Cooking with the Poets

This is what it feels like to be living in our new house right now.  I'm going through the many, many boxes of books we brought with us, which has been a tremendously fraught pursuit each time I've moved house.

I love books probably more than I love any other sort of inanimate created object.  I get a physical rush when I walk into a library, especially an academic library, and if you offered me jewelry, I'd ask for a gift certificate to Amazon instead.  At the same time, I feel a sort of reckless rage against all these books right now, and have the irrational urge to cast them out into the snow, which lays abundantly upon the ground tonight.  I gave away five boxes of books to the library before we moved. A friend then told me about Bookmooch, a book swap site through which I've given away a dozen or so books; while its method is cumbersome, I'm glad to know that these particular books were sought for, requested, and wanted by the people to whom I sent them.  There's also BookCrossing, a site through which you can register books that you then leave in random places for other people to find.  The premise of BookCrossing is interesting: it's a sort of aleatoric method for creating an invisible community of connected readers.  But for me, it's really just a way to get rid of books that are less-than-precious to me, and hope that whoever finds them will take them home, read them, and love them (though I suspect my books will actually be thrown away if I leave them at indoor locations, and become compost if I leave them out of doors).

Our new house, as it happens, has lovely built-in bookshelves, but my books seem out of place in them.  When they were cheek-by-jowl in the rickety homemade bookcases I had for years, my battered copies, mostly second-hand, of books like London Labour and the London Poor, A Muse for the Masses, and Prostitution and Victorian Society, looked at home; here, however, they seem shopworn and suspect.  I don't know if I'll ever use them again -- they were dissertation research, and, though I'm at work on a book version of my dissertation, I'm expanding a different area of my research -- but it seems heartless and disloyal to put them, erstwhile comrades of my spartan, disciplined days of dissertating, up for grabs on Bookmooch or cast them to the Fates on BookCrossing.

I am looking at a book right now, Cuisine for All Seasons, by Helen Hecht, the widow of the great latter-day Formalist poet Anthony Hecht.  I absolutely adore this book.  As with all my books, I remember the circumstances in which I acquired it, bought from a homeless man selling second-hand books and knick-knacks out of boxes by the curb on Broadway between 97th and 98th Streets on my way from the subway to a voice lesson.  When I was married to my first husband, I actually cooked from it once in a while, but mostly I just liked reading it.  It's a menu cookbook of rather complex recipes grouped by season, interspersed with chatty, literate reminiscences of trips to exotic climes and namedropping of poets (one of Mrs. Hecht's menus is called "A Dinner for Joseph Brodsky"; another is "A Birthday Dinner for Tony").  Doesn't this meal, dubbed "A Farmhouse Lunch," sound just right for the first chilly days of fall?

Roast Peppers with Feta Cheese and Olives
Alsation Omelet
Bacon
Tomatoes Provençale
Greek Salad
Apple-Custard Tart or Fresh Fruit

As the author notes, "This is the sort of earthy, rustic lunch you might serve to weekend guests or to friends who gather at your house after an outing in the country."  Indeed.  Or what about this one, perfect for a night like tonight:

Celery and Gorgonzola Soup
Leg of Lamb with Green Peppercorn and Mint Sauce
Spinach, Cheese, and Mushroom Casserole
Braised Fennel
Green Salad
Mocha Mousse with Chocolate Almond Brittle 

While I'm not at all sure if I'll ever cook any of Helen Hecht's proposed meals again, I can't bear to part with her cookbook, which gives me the feeling that there is a world of comfort and peace available to those who order their lives and the seasons according to a collection of recipes like hers.  And, while I feel as if I should cast off the old man to begin a new life in my new home, I'm not ready to jettison the books that old man read and cherished.

Moving On Up

It's funny how my husband and I are homeowners now -- we moved into what my son calls "our new house-home" yesterday -- and yet my life hasn't changed, excepting the obvious; it hasn't, in other words, magically become more wonderful, beautiful, or thrilling.  And I'm a little pissed off by that.

