The Best American Poetry

Dogfish Head Beer [by DL]

"Everyone in Mahattan / is high hattin'," sang the lady in satin as I turned into the parking lot of the Finger Lakes Beverage Center, my local, in time for the beer tasting of the week. I tasted four varieties of Dogfish Head: three of their core brands (Raison d'Etre, Midas Touch, and Palo Santo Marron) as well as the seasonal Festina Peche (a smooth and tart wheat beer with a touch of peach). The latter was lovely as was the Midas Touch, which the brochure characterizes as "somewhere between wine and mead." Festina Peche would go down well on an extremely hot day in July.

The names of their brands intrigued me. They have "Bitches Brew"  ("three threads of imperial stout and one thread of honey beer with gesho root"), which they expect you to drink while listening to Miles Davis, and "My Antonia" (a citrus inflected pilsner), which is ideally poured when in a Willa Cather frame of mind. The brewers (www.dogfish.com) are a literary bunch. One of my favorite quotations from Emerson (beginning "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist" and continuing with "Nothing is at last sacred but the integirty of your own mind") graces the back of their brochure.

Now people who know me know I favor cocktails made with gin, bourbon, rum, or anther hard lkiquor. I had planned to serve Plymouth gibsons tonight, or possibly daiquiries with Key West lime juice and Cruzon rum, in honor of summer, but it's chilly and gray in an Ithaca way and I guess I'll have to change my plan and drink, in a chilled stein, the Dogfish Head Palo Santo Marron, their brown ale, which "picks up caramel and vanilla complexities from the 10,000-gallon handmade wooden tanks it ages in." -- DL

The "Soupe au Pistou" Challenge [by DL]

Can you come up with a better recipe for soupe au pistou than this one or that one?

Which do you favor, the Epicurious recipe or Mark Bittman's in The New York Times?

A friend is going to the south of France, and our conversation prompted my recollection of this wonderful soup as served in Vence and other such places in the alpes maritimes just north of Nice. -- DL

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: You Get What You Order

Bars are not democracies, but in both cases, you get what you order with regularity. Voters pick the guy who’s going to deregulate, reform education and cut taxes, and lo! that’s what he does. Voters pick the guy who’s going to reform health care, cut taxes and get us out of Iraq, and lo! Ditto! There are few surprises. Scott Walker’s bait and switch aside, elected officials are actually kind of predictable.

So what do voters mean when they complain about slippery politicians? It means they ordered up something they don’t want after all, and instead of admitting their own mistake, they find a crack in the glass, a fly in the soup, a crook behind the bar. Obama the candidate was pretty clear about seeking to reform healthcare should he be elected. Guess what? He did just that.

But voters want to send back the Obamacare cocktail, and now he’s ignoring his own biggest legislative achievement. He could say, “Hey, you got what you ordered.” But he won’t. As every bartender knows, you dump the perfectly good drink and make another, to the customer’s specifications, even though it’s the customer who’s at fault.

Having been maneuvered into this defensive posture more than once, here’s what one former bartender used to do: suppress customer turnout. In other words, I took preventative measures, steps to avoid filling the orders of customers likely to return them, by discouraging the customer from staying at my bar. I profiled. Here’s the kind of customer who’s going to send a drink back:

• Asks for, then spends a very long time parsing, a Drinks Menu
• Chooses based on the garnish, hence ordering that which comes with an umbrella, cucumber, or
  specialty ice cubes in the shape of florets
• Giggles
• Consults friends and neighbors before ordering, but does not consult the bartender
• Zeroes in on the flaming drinks

Someone who fit this profile would learn from me, much to my disappointment, that the key ingredient (crème de boullion, a sparkler) was out of stock. If I had to, I’d invent a key ingredient.

This method is highly inexact and therefore thoroughly unfair. No doubt many lovely customers got caught in my dragnet. Tough. Since I’d earn better tips from taking care of fewer, less problematic drinkers, prevention was too winning a strategy to ignore.

Which is why Republicans are very busy suppressing wide swatches of the electorate with “anti-fraud” laws, lest some few of them vote for Obama, and why I here suggest that Democrats try the same, anti-democratic, elitist, un-American, immoral strategy. Here’s how:

• Card the usual suspects: every white person over the age of 50. Make sure each has a valid passport or similar to prove U.S. citizenship.
• Inspect the ID photo—does it really look like its bearer? Or like a younger, more attractive cousin? Since passports are good for 10 years, a number of photos will be out of date. Challenge these.
• Check the address—is it within the polling place’s district? Some of the elderly move into assisted living but don’t change their addresses on their passports or driver’s licenses, since they can no longer travel or drive. Flag these tricksters as potentially fraudulent voters, no doubt pulling a fast one on America from their socialist, Obamacare-subsidized wheelchairs.
• Also target younger white men with cigars, white women who show up during business hours pushing expensive strollers, and anyone wearing a cross.
• Canvass the parking lot, then demand valid proof from white voters with fish or other Christian iconography on the bumpers or rear-view mirrors of their cars.
• Have all of the above cast provisional ballets, so they are in the same boat as the young, black and brown Americans who’ve been harassed by the other side.

