Roy Miller's Blog, page 176
May 29, 2017
'Destined For War' Explores How To Avoid Unnecessary Future Conflicts
This content was originally published by on 29 May 2017 | 8:33 pm.
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NPR’s Robert Siegel interviews Graham Allison, author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, about honoring the dead by avoiding unnecessary wars.
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Lemon White Pizza, Smothered Pork Chops, Pea Guacamole: 10 Takes on What to Cook This Summer
This content was originally published by on 29 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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Another notable entry in the Everyday genre is TARTINE ALL DAY: Modern Recipes for the Home Cook (Lorena Jones/Ten Speed, $40), by Elisabeth Prueitt, who, alongside her husband, Chad Robertson, makes up the team behind San Francisco’s legendary Tartine bakery and food empire. In this book — the first from the Robertson-Prueitt world to include all-purpose cooking along with the rustic breads and pastries Tartine fans would expect — Prueitt traffics in the simple-but-sophisticated culinary vocabulary we’re used to seeing in the Chef Cooks at Home category. The difference here is that Prueitt comes at it from the gluten-free angle, and in a way that doesn’t feel upending or intrusive. Maybe this is because she discovered her intolerance long before gluten-free eating was trendy and while she was running one of the most beloved baking institutions in the country, forcing her to dive deep into the ever widening world of non-wheat flours and starches. Her search for fluffy gluten-free cornbread led her to a combination of millet flour and masa harina, the cornmeal that has undergone “nixtamalization,” a process that makes corn softer and more nutritious. Her banana bread is made with a mixture of three alt-flours (oat, almond and brown rice) as well as chia seeds in order to take advantage of their moisture-lending properties. Wheat-free buckwheat shows up in chocolate madeleines and crepes, more authentically known as galettes in Brittany, where they provide the foundation of a simple meal when paired with sautéed mushrooms and an egg. In other words, for anyone interested in exploring the modern baker’s pantry — whether gluten-free or merely adventurous — Prueitt is the one you want holding your hand.
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After reading DINNER CHEZ MOI: 50 French Secrets to Joyful Eating and Entertaining (Little, Brown, $25), by Elizabeth Bard, you might wonder why you never thought of between-meal hunger as foreplay, which, according to Bard, an American living in Provence, is how the French manage to eat all those croque monsieurs and stay so trim. Though the French-Do-It-Better premise of this book is nothing new, its structure — 50 French secrets to joyful eating, accompanied by fresh, simple recipes with lots of chatty sidebars — is refreshing and ridiculously readable. In addition to that foreplay secret (Secret No. 38: “Enjoy Being Hungry. … Fifty percent of pleasure is anticipation”), there’s a very basic one: “Shop well, cook simple” (“If you concentrate your energy … on buying high-quality meat, fish and vegetables, you won’t need to cover them up”). Secret No. 26 recommends cooking a whole fish, not fillets, as the ultimate quick weeknight dinner (“the protective skin makes high-heat methods, like broiling or grilling, a real option”). Perhaps most logical, Secrets Nos. 34, 35, 36 respectively: “Sit down,” “Eat together,” “Put it on a plate.” In the hands of someone less likable, the conceit could come across as gimmicky at best, arrogant at worst, but Bard’s recipes are both approachable and presented in context — this classic yogurt cake is the first cake most French kids learn to make; these orange-and-anise-flavored lamb shanks are her never-fail dinner party main course; this croque monsieur is her favorite family dinner — which helps keep it real. So do the references to Bruce Springsteen and frosting in a can.
Also in the read cover-to-cover department, SALAD FOR PRESIDENT: A Cookbook Inspired by Artists (Abrams, $35), by Julia Sherman, which earns its kitchen shelf real estate as much for the artist interviews as for the salads she’s made a career of curating for her blog and, occasionally, museum rooftop gardens. One thing is for sure: You won’t find many cookbooks that address the behavior of William Wegman’s famously photographed Weimaraners preceding a recipe for his charoset; or Tauba Auerbach discussing font design as a lead-in to her shredded brussels sprout salad with lemony almonds and shaved apple. If the leap seems large, Sherman would like us to think about it this way: Curating a salad is just another form of expressing oneself. So she encourages us to “think like an artist: to steal ideas, break rules and find something spectacular in the everyday.” Hence: little gems with crispy pancetta and green Caesar dressing, flank steak with bean sprouts and kimchi-miso dressing. If everyday spectacular is a genre, she’s nailed it.
