Okay, for those of you who read who much I couldn't relate to Things Fall Apart, get ready for another negative review. (I almost said lukewarm review, but I really am more than cool about this one.)
Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the introduction where David Thomson writes: "Over the years I have recommended Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays to people, and I have learned to be cautious or terse ... And sometimes people come back with a hurt look: the book is very ... sordid, isn't it? And tough - by which they they mean not a tough read but hard-hearted. Sometimes people flat out say the story is bleak and unpleasant ... So I say, "Read the book," but I add as little as possible about it in advance."
On the other hand, Thomson has wonderful things to say about the opening line: "What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask ... " ponders Maria the central character of this tale of drugs, adultery, and movie-making in the 60s.
Ironic Maria begins with Iago. In Shakespeare, evil is personified. Motives are clear and corruption punished. In Maria's world, not only is she a passive, zonked out victim, but her misfortunes are as random as a roulette wheel. Somehow, despite their being written a decade and continents apart, PIAIL and TFA, both have perspectives that place the protagonist in surroundings that destroy them, "tragedies" wherein neither Maria nor Okonkwo gain insight into their creating their own ill fortune.
This view of times and place controlling the protagonist is, for me, a thin story line. I want a character meeting his fate full frontal. The singing of the tale is not in the victory but in the struggle and growth. Okonkwo is dead and Maria's soul is lost at the conclusion of both books and the reader leaves the last page in both novels equally stunned, equally uninspired. A reader does not meet an admirable hero, does not garner hope for the human condition. No wonder deconstructionism emerged with genres like this.
Second thoughts: At least this book is provocative in that I lay in bed last night trying to figure out why it disturbed me so. Eventually, I decided it is more Kafka-esque than Beat. If Maria were to inventory her life and emotions, she'd be left with a list something like this:
Husband = philanderer
Child = institutionalized
Parents = mother a probable suicide; father a losing gambler
Female friends = surgically enhanced aging swingers
Male friends = guiltless womanizers
Career = exploited by above men
Interests = drugs and driving, often simultaneously
Life's pleasures = nonexistant
Life's purpose = no free will as everything is pointless, random and unpreventable
So how can Didion convey all that information and atmosphere in just over 200 pages, a very quick read? Why do I impose this bleak world and critical story events onto her as necessarily autobiographical? Would I ever do the same with Kafka?
Essentially, no. What Didion is is hyper-alert and blessedly distant from the malaise of the West Coast in the 60s. She is a keen observer of life in the fast lane living and she creates Maria not as a voice of reason, but as a voice silenced in the desert: "Maria faltered. She realized that she expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would crash if she boarded them in bad spirit, as unquestionably as she believed that loveless marriages ended in cancer of the cervix and equivocal adultery in fatal accidents to children. Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal." This philosophy was imprinted on her by her parents and her harsh, destitute surroundings; it was confirmed by her husband's affairs and her daughter's mental illness.
Other reviewers have noted the symbolism of snakes, eggs and cold rooms that recur in the book as further metaphors for the sexual dysfunction pervasive in the story. I rather noted Maria's fantasies about food. So she doesn't look like a lonely single woman in the grocery store, she buys super-sized packages of items she never can use. When she thinks about how her life could be different, she sees herself canning preserves, fruits in beautiful jewel colors lined up in jars in her kitchen. She wants to be a classic housewife, making a larder rich, feeding her children, somewhere warm and quiet. Didion can write about longing and the soul-wrenching vacancy of contrived bustle.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Three Books Delinquent: Things Fall Apart
I vow I will get these book reviews posted. It's not a question of dropping off a cliff literary-wise after a bang-up start to 2012, but my A author and D author are not eliciting cheers from the mountain top.
First, some comments on Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. This is a simple story, almost an allegory, of tribal life in Africa before the white missionaries arrive and the impact they have on native religion and community once they do. The story focuses on Okonkwo a prosperous yam farmer, his three wives and their children. It begins with a bit of history about Okonkwo's lazy father who was in debt to most of the tribal elders and who would rather play music than work in the fields. In direct opposition to his father's example, Okonkwo decides to be an ambitious hard-working man. His ambition has an underside of anger and intolerance: he is abusive to family members and twice finds his impulses have threatened his entire village. The first time, he accidentally kills a young man and is exiled to his mother's village for seven years. By the time he returns home, the missionaries have established a church and school and attracted several converts including his eldest son.
His second crime is much more intentional. He decapitates a white governmental official, completely ignoring the temperance urged by other tribal leaders, and committing suicide as a result of his shame.
