Category Archives: Jean Zimmerman

April 19, 2013 · 10:06 pm

Scented Letters

I went in search of the ink. As a writer, I was naturally beguiled by the idea of a perfume that was supposed to have the scent of ink on skin, from a company called Byredo. Gil said he’d give me a bottle for an early anniversary present, so we ended up at Barney’s, the department store on Madison Avenue, a glitzy place to shop but the only location that stocks the stuff in the United States.

It’s actually called M/Mink, I discovered.

M/Mink, along with the rest of a line of unorthodox scents developed by a tattoo-covered Swedish basketball player turned fragrance entrepreneur (!) named Ben Gorham, “is given a clear identity and reason of being.”

M/Mink came about in partnership with parfumiers Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak of M/M (Paris) and features such ingredients as patchouli leaf, clover honey and amber. At the counter, the clerk sprayed some M/Mink on a paper wand. I inhaled, Gil inhaled, and we shook our heads. Somehow chemical. Not right for me.

I love scent. A few years ago Maud and I visited Grasse, in southern France, whose thousands of acres of flower fields make it an ideal perfume manufacturing spot. Jasmine, rose, lavender, orange flower, and tuberose are all harvested nearby. We spent a morning at Parfumerie Galimard, which began making perfume in 1747. It actually started out providing the king with olive oil, pomades and perfumes to scent the all-important fashion accessory, the leather glove, also a historic local industry. At Galimard today, if you don’t want to purchase their Rencontre or Ma Faute, you can sit in a cubicle and be guided by a “nose” (a professional parfumier) in creating your very own scent, with the assistance of eye droppers and beakers and over 127 “notes.”

Smells, to you. Combine the top note (peak note), the middle note (heart note) and the base note (fond note) in the proper architecture and you get a bottle of your own to name. I came up with Plus Plus (English translation: More More). Maud’s “brand” was Bel Ete (Beautiful Summer). And it was a beautiful summer. Maud and I agree that becoming a temporary nose was one of our most enjoyable experiences. Ever.

They kept my number on file in case I ever need a refill. But it gave me respect for the noses behind wonderful places like Penhaligon’s (British, also venerable, est. 1870) because it turns out you can’t just throw in some honeysuckle and some green grass and have it all turn out alright.

For a horrific nose-based thriller, try Patrick Susskind’s Perfume. The counter personnel at Barney’s would love it.

This blog post is brought to you by smell-o-vision. Today, Gil and I sniffed the other perfumes in the Byredo line, in rapid succession. Baudelaire was tasty (juniper berry, black pepper, hyacinth, leather). Pulp, a little too pulpy (bergamot, cardamom, red apple, peach flower). We tried others for good measure – Palermo and Gypsy Water were contenders – and ventured outside the line to small colored bottles of essential oils that would have cost a fortune. We learned that the salesman had a sister who rescued endangered birds. The saleswoman had suffered an acrimonious divorce in Iran.

Flowery, spicy, powdery. Figgy. Just like Chanel. Our noses were swimming.

They sprayed the scent on my fingertips. On the backs of my hands. A cup of coffee beans was proffered to cleanse my nasal palate. We were advised to take a stroll around the store to clear our heads. And we did. I do anything someone tells me when they treat me like Cleopatra.

You get along so well, said the saleswoman, rapidly waving a wand to get the perfume just dry enough to sniff. He’s so agreeable! she said to me. And he was, was Gil.

It was rather warm in there, and I realized one of the first scents I’d tried was the finest. Bal D’Afrique, which combines African marigolds with violet, jasmin petals and cyclamen in an elixir you’d almost like to drink.

Gorham accompanies each bottle with a funny little story line. The one for Bal D’Afrique goes: “The noble faces of tall and straight-backed chieftains and princes greet us, the guests. The red dirt floor, covered by the exotic furs of big game, resonates with the stomps of the bejeweled dancers…” I can’t finish, I’m laughing too hard.

We followed our noses out to the street, where my wrists and throat were now armed against the delightfully dirty New York air.

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Filed under Fashion, History, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Writing

April 18, 2013 · 7:34 pm

Turning It Around

I can’t believe it, I said to Gil. I cannot believe I’m 55 years old and don’t know the proper time to plant a sunflower seed.

Well, he said, it’s no big deal. I’m 59 years old and I don’t know either.

It got me to thinking, how many new things, simple things, nothing earthshaking, come into my life every day, even at my advanced age.

It’s a question of noticing.

Today I prowled around the boonies upstate, in Dutchess County, with my brother Peter – these photos include his — seeing some small things I hadn’t seen before.

We spent most of our time in Tivoli, a tiny village near the Hudson River that dates back to 1872 but avoids all dustiness, with its free-thinking, artistic, intellectual inhabitants. Nearby Bard College sends over a constant scruffy stream of students, not to mention professors.

Pete introduced me to a monument in the cemetery of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Tivoli, where the stones seem dominated by the Hudson Valley families DePeyster and Livingston.

An exquisite stone carving to represent the soul of a remarkable woman, Estelle Elizabeth de Peyster Toler, who was born in 1844 in Red Hook and died 45 years later in Manhattan. Descended from the cream of New York society — De Lanceys, Van Cortlandts and Coldens — she was known for her piety and philanthropy. Her husband died the day after her death of a broken heart. Estelle’s marker reads, from the Proverbs, “A perfect example in life of the ideal virtuous woman.”

But I found the inscription on the base of the praying girl more moving.

With its sweet embellishments of lichen and moss: SISTER–BABY.

Another grave, more modest, this one in a field of grass off a country highway.

Was this Molly also a virtuous woman? A virtuous pet? It’s an odd place for a burial but oddly peaceful.

Coffee break.

I’ve had plenty of fancy cappuccinos, like this one at Tivoli’s Murray’s café, designed by stylish barrista Michelle.

Pretty good, she said under her breath, checking her work, deadpan. Not the best I’ve done.

But I’ve never before had borscht made with garbanzos rather than beef to complement its beet chunks. Topped with a spoonful of organic sour cream, it was scrumptious.

And before today I never had a perfectly-designed, shot-silk carryall for knitting needles such as I brought home from the yarn shop on the tiny stretch of Broadway that is the heart of Tivoli. Fabulous Yarn offers luscious skeins (“fibers for fanatics”).

And whimsical taste. Under one cheery roof.

Down the street, a tavern called the Black Swan, currently under repair.

Attitude will remain unchanged.

Before today, I had never laid eyes on the brick-and-stone construct of architectural genius that is the historic Stone Jug House in Clermont, housing families since 1752. Local stone, I knew. Weathered brick, sure. Together, gorgeous.

