then I’m fanatic).

But from an artistic point of view, stories about children—good stories—provide us with the pleasure of dramatic irony. (Remember back to English class? That’s when we know how the story will end up, but the characters don’t.) For the child, the world at hand is monumental; it’s all she knows. But we’ve been through all that and survived. We know the ending, and it’s our confidence that in all probability she'll also make it through childhood (with its many slings and arrows) that lets us watch with pity and even a kind of protective love. It’s that gap—between her short view and our long one— that gives these stories their enjoyment. We want to save her, not just from hurt, but also from the hopeful melancholy of her innocence, and carry her swiftly to our safe, adult vantage point, though, of course, what we’ve got is no safer. No one, least of all some junior-high prince, flew down and airlifted us out of childhood. So the fictional child has to live through it, too: loved (if she’s lucky) but essentially alone. That’s what the good storyteller does—tells the world as it happens, without trying to fix it. And this is where Peter Pan’s creator J.M. Barrie got it wrong. He wanted to spare his characters from having to grow up, not knowing that for most of us, adulthood is precisely the vantage point we need to make sense of the most wonderful parts of childhood.

Next time I want to talk about a few authors who handle the themes of children and childhood well. So be thinking of books (and movies)! I’m most interested here in how childhood is communicated to adult audiences, though I'd love to hear about any children’s book or movie you love.

2006-09-05T16:18:00.000-07:00

Crackers!

One of my students recently returned from her brother's wedding in Kyoto and brought me a box of Japanese sembei (a.k.a rice crackers). These particular sembei are called "The Seven Gods of Good Fortune," a name that works out to be a tad ungainly in English, but who cares! Each of the teeny, half-dollar size crackers is encased in its own special package, which gives them an unexpected distinction (kind of like carrying each of your pennies in its own separate coin purse). It also drastically slows down the feeding process for those of us used to opening boxes of loose crackers and scooping them to our mouths steamboat paddle-style.

And, surprise! This being a Japanese snackfood, the packaging also allow for an explosion of cute characters. Each package depicts one of the seven happy gods--both front view and rear view (if you flip over the cracker).

Corresponding to the little characters are seven flavors: butter, cheese, shrimp, seaweed, shiso, curry, and hot pepper. I had fun tasting and guessing. Some, like the butter and curry, were obvious from the first whiff. A few others, like the shiso and shrimp, were less recognizable to my Western palate, dulled by years of imbibing Lousiana Hot Sauce.

If ever the NYPD needs a butter-sniffing cat, Bunn will be their man. As I type this, he is nosing around at the open cracker box in search of the fragrant butter cracker, but also trying to see if he can squeeze the entire box over his head. That's his idea of heaven: a box of food blinding his vision while he stumbles around bumping into things. Sounds about right.

Hard at work with another investigation

2006-08-31T18:13:00.000-07:00

Parenting 101

Overheard tonight:

A young mother climbs on the bus, leading her toddler son by the hand. The little boy has a band-aid on his cheek.

Mother: Look at your face! It look like somebody socked the shit out of you!
Boy: It look like somebody sopped the shit out of me!
Mother: [laughs] No, baby. Not sopped—socked.
Boy: It look like somebody socked the shit out of me!
Mother: Watch your mouth.

2006-08-29T20:05:00.000-07:00

From bison to String Theory and beyond

Warning: lost post ahead!

So I went to Fordham yesterday for a long day of orientations and introductions and meetings and preparation for the next few years of doctoral work, and I don’t know what else to say at the moment beyond the fact that I am just downright delighted with all I saw and heard. Of course I didn’t feel delighted while I was there. Frenzied with nervous energy is a more apt description. My resolve to be honest and direct about my feelings about grad school had amounted to me walking around the house all weekend muttering the phrase, “I feel nervous” at regular intervals. To rally my spirits on orientation day, I wore my red platform sandals (see earlier post). I had hoped to shock at least one tweed-wearing person, but not a soul was in tweed, corduroy or even a patched-elbowed blazer, though a few girls wore the requisite lit department whimsical earrings and poetess blouses. A few of the older kids (I mean, the more advanced PhD students) even sported tattoos and bleached blond hair. (Speaking of tattoos, did anyone read David Brooks's silly, irrelevant piece about tattoos in the Times this weekend? I guess there really isn’t anything else going on in the way of global news. Dumb globe.)