SHAKE SHACK: Recipes and Stories (Clarkson Potter, $26), by Randy Garutti and Mark Rosati, is what you might call on-brand. I.e., it’s exactly the book you want it to be. Yes, you’ll find at-home instructions for replicating all your favorite orders — from their craggy-edged smashed California-style burger to the vanilla custard Concretes — but, in typical Shack fashion, you’ll also come away feeling like (a) you want to apply for a job there; (b) now is the time to join the “Maker” revolution … mustard, relish, jam, anything; (c) you’re somehow part of something way bigger than burgers and fries. Inspired by the drive-ins of his St. Louis youth, the restaurateur Danny Meyer started this blockbuster burger chain with a hot dog cart in Madison Square Park in 2001 in order to create “community wealth,” and he succeeded, overseeing a company that made people unspeakably happy with his “fine casual” burger-and-shakes fare. Garutti, the Shake Shack chain’s C.E.O., and its culinary director, Rosati (with an assist from the veteran editor Dorothy Kalins), tell the whole story, highlighting the do-gooder staff, the adoring Instagramming customers and a recurring “local hero” sidebar that pays tribute to the suppliers who make it all taste so good. Though cooks should know that translating the Shack experience at home is going to be a bit elusive (unless you have easy access to all those local heroes), there are enough legitimate tricks of the trade to up your game at the griddle: Use Martin’s potato rolls; toast and butter them with a brush; grind muscle meat, not economy cuts; invert a strainer over your frying burger to control fat splatter; American cheese takes exactly 45 seconds to melt on a patty; add baking soda to your fried chicken dredge; invest in a U-shaped crinkle cutter; and on and on. And, it has to be said, no lines.
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Samin Nosrat’s SALT, FAT, ACID, HEAT: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking (Simon & Schuster, $35) is an exhaustively researched treatise on the four pillars of successful cooking. If you can train yourself to recognize the proper balance between salt, fat and acid, then apply the right kind of heat, you’ll churn out simple, sophisticated fare in the spirit of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, where Nosrat started out. The recipes come almost as an afterthought to the teaching portion of the program — they officially begin on page 224 — and that’s the point. Above all, Nosrat wants you to learn to trust yourself, to pay attention to sensory cues and not rely on the oven dial or the recipe’s cooking time to decide when your food is ready. Better to use your own palate to measure the balance of flavors in a tomato sauce than a recipe written by someone using different tomatoes from a different farm. There are no photos accompanying her recipes, but the illustrations by Wendy MacNaughton further the mission, with wheels like “The World of Acid,” a cheat sheet for matching the typical cooking and garnishing acids for over two dozen international cuisines. There’s a huge amount of technical information crammed into this book, but the lessons that come straight from the Chez Panisse kitchen tend to be the ones you hold onto. A chef changes the way Nosrat thinks about acid when he tastes a perfect velvety carrot soup and tells her to add a transformative teaspoon of vinegar. (“While salt enhances flavors, acid balances them.”) Nosrat recalls learning how to make a simple polenta in her early years, when Cal Peternell (another Chez Panisse chef-turned-cookbook-author) keeps insisting she add more salt, finally coming over to the pot to throw three palmfuls in himself. Three palmfuls. Try getting that image out of your head every time you’re stove-side, hovering over a pot of virtually anything.
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This spring brought the usual crop of vegetable-focused collections, one of which might have the potential to rearrange your culinary worldview. SCRAPS, WILT AND WEEDS: Turning Wasted Food Into Plenty (Grand Central Life & Style, $35) is written by Tama Matsuoka Wong and the Noma co-founder Mads Refslund, who is on the forefront of the movement to raise awareness about the environmentally devastating amount of food that goes to waste every year. (Globally, we’re talking an estimated $750 billion.) The book is organized by ingredient, making it easy to search for ideas to repurpose whatever vegetable is close to liquefying in the crisper. Refslund challenges readers to honor not just the imperfect but the scraps and the pulp. “Instead of slimy fish skin, see crispy umami. Instead of mushy fruit, see succulent fermented glaze.” That’s how you’ll end up telling your children to save their lunchbox apple cores — to be boiled into a stock that will be used in apple scrap cake. Or why you will think twice before discarding the core of a cauliflower — instead of just spiralizing it into noodles, then tossing with pecorino, butter, crème fraîche and spices for a reimagined cacio e pepe. There are plenty of cheffy moments — he loves grinding dehydrated vegetable pulp into powders to be used just about everywhere — but they’re balanced by more approachable solutions, including a chapter on classic recipes that stretch out scraps, which in other cookbooks would simply be categorized as peasant food. As he acknowledges, “This is the way people have lived frugally — to survive — from the beginning of humanity.” But it sure is nice to have a Michelin-starred chef giving his take this time around.
