Jean Zimmerman

May 19, 2013 · 9:32 am

Bluebirds Dancing in the Rain

I always wondered about the Danish Home. I’d passed the faded sign on Cedar Lane a hundred times, and never followed it down.

I always pictured Keebler elves performing pirouhettes atop a barrel in the woods.

Saturday I had a chance to check it out, because the troupe of Morris Dancers known as the Bouwerie Boys were set to perform at the site. It was, of course, a home for seniors. Nonresidents were welcome.

A light drizzle from the still-cool sky only enhanced the lush perfection of the setting. May flowers.

A venerable orchard.

An imposing building of dark stone. A castle.

Maud and I learned about the Danish Home. Founded in Brooklyn in 1906 for those of Scandinavian descent, it moved in 1954 to Croton-on-Hudson, New York. Eighteen or so seniors inhabit the former stable–the castle–built by financier JM Kaplan earlier in the century as part of a 40-acre estate. It felt like a different country.

A harbinger of good fortune greeted us when we stepped across the wet grass behind the building while waiting for the dancers to arrive. Atop a cockeyed birdhouse tethered to a hydrant sat a bluebird.

Well–with a flash of sapphire and a touch of rust it fluttered away, not allowing a picture. Thank goodness it didn’t fly up my nose. We learned from Eric Anderson, who runs the place, that bluebirds and barn swallows squabble over the dozen birdhouses on the property, each camp currently claiming half.

Morris dancing also is supposed to bring prosperity, fertility and good luck after the long winter. Each village of the Cotswolds, in England, where the tradition originates, has its own style and costume, and all the moves are passed down from father to son.

No elves, but something elfin about these husky grown men and their skips and hops, their bells and ribbons and flashes of “whites.”

The Bouwerie Boys dance all over the New York area (you can find their schedule on Facebook) and a little drizzle seemed to bother them not a whit.

Nor did it trouble the elderly ladies in attendance, though umbrellas were in short supply. One kept up a steady gab throughout the performance. “I want to know what this is all about!” she said at one point and, later, with authority, “Goes back to Shakespeare’s day.” Which was not, in point of fact, correct. The year 1452 was the earliest recorded show of Morris dancing, so by Shakespeare’s day the steps were ancient.

The fiddle player in his “reel” life is the violist for the Manhattan String Quartet. By the end of the performance he’d popped a string.

Then the dancers sang a jolly tune: I like to hear those small birds singing early in the morning – hurrah for the life of a country boy.

Finally, shots of a clear liquid were passed among the dancers. Well earned, after valiant leaps in the light, ancient rain.

9 Comments

Filed under Dance, History, Jean Zimmerman, Music

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 17, 2013 · 2:55 pm

Maud to Malawi

Lovely 21-year-old Maud has come home from school, needing a few trillion hours sleep and all her sheets cleaned but no worse for the wear after her third year of college.

Right away, she has to go to a barbecue with her boyfriend. She has to go to a friend’s 21st birthday party at a club in New York. She has to entertain a college friend, and have dinner with a high school friend. She has to help her mother weed the garden. The baby carrots need thinning.

The potatoes need de-Phragmite-ing. The reeds rear up through the loamy soil no matter how we pull them or attack them with shears. They don’t get it. Go back to your marsh! We don’t want you among the tomatoes!

So Maud is going to help me eradicate them. Then off she has to go again…

To Malawi. In just a few days she will go to help build a school in a little town neither you nor I has ever heard of.

I’m trying to remember what I was doing the summer I was 21. Sleeping on someone’s floor on 112th Street. Reading Anais Nin. Putting poetic scrawls in a notebook. A stupid job in a busy bakery (Zaro’s, in Grand Central Station, still exists), barely going to bed before I had to get up in the dark to go to work. Juggling boyfriends. Nothing really of note.

Maud’s going to Malawi with an organization she runs at Columbia called buildOn, whose mission is to build schools all over the world in underresourced communities. Eight other students will go too. Girls, she says, especially benefit from the work they’ll accomplish, because one mandate of buildOn is that female students must have equal access to the educational resources it makes available.

