LOST.

I grieve for you in the cold quiet of winter

My absent child, my long lost son

Warming my hands over dying flames, frost covered smouldering clinker,

By the wood where icy streams run

Through the shrunken sedge, and barren fields

Stretching for miles, empty of meaning.

The landscape like a worn photograph yields

Your tremulous smile, then nothing.

Here, you ran with startled steps

Through the yielding sheaves, yelling with surprise,

Chasing indifferent spiders, and discomfited birds

With hatred in their pebble pool-dark eyes.

Querying awkwardly spoken words, small

Tenacious fingers that caress and clutch

Every passing object, loudly chuckling, wisely playing me for a fool

A silly father who loved too much.

On the anniversary of your leaving I required solitude

Partnered only by memory

Away from familiar crowds, the booming, barking fusillade

Of the present day commonplace urban itinerary,

Where only the crackle of snow

And the fleeting trajectory of birds

Distracts my slow

Marshalling of comforting thoughts.

The cottage where we lived haunts the shallow glade,

A shrouded ghost swaddled by the half-light,

Positioned squarely like an old man, its cladding beginning to fade,

White branches like dead-fingers that gleam in the night.

In the closet are your dust-sprinkled toys, a yellow plastic duck,

A cheap skateboard, ancient video games,

A guitar you never learnt to pluck

A chess board on which you pulverised my endgames.

 In the preserved furnishings of your bedroom

Your school work gathered into stacks

Barely visible in the gloom,

Our life together in disorganised packs

Denoting year and level

Development and academic achievement,

If any, (but I mustn’t once again cavil)

Indicating, even in your earliest years, a specific bent.

Standing on the mantelpiece, propped up against the wall,

Are brightly coloured, polished pictures

Of you. Plump, blonde, agreeably small

Dancing, standing, jumping, grinning, absurdly wistful mixtures.

A bitter echo resonating from the shadows

A cold thought darkening into memory

The spectre of your voice disappearing in the meadows

Having left all of us! Having left me!

Last week would have been the 99th birthday of William Burroughs. A great writer (in patches) and a key member of the Beat Generation Burroughs was also infamous for killing his wife, apparently accidentally, in a drunken reenactment of the old William Tell trick but with a pistol.

I loved all things Beat Generation as a teenager but it’s difficult, looking at it now, not to feel sorry for the women like Joan Burroughs who were caught up in it. None of them achieved the artistic success of the men, Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, or Allen Ginsberg. Reading Kerouac’s books now you wonder if that wasn’t because they were too busy doing all the cooking and cleaning for their oh-so-creative menfolk. The women in Beat novels are generally maids or whores, preferably some convenient combination of both. Those who aren’t, who want something more for themselves and the children the Beat writers occasionally father (and generally abandoned) come out of the Beat novels as pushy harridans cramping the guy’s creative style.

So, as I got older, one of my favourite pieces of Beat writing became Allen Ginsberg’s poem Dream Record: June 8, 1955. It is one of the few looks at and acknowledgements of the women behind the Beat Generation, who fed and watered the men, almost always anonymously and often at great cost. I figured Joan Burroughs “leaning forward in a garden chair, arms on her knees” deserved remembering today just as much as the famous man who killed her.

A drunken night in my house with a

boy, San Francisco: I lay asleep.

darkness:

I went back to Mexico City

and saw Joan Burroughs leaning

forward in a garden chair, arms

on her knees. She studied me with

clear eyes and downcast smile, her

face restored to a fine beauty

tequila and salt had made strange

before the bullet in her brow.

      We talked of life since then.

Well, what’s Burroughs doing now?

Bill on Earth, he’s in North Africa.

Oh, and Kerouac still jumps

with the same beat genius as before,

notebooks filled with Buddha.

I hope he makes it, she laughed.

Is Huncke still in the can? No,

last time I saw him on Times Square.

And how is Kenney? Married, drunk

and golden in the East. You? New

loves in the West–

      Then I knew

she was a dream: and questioned her

–Joan, what kind of knowledge have

the dead? can you still love

your mortal acquaintances?

What do you remember of us?

      She faded in front of me–The next instant

I saw her rain-stained tombstone

rear an illegible epitaph

under the gnarled branch of a small

tree in the wild grass

of an unvisited garden in Mexico.

- Allen Ginsberg        

Picture: Collecting books for readers in the reserve stacks, 1964: http://flic.kr/p/6YUnLX

When studying English literature at school in England, you could be excused for thinking that no one outside the UK has ever produced a novel/poem/play and that no one in the UK has picked up a pen since Charles Dickens was seducing his way through London.

Happily this is far from true, and to try to broaden my reading horizons I’ve dedicated my reading list for the next year to authors from around the world, starting with America.

There is such a bulk of great American literature that to produce this list, I further narrowed it down to novels set in a Southern state and written by an American, preferably Southern, author.

1. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

“Death, taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them.”

Perhaps the most epic of all Southern novels, our heroine Scarlett O’Hara survives the American Civil War, Restoration and three marriages, including one with the infamous blockade runner, Rhett Butler.

Both the novel and film adaptation have a cult following and enduring popularity that shows no sign of slowing down.

GWTW is a magnificent war novel that has no battle scenes, a romance with no happy ending and a powerful social commentary. I have never rooted for and disliked a protagonist as much as I did for Scarlett O’Hara. She is daring, brave, and charming, but also thoughtless, cruel and reckless; and you too will be swept along.

2. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

“They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions… but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

Set in Alabama during the Great Depression, Scout narrates the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman and facing the death penalty. Tom is defended by the much adored character, Atticus Finch, and nearly pays a very dear price for his courage to try to give Tom a fair trial in a time of institutional racism.

Along with Anne Frank’s diary, To Kill a Mockingbird teaches us more about tolerance, kindness and justice than any other novel. I read it as a child and it has stayed with me, and I still think “what would Atticus do?” in certain situations.

Like Margaret Mitchell, Harper Lee only wrote one novel, when asked why, she replied:

“Two reasons: one, I wouldn’t go through the pressure and publicity I went through with To Kill a Mockingbird for any amount of money. Second, I have said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again.”

A must read.

3. Cold Sassy Tree, by Olive Ann Burns

“But to mourn, that’s different. To mourn is to be eaten alive with homesickness for the person. That day, I mourned mostly for Granny, who had lost more than any of us, but also for Grandpa, for mama and for myself. I didn’t want to visit Granny at the cemetery like Grandpa was doing. That was just her empty shell over there, whereas here I could touch things she had touched, look out on the flowering plants she had looked at and walk through her house.”

Cold Sassy Tree opens with the death of Will Tweedy’s long suffering grandmother, and quickly heats up with his grandfather’s scandalous marriage to the much younger Miss Love, three weeks after his wife’s death.

