Happy weekend from all the women pastors
Her mother being a second-generation Texan atheist, my mom was raised in a godless fashion. When her conversion came, though, it was swift and feverish.
She accepted Jesus into her heart at the direction of staid Presbyterians. Five years later she’d cast off the training wheels — the catechism, the silver-haired minister, the stained-glass windows and velvet pews — and was pastoring her own Charismatic church in a warehouse just off the Palmetto Expressway.
Among Miami’s Protestants, she was a laughingstock, and a pariah: A woman preaching is an aggressive act. I was then, as I am now, embarrassed, proud, and protective of her, in equal measure. (Oops, I forgot enraged by.)
All these years later what’s most remarkable to me is that the religious zeal and leadership that seemed in my childhood to spring up out of nowhere has echoes in my mom’s family line. Rindia, the great-grandmother I wrongly accused of murdering an infant (that was one of the other great-grandmothers, you see), and one of her sons, were “very devoted Pentecostal ‘holy rollers’ who lived at church,” according to my mother. Mom knew this growing up, although her dad’s family was something of an abstraction.
And she didn’t find out until a few years ago, long after her own place of worship was shuttered, that her maternal grandmother Alma’s sister Virgie and niece Alma Honor “voluntarily started and pastored the only church in Stockard for many years until they finally got a man to come in from somewhere and take over.”
I learned all of this last year and found the news oddly soothing. It makes my terror of an eventual religious conversion seem maybe not so irrational, after all.
According to my mom’s notes, the woman pictured in the photo above is probably Alma Honor. In another (Xeroxed) photo that I’ll scan in some other time, Alma Honor’s mother and co-pastor, Virgie, wears the same coat.
Jessa Crispin’s Irish brown soda bread
Has anyone done more in the past six years to foster reading than Bookslut founder Jessa Crispin? What started as a blog and monthly magazine written and edited on the clock at Planned Parenthood has grown into a full-time gig that leaves Crispin plenty of time to read, to write about reading, and to endure dreadful publishing events filled with people “pulling wheeled suitcases that they will gleefully roll over your toes.” (If you think the London Book Fair sounds romantic, follow that link and have your illusions shattered.)
Now she’s also test-driving recipes. “Cookbooks can force you into moments of great vulnerability,” she observes, before confirming what you’ve always suspected: that the slickest celebrity chef volumes aren’t tested before “being slapped with a $35 price tag and shipped off to bookstores.” Below Crispin shares one of her own standbys.
When I lived in Cork, Ireland, there was a small bakery that sold the best brown bread. It wasn’t the traditional brown bread, which is made only of whole wheat flour, oats, buttermilk, salt, and baking soda. That particular form of torture taunted you with its earthy aroma and the way it crumbled in your mouth when pulled from the oven and immediately slathered with butter and jam. An hour later it had the texture and flavor of a rock. Then the only thing you could do with it (besides throwing it at the small children yelling outside your window) was chip off wedges to scoop the last bits of egg yolk, baked bean sauce and rasher grease into your mouth without directly licking your breakfast plate.
In the ten years since, I occasionally tried recipes for brown bread but ended up mostly with rocks, and hardly ever with the crumbly, moist bread with a crust so thick you could tip the loaf onto its cut side and leave it out overnight. It couldn’t be so hard to find a bread with a shelf life of over an hour, could it?
My sister gifted me with the cookbook Irish Puddings, Tarts, Crumbles, and Fools by Margaret M. Johnson, which also included a recipe for brown bread. I gave it a shot, and was pleasantly surprised. It was almost exactly the bread I remembered and loved. Over the years I’ve made this recipe a hundred times. There’s half a loaf sitting on my countertop right now, cut side down. Here is my slightly modified version of Johnson’s recipe:
Kinsale Brown Soda Bread
4 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup quick cooking (not instant, nor steel cut, unless you want to break a tooth) Irish oatmeal
1/4 cup wheat bran
1 teaspoon baking soda
generous pinch of salt
1 1/2 tablespoons honey
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup canola oil
2 cups buttermilk
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and grease a 9×5 inch loaf pan.
In a large bowl, mix flour, oats, wheat bran, baking soda and salt. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in buttermilk, oils, and honey. Whisk the wet ingredients, gradually incorporating the dry as you go. Switch to a wooden spoon when your whisk gets clogged. Stir until dough forms, then switch to your hands and knead. (You can do this directly in the bowl, save yourself the countertop mess.) Form into a loaf, put in pan, and bake for about 50 to 55 minutes.
