Category Archives: Publishing

May 25, 2013 · 3:16 pm

Simple Stock With a Side of Butter

We in the northeastern U.S. have been deluged with a cool spring rain for several days now. Not good weather for adventuring, though I managed to get out and about yesterday and sample some history and some garlicky pork chops.

The weeds are thriving. Our sump pump is heaving, with the Cabin set as it is down into an overflowing marsh. And the room around me is dim and shadowy, a womb of dark lumber. The pictures stare out of the murk.

Chestnut, a building expert recently assured me. The Cabin is built of chestnut logs. How do you know? I asked. I just know, he said. You can see it in the fireplace mantle.

Today is fit for a few errands – dry cleaning, library, Good Will. Then as many rounds of a knitted cowl as I have patience for. Beautifully soft merino wool in a heathery blue-brown. The proprietor of my local knit shop, Flying Fingers, after salvaging yet another botched project of mine, confided that business falls off after the winter, that people seem not to think of knitting as a year-round activity. I immediately bought some new yarn.

I think I’ll take another listen to Barry White’s Ecstasy, which I heard in the car for the first time in a long time. At least 20 years, in fact. Is it still brilliant or is it just me?

Perhaps a chapter of What Maisie Knew, the original by Henry James, which I’m newly interested in after the disturbing contemporary movie version I took in earlier in the week. Perhaps a start on The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner, which just appeared in April and takes place in 1975 in New York City, where a young woman named Reno is intent on conquering the SoHo art world.

I know I’ll make a big pot of chicken soup, and dive into another pot: links I’ve been saving to mull over on a day just like today.

Here are some you can sink your teeth into.

Have you ever wondered about butter sculpting?

Linda Christensen, a master at the craft, typically spends a week and a half in a booth chilled to near freezing at the Minnesota State Fair in order to render likenesses out of 90-pound blocks. An artist friend of mine once imagined making sculptures out of breast milk butter, but it never came to pass.

How about houses so small they can be mounted on grocery carts?

Early water pipes under New York City carved from whole trees.

Archaeologists are finding them now.

Italian prison inmates who make award-winning chocolate truffles.

The question of whether Michael Pollan is a sexist pig – an excerpt from Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, a new book by Emily Matchar that sounds an awful lot like my decade-old Made From Scratch: Reclaiming the Pleasures of the American Hearth.

Is it time to order a new supply of Goatboy Soaps, handmade from goat’s milk and shea butter on a farm in New Milford, Connecticut?

The one called Heavenly does indeed have a celestial aroma, I can vouch for it,but you can also choose from among Blackberry Sage, Cherry Almond, Clean Greens, Lavender Oatmeal, Serious Citrus and others, including Red Clover Tea, the company’s bestseller. No breast milk in evidence.

Research showing why the act of pointing makes babies human. It turns out, according to Slate, that “Babies point to refer to events in the past and the future. They point to refer to things that are no longer there. They can figure out, when an adult points across the room toward a group of objects, what exactly the adult is gesturing toward (the toy they’ve previously played with, say). They can deduce that, by pointing, an adult is trying to communicate something specific (find that toy hidden in that bucket). And not least of all, babies point because they want to share their experience of the world—that puppy—with someone else.”

The fascinating blog of an Irishman elucidating a video of Dublin phrases. You’re in for a treat if you make posts from Sentence first a regular part of your day.

A recipe for how to make Mango Sticky Rice, at a site called The High Heel Gourmet, brought to you by Miranti, a young chef who seems to know exactly what she’s doing.

And, finally, a piece so lively it will drive all the rain away (by tomorrow, I hope, when I plan to go mushrooming in the Westchester woods), a photo doc on skateboarding in 1965, courtesy of Life magazine.

I am sure that some of the individuals pictured have traded skateboards for walkers, but then everything was a breeze.

If you wind up wanting to make home-made soup, a chicken elixir, here’s how.

A Recipe for Simple Stock

1 soup fowl/heavy fowl/soup hen

A bunch of chicken feet if you can get them

2 big fat carrots

2 sticks celery

1 large onion

1 large purple-shouldered turnip

1 large parsnip

a bunch of dill if you have it

salt and pepper to taste

Bring chicken to boil in a pot large enough to accommodate all ingredients.

Skim off scum and reduce to a simmer.

Add all other ingredients.

Simmer 3 hours or until chicken starts to fall off the bone.

Strain stock.

Add noodles or matzoh balls, use as a base for leek-and-potato soup, make gravy for chicken pot pie or stir up some risotto. Perfect for anything that ails you. And if you dribble a little over the kibble, your dog will love you for it.

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Filed under Cooking, Fiction, Film, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Knitting, Nature, Publishing, Writers, Writing

May 23, 2013 · 1:47 pm

Enough to Feed an Army

An army marches on its stomach, said Napoleon, who knew a little something about food as well as armies, if his portrait is to be trusted.

I recently read a profile of a man seemingly born to fill that marching stomach, Derrick Davenport, a culinary specialist who has just triumphed over 17 other gastronomic overachievers to become the Armed Forces Chef of the Year. Parade reports that the competition has taken place for two decades at the Joint Culinary Center of Excellence in Fort Lee, Virginia. It’s judged cooking-show style, after contestants prepare four courses in four hours, taking in hand some challenging ingredients they didn’t count on ahead of time.

Quinoa and arugula salad. Roasted lamb loin in mushroom sauce with butternut squash puree. Edam cheese fritters? These are no ordinary MREs. But the military takes its food more seriously than ever now that troops’ palates have grown more sophisticated. Plus, says an army evacuation medic named Corrie Blackshear, “It’s more than nourishment. It’s spiritual nourishment.”

Nourishment to the tune of 5,250,000 gallons of milk, 448,000 pounds of Thanksgiving turkey and 214,000 gallons of ketchup a year. Fully 24,884,000 pounds of cooked chicken.

This is just part of the 2012 breakdown for all of the U.S. Armed Forces.

I began thinking about gargantuan military food quanities a long time ago when I served as the head of a soup kitchen in Manhattan. I had picked up a copy of the West Point Officers Wives’ Club Cookbook at the Naval Academy bookstore when I was at Annapolis doing interviews for Tailspin, Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook.

