I might have complained about MLA citation. I do think it’s clunky, with the parenthetical citations at the end of every other sentence, and student never know whether to put the end punctuation before or after. For my own writing, I found footnotes less cluttery. Not endnotes – I like all the relevant information to be on one page, so I can see at a glance whether more details are available without flipping to the back of the book, losing my place, only to find page numbers.
Footnotes, technically, are Chicago style citation, which was the required form for the article I submitted today. I had to look up Chicago style to make sure I was being consistent… and I ended up spending another hour tweaking my notes. Ridiculously, there are two separate styles for full citations in the footnotes and in the bibliography. They had enough minute differences (order of first and last time, abbreviation or not of the word “editor”, location of page numbers) that my eyes crossed trying to keep them straight. The first in-text citation gets the long version; each subsequent in-text citation gets Surname, Title, Page Number listed as opposed to the tidier (last name, page number) format of MLA. All the extra words put me several hundred over the 8,000 word limit for this article.
This is dumb. “Citation has a purpose,” I used to soothe my composition students. “If anyone wanted to use your work as a reference. . .” But since the collection is requiring endnotes for my article, anyone who wants to read it will have to keep one finger in the back of the book, flipping to and fro at each of my sixty endnotes to see if I’ve included a pithy remark or only and overlong source reference.
When I get some intellectual leverage in the world, I am going to invent a new citation strategy called Sara style. It will be sleek, informative, and easy to use… like Wikipedia, but with more reliable citation.
There is a long shelf in the restroom near the writing center, an awkwardly placed shelf by the door that you can’t see from the sinks. I don’t generally leave my bag there.
Last week, there were a pair of shoes on the shelf – strappy sandals – and a sign taped to the wall above them said “Help Yourself!” in printed capitals. I liked that. I had no need of strappy sandals, but I appreciated the exhortation to help myself. It was like a cookieless fortune, a friendly reminder in the same tone as the sign on the restroom door that exclaims, “Wait! Do you have your keys?”
On Monday, the shoes and their sign were gone. What happened to them? The cleaning crew must have seen and ignored them for several days in a row; had they finally been thrown away? Or did some office Cinderella trip in, try them on, and find them fitting?
On Tuesday, today, there is a bundle of green and white fabric on the shelf. A blue post-it with red cursive writing proclaimed that the contents were free, and included one duvet cover and two pillow shams. I am impressed that the donor gave all of the proper names; I would have forgotten sham, I wouldn’t even have called it by another recognizable phrase like pillowcase. I would have said pillow cover. However, the writing at the bottom was less legible; I think it said “frist laundered.”
I am intrigued. I have a box of discarded things from my last big clean-out in Spring. No clothes or shoes: those were redistributed at a swap among friends, so that we all now point and grin when we see one of us wearing our old clothes.
No, nothing as personal as cloth that has been against my own skin. Instead of I have objects that have fallen into disuse: a clock shaped like the Eiffel Tower; a nearly complete set of Sims 1 expansion packs; a stack of ACT workbooks. I tell myself that one day I will throw my crate of goods into my granny cart and roll them up to AIDS Thrift, allow them to decide how to recirculate my trash. But I’m here every day anyway… what if I brought something up every morning, and left its fate to chance and post-its? Perhaps I wouldn’t need to include any notes at all with these objects – does a free Eiffel Tower clock need selling?
This is not so much a recipe as a recommendation. All you do to make stock is boil veggies and herbs in water and then strain it. It’s worth a post, though, because seriously everyone can do this and I’m embarrassed that I’d never tried it before.
The reason is that I never thought I had enough vegetables to make a stock. Now I definitely do, with the CSA: although I can finish most of my share, I just don’t eat a lot of onions (which are plentiful right now), and even if I freeze some of the fresh herbs there is still a lot of them. So I started keeping a freezer bag that I’d just add leftovers to every week.
And once I’d started a bag for my vegetable waste, I realized that I’d just been wasting edible vegetables all this time. Seriously! You know how fresh herbs always come in a quantity that is slightly more than you need? I often chop and freeze herbs into ice cubes, but the stems or even whole bunches of herbs can go in the pot. The carrots that get a little wibbly after hanging out in the so-called crisper too long? Chop them up. The little leaves that grow on broccoli stems that you usually throw away when you’re chopping the broccoli? Why not! I could have been keeping a freezer bag of stock veggies for years instead of buying so many cartons of broth at Whole Foods (I cook with broth a lot).
