two umbrellas

I am certainly an amateur in the kitchen. I have learned to become much more comfortable in the kitchen and have come to quite enjoy cooking. Every once and a while mr twoumbrellas and I like to try something a bit fancy: homemade cassoulet or pasta sauce. Crepes were fun; mustard was not. I need to follow a recipe. I don’t have a chef’s intuition about food combinations, tastes, or textures. But we have a good time and there is no pressure other than deciding where to eat when things don’t go as planned, which luckily isn’t too often.

Bill Buford’s Heat is a story about the average man who decides that he wants to learn what it takes to be a chef. As you begin the book, there is an understanding that Buford is slightly more than an amateur, if not in his skills at least in his palate. He begins his cooking adventure with Mario Batali, whose restaurant, Babbo, has three stars in New York. I had never heard of Batali before reading Heat, but apparently he was a pioneer of the “new” celebrity chef – not the traditional Julia Child, who became a household name; but the celebrity chef as rock star: a bad-ass demagogue of trendy food with an inflated ego. Batali transformed the Food Network (or according to Food Network, they transformed him) into its modern day spectacle, leaning a little towards food porn, where personality and presentation are more important than food, taste, or technique. Buford does present Batali as a rock star – luckily as the kind that everyone wants to believe in: lives too fast and too hard, drinks, eats, and parties harder than most thought humanly possible. What I appreciated about the celebrity Batali is that he seems to always have food and cooking at heart. We learn that the real celebrity chefs (i.e. the ones you don’t hear about because they are too busy to be television stars) see food and cooking as an art. I don’t think I thought about food that way until I read this book.

The book (as the subtitle suggests) takes the reader on a cooking adventure from the depths of a famous kitchen, with all its personalities, to Tuscany, where food is not an art but the living history of generations of Italians – the ghosts of families and traditions lingering in every bite. Buford writes eloquently yet personally throughout the book. While a kitchen slave at Babbo, he gets humilated, stressed, burnt, sliced, and a thorough education of what is necessary to make a three star kitchen. There are few secrets left and I will think twice before I am quick to order specials (particularly if I think they could have come from the trash). Buford also skillfully addresses food history and even some techniques that I was able to take away from the book and use in my own kitchen.

The book focuses on Italian cooking (Babbo is an Italian restaurant) and the focus made for a stronger book. He doesn’t ignore other styles of cooking (there are some elements of French vs. Italian styles) but the focus gives the book a greater roundedness where I didn’t feel like I was just following some guy around who was able to quit his day job (writer for the New Yorker) to work for free for a year or so in the kitchen. The book wasn’t about him. It was about the food, the history, the restaurant business, and an almost mythical Mario Batali.

A few months ago I went to a reading presented by Hobart magazine. It was a good time and the readings were good. As an added bonus, they gave away door prizes and mine happened to be a one year’s subscription to Ninth Letter, a literary magazine that is published by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The print version is large, bulky and very hard to handle. I would never take it on the bus with me. However, it is a treasure chest. It is beautiful. The art is creative, interesting, and unique – unique not only to the magazine, but to each piece. The magazine covers fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and interviews. The Fall/Winter issue boasts works by: Oscar Hijuelos (and an interview), Michael Martone, and Louise Erdrich, just to name a few in the 200 or so pages of the magazine.

Today was the first day that I went to the website. Again, very dramatic art and design. But there is more. The website has added content and featured artists. One of the featured artists is Richard Powers, who has contributed a piece of short fiction called, “They Come in a Steady Stream Now.” It is a piece that needs to be experienced.

There are so many literary magazines available online and in print. Often it is difficult to comb through all of the new writing and find pieces that are creative, well written, universal and timeless (lofty qualities – I know) and presented in an innovative way. But there are a few.

The Guardian has a new story by Tessa Hadley. It’s only a few short paragraphs but she is always able to pack a lot of sensuality and sound into a sentence:

We crunched in socks and sandals across a rim of crisped black seaweed and bone and sea-washed plastic: the tide was in, the long grey line of the waves curled and sucked at the cramped remainder of the beach, a narrow strip of pebbles.

As in many cities around the country, Philadelphia will be having their Winter Restaurant Week from January 28-February 2, 2007. mr twoumbrellas and I will be dining at Django.

At only $30 per person for a three course meal, it’s a great way to sample the more expensive treats at a reasonable cost. As I find myself becoming a bit of an amateur foodie, I am very excited.

