June 2009

June 3, 2009    Holy Cow, Leaf lard IS Good for You

unbelievable---Lard is good for you---on Slate.com today---by Regina Schrambling

In January at my mother's funeral, Dad was telling us about the values of "leaf lard, " which Mildred always insisted on using for her pie crusts because it was the best."  I nodded in disbelief just to keep him talking--he is now 93.  But now here it is--confirmation from the great Web itself---

The best lard is leaf lard, from the fat around the kidneys of a hog, preferably a heritage hog.Flying Pigs Farm sells this at the Greenmarket in Union Square in New York City for $6 per 8-ounce container, and it sells out fast. Lard from the supermarket can still be pretty scary; most of it has been hydrogenated to make it last longer.

(As I learned from lard crusader Zarela Martinez in New York, you can make your own if you can get your hands on top-quality fat from a small producer—back, belly, or kidney fat will all work. Cut it into chunks and cook them very slowly over low heat until the fat seeps out and only crispy bits are left. Strain it and save the fat in the refrigerator almost indefinitely. Salt the cracklings and eat them as what Mexicans call chicharrones.)

Holy Cow -- as we used to say as kids.  

Thanks goodness my macrobiotic phase is years behind me now.  Please pass the pie.  

June 5, 2009   Kira Salek's Novel

I have never read anything by Sebastian Junger but his back-0f-the-cover blurb about Kira Salak's book is so accurate and so powerful I am pasting it in here.  Everything he says is true, more true than anyone can say.  

“One cannot write well about people risking their lives without having done it oneself; suffice it to say that Kira Salak is profoundly convincing on the topic. Salak’s got it: That ability to capture the world in all its beauty and darkness and violence without romanticizing it. This is a book borne of the years that Salak spent as a journalist and traveler in some of the most terrifying places in the world, but she has held on to her basic humanity through it all. That essential humanity is what elevates The White Mary—and all of Salak’s work—from mere ‘adventure writing’ to true literature. The reader is changed by it—changed in the same way Salak must have been, many times over, in the writing of it. This is a truly inspiring book about the kind of place I have spent many years reporting from. There is no doubt: She nailed it.”—Sebastian Junger

June 8, 2009   Bernhard and Julian of Norwich

Thomas Bernhard in an interview

In this passage the frequently irascible Bernhard sounds as gentle and forgiving---everyone is saved---as a mystic like Julian of Norwich:

There are always traditions, conscious and unconscious. From reading and being alive since childhood, all that comes of its own accord. And because you're constantly throwing out what you don't like or what's bad from the beginning, you're left with what you want. Whether it's stupid or not is another question. Whether or not it's the right path, no one knows, every individual has their own path, and for that person every path is the right one. And now there are four and a half billion people, I think, and four and a half billion right paths. The misfortune of human beings is that they don't want to take the path, their own, they always want to take a different one. Striving and struggling towards something other than what they themselves are. Everyone is a great personality, whether they paint or sweep streets or write or... people always want something different. That's the misfortune of the world.

June 19, 2009    Two major finds today

While studying music in 1957 at the Mozarteum, Thomas Bernhard and his new girlfriend Ingrid Bülau discovered "to their delighted surprise [that] the favorite book of both was Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, which had just come out in German and captured the imagination of an entire generation."  (66)

And

Ingeborg Bachmann in 1969 wrote to Thomas Bernhard to praise his "pioneering achievement" in the publication of his story "Watten" (A Card Game).   "In her view his recent prose far surpassed Beckett's in its compelling severity." (68)

     Gitta Honegger, Thomas Bernhard: The Making of An Austrian

June 26, 2009

Kehlmann's Punch Line

Spoiler alert----if you plan to read the novel Measuring the World what I say from here on might interfere with your pleasure in the book.

Daniel Kehlmann is a young German author who has made a splash in Europe.  Today---two-thirds of the way into Measuring I found out one reason.  This book retells the achievements of two great German scientists of the early 19th Century---Gauss, the mathematician, and Humboldt.  Ok, great, the early heroes of the nation.  

Key scene with Humboldt is when he is in Mexico after having been the first man to climb the tallest peak in South America.  He can't believe the scale of the city.  He sees the huge carved stone wheel and realizes it is a calendar.  He meets the grandson of Moctezuma and hears about the conquest and especially about the twenty thousand or more killed by the Aztec priests to dedicate the huge temple that Cortes had destroyed. Under the last high priest, the viceroy explains, the kingdom has become addicted to blood.   Humboldt is incredulous at the claim.  

My good man, said Humboldt, don't talk nonsense!

         Twenty thousand in one place, in one day, was unthinkable.  The victims would never tolerate it.  The audience wouldn't tolerate it.  What was more, the world-order would not support it.  If such a thing ever happened, the universe would come to an end.

          The universe, said the worker, doesn't give a shit.  

A bit later Humboldt goes out to see the ruins of Teotihuacán.  Again he is dumbfounded by the scale and using his scientific instruments figures out how the city was planned in relation to the stars as a calendar. He was the first person in a thousand years who could read the city plan correctly.    Bonpland, his companion and assistant in these travels, asks him why he seems so depressed.

So much civilization and so much horror, said Humboldt.  What a combination!  The exact opposite of everything that Germany stood for.      (177)

June 26, 2009    Errors and Last Words

Reading more Steiner  is both exciting and irritating.  He is perfect and pure “old school” and I finally thought to myself, Yeah, why didn’t God get rid of one of the weaker commandments (thou shalt not not) and have the 10th be Thou shalt not demonstrate your own brilliance until After you have demonstrated your own blindnesses before imposing power of any sort over another, including views and opinions and interpretations.  Steiner is the "best" of high humanistic education of two generations ago----or presents himself that way.  But maybe he was just the best A-grabber, too.  

Maybe at least it should be a law for all memoirists and autobiographers---you may not publish your book unless you have a chapter called “My Blindspots” that has been edited by someone outside all your major spheres of influence.  I guess that would take all the fun out of reading memoirs.  

Finally though I gave up on Steiner---the way I think I have every time I have looked into one of his books.  Insufferable pedant is I guess the short phrase.  His memoir is entitled "Errata" and his stance toward his readers is precisely that---"you did not get my points earlier so let me try once again you dummkopf to correct your errors."   Yes he is brilliant, polymath, cultured, worldly blah blah blah---but if this is the best that a life in literature has to offer then no wonder the study of literature is as in sharp decline----as all other studies.  

He was smart and wise enough to reject Theory & he mastered the old style philology & now he makes endless discernments and judgments.  Maybe he should have been a canon lawyer or a corporate defense lawyer.  

Once again I find that it is the voice--the voices---of the "truth-tellers," the historians and memoirists and auto-biographers that I have little patience with after I've satisfied a curiosity here or there about this or that point of needless trivia or gossip.  For real pleasure and truth, give me the lying sons of bitches who write fiction every time.  

Historian John Lukacs, also in his 80s, calls his recent memoir Last Rites.  Maybe that is just as magisterial, just as bad.