A Mild Adversative

an advice column

2011-11-11T04:42:00.006-06:00

Hey! I was Googling myself--I don't do it often, but a woman does what she has to do--and I discovered that an old column of mine, written under duress in the months before the year 2000, had made it to a Web site concerning Tudor history. I'd forgotten all but the column's idea.

http://tudorhistory.org/humor/advice.html

Silly great love songs

2010-10-13T15:17:00.003-05:00

One of the things that I adore about Kip Winger is the way he wears his heart on his sleeve--no, no tats, thank heavens. When he falls in love, he does it hard and well, and he writes great songs about it.

Maybe that's part of his being a sensitive guy. His musical life was ruined and transformed by vicious critics and jokesters, and since the end of the 1980s, he seems to be running from undeserved bad press in all his musical choices.

In a recent blog post, Mr. Winger seemed amazed that anyone could look back on "In the Heart of the Young" with any fondness. I certainly do. I'm a woman past middle age, and I consequently like power ballads, even now.

Since he's gone into harder rock (plus writing ballet, another turn to and fro), I was surprised and not surprised when, in an interview, he was asked to name the greatest rock musician and he named Paul McCartney. I've wanted to marry McCartney since 1964, when I was 10, but most people plump for Lennon. Yet Sir Paul knew melody and perfect harmony, and he also knew love, once.

all you can eat

2010-03-17T05:36:00.002-05:00

From J.S. Borthwick's Dude on Arrival, p. 73:

Julia Douglas and Sarah staked out their table and then joined the buffet line. Sarah was staggered. A hundred salads, forty breads, and little hot dishes for dipping into or pouring onto pasta, toast points, shells, croissants. She sighed happily.

"Someone else's food is heaven—I really don't like to cook, though I keep buying cookbooks. In case I can catch the interest—like the plague."

Liberal guilt

2009-10-20T05:15:00.001-05:00

10/3/99

Good deeds and a clean conscience have their rewards, but they won't put dinner on the table.

In the late '80s, when I was still on the bright side of 35, I remember scampering from our Rountree rental home toward the supermarket, full of big plans, no doubt. I'm sure some mad cooking inspiration was driving me, the dish to die for.

But a horrid sight stopped me short. I'd seen all too many bottles lying smashed against the gutter. But this was worse. Threatening big shards and insidious semivisible ones lay sprawled over the sidewalk before a little house near National Avenue.

Yes, I could walk around, and I wanted to, heaven knows. But a bad upbringing held me back, one fraught with pathological feelings of guilt about actions that had nothing to do with me. Think of the futures hanging on *my* action: Children and pets might slash their tender flesh. The homeowner might be sued. All from my negligence! Aiieeee!

I hate bursting in on strangers, but I had to tell the homeowner what evils might await. My timid knock summoned a nice woman, several decades my senior and rather frail. After I'd explained the situation, she asked: "Would you clean it up for me?" Now this was going a bit far! I'd done my bit! I'd rid myself of potential guilt, hadn't I? "Sure. No problem," I choked out, and she fetched a broom, a dusptan and a wastebasket. Sheesh.

The job took forever, of course. Broken glass always does. There was glass in her lawn, too, and visions of fatal lawn-mower accidents forced me to search those little leaves for the hated shards.

At first, my mood was anything but bright. But as the task neared an end, I cheered up. I'd done the right thing! No, my thoughts hadn't been pure or noble, but I was, in the words of the Wizard of Oz, a phil ... phil -- a good-deed-doer.

Not for long. The object of my kindness smiled at me sweetly, no doubt taking in my scraggly attire, and said: "Here. Take this." She held out three shiny quarters. "Oh, no, please," I gasped, but she insisted. I couldn't ruin *her* feelings of doing a good deed for my own, could I? For shame!

I didn't go to the supermarket or whip up the dish of my career. I was too tired and hungry. I slunk home, 75 cents weighing down my pocket, and vowed never to let good-deed-doing get in the way of dinner.

***************

Speculations on what might have been tend to the ridiculous -- especially when they have to do with me and cooking. What if, on one fateful day, I had proceeded to the store and bought a botulism-bubbling can? What if my creation had burned down our kitchen, and the spouse had left me? Gosh, I can't take all this possible guilt. I'm probably very lucky that I was waylaid from my purpose by a sidewalk full of glass.

The spouse took me out to dinner that night -- to a very inexpensive littl'e Korean place in center city. We'd never been before, and the meal was very nice. Or nice until we noticed that the place took neither checks nor credit cards. Cash? Who carries cash? We scrabbled through our wallets and gathered up enough for the tab, and not much more.

You think I was relieved? Hah! I had before me a disaster, a full plate of both guilt and shame. Our tip wouldn't hit the proper range. I've been a waitress, and I know that servers are taxed on tips whether they get them or not. So there was guilt. And shame, too -- can you imagine walking out of a place when you've had a good and inexpensive meal, and not even leaving a lousy 15 percent? Black depths of horror opened up in front of me.

Then, suddenly, I felt my pocket. Three quarters. Not much, but it saved my sense of self. Good deeds can pay off, in their own perverse fashion.

Now that I have filled you all with uplifting thoughts, it's time to bring them back down to earth. Cauliflower is our subject today. The weather is changing, and I've been having cauliflower cravings.

Don't like cauliflower? That's OK. The spouse blanched when I mentioned my plans, but he helped snarf up the dish. And anyway, what we've got here is a basic gratin. If you want to, gussy up the cauliflower with onions and red peppers and anything else you fancy. Or take different veggies altogether (enough to cover a 9-by-13-inch glass dish), undercook them slightly, and give them the same treatment.

In fact, the source of the recipe -- Springfield resident Royce Cordes, whose fund-raising "The Gardener's Cookbook" was recently featured in this newspaper -- wants you to play around. *You* may hit the culinary jackpot I doubtless missed more than 10 years ago.

SWISS BAKED CAULIFLOWER FLOWERETS

2 small cauliflower

2 teaspoons salt

1 cup shredded Swiss cheese

2/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1/3 cup seasoned bread crumbs

1/4 cup melted butter

Cut cauliflower into flowerets. Cook, covered, in salted water until barely done, about 10 minutes (or steam about 8 minutes, and salt afterward), then drain. Put in buttered 9-by-13-inch glass dish. Mix cheeses, crumbs and butter in a bowl, and sprinkle over veggies. Bake in a preheated 400-degree oven until crisp on top and bubbly, about 10 to 15 minutes.

Wandering this world

2009-10-15T20:26:00.004-05:00

Before I got really old and bitter (the Dubya years), I had begun to notice that the poor saps who sat near me on the copy desk or in design were occasionally listening to my random outrageous remarks.

During my two years at the Austin American-Statesman, I played an amazing amount of Jonny Lang while driving to and from work. So I spoke of a former fave: "Breakin' Me." "That's what all of us older women want to hear, you know: cute young guys in agony because they treated us wrong." Stop, drop, and roll, Dick, roll.

I heard guffaws on that one.

Btw, the Lang version of "I Am," a song by the artist known again as Prince, is brilliant, in my humble opinion. And I used to smile nonstop at "Second Guessing."

sensitive keyboards

2009-10-15T18:57:00.002-05:00

My keyboard story (not very interesting):

New Mac keyboards are getting very flat, very compact, and disgustingly sensitive. I grew up on old typewriters and was a disaster at typing, anyway. (For years I couldn't get a job as a secretary because of the typing tests; here in Springfield, at SMS/MSU, it wasn't permitted to backspace over errors until only a few years ago, and I make a lot of them.)

When I bought my new iMac last March, I messed up when ordering the keyboard; I was so excited that I just chose the standard model, which has no forward-delete key. And I'm all about deleting both past and present. I gave that keyboard to the spouse, who doesn't like the space that the number pad takes, and I ordered an older-fashioned keyboard for myself. Then it started to rain in Springfield, and the ants came in. Heck, they started to mass upstairs on my desk. I fought womanfully against them, but it got to the point that I was putting piles of Borax on my desk, and the Borax started to fall into the keys. Soon, I could barely pound letters out of that Macally IceKey keyboard because of all the grit, and perhaps, as the spouse said snidely, all the Diet Coke that may have been spilled.

No matter. The big family crisis called me away to Texas for most of the summer. In the garage there in Austin (built by my husband, btw), you can find my dad's first iMac, the one he killed with pipe tobacco. When I'd visited in February, I looked and thought seriously of stealing the old keyboard that came with it for my aging and distressing eMac. But in the summer, I noticed that the old keyboard was up with his new iMac. What happened? I asked. Dad just couldn't deal with typing on the new one, my little brother said. With permission, I took the rejected newer keyboard home. A mixed blessing. I have no grace when typing under pressure.

The story of my crash course in typing might be rather more interesting. But it's not for the faint of heart. That was back in 1971, a year that really belonged in the 1960s.

Nice bit of Capon

2009-10-04T14:33:00.005-05:00

I'm stunned that I'd never posted this piece before. Brilliant.

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection, 1967, 1969, pp. 39–40.

Economy is not one of the necessary principles of the universe; it is one of the jokes which God indulges in precisely because He can afford it. If a man takes it seriously, however, he is doomed forever to a middle-income appreciation of the world. Indeed, only the very poor and the very rich are safe from its idolatry. The poor, because while they must take it seriously, they cannot possibly believe in it as a good; and the rich, because, though they may see it as a good, they cannot possibly take it seriously. For the one it is a bad joke, the for other, a good one; but for both it is only part of the divine ludicrousness of creation -- of the _sensus lusus_ which lies at the heart of matter. And that is why all men should hasten to become very poor or very rich -- or both at once, like St. Paul, who had nothing yet possessed all things. The world was made in sport, for _sports_; economy is worth only a smile. There are more serious things to laugh at.

O the sad frugality of the middle-income mind. O the humorless neatness of an intellectuality which buys mass-produced candlesticks and carefully puts one at each end of every philosophical mantlepiece! How far it lies from the playfulness of Him who composed such odd and needless variations on the themes of leaf and backbone, eye and nose! A thousand praises that it has only lately managed to lay its cold hand on the wines, the sauces, and the cheeses of the world! A hymn of thanksgiving that it could not reach into the depths of the sea to clamp its grim simplicities over the creatures that swim luminously in the dark! A shout of rejoicing for the fish who wears his eyeballs at the ends of long stalks, and for the jubilant laughter of the God who holds him in life with a daily _bravo_ at the _bravura_ of his being!

Into outer darkness then with the pill-roller and his wife. They have missed the point of the world; they are purely and simply mad. Man invented cooking before he thought of nutrition. To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its_ eternal_ purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is _taste_.

Pills indeed! Someday, no doubt, the dreadful offspring of that hapless couple will invent flavorless capsules which, when swallowed, will give the user a complete command of any desired language. Let us hope only that when he does, the sane among us will lobby for a law to keep such people from writing poems. Language is no utilitarian abstraction; English, French, Greek, and Latin are concrete delights, relishings by which the flavor or words and syntax are rolled over the tongue. And so in their own way are all the declensions and conjugations of beef, lamb, pork, and veal. Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than it is useful. Necessity is the mother only of cliches. It takes playfulness to make poetry.

Hog wild?

2008-08-20T13:07:00.005-05:00

A column from Dec. 14, 1997:

Entertaining isn’t very entertaining. At least for me.

Part of the problem lies outside the kitchen. Guests seem to be oddly unsettled by a couch covered with cat fur, and while old hairballs hiding under coffee tables are old hat for me, they make some people squeamish, I’m told. And it’s useful to have a clear path around the books and newspapers through which visitors can walk without fear.

A greater problem in entertaining is psychic. I want to be perfect, and I want everybody to love me and admire me and maybe work me into their family legends. In the next millennium, let me be remembered as a demigoddess of bounty. “Yes, children, this meal almost recaptures the Feast of ‘93, when Alison worked magic with mushrooms and artichokes and lifted us from the yawning depths of mealtime despair.” Later, I’ll turn into a beauteous, albeit middle-aged, genie of the kitchen whose magical concoctions, once upon a time, imparted eternal joy and lengthy youth to lucky wanderers. In my dreams.

Fear of failure invites failure. And the most certain path to a failed feast is overdoing. Of course, I lose all sense of proportion. There’s nothing fun about proportion, and excess is always preferable to deficiency, at least where good things are involved. But I can be so frantic to please that I push more and more dishes onto the table, just so there’s more than enough for everybody, and if one thing doesn’t suit a particular palate, another thing will. Don’t like olive paste? Try these spiced nuts! We have them plain, too. Or this English cheese. And here’s one from Germany. Have you had any of my mushroom pâté? On a diet? How ‘bout these crunchy, negative-cal crudités? Let me bring out the yogurt dip. In short, I whip up a recipe for driving guests to an early exit.

Too much food is fine, of course, at a big party, if the cook can hold back his or her natural tendency to foist and to hover. But at a small party, you don’t want guests’ eyes to get wild and fearful as dish after dish piles up on the groaning board.

Years and years ago the spouse and I had over a single guest, a very intense, very jumpy young man who was a year behind me in grad school. I didn’t know what to make, so I made several things I knew, almost all heavy and laden with cheese. There was quiche and eggplant parmigiana and pinto cornbread covered with cheese and an elaborate salad, full of just about everything I could stuff in. I can’t remember what I made for dessert, for we never got that far. Poor Jim, who was a meat-and-potatoes guy, took a very few bites. He muttered, over and over, “Too good; too rich,” and then hightailed it out of there. I kid you not: He really ran, all the way to the library!

A little psychology and strategy could have saved a lot of overdoing. But what the heck? The spouse and I ate happily for days on the leftovers. And the apartment was tidy for several hours.

************************************************************

In the ‘90s, I’ve seen a lot of cookbook writers try to make up for their perceived gaffes in the two decades before. Revisions slash the fat and shun the dairy, ironically even as we learn that good fat is essential, butter isn’t the villain it was long thought to be, and eggs and cheese may be really good for us. When one of my favorite cookbooks, Mollie Katzen’s “The Enchanted Broccoli Forest” from 1982, resurfaced in a revision in 1995, I immediately checked its index to see whether my favorite recipe from the tome, one I have made over and over and over to high praise, had undergone any serious revision. The darn recipe had been dumped!

Here it is. I often halve it for small parties, and I’ve usually used cottage cheese instead of ricotta (blended or processed with the mushroom mixture) because I’m cheap and that’s what I’ve had around. Maybe the results would be even better if I behaved.

MUSHROOM & CHEESE PATE (1982)
4 tablespoons butter
1 pound mushrooms, coarsely chopped
3 cups chopped onions
1/2 teaspoon salt (more to taste)
1 teaspoon dry mustard (go for Coleman’s)
1/2 teaspoon dill
black pepper, to taste
cayenne, to taste
3 tablespoons dry white wine or dry vermouth or water with a splash of vinegar
1/4 cup wheat germ
8 ounces (1 cup) Neufchatel or cream cheese
1 pound (2 cups) ricotta cheese
For garnish:
paprika and freshly minced parsley

1. In a large, heavy skillet begin cooking the onions in butter over medium heat, stirring occasionally.
2. After about 5 minutes, when onions are soft, add mushrooms, salt, dry mustard, dill, black pepper and cayenne. Stir well and cook uncovered over moderate heat, stirring intermittently, for another 5 minutes.
3. Add wine, vermouth or water plus vinegar, and stir. Continue to cook for 5 more minutes.
4. Sprinkle in the wheat germ, stirring as you sprinkle. Stir and cook 1–2 minutes more, then remove from heat.
5. Cut the Neufchatel or cream cheese into the hot mixture.
6. Use a blender or food processor fitted with a steel blade to puree the mixture. Transfer puree to a large mixing bowl. Whisk in the ricotta.
7. You can bake the pate in a buttered deep-dish casserole or in two medium loaf pans. If baked in a casserole, you can serve as a spread, especially for crackers. If baked in loaves, which is what I always do, it will be sliceable and spreadable, also good with crackers and bread. (When you use loaf pans, oil them or spray them, and line with buttered waxed paper.)
8. Bake in a 400-degree F oven for 1-1/4 hours or more. (At the minimum time, the pate will look very liquid. I’ve found that it will set up nicely and be light and pleasing; on the other hand, I like the more intense flavor when I cook it for 15 minutes or more longer.) Cool on a rack and chill for several hours or overnight. When you use loaf pans, dump the chilled critters onto nice plates and peel off the paper.

Barbara Holland on cats

2007-12-16T10:47:00.000-06:00

Barbara Holland links two of my favorite things--cats and artichokes--with her cat essay in Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences (1995).

Cats

For some people, the pet dog is just a bit too, well, predictable. Once you have come to know your dog and the one or two ways in which she differs from thousands or perhaps millions of other dogs, she's unlikely to astonish you; she's the same all the way through, like a banana. The cat is layered, like an artichoke.

Pleasingly, the outermost layer is fur. (Most dogs, too, are furred, but the product varies in quality, texture, density, and, lamentably, smell.) Naked ourselves, we long for fur. Fur is superior to human skin in every cosmetic and practical respect; it insulates the flesh, resists sunburn, and doesn't show wrinkles, bruises, acne, sweat, or cellulite. It looks much the same in old age as in youth. It feels good, too. We like to touch it, but in recent years a cloud (see Wearing Fur) has fallen over the ancient custom of appropriating animal furs and swaggering around pretending they're ours. If we're going to run our hands over fur, it's now correct only if the creature's still in it. (Actually, it feels better that way, the creature adding a warmth and solidity under the softness.)

For fur on the hoof, you can't beat a cat. It's exactly the right size to have around the house, it's naturally clean in its habits, and if it likes you it sometimes gives off a nice humming sound. In the winter, it's better to sleep with than a hot-water bottle, maintaining an even temperature all night and never slipping off the foot of the bed and dragging the blankets off with it. On the lap, a cat far outshines a child; it's lighter in weight and softer to touch, and doesn't whine, squirm, or object to having a book propped on its back.

If your relationship with the cat goes beyond the purely physical, you'll uncover a few more layers under the fur, though being but human you'll never penetrate clear to the intricate prickly geometry of the choke and the hidden heart under it. However, your cat, unlike your dog, will sometimes astonish you. Sometimes its mental processes will impress you. Sometimes it will simply baffle you, as in the matter of Jeoffrey and the shower.

Jeoffrey is a young Siamese, overweight, placid, and rather timid, with a consuming passion for people showering or, more precisely, people who have showered. The first sound the showerer hears after turning off the water is Jeoffrey shrieking and clawing frantically at the door. The door must be opened, has to be opened, on even the shyest guest, or Jeoffrey will tear it down. Once inside the steamy, damp bathroom, he purrs thunderously, trembling with pleasure, and rubs against the wet legs over and over, pausing to turn an occasional somersault of pure joy. When he's dried the legs to cat-height, he hops into the wet bathtub and dries that, still ecstatic, still purring.

Finally the bemused showerer puts on a bathrobe and emerges, accompanied by steam and Jeoffrey, who strolls across the hall with the drunken dignity of a deacon leaving a brothel.

I don't understand, but the occasional mystery, the otherness of cats, is part of their charm. Humans and dogs are all very well, but their familiarity breeds contempt. No one feels too familiar with a cat. Cats provide a needed outlet for the human imagination.

Or, if we feel we have enough to wonder about already, we can limit our examination to the fur; it's almost excuse enough for cats.

OCD

2007-11-22T17:38:00.000-06:00

After I wrote a few obligatory fan letters to Kip Winger, I had to tell him about major typos in a couple of paragraphs in his bio. Thinking more about the subject, I wrote another letter pointing out run-on sentences. Sorry, I said, but copy editing tends to attract people who are obsessive-compulsive.

Kip wrote back to my second riff about his autobiographical piece; he said something on the order of "Wow, you really are OCD."

The poor fellow doesn't know the half of it.

I'd kept noticing that the number of plays for the songs on his MySpace page followed the order of their sequence: "Resurrection," "Daniel," "Cross," and "Naked Son." Ultimately, I took matters into my own hands.

Backstory: Kip Winger apparently likes "Resurrection" best out of the tracks on "Songs from the Ocean Floor." I'm not musical and he is, but I prefer "Cross." Am I going to be dictated to by a mere man? Even one who's such a hunk?

So, dammit, I started to listen to "Cross" on Kip's MySpace page, again and again. We're talking fourteen hours out of several of my days. I'd spring up from the recliner in my study and play the song repeatedly.

In less than a week, "Cross" was more than 400 plays atop "Resurrection," so I turned to "Naked Son," from "thisconversationseemslikeadream." For a while, "Naked Son" was in second place, but I didn't have my heart in that battle. I'd finally begun to ask myself why I was risking carpal-tunnel syndrome to play a song that I already had on CD. And I wanted to hear both of the full albums again--I've always believed that good albums should be played in full and in sequence. So, ever rational, I backed off and moved on. But then, less than a week ago, I saw that "Resurrection" was moving in on my comfort zone, and I was forced to hit play on "Cross" once again.

Today, which is Thanksgiving, the Kipster changed his MySpace songs. Thank you, Mr. Winger.

Those basters

2007-11-17T15:06:00.000-06:00

Back in the day, I wrote a few nutritional screeds. At a dinner for the Springfield-Greene County Friends of the Library, the woman next to me saw my name tag and said, "Oh; you're Alison Parker." I was happy to have my name recognized. But it quickly became clear that the woman, a nutritionist at a local hospital, hated my guts. The main point in the links below is bad science and the people who bow to the generally accepted rules. Be slow to believe what those basters (sic) are telling you. See the following:

Gary Taubes on salt:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/5379/898?ijkey=ATm56Jl8nBVYU

Gary Taubes on fat:
http://people.bu.edu/sobieraj/nutrition/fat_science3_30_01.html

I'm happy to say that most of my stands on nutrition have been borne out. For now, at least. If only I had followed them!

More metal

2007-11-11T07:26:00.000-06:00

I'm often slow on the uptake. For example, I hadn't heard Dokken until this fall, when I started to do research on my old favorite, Winger.

I know a lot of Dokken now. I am Rokken with Dokken, it seems.

I write to a former teacher of mine--technical writing and computer applications--and, after he sent me a few cat pix of his, I told the guy to check out my pictures on my MySpace site. His response went something like this: "I noticed that almost all your 'friends' are from Winger. There must be a story here."

Indeed.

I've always been one of those pathetic women with a prissy, overeducated accent. And I've worked as a copy editor, for all the good that it did me. Neither Kip Winger nor Paul Taylor has followed my advice in cleaning up their MySpace profiles. I haven't yet told Reb that he needs to write "your" most of the time when he has "you're" on his formal Web site (www.rebbeach.com).

Anyway, Michael had never pegged me for a metal fan. He's probably surprised that I loved King's X but hated the Foo Fighters. He didn't know about my passion for David Coverdale.

Back to Winger. Michael is also big on Winger, and he's at least twenty years younger than I am. [Correction: He's not quite twenty years younger than I am.] I sent him a YouTube link to Reb Beach's favorite Dokken song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7m1x5XAKYk), and now I owe to Michael my fascination with that group.

I'm now listening to Kiss, thanks to my former teacher.

Things that I wrote almost a year ago

2007-11-10T19:46:00.001-06:00

1. Made in China:

Relentless time chips away at all our common goals and ideals.

But we all want the same thing, no? All girls are brought up to hope for a set of fine china.

I was born in the '50s and grew up on dishes that captured the expression "One word -- plastics." Melmac didn't chip, or if it did, who cared? The "fancy" dinnerware that my parents trotted out for company did chip. It was made of rather coarse clay.

When I got married in 1979, my parents promised us that nice set of china. They'd finally bought theirs just a year or so before. And boy was I eager for those plates. But our nomadic life intervened, and I put off choosing a pattern.

Madness seized us in early 1984. We still owned most of the cheap Ironstone I'd bought in graduate school, which boasted a bold brown geometric pattern that did the disco era proud, plus the more sedate cream-and-tan stoneware that we'd plunked down 50 bucks for shortly after our wedding. The spouse and I thought our lives would be made if we only had a typewriter sporting a line of memory, making for easy erasing. Thus we bargained away the promise of Lenox for what we should have known was already an electronic dinosaur, had we bothered to do a little research.

I kicked myself for years. Time was indeed chipping away at our old dinnerware, and we couldn't find or afford anything decent to replace it. Our one effort at semifine stuff, pure white porcelain that we found at an import shop and picked up piece by piece, chipped even more quickly than our lower-class plates.

And then I saw porcelain heaven. I walked into the Salvation Army Superstore on a half-price day, and there it was: Some twit had unloaded six lovely dinner plates, eight giant soup bowls, at least 11 dessert or salad plates, and seven big mugs, all ringed with a rich, deep, satisfying blue. And all ll this for $16! Oooooh, I was in ecstasy. No fool I, not any longer, I hit the World Wide Web. I wrote customer service at Oneida to find out more about the porcelain, and then discovered that an online outlet store was selling sets for four very, very cheap. So cheap that the shipping costs matched the actual price. I had to pounce; after all, one needs 10 full place settings for civilized dining.

The extra china (and it's indeed made in China) came quickly, and I clutched it to my heaving breast. OK, we don't use it all that often, for who wants to jeopardize the health of something so dear?

Not long afterward, I heard from a nice woman at Oneida. "Oh yes, that line," she wrote, or words to that effect. "One of our companies used to make it for Wal-Mart."

My finest china, you see, was so common that Wal-Mart discontinued it.

***

The dream of children is to outdo their parents, or so I've heard. I'm just trying to run in place.

In the fraught few months before my wedding, I fastened on the same Gorham silver pattern that my folks were given when they got married. I don't know where they keep their silver, and the set the spouse and I own is still in the original plastic. Who wants to clean silver?

