Fashion, War, and Other Necessities

Charlie the Tuna, France, the film Hugo, and a salad dressing recipe. All that and then some in my essay about Adam Gopnik’s The Table Comes First. 

 

 

 

New essay/book review on Bookslut today. Nobody is immune to healthcare woes or the lure of Maine…a brief excerpt below:

It’s no secret that the state of health care in the US is grim, even if you have a plan, as I do. Health crisis shenanigans such as this make me pine for the days when my family doctor, a man who delivered my four siblings and me, could give me medical advice in the produce section at Hannaford’s. This doctor also knew my parents, their friends, most of my family’s medical history, and my batting average for the high school softball team. It was Maine, the way life should be, as the billboard on the Maine Turnpike declared as you cruised into Kittery via the Piscataqua Bridge.

My review of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book Jerusalem: The Biography is now published on Bookslut.com If you are interested in additional resources or have questions about the region, please send me a note or post your questions below. A modest excerpt:

Simon Sebag Montefiore writes of Jerusalem Syndrome, a “madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion” that arises out of the Jerusalem experience. “The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating than a hundred patients a year are committed to the city’s asylum.” Like many visitors who came before me, I was disappointed. Jerusalem felt forsaken, less religious than a bowling alley.

I started cooking lunch for some ladies (with paying jobs) on Thursdays and I made one of my standbys, having not much in the fridge that day. I always seem to have carrots, so this is what we ate. Anyone who has ever eaten at my house has probably had these. I’m posting the recipe for my hard-working lady friends, who asked for it.

INGREDIENTS
• Carrots: the best you can find. They are the star!
• Cumin: preferably whole (toasted in pan until fragrant – no oil – then crushed while warm) or ground cumin if you must.
• Coriander: FRESH only. Parsley if no coriander is available.
• Sweetener: brown rice sugar, agave, sugar, honey, etc.
• Lemon: One, freshly squeezed. Don’t use that stuff that comes in a plastic lemon or I will come to your house and hurt you.
• Salt: anything but iodized.
• Garlic: again, FRESH. Don’t use pre-minced or you will ruin this.
• Olive Oil: preferably Spanish, Greek, or Turkish, preferably from a can or glass, not plastic. Nothing else will do. The stronger the better. Make sure it too is FRESH. Old olive oil tastes like plastic flip flops.

WHAT TO DO
• Cook peeled carrots in boiling water. Take them off heat before they become mushy. Strain, spread out on cutting board, and cool.
• Meanwhile, mash up one clove of de-germed garlic with a bit of kosher salt in your mortar & pestle. Don’t have one? Then use your fine cheese shredder and moosh in your salt. Carry on, mixing in lemon, cumin, sweetener, and beat in while pouring, your olive oil, adding enough oil so that the lemon is abated; you don’t want the dressing to be loose, watery, or too lemony. Add pepper or better yet, Turkish pepper flakes. Just a touch of those. Don’t substitute.
• When cool, cut carrots on the bias and in small bite-sized shapes. I don’t like the way these look when they are cut into coins; it reminds me of school lunch and boiled dinners. Blech.
• Chop up the washed coriander, finely, including the stems if they aren’t too tough.
• Throw it all together, adding whatever you need to make it taste good.

This is yum on the 2nd day when all the flavors have absorbed into the carrots. A couple days later spoon then over some fresh spinach, adding walnuts and/or goat cheese.

Naturally, I came home from Istanbul with spices, kilims, and a craving for pomegranate juice, however, my Pièce de résistance was what I saw women in Istanbul wearing: headscarves with intricate decorative edging, mostly comprised of flowerlike motifs, an art called Oya.

The three-dimensional needlework is incomparable. The motifs and colors historically express the feelings of the woman who make them and it is traditionally sewn onto hand printed cotton scarves using (Yazma). The edging repeats or compliments the pattern of the scarf and some of the results are arresting. There are many machine-made varietals lurking in the Grand Bazaar, but an acute eye will help you separate the wheat from the chaff. Also, if you are lucky, you will find some silk embroidery or some motifs embellished with beads. So lovely.

