Socially Distant Cuisine

Okay, so today two "news" articles have made me laugh out loud. First, Slate reports on the " Meatlifting " epidemic. Now that pseudophedrine is behind the pharmacy counter in many states, home meth chefs have been replaced by "aspirational meatlifters" as the scourge of the grocery industry. Who are they? Gainfully employed women between the ages of 35 and 54, who think that every once in awhile they deserve the filet mignon, and are willing to shove it into their purse. Second, the NYT home and garden section has a hilarious vignette of "MTV’s Real World with a slovenly cast of Democratic power brokers," Rep. George Miller's (D-Calif.) Capitol Hill crash pad. Apparently Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is known to kill rats with his bare hands, but they make Senator Schumer (D-NY) take care of the mice.

Just started reading my first for-fun book of the holiday season... The Russian Debutante's Handbook. I'm not very far in, but this paragraph, from one of the first pages, portends good things. "Janus-faced sandwich"? Delightful! Meanwhile, in the cluttered back office, junior clerk Vladimir Girshkin-the immigrant's immigrant, the expatriate's expatriate, enduring victim of every practical joke the late twentieth century had to offer and an unlikely hero for our times-was going at it with the morning's first double-cured-spicy-soppressata-and-avocado sandwich. How Vladimir loved the unforgiving hardness of the soppressata and the fatty undertow of the tender avocado! The proliferation of this kind of Janus-faced sandwich, as far as he was concerned, was the best thing about Manhattan in the summer of 1993.

Really interesting article in NYT today about Rick Lowe, an artist living in Houston. His work with young single mothers, artists, and low-income renters boarders on urban renewal, and gentrification of a low-income neighborhood is following his work. Will be interesting to see whether the project (and its multi-constiutency coalition) can work to maintain some diversity in the neighborhood in the future. I liked the quote: “We can approach our lives as artists, each and every one of us,” he said. “It’s a choice people have. You don’t have to make houses the way people always have. If you choose to, you can make every action a creative act.”

Just read John Banville's The Sea . It was sad, meditative, and truly beautiful. Choice quotes: Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much a matter of accumulation, of taking things--new experiences, new emotions--and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self. But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentus change of all?

More at the NYT on the boy crisis. Why, I wonder, are they so obsessed with this topic? Good quote from Sara Mead at Education Sector , wondering whether this is a symptom of feminist backlash: I'm troubled by this tone of crisis. Even if you control for the field they're in, boys right out of college make more money than girls, so at the end of the day, is it grades and honors that matter, or something else the boys may be doing? Bottom line: being male is still an advantage in the workplace. How could this be? Oh, I've got it. Just combine the Slacker Boy Phenomenon with the Opt-out Revolution that NYT is equally happy to pump. Boys don't *need* to be high school and college all-stars... they'll still have great jobs, because so many of the well-qualified, high-achieving women simply don't want to work! I can't wait for the forthcoming article blaming the opt-out women for the slacker boys' choices to play video games 6 hours a day rather than stud...

Sharp gusts of wind tugged at the joints of her arms as if they wanted to pull her into the sky, up and away from the Oregon shore where she stood. The clouds were all shades of gray, ranging from pure white to angry, thunderclap dark. Her kite was a lonely patch of bright against the dark of sky, reflecting a bit of light from somewhere unknown as it was pulled here and there in the blustery fall. The dark sand was cold and firm against her bare toes, and as a bigger gust inflated the u-shaped patch of fabric, she dug deep into her spot, fixing herself to the ground as the kite pulled her arms further up to the sky. For a moment, she felt like a tree, her toe-roots strongly anchoring her to the earth, and her branch-arms reaching upwards, straining away from her body and its center. It was the kind of kite with two long strings and two yellow plastic handles, the model that professional tricksters can guide into figure-eights and impressive loops. She had tried these tricks at th...

