Jon Frankel's Blog, page 16

Grilled Swordfish with Spicy Stuff

My son Andalucia 5 is in the city for the weekend to see the Mets play the last game of a glorious season, leaving me with Andalucia 4, who is 15. A 15 year old can be a tough customer, more inclined to grunting than conversation. Andalucia 4 and I however still share a few enthusiasms. One is good food. The other is gangster movies. When he was 12 I took him to see The Godfather at Cornell, on da big screen. That’s how old I was when I read the book and saw the film. It was a wonderful thing seeing it together, and we’ve been meaning to see part 2 ever since. So, with the house to ourselves on a Saturday night I proposed 2 things: I buy a nice piece of fish, one we wouldn’t normally get because of the cost, and that we watch The Godfather Part 2. This being agreeable to the occasionally disagreeable, somewhat prickly Andalucia 4, I set about making a meal I usually make for myself, a Thai inspired dish. But then, alas, Billy, my good friend Billy, had the evening, not the night, free. So Billy, who likes to eat also, joined us. Normally I make this with tuna steak, but the tuna steak was from Sri Lanka, and the swordfish was from the USA, so I went swordfish. I think I’ve posted a version of this before, but in that version everything is cooked in an iron frying pan. In this one I’ve grilled most of it. It is a Thai inspired dish as I said, but it’s not an actual thing I’ve ever seen. I grilled tomatoes, jalapenos, red onion and garlic. I grilled the swordfish. I assembled them with a fish sauce and lime juice dressing, and sprinkled fresh herbs on top of it all. It is spicy, salty, sour, sweet. The fish easily stands up to this onslaught of flavor. I served it with white rice and a salad, and allowed it to overmatch a 10 dollar bottle of red wine. At meal’s end our tongues were buzzing with heat and conversation. Then Billy left, and we watched one of the greatest movies ever made. This time anyway I liked it better than the first. Likely that will change as all things do.

 

Grilled Swordfish

3 swordfish steaks, about 3/4s lb each

salt

3T cracked black pepper

3T cracked coriander seed

vegetable oil

2 fresh tomatoes,

1 large red onion

2 cloves garlic, not peeled

3 red jalapenos (green are OK! Use 1or 2 or none)

2T minced lemon grass

1 clove garlic minced

3T lime juice

3T fish sauce

1T sugar

¼ cup chopped cilantro

¼ cup chopped mint leaves

An hour or so before you are going to cook the fish prepare it for grilling: salt both sides, and the evenly apply the cracked pepper and coriander seed to each side, patting the spices into the fish. Set aside.

Get a grill going. It will need to be hot. Mine was 500+ degrees, with a good bed of coals for charring

Rub a little oil on the tomatoes and chilies. Peel the onion and cut 3/4s of it into wedges about a half inch thick. Toss these wedges in some oil to coat. Do the same with the unpeeled garlic cloves. Take the remainder of the onion and arrange it on a platter you will use to serve the fish. Sprinkle some chopped mint and cilantro on top of it.

Prepare the dressing: mix the fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, lemongrass and minced garlic.

When then grill is ready char the onions, jalapeno, tomatoes and garlic. You don’t want them black but they should be cooked. The tomatoes should just be softening and taking on color. You want the juice. Chop the jalapeno (take the skin off if you like) and the tomatoes, keeping as much of the juice as you can. Combine these in a bowl with the onion. Peel and chop the garlic (it will be like a paste), mix it in, and add half the remaining dressing. Toss to combine. It should be chunky.

Brush the swordfish with oil and grill 10 minutes an inch (flipping it halfway through) over hot coals. It should be just done, charred on the outside, with a nice pepper crust. When it’s done, put it on the platter, on top of the raw onion and herbs, then spoon the remaining dressing onto the fish. Put the tomato-onion-pepper mixture on top, and garnish with the rest of the green herbs. Serve with White rice. We had a tossed salad of ettuce, arugula, escarole, carrot and sweet pepper. I used safflower and a little sesame oil and rice vinegar. A Riesling would be outstanding, as would Gewürztraminer. I had it with a cheap shiraz. Beer or Gatorade? Why not. Andalucia 4 had root beer.

