I recently finished White Truffles in Winter, a fiction of the life of Auguste Escoffier, the Belle Epoque  chef who was instrumental in creating and standardizing the French gourmet cooking we fantasize about.  Or rather, it’s a fiction of the loves between Escoffier and wife, Escoffier and Sarah Bernhardt, and a few other love-challenged people. The story is a little meandering and very sad – which is appropriate enough, as much of the book is a remembrance of Chef and Madame Escoffier shortly before both die from the infirmities and indignities of old age.  (Hence “winter.”)  But there are also truly lush, opulent passages describing parades of fine food, the flamboyant excesses of Sarah Bernhardt and other wealthy hotel denizens.  There are haunting recollections of historic tragedies, and equally haunting consideration or and love, which in this novel is complex and grand and mundane and always a little tragic.

Overall, I dug it.  But this post is not about that.

This is a novel with a lot of sexiness in it. Characters are perpetually being overcome by the deliciousness of their food, cooking together in tiny kitchens crackling with sexy energy, inviting one another to taste this and close their eyes and enjoy it.  But the sex scenes themselves – of which there are few, and they might be more appropriately called pre-sex scenes – were somewhat off-putting to me.  No, wait, actually they were pretty delicious.  Escoffier’s first and hard-won tryst with Sarah Bernhardt involves feeding her spoonfuls of cavier that he’d dolloped with fine sauces on her own belly.  Later on, he arranges another woman on a bed strewn with rose petals…. and then encourages her to fall asleep there, as he gets up and writes down a recipe for a pristine white dessert.

Basically, he does not have sex with these women in the narrative.  He plates them.

To be fair, this is not true of all of the women in the story.  There are no scenes of Escoffier plating his wife; their chemistry is mostly played out in sparring conversation, and then the scene fades to black before we can see that she’s his equal elsewhere too (although it is implied).  Another female character is suggested to be sexually assertive, but it is only a suggestion.  So there is not really enough to counterbalance the strangely passive, inert bodies of women who are forthright and commanding elsewhere in the novel.  (Sarah Bernhardt!  Come on!)

When I realized this – and it took me a little while, since the writing is very seductive, but once I saw it I could not un-see it – I was reminded of something else I didn’t like about the thoroughly annoying book I lambasted in the post below: The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides.  I wouldn’t say that the main female character of that book was entirely sexually passive, but it’s like her sexual agency is not something the author knows how to write about.  The narrative says that one of her early college romances is driven by sexual desire, but we don’t really see that in her actions.  What we do see is Madeleine fumbling when asked what her sexual fantasies are, and coming up with “being pampered.”  (In other words, plated: washed, moisturized, arranged.)  In fact, both of the fantasies she discloses involve her playing a passive role; her partner’s fantasy, too, involves her being inactive.  (“Sleeping beauty,” in the book’s words.)

Writer-friends, don’t do this.  I’m not saying women should never, ever be written as sexually passive.  I’m just saying I’m beyond bored with it.  Try to imagine something else, okay?

I don’t always want to talk about the books I like.  Reading can be both business and pleasure for me, and sometimes I prefer to keep my pleasures private. If a book fails to be entirely engrossing, though?  I will happily judge and lampoon all day long.  I want to gossip about it like an acquaintance who has made poor choices publicly. Unfortunately, Goodreads categorizes each book you enter as “read,” “currently reading,” or “to read.”  There is no option for “read the first bit, was too unimpressed/dubious/appalled to read on.”

That’s what blogs are for.

The Angel Makers, by Jessica Gregson

I was intrigued by the book’s promise of women banding together and being awesome, although making some perhaps regrettable decisions.  But the storytelling was sort of bland, and all of the characters you’d expect from a period tale about a poor European village showed up: the crone, the wise father, the outsider girl versus the gossipy women, the young man experiencing sexual desire in all its novelty, blah blah blah.

Why We Broke Up, by Daniel Handler and Maira Kalman

Co-written by the man otherwise known as Lemony Snicket.  I have enjoyed the website for this book, especially his snarky comments on some of the submissions.  The man’s trademark arch, Goreyesque preciousness is there – I like it, but it is precious! – as well as some intentional awkwardness of syntax appropriate to the context (after all, the narrator(s) are the jilted young, not a quasi-omniscient storyteller).  But I just couldn’t roll with a whole chapter of preciousness and awkwardness.  I was a teenager once already, thanks.  Though I wish I’d thought of having a “Bitter Sixteen” at that age, when we were having anti-Valentine’s Day and basically moping around in black.

It’s possible that I missed some wonderful books by judging the free sample.  It’s definite that there are a few books I sampled, and regret downloading.