I have found it difficult to get into African literature, be it as "pop" as the number one ladies detective agency series or David Eggers' What is the What. It seems to be a literature still coming to terms with history, war and identity -- themes common enough in other cultures' stories but without context or understanding on my part.
And maybe it's because I am on a streak of so-so books and nothing is appealing to me. This is hardly going to make anyone want to read the other reviews I will shortly post. Sorry, go on to Corelli if you want to hear something glowing.
First, some comments on Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. This is a simple story, almost an allegory, of tribal life in Africa before the white missionaries arrive and the impact they have on native religion and community once they do. The story focuses on Okonkwo a prosperous yam farmer, his three wives and their children. It begins with a bit of history about Okonkwo's lazy father who was in debt to most of the tribal elders and who would rather play music than work in the fields. In direct opposition to his father's example, Okonkwo decides to be an ambitious hard-working man. His ambition has an underside of anger and intolerance: he is abusive to family members and twice finds his impulses have threatened his entire village. The first time, he accidentally kills a young man and is exiled to his mother's village for seven years. By the time he returns home, the missionaries have established a church and school and attracted several converts including his eldest son.
His second crime is much more intentional. He decapitates a white governmental official, completely ignoring the temperance urged by other tribal leaders, and committing suicide as a result of his shame.
I have found it difficult to get into African literature, be it as "pop" as the number one ladies detective agency series or David Eggers' What is the What. It seems to be a literature still coming to terms with history, war and identity -- themes common enough in other cultures' stories but without context or understanding on my part.
And maybe it's because I am on a streak of so-so books and nothing is appealing to me. This is hardly going to make anyone want to read the other reviews I will shortly post. Sorry, go on to Corelli if you want to hear something glowing.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
The Chauvinistic Theatergoer: The Shakespeare Riots
The Shakespeare Riots introduced me to a part of Americana long lost: a time when, still a young country, America regarded Shakespeare’s plays, especially his dramas, as models of personal, community and national behavior; and when the audience was a cross-section of all classes with conflicting tastes, expectations of actors, and attention spans.
I came across this history of the Astor Place Riot of May 1849 when I was looking to see what else Nigel Cliff, author of Holy War, had written, and its title appealed to me. Having read most of his plays in third English Lit core course in college – from an anthology I remember most as the place where during every Monday’s lecture I wrote the previous weekend Yale football game score – I was pressed to imagine performances inciting riots. Any book that begins with an acknowledgment or quote from de Tocqueville immediately has my attention: "The tastes and inclinations natural to democratic nations will ... find their first literary expression in the theatre, where we can be sure they will make a violent entry. On the page, aristocratic traditions will be gradually modified in, so to speak, a legal manner. In the theatre, they will be overthrown by riots." (This composed almost a decade before Astor Place.) Couple de Tocqueville with an early reference to what was going on with touring actors in Albany, and I’m fully transfixed.
Alexis recognized the civilizing and alienating elements of the theater. As the country’s population moved west, as towns sprung up, so did rudimentary stages, followed by more culturally affected venues. Rag tag troupes were in turn succeeded by “stars,” most notably the touring Englishman, William Macready and Edwin Forrest, a rough-hewn Jacksonian, who both came to personify the antagonism festered by memories of too recent wars and exaggerated patriotism.
Interwoven are other literary icons from both sides of the Atlantic: Dickens whose critique of America after his visit, contributes to the vitriol; Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper writing almost as mediators and finding no audience. As provincial as America comes off during this period of history, England already displays low brow behaviors and traits that continue today as national stereotypes: inflammatory scandal sheet newspapers and a preference to spectacle, circus and vaudeville over serious drama. The book also details the effect of the gangs from Five Points in the riots, the emergence of NYC's silk stocking National Guardsmen,
At the conclusion of chapter ten, Cliff distills the factors leading up to the riot: "A personal, a local, and an international feud had all converged in one fraught moment. Macready's determination to make the theatre respectable had made him the archetype of the Victorian Englishman. Forrest's frontier populism had made him the hero of the new America ... English abuse had worn America's patience thin, and American expansionism and indebtedness had raised English hackles. The wealth of New York's elite had incensed its increasingly impoverished workers, and the power of gangs had made organized violence demonstrable threat ... Not least of all, America's conflicted relationship with its heritage had split the nation into two opposing camps, and both were determined to claim Shakespeare as their own ... It was absurd that two Shakespearean actors fomented one of the worst riots in American history, but it would have been even more astonishing if peace had suddenly set it."