The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway is a short but dense novel that infuses writing and identity on many levels. The writing is hard and desperate – at only 247 pages, it took me almost two weeks to get through it. When I read most of Hemingway (with probably the only exception being the Nick Adams stories), I am left feeling weighted and heavy, burdened with emotion as if I had been able to read the mind of someone I love. I am not used to such stark prose and I am always surprised by sheer honesty.

The novel begins with David and Catherine, newlyweds on their honeymoon, completely satisfied with themselves. They make love, eat, drink, and swim (I don’t think that life could get much better). But in reality, no one can ever be completely satisfied. Catherine decides to cut her hair short, like a man’s, lets herself get very tan, and decides to dominate David in the bedroom. David allows the transformation and even allows Catherine to introduce Marita into their lives, who becomes the balance between David and Catherine. Eventually, David needs to go back to work (he is a writer) and Catherine reveals who she really is – a young, jealous, and unstable woman who doesn’t know who or what she wants to be. David begins to struggle with two realities, the one that is real and the one he creates in his work. Marita plays many sides, loving Catherine, David and David’s work. In the end, everyone is desperate and betrayed, which is foretold early in the book when Catherine says:

There’s nothing except through yourself,” she said, “And I don’t want to die and it be gone.”

The sadness in the story comes from the struggle of duality. That we are forced to be selfish and giving on so many levels. How is it that David can give all of his love to Catherine and Marita and his writing? How, then, is Catherine supposed to give all of his love to David, and Marita, and let David have his work? What happens when we want everything and get everything? You are only left with one thing – usually yourself.

The beauty of the book comes from the writing in two ways. First, as mentioned, how easily and openly Hemingway writes (which I won’t dwell on because everyone knows why Hemingway is so good). Second, David is a writer and so Hemingway must write what it is to be a writer. I love novels that teach you how to write. I know that should be a statement about most novels, but reading Hemingway is often like having a good book read and annotated to you by your own personal writing coach:

In the story [David] had tried to make the elephant come alive again as he and Kibo had seen him in the night when the moon had risen. Maybe I can, David thought, maybe I can…No, you can’t do it…There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. An you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.

aside This is an interesting post that goes through what the characters had to drink. An extensive list, I must say.

I recently read this post at the Guardian and was intrigued by the question as I had been recently ill and taken to many long days lying around reading. I had just finished Madame Bovary and decided that I needed something that I thought might rely a little more on plot. I picked up The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas. I was pleasantly surprised when I got much more than I bargained for: character, voice, philosophy (that wasn’t too far over my head), and a very good plot.

The book centers around Ariel Manto who is a PhD student researching an obscure (but fictional) author, Thomas E. Lumas. From the opening, the book moves. Her professor has disappeared seemingly without a trace. She finds a secondhand copy of Lumas’ lost novel, The End of Mr. Y, which is supposed to have been cursed. Then, Ariel finds her way into another dimension. Now I know this sounds bit far fetched and not so literary, but Thomas develops her main character just enough to draw in the reader. Her voice is strong and identifiable, but then I am partial to writers who can throw in a good fuck and have it sound completely natural.

Thomas elevated the story by making it more than just about trips to another dimension. She seamlessly weaved in Heidegger, Derrida, and Einstein (among others). In traveling to this other world, Ariel questions how and where could it exist and begins to question thoughts and language. How can a world be defined? Who or what makes or governs these definitions? Is it a god? Or a scientist? What if someone could see the world in its most basic form and thus be able to define it? How could Newton or Einstein understand the world in such a way that changes our concept of reality?

I am left with all of these questions at the end of the novel (even if the characters aren’t – hence the title). I can’t help but ponder our current technology, particularly computer technology. (If mr. two umbrellas reads this post, he may have to correct me.) It seems that computer scientists have the ability to understand language and its processes at their most basic form (creating many languages that manipulate ones and zeros), so much so that they can manipulate and create actual things: applications, networks, etc. I recently read Steven Levy on Stewart Brand in Bookforum (unfortunately not online) and in the article Levy discusses the a famous quote by one of the members of the Xerox PARC team that created the graphical user interface: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

The Guardian profiles Philip Gourevitch, the new editor of The Paris Review:

I love what the Paris Review was, its traditions, what it stands for; but I didn’t feel that I was being hired to act as the curator of a museum piece. Rather, that I should treat it as a living thing, with its own new form. It’s a sign of my respect for Plimpton that I’m not trying to be him…

We’re living in complicated and dramatic times, and I feel that our literature, especially the periodical fiction, is rarely up to the wildness and boldness of the times, that it seldom expresses the outlandishness and range of the actors and actions that are shaping our world. Without trying to run a timely publication [the Paris Review is a quarterly] I feel it’s exciting to see what gets thrown off at a glancing angle from the actual headlines: not only as non-fiction narrative, but as fiction, as poetry, even as interview.