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“If you’re looking for 10 Easy Weeknight Dinners for Vegetarians,” writes Jeremy Fox in ON VEGETABLES: Modern Recipes for the Home Kitchen (Phaidon, $49.95), “this book will not be of much use to you.” Who would it be of use to? Serious cooks who revere produce; adventurers; foragers; design nerds — purely as an object, the book is stunning; and, well, definitely Mads Refslund, with whom Fox shares more than the usual chef’s disdain for waste. “Throwing away food embarrasses me,” Fox writes. “It makes me feel like a hack chef.” Fox, who may be the furthest thing from a hack, punched the clock at a handful of famous kitchens in California, most notably Manresa in Los Angeles, before becoming the chef at the vegetarian mecca Ubuntu in Napa. His mission there wasn’t unusual — as much as possible, cook with the food you grow — but the dishes were. (Arguably his most famous: a salad of peas with white chocolate.) David Chang, René Redzepi, Thomas Keller and all the right people flocked to Napa, the reviewers gushed and the awards piled up, but this only exacerbated Fox’s lifelong battle with anxiety, leading to an early flameout and a few years of rock-bottom darkness when he almost stopped cooking. (“A turnip looked like a stranger.”) The book is populated with dishes that contain time-consuming sub-recipes (for, say, sea moss tapenade or cured egg yolk), and it goes without saying that most of the recipes are only worth it if you’re working with the best possible produce, but this collection isn’t pretending to be anything else. Fox’s ultimate goal is to give readers the confidence to expand their idea of what can be done with produce you might have written off — and also to leave us with this truth, whether we’re making Fox’s caramel black olive paste or Kraft macaroni and cheese: “Food from a happy kitchen tastes better than food from an unhappy one.” Amen.
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What’s your go-to summer cookbook?
“In Sweden, most land is public land, so you can cook outside — in the forest or by the water. Niklas Ekstedt explores that phenomenon well in ‘Food From the Fire: The Scandinavian Flavours of Open-Fire Cooking.’” — Marcus Samuelsson
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15 More Cookbooks
Don’t mind the heat and can’t bear to leave the kitchen? Here’s a quick look at 15 more cookbooks. — The New York Times
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ADVENTURES IN STARRY KITCHEN: 88 Asian-Inspired Recipes from America’s Most Famous Underground Restaurant. By Nguyen Tran. (HarperOne, $29.99.) Asian fusion comfort food from a popular Los Angeles restaurant that started as an illegal operation in a North Hollywood apartment.
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BACK POCKET PASTA: Inspired Dinners to Cook on the Fly. By Colu Henry. (Clarkson Potter, $28.) A former special projects director at Bon Appétit offers suggestions for speedy, tasty weeknight dinners.
THE BAKER’S APPRENTICE: The Essential Kitchen Companion, With Deliciously Dependable, Infinitely Adaptable Recipes. By Jessica Reed. (Clarkson Potter, $18.99.) Full of conversion tables and lists of possible substitutions, these recipes give bakers plenty of opportunity for improvisation.
BURMA SUPERSTAR: Addictive Recipes From the Crossroads of Southeast Asia. By Desmond Tan and Kate Leahy. (Ten Speed, $29.99.) Accessible dishes — and the stories behind them — from a Burmese restaurateur based in the San Francisco Bay area.
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THE HAVEN’S KITCHEN COOKING SCHOOL: Recipes and Inspiration to Build a Lifetime of Confidence in the Kitchen. By Alison Cayne. (Artisan, $35.) Basic skills and techniques, demonstrated via 100 recipes from the New York cooking school and cafe.
ICE CREAM & FRIENDS: 60 Recipes and Riffs. By the Editors of Food52. (Ten Speed, $22.99.) Members of the online recipe-sharing community celebrate dozens of frozen delights.
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IN MY KITCHEN: A Collection of New and Favorite Vegetarian Recipes. By Deborah Madison. (Ten Speed, $32.50.) A longtime authority in the field shares her best recipes, organized alphabetically, from artichokes to zucchini.