Finally, Cliff analyzes the effects of the riot: " ... there was a strange new sound from the audience - silence. No longer were interventions from the gallery tolerated ... the working classes gravitated to vaudeville houses ... the age of the theatres as meeting places for an entire society had come to an end ... to the public minded middle classes, the riot at last brought home the shocking depth and extent of disaffection in their midst. They became obsessed with the image of New York City as a diseased organism (even going so far as to clear out space for Central Park)." The Bard was stripped of old acrobatics and song and dance acts and performed with due deference to genius, yet in schools, Shakespeare became a perplexing puzzle of metrics and syntax (gee that reminds me of that old anthology again) and not a writer of familiar speeches to roll around the tongue. And on the stage, his plays were often turned into burlesques.
In retrospect, I would recommend if M'ville still approaches English Lit through five core courses, more overlay of concurrent histories might make the literature both have more context and at the same time, prove its timelessness. And now back to Vasco de Gama and the Holy Wars.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Getting Off to a Good Start in 2012: A Lesson Before Dying
This is the first book officially on the '12 Bucket List but after enjoying The Table Comes First, I am most delighted to find I like Ernest Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying. Little did I know that he wrote The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, one of those movies I never got around to seeing either.
Although Gaines wrote ALBD in 1993, it is set in the pre-Freedom Rider South where the locality is still referred to as the "plantation" and not the Parish in Louisiana. The main characters are a young black teacher who returns home after is college education to teach in the black church and a teenage boy who is found guilty of murder when he is with two of his friends and they are shot when accosting a liquor store owner. The all white jury convicts him; his defense attorney pleads for mercy, claiming nothing is served from electrocuting him, an act that is as insignificant as doing it to a hog.
Grant Wiggins, the teacher, is badgered by his aunt to visit Jefferson in jail and make him "a man" so his nannan can be proud of him. That is the lesson, explicitly to be learned, but both Jefferson and Grant grow and gain tremendous insights into their position in their closed, biased, family-driven society. The story is a bit overblown and maybe dated, but it is so well written. Gaines prose sings. His depiction of rural Louisiana is just as vivid as Pat Conroy's of Charleston, just the other side of the tracks.
There was only one page that I dog-eared. I seem to be looking for those paragraphs or pages where the author just has to intrude, to speak as himself and not through a character. Often those selections are the real ur-story, the why the book was written. This kind of bleeding into the plot or purpose strikes me as an irresistible temptation: the more professional, business-related writing I do, the more the itch to intrude affects me. A writer has to express himself, why else write. It is all graffiti, the "I was here and this is what I had to say"... even when I was asked to pretend to be someone else.
So the self-evidence I found in Gaines' novel, in the voice of Grant giving his lesson to Jefferson: "Let me explain it to you ... We black men have failed to protect our women since the time of slavery. We stay here in the South and are broken, or we run away and leave them alone to look after the children and themselves. So each time a male child is born, they hope he will be the one to change this vicious cycle -- and he never does. Because even though he wants to change it, and maybe even tries to change it, it is too heavy a burden because all of the others who have run away and left their burdens behind. So, he, too. must run away if he is to hold on to his sanity and have a life of his own ... What (she) wants from him ... is to change everything that has been going on for three hundred years." Grant is laden not just with a family obligation, but a Savior like demand of his time, place and people.
It is a story of ties and expectations, family and cultural demands and myths that circumscribe and eat away at all characters. It shows us all how to live beyond frustrations and biases. I cried at the end, wrapped up in the story, and reserved another Gaines to deepen my exposure to his talents.
Although Gaines wrote ALBD in 1993, it is set in the pre-Freedom Rider South where the locality is still referred to as the "plantation" and not the Parish in Louisiana. The main characters are a young black teacher who returns home after is college education to teach in the black church and a teenage boy who is found guilty of murder when he is with two of his friends and they are shot when accosting a liquor store owner. The all white jury convicts him; his defense attorney pleads for mercy, claiming nothing is served from electrocuting him, an act that is as insignificant as doing it to a hog.
Grant Wiggins, the teacher, is badgered by his aunt to visit Jefferson in jail and make him "a man" so his nannan can be proud of him. That is the lesson, explicitly to be learned, but both Jefferson and Grant grow and gain tremendous insights into their position in their closed, biased, family-driven society. The story is a bit overblown and maybe dated, but it is so well written. Gaines prose sings. His depiction of rural Louisiana is just as vivid as Pat Conroy's of Charleston, just the other side of the tracks.
