Category Archives: Non-Fiction

The Reason To Bring A Diva

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Filed under Books, Non-Fiction, True Crime

Books are radioactive. They must be, because apparently I glow in the dark when I open one. There is something about sitting down with a book that makes me visible. From space. Look! You can’t miss me. I’m the one who went off by herself into a room, closed the door, and is trying to read. At least–that’s what I thought I was trying to do. To everyone in my vicinity that knows me, a book is a Bat Signal, frantically begging for rescue from reading the book that I purposely picked up to go read. Knowing I’m likely to be interrupted will often keep me from picking up the big books, the ones that are gonna need me to pay attention. When I really need the time and space to fall into a book, I have to find the perfect place to hide in plain sight. For this, I crave the company of strangers. And for that, I need an airport.

bat_signal

GAH just let me finish this chapter

I really love airports. I realize I am the president, founder, and only member of that club. I know everyone else hates them, because I can hear everyone articulating all their hate while I am standing next to them at the airport. People standing in the line for security complain about the line for security. People not in first class complain about not getting their first class upgrade. People getting their luggage searched because they packed a scimitar cushioned by fireworks complain about getting their luggage searched. I don’t understand these people. I love the energy and purpose in an airport, that sense of suspended animation that comes from being in a parallel world that’s part aggressively overpriced jewelry kiosks, part cutting-edge art exhibits, and part uninhibited daydrinking. But what I love most about airporting is the sustained reading time it affords. Of course, this only works when I am traveling solo.
You: what do you want for your birthday
Me: a roundtrip ticket to Newark
You: you want to go to Newark?
Me: no! I just want to fly there
Orville Wright: those bastards took my scimitar

Packing books for travel in a car is easy. Just fill up the trunk (and camper top) with every book you own and you’re done. Flying is tricky though, because you have limited packing space converging with an ever-present threat of delays. The thought of being stuck without anything to read is enough to make me rashy. This anxiety drove me to prepare for any flight with ridiculous overpacking of reading material, hauling one or two Main Books along with three or four objectively ranked Backup Books. (Then I’d buy a paperback when I got to the airport. Just in case I didn’t look obsessed enough.) I could barely fit my nonessential items like money and underwear in my bag. Musculoskeletally speaking, I wasn’t doing myself any favors. 
Doctor: you’re developing what we call Book Hump
Me: oh no
Doctor: yeah we usually only see it in successful, pretty people
Me: thanks?
Doctor: here’s some cream for your rash

Books have personalities. Some books don’t mind if you stop and start them a million times. They are the mellow morning deejays of your reading list, happy to let you grab a few words whenever you have the opportunity. That’s not what you want at the airport. You need a book that will boss you around from the second you crack the cover, demand you bring it a latte and some coconut water, and completely take over your entertainment schedule. In short, you need a diva. I figured this out one cross-country flight when I picked up my #3 Backup Book, In Cold Blood, instead of my #2 Main Book. In Cold Blood had been sitting around my bookshelf forever, but I’d been avoiding it because it had that “required reading” aura. Once I was buckled in and had paid close attention to the safety presentation, I idly flipped it open to the first page to prove to myself it wasn’t worth starting, and that was it. I was mesmerized. I could have been sitting next to the Rockettes doing their Christmas show on that plane and I would not have known it. Next thing I knew, I was on the last page and the plane was landing.
Me: aviation is miraculous
Wright Bros: you think we invented flying so you could read
Me: yes
Wright Bros: you are bad at epiphanies

Truman Capote knew a thing or two about divas. He was already a famous writer and literary personality when he published In Cold Blood in 1966. The book’s combination of curated journalism and fiction-style prose was a sensation and it’s considered a classic today. In Cold Blood documents the murder of the Clutter family in rural Western Kansas in 1959.  It opens with the last day of the Clutters’ lives and ends with the executions of their killers. The meticulously researched motivations and machinations of everyone involved with the crime give the book the gravity of truth while Truman Capote’s shifting narrations and ruthlessly apt descriptions lift the story into something larger. It examines the capriciousness of the American dream and the banality of evil, and it won’t tolerate being in the same stack as all those cheap paperbacks you brought, because it’s a STAR. I’m still mad I can’t read it again for the first time.