There’s no need to eat it directly from the oven, since this one actually keeps for a couple days, but just try to stop yourself. Serve with salted butter and jam.
Victor LaValle: The New Yorker cracks up
By now everyone knows that the Obama cartoon on the cover of the current New Yorker has ignited a firestorm. I’ve tended to write the thing off as failed satire of the kind that proliferates nowadays: unfocused, simultaneously predictable and overreaching, ultimately resulting in no point being made — except, of course, that the creator is terribly knowing and clever (and smug).
But your mileage may vary, and my friend Victor LaValle’s does. In running his opinion I risk (further) inflaming some of my older white liberal readers (Hi Billie, love you!), especially those who are solidly in Obama’s camp — or were, until the FISA vote and other centrist back-trackings — but LaValle’s perspective is an interesting and provocative one.
It brings to mind a story my (older white liberal Obama-voting New Yawker) therapist told me about his 22-year-old son’s recent trip to visit grandma, who’s always voted Democrat but won’t now. She couldn’t explain substantively what she didn’t like about the candidate; she just had a bad feeling, an intuition that he was untrustworthy or otherwise problematic somehow. “I can’t believe my grandmother’s a racist,” the son kept saying afterward. “I just can’t believe it.”
LaValle’s arguments follow.
The New Yorker is having a mental breakdown. Not just the magazine, but its core readership. Older White Liberals are having a mental breakdown. And it’s all Barack Obama’s fault.
The July 21st issue of the magazine depicts Barack and Michelle Obama standing in the White House giving each other a pound. (I’m not calling it a “fist bump” and neither should you.) Barack is dressed in sandals and a turban. A portrait of Osama bin Laden hangs above the mantle. The American flag burns in the fireplace. Michelle wears a guerilla soldier’s clothing and touts a machine gun on her back. But for all this, the scariest thing in the picture is Michelle Obama’s hair. It’s certainly not an afro (aka a “natural”). As far as I can tell Michelle is rocking a jherri curl and that is a reason to be scared.
The magazine has defended itself, saying this picture is meant as satire, but I’m not quite sure who the joke is on. Is the joke on Michelle and Barack? No. They say the joke is about the fears and anxieties that exist about Barack and Michelle in the White House. But normally this kind of picture might also include the true subject of the satire, maybe a sleeping figure in the lower right hand corner who represents these fearful masses. Maybe George Bush or Rush Limbaugh. Or, unfortunately, even Jesse Jackson. The image of the Obamas would be inside those fluffy lines that indicate a dream.
But if nothing like that is in the picture whose nightmare could this be?
Let’s return to those Older White Liberals, the OWLS; this latest issue of the New Yorker is nothing less than their collective anxiety dream.
I’m a mixed race guy, black and white, and therefore pretty light-skinned (though I do get brown in the summer). But whether it’s summer or winter I’m never so light that I can pass for white. As a result I miss the conversations that happen when the colored folks aren’t around. Luckily for me I’ve got white friends and they’ve ratted the OWLS out.
One dear friend in particular has been privy to a certain kind of dinner conversation. She’s in her mid-30’s but she dines out with Older White Liberals sometimes. And at those dinners the OWLS all say the same thing whenever the question of Obama’s Presidency arises: “I just don’t think the nation’s ready,” they say. “I mean I’m ready, I’d just love it. But I don’t think the nation’s ready yet.”
Inevitably these folks are over 50, generally well-off and liberal to a fault. And yet, now that Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee for President they just can’t seem to get behind him. The last thing they’ll say on the subject is, “I don’t know what it is, but there’s just something about him that I can’t get behind.”
Now the problem isn’t that they’re stupid and they probably aren’t even lying. It is only identifiable as a certain “something.” The real problem is that Barack Obama stirs feelings that directly contradict the story they’ve told about themselves for decades. Maybe even as far back as the Civil Rights era. And these competing truths, rational liberalism and irrational fear, are driving the Older White Liberals out of their minds. Which all finally bubbled up, out of their great shared subconscious, as one startling New Yorker cover.
It’s startling for two reasons. The first is that the humor is just tone deaf and Barry Blitt is usually damn good. (The one where Barack and Hillary are in bed together, both reaching for the 3AM phone call, for instance.) But the second reason is that Older White Liberals are rarely this honest about such feelings. They’ve learned, long ago, not to let them out. It’s the fear that dare not speak its name.