I looked around today for something I’d seen a hundred times, but always loved: a painted turtle. But the large one Peter knew of refused to show his face at the pond, the weather being cloudy. Still, there was something to see, an exploded cattail.

Like cotton wool laced with cornmeal. It was something I’d never touched before.

Sometimes if you simply turn something around, it’s totally new.

Love.

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Filed under Art, Cooking, History, Jean Zimmerman, Knitting, Nature, Photography

April 17, 2013 · 6:59 pm

Start Spreading Manure

What’s in that, anyway, I asked.

You mean what kinds? said Chris, who was busy shoveling a big brown pile of composted manure into 50 lb. bags for us to drive home. Oh, he said. Cattle. Chicken. Pig. And other stuff too. Innards.

He told me he once found a jawbone in the compost.

Last year our garden at the Cabin was, truth be told, kind of weeny. Sallow tomatos hung off spindly vines. This will be the macha season of vegetables, helped along by plenty of fertilizer and more diligent weeding. I’m determined.

Hemlock Hill Farm stocks seasoned manure as well as lots of other fortifying things. A variety of eggs, chicken, duck, quail and goose.

Fresh chickens (the bird we brought home today for dinner was running around yesterday). Johnny Jump Ups, with their little lion faces. “There’s pansies, that’s for thoughts,” said Ophelia. In her day, pansies were wild and small, and sometimes known as heart’s ease or love-in-idleness.

The farm, on 120 acres in Cortlandt Manor, New York, has been owned by the De Maria family since 1939. There is a beautiful hillside to its south, near a spa of sorts for its chickens, which recline on clean straw underneath a shady quonset. It’s good to have an organic farm you can trust in your neighborhood.

We visited the pigs.

I’ll admit to mixed emotions, seeing the spring piglets scamper up to the fence, knowing that we have a pig roast planned in our near future. They’re such magnificent animals. Didn’t one of them write Animal Farm?

Our 300 pounds of Hemlock manure laid the foundation for this year’s vegetable patch. A garden store near us, Sprainbrook Nursery, has fallen on hard times, but the owner, Al Krautter, is making a go of it despite financial strictures, sending an inspiring e-newsletter and cultivating a variety of spring plants when he could not afford water or heat in the greenhouses all winter. Krautter is the guru of organic fertilizer. We were advised.

Peat moss, which Gil cut open with his father Acton’s deer hoof knife.

Not only peat moss, but lime and bone meal and Plant-Tone went into our E-Z Bake topsoil, plus a vinegary smelling mineral rock dust, plus decomposed lobster, plus some stuff they import from Maine that has a mixture of decayed blueberry, mussels and salmon mixed with sphagnum peat. Work it in or cook with it? Whatever you do, be sure you wear gloves.

We toiled all afternoon (Gil sweating hard over the rototill, me somewhat less so over the windowboxes).

Taking a break only to examine the still-uncomposted bones in our garden soil.

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April 16, 2013 · 2:32 pm

Little Green

Spring brings with it a kind of happy sadness. Ferns beginning to emerge.

And yet the air is cold, endlessly.

We’re still looking at the downed trees in our front forty, felled during Sandy. Our neighbor took home a dozen planks from one, and it is pretty great that he could use them to build raised beds for a garden this spring. A happy eventuality.

Still, I’m thinking of the haiku by Kobayashi Issa, who wrote in the early nineteenth century:

The tree will be cut 

Not knowing the bird 

Makes a nest

The bird will surely build another home in another tree, happily, but here this tree lies, fit only for planks.

In our woods, you now see the moss, there all winter but offering up its soft coat in spring as though you’d never seen it before.

My friend Josefa told me that in Virginia, when spring came, she thought about planting moss in their yard, which was too shady for grass. She was informed by local experts that the ladies of Richmond made their guests put on ballet slippers before treading on their moss. And that they fertilized it with buttermilk. Beautiful images. Yet she was sad in Richmond, even in spring, so sad she had to move back north.

Happy sadness in spring. Poets do it best. (April is National Poetry Month.)

Walt Whitman, an aside in “Song of the Open Road.”

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,

I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,

I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,

I am fill’d with them; and I will fill them in return.)

My old delicious burdens. The piercing, pleasurable misery of April. The weight of death, of debts to pay. In the clear sunshine.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

In that poem, The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot also talks about how, In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing/Over the tumbled graves. It was a happy day, beginning in the nineteenth century, for families and lovers to take their leave of the gritty city and visit a graveyard.

The landscaped acreage offered a garden and an art museum all in one, you could stroll or take a carriage, and whatever sadness you might feel was mitigated by your joy at being outdoors in the air, with the pristine green grass spilling over in the spring sunshine. Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, New York, saw half a million visitors a year in the 1860s.

Matsuo Basho gets at the bittersweet flavor of such a foray.

the whole family

all with white hair and canes

visiting graves

In the woods above the Cabin, we have tiny green leaves emerging out of the dusky litter of winter.

“Little Green,” Joni Mitchell’s saddest song, carries within it happiness as well.

Just a little green

Like the color when the spring is born

There’ll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow

Just a little green

Like the nights when the Northern lights perform

There’ll be icicles and birthday clothes

And sometimes there’ll be sorrow

The song, written in 1967, talks about a daughter that the 19-year-old singer gave up for adoption.

Child with a child pretending

Weary of lies you are sending home

So you sign all the papers in the family name

You’re sad and you’re sorry, but you’re not ashamed

Little green, have a happy ending

The comic Louis C.K., who manages to be soulful and raunchily hilarious all at once, gave a recent interview in which he talked about how he gets by in this world.

I don’t mind feeling sad. Sadness is a lucky thing to feel. I have the same amount of happy and sad as anyone else. I just don’t mind the sad parts as much; it’s amazing to have those feelings. I think that looking at how random and punishing life can be, it’s a privilege. There’s so much to look at, so much to observe, and there’s a lot of humor in it. I’ve had sad times, I’ve had some hard times, and I have a lot of things to be sad about, but I’m pretty happy right now.

To achieve happy sadness, we could all be more like animals, who so often mix emotions in their expressions. Yes, there are people who say not-humans lack emotions. But I look at Oliver, the pit-hound in him tuckered out after chasing the white flag of a deer’s tail through the spring brambles. The look across his features.

And I think of Edith Wharton’s journal in 1924.

I am secretly afraid of animals…. I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which belies it, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.

Dogs do sometimes have that look in their faces – if I wasn’t so satisfied now I would cry. With Oliver I could imagine a particular happy sadness. If I caught that deer today I couldn’t chase it tomorrow, so all is well.

