These Foolish Things Remind Me of You

So. We're having friends over for dinner, and usually when I cook I want music on, something rockin' with a beat. Motown usually works. Janis. Allman Bros. Stones. But today, after something of a hellish week where I don't have much brain left, I wanted order and something soothing. Not too orderly as in Bach, but something with passion tied up in a neat bow. Beethoven!

I can't help but think of my father when ever I hear Beethoven. Classical music was his life's blood, and the hours I listened to KKHI as a child...Well, it was a lot. There was always that terrible moment when a new song would come on and my father would grill me and my sister as to which composer has written this specific piece. We never knew, but then we were eight and six at the time, so I consider a little slack is in order. As I grew older, I grew more savvy, and when the quizzing would start, I began to say Beethoven automatically in the hopes that I'd be right. Luckily, it more often than not turned out to be Beethoven. Lucky me.

Anyway, I was listening to the Pathetique sonata, a piece that I tried in vain to learn, and I thought of my father. Nice, kind thoughts, actually. And then I wondered about the other givens in my life. Dad = Beethoven. The smell of bacon = my mother (who still to this day cooks a full breakfast every Sunday morning). Nail clippers = my husband (who once tried valiantly to protect me from a bunch of homeless people who were circling a phone booth we were in with the file attached to his nail clippers). St. Patrick's Day = my friends Micheal and Tanya (who give the best party ever). And that kind of laughter where you cry it's so funny = my sister. Because we when get together, we laugh like that.

Have You No Shame, Mrs. Deen?

I don't watch television (well, with the exception of HGTV with my daughter when she comes home from college and the occasional bout of CNN if and when something news worthy happens), so I'm basically ignorant of the legions of celebrity television chefs that rule the airwaves. To me, there is only one person who deserved her own television cooking show, and that person was Julia Child. She knew how to cook, and she had a personality and charm that made you want to cook. End of story.

A couple of years I found myself in the X-ray department of my local hospital (irony of ironies), and as all waiting rooms in hospitals now have televisions to convince you that you're not waiting THAT long, I found myself watching Paula Deen's cooking show. I know it's not fair to base one's opinion on one show, however, an entire fifteen minutes devoted to dumping cartons of sherbet into a punch bowl filled with 7-up and then mixing them together does NOT constitute cooking in my book. There was some other recipe on this show that had something like forty pounds of butter--I think it was mashed potatoes and the ratio of butter to Idahos was essentially one to one--and, again, not particularly noteworthy. Let's put it this way, neither her ideas nor her personality had me frantically searching my TV guide for the next installment of her show.

Then lo and behold it was announced this week that three years ago she was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. One hates to be cynical, but the fact that she has withheld this information (which is, of course, her right) until she successfully landed a sponsor to pay her for her years of promoting fat-laden, unhealthy food and her moribund lifestyle seems, uh, a little craven to me. She continued to offer her up her brand of fare for three solid years without a single mention that the very food that she was extolling you to cook was likely to make you obese, and, therefore, vulnerable to Type 2 diabetes. How lovely, folks. Just eat your way to medical intervention. Donuts? Have four. Deep-fried cheesecake? Have another piece.

Is it just me or is this insanely irresponsible? Granted, I'm surrounded by medical types on both sides of the family, so perhaps my layman's knowledge of medical stuff is a little more informed than your average Joe. Diabetes is a nasty disease. How nasty? It's like up there with cancer as far as I am concerned. It affects your entire body. As in losing toes and going blind to name a couple of  potential side effects. I've currently embarked on a regime to eat better and exercise more, and the primary reason? My sugar numbers are heading in the pre-diabetic direction, and I would rather cut out chocolate forever than get diabetes. THAT'S how bad a disease it is.

So, I have to ask Mrs. Deen, why didn't she tell her loyal fans immediately that the lifestyle that she was promoting was in fact a direct line, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, to a lifetime of being insulin's bitch? The standard line seems to be that they wanted to have a clear message about all this before making the announcement. It took THREE FRIGGING YEARS to hone a public response to this news?

I don't think so. It took three years to find a sponsor. She disgusts me. Either keep it personal because it is personal, or use your new-found knowledge to immediately revamp your show so that your old message of "every thing's better deep-fried" is now "let's find new ways to make delicious food and not kill ourselves in the process." I'm not saying that she doesn't have the right to deep-fry cheesecake. But what I am saying is that there are consequences to that type of lifestyle choice--as she has found out--and, personally, I believe she has a responsibility to let her fans know exactly the cost of such a lifestyle.