The stock Elana and I made contains: beet leaves and stems that were too fibrous to eat, rainbow chard that started to wilt, lots and lots of spring onion, parsley sage rosemary and thyme, chives, broccoli leaves, baby carrots leftover from a party, quite a bit of lettuce, the knobby bits of garlic scapes, the saturated cloves of garlic from a rosemary oil-infusing experiment, cucumber slices, half a head of cabbage, the green leafy bits from a head of cauliflower, maybe six grape tomatoes from a different party, and celery. Just to be fancy, we first browned the onions in leftover rosemary oil and softened them in cooking sherry until the sherry boiled off a bit. We then filled my huge stockpot 3/4 full with these veggies (the cabbage took up a lot of room) and just covered them in water, adding soy sauce, salt and pepper, coriander, and more wine. We felt it tasted a little “green” and one-note, so we added more soy sauce and Worschestershire sauce for depth… I imagine that will be less of an issue when we get less lettuce and more root veggies, although I will miss turning handfuls of parsley into soup.
Anyway, we ended up with nearly five quarts of delicious broth, but there’s no need to do that much at one time.
The only thing I’d change is our method for straining. The veggies cook way down, but they still hold a lot of water, so even after running everything through my colander we ended up squeezing veggie mush with our hands (hilarious) until we’d extracted another pint or so of broth. I could see the point of having cheesecloth or a soup stock or something… recommendations welcome.
I am going to make a kale and kielbasa soup with my broth!
One morning recently, I opened a book on mother-daughter relationships in fiction and was struck by this epigraph. As far as I can tell this is the poem (or “prosem,” as I sometimes call such things) in its entirety. I’m very interesting in looking up more of this woman’s work.
“Myth” by Muriel Rukeyser
Long afterward, Oedipus, old and
blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a
familiar smell. It was the Sphinx. Oedipus
said, “I want to ask you one question.
Why didn’t I recognize my mother?” “You
gave the wrong answer,” said the Sphinx.
“But that was what made everything
possible,” said Oedipus. “No,” she said.
“When I asked, What walks on four legs
in the morning, two at noon and three in
the evening, you answered, Man. You
didn’t say anything about woman.”
“When you say Man,” said Oedipus, “you
include women too. Everyone knows
that.” She said, “That’s what you think.”
I’m not sure why I’m calling this a stirfry. I think it’s because I’m remembering a recipe I used once or twice in college – do you remember this, muffins? It came from a large-paged cookbook with colorful photos that I no longer own, maybe it wasn’t mine to begin with. Anyway, I made this while I was visiting my gram last week. I brought some of my CSA stuff and used up some things I found in her house (namely, the pork and apple).
Garlic scapes are new to me: they are stems that grow from hardneck garlic and are snipped off so the garlic can put more energy into bulb growth. If I eat them raw or lightly sautéed, I find them extremely spicy – that slow acidic but delicious burn that you get when you eat raw garlic cloves. I think I prefer them cooked down a bit; they were still firm in this dish, but greenly sweet and mellow.
Stuff:
2 pork loins, cut into small (.5”?) cubes that will cook faster
2 small apples, also cut into small cubes and sprinkled with lemon juice to keep them from browning. (1 normal-sized apple would probably be plenty)
3 or 4 garlic scapes, cut into inch-long bits
2 cups (I think?) brown rice
Chicken broth (optional, but awesome)
Some onion (green part optional) and garlic
Fresh chopped sage
Olive oil*
Whatever other seasonings you like
*I actually infused the olive oil with sage, experimenting with a technique Elana uses… I slowly heated half a cup of olive oil and threw in two cloves of garlic and three sprigs of my fresh sage when it got hot. If it’s hot enough, it should sizzle around these water-based things when you throw them in and make tantalizing smells. I let it cook on low heat while I was doing other things, turned the heat off when the sage looked burnt to a crisp and the garlic looked mushy, and set it aside to cool. There was enough for the stirfry and also to coat some sliced beets for roasting.
1. Prepare the rice according to its package. It’s good to use chicken broth with this dish because it gives the rice a good flavor and texture; I also threw in a smidge of the sage-infused oil, and a handful of chopped green stalk from my spring onion. You probably should start the rice before you chop anything else up, because it could take up to 45 minutes to cook rice and the frying part of this procedure goes fast.
2. When you chop the pork, toss it with some dry seasonings. I like to use paprika for the color, salt and pepper, maybe some ground-up dried oregano and thyme, whatever’s around. You can also toss the scapes and apples in seasoning separately, but it isn’t necessary.
