Crumble

By Gwen Morgan

Rain. Not a gentle summer rain, but the sort that hammers down on the roof, sounds like it will flatten the landscape or cause floods, but somehow only makes the world soggy and weighted down. Through the wet curtain of branches I can see blank white, which means fog has disappeared the harbor. Happy the woman who is inside and not picking her way through this on a boat. Happier still if she can take the berries picked yesterday and make raspberry crumble.

There is nothing else quite like these American summers up north. Europe has the south of France and the Swiss Alps, there is sailing in Corsica or along the Dalmatian coast, and surely there is more miserable weather than this in, say, Scotland. But there is nothing quite like the rusticating that Americans seek in the summer as they go north to cabins and cottages, to lakes, islands, and bits of coastline. For a few weeks thousands of Americans take off and live what they suppose to be a simpler existence where they hike and ride bikes instead of driving cars, where they swim, paddle and sail, pick wild berries, fish, eat all the local foods in season. At night the children play cards while the grownups drink cocktails on covered porches. If it’s fine, they might all be out at the point, getting in a last swim.

In this moment, even the raspberries are allowed for a moment simply to be. In the rest of the year, they are overshadowed by their ellagitannins and antioxidant benefits, as if they were nothing more than bumpy little multivitamins. They are brambles, actually, related to the rose, tough plants that grow wild and bear fragile fruit. Not even a fruit, as it turns out, but a compendium that makes up each berry. Herbalists of the 16th century considered the bramble to be “a plant of Venus in Mars.” The house of Mars accounts for the thorns, and you can guess where Venus is in all of this. The greatest health benefits that berries dispense are, surely, attained in their procurement, which involves hiking, picking, and eating.

Even this year, when we Americans are racing down to places we don’t countenance (recession, repossession, retreat) there is still summer up north and Downeast. There are a lot of us living a brief pastoral, and the future with its uncertainties and fears is, temporarily, put aside. In this quick moment, time suspended, let us hope the rain stops so we can hike up the mountain and pick wild berries. If the wind picks up, we’ll go sailing, tacking back and forth out past the lighthouse and head in, wing-on-wing, in time for supper. And if you have been clever enough or just plain lucky and you happened to have picked berries before the weather, then you really ought to take this rainy morning and make Elizabeth’s raspberry crumble:

Elizabeth’s Crumble

(all amounts are approximate)

Mix together:

2q raspberries
1q black raspberries
1q wild blueberries

Toss with:

1 to 1&1/2 c turbinado sugar
Juice of 1 lemon
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 c flour

Put mixture in buttered baking pan.

For topping combine:

2c flour
1c oats
1/2 c brown sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon

Cut in:
1 stick butter

Sprinkle on top of berry mixture to cover.
Bake at 375 for about 1/2 hour.
Serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.
Feeds 16.

John Huggins, Amagansett, New York, 2008, Sears Peyton Gallery, New York

Russophiles

By Terry Gratuity

Can enough good things be said about the sly mordant wit of the New York Times? The paper’s coverage of Russia continues to reach new heights of the sublime; the choice of photos and captions are of such a caliber that contemporary American Russophiles are often reduced to little pools of quivering ecstasy.

Many of us thought the Times could never top its work of this past April 14th: Putin Denies Reports of Divorce; Newspaper Suspended.

That, of course, was the article on Russia's incumbent Prime Minister (and past president) Vladimir Putin and his twenty-four-year-old mistress. The Times chose to highlight the article with a photo of Putin's mistress wearing a spangled leotard, lifting her left leg behind her head. The immortal caption read, "Alina Kabayeva, in 2006 at the Rhythmic Gymnastics European Championships. She has since retired and now holds a seat in Russia’s Parliament." A masterpiece of drollery.

Then on June 15th the seemingly impossible happened. The Times topped itself.

The article was titled “Free and Flush, Russians Eager to Roam Abroad.” The photo featured nine half-naked Russian women flexing by a resort swimming pool in Turkey – A soft porn buffet of female flesh. The caption reads, "A water aerobics class at a hotel in Antalya, Turkey, built for Russian tourists to resemble the Kremlin and St. Basil’s Cathedral."

Where to even begin? The genius of the photographer? The glory of the faux-architecture in back? The eye rolling prose? Built for Russian tourists to resemble the Kremlin and St. Basil's Cathedral! Take that, Trump Taj Mahal. And, yes, of course it's all educational. They're taking a class: A water aerobics class.

A friend sneered that the thugs were missing from the picture. These women didn't come alone. But can the Times do everything?

For what it's worth there is one more picture with the piece – of a fat hairy man in a bathing suit, playing cards with his blond wife and their child. He has a tattoo. And a Nike brand baseball hat. What else is there to say? The cold war was not in vain. The photographer even managed to work the fake Kremlin into that shot too.

Jeffrey Milstein, Virgin Atlantic Airbus A340, 2008, Bonni Benrubi Gallery, New York

Not That the Differences Matter

By David Fitzsimmons

How to live in a world with a T.S. Eliot and George Eliot? A world with a Wallace Stevens and a Wallace Stegner, a Yeats and Keats, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Dickens and Dickinson, Tennessee Williams and William Carlos Williams, not to mention Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe?

Not that the differences matter, really.

The Uruguayan National Soccer Team is practicing on the athletic field around which I run. Some of them are no bigger than me, though they are all dark and handsome. The goaltenders wear green shirts and the rest of the team wears red shirts. They are sponsored by Corona, among others. They run like one long caterpillar over or around cones set up in close proximity to another, high stepping.

Lepidoptera Futbola.

It is 5,237 miles from Washington, DC to Montevideo, Uruguay, the capital of that country, and yet there they were, performing their drills as if they were on their home field. They did not regard me, or any of the other gringos on the track. Maybe they are a well-traveled team, having fought the powerful Germans, or the Spaniards – I should give them more credit. After all, I know nothing of soccer, nothing of Uruguay, except that they eat plantains there. I think.

Did you know that Holland and The Netherlands describe the same place? That the sequential comma ought to be used according to the Chicago Manual of Style, but should be omitted according to the AP Manual of Style?

The Chicago style guide, The AP style guide, and the MLA style guide are confusing.

The Chicago style guide, The AP style guide and the MLA style guide are confusing.

Eliot’s a genius, wouldn’t you say, darling? An innovator. Prescient, really, if one thinks about it.

To make matters worse, on certain days and for no discernable reason, I will arrive to find some joggers running counter-clockwise and some jogging clockwise. Who is correct in this situation? Who am I to follow?

The looser you string a tennis racquet, the faster a ball will come off its strings. It’s true. The string bed is like a trampoline, so you can imagine how much more velocity one might achieve bouncing off a trampoline versus bouncing off the pavement. Though, I wouldn’t recommend bouncing off the pavement. It’s a mistake to string one’s racquet tightly in the hope of hitting a faster, harder shot.

I was recently told by a real estate agent that often a client will ask her to find a nice married couple to rent to – nice married couples suggesting stability, quietude, fewer hassles for the owner.

You don’t want that, the real estate agent explained, for if the married couple splits, it’s hard to find another spouse. If the pair you are renting to, though, are just dating, say, and they split, it’s easy to find a new roommate. In real estate, spouses are a headache but lovers come and go.

One shouldn’t feel ashamed for all that he does not know. The world is a confusing place. It’s difficult to feel grounded. You marry one person, she leaves, you date another, she leaves, you go for a jog, you burn some fat, you envy Uruguayans for their modulation and mellow green eyes; you go home, you pick up Wolfe, you put down Wolfe, pick up the other Wolfe, put it down. Pick up Tobias Wolff, put it down, pick up Naomi Wolf, put it down quickly, pick up Leonard Woolf, put it down - sleep, sleep, dream of fried plantains, a favorite among Uruguayans.

