Category Archives: Writers

June 11, 2013 · 5:20 pm

The Incomplete Fetch

Gil and I have a conversation about Oliver, who has the entrenched habit of greeting whomever arrives at our front door with a shoe in his mouth.

Gil: We used to have a purebred dog who looked like a movie star. Whenever we took her out, her adoring public would gather around to ooh and ahhh. This was before a lot of people had shiba inus.

Me: She was beautiful, but she never brought us any shoes. In fact, everything had to be brought to her.

Gil: Our present beast, in contrast, has issues. Oliver is a mutt, an unlikely combination of a basset hound and a pit bull.

Me: He was a rescue puppy, which excuses some of his defects. Clown-face is the best name we ever had for him.

Gil: He looks stumpy and low to the ground. He has a slight harelip. His breath is atrocious. If his adoring public ever gathered around him, he’d growl and bark at them. Oliver is an example of a creature that is difficult to love.

But love him we do, with a passion. I sometimes think this is a gift he gives us, challenging us to love when loving is sometimes not that easy.

Me: The more I see of men, the more I like my dog. So said Pascal. I think that Oliver’s incomplete fetch at the door — incomplete both because you don’t start the action by throwing to him, and because he won’t drop the shoe at your feet — is perfection itself.

Gil: We have taken to wagering what kind of footwear he will greet us with: a sandal, a boot, a clog. His present-giving never fails to cheer us.

Me: You have to admire the spirit of a dog, no matter show stupid it may see sometimes. Oliver performs the same act over and over again just as eagerly. Sometimes with a sock, if a shoe’s inconvenient.

If we leave the house for half an hour he brings a shoe. If we then go out for fifteen minutes, when we return he will offer the same prize, dipping his head and smiling through the gift. Devoted, submissive, jiving and shucking.

What a good boy am I. An open heart. It’s as if he’s saying, Whatever else I am, I am this flawlessly faithful dog too.

Gil: Is loving more rewarding when it’s difficult? It puts me in mind of a line from a sad poem by John Engels. Precisely to the degree that you have loved something: a house, a woman, a bird, this tree, anything at all, you are punished by time.

Me: We humans should all bring the shoe to the door with the same fervor Oliver does. With the same open heart. What do we get in return? If we’re lucky, the privilege of rolling on our backs in the dewy grass, scratching that perpetual itch.

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Filed under Culture, Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Poetry, Writers

June 10, 2013 · 7:15 pm

Links in the Chain

A handful of links for a rainy day.

A beautiful look at hand paintings by Moscow-based artist and poet Svetlana Kolosova.

Info about the Biblewalk and Living Bible Museum in Mansfield, Ohio.

Job appears real!

Amazing self-portraits by writers. Henry Miller drew his in 1946.

The story of how the Kindle came to be, from an insider’s point of view.

An article on a blog about the history of makeup that discusses whether cosmetics of the past poisoned the women who wore them with ingredients like lead and mercury.

Ten ultra-secluded underground locations, for those times when you’ve disclosed government secrets and need a private place to crash.

And finally, three Japanese hotels that have been in business for a thousand years.

This one, Nisiyama Onsen Keiunkan, was built around a hot spring that supposedly has curing powers. Maybe it cured women with makeup-induced illnesses.

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Filed under Art, Culture, Fashion, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Writers, Writing

June 9, 2013 · 4:58 pm

A Bookish Brunch

Christina Baker Kline’s book Orphan Train was released on April 2nd by William Morrow, and I was lucky enough to attend a brunch in her honor today. As the intuitive and scrappy Allison Gilbert, our nonfiction-writing hostess, put it, “Writing a book is like pushing a mountain through your head.” An event like this, she said, can show people that a book exists from the ground up. “That’s what we writers do for each other.” Indeed. The house in Irvington, New York was filled with bookish well wishers.

Orphan Train has hit the best seller lists of both USA Today and The New York Times, Goodreads saluted it as a 2013 beach read, and it has been brought out in a special edition by Target, for which Christina had to sign thousands of copies.

