We are in the land of happiness and spousal ancestors now, at the beach in the southern Caribbean coast. I have been looking forward to being here for months, but as usual I spent the first three or four days trying to stop feeling inexplicably late. I would sit on the beach for a while, remark on the waves, sunset, trees, you-name-it, and bound up to demand what’s next. Yesterday I finally unsnapped and took a two hour sprawling snoring sticky nap with the baby in the afternoon while V worked. (He’s staying on top of things, though I’m not getting much done. Next time we will arrange for a babysitter in advance.) Afterward we went to a little place near the beach to drink Campari and snack happily on french fries and a “carpaccio” of raw fish. On Saturday we went to the little farmer’s market where we bought, among other things, some of the most complex and delicious honey I have ever had. It tastes first of pure honeyness, then flowers, then like a fruit reduction of cas and lime and passionfruit and some other tropical fruit I can’t identify. (I have eaten up half the bottle already in an effort to understand the flavor.) The farmer and his wife from whom we bought it have a workshop up the hill north of town, which we visited two years ago. I will go back and buy banana vinegar, cacao butter, coconut oil, and lots of chocolate in a variety of forms before we leave. We tasted a snake fruit and spoke with Ancel Mitchell. I bought her booklet on local plants and food and lots of her dried fruit for Aure. The booklet describes local produce and edible wild plants. For someone from a temperate climate, the riotous fecundity is dizzying, the vivid colors and mad shapes all look suspiciously fleshy and potentially poisonous. (I’m pretty sure I wrote once about tasting some fruit at the beach that numbed my whole head, throat and hands. Tasty! Lethal! Yesterday a Canadian woman was telling me how to know when you’ve eaten a piece of fruit recently sat on by a poison dart frog. She claims it feels about like that.) It’s impossible to know where to start. (Ancel describes people who come to the farmer’s market, look around and end up sheepishly buying an apple from Washington state.) In fact, maybe it’s that way for the Costa Ricans too. I’ve always wondered at the simple and mostly quiet food here. The common dishes rely on a few consistent ingredients. Made indifferently, they taste, well—indifferent. Though there are exceptions: the grilled pork belly on a corn and flour tortilla with a heap of pickley vegetables and carroty hot pepper sauce on the street, spit roasted tepesquintle downstairs at Le Monastaire, a sticky-tender-crispy pork chop in chocolate sauce in an anonymous Caribbean soda, a simple fish tartar and a tropical fruit flambé at La Parcela, some astonishing fish tacos and cold avocado soup at a tiny hotel south of Dominical, brothy corn and pork tamales wrapped in banana leaves, cheeses and raw creams from Turrialba, a very spicy patty from a covered basket on the arm of a fat old lady who waddled out of the forest like an arthritic good fairy in the park at Manzanillo, Torta Chilena (not Chilena at all, but very Costa Rican and dreamy and easy to find), lots and lots of chicharron and gin with gingerale. Oops– now I am just listing good food I have eaten here and I will stop because it is easily findable in the same ways it is elsewhere.

Fuschia Dunlop on Chinese artisanal food. (Speaking of camillia oil, I have been using same on my face and hands this winter. Oshima tsubaki. Not the same subspecies as the stuff in the article, but lovely just the same.) I was just thinking how sometimes the American and European rhetoric of local food can begin to sound a bit xenophobic. Not so much the official organizations who work to provide foreign markets for traditional delicacies while their own markets develop, but there’s a weird libertarian edge to some of the conversation around local-sustainable-etcetera that starts to lean more toward survivalist fuckyouism at times. Fine then, you people go live your pallid, miserable, chocolateless lives while the rest of us dip into aguaymanto jam, algarrobina syrup, argan oil… Hmm, Fuschia Dunlop has a blog. Good. I have been meaning to read her book.⁰¹ I will take it with me when I travel this month… Huh, a discussion on how common it is of people to demand Chinese food be dirt cheap. You hear the same arrogant crap about Mexican food all the time. I think it ties pretty directly to what people suppose the cost of living in the country of origin is. Whenever I research in advance of our trips to Costa Rica I notice a similar sort of entitlement on travel boards and blogs. In one place, I read a comment that actually started off, “Costa Rica used to be a nice third world country” and went on to complain at length about how it is way too expensive “for what it is.” Read: “Everyone used to live in a poverty that was awfully comfy for me, but when people make a living wage, they get awfully uppity. I’m going to Thailand next time, where people still know their place.” Yikes, maybe it’s time for you to stay home, mister! Anyhow, back to the discussion at hand– I had an idea the other day about how one might adventure to new places to eat in Chinatown. A while ago I bought a chicken from Bo Bo Chicken. (Chicken for immigrants, the sales lady told me– it comes with parts. Mine was technically defined as an old hen, which a Peruvian woman I know once explained is what really should be used for aji de gallina in place of American chickens, which she described as floppy and not having any flavor. The proprietor of one of the Mexican places nearby told me to be careful with chicken. She knows I cannot eat the gluten in most bullion/sazon mixes and cautions that American chickens are so putrid and smelly that lots of people who’d never use sazon back home have to douse chickens here to get them to stop stinking. Apparently it’s unanimous. American chickens are gross.) It was really damn good. The bones and feet and the tragical little face⁰² cooked up into a really rich gelatinous stock and were reincarnated as a very good risotto. Anyhow, I noticed that their website includes a list of restaurants who use their birds. Probably a good place to start… And one more thing, here’s a place to start for people who don’t know how to identify American food.

Kapow! Evolution! Literature! Theory! So many favorite things in one place. Michael Bérubé‘s review of On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction is brilliant (he even soothingly pats my hand and reassures me there won’t be any evolutionary psychology) but somehow I still can’t decide whether to read it. It sounds like the sort of thing I’d alternately clasp to my bosom and hurl across the room.

Gwen John at the Tate and a bit of tardy gossip on Gwen, Augustus, Dorelia et al.

Prosthesis art.

Oh and, I keep forgetting—that Boldtype post on electronic writing. There are a lot of places to go from there and I still haven’t made it everywhere. I will note that it’s pretty hard for text to continue to work as text while it’s busy being art.

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We are very lucky to have a library just down the street. It’s a small branch, but since it’s the NYPL, I can order pretty much anything under the sun. The downstairs is pretty crowded with computer terminals and lots of Books for Dummies, but they always have a surprising number of new releases and the little literature section seems curated by a kindred spirit. I found multiple copies of every Roberto Bolano book in English. The children’s room upstairs is magical. It’s a lofty mellow space with gracious arched windows and round steam heaters in the center that click and gurgle cozily in the thin winter daylight. There are tons of books in both English and Spanish and a little row of computer terminals at tiny tables where the babies can sit and type. The librarians keep a bucket of crayons and scrap paper behind the desk in the center of the room. Sometimes the activities room is open and one of the librarians reads stories and plays music for the children. The babies dance and wave colored scarves around and make things out of glitter glue. Even on the coldest, wettest days, it’s never crowded. On a particularly cold day recently a woman was sitting out front selling steaming patties of plantain and meat. We bought one on the way home and Aure proudly carried it across the park himself. He clasped it to his tummy as he stood on the front stoop and watched the city workers plant an oak tree in front of our house.

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.