John Huggins, Flag #1 Chippewa Falls, 2007, Sears Peyton Gallery, New York

A Jugmob Sort of Guy

William Grant to the June 5, 2008 London Review of Books:

It’s not very charitable of Terry Eagleton to complain that John Mullan’s history of literary anonymity contains only ‘an absurdly brief epilogue on Anon in the modern age’ (LRB, 22 May). I imagine the reason it’s absurdly brief is that it could hardly have been anything else, now that there are so painfully few glimpses of Anon to be had when gazing around at the world of print. Publishers have long grown used to insisting that we know more about the authors whose books they bring out than many of us have any wish or need to know, and just in case the cosy revelations about where and how they live fail to win our hearts and minds, they like to throw in what is usually a blatantly outdated snapshot showing the author at their loveliest. And all this when, as Eagleton has just before comprehensively shown, the whole Romantic notion of authorship has been fatally and one might have hoped definitively undermined. It’s all very frustrating and I can only suppose that the publishers’ publicity departments that Eagleton invokes are simply part of a much wider conspiracy to repress the unwelcome knowledge that authors never have been singular beings but are simply names of convenience allotted to an anonymous conglomerate.

Karin Laval, Swimming Pool #24, Annecy, France, Tulla Booth Gallery, Sag Harbor

Lost

By Gwen Morgan

You go to the museum to look at some maps. You do this even if you’re not a museum regular, even if you don’t live nearby, even if you’re male, according to the stats put out by the Walters museum after a recent map show. So even if you’re a man, maybe not so prone to darken the doorway of a museum, you go to look at some maps because these aren’t some dose of culture that goes down with all the charm of cod liver oil or that leaves you impressionistically at sea, chippy with the suspicion that what you like is popularly believed among the denizens of high culture to be crap. These are maps, devised that we might know how to get from point a to point b.

I love maps (who doesn’t?), even those back page charts of flight routes that I find in airline magazines, always the same: flight around the world reduced to nexus and tentacle. Even the most mundane maps are at once practical and evocative. All the cleverness of man comes into play in the transformation of space and time into a useful representation, a tool for navigation, and yet every map seems to evoke endless possibility, to verge on metaphor and allegory. So complete is their power that it is enough to make up titles to evoke intricate landscapes of story: Mappa Mundi, The Cartography of Desire. The Cartography of Story, with its seas and continents, magnetic north, compass rose. To see an actual map is only to imagine more places just unknown enough.

Maps are understood to be non-fiction, to be “true” accounts of place unless otherwise indicated. Nothing has more authority than a map, a device that appears to be authorless and objective. But, like all good stories, they have their silences, their cadence and their point of view. They are always about something, be it the geology of the Caspian basin or the shortest route from St. Louis to San Francisco.

Here are the early Portolan maps with their bright coastlines, their illuminated flags of each principality, crisscrossed with rhumb lines -- each a compass heading -- that allowed sailors to navigate out of sight of land. Here is the original Mercator map, taking up the space of half a wall, the sphere of Earth translated into two dimensions. Around the corner Lindbergh’s flight plan, a pencil mark every hundred miles where he checked his position, a record of the attention to detail that kept him in enough fuel to cross the Atlantic. Here is a 300 hundred foot long map depicting the road from Edo to Kyoto, from the emperor to the most powerful warlord, a delicate representation of the lineaments of power. Walk away from this line and you will find the concentric circles of the Buddhist and Hindu maps, centered at the axis mundi of Mt. Meru, oceans and continents in relative proportion to the center, a map that depicts the holy mountains and rivers with, far out on the corners, four persons who have transcended the world of the map. This is practicality taken to another plane: travel to the holy mountains with the goal of going off the map entirely.

Maps are graticules of possibility, reductive devices that provide the starting point for any kind of voyage, in this lies their seductiveness. You name it, you can make a map to take you there. It’s the reduction of space and time itself to something we can hold and comprehend, which opens out to the infinite. It’s the space between Adam’s reaching hand and God, the gap not quite bridged, the promise of the place not yet seen, travel, the exotic, all the spices of India, the thing almost within our grasp, herein resides desire. That’s where your imagination lives. It’s out there, let me draw you a map.

Stephen Wilkes, Data Center, Olympic Village, Beijing, China, 2008, ClampArt, New York

Called To The Bar

By David Fitzsimmons

For some reason unknown to me, I have finally happened upon the web page for the law firm in my office building and have taken to browsing through the profiles (their education and practice areas and general interests) of all the lawyers I see every day, the lawyers I eat lunch with in the cafeteria, the lawyers who I have spoken to on occasion, but only to say things (it is always they who speak, never me) such as: I wonder if they are calling for rain? It was a lovely weekend – we have a pool and had some neighbors over. And, on the occasion of an elevator ride I took with a partner and a pizza delivery man: When I was in the White House the Secret Service needed look through the pizza boxes we had delivered!

Lawyers, what a wonderful breed of human being! I envy them, of course. Their diligence in reviewing documents, their training, their moderated but determined dispositions. Surprisingly, they are not an aggressive bunch, at least the ones I know. They rarely flare, except when they show the NCAA Tournament on the drop-down screens in the cafeteria and certain alumni loyalties become apparent, or one memorable time when one lawyer ran to his colleagues at my table, a stack of papers in hand, yelling “We got those sons of bitches!”

Washington is full of lawyers, of course. Lawyers and lobbyists and consultants and spies. But, as I have just found out, their stories are not the ones you might think.

One lawyer I see often, a giant red-faced man who breathes too heavily and will die prematurely, I am certain, from smoking and lack of exercise, works in environmental law, of all things. He sits on the board of the ballet. He did not go to Duke, as I had imagined (I think it was his southern accent – a small thing, but one formulates from little germs) but the University of Kansas.

The tough-as-nails middle-aged redhead who badgers the El Salvadorian checkout girl at the cafeteria, confirming and reconfirming the price of Diet Peach Snapple, is in her free time: an avid cyclist and involves herself in charity races for cystic fibrosis.

Patent law is a big component of the practice. One young associate, who I assumed worked with the real estate team (they are located on my floor and that is where I have seen him most often), recently earned his LLM and studied classical piano as an undergrad at UConn. Another associate worked at the United States Patent Office and, before that, studied art history at USC.

One wonders how they came to the law: If life had not worked out for them the way they had planned, and patent law, which I understand to be a marketable and lucrative practice area, seemed a safer, better option, perhaps even easier than the pursuit and prosecution of art history or classical piano?

People hate lawyers, of course, but I do not hate my building-mates. From what I have seen, they are as pleasant a bunch as say, credit risk managers, charter-school teachers, or not-for-profit aquaculture lobbyists. Of course, the lawyers talk of their work a great deal, but that is usual. They talk also of family, of children, of movies they have seen or are going to see. They are rather polite to me in the elevator; me, who they have no particular reason to be especially polite to.

I don’t buy that lawyers are nasty people, I don’t buy the jokes, but I know that I am the exception and I am naive. Certainly, when they return to their offices, where I do not see them, they might be crazy animals, they might examine their witnesses with malice and derision, they might cleave workers of their pensions, assist in executing unsafe drilling practices in fragile ecosystems, plot, scheme, cajole, harass. They might do any of these things, and perhaps it is even likely. Though again, I wouldn’t know because I have not seen it or do I care to.

