food : cooking goals for 2010

So far, I have only a couple of cooking goals for the year. One, I want to learn to cook dried beans in my slow cooker. Two, I want to learn to make pizzas. Neither of these will seem like major challenges to most of you, I’m sure, but they are things that I’ve had a block on that I want to get past. To this end, I am soaking my first batch of dried (Great Northern) beans overnight tonight and will be making them in the slow cooker tomorrow. The inaugural cooked-white-beans dish will be Marcella Hazan’s white bean soup, which is essentially white beans, garlic, and parsley. (I finally scored a copy of the original The Classic Italian Cookbook at a local thrift store this weekend and already have about a dozen recipes marked to try; rather than spring for the new version, I’ll now keep an eye out for the equally out of print and well-regarded More Classic Italian Cooking!)

On the second point, we’ve set a date for the 31st of January to make our first homemade pizza (yes, that’s the next weekend day we will have free together after today). Between now and then I’ll be assembling whatever it is we need for pizzas, and polishing up the as-yet-unused pizza stone we received as a wedding gift. (We did request the pizza stone, we just haven’t broken the barrier of actually making a pizza yet.)

In general, I want to branch out into making bread, but I am not yet ready to set a specific goal. I have a strong suspicion that the pizza hump is actually just a foothill of the yeasted-dough mountain by which I remain completely daunted. It’s not even the prospect of either a bread brick or a pot of runny goop that is the specific problem, I am just disproportionately stressed by the whole idea. So, after January 31st, the goal is to make some bread. Sometime. Before 2011. Or maybe not. No pressure!

food : cooking goals for 2010

Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver

This is another book I’ve had for years and just now got around to reading. Prodigal Summer is a lovely novel, one of my favorites by Barbara Kingsolver. Before this book, the only novel of hers I really loved was The Poisonwood Bible; for me, that novel was in a different league than her earlier works, in terms of characters, plot and resonance with a time and place. Others may disagree, and it’s possible I was simply at a different point in my life when I read it. Nonetheless, I’d put Prodigal Summer in the same category, as a cut above her earlier writing.

There are many things that spoke to me in this novel. The challenge of re-creating a different way of being on a contemporary farm. The way in which the place of your youth calls you back to it, whether you particularly liked it there or not. The beauty of being awake to the natural world, and the way something—human, plant or animal—will cling to life even as it scrabbles on the brink of extinction. My own commitment to supporting both organic farming and the conservation of wild places made those aspects of the book most enjoyable. The myth of the coyote—scrappy, wily, and allegedly the only native species to profit from European invasion—is one that is becoming central to how we think of ourselves socially and culturally in this country, and the varied ways in which characters respond to the appearance of these animals provides depth that prevents them from becoming caricatures of themselves. Similarly, the opposite approaches that two elderly farmers take to the same challenge—preserving some part of the natural world that is precious to them—helps illuminate the truth that there is commonality between everyone who cares for their local terrain, despite what appears at first glance to be incompatible difference.

Kingsolver’s close connection with the natural world is evident in the care and tenor of her writing in Prodigal Summer, and the book serves as a sort of fictional prequel to the non-fiction Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that followed some years later. That book deserves a review all its own, but the things that I loved in Prodigal Summer clearly arise from the way in which she looks closely at the natural world around her and holds dear her place in it.

Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver

Black and White, by Dani Shapiro

This was an interesting book, one of those that I couldn’t tell you whether I liked or enjoyed. Even having finished it, I’m still on the fence. The attraction of the book for me was the portrait of the artist as Sally Mann, and the speculation about her daughters’ lives. I don’t know how this book would read to someone not familiar with Sally Mann’s work, and the attendant controversies; since this is the element that fascinated me, I found it hard to evaluate the prose on its own terms.

I was introduced to Sally Mann’s work in college, in a feminist art history course. We studied major 20th century women artists who were challenging norms of gender, sexuality, and femininity, as well as the lines around art itself. Sally Mann, Cindy Sherman, Judy Chicago, and Barbara Kruger are the ones I remember. Nikki Lee hadn’t begun showing her self-portraits at the time I took the course, but they would have been at home in this group of artists. Of all of them, Sally Mann’s work was the most intriguing, perhaps because the reactions to it were so polarized. On the one hand, she was seen as an avant garde visionary who was challenging all kinds of dearly held social beliefs: nudity as sexual, children as asexual, rural life as pastoral and naive (to name a few). On the other hand, she was attacked as an abusive and manipulative mother, exploiting her children for the creation of pornographic images. Probably there were some middle positions, but they weren’t getting much air time back then.