She had come in from a meeting with the powerhouse biographer Robert K. Massie and would go off to be the keynote speaker at an event held by Books New Jersey, but spared a chunk of time in the noon hour to describe her book and the process by which it went from Henry James’ “germ of a story” to a full-blown narrative.

Christina stumbled on to the phenomenon of orphan trains 10 years ago.

It seems her husband’s North Dakota grandfather was one of “riders.” Most kids were plucked off the streets of New York between 1854 and 1929 and shipped to the Midwest as free labor for farm families. Ultimately there would be 250,000.

Some of them, actually about 60 percent, were not legitimately parentless, but their single parents, usually their mothers, simply couldn’t afford to feed and house them. Civil War widows, in particular, couldn’t hack the expenses of parenthood, and there were no social programs to help them. Today the original orphans have two million descendants in this country.

Jacob Riis made devastating pictures late in the 19th century of some of these lost New York street children.

The older they were, the more desirable they were for the farmers who took them in. Better workers.

Babies were popular too.

Girls, not so much. A threat to the women in the household. This little girl Riis captured is beyond sad.

Now Christina has taken this powerful material and made a story out of it, centered in the relationship between a troubled 17-year-old girl and an aging Irish immigrant who keeps her orphan train memories in an attic trunk.

Christina and I talked over aspects of bringing out a book, including the fact that we both take a powerpoint with us when we hit the road to talk about our work, something not every fiction writer does but that seems appealing to fans of historical fiction. I liked something she said about the writing process, about creating the structure for a story: “We need to build too much, explain too much, before we take that scaffolding away in the revision process.”

I can’t wait to read Orphan Train, to see what commonalities exist between her children of the late-19th century to the early 20th century and the parentless waifs of The Orphanmaster‘s 17th-century New Amsterdam. Novelist Helen Schulman said Orphan Train “makes for compulsive reading,” and The Orphanmaster has been called “compulsively readable,” so we have a bond. It’s too bad Adam Johnson couldn’t be sharing bagels and lox with us at Allison’s house today.

His book, The Orphanmaster’s Son, won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I have found myself in the interesting position since the award was announced of having people congratulate me for my “recent honor.” Well… no. But you’ve got to think that this hat trick of orphan novels suggests something in the cultural water. Andre Gide said, Not everyone can be an orphan. I salute Adam, whose book is supposed to be as terrifying as it is wonderful. But for now, it’s just Christina and me in the picture.

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

June 8, 2013 · 5:01 pm

Rock Paper Scissors Book

Kids write books. They just don’t appear on Kindle.

And they couldn’t. They’re hand-wrought. Messy. One of a kind.

We took our nephew Jasper to a book-making class for children today at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s Design Center in Harlem. Jasper is a lefty — is that why he has a creative streak, or is it because he’s my nephew? Just asking.

The ever-patient instructor was an artist named Michele Brody, who is well known for producing site-specific installations, including many involving plants and water.

She likes to show the entire life cycle, she told me, including the decay and death of the plants.

But she’s also produced art volumes about tea and stained by tea, so she knows about putting together books from scratch. Today she introduced me to a novel concept, that of the bone folder.

The bone folder is a smooth ivory tool that allows you get a nice sharp crease in the paper you’re using to bind your book, and to smooth out any bubbles that might appear in the glueing process. How satisfying, sliding the tool along those bubbles.

The children in the class dove in with cardboard, markers and ribbons every which way. Siblings Aidan and Molly — “silly and active,” according to Jasper — did better than I did. I watched their creations materialize across the table.

Jasper’s book was crammed with action and surprises. If he could only write a single book in his life, this one would be enough, but of course he’s already written hundreds.

What did he like best about writing a book, I inquired.

The kid’s answer was immediate. The pop-ups, he said. He has always liked building pop-ups into his works. Architectural, three-dimensional, crazy blasts from another dimension.

Kindle just can’t accommodate construction-paper pop-ups. And that is why you will never be able to order Jasper Zimmerman’s The Spy in Summer from Amazon. It’s the story of a spy who steals the bad guy’s jewelry, then eats him — well, that last part is not actually in this volume, says the author, but it will be in the sequel.

That one will have pop-ups, too.

