Jean Zimmerman

March 7, 2013 · 3:54 pm

Kill Your Darlings?

“Kill your darlings?”

I was talking with a nonwriter about revising my Savage Girl manuscript, about the small cuts my editor had gently suggested would improve the narrative.

Kill does sound pretty violent. And why would you want to kill a darling?

It’s a well-established dictum, something of a cliché at this point. Widely attributed to William Faulkner. (So we know it’s not necessarily about chopping up long sentences.)

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

It may be apocryphal, since I haven’t ever located the story behind the saying.

Faulkner would seem to have adapted the sentiment from a once-lionized writers who has since become fairly obscure.

Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) was a British gentleman who published under the pen name of Q. Fiction, poetry and criticism flowed from his pen, but probably his best-known work was the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900. He also translated fairy tales from the French.

It was when discussing style in his 1916 publication On the Art of Writing that Quiller-Couch proposed the idea that style “is not—can never be—extraneous ornament.” Instead, he advised the following rule:

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

Before Q came Samuel Johnson, who urged, Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Stephen King jumped on the bandwagon more recently. In his 2001 book On Writing, King told writers to kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

But what does the riff mean, anyway? What does it mean for me, as I’m sitting here deciding whether or not to strike, for example, this passage:

Stepping into the lift, I had craned my head up to the purple sky above me, with just a dusting of stars emerging. Below, the blacker pit.

Perhaps cut this? asks my editor. The narrator is stepping into an elevator that will take him down a mine shaft.

Elmore Leonard once said, If I come across anything in my work that smacks of ‘good writing,’ I immediately strike it out.

The idea is that a bit you’re especially proud of will stand out as self indulgent and ruin the piece. Go to writing books, writing teachers, and so-called experts on the web and you will find any number of elaborations on this theme. One editor says, “darlings are scenes or sections that are fantastically written, funny, evocative…but don’t belong. They don’t move the story forward, or they repeat stuff we already know, or they cause problems with pacing, conflict, or characterization. And they are hard to eliminate. The fantastic writing, wit, and emotion blind us to the truth.”

A computer programmer applies it to code, saying, “If it turns out to be overwrought or too slick for the need, you should probably kill your darling and replace it with an ordinary solution that others can actually use, and not just marvel at.”

Darlings are the little pieces of glitter, the tinsel that the crow felt so proud to weave into her nest, but that turn out to be a distraction to everyone else.

I’m reminded of a word a friend of mine once coined to describe inadvertent foolishness with an overlay of conceit. Fardo, she called it. You think you’re being so smart but what you’re doing is overreaching and laughable. If I leave in that passage about the purple sky and the dusting of stars, will I be fardo?

Quick, don’t all speak up at once.

And yet. When you like something you wrote, when you feel good about that glitter you found – and doesn’t the glitter help hold together the nest, anyway? – won’t it appeal to someone else, to a reader?

I find another piece of Faulkner’s wisdom a bit more inspiring when it comes to writing or rewriting. Something he didn’t crib from an earlier author.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

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Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Savage Girl, Writing

March 6, 2013 · 5:09 pm

A Recipe for Happiness

Milk is good for you!

I was champing at the bit waiting for the final edit of Savage Girl to arrive by mail, so I spent some time organizing my collection of cooking pamphlets and community cookbooks.

They are all precious, whether they date from the oh-so-distant 1900s, with one recipe for a “Nice Luncheon Dish” (of sardines) and another for “Plain Apple Pudding,” (starred in pencil by the original owner of the book),

The homespun ’30s,

The science-minded ’40s,

The ’50s, domain of the housewife

Well, every decade with these pamphlets is the domain of the housewife.

And man-the-grill husband. Something for everyone.

The eerie, disembodied homemakers of pamphlets published by companies like Sunbeam grab me the most, I guess.

All this art conveys a plainer time – a time when people actually cooked at home. Betty Friedan’s got nuthin’ on Hamilton Beach.

Recipes reflected a desire for novelty. For expanded horizons. Like this one from the 1939 World’s Fair.

Here you can learn to make “Venezuelan Hallacus,” and wow your friends.

Canned Fish Recipes suggests the adventurous “Delmonico Salmon in Rice Nests” and crunchy, bread crumb-rolled “Crabettes”.