In 1979, I was also about to plump for the same china pattern as my parents just had. I'm rather glad that I didn't. I don't find the flowers around the edge as compelling as I once did. Worse, there's platinum on the rim, which means that you can't put the darn stuff in the dishwasher or the microwave. Who can live like that?

My parents' fine china sits unused in a low kitchen cabinet. Still, their fancy plates and cups are in better shape than the postwar crystal glasses. Resurrecting these pieces from decades of dust and other grime would probably cost more than all of us are worth.

When I'm at my parents' house, we happily drink from old jelly jars and eat off plastic plates that they collected from an early generation of microwave dinners.

This is progress.

My recipe for the day? The obvious choice is Chinese. But much as I adore Chinese food, or what passes for it in most of the USA, I've never mastered the art of cooking it. I've never even come close. Anyway, most appropriate for my best dinnerware is takeout.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

2. Letting off steam:

When I'm chilling with my folks in Austin, Texas, I'm sure as heck not chilly. I live in an inferno.

I hesitate to write about my trivial trials to an audience still suffering from post-traumatic shock after the recent ice storm. But here it is: While the spouse, stuck in Springfield for 10.5 days without electricity, felt the temperature inside our house sink to near freezing, I battled to keep my parents' thermostat at no more than 78 degrees Fahrenheit.

Is it a generation gap? Maybe not. Generalizations are dangerous, and too many counterexamples marred the facile one I worked up about the difference between people who grew up during the Great Depression and baby boomers whose characters were formed during the energy crises of the 1970s, when a favorite president of mine donned a sweater during a fireside chat.

Maybe it's primarily a matter of physics. Heat rises, and in the badly built house that they bought after they expected their children to have flown the nest for good, the temperature in the upper-floor bedrooms is 10 to 15 degrees higher than what those in the first-floor master bedroom experience. And the windows in the room I sleep in weren't designed to open. At all.

There are other bits of physics in play. When I'm with my parents, I gain weight. Consider the free-food factor. Consider also conservation of matter: Whenever anyone in the house gains any weight, the rest lose a compensating amount, and the losers are therefore colder.

Last "winter" in Texas, my increasing adipose tissue started to bubble and squeak. I met up with diaper rash even without diapers, NASA issue or otherwise. I won't say I keep up the appearance of civilization, anywhere, but while I insist on wearing clothes, especially when I'm fat, any unneeded apparel is a downside upstairs in Austin.

I've begun to fight back by finally mastering the basics of the electronic thermostat.

One morning this January, my father wailed, "It's freezing in here!" Yes, I checked the temperature inside the house, and it was 72. Dad was wearing designer-label red-white-and-blue boxer shorts, and nothing more. "Clothes?" he said. "What a novel concept."

After a short standoff, he put on a bathrobe, and I kicked the thermostat up a few notches. Until his back was turned.

***

My use of the word "chilling" today was a first for me. Not long ago, a bubbly young woman selling something or other door-to-door asked to come inside. "It's so cold out," she claimed. It wasn't, but I let her in. The salesperson looked at my mother and asked, "Just chilling?" Mom was flummoxed. "She means something like 'hanging out," I offered and was rewarded with another uncomprehending gaze. Intergenerationally, a lot is lost in the translation.

A recipe for a Tuscan bread salad follows [but not here]. It requires no heat.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

3. Biting the dust:

In a scene central to the postapocalyptic cult classic "Cherry 2000," Six-Fingered Jake praises to the skies a small appliance that's been at the heart of my adult life.

"Toast is just the beginning of your new toaster oven. You can make open-faced sandwiches, baked potatoes. And best of all, the tray is removable for easy cleaning."

I met my first toaster oven early in married life. The nine-dollar toaster I'd picked up at the beginning of grad school had up and died on us. Using the real oven for toast was cumbersome, and back in 1980, who wanted to overheat the whole house when reheating leftovers? Between the toaster ovens and the frying pans, and with the help of the increasingly inexpensive microwave, the spouse and I have sometimes gone for years, it seems, without using the big oven.

My parents' current toaster is a lot classier than my old one, but it doesn't hold full slices of good artisanal bread, and it sure as heck doesn't make cheese toast. I decided to bring the family up to speed. In 2005, I popped a DVD of the 1988 Melanie Griffith movie mentioned above into Dad's iMac, and I played the scene in question to him and my little brother. Then, I dragged them out to Sears and shelled out a painful $44 for a name-brand appliance I was certain would change their very existence.

Decent toaster ovens, I've since learned, usually cost at least twice that much. My father e-mailed me a newspaper article on the subject. Yes, the little oven that I'd set up had gone over like an aluminum balloon. It takes brute force -- at least two thumbs at just the right angle -- to get it to toast at all, and the darned thing takes twice as long as the traditional toaster to deliver worse toast.

So the thing sat there, eating up counter space but gathering no crumbs. Last month, I was seriously considering stowing it away in an appliance graveyard. Along with the air popper, perhaps.

After all, I was using a real oven again. My parents didn't believe it still worked, and I had to clean off dust of more than 10 years' accumulation, but the old trouper fired up just fine. Twice.

The third time wasn't charmed. When I carried the bread pudding I'd stirred up for dear old Dad, who's a bread-pudding aficionado from way back, I encountered a pilot light but no heat, plus the smell of gas.

Sheesh. I'd wasted eggs, milk, sugar, spices and stale bread. What to do, what to do? Flush the whole liquid mess?

My eyes happened to land on the dust-encrusted toaster oven, and I discovered that the two-quart casserole would fit inside.

It was a revelation and a personal triumph. With a cheap and cheesy toaster oven, I staved off unimaginable kitchen catastrophe.

***

I cannot tell a lie and get away with it. My personal triumph wasn't really a triumph.

My husband, whose heart I likely won with custard pie, would have loved the bread pudding. I also found it tasty. But Dad is into bread, and this version wasn't bready enough. Of course he pretended to like my concoction, but when a man lauds a recipe with the word "delicate," you know you've failed. The morning after, he gamely asked for a slice, but he sprinkled it with cinnamon sugar.

The pudding sat in the refrigerator until it was solid enough to dump it into a trash bag.

Heat distribution can be a problem, so I don't recommend that you make the following recipe in a cheap toaster oven. Maybe good toaster ovens perform a lot better, but I have no experience of them. Too cheap. I haven't even called a repair person to fix my parents' gas oven.

The spouse had advice on fixing it. Look at the little holes in the back, the ones nearest the pilot light. They're probably clogged.

No, dear, I said. I'm not sticking my head in an oven. Not even for you.

One more thing

2007-10-15T18:36:00.000-05:00

Check out Sue Grafton, "P is for Peril," Page 183: "She was at that stage of maturity (or lack thereof) where the half-nudie rock star posters ran neck and neck with the stuffed animals of her youth."

On a high note

2007-10-15T12:45:00.000-05:00

Some days ago, I insisted that my spouse listen to tracks 2, 3, 4 and 10 of the Winger album "Pull." Interesting music, he said. Great guitar. But he wasn't sure about the singing.

"WHAT?" I ejaculated. How could anyone find fault with those flawless notes?

The range is too far up, Ed said. The guys are trying to sound tough but they're using the voices of adolescents. Too high to be taken as serious.

The fool I married never understood metal.

I was pissed in the extreme. "Dammit," I said, "back in the 1960s, when I was salivating over the Beatles and the Stones, you played the classic vinyl of soul stars such as Stevie Wonder. Let's talk about high voices."

My husband hit back, noting that (a) he was an adolescent when he listened to soul music, and that (b) tastes do change over time. I stared at Ed so viciously that he backed down. "Yes," he acknowledged, "Kip Winger's voice is good"--Ed has high praise for Kip's acoustic work--"but in his hard-rock singing mode, he's just not my style."

He is my style, however. Bwahahahaha!

A confession: Before my husband really backed down, I'd threatened to play the Cinderella power ballad "Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone)." It's way too high for my pathetic tastes--almost grating. But it's probably good. I learned later that Kip Winger admires Cinderella, and anything Kip says goes.

From Stephen Colbert

2007-10-14T09:30:00.000-05:00

In the Maureen Dowd column titled "A Mock Columnist, Amok":

I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.

Unforgiven over Metallica

2007-09-12T12:08:00.000-05:00

I've probably lost a friend with my earlier remarks about Metallica, and that's sad because I learned to enjoy the band and I most assuredly adored the Metallica fan.

Back in 1999, when I'd returned to Springfield, the young colleague started to tell me about meeting Lars Ulrich in a St. Louis bar. "Who?" I said. He gave me the look that any young person will give someone older who's clueless, and delivered a brief description of Mr. Ulrich's brilliance on drums. Then he went on with his story.

I then started to buy all of Metallica's albums. I was slow on the uptake--look, I was born 21 years before the young storyteller was. And Metallica is an acquired taste, I believe, for people my age. Last winter, I'd uploaded all our CDs to my computer, and I was quite surprised recently when I found "Enter Sandman" likable. I'd always loved "Fade to Black."

But my former colleague can be very unforgiving. After Matt Damon made a dismissive remark about Ulrich in some talk show or other, the colleague steadfastly refused to see any of Damon's films, with one exception.

I guess I'm toast.

OK, OK, I did e-mail the young fellow one scathing piece about the Motor City Madman and his politics.

Sidetracked

2007-09-09T04:03:00.000-05:00

I'm sidetracked again, and I blame romance novelist Sandra Marton, as an e-mail mention of hers about the Rolling Stones got me to looking for the tale of my first two concerts. The first concert was probably in 1965, when the Stones first hit San Bernardino, California. I was 11. I asked Dad to take me there, and when he didn't take the bait, I cried, always a good move. Yeah, we went to that concert. In 1966, my mother agreed to let me see a Stones concert in Cambridge, England. She mortified me by insisting that I wear ankle socks instead of the regulation knee socks. This was a formal occasion, she told me.

It's hard to remember my next few concerts. Who can remember the sixties? I can recall Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Procol Harum. Procol Harum came probably in 1971. Then college and grad school intervened, as well as poverty. Only in the 1990s did I go to a few concerts again: two famous modern jazz bands, and one Bob Dylan thing. Bob Dylan was in his metal phase, and the acoustics at the hall weren't good for those of us in the cheap seats. One song sounded awfully familiar, but I just couldn't make it out until near the end. "All Along the Watchtower." I'd loved Dylan's and Hendrix's recorded versions.

In my computer search, I found an old column of mine, from the year 2000. The piece about the delightful Metallica fan mentioned in a post below was unfortunate, as I exposed this young co-worker to his parents. I had his permission to use his anecdote in my pathetic food column (which ran on Sundays on the first page of the Home section), but the poor fellow had no idea that his parents ever read such a thing.

The former co-worker is a brilliant storyteller, and he had used his stuff about swatting a swarm of yellow jackets outside his apartment, to great effect, but when telling it to his parents, he'd left out the fact that the magazine he employed for the killing was Playboy (the Darva Conger edition).

His mother called him up: "You read Playboy?" His dad, however, was understanding. "At least it wasn't Juggs."

Innocent that I was, I had never heard of Juggs.

More about Mr. Winger

2007-09-07T18:16:00.000-05:00

Back to back today, I listened to three solo CDs by Kip Winger and then to Winger's "Pull." Yummmmmm. Yes, he's good.

I asked Kip Winger to marry me. Well, not exactly, as he was born years after I was. I wrote:

I'd ask you to marry me, but you are already married, as am I. And I've vowed that if I ever take on another husband, he'll be at least fifteen years older than I am. That gets scary because even if the next wedding happens next year (not bloody likely), the fellow will be 69 [or more, I should have added].

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Some of my best friends are older than I am.

Afraid that I'd been too obscure, I explained a reference from my last bit:

Btw, my column about you has an embedded joke in the last word, "decorum." Jokes are never good if they have to be explained, but so it goes. That minor quip goes back to the scene in "Rock Star" with groupies and pussy passes. Mats, the Steel Dragon road manager, says, "Ladies, ladies, ladies, please, please, a little bit of decorum, please."

A story about Kip Winger

2007-09-03T12:26:00.000-05:00

I've never claimed to have sophisticated tastes.

I was trained, so to speak, in literary criticism, and my dad, who just retired as a classics professor, has been a jazz musician and an actor on the side.

But I've worked in journalism, I read romance novels, and I prefer J.S. Bach to Mozart. Not at all promising.

When my favorite romance novelist had a character who badmouthed Gustav Mahler, I asked the spouse what he thought. What did I know, after all? "Sucks," he said, though with more sophisticated language. "Modern crap." Ever curious, I went to YouTube, and the first Mahler clip I turned up fascinated me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7sgq-UgWR4

I sent it downstairs to my husband, and he said it had definite promise. Perhaps.

I've been listening over and over to the Emmy-nominated "Dick in a Box," which makes me guffaw. Less funny, for a woman of my age, is to read about Nikki Sixx's recent autobiography, with the happy revelations about boffing three generations at once--as I'm 53, that hits me where it hurts, even though I was never a groupie. Oh, and there is Metallica, to which I came late in life, and of whose politics I cannot approve. But because of a beloved former colleague and boss's passion for the group, I bought all their albums and even the "Live Shit" boxed set. The first thing that I said to this young colleague, years ago, after listening to the Black Album, was that it scared the heck out of me. I was surprised recently when I could listen to more than Balladica. (Yes, give me "Mama Said.")

ANYWAY--and it's no small "anyway"--I got to thinking about my favorite glam-metal act, Winger.

The hair, the ballet moves--hell, I was thoroughly hooked in the late 1980s and very early 1990s. And then MTV decided to go with rap and game shows.

Married women are allowed their tame animal lusts, as are married men. Tame.

I'd worked up a whole fantasy story about me and Kip Winger. I'd done the same with Star Trek's Mr. Spock and various other sexy but unattainable males. My fantasy story about Kip, which I'm trying to reconstruct, involved me with a guitar in my hands. That is quite a stretch, as I failed both in violin and in guitar even before I hit my teens.

Anyway! With this Timberlake/Mahler/Sixx harmonic convergence, I decided to look up Kip Winger on YouTube and elsewhere.

All those videos and all those concerts. The acoustic stuff. I dragged my husband up to my computer and played him two YouTube pieces. The first was the old video of Winger's "Seventeen." Ed, who never liked hair rock (silly man), insisted that I cut off the song. Ed is one of those men who say, "Just shut up and play!" I was still drooling. But when I turned on one of Kip Winger's solo acoustic pieces, the spouse was wowed. "The guy can sing AND play!" I knew that.

But I hadn't known until days ago about the album "Pull" (with the boffo anti-war song "Who's the One"), which I've ordered. And I certainly hadn't known about Kip Winger's solo career. I'd been sidetracked by the vagaries of TV, a full-time copy-editing job, and a fascination with the female side of the rock equation. Sarah McLachlan and Melissa Etheridge in particular.

So now I have to order all the rest of Mr. Winger's work in due course. Yes, even women my age have financial clout, but there's a matter of decorum.

Developing taste

2007-06-27T00:17:00.000-05:00

In the 1970s, I ate a bit of caviar, most of it cheap. Because I'd been warned that caviar is an acquired taste, I didn't spit the stuff out.

I was less lucky in 1991. The sister magazines Gourmet and Bon Appétit had been treating goat cheese as the bee's knees. At a D.C. restaurant, I saw a sandwich with both goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, and I pounced. Gack! No, I didn't spit anything out; my lunch companion was a nice young woman. Instead, I plowed through the horrid concoction although every bite was a nightmare. Ever since, I haven't gone anywhere near goat cheese.

I thought I'd found a food soul mate in writer Sandra Marton, who has two scenes dissing goat cheese in her award-winning "The Second Mrs Adams." Alas, I'd made the fatal error of confusing the author with her characters.

What does this all mean? I'll have to give goat cheese another try, I suppose.

Mottoes

2006-07-05T23:47:00.000-05:00

My longtime mottoes are "Volume, volume, volume" and "I'm not as stupid as I look." I've worked up a new motto: "I don't get mad; I get -- OK, I just get mad."

I'd use "Trust me; I know what I'm doing," but that's already taken.

'Vanishing Bride'

2006-07-05T00:23:00.001-05:00

When I obtained my marriage license in June 1979, I was handed a pack of gifts. I think I got some sanitary napkins as part of the deal. I know I got a book titled "Vanishing Bride."

In "Vanishing Bride," the heroine gets on the wrong flight -- a good thing because the plane that she'd meant to take, from Nice to Paris, disintegrates. When Marion makes it home, she hears her husband tell his secret sister that he's ecstatic over his wife's demise. The girl was too clinging. And after all, Stanni had married her only for the money and had been defrauding her father's perfume company almost from the beginning. Luckily, Stanislaus turns out to be a bigamist, so the marriage is easily dissolved.

What uplifting reading for women about to take on a husband! I keep running into the book in thrift stores, and I now own at least three copies.

I'm still married to the guy I wedded on Bloomsday almost three decades ago.

Kitchen and newspaper nightmares

2006-06-14T23:13:00.000-05:00

While hanging out with my parents, I've grown fond of cable TV. (Crazed copy editors can get upset at the word "fondling" in sex-crime matters, and perhaps they're correct; "fondle" is a word, surely, that's used only of people one's fond of. Right.)

Earlier this evening, I found myself watching a show on BBC America:

http://www.bbcamerica.com/genre/
home_living/ramsays_kitchen_nightmares/
ramsays_kitchen_nightmares_episode_guide.jsp
*******
Episode three - D-Place

Mexican-born Israel and his English partner, Tara, run D-Place. They've sunk nearly $270,000 of their own money into this fashionable café, which offers a vast selection of fusion cuisine. In charge is executive chef Philippe producing everything from all-day breakfasts to Asian noodles with an astounding lack of flair. The tasteless food is dire and boomerangs back from the dining room as soon as it's served to the customers. Feisty restaurant manager, Dave, loathes his chef and their mutual hatred spills over into permanent running battles. Faced with dysfunctional staff and a disastrous menu, Gordon is about to embark on the longest week of his professional life. Can he quell the panic, banish the deep fat fryer, and bring D-Place back from the dead, or will it disappear forever?
Premieres Wednesday, June 14, 9:00 p.m. ET/10:00 p.m. PT.
********

It all ended badly. Darned if that show didn't make me think throughout of working in a newspaper.

Book disasters

2006-05-16T20:43:00.000-05:00

Digging out a hardback copy of "Gaudy NIght" almost caused a major disaster in my study -- all the books over it started to spill out.

I have other copies of "Gaudy Night," of course. One of them is a first American edition that a supervisor gave me back when I worked in a D.C.-area bookstore. She didn't respect first American editions.

In the mail today I received my third copy (later edition) of an early Barbara Cartland romance, "Desire of the Heart." The book was written before her stable of secretaries reportedly took over. (I can't find the other copies.)

On the back cover of the later edition, received today:

When Cornelia, unexpectedly wealthy, arrives from Ireland to stay with her uncle and aunt in London, she dresses in dowdy country clothes and hides shyly behind her spectacles.

The beautiful Lady Bedlington, to save herself from having to relinquish her handsome young lover, persuades the Duke to propose to Cornelia. A few hours before the wedding, Cornelia, who has fallen in love with her fiancé, finds out why he is marrying her.

In Paris, disguised as a very different person by one of the famous demi-mondaines of the City, she makes a desperate fight to capture the heart of her debonair husband.

'Gaudy Night'

2006-05-16T12:18:00.000-05:00

When I was an undergraduate, my father sent me a copy of the Dorothy Sayers novel "Gaudy Night." I keep returning to it, and I have many favorite passages. Here are two.

From Chapter xiv:

"It appears to be altogether a choice of evils. But you have only to command. My ear is open like a greedy shark to catch the tunings of a voice divine."

"Great heavens! Where did you find that?"

"That, though you might not believe it, is the crashing conclusion of a sonnet by Keats. True, it is a youthful effort; but there are some things that even youth does not excuse."

"Let us go down-stream. I need solitude to recover from the shock."

At least one edition of Keats turns three sonnets on women into one; was it really the conclusion?

From Chapter xxiii:

He was wrapt in the motionless austerity with which all genuine musicians listen to genuine music. Harriet was musician enough to respect this aloofness; she knew well enough that the ecstatic rapture on the face of the man opposite meant only that he was hoping to be thought musical, and that the elderly lady over the way, waving her fingers to the beat, was a musical moron.

I'm hopeless with music, and that confession is painful from the daughter of a musician. I've been known to bang my head.

OK. One more Sayers quotation, back in Chapter xiv:

"Would you have your youth back if you could, Harriet?"

"Not for the world."

"Nor I. Not for anything you could give me. Perhaps that's an exaggeration. For one thing you could give me I might want twenty years of my life back. But not the same twenty years. And if I went back to my twenties, I shouldn't want the same thing."

Addendum on 'Fat'

2006-05-11T15:57:00.000-05:00

I should note that I recanted on mayo. A few years after I wrote the column below, I wrote another diatribe that badmouthed mayo. A reader set me right, and my formal apology was printed the next Sunday.

Have I told you that I adore "An Officer and a Gentleman"?

Fat

2006-05-08T00:30:00.000-05:00

Oct. 19, 1997

I have little patience with the fat police -- dietary experts and columnists who won’t rest until almost every gram, no matter of what type, has been wrung out of their recipes and recommendations for the good life. Some fat, I agree, is absolutely vile and evil, but the intake of good fatty acids is necessary for health.

Let me tell you a story -- and no, I am not making this up.

Sixteen years ago, with the help of Adele Davis, a much ridiculed nutritionist, I and a whole lotta fat revived an absolutely pathetic old pup.

The spouse and I had taken a one-term job in an idyllic college town in the mountains of Tennessee, and the house we rented came with two cats and an aged Welsh Corgi. I was ecstatic about the cats, but cynophobia runs in my family, and the idea of sharing living quarters with any dog distressed and disgusted me. Ick.

But Becket (cq) wasn’t any dog -- he was one of the worst excuses for a dog we’d ever met. The sluggish little thing wheezed, snuffled , shivered, whined and was covered with eczema. He regarded the great outdoors, apparently, with even greater loathing -- it required standing up and moving. Becket oozed decrepitude.

Now this was exciting: The dog immediately called to mind a particularly dramatic description of a case of oil deficiency I’d read a number of years before in Davis’ “Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit.” In our story, Davis is called in to look at the 18-month-old son of a former fashion model, who had shunned fat for years -- and of a dad who desperately wanted an athletic boy.

“This pathetic child was smaller than most one-year-old children,” Davis writes, “and had been covered with eczema since he was three weeks old. The boy was lethargic and seemed dim-witted.” She starts feeding the kid tablespoons of salad oil, and he perks up, electrified, and screams for more. He blooms into a normal, healthy boy. “If there is one man in this world who is willing to die for me,” Davis concludes, “it is probably this boy’s father.” Wotta story.

No problemo (sic) with a mere dog, I thought. We slupped in liberal quantities of oil on top of the dog’s long-standing and owner-prescribed diet of dry food. And he seemed to improve. Getting him to go outside to do whatever it is dogs do was no longer a trial and a tribulation for the spouse.

But then, Becket disappeared. And this was not fun, even for a cynophobe. We looked for him frantically, on foot and by car. In the process of calling his name over and over, we composed an anthem, begging the pup to come home.

Soon we were scum, at least in others’ eyes: After a few days, we got a call from a disapproving neighbor, who clearly thought our neglect -- or worse? -- had driven pitiful old Becket away from a house that was by rights his and not ours. She had seen him way up on campus, and she knew Becket wasn’t the type to go more than a few feet outdoors.

Becket wasn’t suffering at all, it turns out. We found him carousing with new furry friends and aggressively stealing such goodies as students would take out from their eating hall. Becket had gone from homebound invalid to jaunty dog-about-town. A low-rider, yes, but a sportster.

We coaxed him back and this time slathered him with affection to bind him to us. The three of us fell in love. But Becket looked good and we were low on oil, so we stopped giving it to him. A big mistake. Very quickly, he was sluggish and shivering again. We bought good, nonhydrogenated vegetable oil in jugs after that (no, not olive oil; nutritional science wasn’t that advanced in 1981) and made sure he got at least a couple of tablespoons a day.

And soon, we were no longer pariahs in the little town, for the story of our nutritional triumph, our resurrection of dear little Becket, spread. My husband and I taught the classics -- Greek and Latin -- but the best thing we did that semester was teach the glory that was grease.

And when his owners dropped by in April or May to pick up summer clothes, Becket’s vim and vigor stunned them. We were in a state of triumph.

When I explained about oil deficiency and its apparent effects, the woman almost wailed: “And he’d been like that for SIX YEARS.”
*****************************************************
When you buy prepared food, you’re likely to be paying good money for bad fat. No need to get hysterical, but read labels and ask questions, and above all, don’t overdo. Sometimes your body will tell you when you’ve been a wretch; when I’ve eaten potato chips, for example, and I love the miserable things, I can soon feel a thin but unpleasant layer of sticky goo build up on my skin.

When you’re at home, there’s no excuse to use shortening, margarine, processed cheese, hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils, hydrogenated peanut butter, mayo or whipped salad dressing in jars, and so on. You wanna feel bad? You wanna endanger yourself and your loved ones?

But you should consume a moderate amount of extra-virgin olive oil (first cold pressing!) and/or, where less flavor is a boon, canola (rapeseed) or peanut oil, cold-pressed if possible. (There are also sesame and walnut and other oils that come from foods that are naturally oily, so use them if you can afford them and are careful in storing them; I don’t associate oilyness with corn, however, or safflowers and the like, and so I don’t buy them.)

Working good oil into a menu is a no-brainer. I trust you know how to make a vinaigrette and pour it on a salad, or how to saute vegetables, or that you can put olive oil on pasta with freshly grated parmesan cheese. Don’t let anything swim in oil, but remember what happened to the Tin Woodman when he couldn’t get to his oil can.

