Learn by Their Mistakes: Blueprints for Building Better Girls

I'm making my first New Year's resolution for 2012: I will not read a book published in 2012 based on a review from the New York Times magazine. Two times I did such a thing in 2011, for the Julian Barnes Man Booker award novel and now for Elissa Schappell's Blueprints for Building Better Girls, I have been on the whole disappointed ... although I do find Barnes' theme butting into my mind as I read other books. I have no such qualms about Schappell's stories recurring in my mind.

This is a small collection of eight short stories about girls behaving badly, seemingly without recourse or comeuppance. The two longest ones are the ones that are the most dark and for that dire portrayal of girls way in over their heads the are tales of morality, by the lack thereof. It struck me when I finished that with its lipstick red cover with a black cherry on it (a cherry that also looks somewhat like a bomb) that Schappell wanted the book to be used in high school advanced English classes as yet another one of those contemporary stories of dysfunctional families and children who act out badly. I can just hear the teacher saying, "now class, would you be friends in college with Bender?" Or "is Jane just a girl torn between two men or just a tease?"

In addition to these two dark tales of teenage wild children, Schappell writes about bored mothers and empty marriages, and nothing about lustful love. Her only other book, which was nominated for the PEN Faulkner, is titled Use Me, and here I thought I might find a lusty book for December's chilly nights. Nah, the summary sounds again to be about two self-obsessed women. Between Schappell and Barnes, one might come to think that there no longer is any love between the sexes.

Also upon turning the last page, I thanked my lucky stars that I have sons and decided not to mention this collection in Tuesday night's upcoming book club meeting lest those poor women with daughters will lose their minds with worry.

Bundling a Wiki Search: Choice Cuts

What an appropriate day -- Thanksgiving -- on which to review Mark Kurlansky's Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History. This is the last of a bunch of Kurlansky's books I read, none really measuring up to his history of Salt and Cod: 1968, Oyster and now Choice Cuts are all really grade B. CC is such an amalgamation that it reads as disjointedly as if it were prepared by a student who search Wiki for "food" and copied down snippets of every primary, secondary and tertiary hit he got. Until Oyster, CC is not overloaded with repetitious recipes. It is more like an all you can eat buffet, sometimes showing the quality of the cheese grater hotel in Montreal, but more often like the Golden Corral.

I have a closet full of cookbooks on shelves next to the kitchen, some are old reliables, some more souvenirs of other times or places. I subscribe to Food and Wine and probably have too many old Gourmets in the basement, magazines I thought my sons might clip for history or geography of Europe projects in school that never materialized. Like my recent review of why I, or anyone, assemble jigsaw puzzles, I refer to the last entry in Kurlansky's book, by MFK Fisher on why she writes about food: "It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the other."

I have been working in the kitchen today since 6:30 AM, putting together a meal that will make memories for my son, attest to my willingness to adapt the menu to his favorite foods, and express my creativity and signal love and appreciation. I cannot put together a Thanksgiving menu without recalling my mother's or the ones I cooked for her first in my apartment and then this old house. There always was an homage as well as a tease: always a side of Brussel sprouts which she detested. Dessert must be a pie, often sweet potato instead of pumpkin, and more recently chocolate pecan, a pie John would sell his soul for. Very infrequently a turkey, more often a goose when there were enough of us around the table to do it justice, and this year a duck for the three of us. (A duck that will always remind me of setting the oven on fire in my apartment and dowsing it with the glass of beer I happened to have in my hand when I opened the stove.) Always seasonal vegetables, this year replacing the dreaded sprouts, maybe never to be served on holidays again since my mother died this summer, are roasted kohlrabi with butternut squash. Stuffing more like hers, with sausage, since no one here likes chestnuts, and John won't eat oysters ... sorry Kurlansky.

Proust was right ... and a neuroscientist ... that certain food bring unsolicited, pleasant memories. Yet, a chef, as I fancy myself, is also conscientiously intentional about creating those memories. We all recall the year I decided the pilgrims must have tried lobster and we cooked an eight pounder, too big for all our pots, and beyond the reference of friends in Maine who had no idea how long to cook it. Or the year Nana drank so much champagne before dinner that several parts of it were missing or undercooked, but she didn't care at all. Bill is making his own memory today, doing a variation of mac and cheese, gnocchi with Gruyere, as a gift to his friend's parents' supper.