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Filed under Art, Culture, Fiction, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Writers, Writing

June 6, 2013 · 8:57 pm

Prayers and Limits

Rainy day rush hour on 9A, the four-lane that runs through Manhattan and north past the Cabin. Traffic has us crawling. But the radio is loud, with Phosphorescent singing Ride On/Right On.

E-Z lyrics:

Let’s go for a ride, hey you turn me right on

 Let’s get on the bike, hey you turn me right on 

Ain’t nothing to hide and hey you turn me right on 

The city at night, hey she turn me right on

Phosphorescent’s the moniker for an Alabama-to-Brooklyn boy named Matthew Houck (he previously went by the nom de guerre Fillup Shack) and he has out a new album, perfect for rainy day traffic jam listening.

I’m approaching that long, weedy section of highway, bordered by a sluggish streambed, where ordinarily the cars sail along briskly. There’s a sign along here someplace, planted out here near the road by someone who remains invisible. It’s plain plywood, painted white with black Gothic lettering and a simple legend: GOD ANSWERS PRAYERS. I’ve passed it hundreds of times, but I’ve never been able to get a picture of it because traffic moves so fast and there’s no shoulder to stop on. The sign just blinks by.

Now, God and I are not ordinarily on the most intimate terms. But I love this sign that has greeted me on every drive home and in many frames of mind, including the most dispirited. GOD ANSWERS PRAYERS. Okay, whatever you say. And I start to wonder about other manifestations of the same phrase.

They abound, on hats as well as rocks.

In rhinestones.

Is that what GAP means, as in The Gap? Those nice pants I bought last Fall? Never knew.

Zowie. Turn the radio up. Mr. David Bowie has come out with a new body of work, including the exciting song The Next Day, the video for which has been condemned by the Catholic Church as indecent. Well, it does show Bowie attired as Christ alongside Gary Oldman as a debauched priest (I thought Oldman was already a debauched priest) and Marion Cotillard as a beautiful prostitute with stigmata wounds.

Bowie hadn’t put out a record in a decade, I guess he felt pent up.

Ho hum, the traffic does crawl. Gil was in a jam yesterday and God answered his prayers with the Dan Hicks song on his shuffle, Traffic Jam.

Prayers, they don’t always work so good. I favor the sentiment of Oliver Wendell Holmes: We have learned that whether we accept from Fortune a spade, and look downward and dig, or from Aspiration an axe and rope to scale the ice, the one and only success which is ours to command is to bring to our work a mighty heart.

As true today as it was when he said it in 1884. It doesn’t fit on a plywood sign, unfortunately.

You can get a daily “meditation” like the Holmes quote in your inbox from All Souls, a church that is almost not a church it is so open-minded – “deeds, not creeds” is its motto. To get you questioning things like prayer.

That sign on 9A, I like it almost as much as the one I saw by the side of a Nebraska highway about ten years ago. We wanted to bring it home with us but couldn’t figure out a way to tie it on top of the car.

A God with limits? Isn’t that heretical? For some reason I like the in-your-face Nebraska farm wife who stuck it along the interstate. She was probably shaking her fist at us as we drove away.

Whooosh—there goes GOD ANSWERS PRAYERS. Funny, I was just praying I would see that sign come around.

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Filed under Culture, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Music, Photography, Writers, Writing

June 3, 2013 · 2:06 pm

Wildflowers and a Verse

A mile-long park runs along the Hudson River bank at Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where you can walk the path as dusk descends and see the sun set hazily, just for you.

The town took an underused industrial area and rehabbed it about ten years ago with the help of the Open Space Institute so that everyone who wants to came come down and praise the beauty of the wide, placid Hudson. Well, not always placid. It seems every small dog in Westchester County is being trotted along at that hour, yapping and sniffing.

The smell of flowers pervades the air.

Along the railroad tracks you’ll find the multiflora rose, which came to the U.S. in the late 19th century as rootstock for ornamental varieties and was then pressed into use as a “living fence” to corral livestock. Its lovely petals float on the air for just about two weeks every June, then it reverts to its less-beautiful identity as a sticker-bush. Other wild roses bloom here too, some with better manners.

