I hadn’t intended to make a habit of writing about the weather, but it’s definitely the number one topic of interest for just about everyone I know in the area. I’m sitting at my dining room table looking out at what may by morning be another 6 to 10 inches of snow, and who knows how much by tomorrow evening, when the snow is supposed to cease.
I filled the birdfeeder as the sun was going down. There’s been an unusually feisty song sparrow at the feeder today, doing something that song sparrows are not supposed to do: he was sitting on the small tray under the hanging tube and terrorizing all the other birds that would try to fly in to get some seeds. Song sparrows are known as ground feeders, like juncos, mourning doves, and white-throated sparrows. But I guess these are desperate times. This particular song sparrow didn’t even bother to leave the area while I was filling up the tube. He just hopped around on the ground on the other side of my back stoop, pretending that I couldn’t see him. There were birds on the tray and on the ground well after 5 pm, including the female cardinal who only seems to visit at dawn and dusk. I hope they all make it through the night. This is hard weather for birds; because of their high metabolism, unless they can find enough food uncovered by snow, many will not make it.
I will make it, of course, even though by now I’m godawfully sick of the sweet potato and barley chili I cooked in the crock pot Sunday morning. It’s almost gone. Anything with crushed tomatoes in it will eventually taste like Spaghetti-O’s after the fourth day, and this was no exception. I have plenty of coffee and the fixings for turkey hash, my next experiment. Comfort food for the snowed in.
Any more of this white stuff, however, and I fear I may turn into Dr. Zhivago or Jack from The Shining. Working from home is pleasantly solitary most of the time, but I like knowing that there’s a safety valve available every day in the form of a car and a lunch break. Lately it hasn’t been that simple. I’m afraid of what I might wake up to tomorrow.
Be careful.
Arlene Francis and her Modernist zeal over the early 1960s vacuum-packed food revolution has got me thinking about whether it’s really fair to laugh at her expense in 2010. In hindsight and with the insight of recent research on the probable long-term effects of such food science revolutions as hydrogenated oils, bisphenol-A, and teflon perfluorochemicals, we can look back, if we choose, and shake our fingers at Arlene’s benevolent godfathers: the scientist, the dietitian, and the manufacturer. In an age that has witnessed the scandals of Enron and Philip Morris, it’s hard to imagine that there’s anyone left who still thinks that big business acts in anyone’s primary interest other than its stockholders. It may be, but it’s hard to imagine.
I was thinking about the last session of a month-long workshop I took back in 2007 sponsored by the National Wildlife Federation. The workshop trainined volunteers to be Habitat Stewards who would educate their neighbors and friends and communities on the importance of such things as planting native trees and flowers in their yards, creating habitat for wildlife, reducing negative household impacts on the environment, and raising awareness of the plants and animals living among us. For our last class session, a representative from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources came to talk to us about grants that were available to citizens who developed projects encouraging green practices and native gardening. I don’t remember the woman’s name, but I remember her passion about gardening with native plants and her encouraging spirit—and the small sundrops plants she gave each of us as an appreciation for our work!
Something that she said to the class has stuck with me to this day: She understood that we would likely encounter resistance from our neighbors about changing the practices they might have grown up with, like fertilizing their gardens as heavily as they could afford, watering and treating their lawns so that they would grow lush and thick, or promoting diversity by growing beautiful exotic plants in their gardens from Europe and Asia. She cautioned us that it was important to let people know that they shouldn’t feel guilty about what they might have done in the past—that these practices were only as good as the science at the time, the prevailing truth, but that now we have evidence that other methods and practices are better, and we have a responsibility to change to save ourselves.
Funny how scientific truth can alter with more information, more research. At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Karl Popper, the muse and idol of one of my professors in the biology department at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, took things one step further. I’m paraphrasing inelegantly from memory, but essentially Popper believed that we can never definitively prove a scientific hypothesis to be true, we can only falsify it by testing secondary hypotheses and inferring. We may never know the answer to whether things like trans fats, BPA, Round-Up, and rubber mulch are safe for us or our environment, but we can keep challenging these suppositions and testing their effects. Then we can make the best decisions we can at the time, put truth in the context of what we know through scientific research. We can respect the skeptics and whistle-blowers as essential proponents of the scientific method.