In my opinion, there's no middle ground. You have a show. You have people who follow you. Well, now they've been following you into Type 2 diabetes. Will they get a discount on their insulin if they mention your name? Hope so, because insulin is expensive.

Posting Fool! The Biography

Wow, three posts in a week. I'm outdoing myself. Still no pictures though. Sigh.

After I finished writing up yesterday's post on Reardon's biography of M.F.K. Fisher, I began thinking about what a different animal the biography is from, say, the novel. Unlike the novel, where even when it's not about the author, it's ALWAYS about the author, a really good biography is about the absence of self. In the biography, the writer tries to step back and take a really clinical and hopefully unbiased look at the life they are chronicling. There were certainly passages in Reardon's book (and Moorehead's on Gellhorn) that had me raising my eyebrows at both women under study (neither of them would be in contention for a mother-of-the-year award), but the biographer really doesn't have that luxury. She/he can't roll her eyes and say, oh for heaven's sake: you take off for France when your daughter is clearly not mentally able to care for her toddler and you wonder why your sister--who has assumed your responsibilities--is miffed at you? The biographer just puts it down on paper and lets the actions speak for themselves. I'm sure that Ms. Reardon has opinions regarding Mary Frances and her too-apt tendency to throw her hands up and then board the next plane as does Ms. Moorehead--who was personal friends with Martha Gellhorn--and Martha's tendency to cut off long-term friendships with a precision and arrogance that is cruel, but neither of them let the self intrude.

When the self does intrudes, the biography becomes either a love letter or a hatchet job, neither of which is the stuff of good biography. I felt that way about the Muriel Spark biography that I reviewed, what, last year? Stannard was terrified and in awe of this woman and it came through on the page. He always had an excuse and an apology for her rotten behavior, which undermined what he was trying to say about her. I am at a loss to define Muriel Spark because her biographer wasn't honest with us. His self interfered. "Yes, she was imperious and demanding and often cruel, but, but, but, love her anyway," he begged. "Because I am so in thrall with her and I want you to be too."

I don't think we need to be in thrall of anyone. We just want to know what makes/made them tick.

Book Review: The Poet of Appetites: the Lives and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher

M.F.K. Fisher is pretty much the perfect writer in my eyes. I mean, come on! She writes exquisite prose about food. I've owned Joan Reardon's biography of M.F.K. Fisher for a while, and in keeping with my current obsession with biographies, I pulled this from the bookshelf of doom (where I can never find the book that I want, however, I usually find something that I want to read). I devoured it in two days. The stories that rivet me the most are the ones that I have some connection with. Books set in the Bay Area where I grew up and continue to live immediately have an "in."

I had just finished cooking school when M.F.K. Fisher's star went supernova. As an industry insider, I had a few chuckles over several veiled references to people in the food business who, although not named, were rather obvious if you were part of that culture and I was. It was a heady time. The Bay Area was truly at the forefront of the food revolution that sent people back to farmer's markets for organic lettuce and the local butcher counters featured free range chickens and Nimian Ranch beef and Peet's owned coffee and restaurants were theater. When I wasn't working (when wasn't I working?), I was eating out. There was Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower and Mark Miller and a host of other people who were rewriting food in America, and M.F.K. Fisher was the intellectual doyenne of them all. I had friends who were a lot braver than me and made pilgrimages to Glen Ellen, California, to have lunch with her. I adored her as a writer before I became a chef, as my love of language is on par with my love for the table.

This book reminded me of another biography of a strong, independent woman whose relationships were the proverbial nightmare and who was often the lone woman in a field of men, and that is Martha Gellhorn's biography. Both women struggled mightily with doubts regarding their writing, but whose editors probably had permanent ulcers from trying to "edit" them. Both of them had strengths that were regarded by others (and themselves) as weaknesses. Gellhorn was acknowledged as one of the premier war journalists of the twentieth century, and yet she despaired because she could never write a really good novel. Fisher's prose has been acknowledged as having few peers, and yet those around her kept pushing her to stop writing those "food" books and write novels. In old age, both women held "court" with younger admirers (indeed, this is almost shockingly identical). Gellhorn had her "chaps" and Fisher had her "foodies." And both shared a certain--how shall I put this--oh, hell, I'm just going to say it: both women had a real, bone-deep selfishness that perhaps was the flame to the fire of their art. I don't know. I just know that both of their lives were punctuated with fractured relationships, and both of them had extremely problematic relationships with their children. They were both exceptionally nomadic with a similar schizophrenic need for isolation and community. When they were isolated, they wanted company. When they had company, they longed to be alone. They spent a great deal of their life escaping their life.