That’s really unusual in a traditional culture like that of Malawi. (Funds are still being raised for the trip.)

Last year, when Maud came back from a similar school-building trip to La Cruz, Nicaragua, she had dirt under her nails and mud ingrained in her clothes from pouring a concrete foundation. She loved the beans and rice for every meal and the friends she made in the village, especially this little sprite.

When Maud’s my age, she’ll remember more about her 21-year-old summer than serving up bagels.

5 Comments

Filed under History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature

May 16, 2013 · 6:37 pm

Boxcar Boy

Mike Brodie is not making pictures any more. He left that behind along with a life on the rails, wind in his hair, the dirt of the road.

But for almost five years, since he was 17, he used a Polaroid and then a 1980s 35mm camera to document the world of young freight-train hoppers, his peers, in some searing and sweet images.

As I was cleaning my house today I thought, What if I didn’t have a house to clean? What if I didn’t have a counter to scrub, a coffee table to dust? I love home, the idea and the reality. But what if it was all suddenly swept away and I could just fly.

Drift.

Brodie traveled 50,000 miles through 46 states, catching a lift on more than 170 long-haul freight trains, and capturing the tiny details of life that usually don’t mean anything to anyone outside the people themselves. He had no experience as a photographer, he first picked up a discarded camera left behind in a car and just started to shoot his friends. One of his cronies took this portrait of him along the way.

“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.” So wrote Kerouac. His words have never felt less dated.

Brodie’s photos are romantic, edgy, authentic, and might make someone uncomfortable.

All right. You’re shocked. I’m shocked. Youth shocks, it demands attention. Brodie documents arrests and injuries, squats, disheveled car interiors (trains are only part of this story). Dirt. I love this one.

Some photos are grim. One reviewer described the work as “stolen glances.” There’s some truth to that. These are raw depictions of a ramshackle but exhilarating life.

Whitman’s Song of the Open Road, another chestnut that begs to accompany these pictures:

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune,

I myself am good-fortune,

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,

Strong and content I travel the open road.

The result of Brodie’s adventure is a photo book called A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, published by Twin Palms, with coinciding exhibits in art galleries on both coasts. He and his friends apparently have mixed emotions seeing his intimate work appear in the mainstream. “You have a lot of worlds colliding right there,” Brodie told The Guardian.

This is not Never Never Land. Whitman knew the truth. Some of my favorite lines in literature, also from Song of the Open Road:

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,

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

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

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

People in the recovery business talk about the uselessness of the “geographical cure” by which you try to escape your problems by changing your location. But still, some lucky people are flying, mostly by choice, rolling under the stars, true angels with dirty faces, thrilling to the open road.

Can you imagine how sweet these berries tasted?

Cormac McCarthy, in his work of apocalyptic genius, The Road: “Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.”

Mike Brodie has said the inspiration for his work was “from the folks I was hangin’ out with in Pensacola. The punk scene, like radical anarchists and all these feminist girls, at the time, their ideas and way of life were really interesting and inspiring to me and really gave me the push to think for myself and, well, hit the road.” It was a tight tribe, he says, and nobody was “actually homeless.” Instead, “We took what we could get to make it through one more day or to get to the next town.” He reminisced to the Los Angeles Times about the “sound of a high-priority Z train whizzing by you at 70 mph in the middle of a cornfield in Nebraska, zooom zooom, zooom…”

In an essay for his book, he writes that “I don’t want to be famous, but I hope this book is remembered forever.” He has announced that he will not take any more photographs. He has graduated from the Nashville Auto-Diesel College and now works as a mobile diesel mechanic out of his silver ’93 Dodge Ram.

Mike. Please pick up a camera. Maybe show us the secret world of auto mechanics. Or any secret world you choose.

6 Comments

Filed under Art, Fiction, Photography, Poetry, Writing

May 15, 2013 · 6:28 pm

Eagles Nesting 24/7

You may have a lot you think you have to do. Laundry. Work after hours. Dinner dishes. Pushing a cart down the fluorescent aisles of Shop Rite.