Some are sneakily subversive. A Lion in the Kitchen: Meats has a passage by a member of the Lions Club of Hudson, Indiana, “How to Cook a Husband,” that advises, Some women keep their husbands in a stew by irritating words and ways; others waste them. Some keep them in a pickle all the lives. No husbands will be tender and good if treated in such ways, but they are extremely delicious when properly managed over a steady heat. After some more of this it continues: Tie him into the kettle by a strong silken cord of comfort; the one called duty is only jute and is apt to be weak. If he flies out of the kettle, he is apt to be burned and crusty around the edges, since, like crabs and lobsters, they must be cooked while alive. Etc.

The fact that companies and organizations used these publications for self-promotion bothers me not a whit.

Or this number from General Foods:

Or this, from Armour.

Some were straight from the heart, self published, with a readership of their church congregation, if that.

Some are just a mystery (coffee stained in this case).

And some are just a gas.

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March 5, 2013 · 9:54 pm

A New Way In

Just to let readers know, I have now thoroughly indexed these blog posts, going back over a year — a task I’d been putting off and then quite enjoyed. So, if this is a day on which you find yourself particularly interested in history, or art, or cooking, etc., you can simply click on a category to the right and scroll down through my various posts on the subject, most recent first.

I have been thinking that I would really like to follow the suggestions of my readers more as well as my own whims. So if something strikes you that you’d like me to explore, please drop me a comment and let me know.

Maud always says to post more recipes. Would you like more recipes?

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March 5, 2013 · 5:57 pm

Under Cover

I’m thinking about book covers.

Gil takes the jacket off pronto and reads the book naked. The paper covers float arouind the Cabin like disembodied spirits until we remember to replace them.

My editor at Viking was nice enough to ask me for early weigh-in, for ideas as they develop the cover for Savage Girl, my novel which is just now going into production (it’ll be out next winter). My editor did not have to do that. Tradition dictates that authors are owed a consult on the cover, no more. And my last two experiences with jacket art at Viking have been so superb that I trust them implicitly.

But since he asked, I’m thinking about book covers.

The hardcover of The Orphanmaster amazed me because it incorporated period graphics that I thought you’d really have to be an expert to be aware of.

Someone did their homework. On the back flap is fine print that enumerates the images that appear here as a fantastic collage: (hand, detail) Pieter van Miereveld, The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images; (background) View of New York by Johannes Vingbooms, c. 1664, LOC[accession numbers follow]; (foreground) Moonlight Scene, Southampton, 1820 (oil on canvas), Sebasion Pether/The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images. The type’s so small I might have got some of this wrong, but suffice it to say the designers did their homework and the result is seamless and just the right degree of spooky, with its moonlit view of a haunted, tiny New Amsterdam on the tip of Manhattan island so, so long ago.

I always loved that evocation. Then, looking into it a little further, I found out the designer responsible is actually a cover art magician by the name of Gregg Kulick, who has jacketed dozens if not hundreds of books, for various publishers. And is just really smart. He was straightforward when the Huffington Post asked him to name the most important element of a successful book cover: “Getting people to pick it up.”

I also think highly of the cover for The Orphanmaster’s upcoming softcover edition (out April 30).

As an author, I feel so lucky. To me this design holds just the right balance of sweetness and terror, with the little girl’s rosy face and the skull hovering over her shoulder. I’m hoping it will attract some readers who didn’t get a chance to check out the novel the first time around. Bookclubbers, especially who wait for the softcover to pounce.

An interesting place to check out cover ideas is the web site Talking Covers, where authors and jacket designers hold forth on the development of the art for a particular book. The depth of the discussion can be really astonishing. I looked around here, and also at books on the web at the Book Cover Archive and at Amazon and found it was hard to imagine what might be a starting approach for Savage Girl. Historical fiction, yes, murder mystery, yes, and it takes place in New York during the Gilded Age – all strong features of the book. But what images could get across my story so that a reader would, as Kulik said, “pick it up”?

I found myself liking covers with bold, striking colors, semi-abstract.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove, for example, by Karen Russell.

Or Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet.

But did these and other disparate, attractive books have any bearing on what should design should clothe Savage Girl?