There is an easier way. Voters could educate themselves. They want to slash aid for hungry people, schools, NPR and Planned Parenthood, while pouring tax dollars into wasteful defense spending at a rate higher than the next 10 countries’ combined military budgets? They can vote for Romney. They want tax breaks for the rich and squat for the middle-to-poor? They can vote Romney. If people calculated their interests like the rational creatures economists believe them to be, Democrats would win with 99% of the vote. But voters are no more rational than giggling arsonists perusing the drinks menu at Painkiller. Oops, gotta go. Just got a request for Zombie Punch.

All Shook Up at the Poetry & Cocktail Slam [by Catherine Woodard]

The drinks at the 2^nd Poetry & Cocktail Slam at Back Forty were designed to have a bite, to sneak up on partakers – like the seven paired poems, like any good poem.

Drink in hand, Bob Holman of the Bowery Poetry Club read each poem in front of the NYC bar or restaurant alchemist who invented the cocktail. Poet and performer, Holman read with his own magic: softly, slowly for “Somewhere I Never Traveled” by E. E. Cummings or booming for “Crossing the Bar” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  

The benefit for the Academy of American Poets was hosted by Peter Hoffman at his East Village restaurant with tasty treats from his kitchen. This year’s cocktail recipes and some of the poems will join the inaugural ones at www.poets.org/cocktails. 

Tom Macy from Clover Club in Carroll Gardens paired his berried and bubbly drink Clever Girl with the Emily Dickinson poem that begins "NATURE rarer uses yellow." Like many a Dickinson poem that lulls by surface sublime from the natural world, Macy floated a yellow pansy in the drink. All the better to heighten the punch.

“Just like me,” said Jessica Knevals ordering a Clever Girl, wearing yellow heels as bright as the flowers.

“I’d be lying if I said you were the first person to say that,” Macy replied.

Bar banter fueled by alcohol is likely more interesting to the bar patrons than the bartender. But pack in poetry lovers on a sunny spring Saturday afternoon and a drink based on Dorothy Parker Gin from the New York Distilling Company prompts replies to Holman in full Parker poems.

The longest Parker recitation was from Christopher Michel, also the only living poet on the menu at this year’s slam. His Poem in which I am an asshole as a poorly behaved poet guest inspired a rye drink with the longest lines of the afternoon, A drink which can make you an asshole, mixed by Tom Richter of the Beagle. “Because it will sneak up on you,” Richter said. Holman and Michel read the poem together while the Beagle owner covered his eyes.

”They truly are mixologists,” Holman praised those to mix, shake and pour the libations. "And they make more money than poets.”

Catherine Woodard has played coed, pickup basketball in New York City for three decades. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, RHINO and other journals.  In 2011, Woodard was a featured poet at UnshodQuills.com, co-published Still Against War/Poems for Marie Ponsot and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She will be a 2012 fellow at the Hambidge Center in Georgia and is a board member of the Poetry Society of America. Woodard is a former president of Artists Space, one of the nation’s oldest spaces for emerging visual artists. Woodard has a MFA in poetry from the New School University and MS in journalism from Columbia University. 

Props to Poetry at the Gramercy Tavern by Stacey Harwood

You just can’t get a bad meal at the Gramercy Tavern on East 20th Street in New York City: the food is inspired, the atmosphere warm, the service consistently attentive without being obsequious. A couple of years ago, in one of the most enjoyable  experiences of my writing life, I shadowed Modesto Batista, the Gramercy’s chief steward, on his early morning circumnavigation of the Union Square Farmers Market. Ever since, I’ve kept tabs on the Gramercy, grabbing lunch in the more casual “tavern” up front or splurging on the occasional take-the-top-of-my-head-off fine meal in the elegant dining room. Follow the Gramercy on Twitter (@GramercyTavern) to stay current on its daily lunch specials, which are farm-to-market driven and affordable. 

It was Twitter that alerted me to the Gramercy Tavern staff celebration of National Poetry Month. Every day in April, during pre-service “family” meals, the staff members take turns reading poetry aloud. It’s a tradition that started at roughly the same time that the Academy of American Poets introduced National Poetry Month. Anybody who has ever worked in a restaurant knows how the pressure can build just before the doors open for meal service, which makes the restaurant’s tradition of pausing for poetry even more impressive. 

I stopped by the Gramercy on Thursday to listen to the pre-dinner poetry offerings. As the staff assembled in the dining room, they were still talking about the pre-lunch staff meal, during which server Marcelo Valez sang an original composition. At first he demurred, because he had not yet translated his verse from Spanish to English, but his colleagues' persistence wore down his resistance and he took the floor, to everyone’s delight. 

After routine announcements about menu changes and such, David Shaw (right), a charismatic server, approached the makeshift stage and announced, “Today I’m going to read “Lament,” by Franz Wright.” Shaw, one of the more regular readers, has a store of poems at the ready. “Franz Wright is one of my favorite poets,” he said and read the lines as one who has taken in the poem over countless solitary readings: I took a long walk / that night in the rain. / It was fine. / Barehead, shirt open: in love / nobody gives a shit about the rain . . . It was an impressive, moving performance.

Next up was Robert Blake (below), smiling, exhuberant, and, judging by his colleagues' applause, a crowd favorite. Instead of reciting a poem, he performed a scene from Woody Allen’s film Crimes and Misdemeanors.  “If it’s a poem in your head, it’s poetry,” he said before launching into a dead-on impersonation of the film's elderly Professor Louis Levy lecturing about the difficulty of life’s moral choices.  