The main strength of this novel is the intricate and delicate way Burns influences family relationships through small town events, and matures Will through the drama of his grandfather’s second marriage.

One of the very best coming of age novels I have ever read.

4. Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, by Susan Gregg Gilmore

“I didn’t really think Jesus cared what I wore to Cedar Grove Baptist Church, or to see the governor for that matter, considering the fact that in every picture I ever saw of the King of Kings, He was wearing sandals and bundled up in nothing more than a big, baggy robe.”

The daughter of the local preacher in Ringgold Atlanta, population 1,923 and one traffic light, Catherine Grace Cline spends her days eating Dilly bars and dreaming of her escape to the big city.

In her haste to leave town following graduation, she breaks more than one heart and a sudden death reveals a secret long buried and painful to confront.

Gilmore depicts human fragility beautifully, and that bitter sweet feeling of leaving your home behind to follow your dreams.

5. Fried Green Tomatoes at The Whistle Stop Cafe, by Fannie Flagg

“Are you a politician or does lying just run in your family?”

We begin in 1980s Birmingham, Alabama, with Evelyn Couch, a middle aged, unhappy housewife and Ninny Threadgoode, an elderly woman in a local nursing home. Over several months Ninny tells Evelyn the story of her youth in Whistle Stop, and in particular about the famous Whistle Stop Cafe her sister in law Idgie ran with Ruth during the Great Depression.

An excellent small town tale with marriages, a murder trial and some excellent barbeque; food is so important in this novel that recipes are included as an appendix.

The hugely successful film adaptation, (Fried Green Tomatoes, 1991), with Kathy Bates and Mary Louise Parker portrayed Idgie and Ruth as friends rather than lovers, and something very fine was lost in the process.

6. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt

“If you go to Atlanta, the first question people ask you is, “What’s your business?” In Macon they ask, “Where do you go to church?” In Augusta they ask your grandmother’s maiden name. But in Savannah the first question people ask you is “What would you like to drink?”

Jim Williams, antique dealer, was trialled no less than four times for the murder of Danny Hansford, a local prostitute in Savannah in the 1980s; and this non-fiction novel is incredibly atmospheric and Southern Gothic in tone.

John Berendt met Jim and a range of other Savannah characters during his regular trips down South, after realising that a flight costed as much as dinner out in New York and found himself befriending a whole bunch of unconventional characters.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is an excellent non-fiction novel that was on the New York Times Bestseller list for no less than 216 weeks.

7. The Colour Purple, by Alice Walker

“I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way…I can’t apologize for that, nor can I change it, nor do I want to… We will never have to be other than who we are in order to be successful…We realize that we are as ourselves unlimited and our experiences valid. It is for the rest of the world to recognize this, if they choose.”

Like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Colour Purple has been banned a number of times, mainly for its sexual violence and cursing; but those who banned it were clearly missing the point.

Set in rural Georgia, in the 1930s, Celie, our protagonist, is a poor fourteen year old black girl who after her mother’s death begins writing letters to God for her stepfather to stop beating and raping her. Two adopted children later, her life continues to go downhill after she marries the abusive Mr. Johnson and for a while it seems her life will never improve. Her fate changes when she meets her husband’s mistress, Shug, and their relationship is Celie’s salvation.

The violence and oppression Celie experiences make this difficult reading, but it is well worth investing the time in.

8. Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor

“There are all kinds of truth … but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there’s no truth.”

Deeply influenced by her Catholic faith, O’Connor’s writing centres on morality and ethics and she uses regional setting, grotesque characters and her own blend of Southern Gothic to shock her readers.

The grandson of a travelling preacher, Motes grows up with doubts concerning faith and the nature of sin and following being discharged by the army after WW2, he launches an anti-religious ministry in an eccentric southern town with the help of a blind preacher, a mummified dwarf, and a crazy landlady.

A bizarre, but intriguing read.

Her short stories are even better.

9. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

“Jim said that bees won’t sting idiots, but I didn’t believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn’t sting me.”

An all time American classic, that deals with the themes of race and identity through the very charming voice of Huckleberry Finn.

To escape his violent drunk of a father, Huck fakes his own death with the help of a pig and a fire and sets off on an adventure with escaped slave Jim. Together they travel down the Missouri river and run into the lost dauphin, feuding families, and a whole lot of trouble along the way.

Worth reading for the incredible vernacular English Twain employs and his own special brand of satire.

10. Interview with a Vampire, by Ann Rice

“Evil is a point of view. We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms.”

Interview with a Vampire began as a short story, and it took Ann Rice only five weeks to turn it into a 336 page novel that would prove be a huge commercial success and lead to a long list of prequels and sequels.

Rice’s writing is intensely atmospheric and she brings eighteenth century New Orleans to life with an intensity that few writers can achieve.*

Louis de Pointe du Lac, a 200 year old vampire, tells the story of his life to reporter Daniel Molloy, beginning in 1791 when he was a young plantation owner near New Orleans and his story quickly picks up speed as he meets the seductive vampire Lestat.

Rice’s Louis has become is the archetype for the modern vampire with a soul and this novel helped make fantasy novels mainstream.

*For those looking for more novels set in 19th century New Orleans, I would heartily recommend the Benjamin January series by Barbara Hambly.

Picture: Umbrellas at James Smith’s Umbrella Shop by Rev Dan Catt

Harriet:

‘Only connect’ EM Forster famously said, at least before the phrase got co-opted onto a quiz show. It’s a phrase I’ve always rather liked, implying that the answer to all our problems is only to reach out to someone else and try to see things from their perspective. Which is probably true. Howards End is Forster’s great connections novel, where everyone turns out to know everyone, and wholly unexpected people have sex, marry and kill one another with abandon. The novel recognises that life doesn’t always resolve itself as black and white as it ought to, and one might, as Forster did, end up best friends with one’s gay lover’s wife.

Margaret Schlegel makes friends with a woman who conveniently dies, leaving her beloved house, Howards End to her, much to the dismay of the woman’s family, the Wilcoxes. They hide her inheritance from her, but eventually Margaret marries Henry Wilcox anyway. Meanwhile, Margaret’s unconventional sister Helen tries to help a lower middle class Leonard Bast but fails and gets pregnant by him. They all end up at Howards End and Leonard gets accidentally dead, but this is a blessing in disguise because it reconciles everyone and they learn to appreciate each other more. It’s comforting, because at the end everything resolves itself (except for Leonard Bast, I’m afraid) but also quite unlike anything else of its kind, ahead of its time on matters of class and education. Forster is empathic, and that is why Howards End sometimes appeals to me more than the great modernist texts of the period, which plough their course alone and prefer, sometimes, to not connect at all.