KALE & CARAMEL: Recipes for Body, Heart, and Table. By Lily Diamond. (Atria, paper, $22.) Inspired by Diamond’s popular blog, this array of vegan and vegetarian dishes is also a lushly photographed personal memoir.
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KING SOLOMON’S TABLE: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking From Around the World. By Joan Nathan. (Knopf, $35.) An authority on American Jewish cooking ventures farther afield in this collection of recipes from the Jewish diaspora.
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MIGHTY SALADS: 60 New Ways to Turn Salad into Dinner — and Make-Ahead Lunches Too. By the Editors of Food52. (Ten Speed, $22.99.) Tips and tricks —and hefty recipes — from members of the online culinary community.
MY MASTER RECIPES: 165 Recipes to Inspire Confidence in the Kitchen. By Patricia Wells. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $35.) For 25 years, Wells was the global restaurant critic for The International Herald Tribune. Now she runs a cooking school based in Paris and Provence, whose lessons form the basis of her latest cookbook.
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A NEW WAY TO BAKE: Classic Recipes Updated with Better-for-You Ingredients From the Modern Pantry. By Martha Stewart. (Clarkson Potter, paper, $26.) Step-by-step instructions tested in the kitchens of Martha Stewart Living magazine, drawing on a range of new staple ingredients.
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THE PALOMAR COOKBOOK: Modern Israeli Cuisine. By Layo Paskin and Tomer Amedi. (Clarkson Potter, $35.) Innovative Middle Eastern recipes from the creative director and chef who preside over this much acclaimed London restaurant.
RIVER COTTAGE A TO Z: Our Favourite Ingredients and How to Cook Them. (Bloomsbury, $65.) Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his team have become fixtures of British television with their insistence on seasonal, ethically produced menus. Here they offer an anecdotal alphabetical guide to their best-loved, most-used ingredients.
SIX SEASONS: A New Way With Vegetables. By Joshua McFadden with Martha Holmberg. (Artisan, $35.) Bicoastal bravura: A chef (now at Ava Gene’s in Portland, Ore.) who helped manage a farm in Maine preserves his experiences via an assortment of recipes.
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‘The Jersey Brothers’ Highlights The Enduring Legacy Of World War II : NPR
This content was originally published by Glen Weldon on 29 May 2017 | 8:33 pm.
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Sally Mott Freeman’s book, The Jersey Brothers, recounts the story of three men swept up by Word War II. The youngest brother gets captured in the Philippines, and the two others struggle to bring him home. NPR explores why stories of World War II remain so compelling to us today.
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Ae Freislighe: Poetic Form | WritersDigest.com
This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 29 May 2017 | 9:43 pm.
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I’ve covered so many poetic forms over the years, but still have somehow neglected the Irish forms. So let’s finish out May with the ae freislighe!
Ae Freislighe Poems
I think part of the reason I’ve avoided Irish forms is that the rhymes can be so intense, and that’s definitely the case with the ae freislighe. Here are the guidelines:
Quatrain stanzas (4-line stanzas)
7 syllables per line
Lines 1 and 3 rhyme together, but they rhyme as three syllables (xxa)
Lines 2 and 4 rhyme together as two syllables (xb)
The final syllable, word, or line of the entire poem should be the same as the entire poem begins (the poetic term for this is dunadh)
Poem can be as concise as one stanza and scale out as far as a poet wishes to push it
Note: One strategy that helped me get started was to consider two- and three-syllable words before composing the poem.
*****
Learn how to write sestina, shadorma, haiku, monotetra, golden shovel, and more with The Writer’s Digest Guide to Poetic Forms, by Robert Lee Brewer.
This e-book covers more than 40 poetic forms and shares examples to illustrate how each form works. Discover a new universe of poetic possibilities and apply it to your poetry today!
*****
Here’s my attempt at an Ae Freislighe Poem:
Tennessee, by Robert Lee Brewer
Do you recall Tennessee
& all that late night kissing,
or is it a memory
once yours that’s now gone missing?
Perhaps there’s some video
for both of us to review
& retire to Ohio
with vows that we will renew.
*****
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
*****
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About Robert Lee Brewer
Senior Content Editor, Writer’s Digest Community.
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Summer Reading: Photos, Gardens, Birds, Trees: What’s Happening in the Great Outdoors
This content was originally published by DOMINIQUE BROWNING on 29 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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A selection of books, for practical use and pleasure reading, that will take readers from their own gardens far into the great outdoors.