The Japanese christened the unique flavor called umami, something we only understand because of L-glutamate receptors on the tongue. Along with sweet, sour, salty and bitter, the names we all learned as we grew up for what goes on in the mouth when we eat, it’s one of the five basic tastes, identified by scientist Kikunae Ikeda in 1908. But it’s almost impossible to describe. It’s savory or “brothy,” found in dried bonito flakes or shitake mushrooms.

Soy sauce. Parmesan cheese. The thing about umami is that it offers a mixture of sensations that together become pleasurable on the tongue. Intense, saliva-stimulating. A powerful paradox.

Just like spring.

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Filed under Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Photography, Writers, Writing

April 14, 2013 · 12:37 pm

Fixing Stained Glass

Some of the stained glass leading in the sanctuary’s 160-year-old lancet windows has split over time, and high-up panes blew out during Sandy. What remains is lovely.

The Reverend John Hamilton toured us around St. John’s Church in Yonkers, New York, and showed us some of the attributes of this historic place.

In 1752, when the oldest part of the church went up, funded by nearby landowner Frederick Philipse II, the windows of St. John’s were clear, and the walls vanilla-white. The Enlightenment reigned. Worshippers sat in rationally arranged rows facing a central pulpit. The Church of England was the only game in town.

The Philipses’ rubblestone house just 300 yards away rose out of a bucolic landscape. It was grand, a European-influenced manor house in wild country. An indomitable fur trader named Margaret Hardenbroeck first built it as a stopping-off point between Manhattan and Albany in 1682.

A rushing stream, the Nepperhan, ran downhill beside it to the Hudson River. Its terraced gardens were famous among travelers who passed by. There’s even a picture of this paradise, thought to date to a real estate circular in 1784.

A bit later, a diarist recalled that the Nepperhan was surrounded by “fields of wild violets that filled the air with perfume.” A deer park suited the Philipse taste, with the last of the line, Frederick III, a Loyalist who was banished from the new America at the end of the Revolution.

Overseeing the building of the Episcopalian church was his great accomplishment.

You can still see the original doors. To me, they bespeak a humbler age of churches.

Weathered bricks and old silvery colonial stones frame the door. Above, a patterned, multi-colored slate roof.

Quoins of a newer addition (1849) take from the Dutch tradition.

Today St. John’s and Philipse Manor Hall remain the oldest structures in downtown Yonkers, their existence a proud bulwark of a neighborhood that has suffered blight since the 1960s.

The church building itself is hurting. The 1818 church bell can’t ring because its rope is stuck (“I’ll get your bell rope free,” says Gil. He likes to climb.) But inside, intact and clearly visible, high above the congregation, a legend from St. Augustine runs around the edge of the nave: He brought me into his banquet hall and his banner over me was love. About the architect who revamped the old colonial structure and installed that saying, Edward Tuckerman Potter, Father John says, “He made funky buildings.”

At the time of the Revolution, St. John’s served as a military hospital where the wounds of Patriots and Redcoats were tended to equally. Legend says soldiers are buried beneath the building. But an interesting story comes down to us about a rector’s wife of the time, a secret Patriot. She sneakily alerted the Americans to the movements of enemy troops with the use of a domestic semaphore — by the way she hung out her laundry.

Washington worshipped here.

“Don’t forget that sermons were an hour long,” says Father John. “I always say that Washington slept here.” The General also paid court to a Philipse girl, Mary – he called her Polly – down the way. (She was something of a firecracker, someone I wrote about in The Women of the House, and was responsible for the oldest building in Manhattan, now known as the Morris-Jumel Mansion.)

Today the fabric of that past is fraying, at least in the physical character of the church. Father John is happy that the City of Yonkers has promised a matching grant for a campaign to restore St. John’s windows. The economy makes this a terrible time to fix panes of glass.

But otherwise they blow away.

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April 13, 2013 · 12:16 pm

Pruning Links

Damn. My cup runneth over with links. My computer wouldn’t let me save another bookmark, it was so stopped up, so I had to prune. Throw out and organize. Floss. Figure out what I really needed to save, what I might need – need being a relative term – and what could be relegated to the virtual trash heap. So I’d have room for new, extra important links!

It was enlightening, actually. In embarking on this task, I found that there were three big categories that had held special importance for me in the past few years.

One was wonderful me and my wonderful work . My log cabin got its due . Even a movie (just a glimmer, but a Hollywood glimmer) had found its way into my bookmark file.

When I was a middle schooler making covers for my little hand-crafted books by binding pages into cardboard and calico with ironed wax paper, I think I would have been amazed that some day someone in the world would be interested in what I had to say. I still remember the smell of the hot wax paper as it was pressed, and the excitement that Miss Henny Penny’s Travels was going to be “published.”

Edith Wharton tells a story in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, about going in to a book store in London when her first book, The Greater Inclination, came out in 1899 and asking the manager innocently if there was any new and interesting book she could look at. “In reply Mr. Bain handed me my own little volume, with the remark: ‘This is what everybody in London is talking about just now.’” He had no ideas who he was talking to.

Then, second, I have the category of Gertrude and Sylvia and Simone and the rest of the ladies who launch. And more of Stein.

I couldn’t believe how many iterations I had of critiques, praise, profiles, pictures of the women who inspired me over the years and still fascinate me.

The third whopper of a group: scarves. Knit patterns for scarves. Especially circle scarves. Yes, cooking and knitting do take up some of my time, I admit it, unintellectual as that might make me. I’m itching to make Paula Deen’s gooey butter cake. But the scarves have it. I made seven this winter. Plus a sock.

Then there is everything else. Before they go into the Older Bookmarks file, I’ll highlight a few that have grabbed my interest along the way. A self audit, as it were. And a little gift to anyone looking for something new to chew up their time.

I obviously made a serious trip into Victorian America in recent months. Many times over Dance. Dress. Getting around. Mansions, mansions, mansions. Does my time machine have an exit onto Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in the 1870s? You bet.

Even (or especially?) Victorian headless portraits interest me. So much of this nineteenth century arcana found its way into Savage Girl, my new novel that will be published in early 2014, which officially made it work, but it still felt like a guilty pleasure.

More research, this time for The Orphanmaster, unearthed this incredibly absorbing digital redraft of the Castello Plan. You can hover over the first street plan of New York, a drawn-to-scale view of seventeenth century New Amsterdam, and investigate what it was actually like.

I had the idea at one point that we should explore Oliver’s genetic background and see what part of him was actually pit and which part was hound. So I looked into DNA testing for dogs.

I wondered what you’d see if you opened the refrigerator door in Bangkok or Jerusalem. I found out at Fridgewatcher.