Holly:

While I always enjoy unexpected characters having sex, marrying and killing one another, I found Howard’s End, unnaturally light and fluffy, even in its darkest moments.

The characters certainly connect, but at an incredibly artificial level with no mutual understanding ever reached and in the case of Mr. Bast in particular, great harm done in the process. The Schlegel sisters meet Leonard Bast at a Wagner recital, and after a few short encounters decide to rescue him from his hum drum life and faded wife. To Leonard they are symbols of the of life he dreams of, they read poetry and discuss ideas all day long, and to the Schlegel’s he is a child of nature being slowly crushed by his life; both parties are idealised by the other and in the process bring calamity upon one another.

Her speeches fluttered away from the young man like birds. If only he could talk like this, he would have caught the world. Oh, to acquire culture! Oh, to pronounce foreign names correctly! Of to be well informed, discoursing on every subject that a lady had started!

Also, at no point does anyone try to connect with Mrs. Bast; she is an object of scorn throughout the novel and it troubles me that Forster portrayed her so. Was he trying to make a statement about outcasts in a world of strict morality, or was she and her scandalous affair with Mr Wilcox simply a good springboard for the book’s finale?

Harriet:

Poor old Mrs. Bast, she does rather get forgotten about. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that people connect on an artificial level. Mr. Wilcox goes from being a cold husband without the proper respect to his dead wife to someone who can weep in Margaret’s arms and say ‘I don’t know what to do–what to do.  I’m broken–I’m ended.’ He falls a long way, but Margaret, in turn flawed in her own way, saves him. Leonard himself is a deeply complex character, and his connections with everyone else in the novel are artificial, because he is artificial himself. But it shows how important even the most tenuous of connections can be to us even though we might not think it at the time.

I love that it’s about small secrets, and their ability to break down what we think our lives are about. Why does Henry lie at the end? Does he even know he’s lying anymore? Will Margaret forgive him, and what is next for their relationship? It’s the sign of a good novel that you’re left with so many questions at the end. Forster didn’t like to put anything in the way of his connection with the reader, so I don’t think he would have used Mrs. Bast as a catalyst to end the novel. I think he’d worry the reader would see through him. Perhaps her invisibility at the end is, as you suggest, a sign of how invisible she is to society. But that doesn’t quite work because then by rights Helen should be silenced by scandal as well. Helen who says, too wisely, ‘I blame, not your wife for these things, but men.’ Perhaps poor old Jacky achieved respectability as a widow, and went on to live out a blameless life doing one of those quintessential Edwardian professions.

Regardless, the fact that we care says all you need to know about the novel. The characters are real to us and that is not an easy thing to achieve, especially with such a disparate group of people.

Holly:

I rather suspect Jacky spent the rest of her life in some grimy brothel or at the mercy of some unpleasant individual, than in some quintessential profession. Despite being quite possibly the most interesting character of the novel, once her past affair with Henry is revealed, she disappears of the page and we hear no more of her. Dickens would have given the reader a satisfying death in a workhouse or a surprise inheritance to make her respectable and finish her story, but Forster simply drops her storyline with a huge ‘clunk’.

While it is enjoyable to be left with questions to mull over at the end of a novel, gaping holes are just annoying.

This is a novel full of artificial people, who are therefore incapable of connecting. Before Leonard’s death, Margaret was planning to leave Henry and travel to Germany with Helen and start a new life; but the shock of random violence brings them together in what I would argue is a temporary truce, rather than a true connection. A genuine ending between two such contrasting and opposing individuals would have been for their marriage to crumble. They have no values in common, no common language or aspirations to unite them and in the end their marriage survives because Margaret is a nurturer and Henry has been left a shell of himself. Only by ignoring painful truths do they stay together, as we see in the closing paragraph of the novel, when Margaret finally discovers that Henry cheated her out of inheriting Howards End.

Margaret was silent. Something shook her life in its inmost recesses, and she shivered.

‘I didn’t do wrong, did I?’ he asked bending down.

‘You didn’t, darling. Nothing has been done wrong.’

Picture: ‘Brixton Market’ by Loz Flowers via Flickr

Graffiti

We once walked hand in hand through the pleasure gardens
With the giant swans
Who broke their own necks in fits of panoramic madness
And tree limbs writhe with new young lovers
We walked calmly together
Through time and city-dusk and many mornings

I still see you in the ink well
In the fragile pond in Ruskin Park
In the ice of my last drink before lights out

Towards the end
I carried you to the garden of Gethsemane
Laid you in the tomb and mounted the cross
While you smiled up at me through bloody tears,
We no longer needed writing

Written in egg yolk on latrine walls
In creosote on suburban garden fences
We left our trail

The quacks tried to tell us the truth
That we were too fast, so young
And always doomed,
But we didn’t need their truth
We spat out their lithium
And built a myth
You lay me down on the Walworth road
And I grew impossible winter flowers for you
On frosted graves
In Dulwich cemetery

South

Try reading the brail of the streets with the barterers of Brixton shouting,
through the smell of accie and saltfish in the markets under the filthy arches

Past black faces and blue eyes, that meet and spin in perfect harmony
In oily cafes and the back alleys that simmer in half-light

Through the first urban gloamings of the day, light shows
The lollypop lamps and crimson morning and the grey skin of night peeling back
And back and back to show the yawning city with its dreams and its dirt

Hear the lost wake on Coldharbour lane, their souls spluttering to life as they traipse down to Ruskin Park puling and moaning and brittle with hues of the blues they suck their special brew through tinny smiles till all the leaves of grass lay down

To Camberwell, and Greek patisseries that spill urgent babbling voice and the smell of baklava into the road, it mixes with gangland lingo and ‘blud’ and the stench of weed, all awake and alive and harmonious with the constant excitement of violence

Past the tortured twisted willow behind St Giles, stoical in the maelstrom
Past the blocks, rectilinear catacombs in the sky, lives in limbo bathed in screen light behind St George cross and washing and flowers.

On and on to Peckham as the day begins to bleed and the fear of the drip drip subterranean horrors into the evening and the night and light shows again

Cascades of orange and sharp pricks of white and the thundering wheels of lorries with their head lamps throwing sinister silhouettes high onto brick and through glass.

Then finally to New Cross or Deptford, terror and beauty with sticky feet and barflys cutting the rancid air full of stories and smoke and abandonment, all breathing heavily into the frenzy, iridescent and fleeting as the great leviathan rolls over again to crush another morning.

Rehab

It breaks your heart everyday to know
You will never
Have any
Of the pretty girls
On television

Image: Wall painting of the baker Terentius Neo and his wife. From the House of Terentius Neo, Pompeii. AD 50–79. © Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months it can’t have escaped you that the British Museum are putting on an exhibition of artefacts from Pompeii and Herculaneum. It seems like every time you open a newspaper or magazine there is an article or reference to it, and now the date is (almost) here. When I come across blockbuster exhibitions like this, I’m often unconvinced, finding that regularly the museum or gallery in question has tended to over hype the exhibition and supplemented it extensively with artefacts from the permanent collection.