And there are a lot of crucial things to think about these days, from Benghazi to preventive breast removal. You have money concerns, I have money concerns. Someone is in the hospital. Someone else is terribly sad.

There is only one thing for it. Tune in to nesting bald eagles, a majestic pair with their big, wobbly grey babies, eaglets to be precise. Their names: Peace and Harmony. The webcam captures the birds in gorgeous detail.

This family has made its perch 75 feet in the air in a cottonwood tree in central Minnesota, at the edge of a river, and is available for viewing 24/7, any time you’d like to leave your real life behind.

One parent carries a turkey wing back to the mattress-sized nest. The other picks it apart, shoves bits into the chicks’ eager beaks. The mature birds are dashing to look at, as clean as if they bathed with soap and water every day of the week. You know that when they leave they’ll be riding the thermals, jumping on one for altitude then surfing to another, searching ceaselessly for choice prey to bring back to the nest.

The Minnesota chicks are almost a month old now, their primary feathers coming in.

You never know what you’ll get. Sometimes those babies just sleep the sleep of the dead, a couple of heavy-breathing feather balls, and you wonder why you’re paying attention. Then, suddenly, one raises its head, holding itself upright, improbably, the way a bean seedling seems to stretch three inches taller after a rain.

And after watching for minutes… hours… days… you suddenly feel better.

4 Comments

Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Photography

May 14, 2013 · 1:57 pm

A Quiche That Stands Up and Salutes

Does anyone besides me bake quiche anymore? Or has this delicious standby been totally ruined? By familiarity, by bad versions, by a laugh line that will never be forgotten?

Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche was a long time ago – 1982, actually. Funny guy Bruce Fierstein popularized the notion that consuming eggs and cream in a crust was unmasculine. Chopping onions, properly women’s work. Ha ha. Or should it be?

It was a time when the idea of men’s and women’s intertwining roles was particularly fraught. Women had, it seemed, gone on the warpath, demanding equal pay, control over their reproductive lives, a break once in a while in their household routines. I worked as an editor at a think tank called Catalyst, where we encountered business male executives’ overheated fears over the inroads of female executives. Scaling the corporate ladder or any other was in the pop cultural air.

There were men who alligned themselves with women. I love this example of how some men came together in 1979 to share the good fight.

Slate’s Rebecca Onion writes that the newsletter’s authors were “group of men based in Berkeley, Calif., who were working for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The sheet was sent to interested activists throughout the late 1970s, as the feminist movement worked to secure the support of enough states to win the amendment’s permanent attachment to the Constitution.”

The group’s acronym stood for Men Allied Nationally for the Equal Rights Amendment. It’s goal, evidently, was “summed up in a motto that mixed arguments based on morality, feasibility, and ego: ‘Stake, Place, Chance, and Strokes.'”

Quiche eaters all, natch. Some were probably even quiche bakers. Quel horreur!

The B-52’s do a mean Quiche Lorraine. It’s about a little dog

dyed dark green.

About two inches tall, with a strawberry blonde fall;

Sunglasses and a bonnet

and designer jeans with appliques on it?

My point, and I do have one… as Ellen Degeneres used to say. In my house, the quiches happen to be my domain, while Gil does the donuts, the paninis and the best molasses cookies ever.

I haven’t given up on quiche. It’s a historic entree, having originated once upon a time not in France, actually, but in Germany, and English versions of custard in pastry go back to the 15^th century. The original rustic Quiche Lorraine was dished up in a cast iron pan. So ours is a connection to a simpler time. I actually impressed myself by making it for the first time in high school, in home ec class.

And it meets my leftovers standard. The egg in a crust you heat up in the microwave the day after (or the day after that) is almost as good as you had it hot from the oven that first night. Crucial in a household of writers who might not want to pause mid-sentence to create a meal from scratch.

Julia Child has been my guide in developing a great recipe, but I don’t have patience with her doorstop tomes.

I think the 107-page Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom: Essential Techniques and Recipes From a Lifetime of Cooking has just about all the information and recipes that are needed to square you away with your pots and pans. I especially like one of the tenets of her quiche recipe: you measure out the proper amount of eggs to cream by cracking the egg in a half-cup measure and filling it with the dairy, continuing in the same way until you get the amount of liquid required.