Focus, Jane.

The last time I visited Fordham had been at the height of the summer, when the leafy campus was a good ten degrees cooler than the surrounding area. Yesterday it was as foggy, cool and gray as the setting for a Bronte novel. At 8 am, I arrived at the appointed building and found the registration table, where I was given a large Fordham tote bag and a pile of handbooks. I helped myself to some Continental breakfast and proceeded to stand around awkwardly, pretending it was perfectly natural to be spearing grapes from a tiny plastic plate while wearing an oversized red tote bag. Luckily, I soon noticed a woman I sort of know from Hunter, and we hung together happily for the rest of the orientation, talking about Faulkner and school and life and how she secretly doesn’t care much for Jane Austen (“Make up your mind already, Elizabeth!”). She’s entering the program this year also and already knows her dissertation topic: Faulkner through the lens of quantum physics and string theory.

Quelle coincidence! That’s my topic, too!

Err, yeah.

After breakfast, the university president, Fr. McShane, spoke about the school’s history and threw in some juicy factoids about the campus and the surrounding neighborhood, which includes the real Little Italy and the Bronx Zoo. I’ll tell you one very cool piece of trivia, so grab a pen and give it a test run at your next cocktail party: In 1899 after the U.S. had wiped out most of the 50 million bison on the Great Plains, a crew from the Bronx Zoo put together a small herd at the zoo, which was later released into the wild to repopulate the species. Even today, many of the bison you see in western states are descendents of those original Bronx bison!

Fr. McShane then spoke eloquently about the meaning of a Jesuit education, which might be summed up as 1) academic rigor, 2) ethics in and outside the classroom, and 3) respect for the whole person. Not having started classes, I can’t yet attest to the rigor or the ethics, but I am thrilled with how the last factor has played out already. There have been courtesy and sympathy in even in the smallest interactions—from the many faculty members who have offered to answer any question I might have and actually mean it (I’ve already put them to the test) to one of the professors who spoke affectionately of his family and how much he enjoys spending his summers with them. I file away these little moments of humanity, especially after the bureaucracy of CUNY, where individuality amounted to a social security number and a pile of passwords. “Whole person?” I was just another whole person taking up space in an already- crowded elevator or a long line at the registrar’s office (and usually the wrong line, knowing Hunter's helpful, sensitive signage).

The last meeting of the day was the most useful, when the seven or eight of us new PhDs met with the graduate director and the director of job placement, who explained that we should view our graduate work as career preparation, pure and simple. I appreciated this. By this point, we all know books are awesome and reading them is great! We don’t need to sigh over the fate of Tess to remember why we’re here. What I did need to hear— and what I heard to my satisfaction—is that the program will do everything it can to urge (read: boot) me swiftly through the process of courses, comps, and dissertation and, most importantly, help me land a job at the end. Recently, they’ve had a 100 percent job placement rate! Along the way are conferences and research grants, faculty-student reading groups, and the reassuring fact that I’ll be getting a paycheck every two weeks.

So, I’m glad and nervous. The little voice demanding that I justify my decision to go to graduate school has been quieter than usual. He must have heard that I'm now in full possession of a tote-- and I’m prepared to use it.

2006-08-22T14:38:00.000-07:00

Revenge of the day-old bread

When I get the urge to make this summery salad, heaven help me if there’s no old bread handy. I'll hang around the kitchen, staring down at the poor fresh loaf until that precise moment when it is officially on its last legs and I can fall on it and begin tearing it limb from limb--or at least into casual one-inch cubes.

Panzanella is its mellifluous name (and a great name for a cartoon princess, don't you think?), though I prefer the more modest sonics of “Bread Salad.” We had it the other night with HA and V at Diner, a place in Brooklyn that I’d just like to step out and call my favorite restaurant in the city. Ha! Whenever I catch myself talking about my favorite things, I feel like my 10-year-old self again, compiling lists of favorite colors, practicing my signature, and resolving once and for all The Question of Which New Kid on the Block is, in Fact, The Cutest. A quick look at my profile will reveal that I haven’t exactly gotten over this tendency.