Almost as fragrant as the white ones when you stick your nose into a bloom. And honeysuckle – when was the last time you sucked the fragrant dew from one of its blossoms? Put it on your to-do list for today.

Vivid spires come up, having materialized after our rains came, finally, and jump started all the plants.

And the wild iris, down by the shore, its proud head, its feet in the mud.

The great poet Louise Gluck writes in a poem named for a flower, “Snowdrops,” in her Pulitzer-winning collection The Wild Iris:

I did not expect to survive,

earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect

to waken again, to feel

in damp earth my body

able to respond again, remembering

after so long how to open again

in the cold light

of earliest spring—

afraid, yes, but among you again

crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

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Filed under Home, Nature, Photography, Poetry, Writers, Writing

June 1, 2013 · 5:59 pm

Red Is the Color

We were ushered off to our strawberry jaunt by a visitor from prehistory.

A snapping turtle backed herself into a corner of the the vegetable garden when I startled her. She scowled, bit the air and elongated her snake-like neck when her ejection was proposed with a shovel. Snappers evolved over 40 million years ago, so she deserves our careful respect.

It’s strawberry season. But it’s early.

Still, we wanted to pick.

One of my mother’s fondest memories of strawberry picking as a kid is the bluebird she saw on a post, her first bluebird, as she rode into the field in the back of a pickup truck with her sister Sandra and her brother Jere.

No bluebirds for us, or birds of any kind. The berries, clustered under their tents of leaves were largely unripe.

At Grieg Farm, in Red Hook, New York, we had a summer sky, hot blue with hazy clouds. And strawberries, it turned out when we looked, plenty enough for the two of us.

I remember eating strawberries when Gil proposed to me decades upon decades ago. He went into the restaurant’s men’s room and looked into the mirror, then came back to the table and dove in.

Ryan took our six bucks and explained that while the berries weren’t the prettiest, they were just as sweet as if they were perfectly red.

Redder (and pink) were the radishes at the farm stand.

One nurseryman told me that if you harvest the baby radishes with their leaves and saute them together, it results in a dish that is delicious. I have plenty of baby radishes in my garden – until the snapping turtle comes for them – and I’m going to try it.

Red-green rhubarb, to go with my peppermint-striped strawberries.

Maybe preceded by a meal of eggs so fresh their yolks puff up like small islands of saffron?

So the strawberries weren’t red. So what? The barns were.

In the car, driving home with alacrity before my coleus plants wilted, Gil said, Do you know why so many barns are red?

I never thought about it.

Because of the chemical properties of dying stars, he said. One byproduct when stars decay is ferrous ochre. Ferrous ochre is plentiful on earth. And ferrous ochre is what makes paint red. So it’s the cheapest kind of paint.

Okay, I say.

Barns are big, he says. Farmers are cheap.

We have red barns because of the chemical properties of dying stars.

Strawberries are a different story.

Macerated Strawberries with Basil

[Macerate= to soften or decompose (food) by the action of a solvent.]

2 lb. fresh strawberries, rinsed, hulled, and sliced 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick (about 4 cups)

1 Tbs. granulated sugar

2 tsp. balsamic vinegar (alternate: 2 tsp. vanilla)

8 to 10 medium fresh basil leaves

In a large bowl, gently toss the strawberries with the sugar and vinegar. Let sit at room temperature until the strawberries have released their juices but are not yet mushy, about 30 minutes. (Don’t let the berries sit for more than 90 minutes, or they’ll start to collapse.)

Just before serving, stack the basil leaves on a cutting board and roll them vertically into a loose cigar shape. Using a sharp knife, very thinly slice across the roll to make a fine chiffonade of basil. Scatter with the basil to garnish.

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Filed under Cooking, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Writers, Writing

May 30, 2013 · 3:45 pm

Emily in the Garden

The heat feels good. All ninety-nine degrees of it.

The pole beans twist themselves around the bamboo supports, under the arcing sun.

The pansies on the front porch of the Cabin salute.

Even Oliver likes to move his luxuriating form outdoors, having decided that sun-warmed gravel is a choice nap mat. Along the lines of ancient cultures whose people slept comfortably with their heads on carved blocks of wood or stone.