Strangely today on Epicurious was a quick survey about how people regard chocolate: do they share it with a spouse, a friend, or keep it for themselves. I checked off option two, and found myself in the small minority. I always have good chocolate in my desk drawer at work, and people know that and stop by asking for a taste or two. When I get my favorite Vosges chocolate at The Fresh Market, I buy enough to give my college roommate a bar when she comes trick or treating. Finger sticky chocolate is best licked off by another.

Kurlansky delves not only into home cooking but the meaning of dining out. He cites the common reaction of a diner who wants to rush home to try to replicate a meal enjoyed in a restaurant, something I inevitably want to do, with the possible exception of cooking sweetbreads. He does not give enough credence to the importance of one's fellow diners. I select a restaurant with complete regard to the person with whom I am going out to eat: certain places are marked in my mind for special friends and no one else need attend them. I scout new restaurants not only for their specialties or ambiance, but as setting for table mates.

Again, towards the conclusion of his book, Kurlansky cites Balzac on the politics of food: "Just as the first enthusiasts of abstinence were undoubtedly maladjusted, the first enthusiasts of moderation were surely people lacking in appetite ... Aristippe observed that philosophers who distrust wealth are penniless. Diogenes was broke when he was a cynic ... That is the way it is with detractors of appetite, of the tendency that is inherent in well-born men of happy constitution. It is not the first time that charlatans misguided and well spoken, have come to consider a virtue, that which is a well-organized vice." I never want to be abstinent, or even do most things in moderation. I am not a glutton, but an epicure; I am not a trollop, but a sensualist.

The World (or at least NYC) is His Oyster

I'm not sure that one of my ideas for a theme next year will work: namely, finding authors I like and then reading pretty much everything they've written. I will finish the Mark Kurlansky I am a quarter through, but The Big Oyster - History on the Half Shell, didn't engage me as much as some others of his. I loved his Salt and Cod probably because the influence of these food stuffs were depicted on a world wide stage. While Kurlansky garnishes this entree with references to other oyster beds in the southern states, Maine and Europe, he is writing about the growth of NYC and the demise of its harbors and estuaries.

Sometimes the book seemed to be an amalgamation of citations he garnered from a Wiki search. Too many recipes for the same stew, too many Guiness-like records of the hundreds of oysters guzzled on the half shell. His description of oyster cellars and the birth of Delmonico's was interesting but his linking of the entire environmental movement from the pollution of Hudson breeding grounds is a bit of a leap. And I did find one tangent to pursue: his portrait of life in Five Points spurred me to reserve The Gangs of New York at the library.

As a side note also bolstering my disappointment in finding all books by an author to be memorable -- after all, there were a few Dickens I never liked -- I also read Before She Met Me, Love Etc. and Talking It Over by Julian Barnes, this year's Man Booker award winner. The latter two read more like theatrical monologues and were interesting if a bit lengthy, especially after plowing through LE, the sequel to TIO, which over chews the adulterous relationship between a man's wife and his best friend. BSMM is the work on an immature storyteller. Enough said.

Hybred Genre: The Pattern in the Carpet

Recently, my husband has been receiving unsolicited major league baseball junk in the mail, he thinks because he signed up for insider information to help with his betting on winning teams. Instead he has been barraged with schlock, stuff he wouldn’t ever be tempted to look at in a ball park, let alone buy. It was with similar confusion that I received a package from my college roommate in “amongst” the daily pile of eBay purchases. Inside were two books that she found at a sale, she said silently calling out my name and that of my soon-to-be daughter in law: The latter, a murder mystery about baking muffins, and mine an autobiography of Margaret Drabble, The Pattern in the Carpet, subtitled A Personal History with Jigsaws. I am a jigsaw junkie. I finished the book more quickly than my usual concentrated efforts on 1,000 piece Pomegrantes.