The world of food science was younger in 1960, full of space-age ambition and drive, ready for new ideas, new materials, new solutions. Now it seems to have matured, and we’re finding out that the eating habits and practices of our grandparents and great grandparents might be the best ones after all. Just ask Michael Pollan…
I just ventured outside to see about the condition of my car in the snow. Without a snow shovel. Because, I confess, I don’t have a snow shovel. Not because I am opposed to show shovels, just because I am naive and complacent.
After making a few passes with my straw broom over the back and the driver’s side of the Matrix and a couple of lumbering scoops at the snow with my emptied recycling bin, I have concluded that I will not be moving anytime soon. Plowed in. Snow piled up—no, effectively packed in—to the top of the wheel wells. A long mound of plow-push two feet deep and two feet wide going the length of the street blocking all the cars. This is one of the times I sorely miss having a garage. Maybe by Wednesday I can get on the road again if I need to.
The trouble is, despite being stupid enough to not own a shovel, I can’t stand leaving a job like excavating a car undone, especially when other people will no doubt be venturing out soon, too, with their own tools, appropriate or inappropriate. If I just sit inside, my impacted car will haunt me throughout the day. I could not stand it if I were the last car to be dug out to freedom. Maybe a little bit later I might give it another try using a large salad bowl. In fact, there’s no time like the present…
*Postscript: Went out with said broom, recycling bin, and salad bowl. Man on the way to help his son dig out came by taking pity on me and lent me one of his four shovels. My car now looks like a car and not a glacier. The street is still impassable, but at least my car is free. Now for a shower and some lunch.
I don’t often use this blog to promote specific causes—although I think that’s certainly a perfectly legitimate use of a blog—but I wanted to share a pretty cool new Web site/organization with you that I just found out about today from the Guster mailing list: the Green Music Group.
Guster is my favorite band. I loved them (particularly swoony band member Adam Gardner) even before I found out that they were environmentalists. Adam and his wife, Lauren Sullivan, started the charity Reverb to educate and motivate musicians and their fans to promote environmental sustainability. The Green Music Group seems to be a Reverb project designed to help musicians learn about ways they can lessen the environmental impact of touring.
Since there’s a possibility that some people in the music community read this blog, I thought it was worth a mention. That and I don’t have another particularly thoughtful topic to post about tonight.
Check it out. Even if you don’t have a crush on Adam.
Adam, Ryan, Joe, and Brian of Guster.
"I like to entertain informally. The little spread you see here is set out on the coffee table in my living room. Like most working women, my schedule simply doesn't allow for big affairs very often."
At book group last Sunday, my friend Mark presented me with another book to add to my collection of Modernist pop culture publications: No Time for Cooking, by Arlene Francis, a TV personality most famous for being a panelist on the TV show What’s My Line? Curiously, there is no publication date or copyright page, but Wikipedia tells me the book was published in 1961, by the Carson Packing Co. of Philadelphia, PA.
This book is another true gem of the (then) revolutionary convenience foods cookbook genre. That’s Arlene to the left, sporting a New Look silk dress, the material of which I distinctly remember fondling in the upholstery section of G Street Fabrics in Rockville. In the cookbook, Arlene seems perpetually surprised and delighted; she has her mouth open in every picture, perhaps to be all the more ready to receive one of the treats she’s whipped up from conveniently vacuum-packed meats and produce, Carson Packing Co.’s marketing agenda.
What do you think of Arlene’s “little spread” to the left? I like a woman who knows how to finesse a three-tiered hors d’oeuvre tray, personally, especially when it’s topped off with a jaunty pineapple sculpture. Part of me likes to think I could pull that off one day, but for my trouble, the effort would have to be complemented by a full range of classic highballs. Will you come to my cocktail party if I promise to serve Bologna Ring Mold (p. 91), Frankfurter Suey (not “suet,” n.b., p. 95), and Teenage Ragout (p. 84)?
Although I enjoy poking fun at books on Modernist domesticana, I really do admire and respect the vision of the space age, the incredible faith that Americans put in the power of science to solve problems. I consider the 1950s and early ’60s the golden age of popular science culture, when romantic visions of a better, more convenient life seemed possible through research, the frontier seemed limitless, and progress had no negative consequences. It was an age when women, beginning to widen their horizons, could make proclamations like the following without a trace of irony:
Let’s face it: as housewives most of us are miracle-happy. We’re the luckiest cooks in world history…and getting luckier every year. Many of our goods are so miraculously processed, pre-prepared and packaged that miracle is the only word to use for them. For our convenience, ease, and well-being, we have three adoring, full-time godfathers: the scientist, the dietitian, and the manufacturer. These three are constantly putting their highly specialized heads together in our behalf.