The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides

Look, Eugenides is a fine writer.  You could say he brings poetry to the banal.  But, undressed, it’s still banal… and vaguely irritating.  I appreciated this post by Anna Breslaw at The Hairpin, which gives the book the good spanking it deserves.

Practical Jean, by Trevor Cole

At first, I thought this book would be a light, easy read.  The premise is dark comedy material, but the idiosyncrasies of the little town and its characters are given with gentle humor at first.  But after the first blush, the humor falls flat, the prose is uninspired, and the telling manages to be both bleak and shallow. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to stomach the rest.

Strike that, reverse it.

Chalk: compressed limestone which can be used to make lines on some surfaces, allowing one to chalk something up to a thing.

Chock:  a (usually wooden) block that might be used to fill in gaps in carpentry, making a thing chock full.  Of chocks.

Now soldier on.

We were mostly on our own, working under the benign negligence of a professor who had made performance art in California with Chris Burden and the like, but we met once every few weeks to present and critique our projects.  As my turn approached, I found myself at a loss: I’d started and abandoned four or five different projects, and had nothing to show but the pieces: one wing of a bird of prey I’d meant to solder together out of kitchen knives; a coffee cup and hot plate I’d intended to wire up in some edgy postmodern way; a face I’d been carving laboriously out of some brown wax I’d found in the studio; and I can’t remember what else.  I lined them all up on a board and called it Failure Landscape.  I’d carved myself up pretty badly while chipping away at that wax, and my hands started bleeding while I presented my “work.”  I got an A.

This is one of my canonical tales that I tell when I want to explain my approach to scholarship, writing, and anything else: the moral of this story is that flailing around with a few half-formed ideas will be rewarded.  Or so I believe.

I am thinking of this now because every time I log in to check on replies to comments I’ve posted, WordPress presents me with a reproachful list of all the posts I’ve started and never finished.  Usually, I get inspired by something on the internet and start drafting a post on my lunch break, and then flit off to chase the next shiny idea.  Thus, most of the drafted posts are terribly out of date, so rather than finishing them, I thought I’d line them up for my amusement and possibly yours.  In reverse chronological order, they are:

• A response to a recent blog kerfluffle about sexual harassment in the workplace, after a NY Times op-ed that argued weirdly that the workplace would be a lot more fun if we could all settle down and permit a little well-meant flirting, and that smart and capable women aren’t railroaded by such playfulness.  I started to write about my experience with sexual harassment during my stint with Red Cross disaster relief; I am a smart and capable woman, and I was utterly derailed by the daily onslaught of unwanted verbal attention from a man who laughed at my refusals.  Sadly, I’m sure I’ll have another opportunity to tell that story, as “feminists are trying to kill flirtation” op-eds come out every couple of months or so.
• An observation about the silent social rules about space on the trolleys to West Philly.
• A reflection, partly in response to annual hand-wringing about sexy Halloween costumes, about what costumes are for and how I personally choose to perform sexiness through them.  Plus, a retrospective of past costumes of mine and a call for costume brainstorming as a resource to friends who’d like to dress up but don’t know what to be. I’m sure I’ll finish this in time for Halloween next year!
• A most likely dull explication of the weird rules about selling American books in Canada.
• A list of the hilariously descriptive “genres” Netflix has made up to describe my taste in movies.  Formula: [Classic/Emotional/Visually-striking][cerebral/period/foreign] movies + [based on classic literature/featuring a strong female lead].
• A fretful post started more than a year ago about using a troublesome essay collection in my dissertation.  The collection features several essays with what I consider to be really sharp insight about fast food and junk food – all the sharper because the essay writer enjoys food of these types, and thus is critical without being condemning.  On the other hand, he also uses the word “retarded” like we’re in high school and has some completely baseless and faux-thoughtful throwaway lines about women who have gone missing.   I want to use the book, but I don’t want to endorse it.

I feel that I have exceeded the appropriate number of elements for an A-grade failure landscape.  Better negligence next time.

When I searched Goodreads for this book, the following books came up in this order:

1.  The Time Traveler’s Wife
   by Audrey Niffenegger
2. The Pilot’s Wife
   by Anita Shreve
3. The Kitchen God’s Wife
   by Amy Tan
4. The 19th Wife
   by David Ebershoff
5. The Paris Wife
   by Paula McLain
6. The Zookeeper’s Wife
   by Diane Ackerman
7. The Canterbury Tales: Pardoner’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale, The Franklin’s Tale
   by Geoffrey Chaucer
8. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
   by Oliver Sacks
9. The Tiger’s Wife
   by Téa Obreht
10. Ahab’s Wife, or The Star-Gazer
    by Sena Jeter Naslund
11. The Senator’s Wife
    by Sue Miller
12. The Twentieth Wife
    by Indu Sundaresan
13. The Doctor’s Wife
    by Elizabeth Brundage
14. The Starter Wife
    by Gigi Levangie Grazer
15. The Wife
    by Meg Wolitzer

Holy cow.