One thing is certain. Sally Mann–like her fictional alter ego in Dani Shapiro‘s Black and White–took staged photos of her naked children. How the children came to be naked, and why Mann was called to photograph them that way, remains a mystery of sorts. Does it matter what she was thinking? Does it matter what her children’s experiences of being photographed were? Does the art stand alone? Can photos of naked children, or even topless children, ever be art in our contemporary U.S. culture?

To my knowledge, these remain open questions about her work, and speak to the degree to which context informs interpretation and reception. Images are never just images, and Mann follows in the footsteps of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe. Whatever her original intentions, the concerns of social culture layer the life of the photographs. The most basic set of questions, perhaps because it is one we can never really have answers for, centers around the impact on her children. These questions are at the heart of Shapiro’s book. In the end, the author creates an artist who is not Mann in significant ways, and the resolution of the narrative depends on those differences. By relocating the family from rural Virginia to New York City, and continuing the naked–sorry, nude–photo shoots through her daughter’s teen years, Shapiro creates a level of tension that requires action and resolution. It’s not clear that Mann’s own children related to her art in the same way, but it’s one possibility, and a possibility that seems easy to imagine.

This resonance makes Shapiro’s book compelling, but again: I couldn’t say whether that would be the case for someone who wasn’t familiar with Mann’s work and hadn’t already asked the questions to which Shapiro’s version offers an answer.

Black and White, by Dani Shapiro

Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis

I was somewhat disappointed in Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis. This was another book that had the reputation of being clever that didn’t resonate with me. It was entertaining at times, in a light period kind of way, but I didn’t find myself saying, ‘oh, the wit, the wit!’ as I read. I certainly enjoyed the detailed description of the various styles and fads of the era, in clothing, entertainment, and especially home decoration, as well as the attempts of the child narrator to make sense of the somewhat ludicrous setting in which he found himself. Beyond these elements, though, the attacks on middle class mundanity didn’t really do much for me.

Reading books like this makes me realize that what critics, reviewers and fans call clever, witty, or cutting, I frequently find boring and mean-spirited. Anyone can insult someone else, and judgments of taste are only funny when we share them. Insults dressed up as ‘biting social commentary’ are still just name-calling and trash-talking. This kind of thing can be a breath of fresh air when everyone’s pretending to agree, however it’s not quite as entertaining when it’s coming from those with greater social power. Cleverness has historically been a way to rise in a social hierarchy, through education or wit, and as such is a much vaunted personal characteristic. The exercise of cruel wit, though, seems most frequently to be a tool for enforcing those hierarchies, and as such, it’s not a habit I respect.

Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis

book challenge 2007 update

As I roll into the last quarter of the year, I’m pausing to take stock of how well I’m doing on my own personal book-related challenges.

As expected, I have had no trouble actually reading, but a bit less success powering through some of the denser works that have been sitting by the side of my bed for years. Of the books I’ve read this year, just over half have been from the public library, and quite a few more have been books I’ve acquired this year. Only about 20% of what I’ve read have been books I’ve had kicking around my shelves for years. Which means, oh math whizzes, that on the order of a quarter of the books were books I acquired this year in one way or another.

I think I’ve done pretty well at not buying books. There are a few measures for ‘pretty well.’ I purchased very few new books at full price (the works of China Miéville that I didn’t already own in order to get them signed because I’m a geek that way; Barbara Kingsolver’s most recent book; the new books in two fantasy series that we read; two books by Canadian authors; and Sherman Alexie’s new novel for young adults). I purchased several books from the bargain table that I’d been wanting to read for some time or couldn’t resist once I’d read the cover (The Big Year is solidly in this last category). And, I obtained quite a few used books during the time I volunteered at the bookshop (many of these are cookbooks, actually, although a good few were ones I subsequently read for this challenge). Oh, and: I purchased at least one exhibition catalogue new.

I’m not sure what this says about me beyond the obvious: I like books.

Looking ahead to the next 10 weeks, my goal for the end of the year is to write reviews for the books I’ve already read. I trickled off with this at about book 20, so that means 30 or so reviews, which is roughly 3 per week for those following along at home. I’m on it.

book challenge 2007 update