I've been watching too much television. DVR and digital cable are evil, evil tools. The electronic guide makes searching the billion available channels far too simple, and with 300 channels, there's always something on. Luckily for me, the new set of roomies was down with scaling back to the "normal" cable... hopefully this will help me cure my addiction. Another proven cure: find a new hobby. Enter: piano playing. I have always wanted to learn to play the piano. I played the flute from fifth to tenth grade, and the oboe in 11th, so I'm not a complete musical novice. I just have never had the chance to learn piano. In a rush of inspiration, I bought a beautiful "electronic piano" (didn't these used to be called keyboards?!), a book of excruciating exercises (like taking your medicine--has to be good for you, right), and found a teacher. He is Russian and was trained at the Moscow Conservatory. We had our first meeting on Sunday, and based on...

I'm obsessed with n+1 . I read the pieces, and I want to talk about them... to spend time with ideas. One of my favorite things to do as an undergraduate (o, idealistic days of yore!) was to sit down to a mediocre dining hall dinner and talk with people about what they had learned or thought about that day... we were always full of ideas. Now, even though I am surrounded by people just as smart, we spend our days thinking about functional things. I should cancel old credit cards I haven't used in awhile. I should call the power company to switch over the bill to my name. I should book a rental car for my trip to California. I miss the luxurious days filled with thoughts beyond the mundane. Until I can live those again, I'll be a vouyer via n+1. *This issue, there was an inventory of "American Writing Today." From this, I realized that I am well-versed in short stories, but functionally illiterate in contemporary poetry. So, I have resolved to read more p...

Great (if long) piece in the NYT magazine about the implications of a digital universal library... this still seems very sci-fi to me, but the possibilities for reorganizing knowledge are amazing. What if all books were linked together in a web like the internet? I can imagine that it would be incredibly useful, but also a bit overwhelming. Sometimes, as it is, I get sidetracked from a journal article by the footnotes... imagine what would happen if you could link directly to the books/articles/pages that were referenced! Would I ever be able to finish a complete thought?

His goal in life was to be an echo The type of sound that floats around and then back down Like a feather But in the deep chrome canyons of the loudest Manhattans No one could hear him Or anything Wilco. Hummingbird.

Robert Hass Many are making love. Up above, the angels in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond and the texture of cold rivers. They glance down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy-- it must look to them like featherless birds splashing in the spring puddle of a bed-- and then one woman, she is about to come, peels back the man's shut eyelids and says, look at me, and he does. Or is it the man tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater? Anyway, they do, they look at each other; two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious, startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet lubricious glue, stare at each other, and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically like lithographs of Victorian beggars with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags in the lewd alleys of the novel. All of creation is offended by this distress. It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes, ...

Frank Bidart up or down from the infinite C E N T E R B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time the voice in my head said LOVE IS THE DISTANCE BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE * then I saw the parade of my loves those PERFORMERS comics actors singers forgetful of my very self so often I desired to die to myself to live in them then my PARENTS my FRIENDS the drained SPECTRES once filled with my baffled infatuations love and guilt and fury and sweetness for whom nail spirit yearning to the earth * then the voice in my head said WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS REVOLT AGAINST IT WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE 1984

That man he had no resistance in him Even as they brought him to his death I resist every moment that I have I fear the future I rewrite my past Maybe it's peace that lies beyond fear and desire Maybe it's peace that's calling me home If I pass through the doorway of fear and desire Maybe it's peace that will welcome me home I knew there must be a way for the finding Though I feared it could not be of this world If I worry or speak ill of you I'll just say a prayer or two And my soul will remind me I'm still loving you Chorus ©2004 Heaton/Marotta

This morning on the Orange Line train to work, Singing Metro Man made an appearance. If you ride the Orange or the Blue Line, you may know of him...I’ve heard from other passengers that he’s been around for years, though I can only confirm the last three. He’s an elderly Asian gentleman, well-dressed, who steps onto the train right before the doors close. Once the train begins to move, he clears his throat, says a polite but insistent “Excuse me,” and begins to sing a hymn from his songbook. The effect is eerie. The silent morning train, everyone still half-asleep before their first cup of coffee. The whoosh of the tunnel. The man’s gentle, earnest voice singing a capella (he’s not half bad) about how we should trust in Jesus. As he reached his crescendo this morning, I half expected the train to explode or something—the moment just felt very... cinematic. Luckily, life is not a movie, and after the song was done, he wished us all a good day, exited the train and moved to the n...