When I am at the airport by myself with a diva book, I don’t care how long anything takes. Truman Capote taught me the art of the long game. I’ll get there when I get there and I’ve got good company. Hell, if the book is really good, I want to sit at the gate. It’s sick. I KNOW. But for sure, it’s not such an obsession that I carry around a plane-shaped voodoo doll that I stick pins in to cause minor mechanical delays. HAHAHA! Because that would be crazy! Even if it does buy me an extra hour of uninterrupted reading time! Of course, pulling out a plane-shaped voodoo doll can cause some misunderstandings.
Orville: that woman over there is jabbing pins in a vibrator
Wilbur: maybe she’s mad at it
Orville: I don’t even want to know what it did
Wilbur: flying to Newark just gets weirder
Orville: how long you think before i get my scimitar back
#fetchmylatte

Action Items
Truman Capote has a very diva cameo in the supremely silly movie Murder By Death.
I avoided The Sun Also Rises forever, too. I was also wrong about that.

 

 

 

 

The Reason To Order The Special

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Filed under Books, Essays, Non-Fiction

I don’t like to brag, but I am really good at going to restaurants. For example, I can figure out where the bathroom is without even asking. I know to choose the side of the table that puts my back to the wall so I can immediately spot assassination attempts. If I am sitting at the bar, I order a drink that complements my outfit. I’ll stop with all these great specifics because I don’t want you to feel sad about your own inferior restaurant skills. Okay…one more. My BEST restaurant skill is that I always order the special. I’ll even order fish on a Monday because I’m brave like that. I LIKE SALMON AND I GIVE ZERO FUCKS.

Restauranting (a real verb that I just made up) is something that I’ve dedicated hours and hours to perfecting, primarily because at restaurants they cook stuff for you when you ask and then they take way your dishes so you don’t have to wash them and that always seems like a good idea to me. It took a while to get good at it, and I made some training mistakes. Lucky for me I picked the right mentor, someone I looked up to, someone I wanted to be. Someone who was not just good at restaurants, but good at life-M.F.K. Fisher.

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher’s body of work chronicles an American woman’s coming of age in the first half of the 20th century: childhood in rural California, falling in love, experiencing life through two world wars, three marriages, and extensive travel. The Notorious MFK lived on her own terms. She is categorized as a food writer, and that’s (maybe) fair, because she published cookbooks, translated Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology Of Taste, and riddled her writing with recipes. For me, though, her work is a bold, sensual exploration of human desires – food, love, sex, curiosity – through the prism of eating.

I was browsing in a bookstore when I came across a collection of M.F.K. Fisher’s works, The Art Of Eating. I have the same problem in bookstores that I have in libraries, in that I’m incapable of editing the stack. If I put it on the stack, I already own it. That’s made for some regrettable, er, interesting purchases, as well as some truly startling credit card balances. I’d never heard of M.F.K. Fisher but the book was on a shelf at the end of the aisle and books merchandised on endcaps are my Kryptonite. The Art Of Eating (1954) is a compilation of essays previously published in five other books (Serve it Forth, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me and An Alphabet for Gourmets.) I tore through it and my hands-down, runaway favorite was the radical, slightly perverse, and rivetingly humorous essay “Define This Word” from The Gastronomical Me (1947). It is my jam. (YAY FOOD JOKE)  In “Define This Word”, M.F.K. Fisher describes a meal that she had in 1936 in rural France while on a hot, tiring, day-long country walk. Stopping for lunch at a highly rated but deserted restaurant in the spring off-season, she is the object of the full, unsettling attention of the restaurant’s sole waitress. The waitress, recognizing in her customer a rarefied palate, colludes with the unseen but talented chef  to launch a full-out gourmet assault with an endless parade of French deliciousness that almost puts M.F.K. under. The story is a battle of wills between two strong-minded and like-minded women and in it M.F.K. demonstrates the very essence of Restaurant Confidence.

Restaurant anxiety is a real thing. All of the primary hungers intersect there, magnified by the virtue of being on display. Just ask anyone navigating a first dinner date. Who doesn’t relate to Melissa McCarthy eating the hand towels in front of Jude Law in Spy? Ok, I don’t, I’ve never eaten a hand towel in a restaurant or even in the privacy of my own home. The point is, restaurant behavior and etiquette expectations can be a trap, waiting to spring and make you look like a rube with an uncontrollable fabric fetish. I loved “Define This Word”, but it made me cringe, because there was some painful truth in there about self-possession. I saw a lot of opportunity to improve how I was going about my business. Let’s just say I had substituted confidence with narcissism, I had a PhD in self-centered hyperawareness, and had done my thesis on Me In Restaurants. It took dedication to make the food ordering process all about me but I had succeeded admirably. “How can I, too, make this otherwise neutral business transaction all about me?”, you ask? It’s simple. Through magical thinking, assign social acceptance rankings to all of the dishes on the menu. Then, obsessively try to choose the dish that aligns with your waiter’s values so that he/she LIKES YOU. Remember, if you get it wrong, you’re a bad person.
Menu: I gots some killer groceries tonight
Me: omg omg omg freaking out
Menu: What?
Me: What projects supreme likability, chicken or lamb?
Menu: Seriously? Weirdo.
Me: Not helping, menu
Menu: Order some Nobody Cares