I always find it useful to keep a library on file in case my disheveled bookshelves won’t yield it up. And so, here they are, minding their own business, various books in their entirety, like George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, one of my favorites, and the Diary of Samuel Pepys. And it’s always good to be able to access an exhibit based on Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Gil and I ventured to Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal. For a while afterward we didn’t get our cholesterol levels checked. The menu includes such delicacies as Tarragon Bison Tongue and Foie Gras Poutine (foie gras is their speciality, along with everything pig-related), all of it drenched in butter. It was here that I had the famous “duck in a can,” consisting of a duck breast, a lobe of foie gras, half a head of garlic and some kind of spectacular gravy packed into a metal can, like a soup can, and boiled.

Afterwards, when you’ve been sitting at your table for a while marveling at the number of trendy people there are in Montreal, the waiter opens the can at the table and dumps the whole stew onto your plate. Fabulous.

If you like menus as much as I do, you’ll go to The New York Public Library’s historic menu collection.

Something I don’t want to file too far way is The Top Ten Relationship Words That Aren’t Translatable into English, assembled by a serious linguist, and including such gems as Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese): The act of tenderly running your fingers through someone’s hair.

Probably the most delightful site I’m back-burnering. For now. Or, on the other hand, I think I’ll leave it out for a while in case I want to take it with me as a reference when I next tour the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Nipples at the Met(“updated regularly”).

All links welcome; leave them in a comment.

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April 12, 2013 · 3:37 pm

Museum Creatures for Real

The Austrian photographer Klaus Pichler has done a series of works centering around what visitors don’t ever see when they go to the magnificant Vienna Museum of Natural History.

He stumbled upon a back room and his artist’s antennae went up. There were taxidermied animals in various states of confusion, as though they’d been thrown up in the air and tumbled down every which way or, more unsettling, as if someone had gone around arranging them in poses that were anything but the perfect scenes you’d see in the museum’s halls.

It wasn’t only taxidermy and early man come to life.

The museum’s director gave him a tour, and believe it or not the artist rearranged nothing, just took the pictures as he found them. “Skeletons in the Closet” hits some primeval fear-buttons, at least for me.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York City has always been a favorite of mine, and not only because Maud put on her walking shoes there, toddling up and down the carpeted ramps of the Hall of Gems on the Museum’s ground floor. We lived a block away, on Columbus Avenue, and she probably spent as much time there in her preschool years as she did in our small apartment, clocking hours dancing under the gigantic suspended Blue Whale.

I remember a room of gold specimens in particular, which had a small bench on which you could be lulled into a trance by all that gleaming rock around you. Or maybe that was only a trance induced by chasing a toddler down the corridors all morning.

I thought of those gleaming rooms last year when a very smart reader I met persuaded me to get a copy of Relic, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Does everyone experience fascination with the idea of what lurks in the museum basement? Relic would not usually be my type of book, but I was hooked by the gothic quality of the setting.

It’s the first in a series of innumerable thrillers starring a detective named Pendergast, and the author booked some time as a Museum staffer, so he knows his stuff. Something’s loose in the Museum of Natural History and I won’t tell you what but suffice it to say it’s big and savage and hiding behind that innocent looking exit sign just next to the dioramas.

The dioramas, of course, are the Museum’s beauty queens, now refurbished — a team of artists, conservators, taxidermists and designers dusted leaves, freshened fur, and restored the perfect but faded background vistas – and reopened this past October.

Everyone wants them to come alive (not a la Relic, though). Or to step into one. One man was responsible for the exquisite nature of most of these: James Perry Wilson (1889-1976) was a master of trompe l’oeil painting techniques and combined the real materials of the foreground with the painted background to create a mythic space.

It must have been magical to be in it, in the diorama, from the beginning, if you could. To actually make one. Here are Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Horsefall in 1907, at work painting the background of the Wild Turkey Habitat Group in the North American Bird Hall.

I’m thinking of Gil and me at work on something like that – but we might rather do the Bongo Group or the Wild Boars.

Personally, I like the small dioramas at the entrance of the Mammal Hall, which house depictions of mammoths and other ice-age mammals – larger-than-life beasts here rendered miniature, more like playthings than real animals. I love the idea that while the other creatures here are taxidermied, the prehistoric predators here were built from the ground up out of clay or putty or whatever they use. Sort of like the the neanderthals in the basement of the Vienna Museum.

The bigger animals at the Museum of Natural History are naturally exciting, too. (This Vienna one, from Klaus Pichler, is maybe a little too exciting.)

Though truth be told I liked the critters a little mothbit, before their spa treatment. There’s that Mad Men scene from last season when tweenaged Sally clutches her belly after running off to the museum, standing in front of the glorious, imposing dioramas, complaining of stomach cramps, and it turns out she has “become a woman.”

What she feels is not just all that running around in the stuffed, gleaming museum, after all. It’s real.

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April 11, 2013 · 6:05 pm

Apron Strings

My mother Betty has been good enough to pitch in with a guest post today. She attended a presentation at the residential community were she lives by a traveling apron-enthusiast.

I would have liked to see and touch these beautiful heirlooms but I’m 2,000 miles away.

Bobbie Schafer’s medicine show includes a slide presentation and a wicker chest bursting with vintage aprons. Betty brought a Christmas apron embroidered for her by my great aunt in the late 40s early 50s, topped with a round of plastic.

Yes, her waist was that small.

All the photos to follow are my mother’s. Hit it, Betty!

The original style of apron was called a “butcher” apron. It had a bib top, and covered the dress almost completely, to keep the garment from getting soiled. Washing dresses was not easy then. The homesteaders brought aprons (and rifles) into use.

In Victorian times, matrons created their aprons with silk, often with lace. Obviously, the lady of the house used them for adornment, not real use.

Matching handkerchiefs were sewn together in the 1920s to make hankie aprons.

In the ’30s the apron still covered the whole dress. The painting by Grant Wood, “American Gothic,” is an example, also including the use of rickrack, new in the ’30s. Some women wore two aprons, so that when you answered the door, you could quickly shed the outer one and appear in a fresh one.

The ’40s brought shorter dresses. The government told you how long a dress could be. [Note: You’ve got to be kidding!] The amount of material used was less, and because of wartime, it was less easily available. The aprons were accordingly shorter and smaller — often made of only one yard. They were still the full, or bibbed style, sometimes pinafore style. “Victory” aprons appeared during the war, with red, white and blue designs. Polka-dots, plaids and rickrack became very popular. (An interesting side story. During wartime, ladies alway wore hose, and because nylons weren’t available, they used an eye pencil to paint the seam down the backs of their legs.)