Not so at Pompeii and Herculaneum, where apparently the curator, Paul Roberts, was given free rein at the Naples museum, rooting things out of the basement, and encouraged to take as much as possible, including many things never seen outside Italy before. The result is impressive. The museum has chosen to focus on the day to day life of the Romans, taking as its thesis that the reason the destruction of these two cities is so interesting for us is precisely because the lives here were so mundane. This results in a fascinating mixture of rich and poor, slave and landowner. And, as many have said, what really comes across is how like us these people were. My favourite artefact in the exhibition is the mosaic of a skeleton, holding two bottles of wine, that was in the dining room. A memento mori that has a particular poignancy, given what happened next.

Other stand out exhibits included the beautiful garden mosaics, set out as if in the garden, the dormouse jar and the child’s cot, carbonised for eternity. But inevitably most attention will centre around the casts of the dead, which, better than anything else, remind us that these were people with lives that they valued just as we value our own. You can see the facial expressions on the casts, the creases in their togas, and they are displayed alongside the objects they were holding. And it’s actually quite sad, despite the fact that they lived and died so long ago, which is testament to the skill of the interpretation. Setting these Romans so firmly within the home, they become relatable in a way that other exhibitions have missed.

The only faintly absurd element is a video showing the modern equivalent of slavery, explaining how in Rome, slaves became part of the family, much like our cleaning ladies and nannies do today. I think this puts a rather too rosy glow on both modern and ancient day ‘slavery’, and seems a little spurious.

Overall, though, after last year’s disappointing (in terms of visitor numbers) Shakespeare exhibition, this exhibition seems set to break all records. This and the Ice Age exhibition seem to make more sense for a museum which, although it has a large early modern collection, is best known for its ancient things – the Rosetta stone, the Elgin Marbles and the Egyptian mummies.

Pompeii and Herculaneum, 28th March – 29th September 2013. Tickets available here

I see my mother everywhere. The food court is full of my mother – not in a bad way but in a full way. She is waiting in line to buy us knishes. She is talking to a man who looks like my father with her chin raised just a little so she can look younger. She is 90 but she knows she can pass for 75. She has at least a quarter of a century fewer wrinkles than someone else her own age.

Now she sits outside the luggage discount store at the flea market dreaming of moving out of her house. A man sits at the same bench, his stomach out, his legs spread. He snores. I am thinking he too snores who only sits and waits. When I return from my walk around the market stalls, my mother tells me to sit down. I tell her I don’t want to sit down. She tells me I’m tired and I should sit. I think she’s the one who’s tired and wants to keep sitting, so I squeeze in-between her and the snoring guy. I look over at the piano that plays itself. I think about how bad the economy is down here that they can’t afford to hire a piano player and have to teach pianos to play themselves. Why would anyone want to go listen to a piano playing itself? Would anyone want to see an orchestra playing without musicians? A pair of shoes dancing without a dancer? A pair of polyester pants and a white belt without a man snoring in them?

I’m not certain why the men’s room at the food court has the loudest most powerful hand blower I have ever seen or heard. Is it really necessary? Perhaps it would be more appropriate at the airport since it sounds a lot like a plane right before takeoff. I am thinking it was designed by a canasta group of elderly Jewish women who are sick and tired of their husbands leaving the men’s room with wet hands. It just reminds me of the lack of subtlety anywhere around here. I think of this food court not so much as a place to eat but as a place to put enormous amounts of food inside of me and wait for the results later.

Although knishes, as far back as I can remember, were always sidekicks now they seem to be the main characters. They have shoved everything they can into them here – even hotdogs. There are hot dogs now sticking out of knishes. Hot dog has become an adjective phrase to describe a particular kind of knish. Can there possibly be a department anywhere in the world with the word health in it that should have let this happen? I really try to hide my daughter’s eyes when we get to the display case. No matter how you slice it, it is not a wholesome sight. All that being said, whoever thought of it in the first place is a sick and evil genius.

Next to the ‘knish place’ is ‘The First Avenue Deli’ since the name ‘Second Avenue Deli’ is already taken. I suppose they figured ‘what’s one avenue’. You can’t fool people though. Almost no one is buying anything there. Except me. I buy a hot dog. It’s not until I get my Cuban coffee – when the meaning of the universe opens up to me – that I suddenly realize that there is no deli on Second Avenue. But that’s okay. I am in a strangely forgiving mood. It is the power of Cuban coffee. It begins slowly and then suddenly I want to forgive the world for all its transgressions. I look around and notice people are happy. Even the old people are happy. They eat things like knishes and pizza like they’re kids again. They laugh with their grandchildren. Sellers from different stalls are talking to each other. The world has become one big Flea market. I could shop all day, buy things like little hats and tool kits and gold-sequined iPhone cases and bundled socks and reading glasses and all those gadgets they sell at 3 in the morning on TV which make so much more sense to me now and I even feel sorry for the poor guy who sells that liquid soap that cleans glasses where I have never seen anyone stop and I almost buy a bottle except they haven’t invented coffee – Cuban or otherwise – that powerful yet.

I hear that piano that plays itself again and look at it and listen to it with wonder, imagining a world one day when we will not have to lift a finger ever again, when everything will be done for us and we won’t even need piano players to play pianos or saxophonists to play the sax and we can shop shop shop for things big and small and shove things into our mouths, foods we have known shoved inside foods we have never known and listen to music we have never heard and hear books read aloud from somewhere in the sky, while we are awake or dreaming, and as we leave the food court I see the man in the polyester pants still snoring on the bench and I envy him for I see he already has reached his own blessed ignorant happiness: sleeping guiltlessly while making bodily noises among an indifferent public while his wife shops – much to his unconscious pleasure – alone.

Later that evening, back at my mother’s house, stomach acid begins to move slowly yet sinuously into my throat. My mother bemoans her fate, her age, her loneliness here in this apartment – alone now – my father, her friends and family, all gone. She can’t find a bottle of pills she bought that morning at the pharmacy. “My eyes are no good anymore,” she says.

That night, unable to sleep, I notice it too. At first I’m not sure what it is. And then I know. It is the silence. It is a silence I have never heard before. No wind in the trees, no voices across the lake, no cicadas or crickets hiding in the dark-even the phone doesn’t ring – nothing. Now there is only the memory of sound – of years ago or even this afternoon – of pianos playing, of fat men snoring, of hand dryers blowing, of the elderly eating knishes and pizza with their grandchildren – for, alas, the power of the Cuban coffee has vanished.