The most e-mailed article in the NYT for 2 days running? A ruminition on Mac N Cheese, with a couple of recipes. I tried the one for Creamy Macaroni and Cheese tonight-- and Lord! So good. Just to test the recipe, I followed the directions to the letter... it was delicious, though I think I could have easily included about 50% more pasta for all the sauce it made. It was super easy (no yukky white sauce to make/burn, don't need to precook the pasta), and amazing. It probably wouldn't taste that different with lowfat cottage cheese and 1% or skim milk... next time, I'll try that.

Everyone talks about The Unbearable Lightness of Being-- it's one of those novels that's considered a character trait. What I mean is that, if a writer gives his character The Unbearable Lightness as a favorite novel, we're supposed to understand something profound about the character. Anyway, I've finally gotten around to reading it, and I understand the hype. It's beautiful. This symmetrical composition--the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end--may seem "novelistic" to you, and I'm willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a perma...

Today was gorgeous... I took a long walk down around The Mall this afternoon, and it was incredible. I took my parents down there, and they went to the Museum of the American Indian and the Botanical Gardens, while I went to the Hirshhorn. I love the Hirshhorn. Their "Gyroscope" exhibition of the permanent collection is always changing, and the Fall 2005 presentation recently went up. There was an Ann Hamilton installation piece that is new since the last time I was there; it was pretty amazing. It consisted of a room papered floor to ceiling in probably a thousand little pieces of parchment paper, each covered in writing... snippets of story, little confessonal memoir bits. Each one was attached to the wall by a pushpin at the top, and the paper kind of rustled and fluttered because a fan was set up to blow across the room. The floor was similarly tiled with the pieces, though these were under a layer of beeswax, and couldn't be read. I was just really moved by the...

In the past 2 days, I've had probably 5 different people forward me Maureen Dowd's Sunday piece from the NYT. I think she's partly doing the thing that the NYT is wont to do in their social commentary--they see a few instances of something and take it as a broader trend. Did you read the piece she refers to about Ivy League women wanting to be mothers? The reporter interviewed three Yale roommates for that one. I question whether it's really a trend... I talked about it with several friends from college, and we don't think it was at Wellesley. We are certainly concerned about how we're going to balance work and family, but I didn't know many who outright wanted to get married to a rich man and stay home with the kids all day. Maybe Wellesley's not the norm on that one, though. That said, I think the stuff she says about dating is interesting... she's written a lot in the last year about how men only want passive, unaccomplished women, and she...

Okay, so I was spurred by the Didion love to go read some stuff I wrote early in college... so cute! Was I ever that young? Earlier in the evening, she twisted the top off of her first bottle of Bud Light self-consciously, as if everyone was watching. In her mind, this room of strangers just might base their opinions of her on whether or not she could gracefully complete the task. It’s the kind of insecurity that plagues a novice drinker’s mind as she tries to embrace the complicated and nuanced practice of social alcohol consumption. Judging by the ease with which those around her were rid of their lids, she was obviously surrounded by people who had been acquainted with the process longer than she. A guy across the room, a football player type wearing a muscle shirt, had used the skin of his forearm to grip and twist the cap, a move that both impressed and repulsed her. How many beers did he have to drink in order to learn that one? No doubt, many nights of slovenly drunkenness ...

So sad-- just realized yesterday that Joan Didion is doing a reading of her new book at the Folger Shakespeare Library, but that it's sold out. I called to see if I could show up for some standing room love, but no dice. I'm hoping that someone will answer my Craigslist ad for a ticket, but something tells me that the bulk of the PEN/Faulkner Society crowd doesn't use CL. I'm an underliner-- when I'm reading, there are always passages or sentence I want to mark to note... for their beauty, or their truth. When I'm reading Didion, I want to underline everything. Freshman year in college, in my Women and Memoir class, we read Goodbye to All That , an essay she wrote in her early 30's about living in New York as a young woman. Choice bits below in an homage to Didion, and to being young: Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first perso...