Kingsley Amis on headline English

2006-05-02T02:16:00.000-05:00

A recent wordplay ban (excellent discussion by Nicole Stockdale) made me think of Kingsley Amis' views on headlines. I reproduced the punctuation as best I could, though I often disagree with it; heck, I can't say I agree with a lot in the text, either, but I still think it both instructive (utile) and amusing (dulce).

Kingsley Amis, _The King's English_, pp. 95-98.

Headline English

It is no secret that newspaper headlines no longer content themselves with announcing pieces of news in abbreviated but relatively unphilistine language. Nowadays headlines come in several styles. One is the over-informative, such that not only the piece of news is given but also what followed from it, so that we learn before we start to read that story that not only has Chancellor raised interest rates, say, but also that his doing so has 'fuelled' a Tory 'panic' about this or that. I like a headline to state straightforward non-clever things like PRIME MINISTER ASSASSINATED. To add details or consequences ahead of time is to weaken both the story and one's desire to read it, as if anyone cared.

But such matters are not my concern; other styles of headline are. A particularly barbarous one is to take advantage of the hospitality of the language to the use of nouns as adjectives; thus an escaping couple cease to be an ESCAPING COUPLE and become an ESCAPE COUPLE. A string of unleavened nouns will form a whole headline. Three nouns stuck cheek by jowl was once the limit, but now four is standard. Some months ago two tabloids gave their front pages to SCHOOL COACH CRASH DRAMA and SCHOOL OUTING COACH HORROR and a week or two later one of them achieved five with SCHOOL BUS BELTS SAFETY VICTORY. There is some loss of decent seriousness here, as if anyone cared.

This loss is clearer with the style of headline that uses puns or otherwise plays with words. Last month an understandably giggly tabloid carried the following in a single issue:

Page 1. Picture of a pretty girl who had just had a success. Caption: 'A star is born: British actres Julia Ormond gets a pig part.' Headline reads, 'Movie queen is crowned', i.e. is to play Queen Guinevere in £40m King Arthur film.

2. Headline reads, 'Still on tract for more rail misery'.

3. Headline reads, 'Arnie [i.e. Arnold Schwarzenegger] his true self after pregnant pause'. [His part in a recently made film had required him to simulate pregnancy.] Also headline reading, 'Careerof Julia the obscure is into top Gere'', i.e. the actor Richard Gere is to star as Sir Lancelot in the film. An accompanying photograph is captioned, 'Knight movies: Richard Gere makes his point [flourishes sword] while rehearsing his Lancelot swordplay.' Copy contains the sentence, 'In showbusiness terms, unknown actress Julia Ormond has found the Holy Grail.' On the same page, a large photograph of another actress is captioned, 'Dressed to thrill: . . . at premiere of new Arnie film.'

5. Headline reads, 'We're on the road to photo licences' [i.e. to the introduction of driving licences that carry a photograph of the licencee].

6-7. Headline reads, 'Crying all the way to the bank' [Barclays' profits, customers' grievances].

7. Headline reads, 'Food firms find health guide hard to stomach'.

10-11. Headline reads, 'Food firms boil over with anger as Brussels goes sour on soya milk'.

12. Headline reads, 'Banned be thy name' [a church authority has banned the use of pet-names etc. in gravestone inscriptions].

17. Headline reads, 'How our garden paradise was lost' [through nasty neighbours].

18. Headline reads, 'Border skirmish over a hedge'.

21. Heading: 'Crusoe, your island awaits'. Headline reads, 'Talking heads' [on solicitors' wigs].

23. Headline reads, 'A hot issue' [on crematoria]. Headline reads, 'Cine season'.

24. Headline reads, 'Extra time to save Graces' [statuary].

There follows a financial feature with eighteen headlines and no wordplay in ten pages.

The effect of all this in one issue is to make human concerns seem trivial to the reader. But what sort of reader is being looked for? If any, an unusual sort, one well acquainted with the Arthurian legends who knows about Jude the Obscure and much else in literature and yet is at home with 'Arnie' and talking heads. And when we read of somebody headlined in this tabloid and another as 'death husband' and 'kidnap horror man', and puzzle out that the same person is meant, we may start to suspect that, as in the case of much modern poetry, the journalists concerned are not really interested in an identifiable reader. They are just playing a silly game among themselves. After all, they have to fill the paper somehow whether they have anything to say or not.

Stop Press (to use an outdated expression): The other day I read in the columns of a 'quality' newspaper -- in the body of a story, not in a headline -- that bird-protection societies had been sent all of a twitter by something or other. Oh God, when will it end?

Guilty pleasures

2006-04-25T23:33:00.000-05:00

I read trashy romance novels on occasion. Not serious bodice rippers, though; the 187-189 pages of the Harlequin Presents series is about as much as I can take.

For good cover art, check out this site: http://www.worldoflongmire.com/features/romance_novels/

When I have the cash, I'll buy the book Gallery of Regrettable Food. My sister-in-law, who clued me in on the romance-novel Web site above, has just sent me another gut-wrenching URL: http://www.candyboots.com/wwcards/spectacular.html.

The headline cure

2006-04-24T08:07:00.000-05:00

Aug. 31, 1998:

Writing headlines for a living should make me immune to human suffering. In fact, I've thought it could make for lucrative therapy.

I could see the money crammed into groaning bank accounts, riding up and down with the Dow and firming up a few old mattresses. Yes, and there I'd be on "Oprah" and "Jerry Springer," amazing the world with my panacea for misery.

The Headline Cure. It seemed so obvious, yet so ingenious! Over the past six years, I have dealt with all manner of pain, death, destruction and horror, and I'm still only mildly demented. How many deaths have I personally announced in big type? I haven't a clue, but I do it day in and day out without dissolving ceaselessly into gulping tears.

Clearly, I said to myself, it's the objectification of the cause of grief, the headline-writing process, that saves me. Plug any disaster, I reasoned, into headline specs, and it will seem bearable, almost mundane. I was all ready to tell you about this grand discovery last week, but I found, to my horror, that it didn't work. My oldest cat died, and I couldn't make headlines. I was unable to write at all. Sorry.

Still, headline therapy has its merits for cooking disasters.

Let's take one of my culinary tales of woe. To treat the poor News-Leader newshounds one Sunday, I decided on basil dip -- a step above the standard French onion dip and glazed doughnuts (not together!). But our victory garden was sadly defoliated. A local grocery (no names here, to protect the guilty) did have a sexy-looking box of dried basil-dip mix, and I pounced despite the rather outrageous cost. The cost reassured me: If it's expensive, it has to be good, no? I mixed the stuff blithely into sour cream and sashayed into the newspaper, expecting loud applause.

I should have tasted the dip first. When co-workers use the term "interesting," you know you're sunk. The stuff was bitterly, dangerously inedible.

Obviously I'm still suffering from the memory, so let's headline (sic) away the pain by putting a worst-case scenario into big type. NOTE: The following is fabricated for an imaginary tabloid.

"Headline hussy charged with murder try in chip-dip shocker." "Tainted-chip-dip victim tells all: 'I gagged; I swooned; my life passed in front of my eyes.'" "Basil-dip Borgia 'seemed so nice and quiet,' co-workers sneer." "'Dip suspect mulls suit against grocery chain; 'I'm the victim,' she wails from behind bars." And then the inevitable follow-up: "5 years after dip scandal, journalist suffers in blistering Texas exile."

I feel better already. You can try this one at home -- gratis.

************************************

I was recently given a "healthy" cookbook. What a shock! Over the years, I'm afraid, I've grown suspicious of any cookbook that touts healthful eating -- so many rely simply on cutting down fat to unnaturally low levels, putting in two egg whites (a part with far less nutrition than the yolk) instead of one whole egg, or using margarine (evil! evil! evil!) instead of butter.

But I found a number of interesting recipes in Jane Kinderlehrer's "The Smart Baking Cookbook: Muffins, Cookies, Biscuits, and Breads" (Newmarket Press, 1985, 1998). True, the version of breakfast bars that this book set forth did not wean the errant spouse of his soggy-oatmeal horrors. Truth to tell, the things I made were undersweetened and overdry. But we BOTH ate them, and I'm sure, with all the soy flour, oat flour, wheat germ, milk powder, etc., etc., we were better for it.

Not that I'm about to offer it to y'all -- I can see the Ozarks rising up against me and sending me e-mail raspberries. I give instead Kinderlehrer's recipe for high-protein Blintz Muffins, which would make a nice entry at tea, or for a snack, or brunch. If you don't happen to have lecithin granules around, I won't tell on you, but I'll have you know *I* had the gumption to run out and buy a package of the nutritious little things. And, yes, the spouse snarfed the muffins up. I don't have to drive away disaster with my patented headline therapy.

BLINTZ MUFFINS
3 eggs
1 cup cottage cheese
3 tablespoons sour cream (you can substitute other things, of course -- use your intelligence)
2 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup whole-wheat pastry flour
2 tablespoons wheat germ
2 tablespoons lecithin granules
1 tablespoon grated orange rind
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
sliced almonds for garnish

1. In a mixing bowl or food processor, blend together the eggs, cheese, sour cream, honey and vanilla.
2. In another bowl, combine pastry flour, wheat germ, lecithin granules, orange rind and cinnamon.
3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 12 regular-size muffin cups, or three dozen minicups, or line with foil baking cups.
4. Mix liquid ingredients into dry ones, and spoon batter into muffin cu[s. Top each muffin with a few slices of almonds. Bake regular-size muffins for 25 minutes, minimuffins for 15-18 minutes. Serve hot or at room temperature.

Not woman enough

2006-04-21T21:40:00.000-05:00

From February 2000:

Shop as if you mean it, I said. But do I mean it?

Last year, I served up a recipe using frozen artichoke hearts, and a reader complained -- these thistle treats were nowhere to be found in town, she said. I was stern; I rolled my eyes heavenward.

It may be called a supermarket, but you're really the top dog, I said, or words to that effect -- don't let its choices master you.

Easy for me to say: I was sojourning in Austin, Texas, where there's a heavy infestation of yuppies and techies, and stores are crammed with almost anything the wildest recipe requires.

Springfield, I hate to tell you, isn't yet in the same league. And here in the Ozarks, I'm not woman enough to get my food.

I'm an Aries, so I should be a pushy broad, and the spouse and my co-workers think I live up to my stars. But with strangers, I wimp out. No, I haven't even found my favorite brand of *canned* artichoke hearts here, let alone the frozen variety. Yet the remedy is easy, for any of us with guts: Ask our favorite supermarket to order what we want.

My timidity means serious hunting and gathering. Which store has cannellini, which boasts loose portobello mushrooms, which carries the best coffee, and which stocks onions that fit in one hand? My memory is a tad flabby; I often find myself ranging through two to four stores to gather ingredients for one simple recipe.

Or the memory works, but the store doesn't. Not long ago, despite time constraints, I chose the supermarket farther away because of its coffee, the French Roast that the spouse likes best. And the bean bin was empty. Grrrrr. Aaaaccccckkkk. Funny how stores don't seem to catch on, to stock *more* of the things people *actually buy.*

The nice woman at the checkout counter asked me if I'd found everything I wanted. A formulaic phrase, a mere rhetorical question, I'm sure. I usually smile and gibber, "Yes, of course!" -- I cringe under the tarring-and-feathering stares people in line throw at anyone who holds them up with chatter or price problems.

This time, though, my anger and anguish, my utter java woe, spilled out. Then I looked up. The cashier was gaping at me, wounded, nay, crushed. I didn't dare glance behind me at the seething line of shoppers. I quickly pretended I was joking -- can't afford that yuppie stuff anyway, I said -- and I scurried out with head bowed, an eternal stooge of the marketplace.

********

I chose our recipe of the week because it seemed so easy, in two big respects -- not much work to toss together, and with all ingredients readily available everywhere.

In fact, I got it from a fellow Gannetteer, one with a good reputation -- food editor Sarah Fritschner at the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal -- who writes a column titled "The Fast Lane," for busy cooks (check her out online at www.courier-journal.com/sarah/).

In her introduction to the recipe, Fritschner says: "My nomination for best convenience product of the year: baby spinach, sold washed in plastic bags. At my house, we stir-fry it with garlic to serve with pasta; we add it to fried rice; we put it on sandwiches; and we make casseroles ..."

I'd never bought baby spinach, I must confess, but I was ready to shell out for the privilege. Still, I wasn't married to the idea; I was prepared to pounce on a good 10-ounce package of washed adult spinach if that was all I could find.

The supermarket I hit had bags of baby spinach; indeed, it did. But the Depression mentality handed down from my parents held me back -- the store wanted $2.99 for 5 ounces of the stuff, and I blanched. Six bucks for 10 ounces of spinach? Hopelessly cheap, I went to Plan B. I also went to another store. And the one I chose didn't have *any* 10-ounce bags of washed fresh spinach on hand. Aiiieeeee. I am cursed.

Black-eyed Peas With (Baby) Spinach and Cheese
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced (about 1 teaspoon)
10 ounces clean, fresh spinach
1/4 teaspoon crushed red-pepper flakes (or hot sauce to taste)
2 (1-pound) cans black-eyed peas
1 cup freshly grated Cheddar, Parmesan, Taleggio, provolone or other cheese
1 cup unseasoned breadcrumbs

Heat oven to 425 degrees. Grease a gratin dish or 9-by-9-inch baking pan with a tablespoon of olive oil. Mince garlic. Heat another tablespoon of oil in a wide skillet over medium-high heat and add garlic. Cook until aromatic (about 1 minute).

Increase heat to high. Add spinach and red-pepper flakes and stir until the spinach wilts. Put the black-eyed peas in the gratin dish. Spread spinach on top, then sprinkle with grated cheese and breadcrumbs. Drizzle with last tablespoon of olive oil. Bake 20 minutes, or until hot. Crumbs should be brown and mixture should bubble.
Serve with whole-grain rolls and roasted carrots. Serves 4.

An occult hand

2006-04-16T08:58:00.000-05:00

July 16, 2000:

It was as if an occult hand had unfurled its delicate fingers and patted me lightly on the head. Placed lovingly in my e-mail box - OK, and about 100,000 others - sat a recipe for Chocolate Hazelnut Truffles.

Heavens, it looked easy: five basic ingredients and about 90 words of instruction, and no candy thermometer. And I had every ingredient called for - a sign to be sure!

The recipe also gave me a chance to score points against the spouse, for it would let me try out the chopping function of my new hand blender. “Look, doll, I don't just buy the gadgets," I could say. “I actually use them, once in a while."

Surely, the hand of fate had smiled upon me. But was the hidden force hiding things? One minute I saw an essential piece of the blender/chopper, the next it had vanished.

But I wasn't about to be sidetracked in the middle of a divine mission. I wheeled around the kitchen like a madwoman, peering under heaps of newspapers and behind motley gatherings of spice jars and nutritional supplements, in the drainer, on open shelves, in high-heaped drawers, on the stovetop, behind the sugar and the cookies and the flour. AARRGGHH. I tore that miserable room apart. After half an hour of anguish, I was frazzled, dispirited and wrathful, prepared at last to defy fate and turn to my conventional blender or my food processor to chop the hazelnuts.

But then, that occult hand seemed to step in and save me: The beaker lid suddenly turned up in the crockery cabinet, atop a pile of dinner plates. I was still seething, but my new gadget buzzed the nuts so quickly and nicely, my gloom lifted, and I strode on toward destiny.

After melting butter and chocolate, then adding sugar, I blithely dumped in half of the finely chopped hazelnuts. Once this die was cast, a strange force guided my eyes to the remaining nuts. Odd. Lurking amid the nut pieces, a whole passel of white flakes glinted forth. As the chocolate cooked on unattended, I investigated: The plastic cover on my new appliance's chopping blades had disappeared. Something had diverted me from reading the instruction “Remove blade cover before chopping."

I did taste the truffle mixture. Do you like scorched chocolate with a bitter plastic taste?

I'd clearly misread the occult hand. All along, it was giving me a rude gesture.

Ah, Julia!

2006-04-08T15:34:00.000-05:00

A New York Times book review on Julia Child's "My Life in France" (written with Alex Prud'homme) boasts a sentence by Child that is particularly worth reading.

The prose, direct and energetic, abounds in one-word summations like phooey, marvelous, yuck, and yum. Every day in France brought a thrilling new discovery, but Child's capacity for wonder and delight coexisted with "show me" skepticism. When a woman in Marseille tries to tell her that real bouillabaisse never, ever includes tomatoes, she tosses that opinion right out of court. "Such dogmatism, founded on ignorance and expressed with a blast of hot air, irked me," she writes.

The review, "Julia Child's Memoir of When Cuisine Was French for Scary," can be found here (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/08/books/review/08grim.html).

'Badge'

2006-04-03T13:01:00.000-05:00

I grew up in more liberal times. When I was in high school -- in Texas, no less -- I played Cream's "Badge" to my English class. It was part of an assignment. Now I have no effing idea what the lyrics mean.

Granted, I'll never forgive Clapton for screwing Pattie over.

Class warfare

2006-04-02T14:18:00.001-05:00

Inspired by the author of That's Nice, Cheeks, I'm posting an old food column of mine that outraged the advertising department in my newspaper. I was flummoxed. Sure, the ad people had the nice parking spots, but I was also trying to get a shot in against other day-siders who made my life miserable, the reporters. And I was just joking. The piece is from August 2001.

Civilization as I knew it was nearly blown apart by popcorn.

Who really thinks food is a force for good? Granted, in prehistoric times -- or so the scholars tell us -- hunger bred cooperation: Heroic hunters strode forth and slew the ill-starred woolly mammoth, hacked away manfully at its massive carcass, and dragged all they could carry home to the grateful clan.

But when, at the dawn of the 21st century, the great popcorn behemoth willingly spills its guts in the company cola room, life at the News-Leader grows nastier and more brutish.

Your trusty daily newspaper, sad to say, is riven by serious social divisions. In one corner, you have the prosperous day-siders, with their well-coiffed tresses, sleek suits, shiny shoes and assigned parking spaces. Then there are those of us who labor by night, too often clad in the ratty and the recycled, hungry at every turn, and likewise angry and snarling.

Yet the two classes aren't quite as divergent on Fridays: The so-called communal popper makes our upper class shed much of its thin veneer. When the less favored among us stagger in after a grueling, desperate search for a place to put our ancient and bedraggled vehicles, we see the unmistakable signs of the day-siders' animal frenzy: the greasy tracks, the sad shards of popcorn kernels, trailing here and yon across the hallowed newspaper's otherwise sanitary halls.

Night-siders trudge upstairs to the break room to see a popcorn desert, all kernels of civilization now wiped away. Grrrr.

I'll admit it -- I can be a professional malcontent. Every week, I sowed seeds of revolution among my peers with three simple words: "Out of popcorn." I buttered up my night-sider comrades with the cry of "Equal kernels for equal work."

"We need an act of snack subversion, uncivil disobedience." They were popping mad. I proposed sneaking in early with a large paper bag and, while no one was there to witness, looting all I could for the cause. But "while no one was there"? As if! -- those vultures circled constantly.

So, Plan B: espionage and exposé. I came in early for some subtle reconnaissance, insinuating myself into a gaggle of well-groomed women who circled the popcorn trough with crammed cornucopiae in hand. Pretending to study the contents of a soft-drink machine, I aimed my quivering ears outward, to learn "Who hogs the corn?"

But the only clear sound I picked up was a resolute munch, crunch, chomp. Then all of a sudden the gaggle flew the coup, casting scornful glances and a shower of crumbs. Dang. I had forgotten to dress for my part as agent provocateuse. But, lo, the plundered popper came into full view. And it wasn't quite empty. I gathered up one of the last paper cones and started scraping away at the faux-yellow remains.

I'd come, I'd seen, and I was ready to start snarfing. I'll just take this plunder back to share with my comrades --or not. Glorying in the spoils, I danced down to my desk with my trove of kernels. And then I looked up. Right there, staring at me with a bristling sense of betrayal, were the righteous have-nots of the night-side copy desk, extending the hand of solidarity, to share in the wealth.

To which I snarled, "Hey, you want to be able to type with that hand?"

****************

I wouldn't be surprised if the grand poobahs at the News-Leader had caught some whiff of the popcorn discontent. Suddenly, when night-siders trudged upstairs, popcorn was waiting there for us. On a few nights, a fresh batch appeared in the evening! What luxury!

The work place is all the more civil for it, although I miss those days of animal wrath, of seething hunger.

You really shouldn't need a recipe this week, for popcorn is at its most glorious without one -- a little salt, a little butter, or whatever the food companies put into the little microwave packages. But I'll give you something that's really more like candy than like popcorn.

I hope it appeases some of you; I know, alas, that one of my co-workers, Michelle, will be outraged by the marshmallows it contains. As y'all doubtless know, marshmallows contain gelatin, which is made of bones. Oh, well.

If you don't like the recipe below, you can easily find other ideas for popcorn, or just about any dish you can think of, at www.allrecipes.com. The site is divided into a lot of categories, and has several useful ways of searching. Many of the recipes have also been rated by readers.

The Popcorn Cake, by Linda K.

14 cups popped popcorn
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 cup peanuts
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1/2 cup peanut butter (preferably natural)
5 cups miniature marshmallows

Spray with vegetable spray a 10-inch tube pan (preferably with a removable bottom) or other 12-cup.

In a very large bowl, combine popcorn, chocolate chips and peanuts and mix well. (If you don't have a very large bowl, your life will be a lot easier if you cut all the ingredients in half and mix up two batches in large bowls, then combine).

In a double boiler or in medium saucepan over low heat, melt butter (or do by halves, again).

Stir in peanut butter. Stir in marshmallows and continue
stirring until marshmallows melt and the mixture is smooth. Remove from the heat. Stir marshmallow mixture into popcorn mixture until well coated.

Press mixture into prepared pan. Allow to cool completely before removing from the pan; refrigerate to make firm and more easily cut into slices. Of course, you can always just grab big hunks by hand.

Progress

2006-04-01T22:35:00.002-06:00

I fixed the glitch on my DVD of "American Dreamer." On a whim, I ran one of those cleaning sheets for eyeglasses over it.

Speaking of romantic comedies, I must recommend "Cherry 2000," another film that I fell in love with during my cable days. Apparently it's now a cult classic, whatever that means.

Bad move

2006-04-01T18:01:00.000-06:00

Last spring, I saw that a minor local rag, one that one can get free at the supermarket, was hiring. I was in school and not eager to work (who is?), but I e-mailed the company, asking whether any part-time copy-editing jobs were available.

Almost immediately, a nice man who worked for the company that owns the paper, a man based in Branson, Mo., telephoned me. I became a bit worried when I realized that the man wanted a reporter, and reporting is no decent life for anyone, but the interview went well, I think. We were chortling.

At the end of it all, I promised to e-mail him some of my stuff, but I told him that he could find some of my old work on my blog.

I never heard back from the guy. I looked again at the blog, only to find that an old column I'd posted here, the top one at the time, was one crowing about the ease with which some of us oldsters can make public errors.

My set of links didn't help, I'm sure. I put them up with a passive-aggressive purpose. The second one (by a copy editor) shows far more about my character, in one sense of the word, than I'd like. The penultimate one, a thing that one of my siblings and I have guffawed about for decades, discusses the use of giving blow jobs to make it ahead in business.

'Collateral'

2006-04-01T08:00:00.000-06:00

Sometimes dictionaries help. Consider the title of the movie "Collateral." I worked myself into knots over the title until I consulted a dictionary or three. The noun "collateral" didn't make much sense here. The phrase "collateral damage" helped, but it still had holes. Look at the meanings of the adjective. The physical idea in the adjective "collateral" assists greatly in the interpretation. See the elevator scene. And note the position in which Cruise and Foxx sit in most of the scenes.

OK. The following definition was also useful: "secured or guaranteed by additional security, especially by personal as opposed to real property."

Never, never, never involve yourself in literary criticism.

Confessional poetry

2006-03-31T13:42:00.005-06:00

I probably got a job once, one of my favorites, because I was too honest.

The interview was a bit awkward. The interviewer, a prominent physiologist, scanned over the application and said: "Most of this isn't interesting. But what about the My-Oh-My Club?" This was in 1984.

I stared, colored, doubted, and was silent for a moment. "It wasn't very respectable" was all that I could first choke out. But the man looked at me inquiringly, and I submitted. Here's one of those quotations that aren't exact, but which try to carry the meaning (see Thucydides). Important note: The interview was in Virginia, not in Texas, if that matters.

"Well, after Taco Bell rejected me that summer [1972], I was desperate. The My-Oh-My Club was the only place that would hire me. It was Austin's first place with totally nude dancing, though I worked as a waitress and thankfully, for all concerned, kept my clothes on. Between sets, the place showed porn flicks, some of them with pigs and horses."

As waitresses, by the way, we made no salary, only tips. But we made better money, most of the time, than the salaried dancers. For legal reasons back then, the club banned the placement of folding currency in a certain orifice, and in totally nude dancing, you can't just shove a bill into underwear.

I got the respectable job, which involved ferrying around scholarly manuscripts to reviewers. Later, I learned that the interviewer had known exactly what that dear, departed club was because another physiologist in the department hailed from Austin. And everyone, it seems, had been waiting for my arrival at the interview. I'm sure that the poor people were seriously disappointed by the sight of me.

Much later, the first physiologist asked me why I'd bothered to mention the My-Oh-My Club on my application. All I could say in answer was that the application form insisted on a full employment history.

"You should have lied," the good man told me, if not in so many words. Maybe I should have. But, hey, I did get that job! Honor won the day.

Truly whipped

2006-03-30T02:10:00.000-06:00

I told a young woman to stand up for her principles.