With moments to spare before the dinner crowd descended upon the dining room I persuaded Marcelo Valez to send me a link to an original composition. Here it is:

Find Marcelo's translation after the jump.

The Pursuit of the Perfect (by Rebecca Lindenberg)

            On Thursday night, Timothy O’Keefe (author of The Goodbye Town, winner of the 2010 FIELD Poetry Prize) and his girlfriend, novelist Xhenet Aliu, got into town.  They brought with them Luella, their part-border-collie-part-dobermann puppy, shiny as a shoe, who spent most of the weekend running in circles around our piglet-esque, pennycolored pitbull, Ezzie.  Tim and I read together for Utah State University’s “Helicon West” reading series at the Citrus & Sage Café (a cute little house that serves the local artisan-roasted coffee along with very tasty sweet or savory crepes – the best of which is served with just honey-butter, according to essayist and USU professor Jennifer Sinor).  Tim and I have been besties for, like, years, but we’d never actually read together before – and it was really fun.  Tim’s poetry is unlike anybody’s – at once archly lyrical in its musicality and genuinely austere in its gaze, each brief, beautiful poem satisfies the reader or listener utterly while somehow simultaneously suggesting itself as merely the tip of an immense berg made of something much, much more human than the easy metaphor of ice.  Each poem seems to reconcile various struggles within the poet – between form he knows he’s masterfully good at crafting and a powerful urge to do something far more unpredictable than that; between the powerful emotions occasioned by a person or a place or a relationship and the rigorous meditations upon those emotions that I think, for Tim, come right along with them.  Simple lines like, “one way is still a way” or, in a newer poem, his girlfriend humming “a song whose words I’d only recently forgotten” sort of haunt my consciousness.  It’s not just how he writes – it’s how he thinks, it’s what he notices, it’s maybe even what he elicits from others.  On Friday, Tim came in from taking out the dog to report he’d had a brief exchange with our little neighbor girl.  She revealed she had a blister on her foot.  “Does it hurt?”  Tim asked.  She thought about it for a minute and said, finally, “If I cry it does.”  Below is one of my favorite of Tim’s poems:

 

Little Arithmetic

 

1,

She suns on a hill,

all the field becoming

its color, horizon

what she cannot feel

but aligned, lighting

the North Pole northerly.

A green wind winds

shoal to shoal, fallow coast, and spring

piecemealing Spring, sewing leaves

on a white camisole.

 

2,

She and he and the lake are

mostly water. Look—she won't

take his shrug as such-and-such

a sign—red pouring, pining for.

A canoe, skinny trees as far

as the eye projects

summer spaces.

She and he and water are 
t

he color of whatever holds them.

 

3,

The leaves are down, the leaves.

The forest blows a window, a waiting-to-be.

She thinks in red-green. He thinks brown, brown, brown.

 

            One of the things I love about Tim - as a poet, as a person - is his relentless pursuit (however unlikely any of us could ever realize it) of perfection.  This is very admirable in things like, say, "broken sonnets".  (Why can't something be both broken and perfect, after all?)  And very funny in things like, say, raquetball.  Or tennis, which he and my Joseph played a few times, as evidenced by the fact that Joseph is somewhat uncharacteristically sore and tired today. 

            After the reading on Thursday, the four of us (Tim, Xhenet, Joseph, and myself) walked across the street to Le Nonne, a little Italian joint in an old arts-&-crafts-style bungalow, of which there are many in northern Utah.  Speaking of perfect, most restaurants in the Jell-O Belt are far from it, and Le Nonne is no exception.  The food is very inconsistent (and I think we almost all ordered the wrong thing) but it’s one of the few places to eat in this pokey little town that’s open for dinner and serves wine (or lets you bring a bottle) and isn’t a national franchise.  The smoked salmon farfalle was not in a “light” cream sauce – it was practically sticky; the chicken-and-ricotta ravioli lacked salt or maybe just flavor; the clam linguini was supposed to be served in a kind of garlic and chili oil, but seemed mostly to be served with just raw diced tomatoes.  And under the thick white sauce, you wouldn’t have known the crab ravioli had crab in it, if you hadn’t read the menu.  I’ve had pretty good meals there – this was not one of them.  But it was late, and we were the only people there, and we do like each other very, very much, so we more than managed to have a good time.  However, here’s a small digression upon restaurants in the Jell-O Belt – not the fabulous ones I’ve already mentioned on this blog this week, though even those are rarely perfect.  But here are my thoughts about virtually all of the other ones:

            First of all, turn down the lights.  For Pete’s sake, restaurants, it’s like eating a meal in a grocery store!  No ambience, no mood, no romance.  (We have heard of these things, surely.)  Along the same lines, last time I checked, the LDS church does not forbid people to listen to music whilst eating.  When in doubt, jazz – some nice Horace Silver, or Dave Brubeck, or some Buena Vista Social Club.  Or just go get the Midnight in Paris soundtrack and put it on repeat.  Nobody will be offended.  And it’ll feel like there’s something fun going on.  Don’t use Mozart or Bach, for heaven’s sake.  It’s dinner, not a Requiem or a Mass, and even a nice dinner doesn’t have to be quite that ponderous or formal – we’re reaching over and forking mouthfuls of ravioli off each other’s plates, after all.  