Paul Fusco, from RFK Funeral Train Rediscovered, 2008, Danzinger Projects, New York

Clementines

Jessica Todd Harper, Clementines, 2007, Cohen Amador Gallery, New York

Hell's Belles

By Trevor Dallas

William C. Rhoden wrote in the New York Times: “Why do we keep giving thoroughbred horse racing a pass?” He’s referring to the filly Eight Belles breaking down after the Kentucky Derby. “Why isn’t there more pressure to put the sport of kings under the umbrella of animal cruelty?” Why indeed? And while we’re at it, why don’t we take a hard look at short men driving $300,000 cars in an asphalt circles for hours on end? Or the outsized brutes who pummel one another on weekends, August through January? Cavemen on ice? The multi-billion dollar lottery where the nation gambles for a month on sham scholars whose only lasting contribution is to the lingua franca of scratchy sports-talk A.M. radio? Why do we give any of them a pass?

“The sport is at least as inhumane as greyhound racing and only a couple of steps removed from animal fighting.” Meanwhile, on the same day as Rhoden’s PETA pleading, the same section of the paper ran a piece on the Wachovia Championship, a golf tournament in Charlotte. It is an example of a civilized pastime. As Larry Dorman reports, Wachovia “outperks” other tournaments with gestures like hand-delivered invitations (distributed in Hawaii, with a Dom Pérignon lubricator), valet parking (for the caddies), and “monogramming the initials of a top golfer’s children on hotel pillows and towels.” As Phil Mickelson says: “Everything they’ve done here is the right way.”

This is Marie Antoinette stuff. Hugh Pedro McGreevey tells me that if things keep going the way they are – and they are – we’re going to blow up. H.P. thinks that soon we’ll be eating corn three meals a day and riding horses to work, those of us who have any. Think Cuba in Connecticut. If that’s true – and H.P.’s usually correct – then we’d better not extirpate the single remaining element of our society that has any equine knowledge. We’re going to need it.

Tomorrow I’m going out to the Joppa Farm point-to-point. This is the informal end of the spring hunt season, the antidote to twenty thousand spectators at the Hunt Cup two weeks ago. It takes the form of little girls racing Shetland ponies. My hostess writes that she’ll compete as well, riding as “the bug jockey on the favorite, Mardi Gras, the filly by Xerxes out of Whoopee, standing tall at eight hands. I’m praying that I don’t fall off the way everyone did last year.”

Where’s William Rhoden when we need him? Real horse people run the Joppa Farm point-to-point. Thoroughbreds watch from over pasture fences; kids’ parents trailer their ponies in from all over. Must all sport be Spartan, militaristic, and Manichean to matter? Or, perhaps, is it rather the case that those sports which actually do contain the realities of life and death – rather than those that only play it as mummery – have no choice but to strike an ironic pose?

Apropos of which: If your mint isn’t coming up at the end of the driveway, then go to the garden center and assemble a pot of it. Water it every day and keep it in a sunny spot. By Saturday week you’ll have enough to harvest for your cocktails. The word julep comes from the Persian for rosewater. People have all sorts of rituals around the drink – secret syrups and mysterious ingredients – but in reality, the mint julep is very green. Take a large amount of mint leaves and put them into a cup. Silver is best for various reasons – conductivity, cachet. The children’s baby cups do nicely if you don’t have a proper set. All those Jefferson cups you got as souvenirs from trips to Monticello and Williamsburg also work well. Fill the cup with the mint – there’s not too much mint. Add granular brown sugar. With the butt end of a wooden spoon, muddle the mint. The sugar gives the grit. A splash of bourbon helps create the slurry. A woman I once knew from Lexington – a turf woman – insisted on putting the resulting syrup in the freezer. It gives the cup a nice hoarfrosting. Crushed ice, an ample dose of bourbon, a small spritz of seltzer, some mint garnish, and a silver stirring spoon – it’s entirely therapeutic. It is the early herbs of spring, a view of the turf, the smell of onion grass, the sight of the jockeys’ silks. The horses dark with sweat. It is the dawn of life. It is the realization of certain death.

John Stanmeyer, Afghanistan, 2001-2002, Hasted Hunt Gallery, New York

True Story

By David Fitzsimmons

There is a man who stands outside the Vatican embassy every weekday afternoon, holding a sign that reads: The Pope Hides Pedophiles. He is very consistent, this white man of about sixty-five. It’s rain or shine for him. There were several warm days last week, for example, but there he stood on the sidewalk, shaking his big cardboard sign like a tambourine, newspaper strips like shingles stuck into the brim of his hat, protecting him from the sun.

And I was reminded of a certain story I came across in the newspaper one summer, a summer I was an intern at a small public relations firm. The job was exceedingly boring, the office a small one. Like all interns, I thought it would be a good way for me to build up my résumé so that I would be employable when I finished college. My job was to read newspapers and magazines to see if our clients had made it into print, which they never seemed to.

The first story I came across was about the murder of the head of the Swiss Guards, the ancient unit responsible for the Pope’s security. The man murdered was named Alois Estermann and he was discovered, along with his wife, a Venezuelan doctor, as well as another Swiss Guard, a young man named Cedric Tornay, in the entrance parlor of his apartment inside the Vatican walls.

It was not a major headline at the time; only later did the story gain steam – and eventually it was made it into a book called City of Secrets: The Truth Behind the Murders at the Vatican.

Later in the summer there was a story about a woman, an American doctor stationed in Antarctica, who had discovered a lump in her breast that turned out to be cancer. They couldn’t evacuate her from the South Pole because it was too cold for planes to land and so for a time she had to treat herself.

That story, too, got made into a book – the woman doctor wrote it! That one was called Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Story of Survival at the South Pole.

That same summer there was the beautiful Op-Ed piece in The New York Times about a never-delivered speech that William Safire wrote for Richard Nixon in the event of an Apollo XI catastrophe. While that essay didn’t turn into a book, it was included in a book, one about Neil Armstrong called First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong.

And of course, there was the crash that July of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane into the Atlantic: the search, the coverage; the funeral, the coverage.

The funny thing is this: While I remember all these headlines quite clearly as ones I read during a boring summer spent interning, only the latter three: the woman stuck in Antarctica, the Op-Ed piece, and the crash of John Kennedy Junior’s plane occurred that summer, the summer of 1999.

The matter of the murdered Swiss Guard – that happened one year before, in the late spring of 1998.

I am not old but already I am forgetting things, misplacing events or rearranging them for purposes of convenience or linearity or who knows what reasons? What am I to make of this?

If I am young and forgetting things, and therefore not to be trusted, then what of my friend the protestor, the local celebrity, who every day stands outside the Vatican embassy, deploring the Vatican and the Pope for hiding pedophiles? If he is more than twice my age (and he almost certainly is) then are we to believe anything he says?

And yet, it would be interesting to consider: If the motivation for his standing outside everyday is personal (that is, involving himself rather than something that happened to a child or a sibling), and if one were to ask him, and he were willing to answer, I would suspect that he would be able to recall in great detail the events that served as the germ for his crusade. He would know the names, the dates, the locations, the acts – all the important details.

And if he were to be wrong, if he were off inasmuch as one day, or even as much as a year, would we who see him every day then begin having a laugh at his expense, start referring to him as “the crazy guy”? Would we care less? Would we care not at all?

Let’s take a survey. It’ll be a survey of what is forgivable when it comes to Truth. It will be a Truth and Reconciliation survey. We’ll start with John Kennedy, Jr. and work our way backward to Alois Estermann and see what they have to say.

Fred Herzog, Magazine Man, 1959, Laurence Miller Gallery, New York

Charterhouse and Sorrel

By Gwen Morgan

A friend arrives from Beirut. Always stays here when he comes to town for meetings. Lebanon, about which I know next to nothing, except that it teeters – cosmopolitan, beautiful, vulnerable to every neighboring country, rife with car bombs, mortar fire, snipers – the fragile gateway to the Levant. My friend lives in the old city. Across from his office are lined a French bakery, a halal butcher, fruiterers, and a tea seller. The Corniche at sunset. Mt. Lebanon, where the last cedars of Lebanon exhale. In the summer, everyone leaves the hot torpor of the city for the hills with their cool breezes, rocky pastures, and fruit trees. Civil War. Rafik Hariri, prime minister, was assassinated by a truck bomb just when the country seemed again stable. Syria claims it had nothing to do with this, but who believes that? Then Hezbollah and Israel wreaked havoc in the south. The elections, what were they really? My friend smokes more than anyone I’ve ever seen. With our meals we have wine, then coffee.