READING AT BEYOND BAROQUE

I’M READING AT BEYOND BAROQUE, IN LA, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11TH, 7-9PM

POSITIONS WITH WHITE ROSES

Positions with White Roses, by Ursule Molinaro is one of the best books I’ve read all year. (for profiles go here and here; the second link is to a site reviewing her books, scroll down to Bruce Benderson’s memoir of his friend). Molinaro’s style is austere and her imagination tends to formal arrangements. The novel is in the shape of a cross: it occurs at a dinner table, a long, grey marble table, with a bouquet of white roses in the center. A mother sits at one end, and a father sits at the other. In the middle, on either side, are two seats for their two daughters. Only one of these seats is filled, by the “visiting, normal daughter”. This daughter, the visiting normal one, is 30. Her sister, Laura,a fraternal twin, is not visiting. The two sisters are opposites: Laura has a severe curvature of the spine, which required frequent, frightening surgeries when she was a small child. She also has fragile legs that easily break. She is nonetheless extraordinarily beautiful, focused and accomplished. Unlike the visiting, normal daughter, she is a lawyer, with a practice in LA, of all female lawyers. The visiting normal daughter is not beautiful, but very plain looking. She couldn’t complete college. She is an artist, a bohemian vagabond, and bi-sexual. As young women, the visiting, normal daughter uses her beautiful and disfigured sister to attract men, whom she seduces. This dynamic plays out in the book, as both sisters go Portugal, and the visiting normal one becomes involved with a gay Parisian, while painting murals in a former monastery retooled as an aristocratic retreat for gay sadomasochists.

The parents are Italian immigrants, Jews who escape Italy during the war. The mother was a successful fashion designer from a family of artists. The father was a doctor. In America he is an undertaker. The parents are alienated from each other and they are no longer speaking, so the few dinners the visiting, normal daughter attends (she is home for Christmas, after a 12 year absence) are tense and silent. The narrative shifts in perspective between mother, father and visiting, normal daughter. Laura’s absence as a narrator is notable and her story is told by others.

It is a taut narrative. Molinaro’s sentences are crisp and minimal and she has a way of completing or extending the thought of one sentence with the next one. It is a brilliant device, handled expertly, and creates a propulsive narrative. Molinaro’s perspective is detached, severe and analytical, but it is a pleasure to read this book. The layout of the text itself reflects the structure of a cross, as periodically paragraphs have narrow margins.

It is surprising how much detail she fits into such a short book. Molinaro was an eccentric figure. She was a translator, wrote plays, short stories, novels and was also an artist. She came to the US in the late forties from Europe, and wrote exclusively in English thereafter. She started The Chelsea Review, gave private writing lessons and published her books with small presses, including The Fiction Collective. She was secretive, a classicist who believed in the occult and wrote a book about numerology, had young lovers of any gender, and didn’t suffer fools. The picture here is the only one I can find. She looks a bit like the creature from the black lagoon, I know.  the weird thing is, I lived around the corner from her for 10 years, and don’t remember seeing an older woman in a hat with goggle sized glasses, but who would’ve noticed then?

This book is an example of rigorously experimental fiction that is focused on story and character. There is nothing obscure or difficult about it, but it is emotionally and intellectually intense. Every sentence is packed with intelligence and the aesthetic never fails.

DISHABILLE

DISHABILLE

All to night, to bed are growing

A frenzied and forgetful flowing

The apple dappled wood goes down

Where the summer sun once built a town

Of busy flowers but where towers stood

There lies an eyeless neighborhood.

The maples toss their crimson clothes

Birches shed their yellow camisoles

Gingko drops its golden skirt

Black walnut shreds its tattered shirt.

Naked limbs entwined they lie

On banks of blackened cloud and sky.

The trees go naked to their winter beds

Beneath the snow they bow their heads.

 

GAHA: BABES OF ABYSS IN SAN FRANCISCO

I’m going to be reading in October, on the 9th, in San Francisco. I’ll also be reading in LA, but I’m not sure of the dates and times. San Francisco is where I was born, but I stayed a mere six days before flying home to NY. I wonder what that was like: I am adopted, so my parents showed up at the hospital and took me home on a plane. I’ve been back to San Francisco twice, in 1977 and in 1990. I can’t wait to visit with friends, eat FOOD, and go to bookstores. Manhattan has inoculated me to the horrifying destruction of once beautiful cities. I will pass through pale shadows of its former shelf with the same idiotic happiness I do in New York. Hey, it still smells the same! (I love the smell of human excrement in the morning…it smells like…human excrement in the morning).