People ask me a lot about my teeth. They say, “Ben, how can you live with those rotten meat picks? You look like you’ve been chewing rock salt again. By the way, how is that ‘poetry’ thing of yours going?” (Well, I see ‘poetry’ in quotes.)

Very well, thank you,” I reply, choking down a little stomach acid. “I’ve just finished a fourteen-verse) rhymed sestina.”  (Yes, I know I’ve omitted the coda, but I am tired!)

“Oh? Sounds ‘interesting’.” (Dammit, there it goes again!)

“Yes.”

“Oh. Well. Very good. You must send me a copy when it’s finished!”

“But uh, it’s… uh, no, yes, I’ll keep you posted. How’s Thomas?”

“Oh Ben, he’s marvellous. We both are! He’s just been given a raise, and now off to Singapore to sell washing machines. You know, you should consider giving him your number; I’m sure he’d love to chat to you about his career, and might even be able to find you something to do with your life. Basic, of course, but a little pocket money and out of those ratty clothes. We can’t all be bums forever, eh?”

“No. We can’t.”

“Ah well, I must dash! All these functions, so exhausting! Best of luck with your sonnet. It’s so good to see…”

I have decided to end the example at this point as it accurately mirrors the stage in conversation where I feel a crescendo of obscenities plopping out of that arsehole in my face. Perhaps it would be wiser to give ground and let banality slide, however, with the best of intentions, fuck that shit – not my style. Anyway, I digress.

Crack is, altogether, not the most forgiving friend of a drug, and those who deal in it are also generally not of that category. S was a walking sea-mouse (look it up, it’s not as cute as it sounds) of the highest (duh!) calibre. I like to give everyone an even chance, but when they get to the point of chasing you down the road naked with a claw-hammer in each hand, I feel compelled to reassess my prejudices.

I was living, in the loosest sense of the word, in Hackney. That’s London, but not the nice postcard bit, unless the postcards you collect are hung up in darkrooms next to a pile of decomposing testicles. I had experienced the local charm and sophistication long enough to express a dire and sapient need for Class A narcotics – specifically, tiny chunks of bicarbonate and ammonia treated cocaine, wrapped up semi-impenetrably in neat parcels of cling film. The sort of thing elves might post each other at Christmas, if elves were 7ft tall, blade-carrying lunatics. S, being the only adjacent bastard available for this sort of adventure, became my angel of unpleasant, if original, decay.

But then, as this sweet, sublime perfume of existence often swirls, I ran out of wonga, which tends to inhibit drug-taking in a most direct and inopportune way. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to secure some readies (never apply maple syrup to a marmoset), in near-total desperation I found myself at my dealer’s door (barred, gated). I knocked, with as much politeness as the situation required. I’m not going to bore you with the inevitably predictable and inane details, save to implant the notion that we both gained from the interchange. I had a nice, shiny new rock, and S had my right canine, removed, elegantly and painlessly with a pair of rusted wire-cutters. Turns out there’s big business in the underground tooth-trafficking trade. The cartels cart shitloads of the things across The Channel, through gateways in Paris and off into the East, where they fetch huge amounts in strictly XXX Orthodontic bidding circles.

Of course, at the time I didn’t know any of this. I was just pleased to continue my habit, with nothing more inconvenient than the odd weeping sore or sliced nerve. It was only when I began to cough up slightly more infected blood than my staple quota that I picked up the faint trace of an idea that I might be on the road to being hopelessly fucked in the head. S was starting to take a little bit of pleasure in his work, over and above the financial bonus.

I remember one particular item; a lower right wisdom tooth, that was causing aggro with the cutters. I have hard gums. It’s a family trait, leading back to my great, great grandfather Aloysius ‘Absolute’ Power. He was a raging bull of a man and would munch down chisels every morning whilst beating himself with an hot iron rod. A popular character by all accounts, or so the asylum reports say. Well, there was S, bending over me with an air of gleeful anticipation and he wrenched his shears across the back of my mouth. He sighed breathily and told me I was a naughty puppy and needed to keep still because he had a wonderful new present for me. ‘Yippee!’ I thought. ‘Perhaps a twenty bag this time?’

I think I may have lost consciousness at this point, since when I next opened my eyes I was lying on the bloodstained floor, wearing a set of cherry red suspenders, a black whalebone corset and a Mickey Mouse hat. I heard wet sounds from the kitchen area, and peered over at a hunched form that appeared to be covering itself in vegetable oil and corn flour, muttering all the time. I believe I picked out the words ‘flapjacking’ and ‘trouserfish’. The baggie had not made an appearance. Mildly concerned, I pulled myself to my feet, thinking perhaps that I should gently ease myself out as S may have become preoccupied. Also, it was a bit late and I did not want to be mistaken for a lady of casual opportunity on the walk home. I tiptoed to the door and turned the latch. That was when the howling began. Once again, there’s no need to over-elaborate details which a reader would surely find insipid and dull; suffice to say, I have broken contact with S and crack, and retired from the city now to eke out a quiet existence in a small village where one is not obliged to humour the rampages of frothing sociopaths.

Before I left London, I did leave a small token of my affection on S’s doorstep, if only to cement our friendship into the coming years, primarily through the action of never contacting me again under any circumstance. That would be another story though. I have to go – there’s a full set of bicuspids up on eBay and I can’t afford to let them slide. Who knows who might be watching?

Death of an Orchid

Where are you from? Where did they find you?

You lived in the tropics, once. In the rainforest, in the humid haze, spiny stems extending from those huge trees that soar upwards and splay their leaves in the canopy. You hung your purple flowers out into the mist; attracting those humming insects that weave around the twisted branches. The howler monkey’s calls echoed in the forest, and the bright wings of hummingbirds disturbed your sleep.

You are sitting on my kitchen table when your first flower falls.

I walk into the room and hear the thud. I look at you: at those blooms attached, and the one separated, out of place, on the wood of the table. It’s as if it had suddenly given up on life.

I look at you, and you look back at me. Another flower falls, with a thud.

You have four green leaves and now five purple blooms. You were a present from my father’s girlfriend. I placed you on the kitchen table, because you were expensive, and beautiful. You watched me with those dark points. You knew I couldn’t look after you, and that’s why your flowers started to fall.

You don’t look sick. Your flowers don’t curl up or yellow. One moment they are perfect, the next; they’ve fallen from your stem like people jumping to their deaths. Another thud on the kitchen table. Another orchid bloom dead.

You are dying, and it’s my fault.

‘What do I do?’ I say, helpless and shivering in the kitchen in the morning light.

I pull you out of your pot and see that you are sitting in a pool of water. Your roots are not in soil, but huddled around pieces of bark. I didn’t know.

I pull the bark away and the pieces tumble in a mess into the kitchen sink. I try to dry your tendril roots with paper towels. But they are soft and hollow, like the sand cases left by worms on the beach. They are brown and green, and they smell. They are rotting away.