There was only one page that I dog-eared. I seem to be looking for those paragraphs or pages where the author just has to intrude, to speak as himself and not through a character. Often those selections are the real ur-story, the why the book was written. This kind of bleeding into the plot or purpose strikes me as an irresistible temptation: the more professional, business-related writing I do, the more the itch to intrude affects me. A writer has to express himself, why else write. It is all graffiti, the "I was here and this is what I had to say"... even when I was asked to pretend to be someone else.
So the self-evidence I found in Gaines' novel, in the voice of Grant giving his lesson to Jefferson: "Let me explain it to you ... We black men have failed to protect our women since the time of slavery. We stay here in the South and are broken, or we run away and leave them alone to look after the children and themselves. So each time a male child is born, they hope he will be the one to change this vicious cycle -- and he never does. Because even though he wants to change it, and maybe even tries to change it, it is too heavy a burden because all of the others who have run away and left their burdens behind. So, he, too. must run away if he is to hold on to his sanity and have a life of his own ... What (she) wants from him ... is to change everything that has been going on for three hundred years." Grant is laden not just with a family obligation, but a Savior like demand of his time, place and people.
It is a story of ties and expectations, family and cultural demands and myths that circumscribe and eat away at all characters. It shows us all how to live beyond frustrations and biases. I cried at the end, wrapped up in the story, and reserved another Gaines to deepen my exposure to his talents.
Friday, January 6, 2012
2011 Trailers: Still Craving Food
Several books sit on the nightstand as remnants of my reading list of 2011, or just an odd assortment of tangents. To wrap up the diversion I took from lust into gluttony, today I finished Adam Gopnik's Te Table Comes First: Family, France and the Meaning of Food. And like the Michelin restaurant critics that have fallen so out of favor, I must rate this four stars.
Right with his appetizing prologue, Gopnik adds context instead of garnishes to his subject: "Why do we care so much about food? There's a sociological explanation (it's a signal of status), a psychological explanation (it takes the place of sex), and a puritanical explanation (it's the simplest sign of virtue) ... Having made food a more fashionable object, we have ended by making eating a smaller object. When "gastronomy" was on the margins of attention it seemed big because it was an unexpected way to get at everything -- the nature of hunger; the meaning of appetite; the patterns and traces of desire; tradition, in the way that recipes are passed mother to son; and history, in the way that spices mix and, in mixing, mix peoples. You could envision through a modest lens of pleasure as through a keyhole, a whole world; and the compression and odd shape of the keyhole made the picture more dramatic. Now the door is wide open, but somehow we see less, or notice less, anyway. Betrayed by its enlargement, food becomes less intimate the more intensely it is made to matter."
Even the reason behind how he selected the title resonated with me: "I don't understand how a young couple can begin life by buying a sofa or a television ... Don't they know the table comes first? ... The table comes first in the sense that its drama -- the people who gather at it, the conversation that flows across it, and the pain and the romance that happens around it -- is more essential to our real lives ..." I subliminally knew that when at age 28 and still living at home, I knew the piece of furniture I had to buy and store temporarily in my bedroom to convince my mother I really was moving out was a dining room table, the very one that still reigns in my formal dining room decades later.
Gopnik is upfront in his acknowledging the link between my two favorite deadly sins, at least in the realm of the restaurant: "The man who asks the girl out to dinner is not, after all, actually suggesting sex except by the airiest remote inference; he is pretending to be a better man than that; let's meet, talk, try. The restaurant offers the hope of happiness that gives greedy sex the look of lighthearted love, and, in the erotic sphere as much as the eating sphere, turns raw hunger into formal appetite. The restaurant offers not seduction but what precedes seduction, the false promise of pure motives." Perhaps this is why so many restaurant reviewers refer to their fellow dinners as "fair companion" or some phrase equally double entendre-d. Or this is why a friend of mine describes his meals at the latest chi-chi restaurants to a retired chef, hoping that she knows the code to translate these commentaries into the sexual adventures they "feed" into.
Written clearly as his conclusion, is another tenet of fine dining that I hold dear yet never verbalized as well: "A modern meal is a drama unfolding between the Opening Drink and the Concluding Coffee, with the several acts passing between the libations. And, without strong coffee and red wine, it isn't possible to have good restaurants ... French cooking was made not merely in the space between caffeine and alcohol but in the simultaneous presence of both, thus blending, in sequence, the two drugs by which modern people shape their lives ...Alcohol ... is above all a myopic drug: it forces the imbiber's attention even more narrowly upon what's in front of him. It closes us off and isolates us ... A little glass of wine, and all there is in the world is the date and the table ... Caffeine, on the other hand, is a far-sighted drug. Several sips of cafe noir and the sipper feels charged up ... Wine takes us from the world, nd coffee restores us to it again. In between, we eat."