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The post Summer Reading: Photos, Gardens, Birds, Trees: What’s Happening in the Great Outdoors appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Al Franken Has Been Sitting on Jokes for a Decade. Now He’s Ready to Tell Them.
This content was originally published by MOLLY BALL on 29 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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“Al Franken, Giant of the Senate” is, in part, the story of how Franken became a giant phony — how he pretended to be a serious person in public even as his inner comic monologue never stopped running. He recalls that during the 2008 campaign, he was attacked for such transgressions as a late-night writers’-room joke about raping Lesley Stahl, and a 2000 Playboy article entitled “Porn-o-Rama.” Franken didn’t think he should have to apologize for the cracks, which his opponents were taking out of context. “To say I was sorry for writing a joke was to sell out my career, to sell out who I’d been my entire life,” he writes. “And I wasn’t sorry that I had written Porn-o-Rama or pitched that stupid Lesley Stahl joke at 2 in the morning. I was just doing my job.”
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But as the attacks caused Franken to bleed support from women voters, he saw that his explanations weren’t working. “I learned that campaigns have their own rules, their own laws of physics, and that if I wasn’t willing to accept that, I would never get to be a senator.” And so Franken took a deep breath and told a little white lie: “I’m sorry.”
Being in the Senate soon delivered another lesson in the perils of political comedy. Early on, while presiding over the body, Franken rolled his eyes at a speech Mitch McConnell, then the minority leader, was giving, which he found “awful, awful.” McConnell spotted the eyeroll — a serious breach of Senate protocol — and retorted, “This isn’t ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Al.” Franken realized the incident would become fodder for a political press “itching to write something about Senator Yuk-Yuk,” and swiftly delivered an abject handwritten apology to McConnell, who graciously accepted it.
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In the Senate, Franken notes, jokes tend to get taken the wrong way, as when he elbowed his way past a line of visitors muttering quietly, for his own amusement, “More important than you, more important than you.” This did not amuse the Yankee first baseman Mark Teixeira, who tweeted, “@AlFranken let me know ‘He is more important than me.’” At another point, Franken dearly wanted to issue a statement calling a dissent by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia “very gay.” “My staff said no,” he writes. “But they didn’t say I couldn’t put it in a book someday!”
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Franken’s staff, as he tells it, has been his best ally in stifling his funny side, sternly responding “O.K., that’s for inside the car” to his quips, and nixing his hilariously offensive responses to constituent letters. (He once composed a 110th birthday note to Ruth Anderson of Marshall, Minn., that read simply, “You have a bright future.”) They ruthlessly edit out his efforts to “slip in The Funny during speeches,” as when he attempted to state, in a nuclear-disarmament speech, “A wise man once said, ‘Trust but verify.’ That man was quoting Ronald Reagan.” Franken’s press secretary once threatened to write her own campaign memoir, entitled “‘Oh, C’mon!’ Said Franken.”
Still, Franken’s clever asides can’t always salvage his stale recitations of liberal talking points, which seem likely to persuade precisely no one who isn’t already a member of the choir. (Even with jokes, is anyone buying this book because he wants to read a seven-page argument against media consolidation?) In the end, this is a book your liberal aunt will love and your Republican neighbor will never pick up, much less enjoy. It’s not as funny as the best humor books, including Franken’s — but it’s a whole lot funnier than your average political memoir.
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There’s surprisingly little here about the current president; Franken presumably began writing the book when Donald Trump wasn’t expected to win the election. In one chapter, he notes that he, too, is a former entertainer who’s had tax issues and been accused of degrading comments about women — making the case, of course, that Trump’s example is far worse. Another chapter is devoted to a faintly pathetic attempt to convince progressives they shouldn’t lose hope and can still make a difference.
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More interesting than Franken’s political points is his description of the value of humor as a force for bringing people together. He devotes a lot of space to his friendly relationships with Senate Republicans, from the cranky Kansan Pat Roberts to Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, “the funniest Republican in the Senate.” (Informed that Franken is taking a vacation in Puerto Rico, Graham deadpans, “Do two fund-raisers: one with the folks for statehood, one with the folks against statehood. They never talk to each other.”)