It was a spiral-bound community-style softcover of the type I still collect (I have over a hundred) and it had a subtitle I found enticing: Enough to Feed an Army.

I was new to the soup kitchen, which took place once a week at All Souls Unitarian Church on Lexington Avenue, and was known as Monday Night Hospitality. Wandering down to the kitchen one afternoon, just thinking to check out the volunteer options, I encountered a tall, blonde woman with her coat on. I told her I wanted to help. Fine, she said, you’ll cook tonight. I looked around – I was the only one there.

I had cooked for dinner parties before, but the customary crowd at Monday Night Hospitality reached 100 hungry mouths, sometimes more. Don’t worry, said the woman, we have meatballs. And she pointed to the walk-in pantry.

The soup kitchen had always served government-issued meatballs in tomato sauce. Mystery meat. Bad enough to smell, let alone put in your mouth.

That was the only time I served a meal that was not home cooked. I remember trucking in crates of kale from my favorite market Fairway up in Harlem at 134^th Street. The produce manager Jaime saw me coming and would break into a smile.

How much ground beef to make meat loaf for 100? How many eggs? I figured it out. I learned to fry chicken in industrial-size skillets. Not 24,884,000 pounds, but close.

I consulted the West Point Officers Wives’ Club spiral bound. It featured recipes from teachers and parents, officers and their wives (and some husbands). It also contained items like reminiscences of graduations past, and the cadet’s prayer. Finally, and here is where I got some guidance, the mess hall weighed in.

Forty-five hundred servings? Making sloppy joes for 100 was obviously something a person like me could do. I would bring my favorite 8-inch chef’s knife from home, wrapped in cardboard and duct tape. And my well-used apron. Sometimes a pan I wanted to employ. I would put those entrees on the table, whatever it took.

And it was worth it. Often, our dinner was the first time our guests had tasted a home-cooked meal in a long while.

I remember an elderly man who used to grab me by the arm and recall his late wife, the loving meals she used to fix him. A man mountain with a tiny rearview mirror attached to his glasses, dressed head to toe in fatigues, how he chowed down. And an Eastern European woman named Margo, and how she pampered my five-year-old daughter while stuffing buttered bread in her handbag.

I learned that for all the differences, these people were more like me than I had known. The aroma of many was more pungent than I could imagine. A shower at home was a foreign concept. But they ate with the same relish I did. As did the volunteers, who devoured our food and brought home leftovers. The perfect sous chef from the West Indies. The mother who occasionally brought her helpful daughter (at 19, she seemed so old!). The high schooler with the handsome face and a bottomless capacity for doing dishes over the capacious sink.

At the end of four years, I had a personal crisis that made it impossible for me to cook at the kitchen anymore. I had a book on deadline that I couldn’t write. Financial woes I couldn’t solve. And finally a meltdown from which I needed time to recover.

I approached a fellow volunteer, a writer named Alex who had spent many dinners at Monday Night Hospitality slinging meatloaf with me. Could he possibly take over as head of the kitchen? Immediately?

Surprised but gracious, he said yes.

He comes highly praised, does novelist Alexander Chee.

His debut novel The New York Times called “haunting,” and gifted, poetic and elegant are also words that have been offered on Alex’s behalf. His new book The Queen of the Night comes out in February of next year from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – in it, Alex tells the story of an opera singer in 1882 Paris and a secret past she had sought to keep hidden.

All this time later, the soup kitchen behind me, I realize something important. I wasn’t the only one who could do this thing of feeding folks with dignity. I was just a writer, cooking for an army of 100 people with no place else to go. The “spiritual nourishment” was mine as much as theirs.

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Filed under Cooking, Fiction, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing

May 18, 2013 · 11:55 am

Lettuce F*****g Entertain You

Thug politely pledged to test out my biscuit recipe when I contacted him/her/them, that is as soon as the dust settled. (His actual words: I love biscuits and will try your shit out.) Thug Kitchen has after all experienced a viral explosion since the novel cooking site launched in October. Critics call it profane, and profane blended with strawberries and avocados seems to produce a bit of gastric discomfort. Is this some kind of trick? Are we being had?

I call the combination real.

What is it with men and cooking? Top chefs are almost uniformly male. Backyard barbeque-meisters, natch. Boys learn from their fathers.

But those who are not chefs of reality TV or summer parties, the men who man the stove day in, day out, making family meals, making solitary meals, prepping the onions and boiling the rice – still sadly a minority. Even Brooklyn foodies cook less than their wives.

Thug cooks for dogs. Sweet potato jerky treats that Oliver would relish.

The press will tell you different, that hordes of men are cooking now. After all, the men of the fourth estate are different, and they write what they know. Men have of course increased their kitchen activity since, say, the 50s and 60s, since women gave them a shove with the spatula and said, Do it. Make me proud in here. A wee bit. (And truth be told, younger men are stepping up. A 25-year study of Gen Xers found that men were making two-thirds of the meals married women were. Not too shabby.)

Some men today deliver.

Gil, for example, makes a mean green chili. Okay, that’s a typical boy preserve. He can also deliver a whole wheat pizza topped by homemade tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, baby spinach, bacon and olives. With aplomb. Delicious, I had three slices yesterday.

Both my brothers have achieved local fame over the years for their culinary expertise. I still remember the roast goose Andy put on the Christmas table a couple of years back, crisp and done to perfection, but he also puts his kindergartener’s dinner on family table every day. Peter assembles a crazy raw kale salad. Don’t know where they got the gene, as the sum total of our father’s skill is a perfect hard-cooked egg.

Thug Kitchen unites macho and grilled-romaine-with-a-touch-of-seasalt as easily as a stroll in some vegan park. Saveur called it the number one food blog around.