GODFATHERS, people. But then, this domestic elegy was uttered 11 years before Francis Ford Coppola put a slightly different spin on the idea of a godfather.
Interestingly, before I started writing this post, I Googled No Time for Cooking with the hopes of perhaps finding the cover image to include. The first hit to come up was a quote from the writer and social critic Michael Pollan published in the blog Fire & Knowledge (what a great name). Here’s part of Pollan’s quote:
I think that there’s some brainwashing going on with this idea that we don’t have time to cook anymore. We have made cooking seem much more complicated than it is, and part of that comes from watching cooking shows on television — we’ve turned cooking into a spectator sport. We’re terrified to play tackle football too when we watch how it’s played on TV — we’d get killed. But cooking’s a whole lot easier than it appears on Iron Chef…when you create this image of people as being hurried, and harried, and of course you need TV dinners, that kind of sinks in. They kind of flatter us by telling us we’re too busy and that we have such rushed lives, but in the end we find time for what matters. In just the last 10 years we’ve found, what, two or three hours a day to deal with the internet? It’s a matter of priority, it’s not really about ability.
I know, I know, Michael. I believe you. I’ve read a couple of your books, and it’s not that your mantra of “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” doesn’t make sense. I’m trying. I really am. But the real truth for me is that we do find time for what matters. And what matters to me more than cooking on a daily basis is exercise, reading, and this blog.
I just need to find my own healthy medium between Arlene’s vacuum-packed plasticity and Michael’s bucolic back-to-nature idealism. It’s a goal. I’m not there yet.
This evening, instead of trekking to the crowded gym, I decided to go for a walk to the end of Wilson Point Road and back before the snow. I love looking at all the different houses along the water, many with docks that extend out into the creek. There’s one little white rancher for rent with a small backyard and a dock that makes me a little heartsick every time I pass it. I love my townhouse for the most part, but when I look in the windows of that rancher, I can definitely imagine myself inside. I can see myself launching a kayak from that dock, or dangling my legs over the end of it in the summer, margarita in one hand and book in the other. Maybe someday.
In contrast with that little house and many others of a comparable size that range from the sublime to the tacky, there is one huge, gorgeous house that makes my knees weak every time I walk by. I don’t know if there’s a name for the style, but I refer to it as Rhode Island Pottery Barn. It definitely has a maritime influence: clapboard shingles, raised foundation—and the best feature of all—an outside porch on the top floor with canvas curtains on three sides that looks out over the water. If I lived there, I think I might never leave that space. I would make it my bay-view garret. I would hang brass bell wind chimes and hummingbird feeders and eat breakfast out there 6 months out of the Maryland year. I wonder who lives there. I wonder what they do for a living. I wonder how they use that space.
Both those houses have been familiar to me since I moved to Middle River. What I didn’t expect to encounter on my walk was the smell of unfinished lumber framing in a couple of houses that are being renovated. The conservationist in me tells me that I should not thrill at a scent that usually signals new construction and new development. But I have always loved the smell of cut wood, the clean, resinous tang of a rough-framed house.
When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, my mother worked for a home builder, and I would occasionally get to walk through a house when it was still just a skeleton. I liked being able to pass through spaces that would soon become solid walls, trying to imagine what the house would look like finished based on the frame. It felt intimate; I was seeing something that the eventual owners of the house would never see. But the smell of the lumber was the best part. Walking down Wilson Point Road between the two houses being renovated, I passed through a cloud of lumber scent, and it took me right back to my childhood. I wonder if those houses have been sold yet, if the owners have come by to take a whiff of wooden bones while they have the chance.
Picking wall colors.
Paint choice is fraught with peril—
someone won’t be pleased.
With the huge snowstorm that blew into Baltimore Saturday night Saturday night came two new bird species to my feeder. I would be excited about any bird other than house sparrows coming to check it out (haven’t seen one of those yet, BTW), but I’m especially psyched about…
The white-breasted nuthatch, because this is a species we never saw in the yard in Pasadena—ever. I suspect we didn’t have enough large trees in the neighborhood, despite having the huge southern oak tree in the front yard. Nuthatches remind me of fussy old dowagers, puffy and waistless, yank-yank-yanking and chasing other small birds away from the area. Their relatively long beaks are slightly upwardly concave, adding to the disapproving aunt Phyllis look.
