Renie Spoelstra (Indirectly via Drawings and Notes). Still and beautiful– though when will I learn not to read artist statements? They are intended for no one outside the artz biz and leave a taste like licking playground equipment. Can anyone talk sense? There’s someone I was thinking of… Maybe Uta Barth?
Photographs of the Battle of the Somme.
Maureen Drennan’s Meet me in the Green Glen.
Mrs. Beaton online. A quick reference for keeping your ox healthy and resolving domestic disputes. Also lots of pudding and soup.
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I will say this: then, after all that, there was some more illness but now there mostly isn’t. At least for a while. That part was unpleasant, but I sure enjoyed spending every waking moment (and, come to think of it, most sleeping moments) with my child for a couple of months. I would likely have felt differently had there been no end in sight, but this was lovely and finally over with even as it was unfolding in front of me. In the meantime, my living environment has frayed a bit and it’s hard to concentrate when I know that there is a mysterious gooey crust on the top shelf of the fridge and the pile of architecture and science magazines by the Christmas tree is reaching a lethal and precarious height. I can’t even characterize all the other piles. They are a lot like the titles of my posts here.
In the current issue of Tin House, the one with the breastfeeding baby on the cover, (My own talkative toddler will soon be done breastfeeding and I suddenly find it no inconvenience at all now that I know it’s almost over. I heartily recommend it. It was difficult at first, but then both delightful and delightful. I’ll be sad when it’s done. I will also go on a juice fast or something and maybe a yoga retreat or some girly overnight spa thing all by myself. Oh boy!) there is an article called I Cannot Live on Bread At All about having to eat gluten free. After two years, I still haven’t quite worked this out either. I mean, I have worked out the mechanics of eating without and around gluten, but I haven’t quite settled the rest of it. My identity has always been tied up in being the sort of person who will devour anything placed in front of her. (Also puns. Identity bound up in bad puns.) (For a while I mostly didn’t eat meat because I didn’t like anything about the way it was produced, but these days in NYC it’s easy to get high falutin’ meat to meet my meaty meat requirements. Meat!) When I was twelve, my parents took me to the fancy revolving restaurant on top of the Renaissance Center in Detroit. I wore a grey, white, and pink dress polyester dress, and pantyhose for the first time. (They were itchy and sagged at the ankles.) I ordered a caesar salad. I don’t remember anything about it besides the fat anchovy reclining juicily across the croutons. It was an important moment. Since then, I have eaten many other stinky and delicious things. On a daily basis, I handle the gluten thing well enough, but every now and then I think about dim sum and I feel like weeping. Travel is frustrating and I tend to take risks which sometimes don’t pay off. I did that before all this by eating street food and periodically paid the pukey price (Though not as often as I should have, thanks to the mysterious properties of s. boulardii. Very effective for those who can’t swear off fruit, vegetables, juice, meat and whatever else it is you aren’t supposed to touch when you travel; and according to the linked paper prolly something to take when venturing within a three block radius of the hospital.) but now I have the puking on top of the loathsome array of long and short term gluten reactions to consider. I nearly ground my teeth to dust as we walked past barrel after barrel of special strawberry chicha during the festival of the Descent of the Kings in Oyantaytambo last year. Brilliantly arrayed ladies were dipping enormous plastic glasses into barrels of chicha, pouring them back and swirling it all around, elbow deep in pink froth. But alas, it was all fermented with barley. Even the quinoa stuff often is, at least in the hoods I visited around Cuzco. I know. I discussed it at length with half a dozen authors of half a dozen chichas.
On Sunday I went to the Chinese grocery store under Manhattan Bridge to obtain ingredients for sticky rice in lotus leaf. (It will be Christmas dinner.) I found dried oysters to make a veritable oyster sauce, though I could not find a Chinese sausage without wheat or wheat products. Not sure yet what I’ll substitute. Maybe just flavor the roast pork similarly? Though the sausage has a special chewy texture… I had to go several herbalists to find whole lotus leaves, but I’m glad I did. They smell perfumey and utterly different from the banana leaves I was going to substitute. While I was at the grocery store I also purchased something identified as pickled delicious, because I like both of those things (it is a long green plant and I can attest that it is both pickled and delicious); and some fermented sweet rice, the ingredients of which are sweet rice, water, and yeast. The latter fizzed when I opened it and tastes pleasantly of booze.
