Eat, Drink, Smoke in Denver – About.com

Beef tartare at ChoLon, Denver.

A new feature package on About.com which covers eating, dining and eating your smoke in Colorado:

• Craft Beer in Denver
• Denver Dining Picks
• Marijuana Edibles in Denver
• The Cruise Room at The Oxford Hotel
• Food Festivals in Colorado Ski Country
• The Westin Riverfront Resort & Spa in Beaver Creek

Of Essay Writing and Myth Making

For an essay in progress, I’m reading A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong.

She writes about myth, as in the ancient stories told to explain the human experience and its meaning, and not myth, as it is commonly used today as a synonym for “lie”.  It’s striking me that literary essays and myths have a great deal in common.

Consider:

•  Myths [essays] place life in a larger setting, revealing underlying patterns and meaning. They often “spring from profound anxiety about essentially practical problems, which cannot be assuaged by purely logical arguments.” They deal with complicated emotions.
• Myths [essays] express the innate sense that there is more to human beings and the natural world than meets the eye.
• Myths [essays] are concerned with what an event meant. “Helping us get beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and glimpse the core of reality.”
• The most powerful myths [essays] are about extremity. They are about the unknown. They look “into the heart of a great silence.”
• Myths [essays] are not told for their own sake. They show us how we should live.  They are only effective if they provide a new insight, and force us to change our minds and thoughts.

My comparison isn’t as neat as it seems, though. For instance, Armstrong writes that a myth is meaningless without its attending ritual, often, it seems, involving sacrifice and ordeals. Unless this refers to the struggle of the essayist herself, I think this is something of chasm between myth and essay.

As well, there’s the niggling problem of “fact” in literary essay. A myth, in Armstrong’s sense is a story that exists somewhere outside the common definition of “truth”. It’s a story that’s both accurate and not really factual. Which is for some a totally reasonable definition of an essay or a memoir, for others, a total anathema. (This is major theme in a forthcoming book I’m really excited to read, The Lifespan of a Fact.)

As for me, although I recognize the various shortcomings of fact as a concept,  I’m generally a fact fan, since I come from journalism, and also because I think facts are an interesting and important artistic constraint. But I understand the other perspective. And if an essay and a myth can fulfill the same function for society, I wonder what that means for the importance of “fact” in essay.

 

Canadian Honey — About.com

Honey, slowly spooned into a bar glass — could there be anything quite so lovely?

From my perch at the pounded metal bar at TOCA at the Ritz Carlton, I could not think of a serious competitor for the beauty of that backlit pale amber syrup.

While the smartly dressed clinched their coats and whooshed through a glass revolving door into a blue Toronto evening, the bartender poured Bombay Sapphire gin and Angostura Bitters into the glass and mixed vigorously with a long spoon. He produced a martini glass, chilled with a flourish of liquid nitro smoke, applied the garnish of lemon peel.

 

He waited for me to take a sip. I said I found the drink very comforting; did not say that I was lost in nostalgia. For while some families draw together around a holiday ham, or perhaps a plate of chocolate chip cookies, mine came together over its official cocktail, a gin and tonic, and, in less festive times, the official remedy for colds, a “tea” made with more honey than water.

Never had I thought to combine the two beverages, although the idea is quite an old one. During U.S. Prohibition, when “gin” was as often as not a homemade concoction of cheap grain alcohol and juniper berry juice, honey and lemon masked the harsh flavor and scent of the makeshift spirit.

“The bee’s knees,” is how a flapper might have described this warm and comforting concoction, using a popular phrase in the 1920s that meant “excellent”. TOCA’s Bitter Bombay Bee is a modern variation of the classic cocktail that became known as Bee’s Knees. And it was excellent indeed.

Although maple syrup is the iconic Canadian sweetener, local honey is a surprisingly common ingredient in many of the country’s best foods and culinary experiences.

Read on as I follow the honey trail in  Toronto, Nova Scotia (pictured above), Vancouver, Montreal, and Calgary.

