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.

Hard Grace

I wonder sometimes if I'll ever get used to life as it really is, if I'll ever reconcile myself to the fact that it has little if anything in common with the dark, redolent landscapes suggested to me in my youth by the songs of Brahms and Schumann and the poetry they set. In my younger days, I imagined that I could recreate my life whole out of those ingredients, plus maybe a bowl of flowers, some macrobiotic groceries, red lipstick, and a thrift-store coat. Things seemed like so much more than what they were; I could practically feel the molecules moving along the surfaces of the created world, and I expected objects to live and breathe and tell me their stories. I also imagined that I was the translator of phenomena, that I needed to make the hidden stories of things known through my own artistic work. I thought that if things looked a certain way, smelled a certain way, and sounded a certain way in my daily experience, everything would be all right. In short, I believed that aesthetics trumped nature, nurture, neurosis, and the whole host of other uncontrollable variables that end up carving a life out of the seemingly endless run of days. Oh, and grace. I didn't know much about it, nor about mercy; but I did have the sense of an invisible thread of goodness that somehow tugged me safely through some shocking and desperate situations.

But grace is not always aesthetically satisfying. It's hard to distinguish sometimes between the gift of humility, which is like a long exhalation of relief, and the feeling of being kicked down howling into the dirt. Grace has led me further away from the beautiful perceptions that used to make up my days -- the vetiver perfume worn by a bohemian German woman who sat next to me at the ballet one day when I was fourteen, the swirl of cream spiraling down into a glass of black coffee, the delightful label on a can of imported tomato paste, so beautiful that I removed it and pinned it up on the wall -- and deeper into the repetitive, drone-like tasks that actually do make up the days of most adults.

I sometimes think that the adults in my life recognized certain proclivities in me as a child and trained me for them, with the result that I lived as an artist and lacked practicality almost entirely. I also behaved in ways that were hurtful to those around me. I think the adults felt themselves to have been thwarted by responsibility and circumstance from paying court to beauty as they had wished to, and so trained me to do it for them. But in the end, like most people, I eventually had to learn the hard lessons of adulthood; I just did so later than most, and with more resentment.

When everything whispered beauty to me, I lived in a kind of perfumed solitude, which has devolved now into ordinary everyday loneliness. And it's almost a year since we moved away from New York, and I still can't drive.

But Mark Strand wrote in his beautiful poem "The Continuous Life":

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

Above: The Table (1925) by Pierre Bonnard.

The Aroma of Longing

Recently in the combox, some of us have been discussing longing. When I asserted that longing is the post-Romantic condition, Mrs. T corrected me: it is the human condition.

We live on one side of an old two-family house from the 1930s, and when we moved in, I had perhaps irrationally high hopes that our other-side neighbors, a young-ish married couple with no children, would become great friends of mine. But it was not to be. Soon after we arrived, they complained about our noise: our son, whose third birthday was nearing, is a very rambunctious boy, and my husband and I would talk in our bedroom, which abutted theirs, apparently past our neighbors' bedtime. We have tried to be sensitive -- I don't consider us a loud family (except for when I practice, when my husband plays the piano or his accordion, when my son is screaming, when I am yelling ... hmmm) -- but sometimes we forget. My husband was vacuuming the living room the other night when the wife called and said she had just gone to bed and could we please stop; it was, um, 8:30.

So this great friendship was not to be. But I have a kind of olfactory voyeurism into my neighbors' lives. The house has two separate basements, one for each side, with built-in chutes on the first and second floors to throw dirty clothes down to the laundry room. Whenever I open one of the chutes, I can smell what my neighbors are cooking. It always smells so good that I feel disappointed by what I'm cooking on my own side of the house (which is usually also quite good) and seized with longing for what they're having for dinner. They make a lot of popcorn, which is not something we have over on this side. And this morning, as I was throwing last night's pajamas down to the basement, I caught the aroma of their coffee. It was wonderful - cinnamony, inviting, seemingly nothing at all like the coffee I was brewing back home. I imagined what life must be like on the other side of the house: bathed in warm colors, with attractive, artsy knick-knacks strewn about. But my own coffee was good too, and the husband of the couple is getting his doctorate in something called post-subculture studies, so maybe it's just as well we didn't become friends.

Random Acts of Classicism

In my new home town, there is a 1970s-era apartment building in a working-class neighborhood whose cornerstone is inexplicably inscribed with Latin axioms (and one Greek exclamation). I chanced upon it yesterday, and transcribed what I found there:

Eureka
Mens sana in corpore sano
Omnia vincit amor [followed by the seemingly contradictory]
Labor omnia vincit
Gutta cavat lapidem
Ex nihil nihil fit

At the bottom of this list, the sculptor appears to have signed his work:

Loran scupsit

The Ambiguous Virtue of Thrift

My friend Mrs. T at Fine Old Famly has indulged me by writing a post on one of my favorite topics, bargain-shopping at the grocery store. I've found since moving that, now that we're out of the orbit of the greater New York metropolitan area, we have also been freed from the grip of the Gotham Dairy Cartel. For reasons I could never fathom, dairy products are amazingly expensive in New York City. I never bought Land-O-Lakes butter in New York, for instance, although it's my favorite butter, because it cost $5.99 a pound in the local supermarket. Here, it's $2.99, so I buy two pounds at a time.

I've always found bargain-hunting, whether for groceries or anything else, to be a fun and exciting adventure. Most of my fabulous college teaching wardrobe was culled from thrift stores, as were many of my recital gowns, including the one I wore at my dissertation recital last spring, a vintage Pauline Trigère evening dress from the 1960s. I even bought my wedding dress at a thrift shop, a strange and remarkable experience which must be saved for another telling, for $200. (It happened to be the shop in the basement of Fallen Sparrow's favorite haunt for weekday Mass, a Church that I believe is redolent with graces.) That's me in the dress, above.

So I thought nothing of walking over to the local Catholic Charities thrift shop the other day, with my two-year-old in the stroller, to get a few shirts for his new two-mornings-a-week nursery school. When we got there, the place was packed, which seemed unusual, but I found some very nice things for him in good condition. I got onto a long line to pay, and when I got to the counter, the volunteer staff lady asked for my paperwork. I didn't understand, and she explained that Wednesday was "voucher day"; apparently certain social service programs here include a clothing allotment, which Catholic Charities offers to provide. She let me pay, since I had exact change, but I left feeling like I had done the wrong thing. Maybe getting the nicest possible thing for the least amount of money is no virtue if others need it more than you. I felt like I was taking something that belonged to someone else. It made me wonder if thrift really is a virtue, or just a perversion of Yankee individualism.

Heimat

Amazingly, my new neighborhood has a cluster of streets named after the giants of German and Austro-Hungarian classicism and romanticism. There are streets named after Goethe and Schiller (both pictured above), as well as a Mozart Street, a Beethoven Street, and a Schubert Street (sadly, no Schumann or Brahms), and the unidiomatically-spelled (and perhaps -pronounced) Haendel and Hayden [sic] Streets. Perhaps I will be happy here.

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.