Unfortunately it’s hard to have honest conversations. Nobody likes to be called out. When Older White Liberals are told that their hesitation about Obama is, in part, linked to some lurking prejudices they come at you with a rage. The same thing happened when you suggested that some men’s negative reactions to Hillary Clinton had more to do with the fact that she was an aggressive woman than with their principled disagreements about her health care policies.
But still, truth is truth. While much has been made about the fears of working-class whites in Pennsylvania and, of course, the white South, this New Yorker cover is the product of a different but just as panicked constituency, the unassailable Upper West Side.
Practical city living #10: The inner lives of mattresses
New Yorkers: In case you didn’t know, the city is battling a whole new breed of vermin. New to us, I mean. Old to humankind. Pliny and Aristophanes both wrote about these pests. One is a character in the Tales of Bidpai. The scourge even predates King Tut.
It is often pointed out, by the media and politicians alike, that 311 bed bug reports still number only in the low thousands. But I know at least a dozen people who’ve fought these things, and none of them has, to my knowledge, notified the city. In general victims call only if their landlords refuse treatment altogether.
Earlier this morning GMB forwarded a McBrooklyn post, Beware of Garbage With Something Written on It. Good advice! May I also present, for your delectation and delight, Mangy Cur’s Infested (from which the shot at the top of this post was taken)?
I’m going to take McBrooklyn’s warning one step further: Steer clear of curbside finds (and, really, used furniture) altogether. Bed bugs don’t just live in mattresses. They hole up in wood. They thrive in paper. They even camp out in electronics. They hide all day, coming out only to feed, and once inside a building, they move easily between apartments.
Based on the suspicious collections of refuse I see on the streets, I’d bet good money that few people discarding infested items actually bother to wrap them in plastic. Pass the Astral, at 76 India, the night before trash pickup, and you’re likely to find a motley collection of mattresses and rugs, armchairs and bed frames, none of which are labeled, although some bear visible signs of a problem. Mae West may once have lived in the building, but a squadron of wild horses and a year’s free rent couldn’t drag me there now.
And yes, Greenpoint, my old neighborhood, is a hotspot and has been for years, but the plague isn’t confined to any one area. It’s in Manhattan, it’s in Queens. It’s even, according to some reports, invaded the subway.
On my way to work yesterday morning, I passed a couch and two twin mattresses, all wrapped in plastic. When I was returning home last night the couch was still in the same spot. The bedding was gone.
But hark! What is this? Just down the block two young gentlemen trot off into the night, new beds on their backs.
By this morning, only a wad of plastic wrap remained.
Boston has warning stickers. Lexington, Kentucky is distributing leaflets. San Francisco has assistance for low-income residents.
New York City, meanwhile, has… a Department of Health fact sheet that is, to put it generously, a little on the short side? A booming used mattress industry? A local government that’s done next to nothing?
But if you see an Asian Longhorned Beetle, just call the special hotline. You’ll know the bug because it’s pictured on that leaflet that came in the mail last summer.
Surely all this is not without meaning…
Margaret Guroff’s handsome online edition of Moby-Dick offers pithy explanations of terms and references you might stumble over, and lays them in the margin alongside the text. No doubt scholars will quibble over the annotations, but at first blush, to this lay reader, they seem both more navigable and less obtrusive than print edition footnotes.
I haven’t revisited Moby-Dick in full for at least a decade and can’t wait to see how the Power edition holds up, a chapter or two a day, as subway reading.
Leak prevention in a Twitter world
Last week a publishing CEO typed a few excited words about a celebrity manuscript into his Twitter feed. Although he seemed a little nonplussed when Publisher’s Weekly reported and pored over the entry, you didn’t hear Lynne Spears or her agent complaining.
The discussion since has centered on Twitter’s potential as a buzz-builder, but online small talk, especially pre-deal, is a double-edged sword.
When former Gawker writer Emily Gould’s proposal was being shopped around recently, her agent, Melissa Flashman of Trident Media, tried to prevent leaks by requiring editors who received the submission to share copies only by courier. (Despite the restrictions, roughly a quarter of New York City was soon in possession of the document, but it never did seem to make its way to Gould’s ex-boss.)
