http://horsesandhorsesandhorses.blogspot.com/
Amy McDaniel helps run the Solar Anus reading series in Atlanta, where she was born and raised. By writing and teaching, she provides for herself and her dog, Annette. She co-edited From the Second Line, a collection of her students’ essays about Hurricane Katrina.
This is a new feature I might do — easy things to cook that are great. I figure I’m picking up where Mark Bittman is (sadly) leaving off.
The first recipe is an all-star one that I can make some version of at almost any time without shopping, provided I have some canned chickpeas (or white beans, or dried lentils, or I’m sure canned black beans would work). I usually have it with rice, which I always have in the house.
The first step is to chop (smallish) and saute whatever hard vegetables you have on hand. For me, this usually means some combination of carrots, onions, and maybe celery, though I’ve made it without some of those too. You can use anything that’s pretty hard. If you use potatoes or sweet potatoes, you might want to chop them extra-fine or even grate them. So, heat a few tablespoons of vegetable oil in a pot, add your chopped vegetables, and saute stirring occasionally for 5-10 minutes, until softened and maybe browned, or longer if you want to caramelize them. But they will keep cooking a little throughout the process. At the end of sauteing, throw in minced garlic if you like. Minced fresh ginger is good, too. If you have tomato paste, add a tablespoon or so now.
Next, add a can or two of drained and rinsed chickpeas (or other beans), as well as any soft vegetables you have around (except soft greens, which I’ll get to). This could mean eggplant, mushrooms, fresh or canned (with juice) tomatoes, summer squash. Canned tomatoes are probably the one I most frequently add. Then add some liquid, a cup or two depending on how much stuff is in the pot, enough to make it a little stew-like so it won’t burn. Tomato sauce, chicken broth, water, whatever you have. Then add curry powder, salt and pepper to taste. If you don’t have curry powder, add some combo of cumin, coriander, chili powder, cayenne, ground mustard, smoked paprika, garlic powder, onion powder.
Bring it all to a boil and then turn down immediately to a slow simmer. Stir occasionally. Cook until everything is at a nice, eatable consistency, say twenty minutes. At this point, stir in fresh or frozen spinach or something similar, if you have it (I don’t always), and cook until cooked (wilty-looking). If you have any parsley, cilantro, scallions, basil, or chives, chop some and add them. Then it is ready to eat with rice or any other cooked grain that you have cooked. In a pinch I have eaten it with toast. I would eat it with tortillas, if it came to that. It is really good with chili paste or hot sauce.
Again, this is really adaptable. Maybe all you have is carrots and chickpeas. That will still be really delicious if you add enough spice. The great thing about this dish is that you don’t have to have anything fresh–canned beans and tomatoes and some frozen spinach along with your dried spices work great. Leftovers are even better than the first go-round.
The pendulum has swung, as pendulums are so woefully apt to do. When I was small, and first starting reading about what writers said about writing, they all seemed to say that it was better not to discuss a work in progress. At the time, this seemed a kind of magic trick, a superstition of some kind. But I’d be damned if I didn’t take their word for gospel, even though I didn’t understand it any better than I understood the actual Gospels (I heard “Jesus is everywhere” and imagined a thousand teeny tiny invisible Bethlehem babies lounging around even as I bathed).
Apparently, I was damned. By the time I started writing in earnest, the whole mechanism had to do with not only discussing but sharing your work in progress. In college, this was great, because I wasn’t in any way ready to complete anything to the point that it could be published. So participating in workshops was like army boot camp. I learned lots.
In MFA school, I still learned, especially in literature seminars, but I certainly didn’t complete anything publishable. But this time, I was probably ready to, but was hampered by the workshop process. There were three reasons for this, I think. 1, in no workshop that I took did anyone say that a piece should just be abandoned. All criticism was constructive, which was the point, but in reality some work needs to be torn down so that something better can be built in its place. I’m very impressionable, so after hearing my work discussed for 20 or so minutes, I became convinced it was worth my continued attention even if it really wasn’t. But I ran into trouble with the continued attention because 2, my classmates’ and professor’s opinions about any one piece, even a 3-pager, were so conflicted, and the problems they unearthed so convoluted, that I was totally lost when faced with revision. To make matters worse, 3, my professors and classmates (not to mention lots of other people in my life–they all agreed) also told me what book they thought I should write, and how I should go about it. Almost five years later, I have only just really decided that they were wrong, and that the book they had in mind is not the one I should write, at least not right now. Like I said, I’m very impressionable. I have confidence in my own work, sure, but there is something powerful about everyone you know saying they want to read the same as-yet-unwritten book by you. Powerful and dangerous.
Something nice has come out of all this Asian mother nonsense, and it is this little essay by Wesley Yang on the Paris Review blog.