He goes to Canyon Ranch to quit smoking and then to a Carthusian monastery. The Carthusians are a community of hermits. They have a communal silent meal from time to time and, on other occasions, equally as rarely, a half-hour conversation with one person. The rest of the time, as near as I can tell, they spend in their cells. A community of hermits. It is heartening to hear that such a contradiction lives and breathes, and is, if not thriving, surviving. Carthusian: It’s from Chartreuse, in honor of the place where St. Bruno came up with the idea. Two letters from Bruno remain: In one he professes his faith, and in the other he declares his contempt for the world, where he had previously been successful. In English, a Carthusian monastery is called a charterhouse.

He comes back (more meetings) on his way back to Beirut. He’s radiantly healthy, chewing a toothpick. In the time during which he resided at the spa and the monastery, it has been spring here. A moody and seductive spring of drenching rain and wind interspersed by days of clear sunlight. In the last three weeks the daffodils have gone, the red lipstick tulips, too, although the parrots and midnights hang on. The grass is covered with the pink snow of cherry blossoms, and the pear trees have started to set fruit. The azaleas go all exuberant, while the flowering dogwood balances in a moment of aristocratic perfection, its four-petal blossoms elegantly delicate against the sky. The fox has returned to her summer den to whelp another litter of pups, and at the very end of dusk, she lopes along the dark edge of trees and drives the fenced dogs crazy. Even the sorrel has grown up so quickly that I’ve had to harvest it once already.

Sorrel is tough, grows like a weed, and has a bite. It’s the oxalic acid that gives it its sharp taste. In high concentrations (rhubarb leaves, for instance), oxalic acid is poisonous, but in sorrel there’s just enough and, despite, or because of, that one dangerous element, the stuff is good for you. The 17th century Culpeper’s Herbal claims that it cools fever, cleanses wounds, and does just about everything else you could ask for. Grows almost anywhere, perennial, with an arrow-shaped leaf, but if you want to eat it, pick the leaves while they’re still young enough to look fresh and bright green. Make sorrel soup. Cream, potatoes, sorrel: comfort food with an edge. It balances precariously between opposing forces. It’s not Lebanon. This is an edge that anyone can live with. When you get it right, you can taste it.

Sorrel Soup

2 cups sorrel, chopped fine (in a food processor is easiest)
1 onion, chopped
1 small clove garlic, chopped
2-3 potatoes, peeled and cut up in 1/2 inch dice
4 cups chicken stock
2-3 cups water
2 cups half and half
¼ cup or more crème fraiche or heavy cream
salt, pepper
olive oil, butter

Heat 2 tbs of oil and put a tsp or so of butter in
Add onions and garlic and cook until translucent but not brown
Add sorrel and cook for 5 minutes
Add potatoes and mix
Add some salt
Add chicken stock and water and bring to a boil
Lower to simmer and cook until potatoes are soft
Add half and half and heat to just below boiling
Add crème fraiche or cream
Salt and pepper to taste.

You may puree it, but it’s not needed.
Serve hot or chilled.

Nubar Alexanian, Waterboarded 3, 2008, Caren Golden Fine Art, New York

Visiting

By David Fitzsimmons

Father comes to town. Father owns a small construction firm. Father wants David to return home, join the enterprise, perhaps one day take it over. David and Father are dissimilar in many ways. Father is broader and heavier and, even at this late date, stronger than David. Father is tougher than David, to be sure: His work requires it.

While Father is by trade a civil engineer, he spends most of his time fighting with real estate developers to get paid, which often involves banging the handset of his telephone against the desk saying things like: “Can you hear me now, motherfucker?” or “Hey, motherfucker, can you hear me?” or just hanging up the telephone and saying “Motherfuckers won’t pay? Well, fuck it. The subcontractors will have to file liens.”

David appreciates and is grateful to Father, but he simply doesn’t have the constitution for that sort of work, not to mention the fact that he has no faculty for business, mathematics, reading building schematics, arriving at complex estimates, submitting bids, and in turn executing on said bids.

Father is, of course, from Brooklyn, New York. He recently turned sixty and friends from his childhood came to visit for a party. They said Father was a tough motherfucker when he was young.

In regular life, it should be stated, Father is sweet and gregarious and likes to tell jokes and laugh a lot – not at all the man he is at work.

Father meets Girlfriend and David for a drink after work. All day he has been wandering around the city, going to museums (he is on his own for this trip). He went to The Phillips and fell asleep. Father carries a pen, his reading glasses, and a foldout map of Washington in the pocket of his shirt. His wallet is heavy as a brick. Girlfriend asks him about his day. He had a nice day. Father orders a Johnnie Walker Black. And then another.

He explains how hard it is running a company these days, how different it is from what it used to be. Things you can’t say, how careful one has to be, how politically correct. In order to illustrate what things were like way back when, Father tells a story about a “big job” (they all are) that a friend of his had been involved in back in New York.

The story is about how after the job was completed, the client wouldn’t pay the builder. Typical! The client owed something like $7 million. A year or two of building, then all the aggravation and negotiating and trying to come to terms to receive payment – “Why wouldn’t they pay?” Girlfriend interjects.

“Because they never fucking pay,” Father says.

Finally, there is a meeting in the city to settle the matter. The principal of the construction firm – a fat, tough old man – he goes into a conference room where the meeting is held with the client. His staff, all the guys who worked on the project, wait outside. And hour goes by. Then another. And another. Finally the old man comes out. He is weary-looking, but satisfied. He announces that they are leaving.

“What happened?” asks a young project assistant.

“We got a check,” says the old man.

“How much?” asks the project assistant.

“A million,” says the old man.

“A million?” exclaims the project assistant. “The job was for seven!”

The old man walks over to the young man, presses his fat belly up against him the way fat men do, and says, “Who the fuck are you?”

The young man says his name – Robert.

“Listen Bob,” says the old man, “we could wait years and never see our $7 million, or I can walk out today with $1 million in cash. A million fucking dollars. Do you know what I would do for a million dollars? I would fuck my mother for a million dollars.”

Father laughs at this. “You can’t talk like that these days,” he says, pulling his drink to his lips. Girlfriend smiles, but she doesn’t laugh.

The following day David takes Father to The National Building Museum and we see an exhibit on Frank Gehry. We go to The Arlington National Cemetery. We go to The Vietnam Memorial. We go to the Mall: from The Washington Monument up to the Capitol. Again, we go out to dinner. A few more drinks.

Sunday arrives and Father returns home.

On the bus on Monday, I speak to my British friend. It’s spring and he’s melancholy. He misses London and his family and friends. I say I understand. He says people in America don’t laugh as much as they do in the U.K. They’re more self-effacing there. Here, they’re ambitious, which is good, but they just don’t laugh as much.

Here, it’s important for a person to know how much it would take for him to fuck his own mother. $1 million? $2 million? $10 million? With the economy in recession and gas prices soaring, it seems a good time to take stock.

Brian Finke, Lily and Azriza, Air Asia, 2006, ClampArt, New York

Gray Lady

By Terry Gratuity

The New York Times online is shockingly good. The entire paper and all its archives have been made free. News is updated by the minute. The layout is a triumph of accessible and easily navigable design. Efforts to expand content with interactive graphics, videos, music samples, web logs, and the like are working out better than anyone could've anticipated. Every day reveals some new way of expanding coverage and offering new content that brilliantly illuminates prose in an unprecedented fashion. The fact is that www.nytimes.com can lay serious claim to being the best site on the web.