Wanting to be liked isn’t the worst thing to want. Wanting to be liked so much you use a menu as a Magic 8 ball? Time for a get-over-yourself bat upside the head. My reaction when reading “Define This Word” was “SHE WALKED INTO A RESTAURANT ALONE TO EAT ALONE BY HERSELF ALONE IN A RESTAURANT ALONE?” It was a novel idea that there was a level of emotional maturity that elevated beyond ME being at the center of everything. Walk into a restaurant alone to eat by myself on purpose? Why not just walk naked into a math test that I forgot to study for and have to borrow a pencil from a guy I have a crush on?
Menu: Crazy, party of one, your table is ready
Me: Shut up
Menu: You know self-absorption makes you a dick, right?
Me: Does my hair look ok?
Menu: I give up

The Notorious M.F.K. did not have time for navel-gazing. She was too busy being an authentic badass to strive for inoffensive perfection. Confidence, yo. Confidence is so weird in that it makes you generous. If you aren’t busy reapplying your lipstick in the bathroom, you have time to observe your world. And you know what you are are going to see? Some weird shit. M.F.K. walked across France (alone), sat in a deserted restaurant (alone), and went toe-to-toe with a waitress whose laser focus on her customer’s dining experience made French food culture seem like a carnival funnel cake truck by comparison.

Reading “Define This Word” was a double dog dare challenge. The world around me wants to show me what it can do, not manage my neuroses. It was time to get the fuck over myself. I’m not perfect at this (yeah for example “I” is used in this post at least 15 times, so there’s some work to be done on self-focus, WHATEVER) When I am at a restaurant, I ask myself, What would M.F.K. do? And do you know what she would do? She wouldn’t worry about where her table was. She would not care if the waiter liked her. And she would order the damn special. The chefperson spent time going above and beyond to show off a particular ingredient or dish or technique and that is good enough for me. Show off, Chefperson! I’m going to be a great audience.
Menu: So there’s chicken and—
Me: Gonna have the special
Menu: I wouldn’t for real
Me: Not about me! I said the SPECIAL! Done
Menu: It’s wild boar aspic. We left the bristles on! BWAHAHAHAHAHA
Me: well played, menu

I stand corrected-I do like to brag. I am good at restauranting. While we wait for my artisanal slice of hairy boar jello, let’s sip these fresh cocktails and talk about you for a bit.
#thenotoriousmfk

Action Items
To discover your own Notorious M.F.K. work, start here, here, or head to your local library
See Melissa McCarthy in Spy

The Reason To Let It Snow

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Filed under Books, Non-Fiction

The most underutilized feature in my house is the mantel. Once a year, I will use it to lose something. It does not matter what it is–if I put it on the mantel, I am not going to find it until months later. (BTW it’s kind of awkward when you do this with a cat.) It’s because a lot of the time I forget I even have a mantel. There are lots of things I could be doing with my mantel that I’m not, such as:
-Propping one elbow on the mantel whilst contemplating
I never use my mantel to contemplate because I’d have to take up smoking a pipe and I don’t have time for new hobbies.
-Propping one elbow on the mantel while burning mysterious letters in the fireplace
I’d have to go to all the trouble of building a fire when it’s so much easier to turn on the Fireplace Channel. Also I don’t get mysterious letters since it’s not 1848.
-Propping one elbow on the mantel while I gaze at the portrait over the fireplace
There isn’t a portrait on that wall. Or anywhere. I live in a portrait-free zone.