Back in the day, books did not have jackets. You would buy pages bound with cardboard – then bind the volume yourself with leather. When Fanny Trollope came out with her famous 1832 book that lampooned the United States, Domestic Manners of the Americans, London booksellers offered it in two parts, one red, one blue, cloth-bound in the latest fashion, with gilt titling on the spine. It had a huge first run printing of 1,250. Reviews in England were great, those in the U.S. stunk, and Fanny shot to the top of the bestseller list. Perhaps aided by those chic cloth covers?

I like cloth, still. Some nearly naked volumes are my favorites, like The Goede Vrouw of Mana-ha-ta, by Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, published by Scribner’s in 1898.

With an especially beautiful spine.

(My volume was formerly loved as a library book.)

Or, more recently, Magnus Nilsson’s Faviken, its cloth stamped with black flora and fauna.

Cloth or paper-bound, though, a book should jump into your hand from the bookstore shelf. It should warm your lap as you read it; it should purr. A book jacket has to live.

Whether I go to my editor proposing a pearly satin debut gown or a bloody pawprint — two images that pop into my mind when I think of the Savage Girl story–my ideas on their own won’t make much sense. What matters is your designer, your brillant designer of book jackets, and whatever blooms in his head.

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March 4, 2013 · 4:11 pm

A Sweet Old World

“Sweet Old World” came on the radio when I was driving today. I’ve heard Lucinda Williams’ song a hundred times before — it’s 20 years old — and I still blinked back tears. I was thinking of someone in particular: my mother-in-law.

See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world

The breath from your own lips, the touch of fingertips

The heartbreak in Lucinda’s voice and that intertwined fiddle and guitar, it gets you coming and going. But the lyrics truly soar.

A sweet and tender kiss

The sound of a midnight train, wearing someone’s ring

It’s commonly understood that the whole point of “Sweet Old World” is to enumerate all that you leave behind when you go – that, specifically, it speaks to a person who has made the mistake of choosing to leave this earth. About a loved one’s suicide.

Someone calling your name

Sad, so sad. But the song has depths of meaning besides. Emmy Lou Harris covered “Sweet Old World.” She told Lucinda in a conversation that while people think she’s singing about the death of Gram Parsons, “sometimes that enters into it, but that song has so many different levels. It’s a song that talks about our own mortality, as well as others.”

My mother-in-law, Eloise, now in her 90s, is just waiting to step off this mortal coil, confined to a bed, drifting in a hospice-administered cloud of sweet morphine. Some stern higher being decided to take her brain before her body, so she was left in a devastating irony exactly as she hadn’t planned or wished: without her sharp mind, her wit, her total independence.

Somebody so warm cradled in your arms

What makes Lucinda’s song relevant here is that in verses’ litany of things undone, not experienced, undervalued, Eloise had them all in spades. The touch of fingertips,the ring, the sound of a train, someone calling her name. She had her church, the friends she played cards with, a handsome, charming husband, a bushel basket of kids and grandkids.

Millions of us in love, promises made good

Your own flesh and blood

Eloise could hike faster than anybody I’ve ever seen. I saw her plant a quarter acre of wildflower seed, then spend hours on her hands and knees pulling weeds until the garden was perfect.

Looking for some truth, dancing with no shoes

Gil and his sisters take turns by the bedside, holding their mother’s hand. Good night Eloise. It is a sweet old world.

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March 3, 2013 · 5:01 pm

The Chaos of Memories

There is a photographer, Jon Crispin, who has taken some arresting pictures of the suitcases belonging to crazy people. I’m talking about mentally ill patients incarcerated in the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane in New York State between the 1920s and the 1960s. When the hospital was converted into a prison in the mid-1990s, around 400 carrying cases of deceased patients were discovered in an attic. Recently, Crispin spent a year working to document the belongings of people who are now ghosts. Here are some of the 80-100 photos he has made so far.

These are marvelously textured snapshots of men’s and women’s lives. You can’t believe the things the photographer discovered, the objects he documented: from toothbrushes to dimestore snapshots to spools of thread. The beautiful and the banal hand in hand.

One person had a comprehensive set of woodworking tools. Another, a lengthy itemization of her elegant clothing. We have some idea about who these people were because patient records survived and because former Willard staffers worked in tandem with the New York State Museum to preserve the cache of luggage.