And if that wasn't enough, the paper may have finally found its tone. After decades of a certain pomposity (referring to the rock singer Meatloaf as "Mr. Loaf" comes to mind, but the faux-gentility extended beyond that), followed by a crazed dash into chattering first-person thumb-sucking in the 1990s, the Times may have at last found it's voice. The paper is demonstrating a certain wise, regal wit.

One need look no further than the great picture and caption that accompanied and April 19 article: Putin Denies Reports of Divorce; Newspaper Suspended. The art is a photograph of Ms. Kabayeva performing. She wears the obligatory spangles and nude hose. One hand is above her head; the other is outstretched and cradling a shiny red ball. Her left leg is lifted and fully flexed. Her toes are tucked beneath her chin. The deck reads: "Alina Kabayeva in 2006 at the Rhythmic Gymnastics European Championships. She has since retired and now holds a seat in Russia’s Parliament."

Does it get any better than this? The red ball, the literal proof that she can bend her legs freakishly behind her. The outfit. Note, too, that it's not just gymnastics. It's "rhythmic gymnastics." Well, you may say, of course, she's retired. And 2006 was a long time ago. Where else should she be, but in Russia's parliament? No doubt this limber twenty-four-year-old policy maven has mastered the vitals of Russian political life: Where to buy cool furs, what to say when speaking with the teenage prostitute companion of billionaire thug while at the symphony (hint: you don't stop talking just because the music has begun), and, of course, rocking a muscle-bound 56-year-old dictator's world.

Look at the face, the red bowling ball-like object, the right arm extended inadvertent parody of a fascist salute. As a nation we may be in decline, but some facts remain: China and Russia still can make the U.S. look damn classy. And our paper of record is reaching new highs, even as its bleeds money. God bless America.

Mark Yankus, Midtown, NYC, 2004, ClampArt, New York

California Roll

By Trevor Dallas

Was having sushi at my favorite counter in the Belvedere District. The chef was making a roll that, with Japanese wit, was absurdly fat and called Vegetarian. “What are people eating in Tokyo?” I asked him. He had returned recently from a trip. “You know what it is?” he asked. “California roll.” The new wave of Japanese tourists had taken California rolls home, and they’d become a trend. I understood. I’ve eaten my fair share of California rolls. There is comfort in crab-a-like. It’s a fishy cheese wiz. As I ate I thought about Tokyo seven-seaters serving California rolls, inside out, to discerning trendsetters imagining an America as distant from metaphysical reality as the Tokyo I conjured at that moment over my mackerel slice, lemon juice, and pencil shaving of scallion. The California roll, so legend has it, was born in the seventies by an itinerant sushi chef in L.A. The Buddhist monk Atisha, who by greatly simplifying Buddhist teachings into a number of pithy and memorable sayings, was able to persuade the rowdy and licentious Tibetans, previously unmoved by the subtleties of Buddhist philosophy, to the eightfold path. Similarly, the California roll, with its haddock pasteurized and nori wrapper hidden, began the great conversion of the North Americans toward sushi. The result, as was the case with Tibet, was mixed. On the one hand, credible sushi counters, similar to the one I sat at, abounded. On the other, it paved the way for veggie rolls – the chublike obscenity, certain to offend carnivore and herbivore alike, being carted off before me. North America. California. California roll. I thought: there is California roll, the food, and there is California roll, the vehicular maneuver. I’d been thinking a lot about California rolls, motor vehicle department, recently. After driving for a while in Rome, it dawned on me that impressionistic driving was not the product of an anarchic and possibly disordered mind; rather, it was something aesthetic. The Department of Motor Vehicles articulates “rules of the road,” which is dogma cloaked in the rhetoric of engineering: maximal flow, scales of efficiency, and minimization of deleterious contact. In practice, this optimization becomes nothing more than directives for policing. As they constrict the road for enforcement’s sake, they strip driving down to computational language. So much is lost. Consider the California roll: the driver approaches the stop sign. As she decelerates, she considers her next vector, a ninety-degree turn to the right. At that moment in her steady deceleration when she has both reached the beginning of her rotation and ascertained that her new path is free from interference, she begins to both turn and to accelerate, preferably at a rate directly inversely proportional to that with which she has decelerated toward the intersection. When perfectly executed, it is a thing of beauty and economy.

I first learned the California roll, I think, from Peyton Collingsworth’s mother. Peyton had beautiful hair and green eyes. She had a long and articulated scar that ran on the interior of her patella. It was the result of a deep dig at volleyball that led to collision with a hidden sprinkler head. The sprinklers were round and burnished brass then. Scars were frowned on at that time and place – as were any physical imperfections on girls as beautiful as Peyton. She displayed hers proudly. It made her more beautiful still. Her family lived in the Polo Grounds. Her father was an insurance executive. Mrs. Collingsworth – Pamela – drove her automatic transmission car with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. Whether it was from fear, ignorance, or a special economy, I don’t know. I never drove with her but I heard the stories from Peyton and her friends. Peyton had a regular Vedic assemblage of stories – I called it the Peyton Canon. In one, her mother was forever California rolling one stop sign or another in the Polo Grounds and forever being pulled over by one of the village police, in their menacing black-and-white cruisers. They always gave Mrs. Collingsworth a ticket, as much as she pleaded, as much as she flirted, as pretty as she looked, probably as old then as I am now. They gave her a ticket every time.

I thought of Peyton Collingsworth last weekend while cleaning out a box of old belongings. A hairpin fell from the folded cardboard flaps at the bottom. It wasn’t a bobby pin, stiff, with one side undulating and the other flat. It was open, slender, and U-shaped, gently wavy along both legs. It was pliant. Peyton would come to my house unexpectedly late at night and tap on the same window that was left cracked open for the barn cat. I’d go around to the garden door and let her in. She’d spend fifteen minutes or thirty, lying with me in my bed and talking. She wasn’t much of a kisser; neither was she one for getting out of her clothes. She liked to talk. On her way from one place to another, she always had a story – something from the evolving canon – to share. We would lie in the dark in my bed, arm in arm, and she would tell me. Every morning after she visited I would find a hairpin or two in my bed. Oh, the nostalgia – how did it get so far away so quickly, the ship under sail from the dock, the brown Mercedes sedan rolling around the corner and accelerating – down a road that no longer exists – away? Kenko writes of the love lost: “The things that they used have no heart, yet remain unchanged throughout the long, long years. A melancholy reflection.”

Nicole Belle, Untitled, 2007, FOUND Gallery, Los Angeles

Any Man Having Great Fun

By Terry Gratuity

More on Leonard Michaels from the Paris Review.

5) "I hate to use adverbs because of the ‘ly’ endings. They seem like sloppy trailers." The degree to which contemporary writers passionately hate adverbs fascinates me: The way they violently eschew them, the fury with which editors and teachers frantically pluck them out of prose. The whole thing is worthy of more notice. Why do the "LY" words strike the contemporary mind as not just dreadful, but as horribly, gruesomely, and brutally bad?

6) "Life is never apprehended with such fullness and such consistence of feeling over as long a period of time as you typically find in novels. Maybe that's because novels want to tell you how to live, but people only live from one day to the next. They don't generally care about this great apprehension of the flow of things. They aren't so acquisitive of sheer being, so devouring. But that is what one tends to take away from a novel, this sort of accumulation, or experience of accumulation, that is not available in life itself." Writers duly note that our lives don't seem to have plots. Our lives lack clear-cut morals and meanings – more than just writers have noted this. But Michaels takes it a step forward into further oblivion. The bucket has a hole in it. We pour our experience in and it just streams out. There's no weight. We take in experience and piss it out. We live in the eternal present and the novel deludes us into thinking that we're building on a past, a burgeoning past.