“ANYBODY CAN GRILL A FUCKING BURGER OR HOTDOG. Elevate your grilling game with something that simpleminded motherfuckers wouldn’t even consider. Grilling veggies is some classy shit and it only takes a few minutes. I am not talking about some played out portabella burger that tastes like a dirty sponge. Eggplant, artichokes, okra, lettuce: all that shit can be thrown on the grill and are in peak form during the spring and summer. People are guaranteed to come correct next time you invite them over. Raise the fucking bar and grill to impress.”

It doesn’t need to be Oscar Mayer any more.

Thug actually is vegan, if you scroll down the site to take a better look, past the blast of biting admonitory locution. No fathers in man-aprons grilling steaks here. Instead, dishes a lady would love: lavender lemonade: “Calm Your Bitch Ass down like a Boss-Drink Some Fucking Flowers” runs the heading, and the recipe advises, “This is some good shit to make when you are feeling bougie as fuck.” Roasted strawberry and coconut salad inspires this heading: “Eat a Goddamn Salad. Fuck it-Eat Ten Then Brag about it.” But TK told the NY Daily News, “You don’t have to be fancy to give a f— about what you eat.”

Thug Kitchen loves moms.

Thug appears to be a collective. I got a note framed in the royal we. (They’re going out with a book, as soon as they get a proposal together. A book we ladies can share with the gentlemen in our lives.) If so, they must be having a blast, sucking down their strawberry-grapefruit margaritas and talking trash.

Can I come out to L.A. for dinner? I clean up nice and I bet you do too.

Grapefruit Guacamole – recipe courtesy of Thug Kitchen

GRAPEFRUIT GUACAMOLE

5 ripe avocados

2 medium grapefruits or 1 big son of a bitch

¼ cup chopped cilantro

¼ cup chopped red onion

juice of 1 lime (about 2 tablespoons)

¼ teaspoon salt

Take the pit out of the avocados and scoop out all the green flesh into a large bowl. Mash it up with fork. I like my guacamole chunky but do what you gotta do. Cut the grapefruit up into segments like you would cut an orange. Remove the peel and cut the segments into pieces about the size of a nickel. Put all the grapefruit into the bowl with the avocado. Add the cilantro, red onion, lime juice, and salt and mix it all up. Taste it and add more shit until you like it. Serve immediately or chill it for a bit. I’m not gonna tell you how to eat guacamole, just follow your fucking heart.

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Filed under Cooking, Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Writers, Writing

May 10, 2013 · 7:54 pm

A Washington Irving Award, Thank You

Back to Cabinworld after an afternoon at the Washington Irving Awards, presented at a local Hilton.

Compared with hotel air, the azaleas, violets and weeds seem to bloom a bit more riotously.

The smell of rain in the air. The first angry-sounding, toothpick-billed hummingbird of the year dive-bombed me near the feeder with its red sugar-water.

My weathered old three-legged stool (note pegs that join the top, no nails) is ready for duty as a summer-porch-time computer stand.

At the conference to get one of the awards, I spent time with librarians (hundreds, representing the Westchester Library Association) and authors (20 or so, all Westchester residents). Funny, sometimes, inspiring, always. I saw some friends, nonfiction, fiction and librarian. I always feel a little sleepy after a rubber-chicken luncheon, but I pepped up for the remarks of keynote speaker Barbara Stripling, current head of the American Library Association.

Barbara’s remarks, passed along with both bubbly mannerisms and erudition, talked among other things about finding a “gorgeous balance” between digital and paper resources. She spoke about libraries changing lives. But first she told a story about when she was in college, craving an A on a paper and seeing only a lot of plus signs in the margins. She stuck up her hand and demanded to know the meaning of the notations. Those were actually t’s, she was told – they stood for trite.

Ouch.

Does the use of primary sources encourage empathy? That’s the question she asked in her Ph.d. studies, going into high school classrooms that were studying slave narratives. It’s a fascinating line of inquiry.

It’s hard for people to use primaries, she found, without some sort of context. I get that, I suppose. Although as a historian I generally find the original sources when they are embedded in some author’s history to be the most exciting part of the work. They themselves give the context. That’s where you find the BITADs, the bite in the ass details that really give the flavor of a time or place or person.

I liked another story Barbara told, too, about a knitting club that refused to be shut into one of the back rooms at a public library for their weekly stitch n’ bitch, but instead colonized a table in the center of the building. Well, a technology club soon discovered the knitters and found what they were doing interesting, and the two groups ended up knit-bombing the library – the mouse, the circulation desk, etc.

Everything covered in knit and purl by tech geeks and old ladies.

A library “provides the thinking spaces for civilization,” said Jaron Lanier – he’s the computer geek who popularized the term virtual reality.

He has a new book just out, Who Owns the Future? Certainly worth a look.

The feeling that you are just another mouth in a chorus of songsters is a welcome one when you spend a lot of your time on your own at your desk. That is what I brought home from talking to my fellow writers and hearing them deliver brief remarks at the podium. Being one of the crowd, one of a club.

Allison Gilbert won a Washington Irving Award for her book Parentless Parents: How the Loss of Our Mothers and Fathers Impacts the Way We Raise Our Children. Allison lost her own parents at a tender age, but the book is much more than a memoir or advice manual.

It’s not her first book on the subject, and support groups of parentless parents have sprung up around the country to deal with the difficult subject. Allison announced some news, that some these groups have banded together to make a trip to Peru to help orphans there.

It gave me goosebumps to hear about another project she’s got lined up, because the excitement in her demeanor was just so visceral. There’s a real life journalist she wants to write about who went from panning for gold in the early 1900s to penning regular columns for Hearst in one dramatic lifetime. Apparently this person was a rabblerouser, a women’s rights advocate and is now – but perhaps not forever – all but forgotten. What a great topic, a great kernel of history to unearth.

Writers were honored today from all over the literary map.

My colleague Karen Engelmann was there for her novel The Stockholm Octavo, a magical work set in 18^th century Sweden. Delicious, witty and swooping are some of the buzzwords used around her book.

Doesn’t everyone look happy today? If a bit blurry? Karen’s next novel is well underway, and she promises to jump forward a few centuries and incorporate greeting cards rather than fortune-telling into the mix.