        To you waiters, I know, having worked in the service industry in Utah, Mormons are (on the whole) very grim tippers. You’re lucky if you get twelve percent, and if you happen to work in one of those restaurants like the Market Street Grill where my little sister waited tables for awhile, that might well be twelve percent on two soup-and-salad combinations, though you also ran your ass off refilling sodas and bread baskets and slinging French fries and hamburgers for four “kids eat free”.  So you served six demanding patrons, and for your efforts you got a buck-fifty on a nineteen dollar tab.  None of this encourages servers to go the extra mile for their customers, to say nothing of the fact that it does nothing to provide them with the only income wait-staff take home after the taxes are paid on their less-than-minimum-wage salaries.  (If you cannot afford to tip at least 20 percent, you cannot afford to eat at restaurants – I’m sorry, but that’s just how it is.)  But given this culture of mutual disregard, waiters in much of Utah, and maybe especially in Logan, are abysmally, ridiculously inattentive.  It’s also true that often – though not always – restaurants in Utah find they have to cater to the Jell-O Belt’s idiosyncratically prudish palate.  (This might also be very much generational – the younger adults in our community do generally seem to appreciate a more diverse array of foods and ingredients.)  But the boomers are still eating out, so unless you order the right thing, or specify that you actually do like your food very, very spicy, you will get the Utah version of, say, Pad Thai – real easy on the chilis and without even a dash of fish sauce, which tastes much too much like crotch for the white-bre(a)d masses.  And while you might not think of Italian cuisine as belonging to that genre we so vulgarly group as “ethnic,” there are definitely Utahns for whom a very mild rigatoni alla amatriciana is just too “spicy”.  As a result, to keep itself in business, places like Le Nonne might offer beef carpaccio and penne “puttenesca,” but do a roaring trade in thick cream and cheese dishes that sound fairly elegant, but in fact uncannily resemble fancified mac-n-cheese.  I'm not saying I expect a rigorous pursuit of perfection from all of these places - but almost nothing is as depressing as people or institutions who are content to settle for mediocrity.  Whatever you do - whether you drive a schoolbus, cook in a restaurant, compose operas, perform intricate veterinary surgery, and actually maybe especially if you drive a schoolbus - why not aspire to do it to the absolute highest standard?  You probably won't succeed to reach whatever bar you set for yourself, but you might as well fall a little short of the moon as the roof. It was hubris, but during a very impassioned conversation I once told a very good friend of mine who was considering pursuing a Ph.D., "Why not?  I mean, if you're going to dream a crazy dream you might as well dream the whole dream, not feel like you have to pinch yourself awake half-way through."  And I really did mean it.  Again, it's a little exaggerated, but sometimes I tell my students who ask me where they ought to send their work, "Don't worry about it.  And don't write to get published - write to change something important."  I think what I mean is just:  Aspire.  Aspire!

            Having waded through the cream sludge on Thursday night, we decided on Friday night we’d fend for ourselves.  Xhenet is one of the very finest cooks I know – and that’s saying something.  (I lived with Craig Arnold, I'm friends with Jessica Piazza - I mean, really.)  Leaving aside her inventive recipes and the spells she can cast from a Cook’s Illustrated cookbook, she makes her own pickles, cheese (from soft goat chevre to slightly more demanding mozzerella to brie), bread (she brought a loaf from home – it’s gone), and even sausage.  I’m no Xhenet Aliu, but I can manage in a kitchen, too.  We had a little pow-wow with the lads and decided we would go to the store, and then head up into the sublimely beautiful Logan Canyon and Cache National Forest for a short hike and then build a fire, and cook our dinner over it.  The firepits at Chokecherry are only about a ten minute drive from our house, so we grabbed a few steaks, a couple of avocadoes, some salt and garlic pepper, a bag-o-salad, some wine, and a few other bits and bobs and piled into the Subaru with the pups.

            I think everybody likes to cook outside – grilling is a popular activity around this time of year.  The snow begins to run, the sun warms the closed eyes of leaf-buds, waking them open, and pale blossoms froth whitely on the branches.  Grills everywhere are wheeled out of garages, sacks of new coals are stacked in front of grocery stores, and dusk is tinged with the smell of lighter fluid.  But not everybody can do what we can do – we'll drive up into the mountains, Joseph (an accomplished outdoorsman who loves to play with hatchets and matches) can split a pile of nut-white logs and build a big cuss-off fire, and then we can sear a few thick, red steaks over an open flame.  When people ask me, “Why do you stay in Utah?” I think of days like this. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

poet Timothy O'Keefe with a skull of something - probably a deer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A stroll in Logan Canyon - Joseph Bradbury, Xhenet Aliu, and Tim O'Keefe

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joseph making our fire

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

pretty little avocadoes

 

 

 

 

 

 

perfectly seared steak; big, slutty California cabernet savignon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

perfectly rare

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New York Strip Steaks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

yum

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

enough said?

        This is everything I like – these magnificent mountains, a river clear as a window running through them, cool air closing in around a hot fire, brilliant friends, and what we all agreed was the very best steak any of us had ever eaten – perfectly seasoned with just salt and garlic pepper, tender, seared in the hot flames of an open woodfire for just a minute on each side, long enough to caramelize a little crust on the edges and leave the center a barely-warm deep, deep pink.  With wine so red it was almost black and luscious avocadoes, orange flames popping sparks into the darkening sky, it was just, well, perfect.  It was.  It was perfect.  