Silly me. Principles rarely get anyone anywhere, and I should have advised compromise. I was on the verge of recommending sucking up, but a Cheeks post on ass-kissers made me see the folly of my ways. Fortuitous.

Still, I've never liked myself when I'm at my most angry; when I learn that people whom I hate hate me back, I'm appalled. And I've always recommended being nice to others, especially in the newsroom.

Just after the spouse and I bought our first VCR and were playing "Beverly Hills Cop," I had an odd confrontation with our most timid and paranoid cat, Leskhe, a cat who hadn't had much contact with either humans or other cats in the critical first few weeks.

I put her on a chair with our newest feline, and Leskhe, still fairly young, put up with it, probably intimidated by the gigantic human's interference in her life.

And then, while the spouse and I were taking a break from the movie, I went over and kissed the sleeping female. She bit me, hard, barely missing my eye, and then, having realized in absolute horror that she'd delivered her act of aggression not against a well-furred male cat but against one of her mammoth feeders, the poor kitty let out an extremely high-pitched squeal and ran for cover.

After I treated my wound, I sought Leskhe out. It was with difficulty that I pulled her from under a table. Once on my lap, however, she figured out that I had no intention of hurting her in retaliation. She started biting my hand -- in affection, I hope -- but I put a stop to that. Nicely, I hope.

I miss Leskhe. Here's an old column about her; my private title for it was "Pussywhipped."

Sept. 29, 2000

Leskhe L. Lemur was convinced, 17-1/2 years ago, that we intended to eat her.

Most cats inspect new living quarters; this one bolted right behind a couch. For two years, she sat in a defensible position, and stared out at us with suspicious eyes. In the kitchen, however, she lost her fear; if she thought us like the witch in "Hansel and Gretel," working resolutely to fatten the children up for dinner, she didn't care. Food was her prime imperative, and she bolted it, too.

The meek don't inherit the respect of other cats, and all but one of our little wretches have thrived on tormenting poor Leskhe, who clearly led a deprived early childhood and lacks your basic feline graces, such as grooming others and the ability to understand cat tussling as non-life-threatening. To compensate for her low status among her peers, it seems, she has, over the years, come to lord (or should the word be "lady"?) it over the spouse and me; her imperious yowl is ubiquitous.

Our 11-year-old, T. Tadger Tat (once known as Catius Catalepton, I'm ashamed to say), used to delight in pouncing on Leskhe as she exited from the litter box. Her reaction, ultimately, was to make palpable displays of her displeasure on the living-room floor. I felt her pain, indeed, and took to escorting her to the bathroom, where I'd close the door and wait for her offerings. Tadger, whose ears once pricked up at the sound of clay being scratched, lost interest in his youthful game back in 1992, yet to this day, Leskhe still demands her litter ritual. And she insists that I carry her out of the room after the deeds are done.

She who once showed some gratitude for our kitchen offerings now just delivers a "serve me now, vile giants" yowl. More than a year ago, the spouse decreed that we should stop this madness by feeding our babies elsewhere. All our five cats were outraged, of course, and spent several months trying to reverse this scandalous and upsetting situation, but four no longer seem to associate the kitchen with feeding.

Leskhe, however, whose name means "chat" in ancient Greek, knows that she can always talk her meek humans into shelling out a special treat, especially when one of us is foolish enough to hang out in the kitchen and cook. We are the ones now afraid -- that she'll bite the hand that doesn't feed her.

***************

My cat Leskhe (pronounced "Leskay," if you're interested) served as quality control on your recipe of the week.

No, she didn't eat it; she simply did her darnedest to kill it, and yet it lived and thrived.

When I mentioned the dish to our features editor, Louise Whall, she was horrified: pumpkin cheesecake made with tofu? Perhaps I shouldn't tell you this, but she's not a big pumpkin fan.

But the dish turned out to be really boffo, despite our now-oldest cat's assaults on my concentration.

I was so proud of myself. For years I've waited hours for unsalted butter, which I keep in the freezer, to come to room temperature. But this time, I was going to put my clever microwave to use. It seemed so easy to defrost it on low temperature; I could be a contender! But as I stuck it into the wretched appliance, which appears to date back at least 16 years, Leskhe wandered in and gave me her "I need half-and-half" yowls.

Milk products aren't good for most cats, but I've never been able to explain that to the stubborn cat, so I punched in the numbers for my maiden microwave butter defrosting, and then I turned to quiet the cat's imperatives. Alas, instead of microwaving the butter on the lowest temperature for an exploratory minute, I found, as I turned back to my cooking project, that I'd hit it with high power and asked for 10 minutes and 1 second of radiowave time. My six tablespoons of butter weren't soft, as the recipe required, but thoroughly melted. I briefly thought of putting the pathetic substance back into the freezer to firm it up, but time before work was too short. The graham-cracker crust was a royal pain to work with -- was it the fault of having melted butter? I have no idea. But the crust turned out quite edible, and with no extra sugar added. If you're skeptical, use your favorite version of the crust.

Back on my stride after two crusts were formed, I started dumping ingredients for the pumpkin filling into my food processor. Leskhe yowled again. After I'd placated her with a little more half-and-half, I turned back, but I'd forgotten that the recipe demanded that the blending process take more than one stage. As a result, I managed not to process the stuff fully; when I started to pour it into the crust, I found large lumps of cream cheese still present. I smashed them down as best I could and barreled ahead.

With these strikes against my pies, they still gained the spouse's coveted seal of approval. And I snarfed, too, unworried about calories as noble tofu danced down my gullet. OK, I did cheat just a trifle: The recipe in "The Whole Soy Cookbook (Three Rivers Press, 1998)" wants you to use soy margarine, but I disapprove of all margarine, and soy cream cheese, which doesn't seem to be easily available in these parts. And anyway, I didn't have any. So there.

Pumpkin-Tofu Cheesecake
Crusts:
2 cups graham-cracker crumbs (circa 16 whole crackers)
6 tablespoons unsalted butter (or soy margarine), slightly softened

Filling:
1-1/2 pounds silken tofu
1 cup canned or fresh-cooked pumpkin
1-1/4 cups white sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
12 ounces cream cheese (or soy cream cheese)
1 tablespoon(cq) vanilla extract

For crusts, process whole graham crackers in food processor, then add butter (or soy margarine) and pulse until the mixture reaches the consistency of coarse crumbs. (Greenberg says that you can use your blender; I doubt my cheesy little model would survive.) Pat the mixture into two 9-inch metal pie plates, and refrigerate while you make the filling.

For the filling, puree the tofu and pumpkin in your food processor (or in your blender at high speed). Add sugar, spices, cream cheese and vanilla, and process until fully smooth, scraping down sides as necessary.

Put the pies into a preheated 325-degree oven for 50 minutes, or until cheesecake mixture is firm. Turn the oven off, and leave the pies in the oven for 1 hour. Remove from oven and cool to room temperature. Refrigerate overnight. Serve cool.

N.B.: Greenberg suggests that, if you intend to keep the pies around for more than a day, you should use plain, not silken, tofu, as the fuller moisture content of silken tofu will lead to separation in the filling. Perhaps that's a problem with soy cream cheese, but my delightful little cream-cheesed pies survived happily despite their silken content.

Planned obsolescence?

2006-03-29T18:38:00.000-06:00

What is wrong with DVDs? I'd been led to believe that VHS was easily corruptible, but that the tapes would have a decent lifespan of 20 years. Yes, in my VHS copy of "The Fabulous Baker Boys," the piano-top scene plays badly; I'd bought the VHS tape used, and the former owner or owners probably rewinded too much there.

But the DVDs in my short experience with them don't perform well. I'd seen a big problem while watching cable at my parents' house: On numerous occasions, a big scene would start shaking and then die; in one case, the tech in charge wasn't watching, and I had fun waiting to see the film start again. What's the frequency, Kenneth?

When I bought Wahlberg's "Rock Star" on DVD, my first copy wouldn't play at all. The replacement copy from Amazon wasn't new (the DVDs make the difference obvious in the opening screens), and too many scenes started to shake and rattle, or stutter, after one viewing.

Dammit, just now, a recently bought DVD of "American Dreamer" lost a key bit; I can still watch the flick, but I must flip to the next scene after this DVD crisis.

When I buy movies, I do it to see them over and over. I enjoy the convenience of watching films on the computer, but I abhor these drawbacks. Worst, I think, in comparison with VHS, is that one can't watch a small piece of a scene multiple (or myriad) times: We can't rewind (or fast-forward) at will.

The spouse and I have always been late to technology. His 1970 Camaro exchanged its eight-track music for cassette in Christmas 1989. We got our first CD player in 1995. We held back because he was sure that digital cassettes would transform the marketplace.

I've read that DVD technology is advancing, but that two platforms are competing in a nasty way. In 15 years, perhaps, I'll learn all about it.

Straight lines

2006-03-27T17:41:00.000-06:00

I've been worrying myself in a big way over serious problems with tone and nuance. I can be snarky, God knows, but I do my best to avoid snarkiness. And yet when I reread all my straight lines, in the most sincere of e-mails, I start seeing other meanings than I'd intended, other tones.

My spouse thinks the impression of snideness a problem with e-mail. I see it as a problem in all writing. Have I been imbued with too much postmodernist lit crit?

A useful story

2006-03-27T12:42:00.000-06:00

In late 1996, I wasted a lot of time typing up one of my favorite stories by Saki (H.H. Munro). It didn't occur to me until shortly afterward that I could just get it off the Web.

Here's how "The Lost Sanjak" begins:

The prison Chaplain entered the condemned’s cell for the last time, to give such consolation as he might.

‘The only consolation I crave for,’ said the condemned, ‘is to tell my story in its entirety to some one who will at least give it a respectful hearing.’

‘We must not be too long over it,’ said the Chaplain, looking at his watch.

The condemned repressed a shiver and commenced.

‘Most people will be of an opinion that I am paying the penalty of my own violent deeds. In reality I am a victim to a lack of specialization in my education and character.’

‘Lack of specialization!’ said the Chaplain.

‘Yes. If I had been known as one of the few men in England familiar with the fauna of the Outer Hebrides, or able to repeat stanzas of Camoëns’ poetry in the original, I should have had no difficulty in proving my identity in the crisis when my identity became a matter of life and death for me. But my education was merely a moderately good one, and my temperament was of the general order that avoids specialization. I know a little in a general way about gardening and history and old masters, but I could never tell you off-hand whether “Stella van der Loopen” was a chrysanthemum or a heroine of the American War of Independence, or something by Romney in the Louvre.’

The Chaplain shifted uneasily in his seat. Now that the alternatives had been suggested they all seemed dreadfully possible.

Saki runs wild in the rest of his tale. Genius.

Neese's Liver Pudding

2006-03-27T03:06:00.001-06:00

I think about the column below with a degree of sadness. Part of the inspiration was a much-loved columnist at the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer who is no longer with us. When he wrote about liver pudding and asked for comments, he was amazed by my story. He wrote back to ask how a marriage could survive between a good Southerner and someone who doesn't eat meat.

After I got my column published, probably 14 years later, I received an angry response from a reader. The letter writer, who knew my husband but didn't know that he knew him (there are differing surnames in our mixed marriage!), informed me that in my column I had offended North Carolina, my husband, and one other thing that I can't remember. The writer also contended that I'd said "liver pudding" when I meant "liver mush," and he claimed that I'd been confused about the identity of the animal who had contributed its liver. I think that the letter writer and I became friends, or at least reconciled, through subsequent e-mails. Only a few years later, I learned that he had died.

I really hadn't meant to offend.
-----

My name is Alison, and I’m married to a Southerner.

Here’s proof, 200 proof, or at least 150: I recently let the spouse out of the house to forage for food, and he came home with two bunches of collards. At least he didn’t cook them with fatback, but, boy, did he cook them, and cook them, and cook them: He sautéed -- nay, saturated -- them first in liberal glubs(cq) of oil, then drowned them in water and flogged their pitiful corpses with at least two hours of brutal boiling.

I must take responsibility; I have only myself to blame. I knew what he was when I married him -- a vile murderer of some vegetables, and a complete bigot when it comes to others -- but love stole away my senses.

Perhaps I considered the potential for low humor, for I fastened on a lover of liver pudding. Liver pudding is a joke even on its home turf, North Carolina. And as I stood in supermarket lines with that slimy, grayish, lumpy rectangle of pig organ and denatured grain -- wrapped in clear plastic, to trumpet its presence to the world -- I would draw my hair closely around my face, hunch my shoulders together and look to the ground. Perhaps no one would recognize me, and perhaps I wouldn’t be able to hear the snickers. But hear them I did; people laughed and pointed at me and my liver pudding.

The spouse cooked it; he cooked it every day. Every day at breakfast in our North Carolina years, the pathetic boy would sizzle up two eggs and two or three slices of liver pudding, or LP, as I called it to avoid having to speak the ugly phrase. Over high heat, he’d let his eggs brown and toughen round the edges (they really snap, crackle and pop!) and his LP shrivel and turn a ghastly blackish-gray.

Day after day, month after month, year after year I watched this unsavory display of devil-may-care cooking, this gut-wrenching show of cruelty to the idea of food. And I watched. And finally, I snapped.

I, who hadn’t eaten meat in 10 years, suddenly saw myself lunge in desperation at his plate and snatch up a small, ragged triangle of the grotesque meaty mush. Yes, I did it -- I popped it into my mouth. I chewed. I swallowed.

Oh, it was foul. Burned and evil. Gaack. Ewwwww.

But my greatest agony was that I had abandoned my principles and only suffered for it: No moment of gloriously guilty pleasure would carry me through the rest of a plodding, virtuous life. No, of all the sublime and toothsome foods with which the world tempts the pure palate, I chose to stray with liver pudding.

The famous Austen sentence

2006-03-27T01:13:00.000-06:00

The BBC "Pride and Prejudice" miniseries cuts it into two unequal parts. The first: "You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy." The "if you suppose that" is killed, and the next sentence that Ms. Ehle speaks begins with "The mode of your declaration merely spared me any concern I might have felt." The rewriting, I suppose, keeps her breath to swell her song.

A complaint

2006-03-26T22:22:00.001-06:00

Why doesn't there seem to be an easily accessible DVD of "The Fabulous Baker Boys"? I had to buy my big brother a VHS copy.

I was stunned and outraged when I discovered, during a Sunday jazz brunch at Manuel's in Austin, that this brother had never seen that film. As I found after he got it, watched it, and drooled, he'd once met Michelle Pfeiffer at some school thing for kids. He didn't pounce, damn him.

The soap opera that I watched almost religiously from 1982 until 1994, "The Young and the Restless," stole the Pfeiffer-on-the-piano scene. The soap also stole the orgasm scene from "When Harry Met Sally."

Another bit of rambling: In my youth, back before videos, I watched "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" more than once. Ten cents a dance.

You saucy minx!

2006-03-26T21:10:00.000-06:00

"You saucy minx!"

My big brother just addressed an e-mail to me with that subject line. It's a quotation from "Love Actually," a film I sent him recently.

The bro, who has sent me a number of videos in the past, including the Garson/Olivier "Pride and Prejudice" and "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm," had just sent me the Keira Knightley "P&P," apparently having bought the thing on the day it was first available on DVD. I immediately sent him, or had Amazon send him, "Love Actually" and "Notting Hill."

"Love Actually" worried him. Some of the stories didn't end happily enough for him, a guy. I recommended, and I recommend, the extra scenes on the DVD, especially the first one.

"Notting Hill" also worried my elder brother a bit. Not very likely, was it?

I had to yell: "Stop taking these things so seriously!"

He just got one of my latest shipments: "You've Got Mail." When I watched that flick a few days ago, several years after I'd first seen it on TV, I was a tad uncomfortable with it. But I wholeheartedly endorse its stand on zingers.

In my youth, by the way,I memorized the following famous sentence from Austen's "Pride and Prejudice": "You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner." But try to say it without losing breath. I'll have to look at the BBC "Pride and Prejudice" again to see how it's done.

A final note: I'm not trying to stand up for Mrs. Thatcher here.

Another movie reference

2006-03-26T12:58:00.000-06:00

I just responded to a beloved interlocutor with "Damn you, Rebecca Ryan!" He won't get it, probably, unless he looks on the Web. Short answer: See "American Dreamer."

Happy endings

2006-03-26T08:24:00.000-06:00

Dan Puckett's lovely blog makes me ashamed of my taste in movies. In movies, I always fall for the formulaic pieces with happy endings. I haven't seen a movie in a movie theater since "Sense and Sensibility," and the only film I went to over and over (four times?) while in its first run was Stallone's first "Rocky."

Here's what's weird: I love Greek tragedy. I particularly love Euripides' "Medea" and Sophocles' "Ajax." I can deal with unhappy endings when I expect them (though the endings in those plays were meant to be unexpected, as was that in Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex"). Hell, for years I wrote headlines counting the number of dead.

Still, in my light entertainment, and especially at my age (I was born in 1954, a year before Dan Puckett's 1955), I go for pieces that don't depress me. Puckett mentions a Swayze flick that I've never seen; for that matter, I've never seen "Ghost." But I did just get "Dirty Dancing" on DVD.

Heath Ledger? My lust for the young fellow was storied. But I've seen only one of his films (on satellite; it made me late for work): "10 Things I Hate about You." I refused to watch "The Patriot" after I learned of Ledger's character's fate, and I couldn't watch "A Knight's Tale" after a few minutes. I've never gotten around to renting any of the guy's other films. Dan Puckett's blog note has made me want to see "Brokeback Mountain," but wait! Won't the movie depress me?

In my rash youth, of course, back in the 1960s and early 1970s, I did seek out and like bleak films. But that was in another lifetime, and besides, the wench is dead.

Banned

2006-03-23T22:15:00.000-06:00

Sheesh. I'm now banned from testycopyeditors.

Oh, well. I had fun while it lasted.

Persona non grata

2006-03-23T02:07:00.000-06:00

I'm persona non grata at testycopyeditors.org. Probably half of my posts there are deleted by the management. True, what I write is often a digression; I can't help that, can I? But some of my best stuff has been canned.

My reference, for example, to a book review that almost made it to the AA-S:

The new hystericism: Whole lotta shaking going on (joke headline, of course)
---------
Rachel Maines, _THE TECHNOLOGY OF ORGASM: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction_, Johns Hopkins (1999)
--------
The job of sex, indeed. Too few men have ever wanted to do it right, historian Rachel Maines writes, so physicians have been forced to step in since at least the time of Hippocrates.

...
*********

And what about my reference to bad behavior inspired by newspaper jargon? Yes, after reading a job posting on the Web, I responded to the phrase "send tears to ..." with the reprehensible e-mail "Would you like them in small vials or in Mason jars?" Things got uglier after that, alas.

Still, I myself kill quite a few of my testycopyeditors posts right after I've put them in.

Workers meekly eat what they're fed

2006-03-20T05:41:00.001-06:00

(Sunday, Dec. 24, 2000)

It's not good form to look a gift meal in the mouth. Show me free food and I'll usually follow it anywhere. For any crumb that comes my way, be it ever so humble, I'll gratefully yelp: "Please, sir, I want some more."

Usually. But put me in the place of Bob Cratchit, and I'll be the one snarling and barking "Bah, humbug" at such goodies as my hapless employer brings to the table.

I'm not as cynical as I once was. Back in the last century, in months when News-Leader employees had been good, we were treated to a Wednesday cookout of hamburgers and hot dogs, plus squeezy-soft white-bread buns, sweet and gooey potato salad and perhaps even some oily potato chips thrown in for good measure. My vile theory? That our bosses were doing their malnutritional best to cut short our retirement years.

How ungenerous of me! We haven't had one of those little celebrations in a good, long time; no doubt the company is struggling with severe guilt over its food failures of old.

Oddly enough, I was almost alone in my outrage. We had no picket lines, no angry mobs of bedraggled workers shouting "Give me nutrition or give me death!"

Perhaps they're all too weak from lack of decent food. Heck, my sheeplike co-workers rarely complain about our invariable year-end bonus -- a small turkey or a smaller ham.

I was finally going to take a stand! But when, in a fit of meatless pique, I threatened to resurrect the long-dormant Suggestion Box and lodge a protest, one of my superiors nearly wept in horror and begged me: "Don't do it, Alison! Next year, we might get nothing at all!"

Would that be so bad? Let's show some backbone, darn it! Sometimes less is more -- and nothing is most. Take last week's newsroom Christmas meal (please!). The fare was hardly calculated to give some of us needed protein or give anyone a surfeit of vitamins. The one redeeming feature was the mashed potatoes.

So here's my rallying cry for the overfed and undernourished. Workers of the Ozarks, unite! Let us all demand this glorious menu next year: Peanut, Tofu and Sesame Soup; Wheat Germ Loaf; Dandelion Salad; and Elegant Yogurt Compote.

And for our bonus? A tastefully decorated tin of soy nuts. Talk about comfort and joy. No, don't thank me.

Kenny Wayne

2006-03-07T21:21:00.000-06:00

I wrote the following column in the year 2000. My friend, Kate, was only 30 or so. In fact, she put me through hell. It was cold outside at the end of the concert, but the roadies had suggested that we could get autographs from the band members, and Kate was young and idealistic. So Kate and I waited for two hours in hopes of signatures while the best and the cutest strode through the doors of the tour bus. I didn't buy Kenny Wayne's next album, though I did download the two songs with Noah Hunt. OK, so I'm an old romantic.

From the year 2000:

Fine. So the spouse walked out on me last Monday. I'd worked out my revenge.

The old turncoat wasn't yet out the door when my young date arrived to whisk me off for a hot night in center city: dinner and a concert, and maybe even some dancing.

The spouse put on a happy face about his trip to Columbia, Mo., for five (count 'em) days of dry lectures on orality and literacy in olden times. But envy was surely gnawing away at his innards. "Kate" (as I'll call her) and I were on our way to a true feast of the inner child: grooving (or whatever word youngsters use nowadays) to the Websters and the Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band. After 15 staid years in Springfield, off and on, I plunged into the music scene with both feet forward.

"Kate" knew my middle-aged fears; she knew I had ear plugs at the ready. But she had no mercy. After we indulged in some serious carbo-loading on South Street, my date lined us up outside the Juke Joint, and, once inside, staked out a position right in front of the stage, and the speakers.

I expected to retreat, and quickly. But I was paying the spouse back, and it isn't often that 46-year-old women are given the license to ogle good-looking young men. So I ogled. And I hung fast in front of the stage, for more than 3 1/2 hours.

I still look back in anguish. While "Kate" was dancing and waving and whistling with the best of them, I just stood there for most of the night, stiff and self-conscious. I was fiddling so desperately with my ear plugs that even the grim bouncer posted in front of us chuckled. And a nymphet in heavy makeup and little else, who squeezed up beside me to flaunt her wares to the musicians and roadies, actually apologized to me for hurting my ears with her squealing. Man, I felt old.

But I got into the swing of things. By the end of the night, even I was dancing. I had to: After hours in one position, my legs were falling asleep. Perhaps the nymphet knew that -- as she dashed off to the band's bus once the music stopped, she kicked over a bottle of beer onto my feet as a wake-up call.

Revenge? I'll bet that the spouse had it all planned.

************

I survived a night on the town with impressive stamina for a woman of my age.

Perhaps I was driven to greatness solely by the sight of young rock hunks. But I suspect that a fine plate of pasta from a South Street bistro was the real source of my amazing energy.

The dish I offer you here isn't half as fancy as the one that got me through the evening. But it's easy -- not a recipe that will drain any cook, young or old. I found it in "The Complete Vegetarian Pasta Cookbook" (Chartwell Books, 1995), edited by Emma Callery.

Pinwheel Pasta Bake

1 1/2 pounds of dried rotelle (multicolored wagon-wheel pasta), cooked and drained
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, crushed and minced
1/2 pound of mushrooms, quartered
1 cup of chopped zucchini
3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1/2 cup vegetable broth
11/2 cups of grated sharp Cheddar cheese

Heat olive oil in a large pan, then saute garlic for 2 minutes. Add mushrooms and zucchine and cook, covered, for 5 minutes, or until softened. Stir in parsely and vegetable broth, and cook, covered, for 10 minutes more. Add the rotelle, then stir in the Cheddar. Put mixture into a deep casserole dish, and bake, in an oven preheated to 400 degrees, for about 20 minutes.

Basketball follies

2006-03-06T14:15:00.000-06:00

I'm constantly dating myself -- wait, that sounds wrong! -- with my references. But I was always inept. I've just learned how to spell Pete Carril's last name, and I went to several of his games when I was an undergraduate, and I have always worshipped him. When I was a graduate student at UNC, I wondered for a couple of years what Dean Smith's first name was. My husband was slack-jawed when I finally asked.

I still have a crush on the late Jim Valvano. Phi Slamma Jamma indeed.
I still remember the headline "Yes, Virginia, there is a Chaminade."

Wanna hear about my long-standing passion for Kurt Rambis? OK, that's pro ball. My lust for him started when we were stuck far from Chapel Hill and couldn't get any ACC games on the television. That was in the early 1980s. In 1999, my screen saver at work was Rambis in a three-piece suit when he was head L.A. coach. I still love him.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

"A Pair of Blue Eyes"

2005-08-20T19:47:00.000-05:00

I adore Thomas Hardy's "A Pair of Blue Eyes." The book is in every way brilliant and hilarious. Here's a favorite passage from Chapter 33:

He stretched out his arm to seize the projecting arris of a larger block than ordinary, and so help himself up, when his hand lighted plump upon a substance differing in the greatest possible degree from what he had expected to seize--hard stone. It was stringy and entangled, and trailed upon the stone. The deep shadow from the aisle wall prevented his seeing anything here distinctly, and he began guessing as a necessity. 'It is a tressy species of moss or lichen,' he said to himself.
But it lay loosely over the stone.
'It is a tuft of grass,' he said.
But it lacked the roughness and humidity of the finest grass.
'It is a mason's whitewash-brush.'
Such brushes, he remembered, were more bristly; and however much used in repairing a structure, would not be required in pulling one down.
He said, 'It must be a thready silk fringe.'
He felt further in. It was somewhat warm. Knight instantly felt somewhat cold.
To find the coldness of inanimate matter where you expect warmth is startling enough; but a colder temperature than that of the body being rather the rule than the exception in common substances, it hardly conveys such a shock to the system as finding warmth where utter frigidity is anticipated.
'God only knows what it is,' he said.
He felt further, and in the course of a minute put his hand upon a human head. The head was warm, but motionless. The thready mass was the hair of the head—long and straggling, showing that the head was a woman's.