TRACK 28

Track 28

now I am thick with memory

something in these wet windows

and fog smothered roofs

in the glistening slate and brick

I hear the mumble of commuters

and smell the long tunnels

scraped steel and railroad ties,

puddles, the trench coats

and shopping bags and brief cases

rush slowly up the track

and squeeze into the bar car

where we lurch

and what we are lurching into

the tides, the wind,

wet wool and anonymous

emergencies, collide

the eroded faces of men

sinking into smoke and gin,

replenished lips kissing the dented

pillow and the ink of their mouths

wasted in streams

the water that feeds dead rivers

the wind that whittles rock

and the rough shadow of whiskers

on the 5:40 out of Grand Central

boarded up buildings flashing

like billboards in the Bronx

the indistinct time

patters on the glass

the speech of public places

suggestions left behind

“watch the closing doors”

between cars rocking

this glass is splashed with light

I am enticed I enter faces

enclosed in a globe of rain

the shaped lips and jowls

of folk who lie in graves

like the littered war dead

or in beds in the wards

of forgetful 98 year olds

with glasses of Old Yeller

wandering the Ambien dark

in open calico muumuus

I DON’T EXIST!

I spent the weekend reading a book I had hoped would piss me off: MFA VS NYC, The Two Cultures of American Fiction, edited by Chad Harbach. It did piss me off I suppose, but it mostly depressed the hell out of me. According to these authors, I don’t exist. As its title suggests, it is a very limited view, reducing literary culture in America to a binary that excludes almost every book I care about. It is a tasteful, well-presented group of essays on mainstream fiction as I would expect. But taste is the enemy of art. This book challenges nothing, save for the various cliches we hear about MFA programs and the big NY publishers. A reader will not know of the existence of radical or alternative presses, non-academic writers or writers who make their living in jobs. One agent admits that he can only sell what he likes and only likes what he can sell. Others deliver the news that an author’s fate lies in the hands of 20 year olds for the most part. Writers who do not follow one or the other career path are represented as poor, deluded idiots who are taken advantage of by exploitative contests, Amazon self-publishing, etc. You would not know that fiction writing is verbal art, and that the imagination is involved. You would not know that at one time commercial publishers published books like Naked Lunch, Under the Volcano, Nightwood, Invisible Man, or of contemporary authors like Helen DeWitt. Writers from the 19th century and before are occasionally mentioned, but not as often as Jonathan Franzen, a man who is very publicly an idiot, but whom most of these writers consider to be among our greatest, despite his embarrassing episode with Oprah, and his embarrassing essay on William Gaddis, or Mr. Smartypants. They are a little too nervous to be self-satisfied. Conscience nags at apathy throughout these pages. The essays are well written and considered, but for me it was exhausting, a bit like hanging out with people I have spent my entire life trying to avoid. I don’t think it matters at all. The state of publishing and of fiction is not a problem compared to global warming or the war against the poor. Good books will always be written, and great books will occasionally be written, and they will be read and written by people who have MFAs and by people who don’t. The most interesting work will always appear in the interstices. I suppose people have to talk about something, so they do. I would contrast this book with books like Ron Sukenick’s Down and In, which I wrote about last week, and which anatomizes in great detail the rich proliferation of art in America and the lengths artists and writer’s must go to to create their work and somehow find an audience. Liking what you can sell is not on the list.

RON SUKENICK

I’ve just finished Ron Sukenick‘s book, Down and In:Life in the Underground. It chronicles life in the underground from about 1948 to 1984. This is a great stretch of time to study decline. He works through the many many contradictions and problems of being an American artist, whose desire for fame and fortune, whose PT Barnum side, is constantly at war with his wayward, anarchist, anti-authoritarian, imaginative side. For a little while in the 50s and 60s this dialectic was most fruitful: avant-garde, counter-culture, underground, and pop culture fused. The result was an explosion of popular art and mainstream attention to challenging difficult art. There were consequences for the artists and, especially, for the fellow traveler’s as this also involved a lifestyle without rules, a life of yes, sex, drugs and jazz, then rock’n’roll. The book fits in with some other books I love, Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me and Patti Smith’s Just Kids and earlier books like The Banquet Years (Roger Shattuck) and The Bride and the Bachelors (Calvin Tomkins) all excellent explorations of Bohemia. In the mid seventies Sukenick started The Fiction Collective, with Steve Katz, Jonathan Baumbach and other writers who found they could not publish with mainstream presses anymore. They were writers who did not have the commercial support of say John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and William Gass, writers who produced books everyone says they read but didn’t. The Fiction Collective was created by writers who had retreated into academia. They were not academics, but needed the institutional support of the university both to feed themselves and to publish their work. Sukenick shows how this is part of the institutionalization of the avant-garde. He’s uncomfortable with it. It’s a trap. Government grants, university support, take the place of tenements and coffee houses. It’s a depressing situation, but it gets worse. Because the Fiction Collective, while it was a non-profit, collectivist enterprise, took its place alongside other, older alternative presses. These are almost all gone now, while the Fiction Collective survives, albeit under a different management structure and name, as FC2.

