Fortunate Descent Into Gibberish

I know for a fact I'm never going to read the new Tom Wolfe book but I also know it has owls in it thanks to a review by Dwight Garner. Mr. Garner marks this passage as one of Wolfe's unfortunate descents into gibberish but all I know is that if the whole book were like this maybe I WOULD read it:

Rice Droppin'

So Dr. Theresa and her coworker Kevin and her whole department (which is, like, one other person) and all their partners and helpers and students and affiliates did an amazing thing pulling off this 10-day musical event, culminating in last night's joyous Neko Case show. The "green room" was the balcony of the Lyric Theater, and I crept up there and stole a plate of Neko Case's food. So I was leaning on the balcony railing watching the show and two grains of rice fell off the plate! And they hit some guy on the head. And he looked up, right at me! And I just slowly stepped backward and disappeared into the shadows like the Phantom of the Opera! I did not take responsibility for my actions. But the point is that things have been busy around here and also I went out of town and my reading of THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY and THE FAERIE QUEENE has been temporarily stalled. These are nice editions I can't take out of the house! And I just haven't been in the house. But don't worry, I'm gonna get back to them eventually. I don't want you to worry! Promise me you won't worry. Because I'm also doing a presentation for the upcoming Southern Foodways Symposium and I have to get some research done for that! My topic: TV cook and "humorist" Justin Wilson. So I have to read a lot of his "humor." AND! I was sitting at Square Books looking through the new William Gay book, which is a short manuscript found in his papers after he passed away, and I read the compelling introduction by Tom Franklin and I started reading the book and I suddenly realized I had read a certain quantifiable PERCENTAGE of the book and it no longer seemed right to just sit there and read the whole book, maybe, so I bought it, so that's something else.

Properly Crammed

I would like to apologize to the labels ADVENTURE, BLOOD, DREAMS, DRUNK, EMPTY, FAVES, FISH, FURNITURE, GLORY, HAPPINESS, HEADS, HEAVEN, PROUD, RICE, SHINY, SILENCE, SLEEP, SPIRIT, and STATUES, which should have been appended to a recent "post" but could not be crammed properly into place.

Heavy

Reading this lavish, heavy (I mean physically heavy, like it's hard to carry around) book by Umberto Eco, THE BOOK OF LEGENDARY LANDS. It has lots of great parts, like: "In the West, too, there was no lack of artisans able to construct automata, and legend has it that Pope Sylvester II (who reigned 999-1003) was attributed with the creation of a golden talking head that murmured secret advice." And: "At the court of Khan Mongke in Karakorum, William of Rubrick saw a silver tree whose roots were formed by four silver lions, from each of whose mouths poured mare's milk." There was an angel with a trumpet on top, and when the angel blew its horn, some snakes that were coiled around the tree started spitting out wine, mead, and rice beer. Anyway, people used to know how to have a good time.

Yelling in a Hayfield

I hate to complain about anything in THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL but this character Fergus is a lot like the awful, precocious brats in some sitcoms, always coming up with thudding, smart-alecky one-liners. There's one scene where he's just yelling at a bunch of servants who are toiling in a hayfield, and the narrator (Fergus's older brother) is like, "Leaving him thus haranguing the people, more to their amusement than edification, I returned to the house..." And I was like, "Their amusement?" I imagine they wanted to wring his little neck. But I do love the narrator, who is always trying to convince us and himself that he is not a fop, or, as he just put it, "that I was not the empty-headed coxcomb she had first supposed me to be," and my sympathy for Anne Brontë is always restored by the weird, prim snottiness of the scholarly footnotes in this edition, which seem unnecessarily hard on her ("The author awakens intermittently to the memory of the epistolary device," sniffs one). Here's a sentence from our narrator that tickled me, though: "'Nonsense!' ejaculated I." I like everything about it: the noun, the verb, the pronoun, the exclamation point, the order in which they are placed. It made me think of Tom Franklin's epigraph for his great novel SMONK, taken from Edgar Rice Burroughs: "'Magnifique!' ejaculated the Countess de Coude, beneath her breath."