This is a deeply researched book, resting on the aproned shoulders of history making dining chroniclers. Here's Gopnik's read on Brillat-Savarin: "... gastronomy is the great adventure of desire. Its subject is simple: the table is the place where a need becomes a want ... Eating together is the civilizing act. We take urges, and tame them into taste ... His allied subject was sex, which also began with a gasp and was tamed into a game." Why try to look for lusty turns of phrase elsewhere, mais non? A bit further on in the book, using his ever-sharp down-beat phraseology, Gopnik writes: "... the idea of the restaurant as a public place where women could come for their health without having their morality impugned allowed for a whole new ritual of courtship and sublimated sex. (The appeal to self-improvement is always an acceptable cover for sex; that's why they call them health clubs.)"
Moving on to his second "R" pillar, the recipe, Gopnik once again distills the implicit experience of all kitchen chemists: "Anyone who cooks knows that it is is following recipes that one first learns about the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved ... if the first thing a cadet cook learns is that words can become tastes, the second is that a space exists between what the rules promise and what the cook gets."
The middle section of the book has many fewer page corners turned down as Gopnik writes about the vegetarianism, being a locavore, why it seems innate to rate wines, etc. In these chapters, he seems to be "overstuffed" with analytics and short of his "bon bon" mots. Another device that he relies on overly during his "entrees" is email to Elizabeth Pennell, a woman who in the 1890s, he attributes, was the first to see cookbooks as a literary form. His admiration towards her is based on a common geography but by the end of the book, it separates like cold Bernaise, as he discovers a deep streak of anti-Semitism in her portrait of Philadelphia neighborhoods. At this point, the book for a small book, becomes ponderous. But shortly after this heavy segment, Gopnik moves on to sugar and desserts and the tone lightens up. Once sugar becomes plentiful during the Elizabethean Age: "Fine distinctions between similar states of burnt sugar, between caramel and butterscotch, had just opened up. (A feeling surrounds a flavor when it becomes widespread enough. No one yet quite talks about the umami of a marriage, or the hint of soy when we see our in-laws -- but we all talk easily about our saccharine sisters and our vinegary in-laws and our hot-pepper neighbors ..."
And my last quote: "... the real end of dinner is to articulate time ... the point of eating is to slow down life long enough to promote ... with simple charm, good cheer. It doesn't just take time, but makes time -- carves out evenings, memories."
And finally, my own interpretative corollaries.
1. Children discover participatory theater in restaurants. They move out of being stage hands, setting the family table, and become directors. The show is equal to the menu ... or at least I was equally in love with the finger bowls at Keelers as I was with the raspberry sherbet and expounded on both in fourth grade show and tell.
2. Adults know restaurants are for lovers; therefore, there should never be tables larger than ones sitting two. More people at a restaurant are exercising power: a business lunch, a mother's escape for cooking for visiting relatives, or perhaps worst of all, the banquet to mark some coming of age or transitional event where they wealthy and established regale the neophyte, green in a new role or station of life.
3. Homemade cooking, unlike the erotic undercurrent at restaurants, is all about parental love. Cookbooks become annotated with dates of first time bakings and roastings; scores and opinions of family members are marked in the margins, a written proof that they loved me, the cook. Hallmark cards get thrown out eventually, pictures end up being on Beta tapes no longer accessible or in albums where no one wrote the date, but cookbook marginalia documents a successful household.
Right with his appetizing prologue, Gopnik adds context instead of garnishes to his subject: "Why do we care so much about food? There's a sociological explanation (it's a signal of status), a psychological explanation (it takes the place of sex), and a puritanical explanation (it's the simplest sign of virtue) ... Having made food a more fashionable object, we have ended by making eating a smaller object. When "gastronomy" was on the margins of attention it seemed big because it was an unexpected way to get at everything -- the nature of hunger; the meaning of appetite; the patterns and traces of desire; tradition, in the way that recipes are passed mother to son; and history, in the way that spices mix and, in mixing, mix peoples. You could envision through a modest lens of pleasure as through a keyhole, a whole world; and the compression and odd shape of the keyhole made the picture more dramatic. Now the door is wide open, but somehow we see less, or notice less, anyway. Betrayed by its enlargement, food becomes less intimate the more intensely it is made to matter."