But, back to the salad. Yesterday morning I realized that there was half a crusty loaf of bread on the counter, so after teaching, I hauled myself down to the Union Square green market and shelled out way too much money on heirloom tomatoes—fine, if you must know, a shocking $10. Lined up like fat toddlers waiting to be adopted, they were impossible to resist, and I had fun selecting tomato after tomato--the more mishapen and odd the better.

Back home, it took only a few minutes to throw together the salad. We ate it with white wine and miniature farm-fresh strawberries, the latter also purchased in Union Square but at another stand operated by a grim teenage farmer, who accepted my $3.00 skeptically, as if he wasn’t sure he trusted me with his produce. The strawberries look like the kind you see embroidered prettily with leaves and flowers on kitchen curtains, or the ones I remember fondly from this childhood book. Suffice it to say, a single teeny one had more flavor than a bucket of the ordinary kind. Without thinking, I happily exclaimed to Justin, "These strawberries are so small, they're practically the size of berries!" He turned away very slowly, perhaps wistfully thinking what it might be like to be married to a smart person.

Scroll down here for a basic recipe for Bread Salad, which you can adapt as you like. We threw in fresh mozzarella and extra sea salt. Other recipes call for capers, olives or bacon, but that sounded too complex; we wanted to keep it bright--like one of those long, mid-summer evenings.

Buon appetito!

2006-08-15T13:02:00.000-07:00

In which Jane giddily introduces you to a new blog

Here, friends, is a clever music/recording blog that you should read regularly, even if (and perhaps especially if) you can't tell a ten-channel Yamaha or an Ampex MM1200 from a hole in your head. Studies have shown that ingesting such arcane commentary can build brain cells, forge new neural pathways, and add decades to your life (the equivalent of drinking a quart of wheatgrass and doing a hundred pushups daily).

So read it. Besides, it includes awesome photos of cats!

Aren't you dying now to know who the author is? How'd you like a little hint?

Drumroll, please...

Half the alphabet, no letters repeated, baby!!

You know it! What's up now?

2006-08-13T05:11:00.000-07:00

Cupcake or Muffin in Disguise? Whatever it is, it's good.

Cupcake Cafe
522 9th Ave

Jane: So you come here a lot, right, because you work in the neighborhood?
Justin: Well, you know this isn't the original Cupcake Cafe. The original one used to be down the street from my work, and this new one's two blocks up, so I don't come here as much.
Jane: Would you say that the cupcakes have changed?
Justin: No.
Jane: How would you describe the cupcakes here, because, to me this is no ordinary cupcake.
Justin: Well, it's not like one of those Magnolia types, topped with sugary frosting.
Jane: Light, spongy...
Justin: Yeah, it's definitely not the kind of cake that falls apart when you take a bite.
Jane: Well, let's talk about the cake first and then the frosting. To be honest, I think the cake, while delicious, is actually more like a muffin.
Justin: I disagree.
Jane: Don't you think it has the density of a muffin?
Justin: Think of a regular muffin. Muffins have a certain set of ingredients...
Jane: Well, it's not a very sweet cupcake, which I think is a point in its favor.
Justin: Right. It doesn't have to be sweet to be a cupcake.
Jane: But don't you think of cupcakes as sweeter and lighter than muffins? Do you want to redefine what a cupcake is?
Justin: No, I don't. I think this definitely qualifies as cake.
Jane: So, it's more about expanding the definition.
Justin:No, listen. This is a walnut cupcake, and so naturally it's a little heartier. You should try the chocolate and yellow cupcakes before making a final judgment.
Jane: No problem. Well, visually anyway, there's no doubt this beautiful thing is a cupcake. Let's talk about the frosting. This frosting is so buttery-- I wonder how much butter they use.
Justin: I'd say it's 90 percent butter.
Jane: Remarkably buttery...
Justin: A lot of people actually complain about that.
Jane: Really? Well, it is a little surprising just how buttery it is.
Justin: Yeah, the cupcakes are all refridgerated right up 'til they're sold, so the flower decorations don't melt.
Jane: So, would you say this is your perfect cupcake?
Justin: I don't know. Maybe the perfect cupcake should always remain elusive.
Jane: Either that, or it's any one that happens to be sitting in front of you.

Stay posted. In our next installment, Justin and Jane tackle the desserts at another NYC bakery.