7) Michaels makes arguments for Kafka's diaries, Montaigne's essays, Le Rochefoucauld's maxims, and George Herbert's poetry. Then we get this sentence: "On the other hand, Sentimental Education, a long novel, is one of the best books I've ever read." Flaubert's last complete novel is a key text in the literature of an eternal present. It is the great novel of lazy entropy. It is the 19th century masterpiece where little adds up. The narrator finds himself at the end of it more than halfway through a life, compromised, bewildered, and haunted.

8) "The publisher should have attached a warning to the cover: This book is not to be read by morons or lunatics. But they'd never do anything that might kill sales." This is Michaels bitching about the reception his The Men's Club received. Paris Review has pulled the quote in beige and blue for the little bookmark they include with the issue. [Magazines that come with their own bookmarks is a subject for another day.] On the reverse of the bookmark is an advertisement for something called The Raleigh: On The Ocean. Evidently a hotel. The irony cuts.

9) "I was uninterested in Kennedy and his circle. When Bob Dylan was big, I preferred the Coasters. I've never gotten with it. I lack a sensibility that quivers at change in the cultural atmosphere."

10) On Hollywood: "I should say, however, that I had more fun hanging around New York, Berkeley, and L.A. with Howard Gottfried, the producer, than I've ever had with anyone, except my other producer friend, Tom Luddy. I know plenty of people who live the good life, but very few outside the movie business know how to make life into a continuous, high-quality entertainment, despite serious worries and very hard work. In my experience, any man having great fun is probably about to get divorced."

In my experience, any man having great fun is probably about to get divorced.

I prize wit over wisdom, but then, I'm not married.

Michael Dweck, Mermaid, 2007

The Pope's Whiskers

By David Fitzsimmons

The Pope was here.

Tuesday, the day of his arrival, I began my usual afternoon lap around the esplanade at the Kennedy Center. If you have never done this – walked the grounds there – you ought to. It’s a beautiful building and the esplanade is too: wide and white, like the Halls of Justice.

As I rounded the northwest corner, I came on a security guard. I thought that he was simply on break: He was standing with his arms on the railing, looking out at the Potomac River. The security guard stopped me and asked me who I was.

It is a rare thing to be asked that outright: Who are you?

I didn’t know whether to be funny or to be indignant, but because I avoid confrontation whenever possible, I thought I would be funny. Instead I said perhaps the dumbest thing that I’ve said in some time (which is hard to assess when one says foolish things all the time).

I said: “I’m me. It’s me. David Fitzsimmons.”

It didn’t make any sense, I guess, but it was all I could think to say.

The security guard (I took him to be a Nigerian, by his accent) made a gesture with his arms and shook his head and said, “No, no. I’m sorry. No.”

“I can’t walk?”

“No. The Pope, man. The Pope.”

Then I understood. You see, the western esplanade of the Kennedy Center overlooks the GW Parkway, likely where the Pope would drive up from Andrews Air Force Base, and they didn’t want anyone to have what I supposed would be a terrific shot.

Wednesday, I went to see my ENT doctor about a lingering sinus infection. This has been going on for several months and involved pressure and stuffiness and tenderness of my upper and maxillary sinuses.

At the first appointment, I described my symptoms. He prescribed some medicines for me; I took them. For the follow-up, he ordered a CT scan to see how things were progressing. When I went back, we looked at the scan and saw that the medicine had not worked. There were gray areas (inflammation), which should have been black. He upped the strength of the medicine (antibiotics and steroids) and ordered me back two weeks later. At the end of that visit he said, stay on the medicine, and then gave me more medicine. Come back in two weeks, he said. This was the visit I was on now, again with another CT scan, after which I was placed in a room to wait for him.

And though I knew that I had nothing more than inflamed sinuses, I became concerned. The longer I waited in the room, the longer I read Newsweek (stories about the Presidential race, an article by Karl Rove on how to treat your delegates). My doctor was in the room next-door, I could hear him, speaking in a low and serious voice to a woman. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I started worrying that he was telling her dire news, and that she was, in turn, asking dire questions. And then I worried that he would leave her room, look at my scans, and bring me dire news, something involving growths or lumps, which “concerned” him. Doctors say that sort of thing all the time: concerned.

The doctor left the examining room next to mine and went to look at my scans. They were hanging on one of those lighted panels in the hallway. He came in and shook my hand (he has the hands of an orthopod) and said he was frustrated that the inflammation had not gone down. I asked him immediately if he thought it was anything more exotic. He said no, they see this sort of thing all the time. It’s annoying but not serious.

He told me to stop taking antibiotics and to instead focus on decreasing the inflammation. He wrote prescriptions and I was relieved.

Thursday, after having administered myself a sinus irrigation, sprayed my nose with a corticosteroid, and swallowed 1200 mg of an over-the-counter expectorant, I ate lunch at the Kennedy Center.

The Pope was still in town, but he was busy with a Mass down at RFK Stadium. After I ate, I did my walk. No one was there to prevent me.

I thought of a situation whereby the Pope would be returning, this time south on the GW parkway, heading back to his plane. In this different situation, in this scene, I had received unwelcome news from my doctor, as patients in that doctor’s office likely would throughout the day and days to come.

If that had been the case, had bad news been delivered to me, you can be sure that I would have thrown down whatever security guard was shuffling me away, and, in spite of all -- my religion or lack thereof, my transgressions or lack thereof, his transgressions, and the church’s -- I would have leaned over the railing and shouted to the Pope: I’m me! It’s me, David! Can you help me, Holy Father? Please!

Brad Moore, 405 & Magnolia, Point of View Gallery, New York

Rotating a Phonograph Record To and Fro

From A Glossary of Literary Terms, Ninth Edition, Abrams and Harpham (Wadsworth):

The most widely known and practiced performance poetry is rap, an element in hip-hop; the latter term since the 1980s has come to designate a cultural movement among urban African-American youths that originated in New York and was marked by distinctive clothing, graffiti, break dancing, and music, especially rap. The verbal component, technically speaking, consists of an irregular meter, in verse lines of variable length and a varying number of mainly sequential rhymes. “To rap” is slang for “to talk,” and rap verse is spoken, in a heavily stressed beat, over an accompaniment of bass, percussion, and sometimes other musical instruments. Often the accompaniment is punctuated by “scratching” (the sounds made by rotating a phonograph record to and fro on a turntable so that the needle moved back and forth in the groove) and by “sampling” (the insertion of fragments of recorded music). In the mode known as freestyling or battle-rapping, rap verses are improvised during performance, often in competitions between rival rappers. A rapper’s distinctive style is called his or her “flow.”

In its early years rap usually conveyed a contentious and anti-establishment message, and in the 1980s the genre came to be dominated by the highly aggressive form, originating on the West Coast, called gansta rap (“gangster rap”), which flaunted its transgressive stance against propriety, law, and conventional morality by celebrating violence, misogyny, homophobia, and a candid desire for material goods and sex. In recent years rap has achieved a remarkable and wide-ranging popularity.

Stephen Connolly, Film for Tom, 2005, Courtesy of Bloomberg SPACE, London

Slithering Girls

By Terry Gratuity

Before leaving terrestrial earth for that infamous writers colony in the sky, Leonard Michaels, who died in 2003, authored a fine short memoir, Sylvia, a rather disappointing novel, The Men's Club, and a few terrific short story collections for which he should be better known. I Would Have Saved Them If I Could is the clear pinnacle. It is a strange, witty, and exhilarating collection that features “In The Fifties,” one of the great short stories in English.

The world's full of dead people, but few magazines bother to solicit their opinions on matters literary. It is thus a pleasure to find that the spring Paris Review has bucked the sad favoritism of our trend-mad society to feature an interview with the late Michaels. Some highlights, and some rather strange bits, from the interview follow.