I’m especially moved by this project, having many friends and family members who might be a bit “teched,” you could say (myself included). In previous eras, all of us might be stigmatized and isolated in an asylum, with only a suitcase to our names.

The satchels and valises call to mind something the great German writer-philosopher-aesthete Walter Benjamin wrote in “Unpacking My Library,” a famous essay about book collecting: Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. The collectors Benjamin had in mind were connoisseurs of fine volumes, leather-bound works worth thousands of dollars apiece. But his words apply as much I think to those who have fallen on hard times, people who build their very finite collections-in-a-suitcase inadvertently to some extent (what trinkets you wind up with at the end of the day) but deliberately, also (what you make every effort to keep, against all odds).

In collecting, on a bookshelf or in a suitcase, you yourself assign value to objects, you alone decide what is worthy. It’s a way of managing that “chaos of memories,” and it elucidates your character. I like something Crispin said in an interview with Collectors Weekly: “The suitcases themselves tell me everything I want to know about these people. I don’t really care if they were psychotic; I care that this woman did beautiful needlework.”

He told Slate in a recent article that the project wasn’t all ghastly: “Some of the stuff is funny. You see odd things: false teeth out of context, for example. It wasn’t all heavy-duty, serious stuff. I think the pictures are successful because they do convey a sense of time and the struggle people had to deal with.” Some of the pictures will go an exhibit at the San Francisco Exploratorium on April 17.

To me, though, the sadness inherent in these carryalls brings to mind another, notorious image of abandoned suitcases – the ones at Auschwitz, now piled high in Block Five of the on-site museum, marked with victims’ names, telling their woesome story alongside shoes and a display of artificial limbs.

But, incongruously, the photos from Willard also call to mind a more immediate, recent, happy time, for me, when I was touring to talk about my novel and my suitcase was always packed beside my bed with what I needed to fly. Face wash, check, Kindle, check, laser pointer, check. I got a suitcase for my birthday after years of depending on a dilapidated duffel. The new green bag meant unexpected, exciting things might occur at any moment.

The people whose suitcases Crispin depicts weren’t going anyplace. What was in that luggage was their whole world.

Now, this blog is a kind of suitcase for me. In it I stash small and large things of some importance to me. And for a brief moment, sometimes, you pop the top open and have a look in. What would you like to see here? What interests you? Tell me outright in a comment and I’ll try to pack it.

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March 2, 2013 · 12:30 pm

Mud Pies and Other Delicacies

I think this is my favorite season. It’s actually an inter-season, when the last of the snow has nearly melted and the reeds of last summer still stand tall and blond and dry.

And yet… the canes of bushes like these raspberries are reddening.

Tiny fringes of green poke through rotted leaves.

You can almost hear the sap rising in the trees. The end of winter. The beginning of spring.

I’m impatient to have the warm weather here. At five in the morning the birds are beginning to tune up. I am ready for the warm-weather mud.

I still think of a book I obsessed over when I was a child, called Mud Pies and Other Recipes. The author, Marjorie Winslow, spelled out instructions that called for raindrops (to make “fried water”) and crushed dry leaves, flower petals and pine needles (for appetizers, to serve prettily in baking cups cut from shirt cardboard). I dreamed over that book.

There was, naturally, plenty of mud. For “wood chip dip” you must “mix dirt with water until it is as thick as paste. Place this bowl on a platter surrounded by wood shavings. Scoop the dip with the chip.” For a kid who liked to build homes out of acorn shells between the roots of trees, this was heady stuff.

The landscape around the Cabin, especially in this inter-season, makes me wonder what magic Winslow would concoct here.

How about a bark sandwich?

But let’s try to leave babyish games behind.

One of the best-known young Scandinavian chefs, Magnus Nilsson, brings nature into his decidedly grownup cuisine, with meals people travel into the remote Swedish hinterlands to experience. Marigold petals are as much staples of his kitchen as they are in the world of Mud Pies, along with ingredients like birch syrup and moose-meat powder.