He’s found common ground with such staunch conservatives as David Vitter of Louisiana, considers the present attorney general, Jeff Sessions, a personal friend and once wrote a country song with the Utah senator Orrin Hatch. He’s made McConnell laugh out loud: “Try to imagine what that looks and sounds like! You can’t!” After years of railing against George W. Bush while he was in office, Franken even manages to share a laugh with the former president when they run into each other. Maybe, he implies, we’d all be better off if we could dial back the partisan outrage and learn to take a joke.
Being in the Senate, Franken admits, has softened his own partisanship, though not everyone is treated gently. “I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz,” Franken writes. “And I hate Ted Cruz.” In the chapter on Cruz, entitled “Sophistry,” Franken describes him as “an absolutely toxic co-worker,” “singularly dishonest” and a “sociopath.”
The publication of “Al Franken, Giant of the Senate” marks a major break with Franken’s previous political persona, one that is sure to stoke speculation about his future in a party that is desperately bereft of future prospects. Up to now, as Franken observes, his dogged unfunniness has been the default angle of every article about his political career, to wit: “No Joke: Franken Running for Senate.” The cliché has become so pervasive, Franken wryly notes, that when he dies, his obituary will surely be titled “No Joke: Former Three-Term Dead at 93.”
And yet it somehow never gets old: Just a couple of months ago, a column in National Journal was headlined “No Joke: Al Franken for President?” Now that would be hilarious.
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David Sedaris’s Diaries Track a Path From Struggle to Success
This content was originally published by PATTON OSWALT on 29 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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A yearbook or a collection of jokes doesn’t have the elliptical, weirdly addictive narrative of “Theft by Finding.” So, again, disregard the above recommendation by the author about his own work. In this case he doesn’t know better. Start from the beginning: Sept. 5, 1977, in Sacramento. A 20-year-old Sedaris gets a ride to the California State Fair, where Shari Lewis is performing. He sleeps, that night, under the stars, next to the American River.
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And then keep reading until the final entry, 25 years later — Dec. 21, 2002, in London. Sedaris, five days away from his 46th birthday, is confused about the threat of terrorist attacks during the Christmas shopping season: “Don’t they know the Christmas shopping season is essentially over? The time to strike was last weekend, not this one.” In two days he travels back to his home in Paris. And, presumably, continues the diary for the next 15 years — the second volume of which we’re going to have to wait for.
In between those events, the Three Stages.
There’s David Sedaris in his 20s, dealing with piecemeal jobs, aggressive bills (Jan. 4, 1982: “I wondered why the rent and bill situation always has to be so desperate. Then I realized I made it desperate. I am desperate”) and survival strategies. The entry for March 15, 1982, when he’s so broke he has Cream of Wheat for dinner, gave me a rueful smile. I had many a dinner of Cream of Wheat in my 20s. Even cheaper than ramen noodles. And more iron. Do people in their 20s even know this trick anymore?
There are also the ominous warnings about the future, remembered as fleeting distractions (“July 3, 1981, Raleigh. There is a new cancer that strikes only homosexual men. I heard about it on the radio tonight”) and fleeting distractions that must have felt, emotionally, like permanent scars (June 18, 1982: “I called the number Brant gave me, and it was made up. Then I called all the dorms at Louisburg College and was told there is no Brant. Tricked again”).
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Throughout the Starve and Struggle years of “Theft by Finding” we spend time with a David Sedaris who’s doing what everyone does in his 20s. Specifically, realizing the core of who he is (gay), picking up habits that don’t seem harmful then (drinking), and making the first tentative steps toward what he’ll become (a writer). The gayness seems to have always been there, but for the first couple of years he’s coy about stating it simply in the diary. In the American South of the ’70s, was there fear in even seeing the word “gay” in your own hand on the page? The heavy drinking doesn’t feel like alcoholism at the time because anyone who has imbibed in his 20s knows you can ingest oceans of booze and recover the next morning as if you stepped into a time machine right before going to sleep. And writing as a vocation — despite keeping a diary — has to elbow its way past odd jobs, favors-that-end-up-paying, retail wage slavery and, for a short period, art. An entry from Oct. 28, 1985, features a critique of David’s paintings by a classmate: “We do not enter their space, they enter ours.” Which, if you’re familiar with any of Sedaris’s writings, is an exact opposite description of the effect his essays and humor pieces have on a reader. Painting was not to be, thankfully.