A confession that will not surprise you: for some time before the evidence was laid out so plainly before me, I was both fascinated and alarmed by the number of titles I’d encountered that had the format of “<masculine name or noun>’s wife”.  Likewise “<masculine name or noun>’s daughter.”  When browsing, I reach for these books immediately.  Often as not, I put them back.  In many cases, these titles portend an exploration of what it is like to be the helpmate of an important man, both utterly crucial to the man’s success and utterly secondary to it.  I support this; I’ve wanted to explore this dynamic myself, fascinated by a couple of widows who completed the editing and publication of their philsopher-husbands’ work.  But the sheer volume of titles with this construction seems counterproductive, like the only stories that get on best-seller lists are those about women playing second (or nineteenth.  Or first of many).

I do like Wolitzer’s variation of this: the book is indeed about a woman coming to terms with a lifetime of deferring her own writing to help her author-husband achieve fame and fortune, but it’s not called “The Author’s Wife” or “The Helsinki Prize-winner’s Wife.”  That’s something, I guess.

Over the last few years I’ve traveled less and less frequently.  I’ve said it’s because of my work – the dissertation work, not the carousel of jobs I’ve been round – I’ve said that air travel is getting more and more uncomfortable, and these things are true.  But it’s also true that I really like being at home.

Don’t get me wrong.  I really enjoyed traveling for work this past weekend, especially when I compare it to previous excursions for scholarly conferences as a grad student.   In addition to presentation nerves, I always felt a little bit of quiet panic as I stretched the student travel funding to the limits, keeping my stays brief and my expenses few. Last year, I went to a pop culture conference outside DC for a day and a half and subsisted on free coffee and one glass of white wine, which was cheaper than the snacks proffered by the evening festivity (singular). In contrast, my current employer covers the cost of my food and shelter while I’m traveling on their behalf, and since I am obliged to stay for several days, I had both the time and the capital to enjoy the city a little.  I went to an art museum, like I do. I walked for miles. I took some pleasure in scouting out good food and drink, and in passing these recommendations on to my new colleagues and temporary conference friends.  And I am glad I experienced a new city.

But I’ll tell you what I missed. My own computer. Paying my own music – loudly. My cats. My narrow kitchen. Eating my own food. The last made me most uncomfortable of all: I am accustomed to cooking myself meals that generate leftovers for lunch and dinner the next day. I save my veggie odds and ends for stock. When I have a large meal out, I take half home for later.  This isn’t merely thrift but how I prefer to manage my consumption: in a world that produces copious amounts of trash, I want to buy and make good things and make them last.  While away, I had no access to a kitchen or even a mini fridge to store the remainder of too-large portions.  I ate out for every meal, and though I enjoyed most of these, I began to dread the laborious process of finding a good meal and going through all the niceties (“How is everything?” “Good, good…”) and putting down my card and confronting the ethics of tipping well vs. spending frugally when expensed by a nonprofit.

I look forward to the next trip.  Then I look forward to getting home from it.  And I am really looking forward to making soup with my ladyfriends tonight.

*

On my last night in Baltimore, I walked to Little Italy for a plate of puttanesca and some live jazz. The music was good; it gave me shivers. I had a glass of moscato. And I looked at my phone and wondered who I should text, who I could tell “Wish you were here.” But I didn’t text anybody and slipped out after an hour or so, having had my fill of pasta and wine and intricate composition.

That’s something I’d forgotten about love.  Friends make a place home for sure, but love is who you call when you are missing home, the one whose words would make home feel a little closer.

It was clear where to go to get involved. The URL was on the sign. The materials for making new signs were on the ground. There were a few makeshift booths, tables, and salvaged bookshelves among the tents.  One had a sign up every day that I passed: SUSTAINABLE LIVING.  WE ARE COMPOSTING – ASK US HOW!  Most people were milling around the booths. A band was playing, but no one danced. The mood was purposeful and serious. A few people stood gravely on the corner, showing their handwritten signs to traffic in both directions.

I liked this, very much.  The criticism of the Occupy Wall Street Movement I hear most often, and usually from the lips of ostensibly progressive liberal people like myself, is that it does not appear to be moving at all.  What do these people want? skeptics ask. How do they propose to get it?