He has recently come out with a cookbook, Faviken, that evokes fairy tales through its approach to food preparation. The book delineates the secrets of Faviken Magasinet, the fabled restaurant Nilsson runs, giving recipes with surprisingly narrative titles, like “Marrow and heart with grated turnip and turnip leaves that have never seen the light of day, grilled bread and lovage salt.” He explains, about this dish, that “the main ingredients are a perfectly fresh femur and an equally fresh cow’s heart.” Not something I’m going to try at home, but possessed of a mythic poetry. Or how about this one? “A tiny slice of top blade from a retired dairy cow, dry aged for nine months, crispy reindeer lichen, fermented green gooseberries, fennel salt.”

Magnus Nilsson loves lichen. He loves all the ingredients from Mud Pies, it would seem. A typical recipe: “Pine mushroom, lamb’s kidney, pickled marigold.” Wild plants distinguish his cooking. “Vegetables cooked with autumn leaves.” And perhaps the most spectacular yet absolutely simple preparation: “Vinegar matured in the burnt-out trunk of a spruce tree.”

I bet I could put together some pretty good acorn furniture for the base.

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March 1, 2013 · 3:39 pm

Getting a Head of Myself

I really wanted the headcheese. Or headcheeses. There were quite a few at the Polish food shop.

But we ended up with kielbasa, which hung high above the many other types of wursts on display.

I am the only one in my household that will deign to consume a pressed, jellied concoction of bits of pig’s head, heart and other rather downscale meats.

I wondered how the dish came about its name, since it has no cheese in it.

The chef Brad Farmerie gives this derivation: “The word fromage comes from the Latin word forma, which translates as a basket or wooden box in which compressed curds were molded to make cheese. Forma, and then fromage, became the word for cheese, but also remained synonymous with the concept of molding and pressing no matter what was being formed. Thus, the forming of a pig’s head using a mold is called fromage de tête and translates more to “pressed head” than anything to do with cheese, but we English speakers ignore a few of these minor details and use the direct translation to come up with the delightfully unusual ‘headcheese’.” Farmerie has a recipe on his site, along with a vivid photograph of pig snouts rising up out of a steaming pot that I can’t bear to include here.

It’s a little hard to enjoy pork, I find, when you knew the pig. This summer we laughed at the hijinks of the piglets my nephew was raising in Wisconsin. They rooted where they shouldn’t and skipped about and were delightful pests if not pets. Not so many months later, we were the recipients of a tasty haunch – Gil cured and smoked it and we’re still eating the ham. But its savor, as fine as it is, can’t be separated from the memory of those young, peppy swine. In my mind, at least.

Pickles are a good, pork-free food.

Mushrooms, too. Especially Milky Cap mushrooms, whatever they may be.

Today we stocked up on pierogi, saurkraut, and other fixings for a Polish feast. The Pole in me – my paternal grandparents’ line, who lived around Lodz – salivated, even though as Jews I don’t think my progenitors would have stepped in a store whose main product was pork.

There are a few things I don’t eat, but I am proud to say I create my own dietary restrictions, which I am free to break at will. Serve me an oyster today and I may decline, but next week I’ll scarf it down. Especially if it’s in the oyster stew from the Oyster Bar at Grand Central. I’m girding up to try escargots again, too, as long as they’re swimming in garlic butter.

It’s all good, as long as I have my slimming coffee to round out the meal.

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February 28, 2013 · 9:44 pm

A La Mode at the Met

I’m at the Met.

Doo wop’ers belting out, “Words could never explain/I just wish it would rain!” What did the Temptations mean with that song?

On my way to a stunning exhibit, to a series of rooms where I will swoon, I get clobbered by various objects I see. The Metropolitan Museum of Art really does have it all. There is no reason to ever go anywhere else.

A yellowed, carved ivory tusk, Byzantine 810. Jesus in your pocket.

Elsewhere, cloissone garnets glow in whorling brooches, made in the year 500 by mad German jewelers. I’m taking a scattershot approach to beauty this afternoon, ranging over continents in every hallway to find the loveliest things.

A golden girdle from Cyprus, hammered around the same time as the cloissone. Down the hall, skipping through an exhibit called “Plain and Fancy,” I stumble upon the designer whose work I encountered earlier this year: Christopher Dresser, urbane and brilliant Englishman who introduced a lovely angularity to objects in the second half of the 19^th century. Here he has an 1880 tureen and ladle formed of electroplate and ivory, and a pronged letter rack of silver plate. Down the way, a taste of something completely different: a sugary pink and white Sevres tea service crafted in 1855 for some extravaganza of a tea party.