 

Food/Writing [by Rebecca Lindenberg]

            I love reading about food.  Cookbooks, blogs, essays, you name it.  And since everybody eats and therefore thinks about food, you can find writing about food from novelists and poets, housewives and scientists, the affluent and the grossly underpaid.  Young writers, old men, women who don’t necessarily think of themselves as writers, and some women – like the brilliant essayist M.F.K. Fisher – who changed the way Americans not just write but also eat and think about food. 

M.F.K. Fisher

            It’s hard to overstate the importance of M.F.K. Fisher’s contribution to American culture, especially to American letters.  The poet W.H. Auden once said of her:  "I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose."[1]  No everybody knows her writing, but they know her legacy – for example, one of her most charming and fascinating books is a slim volume called Consider the Oyster.  Her writing is effortlessly intelligent, which I admire very much, and it’s fiercely charming, which I also love.  Without Consider the Oyster, the nineties and early naughties might not have seen the publication of similar meditations on a single food, its history and economic import, its culinary and cultural importance – books like Cod or Salt.  Author David Foster Wallace certainly knew his M.F.K. Fisher – he cribbed her title for the essay he wrote for Gourmet magazine, ostensibly about the Maine Lobster Fest but really about ethical eating and the nature of pain, “Consider the Lobster.”  When he compiled a whole book of essays, including that one, he used the title again for that volume.  M.F.K. Fisher made some very astute culinary observations.  (For example, she observed that almost everything about an entire cuisine can be reasoned or explained by considering the fat that cuisine predominantly uses in its cooking – the French preference for butter, which smokes at a very low temperature, explains a lot of the ingenuity that cuisine requires; Italian use of olive oil, which smokes low but not as much so as butter, determines many of that cuisine’s flavor combinations; many Asian cuisines prefer peanut or other nut oils that smoke at a very high temperature, so many of those cuisines include traditional dishes that exploit the possibilities inherent in cooking at very high temperatures.  Some would argue that the Chinese “wok he” or “soul of the wok” is really just a clean enough oil over a hot enough fire.)  But M.F.K. Fisher didn’t really write about food – it was ostensibly her subject, but mostly, she wrote about people. How to Cook a Wolf is about rationing during wartime, so it's also about wartime.  And it's about courage, fortitude, and human resourcefulness.  It's about dignity, and it's about identity.  And all of her books work like this.

            Below is a short excerpt from the essay “Borderlands” which can be found in her collection, Serve It Forth.  In the essay, she’s in Strasbourg with her husband, Al, who’s away most of the day on business.  The weather isn’t particularly great, so she spends a lot of time in their hotel room.  She writes in the second-person imperative, maybe a bold move for a lady writer back then, and still she artfully maintains the very lightest touch:

In the morning…sit in the window peeling tangerines, three or four. Peel them gently; do not bruise them, as you watch soldiers pour past and past the corner and over the canal towards the watched Rhine. Separate each plump little pregnant crescent. If you find the Kiss, the secret section, save it for Al.

Listen to the chambermaid thumping up the pillows, and murmur encouragement to her thick Alsatian tales of l'intérieure. That is Paris, the interior…While she mutters of seduction and French bicyclists who ride more than wheels, tear delicately from the soft pile of sections each velvet string. You know those white pulpy strings that hold tangerines into their skins? Tear them off. Be careful.

Take yesterday's paper (when we were in Strasbourg L'Ami du Peuple was best, because when it got hot the ink stayed on it) and spread it on top of the radiator. The maid has gone, of course - it might be hard to ignore her belligerent Alsatian glare of astonishment.

After you have put the pieces of tangerine on the paper on the hot radiator, it is best to forget about them. Al comes home, you go to a long noon dinner in the brown dining-room, afterwards maybe you have a little nip of quetsch from the bottle on the armoire. Finally he goes. You are sorry, but --

On the radiator the sections of tangerines have grown even plumper, hot and full. You carry them to the window, pull it open, and leave them for a few minutes on the packed snow of the sill. They are ready.

All afternoon you can sit, then, looking down on the corner. Afternoon papers are delivered to the kiosk. Children come home from school just as three lovely whores mince smartly into the pension's chic tearoom. A basketful of Dutch tulips stations itself by the tram-stop, ready to tempt tired clerks at six o'clock. Finally the soldiers stump back from the Rhine. It is dark.

The sections of the tangerine are gone, and I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp just after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell.

            The premise of this delightful essay is very simple:  “Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat.”  I suppose we think right away of “guilty pleasures” – which might mean, to some, foods that one ought not to eat because they’re unhealthy (Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream, for example) and to some, because the pleasure is childish and a little embarrassing (I confess, I kind of love Cheetoes.  Even the sticky orange powder that gets all over your fingertips and face and makes them feel oddly, chemically numb.  Gross, I know.  But there you have it).  There’s also secret eating that’s just about weird preparations – this elaborate ritual for a little tangerine, or for my Mom, the pleasures of crushed ice.  For Christmas one year, I got her a kitchen device that looks like a pretty little baseball bat, specifically designed for breaking up ice in a bag.  She eats it almost by the bowlful every single day.  I love edamame in the pods, but I love it the most when I dip it in a little bit of rice vinegar before I suck the salt off the pods, pop them open with my teeth, and scrape out the little al dente green pods with my tongue.  The little extra sting is just so fine.