I stood up to say a few words about The Orphanmaster. How The Orphanmaster is a love story wrapped around a murder mystery that takes place in a tiny settlement in the middle of a vast wilderness. And about libraries. That over the years I’ve not only dug into books and mususcripts, taken thousands of pages of notes and written many chapters in libraries, but eaten and drank within their hallowed halls. My hometown library growing up, in Hastings-on-Hudson, where I read Tristram Shandy for the first time:

I’ve also taken some great naps, with fantastic dreams.

Some of what I was saying felt as if it were in the rearview – I’m working on the Savage Girl copyedit, and just took a first peek at the proposed cover for the novel. The art is beautiful and chilling and only needs a little fine tuning to make it perfect. I am obsessed with Savage Girl at the moment, though I have to wait until January 2014 for the book to be published.

Still, The Orphanmaster has just come out in paperback, well in time for another season of beach reading. And to be given an award for The Orphanmaster by librarians, for librarians to appreciate it, was a very special thrill.

Without librarians, said Maggie Barbieri, one of the fiction writers getting an award, we’re “a bunch of noisy trees echoing in an empty forest.”

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Filed under Fiction, History, Jean Zimmerman, Knitting, Nature, Publishing, Savage Girl, The Orphanmaster, Writers, Writing

May 9, 2013 · 5:59 pm

Parsing the Copyedit

My copyeditor got the manuscript for Savage Girl back to me and I’ve been hustling to get it done by the deadline. Did you know that it’s typical for authors to be given two weeks to get a copyedited manuscript back to the publisher? Did you know that copyeditors go way beyond the Chicago Manual of Style, making themselves experts on every subject your book concerns. When copyeditors do their job, the pages are covered with pencil — at least they used to be. Now everyone uses the track changes function on Word, so editors do their work on the computer and so do you.

Yes, it is nerdy, and yes, as an author you must do it.

Fortunately, there are great copyeditors who make the job easy, using every tool at their disposal. Often they just add or subtract commas, other times they throw queries at you and the judgment is your call. By the way, that previous sentence features a comma splice, which means two standalone phrases on either side of a comma, and my current copyeditor would not let it occur on her watch. But this is a copyeditor-free zone. So sue me.

I like my copyeditor a lot. Her name is Maureen. She left me a note attached (electronically) to my manuscript telling me that she hoped the rest of the world would love Savage Girl as much as she did. Isn’t that grand? Twice over, that she thought it, and that she went out of her way to tell me. It’s a weird intimacy you have, writer and copyeditor joined for a brief but intense period of time over this thing that you care about so much, before virtually anyone else has seen it.

This afternoon I’ve been addressing concerns such as whether there would actually be a gibbous moon in May of 1776, and the proper Latin translation for “the door has a floor,” a saying in the family portrayed in Savage Girl, the Delegates. Maureen went to great lengths to nail the correct form of the expression, and even consulted with a friend who was a Latin scholar at Columbia University to get it right.

She also wanted to determine precisely when the word was first coined for a tigon, the African cat that has a tiger for a father and a lioness for a mother.

As opposed to the ligon, for which the reverse parentage is true.

Something that makes the copyedit go better is if you bake at the same time. Well, most things go better if you bake simultaneously. Which I will definitely do next time around, perhaps creating some rice crispy treats in the shape of my favorite punctuation mark.

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Filed under Fiction, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Savage Girl, Writers, Writing

May 8, 2013 · 8:05 pm

Reading a Golden Book

I must have been pretty young, because it was Golden Books we were after.

Me and Auntie, stopping in at Brasfield’s drug store in Greenfield, Tennessee on a muggy summer afternoon. Auntie, my great aunt, was an important lady, a home economics teacher whose house stood in a field of green beans. I had her all to myself when she took me to buy a book.

Auntie’s father, J.P. White, another important person, owned the drugstore, smack in the middle of Front Street, just across from the sober-faced local bank. J.P. had long been the town’s pharmacist, as life-saving as anyone with a doctor’s degree in this doctor-less town.

Brasfield’s had fancy floors of black-and-white half-dollar tiles, a grand soda fountain where my grandmother, Auntie’s sister, had jerked sodas as a teenager, tables topped with marble, coca-cola chairs. Body powder and lotion and perfume lined the shelves, making Brasfield’s the place to go when you needed a present for somebody special.

And most important, right up at the front, a wooden rack with magazines and books. Golden Books.

I’d get to choose one, take it back to hunker down with in the little living room Auntie shared with Uncle Bob or on the vast wraparound porch of my grandmother’s house, on the creaky glider.

Picking a Golden Book was my first experience of picking a book, choosing for myself what book to bring home from the cluttered selection in a store. My idea of what I wanted to read. No one else’s.

I thought of a hot summer day with Auntie and The Poky Little Puppy when I read a lovely essay by Rebecca Makkai in Ploughshares Literary Magazine. She writes in How to Shop at a Bookstore: An Easy 20-Step Guide for Authors

about what happens when an author enters a shop, the jitters and the excitement that go with knowing that your name actually appears on one of the thousands of volumes there. One thing that happens is thinking back to bookstore of yesteryear. She writes:

“First, smell it. Look at the new arrivals, lined up like candy. See if, for just one second, you can remember what it was like to walk into a bookstore as a reader. Just a reader, a happy, curious reader. With no agenda, no insecurities, no history of bookstores as scenes of personal failure and triumph. Wish for a time machine.”

I recall patronizing the great Strand Bookstore on 12th Street and Broadway back thirty years ago, the smell of the paper, the sense that I could find absolutely anything there. Having known and loved the store so long made it thrilling when I found my own book there.

I was delighted to read Makkai’s fresh and honest perspective.

She talks about other parts of the experience authors have in temples of literature, commercial as they are. Such as turning your book around so that shoppers see the cover rather than the spine. (Spine, by the way, is one of the simpler terms that come into play when discussing a book. For more on attributes such as wire lines, chain lines and head-pieces, take a look at 10 Terms to Describe the Anatomy of a Book.

Makkai, whose authorial experience includes the novel The Borrower (Viking, 2011) and numerous short stories, writes about the decision that’s in store for you once you get over the shock of finding yourself on the shelf.