In Baltimore, the answers were clear enough. They wanted different things, they said so on their signs: less war, more even distribution of wealth, a say.  And what can you do to get those things, when the gatekeepers are so much bigger and more powerful than they ought to have been allowed to get?  As it happens, you can do exactly what these people were doing.  Assemble, freely.  Talk and listen.  Learn some things.  Make changes to your own life, the way you engage with those giant adversaries.  That’s movement: many steps from many feet.

I went to the harbor again and again because I liked to walk the bridges that crisscross from pier to pier, looking out at the wide flat water  surrounded by the bright cityscape.  Others are drawn to that part of the city too, and the little tent community had a wide audience for their messages.  As I walked back to my hotel one night, I heard a man ask one of the sign-holders what what going on.  The asker had a serious Southern drawl, like he might have been from the same place I’m from.  He sounded like he genuinely wanted to know.  The sign-holder began to answer him, also in a drawl that belonged further South than we were.  He was explaining his sign as I walked out of earshot.  Three complete strangers, those men and I… probably none of us from Baltimore, probably little in common outside of standing in the same place at the same time.  But all three of us spent some time that evening thinking about the word on the one man’s sign: PROGRESS.

The contrast of the small, quietly industrious village at the feet of towering bank buildings and hotel high rises seemed appropriate. They already know nothing is going to trickle down, so they work on  progress from the bottom up.

I was blithely washing dishes this morning when something in my sink squirmed.  I gasped and dropped the silverware I was cleaning, spraying suds on the intruding creeper, which lifted up the front part of its long body and waved its bits around in protest. It was a caterpillar – I think?  It has legs, or leglike things – about an inch long, brownish with stripes.

WHAT THE HELL IS IT DOING IN MY SINK.

Look, I’m not squeamish about worms or caterpillars.  My previously documented dislike of buckmoth caterpillars is  entirely due to the fact that they are poisonous, and inconvenient during barefoot weather.  I don’t like picking the gigantic pink or turquoise worms out of our ears of corn when we get them in our farmshare, but I’ll do it.  However, I have done absolutely nothing to invite a caterpillar into my kitchen sink.  My partly-opened windows are not near trees.  I did cook with farmshare vegetables two nights ago, but I think I would have noticed if my broccoli or kabocha had an inch long caterpillar living in it – especially considering that these things got chopped into small bits for a tagine.  I heated up some leftovers last night and washed some dishes and there was no caterpillar present.  I feel aggrieved.

I couldn’t bring myself to take a photo before flicking it outside but I did take immediately to the internet to try and identify it.  I found this neat site:

http://www.discoverlife.org/20/q?guide=Caterpillars

wherein you can enter your caterpillar’s identifying characteristics (color? hair or no hair? distinctive markings?).  This was not entirely helpful in identifying my kitchen sink caterpillar – it didn’t really look like any of the caterpillars pictured – but it make get me kind of obsessed with caterpillars for an hour.

Caterpillars only have six true legs; the other leg-like appendages are merely nubs called “prolegs.”  They help the caterpillar inch along like so many little walking sticks, but they disappear in metamorphosis.  That made me feel a little sad, even though I understand that caterpillars aren’t complex enough to miss their lost non-legs, or to wonder whether flight is an adequate alternative.

Nonetheless.  I super love working in a place that contains multitudes of physical books.

The shelves above my desk are covered with books.  Rows and rows of bookshelves line our hall and workstudy cubical.  There are books set up on every available surface.  There is even a tall wooden bookshelf in the bathroom that opens off of the conference room, though I assume that the books populating it are not considered part of the archives.

A few times a week, books will appear in my mailbox.  This signals that they have arrived in the warehouse, located in Baltimore.  The copies I receive can be shelved over my desk for quick reference, or handed off to my workstudy students to be shelved in my department’s collection.  Lately, paperbacks have been coming in.  I picked one up from my mailbox recently, and it felt like suede under my fingers.

We had just been talking about special effects in a meeting earlier that day – like foil in the cover, or raised ink to make a drawing stand out – and I wondered if this was such an effect.  The cover really is soft to the touch, not exactly silky – there’s a little bit of resistance to the fingers, like suede, but not so pronounced.  The cover that fascinated me is also a lovely warm shade of rust.  I kept finding excuses to handle it all morning.

As it happens, a number of our books have that soft, velvety cover, which is nothing more exotic than a matte paper binding.  For whatever reason, it must be more common for trade books to have a glossy finish, so the non-reflective paperbacks were enough outside of my experience to entrall me with their gentle, soft texture.

I may not be invested in the physical structure of books, but if I had ever come across a matte book in my civilian book-browsing, I would have judged that book by its cover.  I would have bought it because it made me feel good.