Funeral Potatoes (by Rebecca Lindenberg)

    This past Christmas, my parents came out here to Utah for the holidays, and the four of us (myself, Joseph, and my mom and dad) went out to Bountiful, Utah for a dinner with Joseph’s folks at his grandmother’s house.  Joseph’s grandmother ran a couple of restaurants in Salt Lake City for awhile – one of them, called Brad’s Café, served home cooking to a big lunch crowd of workers.  A popular menu item was “Hot Hamburgers,” which Joseph remembers as “one bun and two patties, served as two open-faced burgers, smothered in brown gravy.”  Brown gravy, by the way, is what cooks outside the Jell-O Belt might know as “pan gravy,” made from whisking a roux into the fat and juices and scraps left from roasting a bird or a rump roast or even pork shoulder.  You can buy this in powdered packets labeled simply “Brown Gravy,” though that’s not what Joseph’s grandmother does.  Joseph’s grandmother cooked daily for a crowd in the restaurant, and weekly for the crowd of family that gathered at her house for a traditional Mormon Sunday Dinner.  Joseph’s grandmother is a sturdy, unapologetic woman whose basement has been the refuge for many a grandchild in various stages of transition, and whose generosity never falters; despite the fact that the fused vertebrae in her back make it almost unbearably painful for her to stand or work more than five minutes or so at a time, she presented us with a mountain of home-made cookies and candies, and a homemade dinner of spiral-cut ham, honey-glazed and glistening, slightly-opaque green Jell-O salad with whipped cream on top, as well as the kind of salad that has lettuce, onions, tomatoes, and vinagrette. There were white rolls and butter, Jane’s hot mustard (of course), and what my mother would call potatoes au gratin.  “This looks amazing,” I said.  Joseph’s father Frank said, grinning, “It looks like a Mormon funeral in here.”

            The casserole dish my mother would call “potatoes au gratin” Joseph’s family (and everybody who’s spent the requisite amount of time in the Jell-O Belt) would call “funeral potatoes”.  They aren’t quite potatoes au gratin, though the principle is basically the same.  Some people make them with cubed or scalloped potatoes (I slice them thin), some with grated hashbrown-style spuds.  Some people use onions (I do), others prefer without.  Often, funeral potatoes include a can of cream-of-something soup from the food storage (chicken is a popular choice, though I’ve also seen mushroom, broccoli, and asparagus).  Since I don’t usually keep cream-of-whatever around, I just use sour cream.  And then, of course, cheese.  Lots and lots of cheese.  Usually cheddar – I use sharp cheddar but I’ve seen them made with everything from Velveeta to Danish Fontina.  Even my lactose-intolerant boyfriend can’t help but have a little.  “But I love them,” he says later, with a tummy-ache, “they just don’t love me back.”

            Certain aspects of Mormon culture find their way into the lives of everybody who lives in the Jell-O Belt, because they’re just plain good.  I’ve lived a lot of places (the Bay Area in California, Northern Virginia just outside of D.C., Dublin, Brooklyn, Rome) and I have liked – adored, really – almost every place I lived, for its own different virtues.  But not a single one of those places holds a candle to the Jell-O Belt when it comes to people getting born, people moving house, and people dying.  When my sister moved away, we had a dozen people show up at our house and it took all of about an hour to pack her entire apartment into a trailer, then we all settled in for the pizza and beer.  When my friend Tim’s girlfriend moved in, so many people came to help that by the time the stragglers arrived (forty-five minutes after the appointed hour), the work was done and they had to eat their pizza and drink their beer in shame. 

        And when somebody is born or somebody dies, the family whose attention everyone agrees cannot be expected to be on cooking or grocery shopping is brought meal upon meal upon meal.  These meals have to feed a lot of people, so they have to be fairly simple and inexpensive, calorically extraordinary, and accessible to all palates (if not all arteries).  They have to last awhile, and reheat well.  A distinct advantage to funeral potatoes, they can be served a side with breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or as a meal in and of themselves.  They’re tasty, cheap, versatile, and popular, and even if they aren’t per se healthy, you can get your basic carbs, veggies, and protein from the one simple dish.  Like most Mormon food (like most Mormons) they are imminently practical.

            Obviously, funeral potatoes aren’t only served at funerals – they’re also served at, say, a Christmas dinner.  Or a Sunday dinner.  Or a potluck.  Or on a day that ends in Y.  The amateur cultural critic in me reads into this a kind of tacit communal acceptance of the everyday-ness of tragedy that not all cultures share.  We Americans are, generally, an optimistic bunch who view death (especially of the young and virile) as a radical upset of the natural and social order of things, a rift in the time-space continuum.  When you live in a community that is both sizeable and close-knit, you quickly come to understand that simply isn’t the case.  Tragedy is, tragically, a very everyday occurrence.  And it’s good to have a community around when it happens.