Big Arboreal Rice Rat

You know I have a book about weeds and a book about seahorses and an "ethnobotanical dictionary" and a waterlogged set of BUTLER'S LIVES OF THE SAINTS and elsewhere on the "internet" I have written about my love of reference books so it is no surprise to you that I picked up MAMMALS OF THE WORLD: A CHECKLIST and ALABAMA WILDLIFE VOLUME TWO: IMPERILED AQUATIC MOLLUSKS AND FISHES at Off Square Books the other day, but my purchase afforded much amusement for those gathered, including Lisa Howorth, who was moved to take a picture of it (above - see also). Only Melissa Ginsburg, who was there, truly "got" why these books are so interesting, although one other person said (unconvincingly), by way of compensatory sympathy, "I do want to know what's going on with that anteater and that skunk," referring to the cover of MAMMALS OF THE WORLD: A CHECKLIST. MAMMALS OF THE WORLD: A CHECKLIST is a checklist of the mammals of the world. That's all it is! Page after page. No illustrations. Font, font, font, closely packed. There are even little boxes next to the names of the mammals so you can check them off right there in the book when you see them! "And it tells you where to go," Melissa observed. Sure enough, I now know that I might have to go to Peru to see a "big arboreal rice rat." As for the book about imperiled mollusks, I am sorry the mollusks are imperiled but they have great names, presented in all caps and illustrated by beautiful color photographs. Just now I opened the book at random and found ORANGEFOOT PIMPLEBACK and DELICATE SPIKE and PINK MUCKET. (See also.) And oh yeah a while back I thought it would be a great idea if I had some unwieldy facsimile editions of HOLINSHED'S CHRONICLES - from which Shakespeare got a bunch of his ideas - but I could only get hold of volume three and volume six. Still, volume three has the reign of Henry VI in it, so recently, when I was reading about Henry VI elsewhere, I thought: "At last! A use for HOLINSHED'S CHRONICLES! I bet there's some hot stuff in there!" There is not. (See also.) But volume six says that Irish people are "religious, franke, amorous, irefull, sufferable of infinit paines, verie glorious, manie sorcerers, excellent horssemen... Their infants, they of meaner sort, are neither swadled nor lapped in linen, but folded vp starke naked in a blanket till they can go... otemeale and butter they cram togither... they let their cowes bloud, which growne to a gellie, they bake and ouerspread with butter, and so eate it in lumps." Whoa I got carried away typing there.

With Creamed Cabbage Thou Must Fill My Crown

Hey don't you want to hear about the old cookbook I was reading because I was trying to remember the word "gremolata"? (It didn't help.) Naturally I wandered over to gelatin. According to this cookbook, "Jellied Ginger Ale Cubes" make a terrific salad garnish! This cookbook also tells you how to have a party for Washington's birthday. "Fill tiny blue and silver tri-cornered hats with red gumdrops and set these at each plate." For Lincoln's birthday serve "buttered steamed rice," plum pie, and the majestic (I assume) "Crown of Frankfurters"! Ingredients: 20 frankfurters and 2 cups cooked sauerkraut. That's all! Although you can "Fill crown with stuffing, creamed cabbage, creamed cauliflower or Potato Balls instead of sauerkraut." Ha ha, Potato Balls, the capital letters make it funny. This is the CULINARY ARTS INSTITUTE ENCYCLOPEDIC COOKBOOK: DELUXE EDITION from 1976, "newly revised," though it was first published in 1948, and reads that way. I also found one of my brother's old report cards folded up (hidden?) inside!

A Struggling Salesman of Pencil Sharpeners

Things I enjoyed learning from this article in the New York Times: Edgar Rice Burroughs was "a struggling salesman of pencil sharpeners" when he decided to become a writer. He read adventure magazines and said (actual quote), "I could write stories just as rotten." And he did! This I admire. Later, he and L. Frank Baum of "Wizard of Oz" fame were neighbors. Baum called his place "Ozcot" and Burroughs - creator of Tarzan - called his "Tarzana." Ha ha! All right! I love it.

Foodstuffs!