This reminds me of another egg trick I thought was great when I saw it in a movie. When a recipe calls for a whole egg, you sklurp your finger around the inside of the shell after breaking it to make sure you don’t waste any bit of precious white.

I make what historically has been called a Quiche Lorraine, with eggs, bacon and cream, except I always use cheese, and usually add some kind of leafy greens or broccoli – to make it healthy (!). My crust recipe is tried and true, and I always use leaf lard if I have some in the house.

The recipe may be mustily retro, but let’s call it classic cool. The quiche. A recipe for men and women equally.

A Noble Quiche

Crust:

1 ½ c flour (half and half white and whole wheat)

¼ c butter

1 ½ T crisco (or lard)

½ c cold water

pinch salt

Cut together butter, shortening and flour and salt, then mix in water with a fork; chill an hour.

Filling:

4 eggs

Half and half to fill up a half cup for every egg (you can use heavy cream for a more custard-like or milk for a more omelette-like consistency)

(plus extra eggs/cream as needed to fill your pie plate)

1 large onion, sliced thin

6 slices crisp bacon, crumbled

1 ½-2 c gruyere, shredded

greens or broccolli to taste, steamed

Fry bacon, remove. Fry onion til golden in same pan.

Whisk eggs and cream together.

Lay onions then bacon then cheese in pie shell. Pour in egg/cream mixture. Grind some pepper on top.

Bake at 375 for 45 minutes.

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

May 13, 2013 · 4:25 pm

Suzanne Takes You Down to Her Place by the River

Allow me to introduce a photographer whose work needs to be better known.

Suzanne Levine. For decades she has gone nowhere without a camera in her hand.

She happens to be family to me, my sister-in-law, and lives with her husband and son in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where I grew up and lived for years.

People in-the-know know that she is one of the most talented photographers around.

Thank goodness, the explosion of social media means for one thing that fantastic photographers don’t have to labor in obscurity. Much less likely, the possibility of overlooking a Vivien Maier, the recently discovered shutterbug who worked for years in the 1950s as a nanny while walking the streets with her Rollieflex, photographing everyone from well-dressed shoppers to street bums, producing gorgeous images that no body ever saw.

Street photography isn’t Suzanne Levine’s chosen discipline – though she is great with the human form.

More her bent is landscape, and particularly, I think, articulating a vision of the Hudson River.

Her living room window overlooks the tracks headed south along the shore and the Palisades beyond, so it’s got to be a lot on her mind.

Her usual interpretations of the Palisades are fluid and soulful, soft yet strong.

Rothko-esque.

Suzanne is sensitive to the venerable Palisades-depicting tradition in Hastings, beginning with Jasper Cropsey, who painted this canvas in 1887.

“It’s hard to do it in a meaningful way,” she says. “Particularly with photography, a landscape may be technically skillful, but empty. The detail and the majesty can be overbearing; too much of a hard sell. When I see an image like that I think, that’s not how you make a picture of the Palisades.”

You can see a series of Suzanne’s Palisades images here.

She is also an intuitive mom-photographer, with a knack for “getting” what’s going on with her son. Jasper’s now six, a gabby, literate, lego obsessed energy bundle, and she captures the bright light of his personality.

One recent body of work Suzanne called postcards.

Works that threw two images together, shook em up, poured em out as the perfect visual cocktail. She started to make them as portraits of Facebook friends, both those she knew personally and those she had met on line. “Are you a psychic?” asked a friend she hadn’t seen since high school.

She must have done a hundred of these.

Each one more interesting than the next.

Suzanne has recently begun using an Olympus OM-D E-M5, a Micro Four Thirds interchangable lens camera, a step-up from the compact digital cameras she’d been using the past few years. Once in a while she still employs a one-megapixel camera, when she wants to go lo-fi. She still keeps a 35mm Nikon F and a Rolleiflex TLR, as well as a collection of vintage cameras. Her favorite: a Newman & Guardia view camera, which was the camera of choice for polar explorers because of its innovative spring-powered pneumatic shutter.