Apparently no one thought to put constraints on Twittering. Shortly after the manuscript went out, HarperCollins publicity manager/memoirist Felicia Sullivan said she was “trying hard to be objective whilst reading a proposal from a certain NY media hyped author.” (On her blog that same day, she decried blog stars and the “hurt circus” that is the Internet, so it wasn’t too hard to figure out whose book she meant.)
By Thursday afternoon Sullivan was shut in her office, kicking stuffed animals. “If it’s a million, I’m breaking out the shovel and a 12-gauge,” she wrote, a few hours later. In the end Gould’s manuscript sold for a rumored low six figures, presumably immunizing the HC offices against a shooting rampage.
Was Sullivan’s post behind the $1 million rumor that spread through New York media even as she was proclaiming triumph? If so, I guess it was good for business. But I’ll be curious to see how agents will try prevent leaks in an increasingly-Twittering publishing world.
Update: Galleycat’s Ron Hogan hopes Twitter will bring down the media embargo.
A Murdoch hero on writing & quitting the day job
Last summer I lugged my copy of Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince all the way from Brooklyn, through Tennessee, to Oxford, Mississippi, without so much as opening it. Probably a good thing, because that was a social trip, and when I finally started reading the novel over the long weekend that just passed, I ended up shunning people and the Internet, and was even a little surly to the cats.
In lieu of the usual Monday morning book news and chatter, here’s an excerpt from the first chapter:
When this story starts — and I will not much longer delay its inception — I had already retired, at an earlier age than is usual, from the tax office. I worked as an Inspector of Taxes because I had to earn a living which I knew I should never earn as a writer. I retired when I had at last saved enough money to assure myself a modest annuity. I have lived, as I say, until latterly, without drama, but with unfailing purpose. I looked forward to and I toiled for my freedom to devote all my time to writing. Yet on the other hand, I did manage to write, and without more than occasional repining, during my years of bondage, and I would not, as some unsatisfied writers do, blame my lack of productivity upon my lack of time. And I would say that even now. Perhaps especially I would say that now.
The shock of leaving the office was greater than I had anticipated. Hartbourne warned me that it would be so. I did not believe him. Perhaps I am, more than I realized, a creature of routine. Perhaps too, with scarcely pardonable stupidity, I imagined that inspiration would come with freedom. I did not expect the complete withdrawal of my gift. In the years before, I worked steadily. That is, I wrote steadily and I destroyed steadily. I will not say how many pages I have destroyed, the number is immense. There was pride in this as well as sorrow. Sometimes I felt at a (terrible phrase) dead end. But I never despaired of excellence. Hope and faith and absolute devotion kept me plodding onward, ageing, living alone with my emotions. And I found that I could always write something.
But when I had given up the tax office and could sit at my desk at home every morning and think any thoughts I pleased, I found I had no thoughts at all. This too I suffered with my bitterest patience. I waited. I tried to develop a new routine: monotony, out of which value springs. I waited, I listened. I live, as I shall explain soon at more length, in a noisy part of London, a seedy region that was once genteel. I suppose I have myself, together with my neighborhood, made my pilgrimage away from gentility. Noise, which had never distressed me before, began to do so. For the first time in my life I urgently wanted silence.
Of course, as might be pointed out with barbed humor, I had always in a sense been a devotee of silence…. Three short books in forty years of sustained effort is not exactly garrulity. And indeed if I understand anything that is precious, I did understand how important it was to keep one’s mouth shut until the right moment even if this meant a totally voiceless life. Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck….
Fellow fans may enjoy the London Walks, which, according to creator Barbara Julian, explore the city through Murdoch’s novels. (Thanks again, Chris, for steering me toward Murdoch lo these many years ago.)
The real (fictional) story of Shoot out the Lights
My buddy Hayden Childs keeps promising to send me a copy of Shoot Out the Lights, his 33 1/3 homage to Richard and Linda Thompson. The book “features a fictional narrator describing the real events around the making of [the] landmark album.”
This week at Powell’s, Childs attempts to channel (or, in his words, to deface and demean) some of his favorite writers. He imagines Flannery O’Connor on The Fall, Cormac McCarthy’s The Drift, Thomas Pynchon’s Blueberry Boat.
Incidentally, it was my experience that there is no better song for a woman in her twenties to put on repeat and scream-sing at the end of a love affair than “Walking on a Wire.” See above for details. (Seemingly indifferent man strumming guitar nearby + bottle of bourbon = optional.)