I was told that the art is disappearing with many of the complex patterns in the imagination of the women who make then. When they die, the pattern goes with them. So naturally, I bought as many as I could.

A few related links:

• A YouTube video showing the craft being made.
• You can buy them (new) from Istanbul artist, Rengin Yazitas on Etsy. Rengin’s website also has a bit of information and history about the scarves, as does the Turkish government.
• My photo shows two scarves collected by Kristin Evihan. She is a glassmaker by trade, however, over the years collected a big pile of vintage scarves. She also collects the beaded trims (minus the scarves they were originally attached to). You can contact Kristin at www.evihan.com or at her Etsy store.
• There’s not a lot of information on the web about this art, but if you Google “Oya” or “Yazma” or “Nallihan*” you will find more.

What do these movies have in common?

- Crazy, Stupid, Love
- The Green Lantern
- Captain America
- Larry Crowne
- Everything Must Go
- The Hangover, Part II
- Our Idiot Brother
- Terri

They were released in or around Summer 2011, yes, but more specifically, they feature men: juvenile, sometimes morosely backward, incapable, immature, fuddling, canoodling, inept, drunk, and/or boyish men, minus the boyish charm. Yes, they exude boyishness, but in smelly body funk way, not a snips and snails and puppy dog tails way.

The movies generally reflect the lives of ordinary men who have an “a ha!” moment: Steve Carrell in Crazy, Stupid, Love[1] is a bumbling husband needing a makeover. Tom Hanks in Larry Crowne plays a jobless hopeful goofy every day guy.[2]. Even Captain America is a scrawny nobody until he becomes Captain America. An exception might be made for Ryan Reynolds in The Green Lantern who plays an ace pilot, however, characterizations of pilots lean toward the immature, myopic braggart, with The Green Lantern himself leading the pack. (see Jet Pilot song here for further reference). In one case, (Terri) the main character is literally an outsized teenager. The movie Our Idiot Brother speaks for itself. Oddly, the one movie released this summer I thought would typify the man-loser model is Planet of the Apes, however, the lead man in that movie is an ape, and a very clever one, indeed.

Are these movies indicative of our culture, of men in particular? Did something happen to men or our impression of men in the past ten years, the years I’ve been married to a very un-blockheaded guy? Are we supposed be heartened, sympathetic, or fooled by men who are simpering failures? or  are they contrition for all the movies that have inelegantly portrayed women over the decades….?

What they also have in common is a focus on current social fears. Thematically, the movies orbit around such current motifs as suburban resignation (Everything Must Go), economic hard times (Larry Crowne), overall loserishness (Captain America, The Green Lantern), drunken debauchery (The Hangover, Part II).  Is this the new man gestalt? That is the real fear.  Or, as Charleston Heston said in the first Planet of the Apes “You did it. You cut up his brain, you bloody baboon!” Now that’s a real man.

Though I review books, I often am not convivial about book recommendations myself. Often, books are praised too quickly, when they are basking in the warm days of their launch, when positive reviews are sometimes tied to backroom handshakes and the cozy blurb reciprocity of authors. I also avoid taking recommendations from friends for fear of not liking the book and having to tell them as such. I evade book clubs too, even though I’d love to join the literary fun.

In the period between the sizzle of book launch and the fizzle of declining sales, I may buy a book, however, I sequester it away until the white noise of its newsiness has died down. If the book becomes a bestseller, it may sit on a shelf for years before I even crack the cover. Simply said, I am skeptical of anything that shines too brightly and quickly and leaves a comet’s tail of transitory appeal.

Russell Perrault, VP/Director of Publicity for Random House, posted on his Facebook wall that Stoner was one of his favorite novels. I vaguely knew Perrault and I had never heard of the author, John Williams (1922-1994), which seemed in perfect synchronicity with my book buying habits. A few of Perreault’s FB friends posted emotional praise for the novel too. John Edward Williams grew up in Texas, lived in Denver, and taught at U. of Missouri (which it appears his book Stoner took cues from). He also won a National Book Award for another novel, Augustus. Thus I bought it, curious about an obscure book from an obscure author, recommended by people I didn’t know.