3. Heat up a little oil (sage-infused, if you like) in a pan that has a lid. Cook a few tablespoons of minced onion and garlic in the oil until it begins to brown. Add the pork cubes, adding oil if necessary to coat them; push the cubes around on fairly high heat until they start to brown. Add scapes; toss to coat. Add apple cubes. Cover the skillet and turn the heat low; you want all the things in there to produce their own juice and steam themselves a little.
4. When your rice is done and you are satisfied that the pork is cooked through, add a couple tablespoons of the fresh chopped sage to the stuff in the skillet. I spooned a bunch of the rice on top of that, covered it, turned the heat off and walked away for an hour to do something else – but probably you can mix it all up and eat it as soon as the rice and pork are finished.
I am not, of course, at all sure that this will work for you. But for us it was pretty tasty.
So this may not be news to you, but… I haven’t been posting lately. Perversely, I tend to blog the most when I have the least time – that is, when I’m producing the most output, teaching and writing and grading and being graded. This calendar year I haven’t been putting out much (so to speak), with the exception of my dissertation proposal, which at this time is still floating in departmental neverwhere waiting for professorial comment (which they must be prodded into providing, and our adept cat-herder is being transferred to another department. Oh, academia!). Instead, I’ve been reading. Thinking. Outlining. I’ve been… stewing.
But this week I’m meant to both complete an article for submission and show an outline of my first dissertation chapter to a graduate advisor, so how do I cope? By revamping my blog.
I thought I might as well use it for the purpose to which it is best suited – scooping the froth from the top of a busy brain. Some of it will be work-related: I’ll post things that interest me or puzzle me, or my own ideas when I just need to get out of my own head and see if this stuff translates to the real word. Much more of it will be food-related: I receive a weekly CSA (community supported agriculture) box, which I HIGHLY recommend doing, as it allows me to eat vegetables pretty much all the time and forces me to combine them in new ways. Some of these concoctions are not fit for public consumption, but others are kind of tasty and I am capitulating to a desire to post and receive recipes on this blog. They will be labeled “reckless” so you are warned that I don’t really measure and sometimes forget steps, and I think you can substitute pretty much anything in it for something else.
I also finally got a feed reader so I can do a much better job of noticing when your blog is updated. (Sorry, Richard!)
Here’s what you can do for me: say hi. Been blogging lately without my comment? Pointedly remind me; I’ll drop in. Haven’t been blogging? Well, why not?
I’ve been reading – on a number of different blogs – about two media debacles this weekend.
One is Amazon Fail. To summarize if you’ve missed it: Amazon has a policy to strip the sales rankings of “adult” media to make it less searchable – in case any children are shopping on Amazon (you know, with their credit cards) and might accidentally come across something that an adult would have to explain to them. Except, the only media being stripped (hah!) is that which deals with gay and/or female sexuality in a positive light. Some pro-woman and pro-gay books will not even show up if you search for their titles word for word, unless the title is also available on Kindle. (Hm.)
Theories are many and varied: Is Amazon really right-washing its search criteria? Is it running automatic software that strips texts that have received the most complaints? This post has a theory of third party involvement. What interests me most about that last theory is the concept of creating chaos for “lolz” – as in, pitting groups with opposite ideologies against each other is hee-larious! See how funny it is when people care deeply about things and make noise about it?
No big deal for me to move my internet shopping elsewhere, but since I do find some of my best deals in Amazon’s Marketplace, I’m very interested to know who is swinging the banbat, and for what motive.
The other brouhaha is over the new Seth Rogen vehicle, Observe and Report. It looks waste of celluloid all around, but naturally the scene that saddens/enrages/exhausts-from-repetitive-bullshit the blogs I read is the rape scene played for laughs. In sum: the protagonist takes his crush out to dinner, where she gets blackout drunk from tequila and drugs; then he takes her home and has sex in her. At some point, noticing that his date appears to have passed out on the vomit-stained pillow, the character asks if she is okay. She says something* like “Who told you to stop, motherfucker?”
Rogen’s comment: “When we’re having sex and she’s unconscious like you can literally feel the audience thinking, like, how the fuck are they going to make this okay? Like, what can possibly be said or done that I’m not going to walk out of the movie theater in the next thirty seconds? . . . And then she says, like, the one thing that makes it all okay.”