Even the reason behind how he selected the title resonated with me: "I don't understand how a young couple can begin life by buying a sofa or a television ... Don't they know the table comes first? ... The table comes first in the sense that its drama -- the people who gather at it, the conversation that flows across it, and the pain and the romance that happens around it -- is more essential to our real lives ..." I subliminally knew that when at age 28 and still living at home, I knew the piece of furniture I had to buy and store temporarily in my bedroom to convince my mother I really was moving out was a dining room table, the very one that still reigns in my formal dining room decades later.
Gopnik is upfront in his acknowledging the link between my two favorite deadly sins, at least in the realm of the restaurant: "The man who asks the girl out to dinner is not, after all, actually suggesting sex except by the airiest remote inference; he is pretending to be a better man than that; let's meet, talk, try. The restaurant offers the hope of happiness that gives greedy sex the look of lighthearted love, and, in the erotic sphere as much as the eating sphere, turns raw hunger into formal appetite. The restaurant offers not seduction but what precedes seduction, the false promise of pure motives." Perhaps this is why so many restaurant reviewers refer to their fellow dinners as "fair companion" or some phrase equally double entendre-d. Or this is why a friend of mine describes his meals at the latest chi-chi restaurants to a retired chef, hoping that she knows the code to translate these commentaries into the sexual adventures they "feed" into.
Written clearly as his conclusion, is another tenet of fine dining that I hold dear yet never verbalized as well: "A modern meal is a drama unfolding between the Opening Drink and the Concluding Coffee, with the several acts passing between the libations. And, without strong coffee and red wine, it isn't possible to have good restaurants ... French cooking was made not merely in the space between caffeine and alcohol but in the simultaneous presence of both, thus blending, in sequence, the two drugs by which modern people shape their lives ...Alcohol ... is above all a myopic drug: it forces the imbiber's attention even more narrowly upon what's in front of him. It closes us off and isolates us ... A little glass of wine, and all there is in the world is the date and the table ... Caffeine, on the other hand, is a far-sighted drug. Several sips of cafe noir and the sipper feels charged up ... Wine takes us from the world, nd coffee restores us to it again. In between, we eat."
This is a deeply researched book, resting on the aproned shoulders of history making dining chroniclers. Here's Gopnik's read on Brillat-Savarin: "... gastronomy is the great adventure of desire. Its subject is simple: the table is the place where a need becomes a want ... Eating together is the civilizing act. We take urges, and tame them into taste ... His allied subject was sex, which also began with a gasp and was tamed into a game." Why try to look for lusty turns of phrase elsewhere, mais non? A bit further on in the book, using his ever-sharp down-beat phraseology, Gopnik writes: "... the idea of the restaurant as a public place where women could come for their health without having their morality impugned allowed for a whole new ritual of courtship and sublimated sex. (The appeal to self-improvement is always an acceptable cover for sex; that's why they call them health clubs.)"
Moving on to his second "R" pillar, the recipe, Gopnik once again distills the implicit experience of all kitchen chemists: "Anyone who cooks knows that it is is following recipes that one first learns about the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved ... if the first thing a cadet cook learns is that words can become tastes, the second is that a space exists between what the rules promise and what the cook gets."
The middle section of the book has many fewer page corners turned down as Gopnik writes about the vegetarianism, being a locavore, why it seems innate to rate wines, etc. In these chapters, he seems to be "overstuffed" with analytics and short of his "bon bon" mots. Another device that he relies on overly during his "entrees" is email to Elizabeth Pennell, a woman who in the 1890s, he attributes, was the first to see cookbooks as a literary form. His admiration towards her is based on a common geography but by the end of the book, it separates like cold Bernaise, as he discovers a deep streak of anti-Semitism in her portrait of Philadelphia neighborhoods. At this point, the book for a small book, becomes ponderous. But shortly after this heavy segment, Gopnik moves on to sugar and desserts and the tone lightens up. Once sugar becomes plentiful during the Elizabethean Age: "Fine distinctions between similar states of burnt sugar, between caramel and butterscotch, had just opened up. (A feeling surrounds a flavor when it becomes widespread enough. No one yet quite talks about the umami of a marriage, or the hint of soy when we see our in-laws -- but we all talk easily about our saccharine sisters and our vinegary in-laws and our hot-pepper neighbors ..."
And my last quote: "... the real end of dinner is to articulate time ... the point of eating is to slow down life long enough to promote ... with simple charm, good cheer. It doesn't just take time, but makes time -- carves out evenings, memories."
And finally, my own interpretative corollaries.
1. Children discover participatory theater in restaurants. They move out of being stage hands, setting the family table, and become directors. The show is equal to the menu ... or at least I was equally in love with the finger bowls at Keelers as I was with the raspberry sherbet and expounded on both in fourth grade show and tell.