Sitta carolinensis
The second new species, however, is my ringer: a purple finch (male). Now all you doubters out there who know how relatively rare purple finches are compared to the similar-looking house finch, I have done my homework. I spotted the raspberry jam stain on the bib extending over the back that’s characteristic of the male bird. This was a purple finch, people. Another species we never got in Pasadena. In fact, unlike the relatively common white-breasted nuthatch, I’ve only seen one or two purple finches in the wild. Awe. Some.
Carpodacus purpureus
Oh, and I was able to observe said birds from my (humble) new Bjorkudden/Bertil. That’s IKEA for dining room set. Am I officially a grown-up now? Luckily there is still room for my three clothes drying racks in the dining room if necessary.
J.D. Salinger died today, at 91, after a long self-imposed exile from public life. He published only a few works of fiction and then retreated into his home, granting no interviews and giving no sign that he would ever publish again despite his books’ tremendous success and respect, particularly the iconic The Catcher in the Rye, a staple of high school English classes.
I haven’t read any of Salinger’s obits yet, but learning of his death made me think of an article I’d read in the New York Review of Books about the recent publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s final unfinished manuscript, The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun). Nabokov had instructed his heirs to burn this manuscript, but instead they elected to publish it against his will. This from NYRB:
Nothing, but nothing, causes more posthumous difficulties for a writer’s heirs and friends than a request to burn a manuscript after death. It is a crystalline case of being damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The interested public wants one thing, and the departed loved one has demanded another. Adding to the complexity of the question is the hard-to-dispel thought that if the writer had, in the deepest recesses of her being, wanted to burn the manuscript, she would have done it herself. So the choice is between different kinds of betrayal, of the writer’s wishes or of the readers who are, now, that writer’s last chance of life. To burn the manuscript is to help the writer to die. But is that what she wanted…?
I can understand this dilemma. I think Lolita is one of the most disturbingly beautiful (and I use those words in combination quite often) pieces of fiction ever written in English, and the idea that there is now a little bit more of Nabokov floating around out there, probably the last thing we’ll ever get, is intoxicating. I saw The Original of Laura at Barnes & Noble when I was there the other night, but I resisted picking it up. In a way, doing so would have felt similar to the way I felt about the purchase I did make, an issue of More: voyeuristic and potentially duped. Do we really have a right to examine Nabokov’s unfinished work against his wish? Do his heirs really have a right to profit from it? Do I want to contribute to that cycle?
Vladimir Nabokov, by David Levine (1967)
But I do want to read it. Oh yes. I want to read it like I would like to see that recently discovered footage of Marilyn Monroe (a onetime obsession of mine) smoking pot. Because it might be a glimpse behind the persona, a look backstage at the creative process, maybe even some kind of clue into the “real” person—the very thing we probably have no right to own or expect from an artist, even though so much of contemporary criticism seems to depend on cultural context and personal history. Salinger would not approve of the publication of The Original of Laura.
From what NYRB had to say about it, The Original of Laura could end up being not much more than an incomprehensible jumble of index card-notes randomly strung together, a 52-pickup of a sexual fantasy. I might end up feeling like the book was much ado about nothing, a final attempt to squeeze some more money out of a belles-lettres franchise. But like Humbert Humbert snatching glances at a nymphet, I might just read it anyway.
So after “reading” More magazine last night, I’ve learned a few things about their target market of 40- to 60-something women with money: they are used to battling for what they want. And what they want is to look younger, despite the tagline of the magazine, which is “celebrating what’s next.”
I’d say a good 75% of the ads in More feature anti-aging products, and they make it clear that this is no place for girly girls (so I guess I was wrong). “Prepare yourself for the beauty battlefield.” “The world is full of skin-damaging assaults.” “Put up your guard and help protect your skin.” “Fight deep wrinkles.” ”Midlife complexions are moody, erupting without warning…stinging without provocation.” “Use a cleanser with horsepower.”
Another 20% of the ads are for incontinence pads, hair thickeners (guys, you aren’t alone in hair loss), weight loss products (it never ends), and soy. Which leaves about 5% of the ads for expensive cars and jewelry.
The takeaway message is that, as a comfortably wealthy middle-aged woman, if your fate is to leak pee when you laugh, let it be on the leather seats of a Cadillac SUV.