1) The Q&A was conducted in 1987. It was then "never published." The Paris Review files it in something called “Archive” and titles the piece "Leonard Michaels: The Lost Interview." Clearly there's a story here that we're not getting. Why was it not published? The interview was made with the intention of publication not long after it was conducted. What happened? It'd be nice to know.

2) The novelist Mona Simpson is quoted as saying Michael's work "stands alongside those of the best of his Jewish contemporaries—Grace Paley and Philip Roth." In fairness to Simpson, perhaps urban Jews writing about the adventures their genitals got them into isn't what does it for her as art. Hey, that's fair. Totally valid. Simpson, a former Michaels student, isn’t expected to venerate him, but still. This is the best line that the Paris Review could dig up?

3) Michaels holds forth on why Brits maintain the belles-lettres, man-of-letters tradition, while the Americans don't. "In England, a writers writes; in America, usually, he writes this or that, not this and that. Can you imagine Hemingway schlepping his weight through a book review? Your question must have touched a nerve. I'm slithering."

4) The interviewer quotes Faulkner: "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode To A Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies." Michaels responds, "Would he say the same about little girls? He sounds like a moral midget having a tizzy."

Little girls?

Elizabeth Opalenik, Outer Light, 2005, Courtesy of David Weinberg Gallery, Chicago

Comforter

By David Fitzsimmons

I overhear a conversation between two attorneys in the cafeteria. Two women, one is perhaps thirty-four, the other ten years older. I will call the younger one Mindy. I will call the older one Deb. Mindy is reading an email from her Blackberry. They are both having the white bean soup and side salads. The email Mindy reads to Deb is from her mother-in-law. From what I gather, it involves a comforter: the source of a magnificent argument, the kind of argument that divides families.

She reads: “'I meant the comforter to be a gift given in kindness and serendipity.'”

“She used ‘serendipity’ wrong. What an idiot,” Mindy says.

She continues to read about the comforter. Deb stops eating and is simply listening. This is something important.

Another woman joins them. I will call her Jennifer. It turns out that Jennifer is the actual one with the mother-in-law problem. Mindy has simply been relating the tragic story, which she learned from her Blackberry.

"I know,” Jennifer says. “Can you fucking believe that? I hate her,” she says. “I can’t tell you how much I hate her.”

The two other women empathize. Why won’t her husband stand up to his mother in law? Why won’t he say anything? Why should the burden fall on Jennifer’s shoulders? The mother-in-law, let’s call her Blanche (I know, I know, but surely she is a Blanche: a heavy red-faced Virginian), she is overstepping her bounds with the comforter.

“This is my family,” Jennifer says.

The two other women tell her what she would do. Mindy says she wouldn’t stand for this comforter business one second. Not one second. She would take the comforter in front of her son and burn it, just to make the point to the whole family that she is in charge.

I look at Jennifer. She likely does tax litigation or international trade law, likely has important responsibilities, certainly makes a good living, probably went to a good law school, and in spite of all that, she has been brought low by a mother-in-law and some incident involving a comforter – the specifics of which I am not able to discern.

What am I to make of all this? How are we to live in a world where mothers-in-law are imposing their unwanted comforters on our children, are involving themselves in the private rooms of our lives where they do not belong? Why won’t our husbands stand up to their mothers? Would I, if I were a husband, stand up to my mother, if she were to do something as inappropriate as, say, give my little boy (I will call my imagined little boy Tom) a comforter – something which has sentimental value to my mother, an article that might have been passed onto her, maybe since before the War: the comforter as an heirloom, then, an article my mother would have wanted Tom to have, but which, for whatever reason, my wife (I will call her Eleanor) doesn’t appreciate, is threatened by, and felt my mom was intruding.

Today, The New York Times reports that Taliban insurgents attacked a police checkpoint north of the city, killing 11 police officers. There is a Dengue fever outbreak in Rio de Janeiro; it has killed at least 80 people. Islamic militants murdered four teachers in a Somali town. The Pope is coming to Washington. His visit is sure to cause major traffic problems, but President Bush is pulling out all the stops and plans to greet him personally at Andrews Air Force Base.

Erwin Olaf, Caroline, 2007, Courtesy of Galerie Magda Danysz, Paris

Budding Boughs About To Blossom

By David Fitzsimmons

A German at the bus stop this morning. She is a brunette, medium height and build, and she is talking on the phone with someone. I cannot tell who: a boyfriend, her boss, a friend? She is a little younger than I am, not especially pretty, but I have seen what the Germans do. There is nothing sick or profane in the world that one could ever think of that the Germans have not done before, not done better, not done with élan. Swapping and transference. Man-to-woman or man-to-man or woman-to-woman. The snowball. The cream pie. There is one video that I have forever been unable to delete from my hard drive. At this point, I keep it for sentimentality’s sake. It is really quite something, if you have never seen it. In it, these Germans, none of them particularly attractive (but that’s not the point, is it?), seven of them, or more – are caught depositing and re-depositing, licking and sucking – bodies that have been tanned under sunlamps, bodies that have been waxed up for the occasion. The Germans have done something special. Angela Merkel should establish a holiday.

The German girl gets on the bus before me, or perhaps I don’t notice her at all, for I am immediately engaged with my friends from the bus – two men my age. One is a Brit, who we are certain is royalty. Went to Cambridge, then came stateside to attend an Ivy. Got two advanced degrees there, now is a banker and is in all ways a lovely chap: cheerful, kind. I am pleased to think of us as friends, and, if not friends, then friendly. The other is a lawyer (who isn’t a lawyer in Washington? – there are lawyers, consultants, not-for-profit aide workers, and then what I have heard referred to as “Hill People” – that is, young professionals working on Capitol Hill – they are a nice looking bunch, but beware – they have intransigent opinions). The lawyer is also a pleasant guy.

We have met for happy hours, the lawyer and I, and we have brought along our significant others. In the mornings, naturally, we talk about the bus ride the previous night, our misadventures. Last night, the bus didn’t come at all (a fuel leak near the Pan-American Health Organization building), and the lawyer and I ended up taking a cab. A strange man who works at State joined us. We see him all the time, and he has tried to form similar relationships with the bus-community, but, because he is strange, he has failed. Because the lawyer and the Brit own homes, they talk about property taxes and how they are separately appealing their tax increases and how they fear the values of their homes will drop. I listen, sitting across from them. What will we do this weekend? The Brit is beginning a home remodel project and the lawyer – his wife is out of town and so he will sleep. But the cherry blossoms are still in bloom, I think, and it may be worth it to make a trek downtown, in spite of the crowds. The Brit encourages me emphatically to do it, do it early in the morning with a Thermos of coffee, that’s the best way. He should write copy for, well, anything.

Several seats back there is my Belarus friend, a tall, bleach-blond woman a couple years younger than me. I know two Russians, her and another – I call them that but I am not sure that is right. Belarusian? Is that right? They are a frugal group of people, it seems. And yet, they like to shop. Love it. A gossipy bunch, too.

Washington is one of the places where everyone truly is from someplace else, but more interestingly, from somewhere else in the world. It is foreign to me. There is a durability they possess that I don’t. I envy it. The Brit travels for work to Mongolia, to India, to Norway, and speaks of it as if it were only a little more difficult than our morning commute. He has never spoken of travel to Germany and he has never spoken of travel to Japan. The Japanese, now there is a group of people. Our bus clique is absent of Japanese, it seems, and the worse for it, in my opinion. Oh God, the Japanese – what they do! The Germans have nothing on them.