Anyway, Reardon does a very fine job of capturing the elusive Mary Frances. We follow her palate from the orchards of Whittier to the cobble-stoned streets of Dijon to the brutal beauty of the California desert to the mustard-dotted fields of the Napa Valley to her last place, a ranch in Sonoma. It's fascinating watching a woman so in tune with the simple beauty of food and her surroundings that she turns the minutia of a simple meal into a verbal feast. Equally fascinating, I shuddered as I read about her yanking her children from this country to the next, refusing to give them the grounded childhood that she had had. It's clear from her letters that she really didn't want children who had child-like needs. She wanted mini-adults to ooh and ahh with her as they traipsed over France. It's a little mind-boggling that she was shocked that both children were often behind grade, because she had no compunction about taking them out of school and shoving them into whatever school she could find for three months here, four months there.

If we have the less than stellar mother, we also have the writer whose turn of phrase leaves me breathless. Reardon does a marvelous job of charting the trajectory of the aimless girl, Mary Frances, who becomes the formidable writer, M.F.K. Fisher. Reardon doesn't excuse Mary Frances, but neither does she hold back from giving Mary Frances her due. The chapters written of her first two marriages are especially fine, creating a solid sense of her growing strength as a writer. Highly recommended read.

Cranky Pants 2011

Looking back over the books I've read in the last year, it's impossible not to recognize that I come across as, um, slightly cranky. A part of me thinks, I should lighten up, and another part of me says, why should I apologize because another writer hasn't done their job.

There are so many books that I've read lately that needed another six months worth of thought. And this is the truly tragic fallout from the current publishing clime, the publication of books with excellent bones that don't realize their potential. These books need a stern editor, not a marketing director, and yet that seems to be what is driving the publishing industry these days.

I'm not saying that every book needs to be literature, but I am saying that within its own specific niche, most books should be a lot better than what is currently being published. Even a beach read, which is how I categorize my own meager output, should be a damn good beach read. It should fulfill its purpose. Most books aren't about making earth-shattering statements. They are about entertaining us.

I was talking to a co-worker today about Michael Connelly. He doesn't hit it out of the park every single time, but I would never accuse him of being lazy. His plot busts are minimum (there is one in one of his Lincoln lawyer books that made my eyes hit the wall, but generally speaking, he's top notch in the plot department). He also thinks about his characters. THERE he is never sloppy. And he does something in a series that I find rare. He moves his characters forward. Sometimes it's more of a lurch than an arc, but he's not phoning it in and he never writes cliche. This is why I was so dissatisfied with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Every single character was a cliche, with the exception of Lisbeth Salander. And then, damn and blast, Larsson trots out the cliche at the end with a cheesy romance angle.

All I am asking is for simple entertainment. I'm not looking for literature. I'm looking for plot that doesn't make me squint, characterizations that aren't cliche or improbable, and some spark that is all an author's own.

The best books I read this year were mostly non-fiction (another plug for Schiff's Cleopatra, yowzah, that was beautifully written), with a few notable exceptions. The exceptions don't mean that they were perfect. It just means that they were magical enough that the author had me, owned me, and whatever stumbles they made I was willing to forgive them.

I felt that way about two books this year. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson and The Weissmans of Westport by Catherine Schine. The ending in "Last Stand" was far too dramatic in what is essentially a very quiet book, and there is an absurd plot issue in "Westport" that took me to the brink. However, both books say so loudly, "I love this story. I care about these people. They have become part of me and I hope they become part of you." And when you have that passion on the page, then a reader can forgive a lot. That is why cliche is so damning in a novel. Cliche is the universal. It's the phrase that is so ubiquitous that it has no meaning. It's the ultimate in familiar. When a character is nothing more than a bunch of cliches (as I found the character Blomkvist in "Girl") there's no mystery in the character itself. I'm not reading to find out who this character is. I know who he is. I was not surprised by ANYTHING he did as a character in "Girl." That book relies solely on the mystery of who Lisbeth Salander is. THAT's why I kept reading. Larsson clearly loved her enough to give her an identity outside of the cliched characters that populate his novel.

That's what I'm looking for. Authors who care enough about their story so that as readers we can pick ourselves up off the ground when there are any stumbles. Because there's enough magic to ward off the bruises.