Drabble set out to write a book about the history of puzzles tracing them back to an origin of teaching tools -- whereby children could put together maps of France or England and learn their geography. Drabble occasionally migrates from this intent to overlay her research with reflections on the place puzzles played in her own childhood and again as an adult. Lots of the book seems to echo my implicit thoughts about puzzles: such as, start with the corner pieces and frame edges, move on to related color segments, join these larger assembled pieces together, then realize that it’s time to proceed from a color-based to a shape-based approach to fill in all the background, sit back and enjoy the finished product for a couple of days, take apart and stow away forever. (I am attempting, as I inch into becoming an eBay seller as well as buyer, to offload my puzzles, so far to no success. But alas, I think I have found a semi-willing pack rat who thinks they will be something to do as she recovers from surgery in December. I hope to get rid of at least half of them.)

Drabble associates puzzles with her aunt, the woman in her family who takes the place of an unstable mother whom she really never likes. Auntie Phyl is no Mary Poppins herself but is tolerant of young children, having been a primary school teacher.

Drabble’s writing style defies the logic of her approach to completing puzzles: she is all over the map, using puzzles as a metaphor to understand her need to impose order and get the big picture of her life and her relationships. She goes on many a tangent, investigating mosaics, comparing the items in museum shops vis a vis their art collections, and digressing into London’s industry of publishing children’s books.

In a way she is like Pamuk's Museum of Innocence and his story of collecting the detritus of his beloved’s life as a vehicle to explain his city and his soul. She itemizes those puzzles depicting English cottages similar to the inn her grandparents operated, trying to capture reality onto a "game" medium. She briefly self-discloses when she writes: “… and now that I am old I recognize that I may be condemned to live with an unresolved story and an incomplete picture. I may never fully know why my mother was so unhappy and so angry … But I cannot resist continuing to try to piece things together.”

In one of those six degrees of separation moments, Drabble writes that Julian Barnes loves jigsaw puzzles and her reprise towards the end of her book hearkens to Barnes’ theme in The Sense of an Ending about making up one’s own life story: “We invent our own family tree, we construct our own ancestry, we collect our own fragments, we ignore the pieces that don’t fit, we deny the stories we don’t like … We throw the extra pieces into a bucket, and pretend they belong to some other design, some other puzzle.”

She makes shorter shrift of the "missing piece," not extending that metaphor into her constructing her life and reflecting on it. Personally, as I work on a puzzle, I am outraged when the dog grabs a piece and chews it into an almost unrecognizable pulp. My goal of perfection has been destroyed, even if I manage to force fit the distended cardboard into the pattern. And a lost piece absolutely negates all of my efforts with the other 999 pieces. So too is my life. So much so, I bought a couple of wine glasses etched with a ring of puzzle pieces to acknowledge that as I continue to go about constructing my life story, all pieces must be accounted for and those long lost cherished as a prodigal.

There is one other apt quote in Drabble's book that makes me wonder whether my roommate looked beyond the inside blurbs. Drabble writes about her Aunt Phyl's little white dog in much the same vein as my friend might describe my Bichon: "the dog became so naughty because my aunt had de-trained him, and that, by allowing him to pee on the carpet, lick her face and feet, masturbate against her ankles, jump at visitors and bounce on beds, she was expressing the bad behavior that had been pent up in her by a lifetime of ... propriety ..."

Somehow I'd rather sit down and tackle a new puzzle than train JJ.

Lust in Translation

Pun on that awful Bill Murray movie, Pamela Druckerman's book, Lust in Translation - The Rules of Infidelity from Toyko to Tennessee, is less than mediocre. Druckerman is a former Wall Street Journal writer so if this were bonds, I'd rate it B-.

Without any training in psychology or counseling, she travels the globe attempting to rank the nations from least to most faithful to monogamy -- this as she approaches her first marriage. She is not looking from common traits (or flaws) but wants to compile the effects of various religions, economics and culture on as causes or deterrents to adultery. The behaviors she depicts in Moscow and South Africa lead one to conclude that they would not want to be married there, let alone live in such hotbeds of infidelity. In the former, an increase of wealth spurs cheating; in the latter, lack of any opportunity to make money urges both sexes to get any kind of pleasure whenever possible, and at a huge risk to contracting AIDS.

Her portrait of Japanese marriage is so unappetizing that it's a wonder people start a family. The tradition of Geishas was deteriorated to sex clubs where men go to play. Things are similar in China except there a newly rich class at least can afford to set up a second family in a neighboring town. Druckerman's final observation, I think much to her comfort, is that Americans and the French are way down in the lust poll but for different reasons: in the USA, Puritanism has evolved into a sort of marriage cult where one's spouse equates to the sole person who can fulfill own's pursuit of happiness; in France, the tradition of "five to seven" (PM) still holds some sway.