“There are two copies. If there were only one, you could walk away right now. Because, you’d tell yourself, it might be sad to offer to sign their one and only paperback copy of your book, a copy they were probably planning to return to the publisher tomorrow. A copy they probably ordered by mistake. If there were five, with a lovely staff pick card right below, you could waltz confidently to the counter. But you have to do this. Because it helps the store, and it doesn’t hurt you either. And everyone knows that this is how you build relationships with booksellers.”

And she’s funny talking about approaching the checkout to sign those copies: “Thank god there’s a cat on the counter. Stroke the cat manically when you approach. The fact that you hate cats is irrelevant.”

But the thing that had me thinking about Auntie and The Poky Puppy is number 18:

“As you cross the street with your bag of new books, remember the first time your mother took you to a bookstore and told you to pick something out. To keep, not borrow. You were overwhelmed by choice and wonder. Remember how you pulled things off the shelf at random because every book was equally unknown and fresh and promising.”

Today, the first discovery of books is usually glitzier than Brasfield’s drug store. You’re as likely to get your stories on a screen as you are on a page. But that’s not all bad. Check out these animated pop up books and see if they don’t give your imagination wings.

The important thing is to have an Auntie there with you to hold your hand.

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Filed under Fiction, History, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Writers, Writing

April 30, 2013 · 1:57 pm

Softcover Orphanmaster In Bookstores Today

It’s a beautiful day to publish a book in softcover!

Today, April 30th, The Orphanmaster hits the bricks as a paperback. Less than a year ago people were introduced to my book for the first time.

It’s interesting. I’m sitting in the Ossining library researching Revolutionary New York City for a new novel. At the same, I heard today that the copyedit for my next book, Savage Girl, to be published by Viking in early 2014, is wending its way toward me. Savage Girl‘s story is set in Gilded Age Manhattan. I’m not flummoxed, though, by all these cultures, all these stories, all these versions of New York crashing against each other.

Like a fat, comfortable burgher in the 1664 Manhattan of The Orphanmaster, I’m taking it in stride.

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Filed under Art, Fiction, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writing

April 29, 2013 · 5:26 pm

Writing From the Nitty Gritty

Reading The New York Times today, I came across a story about archivists in the city, what a rare breed they are and what their jobs are like, and I envied them. “Specialists who snatch objects from oblivion,” as Alison Leigh Cowan, the author of the piece, describes them, these men and women get to immerse themselves in the nitty gritty of life in a different time and place, continually. It’s an activity that as a history-obsessed writer I only get to spend part of my time doing. The archivists profiled preserve everything from teacups, to Meyer Lansky’s marriage license, to the see-through panties of Gypsy Rose Lee.

I have favorites among archival collections.

The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum has on view those myriad fine art and decorative art objects that are not currently displayed in the more conventional Museum galleries. It’s a funny sort of place, an open secret, accessible to the public yet off the beaten track. Objects have been arranged in huge glass vitrines according to material (e.g. furniture and woodwork, glass, ceramics, and metalwork).

It’s a fine place to find a dozen nearly identical andirons, if you’re in the mood to see andirons, or a hundred sterling silver tumblers, or any number of porringers of yesteryear. Oh, and paintings. Any item the museum can’t find a place for at the moment gets tucked away here, in plain sight, and that includes some wonderful canvases. Even such crowd pleasers as John Singer Sargent’s Madame X sometimes cool their heels here. One day I turned a corner and came across one of my favorite paintings that I’d never seen in person, the portait of nine-year-old Daniel Verplanck by John Singleton Copley, painted in 1771.

It’s not the only boy/squirrel portrait Copley painted – there’s one in Boston, too, at the Museum of Fine Arts, a fine one, of Henry Pelham, painted in 1765.

But here I had what amounted to a private viewing, just me and the boy and his pet. It seems funny now, but keeping squirrels as pets was commonplace through to the twentieth century. Before the family dog, the family squirrel. Here we have the Ridgely brothers in 1862, Howard and his younger brother Otho, the children of a wealthy landowning family in Maryland.

I like to visit another kind of archive when I’m at the Met, as well. Next door to the imposing Temple of Dendur is a tiny warren of display cases that contain long rolls of linen 2000 years old, mummy linen. Here is a scrap.

I don’t know whether the fabric has been unrolled from the embalmed corpses or is waiting to enfold them, but it is incredible to be inches away from these archivally preserved Middle Kingdom textiles. Only slightly frayed and browned by time. Magic.

Another archival highlight. I once ventured up to the attic of the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, with the well-known rose window designed by Henri Matisse – his last work of art, dedicated on Mother’s Day 1956.

There under the eaves lay the physical archives of Historic Hudson Valley, the nonprofit organization that runs the church and other properties in Westchester County. I was there to view a painting of an elite young Mary Philipse by John Wollaston, for my book The Women of the House.

I was, luckily, sanctioned to browse around the other objects displayed on the shelves while the archivist inspected various historical maps. Some intricately decorated colonial pottery, some other paintings, including one, provenance unknown, of waves crashing against the shore at the southern tip of Manhattan around 300 years ago. And what really got me, a collection of pastel silk slippers in pristine condition, perfect for the fancy parties of the eighteenth century. All these things just breathing there, largely ignored by the world, protected in their secret little alcove atop a church.

The Manuscripts and Archives Division at the New York Public Library, when I went there to do research on I.N. Phelps Stokes for Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance, always seemed like it existed underwater, dim and calm, holding tight to its treasures. It contains over 29,000 linear feet of archival material in over 3,000 collections, of which I was accessing 36 boxes of yellowed paper.

There is something gratifying about examining letters that have not been paid attention to in a hundred years. Being the first to take them out and handle them. The papers that interested me concerned the architect/philanthropist/collector’s epic Iconography of Manhattan Island. I had already done research at the library of the New-York Historical society, where I discovered a note from Stokes imploring an influential friend for contacts to help publicize his book.