Truth be told, I don’t think about the mantel at all unless it’s August, because August is when the holidays arrive in my mailbox. August is when the lifestyle book of all lifestyle books is delivered, personally, to me: Christmas with Southern Living. It’s a holiday-centered entertaining/decorating/cookbook that has been produced annually by Southern Living magazine since 1981.  Lushly staged and lovingly photographed, this book solves all the holiday problems I didn’t know I had. The covers alone make me swoon–the signature Southern Living cake headshots (“Look at the camera, gorgeous! Now show me buttercream!”) with mathematically precise slices removed to showcase dreamy multi-colored layers. Because of this book, my Holiday Badass Level is Ninja. SANTA NINJA. I am fully prepared to host a post-tree-trimming hot chocolate party, a New Year’s midnight dessert buffet open house, and a day-after-Thanksgiving pre-shopping breakfast. I can cook for, decorate for, and thematically execute on any kind of holiday mood—Dickensian classic, North Pole merry, or Winter Wonderland frolicking forest. In August, when the new book is delivered, I retreat to spend an hour just flipping through the pages to see what is the latest in turkey basting technique and ornament crafts, but the very FIRST thing I look at is the mantels section.
You: have you ever HAD a hot chocolate party?
Me: hmmmm?
You: tell me about the last turkey you basted
Me: well, it was, um, turkey shaped
You: your halls are decked with boughs of bullshit

Busted. I am not, by any definition, a homey-crafty-decoratey person. My decorating efforts are an endless Pinterest fail. And I don’t even have a Pinterest account. People visiting my house for the first time ask “Did you just move in?” Yup. Eight years ago. Don’t rush me. I’m still basking in the glow of having managed to unpack all the boxes. I don’t want to harsh my buzz by going shopping for stuff like furniture or curtains or dishes. I did procure a new couch recently, having been forced into it because the one I had would shed nails (or bolts or whatever holds a couch together) every time someone sat down on it. It had disintegrated to the point that you could only sit on one half of one cushion right in the middle, and you could only sit upright. NO LEANING BACK. I have a vague sense that legit adults don’t live this way and it is my sincere wish that those legit adults invite me over to their houses so I can spend time with responsible people whose decorating ethic has evolved past Dorm Room 101. Also, if I am not in my own house, I don’t have to worry about decorating it. But when Christmas with Southern Living arrives, I’m flush with the potential to deck the crap out of my halls.

These books are endlessly gorgeous, picture after picture of beautifully styled, inviting rooms, expertly plated food, and homemade placecards. I have the same reaction to these pictures that I have when I see a masterpiece on a museum wall–it’s beautiful, but it’s unattainable beauty, not meant for mortals like me to create. I am perpetually in awe of people with decorating talent. How on earth does someone look at a branch, pine cones, and an ice bucket and come up with “charming centerpiece”? My brain is not wired that way. I have an ice bucket. It’s in a cabinet and the last time I touched it was to move it out of the way to get to a bag of Fritos that had fallen behind it. Christmas with Southern Living gives me hope that one day I’ll gain the ability to use a glue gun without ending up in the emergency room. Well, not “ability” so much as “interest in making an effort”.
Glue gun: wrong end
Me: what? not listening
Glue gun: I know that’s why—
Me: MY FINGERS

As great as everything looks in these books, my absolute favorite are the decorated mantels. There are garlands (fresh greenery, ornaments, homemade stockings) and candlesticks (add beads! Or more greenery! Or ribbon!) and mercury glass. There are shiny abstract tall objects artfully placed next to shorter shiny abstract objects, interspersed with lush branches. There are stocking hooks shaped like letters spelling out cheery holiday words. These mantels radiate a ‘seasonal hospitality’ vibe, which would be a nice change from my mantel’s usual ‘deserted prison parking lot’ vibe. I get excited and sometimes even go so far as to mark a page in the book that has a swagged-out mantel that I particularly like. Then, because it’s August and I am fucking hot, I put the book on the shelf with all the other Christmas with Southern Living books and go turn up the air conditioning. Do you know how much stuff I would have to get to make a magical holiday mantel? I’d have to cash in my 401k just to lay in a base inventory of floral foam.
Book: but adult goals!
Me: can’t, complaining about the heat
Book: look I’m so inspiring
Me: shhhh busy not maturing

Mantel

This mantel looks great. That’s how you know it’s not mine.

Like I do with all my other problems, I am solving this dilemma with books. I am absolutely, positively going full holiday on my own ass. I am getting all my Christmas with Southern Living books off their designated shelf and lining them up on the mantel, right after I move that 4-month-old pile of mail and the Sharpie that I lost last spring. In December, when you come over, I’ll invite you to go through them and find your favorite mantel. Victorian splendor or atomic age retro? Be bold! We’ll prop the book open to your chosen picture, sit down on my functional sofa, and soak up all that silver bells atmosphere. I will even pour you a cup of freshly made wassail. HAHAHAHAHA I don’t have any wassail. Let’s just go out.

#icebucketandfritocenterpiece

Action Items
Take down the Christmas tree before Easter