Also in the ’40s, the first patterns for aprons became available, from companies like McCall’s and Simplicity.

There were iron-on transfer patterns with designs for embroidery and appliqués.

In the ’50s hostess aprons were popular, often made of taffeta. These were party or cocktail aprons. Often they had hearts, spades, clubs appliquéd on them, for use at ladies’ card parties. Sometimes women wore holiday aprons, and some had aprons for each holiday.

There were also cobbler aprons, or hobby aprons, with lots of pockets for holding tools, etc. And for the first time, aprons for MEN! (These were back to butcher-style.) Real aprons for women went out of favor, as TV dinners had been invented, and women didn’t cook as much.

In the ’60s, The washing machine meant aprons didn’t need to cover the dress. Women started wearing pants and with the women’s movement, women decided to throw away their aprons, anyway!

In the ’70s, the pinafore style became popular again. Now the apron is back. There are more patterns available than there were 10 years ago. They are popular, even on college campuses, and in stores like Target.

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Filed under Cooking, Fashion, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman

April 9, 2013 · 5:54 pm

A Lion, a Pit-Hound, a Bud

The warmth has hit. The sun pours down. The day reminded me of the scene on a Mexican plate from the early 1800s that I saw recently at the Hispanic Society.

Except I was sporting a ball cap rather than a parasol and my companion was a pit-hound rather than a lion.

Gil and I took some time outside to rake the pachysandra beds and clear away crumbled leaves from a set of rather magical stone steps that lead to a sunset ridge near the front porch. There’s a wood bench at the top. I plan to colonize it this summer, mint iced tea in one hand, Emily Dickinson in the other.

We sat on the patio late in the day. It faces east, over the marsh. A hawk soared, its breast glinting white. The peepers were even less polite than usual. This spring has been so long to come, but the about-to-bloom magnolia knows when the time is right.

Just when you couldn’t wait any longer.

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Filed under Art, Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Poetry

April 8, 2013 · 2:37 pm

Neruda Poisoned?

Did General Augusto Pinochet murder the great poet? To me the question is not whether but how. Neruda’s remains, interred for 40 years in his garden, have now been exhumed. Will toxins be found that prove he was killed by the fascist regime on the 23^rd of September 1973, just 12 days after Pinochet’s military coup?

It would be a level of political venality the political animal Neruda would appreciate. Among numerous political posts, he served as the President Allende’s ambassador to France in the early ‘70s.

Neruda penned love poems, beginning with his first book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, when he was a 20-year-old prodigy.

The language was lyrical, passionate, penetrating, fiery.

I want

To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

He wrote in “La Poesia” of his being swept away by poetry: I was fourteen years old, proudly obscure.

You can hear him read the poem here.

It was at that age

that poetry came in search of me.

Madonna, of all people, has given a thoughtful reading of the masterful “If You Forget Me” in a video.

Mostly he wrote about love. From “100 Love Sonnets”:

so I wait for you like a lonely house

till you will see me again and live in me.

Till then my windows ache.

But sorrow was also his domain. Wild, bursting nature.

Introspection. His words:

Someday, somewhere – anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.

Alienation. My favorite of his poems, “Walking Around,” has nothing to do with love, really.

It so happens I am sick of being a man.

And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses

dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt

steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.

The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.

The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,

no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails

and my hair and my shadow.

It so happens I am sick of being a man.

The poem goes on from there and only gets more powerful, especially in the masterful translation of Robert Bly, who did a book-length Neruda and Vallejo.

He came from a backwoods background in southern Chile, born in 1904, Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto, a name he changed when he reached his teens in homage to the Czech poet Jan Neruda.

He favored green ink, using it as his symbol for desire and hope.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” He filled stadiums with awed fans.

He shared his romantic passion with his wife and muse, the singer Matilde Urrutia, in the beach idyll of Isla Negra, off Chile’s southern coast.

All his poems can be had on line, for free, which I think he would have liked.

Now the possibility of his poisoning. Supposedly Neruda had prostate cancer. But he never had cancer, says one of his closest survivors, his driver Manuel Arraya. Supposedly he went into the hospital for treatment, just 12 days after Pinochet’s coup, and there he died of a heart attack. It was just days before he was to travel to Mexico to lead the global opposition to the new regime. Neruda’s assistant says he got a call from the hospital. Pablo, saying they had come in the night and given him a mysterious shot in the stomach. “They didn’t want Neruda to leave the country so they killed him,” says Arraya. The poet was 69.

A week before, soldiers had searched his house. He reportedly told them: “There is only one thing here that poses a danger to you: poetry.”

To quote another monumental poet, W.H. Auden, about the death of yet another great poet, W.B. Yeats, What instruments we have agree/ The day of his death was a dark cold day.

All of Chile wept.

There is a poem Neruda wrote titled “The Me Bird.”

I am the Pablo Bird,

bird of a single feather,

a flier in the clear shadow

and obscure clarity,

my wings are unseen,

my ears resound

when I walk among the trees

 or beneath the tombstones

 like an unlucky umbrella

or a naked sword,

stretched like a bow

 or round like a grape,

I fly on and on not knowing,

 wounded in the dark night,

who is waiting for me,

who does not want my song,

who desires my death,

who will not know I’m arriving

and will not come to subdue me,

to bleed me, to twist me,

 or to kiss my clothes,

torn by the shrieking wind.

That’s why I come and go,

fly and don’t fly but sing:

 I am the furious bird

of the calm storm.

It’s been interpreted in an animation that shows a dancer, imprisoned, flightless, as the walls close in.

Ambushed by death, singing all the while.

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Filed under History, Jean Zimmerman, Poetry

April 7, 2013 · 8:17 pm

Minnies Land and Audubon

What would John James Audubon have made of the transformation of his Manhattan estate in the years since his death in 1851? He called the 44-acre property Minnies Land in honor of his wife – her name was Lucy, but Minnie was a Scottish endearment, the term for Mama, and it was what he and the couple’s two sons had begun to call her when they lived in Scotland in the 1830s. In 1842,with funds from Birds of America, the Audubons bought the property and built a sprawling house on the Hudson River’s bank, near a lively stream. If there were city streets there then — so far they were only parallel lines on a surveyor’s map — the house would have stood in the vicinity of 157th or 158th.

Two piazzas (the then-name for verandas) opened from the gracious two-story structure, which at some point got a mansard roof and a new bay window. It could be that Samuel Morse, a friend of Audubon’s, sent the first telegraph message across the Hudson from a laundry room in the basement. It was a place where things happened, because things were always happening around Audubon.