Also something of a gas was his 1913 campaign, revealed in a fundraising letter, to get an educational farm installed in Central Park. His sister Ethel had the idea of equipping “a diminutive group of buildings, consisting of a tiny cottage of four rooms, a cow-shed and dairy for two cows, and a chicken house for twenty-five chickens.” Everything could be “inspected through glazed openings without entering the buildings,” wrote Stokes. A negative editorial in The New York Times helped shoot down the plan.

Petting squirrels was still popular in Central Park at that time, I have found.

I recall the day at the NYPL Manuscripts room when I found a small envelope containing two thumb-sized black-and-white photographs depicting the very first street plan of New York, drawn in 1660.

They were snapped by Stokes’ researcher behind a guard’s back at the Florence villa where the map was housed, and sent back over the sea to his boss in New York City. Stokes must have leapt out of his chair (also in the New York Public Library, where he had a private second-floor office) when he saw those first pics in 1916.

A friend of mine, the curator Thomas Mellins, produced Celebrating 100 Years, an exhibit for the New York Public Library that brought some of its best archival artifacts out of mothballs. Did you know that this book-and-paper institution in in the possession of the walking stick Virginia Woolf had with her when she waded into the water on her last day? It floated to the surface. The Library also has such objets as Jack Kerouac’s typewriter, yes, the one on which he wrote On the Road. And my personal favorite, perhaps because I had just been reading David Copperfield when I saw it — Dickens’ personal copy of David Copperfield, the one he used when touring for the book, pocket-sized, complete with his penciled-in notations for emphasis. There is also the genius’ letter opener, topped with the taxidermied paw belonging to Dickens’ cat, Bob.

The pleasure of handling archival materials is an emotion that you can’t experience second-hand, unfortunately. You have to be there, deep amid the tarnished porringers and the satin slippers. But there is a website I like a lot that gives you snippets of historical artifacts. Slate features a department called The Vault: Historical Treasures, Oddities, and Delights. You can see, if not touch, pieces of history like a hand-written dance instructional from 1817, an 1893 letter promising compensation to former slaveowners, or Bram Stoker’s literary plans for Dracula. You don’t get to sit underwater at the Manuscripts Collection, true, but you can turn the virtual pages in the comfort of your living room, in your stocking feet.

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Filed under Art, Fiction, History, Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely, Photography, Publishing, Writers, Writing

April 27, 2013 · 10:44 am

Book Award to The Orphanmaster

I’m proud to say that The Orphanmaster has been selected as a 2013 Washington Irving Award Winner by the Westchester Library Association.

Since 1987 the Association has gone about choosing “books of quality” written by Westchester residents, encouraging librarians in the county to encourage patrons to check them out and read them.

The Orphanmaster shares the spotlight with some great books, both fiction and non. This year the group of authors includes Don deLillo, Karen Engelmann, Esmerelda Santiago, Robert K. Massie and Dan Zevin.

Why Washington Irving, you ask. It makes perfect sense. He’s Westchester County’s foremost literary light, historically. Though he’s pretty much known today mainly for “Rip Van Winkle,” in his day, the early 1800s, he achieved rock star status, producing at least a dozen and a half popular histories, biographies and collections of essays as well as novels and stories.

Irving’s first major book, A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), published when he was 28, was a satire on local history and contemporary politics that ignited the public imagination. A later work, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., out in 1819, which contained Van Winkle (written in one night, it is said) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, shot to international bestsellerdom. He’d been writing voraciously since he was a teenager submitting clever letters to the editor of Manhattan’s Morning Chronicle.

Irving invented the tag “Gotham” for New York City. Here is Wall Street in 1850, Irving’s home town.

Some of his books lampooned early Manhattan’s manners and mores. They set up a lasting stereotype of the stalwart Dutch burgher and his stolid hausfrau partner, influencing me when I researched The Orphanmaster. Rip Van Winkle figured in this ilk, telling the tale of a man who nodded off in the Catskill Mountains for 20 years, sleeping through the American Revolution, with the world having changed irrevocably during his slumber. Another more modern rock star, Johnny Depp, appropriately brought Washington Irving out of the nineteenth century with his portrayal of Ichabod Crane in 1999 in the film Sleepy Hollow.

Irving traveled extensively on The Continent – he served as an ambassador to Spain — as a true man of the world, feted everywhere, dazzling literati and royals alike with his intellect. When he spent time in the U.S., he lived with his nieces in a picturesque cottage called Sunnyside on the river bank in Sleepy Hollow, New York, a “snuggery” of yellowish stucco with climbing wisteria on rootstocks imported from England, a fainting couch in the parlor, and a west-facing veranda from which he could watch the sun set over the Palisades.

Irving hosted Dickens there, yet another rock star – fans grabbed tufts of Dickens’ fur coat as souvenirs — when the novelist did his American tour in 1842. When the train came through in 1851, cutting between Irving’s cottage and the Hudson River, he fumed. It ruined his bucolic view, and he never forgave it.

You can visit Sunnyside today and check out the tiny study where he sometimes nodded off, though not to wake a century later.

Today the library is carefully curated by a staffer from Historic Hudson Valley, the nonprofit preservation outfit which owns the restoration. I know the librarian in charge. She is cognizant of the honor of handling the great man’s volumes.

As I am of receiving an award in his name.

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Filed under Fiction, History, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writers, Writing

April 26, 2013 · 12:46 pm

How to Be a Couple of Writers

Today is our wedding anniversary. Gil and I have been married 26 years. It’s a lot of time since our engagement party, at a Russian bar in Brighton Beach, New York!

People always ask, How can you possibly stay married to another writer? It’s not something everyone does, and in fact the matrimonial union of two inkstained wretches is almost as rare as the Javan rhino, of whom less than 60 now exist.

Some other writer-couples make it work. Novelists Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt are a famous example. Well, they live in Brooklyn, and perhaps that artsy atmosphere gives them sustenance. Also consider the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, together from 1954 until Ginsberg’s death in 1977. They chanted. They stayed loose. They were happily hip.

Once upon a time there was Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,/like wrecks of a dissolving dream). It was wildly romantic, she running off with him when he was married to another woman and she was 16. Anais Nin and Henry Miller also managed to have both a torrid love affair and a meeting of the literary minds.