Let’s call this The One Thing That Makes It Okay FAIL. (Alternately, Definition of Sex Fail.) There are two things that make this assumption epically unsustainable. (1) The speaker of The One Thing That Makes It Okay is not a real woman. She’s a fantasy. She is, in fact, one of those mythological Unrapeable Women: she’s not classy and she’s promiscuous; her horror at being flashed at the mall is played for laughs (hasn’t she seen a few, haha?). But just in case that wasn’t enough, the writer(s) saw fit to place the One Thing That Makes It Okay in her mouth – consent! She just lies there, and she participates enough to make it legal! Fantastical!
(2) Except, not. To view this scene as not-rape, or even the notorious “gray rape”, you must suscribe to the deeply problematic belief that the difference between sex and rape is the word “no.” That is, if you do not say No, then you’ve consented by default. This kind of thinking is what allows a lot of rape to happen in the first place (c.f. Rogen’s character plowing away at an unconscious woman); it’s what allows society to condemn women who get very drunk (of their own volition or not), because they’ve lost their ability to say the magic word. On the other hand, if you think about sex as a healthy, positive, and mutual activity, then you’re not likely to be soothed by this deathbed-confession consent from a mumbling drunk. Consent is not the absence of “no” but the presence of “yes” – words and signs from the beginning that both partners are eager and interested. The One Thing That Would Have Made It Okay is if positive consent were present from the beginning. It was not, and a mumbled one-liner from a vomiting woman cannot retroactively make this scene not-rape.
All of this is dealt with clearly and movingly in a recent essay collection entitled Yes Means Yes: Visions of female sexual power and a world without rape. I’d Email the writers and actors of Observe and Report a recommendation to this book, but it is one of the titles that you can no longer search for on Amazon.
Funny.
*Can’t be arsed to watch the trailer again. It’s shit.
I recently discovered Jean Stafford and am lapping up her short stories like sour candy. I’d like to use one of them, “The Echo and the Nemesis,” in a dissertation chapter, because it is an absolutely batshit story about food, friendship, and compulsive behavior in both. This is mainly a story of stories – most of the narrative is of one character’s competing narratives – so a summary is not going to do it justice, but I’ll do my best:
Sue and Ramona, both studying abroad, are completely socially awkward and don’t even like each other that much, but become “friends” by sharing coffee together after class. At one of these meetings, Ramona tells a version of her family history that captivates Sue: in this version, Ramona is the only ugly child in a family of beautiful accomplished people, including three dashing brothers and one beautiful twin sister who died five years earlier. In this version, Ramona is beloved by her family but imagines herself an embarrassment to them (she is described as “fat to the point of parody”). Ramona begs two things of Sue: first, that she join Ramona on a family ski vacation and meet the dashing brothers; second, that she join Ramona for lunch daily and basically fat-shame her out of eating. Sue agrees to the former enthusiastically and the latter half-heartedly, but she plays the role well.
Over the course of their association, Ramona tells many more versions of the story (the family loves her; the family hates her; she’s always been fat; she was skinny as a child; her doctor refuses to let her lose weight; her doctor insists that she is ruining herself with food). Sue doesn’t know what to believe, but she doggedly hangs onto the hope of a skiing vacation. Eventually that goes bust too, as Ramona has a kind of meltdown and spins out a wildly contradictory dialogue that suggests she may be traumatized by childhood incest and is certainly mentally unbalanced. She shows Sue a picture of her thin, beautiful dead twin “Martha”; Sue notes that the photo says “Ramona” on the back, and flees the scene as Ramona throws luxury food goods (caviar, candied fruit) all over the bed and starts eating it.
I know! Barking mad!
So I looked up some articles about this story to see what other folks have said about it. One says that Ramona’s fake twin is the Echo and her obesity is her Nemesis (a misunderstanding of the mythical Nemesis, but whatever). The other suggests that this is a story about narcissism in the Freudian sense (Narcissus is the third party of the Echo-Nemesis myth, tellingly unmentioned in the title). Both articles cite from a study by a German psychoanalyst named Hilde Bruch who specialized in eating disorders. Bruch’s work links the “mental symptoms” of obesity to those of schizophrenia: e.g. “flights into fancies and daydreams”, a mechanism to cope with internalized sense of ugliness; low frustration tolerance; sense of rage and helplessness. Bruch also argues that women tend to either experience dissociation and/or put on excessive weight when they experience guilt from sexual trauma, as may be the case with Ramona. But Bruch thinks there might be a little causation with this correlation, producing this gem (cited in an article by Clare Hanson): The obese have ‘an all or nothing attitude toward life; when confronted with the fact that [... ] unlimited knowledge or power is not obtainable [... ] they are apt to give up in sullen despair. Most will resort to more avid overeating and grow still fatter, but some will suffer a schizophrenic break’.
