A few of my favorite things from 2007…

Now that I’ve put Scrabulous in its place, I can get to the posts I wanted to write at the end of last year.

My top reads of 2007:

The books that moved me the most this year are ones that took me to a contemporary place revealing a world previously unknown to me.

• In Martin Amis’s House of Meetings, a book that is a pleasure to read for the language alone, the protagonist survives Stalin’s work camps only to return to them in 2004 as an 84 year old dying man recounting his past in a letter to an American stepdaughter.

• Against a backdrop of Post-WWI historical tumult, The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa, is patterned after Madame Bovary, but begins its journey in Peru in 1950 and meanders through Europe and Asia to end in contemporary France.
• Septembers of Shiraz, probably my favorite novel of the lot, is the story of a middle class Iranian Jew imprisoned by the Revolutionary Guard in 1980s Tehran and his family. A prodigious first novel by Dalia Sofer, it suffers from a lousy title for the U.S. market, but one that comes clear in an ending scene that has a bittersweet universal quality.
• Then there is Elizabeth Hand, who’s work I only just discovered through her collection of short stories called Saffron and Brimstone. Several of these stories, set in real time or near future, had a prescient quality when I read them-they seemed to happen to me when I was grappling with aspects of their themes, so the paranormal characteristics of her style seemed to leak into my life. Filed under sci-fi/fantasy, Hand’s writing really belongs to the genre of speculative fiction inhabited by authors like Angela Carter, JG Ballard, Ursula LeGuinn, Margaret Atwood-all favorites of mine, which is why I am surprised that I’ve never heard of Hand before.
• I read lots of essays and short stories this past year, but one piece stands out as absolutely the most compelling I read all year: Werner, by Jo Ann Beard, from Tin House’s fantastic Graphics Issue. Werner has been anthologized in this year’s Best American Essays –just read it.

Favorite cookbooks: This is kind of a cheat, but my two favorites from 2007 are books I bought from Amazon UK in 2006, but were released in the U.S. in 2007.

• I still can’t get enough of Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries, which I read often and cook from only in the sense that his sensibility has slipped into my own attitude towards food.
• I also love to read Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories, which came out in paperback in the UK in 2006 and supposedly was released in the U.S. last year, but I haven’t seen it anywhere. He’s a fun writer and each chapter contains an essay and several recipes for his favorite ingredients, such as anchovy, brains, chicken, chocolate, and on through the alphabet. Try the leek tart and the steak au poivre. I’m still trying to find a humane source for fresh rabbit so I can try his recipe for rabbit terrine.
• I also enjoy cooking from How to Pick a Peach by Russ Parsons, and A Twist of the Wrist by Nancy Silverton, though I don’t always reach for the latter because I seldom have the pantry ingredients called for on hand.
• Favorite cookbook I can’t wait to get to: this would be Jamie Oliver’s Cook with Jamie.
  

  Yeah, you heard me right, Jamie Oliver. The new book is very pretty and full of Oliver’s inexhaustible spirit and inventiveness. I’ve always enjoyed his slightly manic, “let’s just pop round to the shops and go home and whip something up” attitude and I also admire that he has turned his fame into activism. Plus his food is always tasty, and this book really makes me want to cook, unlike Alice Waters’ latest, Art of Simple Food, which wins my vote for Most anticipated book I almost bought and then decided to wait until it comes out in paperback. Don’t get me wrong – Waters is responsible for a important shift in the way that Americans (at least on the coasts) look at food. But this book has a fussy, overprivileged aesthetic that is off-putting. And I have to admit that as much as I refer to and cook from her books-especially the collaborations with Paul Bertolli and Lindsey Shere, there is something about these books that is a little intimidating.

Long story short, if I were to invite someone into my kitchen to teach me something about cooking, it would be Jamie, not Alice. I feel like I’d be getting an education, not a lecture.

Jamie’s School Dinners Ad for Channel 4

 

 

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Who in the #@%!! is Matt Lauer?

  I wasn’t going to weigh in on the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech, but after 3 days of watching NBC’s Today Show host Matt Lauer’s petulant, reactionary coverage, I just have to join the fray.

Take this exchange on Tuesday between Lauer and Omar Samaha, whose sister Reema had been murdered:

Lauer: is there anything but anger in your heart for this young man who committed these crimes?

Samaha: Angry? I can’t even say I’m angry yet…There’s nothing that’s going to bring my sister back…and that’s bottom line to me…we’re not the only ones…its important the community is coming together because we are all family here.

I was impressed by Samaha’s reply and the way he dodged, unwittingly or not, Lauer’s vulgar leading question. When Lauer turned back to face the camera, I wasn’t sure if the anger in his expression was due to the story he was covering, or the fact that Samaha didn’t utter the words he wanted to hear.

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This morning as the details of Seung-hui Cho’s psychological profile came more clearly into focus, Lauer found it important to stress, at least twice, that Cho was not depressed, that he was psychotic. He spat the word “psychotic” out with an edge of disparagement in his voice, as if Cho had chosen psychosis over the more palatable diagnosis of depression as some sort of lifestyle choice.

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At the turn of the 20^th Century authors such as Theodore Dreiser illuminated the harsh realities behind the fiction of the American Dream. In Dreiser’s novel “An American Tragedy” which was based on a true 1906 murder case, the protagonist ( Clyde Griffiths) is found guilty of drowning an ex girlfriend whose murder he pre-planned but did not actually commit. In Dreiser’s fiction Clyde Griffiths was victim of a confrontation of class, money and a need to possess something he thought had been promised to him. Provocative at the time, this theme became a well known and often retold perspective on life in America. At the turn of this century, we are seeing the new, less personal but no less sorrowful ‘American Tragedy,” a confrontation of disenfranchisement, glorified gun culture and misplaced rage being increasingly played out in front of our collective eyes through the media. Instead of great authors revealing the truths of our culture through fiction, we have glowering numb-skulls like Matt Lauer spinning fiction, conjecture and blame before the truth can even unfold.

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It seemed to me that it would be at least three days before the information I needed to know to begin understanding this case would come to light, and I wasn’t wrong. Beyond the obvious conjectures about his issues with women and disdain for the rich, the details of Cho’s psychological profile are very sad indeed. Multiple complaints of stalking behavior filed by VT coeds, teachers, counselors and acquaintances (he appears to have had no friends) worried about his behavior and his lurid writing, an involuntary stay in a mental hospital during which he was assessed as an imminent danger to himself or others and then released ( a complicated mess of free will and privacy rights), parents who seem to be invisible, the ease with which he was able to lie on his application and purchase his handguns from a dealer who thought he looked like a clean cut college kid; all of these indicators, and still he slipped through the cracks so easily. Like his Columbine mentors before him, Cho is the face of the new American Tragedy, and as things currently stand, we should brace ourselves to see much more of it in the future.

 

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