The environment was more like a Cropsey canvas than anything associated with metropolitan New York (the Hudson River School genius painted this one around West Point in 1877). Even then, the city proper stood miles downtown, at the tip of Manhattan. The estate “consisted of forty-four acres, all heavily wooded, and at that time was almost as remote from the city as a lodge in the Catskills,” wrote one historian in 1902.

A good place for bird hunting, if you were a man in need of a spectacular looking turkey.

Not an inch of Minnies Land remains today, but we went looking for clues, snippets of the past in a jostling, randy, determinedly contemporary neighborhood.

We started with Audubon’s burial site, under a towering local-bluestone obelisk in Trinity Cemetery at Broadway and 157^th Street.

Elaborate carving shows bas relief critters on each side of the piece, land-mammals on one side and creatures of the air on the other. Fittingly, while one plaque shows painterly accessories, a palette and a brush, its twin on the reverse of the monument gives the gritty equipment with which Audubon accomplished his goals.

A few daffodils reared their heads amid the stones for Woodruff, Corbin, Mayer and Smith, so many Smiths, it seemed, all the early New York names. And in another part of the cemetary (bisected when Broadway came through in 1868) lies Charles Dickens’ son, struck down by a heart attack in 1912 when on a lecture tour in the U.S. on the centenary of his father’s work.

The terrain of Trinity cemetary is the one feature in the neighborhood not changed in the nearly two hundred years since Audubon settled his family here. Rough, craggy, sloping steeply down to the Hudson, the graveyard was a favorite destination for Manhattanites, who loved to drive uptown in their carriages to stroll here.

Since 1932 a grand apartment house, 765 Riverside Drive, sits where the Audubon house did, and it is cut off from the river by the Riverside Drive viaduct, which came through in 1911. Then, the house sat some 50 feet below the current street level, on the river bank, and the new highway buried it almost completely.

The gracious old house was eventually moved, then demolished.

When her husband died, Lucy and her sons had begun selling off parcels of the estate to make ends meet – there were 14 grandchildren to support – and 10 happy owners became part of a development known as Audubon Park. Lucy, residing nearby, outlived her husband and her sons.

All the grand houses have since been razed, but we wandered around the neighborhood. We discovered the carved bronze back door of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, with its beautifully grave women and its inspiring legend:

On the next block, the reverse of the building sports more etched mottos. Milton.

A good book is the precious life blood of a master spirit.

And, with no citation but from Edwin Arlington Robinson.

We are Young and We are Friends of Time

I’m in need of a new personal motto and that one seems just fine.

Another legend, one more in keeping with the present spirit of the locale, had been pasted up on the locked doors below: No sidewalk or street barbeques allowed.

Audubon Terrace, a Beaux-Arts complex that houses the American Academy, also is the site of the Hispanic Society of America Museum, seemingly unchanged since it opened in 1908, except for dozens of empty display cases, which will one day soon be filled, hopefully. Still, there are new coats of terra cotta paint to match the gallery’s burnt-sienna floor tiles. Here you can see a sheaf of works by Goya and El Greco and Velasquez, along with curiously beautiful objects. Door knockers dating to 1500.

Ceramics, tin-glazed earthenware, of dragons, which were real in the middle ages.

Tiles, this one depicting one of Oliver’s ancestors.

Infants embracing skulls, from about 1700.

And a Saint Acisclo so vivid you feel he’ll step out of 1680 and shake your hand.

A visit to Minnies Land would not be complete without a visit to the Morris-Jumel mansion, “your house,” as my brother told me, since my book The Women of the House concerned itself in part with Mary Philipse and Roger Morris and the adventure of building their home on a bluff overlooking the Harlem River in 1765.

Later the home made the perfect headquarters for General Washington, who could stroll around this high perch and be able to sight miles in every direction, planning military campaigns all the while. When Audubon took up residence at Minnies Land, the Morris House was still probably the only place nearby you could go to get a cup of sugar.

Perfectly preserved, the house offers a display of morning-glory wallpaper, velvet, circa 1820, handblocked and flocked to within an inch of its life.

And there is the famous octagonal drawing room, said to be the first in America, then called a withdrawing room, that I was once lucky enough to give a talk in.

Walking back to the car, we passed by J & F Meat Market, Iglesia Pentecostal and Flaco’s Pizza, the sidewalks bathed in dog waste. A church lady making her way home in a purple hat. A bold mural. Everything was blowing up in the cold spring wind.

In 1909, The New York Times opined that “within another year there will be no trace of the little garden spot laid out by Audubon about seventy years ago.”

There’s not. And that’s hard to take. But we can still imagine it.

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Filed under Art, Dogs, History, Jean Zimmerman

April 6, 2013 · 7:42 pm

Gone Birding

The last time I was in a room with so many birds — a pet shop with African Greys and budgies and the like — I had something of an anxiety attack. Many of them were free to roam at will, and some decided my shoulders would make a good roost.

This time the closest thing to drawing blood came in a museum gift shop, where the sharp elbows of two Manhattan matrons kept jabbing me away from the bird postcards.

The day was clear as glass, but cold, and we decided that we’d have better luck birdwatching at the New-York Historical Society than in Central Park.

The museum is having the first show of three, together titled “The Complete Flock,” that will display all the museum’s unparalleled collection of John James Audubon. At the same time as it shows the watercolor models for the sumptuous double-elephant-folio print edition of The Birds of America (published between 1827 and 1838), it has something else special – early works that have rarely been seen, that show the development of the artist from a young age, when the naturalist was new to America and stoked about what he was seeing.

He was new, and so was the turkey vulture he depicted in 1820, when Audubon was 35.

You can see the nestling’s downy feathers, rendered in pastel, and its leathery feet, drawn in black ink. Interesting creatures, they open their eyes immediately after hatching and in less than a week begin to move about in their dark cave. Lacking a syrinx, their vocalizations are limited to hisses and grunts. Within two weeks they become larger and more aggressive, and their black flight feathers begin to emerge, as Audubon shows with dreadful clarity. The adult turkey vulture has a six-foot wing span.

Also on display, a mechanism through which the young Audubon got the poses he wanted. He used something called a “position board” with horizontal and vertical lines, to which the bird was fixed with skewers and pins. None survive today but we have a verbal description of the specimens being impaled. This was an improvement over his earlier techniques, when he simply suspended a jay or a meadowlark by its beak and drew it that way, or a barn owl by its honey-colored wing. You can see the folds of the paper the artist used for this pastel.

The great naturalist would kill 400 ducks to get the proper specimen. And when in the wild, he consumed his specimens for his supper.

Bird calls are a thing you can’t describe in words. So I was glad there was a small device available that allowed visitors to hear the call of the wood thrush, so extolled in poetry.