John Cheever, far right on bench, not in California, in front of trees
Some of you might very frequently pick up a book feeling certain that you will like it. This happens to me pretty rarely; usually only when I’ve read the book already, or when it is by Charles Dickens or Virginia Woolf. So it was with particular relish when, still feeling the pang of having no more of Middlemarch to read, I opened The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever.
I’d only read Cheever’s stories, which I really love, whether the earlier perhaps more conventional ones or later so-called experiments like “The Swimmer.” Putting aside the question of whether “experimental” is or is not a troublesome descriptor of any art, I don’t think it fits well with Cheever at any stage in his career. One gets the sense with Cheever that he read widely and deeply, probably heavily in Shakespeare and the classics, took what he found useful and then made sentences that were all his own, without giving any thought to fashion and currency.
Sentences like:
We have all parted from simple places by train or boat at season’s end with generations of yellow leaves spilling on the north wind as we spill our seed and the dogs and the children in the back of the car, but it is not a fact that at the moment of separation a tumult of brilliant and precise images–as though we drowned–streams through our heads. We have indeed come back to lighted houses, smelling on the north wind burning applewood, and seen a Polish countess greasing her face in a ski lodge and heard the cry of the horned owl in rut and smelled a dead whale on the south wind that carries also the sweet note of the bell from Antwerp and the dishpan summons of the bell from Altoona but we do not remember all this and more as we board the train.
CONTEST! My favorite line in Lost is when Sawyer walks up to Jack and Juliet mid-intense-conversation and says to them, “What yall doing, arguing about who’s your favorite Other?” In the spirit of that and mean, who is your favorite HTMLGiant troll, past or present? deadgod? MFBomb? mimi? Christopher Higgs? Mather Schneider? phmadore? What would your grandfather say if he met the troll? Winner gets to direct a bromantic comedy with the troll and any 3 of our contributors or frequent non-troll commenters.
elimae (1996-2010) was eliminated from this world due to fatal complications resulting from a malfunction in its bullshit detector. Efforts to resuscitate the detector failed; insiders who wish to remain anonymous told us, “The detector was just too delicately calibrated to be saved. It was the only thing keeping the magazine from publishing truly random word salad bullshit.” Sources concur that the detector was the secret weapon that allowed editors Cooper Renner and Kim Chinquee to respond to submissions within a week, usually much sooner. “No human acting alone can sift such gems out of so much masturbatory bullshit that quickly,” said an industry insider. As-yet-unconfirmed rumors report that the cause of the malfunction was a $1.2M re-engineering project that would have enabled the detector to reject realism-oriented writers who were even just thinking about submitting to the esteemed journal. Details continue to come to light.
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We Who Are About to Die (March 2010-October 2010) just did. The group lit blog was fatally shot by the internet police while attempting to carry out a large-scale but covert fratricide and patricide on other group lit blogs, including but not limited to HTML Giant, The Rumpus, and Montevidayo. The internet cops involved in the operation seemed disoriented and unable to verbalize exactly what went down, but one made a valiant attempt: “It said it wanted all these things to go away or stop, but it, itself, was or did all those very same things, and it admitted that kind of, but still.” Another cop added, “You gotta just own it, you know? If you just own it, these things wouldn’t happen.” An autopsy revealed that had the gunfire not killed the blog, it would have indeed died soon enough. The coroner’s report elaborated, “The blog’s acronym was found to be malformed, or, in layman’s terms, really annoying. Plus, nobody could ever diagnose what those prank calls were about.” None of the intended targets of WWAWAATWD’s killing spree were injured in the slightest, even symbolically.
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Online lit journals in general (1996-2010) met a tragic end in an apparent case of criminal neglect on the part of everyone who wasn’t in the current issue of one of them or planning to submit very soon. The exact time of death is unknown; at first, many writers just figured the new issues were just a little late going live, and nobody else noticed for as much as a month. The death was a shock to many who had long predicted the demise of print publications. “It seems like just yesterday that I was looking at online proofs for four different journals that I was supposed to be in. And now all my last-minute revisions will never find their audience.” said one mourner. More philosophically, a source who claims to be a “veteran” of what he calls “the scene,” noted, “I guess nobody reads online journals, either. People would “like” it on facebook if you linked to a journal you’re in, but maybe they weren’t clicking on the links. I probably have enough online cred already anyway. But I will miss being solicited.” 12 of the source’s friends “liked” this comment.
Some argue for classifying the death an accidental mass suicide. Some editors simply forgot to put up new issues; others report intending to get to it after actually working on their writing for a change. “Everyone got so carried away with encouraging people to buy from small presses that nobody remembered to look at all the free shit online,” charged an anonymous source. The survivors of the deceased request money in lieu of flowers.
I almost told you, we must resist asking what it means when we haven’t yet determined what it is. But I grew bored; I’ve never been much lit up by resistance, a heavy sprinkler on the same clipped lawn. For what is there to resist besides the sun? I prefer insistence. To insist that we won’t know what it is; we will only run our fingertips through the traces. We turn from the spectacle not because it dazzles us but because we want to see the faces of our fellow theatergoers. The trouble comes when they too turn, and they face our glancing faces.