I finished the book in two days, reading in bed until my arm hurt so much I had to take ibuprofen. I never repeat a plot, and in this case, that’s easy because there really wasn’t one. There was only time marching on to the restrained emotions of the characters, the exquisite prose, and the one shining point in the novel where there is so much hope and love, I considered, briefly, joining a book club. Stoner is a work of immutable beauty and I wonder, as did C. P. Snow writing in The Financial Times in 1973, “Why isn’t this book famous?”

Stoner was reissued by New York Review Books in 2006 (it’s 20% off on their website today).

Originally published in American Book Review, December/January 2011

Books reviewed:  In Envy Country by Joan Frank, University of Notre Dame Press, 2010 and Feeding Strays by Stefanie Freele, Lost Horse Press, 2009.

The short story collections In Envy Country by Joan Frank and Feeding Strays by Stefanie Freele tackle the universal subjects of domesticity such as marriage, babies, husbands, wives, meals, and work. Dirty diapers and disillusioned homemakers still exist, however housewifery clichés do not. Freele and Frank explore the complexities of human emotion and action with humor, nuance, and intellectual acuity using slightly unconventional narrative constructs. While Frank employs a voyeuristic tack, Freele re-imagines the emotional states of ordinary people with quiet gestures in tiny universes. In both collections we meet the broken-hearted, the jealous, the attention-starved, the murderous, the obsessed, the static. The characters are complex and layered, as are their stories and the methods used to tell them. They are imperfect. They are human. They are us.

Without being alarming Joan Frank’s stories alarm us. Frank escorts her readers on an expedition across the IED-stricken terrain of envy. Her characters are Madame Defarge-esque, chronicling the steps and missteps of others with no less bloodlust than the French Revolutionary herself. What’s clever is that the storytelling is both vitriolic and detached, wonderfully demonstrating the tension of concealed yet seething jealousies. To wit: Merin, from “A Note on the Type,” is a receptionist where her job is “simply letting people in and out of Gerald’s building.” Merin accepts her fate as Gerald’s clerical dilettante simply because he “plucked” her from the “daily floodtide of the lost and lonely—a tide still visible out the office windows….” Enter Rochelle, Gerald’s fledging hire. Merin details Rochelle as would a stalwart spy: “Her eyes were Betty Boop’s: huge and black. Eyes eager to persuade you of their natural sympathy without revealing the least trace of a thinking agency behind them. . . . Rochelle’s behavior made the same warrant of empty vesselhood as did her eyes and even her voice, a piping sing-song.”

Eventually, Gerald provides Rochelle with services such daycare, a housekeeper, and an accountant (things not provided to Merin). Merin considers, “What did that leave Rochelle to do? It left her free. Free to arrange things . . . Bikini waxes, psychic readings, makeovers, Scuba lessons. Spanish lessons. Acting lessons. Singing lessons. Yoga. Home and garden shows. Car shows. Rebirthing sessions. Deep tissue massage,” while rhetorically asking herself, “For myself? . . . My little place was a handy block from the main streetcar line. I thought of it as a second-floor shoebox, with holes cut in the lid.” These small oblique explosions unmask Merin’s feigned objectivity for what it really is—malevolent envy—and her narrative neutrality is diluted by the precise rhetoric used to construct it.

Lena, in the title story, is a radio broadcaster, and visits the home of Karen Ryerson, a TV anchor and local celebrity. Lena tells herself that Ryerson’s “Turkish rugs over the polished hardwood floor. Two deep sofas; two puffy armchairs piled with extra cushions all in rich creams and autumn golds” are “distastefully shrill.” But the three page detailed description of such a home is possibly an inventory of all that Lena wants but does not have. But does she want the riches that come with celebrity success, or does she want the celebrity? One night Lena and her husband Phil are eating dinner at the Ryerson’s when the Ryerson’s step outside to finish an argument they began inside.