All the quiet and heat and a sense of the plants feverishly growing brings to mind the work and life of Emily Dickinson, she who was, according to one scholar, “known more widely as a gardener, perhaps, than as a poet” during her time. Dickinson conscientiously tended the flower garden at the Homestead in Amherst, Massachusettes, where she spent her whole life, assembling. a collection of pressed plants in a sixty-six page leather-bound book which contained 424 pressed flower specimens organized according to the Linnaean system.

Dickinson is usually thought of the way she appears in the iconic photo taken when she was about eighteen.

Recently another portrait materialized in an archive, with the poet on the left and her friend Kate Scott Turner on the right.

She would have been well into her genius years, both in terms of writing and gardening.

The Homestead garden was famous in its time, at least among the neighbors. Dickinson’s niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, remembered “carpets of lily-of-the-valley and pansies, platoons of sweetpeas, hyacinths, enough in May to give all the bees of summer dyspepsia. There were ribbons of peony hedges and drifts of daffodils in season, marigolds to distraction—-a butterfly utopia.” Dickinson loved scented exotic flowers, writing that she “could inhabit the Spice Isles merely by crossing the dining room to the conservatory, where the plants hang in baskets.” She liked to send friends bunches of blooms with verses attached, but complained mildly that “they valued the posy more than the poetry.”

Dickinson went everywhere, apparently, with her brown Newfoundland Carlo, a gift from her father in the fall of 1849. “My shaggy ally” she called him in a letter.

A lovely animation gives the perfect flavor of the poem “I started early—took my dog.”

Emily was so mysterious, endlessly elliptical.

Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn

Indicative that suns go down;

The notice to the startled grass

That darkness is about to pass.

Less than a dozen of Dickinson’s 1,800 poems were published in her lifetime. Among the rest were 40 pieced-together and hand-sewn books she had assembled in the years before her death.

That’s the fascicle-bound manuscript page for the passionate, rhapsodic poem Wild Nights!:

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!

In her final years Dickinson also wrote on scraps of paper, chocolate wrappers, the margins of books, and even envelopes she received in the mail. A book documenting these envelope poems is due out this coming October, to be titled Gorgeous Nothings. A related appreciation and performance can be enjoyed even before the book is published.

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Filed under Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Poetry, Publishing, Writers, Writing

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 21, 2013 · 8:34 pm

Meatpacking Amble

We started and ended our Manhattan amble in the Meatpacking District, that venerable neighborhood from around 14^th down to Gansevoort Street that has been totally gentrified in recent years. This is a place that in 1900 had 250 slaughterhouses and packing plants lining its streets. The paving stones under the butchers’ awnings used to actually lie slick with lard and blood when I first came to New York in the late ’70s. Now Diane von Furstenberg has a building of refurbished brick with lavender windows and a penthouse that looks like a geodesic glass bubble on top, and there are eateries like Bubby’s opening that pride themselves on their farm-to-table cuisine.

The sign announcing the imminent arrival of the joint puts across it’s down home, wry message: Defending the American Table (also, we steal recipes from grandmas.)

With illustrations around the side that already seem faded as a pair of farmer’s Levi’s.

It reminded me of a sign we saw up in also gentrifying Morningside Heights recently, on Broadway near 125th Street.

There was a man on scaffolding outside and we weren’t sure whether he was taking down an old sign or putting up a new one with an exquisitely vintage look. The sign down below left us equally confused.

Maybe you can figure it out.

Anyway, on from the Meatpacking District to see a movie on Houston Street, at the northern lip of Soho. “What Maisie Knew” is based on a novella written by Henry James in 1897 about a classic dysfunctional family. Sad, sad, film.

It features Julianne Moore as a self-absorbed rock vocalist married to a self-absorbed art dealer played by Steve Koogan. At the heart of the story is their seven-year-old daughter, Maisie, who is being torn apart by the breakup of her parents’ marriage. The two adults literally abandon her places – the story takes place in contemporary Manhattan — when they tire of her. I wondered what James would have made of the profane adaptation.