I hate them!
I mean it!
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If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
Don Delillo, The Names
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Turn a key. Empty an ice cube tray. Open a bottle. Hit a forehand. These are actions I took, as the saying goes, for granted. But for the past month I haven’t been able to do those things because of a very painful injury of my right (dominant) wrist. Neither my twice-weekly physical therapist nor my orthopedist can tell me when it might heal; until the pain goes away, the treatment is immobilization, ice, anti-inflammatories, splint, and 14-hour battery patches that pulse medicine into my tendons. No tennis, no piano, no gardening. Driving, cleaning self and home, typing and hand-writing are necessary but very uncomfortable and clumsy.
It could be worse. Is worse, for so many. This is, presumably, temporary, and everything else about my body and my life is fine.
I was all geared up for an active, healthy, productive summer. I moved from a 5th-story loft to a house, close to the ground, apt to fly out of the door at any moment to participate in some active, healthy, productive activity. And write. I would write so much!
Here’s some poetic injustice: all those active, healthy, productive activities are now impossible or painful, whereas most kinds of indulgence and debauchery are totally doable. I can’t chop up vegetables, but I can fry up chicken or order pizza. I can sit at a bar and drink alcohol. I can have most kinds of consensual sex. I can get a pedicure. I can watch tv and order shiny objects from websites.
Just before my injury, I was newly liberated from a fraught romantic entanglement and ready to move into the new place. Free! Independent! I gamely packed and lifted boxes by myself since my romantic entangler was not around to help as planned. And that’s how I injured my wrist. Lifting boxes. Exercise in self-sufficiency: fail.
Hard work and self-reliance not only didn’t pay off but also became nigh impossible. Taking all those activities for granted didn’t cause my injury and giving thanks wouldn’t have prevented it. I take plenty for granted now, and I’ll take everything for granted again. Those things WERE granted to me, until they weren’t.
We’re told not to take things for granted. This is misguided. Plenty is just granted to us, good or bad. If anything, we should take more for granted. Not everything operates under our locus of control. Sometimes we do the right things and get hurt. Sometimes we can’t do anything to make ourselves better. We just have to wait, do nothing productive, indulge ourselves for awhile. Recognizing that we are not autonomous–that is liberating.
When I was about 5, my mother started reading the first installment in The Boxcar Children to me. She got to the end of chapter one and asked if I wanted her to continue. I could not believe my luck: this story, these characters, lived on in the following chapter. I was accustomed to picture books, wherein the narrative concludes after 15 pages or so. Any big books I may have had were probably anthologies of similar stories, fairy tales or fables or the like. That there were all these bigger longer stories was the most awesome childhood discovery. That The Boxcar Children was a whole series of such books, well, hell’s bells.
This began as a comment to Catherine’s post this morning, but then I felt like I was talking about something kind of different, so I decided to devote a post. Catherine coined the term “intellectual fatties” to describe long, abstruse novels that she gets no joy from reading. Presumably, the longer a difficult book is, the harder it is to get through, which is why she limited the field as to length. This got me to thinking about books that are long, but only regularly difficult. I don’t, to my knowledge, read many very difficult books of any length, so I can’t speak as to that.
The longest books I’ve finished are Moby Dick, War and Peace, A Suitable Boy, Les Miserables, lots of big Dickens. None of these are terribly difficult intellectually, but in all cases the experience was joyous. Longer is not harder to get through, in my experience. It’s actually much easier to read one 1200 page book, intellectually, than to read 4 books of 300 pages. In the latter case, you have to get accustomed to 4 different worlds, 4 different voices, so many more characters. In the first case, you only acclimatize one time, and then you are sailing. And you get to know those characters so much better, and you become fluent in the sound and the rhythms of the prose. After finishing The Pickwick Papers, the first 150 pages of which are dreck, I missed Sam Weller the way I miss good friends in absentia.
Whenever I teach a book to my students, I assign the first 30 or so pages, talk about those, and then assign increasingly larger sections for the duration of the novel. This isn’t just because beginnings are so important; it’s because starting a novel, and learning to navigate its terrain, is the hardest part, and I want to spend a lot of time helping them with that.
While I don’t have any hard numbers to back this up, I’m pretty sure that most of the books I’ve not finished (but have read at least, say, 40 pages of) come in under 200 pages. Don’t know why, really, but perhaps it’s because the investment doesn’t seem worth it, if I’m not pretty immediately delighted by it. Once I get into it, it’ll just be over. That’s no fun.
I prefer television shows to movies for the same reason. If I’ve signed up to immerse myself another person’s vision of things, I don’t want to be hauled ashore after just 2 or 3 hours.