2006-08-12T05:44:00.000-07:00

The People's Art

Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid polled Americans to find out exactly what we're looking for in a painting, and, apparently what we want is a dishwasher size landscape featuring a famous historical figure. Check out the resulting paintings from the United States and several other countries.

Komar and Melamid's snarky project is already ten years old, but I just discovered it this morning as a quick aside in Amy Hempel's novella Tumble Home. A poet friend recommended Hempel to me, saying, "Every one of her sentences makes me fall on the floor and weep." When I had finished laughing haughtily over what a great workout that must be, I tore out onto the street and made a flying leap for Barnes and Noble.

2006-08-11T16:41:00.000-07:00

Dear Nopales,

How can something as vicious as you be so delicious?

2006-08-11T05:42:00.000-07:00

Too Wussy to go to Afghanistan?

Leave it to Rory Stewart. A 20-something Scotsman, Stewart does what I would certainly do if I had several weeks of vacation to kill: he crosses Afghanistan on foot in the dead of winter. And then he writes an excellent book about it.

Less a historian than a brave, erudite guy with an abiding love for remote places, Stewart dodges land mines, trudges through shoulder-deep snow, and shakes off occasional hostile villagers and packs of wild dogs as he makes his way across the war-torn country in January 2002, just months after 9-11. The book is structured around his daylong hikes and his nights with the Afghan villagers who give him lodging. (Since I'm a sucker for books with pictures, I love that he includes frequent perceptive line drawings of the people he meets.)

The most exciting passages describe Stewart's encounters with hostile villagers, when his survival rests on his courage and verbal dexterity (yep, he speaks the language). There's a riveting scene toward the end of the book when armed Taliban fighters stop him with questions, and he manages to concoct a story convincing enough to save his life.

Last weekend Justin and I went to Jersey to visit friends and spent a few hours splashing around at the beach before settling in to discuss Stewart's book. (It was a real live book club!) We ate fish tacos and sipped peach Sangria, and the conversation was just as good. Jer pointed out that the author's trip falls into the tradition of the privileged British traveler setting out to see the world. Updated for modern times, that archetypical traveler is still a stoic observer with a keen eye, but he no longer plays up the exoticism of alien landscapes for the benefit of those on the homefront. Stewart's reserve translates into a near ban on emotions, excess self-reflection and analysis. All the focus is on what he sees and hears. If this sort of emotional reticence seems off-putting, well, imagine the alternative: having to read about his hurt feelings whenever someone calls him an infidel or serves him stale bread for supper. There are definitely times when I craved more details about his inner life, but, in the end, I have more respect for a book that leaves me a bit hungry.

Oh! And if you're made of the same sentimental mush as me, you should know that a big, loyal dog figures prominently in the story.

Stewart interviewed on Fresh Air.

2006-08-06T06:20:00.000-07:00

Reading Far Away

The day before we took off for our recent trip to Mexico, a book of poems came in the mail. It was one of those online used book purchases from Amazon that take so long to arrive that when they do show up, you’ve long since forgotten when you ordered them. I’ve had other books take so many weeks that as I crack them open I wonder what could have possibly motivated me to buy them in the first place. This has happened more times than I ought to admit: I look down at the book, and the book stares back haughtily-- “Hey, I don’t know why I’m here either. You’re the one who thought One Hundred Suppers with Lentils would be a good idea. So, here I am. What are you going to do about it?”

I always shelve these books politely. It never occurs to me to send them back.

I didn’t exactly have that reaction to this particular book, The Afterlife of Objects by Dan Chiasson. Ever since I stumbled across one of Chiasson’s poems in a magazine, I’ve wanted to get my hands on the book. The title alone, containing two of my favorite words, “afterlife” and “objects,” would have been enough to sell me. The day we left for Mexico, I threw it in my bag along with a battered copy of The House of Seven Gables. I didn’t have any reason for taking these two particular books except that they interested me at the moment (I wonder if the two of them bothered to get acquainted as they lay squashed together, undignified, in the overhead compartment.) But I also really love these accidental combinations—how books and circumstances can fall together like an unplanned meal. The other night there was nothing else in the house to eat, so we had a supper of Baba Ganoush, roasted red peppers with thyme, and a side of crispy fried tofu with peanuts. Odd, mismatched and too snacky to really count as a meal, but sometimes it works, and it often works well with books. (One notable exception was my idea to pick up Charlie and the Chocolate Factory during a month when I’d decided to give up sugar. I suffered through the book like a martyr but probably gained five pounds anyway just from all the passages about chocolate rivers and candy flowers, etc. )