I’m also reading a book I wanted to read because I thought it would make me angry. It hasn’t. It’s depressed me. MFA vs. NYC, which I’ll review when I’m done, shows a literary culture paralyzed by its own failure. The best lack all conviction. Things are as they are. The MFA isn’t the barren wasteland its detractors have called it. It’s a barren wasteland with some nice oases, and anyway, who cares, that’s the way things are. Commercial publishing isn’t the barren wasteland its MFA detractors have called it, it’s a threatened barren wasteland with a few shivering starving endangered species gasping by shrinking sinkholes full of fetid water. But really, there’s nothing to do about it so that’s the way it is, the world is going to hell, oh well.

Sukenick at least is kicking and screaming, trying to create something outside of the relentless drive for maximum profit, resisting all the way. He does so with cynicism and knowledge, not naivete or self-righteousness. He knows he’d sell out, but he can’t bring himself to punctuate a piece he believes needs no punctuation, even if he loses his publisher. My first and only real writing teacher, the poet John Perlman once told me he knew things had changed when his young students didn’t understand what the big deal was with cutting your hair. If they want you to cut it, why not cut it? Well, for some of us the fact that THEY want you to cut it is enough reason not to do so. It has nothing to do with hair, it has everything to do with not knuckling under, with wanting to be free to be and define yourself, and resisting those things you don’t agree with, fit into or think is wrong. I don’t love Sukenick’s fiction, and I’ve always been allergic to the self-consciousness of the meta-novel, but he and his compeers never ceased believing in the possibilities of narrative and narrative art, and they wrote as individuals, out of a creative, imaginative life. Sukenick interview: here. Obit: this article quotes Down and In extensively, and says everything I would say, so why say it? go here!

Green Beans in Salsa Cruda

When I was a child one of my favorite foods was romano beans cooked in tomato sauce. Romano beans are the wide string beans. They are meatier than regular string beans but just as tender. We cut them into two inch pieces at an angle, and cooked them, sometimes with bacon, in canned tomato sauce until they were soft. I can still remember this flavor as vividly as the face of the woman, Marisa, who made them for me. It is a piece of the stained glass window through which I view the world. Since then I discovered the intense, spicy Indian version made with fresh tomatoes and garam masala with mint or cilantro. I have cooked beans in fresh tomato sauce with basil, or with sage, or rosemary, with and without bacon or pancetta, and stir fried with onions and jalapenos and chunks of tomato that just start to breakdown and become part of the sauce of fish sauce, vinegar, soy sauce, ginger and garlic. The other day I was fantasizing about this (I do have food fantasies, but they are not exactly fetishistic! They aren’t even erotic, though born of eros), and I thought, why not make green beans with a raw tomato salsa, like the one I use for bruschetta? It was a tomatoey weekend, as late August weekends are wont to be. We had bruschetta, we had pasta with a sauce of cherry tomatoes, sliced garlic and basil, grilled coho salmon with a sauce of chopped red pepper, onion, garlic and tomatoes. I just kept pickin’ ‘em and eatin’ ‘em. The green bean dish with the salsa cruda was great. I am going to describe a method here, since quantities are hard to specify and should be to taste.

I had two medium tomatoes that were ripe. I cut them in half and dug out the seeds and juice, removed just the tip of the core at the stem, and then chopped them into small chunks, perhaps a dice. I put them in a colander over a bowl and let them drain for a couple of hours. The juice is delicious and can be used for whatever. Then my highly skilled brilliant assistant Z, who returned to college today, minced a small clove of garlic, and diced some fresh onion and red pepper. I stirred this into the tomatoes with some olive oil, a pinch of salt, a healthy grind of pepper, a splash of vinegar and a generous chiffonade of red and green basil. Color is important here. There are yellow, orange, purple and green tomatoes, and red and green basil, white and red onions, red, yellow and orange peppers. It should taste of summer but look like a brilliant fall day. Let the salsa rest for a while. Not hours. While you do other stuff. Or for hours. Then lightly steam some beans, yellow, green or purple, romano or string, and toss them with the tomatoes. Do this a little before you are ready to eat, so the beans can cool to warm and the sauce can cure. We accompanied this dish with grilled half chickens and boneless pork loin chops, grilled corn, grilled eggplant and pan roasted potatoes with sage and garlic. It sounds decadent. It was. But Z doesn’t leave for college often. This will be her sophomore year. When they tell you it goes fast, believe them.