            When my late partner, Craig, passed away in 2009, I was living in Salt Lake City, Utah.  As soon as word of what was happening got out, my friends (especially Kathryn and Tim) sprang into action.  It was something I could never have imagined – someone brought a lunch or dinner every single day.  And while the food was amazing (Halina’s chicken and orzo soup, or crispy salad; Danielle’s burritos; Kathryn’s amazing cheese), what I couldn’t have imagined until it was happening was how much I needed the other things that came along with this schedule of meals.  For example, I had to get out of bed and take a shower before noon, since somebody was going to see me.  My long, confusing days of terror and then of shock and then of sorrow were organized into hours by my friends.  Without them, each day would have been a long night of panic and grief, unbroken and maybe un-break-in-able.  And each person who came also stayed and ate with me, and that activity, the communion of breaking bread with a friend, was a sacred and sustaining ritual.  If I wanted to talk, there was someone to talk to; if I wanted a distraction, there was someone to distract me.  And above all, when I felt the most lonesome I have perhaps ever felt, I found I never had to be alone.  When I started to feel better, when summer came and people began to drift away for various jobs and residencies and vacations, my beloved teachers and friends Donald Revell and Claudia Keelan took me in for awhile.  They fed me wine and smoked salmon and guacamole and let me sleep and sleep.  We watched old movies and talked about poems, and I began to understand that, unbelievably, everything might be okay.

Further Adventures in the Jell-O Belt [by Rebecca Lindenberg]

            In the beginning of the film Napoleon Dynamite, the credits come up as a collage of weird culinary Americana – ketchup and tater tots, mustard and corn dogs, peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, cheeseburgers and mayonnaise, nachos studded with black olives.  Plate after plate appears on a background of maroon shag rug, then baby-blue carpeting, then avocado green linoleum, and so forth.  Blast from the past, bomb shelter fare, served in rooms decorated in a similar idiom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

        Set in Preston, Idaho, where writer-director Jared Hess grew up, Napoleon Dynamite comes right out of the Mormon Corridor, the so-called “Jell-O Belt,” that spans a certain area of America’s Intermountain West.  It sort of radiates outward from Salt Lake City, Utah, reaching deep into Idaho and into Wyoming, very slightly into Colorado, trickling a little ways down through Arizona and then hopping by patches all the way down to certain parts of Southern California.  This exceedingly beautiful part of America includes the surreal red rock deserts of Moab and Monument Valley, the sublime limestone cliffs of Zion and St. George, the lava-rich soils and aspen forests of the Grand Escalante, the eerie stillness of the Great Salt Lake, the rangey splendor of the Wasatch and Uintas, the windy high plains and ranchlands around Rock Springs and Laramie, the stubborn fields and pastures of Idaho all the way up through the formidable Grand Tetons.  It’s dominated by some of the most beautiful and various and mysterious country in the world.  The poet James Galvin, who has a ranch in Wyoming, has at times written about this land, the people who live there, its weather and its other weathering forces – a different portrait, perhaps, than Napoleon Dynamite.  He writes in “Ponderosa,”

 

                                                                        The bolt

came down like knowledge, but the tree did not explode or burn.

                                                                              It

Caught the jolt and trapped it like a mythic girl.

                                                                Its trunk was three

Feet through

            lightning couldn’t blow the ponderosa into splinters,

And couldn’t burn inside without some air.

                                                                A week went by and we

Forgot about it. 
But lightning is a very hot and radiant girl.  

                                                                            When

Heat bled out to bark, the tree burst into flame that reared into

Silence under a cloudless sky.

 

        There does seem to be something about the land in this part of the world that inspires mythic thinking, or at least otherworldly thinking.  The enigmatic rock formation from the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the bundle of hexagonal basaltic columns known as Devil’s Tower, an ancient volcanic plug (the volcano around it long since worn away) rising out of the flatlands of eastern Wyoming.[1] 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Devil’s Tower, Wyoming

         Much of this land was hard to settle, and harder still to scrabble a living out of.  So much so that a lot of it remains very sparsely inhabited.  Indeed, southern Utah was considered so barren and unnecessary (and its mostly-Mormon and otherwise Native American population so “Other”) that the U.S. government wasn’t too bothered about the fact that radiation and radioactive debris from nuclear testing in Nevada was blowing all over it – something Rachel Marston has been researching and writing about for some years.  By some accounts, Uncle Sam even encouraged the smallish population living around St. George at the time to go out of doors and watch the sky change from the nuclear tests, as the sometimes snowflake-sized ashes drifted into their towns, clinging to their clothes and curtains and porch furniture.  (Did the government know what the effects would be?)  Being, as a culture, generally trusting of authority, they did.  And a whole generation of “downwinders” suffered quietly together with the massive, unusual tumors and other forms of cancer that ravaged their communities. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Southern Utah, an arroyo near Monument Valley

        Sometimes, people settled this land because it was so barren, so desolate, so ignored and so ignorable.  In this same area of southern Utah, for instance, you’re more likely to run into individuals who belong to an FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints) polygamist community.  Some friends and I have rented a house near Zion in the past couple of summers, where you might just run into a group at the local Walmart or Costco, dressed in Laura Ingalls Wilder prairie garb, buying slats of boxed macaroni and cheese.  Much is being said about polygamy in the media these days, thanks in part to HBO’s Big Love and well-curated “reality” spin-offs like Sister Wives.  Most of what I know about polygamy comes from people who self-identify as victims of it, and I cannot do their stories justice here, so I will not elaborate except to say that, like anything, it’s not like they show it on TV.  For some information about an aspect of polygamist culture and practice that few people, even in Utah, have considered, watch Jennilyn Merten’s amazing documentary, Sons of Perdition.

             Rumor has it that polygamist culture games the government’s entitlement programs, since second and third (and subsequent) wives are, according to the relevant tax documents and applications forms, single mothers with a pack of kids and no job or income whatsoever.  Except that, if the polygamist lifestyle is anything like it appears to an outsider such as myself, they do in fact need those food stamps, and it’s not a scam.  I honestly just don’t know.