2. Adults know restaurants are for lovers; therefore, there should never be tables larger than ones sitting two. More people at a restaurant are exercising power: a business lunch, a mother's escape for cooking for visiting relatives, or perhaps worst of all, the banquet to mark some coming of age or transitional event where they wealthy and established regale the neophyte, green in a new role or station of life.
3. Homemade cooking, unlike the erotic undercurrent at restaurants, is all about parental love. Cookbooks become annotated with dates of first time bakings and roastings; scores and opinions of family members are marked in the margins, a written proof that they loved me, the cook. Hallmark cards get thrown out eventually, pictures end up being on Beta tapes no longer accessible or in albums where no one wrote the date, but cookbook marginalia documents a successful household.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Happy 2012 ; Not a Bucket, but a To-Do List
For the second year in a row, I am not happy with the results of my annual list. If lust is to be found between the covers, those covers, alas are not those of a hard cover book. Looking backwards and assessing which made it to the top, I select very few, in fact only four:
A Happy Marriage and The Last Time They Met, both of which told the tale of a lost lover, one who died terribly after a long life together and the other before love could blossom. Each provoked thoughts about the "completeness of love," making one partner more than he or she could be without the beloved. The other two are books of terrible themes of perverted love, Lolita and Sade's Philosophy of the Bedroom. In their case, these novels sent me on tangents to read more books with despicable protagonists. In addition, they tickled my fancy in better defining what the list for 2012 should be. They are both "classics" and I realized there are too many notable books that I've never read and should to be a more erudite lover of literature.
Although I plan on reading more than two dozen books over the upcoming twelve months, I will default to my preferred sorting mechanism, picking a book alphabetically by author. Here's what I've chosen so far:
1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe -- January 29, 2012
2. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury -- September 11, 2012 and Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire -- February 25, 2011 and Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
3. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
4. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion -- January 29, 2012 and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
5. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco -- November 25, 2012
6. The Sound and the Fury and/or Go Down Moses by William Faulkner
7. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
and A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines -- January 9, 2012
8. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston -- September 24, 2012 and The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne
9. Exit the King by Eugene Ionesco
10. The Phantom Toll Booth by Norton Juster -- March 16, 2012 and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson -- March 16, 2012
11. Flowers of Algernon by Daniel Keyes and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milos Kundera
12. The Giver by Lois Lowry and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Leguin and The Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle -- March 16, 2012
13. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers; and serendipitous adds: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann -- February 9, 2012 and his Songdogs -- February 23, 2012
14. Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul and The Book of Questions and Intimacies by Pablo Neruda -- December 30, 2012
15. 1984 by George Orwell or The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy and A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor -- April 1, 2012
16. The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe and A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil by V.S. Pritchett
17. Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey
18. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
19. Grapes of Wrath and/or Of Mice and Men by John Steinback
20. The Art of War by by Sun Tzu and Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
21. Gunnar's Daughter by Sigrid Undset
22. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
23. Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton or Beau Geste by Percival Christopher Wren and Decline and Fall by Evenlyn Waugh and My Man Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
24. NEED SOMETHING FOR THE LETTER X
25. Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates
26. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
So, dear Slackers, if you have one or more of those books you feel guilty about never cracking open, please add them to the new year's list.
PS. I've decided to do a separate "OFF LIST" for those other books that I consume during the year.
1. The Shakespeare Riots by Nigel Cliff -- January 21, 2012
2. Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen -- February 12, 2012
3. Coming Apart - The State of White American, 1960 to 2010 by Charles Murray -- March 16, 2012
4. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann -- March 30, 2012
5. The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker -- April 10, 2012
6. Portrait of a Spy by Daniel Silva -- April 10, 2012
7. Drift by Rachel Maddow -- April 20, 2012
8. Come Home by Lisa Scottoline -- April 24, 2012
9. Unholy Night by Seth Grahame-Smith -- April 29, 2012
10. Natural Woman by Carole King -- May 4, 2012
11. The End of Illness by David Agus -- May 9, 2012
12. Celebrity in Death by J D Robb -- May 15, 2012
13. Dropped Names by Frank Langella -- May 24, 2012
14. My Cross to Bear by Greg Allman -- June 1, 2012
15. Drop Dead Healthy by A. J. Jacobs -- June 4, 2012
16. We Have to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver -- July 4, 2012
17. The Female of the Species by Lionel Shriver -- July 7, 2012
18. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller -- July 10, 2012
19. American Eve by Paula Uruburu -- July 14, 2012
20. Seven Seasons in Siena by Robert Rodi -- July 23, 2012
21. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Green -- August 3, 2012
22. The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall -- August 18, 2012
22. The Post Birthday World by Lionel Shriver -- August 3, 2012
23. The Empty Glass by J. I. Baker -- September 7, 2012
24. City of Light by Lauren Belfer -- September 7, 2012
25. Shrub by Molly Ivins -- November 25, 2012
26. The Fiction Class by Susan Breen -- November 25, 2012
27. The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean -- November 25, 2012
28. Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell
A Happy Marriage and The Last Time They Met, both of which told the tale of a lost lover, one who died terribly after a long life together and the other before love could blossom. Each provoked thoughts about the "completeness of love," making one partner more than he or she could be without the beloved. The other two are books of terrible themes of perverted love, Lolita and Sade's Philosophy of the Bedroom. In their case, these novels sent me on tangents to read more books with despicable protagonists. In addition, they tickled my fancy in better defining what the list for 2012 should be. They are both "classics" and I realized there are too many notable books that I've never read and should to be a more erudite lover of literature.