This does seem to describe Ramona’s character as Sue sees her. So in both articles, Bruch’s theory is presented as an “Oh, that’s why!” bit of information – it all makes sense now! She’s crazy because she’s fat! Or she’s fat because she’s crazy! Either way, fat and crazy have the same symptoms! That explains Ramona’s extraordinary behavior.
And I find this extremely troubling. The study itself is offensive enough – if you’re not sure why I’m not sure I have enough time to explain it to you. But I’m also offended that an critical reader of literature would find this study a useful key to a complicated story. Look, literary criticism is not about finding easy explanations for texts. That’s not useful. It’s also not about author’s intention. Frankly, I can imagine Stafford writing a story about a crazy fat woman who was fat because she was crazy or vice versa: she was a cranky lady with her own mental problems and body issues, and I can imagine this story as an exorcism of her own demons. Maybe she felt like if she didn’t control her eating then she would eat the whole world, like Ramona does in her nightmares; maybe she just loathed obese people and cast one as a compulsive liar. Who knows? I don’t. I do know, though, that literary criticism should be about examining language, seeing how ideas bigger than the words themselves are carried across, to understand that (for some texts more than others) there can be many ways to read a text. And it is ideally part of our study to notice what readings of texts say about things larger than the words. And I think there is something more to be learned from both this text and the interpretations I read.
Ramona is a wildly unreliable character. She seems to have lied about everything. One thing she definitely lied about is the prospect of a skiing trip; other things, not so clear.
1. Was she or wasn’t she binge-eating during her diet lunches with Sue? Not known; Stafford only shows Ramona eating “excessively” twice. The first time is when she first tells Sue about her twin; her third piece of cake is accompanied by a dramatic announcement of self-loathing and the plea for Sue’s chaperoning. The second time is bed feast finale, a theatrical show of consumption (both “devouring” and “purchasing”, since the shameful hidden foods are luxury good) Sue is invited to join so that the uneaten food disappears before Ramona’s father arrives to take her home. (Will he arrive? Does he exist?) Two scenes of highly staged overeating… So, although Sue accepts without question that Ramona’s size is a result of her eating habits, the evidence is not at all conclusive. She may have had an illness, like the unfortunate Martha (if she existed). She may have inherited the genetic blueprint for fat from a relative – maybe even a member of the beautiful, accomplished immediate family, since it is only according to Ramona that they differ from her in appearance.
2. Is Ramona’s name even Ramona? When Sue finds a photograph of a thin, beautiful Ramona, she assumes that it is an earlier version of the same Ramona she knows and that “Martha” is what Ramona calls this thin self, dead and “buried beneath layers of fat.” Because of this, Sue thinks she understands Ramona’s wildness; she feels sad about Ramona’s “lost” beauty, assuming that fat is antithetical to beauty and that Ramona would naturally be unhinged from this loss (rather than the loss of her twin, or her childhood). But this is hardly the only possibility: it may be that Ramona and Martha are the same person, but that Ramona’s weight gain was the result, not the cause, of trauma or tragedy: it may be, too, that there was a beautiful twin and a fat twin, but that for her own reasons, Ramona switched their names in her story (meaning that the girl in the photo is the twin of the girl Sue knows, and the girl Sue knows is Martha).
3. In any version of this story, her reasons are nearly inscrutable – but it seems to come back to sexual abuse. At Ramona’s least sensical moments, she refers to possible incest or abuse – she alludes to a proposition from a cousin, she breaks out in rage over an imagined slight of her doctor’s competence, she vacillates unpredictably between repudiation of her father and brothers and intense desire for their love. Ramona’s final words to Sue implies a scene of trauma – “Do you know what he said the last night my name was Martha? The night he came into that room where the anemones were? He pretended that he was looking for a sheet of music-” Sue leaves before she finds out who “he” is or what he said, but the implication is that Ramona experiences dissociation as a result of whatever happened when “he” came, lying about music, into that room. This definitely complicates the above question of who “Ramona” and “Martha” are. Ramona may have been abused as a fat twin and chose to rename herself by the thin twin’s name; she may have been abused as a thin twin or thin only daughter, and became fat through illness or overeating or deliberate desire to remove herself from a violated body or some combination of all three. Sue chooses not to think about any of these possibilities.
Clearly, I am not arguing for one reading of Ramona’s erratic behavior. I want to ruminate a little more – maybe there is a way Ramona could shed light on my understanding of how eating habits are integral to identity. But I’m afraid her motives are indefinable.