I wrapped up The House of Seven Gables after we arrived in Oaxaca, and it was—not to gush or anything—really thrilling to read Hawthorne’s long, baroque passages about generational curses and then step into the cramped, pungent aisles of the covered markets. The intricate knots of his characters’ minds, so alien to one another, seemed to hang over my attempts to speak to strangers, and the story’s view of home as a prison you just can’t stand to leave contrasted with a place that eventually seemed familiar and stomach-ache inducing, while home grew more and more elusive, accessible only on the far side of a plane ticket.

By the time I opened Chiasson’s book, we were a few days into our trip, and its cool title had taken on a new significance. The airline had lost our single suitcase somewhere between Houston and Oaxaca, and sitting in our hotel without any of our precious stuff and only a slim volume of poems called The Afterlife of Objects for company, we could appreciate the irony.

Chiasson’s book is fixed on losses, especially ones from long ago. He seems to say that some of the most beautiful objects and moments seem born with their future loss already inscribed in them, like a genetic code. He reaches into the past for objects (kind of like reverse souvenirs), but he avoids any whiff of sentimentality by forfeiting the usual pleasure of nostalgia—that backward-facing soliloquy that allows you to dabble in your old, innocent self, but really, wink, wink, only reveals how much time has passed, how you can never go home again, how you’re a grownup now and you’ve put away childish things but, damn, weren’t things pretty and sparkly back then, and that’s what really matters in the end: the sparkliness of it all.

Thankfully, Chiasson never resorts to this line of thought (which, come to think of it, sort of sums up a lot of Romantic poetry). Instead, he fall into the past in all kinds of odd, jarring and bruise-inducing ways, like a kid who’s had it with the limits of gravity and decides to throw himself backward into a leaf pile, suspecting that it might blow away before he reaches the ground, but not really caring.

Look at how his mind works here:

Spade

I dreamed I was the spade
my mother used

to dig her marigolds in spring,
her bloom and worry.

her digging, throwing, patting to bring
rows to life, each
bloom familiar

to worry, every row perfect, bloom,
rich dirt between, planned
absence and full, superfluous bloom—

I made the trench her hand proposed;

I was the pressure in her palm;

her ache from planting
was
my presence in her life.

Here’s one more. I read this poem several times on the trip and again this morning, and each time it I love it more, and it speaks more fully to the trouble of trying to access the past. It’s a given, I guess, that memories are not fixed places in time that we can visit at will, like points on the map. But the harder thing Chiasson is saying here is that even in the act of speaking or remembering—i.e. writing—the past can’t be retrieved, corralled, explained. At first this seems a blow, a reason for despair, but for me it’s actually unexpectedly reassuring—to think that the past is as itinerant as we are, and as stubbornly resistant to being pinned down.

Poem

When I picture 1940 everyone poses
for me, as though I had the one

camera in the world. I cannot distract them
from their studied, ghoulish jolliness.

My grandmother is posing, yelling
Smile and my grandfather is horsing around

with a tire, making his biceps big. I
can’t know the past, because the past

keeps arranging itself before my lens. People call
out Here and Over here, striking

their prewar, rural, easygoing stances.
That night, when I try again, everyone

is indoors, in parlors, reading quietly.
A woman rocking in and out of lamplight

studies me. The neighbor’s
middle child died this afternoon.

2006-08-04T08:54:00.000-07:00

100 Degrees of Perspiration

WNYC has set up a Flickr photo pool where New Yorkers can post images of the last three days of heat. Here's the slide show. A few of the photos show long lines of coffee lovers waiting for the complimentary iced coffees that Starbucks was handing out yesterday. I left school with a few students to check out the scene at our local S-bucks, but the line was snaking around the block, so we took one look and went back inside. An iced coffee is nice, and a free iced coffee is extra nice, but you only really need one when you've intentionally endured an hour of punishing sunlight and the possibility of heat stroke, waiting for it.