O’Connor’s “Good Country People” on film
I didn’t know anyone had adapted Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” but somebody has posted ’60s-era short, attributed to Gary Graver, at YouTube.
Richard Grayson writes: “Wow, I can just imagine how O’Connor would have hated this. As she said about the Schlitz Playhouse version of ‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own,’ with Gene Kelly(!): ‘The best I can say for it is that it conceivably could have been worse. Just conceivably.’”
Vocabulary lessons and the neighborhood flyer
Speaking of potential libel, I happened upon this clump of flyers in the gutter over the weekend. Instantly I felt sorry for Yisroel [Redacted], alleged “‘noted’ moser!!!” of my neighborhood’s Orthodox community, whose name has now literally been dragged through the mud.
Back at home, I discovered that a moser is “a Jew who intends to turn another Jew in to non-Jewish authorities.” (The plural is mosrim.)
According to the authors of Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin, din moser is “the duty to eliminate” such a person. I guess Yisroel got off easy.
Since I grew up in Miami, initially I was kind of surprised I’d never heard the term. But, on reflection, my friends were Reform or non-observant. One made me a BLT on Yom Kippur to cure a hangover. (”This is how I atone for last night’s party,” he said.) Another supplied the drama crowd with weed from her parents’ stash. The Hasidim were insulated from our debauchery. I think they lived way out by the beach.
Anyway, here’s a question: From the radical Orthodox perspective, do you violate Talmudic moser rules if you explain to a gentile what a moser is?
Defamation immunity for website operators narrows
Website operators traditionally have relied on the Communications Decency Act to shield them from liability for user-generated content.
The April decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com significantly narrows this immunity. Over the weekend my friend and former law professor Lyrissa Lidsky alerted me to the case, noting that it
may spell doom for websites that solicit defamatory information (like Juicycampus.com, DontDateHimGirl.com and so forth). Basically the case limits Communications Decency Act immunity if the blog/website “solicits” or otherwise actively participates in generating illegal or defamatory content.
On Friday another federal court dismissed a suit against ConsumerAffairs.com, but it seems to me that any blogger who accepts comments from users “in direct response to [his or her] questions and prompts,” and profits from those comments, should take a close look at the Roommates.com case.*
For further details and musings, see Tom Just De-Friended the Ninth Circuit.
In unrelated defamation news, Jennifer Howard considers the “chilling effects of libel tourism” at the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
* An excerpt worth contemplating: More »
John Waters: Groundbreaking director, delightful misanthrope
Years and years ago, I read an interview in which the director John Waters divulged his strategy for avoiding conversations with fellow passengers on airplanes.
He hides whatever book he’s reading behind the cover for Flying Lesbian Nuns.*
Last night New York’s Blythe Sheldon saw Waters performing This Filthy World at the Society for Ethical Culture. Among other things, Waters offered a little advice on how to keep the kids reading. “If your daughter is promiscuous, give her a book on womb raiders!” he reportedly said.
Asked after the show whether he had any desire to start a blog, Waters was unequivocal.
“No!” he replied. “I want to be harder to reach. I don’t want people to find me. I’ll write a book.”
* At least that’s how I remember it, but I can’t find a single hit for that title. Which explains why, despite years of hunting, I’ve never been able to put his suggestion into practice.
Zeebah solves all: “I simply can’t imagine John Waters with a copy (it isn’t nearly campy or glamourous enough), but… Naiad Press put out a book called Lesbian Nuns, which was pretty groundbreaking for its time.” Cecilieaux seconds the motion.
Online altar for Twain fanatics
When Charles Ives’ fiancee Harmony Twichell presented her beloved to Mark Twain for approval, “Twain drew out his first overlook, finally ordering ‘Spin him around — let’s see the aft!’”
I learned this thanks to Jack Pendarvis, who idolizes Ives as passionately as I do Twain (but probably less conflictedly), and who, after our all our excited back-and-forth, said, “I think at this point we are obligated by convention to write an off-Broadway play about the encounter!”
He was kidding. But if he loves procrastination the way I love procrastination, Let’s See the Aft! could soon be coming to a church basement near you.
The excuse for this post is that, in the midst of our volley, I discovered The Mark Twain Project, a staggeringly comprehensive site put together by the Bancroft Library. It includes not just transcripts of 2300 letters, but some digitized facsimiles. Twain’s letters to Joseph Twichell, his best friend and Harmony’s father, are part of the collection.