QUEER AND ALONE

Frigid Irony and Overheated Satire: Queer and Alone

 

The first thing I noticed about James Stah’s Queer and Alone is that the narrator protagonist is neither. At least not in the conventional sense. He is certainly queer in the old sense of the word, and he is alone also in the sense that he has no awareness of how others perceive him, but he spends the book mostly speculating on women’s bodies and underwear, and he is almost always with other people.

Desmond Farrquahr is living in a villa outside of Rome when he receives receives a dire prophecy, that he will be betrayed by friends and die. A man of mysterious means, he leaves the villa and finds a steamer bound for Hong Kong by way of the Cape of Good Hope. On board and at various ports along the way Des has a series of increasingly bizarre and surreal adventures. All of the events of the novel are bent by the demented perspective of Des. Strahs’ narrator is a queer duck, with a Beckettian sense of language. But this is a low rent production. It is not a Nabokovian jewel box. Des’s solipsism is extreme, and he is language obsessed. The major driving force of the book is sex and it is thoroughly perverse, toying constantly with pornography. Strah’s from page one evinces a thorough, unsettling misogyny, the only aspect of the narrative that is not ironic. It is part of the dark underpinnings of what is generally a very funny bit of oddball improvisation. Like all journeys this one needs no plot. It goes forth with the wind of psychosexual compulsion in its sails. Strah’s style and perspective remind me of Robert Walser. He intentionally uses the words Gay and Queer in their old accepted sense and does so with almost every other figure of speech, real and invented that peppers his text, caged by <>. Innocent words and phrases become obscene through a process of inversion.

There are characters: the Caymans, or, as Des calls them, the Caymen, Nannette and Cayman, an older couple, perhaps in their fifties, probably closer to sixty, with whom he drinks. Despite frequent expressions of disgust he and Nanette have a barely concealed dalliance that involves the most frequent act of sex portrayed, the hand job. Despite many references to fur gates and juicy puddings, rear entries, ass obsessions, and nose blowing, it is the good old hand job, with detailed descriptions of the launch and landing of the narrator’s semen, that is portrayed both on board ship and on land most often. There are the placidly innocent blond naïf Deborah and her ravager Rory, a man intent on sleeping with all of the women on board. Des’s obsession with Deborah and Rory ultimately is his undoing. The ship’s captain says little (and that rendered into absurd pidgin) but is often spoken to by Des until he falls into an unexplained funk. In fact the other passengers’ horror of Des emerges here and there through the Rube Goldberg sentences. It would be wrong to say there is no purpose in all of this but I wouldn’t want to burden the narrative with some serious intent other than the author’s determination not to allow the reader to settle down into an old fashioned narrative with interesting characters and the conventional satisfactions of incident, instead supplying a steady flow of weird and amusing sexual situations blinded by oblique description. At one point near the end Des, in Hong Kong, at the table of a Communist Party ideologue, has this exchange with him:

 

“He then zeroed in on my opinions under the guise of an interest in art. As if from nowhere he asked:

‘Under what conditions would one need such <>?’

‘What irony and what satire?’ I started in unfeigned ignorance.

‘Oh, you know’ he drawled, winking. That pickled fish, I thought, and then said:

‘Well, it’s really the maintenance of a constant and absolute aesthetic, isn’t it, really, at any expense. Something from which to pivot regardless of terrain or weather conditions or etcetera, isn’t that what you’re after?’

It was then he explained it to me. Another sledge part from the Finnish bog, that old vehicle, I said to myself. Apparently he thought art the ability of the human mind to enter into representation. Aesthetics were, then, the nature of this representation. And the purpose of this representation was…politics.”

 

This fairly describes the central assertion and dilemma of the book, the use of irony and satire to subvert representational art and the drive to force art into a purpose other than desire. This wayward, dirty, knowing and intelligent novel is a pleasure to read, an anarchic riposte to puritanical political/sexual earnestness and an emetic designed to both purge and go down easily. James Strahs, was a playwright associated with downtown avant-garde theatre in New York in the 70s and 80s, especially the Wooster Group. He died on October 1st, 2011, in Vermont. This book has been out of print, but is being republished by Whiskey Tit.