The Object Stares Back

2005-07-16T08:54:00.000-05:00

Work on Thomas Hardy took me back to a good book on sight.

James Elkins, _The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing_ New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996, pp. 12-13 (the very opening of the introduction) and 225-26 (in chapter on "Blindness," near the end).

At first, it appears that nothing could be easier than seeing. We just point our eyes where we want them to go, and gather in whatever there is to see. Nothing could be less in need of explanation. The world is flooded with light, and everything is available to be seen. We can see people, pictures, landscapes, and whatever else we need to see, and with the help of science we can see galaxies and viruses and the insides of our own bodies. Seeing does not interfere with the world or take anything from it, and it does not hurt or damage anything. Seeing is detached and efficient and rational. Unlike the stomach or the heart, eyes are our own to command: they obey every desire and thought.

Each one of those ideas is completely wrong. The truth is more difficult: seeing is irrational, inconsistent, and undependable. It is immensely troubled, cousin to blindness and sexuality, and caught up in the threads of the unconscious. Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they will and then tell us they have only been where we have sent them. No matter how hard we look, we see very little of what we look at. If we imagine the eyes as navigational devices, we do so in order _not _ to come to terms with what seeing really is. Seeing is like hunting and like dreaming, and even like falling in love. It is entangled in the passions -- jealousy, violence, possessiveness; and it is soaked in affect -- in pleasure and displeasure, and in pain. Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.

**************************************************

... I might entertain the idea that there are two kinds of seeing, instead of the single equation that says seeing equals thinking. The first would have to do with expressions such as "illuminating a problem" or "shedding light on an idea." When it's put that way, then thought is the illumination, and the truth is what needs to be lit by thought. On the other hand, when I say I'm "reflecting" on a problem or something has "just dawned on me," then it's as if the truth is already luminous and my thought merely collects the light.

According to the first model, thought takes place in darkness. Ideas and things and selves must be in a primordial darkness until thought sends out its beams to reveal them. But if I reflect on something, then I exist along with various objects in the world, all bathed in a light that comes from somewhere else. In the first model, blindness is all around: it is the condition of the world, and a thought is like a flashlight that temporarily reveals some local object. In the second there is no place for blindness, except in my own mind. If I fail to reflect, if I decline to try to understand the world, then I become blind, or rather I give way to the blindness that is already within me. The second model, where the world is bright and suffused with thought, really has no place for catastrophic, ongoing blindness. If I live in such a world and I choose not to see, then I suffer a momentary blindness -- it might be a slip, and error, a blunder, or a mistake, or in visual terms, a blind spot, a moment or a day of hysterical blindness, amnesia about a trauma, or just a misapprehension, something I overlook, something I fail to notice. No matter how serious these blindnesses are, I can recover from them: I can become aware of my mistake; I can look again and see better. In the first model, where the world is dark and only thought can illuminate it, blindness is more permanent, and I may not be able to recover from it at all. That kind of blindness would include ingrained prejudices, permanent gaps in my thought, failures of imagination, psychotic breaks, fanaticisms and dogmas, and in visual terms, all the things I cannot see or that I refuse to see. Blindness would be all around. Every image would be a light in the darkness, and seeing or thinking would take place against a backdrop of blindness. In this way of setting the problem, blindness is the precondition and constant accompaniment of vision. It cannot be fully seen, but it must always be present wherever there is seeing.

I would be more content to think of the world as it looks each day, filled with light. The sparse shadows and dark spots that remain would be like the few gaps in my sight—the blind spot in each eye, for instance. If I choose to think this way, thought is beautiful and easy. All we have to do is conceive of an idea and it appears in front of us, bathed in the light of thought, clear and distinct in all its details. And sometimes this happens: if we know an issue very well, we can call it to mind and see all its contours, everything that is involved in it, without effort and in great clarity. But there are many other moments when the other model seems more true. If we do not understand a problem very well, then we cannot form a mental image of it. It seems dark, and thinking about it requires great effort. Even if we think hard, we may illuminate only a small portion of it, and the light we throw may make it look distorted. In that case we might say we can't see the problem very well, that we cannot generate enough light to illuminate its outlines. It is sadder, but it strikes me that this is much closer to the truth: like seeing, thinking is intermittent, unreliable, and difficult. Both take place in darkness and both depend on light. Blindness is their constant accompaniment, the precondition of both thought and sight.

Concrete Delights

2005-06-11T17:36:00.000-05:00

Though I cannot relate to many of the details, I adore this piece.

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (1967,1969), pp. 39-40:

Economy is not one of the necessary principles of the universe; it is one of the jokes which God indulges in precisely because He can afford it. If a man takes it seriously, however, he is doomed forever to a middle-income appreciation of the world. Indeed, only the very poor and the very rich are safe from its idolatry. The poor, because while they must take it seriously, they cannot possibly believe in it as a good; and the rich, because, though they may see it as a good, they cannot possibly take it seriously. For the one it is a bad joke, the for other, a good one; but for both it is only part of the divine ludicrousness of creation — of the sensus lusus which lies at the heart of matter. And that is why all men should hasten to become very poor or very rich — or both at once, like St. Paul, who had nothing yet possessed all things. The world was made in sport, for sports; economy is worth only a smile. There are more serious things to laugh at.

O the sad frugality of the middle-income mind. O the humorless neatness of an intellectuality which buys mass-produced candlesticks and carefully puts one at each end of every philosophical mantlepiece! How far it lies from the playfulness of Him who composed such odd and needless variations on the themes of leaf and backbone, eye and nose! A thousand praises that it has only lately managed to lay its cold hand on the wines, the sauces, and the cheeses of the world! A hymn of thanksgiving that it could not reach into the depths of the sea to clamp its grim simplicities over the creatures that swim luminously in the dark! A shout of rejoicing for the fish who wears his eyeballs at the ends of long stalks, and for the jubilant laughter of the God who holds him in life with a daily bravo at the bravura of his being!

Into outer darkness then with the pill-roller and his wife. They have missed the point of the world; they are purely and simply mad. Man invented cooking before he thought of nutrition. To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is taste.

Pills indeed! Someday, no doubt, the dreadful offspring of that hapless couple will invent flavorless capsules which, when swallowed, will give the user a complete command of any desired language. Let us hope only that when he does, the sane among us will lobby for a law to keep such people from writing poems. Language is no utilitarian abstraction; English, French, Greek, and Latin are concrete delights, relishings by which the flavor or words and syntax are rolled over the tongue. And so in their own way are all the declensions and conjugations of beef, lamb, pork, and veal. Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than it is useful. Necessity is the mother only of cliches. It takes playfulness to make poetry.

Staccato Yelps

2005-06-09T15:55:00.000-05:00

A piece from my first copy-editing textbook.

From Lynn Ludlow, "The Unappreciated Art of Writing Headlines," in Bowles, Borden and Rivers, Creative Editing for Print Media (1993), p. 176f.:

The headline itself is considered an American invention. It came after centuries when newspapers were festooned instead with captions, the term used for static labels or headings. Present-tense verbs burst into headlines near the end of the 19th century, when the new-fangled rotary press brought mass circulation dailies into urgent competition for readers.

Editors began to talk of banners, screamers, skylines, ribbons, wrap-arounds, snappers, kickers and eyebrows. Headlines were staggered, hung, stepped, indented, centered, boxed or shaped like a V. The language of headlines was shorn of auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, prepositions [?] and articles. Verbs, ignored in caption days, became queens. As nouveau royalty, predicates began to kill off their subjects. Consider the Chicago Tribune's screamer of April 11, 1951: "FIRES GEN. M'ARTHUR."

The copy editor's language favored staccato yelps: rap, pit, foe, rid, tie, cap, pry, ebb, cut, nip, nab, vow, rip, set, din, bid, aid, jar, try, act, rid, aim, fix, due, ban, jam, row, etc. Perhaps a student of general semantics will someday attempt to analyze the subconscious effects on generations of newspaper readers assaulted each day with a headline vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon terms chosen for brevity and violent impact: fray, whip, rout, stun, raid, curb, howl, lash, spur, rout, slap, slash.

Strangely, considering that copy editors live by the printed word, the lore of headline writing is passed down from one generation to the next by way of oral guidelines, mostly negative, mostly barked.

No, says the dealer, I never want to see set used again in this paper; it makes it too easy.

No, don't write heads with acronyms unless the story is about acronyms (in the Seattle Times: "You CETA Words but They Have NOOA Meaning.").

No, don't use overworked pun ploys ("Jane is Fonda exercise").

No, may is unacceptable; someday, pigs "may" fly.

No, avoid abbreviations. No, avoid officialese. No, avoid jargon. No, avoid cliches.

Note: I don't know why "rout" is used twice in the third paragraph.

Obligatory Sex Scenes

2005-06-08T16:54:00.000-05:00

Here's a draft, at least, of a 1999 posting to the Phil-Lit list:

WARNING: Strong sexual content; some quite objectionable language. Read at your own risk.

When I offer up these passages, I do so with reference to a number of threads on Phil-Lit, most of which I won't spell out. One is on rereading beloved works after years have passed. I read the Jane Austen scene when it first came out in 1976 and remembered it fondly over the years — so fondly, in fact, that when I found out, through a little Web searching and close questioning of a Canadian bookseller, that the bit could indeed be found in a little paperback book, I shelled out 11 bucks (U.S., not Canadian) to have the thing sent by air mail. I still find the piece funny, but much less so. Is it that the humor is dated? That I'm not 22 but 45? That my love of Jane Austen is less passionate now than it was 23 years ago? I remembered finding the piece flawed years ago; the flaws in the parody stick out even more now.

To add some philosophy, I give the Heidegger scene. I doubt I read it in 1976, and I know too little about Heidegger to judge it now (I'm so ashamed — should one of the chiders chide me?). It looks ham-fisted. But I feel guilty saying that, nay, even immoral — I should at least know what it's playing off. Yet it's not, I should think, "art."

Other sex scenes in the National Lampoon article, for those interested, are for: Plato's "Republic" (not especially funny); "The House at Pooh Corner"; "Walden"; Sherlock Holmes; Charles Goren's "Contact Bridge"; Amendment I of the (U.S.) Bill of Rights; Carl Sandburg's "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years"; "The Song of Hiawatha"; "Moby Dick"; Consumer Reports; "The Pickwick Papers"; "Our Town"; "The Gulag Archipelago"; "The Purloined Letter"; "The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu"; Roget's International Thesaurus; F. Scott Fitzgerald ("Bernice Bobs Her Cunt"); "The Brothers Karamazov"; "The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde"; "Who's Who"; "A Streetcar Named Desire"; "Gulliver's Travels"; "Waiting for Godot"; "Dune"; and "The Communist Manifesto."

----------
"Obligatory Sex Scenes," by the editors of National Lampoon (originally published in August 1976, reprinted in National Lampoon: Another Dirty Book, eds. P.J. O'Rourke, Peter Kaminsky, and Elsie Cagan, 1979).

Three famous men, authors all of important novels (Spiro Agnew, William F. Buckley, and John Lindsay) have lately and often appeared upon prestigious talk shows to plug their respective books. Each member of this august trio has unblushingly observed that, yes, his tome does contain the "obligatory sex scene."

Clearly, these writers, all men of the world, have seen fit to trim the sails of their creative integrity to the prevailing winds of marketing considerations, motivated not by greed but rather by the desire for their significant and redemptive fictions to reach a wider audience than your ponderous and semiliterate political potboiler usually does.

Always keen to follow the example of our elders and betters, we have taken it upon ourselves to write the "obligatory sex scenes" which, if included in the pages of well-intentioned but, alas, for the most part ignored classics of literature will return these works to the popularity they deserve.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
by Jane Austen

Chapter XLIII

The winding path that they had been following had grown narrower, and was overhung with branches that tore at Elizabeth's gown; soon it was but three feet at its wides part when she espied, in the distance, an old summer house, dilapidated and overgrown with weeds and mosses, of a lonely and slightly forbidding aspect. As the first drops of rain began to fall, Mr. Darcy turned his steps towards the building, quitting the path and taking a shorter way through the tall grasses;—Elizabeth had little choice but to follow. He murmured something about the weather as they reached their destination; the door yielded easily to his touch, and they reached their haven just as the rain began in earnest.

The interior was empty of any furnishing, save for a small settee, towards which Darcy led Elizabeth;—and when she had seated herself, much to her amazement, he flung himself to his knees before her, and, in a change of mood that seemed as abrupt as the change of weather, began ardently to express his admiration for and devotion to her person. Elizabeth hardly knew how to respond!—was this the cold, arrogant Mr. Darcy, who had expressed such scorn for her on previous occasions? She was attempting to reply when an even more strange event took place;—to her great consternation, he lifted up her skirts, and disappeared beneath them!—in breathless accents did she beg him to desist; in ardent though muffled tone did he make negative reply, as he attempted, with no little difficulty, to undo her drawers; when he had succeeded in the latter, he stopped attempting the former; and Elizabeth was filled with the most delightful and confused sensations: she allowed to herself that they were certainly pleasurable, but at the same time wondered with rising alarm if she had, by her previous weakness, allowed too much familiarity in their previous intercourse.

But her pleasure mounted to such an extent that she soon lost her fears in that direction. "Oh! Oh!" she cried, when she could contain herself no longer—"I am all in a flutter!—Mr. Darcy, your unexpected cordiality has left me quite speechless;—my previous coldness was unpardonable;—oh, my dear, *dear* Mr. Darcy;—how can you ever forgive me?—oh, oh, *oh!*"—and Mr. Darcy, whose head now emerged from beneath Elizabeth's petticoats, although *another portion* of his anatomy remained hidden from view, joined his voice to hers in an outpouring of sentiment to which no one, knowing his proud, aloof manner, might have responded without a great deal of amazement.

---------------

BEING AND TIME
by Martin Heidegger

V. Being-in as Such

26. Throbbing-Memberhood and Its potentiality-for-Exploding-in-White-Hot-Orgasmicity

At first glance the Being-in (*In-sein*) of Throbbing-member appears to us as a latency. Throbbing-member stands before us as a phenomenon of Itness, i.e., Throbbing-memberhood-in-its-Selfhood-as-merely-ontic Being. The Being-in of Throbbing-member attains facticity as an ontological verity when, with eager hands and low urgent moans, she guides Throbbing-member into her hot, pulsating womanhoodness. Then, too, does Throbbing-member discover the Being-present-at-hand-along-with (*Mitvorhandsein*) of breasts, mouth, clitoris, etc.

Thus, Throbbing-member enters "into" the spatio-temporal nexus of her love-drenched pussyhood and is present (*zugegen*) to its potentiality-for-attaining-orgasmhood. This is what I call Throbbing-member's *Being-toward-orgasmicity.* Her verbal characterization, "Oh my God, you're in me!" has "the entity inside" (*Das inwendig Seiende*) in its ontological selfhood as Throbbing-member, exclusive of the theirness of other "throbbing members" merely ready-to-hand, i.e., mere equipment.

"Oh God, I can't stand it, I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming . . ." is, therefore, not only a phenomenological statement, but has existential-ontological meaning as well."

Amy Eisensohn: Conventions, fashions, and style

2005-06-08T00:38:00.000-05:00

It's just like me to strike a blow for punctuation relativity. In any case, Amy Eisensohn is good on changing fashions in punctuation.

Amy Einsohn, The Copyeditor's Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communication (University of California Press, 2000), 72-73.

Conventions, Fashions, and Style

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English authors tended to be profligate in scattering commas and semicolons; their style is now called *close punctuation.* The contemporary preference, however, is to use as few commas and semicolons as possible, a style called *open punctuation.* ...
...

Within the realm of open punctuation, some choices, particularly those related to the comma, are more subjective than objective. Some writers, for example, *hear* punctuation, and they use commas, semicolons, and colons to speed or slow the pace and rhythm of their prose. Aural punctuators tend to hear a comma as a one-beat pause, a semicolon as a two-beat pause, and a period as a three- or four-beat pause. Some also hear a colon as a pause; for others, a colon signals a sharp accelerando, a signal to speed ahead because something important is coming.

A second group of writers have a highly visual sense of punctuation, and they are most concerned about how their sentences look on the page, aiming for sentences that are not overly cluttered by punctuation yet not so sparsely punctuated as to look neglected or to be confusing.

A third approach — and the one taken by all the editorial style manuals — is to punctuate according to grammatical and syntactual units. The advantage of this method is that it does not rely on the ear or eye of the writer or copyeditor, and therefore tends to be less subjective. In a given sentence, the question that syntactical punctuators ask regarding the presence or absence of commas is not "Do you hear a pause here?" or "Does this look too choppy?" but "Is this an introductory adverbial phrase?"

You will also encounter writers who regard punctuation as an esoteric art and freely combine the aural, visual, and syntactical methods. Most of the idosyncratic punctuators take a wing-and-a-prayer approach and will be pleased by your imposition of order and reasonableness. A few, however, will defend to the death their eccentric ways, proclaiming that the First Amendment guarantees their freedom to punctuate without editorial interference.

When copyediting nonliterary texts, corporate documents, and scientific or technical reports, you can confidently apply the conventions set forth in your style manual. But if your author is an experienced literary or professional writer, you will want to interpret some of the conventions more liberally. Writers who care about punctuation may become quite upset if a copyeditor imposes conventions that are at odds with their own sense of cadence, appearance, or taste.

David Mulroy, Why Did We Revert to Tribalism?

2005-05-31T10:29:00.000-05:00

David Mulroy, The War Against Grammar (2003), pp. 17-19

The tendency of modern teachers to disparage the importance of literal meanings reinforces and is reinforced by the low status of grammar, since the rules of grammar play an indispensable role in establishing the literal meanings of statements. Grammar and literal meanings have both become pariahs, and this fact lies at the root of several troubling tendencies.

To a teacher in the humanities, the most obvious of these tendencies pertains to reading comprehension. We increasingly encounter students who can speculate about the "hidden meanings" of literary texts but miss their literal sense. To gauge the extent of this problem, I recently asked members of one of my large mythology classes to produce brief paraphrases of the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

I was looking for a restatement of the proposition expressed in the main clause, that respect for public opinion makes it necessary for parties who are abandoning an established union to explain why they are doing so. It was disconcerting that of sixty-one students who tried to paraphrase the sentence, none seemed to recognize its source. Some thought that it had to do with ending a romance. I estimated that twenty-five comprehended the gist of the sentence. In making this assessment, I tried to be fair, taking into account the fact that the students were writing extemporaneously. I counted as correct any paper that seemed to get the essential idea even when it was expressed somewhat incoherently. For example:

When people decide to fight/separate among countries, cities, themselves, they should say why they are fighting.

In life, people dissolve political bands that connect them with another, in order to join earth and its powers, by following Nature's and God's path, should declare why they separate.

Yet, even without nitpicking, a majority of students seemed to miss the idea altogether. For example:

In people's lives, things may happen that would cause them to no longer want to be part of a certain government of which they are part. These things would give them reason enough to become their own ruling body.

Most disturbing, however, were a large number of students who responded to the assignment with misguided enthusiasm. It should be noticed that in many cases the students' difficulty in comprehension evidently does not arise from a deficient vocabulary.

When dealing with events in life, one should drop preconceived knowngs and assume that everything that happens, happens for a reason, and basically life goes on.

I believe it is saying that as a group of people everyone is equal, but when it comes to laws of nature, only the strong will survive.

Cut your earthly bonds and wear the mantle of Nature and God. Wield the power and declare justly your ascension from man's law. Then shall all bow before your might.

Every human encounter is special and is an important piece of an intertwined quilt. Every man and god's creatures should have the respect and the dignity they deserve.

I think it means that people should look at their own morals. They should follow the laws of Nature and Nature's God, but also in their own way follow their own morals.

As life proceeds down to the very moment through which we perceive our existence as, indeed, separate entities of perception, transformation is key to our understanding of the necessity of change, and its living role, within all of us, in relation to time.

People must have true facts to back up their thoughts on a god if they are different from the thoughts of the majority.

If doesn't matter where you came from. In the end we are all human beings. Humans are at the top of the food chain, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't respect nature. Because we have one earth, learn to preserve it.

And, finally:

I can't paraphrase this sentence because I'm not sure what point is being prevailed. Politics? Nature?

I was taken aback by how poorly the students had done on this test and repeated it twice with essentially the same results. Most recently, in November 2002, I offered the paraphrase exercise as an opportunity for "extra credit" on a mythology test. Sixty-four students of 118 attempted it. Thirty-three seemed to have grasped the essential thought. Among the others were some more vivid examples of interpretation by free association. For example:

Mankind is in a state of separation. There will come a time when all will be forgotten, and man will be one with mother earth.

When man loses all political structure and is reverted back to tribal and instinctive nature, man should figure out what happened, so it won't happen again.

These responses seem to me to exemplify a kind of higher illiteracy. The students who suffer from this are proficient in spoken English and can express their own thoughts in writing adequately. They lack the tools, however, for the precise interpretation of the meaning of complex statements. This kind of illiteracy boils down to an ignorance of grammar. If a student interprets the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence as an exhortation to "preserve the earth," then how can you demostrate the error? There is no way to do so that does not involve grammatical analysis: the subject of the main clause is "respect to the opinions of mankind," the main verb is "requires," and so forth.

H.J. DeBurgh, "Half-Hours with the Classics"

2005-05-30T10:37:00.000-05:00

H.J. DeBurgh
HALF-HOURS
WITH THE CLASSICS

Ah, those hours when by-gone sages
Led our thoughts through Learning's ways,
When the wit of sunnier ages
Called once more to Earth the days
When rang from Athens' vine-hung lanes
Thy wild, wild laugh, Aristophanes!

Pensive through the land of Lotus,
Sauntered we by Nilus' side;
Garrulous old Herodotus
Still our mentor, still our guide,
Prating of the mystic bliss
Of Isis and of Osiris.

As the learn'd ones trooped before us,
All the wise of Hellas' land,
Down from mythic Pythagoras,
To the hemlock drinker grand.
Dark the hour that closed the gates
Of gloomy Dis on thee, Socrates.

Ah, those hours of tend'rest study,
When Electra's poet told
Of Love's cheek once warm and ruddy,
Pale with grief, with death chill cold!
Sobbing low like summer tides
Flow thy verses, Euripides!

High our hearts beat when Cicero
Shook the Capitolian dome;
How we shuddered, watching Nero
'Mid the glare of blazing Rome!
How those records still affright us
On thy gloomy page, Tacitus!

Back to youth I seem to glide, as
I recall those by-gone scenes,
When we conned o'er Thucydides,
Or recited Demosthenes.

L'Envoi

Ancient Sages, pardon these
Somewhat doubtful quantities

Deborah Cameron on thats and whiches

2005-05-22T22:09:00.000-05:00

Linguist Arnold Zwicky's delightful Language Log post on the brouhahas over whiches and thats, Five more thoughts on the That Rule, reminded me that I had the following piece from Deborah Cameron lurking on my hard drive.

Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene (Routledge: 1995), 50ff.

A friend of mine once worked as a copy editor for a major publisher in New York. The project she worked on was a large encyclopedia, and her job was to edit a large number of contributions from all over the world in accordance with the rules laid down in the Chicago Manual of Style.

Among these rules is one that concerns the use of that or which in relative clauses. That is prescribed in those cases where the clause is 'restrictive', e.g 'the book that Nigel gave me was no good', while which is used in 'nonrestrictive' clauses, e.g 'the book, which Nigel gave me, was no good'.

The difference between the two sentences above is one of those subtleties beloved of language mavens everywhere. In the first sentence, the relative clause that Nigel gave me 'restricts' the reference of the book, making clear that I am talking specifically about the particular book that Nigel gave me, as distinct from all the other books I possess. In the second sentence the information that Nigel gave me the book in question is still present, but it simply adds incidental information rather than being necessary for the identification of one out of a whole class of possible referents.

English speakers normally put which in non-restrictive clauses, but they quite often fail to observe the part of the rule that prescribes that in restrictive clauses: many native speakers find it equally acceptable to use either 'the book that Nigel gave me' or 'the book which Nigel gave me' (as well as a version with no relative pronoun, 'the book Nigel gave me'). It is not that such people perceive no difference between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses; it is rather that, for them, the distinction is carried by the commas that mark off the non-restrictive clause (or the prosody, in the unlikely event of someone uttering this sentence), and not by the choice of pronoun. Nevertheless, the Chicago Manual of Syle insists on that rather than which in restrictive relative clauses. Copy editors therefore spend a good deal of time correcting which to that in writers' copy.

British readers unacquainted with the Chicago Manual of Syle may well have followed this discussion with a degree of bewilderment. The rule about that and which is not insisted on in Britain as it is in the US; though some authorities (such as Fowler and The Times guide) do recommend it, it is not an absolute prescription. Bewilderment mixed with irritation was certainly the reaction of many British contributors to the encyclopedia my friend was editing. She sent them proofs with the whiches changed to thats; they promptly returned them with the thats changed back to whiches. My friend referred the matter to her boss, the 'copy chief', for an authoritative ruling on the entire pronoun question. After due deliberation he handed down his decision. Britons could write which if they wanted, but Americans must go by the book and write that.