I'm also chagrined to find that the loveseat I was so hoping to leave by the curb has somehow made its way into our new house-home.  There's nothing, technically, wrong with this piece of furniture, aside from the fact that it's rather unlovely.  It's actually quite comfortable.  But it came to us third-hand by way of a bartender friend of my husband's who, along with about forty percent of our old neighborhood in the Bronx, decided to repatriate to Ireland a few years ago, before the economy there collapsed.  Something about knowing that this loveseat spent most of its life on McLean Avenue in Yonkers just bothers me, though I can't quite put my finger on it.  I just want it gone, but then there would be nowhere to sit in the family room.

I've been offering my Saint Andrew's novena for my intentions and those of my family, and also for the special intentions of some readers, including Sally T, Emily J, Josh Snyder, and Mrs. Darwin.  Dear all, I fell asleep while praying for you last night.  I hope it still works.

New Home

I write from my new city. The move was something of a disaster, with more going wrong even than usual with this sort of thing. To make a long story short, the moving company's estimate of time and labor turned out to be wildly off the mark, and it took five men almost three days to pack and move a two-bedroom apartment. Granted, I have a piano, but it's a small one; there were also those seven bookcases. But, to compound matters, it turned out that the estimator had also made a gigantic error in estimating the cost of all this, and because so much else had also gone wrong, the moving company decided to write off the difference. So all's well that ends well.

Our new home is a half-house, two stories plus a basement and garage, for exactly half the rent of our old two-bedroom apartment in the inaccessible outer boroughs of New York. But my new hometown is one of the depressed cities of the Northeast, so I imagine the low rent is a reflection of the low desirability of my new city as a place to live. It is beautiful here, however. The city is surrounded by mountains whose names no one appears to know.

Before we left, I stocked up on British sweets. My old neighborhood, with its large population of recent Irish immigrants, featured an impressive selection of English and Irish candy in just about every deli and corner store. Devotees say that there's no comparison between the English Cadbury bars and the American version, and I don't know when and where I'll be able to find things like the Cadbury Flake bar (above) again.

And we just acquired a washing machine and dryer. I am giddy with excitement as I await the delivery and installation. In New York I would wheel my grocery cart down to the corner laundromat every week and do six loads of laundry at one go, but that's not how it's done here, except by students and the very poor. So, while my fabulous college-teaching wardrobe hangs unused in my new walk-in closet, I am poised to become more like the mother in We Help Mommy and do the wash every day; there's even a clothesline here to hang it out on. Perhaps my son will even become as helpful as the two little ones in the book. Right now, he's mostly interested in the novelty of our flight of stairs, and throwing things down them.

The Great Purge

One of the worst parts of moving is the necessary winnowing of one's possessions, so many of which are laden with memories. And for me the very worst part of this process is trying to decide which books to jettison. I have seven six-foot-tall bookcases (one of them is devoted exclusively to scores and sheet music, and another is for my son's books), and some of their contents will have to be consigned to the flames. But the process of going through them has unearthed some forgotten treasures, making it difficult to choose. There is, for instance, the tiny second edition (1912) of Rainer Maria Rilke's long poem "Requiem," published in Leipzig; someone has written on the flyleaf: "En revenant toujours . . . " and dated it the 22nd of February, 1916. I admit I've never tried to read this book; though I can read German (with a dictionary), like Bartleby the Scrivener, I would prefer not to. I suppose it's the handwritten inscription that has kept me tethered to it all these years. Was it a gift to a lover, a friend, a sister? And the inscription "En revenant toujours" (always coming back) might well be the motto of my own imagined family crest, or at least of this blog.

Then there is Best American Short Stories 1998, which I confiscated from a former boyfriend because it included a wonderful story I'd read that year in the New Yorker, "Every Night for a Thousand Years" by Chris Adrian, a fictional account of Walt Whitman's time as a Civil War nurse (the story can be read in its entirety here). Much later, when I got around to reading the rest of the book, I found another terrific story, "Cosmopolitan" by Akhil Sharma (read it here). Interestingly, neither Chris Adrian nor Akhil Sharma is exclusively a fiction writer: Adrian is a doctor, and Sharma an investment banker. I've read both stories multiple times, but I think this collection is one of the books I'll carry with me to my new home.