Wherein I ponder (*shudder*) "meal planning"


One of the reasons I like to travel, aside from all the relaxing and adventuring, is the chance to reevaluate my life at home. I find that the perfect formula for quality self-reflection is geographical distance + routine change + not having to clean my house.

On our recent family trip to Traverse City, while I wasn't busy chasing Bea or trying to convince her that stagnant, bug-infested pool water is not awesome for drinking, I did some thinking about life-stuff I want to change. First, I realized I need to get out of the house more to work on my dissertation. I also decided I need some new challenges on my horizon that don't involve academia or baby. As soon as we got home, I signed up for a 10k and a class. (In my next post, maybe I'll talk about my experience so far training for my first run. As for the class--well, it has some tangential ties to my research, but it's mostly just for me; the idea of studying a new language sets my nerd heart aflutter.)

I also thought about how I need to do more scheduled activities with Bea. Following her around the house while she opens cupboards and sticks her foot in the cat's dish fills me with desperation and ennui; that really had to change. Since returning from the trip, I've taken out my art supplies and we've made some pictures together. It's wonderful. It's something we can do together that we both genuinely enjoy. Granted, she always wants to draw with three pencils jammed in each hand, which is annoying, but really, the child's 15 months old, so I can't get too worked up about it.

                                   Bea scribbles, and I fill in the occasional triangle until she wrenches the pencil out of my hand.

Finally, I thought about the eternal, vexing question of What to do for Dinner. With a small kitchen, a small child, and very small windows in which to cook, I have to be deliberate about choosing and shopping for meals. Justin works late, at least for now, so the task of dinner falls mostly to me. Granted, he takes over some of the cooking on weekends and is always fine with ordering in, but there are usually a few nights a week when I am duty-bound to plan a civilized, decent meal for the three of us. Before Bea was born, this used to be a pleasure (cue music and the corking of wine) but these days it's not always my favorite thing.

So, yeah, meal planning. Meal planning. Meal planning. A bleak phrase. It's so far from my usual strategy of wandering the sample area of the grocery store, popping bits of olive into Bea's mouth, waiting for inspiration to strike. Sometimes inspiration will come, but often it's just in the form of a lame rationalization: c'mon, toast and eggs is a great dinner! Hey, what's wrong with cheese and a baguette for dinner? It's romantic, in an impoverished kind of way! Or, what if I make a ton of guacamole-- like six avocados' worth? That totally counts, right?

I've lately been calling this condition Dinner Block. And just as blocked writers need tricks for clearing their cognitive hurdles, I need a system. For no particular reason, I decided that Mondays would be a grain-based dish (rice, quinoa, etc.), Tuesdays would be pasta, and Wednesdays salad. Thursday-Sunday would be kept open for going out to eat, ordering in, making dinner-sized sundaes, or using the new oyster knife Justin got me for my birthday to have an oyster party. Monday-Wednesday are, hands down, the toughest nights for me, so those nights need a system.

So, okay, so grain, pasta, salad. GPS.

After we got back from vacation, I launched in immediately. The week started with a Sunday trip to the farmer's market. My usual farmer's market M.O. is to wander around, surveying the produce and just buying what looks good. But this time, before we left, I sat on the floor for a good 20 minutes, waist deep in a nest of cookbooks, thumbing around for recipes to fit into the GPS slots.

And you know what? It was so, so fun. Before long, I'd filled a few notebook pages with ideas, and as I built up a collection of recipes my GPS categories suddenly got more flexible and interesting. Inventing and justifying culinary taxonomies is a fun thing if you haven't tried it. (What? You haven't tried it?) Are Mark Bittman's lettuce and rice noodle-stuffed spring rolls a salad, a pasta, or a grain? Couscous is a pasta, right? Is tuna salad a salad? For a real trip, take a look at the salad section of Nourishing Traditions. The crowning jewel? "Meat Salad."