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Once Sedaris reaches Chicago, the diaries shift and mutate. In the ’70s and early ’80s, still in Raleigh, they function as a stress vent. Now they feel like limbering-up exercises for the kind of writing he’s going to do. The entries about the IHOP he frequents, and the rotating cast of flinty waitresses and damaged customers, feel like tracks off an early EP of a beloved band. I felt another warm jolt of camaraderie when I read how Sedaris was happy to discover that David Lynch used to eat at the same Bob’s Big Boy in Los Angeles for years. I remember discovering that same nugget of information about Lynch, and how it somehow justified my eating nearly every breakfast during the ’90s at the House of Pies in Los Feliz.
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And then it’s the fall of 1990, and Sedaris has moved to New York. Every “lad in the city” memory comes rushing back when you experience Manhattan through his Chicago-by-way-of-Raleigh eyes:
“I took a cab from Penn Station, and Rusty was waiting at the apartment when I arrived. It’s much bigger than I’d imagined. The neighborhood is too beautiful for me. I don’t deserve it. Or, O.K., my block I deserve. It’s more industrial than the ones around it, and we look out at a parking lot for trucks. Two short blocks away, though, it’s perfect. Tree-lined winding streets, restaurants and coffee shops. It’s enchanting. I can’t picture myself in any of those places, but still. How did I get to live here? Rusty says that some of the apartments in the area are going for a million dollars. I’m not sure about that, but I do know that a ginger ale costs three dollars. Three dollars!”
The Feast is about to start, only Sedaris doesn’t know it yet. More odd jobs, intrusive neighborhood crazies (Sedaris is a primo hassle-magnet, a trait that he constantly spins to his advantage when writing about his collisions with the Broken) and a stint working as a Santa’s elf at Macy’s Herald Square. At this point the diaries evolve from emotional vent to limbering-up exercise to full-on rough drafts for Sedaris’s writing. The entries about Macy’s are the equivalent of bonus scenes from “SantaLand Diary,” the essay Sedaris wrote based on these entries. “SantaLand Diary” aired on NPR’s “Morning Edition” on Dec. 23, 1992.
It was his first big break as a writer, and it set him on the road to becoming “David Sedaris.”
Know how you can tell, just from reading the diaries? Because the chapters for 1993, ’94 and ’95 are blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em short. Stuff’s starting to happen. You go from Struggle and Starve to Feast — you’re not tapping on the window of the buffet restaurant. They wheel the buffet out to you, and you can’t tell how long it’ll be there. So you grab grab grab for a while. “Yes!” to every offer. To any offer — because you’ve never been offered. Anything.
Part of David Sedaris’s Feast was moving to Paris. By the late ’90s he’s making a serious effort to learn French. This lets us read bonus scenes from “Me Talk Pretty One Day” (“Today the teacher told us that a ripe Camembert should have the same consistency as a human eyebrow”). We also get a hilarious entry for April 6, 1999, when this occurs:
“The inevitable finally happened, just as I knew it would. My French teacher faxed Andy at Esquire to say my article has had the effect of a bomb at the Alliance Française.”
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Being an observant, acidic writer has its hazards, especially when it splashes onto your life in real time:
“In my story I failed to mention her wit, and her skill as a teacher. That is what I have to apologize for, my laziness.”
But 14 days before this entry, when Sedaris is back in Chicago, Bloat has begun to seep into the narrative:
“I haven’t had a drink in 48 hours. This is not an accident but a concerted effort, and a very difficult one. I’d have to double-check, but I’m pretty sure I’ve been drunk every night for the past 18 years.”
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No one escapes Bloat, but many survive it. Maybe not with the grace, whining, hilarity and eye-rolling that Sedaris does. But through all 25 years of “Theft by Finding” — of soap opera addictions and spider feeding, family kookiness (Sedaris notes the day Charles Addams dies; it feels like the passing of a baton) and language lessons — Sedaris’s developing voice is the lifeline that pulls him through the murk. In the last year of the diaries, with Sedaris a now-established best-selling author and world traveler, the prickly Southern wit is still intact and sparkling:
“Jan. 28, 2002, Florence. Florence often smells like toast.”
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Neanderthals: They’re Just Like Us
This content was originally published by ALEXANDRA ALTER on 25 May 2017 | 8:38 pm.
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Claire Cameron, author of “The Last Neanderthal.”
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Ian Willms for The New York Times
Fiction hasn’t always been kind to Neanderthals. “Hairy or grisly, with a big face like a mask, great brow ridges and no forehead, clutching an enormous flint, and running like a baboon with his head forward and not, like a man,” H. G. Wells wrote about Neanderthals in his short story “The Grisly Folk.”