Although I plan on reading more than two dozen books over the upcoming twelve months, I will default to my preferred sorting mechanism, picking a book alphabetically by author. Here's what I've chosen so far:
1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe -- January 29, 2012
2. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury -- September 11, 2012 and Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire -- February 25, 2011 and Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
3. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
4. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion -- January 29, 2012 and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
5. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco -- November 25, 2012
6. The Sound and the Fury and/or Go Down Moses by William Faulkner
7. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
and A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines -- January 9, 2012
8. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston -- September 24, 2012 and The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne
9. Exit the King by Eugene Ionesco
10. The Phantom Toll Booth by Norton Juster -- March 16, 2012 and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson -- March 16, 2012
11. Flowers of Algernon by Daniel Keyes and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milos Kundera
12. The Giver by Lois Lowry and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Leguin and The Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle -- March 16, 2012
13. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers; and serendipitous adds: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann -- February 9, 2012 and his Songdogs -- February 23, 2012
14. Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul and The Book of Questions and Intimacies by Pablo Neruda -- December 30, 2012
15. 1984 by George Orwell or The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy and A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor -- April 1, 2012
16. The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe and A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil by V.S. Pritchett
17. Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey
18. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
19. Grapes of Wrath and/or Of Mice and Men by John Steinback
20. The Art of War by by Sun Tzu and Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
21. Gunnar's Daughter by Sigrid Undset
22. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
23. Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton or Beau Geste by Percival Christopher Wren and Decline and Fall by Evenlyn Waugh and My Man Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
24. NEED SOMETHING FOR THE LETTER X
25. Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates
26. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
So, dear Slackers, if you have one or more of those books you feel guilty about never cracking open, please add them to the new year's list.
PS. I've decided to do a separate "OFF LIST" for those other books that I consume during the year.
1. The Shakespeare Riots by Nigel Cliff -- January 21, 2012
2. Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen -- February 12, 2012
3. Coming Apart - The State of White American, 1960 to 2010 by Charles Murray -- March 16, 2012
4. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann -- March 30, 2012
5. The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker -- April 10, 2012
6. Portrait of a Spy by Daniel Silva -- April 10, 2012
7. Drift by Rachel Maddow -- April 20, 2012
8. Come Home by Lisa Scottoline -- April 24, 2012
9. Unholy Night by Seth Grahame-Smith -- April 29, 2012
10. Natural Woman by Carole King -- May 4, 2012
11. The End of Illness by David Agus -- May 9, 2012
12. Celebrity in Death by J D Robb -- May 15, 2012
13. Dropped Names by Frank Langella -- May 24, 2012
14. My Cross to Bear by Greg Allman -- June 1, 2012
15. Drop Dead Healthy by A. J. Jacobs -- June 4, 2012
16. We Have to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver -- July 4, 2012
17. The Female of the Species by Lionel Shriver -- July 7, 2012
18. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller -- July 10, 2012
19. American Eve by Paula Uruburu -- July 14, 2012
20. Seven Seasons in Siena by Robert Rodi -- July 23, 2012
21. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Green -- August 3, 2012
22. The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall -- August 18, 2012
22. The Post Birthday World by Lionel Shriver -- August 3, 2012
23. The Empty Glass by J. I. Baker -- September 7, 2012
24. City of Light by Lauren Belfer -- September 7, 2012
25. Shrub by Molly Ivins -- November 25, 2012
26. The Fiction Class by Susan Breen -- November 25, 2012
27. The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean -- November 25, 2012
28. Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell
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