            But when we were at a grocery store outside of Washington, Utah, near the Nevada/Arizona/Utah border, and these women in long, high-necked and high-waisted gingham dresses were buying up the milk and the powdered soup and popsicles, we were standing in line behind them with tilapia and garlic and all of the mixings for strong margaritas.  And before I turned my attention to the prairie garb or the fact that one of them with three small children could not possibly have been eighteen, or whether they all might be married to the same patriarchal oddball, I thought:  “I’m kind of glad I’m not eating dinner at their house.”  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zion, Utah’s first National Park (1919) in southern Utah (in August)

         For awhile, I rode a Greyhound Bus every-other weekend from Salt Lake City to Laramie, Wyoming, through some of the most stridently tough and unpleasant territory in the Jell-O Belt.  Interstate 80 roughly traces other historically significant travel routes in the Western United States: the Oregon Trail across Wyoming and Nebraska, the California Trail across most of Nevada and California, and except in the Great Salt Lake area, the entire route of the First Transcontinental Railroad.  You meet a lot of interesting characters on the bus, before you learn to board with your headphones already in your ear-holes and pretend not to be able to speak English.  Or Spanish.  Or at all.  Of the various people who might sit next to you, the most desirable seat companions are a toss-up between college kids (also be-headphoned) and truckers deadheading back to Indianapolis or wherever they’re based.  In the latter case, they will cheerfully pronounce that the stretch of I-80 from SLC to Denver is the absolute stupidest leg of highway ever laid down – subject to constant closures, and as often as it’s for snowstorms, it’s for unbelievably high-speed winds.  Trying to drive a little Honda along that road is one thing – the wind blows so hard it seems to get under the wheels, so you’re almost aeroplaning from the lift and drag.  But the same wind fills up its cheeks and blows over tall semis, passenger busses, and as I once saw (blood and feathers all over the road), a long trailer full of chickens.

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: ObamaCare as Imperial Fizz

The case against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare, is not nearly as fun as an Imperial Fizz, though it's definitely fizzy. All of the law's ingredients, the whiskey, rum, lemon juice and sweet, sweet sugar of insurance policy arcana--all except the sparkling water of a mandate--have already been mixed and are being shaken as we speak. They can’t be taken apart at this point without dumping the whole shebang down the drain, which is not to say that the Supreme Court won’t do exactly that. And the glacial pace of the Affordable Healthcare Act's implementation, like the slow-motion process of its enactment, gives opponents plenty of time to whip up a frenzy of anti-Imperialism, before this drink ever hits the coaster.

I, ______________, should not be forced to pay for health insurance.
Fill in the blank with “taxpayer,” “small business,” “Utah” or “Catholic bishop,” and you’ve got the argument against ObamaCare. All of its critics base their opposition on that word forced, raising issues of liberty.  Certainly, the recent contraceptive flap was initially introduced—by Republicans, not the media—and framed as a question of religious liberty. But if we’ve discovered anything from that debate, it’s that liberty is not the only value Americans hold dear. Liberty’s not the only value enshrined in the Constitution, either. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the big three, and it wasn’t long before the national conversation morphed against Republicans’ will into one about a different set of values: whether women deserve to pursue the kind of happiness that comes from choosing when they have children, and to have the kind of life that comes from preventing pregnancy when it poses a health risk. Guess which two values trumped the third in a contest between the religious liberty of bishops (total of 195 in the U.S.) and the life and happiness of women (more than 150,000,000 in the U.S.)?

Not only are bishops a tiny group, they don’t use contraceptives and nothing in the health care law is making them do so. But when they act as employers, rather than as leaders of spiritual flocks, they have to follow the same rules as secular hospital or university administrators. As employers, they can’t dictate the health care decisions of their employees. They are not Imperial, though they do have nifty regalia.

Leaving the contraception coverage rule aside, I look at the broader debate over health insurance and find it odd that so much resistance to ObamaCare has come from the religious community, particularly fundamentalist Christians. Jesus had a lot to say about taking care of each other, from loving thy neighbor to all those blessings on the poor and vulnerable in the Beatitudes. He spent quite a bit of His time healing people and feeding them, and none of it lobbying. While He never ran for office, it’s easy to imagine Him favoring universal access to health care. On this specific topic, He said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick.”

Here’s what the emphasis in the New Testament is not on: taxes, small business, states’ rights or, frankly, political liberty. What little Jesus said about taxes, “render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s,” seems to argue in favor of paying them. He never mentioned small business, unless you count the enterprising moneychangers and dove-sellers in the temple, whom He whipped. Judging from that rare example of holy rage, His policy was not pro-business. The Chamber of Commerce would have despised Him. Jesus talked more about divorce than taxes. Where is the fundamentalist Christian groundswell to make divorce illegal? And how do the 1 in 3 divorced Evangelicals—Evangelicals defined as Christians who attend church weekly, take the Bible literally, and proselytize—reconcile their own failure to stay married with Jesus, their Lord and Savior?

But on caring for others, Jesus had a lot to say. He was inclusive, embracing tax payers, tax collectors, Samaritans, women, and other “others”—one might almost describe Him as a single payer plan. ObamaCare, emphasis on “care,” is inclusive, too. Embrace that moniker, Mr. President. It’s the Christian thing to do.