I loved the slightly nutty picture of house wrens nesting in an old faded hat, but appreciated it all the more because displayed alongside was the copperplate that had been used to make the print.

After the plates came to America in 1839 they were stored at Minnie’s Land, Audubon’s estate on the Upper West Side of New York. Until in 1871 Lucy Bakewell, his widow, in desperate financial straits, sold most of them for scrap metal to the Ansonia Brass and Copper Company (the company, incidentally, owned by the Phelps family I wrote about in Love, Fiercely). Supposedly a teenaged son saved nearly a quarter of the plates from destruction. (Could it be Newton Stokes’ ancestor who made this smart move?) The New-York Historical Society owns four of the extant plates.

Audubon, we know, was suave, lean, a rock star of his time, his hair smoothed back with bear grease.

Lucy, a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, liked to swim naked in rivers, and often went birding alongside her adventurous husband. They saw many crystal days together, and I bet they found some birds in Manhattan, too — before Central Park, back when New-York had a hyphen. The Central Park, as it was then called, did not open until 1857.

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Filed under Art, History, Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely, Nature

April 4, 2013 · 4:46 pm

Tiny Houses

Walled with dark wood logs, topped off with dark wood rafters, with dark wood planks underfoot, the Cabin can be a shadowy place sometimes. Especially when all outside is calling crazily that spring is here. I look out the window over my desk and see the bright glow of the marsh reeds, the heady blue of the sky, the sunlight cast over everything, and I can’t help but feel that the house I live in is… small.

Magical, yes. But dainty.

We have about a thousand square feet. Some of that number, I have to say, is stairs. I know people whose total window area measures larger. My friend Josefa tells me that how to live in so small a space is the way they do on ships, stowing everything when it’s not in use.

I never liked shipboard life. All our cubbies are full to bursting, plus we have out and available all the things we’re interested in at any one time. We scoot in between pieces of furniture, and sometimes have to tuck in our feet so they don’t get stepped on. Books clutter every surface. (Don’t say clutter though, that’s a negative, suggesting untidy or disordered – try “a wealth of books” instead.) I can barely see the surface of my narrow desk, covered as it is with slips of paper, notebooks, folders and stacks of books. Pots live out in the open in the kitchen, the cupboards won’t fit them. I just realized the aloe plant I proudly acquired and nurtured this winter has to be moved so the dutch door will open this summer.

I like to write about peoples’ houses, and some of them have been big enough to fit the Cabin into many times over. Shadow Brook, for example, which the Stokes family built in 1893 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The rambling stone castle cost one million dollars to construct, and had an acre of floor space on each of four floors.

In Vermont a cabin built by a family named Hyde has stood since 1783. It’s a twin to ours, built during the same era, with similar materials in a near identical layout.

We do have another floor, also tiny, and a kitchen in the basement, neither of which was there when the Cabin first went up. It must have felt like such a haven when you came in with wet boots around 1800 to the fire roaring in the hearth and maybe a chicken on the spit.

Ours isn’t quite the tiniest home. I know because I’ve done a little sleuthing.

Last spring I visited a publishing convention in southern California, where I manned a table with advance copies of The Orphanmaster to be signed and given away. Just across from me, I noticed in between conversations, was a constant throng of people. When they cleared momentarily I saw that the author at that table was signing copies of Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter, a large-format book that was beautifully illustrated with pictures of places that some might say were suitable only for Tom Thumb.

At the book conference, every time I looked across the way there was the Tiny Homes author, replenishing the stacks that towered on his table from the cardboard boxes behind his chair.

Lloyd Kahn, the author, was once upon a time the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and has spent his life building green structures out of interesting materials (sod roofs, poured concrete walls, plywood and aluminum geodesic domes), when he wasn’t surfing. At the convention, he also had adorable palm-sized souvenirs of his book, tiny books about tiny homes, one of which I took back to my own home.

It made me wonder. The fantasy of a tiny home. All these people lining up for a glimpse into the peanut world presented to them by Lloyd Kahn. Who actually wants to live the tiny life? Besides Gil and me?

People who live in tiny homes see life as an adventure.

Edna St. Vincent Millay lived at 75.5 Bedford Street, in Greenwich Village, which was then and now Manhattan’s skinniest house. “Please give me some good advice in your next letter,” wrote the poet. “I promise not to follow it.” Her narrow domicile had only 999 square feet and was 9.5 feet across in the front. Last I heard it was on the market for 3.95 million dollars.

I checked out a web site for people who want to buy, sell and rent tiny structures. Tiny House Listings offers homes of 1,000 square feet or less.

Could anyone not love this caravan? A kind of giant beer barrel on wheels.

Five hundred square feet. Yours for $29,000. Siloam Springs, Arkansas. Checkers included.

For a bit more you could have this hobbit house, an A-frame in Granite Falls, Washington.

Or rent. For 400 a month you can stash your stuff in this green house’s cubbies.

The web site allows you to dip inside and get the big picture, so to speak, before you commit to the Tom Thumb lifestyle.

For a galley, it looks more spacious than the Cabin. Maybe it’s all that clean, smooth, un-lived-in pine.

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Filed under History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster

April 2, 2013 · 3:09 pm

The Bite-In-the-Ass Detail

I just finished a work of history that I found as interesting for what it was not as for what it was. In Jefferson’s Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism, Roger Wilkins explores the disconnect between the egalitarianism of the founding fathers and the fact of their slaveholding. It delves into the experiences of black and white Americans during the Revolutionary era. My book group loved the book. It has a personal cast as well as an academic focus, showing how the author as a black American came to respect and value the contribution of the early patriots despite their hypocrisy, which so harmed his African and American ancestors. “To be human,” he insists, “is to live with moral complexity and existential ambiguity.”

I read the book wanting to be drawn in by the author’s careful parsing of racism then and now, and I felt moved by the telling of it. Yet I found myself wanting more. More details, more original sources. More of the bits where the author painted a picture. More crunch. Wilkins cites the fact of Thomas Jefferson, for example, being carried on a pillow as a child by slaves belonging to his wealthy family – the trope that gives the book its title. It’s a gripping image. Yet I wanted the participants’ names, the type of carriage, the destination of the procession, the fabric of the pillow.

We have a term in my house that gets at the fabric of the pillow. Once, Betsy Lerner, she of the keenest mind and editorial ability (she’s also my literary agent) made a comment in passing. I want more bite-in-the-ass details, she said. That’s what good writing called for.

From that day on, Gil and I knew it when we saw it. “BITADs,” as he abbreviated her counsel. Bite-in-the-ass details.