Lena was enchanted.

Phil! Come look! . . .

They’re fighting, breathed Lena without taking her gaze from the window. She said it the way a small girl might have said, a mermaid.

Yeah? Lemme see. Why’s that so nice?

Because they never fight, said Lena softly, moving over for him on the couch. They’re always perfect.

It appears that what Lena really wants is the undoing of Karen Ryerson. This oscillation between desire and jealousy raises the question, are envy and aspiration intrinsic to one another?

In Frank’s stories, we watch others watching others, and judge alongside them, becoming complicit voyeurs. In doing so, we ultimately observe ourselves;

by mirroring our own voyeuristic dispositions, Frank shows us the inclination of humanity to experience covert pleasure in the downfall of others. As Jeff’s nurse in the Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window said, “We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms.”

Like Frank, Freele takes on domesticity, but when life hands her characters lemons, they make lemon tarts—and lots of them. “In the Kitchen She Wakes” pivots on the emotional struggle of a woman dealing with the recent separation from her husband, in part by baking excessive amounts of lemon tarts. The story is a concise five paragraphs, but Freele expresses an entire universe of feelings despite its elfin size.

“What the hell did you bake this time?”

“Lemon Tarts.”

“No pen caps sprinkled on top?”

“They’re perfect.”

She hears him adjusting himself on the pillow. “I love your lemon tarts,    damn it.”

She can smell inside his glove compartment, cigars and tape. She can taste the shoulder of his wool sweater. “Will you just stay on the phone while I get back in bed?”

He breathes.

When stories are thus compressed, even Freele’s titles are vital. “From Bootleg to Blackout—the History of Relapse in America,” one of the shortest stories in the collection (there are a total of fifty-one), begins with what almost every alcoholic utters at one point: “I will never drink again.” We know the ending because of the title, but Freele conveys in a few broad strokes and some large gaps in the text (signifying perhaps blackouts), the ugliness between “I’ll never drink again” and complete relapse. The story crisply portrays alcoholism, while simultaneously examining the idiom “I will never drink again.” As readers, we are compelled to rethink all hackneyed sayings as well as alcoholism itself.

Stefanie Freele’s work sometimes prompts the reader to forgo concepts of time, logic, size, and reality; in the collection we encounter a carnivorous sinkhole, a levitating baby, and mysteriously appearing appliances. In “Fish Fishy” a woman hides in a fish tank from her husband while he mutters things like “Don’t drink from the aquarium please,” and “You can’t fit in there; this is only a twenty gallon tank.” The absurdity is apparent, until the husband says, “Come on, hon, come on. I apologized didn’t I?” His wife then “drifts “underneath the fish, one leg wrapped around a fin, the other drifting lazily in the decorative rock”. The woman is suspended in the tank and in the argument she had with her husband, floating physically and mentally underwater in a liquid limbo, with the muffled sound of her own conflicting thoughts. Suddenly, the story doesn’t seem so peculiar.

Again, in “A Glowing Pregnant Woman,” Freele examines normalcy and overused adages. Freele dissects the oft-repeated phrase said to pregnant women; ‘you are glowing’ and challenges clichés, of both language and motherhood. “The bed lay unmade as she’d slunk back in it three times today. The dishes of half-tried beans and untouched tuna attracted ants in the kitchen. The floor hadn’t been cleaned in a week. . . .She belched and supported her aching head with her arm. The fatigue behind her eyes—impossible as all she seemed to do was sleep—urged her back to the pillow.”  Soon, the “father of the blossoming fetus” comes home from work and his pregnant wife undresses. Her husband sees her naked breast and turned on, undresses himself.  “Her pre-pregnancy brain acknowledged his muscles and flat stomach, but still, despite every intention, she scrambled for the toilet and heaved white cottage cheese into the bowl . . . .” Freele’s rendition of the otherwise formulaic expression, ‘You are glowing’ shows that pregnancy isn’t necessarily fulsome, and the phrase itself becomes a parody, rendered meaningless by revealing what lay beneath it.