The novelist was a theater aficionado and aspiring playwright. Couldn’t he be satisfied with being the most brilliant prose stylist of his day? He never got the reception on the boards that he so very much wanted. Movies might really have rocked his world. We think of him as fusty now, but Edith Wharton writes in her memoir A Backward Glance about how much James loved to “motor.” Yes, driving in the new, perpetually breaking-down automobiles, feeling the wind in his pate, was just about his favorite thing.

Making our way north, we grabbed a schnitzel and a wurst at a little German joint. En route, we passed the phenomenon that has been around longer than anything else I know in New York: the basketball game at West 4^th Street and Sixth Avenue, also known as the Cage.

Anybody can play and there are fierce tournaments. The supports for the baskets are actually padded with duct tape to mitigate injury to players who stuff.

Under the High Line, where we had earlier found parking (who said it’s tough to get along in New York? Come with me, I have the best parking karma in the city) night had fallen.

A park so beautiful that even Manhattanites are impressed, the High Line was once quite different. An old elevated freight line for meat packers, built under the aegis of Robert Moses, it ran through the buildings of the district, raised up above the streets underneath. The rail bed had long since fallen on hard times when I first saw it decades ago. It was basically a long, winding, dispiriting field of syringes, condoms and weeds. Some brilliant dreamers fought to bring it back to life as a park planted throughout with native plants, meticulously cared for, ingeniously designed. The first section of the park opened in 2009. Now people throng to it day and night, both to walk and to lounge on the massive wooden chaise lounges found along its length.

Gil climbed the stairs and waved down from the dark trees above. I was content looking up past the old, weathered, still-extant butcher’s awning at the winking moon.

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Filed under Cooking, Fashion, Fiction, Film, History, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Writers

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 11, 2013 · 10:54 pm

It Makes Perfect Sense

About to be Mother’s Day. The night before, Saturday night, we go into Manhattan just as the thunder starts to roll. Fissures of lightning streak the sky.

As is my mother’s prerogative, I let Gil do the driving.

We check out a movie not for the weak of stomach.

Then take dinner at Katz’s, founded in 1888 on Houston Street, its threshold long worn-out.

There is really no reason to go anywhere in New York for dinner except Katz’s.

You wait on line for your carver to finish your sandwich and he pushes a hot little slice of pastrami across the counter at you. It makes perfect sense. A morsel to whet your appetite.

David has worked his station since ’02.

The pickles are luscious. Green tomato, sour dill and new.

But they can’t match the pastrami. As Sinead O’Connor sang, Nothing compares to you.

Anyone can sit at the Where Harry Met Sally table. We did. It makes sense to do it if you can.

Outside I was surprised to see a sign on the side of the building that read WURST FABRIC.

Was Katz once in the textile business?  Michael Stern, the road food genius, schooled me.  Fabric is an Americanization of the Yiddish term meaning home-made.

Our pre-mom’s day Gastro-crawl continued on 23rd St. right next door to the Chelsea Hotel, scene of so much poetry and debauch over the years.

Now we have the Donut Plant. Gourmet donuts done right.  Proctology cushions covered with fabric (home-made in yiddish) covered the wall.

Perfect coffee, Mother’s Day specials.

Rose petals in donuts. Could it be a joke?  Yes, but it made a weird kind of sense.

There were in fact petals baked into the dough. I was transported to the Middle Ages. Or the middle of India and its rosewater delicacies.  I don’t know if biting into one made me feel more maternal or just trendy. Anyway, I liked it.

Right across the street, the historic home of the Communist Party in America, 235 west 23 street, was hosting a musical extravaganza.  A group called Legacy Women performed Afro Dominican palo and Afro Puerto Rican bomba for a rapt, folky audience that shushed us numerous times.

These women rocked. One song they announced was for mothers, and they belted out the chorus, mama-ah.  Another sounded like they were singing put your pants on in some native dialect.

Hitting the street again, the rain had all cleared away, leaving things new.

I looked across the street to the Chelsea Hotel,  now sadly being modernized, made into condos, its art collection all sold off.  I thought of Alejandro Escovedo’s song about the Chelsea, Chelsea Hotel ’78.

It makes no sense, he sings, it makes perfect sense.

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Filed under Art, Cooking, History, Home, Music, Poetry, Writers

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

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