Welcome once again to "Foodstuffs!" - the only place on the "internet" to read about food. It occurs to me that any of the four previous "posts" might have served as a new edition of "Foodstuffs!", concerning as they did horrible chocolate wine, pig fragments, blobs of rice, and ammonia Coke. Mmmmmm, some menu. Reminds me of a postcard Kelly Hogan sent me many years ago (see above). Speaking of ammonia Coke, my friend from "She Blogged By Night" writes in with an interesting explanation: "Ammonia Coke contains Aromatic Spirits of Ammonia, i.e. smelling salts!"

Gummy Humps

Remember when I used to write fiction? That was stupid! But terrible old habits die hard. I have a short story in the new Oxford American, that's right, along with my regular column. As I am sure you will be thrilled to hear, my column features a reference to character actor Vito Scotti (pictured). I hear the sounds of millions running to their local newsstands. My short story, on the other hand, is called "Ghost College." Does it live up to its title? Of course not! That's what "writers" do. We sucker you in with a title and at the end you're all, "What was THAT all about?" And we are like, "Too late, you already read it!" And we laugh and laugh. On the plus side, the issue features Michael Martone, Steve Almond, James Whorton, Jr., and lots of other people who are truly good at what they do. As always, it's action-packed! Daredevil John T. Edge eats a school lunch. But at least we are lucky enough to get this sentence out of his loathsome experience: "The rice arrived in gummy humps." I've been saying that out loud a lot. It sounds like part of an Edward Lear poem! For some reason (well, the reasons are probably obvious) it makes me think of a sentence from A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN: "And a fellow had once seen a big rat jump plop into the scum." (Hey, my new story has the word "plop" in it. I'm just like James Joyce!) Gee, speaking of ghosts, I have really been falling down on the job of telling you about what's in the New York Times every day. A couple of weeks ago (?) there was an op-ed with a misty blue ghost in it. Let me look that up to make sure I'm not crazy. Yes: "the mist came down the hall, paused to consider him, and then curled into the room where my mother lay dreaming." That's an op-ed! At a later date, the New York Times gossip columnist was hanging out with the cast of the reality show GHOST HUNTERS, which just seems sad and forlorn somehow, especially for the cast of GHOST HUNTERS. And, on a somewhat unrelated subject, there was an obituary for "a distinguished Abstract Expressionist artist who — after what he described as a chance sighting of something flat, silver, airborne and unfathomable — became the father of the alien-abduction movement."

These Gleaming Vessels: A Brief History of the Casserole

I was having a conversation about casserole - never mind with whom! Why must you pry into every aspect of my fascinating life? My friend and I were wondering about the origins and exact definition of a casserole. I promised to go home and look up "casserole" in my OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD, but I never did... UNTIL NOW. Hold onto your hats! A casserole is "a covered heat proof vessel in which food is cooked and served or, by extension, the food cooked in such a vessel. The word has a complicated history, starting with a classical Greek term for a cup (kuathos), progressing to a Latin word (cattia), which could mean both ladle and pan, then becoming an old French word." The author of THE OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD goes on to note "the remarkable fact [if you say so - ed.] that there has been a sudden and complete change in the meaning of casserole in English in the last 100 years." Have you stopped reading yet? If so you will not find out that "some time around the 1870s" a casserole stopped being "a dish of cooked rice moulded into the shape of a casserole cooking pot and then filled with a savoury mixture, say of chicken or sweetbreads" and for no apparent reason, out of the blue, became "a dish of meat, vegetable, and stock or other liquid, cooked slowly in the oven in a closed pot, its current sense. On the French side, it is of interest [sure it is - ed.] that when Favre wrote his huge culinary encyclopedia (1883-92) a casserole was defined as a tinned copper cooking pot, well suited to being displayed on the wall in order to impress visitors with the wealth and highly civilized lifestyle of the owners 'who live on food prepared in these gleaming vessels.'"

McNeil's Movie Korner

Welcome to a new edition of McNeil's Movie Korner. It has been far too long between Korners. Which reminds us: McNeil is about two weeks past his deadline for cranking up the second phase of MGMIEET, in many ways the offspring of the Korner. In the meantime, you of course recall McNeil's affection for a certain kind of band with a certain kind of name performing in a certain kind of movie. Think back to over a year ago, when McNeil was cooking rice and singing a refrain by the Comfortable Chair. Well, McNeil has recently enjoyed a film called THE LOVE-INS on TCM, and reports that it contains a performance by the Chocolate Watchband (above). McNeil has never seemed happier.