More Jill Lepore

By Mischa Henry

Jill Lepore writes: “Today, publishers figure that men buy the great majority of popular history books; most fiction buyers are women.” Are Blue Miracle: New York Giants, Super Bowl Champions and German Weaponry of World War II history? Are cozy mysteries and belly-strokers like Saying Yes To The Boss really fiction? And if fingers-in-your-pants Romances really are fiction, aren't then sub-hunt Thrillas as well? What about all those books with four-color ads featuring some muscle-headed guy floating near the cover of his latest foil-stamped junker? It invariably stands proudly atop a pile of four or five other foil-stamped brutes, all with their titles in raised print for the emotionally blind. Who buys those? Jill Lepore?

Poor Peg Seltzer

By Mischa Henry

Poor Peg Seltzer. She is the victim of having committed no crime. And now Harvard historian Jill Lepore has used poor Peg as the peg for a New Yorker piece. Lepore’s main agenda is to push back against Brown historian Gordon Wood for his review of her book on King Philips’s War. Wood was mainly gentle with her, particularly given the crashing difference between them as historians. In her piece, Lepore returns the professional courtesy. Instead, it’s poor Peg Seltzer who she singles out for a lashing. “Jones,” Lepore sputters, “also known as Margaret Seltzer, tried to pass off a gangland bildungsroman as the story of her life. Pulped days after it was published, the book, titled Love and Consequences, is a fraud; [Henry Fielding’s] Tom Jones is not. Fielding was playing; Seltzer was just lying.”

Lepore argues, essentially, that novels can be useful to historians. Because Fielding is useful to her, he is “playing.” Because Seltzer is the competition, she’s a scoundrel. Lepore’s glee at Seltzer’s “pulping,” is particularly odd. Lepore believes that fiction “can do what history doesn’t but should…it is the history of obscure men. Who are these obscure men? Well, a lot of them are women.” Just not Peg Seltzer. So what if Seltzer had reasons for obscuring her identity? So what if her supposedly privileged and white upbringing wasn’t so happy? So what if Seltzer’s own sister ratted her out? Who cares? Whatever her obscure story is, it’s not the kind of obscure story that matters to Harvard historian Jill Lepore.

Besides missing the point about Peg Seltzer, Lepore is completely wrong, of course, about Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe. She’s quick to Defoe’s rescue for charges of the same sort as Seltzer’s. Defoe claimed Robinson Crusoe to have been “Written by Himself.” Defoe’s name appeared nowhere on the first edition. “This was a lie,” Lepore writes, “but not a hoax.” A different “lie,” it appears, than Seltzer’s. Defoe had multiplex reasons for not wanting his name to appear. One of them, though not the only one, was to make money selling the book. The fact that Seltzer did precisely the same, and did it for a complicated set of personal reasons, doesn’t impress a mind like Lepore’s. Her agenda is to advance her own career by way of burnishing her name in the New Yorker. She is a historian who, as Wood puts it, does “not recount events and tell stories.” She is also a budding novelist. She has an upcoming book called Blindspot, written with Jane Kamensky. “Peopled not only with the celebrated Sons of Liberty but also with revolutionary Boston’s unsung inhabitants—women and servants, hawkers and rogues and pickpockets,” the pre-pub states, “Blindspot is both prodigiously learned and lush with the bawdy sensibility of the eighteenth century. It restores the humanity, the humor, and the sex to the story of the American Revolution.” Gangland memoirists need not apply.

While Lepore was dispatching Peg Seltzer as a writer of “fake memoirs” (whatever a “real” example of the form might be) another famous hoax, though one with a distinctly different profit outcome, was visiting Baltimore. Pumping his own brand of malarkey (at a ticket price of $40-$60 a head) Frank McCourt told a reverent crowd that he was writing a novel. Why? So that his greedy ex-wives couldn’t sue him for telling “the truth.”

Sea Devils

By Trevor Dallas

Had a drink with H.P. McGreevey at Parkway Pharmacy a while ago. He was exercised, as he often is, by the report he had heard of a fish that after mating becomes completely absorbed by the female. It was a metaphor, he ranted, for all that is wrong with society today: Feckless males, willing to allow themselves to be absorbed wholly by the feminine for one “Fuck!” he yelled. He smashed the bar and spilled his drink.

“Never a tale suffers in the telling,” McGreevey’s own father says of him. Imagine, then, my surprise when, while reading through a stack of old New York Reviews, I came across the following in a review by Tim Flannery:

"The first time that a male black sea devil meets his much larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a fetus-like dependent who receives from his mate's blood all the food, oxygen, and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependence is a loss of function in all of his organs except his testicles, but even these, it seems, are stimulated to action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male sea devil simply vanishes."

McGreevey’s a bear when it comes to sex. For him it’s purely transactional interaction, usually achieved by means of naked shorting. His complex mind is tortured by the idea of Finnish stewardesses, shorn. Of course the black sea devil would appeal to him as metaphor. No matter the fish: Isn’t even the proud chub just a flexy sea devil, waiting to be emasculated? Aren’t all men, on the penetration of darkness, prone to be absorbed?

When I read the description, I wondered. What if the black sea devil, inhabitant of the benthic abyss, has it figured out? He glides slowly through the dark, under the weight of all time, until he comes upon a spheric attraction. What draws him? The spangle-flash of her luminescence? A scent like plain gelatin? The crackle of ice in a cocktail? Whatever, he goes to her, he bites, attaches, penetrates. And therein follows a protracted lovemaking, glacially slow and deeply profound. Beneath the pressure of a hundred worlds, he becomes the complete object of her affection. She feeds him, shelters him. In time, she comes to breathe for him. Slowly he feels himself falling into her, his arms, his legs disappearing. They are lip to lip, chest to chest, in an ethereal embrace that does not end. A superhuman glow envelops him. He begins to effervesce into a swoon of complete passion. He is manhood only: pure, focused, singular. His last sensation is a powerful stirring and a heat such as he has never encountered. It is the last thing he feels, and then he is gone.

Mary-Beth Thielhelm, Black Sage Sea, 2007, Courtesy of Sears- Peyton Gallery, New York

Lucky Number

From the Gnome of the Rhondda: If you dreamed of jayhawks, curry, and barbecue two ways your lucky numbers are: 2, 21, 39, 62, 69.

On Receiving Financial Advice in Vail

By Hugh Pedro McGreevey

Where: Passed out in a snow bank near The Red Lion (1:00 a.m., MST).

Why: Overdid it at The Club. Whipped into drinking frenzy by a bard/entertainer called “The Good Times Guy” after he got “Sky Sluts” (i.e. airline stewardesses) to remove their over-garments.

Resuscitated By: James P. McManus, Director, Brookfield Trading, High Yield Desk.

What He Said: “Jesus, H.P., you haven’t looked this pathetic since Youth Hockey League when you had to skate with a chair.”

What I said: “Who are you?”

What We Discussed: Getting long silver. Shorting the dollar. Going long on energy stocks.

His Gist: “The middle class are going to die, H.P. They won’t be able to afford staples, food and milk. Commodity prices are going to the moon. American stability is going to zero. Don’t listen to me. Listen to Jim Rogers, Elliot Prechter. People smarter than us by eons. People that don’t party in snow banks.

H.P.’s Summary: Rich people want to help you. You just have to appear helpless in a place where they happen to ski. For this, you do need “some” money. Consider it an investment in your future. The key is: When you get there, don’t look for them.

McManus’s Parting Words: “I’m going to a party at my chalet with some Swiss supermodels, but good seeing you H.P., keep in touch.”

How I Know at Least Part of What McManus Said Was True: Vail was packed with Euro-trash and hedge fund plutocrats. The difference is this: On the triple chair to Outer Mongolia, an ex-ranked tennis tour professional from Austria invited me to his place in Rio de Janeiro. He promised that we would party together like rock stars. Which tells me two things: 1. The dollar is weak. 2. Americans will share financial advice, but remain stingy, Midwestern shopkeepers at heart.

John Huggins, Aspen #10, 2007, Sears Peyton Gallery, New York