This incident is absurd, and it was recounted to me as an absurdity. Nevertheless, it reveals a number of interesting things. First, it reveals that editorial practices need have nothing to do with communicational efficiency. Although the use of which in restrictive clauses may strike educated Americans as inelegant, one can scarcely imagine it interfering with their comprehension of the text. Second, it is notable that the copy chief did not try to resolve the that versus which problem by an appeal to rational principles. His solution implicitly acknowledged that no principled argument could be advanced in support of either alternative. Third, the outcome reveals that the much-vaunted principle of consistency can be ignored in certain circumstances. The copy chief did not say, as one might have expected, that while the rule might be arbitrary, it must be observed by all. On the contrary, he ended up allowing the encyclopedia as a whole to exhibit the very inconsistency the rule was supposed to eliminate. The chief did not however go so far as to give individual authors freedom of choice on the relative pronoun issue. The overall inconsistency of usage had to be structured by national affiliation — one rule for British writers, another for US writers (inevitably disputes arose later about how to categorize Australian and Canadian contributors). The underlying concern, then, was not that the text should be either clear or consistent: it was that people should follow rules. Indeed we might read the whole affair as a kind of demarcation dispute in which members of one 'guild', the American copy editors, agreed to respect the differing craft practices of their colleagues across the Atlantic, while continuing to uphold the authority of such practices in themselves.

Arguably, however, it was not only the need to preserve editorial authority that led to the bizarre outcome of the relative pronoun controversy; it is also relevant to consider the working culture of the copy editors. Editors are not just automata, mindlessly applying the rules. What looks like excessive zeal on their part may in fact be a mixture of self-interest and subversion, as practised by alienated workers everywhere.

My friend and most of her fellow toilers on the encyclopedia fell short of Elsie Myers Stainton's ideal: they were not caring fusspots but graduate students working for doctoral degrees. Casual editorial work suited their need for flexibility at reasonable rates of pay, and they suited the publisher's need for a smart and highly literate workforce which would nevertheless be relatively cheap and disposable. They were hired to work on a specific project, and liable to be laid off when it was finished. While they worked they were paid by the hour. This particular group may well have represented an extreme of casualization and at times disaffection, but freelance arrangements of a roughly comparable kind are common in the editing trade, and these conditions affect the way the job is done.

For example, it was in the encyclopedia editors' interests to prolong work rather than hurrying to finish it. They lost money — and ultimately their jobs — if they worked too quickly. On the other hand, as casual workers they were easy to fire if they were thought to be shirking or 'padding their hours'. The best way to cope with these conditions was to edit copy with extreme thoroughness, both to display conscientiousness and to maximize the hours for which they would be paid. In their attempts to meet these criteria, they adopted the maxim of 'not just passing copy'. Whatever could be queried would be. This group of editors took particular pleasure in generating an obscure query that would need referring up to the copy chief. This was at once a good delaying tactic, proof of keenness and an outlet for underused creativity.

From an editor's perspective, then, hyperstandardization has its advantages: it makes a thorough editing job a relatively long job, a source of financial as well as professional satisfaction. l am not, in fact, the only linguist to have harboured this sort of suspicion. A review of a (British) monograph in the (US) scholarly journal Language ends with the following remark:

[The author] and presumably the [publisher's] copy editor make no attempt to observe the infamous that/which distinction in restrictive relative clauses. For this relief, much thanks, and why can't American publishers give up on this device, whose sole virtue (speaking as the husband of a copy editor) is to give copy editors more billable hours?

(Aronoff 1992: 610)

That billable hours are not the sole reason for editorial practices is strikingly borne out by the fact I noted earlier: that some copy editors continue to enact the role of 'fusspot' even when their employers are begging them not to (the employer who told me this did pay by the hour, but there was a limit beyond which editors had to fuss at their own expense). Even among the encyclopedia casuals, for whom editing was a pin-money job and not a lifetime vocation, it was obvious there was professional pride at stake as well as dollars and cents. The working conditions and culture of editors are defined by a combination of economic and professional considerations, and these are both factors in explaining, if not the phenomenon of hyperstandardization itself, then at least how and why it is enacted so zealously in everyday working practice.

Russell Baker on the essence of the essay

2005-05-22T10:10:00.001-05:00

Russell Baker, Growing Up, New York: 1982: 186ff.

The notion of becoming a writer had flickered off and on in my head since the Belleville days, but it wasn't until my third year in high school that the possibility took hold. Until then I'd been bored by everything associated with English courses. I found English grammar dull and baffling. I hated the assignments to turn out "compositions," and went at them like heavy labor, turning out leaden, lackluster paragraphs that were agonies for teachers to read and for me to write. The classics thrust on me to read seemed deadening as chloroform.

When our class was assigned to Mr. Fleagle for third-year English I anticipated another grim year in that dreariest of subjects. Mr. Fleagle was notorious among City students for dullness and inability to inspire. He was said to be stuffy, dull, and hopelessly out of date. To me he looked to be sixty or seventy and prim to a fault. He wore primly severe eyeglasses, his wavy hair was primly cut and primly combed. He wore prim vested suits with neckties blocked primly against the collar buttons of his primly starched white shirts. He had a primly pointed jaw, a primly straight nose, and a prim manner of speaking that was so correct, so gentlemanly, that he seemed a comic antique.

I anticipated a listless, unfruitful year with Mr. Fleagle and for a long time was not disappointed. We read "Macbeth." Mr. Fleagle loved "Macbeth" and wanted us to love it too, but he lacked the gift of infecting others with his own passion. He tried to convey the murderous ferocity of Lady Macbeth one day by reading aloud the passage that concludes:

. . . I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums . . . .

The idea of prim Mr. Fleagle plucking his nipple from boneless gums was too much for the class. We burst into gasps of irrepressible snickering. Mr. Fleagle stopped.

"There is nothing funny, boys, about giving suck to a babe. It is the — the very essence of motherhood, don't you see."

He constantly sprinkled his sentences with "don't you see." It wasn't a question but an exclamation of mild surprise at our ignorance. "Your pronoun needs an antecedent, don't you see," he would say, very primly. "The purpose of the Porter's sccene, boys, is to provide comic relief from the horror, don't you see."

Late in the year we tackled the informal essay. "The essay, don't you see, is the ..." My mind went numb. Of all forms of writing, none seemed so boring as the essay. Naturally we would have to write informal essays. Mr. Fleagle distributed a homework sheet offering us a choice of topics. None was quite so simpleminded as "What I Did on My Summer Vacation," but most seemed to be almost as dull. I took the list home and dawdled until the night before the essay was due. Sprawled on the sofa, I finally faced up to the grim task, took the list out of my notebook, and scanned it. The topic on which my eye stopped was "The Art of Eating Spaghetti."

This title produced an extraordinary sequence of mental images. Surging up out of the depths of memory came a vivid recollection of a night in Belleville when all of us were seated around the supper table -- Uncle Allen, my mother, Uncle Charlie, Doris, Uncle Hal — and Aunt Pat served spaghetti for supper. Spaghetti was an exotic treat in those days. Neither Doris nor I had ever eaten spaghetti, and none of the adults had enough experience to be good at it. All the good humor of Uncle Allen's house reawoke in my mind as I recalled the laughing arguments we had that night about the socially respectable method for moving spaghetti from plate to mouth.

Suddenly I wanted to write about that, about the warmth and good feeling of it, but I wanted to put it down simply for my own joy, not for Mr. Fleagle. It was a moment I wanted to recapture and hold for myself. I wanted to relive the pleasure of an evening at New Street. To write it as I wanted, however, would violate all the rules of formal composition I'd learned in school, and Mr. Fleagle would surely give it a failing grade. Never mind. I would write something else for Mr. Fleagle after I had written this thing for myself.

When I finished it the night was half gone and there was no time left to compose a proper, respectable essay for Mr. Fleagle. There was no choice next morning but to turn in my private reminiscence of Belleville. Two days passed before Mr. Fleagle returned the graded papers, and he returned everyone's but mine. I was bracing myself for a command to report to Mr. Fleagle immediately after school for discipline when I saw him lift up my paper from his desk and rap for the class's attention.

"Now, boys," he said, "I want to read you an essay. This is titled 'The Art of Eating Spaghetti.' "

And he started to read. My words! He was reading MY WORDS out loud to the entire class. What's more, the entire class was listening. Listening attentively. Then somebody laughed, then the entire class was laughing, and not in contempt and ridicule, but with openhearted enjoyment. Even Mr. Fleagle stopped two or three times to repress a small prim smile.

I did my best to avoid showing pleasure, but what I was feeling was pure ecstasy at this startling demonstration that my words had the power to make people laugh. In the eleventh grade, at the eleventh hour as it were, I had discovered a calling. It was the happiest moment of my entire school career. When Mr. Fleagle finished he put the final seal on my happiness by saying, "Now that, boys, is an essay, don't you see. It's — don't you see — it's of the very essence of the essay, don't you see. Congratulations, Mr. Baker."

For the first time, light shone on a possibility. It wasn't a very heartening possibility, to be sure. Writing couldn't lead to a job after high school, and it was hardly honest work, but Mr. Fleagle had opened a door for me. After that I ranked Mr. Fleagle among the finest teachers in the school.

Hungry for Love

2005-05-21T10:18:00.000-05:00

Late September 1998

The spouse can read me like a book. What I'm reading clues him in directly to my moods.

A fairly sure sign of depression: the romance novel at my bedside. Not the bloated bodice-rippers — I'm as fond of ogling Fabio as any well-vitamined woman, but fat historicals take too darn long for quick and ready satisfaction. Give me the Harlequins, the Silhouettes, the Loveswepts, 189 pages of easily digested, formulaic puff plot, with a cheerily sugary happy ending on top.

My favorite recipe for romance novelettes has changed over the years, of course. No, although I was born in the '50s, I was never captivated by the imperiled Pauline, swept off her feet or the railroad track. Back in my early 20s, when my mother first introduced me to the genre, I fell for heroines with a purpose whose talents stunned rich and noble swains into submission.

Here's a book I gobbled up with passion before I signed myself away to the spouse 19 1/2 years ago: Hungry for Love, by — I blush to tell — Barbara Cartland. A wastrel brother who gambles his family into deep debt doesn't get young Araminta down! She is determined to win back the enormous sum lost in cards to the sneering hero, by using her amazing powers of cookery! She can put the famous chef Careme to shame!

I had no taste for the wonders this pretty young thing could produce — pigeons stuffed with foie gras, chestnuts and olives; young mutton with cockles and herrings; kidneys cooked in vintage champagne; or filets of sole folded over a sauce made of ortolans and quails. But I wanted to be mistress of such manifest gifts, magic to turn men's hearts into quivering jelly.

Two decades older, I have no such hopes — I am what I am, alas. And, on the rare occasion I need heavy cheering up, I seek out a different romantic formula. Our heroine isn't supremely talented, perhaps, but she's loyal, long-suffering and self-sacrificing, not to mention grossly misjudged. The snarling hero treats her with open contempt despite his hopeless lust. When he learns, to his horror, what a swine he's been, he crawls back abjectly, begging forgiveness.

But I have yet to find the perfect formula romance. The once-savage beast is now thoroughly domesticated, a "Captive of Love" in the kitchen! He takes on all the labors of cooking and cleaning, creating a paradise for his precious mistress. Now that's a recipe for happy dreams.

***********************************
With all this talk of foie gras and ortolans, perhaps you are already salivating, in the foolish hope that I'll trot out an elegant, eye-popping creation. Get real.

Maybe as the season slips toward the big holidays, I'll become more feeling, more generous, more ambitious. Maybe then I'll drag out the pastry bag for decoration and the fancy little cutters for true flair, and bring forth a dish guaranteed to send socks into the next county or two. Heck! Let's go past the Arkansas state line! No, let's try another direction, right into Tennessee. But not now, my friends.

Right now, I'm lucky just to make it through each day; applause is not an option. All you get is a lowly casserole to help you welcome the beginning of fall. Julia Child I ain't.

LENTIL-PASTA DELIGHT
3/4 cup green/brown lentils, picked over and washed
salt
1 1/3 cups smallish pasta shells (or corkscrew pasta, or elbow macaroni, or whatever)
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 medium onions, chopped
2 big carrots, sliced fairly thin
2 stalks of celery, sliced
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 teaspoon dried oregano
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1/4 cup chopped parsley
freshly ground black pepper
8 ounces of feta cheese, crumbled or grated
1/3 cup bread crumbs

1. Put lentils in a pot with water to cover generously. Bring to boil, then simmer for about 40 minutes, or until tender. Near the end of cooking, season with a half-teaspoon of salt. Drain fairly well, but save liquid in case needed.
2. Meanwhile, bring lots of water to boil in a big pasta pot. Add a tablespoon of salt and the pasta. Cook until just tender, but not very — the cooking will continue in the oven. Drain, and combine with lentils.
3. Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a big pot or skillet and toss in veggies and garlic. Coat nicely with oil, then cover and simmer until fairly tender, 10 minutes or so. Uncover, add oregano, and heat for about a minute. Stir in tomato paste, parsley and several grindings of pepper. If needed, add some lentil stock.
4. Add veggies to pasta and lentils, and stir in half of the feta. Taste and correct seasoning, then place in a 9-by-13-inch glass baking dish. Cover with the other half of the feta, and sprinkle with bread crumbs.
5. Put dish in a preheated 400-degree oven, and bake about 30 minutes.

Note: I'm very proud of myself. Every time I put a bunch of parsely through the food processor, I duly freeze the excess, and I duly throw it out a year later, when I find it again in the back of the freezer, a sickly pale yellow and encrusted with ice crystals. But this time, I remembered my flat pouch of parsley and put it to use before it was too late! We shall overcome.

When the dust clears

2005-05-15T11:41:00.000-05:00

11/29/98

Why envy youth? It's a time of excruciating self-consciousness and pathological need for approval. Luckily such sensitivity fades with age.

True, getting on in years is nothing to crow about: My own shallow soul has gained no depth; my blossoming wrinkles aren't a badge of anything worthy. But aging has done me one big favor. As I've careened through life, I've grown increasingly free from fear of what others think.

Considering some of the things I have to live down, it's just as well to shed my sense of shame. I've given the world some horrific headlines. Four years ago, at the end of a particularly grueling shift for a massive Sunday News-Leader, I was hit with a cheery story on choirs of children near Christmas time. My frazzled brain groped for something glittering – like "star dust" – to describe their glow, but fastened, disastrously, on "angel dust." It got into print, and no one was amused.

It stuns uptight newspups now when I freely recount this and other tales of disgrace. They would just die of embarrassment. You should see how their ears prick up when Alison speaks! What new indignity will she confess? But at 44, I bask in the scandal.

In one area, however, I'm still a victim of repression, ever sensitive to the cuisine snobs who skewer us with their sneers. Many of my generation consider cooking flops as moral failures.

I grew up to the strains of "Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy?" Cooking was the crown of womanhood, the way to earn and keep one's man. Later, when a woman's place and duties spread out beyond the home, pressures to cook well grew perversely more acute. For all my adult life, the perfect dish, the authentic spice, the original twist have been objects of worship among the culinary cognoscenti, and their religion has left deep marks on the middle-class cook. No wonder Shame is such a hot topic among the psycho-babblers.

Dirty Shame has dogged me down, from my first wretched dinner party, with its fancy soup from a can, cheap "caviar," and pie in a once-frozen 8-inch shell, to my last one, an almost studied exercise in self-humiliation.

I may someday outgrow my kitchen angst, only because each time I try something ambitious, I see more clearly that I'll never win acclaim. As long as my guests don't gag and collapse, there's some satisfaction.

Anyway, I find solace among the young adults I know. They howl at other embarrassments but will gratefully eat almost anything.

********************************

I've been able to loosen shame's hold over the years, but I was born into original guilt – I'm given to hair shirts and self-flagellation when I think I've caused pain or inconvenience to others, even people I don't particularly like.

And I'm not consistent, allowing new openings for pain. I can scoff at and flout worries about nutrition on some days, but on others I'm haunted by my heedlessness and its dangers.

I took a perfectly luscious-looking recipe from a Junior League cookbook and did the right thing: I increased its protein substantially and at the same time slashed its fat content.

But I feel guilty about being good, too. I'm sure the recipe is heavenly with the original ingredients, and I hate to deprive you of heaven, so if you must be bad, omit the olive oil, eggs and ricotta, and use instead 1 whole stick of the butter (1/2 cup) and a pint (2 cups) of sour cream, and bake for 20-30 minutes. Maybe for company ...

SPINACH AND ARTICHOKE CASSEROLE

3/4 cup chopped green onions, tops included
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 teaspoon dried basil (or 2 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped)
2 10-ounce packages frozen chopped spinach, lightly cooked (thaw in microwave without extra water, then zap for about a minute more) and drained (or 2 pounds fresh chopped spinach)
2 14-ounce cans artichoke hearts, rinsed and drained (or 2 10-ounce packages frozen artichoke hearts, cooked and drained) – cut into halves or quarters (you want them recognizable)
3 eggs
2 cups ricotta cheese (a 15-ounce tub will do)
3/4 teaspoon salt (more to taste)
freshly ground pepper
1/8 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 cup grated Swiss or mozzarella
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan

1. Saute onions in oil and butter until almost tender (add fresh spinach here, and cook until wilted); add basil and cook about a minute. Stir in frozen spinach, and then artichoke hearts. Cut off heat, and let stand.
2. In a large bowl, beat eggs, and stir in ricotta, salt, pepper, cayenne and Swiss or mozarella. Fold veggies into cheese-egg mixture. 3. Put veggies into an oiled or buttered or sprayed 9-by-13-inch glass dish; top with Parmesan, and put into a preheated 350-degree oven. Bake about 30 minutes.

By the way, I don't belong to the Junior League. I don't think the group would have me, but, as the old joke goes, I couldn't respect any club that would.

M.F.K. Fisher on soup

2005-05-14T11:21:00.000-05:00

M.F.K. Fisher, With Bold Knife and Fork, 1968, pp. 43ff.

Any half-decent approach to maturity in the use of words is as mysterious as that of sex initiation into a Congolese tribe, but slower. Of course I can only judge at first hand by the former, but books tell me that it is apparently much easier to learn marital protocol in a jungle clearing southwest of Lambarene than it is to accept reasons for some of the sounds we use in communications.

My first hint of puzzlement ahead came long before I could spell or read, when I felt bothered, irked, perhaps slightly wounded by the rhyme scheme of:

I love little Pussy! Her coat is so warm!
And if I don't hurt her, she'll do me no harm.

Since then, I have listened to several kinds of accents tackle this, and never have they coped with the basic problem.

About a decade later in my semantic — or, at least, phonetic — education, after I had survived the hazards of "Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear" and suchlike hymns I could sing without reading, I met a professionally mad Basque, really a nice, mild Spanish aristocrat raised in Paris, who shocked me almost silly by prattling persuasively at my first grown-up dinner party about the pity of wasting the word "iodine" on a foul medicament."Correctly pronounced," he cried, "it would grace any lovely woman! If I should ever have a daughter, I would call her Yo-deen!"

I have never recovered from this part of the initiation, and I still transfer common sounds into real or imaginary languages, even subconsciously. Once, in a repaired attic room in Aix-en-Provence, I awoke to the Matins from St. Jean-de-Malte, which rang a few dozen feet from me, and I was saying aloud, "Avocado . . . ah-vo-caa-doh." It was beautiful. I was making progress. (It lasts, so that now deep bells sound very softly when I see the fruit or taste it.) My teachers were leading me from the jungle. Sometimes what they showed me was clear, as with Yo-deen, but why the Matins in the cool morning sounded avocado "ah-vo-caa-doh" to me I do not yet understand.

One of the last teachers was an Algerian with a bright eye and ear. "What," he asked me with a subtle air of impudent challenge, for he was politically wary and liked to ascribe this wariness to cultural gaps (mine, not his), "is a beautiful sentence to you — a perfect phrase?" Without any thought, I answered, "Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup." We were astounded, both of us, if for different reasons. We talked about it, and I have often pondered it since then. Basically, it can be left alone, like a fragment of Etruscan pottery, and the Algerian had no real need to point out to me, as he did very skillfully, how dull it would be in translation. (Italian and Spanish sounded better than French.)

Of course it was the Mock Turtle, singing for Alice when she was in Wonderland, who gave me the phrase. The peevish Gryphon had maliciously suggested the subject to the poor creature who represented soup itself in those Victorian days, and it was a kind of melancholy wail, a musical moan, he managed to produce. But it still sounds in my ears, "more and more faintly . . . carried on the breeze":

Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two p
Ennyworth only of beautiful soup?
..............................................................
Soo-oop of the e-e-evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

In the soup

2005-05-14T11:15:00.000-05:00

10/25/98

The spouse doesn't like to leave me on my own. Will I, in the blinding fog of my brilliant musings, wander off in front of savage trucks? Eeek. Splat.

Maybe he's right to worry. But he's not stupid: He got the heck out of Dodge (aka Austin, Texas) a week ago Thursday, heading east fast before the rains swooped down. And he's been tormenting and twitting me ever since with tales of weather that's lovely, or at least bearable, first in scenic Springfield, and now in Boonville and Chapel Hill, N.C. Here, I'm afraid, the fog was thicker than sea — er, sorry, pea soup.

But why should I care? If I may badmouth marriage a bit, there's too much compromise involved, too much giving in just to keep the peace. I can deal with the weather without a helpmeet, and the bachelorette's life has its compensations. Not that I'd like to be on the prowl again — good heavens, I'd have to dye my hair and buy clothes! I'd have to keep my house in some state of presentableness. Eeek, indeed.

But whenever the old boy pegs out for a short spell, I do get a little wild. No, I don't paint the town a pale pink, which is all the effort I could muster at my age and decrepitude. Instead, I take power at home. With the culinary tyrant out of the house, I can do what I want in the kitchen.

In my usual assault on marital propriety, Brussels sprouts and lima beans cram the freezer; I'll even eat the things for breakfast with the protein booster of an egg or two. But this time, the foul weather spurred me to a far more dramatic cock-snoot at our menu rules. I made split-pea soup from scratch, and I loved it. It's not a pretty sight, I'm sure, when a middle-aged woman gulps down great bowls of the green stuff, full of glee and devoid of the table manners she cleaves to when other humans crowd her space.

Who's to know? No one saw but the cats.

Oh, yes, the cats. Here's a downside to the single life -- I'm the only one around to feed those demanding yet finicky little beasts, or clean up after them.

And worst is the coffee situation. Now that I have to brew my own in the morning, it hardly seems worth getting out of bed. I wish the spouse were home where he belongs.
*************
SPLIT-PEA SOUP

1 cup green split peas, rinsed
4 cups water plus more as needed
1 bay leaf
1/4 cup long-grain brown rice, raw
---
3 tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil
2 medium onions, chopped (about 2 cups)
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
---
1/2 cup of chopped parsley
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Bring peas to boil in the 4 cups of water; add raw rice and bay leaf, and simmer, covered, over low heat for 45 minutes to an hour. Fish out bay leaves.
2. In the meantime, heat oil and sautee onions and garlic until onions are tender; add spices and heat for another couple of minutes.
3. Mix in with split peas and rice, and add water, or vegetable stock, if needed for proper soup consistency. Dump in the parsley, and add salt and pepper to taste. Reheat before serving.

Invasion

2005-05-12T21:54:00.000-05:00

Late June 1998

Ah, the glory of nature, the grandeur of the great outdoors! The gentle breezes caressing the cheek, the sunlight dancing on dewy petals, the soothing buzzing of the busy bees — or are those yellow jackets? — the peaceful labors of the industrious ant — Hey, they've taken over the picnic basket. Yes, Nature's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Even in the days when I consorted with flower children, I regarded the notion of going back to nature with suspicion. What about poison ivy? Creepy little bugs, buzzy divebombers that hit and run, putrid pools of infested water? Ick. Now, the notion is unthinkable: Where would I plug in my computer and modem in the woods?

A few years ago I tried hypnosis, seeking relief from the terrors of the workplace, specifically the horror of writing those awkward captions to the photos you see in your newspaper. How to get all the names in, say something suitable, and all in two lines? — and be sure you've got the right photo! The stress was hacking away at me like a woodpecker at a tree. As I lay on the therapist's plaid couch, he tried to take me to a happy place, away from glowing and glowering computer screens, gruff managers, frazzled editors, ragged reporters and cruel page designers. Where does he put me? In the bosom of nature, sitting under a strong, solid, sheltering tree on a mild spring day.

I was miserable. How could I be happy and content and freed from caption anxiety when heaven knew what tiny, gruesome faces were lurking in the folds of the bark, planning their evil assault on my tender flesh? What if I were sitting, unawares, on a mound of fire ants? And though light winds are nice, my flyaway hair was tickling my face, and my nose itched horribly. How could I concentrate under these conditions? Not the best-spent money of my career. The next time, the therapist conjured up a clean living room (miraculous!), with a cat or two to give me a sense of communion with the Earth. My fear of captions was never completely cured, but at least I have a vision of a happier place.

The Fourth of July is bearing down on us with compulsory picnics, Firefall and the like, fiendishly planned for the first wretchedly hot week of summer. You won't catch me out in the wild. Think of all the effort it takes to do a respectable picnic — packing food so it won't ooze out on the car seat or spread alluring smells; fighting the throng for a decent spot and dealing with those inevitable, unwanted guests.