The last flower drops off into the chrome of the kitchen sink.

That’s it, then. You’re dead.

What kind of person am I? To have a plant in the house and, instead of looking after it, slowly killing it. Overwatering it, like a fool.

You stupid girl! I hear my father’s voice in my head, shouting at me when I knocked over a glass as a child, or got the times wrong for a friend’s birthday and turned up an hour late, after they’d left. Or worse: the silence, the presence of B grades on exam results. And the unspoken words, said in down-turned eyes: you’ve failed.
Yes, I am a failure. A person with half a brain would have looked up ‘orchid care’ and discovered that ‘overwatering is the number one killer of orchids by amateurs.’

I sit on the floor. An amateur. Outside, the train rumbles past the compact gardens of the terraced houses. You drip on the kitchen bench; rotten roots coiled and damp. You say: failure and I say: I know.

My father will be visiting with Abigail tomorrow. I go over the scenario again and again in my head:  he will say ‘How is the orchid?’ and I will say ‘It died’. He will look appalled and disappointed and say, ‘Oh no…,’ as if it is the end of the world. And Abigail will look appalled, and I will feel like a child again and will lower my head in shame.

I snap your stem in two and push you into the bin.

The next day, my father arrives with Abigail.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I say, and they follow me into the kitchen.

The kettle rumbles.

‘Where’s the orchid?’ says Abigail, with an edge to her voice.

There is a damp stain on the kitchen table where the pot once stood.

‘I killed it,’ I say, pouring hot water.

I turn round and their faces are horrified. I hand them their drinks.

‘Oh no…’ says my father.

‘I know. I am a failure,’ I say.

He frowns, as if I’ve sworn, and sips his tea. He looks away- anywhere but at Abigail, or at me. Abigail looks at him with force, with a face that says: say something to her! She is childless, and resents me.

She looks back at me, and scowls. I smile.

‘If you think it’s important Abigail,’ I say, ‘You can pull it back out of the bin.’

They don’t stay long. After the door shuts, I sit down at the table and look out at the garden in the fading light. I imagine that you have forgiven me, and it might be better to forget you now. I sit with the glow of the computer screen in front of me: Venus flytraps are easy to care for.

‘I’ll get one of those then,’ I decide.

The Grave

My mother lies in the hillside beneath the long grass

Undiscovered, with no mark of the match lit past

Only known by the sheep with the iron-dark eyes

Moving over rough heather and mounds in their tribes.

When she died

No one watched

But the low, ticking clock.

And we all left her bones on the hills

When she died

We walked down to the car park and none of us cried.

How I wish I could rumble with the bracken-burnt sheep

Over scarred earth lain raw like old wounds and old meat

Away from the grave that lies in the heath

To the higher hills where the wind-worn find peace

But mama is always under my feet.

“And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner,
haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold
on sausage and haddock by writing them down.” – Virginia Woolf

Anticuchos are grilled marinated beef hearts. They were among the indigenous specialties of Peru that an ex-boyfriend had encountered during his Peace Corps stint and that he introduced me to at our local Peruvian restaurant. I tasted them, warily, and was surprised at how lean and tender and tasty they were. He went back to Lima for a visit and brought me a cookbook. It was in Spanish, but with a smattering of the language and a little help I was able to decipher many of the recipes. I made Papas a la Huancaína, cold potatoes with a spicy cheese sauce, and a couple of fish dishes, but not anticuchos—I was too squeamish to touch bloody cow entrails. He, however, had no qualms about manhandling my tender heart. I’d been swept up in all the new experiences he exposed me to early in our relationship, when he exuded disingenuous charm from every pore. I sent him packing—with the cookbook—when I learned of his infidelities, but memories linger in a musty mental file of mistakes I don’t seem able to delete, even after thirty years. Anchovies, abalone, artichokes: they all have stories to tell. Why did I start with him?

Bacon is the only food I missed during my venture into vegetarianism in the seventies. It was the thing to do back then, aided by Diet for a Small Planet and its protein-balanced recipes interspersed with dogma and shocking truths. Did you know that the grain fed to American beef cattle is enough to feed all the world’s hungry? But I wasn’t sufficiently motivated to maintain the regimen beyond several months. I stopped eating meat again five years ago, this time for personal convictions rather than to follow a fad or make a political statement. Bacon was my downfall the first time, and it’s still the litmus test of my commitment. I no longer yearn for it, don’t salivate when I hear it sizzling or smell it cooking. At a New Year’s brunch I eyed a tempting platter of rashers, not too crispy or too greasy. Why not, I thought, picking up a slice. I bit into it—Ah, yes!—but that was enough.

Chocolate. I was a dark chocolate devotee long before it was fashionable, before it was acclaimed as healthy, a panacea for heart disease and depression. Oh, but it’s such a cliché of the female experience. Instead, I could write about cottage cheese, a childhood favorite with canned crushed pineapple; or about cookbooks, how I swooned when Jacques Pepin autographed my food-stained copy of Simple and Healthy Cooking; or about carrots and candy, how my mother used to send me to the movies with a bag of carrot sticks instead of giving me money to buy candy, which brings me back to chocolate….

Diets. Blessed with a slender frame, an “Energizer Bunny” metabolism, and an abundance of self-discipline, I look askance at diet fads that play on people’s—women’s—insecurities, promising fame, fortune and the mate of your dreams if you adhere religiously. And if you’re not successful, it’s your own fault, because it works for others, right? Look at the testimonials, the before and after photos. I try, as certain supercilious Christians boast so disingenuously, to spurn the sin but not the sinner, to not let my disdain carry over from the diets to the dieters, among them a couple of good friends whose on-again, off-again efforts I try to support. There but for the grace of my lucky genes go I.

Eggs are good scrambled, soft and fluffy, whites and yolks whisked into a buttery froth. I loathe fried eggs, poached, boiled, hard or soft, two minutes or five. My daughter loves deviled eggs. When she was young I taught her how to make them and said, “You’re on your own now, kiddo.”

“Food in my life; my life in food” was an early title for this compendium, envisaged as a chronology from childhood to present. I came to prefer the serendipity of the alphabet, the memories it invoked, and the more elusive title. Food is my hook into memories and moods. Some people remember names or faces; I’m good at both but even better at meals. I recall my first artichoke, puzzling over how to eat it, what to do with the fuzzy stuff, worrying about looking foolish in front of my date (whose name and face I’ve forgotten). I remember the first meal I fixed for my husband—angelhair pasta with basil, tomatoes and mozzarella—and knocking over the wine (an Italian red) when we got cozy.