Yes, there were couples that were cursed, like Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. One dead by her own hand, one forever tortured by her demise. A similar dark story in Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He stole well-turned phrases from her journals, and things turned out badly (him dying of drink, her in a mental hospital fire).

So what makes a writerly marriage work? Gil and I have been writing our own stuff and collaborating with each other ever since we got together. We actually met in a poetry writing workshop in New York City, led by the wonderful Sharon Olds (she won the Pulitzer for poetry this year). In the early days we didn’t have much space. I remember a tiny studio in Los Angeles with a single surface, a kitchen counter, where we set up our computers across from each other. And we produced books there. Today in the Cabin we have a bit more room, two separate offices (mine in the living room!), but we seem to often end up working side by side. Somehow our literary life together succeeds.

So I will offer you my suggestions about sharing your life as a writer with another writer.

Accept debate. Disagree, argue, even fight over language. Just don’t come to blows. Try not to be hardheaded over a word or phrase or plot point. Be willing to kill your darlings, as they say, if your partner advises it. (Also praise each other’s work to the skies).

Celebrate the milestones. Little as well as large – the nice, toss-off comments of an acquaintance or the brilliant review. The copyedit as well as the first pristine hardback book copy. Raise a toast together, no matter which of you got the kudo, the contract, even the mot juste.

Ride the ups and downs. And there will be downs.Publishing is a fickle business and you can’t let the market ruin your mood or your relationship.

Embrace change. When we were married, I was an aspiring poet and Gil wrote plays that were produced off-off-Broadway. We made ends meet with editorial jobs. We grew, we branched out. We were the same people, but we became different sorts of writers. Between us, articles, screenplays, nonfiction, memoirs, fiction, even this blog…

We don’t know what will happen in the future. What writer does? Just be prepared to be perpetually surprised by your writerly mate, as you are surprised by yourself. Said Andre Maurois: In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.

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Filed under Fiction, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Photography, Poetry, Publishing, Writers, Writing

April 25, 2013 · 7:19 pm

The Orphanmaster Big Giveaway

It’s nearly April 30, the publication date for The Orphanmaster in softcover! I’m giving away copies.

I have a stash that I would love to distribute to early readers. Drop me a comment (with your email – nobody sees that but me). I’ll get signed copies off to the first ten that respond.

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Filed under Fiction, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writers, Writing

April 24, 2013 · 10:40 pm

Mob-fest at Apalachin

There were so many people who wanted to attend Gil’s talk on his book Mafia Summit: J.Edgar Hoover, the Kennedy Brothers, and the Meeting That Unmasked the Mob that the location had to change. From the Apalachin Library, it would now take place in the cavernous party room at a local landmark, the Blue Dolphin diner.

The book had strong local interest. Gil tells the rollicking story of the 1957 mobster meeting in Tioga county, New York, the assembly parodied in the Billy Crystal/Robert de Niro movie Analyze This, where the bad guys skulk off into the muddy woods. The book’s also about the mob wars that led up to the meeting, and the drama that followed between Hoover and the Kennedy boys. People here knew the Barbara’s, the family whose paterfamilias hosted the meeting, they socialized with them, worked for them. For them, it’s not only a national saga but an intensely personal story.

We got to Binghamton – Apalachin’s big-city neighbor – and hungrily headed for a spiedie joint.

Spiedies are a kind of marinated pork kebab that you squeeze between pieces of cheap, soft white bread. For some reason Sharkey’s also specializes in clams “available to go by the dozens, hundreds and bags,” boasting on its menu that, “The clams you eat today slept in the bay last night.” Since the only water nearby is the muddy, meandering Susquenna River, that gave us pause.

But didn’t stop us from ingesting a dozen coarse, prehistoric-seeming steamed clams.

Just as we got ready to go, I noticed a button to the side of our old, scarred booth, a relic of another time.

Some kind of a magic button, maybe capable of summoning a mobster’s ghost. The place dates back to 1947, and it was probably old Joe Barbara’s cigarette smoke that stained its walls a coffee brown.

We stayed at a highway motel. Not just any highway motel, but the one where Detective Ed Croswell, the hero of Gil’s book, first intuited that something was rotten in the state of Apalachin.

Croswell, there on another police matter, saw a guy in a sharkskin suit making reservations for a group attending a “convention” and hung back observing the situation until he got the information he needed.

The motel needs a bit of a spitshine but it definitely gets you in the mood for a mob-fest, like the one at the Blue Dolphin tonight that packed the room with people who drove an hour to get there.

Gil has some serious hand cramps in its wake.

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Filed under Cooking, History, Photography, Publishing, Writers, Writing

April 5, 2013 · 1:03 pm

Mad Men Season 6: Don Draper Presents

DON DRAPER: Sorry I’m late.

PETE CAMPBELL: Don, this is Harold Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer from Viking Press.

DON: George, Harold.

HARRY CRANE: We were just starting.

DON: Don’t let me stop you. Peggy?

[PEGGY OLSEN and STAN RIZZO approach the easel and reveal the story boards.]

PEGGY: All right. What we liked about The Orphanmaster is Jean Zimmerman’s ability to transport the reader across time. So we see a woman of today, she’s in a bikini, she approaches one of those big canvas folding chairs on a perfect white sand beach, she’s got her straw day bag full of her towel, her cigarettes, her suntan oil, her magazines—

GEORGE: Maybe not magazines…

HAROLD: We don’t want to promote the competition.

PEGGY: Fine. No magazines. She stretches out on the chair, it’s an ideal beach day, sunny, beautiful. She reaches into her bag and pulls out the paperback copy of The Orphanmaster.

STAN: Something happens when she opens up the book.

PEGGY: She hears strange voices, people speaking in Dutch, the clopping of horses, the creak of sails…

STAN: She’s startled and she closes the book, the sounds stop.

GEORGE: We love it.

PEGGY: Wait. She opens the book again, the voices start up again, whispers, snatches of phrases from the text itself.

STAN: A wind comes up.