Hawaii – About.com, Perceptive Travel

Sunset from the cottages at Travaasa, Hana, Maui, Hawaii, the Pacific Ocean, the United States.  This was the last trip of 2011 for me, and it was a very good one.

Many more stories are coming from this trip — in the works, a story of a mule that hated me, and a love affair with taro –  but a few pieces already rolled:

• Molokai Sunset and Afterglow Everyone knows that Hawaii’s got some spectacular sunsets; fewer know why.
• Encountering Pearl Harbor: December 7^th, 1941 was also at its start a day like any other, a day when a wrench was tucked into a work belt, a gun slid into a holster…
• Food Diaries: Oahu, Waikiki Beach, Maui, more Maui, and Molokai.

Impossibly Elastic Sexual Violence

This has been bugging me ever since I read it.

A new CDC study attempts to quantify the number of people in the United States who have been a victim of rape and sexual violence, which includes stalking and “intimate partner violence”, a broader definition of domestic violence, and coercion involving reproductive health.

The report doesn’t suggest that anyone lump all these categories together, but in a take down on the methodology in The Washington Post, Christina Huff Sommers does just that and totes the categories, arriving, of course, at a very high number. She goes on to claim that the number of people who are counted as being a victim of some sort in this study is overdramatic, overstated, way too high — “comparable to war-stricken Congo.”  She argues that the methodology has been infested by feminist theory and that the CDC should recall the report.

This is the part that amazed me the most:

In a telephone survey with a 30 percent response rate, interviewers did not ask participants whether they had been raped. Instead of such straightforward questions, the CDC researchers described a series of sexual encounters and then they determined whether the responses indicated sexual violation. A sample of 9,086 women was asked, for example, “When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had vaginal sex with you?” A majority of the 1.3 million women (61.5 percent) the CDC projected as rape victims in 2010 experienced this sort of “alcohol or drug facilitated penetration.”

What does that mean? If a woman was unconscious or severely incapacitated, everyone would call it rape. But what about sex while inebriated? Few people would say that intoxicated sex alone constitutes rape — indeed, a nontrivial percentage of all customary sexual intercourse, including marital intercourse, probably falls under that definition (and is therefore criminal according to the CDC).

This has to be one of the silliest arguments I’ve ever read on such a serious subject.

A thought experiment: if you get drunk at a party, and someone steals your wallet, does it count as a theft? Or is it a gift?

Of course it’s a theft! We can argue about whether one should be getting drunk at a party or not, but the fact is that if a person doesn’t consent to a sexual act, whether they’re physically capable of giving that consent or not, something has gone very wrong. A crime has been committed, and the CDC gets it right.

But let me back up here because the question Christina Huff Somers poses here is a major red herring.  What about sex when inebriated or intoxicated, she asks, pointing out that a great deal of even hallowed marital sex would fall under that category, and therefore “probably” falls under the CDC’s definition of sexual violence.

Is she serious? The question from the study she reproduces is clear — the issue here isn’t whether a few cocktails went down the hatch before married people hijinx ensued, but whether there was consent. I simply don’t understand how this could be in any way controversial:  Nonconsensual sex is the very definition of rape.

The term “rape” is loaded, in part because of arguments like this, and so many victims have trouble saying the words “I was raped”. Good for the CDC for phrasing the question in a way that gets past that.  And shame on Christina Hoff Sommers for wasting everyone’s time with ridiculous comparisons.

Nothing to Envy: Some Thoughts

I read Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives of North Koreans over the holiday. It’s been on my list of books to buy for a long while, but it was only acquired during an early December raid on Powell’s — which turned out to be great timing because, unrelated, the death of Kim Jong-Il soon followed.

Anyway, I devoured Nothing to Envy in two days, and in fact I would have read it faster if I hadn’t been sick with a lousy cold and slammed with work at the same time — it was a page turner.

I’ve been considering why it was so compelling. Barbara Demick imparts an astounding amount of information about North Korean politics, economics, diet, language, social structure, prisons, markets, almost without the reader noticing, so caught up are we in the stories of the characters.