Here in Texas I have quite enough nature right inside. The outdoors is so oppressively hot and rainless and miserable that the ants have no interest in staying at home with Mother Nature. So they've all moved in with us, lured by the dripping faucets and the whir of the air conditioning. No corner of the house is safe, but the kitchen is most under siege. It makes mealtime a real challenge.

You know, we might just have that picnic after all: It's safer outside.

******************************

I suspect the ants who have invaded our house aren't real ants, but scheming aliens who want to demoralize me thoroughly and gain a firm foothold for their planetary takeover by altering the course of cookery.

Face it, they aren't normal ants. Sure, they pretend to be, hanging around the usual places, where water and food await. But these ants are evil. They even go after dry goods, and dry cat food. It's. The spouse has taken to spraying his favorite chair with "Off!"

Most suspicious, however, is the way they've taken to massing in the far corner of my little "study" upstairs. The "ants" must know how shamelessly I waste my time in here, pretending to write such high prose as this, but in truth wandering aimlessly over the Web and engaging in bizarre little squabbles in high-volume e-mail lists.

The aliens, meanwhile, let me know that they're onto me, and that THEY know how to work. Their industriousness is beginning to drive me batty.

So I retreated to a happy place and time, a day or two before I got married. The fiance and I and a very few very close relatives piled into a couple of cars and had a picnic at Austin's glorious Zilker Park. My mother had worked madly to make a divine repast. I was still smoking cigarettes. I could forget we were outside.

One of the desserts my mother made was a Grand Marnier Cake, from "The Picnic Gourmet" (1975/1977), a lovely book by Joan Hemingway (a granddaughter of Ernest) and Connie Maricich. We didn't let any vile critters make off with that masterpiece.

GRAND MARNIER CAKE
Cake:
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
3 large eggs, separated
1 tablespoon Grand Marnier
2 cups sifted unbleached flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/4 cups sour cream
grated rind of one orange
1 cup chopped walnuts
Topping:
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup orange juice
1/3 cup Grand Marnier
slivered almonds

1. In a big bowl, cream butter and sugar until smooth and pale. Beat in yolks one at a time; add 1 tablespoon of Grand Marnier.
2. Whisk or sift together the flour, baking powder and baking soda, and add to batter in three parts, alternating with sour cream; beat each time until smooth. Stir in orange rind and walnuts.
3. In a clean, dry bowl with clean, dry beaters, beat egg whites until stiff but not dry. Fold gently into batter.
4. Pour batter into well-greased Bundt pan, and place in a preheated 350-degree oven. Bake for about 50 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool before removing from pan.
5. Mix together topping ingredients, and have some slivered almonds ready. If you're actually taking this cake to a picnic, carry the cake in its pan, wrapped in foil, and bring the topping in a little plastic container.
6. At serving time, pour the topping over the cake and sprinkle with almonds.

A tortuous road

2005-05-08T10:48:00.000-05:00

I've never gotten along particularly well with U.S. literature. I don't know why it is. A defect in my character? Bad early teaching? This little essay, at least, has saved a poem by Robert Frost for me. Now I can find it amusing.

From “Satire: That Blasted Art,” edited by John R. Clark and Anna Lydia Motto (New York: 1973), pp. 17-18.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two woods diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Indisputably a charter member in that dubious class, “Best-Loved Poems of the American People,” Frost’s Road work has been constantly anthologized — and consistently misunderstood. American Romantic lyrics in the nineteenth century often trumpet noises about affirmative individualism, after the manner of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and kin to the many road-of-life poems popularized by Longfellow. After a first reading, the reader might feel that Frost’s creation positively deserves consignment to this genre: His poem is exalted, often enough, as a chest-thumping (if slightly sentimental) affirmation of unique individualism electing the private footpath — a footpath by the bye that turns out to be the audience’s popular superhighway. However, more careful scrutiny of the poem wil reveal it to be, instead, a powerful parodic defection from that tradition which applauds singularity, rather than being its avatar.

The poem’s last line raises our first question. It has an assurance about it that might at first put us off; but it is markedly foggy and ambiguous. What difference has been made? we might well ask. We might also recollect similar fuzzy endings in other romantic lyrics. Is Robert Frost victor or victim in this romantic tradition?

Additional readings of the poem should leave no doubt about Frost’s ironic intention and control. For the elemental question is, when all is said, whether the speaker ever did take the less-traveled road. Another perusal of the middle stanzas provides the answer: no. Comically enough, that other road is embarrassingly similar to its mate. For, although the one “perhaps” had a better claim to being less traveled, yet
... as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

This is no medieval romance — where all forks in the road are as morally distinct as a pikestaff. (Knights always turn to the right — that road promising to be the highroad. The left, usually through foul and dark woods, is always “sinister.”) And, as a matter of fact, Frost’s very title calls attention not to the road selected, but to this other “equal” pathway that never was negotiated!

As a stroke, Frost’s poem assumes new meanings that transcend any easy morality or happy romantic bliss. His poem acutely studies the psychology of the chooser. Hypothetically, he realizes that, in the distant future, he wil have “modified,” “shaped” the story of his life. In such a sentimental world, he will be forcefully motivated to tell his future audience (and to believe it himself!) that his choice long ago had been deliberate and meaningful — when of course it was not. Frost’s poem, then, by approaching conventional patterns and themes only to violate them, achieves a level of insight into man’s nature that the soft, cheery sentimental poetry of inner-directed men seldom attains. The poem is significant just because it does flirt with conventions, play with themes, and tease our fond traditions. It is a slight poem, surely, a small lyric sung in playful numbers, but that does not prevent its satiric gaming from helping it achieve a high order of perception.
-------------------------
17. Cf. the conclusion of Wordsworth’s “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways”: “But she is in her grave, and, oh,/ The difference to me!” For rather bold assertions of one’s control over one’s destiny, see Clough’s “Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth,” Henley’s “Invictus,” Arnold’s “Prospice.”

18. The Latin for “left” is in fact sinister.

Such a tool, take 2

2005-05-06T22:07:00.000-05:00

Jan. 4, 1998

I looked to be in deep trouble. Maybe.

An hour or so after a raging torrent of chopping, grating, mixing, sauteeing, beating, crumbing, and reeling and squealing, I actually thought of cleaning up a little, and saw circumstantial evidence of disaster. There on the counter a set of mixing spoons was no longer a set — they lay scattered drunkenly where I’d left them last, now liberated from the metal ring that had kept them in line.

Decay and collapse I can deal with — I’m 43, after all; I live with it daily. But the quarter teaspoon, I found, was gone, gone, gone. And that raised an awful possibility: What if the measuring spoon had taken an unceremonious dive into my labor-intensive creation? Surely not!

Yet the spoon was nowhere. Not between counter and fridge, or on the floor under the cabinets. And not mixed up in or behind the jumble of spice jars — I actually undertook the superhuman effort of straightening up that stretch of counter, but no spoon surfaced to give me peace of mind. I expanded my search area to the whole kitchen, but I came up emptyhanded. Gone.

I had some decisions, some careful calculations to make. Do I tell the spouse about the chance of mischance? Watch him sear me with a painful look of amused contempt? Or just feed him the dish and pray for divine mercy? I put off the decision, only to hear the spouse, in a burst of good feeling, invite my sister-in-law to share in our feast.

Now this was getting serious. It’s one thing to prove oneself a total idiot in front of one’s life partner, or even to endanger his or her life through foolishness. Happens all the time. I read a news story recently about a romantic Russian fellow who put a ring into his love’s champagne; she choked on it and died. Oh, well.

My sister-in-law was another matter. I like her a lot. And what if she sued me — if she were in any shape to sue? Or worse, what if she laughed at me?

In my defense, let me note that the spoon in question is a full 3-3/4 inches long, and one would expect it to announce its presence on a fork; a glutton shameless enough to stuff a hunk of fork food that massive into his or her mouth deserves shame at least. Anyway, that dish ate up a lot of my time. Granted, the darn thing shouldn’t have taken me three hours, but it did. And it wasn’t cheap.

I didn’t have fun at that meal. I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the food moving from the spouse’s and the sister-in-law’s plates to their respective mouths. I must have been a little jumpy. “What? Me? Looking at? Oh, nothing!”

I’d imagined all sorts of horrors: the clash of cheap aluminum and expensive tooth enamel; gagging and gasping and keeling over; or, worst of all, the sister-in-law’s wry remark, “How clever, Alison: a casserole with its own little serving spoon baked in.” Didn’t happen. And I didn’t confess — until now.

A couple of days afterward, when the creation was safely gobbled up, I slyly brought the subject around to the case of the missing spoon. “That?” the spouse said. “I took it to use in the cat medicine.”

You’d think a man would understand the concept of tools of the trade. How unprincipled can you get?

Such a tool

2005-05-06T21:51:00.000-05:00

Dec. 28, 1997

The freshman English assignment contained any number of topics: the nature of friendship; the sources of peace, inner or international; I don’t remember too particularly, but I do remember that the suggestions were distressingly heavy, alarmingly cosmic. Luckily for me, there was an out: You could pick your own topic as long as it was a source of deep personal passion.

I gave that essay passion; boy, did I! And with a scintillating thesis, if I do say so — tea serves up a transcendently sensual experience only if the beverage is slurped piping hot. The professor didn’t understand, alas — I think he dismissed my genius with the word trivial — and in another assignment, he wasn’t too fond of my rather risque description of stapler as sex symbol, either. Philistine!

My obsession with scalding tea shriveled, I admit, and I don’t have the foggiest notion now how I, at 17, could fill a page in its praise. But some kitchen ardors go deeper. Only a few years later, when I first began cooking in earnest (if fecklessly), I decided that someday, goldarnit, I would compose a paean to the most divine, most meaningful piece of cooking equipment I’ve known. I speak, of course, of the rubber spatula. Not just any rubber spatula — get real! — we’re talking sturdy, wooden-stemmed and heat-resistant here; no wimpy, bendy (cq), achy-breaky, weaselly little implement, Nosiree, but rather a tool at once macho and diplomatic, one that can put muscle and finesse behind hard-core stirring and scraping and folding and generally putting two and two together.

I’d always attributed this affection and affinity for rubber spatulas to a persevering (and sometimes perverse) distaste for waste. Give me a bowl, and I will spatulate (cq) it clean. I will also bring out my backup spatula and a butter knife to run to ground any dribs and drabs — to get the goods to the last drop.

But love is never so simple, never so noble, is it? My life has been battered and buffeted by bizarre impulses, urges that seem idealistic but, upon closer examination, prove to spring from reconsidered pleasure and ruminated pain.

I was making brownies recently, and, most uncharacteristically, I wasn’t in the mood to bow and scrape. And so, when the pan was in the oven, I faced a bowl and — wow — a spatula still coated with chocolaty glory. I didn’t use my fingers to move brownie batter from spatula to mouth, I’m afraid. No — I got down and dirty and licked that darn thing, and, in a flash of clarity, I understood everything!

I was a young girl again, back in the kitchen with Mother, and we were making cakes and cookies and icings and all the important things women produced to keep our men in our thrall. While the males were doing their silly, manly, useless things with power tools and sporting gear, we were cooped up in the kitchen, second-class citizens but superior creatures. For we who have charge of the wanton beaters and luscious spoons and spatulas have the ultimate privilege of licking and lip-smacking.

***********************************************

I have a confession to make: I was unfaithful. But you’ve gotta understand — those of us in midlife are sometimes carried away by fascination with what’s younger, sleeker, newer. I tried to be good, but when I read about the spoon spatula, my sense of loyalty started to shake and quiver. I held out; I wrote the discussion of the traditional rubber spatula without having strayed. But on Christmas Eve, I dragged the spouse out to a housewares shop and plunked down good money for two of these curvaceous little honeys. And I was smitten.

Dardis does Hemingway

2005-05-06T09:10:00.000-05:00

The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer (rev. ed. 1991), an excellent book by Tom Dardis, who died in 2001, tells of booze's pernicious effects on four writers' talents. I've always been torn over Hemingway — obviously not my kind of prose. I offer a few passages from Dardis on Hemingway's decline; the meat of the literary judgment comes at the end.

pp. 162-63:

In those Paris years the day's drinking for Hemingway did not begin until his self-imposed quota of words had been achieved; keeping alcohol and writing apart seemed easy enough, and Hemingway appeared to have a special talent for drinking, despite occasional signs that all was not as benign as it might appear. . . .

His writing flowed miraculously in the late twenties with a power comparable only to that of Faulkner at the same time. Besides The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway published a series of short stories that continue to command our admiration . . . .

pp. 188-89:

The characters in The Sun Also Rises were heavy drinkers, especially Brett and Jake, but they appear abstemious compared with Cantwell [Across the River and into the Sea], to whom Hemingway has attributed his own vast capacity. He tells us about each and every drink the Colonel consumes, starting with his arrival in Venice in the late afternoon.

Cantwell begins with a gin and Campari before moving on to the bar at the Gritti Palace Hotel, where he drinks three very dry double martinis. When he leaves the bar for his room, his waiter gratuitously serves him a gin and Campari, which the Colonel regards as "an unwanted drink," but he finishes it nevertheless, as he tells himself that "it is bad for him." It's then time to meet Renata at Harry's New York Bar, where he lowers three Montgomerys, explaining to her that they are extra-dry martinis made with a ratio of fifteen parts of gin to one of vermouth. Now the couple return to the Gritti Palace to order their dinner and the wines to drink with it. They begin with a bottle of Capri Bianca, proceed to two bottles of Valpolicella, followed by a bottle of champagne, Roederer brut '42. They like the Roederer well enough to order another bottle but have to settle for Perrier-Jouet, which brings their meal to a close.

When they leave the hotel for their lovemaking in the gondola, they take along another bottle of the Valpolicella. At the end of his evening, the Colonel has a nightcap from still another bottle of Valpolicella, which the waiter has thoughtfully left in his room. Over a period of six or seven hours Cantwell has consumed between twenty-four and twenty-eight ounces of alcohol in the gin drinks and a dozen or so in the various wines. It all adds up to more than a quart, which would render most of us insensible. Although the Colonel is described as terminally ill with a cardiac condition, he is nevertheless capable of performing the sexual act in the gondola with Renata at least twice and arising the next morning "at first light" with no aftereffects.

There is something of "cloud cuckoo land" in the ritualistic manner the characters muse over the name-brand drinks they order, but Hemingway was seemingly oblivious to reality here because this was the way he then drank in order to maintain himself comfortably in daily existence . . . .

191-192

At fifty Hemingway had unquestionably become that which he had always scorned: a rummy, or a man who cannot go without a maintenance drink for more than an hour or so without extreme discomfort. As his son Patrick remarked, the moment his father was deprived of alcohol he became badly depressed; he now required at least a quart per day.

Conforming to the adage that you cannot underestimate the taste of the American public, Across the River and into the Trees sold extremely well despite a critical reception that was mostly hostile. His next book, coming just two years later, was The Old Man and the Sea, which succeeded in winning him the Nobel Prize. Telling people that the novella is a trite, sentimental tale often produces an effect similar to informing children that there is no Santa Claus and that they will get no Christmas presents. If is a self-conscious work brimming over with Christ and crucifixion symbols; it is fatally marred by its whimsical, folksy talk about the Indians of Cleveland and the Great DiMaggio. Hemingway had set down a far superior tale about indomitability in "The Undefeated" in 1927, a story written without sentimentality but with the care of a writer in perfect control of his material. What should be hard and taut about The Old Man and the Sea is instead soft and self-indulgent.

Nevertheless, the little book took the world by storm and has become a fixture in the curriculum of American schools because it is short and contains "symbols" that the teacher can unveil for the student; it is currently the American student's major contact with Hemingway. The fantastic triumph of the book included its being hailed by people of taste such as Bernard Berenson and Cyril Connolly, who compared it to Flaubert's "A Simple Heart." This sudden swing in opinion about his work made his oft-repeated question "How do you like it now, gentlemen?" take on new meaning.

Like nearly all of Faulkner's later work, The Old Man and the Sea is based directly upon observations from the distant past: Hemingway had written an embryonic version of his tale about Santiage and his giant marlin for the pages of Esquire in 1936. "Invention from knowledge," as he liked to call his method of writing, was his uncanny ability to create situations, places and people entirely from what he had seen. But that talent was now in abeyance, and the occasionally self-parodic image of Papa Hemingway was in full command. By the time Across the River and The Old Man and the Sea had appeared, Hemingway had lost the "magic," the thing he justly praised in the best of Fitzgerald and Faulkner. By the early 1950s his writing had become as marred as Faulkner's was by this time. In the midst of a book in which he had invested a great deal of emotional capital, he indulged in literary vendettas against people like Sinclair Lewis, whom he pilloried in Across the River. There was now a kind of boozy sentimentality running through his work, visible on many of the pages of The Old Man and the Sea. It is fair to say that with a single magnificent exception to come, everything he published after 1940 partakes of this increasingly prosaic quality.

More Kingsley Amis

2005-05-05T21:47:00.000-05:00

I had to look "berks" up, sad to say, when I first came across this nice bit from Amis's usage manual (for more info, see "Kingsley Amis on Womanese").

Berks and Wankers
Not every reader will immediately understand these two terms as I use them, but most people, most users of English, habitually distinguish between two types of person whose linguistic habits they deplore if not abhor. For my present purpose these habits exclude the way people say their vowel sounds, not because these are unimportant but because they are hard to notate and at least as hard to write about.

Berks are careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one's own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin.

Wankers are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one's own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin.

In cold fact, most speakers, like most writers left to themselves, try to pursue a course between the slipshod and the punctilious, however they might describe the extremes they try to avoid, and this is healthy for them and the language.

Kingsley Amis on Womanese

2005-05-04T22:08:00.000-05:00

Kingsley Amis's manual on English is a perverse delight—even for women.
See Kingsley Amis, The King's English (1997), pp. 244-45:

Womanese
It has long been noticed, by members of both sexes in their different ways, that men and women speak discrete languages, or more precisely they speak closely related variants of a single language. Each variant is well enough understood across the sexual divide, but attempts to treat the two as one are as unproductive as any other chimera about the essential sameness of men and women. The word *reasonable*, to take a familiar case, changes meaning with the sex of its user. So a wife might say of her husband that it was not reasonable of him to expect her to be reasonable on some stated occasion and be understood, not as one making a mildly cynical, moderately impartial, worldly-wise remark on a difference between the two sexes, but as putting forward a serious, valid complaint about typical male insensitivity -- putting it to another female, naturally.

No doubt I have already come too far to be safe. I had better take refuge behind the rock-hard factual observation that, unlike most men, women are always getting set phrases wrong. This propensity of theirs was noted at least as far back as the works of Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), if not much further in the character of Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan's _The Rivals_ of 1775, whose nice derangement of epitaphs may have struck many auditors as not close enough for discomfort but never, surely, as being put into the mouth or a character of the wrong sex. It is worth noting not only as required but also as accurate that Mrs. Malaprop's mistakes are nearly enough on target to be, like so many of this type, inners rather than outers or hopeless misses. You can always guess at once at what she nearly said.

My ignorance of foreign languages is far too deep for me even to conjecture what female behaviour there might be. The novels and stories of Peter DeVries, however, from _Tunnel of Love_ (1954) onwards, make it clear that such divergences or variations (or whatever one is to call them) of self-expression thrive in the land of the free. There and only there, possibly, could a wife have said to a husband in reference to some third party, 'No, you're wrong, he's not a profound character, at least only on the surface. Deep down he's shallow.' This is perhaps not exactly a malapropism but that it is a specimen of womanese will be doubted by no normal male who has talked to a normal female for more than five minutes. Such a one will, if he is any good, have seen that examples of womanese and of how men respond to them capture a pair of truths about the sexes in a way that no discourse in run-of-the-mill English could.

So to our own time and place. I fill out this pioneering study by reproducing a string of such cases as listed in a novel of 1995. Note the wide range of styles ventured into. All phrases quoted are warranted truthful instances of womanese, presented flat. *Vicious snowball. Quicksand wit. Up gum street. Beyond contempt. On its death legs. Hubbub of activity. When it came down to the crunch. Greaseboat. He lost his top* and *she blew her rag*. And *I was talking aloud* -- once, just once, but once.

It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction, though I have never seen their imperfect grasp of their native language as one more piece of evidence.

Chomp

2005-05-03T23:30:00.000-05:00

From December 1997

Sometimes, fork food just won’t cut it. For big hungers, the only way to eat is hand to mouth.

No wonder pizza is such a beloved and perennial victim, changing here and there to reflect the evolution or devolution of tastes, but not altering its essence: a semitough shell of baked dough beneath or around soft but stringy protein, tender, fat-kissed lumps of crunchy stuff and oozy, red, dripping sauce. For full satisfaction, the jaws must open wide, then clamp down, and the teeth must wrestle and gnaw and gnash.

The chewing isn’t incidental. In “Beyond Prozac,” author Michael Norden, M.D., discusses the calming effects of certain types of muscle movement, which raise levels of the brain chemical serotonin; “The most effective motions are repetitive ones, especially chewing and licking.”

Norden notes the strong stress-reducing properties of gum chewing. It is a phenomenon I can well attest to — I once had an amazing proportion of the News-Leader’s newsroom completely in my thrall.

It started out innocently enough: One Halloween, I wandered in with a big bag of bloodshot-eyeball gum and left it out beside my work station for any and all takers. There were a lot of takers, so I repeated the exercise. Soon, I had to convert to Super Bubble, lip-distending logs of sugar-laden chewiness. No matter; suddenly, all these people liked ME. I had a growing circle of addicts. I would occasionally try to kick my habit and come in empty-bagged, but the wild-eyed desperation among panting, stressed-out newshounds wore me down — heck, what could I do? My popularity took a nose dive when I didn’t come across with the goods.

Thankfully, my colleagues’ dentists stepped in and saved us all.

But I digress. Consider how often crusty bread goes along for the ride when pasta is on the menu. That used to strike me as odd — why should one starchy food require another to give the diner a sense of satisfaction? But pasta, even al dente, doesn’t give the jaw enough of a workout; not enough can be crammed at once, at least in polite or semipolite company, to sate the savage mouth. Wanna check it out? Break out some microwave lasagna. Eat part of it with a fork. Then put another part between two slices of toasted or properly chewy bread. Bite in. See?

The hands are almost as essential as the chomping. Let’s try another experiment, this time with pizza. Consume one piece with the aid of a fork and knife, then slam a second slice shamelessly into the gaping maw. I rest my case.

But bite off more than you can chew, and you’ve killed the fine feral joy. An overstuffed sandwich means human shame, as globs of food pitch and spray and plop onto the plate (if you’re lucky). Worse, it probably means forks, to dispose of the evidence. Sheesh. Get a grip.

Menus and meaning

2005-05-02T07:35:00.000-05:00

July 1998

Books are often the best dinner companions, but there's nothing like reading menus to add drama to the meal. True, for plot and character development, menus are naturally and inevitably inferior to books, but menus, even the worst of them, still have their theatrics.

Sometimes it's farce. Think of a meal where the curtain opens on cocktail weiners and chipped beef wrapped lasciviously around processed cheese: the height of low humor, indeed.

Then there's tragicomedy: food with pretensions but no elegance. A risotto made with instant rice. Canned French peas nestling on canned artichoke bottoms. Want to wallow in tragicomic cuisine? For an almost indescribable casserole of mixed feelings, fling open a spiral-bound community cookbook from 25 years ago. The horror. EEEEEEeeee! Har har!

Sadly, the tragedies are often the menus of your own making. Hubris overtakes you, and you take on too much, try too hard, then watch your audience wallow in pity, fear and loathing.

Darn it, there are so many rules, so many places to fail. Menu making is a desperate balancing act, where light must complement heavy, sour find its match in sweet, color find contrast, and never, no, never repeat yourself. And if the food you manage to produce chances to be edible, will the cook eat it? I've always worked myself out of an appetite when I cook — too much nibbling, perhaps -- and so I sit there at the dinner table with motionless fork. Funny how the guests start to notice, and start to look at their forks, and then peer suspiciously at the food I lavished my love on. What does she know that we don't?

But my favorite solution for menu angst is a change of scene — I hie myself to a restaurant. Now there's a menu for you. You sit back and read thrilling prose about food you haven't sweated over — or onto. In this heat, every kitchen task feels "Like Water for Chocolate."

The problem with restaurant menus is the lack of connected plot. They leave you to wander off. wondering what "Artichoke Alamo" is really like. And once you've made your choice, diner's remorse sets in.

Anything I buy I'll wish were something else, and the seasoning won't taste right and the color will be off. And it turns out not to have artichokes. So I'll stare at other plates around the room, plates plopped in front of complete strangers, out of longing or curiosity. Sometimes I can't resist asking, "How is the 'Curried Tofu with Yams'? Doesn't that need some hot sauce?"

After a few outings like that, the spouse prefers to head for the border, to bring home dinner from Taco Bell. And, over a bean tostada or two, I dip into Dante's "Inferno" — the perfect companion to the Texas heat.
********************************

For all my complaints about the difficulty of composing a menu, I can't stand cookbooks that tell me what to serve.

It's not that I mind suggestions. But some cookbook authors think they're doing the reader a favor by dividing the work up into a series of menus, instead of putting forth recipes by category or ingredient. I CAN'T WORK UNDER THESE CONDITIONS. I wish I could give myself up to the fantasy of each meal, but perversity and rebellion seize me. Nobody, just nobody is going to tell ME what to do. And so I suffer, alone and helpless, each time I try to put together my own set of complementary dishes.