Garlic wards off vampires and evil spirits, sometimes friends and family too. My husband’s siblings claim to be allergic to garlic and predict that it’s just a matter of time for him. Grounds for divorce, I tell him. It’s a bone (bulb? clove?) of contention in the office lunchroom—antisocial, some would say. Flash to a weekend retreat in the mountains. Several of us went up a day early and, all garlic fanatics, staged a blow-out feast. Whole roast bulbs smushed onto crusty baguettes, garlic-stuffed mushrooms, pasta with pesto. I made a take-no-prisoners Caesar salad. When the others arrived the next day, they gasped at the fumes that greeted them and taunted us all weekend about our stinky breaths.

Haggis became the Scottish national dish after Robert Burns wrote “Address to a Haggis” in 1787: Great chieftain of the sausage race! Above them all you take your place.… Mix sheep’s offal with onion, oatmeal, spices and stock; stuff it into the animal’s stomach and simmer for several hours. Our host on a 1995 trip to Scotland was Anthony, whom we’d met in southern England two years earlier. At a country pub outside of Edinburgh I hinted at my curiosity about the dish, my reluctance to order it. Anthony generously obliged and offered me a taste. The stench was like decaying roadkill; I had to hold my nose in order to get it to my mouth. I braved a perfunctory chew, then swallowed quickly. Anthony cleaned the plate with gusto.

I eat, therefore I am. In the painful barbs exchanged during the waning days of a relationship, my companion of seven years accused me of having no values, of being more interested in my next meal than in the world around me. This in spite of the fact that our first meeting and many of our shared activities centered around social and political issues. He said, “If someone asked you what you believe, you’d say, ‘I believe I’ll have another beer.’” His indictment stunned me, and twenty years later it still rankles. Where was my snappy comeback, my assertion that “the personal is political,” that we are what we eat?

Jackie’s Jams are made here in San Diego with fresh organic fruit in 26 flavors. My favorites are strawberry rhubarb and Chambord blueberry. There’s a scene in “Gosford Park” when Tom Hollander as despondent Anthony Meredith (“When you’re ruined, there’s so much to do,” he tells his unsympathetic brother-in-law) slips down to the servants’ quarters, where a kitchen maid finds him dipping a spoon into jars of berry jam. She understands the yearnings that have brought him there and offers a bit of homespun wisdom about love—“Not just getting it, but giving it”—that sends him bounding upstairs to embrace his surprised wife. I think the jam helped too.

Key lime pie. Nora Ephron died in June. I write a tribute, watch her movies and reread her books. In her last collection of essays, I Remember Nothing, she reflects on aging and death. She catalogs things she won’t miss (dry skin, dead flowers, funerals) and those she will: her husband and sons, spring and fall, walking in the park, reading in bed. Waffles and the concept of waffles, Thanksgiving dinner, dinners with friends, intimate dinners for two, butter. In the thinly-fictionalized Heartburn her protagonist makes a key lime pie (recipe included) that—spoiler alert!—she smashes into her philandering husband’s face.

Leftovers on lettuce. Rich with subtext, I think, don’t you? This was to be the title of a personal essay about a short-lived liaison with a gourmet cook and connoisseur of fine dining (he came after the Peace Corps guy and before my “another beer” politico if you’re keeping track) with whom I had memorable culinary adventures. When our fling ended, I went back to my frugal but inventive meals at home, which often consisted of reconfigured leftovers on a bed of greens. I wrote the story, and it won an essay contest, but with a different title.

“M” for Mom’s meals—there was meatloaf and meat pie, mac & cheese, macaroons, mashed potatoes, myriad M’s and mmmm’s. Watch people’s faces light up when they talk about the food of their childhood. The nostalgia as they recall birthday and holiday traditions, burning marshmallows on a coat hanger over a campfire for “s’mores,” hand-cranked ice cream with fresh peaches, grandma’s fried chicken or turkey enchiladas, the best ever peanut butter cookies. Even the horrors, like choking down liver and onions, are retold with fond chuckles. Like when, reminded of our good fortune compared to that of the world’s starving children, we would look up from the gristly bits or runny globs on our plates and say: “Ick—send them this!”

Nutella crepe. My friend smacks her lips as she places her order. I’m surprised that so many people seem to love this oily paste. It advertises unadulterated contents: roasted hazelnuts, skim milk and a hint of cocoa. No artificial colors or preservatives, gluten free, kosher too. Spread on bread, “Breakfast never tasted this good.” But read the label, and you find that the first ingredients are sugar and highly-saturated palm oil. Like a candy bar, according to the California mother who sued for misleading advertising and was awarded $3 million. Nutella was developed in Italy in the 1940s to stretch rationed chocolate. Chocolate is plentiful now, hazelnuts too. And they’re great together. But Nutella? I don’t get it.

Oleomargarine. It wasn’t butter, though that’s what my mother called the pale cubes she put on the table, not to deceive us, but in the same way that Miracle Whip “salad dressing” was called mayonnaise. Margarine and Miracle Whip were thrifty alternatives in households like mine. It started in the mid-nineteenth century when Emperor Louis Napoleon III of France offered a prize to the creator of a butter substitute that would suffice for the lower classes. Voila oleo! Its popularity spread and grew, especially during the Depression and World War II when butter was scarce. In the 1950s TV ads pitted margarines against each other and against “the high-priced spread:” “I can’t believe it’s not butter!” “Flavor so good, I feel like a queen!” Butter and margarine are both 80% fat, but butter, being saturated, was the prime malefactor until trans-fats from the hydrogenation of margarine were found to contribute to high cholesterol. Now there are trans-fat-free margarines and other water-based, dairyless, guilt-free spreads. I grew up thinking I didn’t like butter or mayonnaise, but after I tasted the genuine articles, I realized what I’d been missing.

Pizza is one of two main dishes that will grace my last meal. Nora Ephron wrote poignantly about living life to the fullest. Whether talking about her fantasy last meal or just about doing what you want to do, the pearl of wisdom she dispenses is this: Don’t wait. Do it now, do it often. My friend Kate, distressed in equal parts, it seems, by Nora’s death and by disappointment with her own life, makes a tragic disclosure: “I don’t even know what my last meal would be!” Really? I enjoy my favorite foods often, including pizza every Friday night. I alternate between Bronx Pizza—those guys make a killer cheese pie—and Pizzeria Arrivederci, the “Siciliana” with anchovies, olives, fresh tomatoes and onions. The other entrée at my last meal? See “S.”

Quick oats, Nestles Quick, quick and easy everything. Not fast enough for you? Try instant oatmeal, instant cocoa and those ready-to-heat-and-eat meals. In the mid-‘80s a neighbor, taking advantage of newly available computer technology, typed in recipes and printed them out in a do-it-yourself plastic-loop-bound book with a glossy cover: “Quick Breads by Kathy.” It didn’t bring her fame or fortune or a TV show, but it was cute and clever. The move toward fast and simple food preparation came out of good intentions, freeing women from bondage in the kitchen, but the value put on speed in all things seemed to go overboard. Once the pendulum swings to a certain point, however, it swings back in the other direction: let’s hear it for the Slow Food Movement.