I guess long lines of sweaty people suit Starbucks, since they like to see their customers (myself usually included) falling all over the counter in anticipation; and in the end, it works for the customers, since everybody knows that cold drinks just taste better when you're almost dead. And I can totally understand. Every winter I deliberately try to get frostbite in a few of my toes; it just makes my hot cocoa taste that much better.

2006-07-29T15:12:00.000-07:00

Dog Days

The temperature’s hovering around 95 degrees, and through the back window, the neighbor kids are splashing in an absurdly large plastic pool. One of them hoists a bucket of water over the head of a smaller girl, freezes for a second and lets loose. Squealing and laughter. In a neighboring yard, a middle-aged man sweeps his patio and wipes his forehead, squinting in the sun. Inside, the cats are lazing on the wood kitchen floor like long, open parentheses. It’s almost too hot to write. In the meantime, I’m sipping a glass of this:

Wine Cooler for Grownups
[from "The Splendid Table"]

* Juice of 2 fresh limes
* 1/3 cup sugar
* 1 bottle of light-bodies, fruity red wine, chilled
* Ice
* Lime wedges for garnish

In a large pitcher combine the limejuice and sugar; stir until sugar dissolves. Add the wine and stir. Pour wine mixture over ice in chilled glasses. Garnish with a wedge of lime.

2006-07-24T20:22:00.000-07:00

Pistachio butter-cream cookies and an anniversary

These little inventions are a simple sugar cookie topped with pistachio butter-cream frosting and a pinch of crushed pistachios. I nabbed the frosting (only the frosting) from Nigella’s macaron recipe, and used a basic sugar cookie for the base. The VIPs of this cookie are really the pistachios and salt. Without a food processor, I used my coffee grinder to pulverize some pistachios for smooth, creamy frosting. Finally, crushing a few more with a rolling pin and tossing them onto the finished product supplied crunchiness and, according to Justin, “drew out the pistachio-iness of the frosting.”

After some experimentation, I discovered that sprinkling sea salt over the plain cookie resulted in a pleasant salty-sweet taste once I'd slapped on the frosting. I know next to nothing about how ingredients interact during the baking process, and I wondered how the addition of salt at various stages of baking might impact the final product. I played with salting the cookies immediately before or after they went into the oven, though I didn’t bother adding salt to the pre-rolled dough because I wanted to retain that crunchy sea salt texture. Salting beforehand resulted in a slightly warped cookie when compared with the consistently smooth, white results of salting afterward. I didn’t really detect much of a taste difference, and the warped effect may have been caused by some other factor. Sadly, I can’t offer anything really conclusive about the addition of salt to cookies, but would very much love to know more, if anyone happens to have, say, minored in that in college.

Unsurprisingly, this little adventure ended with a massive sugar headache (I don’t recommend baking desserts before breakfast). While I poured myself a fistful of asprin, Justin offered his sympathy and took over as taste-tester. He bit into a cookie, squinted, and chewed skeptically for way too long before pronouncing the thing tasty. It’s good to live with a tough critic, even though at least half the time his judgments make me stomp my feet and pronounce him wrong, wrong, wrong-- at which point he smiles knowingly. I’ve worn a hole in the kitchen floor with all my stomping. As of last Friday, we’ve been married for five years. Laissez les bon temps rouler.

2006-07-21T14:25:00.000-07:00

How Body Piercing Saved My Life

I'm only six pages in and already really liking this book. It's always so flattering when someone takes your youthful self as seriously as you did.

2006-07-19T18:25:00.000-07:00

On shoes and being young

Bringing home a pair of fire engine red sandals the other day from Steve Madden reminded me another shoe shopping trip about a month ago. I was heading out of town on short notice and was in need of a pair of basic walking shoes. I checked a handful of stores without any luck before wandering, with some hesitation, into a chain store known for its comfortable and “therapeutic” women’s shoes. As I entered the store, a nice elderly man with a store nametag held open the door for me. I headed for the displays and had been browsing for a minute when I glanced up and noticed that everyone else in the store—employees and shoppers, every last one of them except me, were senior citizens. I shrugged and went back to shopping but soon started feeling unnerved by the throng of grandmothers quietly browsing around me. Had I missed the sign on the door about a minimum age limit? Now the shoes in front of me appeared in a new light. Heels and sandals that had before looked pleasantly sturdy suddenly seemed aggressively orthopedic. I half expected to see Janet Reno, that tyrant of sartorial practicality, elbowing her way toward the counter and slamming down her AARP card and a pair of oatmeal pumps.