This year the project will start to post his writings.
Rebutting The New Yorker’s most famous cartoon
NB to professors searching for a colleague’s name + “pussy”: If you are going to troll the Internet for images of or information about someone’s genitals, you might want to do it from someplace other than the university where you work.
Especially when your last name and first initial are embedded in your IP address.
And even more especially when the proprietor of the site where you land is a big fan of your colleague’s writing.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been more offended by a Google search. And believe me, what with my affection for Lolita, people have arrived here through some pretty twisted paths.
Update: I’m not interested in playing 20 questions, and given that my sidebar rotates I’m sure you could plug in fifty female writers’ names at any given time and come up with fifty different matches, but since there’s confusion, let me be clear: searcher and searchee teach at the same place, and neither of them wrote a piece for Slate about America’s deodorized fiction. Thanks.
Lizzie Skurnick’s Fine Lines and salade nicoise
Lizzie Skurnick, poet, YA novelist, critic, and longtime (in blog years) friend to MaudNewton.com, will be publishing a book based on her marvelous Fine Lines, a weekly Jezebel column in which she takes “a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children’s and YA books” she loved in her youth.
I’ve been sitting on the news since she told me over salade nicoise a few weeks ago, so it’s fitting that she shares her own recipe below. Enjoy while thumbing through your tattered copy of The Secret Garden.
Unless you go back 10 generations to some Heberts in New Orleans, I’m not French. However, I am overly fond of salty oily crunchy vegetabley fatty eggy things — the ne plus ultra of which, combined, is the salade nicoise, which in my estimation stands even above frisee aux lardons. (Which has BACON!)
I chanced upon the best recipe for the divine assemblage this winter, as I fighting off a series of fevers that made me alternately crave malted milk balls and Omega-3 acids. One December evening, having slept off the worst of a fever, I woke starving, starving, craving crunch and oily snap. I would like to say I immediately headed to the grocery store, but I actually headed to the phone, where I called a nearby brasserie to see if it was on the menu.
The owner and maitre d’ informed me it was out of season — “You know, thees is a beautiful salade for summer, when zee vegetables are beautiful” — but then thoughtfully took charge the moment I said I was willing to forge ahead anyway.
“You ‘ave shallots? Some shallots in the house?”
“I have nothing,” I said.
“Okay, you put together a pen,” he said briefly, and covered the phone. I heard the voice of a waiter, anxiously querying. “I am on zee phone!” he said angrily, and came back. I immediately put together a pen. “You are still there?”
Salade Nicoise (Whole Foods, my opinion, organic actually tastes better edition)
Ingredients:
1 head Boston bibb lettuce (that organic Whole Food plastic box one is good)
1 handful haricot verts (make sure they’re skinny and fresh)
1 egg (organic)
3-4 small fingerling potatoes, red or yellow (organic!)
5 cherry tomatoes (you know the drill)
3 teaspoons capers
6 black olives, with pits
1 can anchovies (I like the Genovo brand, rolled with capers)
1 can tuna (Genovo brand is nice, in OIL, light, not white)
Any other crudite you desire
Dressing:
1 shallot
3-4 heads of garlic
2-3 teaspoons red wine or champagne vinegar
1 tablespoon mustard (I like the yellow polish kind, but you can use Dijon if you must)
Olive oil
Freshly ground salt and pepper to taste
Glass jar with lid
Since they need to be chilled, immediately start the potatoes boiling on high and the haricot vert steaming. Chop your garlic and shallot very fine, and place in empty glass jar (an old jelly one works best). Add one or two teaspoons vinegar, enough to just cover the pulp without much extra liquid. Add your teaspoon or two of mustard. You should have a yellow-ish mass the consistency of chewed grapefruit. Cover, and set aside.
By now, your haricot vert should be steamed. Place in fridge, or, if it’s December, outside on the window sill. Check your potatoes — they may well be done. If so, follow suit. Either way, start your egg. Use the Patti LaBelle* method.
Take your Boston lettuce, rinse, dry, chop or tear into bitable bites, place in large bowl.
Did you check your potatoes? Okay, they should be done now. Place those in fridge/outside now too.
Go back to your dressing. Open the jar, open your olive oil. Fill with a LOT of olive oil — say, two-three inches above the pulpy mass. Grind some salt and pepper in, a few rounds. Cover and shake until it they emulsify, maybe 30 seconds. Taste, and add more of anything that seems off to you. Set aside.