More fragments of created beauty on the way to the exhibit. Jean-Honore Fragonard, Monsier Rococo, one of my favorites for syrupy, cheeky pictures, and his “A Woman with a Dog,” from 1769. What an expression.

Then I reach the prize, “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity” a new exhibit that has me under its spell before I reach the middle of the first room.

This is a show that displays paintings by the French greats of the late 19^th century, Manet, Monet, etc., and then showcases the clothing worn in the paintings. Showcased in prismatic vitrines set up in the middle of the room. So there is Albert Bartholome’s “In the Conservatory,” for example, where he treats his wife coming in from the garden – and right there is her costume itself, all purple polka dots, stripes and pleats, with about a 24 inch waist, miraculously preserved by the family.

I come upon a crisp photo of a woman posed in a spreading black dress, knock-out elegant, holding up a black and white fan, and displayed alongside, the actual intricate fan.

There are some paintings that have not been matched to the exact garment, but they are splendid even in two dimensions – like James Tissot’s portrait of Marquis de Miromon in 1866, her outrageous bubblegum-colored ruffle cascading to the floor.

But Tissot also painted a redhead by a window opening onto the sea, lounging in white flounces, with a pale yellow ribbon down her front, and the Met somehow found two specimens that are not this dress but quite close to it.

Berthe Morisot’s paintings are on display, but she is also here as a subject, painted in white by Manet. She married his brother–and was also Fragonard’s grand niece!

A critic at the time wrote that she “grinds flower petals onto her palette in order to spread them later on her canvas, with airy, witty touches.”

Small gestures predominate, as in Carolus Duran, a woman in elegant black (black being greatly a la mode, suddenly) delicately pulling off her dove grey gloves.

The Met’s analysis of all this lusciousness: “The novelty, vibrancy, and fleeting allure of the latest trends in fashion proved seductive for a generation of artists and writers who sought to give expression to the pulse of modern life in all its nuanced richness.”

But I wouldn’t overthink it. Purple polka dots, the painted and the genuine. It gave me the shivery feeling that I could somehow walk right in to the paintings and live there.

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February 27, 2013 · 8:49 pm

1933 at the Movies

Sometimes, when you make writing your work, you get to keep your own hours. That means getting the non-job-stuff done on a Tuesday, and fun stuff as well.

So I got my coif chopped while Gil waited stoically.

We parked our steed against a pole in Tribeca.

We dined on crisp crust pizza at 4 pm – what is better than the meal that is not lunch nor dinner? call it dunch – in a little restaurant with a stamped tin ceiling and raw brick walls.

Then we went to the movies.

Film Forum, the great independent cinema on West Houston Street, is showing 66 films from 1933, a series it calls “1933: Hollywood’s Naughtiest, Bawdiest Year,” presented in collaboration with the Library of Congress. That was the year of genius works like George Cukor’s Dinner at Eight and Little Women, and Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living, and the great King Kong with Fay Wray, among numerous other classics. Standing in the lobby, I saw a young woman with appropriately styled seamed stockings and sensible shoes – then another cinephile more of our time, sporting purple tights. Before the lights went down, vintage music emanated from the auditorium’s speakers: “Am I only moonstruck or is this really love?” crooned a 1930s tenor.

Then our trip to the dark side. See, there were many less celebrated numbers in 1933, most of them a bit pungent, with titles like Picture Snatcher and Hard to Handle and Female. 1933 was the final year of “pre-Code” movies, before the studios began to implement self-censorship, first stated in the Hays Code. It took a long time to move past this pinching back of the cinematic imagination.

We saw a triple feature, sinking down into our well-used chairs until our seats went slightly numb. 20,000 Years in Sing Sing was a marvelous oportunity to admire vistas of the prison that still marks the downtown of Ossining, our little community. Even today, we can drive right up to the walls and wave at the gun-toting guards in the towers above. They don’t like that too much. In the film, a smooth-faced Spencer Tracy takes the rap for moll Bette Davis’ self-defense killing.

Then we saw Blood Money, a wacky saga of a bail bondsman and a thrillseeking debutante. And, finally, Laughter in Hell, a long-lost flick that shows in chilling detail the experiences of a chain gang and even a multiple hanging.