Root vegetables of suspicious character and form appear frequently in my weekly CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) deliveries. I’d never eaten parsnips, turnips or rutabagas before the CSA, and frankly I can do without them. But I rise to the challenge and find ways to use whatever comes my way, relying on generous additions of garlic (see “G”) and butter (the real thing) to turn them into palatable soups, mashes and stir-fries.

Salmon, glorious salmon, fresh and wild from the Pacific: King, Sockeye or Coho. Grilled on a cedar plank with mustard, brown sugar and rosemary; fresh smoked with garlic and maple syrup from the Ballard Farmers Market in Seattle; cold-smoked—lox, that is—on a chewy New York bagel with cream cheese and black pepper, or on Wolfgang Puck’s immortalized pizza with crème fraiche and pearls of golden caviar. Poached in the garlicky salmon soup at Emmett Watson’s Oyster House; layered with cabbage, avocado and chipotle mayo in the tacos at Bo’s Seafood; raw on the “49er roll” at Akiko Sushi in San Francisco; canned, yes, even canned, bones and skin and all, in a loaf like mom used to make. My last meal—it’s to die for.

Trillin, Calvin, a treatise on Thanksgiving turkey: “Let’s have Spaghetti Carbonara instead!” Trillin points out that we really don’t know if the Pilgrims ate turkey, and whatever they ate probably wasn’t very good. He prepared carbonara for a family gathering one Thanksgiving. After giving thanks that they weren’t eating turkey, he told the story of the first Thanksgiving, at which the Indians, wary of Pilgrim cuisine, brought spaghetti carbonara, which their ancestors had learned to make from Christopher Columbus more than a century earlier. Offended by the Pilgrims’ high-hatted rejection of their offering, the Indians said: “What a bunch of turkeys,” causing the confusion that has led to our current tradition.

Uni is sea urchin, a delicacy that we are fortunate to have in fresh and plentiful supply here in San Diego’s placid waters. It is au courant at trendy restaurants; one reviewer described it as “coral-colored, spongy-velvety, sexy-tasting maritime fluff.” People line up at farmers markets for the dark spiky menacing-looking balls, like hand grenades nesting on a bed of ice. The vendor cuts them open with great precision and hands them to waiting patrons, who scoop and eat the innards out of the shell with plastic spoons. I had uni once, just once, on sushi, with the earlier-mentioned gourmet cook and connoisseur of fine dining. The squishy ochre globules smelled and tasted musty, with a lingering acrid aftertaste. The color and texture reminded me of brains, which I also sampled once. Aficionados urge me to try it again: It’s exquisite,” they say; “What you had must not have been fresh.”

Velveeta belongs to childhood. I’m weak-kneed at the thought of it melting—oh, how it melted—in grilled cheese sandwiches, oozing out the sides of the bread, tasty burnt bits crisp in the pan. But Velveeta isn’t cheese. It’s pasteurized processed cheese product, made with milk, water, milk fat and whey. The last ingredient, like an afterthought, is cheese culture. My cheese tastes have grown more sophisticated over the years; I’m partial to aged English cheddars, designer blues and ashy goats. I think I would still love creamy Velveeta, a thing apart from cheese, but I can’t bring myself to buy it. Still, it helps me better understand Nutella lovers.

Woolfophile. I’ve been a card-carrying Virginia Woolf scholar for more than twenty years. I presented a paper at the 2010 Woolf Conference entitled “‘A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage’: Dining Well in Virginia Woolf’s Life and Work.” My premise is that while she suffered at times from by eating disorders that accompanied her severe depressions, she loved food and wrote about it brilliantly, passionately. Meals and dishes form evocative passages in her novels, like Mrs. Ramsay’s boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse. Her diaries and letters include mouthwatering details about meals she enjoyed. She loved French food—especially goose liver pate—and cream sauces, succulent roasts, mushrooms that she foraged from the Sussex woods. During the war she took pride in baking her own bread and making hearty and thrifty vegetable soups. She used the language of food vividly and playfully, describing someone as being like “a perfectly stuffed cold fowl” or “mute as a trout with the swift composure of a fish.” One of her most-quoted lines—on bowls and mugs, shirts and bibs, menus and notecards, posters and restaurant menus—is: One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. I wish I’d said that in response to you-know-who’s “another beer” jibe.

Xerophagy is a kind of partial fasting—not to be confused with xerography, a dry photocopying technique—observed by some Eastern Christian religions during Lent. I don’t go in for fasting, whether for religious reasons, cleansing and purging, or to lose weight, just as I don’t relish pain and suffering. They happen, but I don’t go looking for them. Some people do, and some people fast. I endured a few 24-hour fasts back in the seventies, companions to my vegetarian fling. I remember going to bed early on those days, partly out of exhaustion, my energy depleted, and partly to get the blasted thing over with. On the morning after my first such deprivation I breakfasted on tea, orange wedges and toast. I spread the toast with peanut butter and cut it into bite-sized pieces. I raised the morsels to my mouth one at a time, chewing slowly, feeling life course back into my body.

Yellow mustard, French’s, is the only mustard we knew in childhood, the one we spread on our hotdogs and bologna sandwiches. I discovered Gulden’s brown mustard on a family outing to Dodger Stadium in L.A. when I was in my early teens. It confirmed inklings I’d had that my life thus far had been very sheltered and that countless delights awaited me. French Dijon, spicy German, and the very hot English Coleman’s: I would soon relish a veritable United Nations of mustard. I liked mustard on BLTs, and when I would phone my lunch order to the deli downstairs from my office, I didn’t have to leave my name. The Russian owner would say, “Ah yes, it’s you.”

“Zucchini and other summer squashes” is the last item in Alice Waters’ exquisite Chez Panisse Vegetables. She writes eloquently about the species’ history, its multi-hued and oddly-shaped varieties. She offers recipes for stuffed squash blossoms, zucchini fritters, ratatouille, and a cheesy zucchini gratin. Summer squashes, like root vegetables, appear in quantity in my CSA box. Unlike root vegetables, I am never at a loss to find uses for them. This week I had a sackful of baseball-sized, smooth pale green globes that Alice identifies as Ronde de Nice. I grilled them, sautéed them, and steamed them, then with the last ones created a cold soup topped with lemony shrimp, yogurt and parsley.

Do you know what the first entry is in Chez Panisse Vegetables? No, not artichokes, asparagus or avocado. Can’t guess? Amaranth greens! Is it too late to replace the anticuchos?