How are your potatoes and beans? Are they chilled enough? Probably. Go back to your lettuce, and add your dressing, as much as you like. Toss the lettuce. Add it whatever receptacle you’d like. Take all your crudites — tomato, haricot vert, potato, olives, capers — and place them on top of the lettuce. Don’t mix — put them each in a little area, like a patchwork quilt. When you add the tuna and anchovies, glop some oil on too, you wuss. Slice egg into quarters and place on top too. Eat an anchovy, just for the hell.
Now, cover it all with a bit more dressing. Assess for oily crunch. Eat!
* Place egg in pan, cover completely with water, cover. When water is on high boil, turn off, move off burner, and let sit, covered, for about five minutes. Drain and set aside.
Susan Maddux: Nature, technology, and the tropics
In my friend Susan Maddux’s gorgeous Hawaii watercolors, nature and technology cohabitate so convincingly, you can almost feel the heat radiating off the satellite dish.
I haven’t been back to South Florida in several years, but so much of my novel takes place there, I can’t get enough of the sensory associations these paintings inspire. No matter what drab square of concrete you’re standing on in Miami, you’re always aware that the imposed order is precarious. Tree roots wreck buildings, roof tiles become terra cotta grenades, parking lots flood so quickly that you might exit a dental appointment to find your car submerged like a rhinoceros. (Susan Orlean made similar observations far more eloquently in The Orchid Thief, but my copy is indisposed.)
Despite the mountains, no image in recent memory has conjured up my childhood more fully than the phone pole, barbed wire, palm tree, and small, downtrodden woman all backlit against a pinwheel sun in the painting below.
A few days ago I discovered a recent interview in which Susan discusses, as the questioner puts it, the “relationship between man and man made artifacts and the natural world.” She says:
in Hawaii the natural and the unnatural are so close together that there’s a forced interaction, an interdependency even. The myth of Hawaii feeds the tourism industry that destroys everything it touches. But the myth by this point has become integral to the place, and within it there is some truth. The islands, isolated in the middle of the ocean, are an amazing microcosm. So, what is the natural world? In some cases it’s more obvious than others, but I’m interested in the grey areas.
And when asked about symbolism, she elaborates on my favorite painting:
When I use a palm tree, I really mean to talk about a palm tree. However, that palm tree has many connotations, some of which are contextual, some come from the visual information. For example, I think the black silhouette of the palm looks kind of ominous because of the quality of the painting. And when the palm tree is put face to face with an equally rendered telephone pole, then the meaning is informed by that relationship.In between them an older lady crosses, and I always think of my own Japanese grandmother who died before I was born when I see these ladies, to me they are a reminder of my birth connection to life in Hawaii so this person is about connection to a place, about time. She crosses between the natural and the unnatural.
Between them flares a sort of rainbow-color explosion, which to me seems to represent an exuberance, like a sunrise, coming from the mountains. The figure seems oblivious to it all, lost in thought, perfectly at home. Although this was one of the first pieces I did in this series, the ideas in this painting still feel very relevant to me.
You can see more of Susan’s art at her site, and in Faesthetic’s Doomsday issue.
A conversation with Colin Marshall
Colin Marshall interviews me — thoughtfully and at length — for his Marketplace of Ideas show, and inadvertently reminds me why I usually prefer to answer questions in email: Once I start talking, I do not shut up. No wonder my friends never answer their cellphones.
Also, good God. Evidently I say “I think” the way some people say “um.” And yes, I always slouch like that.
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s last events ’til Labor Day
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled and posted by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30 pm, and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to Ms. Cerand at lauren [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication. Due to the volume of submissions, events cannot be considered unless the date appears in the subject line of your message.
TUE, 24: A local launch party at Bookculture for author Judith Matloff: “After twenty years as a foreign correspondent, traveling through tumultuous places including Rwanda and Chechnya, Matloff returns to her native New York City to house-hunt, while her husband stays behind in Moscow to pack their belongings. Intoxicated by West Harlem’s cultural diversity and affordability, she impulsively buys a “fixer-upper” in the neighborhood, unaware that their new residence is a termite-infested former crack house on a street crowded with dealers.” 7PM, FREE (see also: Kelly McMasters & Honor Moore at Bookculture on Wednesday).