Was I overreacting? Making drama out of something mundane? Well, duh. There are, after all, worse things than discovering one shares the same retail impulses as people over 65. But standing there glancing from the shoes to the customers and back again, I also felt something more personal. I have always had the sense that, though my birth certificate swears I’m only 29, I am at heart going on 80. I’ve always had an affinity for old ladies. I like their circular, patchwork stories, their dreamy complaints and their unexpected ease in their own skin. I like their nostalgia, how they insist on dreaming in reverse when the rest of the world is busy lunging into the future. I think I’m fascinated most by how they risk being lost in that past—something I can deeply relate to, though I can’t say precisely how. In college, my favorite sweater was a grubby white cardigan that resembled nothing so much as a doily crocheted by an angry blind woman and pinched from the back of a Victorian armchair by a dirty-fingered street urchin.

A student once told me that I have “an old soul” and hastened to add that the remark is a compliment. I take it as such. I'm glad my soul is old, but do my shoes have to be?

So there I was in the store, contemplating all this. Meanwhile, shoppers were making their selections, and helpful employees with bifocals and glasses cords were entering and exiting the back room with stacks of shoeboxes. Then the little bell jingled to signal that more customers were entering. The nice greeter straightened up a bit and held open the door for two new arrivals: a pair of wrinkled nuns in their habits, headed straight for the walking shoes.

2006-07-16T16:30:00.000-07:00

I named this blog a few months ago, long before it was a full-fledged blog—back when it was just a little blog-twinkle in my eye—because it occurred to me that of all the earthly things I love, two of my most favorite can be reduced to the categories of salt and paper. Salt elevates eating from a ho-hum duty to pure delight (think of a plate of fresh-picked tomatoes, sliced and scattered with salt), and paper is for scribbling and scrumpling, not to mention folding, stitching and binding into books, which in turn can be cracked opened and enjoyed with a piece of dark chocolate or a bowl of salty peanuts. See how it comes full circle?

Salt and paper inevitably point to bigger things—a bite to eat with people you love, an empty page for filling, a good read. In that light, food and books will pop up a lot here. I'll sometimes post about what and where I eat, but only if it’s worth sharing. If it’s another supper of black beans and fried eggs, I promise to spare you. This summer I also want to try to document my attempts to make a book. With fear and trembling I recently took a book binding class at the Center for Book Arts, where I studied book anatomy (case-spine, foredge, etc.) and was shepherded through the meticulous process of creating three books of my own (see yonder photo). Now, with even more trembling, I’m going to attempt to duplicate the results at home, though I don’t know how I’ll manage without the Center's heavy book presses and savvy instructor. (Oh, Laurel, where are you when I need you most?). The plan is to make just a simple book to begin. Okay, an extremely simple book. Fine, a piece of notebook paper folded in half with my name written on the front in bubble letters. Care to buy?

2006-07-12T14:29:00.000-07:00

Tokyo Dylan

I wish every workday were like this.

Typically, my student Hiroyuki meets me on Wednesdays to practice his pronunciation and conversation, but today he surprised me by bringing a guitar to our meeting. In the little cramped classroom he opened the case, tightened the strings, and began to play and sing. I already knew he was a Dylan fan, since we’d spent some time parsing Bob's lyrics (he also loves John Lennon and was a Lennon impersonator back in his high school Beatle Mania club in Tokyo), so I wasn’t surprised when he kicked things off with “Positively Fourth Street” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” While he paused to catch his breath, I hummed a few bars, trying to recall the name of my favorite Dylan number. He guessed right and launched into an awesome, passionate rendition of “Don’t Think Twice, it’s All Right.” Imagine Dylan himself—the precise nasal twang, the tortuous vowels, the sheer persistence of it—but with a Japanese accent. After several more songs, I realized I hadn’t been keeping track of his pronunciation errors or doing anything else particularly teacherly. I’d been too busy singing along like a contented, old drunk.