You can see more of these photos. You can share work with Suzanne or to talk about getting a print made. Leave a comment for me here and I’ll make sure she gets your information.

Just don’t distract her too much from the sweet, moody, serene, soulful river that runs through her world.

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Filed under Art, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Photography

May 12, 2013 · 9:08 am

Thug Kitchen: Lavender Lemonade

From my friends at Thug Kitchen, one of the best cooking sites, comes this perfect Mother’s Day refresher.

Thug Kitchen: Five simple fucking ingredients in this bitch….

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Filed under Cooking, Home

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 11, 2013 · 2:02 pm

About To

Cloudy and damp, good planting weather. And just the right climate for the annual plant sale at Teatown, the nature preserve down the road from the Cabin.

Teatown has 875 miles of trails, a large lake, hemlock forests and laurel groves, a wildflower island and, dear to my heart, a collection of wounded raptors, lost souls that have here been given a safe haven and a purpose: educating visitors about how wonderful they are.

I like the owls, some of them one blinded in one eye, most paired in their environments in a perfect, companionable matched set.

I collected my little starts at the herb table, dill and chamomile. Thought I’d try some eucalyptus. Wished I had to space for the native plants for sale all around.

Then I noticed a stalky bearded iris obviously about to burst.

I realize that they more I go along, the more I like things that are about to…

Like the iris. You can just see a fringe of furled purple petal above the green.

Like a novel about to be published.

Rolls about to come out of the oven.

A cardinal about to skitter up into the air.

Oliver about to enter his snoring slumberland.

Water about to boil – test it for salt with one hardy finger.

About to speak at an engagement, that shivery feeling in your stomach.

About to buy something exquisite, but expensive. Then deciding not to.

About to start to knit, a chunky skein and needles in hand.

My 21-year-old Maud about to have the most glorious adventure, working in a school for Teach For America, living in New York City, the whole shebang laid out ahead of her.

Rolls about to come out of the oven.

Water about to boil.

The iris about to pop.

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Filed under Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Knitting, Nature, 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

May 7, 2013 · 6:04 pm

Wizard Sticks and Tree Guards

Some magic has come into my life. I am not a person who favors yard ornaments in the vein of gnomes, glass spheres or plywood ladies with polkadotted underpants. And I’ve never even read The Hobbit.

But I have fallen in love with a Wizard Stick.

It owes part of its charm to the fact that it was a gift from old friends. Part, also, to the chunky blue-green “crystal” grasped in its iron claw. The Wizard Stick will bring the rains to my vegetable garden, I am sure, when planted facing in the proper direction and with the ceremony that behooves its installation. Gil’s going to jump around minus his undershorts while I chant for precipitation.

But there is something else. The company that created the Wizard Stick, Tringalli Iron Works, fabricates the totems only as a sidelight to its regular business. A business to which street tree guards are central, and have been since Liborio Tringalli started the enterprise in Tribeca in the 1920s.

Yes, tree guards do matter. Here is one you probably have overlooked every time you ambled down a New York City sidewalk. Eighteen-inch iron hoops all around. Shielding a little root-friendly plot that is blessedly feces-free.

Edith Wharton showed Lily Bart roaming around near Grand Central Station in the humid heat of a Manhattan summer afternoon, desperate to find some cool relief.

“‘Oh dear, I’m so hot and thirsty—and what a hideous place New York is!’ She looked despairingly up and down the dreary thoroughfare. ‘Other cities put on their best clothes in summer, but New York seems to sit in its shirtsleeves.’ Her eyes wandered down one of the side-streets. ‘Some one has had the humanity to plant a few trees over there. Let us go into the shade.’

“’I am glad my street meets with your approval,’ said Selden as they turned the corner.”

In 1905, when House of Mirth was published, a battle was underway over New York’s street trees. The island was still nostalgically remembered as a haven, a bower of oak, chestnut, pine and cedar, but now the trees had been almost all torn down for new construction. They were inconvenient to development.

Madison and 55th Street in 1870.