David Lodge: Morris Zapp lectures

2005-05-01T09:17:00.001-05:00

From David Lodge, _Small World_, 1984

In the event, not many people did like Morris Zapp's lecture, and several members of the audience walked out before he had finished. Rupert Sutcliffe, obliged as chairman to sit facing the audience, assumed an aspect of glacial impassivity, but by imperceptible degrees the corners of his mouth turned down at more and more acute angles and his spectacles slid further and further down his nose as the discourse proceeded. Morris Zapp delivered it striding up and down the platform with his notes in one hand and a fat cigar in the other. "You see before you," he began, "a man who once believed in the possibility of interpretation. That is, I thought that the goal of reading was to establish the meaning of texts. I used to be a Jane Austen man. I think I can say in all modesty I was *the* Jane Austen man. I wrote to establish what her novels meant -- and, naturally, to prove that no one had properly understood what they meant before. Then I began a commentary on the works of Austen, the aim of which was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle -- historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, structural, Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, existentialist, Christian, allegorical, ethical, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it. So that when each commentary was written, there would be *nothing further to say* about the novel in question.

"Of course, I never finished it. The project was not so much Utopian as self-defeating. By that I don't mean that if successful it would have eventually put us all out of business. I mean that it couldn't succeed because it isn't possible, and it isn't possible because of the nature of language itself, in which meaning is constantly being transferred from one signifier to another and can never be absolutely possessed.

"To understand a message is to decode it. Language is a code. *But every decoding is another encoding.* If you say something to me I check that I have understood your message by saying it back to you in my own words, that is, different words from the ones you used, for if I repeat your own words exactly you will doubt whether I have really understood you. But if I use *my* words it follows that I have changed *your* meaning, however slightly; and even if I were, deviantly, to indicate my comprehension by repeating back to your your own unaltered words, that is no guarantee that I have duplicated your meaning in my head, because I bring a different experience of language, literature, and non-verbal reality to those words; therefore they mean something different to me from what they mean to you. And if you think I have not understood the meaning of your message, you do not simply repeat it in the same words; you try to explain it in different words, different from the ones you used originally; but then the it is no longer the *it* that you started with. And for that matter, you are not the *you* that you started with. Time has moved on since you opened your mouth to speak, the molecules in your body have changed, what you intended to say has become superseded by what you did say, and that has already become part of your personal history, imperfectly remembered. Conversation is like playing tennis with a ball made of Krazy Putty that keeps coming back over the net in a different shape.

"Reading, of course, is different from conversation. It is more passive in the sense that we can't interact with the text, we can't affect the development of the text by our own words, since the text's words are already given. That is what perhaps encourages the quest for interpretation. If the words are fixed once and for all, on the page, may not their meaning be fixed also? Not so, because the same axiom, *every decoding is another encoding,* applies to literary criticism even more stringently than it does to ordinary spoken discourse. In ordinary spoken discourse, the endless cycle of encoding-decoding-encoding may be terminated by an action, as when for instance I say, 'The door is open,' and you say, 'Do you mean you would like me to shut it?' and I say, 'If you don't mind,' and you shut the door -- we may be satisfied that at a certain level my meaning has been understood. But if the literary text says, 'The door was open,' I cannot ask the text what it means by saying that the door was open, I can only speculate about the significance of that door -- opened by what agency, leading to what discovery, mystery, goal? The tennis analogy will not do for the activity of reading -- it is not a to-and-fro process, but an endless, tantalising leading on, a flirtation without consummation, or if there is a consummation, it is solitary, masturbatory. [Here the audience grew restive.] The reader plays with himself as the text plays upon him, plays upon his curiosity, desire, as a striptease dancer plays upon her audience's curiosity and desire.

"Now, as some of you know, I come from a city notorious for its bars and nightclubs featuring topless dancers. I am told -- I have not personally patronized these places, but I am told on the authority of no less a person than your host at this conference, Philip Swallow, who *has* patronized them, [here several members of the audience turned in their seats to stare at Philip Swallow, who blushed to the roots of his silver-grey hair] that the girls take off their clothes before they commence dancing in front of the customers. This is not striptease, it is all strip and no tease, it is the terpsichorean equivalent of the hermeneutic fallacy of a recuperable meaning, which claims that if we remove the clothing of its rhetoric from a literary text we discover the bare facts it is trying to communicate. The classical tradition of striptease, however, which goes back to Salome's dance of the seven veils and beyond, and which survives in a debased form in the dives of your Soho, offers a valid metaphor for the activity of reading. The dancer teases the audience, as the text teases its readers, with the promise of an ultimate revelation that is infinitely postponed. Veil after veil, garment after garment, is removed, but it is the *delay* in the stripping that makes it exciting, not the stripping itself; because no sooner has one secret been revealed than we lose interest in it and crave another. When we have seen the girl's underwear we want to see her body, when we have seen her breasts we want to see her buttocks, and when we have seen her buttocks we want to see her pubis, and when we see her pubis, the dance ends -- but is our curiosity and desire satisfied? Of course not. The vagina remains hidden within the girl's body, shaded by her pubic hair, and even if she were to spread her legs before us [at this point several of the ladies in the audience noisily departed] it would still not satisfy the curiosity and desire set in motion by the stripping. Staring into that orifice we find that we have somehow overshot the goal of our quest, gone beyond pleasure in contemplated beauty; gazing into the womb we are returned to the mystery of our own origins. Just so in reading. The attempt to peer into the very core of a text, to possess once and for all its meaning, is vain -- it is only ourselves that we find there, not the work itself. Freud said that obsessive reading (and I suppose that most of us in this room must be regarded as compulsive readers) -- that obsessive reading is the displaced expression of a desire to see the mother's genitals [here a young man in the audience fainted and was carried out] but the point of the remark, which may not have been entirely appreciated by Freud himself, lies precisely in the concept of displacement. To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of the text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of striving to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing."

Morris Zapp went on to illustrate his thesis with a number of passages from classic English and American literature. When he sat down, there was scattered and uneven applause.

(text used: New York: Warner Books (1986), pp. 28–32)

It's alive!

2005-04-30T17:22:00.000-05:00

A Halloween piece from 1997:

First, dump a can of cream of mushroom soup into a wide bowl.

Don’t let the moment escape you, now. Savor the giant sucking sound, then the slurping glop. And look, oh, look! It’s alive.

I had to work up my courage to perform the task, I admit. I bought the can early last summer, but I just couldn’t face disemboweling it. Indeed, I carted that darn can from Springfield to Austin, Texas, unwilling to throw it away, but too squeamish to perform the ugly operation.

My subconscious seems to have tried rather desperately to save me the trauma, too, for what would come welling up in my memory but my first dinner party? Was I hoping to forestall the moment of goop?

Let me take you back for a moment, back to the ‘70s again, alas. In spring of 1977, I invited a couple of fellow students to my digs at — I kid you not — the Yum Yum Apartments in Carrboro, N.C. Here was a good chance to do something other than what I was supposed to do — wallow in Latin and Greek, laughin’ and grief — and I threw myself into the task of providing an elegant meal to end all elegant meals. You really don’t want to know all the appalling details. The soup is enough.

I just had to serve vichyssoise (by the way, the final “s” is pronounced; please don’t end the word with an “ah” sound, for it upsets me). Unfortunately, the recipes I had called for chicken broth; I wasn’t about to use chicken broth, and I did not deviate from recipes back then. Heck, I’d never even tried to make soup from scratch. But lo! In the gourmet section of the supermarket, cans of potato soup with no poultry product listed on the label claimed the name vichyssoise, and I pounced.

I was an innocent. I might have saved the day with a little more guile, a little less What You See Is What You Get. Maybe if I’d seen to dressing up the stupid store-bought soup with a few herbs or spices, and serving it into nice bowls, with no confession of its base genealogy ... but maybe not.

True twit that I was, I took the darned cans directly from the fridge, opened them in plain sight of the two young men, at least one of whom I wanted to impress, and saw the grotesque mound that starchy canned soup is wont to make as I plopped it straight into individual bowls. Had I said aloud, “I am not a cook,” I — unlike Richard Nixon — would have been believed without question or hesitation. I stirred wildly, but my effort, such as it was, was wasted. Even had the stuff been particularly palatable — and it wasn’t — the monster from the can had doomed the dinner.

Cans can be our friends: We eat what we can, and what we can’t we can. Or something like that. You should still be very sparing about availing yourself of the convenience when you’re having serious company over, but with close friends or spouses, you can be a little looser. If you look to an inside page, I’ll give you a dinner for two (or three) based on what you can find in two cans.

Still, some things are to be banned from the kitchen: No canned spinach. Ever. The spouse occasionally buys canned green beans and collards, and I overlook them, but surely neither I nor you would make them part of a respectable menu. Or canned corn — gag me with a spoon. Frozen can be forgiven; canned cannot.

And a can of creamed mushroom — or chicken or celery — soup? You know you can make a stiff white sauce and season it highly, so if a recipe you just must make calls for canned cream soup, you can easily improvise. Starting to waver? Read the ingredients. And think of the glooping, shuddering, monstrous blob. Finally, this past week, three days before Halloween, I steeled myself to slice into the bloody can, and I watched it spill its great curdled globs of greasy, grimy, gopher guts. The horror. The horror.
**********************************************************

When I promised you a meal based on two cans, I didn’t mean two cans would be all you and your guest or two guests needed to get reasonably fed. Sheesh. Grow up. You’ll have to drag the pasta out of your cupboard, or freezer, and cook it, and I suggest you add some chopped tomatoes and/or some steamed green vegetables to the meal. And you should have a hunk of Parmesan cheese on hand, or Swiss, or something, not to mention garlic and the usual other stuff. Anyway, to save yourself from the cooking crunch at the last moment, take can No. 1 and make in advance your artichoke sauce (adapted from a recipe in “Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home”). As you get ready to roll, cook pasta, heat up a can of black beans (there’s can No. 2), chop tomatoes and, if you want, steam green vegetables. Reheat artichoke sauce and grate cheese. Serve.

Easy Artichoke Sauce
3 tablespoons of olive oil
3 tablespoons of unsalted butter
4 cloves garlic, smushed and minced (clove size? whatever fits your palate)
1 14-ounce can artichoke hearts, rinsed, drained and chopped
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil or other fresh herb (in a pinch, since this isn’t for fancy company, you can substitute 2 tablespoons of fresh parsley and 1 1/2 teaspoons of dried basil)
1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice
Freshly ground black pepper to taste

Heat the oil and butter in a nonreactive saucepan. When the butter has melted, add the garlic and sauté for 2 or 3 minutes, until golden but not brown. Add the artichoke hearts, basil and lemon juice, and heat gently for about 10 minutes. Add black pepper to taste. Serve warm on, for example, cheese ravioli, spinach fettuccine or linguine, topped with grated cheese and chopped fresh tomatoes.

A raid on the inarticulate

2005-04-30T17:01:00.000-05:00

A post of mine to the Copyediting List in October 1998:

Last February, in the middle of a standard battle between reporters and copy editors on the SPJ list, I threw out a remark to the effect of: "Come off it. Whether copy editors or reporters, most of us -- I include myself -- are at best mediocre, anyway." I think the word "slovenly" came into it. One veteran copy editor responded: Speak for yourself, Parker. And I answered thus:
I was just trying to be honest. If I live another 44 years and use them to good purpose, reading and writing far more, and more carefully, than I have thus far, I'll still consider myself no more than a trifler with my own tongue. Consider the following passage, from near the end of "East Coker" in T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets":
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years -
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres -
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Smugness and arrogance make bad writers and copy editors; the humble ones keep asking questions, learning and improving.

If we think we're the only salvation of the English language, it's in deep trouble.

Whipped

2005-04-30T10:50:00.000-05:00

Here's one of my earliest efforts, from the fall of 1997.
--------

Miss Manners declares that certain sounds — OK, bathroom sounds — simply do not occur. If kitchen sounds fell in the same category, a favorite family tale would be ruined. The hissing and spitting and splatting of a can of whipped cream disgorging its goods is hard to mistake, or at least to make strike the ear as something more pleasant than it is. There is sort of a queasy inelegance about the whole operation. Sad, I suppose: I love canned whipped cream.

My father is wrong about the story, by the way. True, he was there, and I wasn’t, but his account of a dinner party he and my mother gave in the early ‘80s doesn’t make internal sense, and I am the one in the family cursed with the memory for utterly useless details. I remember it, I am sure, as my mother told it. If only she remembered it now ...

Anyway, the parental units invited over a poet/translator my father knew from work and the poet’s friend. At the dinner, my mother smiled brightly and asked the other woman present what she did. The horrifying response: She taught at a cooking school in Austin. Mother freaks out, of course, and, first sin of sins, overbroils the shrimp in beer: Real gourmets, as you know, demand a wiggle in their fishies, the cooking of which should approximate the amount of vermouth in a dry martini.

But the worst was yet to come. Cake was for dessert; a homemade cake, thank heavens, and not a tackily frosted cake, but a cake to be gussied up with a light and glorious cloud of cream. Yes, the cream was necessary, and, yes, my mother knew well how to whip it herself, but she had opted to save the trouble. She had made the cake, after all.

The kitchen in my parents’ post-nest house is right by the dining area, and the acoustics are bad — or good, however you look at it. There she was, lurking behind thin walls, trying to let out the puffs of whipped cream in short enough spurts to fall beneath the ears’ sensory capabilities. Spfffllt. SppFFFlTTT. Over and over. I wonder if my mother’s shudders were likewise audible.

(My father, I should say, believes my mother knew beforehand what Ann Clark, her guest, did for a living, and that her giving the dinner was a show of incredible, if reckless, valor. If so, valor indeed — I’d never have had the courage, and the cooking teacher said at the time that her profession rendered invitations a rarity. But if mother knew who she was, why didn’t she make the whipped cream? Father has no answer for that objection.)

In any case, my mother gave up giving dinner parties about that time. Dad says it’s a coincidence.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

As far as I know, Ann Clark wasn’t published in those days. I’d say “too bad” if I cared nothing for my mother’s feelings, for the fall of my mother’s jaw would have been all the more dramatic if she’d found herself facing a cookbook author. Thankfully, that happened later. Who knows: Maybe my mother’s efforts inspired Ms. Clark in some perverse way.

Ann Clark has published at least two cookbooks since. One, “Ann Clark's Fabulous Fish: Easy and Exciting Ways to Cook and Serve Seafood,” seems to be out of print. Not long ago I bought (new) her “Quick Cuisine: Easy and Elegant Recipes for Every Occasion,” Plume/Penguin, 1993/95. From that book I picked out two recipes of some relevance. First, shrimp, but not broiled -- that’s too easy to blow. And it’s mushed up anyway, so texture won’t be of the essence,

The second is a cake, but without whipped cream. Clark does have a recipe for one, a walnut and almond cake with cassis cream, Maybe some other time.

QUICK SHRIMP PATE (serves 6)

2 cups water
Pinch kosher salt (or regular, if you must, she says)
I pound medium shrimp in the shell
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon hot Hungarian paprika
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper
1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley or fresh dill, for garnish

Bring the water to a boil, add the salt, and cook the shrimp for about 3 minutes or until they curl. Drain, and plunge in a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking. When cool, peel.

Place the shrimp in a blender or food processor with the lemon juice and oil. Blend to a smooth paste, adding more oil if needed. Add the paprika, salt, and white pepper, and mix well. Spread the paste on the bottom of an 8 x 8-inch metal baking pan and chill in the refrigerator for 7 to 10 minutes, or in the freezer for 5 minutes. Serve, garnished with parsely.
NOTE: Unless the vein in shrimp is very large or dark, Clark generally does not devein shrimp.
MAKE AHEAD: up to 24 hours; store in a covered crock or jar in the refrigerator.

ESPRESSO CAKE (serves 6 to 8)

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/2 cup plus one tablespoon sugar
2 large eggs
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
7 tablespoons cornstarch
1 1/2 tablespoons instant espresso powder
1 1/2 heaping teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons brewed espresso coffee

MOCHA ICING

2 ounces bittersweet chocolate
2 tablespoons brewed espresso

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. With a mixer, cream the butter and sugar in a large bowl. Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition. Sift the flour, cornstarch, instant espresso, and baking powder together. Add to the egg mixture, and blend well. Add the espresso coffee.

Butter and flour an 8-inch square or round baking pan. Pour in the batter, and bake for 30 minutes, or until cake springs back when pressed. Remove the cake from the pan and cool on a wire rack.

When the cake is cool, make the icing: Melt the chocolate in the coffee in a double boiler. Stir to mix well. Pour the warm icing over the cooled cake.

NOTE: Although espresso gives the best flavor here, you can use any double-strength dark-roast coffee instead.

MAKE AHEAD: up to 48 hours: refrigerate, covered; or freeze for 3 months, with or without icing; to thaw, leave at room temperature for 3 hours.

Ratatatat

2005-04-30T01:58:00.000-05:00

When I wrote this column in August 2001, the advertising department of my newspaper was outraged. That surprised the hell out of me: I'd meant to outrage the reporters just as much. Oh well.
-----

Civilization as I knew it was nearly blown apart by popcorn.

Who really thinks food is a force for good? Granted, in prehistoric times -- or so the scholars tell us -- hunger bred cooperation: Heroic hunters strode forth and slew the ill-starred woolly mammoth, hacked away manfully at its massive carcass, and dragged all they could carry home to the grateful clan.

But when, at the dawn of the 21st century, the great popcorn behemoth willingly spills its guts in the company cola room, life at the ... grows nastier and more brutish.

Your trusty daily newspaper, sad to say, is riven by serious social divisions. In one corner, you have the prosperous day-siders, with their well-coiffed tresses, sleek suits, shiny shoes and assigned parking spaces. Then there are those of us who labor by night, too often clad in the ratty and the recycled, hungry at every turn, and likewise angry and snarling.

Yet the two classes aren't quite as divergent on Fridays: The so-called communal popper makes our upper class shed much of its thin veneer. When the less favored among us stagger in after a gruelling, desperate search for a place to put our ancient and bedraggled vehicles, we see the unmistakable signs of the day-siders' animal frenzy: the greasy tracks, the sad shards of popcorn kernels, trailing here and yon across the hallowed newspaper's otherwise sanitary halls.

Night-siders trudge upstairs to the break room to see a popcorn desert, all kernels of civilization now wiped away. Grrrr.

I'll admit it — I can be a professional malcontent. Every week, I sowed seeds of revolution among my peers with three simple words: "Out of popcorn"; I buttered the night-siders up with an image of the new popcorn age to come under my brilliant leadership, and they oozed gratitude and awe.

'We needed a giant showdown, but how? I liked the idea of sneaking in early with a large paper bag and, while no one was there to witness, looting all I could for the cause. But "while no one was there"? As if! — those vultures circled constantly.

So, Plan B: Try blackmail. I slithered up the stairs for some subtle reconnaissance in the Friday midafternoon. A gaggle of well-groomed women circled the popcorn altar, with crammed, overspilling cornucopiae in hand. Pretending to study the contents of a soft-drink machine, I aimed my quivering ears outward, ready to pick up any damning statements that I could quote against them.

Curses! Foiled again! The only clear sound I picked up was a resolute munch, crunch, chomp. Then all of a sudden the group scattered, and the plundered popper came into full view. Wait! It wasn't quite empty. I gathered up one of the pathetic paper cones still remaining and started scraping away at the faux-yellow remnants inside.

I'd come, I'd seen, and I was ready to start snarfing. Mindful only of that, I danced down to my desk with my trove of kernels, kernels that perhaps had seen better hours, but ones I could still sniff happily; I could still glory in my prey and in its inevitable surrrender. And then I looked up. Right there, staring at me with a bristling sense of betrayal, were the righteous and rabid have-nots of the night-side copy desk. Through the grim silence, I could hear their thoughts — I was a popcorn quisling.

But as my nose and my gaze was drawn back to my prey, I could feel the world well lost. I buried my face in popcorn and gave myself up to private ecstasy.

Peter Parisi: "Liberal Arts and Journalism"

2005-04-29T16:42:00.000-05:00

Parisi, Peter. "Critical Studies, the Liberal Arts, and Journalism Education." Journalism Educator, Winter 1992, Vol. 46 Issue 4, pp. 4-13. pp. 5-7:

Liberal arts and journalism

The liberal arts are fundamentally and persistently critical. Liberal arts study may indeed have responded historically to vocational opportunities,(2) but the liberal arts college insofar as it deserves the name does not "train" but "educates." It remains centrally "an institution created for the critical examination by professional minds of tenets, principles, laws, dogmas, and ideas that make up the ever varying body of truth" (Jones, 1967).

Liberal arts education "preserves truth by perpetually subjecting conventional assumptions to critical analysis, discarding fallacies, and retaining as valid only the information or the general statements that pass severe, impersonal, and professional testing, and it extends truth by pushing forward, into the unknown, task forces of professionally trained persons who are skilled in distinguishing fact from assumption" (p. 15).

Some journalism educators would contend that journalism and journalism education fulfill this spirit just as they are. Mencher (1990) defended the liberal arts values embodied in journalism by pointing to key critical qualities: "the premise that a rational, independent approach to problems will turn up useful, sometimes essential information," " a scientific approach—objectivity of observation, verifiability, exactness of description," "demand[ing] proof of assertion," and freedom "from the bonds of bias and unreasoned conviction" [p. 66]. Journalism, Mencher says, is "the university's center of Enlightenment values, the focus of a truly liberal education" (p. 66; see also Merrill, 1962; Wilcox, 1959; Higginbotham, 1961).

But at the same time, journalism educators are not entirely comfortable with the critical spirit. Would it create Hamlet-reporters, so sensitive that they cannot write? Lance (1961) worried that "the heady perfume of aesthetics" might "cripple the student's news sense" (p. 87). And Meyer (1986) described a student answering an ethics question, so freighted with virtue he couldn't see any way to write a story.

In an important sense, journalism does not "critically examine tenets, principles, laws and dogmas." Tuchman (1978) notes that "dependence upon accepted understandings of the social world [is] intrinsic to news" (p. 88). Journalism posits events as "understandable in themselves" (Benjamin, 1969, p. 89), and for the same reason has been called "empiricism without science" (Nord, 1990, p. 26).

Journalists may pride themselves on criticizing public officials, but the standards of criticism must be based narrowly on existing law and regulation. And journalism is notoriously uncritical of the larger framework of this very law or the context of social problems. Journalistic writing achieves the appearance of objectivity precisely by pruning away context, by fragmenting events and framing them within terms that can achieve immediate public assent. Tenets, principles, and laws are hard to fit in a news story.

Journalists make it their social role to suppress personal opinion in order to mediate between sources and the public. They are to be objective, or, if that seems too pretentious, impartial and balanced. They "get sources from both sides." They define events by asking questions about measurable facts (the five W's and H); they gather information most often, not through their critical assessment of published literature, but through personal interviews with sources (and "a reporter is only as good as his or her sources").

Finally as Tuchman and others have shown, journalists do not really claim to find the truth but only to state the fact that Source A made Statement X (though this caution does not prevent codes of ethics and rhetorical fervor in which journalists proclaim their dedication to the pursuit to an apparently uncomplicated truth.)

Journalistic method entails a partial neutralization of the intellect in the name of public discussion. As Sandman said, "The reporter makes a principled decision not to think" (1988; see also Sandman, 1986). This formulation isolates the social value, the principle, that motivates journalists, but at the same times reveals the nub of the contradiction between traditional journalism education and the liberal arts. Journalism education that uncritically inculcates the objective method is, in a significant sense, an education in how "not to think."

True, most journalism educators urge students to put facts in context, but it is relatively rare that the journalism curriculum examines the dimensions and limits of journalism as a rhetorical method of examining social experience.

The problem is compounded when we reflect that the theory of knowledge that underlies journalistic objectivity ignores the most important currents in contemporary thought. In journalism, the gathering and description of "truth" is straightforward and, philosophically if not practically, unproblematic. Journalism treats facts as simple things. But as Tuchman (1978) points out:

"taken by itself, a fact has no meaning. Indeed, even 'two and two equal four' is factual only within certain mathematical systems or theories. It is the imposition of a frame of other ordered facts that enables recognition of and attribution of meaning (p. 88)."

This view reflects the most significant contemporary developments in anthropology, philosophy (including philosophy of science), literary theory, sociology, and other disciplines. Truth is not "found" but is defined by the very methodologies, languages, technologies, cultural assumptions, economic imperatives, and literary systems through which it is sought and represented. For liberal study, facts, knowledge and the truth are not "out there" but are socially constructed.(3)

Forms of writing and interpretation, such as journalism, are seen to take shape within a specific social (as opposed to institutional) history. Thus Schudson (1978) can show how objectivity itself "became an ideal in journalism ... precisely when the impossibility of overcoming subjectivity had come to be regarded as inevitable" (p. 157). It is because journalism and journalism education so systematically ignore this truly critically understanding that Birkhead (1985) observes:

"handling news is not a way of exploring and reporting the world that stands on its own merits as an epistemological method. In the university setting, it often demands less creativity and aptitude than other forms of observation, research, judgment and expression that may be demanded of students during their academic careers. Many journalism departments operate in intellectual isolation, closer in spirit to the media they serve from a distance than to the university community within which they reside (p. 35; see also Birkhead, 1986)."

Since journalism education ignores its own larger historical and cultural dimensions, it cannot coherently reinforce the liberal arts curriculum.

(2) As Nash (1944) points out, even the most classical liberal arts subjects arose in a vocational context: "a liberal arts course based on the synoptic study of classical culture provided the vocational training of future leaders in Church and State" (p. 399). Higginbotham (1961) and Merrill (1962) make the same point to deflect criticism of journalism vocationalism (see also, McCall, 1987; Jones, 1986).

(3) Providing references for this observation requires almost a course in the intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries. The following selected works may serve, however, to suggest ways in which conditions of the act of knowing are recognized to govern what is known: Kant (1929 [1781]); Freud (1953 [1924]); Cassirer (1970; Mannheim (1936); Heisenberg (1958); Berger and Luckmann (1966); Foucault (1972).