When I looked at it again, pencil in hand, I realized that the whole book is actually framed around a doomed love story between two North Koreans, with other characters’ stories woven in between.

The thing I find so interesting about this is that Demick lets reader knows very early — page 9 — that the love story won’t have a happy ending. So the tension that sustains this book isn’t a sappy will-the-boy-get-the-girl.  The tension comes from wondering how this relationship will unfold and unravel, and what it will all mean.

It’s a device she uses on a smaller scale with other characters, too. I admire this for a few reasons — first, because it works; second, because it reduces the amount of work the reader must do to keep up — these are complicated stories; third,   it strikes me as fundamentally honest. The writer knows how the story is going to end, and while readers don’t want the whole story thrown at them all at once, it’s refreshing to see the authorial strategy on the table. Once you’re re-reading the book, that is — there’s no way to catch any of this on the first go.

In her acknowledgments, Demick thanks John Hersey, who was her teacher (a very subtle way of saying she went to Yale, I suppose). She says that Hiroshima was an inspiration as she wrote her book — which has now led me to re-read Hiroshima. I’m in the midst of it now, too soon to say anything at all about it, but I’m curious to see if I can find the inspiration for one remarkable book in another.

 

 

 

What I Read in 2011

It’s the time of year where publications both paper and pixel run lists of books read in 2011. I wonder if I’m the only one who thinks the contributors are lying? Well maybe not lying, but posturing in some way — and leaving out the trashy romance novel or the diet books or something else that doesn’t comport with “brand”, “niche”, “public image”.

Well who could blame them, really, it’s embarrassing to discuss how much we all care about life’s smelly sticky messes. Even while we’re all veddy veddy litch-er-ary.

Never letting a little hypocrisy stop me,  I started to think about what I read this year. It’s a task made much easier thanks to eReaders. I just need to look back at my Kindle and Nook accounts (read on iPad and phone) to know what I ordered and read in the past twelve months. This isn’t a complete list of what I read. For one thing, the NYPL recently changed its system, and I can’t figure out how to find a list of the books I checked out, nor do I have a complete list of books read on paper, many of which I bought at indie bookstores. But I do have my daily journal. Not every book made an appearance in my morning musings, but it’s a good enough record. And my idea here is to just record the books that were in some way meaningful to me.

I also think it’s funny when people apologize for reading books that aren’t newly published. Isn’t longevity the point of a book?

My list of meaningful books, 2011.

• Lia Purpura, On Looking
• Lewis Hyde, The Gift
• Mary Roach, Packing for Mars
• Andre Aciman, Alibis
• Best American Travel Writing 2011
• Best American Essays 2011
• Margaret Roach, And I Shall Have Some Peace There
• Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation (re-read)
• Nick Flynn, The Ticking is the Bomb
• Calvin Trillin, The Tummy Triology.
• Blue Nights, Joan Didion.
• Sarah Blackwell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne.
• Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. (Re-read)
• Michael Ondaatje, Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
• Sven Birkerts, The Art of Time in Memoir
• Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously
• John D’Agata, About a Mountain
• Anne Elizabeth Moore, Cambodian Grrrrl
• Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon
• Iphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm
• Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

I always read a lot of books on writing. Some of these I re-read this year since I started teaching at Gotham. But I like to read about writing, generally. These books influenced my thinking this year:

Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction
The Journals of Joyce Carole Oates
Marion Roach Smith, The Memoir Project
Adair Lara, Naked Drunk and Writing
Kim Robert Stafford, Muses Among Us (re-read)
Bonni Goldberg, Beyond the Words (re-read)
Barbara Tuchman, Practicing History (re-read)
Richard Rhodes, How to Write (re-read)
Annie Lamott, Bird by Bird (re-read)

I also do a bunch of reading for projects of various kinds. I read several manuals on etiquette, a book about mothers that kill, several books about incest. Also, typography, book jacket design, indie publishing. Also, a couple of books about the history of science fiction, several biographies of Edgar Allan Poe, a few books about Star Trek and a biography of Robert Goddard. Also several books about Christopher Columbus.

I bought scads more books than I read. There’s always next year.