I wrote about the transformation in my book Love, Fiercely, that took place during that period. I.N. Phelps Stokes despaired over the change:

Old, bucolic Manhattan was vanishing, buried in the smooth cement of the new. By the turn of the century, the leafy streets of lower New York had lost their shade.

In an incisive history called The Creative Destruction of Manhattan 1900-1940 author Max Page charts the demise of the New York street tree. At a certain point the trees could be counted on one hand. I love this 1913 photo of a woman he included in his book, walking by the sole remaining tree at Fifth Avenue and 37^th Strteet.

And the pear tree planted by Peter Stuyvesant at 1o^th Street and Third Avenue. The city mourned when it was killed after being mowed into by a dray in 1867; it had stood for 200 years.

Yes, there was a love of trees, and 317,166 were planted in New York State on Arbor Day between 1889 and 1909. But in 1909 only one in five of those trees still stood. A Tree Planting Association sprang up to organize around replenishing the city’s streets, with a classic Progressive fervor, augmenting the efforts of New York’s Parks Department. The fact that we have any street trees at all today is probably due to their efforts.

And to those tree guards. Tringalli has made 125,000 of them since 1923.

Today, the city’s plan is to plant more than 200,000 new street trees over a decade (street trees area subset of city trees in general, which include parks, yards, etc). There are upwards of half a million street trees now. MillionTreesNYC is playing an important part. Saplings come from three different nurseries in Maryland, Buffalo and long Island. These are Maples.

People who care about trees can even become Citizen Pruners, taking a five-session course and getting a license that lasts for five years. A friend of mine has become an arborist, a new profession, who advises construction companies on the health of trees.

The New York Parks Department keeps count of species, and has identified 168, with the top specimens the London Plane Tree, the Littleleaf Linden, the Norway maple, the Green Ash and the Callery Pear. And there is always the ubiquitous, sometimes stinky ginkgo biloba, with its pretty fan-shaped leaves. Long thought to be extinct, the ginkgo was rediscovered during Victorian times in hidden groves in China.

All of them need a tree guard.

A Wizard Stick might be nice, too. Some magic, to keep a tree alive when the chips are down.

I’m not parting with mine.

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Filed under History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely, Nature, Photography

May 6, 2013 · 4:11 pm

Lavender and Mud

My mint weathered the winter. In fact, it’s so impossibly bushy already I plan to give it regular haircuts throughout the warm weather and make many pitchers of iced tea. Sit in my favorite dilapidated garden chair and watch it grow some more.

Rosemary, sage and the rest are all tucked in place. I put in fringed lavender as well as the commonplace kind. Fringed lavender, also known as French lavender, is the kind you want for butterflies. Also potpourri. And I do want potpourri.

And now my mizuna, radishes, carrots and potatos have sprouted. The potatoes are mucho macha.

And onions. The green of spring onions.

Puts me in mind of Booker T. & the M.G.’s, their Green Onions released on Stax Records in October of 1962. It reached number 33 on the Pop Albums chart in the month of its release but of course is a perennial.

The only sound I can hear now, sitting on my funky old chair next to the potatoes and the onions, is the tiny, crinkling noise of the reeds growing in the marsh. It’s a constant, but you can only hear it if you stay very, very quiet. That and the chip-chip of the cardinals having one of their cardinal parties.

Now if only it would rain. We haven’t had water from the sky in weeks and no one’s sure when it’ll come. A sprinkler’s never the same.

Puts me in mind of these people at The Year of Mud, who make building cob, straw bale and timber frame houses look impossibly glamorous. I might actually like to build a cob oven, like they are giving courses on this coming summer. Gil’s been wanting to bake pizza outdoors. Biscuits from the cob? Sounds impressive. A little smoky, though? With Ziggy as a guide, they’d probably be perfect.

Ziggy (his real name is Brian Liloia, but that’s what he’s called) documented his time building a cob house called ‘Gobcobatron’ at a place named Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, in Rutland, Missouri.

He says, “I think I have it figured out. I’ve boiled life down to the most elemental action. As I see it now, life is basically an on-going series of moving objects around.” He’s talking about moving clay and sand and straw onto a foundation, moving wood into the shape of a roof, moving soil and compost to make a garden bed, etc.