Freele and Frank convey, in fully formed ecosystems, the sublime intricacies of daily life. The women who form the nucleus of the activity are faulted and palpable, and their stories bear the fraught anticipation when your back is to the wave of an incoming tide; and like a rogue wave, the stories catch you off guard but plunge downward with a meaningful thump. Frank and Freele’s stories explore what hides under details, events, and clichés and they administer doses of domesticity that are germane and realistic with no satisfying resolve, because life itself is untidy. As Frank’s narrator in “Savoir Faire, Savoir Vivre” notes, “It seemed that the very beautiful owned a secret…knowing what to do, how to live. And there in that knowledge, I thought, the anointed few dwelt forever: untouchable, divine.” And human beings are simply not divine.

As an NBCC book critic, there are things I do before critiquing a book: I read the book; I try to hear the author speak or read his or her own work; and I try to rest my opinions of the scope and intention of the published work…rest assured published author, I proceed with caution, care, and respect for you…because YOU have published a book, no easy feat itself. But what should you expect from your assigned publicist?

Expect nothing. If you depend solely on your publisher’s publicist to help your book gain exposure, well, don’t. My recent attempt to try to obtain the thinnest of information about a forthcoming author and his book was met with fairly unresponsive emails for the author’s publicist, someone explicitly named as the person of contact on the Advanced Reader’s Copy I received. Often it seemed my emails were skimmed, responded to hurriedly, or not understood at all. The odd responses I received to my simple question (“does your author have any events in [UNNAMED LOCATION] that are NOT listed on his website?”) reinforced my belief that you, dear author, should take care to promote yourself. Your publicist could be: underpaid, overworked, not reading emails carefully, inexperienced, busy with their 4^th of July preparations (I got an “out of office” reply on July 1 preceding the July 4 holiday) or suspiciously, not as interested in the sale of your book as you are. I’m not saying all publicists are not paying attention…but some, unfortunately, fall into this category. (Apologies to those of you doing your job brilliantly).

Besides writing your book, the most important draft is that of your promotion plan. This could include anything from a follow up children’s book of your novel, a book club guide, or a kick ass website, blog included. You could also start a nonprofit, participate in panels, teach a class, write a column, anything that will keep your readers interested in you and your next book (you do have a next book, right? That should be in your promotion plan, too). And if you do blog or Facebook or Twitter, (which you should; eBook sales grew a whopping 164% from 2009 to 2010 so your book and your name should be omnipresent on the web) please don’t stop as soon as your book tour begins; your book sales will decline just as quickly as your interest in yourself. In other words, if you are not interested in yourself and your publicist is queuing up at the barbeque or the Martha’s Vineyard Ferry, your book will die dusty upon the sale table at your nearest Barnes and Noble or drop precipitously from eBook enigma to digital death.

To  follow up to my previous post, my husband discovered (after only one inquiry to the firecracker lighter himself) that the owner of the bar across the street was shooting off fireworks in order to shoo away our newest resident  homeless person. The homeless man recently settled in a small garbage heap that was the result of the wind blowing garbage around town, it all landing in a cement roofless enclosure that abuts a building. After a month, the garbage heap began to enlarge and scatter across the parking lot next door. Often the homeless man, although deeply embedded in the garbage heap he helped create, is invisible unless he tries talking to any passer-bys. He is sick, you can see that, and unable to communicate except in garbled pleas, in a language I don’t understand.

My husband and I have spoken to the building security guards, the police, a gentleman who works at the prison, to see how we could help this man, to see what is available to him, to see how Curacao handles the homeless situation (which seems, especially for the population, astoundingly large). We found out that homeless people have services available, but they have to opt for them…in other words, if they want to seek shelter, they have to walk into the shelter. That’s sensible, in a way, but for this man who can barely walk, never mind find someone who will drive him to the shelter and have the capacity to ask for help, is futile. Instead, he is being firecrackered out of his bed every night and will probably stay until he gets tired of all the noise. This we have in common.