And perhaps, it is this theory of structuring time, that she leaves least explored. She hints about American women from the 50s and 60s as having more chunks for free time in which to engage in finding a lover as contrasted with overscheduled hours now. She also mentions that there is a notable demarcation in the progress of a relationship when it moves into actually spending the night sleeping with one's lover. But she never explores what do lovers do with the rest of the day when they awaken. Is that those long day light hours that turn lust into obligations? How erotic do partners remain when they rake the lawn together, take each other to the dentist or go to the laundromat? Given those mundane realities, the scales of one's life need to be balanced with some passionate arousal. Druckerman reaches no conclusion of how far one can or should look for such fulfillment.

You Had to be There: 1968 The Year That Rocked the World

After finishing The Belly of Paris, newly translated by Mark Kurlansky, I checked out his other books, remembered I enjoyed Salt and Cod, and reserved 1968. While Kurlansky organizes this book by time rather than commodity, he presents a global view of what was happening concurrently each month, in Paris, Prague, Mexico City, as well as Chicago and My Lai. But this is not exclusively a political reprise. Although focusing primarily on street demonstrations and university occupations, he interprets such events as the cause of an all volunteer army and military control of media coverage, of the rise of image over substance in politicians, oddly traced back to Pierre Trudeau, and of White backlash becoming an underlying platform of the Republican party.

The ability to broadcast news live to my thinking, was the most critical paradigm shift. There were not longer delays, interpretations, cropping of film; news went to an hour, editorial comment seeped in, and the theater aspects of violence came to predominate coverage. All causes had to compete for air time and action-backed clips.

But being there, actually turning 21 the fall of '68 what I remember most is a palpable change in one's sense of security. Concerts on campus were no longer an afternoon with Horowitz, but hours of ear-blasting Cream; diversions were no longer sneaking into the all-male operated radio station but salvaging thrown out stuff on the Grand Concourse. Pill box hats were out, headbands were in. I swore for the first time at one of my roommates whose father was a General in Viet Nam. Graduation was celebrated with John Lindsay as commencement speaker and by the senior class doing its version of Hair.

Those few LPs that have made it through several moves and changes of equipment are cherished and blasted by my youngest son and when my other roommate visits she always asks him "aren't they your mother's records?" even when he has programmed them on Pandora.

68 has deep roots, the kudzu of America and the world. I just toggled over to Internet news and the Basque ETA says they are laying down their arms; my high school friend who occupied Grayson Kirk's office, went to the Democratic convention and to other landmark events of that year, emailed me back as he participated in Occupy Philadelphia.

Strangely, I feel almost like Tony Webster from The Sense of an Ending. I have filtered and made revisionist history of how 68 impacted me personally. Not only do I selectively remember people and events from that tumultuous year, but I pride myself in how much I've changed (or reverted to pre 1967) me. Some of that year's culture remains iconic, most has so infiltrated our daily lives that it is difficult to attribute so much to one span of twelve months. Maybe I should read 1492.

Even a Faster Read: The Sense of an Ending

Finished reading Julian Barnes' latest novel, The Sense of an Ending, the day after it won the Man Booker award. It is an excellent short novel even if its construction is a bit obvious, sort of like those new ecto skeletal buildings ... you see everything blatantly that holds it together, but still marvel.

Barnes' protagonist, Tony Webster, is a man who decides how to construct his own life, making it comfortable and avoiding conflicts. He is not a person typically lost in the past nor analyzing how he came to be where he is -- divorced, retired, pretty much out of contact with friends from the past. When that past intrudes, it comes back almost with footnotes. Webster filters out his memories of school lessons, outings and events so that they inform and reinforce his perceived character. It is a lesson in filtering past experiences, assigning import, and force fitting patterns, a worthy uber theme of novel writing itself. What does the author purposefully include to advance the plot, provide a subtheme and develop characters and relationships? Barnes asks the reader to think how are these intentions different from how a person writes his own internal autobiography.

An interesting book and marvelously written. I have already reserved a couple other of his novels to appreciate his complete oeuvre, novels that contributed to the Man Booker this time around after four previous nominations.