What can I say about Madame Bovary that hasn’t already been said? Probably not much other than that I should have been forced to read this book many years ago and shouldn’t have waited so long to force myself. Although (it seems as of late) I have a penchant for reading tales of adultery, I read this book because of Milan Kundera’s essay in The New Yorker. I am always open to learning new ways of storytelling or even just sentence writing – but now I know I was missing some of the foundation.

What I loved about this book were it’s sentences. I didn’t like the story that much – in fact, it got to be quite boring and tiresome about two thirds of the way through. But I knew I had to finish. I couldn’t wait to get to the next sentence just to see what it would be like and what Flaubert could do with it:

The street (the only street), long as a rifle-shot and lined with a few shops, abruptly ceases to be a street at the turn of the road.

As for Emma, she never tried to find out whether she was in love with him. Love, to her, was something that comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightning – a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings. It never occurred to her that if the drainpipes of a house are clogged, the rain may collect in pools on the roof; and she suspected no danger until suddenly she discovered a crack in the wall.

Her desires, her sorrows, her experience of sensuality, her evergreen illusions, had developed her step by step, like a flower nourished by manure and by the rain, by the wind and the sun; and she was finally blooming in the fullness of her nature.

The connections that are made become as Kundera writes in his essay “the art of the novel and the territory it explores, the prose of life.” Flaubert creates his sentences as he creates his characters – they are aware of themselves. As I read, I noticed the distance that is maintained among the main characters. Never do we get a sense of Charles and Emma together; we only see Emma’s view or Charles’ view even when they are in the same room. The feelings she has during her affairs are so isolating that they could almost be imaginary. Flaubert exquisitely imitates our own immediate sensibilities that can only be shared with others but never fully known by others.

when newspapers gather what they have read over the past year and make wonderful lists of this year’s best:

• The Independent
• The Times (UK)
• The Guardian
• Boston Globe
• LA Times fiction and nonfiction
• Washington Post
• SF Chronicle (Updated)
• NY Times This list is probably the worst I have seen from the Times. I am losing great respect for the book section with its grandiose self promotion.

Barrel Fever by David Sedaris is an early collection of both short stories and essays. I was unaware that Sedaris wrote stories and I was only familiar with a few of his essays in The New Yorker, so one could say that I was a Sedaris virgin. I felt a little out of the loop (as usual), not having read any of his collections. This collection, being one of his earlier ones, was probably not the best place to start. I was intrigued by the book containing both essays and short stories – where would he be coming from and where did he want to take the reader with such an approach?

Let me start with the stories. There are twelve stories in all and I have a hard time distinguishing them from each other, except for the title story. The stories are written in the first person and they are victimized and they are very angry about it. I enjoyed the angry voice; it’s refreshing to hear a little honesty. However, when all of the voices – even if the characters are male, female, young, old, gay, straight – sound the same, the anger tends to lose its bite. I did appreciate the strings of fantasy that flow through the characters. Narrators create ideal worlds and desires for themselves with such blind sadism that Sedaris’ comedy lies in their fantastic absurdity. Yet, the best short story, “Barrel Fever”, is grounded in (albeit strange) reality, but there is structure and character depth that Sedaris had not achieved in this collection until this story.

The essays are where Sedaris shines. In “Giantess” Sedaris writes for a fetish magazine for people who fantasize about giant women. He seems amazed by these people who have such different desires – a welcome change from the stories where many of his characters are angry about being marginalized. My favorite was “SantaLand Diaries” where Sedaris writes about being an elf at Macy’s during Christmas. He structures the essay like the repetitive days he describes. The paragraphs are short and almost listlike:

Yesterday was my day off, and the afflicted came to visit Santa. I Photo Elfed for Santa Ira this afternoon, and he told me all about it. There were severely handicapped children who arrived on stretchers and in wheelchairs. Santa couldn’t put them on his lap, and often he could not understand them when they voiced their requests. He made it a point to grab each child’s hand and ask what they wanted for Christmas. He did this until he came to a child who had no hand. This made him self-conscious, so he started placing a hand on a child’s knee until he came to child with no legs. After that he decided to simply nod his head and chuckle.

Sedaris’ essays are grounded much more than his stories giving them a fullness in both their comedy and sadness. The entertainment of the fantastic and absurd of his stories only scratches the surface of what he seems to what to give his readers.