The fun continued at the market, where I tweaked the week's dishes to reflect what I found. Monday's grain recipe was still kind of up in the air (something with farro?), but I'd settled on Tuesday's pasta of fresh tuna, radishes, and celery. When I didn't see any celery, I snapped up some kohlrabi instead, just because it looked good and crunchy. Wednesday's menu was a roasted corn salad with tomatoes and feta, so I grabbed an armload of unshucked corn, which Bea and I had a blast peeling a day or two later. I also happened to notice a bunch of mint that would be delicious in the corn salad, so into the basket it went.

So far--and it's just been a couple weeks--the creative constraints have made for some fresh, seasonal meals. While we're not eating anything radically different, I feel more relaxed. It's like I've outsourced the dinner decision-making to my more uptight self so I can turn my attention to something else. I also like to think that since I master-minded this little system, I can dump it at will and go get calzones. Calzones are a grain, alright?

What does each noun mean?

Here's Ray Bradbury on writing in a conversation with Paris Review. His advice reminds me of Lynda Barry's exercises in What It Is. I wonder if Barry knew the interview or if the two writers were just thinking along on the same, marvelous cosmic wave length.

"Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are."


I really like this--the clarity and practicality. There's something even kind of American in the commitment to things, stuff, nouns as the starting point for a task so elusive and intangible as writing. Some day soon I'm going to clear a few days from my schedule and actually write creatively the way I used to do in college (happy non-academic moments wedged in between paper-writing and exam studying--and I thought I was oh-so-busy then. Ha!).

In Joshua Foer’s nifty new book about the art of memory, Moonwalking with Einstein, he says that memorizing connects us to an oral tradition in which the culture’s most valuable ideas weren’t written down but memorized. One of the main qualities of a good memorizer is the ability to look to the past. Surprise, surprise: Americans are notoriously poor at committing stuff to memory because we’re so focused on the future.

I’ll cop to being a stereotypical American in this respect. While I don’t think I’m an awful memorizer (want a Robert Frost poem, anyone? No?), I have been future-oriented all of my life—or at least since around 13 or 14 when I discovered the cause-and-effect satisfaction of earning good grades and managing my weight.

I sometimes think about what I’ve lost in this drive toward the future. Whole potential experiences, thoughts, and features of my personality have probably been lost, sink-hole-like. Some people are haunted by things they never accomplished. I’m haunted by time I didn’t waste when I should have.

This all to say that it has been challenging adjusting to having a baby. The loss of sleep and freedom are rough (this is a lot easier now that she’s almost a year), but I’m still a little perplexed by this new reality in which my own future is not only irrelevant but is actually an impediment to the process.

I’ll be sitting on the floor watching Bea turn a small object over in her fat little hands, or I’ll be dragging her out of the kitchen for the twentieth time, explaining that we can’t, however much we’d like to, stick our hand, wrist-deep, in cat food. While all this is happening in real time, I’ll feel like I’m being slowly erased, like small particles of me are being spun out into the air, diffused and gone. The experience is at once sweet, serene, and also kind of scary.

For the record, I hate the psycho-pop mandate to Be in the Now. Now makes no sense. Now is the stuff of nostalgia, an invention. There’s a stink diaper to be changed, and that’s not a now I want to live in.

Besides, everything I’m doing for Bea now is designed to move her into the future. I have to make sure she is fed and loved today so can exist tomorrow and the next day and on into the future, happy and undamaged. Just to prove what a little speed racer she is, her face keeps changing. She’s looking older. She keeps getting taller. The calendar keeps bossily informing me of her tumble routine into the future. I need to help her get there. It’s kind of like the way nature takes what it needs from the mother’s body and gives it to the fetus (traces of depletion in postpartum bones and teeth and hair). The future needs me less than it needs her. No surprise there.

So I help her move forward. I’m fine with that. I just need to figure out where that puts me in the meantime. I suppose it puts me in the meantime. Whatever that means.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Stylin' Aslan's Mane

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

Finally! Paris photos

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!

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.

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.

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?

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!

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.