Victuals

Two emails on the subject of food came through last night. The first, it should come as no surprise, was from Dr. "M.," who, as you very well know, is the "blog's" resident expert on food ("click" here for the most recent corroborative "post"). Dr. "M." writes on the subject of our recent "cabbage vs. collards" dilemma: "My mom fixed hoppin' john and cabbage tonight. But she commented at the dinner table that we should really be having collard greens. But the cabbage was divine. Also, you are supposed to hide a dime in the hoppin' john, but she was too tired to do that, she said. Actually, she said she was too tired to clean the dime so that she could hide it in the peas-n-rice. I am glad to know that all of those years of finding dimes in my peas (often once they were in my mouth!) that the money was clean and sterile. Whew!" The cabbage, we would like to note, was grown by Dr. "M.'s" husband the Farmer. Dr. "M." and the Farmer just returned from a trip to Chicago, and Dr. "M." also provided, in a postscript, a long list of restaurants they enjoyed while there, and which we reproduce here for your pleasure and edification: Cafe Spiaggia * The Green Zebra * Orange * Milk and Honey Cafe * Lovely Bakeshop * Hot Chocolate * Hopleaf Bar/Restaurant * Eleventh City Diner * Intelligentsia Coffeeshop. The second food email came from James Whorton, Jr., commenting on our recent lauding of Lobel's hot dogs. A student of Whorton's, it turns out, is the "webmaster" for the Lobel's "web" site! In a non-food-related coincidence, Whorton reports that as the new year begins, he is reading LITTLE BIG MAN by Thomas Berger, "originally published in 1964" (Whorton's note). On 12/31/07, I finished up THE FAR SIDE OF THE DOLLAR, which was ALSO ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 1964! Astonishing!

Luck & Money

Happy new year! As you know, you must eat some black eyed peas with rice (hoppin' john) and collard greens today. The peas are for luck and the greens are for money. Or maybe you are from Britain or some other classy place and you do not know about this tradition! Well, have you asked yourself why you didn't have any luck or money in 2007? It is probably because you did not eat black eyed peas or collard greens on January 1, 2007. Also, it is bad luck to wash clothes today, so watch out! In the grocery store the other day, two different people tried to tell Theresa that we are supposed to cook cabbage today, not collards! Are those people out of their minds?

One Year Ago In "Blog" History

One year ago today, I had brown rice with lunch. This has been "One Year Ago In 'Blog' History," gingerly proffered for your contemplative pleasure by the staff and administration at this joyous time of year.

Brown Rice

You know what's good AND good for you? Brown rice. Just had some with lunch. Brown rice! Awesome. Try brown rice today.

Dear "Blog"

Our recent humble "bloggings" have garnered literally four responses! It's by far the most overwhelming thing we have ever experienced here at the "blog." And now, with our current intern shortage, we won't lie - it's a little hard to acknowledge all four letters individually. But we respect you, our "blog" readers, and we're going to do the best we can to respond to each and every communique. First, Barry B. writes in to note that the Jeep's diet consisted specifically of orchids. Speaking of diets, Jim Whorton was moved by our recent reflection (or "blog"flection, as I like to call it) on lunch boxes of days gone by. He recalls that in 1971 he enjoyed sandwiches of mustard and American cheese, AND sandwiches of butter and sugar, each sometimes carried in his first lunch box, which featured the Hair Bear Bunch (pictured). Meanwhile, the reliable Mr. McNeil reports a flabbergasting coincidence. Yesterday, BEFORE he had read my "blog," with its reference to The Comfortable Chair, he found himself standing at the stove, whipping up a batch of rice, and singing to himself, over and over, "a child walks in the garden"... the refrain, Mr. McNeil informs us, to a song by that very same band, The Comfortable Chair! And finally, the mysterious Ms. "M" chimes in to approve of our approval of THE WIRE. Thanks for writing, everybody! Sometimes I wonder if "blogging" really matters, then I remember the good folks out there.