December 2009
57 posts
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All this and haunting, too.
1. Flannery O’Connor uses cliches in her novels to make startling events seem more startling. In the Southern towns where her stories are set, where everyone speaks in cliches, it seems like nothing weird can happen (because everything weird already is).
2. Cliches are big in my family. My mother is a fan of “You take the good with the bad” and grandmother enjoys the...
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quality time.
Shopping is already way way down on my list of fun activities to do, but even lower is shopping at the mall where I used to hang out as a teenager.
For several hours I feel gargantuan and old watching the skinny jeans-wearing kiddos with their acne and their fatigued Chucks and their hoodies from Aeropostale glug Big Sodas and barely notice the senior citizens like me hauling shopping bags around...
Digesting Christmas
It’s the day after Christmas and I’m in Pennsylvania, wearing a pajama thing that I made out of an old house dress, a scarf, and some teeball pants I found from when I used to play on the boy’s baseball team in 4th grade. It’s just as good as a Snuggie, better even, and I’m still able to do things people wearing Snuggies do. Like cry about being fat.
I’ve done nothing but eat in Harrisburg and...
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Rich Cake.
I really did intend to cook something over the holiday season that I could photograph and post on this blog, but it turns out that will never be necessary, because until I get back to New York, there will always be too much food.
Today my parents hosted their semi-annual after-Christmas brunch. Lots of food was going on in the house. Eggs benedict, spinach salad with baby tomatoes, Christmas...
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Book predictions
Good:
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Alienist by Caleb Carr
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Neffenegger
Villages by John Updike
Bad:
The Believers by Zoe Heller
This Book Will Save Your Life by AM Homes
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Saturday account.
We never assume it will snow. Except on the day we are supposed to do something we don’t really want to do, like go ice skating. That’s what we call appropriate timing, or, in clinical terms, mutual subterfuge. Both of us had been thinking all week, quietly to ourselves yet somehow shared and knowingly, how we’d look like idiots trying to skate in public on Saturday. And it...
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Harbinger
I never sleep at night after I drink wine at a party, so the day after a party is always guaranteed to be a blur, like this one, where there is only doing laundry and reading books and picking up the guitar from time to time to sing quiet songs in Bacchanalian repent.
But by 5 o’clock or so, the previous night’s revelry is erased, and the body is hungry again. I can tell...
Toni Morrison, Beloved
“The sounds had become an occasional mutter — like the interior mutter a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work: a sth when she misuses the needle’s eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter. Nothing startling or fierce. Just that eternal, private conversation that takes place between women and their tasks”
Ways not to spend your first day of holiday...
-Waxing the kitchen floor
-Watching Barbarella
quote of the month
“the way some people overeat, that’s how I read”
-BC Craig, on reading the same books over and over again
Saturday account.
As a rule, we prefer not to eat out in New York. But sometimes the situation calls for it, like when our apartment is 110 degrees, thanks to a no-access thermostat, and it is too uncomfortable to cook, let alone do anything but stand in our bathrobes next to the open window and stare longingly at the people in the apartment across the street. These people, we think, can probably adjust their own...
Checklist
This weekend we will ice skate at Rockefeller Center, bake at least one variety of Christmas cookie, and watch two Christmas-themed movies. Then when we get to Pennsylvania we will do it all over again.
Friday night account
I spent the entire day at my laptop at the kitchen table, drinking tea, periodically boiling water I sometimes did nothing with, and noshing on Blue Diamond almonds, trying to concentrate on not getting up to cook, no matter what, because I had to do my work. BD sat on the sofa, eating apples, drinking coffee and taking conference calls, and every now and then we would get up to pace around the...
Having a coffee
at 71 Irving Place is one of my favorite things to do, even when it’s busy. I used to come here when I was a new implant in New York, and since then the romance of (this part of) Gramercy has still not waned. My only complaint is that the lighting is decidedly cavernous, too dim to get any reading done. It’s best to come here for table talk or on independent luncheons.
It is definitely boot season. So get out your skinny jeans and, if you’re smart, avoid anything over a 1” heel.
Update
on being the only cook in the house: I let BD make dinner last night. He made sauteed portabello slices with spaghetti and salad and it was delicious, heightened only by the joy of my having nothing to do with it.
Stand By Me
The homeless man on the subway is a true poet; like the ancient variety, with a lyre. He is a vagrant. He does not eat well. His teeth are bad, he wears tattered clothing, smells of urine, and doesn’t care; he lives in a world where the body is immaterial. He is free, and so is his instrument. Damn can he sing.
On Self-Domestication
Like plenty of people, I am in a relationship with someone I really respect and who I admire a lot, and our relationship is happy but intermittently frustrating and sometimes argumental. And I’m satisfied with that.
But Elizabeth Weil is not, as she wrote in her piece on Married Life from this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. The article (“Married Happily with Issues” )...
Austenation
I thought Persuasian was the worst Austen novel, and it makes sense because it was also her last, and being terrible is like, the law of last novels, right? I did become very fond of Anne Elliot, the heroine, who is just much more desirable than Emma Woodhouse, or Elizabeth Bennett. Anne seemed to be a lot more charismatic, a lot more confident. One of those homely girls who is actually sexy...
Sunday Account
We hadn’t gone to bed until two — one hour into Vicky Christina Barcelona which, we both decided, had its shortcomings — but I woke up first, at 7, and went for a walk. I walked towards Morningside Park along 117th street. I passed the health food store, the Indian Laundromat. Everything was closed. I crossed onto Manhattan Avenue and entered the park’s gates. I ran up...
Bakewatch.
Of all the things I do to distract myself from academic research, bakewatching is at the top of my queue — Baking while Watching.
Tonight I am watching the last four episodes of Modern Family that aired on Hulu, while BD and I are baking chocolate chip cookies. The heat kicked on in our building and we’ve started to hibernate. An hour ago, we ate big platefuls of White Bean and...