Sue, on the other hand? We can read Sue. We see this story from Sue’s point of view. We see her intense loneliness, her empty friendship, her desperate clinging to the hope of a ski trip with dashing brothers. We see her define Ramona’s obesity as one of her biggest problems from the start. Sue thinks she understands Ramona when she sees the photograph of a lovely young girl named “Ramona” – for Sue, all of Ramona’s erratic and eccentric behaviors can be drawn back to the tragedy of lost beauty. And because Sue is the narrating voice, it is tempting to share her realizations. But Sue was wrong about everything else – the skiing trip, the family - so it’s questionable that she would be right about these.
If Sue’s assumptions fit a little too neatly into our own – and by “our own”, I mean the assumptions about obesity and mental illness accepted so readily by the articles I read – then that is the insight we can gain from a critical reading of this story.
Okay. I’ve been in classrooms, both as a student and as a teacher, where cell phones have embarrassed everyone by bursting into their cheerful, abrasive songs. And really, it has been an embarrassment: both my classmates and my students had the grace to be utterly abashed and swear not to let it happen again. These interruptions are annoying, but almost pleasurable, since the teacher has an opportunity to crack a crotchety one-liner and everyone with their cellphone on silent may gloat. (Setting it to vibrate does not count, since the grinding moan of a vibrating phone is equally distracting.)
But I am sitting in a very cold, silent room with about a dozen other dissertating grad students. We’re thinking, reading, writing and we’ve been here for two hours without saying a word to one another. We are focused. And yet already, three different cell phones have begun their equally mortifying ringtones and have been allowed to “ring” until finished. Why? How could anyone think that was appropriate? Would you whistle while you work in a study zone? Would you begin reciting the Declaration of Independance while you and everyone else is attempting intellectually industry? You wouldn’t… or you shouldn’t… and I can’t understand why the owners of these phones don’t scramble for them and turn off their offensive noise. It’s like… aural littering. I want to sit on this bench, but there is gum on it.
So since I haven’t repurposed the shattered pieces of my attention span, I’m complaining about it. Feel free to commiserate with my grumpiness (has anyone noticed that folks on the bus seem to let their ringtones play on purpose before answering, like they are treating us all to a little bit of Top 40 airplay?) or to talk about how your own ringtone is so much better than anyone else’s.
(Or, notes from Dissertation Boot Camp.)
I named myself when I was 15. It was a private name – a secret identity for the nefarious purpose of logging into AIM without the whole world knowing I was there. When I got to college, and wanted to shed my skin as I do every so often, I abandoned my old public screenname and brought my secret identity forward. “Tangle what?” people would ask. I told them it came from some angsty teenage poem I’d written and forgotten. This is half a lie. I did not forget, and the poem was the name itself, a phrase that entered my mind unbidden. I liked it; it sounded defiant, both a call and response. Just try it, this name seemed to snarl, implying a recalcitrance and inscrutability that my adolescent self was not fully capable of.
I did not know that years later I would be saying this name over and over. I need a concise thesis, but I got tangled up, I say. I’m going to try to write my way through this tangle. I also say, interconnected. Intersubjectivity. These are more or less the same. Tangled is the natural form of this thought that I am trying to subdue and comb into straight lines of literary discourse. Word connects self to world. Word is shaped by world. The self’s words change the world. Over and under in loops, back and forth.
If I write about literature – even (or especially) if I only write about scenes of eating in literature – then I am writing about race, about gender, class, all of it, all at once. I know that systems of power do not layer like a cake but meet and part like strands of a web. But I also know that particular identities have particular discourses, histories, controversies that can (should?) be addressed. How do I force a book of chapters – they go in order, step 1 to step 5 – to describe intersectionality? I could address class-specific issues in one chapter, race-specific issues in the next, give each problem a close reading and utterly undermine my committment to intersectionality by sectioning off. I could arrange chapters by types of food scenes – alone in the kitchen with an eggplant? Bakhtinian banquet? – and allow the interplay of identity narratives to do what they do. . . a chapter like a skein of yarn in a kitten’s paws, structurally an embarrassment to a teacher of composition. How do you textually represent clusterfucktastrophe? It would be the most realistic realism ever written, and it would be as incomprehensible as the culture we’re swimming in.
I almost named this post “Untangling this.” But this is not what I want to do. My job is to describe, inscribe. I remind myself that the map is not the territory. But I know that maps and metaphors are equal parts useful and dangerous.