They were all great, a truly rare experience. If you can get over to the Film Forum, the festival’s ongoing until March 7.

Hungarian Reprint: The Orphanmaster

Introducing the book jacket for the Hungarian edition of The Orphanmaster:

To me, it looks so exotic, those mysterious half-smiling girls above the dark, spooky ships with their tangle of masts…

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February 25, 2013 · 5:12 pm

Beasts of the Prehistoric Wild

A lunchtime conversation yesterday with some science-heads got me to thinking about prehistoric mammals and how we got along with them way back when. Evidence of Pleistocene-age man coexisting with “megafauna”—gnarly, gigantic beasts–can be found the world over.

Woolly mammoths, sabertooth tigers and giant sloths thrived up until 12,000 or so years ago and we thrived alongside them. But they weren’t the only oversize creatures. How about dire wolves, giant beavers, the stag-moose, the giant polar bear and the saber-tooth salmon? No joke. As if polar bears aren’t big enough today. And the auroch, the ox-like creature which actually survived in Europe until the middle ages.

I’m always amazed to think that in The Odyssey, when the characters constantly throw meat on the fire, Homer is probably referring to flavorful cuts of the gigantic auroch. (If you’ve seen Beasts of the Southern Wild, the mythical animal called an auroch is simply a blown-up potbellied pig.)

To me, all these shaggy, heavy-footed animals are both more fascinating and more terrifying than any Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Bits of their story – and ours – continue to surface. Monte Verde, Chile, for example, was excavated beginning more than 30 years ago, when the remains of mastodons were discovered right alongside stone artifacts and nearly a dozen house foundations. A bog sealed over the site, protecting the wooden relics from decay. Archaeologists have even found seeds and fruits in mortars, suitable for crushing.

All this in the middle of an Ice Age that created ice fields two miles high.

Wouldn’t you like to reach out and touch a woolly mammoth?

It sounds ridiculous, but a lot of people would, for real, and scientists have been trying for years to clone one from the bodies they find buried, usually in Siberian permafrost. The problem is, no viable DNA has yet been discovered. That may soon change. A team from Russia’s North-Eastern Federal University recently found a set of well-preserved remains, including the fur and bone marrow that may contain living cells, during a paleontological trip in the province of Yakutia. The living cells would contain an intact nucleus, which would be inserted into an elephant embryo, and coaxed into becoming a mammoth clone. Interesting feature on cloning mammoths here.

I don’t know, though, I think I’d rather see a real, live Pleistocene cave lion, 11 and a half feet in length and 700 pounds, like the kind depicted in Werner Herzog’s mesmerizing documentary about paintings in the Chauvet cave in France, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Inhabitants of the cave rendered the cats in detail, including the scrotum of the male, alongside their own beautiful signature handprints.

The cave lion fed, it would appear from evidence in similar caves in Romania, on giant cave bears, whose hibernation nests have been found alongside the skeletons of giant hyenas. Horses rounded out their diet.

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Filed under History, Jean Zimmerman, Nature

February 24, 2013 · 6:27 pm

A Tune Up

I thought I’d spend the midday concert with my knitting. I’ve always thought that being able to knit and do something at the same time was the coolest thing in the world. My great aunt, a knitter par excellence, took her work with her into the darkened movie theater. I’ve always had a burning envy of that.

But today it was not to be, and that was probably a good thing. The ribbon I’m employing to knit is too slippery and the library’s basement theater was too shadowy to allow me to handle it properly.

So I listened. I paid attention. I dreamed.

The first thing I noticed was the fiddle, color blocked, as the fashionistas would have it, in glossy black and honey-colored wood. I’ve never seen such a beaut of a violin. It belonged to Harry Bolick, “fiddle player and tunesmith,” as he styles himself.

Then came the tunes, old-timey, straightforward and pretty… sweet, said Bolick, introducing each number. He played with a guitar accompanist. The full room hushed to hear this message from another place and time.