WED, 25: Ornithology, a show for the birds, opens at Jen Bekman Gallery. 6-8PM, FREE. And, “Show/Tell 10,” presented by the Goethe-Institut at the Austrian Cultural Forum, features Frieze’s Jörg Heiser and Artforum’s Brian Sholis discussing Heiser’s new All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art. Noted, “Jörg Heiser provides a sharp summary of contemporary art since Marcel Duchamp. ‘When it’s good,’ he claims, ‘art hits where it hurts, striking at the heart of an ossified status quo by which it itself was brought forth.’” 7PM, FREE with RSVP requested [Full disclosure, as always: the Goethe-Institut New York is one of my publicity clients].
SAT, 28: Release party for Lady Tyrant (The all-women issue of the New York Tyrant): Featuring a female artist and a female-fronted band (10PM: Lucy Wainwright Roche, 11PM: The Choke), with a portion of the proceeds going to Girls Write Now, a nonprofit devoted to encouraging NYC public school girls to develop as writers. At Bar Nine (9th Ave between 53/54). 9PM, $10 cover includes a copy of the latest issue, featuring work from: S.G. Miller, Cezarija Abartis, Leni Zumas, Paula Bomer, Jessica Anya Blau, Nadxieli Mannello, Rachel B. Glaser, Elizabeth Koch, Leigh Newman, and Deb Olin Unferth, among others.”
And with that, The Smart Set breaks for summer. Upcoming highlights:
July 23rd: At KGB, a reading to commemorate 60th anniversary of “The Lottery”: “An evening of live readings from Ms. Jackson’s work is sure to unsettle audience members. Readings from Shirley Jackson’s work will begin at 7pm and end by 9pm. The cover charge is $5 per person. In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, and with permission of the author’s estate, the Shirley Jackson Awards have been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.”
July 31st: The July edition of “Upstairs at the Square,” hosted by Katherine Lanpher, will feature Aimee Mann and Joseph O’Neill in performance and discussion at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. 7PM, FREE [Full disclosure, as always: I am very involved with this project].
Plus, bloggy favorite Dzanc Books has some New York events up its sleeve.
At the top of my personal event wishlist: Electric Sound Art and Media Festival in Canada.
And, a video of inspiring writers telling their tales right here in the city [Full disclosure, as always: I am on Girls Write Now’s board of directors].
See you after Labor Day!
Resurrecting Lazarus Averbuch, who looked like an anarchist
My review of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project appears in The Boston Globe today. Here’s an excerpt:
The late, great writer and World War II veteran Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was captured by the Germans and confined to a prisoner-of-war camp in Dresden. When an American air raid destroyed the city, he was put to work carrying civilians’ corpses. The apocalypse haunted Vonnegut ever after. “Believe me,” he wrote, “it is not easy to rationalize the stamping out of vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored when gathering up babies in bushel baskets.”A similar sense of the indefensibility of bloodshed underlies Aleksandar Hemon’s stunning new novel, “The Lazarus Project.” The book opens on March 2, 1908, but the date could be a century later. A “slim, swarthy young man” with cold eyes turns up at the door of Chicago’s police chief, and thrusts an envelope at him. Taking the stranger for an anarchist, the lawman restrains him, summons the missus, and orders her to do a pat-down. A struggle ensues; she thinks she feels a pistol. Soon the man is dead, his blood spattered across the room. The assistant chief pulls down the victim’s pants to verify his ethnicity. ” ‘He’s a Jew all right,’ he announces, leaning over the young man’s crotch. ‘A Jew is what he is.’ ”
The deceased is one Lazarus Averbuch — a fitting name, given that Hemon has resurrected a real man, an immigrant who escaped a brutal Kishinev pogrom only to be gunned down in the Land of Opportunity.
You can read the rest in the Globe. And at the author’s site, peruse a collection of related photos from the Chicago Historical Society, and many more recent ones taken by Hemon’s photographer friend Velibor Bozovic on their trip to Averbuch’s birthplace.
Shielding the reader from the frenzy
Nothing makes me less interested in discussing literature than being only a quarter of the way through a fatuous book that I feel obligated to finish.
(Especially when the book wants to be a contemporary answer to This Side of Paradise but lacks the romance, charm, curiosity, and specificity of place and time that lift Fitzgerald’s juvenilia above mere collegiate pomposity and navel-gazing.)
I’m sure I’ll be tempted on finishing the book to say more, but I defer to the wisdom and experience of Mark Twain, who once told Joseph Twichell:
I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