Neanderthal characters are slightly more appealing in Jean M. Auel’s 1980 novel, “The Clan of the Cave Bear,” a best-selling prehistoric drama about an orphaned Cro-Magnon girl who is taken in by a Neanderthal tribe. Still, they are brutish and sexually violent, with a limited vocabulary and even more limited emotional range.
Decades later, the scientific view of Neanderthals has evolved — there’s evidence that they wore decorative feathers, buried their dead and were skilled leatherworkers — and so has their portrayal in fiction.
In her new book, “The Last Neanderthal,” the Canadian novelist Claire Cameron drew on the latest genetic, anthropological and archaeological research to draw a deeply sympathetic portrait of a Neanderthal girl struggling to survive some 40,000 years ago, battling leopards, bison, a brutal winter and starvation. Her vivid survival story is interwoven with the tale of a pregnant archaeologist named Rosamund, who makes a startling discovery when she finds the fossilized remains of a Neanderthal and a human buried next to each other.
Ms. Cameron got the idea for the story in 2010, when she read an article about sequencing the Neanderthal genome, which showed an astonishing overlap of about 99.7 percent between human and Neanderthal DNA.
She read dozens of books and scientific articles, and consulted experts, including Yuval Noah Harari, the author of “Sapiens”; Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist; and John Shea, an archaeologist and paleoanthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York. Mr. Shea, who read an early draft of the novel, was a particularly tough editor, Ms. Cameron said.
In 2014, when she was deep into researching the book, Ms. Cameron had her DNA sequenced and was thrilled to learn that she is, genetically speaking, 2.5 percent Neanderthal. Discovering her own faint and distant connection to Neanderthals gave Ms. Cameron the confidence to write the novel, despite her worries that her prehistoric protagonist would come across as outlandishly campy.
“The idea that there are traces of Neanderthal in me is incredible,” she said. “I grew up thinking that they’re gone, but their line isn’t gone; they’re present in us.”
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Rich Green Up at ICM
This content was originally published by on 24 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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ICM Partners has promoted Rich Green to head of media rights and made a number of other personnel shifts in both its media rights and publications divisions.
Green’s promotion comes after the media rights department sold rights to a number of the year’s most critically acclaimed film and television series including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale to Hulu and Daniel Handler’s Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events to Netflix.
“Intellectual property is the lifeblood of media in all formats,” board members Sloan Harris, Esther Newberg, and Kevin Crotty—the former two co-heads of the agency’s publishing department, the latter a partner—said in a statement. “With Rich at the helm of our media rights department, we are poised to build on the strength of our publishing department, providing the best opportunities to expand the work of our clients.”
In other changes, Will Watkins, an agent formerly in the agency’s motion picture literary department, has moved into media rights, while Lia Chan has been promoted to agent in the unit. Hillary Jacobson, Heather Karpas, and Zoe Sandler have all been promoted to agent in ICM’s publications department in New York.
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May 28, 2017
An African Novelist Poised for Recognition in the U.S.
This content was originally published by JOHN WILLIAMS on 25 May 2017 | 8:43 pm.
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Alain Mabanckou, author of “Black Moses.”
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Monica Almeida for The New York Times
In 2012, the novelist and memoirist Alain Mabanckou won the Académie Française’s grand prix for lifetime achievement. Though he is just 51 now, Mr. Mabanckou’s life’s work — most of it set in Pointe-Noire, his hometown in the Congo Republic — has yet to become as well known in the United States.
His latest novel, “Black Moses” (out June 6), might start to change that. The book, translated by Helen Stevenson, was longlisted for this year’s Man Booker International Prize. It’s the dark but entertaining story of a boy in the Congo Republic who escapes a harrowing orphanage and ends up coming of age among a group of thieves in Pointe-Noire in the 1970s and ’80s.
“Black Moses” is less autobiographical than some of Mr. Mabanckou’s previous books. He was not an orphan, for one thing. But it takes place during the Marxist-Leninist revolution he lived through. (He moved from Africa to France in his early 20s, and has been teaching literature in the United States for the past 15 years, first at the University of Michigan and now at U.C.L.A.)
“I’m trying to create a world in which it’s going to be like a biography of my city,” Mr. Mabanckou said of his books. “People in the Congo like that I’m recalling the sea, the street, the prostitutes, the old names of the neighborhood. They want to have that kind of history, because the history of Africa, Francophone history, was written by France. It is not accurate.”
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