We were transported to Carroll County, Mississippi, listening to the compositions of rural musicians–both black and white–from the beginning of the 20^th century, collected as part of WPA efforts in the mid-‘30s then basically forgotten about. Bolick has been researching the “lost fiddle tunes” of the Magnolia State for a book. As he played, we could hear the simple thunking steps of the square dance, the slightly lighter gait of the waltz. We listened to one song that was the best seller of 1929, selling 100,000 copies. Bolick is a fiddle player, yes, a tunesmith, yes, but also a musicologist. (Some songs can be heard on his website.)

In those days, men out in the countryside courted women that had pianos because they wanted to marry music. There was a virtuoso named Alvin Alsop, now known to almost no one but surely one of the brightest talents of his neighborhood. His song Sweet Milk and Peaches lifted me up, spun me around and set me down in another time.

I saw a road leading through black-dirt fields to a community center. I saw patched gingham skirts and dungarees and a fifth of whiskey poking out of a chest pocket, the windows propped open and a fiddler and banjo player in the corner, everyone flushed and ready to go all night… When I got home I found this picture, snapped in 1939. It matched my fantasy exactly. Let’s waltz.

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Filed under History, Knitting, Music, Photography

February 23, 2013 · 5:16 pm

Adding On

I’ve been a little laid up with an ornery quadriceps today, sitting on the couch, smoothed out with Motrin, admiring the fire and working up a ribbon scarf for my friend who is just moving in to a new home.

She actually cut through from her old apartment to claim the new space, so it’s sort of a Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe situation, with the old place lived in and broken in and loved, and the new place all spitshined and airy and immaculate. Magical.

The scarf I’m knitting isn’t the complementary flower arrangement those new light-sage walls deserve, but it’s got the warm rose colorations of the springtime that will have arrived when she and her family have moved in and colonized those spacious, high-ceilinged rooms.

Yesterday we toasted the novelty of getting this new add-on to her life, with seltzer. “If you don’t have enough,” chortled my friend, “reach for more!” She had been waiting a long time for this expansion.

The scent of just-finished oak flooring reminded me of moving in to an off-campus apartment so many years ago, when I was in college. The combined polyurethene underfoot and bright white latex on the walls made a heady perfume that promised a new exotic life out from adult supervision. I remember the sound bouncing off the undisturbed walls the first day I walked in, they echoed with promise. I put a scarred old wooden office desk in the corner and propped up my beloved books, then set my bed against the window where I could look out over the little trees in Straus Park and hear the rumble and wheeze of the 104 Broadway bus halting at the stop on our corner. It was the first home that I myself made, all for myself.

“Home is a name, a word,” wrote Dickens. “It is a strong one; stronger than a magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.”

You can live in a primitive treehouse in Laos, or a Fifth Avenue duplex.

I’ve written about an 1890s mansion in the Berkshires, called Shadow Brook, that had 100 rooms and an attic so big kids could ride their bikes in it. My own house of the moment, the Cabin, could fit in a pocket.

Home exerts the same pull, no matter how swellegant or how modest. It affords the same excitement when you first move in, too.

Even for animals. A dog makes a rug its home, those four corners for that moment are the ends of the earth and all that matter.

Dickinson said it, typically, simply: “Where thou art – that – is Home.” So, to expand your home, it would seem, to move in, especially if you’ve been yearning for it for years, is an expansion of self. Could anything be more thrilling?

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Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Knitting

February 21, 2013 · 5:39 pm

Day Trip to the 1890s

Feeling a little cabin feverish today. So icy outside, and so still, only the titmouse on the feeder seems alive.

I wonder what I’d be doing if I lived in Manhattan in the 1890s?

Strolling the top of the Croton Reservoir at 42nd and Fifth, where the New York Public Library now stands? There used to be a little shop across the street where we could take a refreshment. Hot cocoa, then cloak your cold fingers in a warm fur handmuff.

Or perhaps if it warmed up in the afternoon we’d go cycling up at Riverside Drive, on the Upper West Side. After all, for women, being on a bike had gone from being incomprehensibly daring to exceedingly fashionable. Sagacious Susan B. Anthony said that cycling “did more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”

Or after all, why not just go home to a shabby-genteel (emphasis on the shabby) clapboard cottage on Amsterdam Avenue at 122nd Street. (Maud’s dorm now overlooks this exact corner.) Then it was still very much in the country. Note the goat on the steps near the front door.

I wonder what the wallpaper looks like inside?

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Filed under History, Jean Zimmerman, Photography

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