PEGGY: A big whirlwind, like the one in The Wizard of Oz. Her chair starts to tremble and shake. She holds on for dear life. The wind lifts her up, still in her chair…

STAN: She flies up into the sky…

PEGGY: And lands with a thump on a street in 17th century New Amsterdam, Manhattan island. There are people on the street dressed as Puritans, there are Dutch sailors, there’s a baker blowing his horn to announce his bread is fresh out of the oven…

STAN: A pony cart going past…

PEGGY: And she’s there on her beach chair in her bikini. It’s a very arresting image.

DON: It’s what she dreams about. She’s been taken out of her world and swept up in another one.

PEGGY: And right in front of her is the man of her dreams, a handsome British spy…

GEORGE AND HAROLD (in unison, laughing): Drummond!

PEGGY [revealing a storyboard and giving the tag line]: The Orphanmaster. The perfect beach read—when your beach is in 17th century Manhattan.

GEORGE: Harold?

HAROLD: All I can say is… wow.

HARRY CRANE: The media buy is across several different platforms, destination cable like AMC, FX, some network but precisely targeted, we’ll have a card on PBS, Masterpiece Theater, radio, print, a Times Square billboard…

ROGER STERLING [sticking his head in the door]: Oh, this is the book thing. You know, I read a book once. I didn’t like it. [Leaves.]

HAROLD: What was that?

DON: Don’t mind him.

GEORGE: This is all great.

HAROLD: Only…

PEGGY: Yes?

HAROLD: Well, we were thinking…

DON: What?

GEORGE: It’s a woman.

PEGGY: Women buy books.

GEORGE: But the thing about The Orphanmaster, we are trying to get the message to men, too, that they’d enjoy this book. It’s a rip-roaring read.

DON [smoothly]: I read it, I liked it, my wife liked it, we were both up all night reading.

PEGGY: Fine, fine. What about, there’s a couple on the beach…

GEORGE: A woman and a man!

PEGGY: They’re both transported, the two of them together, swept up, deposited into that New Amsterdam street scene. They look at each other with this mix of amazement and delight.

GEORGE: Sensational. Harold?

HAROLD: I think we have a winner.

PETE: Great!

HARRY CRANE: Great!

DON: I wish they were all this easy, but when you have a great product, this job can be a breeze.

HAROLD: More like a whirlwind!

[All laugh at the client’s lame joke.]

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Filed under Publishing, The Orphanmaster

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

March 28, 2013 · 5:16 pm

100 Books About Books

I climbed the stairs of the brownstone at 72^nd Street and Madison thinking about what it was like when the house was new, in the 1880s, and surrounded but nothing but cow meadows and truck gardens.

Once inside, I noted that the interior was as fabulous as it had been when I was first introduced to it and wrote an article on it for The New York Times some months back. It hadn’t been a figment of my imagination. It was all there, the gleaming mahogany, the sumptuous velvet portierres, the sparkling sunflowers spread across the wallpaper. The gold and cranberry crystal remained perfectly organized in its tall glass cabinet, ready for punch, just as it was when the Mayer family had the place in the Victorian era.

Now how to put all this fabulousness in book form? That was the agenda of the meeting, attended by architect David Parker and an independent publisher of illlustrated books who just might be interested in showcasing the brownstone so the world can admire it. How would a book look, what size should it be, how many photographs should it include? Durston Saylor, who shot the photos for the Times, might play the same role with an illustrated book. What kind of cover? What sort of endpapers? Should they resemble embossed leather – or peacock feathers (an emblem of the Aesthetic Movement)?

Still mulling over books, I left the townhouse and checked out the Edward Ruscha show at the Gagosian Gallery. There I encountered published works that were about as far from the 1880s as they could possibly be.

Ruscha is the conceptual artist who created his first book in 1962, inspired by the humble volumes he found on street stalls during a trip to Europe.

Twentysix Gasoline Stations featured 26 photos of gas stations with simple captions denoting their brand and location. A common denominator: they were all on Route 66.

In the decades since he has published many more of these short, photographic monographs, unintimidated by the Library of Congress’ refusal to copyright Twentysix Gas Stations, due to its “unorthodox form and supposed lack of information.” His greatest hits include Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968), Real Estate Opportunities (1970), Various Small Fires and Milk (1964), and Thirty-four Parking Lots (1967), all minimalist, all deadpan, all brilliant.

He did something a little different but that I love in 1969 with Stains, a copy of which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Here you have a portfolio of diverse smeared substances, from L.A. tap water to sulfuric acid to egg white to parsley to cinnamon oil. All carefully listed.

The art world eventually took notice of Ruscha’s mischief, and the exhibit at Gagosian displays dozens of homages to his works, many of them dangling from chains on the walls so that you can hold them and flip the pages.

Here are some: 149 Business Cards, by John Trembley. Every Letter in ‘The Sunset Strip,’ by Derek Sullivan in 2008, which features anagrams like Enthuses Script and Persistent Huts. Mark Wyse, in 2002, assembled 17 Parked Cars in Various Parking Lots Along Pacific Coast Highway Between My House and Ed Ruscha’s. It was a small edition, only 10 printed. John Waters made his contribution in 1999 with 12 Assholes and a Dirty Foot. The exhibit goes on. There are Ten Convenience Stores, Fifteen Pornography Companies, Nineteen Potted Palms, Twenty-six Abandoned Jackrabbit Homesteads and Every Coffee I Drank in January 2010. (The photos feature only the dripped-on take-out lids.)

Ruscha once said, “Good art should elicit a response of ‘Huh? Wow!’ as opposed to ‘Wow! Huh?'”

Also on view is Jerry McMillan’s Photographs of Ed Ruscha 1958-1972, including one of the artist as a cowboy and one wearing a bunny suit.

Taking the train home, my head was filled with books. Across from me, a guy wearing a crewcut, reading a thick copy of Debt: the First 10,000 Years and devouring a sloppy sub. If this were a car of Ruscha-ites, we’d all be eating a variety of hoagie and reading things like Furry Animals: The First Quarter Century and Cranberry Crystal: The First 120 years.

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Filed under Art, Jean Zimmerman, Photography, Publishing, Writing

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