BITADs are the key to good writing. Or at least the writing I like and aspire to. I want the detail that sings, that is irresistable, unassailable.

Take hummingbirds, for example. Okay. Adriaen van der Donck was a Dutch lawyer who helped settle New Amsterdam in the mid-seventeenth century. For a book, I borrowed his thoughts from his journal on the subject of these beautiful creatures, that they were too “tender,” as he wrote, to make good pets: “We … prepare and preserve them between paper,” he explained, “and dry them in the sun, and send them as presents to our friends.” Russell Shorto, in his insightful work The Island at the Center of the World, relied heavily on Adriaen van der Donck, but left his ass unbitten by the hummingbird.

But the bird’s a BITAD, one that helped me show Europeans’ awed reaction to the New World when I was writing The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-Merchant Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty. (It was such a fine BITAD I repurposed the poor dessicated hummingbird for The Orphanmaster as a gift that a smitten suitor gives Blandine, the novel’s heroine.) Scouring the texts of seventeenth century America I have found a surfeit of BITADs, from wild grapes “as large as the joints of the fingers” to winter weather cold enough to freeze eels in a bucket of water, to six-foot lobsters harvested from the floor of the East River off Manhattan.

The details I sought out in describing early New York in The Women of House went beyond the wonders of nature. Like Wilkins, I discussed slavery, which was more prevalent on Manhattan and its environs than many people are aware of. I found myself fascinated, too, by slave rebellions of the colonial era. There were many and they were gruesome affairs. Wilkins mentions the Stono Rebellion of 1739, but somehow neglects the details that make it so arresting, a car wreck from which you cannot avert your eyes.

Stono took place in South Carolina, just outside Charleston. King Philip of Spain, who had colonized Florida, offered freedom to any English-owned slave who could flee to St. Augustine. Then he proposed a settlement to be founded by and for escaped slaves. It would be called Fort Moosa. All residents would be armed against their former masters.

What happened next is something that has been pretty much erased from our collective memory. Twenty Stono slaves raided a weapons depot and left the heads of two hostages on display before crossing the river to George en route to the promised land of Fort Moosa. Slaying whites and appropriating weapons at every house they passed, the crew gained ecstatic adherents along the way. Slaves joined in with shouts of “Liberty!” as the freedom fighters moved south. Then, in an open field where slaves were celebrating their new freedom with rum and dancing, government troops descended. After the killing stopped, dozens of pikes topped with rebel heads lined the main road at one-mile intervals. (That’s a BITAD.)

Stono was only one of dozens of slave rebellions during the colonial period. Some conspiracies took place in New York, where it was said that slaves poisoned the water supply or set conflagrations. The so-called Great Negro plot of 1741 involved both black and white insurgents, who congregated in a tavern nicknamed Oswego after an English trading post on the shore of Lake Ontario where the riches of Europe were bartered for those of the northern frontier. (BITAD!)

Now you get it. As a young writer I assisted a woman who was brilliant but not a professional writer, helping her get her ideas down in a book. Her idea of guiding my work was a simple phrase that frustrated me no end: “Make it compelling,” was all she would say.

There are many strategies writers use to make their work compelling. The BITAD stands at the forefront. But is slavery too somber a subject to be enlivened by writerly strategies? I think not. Every subject benefits when you find the strange and particular attributes that distinguish it.

Not just big-picture history, either. Consider how you might tell a story of your own experience. Say I want to convey my time in middle school. I’d start with the strains of Windy, by the Association, sung in chorus, kids standing on rickety wooden bleachers… Who’s peekin’ out from under a stairway, calling a name that’s lighter than air…

I’d tell about the chorus teacher, a woman with flame-orange hair in a flip. I’d tell about her bust, twin torpedos encased in a tight wool sweater. But the BITAD, I think, would be the gold watch she wore on a pendant, which dangled over the shelf of her bosom, to our endless middle-school hilarity. The detail that sings, so to speak. Above the clouds (above the clouds) Above the clouds!

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Filed under Jean Zimmerman, The Orphanmaster, Writers, Writing

April 1, 2013 · 2:14 pm

A Pretty Good Biscuit Recipe

She made a pretty good biscuit.

A kerfuffle over an obit has me thinking about how I would want my character to be rendered in print once I die.

What happened is this. Yesterday The New York Times ran an obituary for a jet propulsion scientist with a title that read, “Yvonne Brill, a Pioneering Rocket Scientist, Dies at 88.”

The long, laudatory article, written by veteran Times reporter Douglas Martin, honored Brill’s achievements, noting that in the 1970s, she “invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.” She received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama at the White House in 2011.

The problem was the lead of the obit. It went like this: “She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. ‘The world’s best mom,’ her son Matthew said.”

Only then did the story commence with Brill’s amazing career accomplishments: “But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist…”

The Twittersphere went crazy with critiques. How could “world’s best mom” precede “only woman doing rocket science in the 1940s”? A mean beef stroganoff? Really?!

In response to all the excitement, the Times edited the online version of the article to begin this way: “She was a brilliant rocket scientist who followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. ‘The world’s best mom,’ her son Matthew said.” No more stroganoff.

So consider… would you want your domestic life and achievements to take the lead in how the Times explained you at your death?

I make a pretty good biscuit. I think that sounds like a pretty good lead. And she wrote some decent books too…

It took me a long while to master biscuits. They came out too brown, too crisp. Too flat. That was the main thing. And how can you serve a flat biscuit? They were only serviceable as dog biscuits. How could I get them to rise?

I so envied my friend Christine, who could turn out a fluffy, towering batch like she was walking down Broadway. I began to think I lacked the biscuit gene.

Well, there is no gene for biscuit making, it turns out. It’s just trying and failing until you succeed, like with anything (writing included).

Although you do have to put in, corny as it may seem, a dollop of love. As with so many homecooked specialties. Meat loaf. Macaroni and cheese. Beef stroganoff, rocket scientist’s Yvonne Brill’s specialty.

Love, and the right recipe. Here is mine.

A Pretty Good Biscuit

Preheat oven to 450.

Sift together 4 cups flour, 8 tsp baking powder, 2 T sugar and 1 and a half tsp salt. Cut in 6 T butter and 6 T shortning (best if you use lard, especially leaf lard). Stir in 1 and a half c. milk with a fork until the dough mostly hangs together. (Here’s where you add that love.) Turn it out on a floured board and knead gently for 30 seconds. Roll dough half an inch thick and cut with a glass for the size biscuits you want. Bake 10-15 minutes. Invite over some friends. Throw a pig roast. Serve biscuits with sweet butter, jam, honey or ham.

Then go invent your space-wang-doodle and take it round the sun.

7 Comments

Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman

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