This one is not about food

As I was flying home from Portland today, I continued to read Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being (specifically, "A Sketch of the Past"), begun a few days ago and then literally lost amidst my covers until I made the bed at 4:30 this morning. As I came upon a passage I began to say the words aloud in my head, a second's flash before reading them: "But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and most emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself." It has probably been twenty years since I read that book, but it was as if the words and their very rhythm were still inside of me. This single beautiful sentence comes from a longer passage about patterns and connections between things:

From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool [of non-being] is hidden a pattern; that we -- I mean all human beings -- are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.

A little of a late bloomer, I found Woolf in my twenties, and I became enormously devoted to her. When I read her work (and some of that by E.M. Forster: "connect, connect"), I had a feeling of both familiarity and discovery. Was she voicing ideas that I had inside of me as well? Or was she saying something new that I could believe? The will to find connections, to see patterns amongst people in the world (if not, as she does, in the natural world as well) defined my sense of my own place in the world. And these ideas drove my beliefs and, I think, my actions in my twenties quite explicitly and then implicitly over the next eight or ten years. In these beliefs I see my dedication to my friends as well as my union work in grad school and my teaching then and since. But something also broke for me along the way -- especially over the last five years (and most especially the last year in particular). For one, I think I became driven by notions of loss. For another, I think the make-up of my cohort has radically changed so that the connections I made with many of my friends became ancillary to their families or other primary relationships. And as I have not had a family myself, I am a bit adrift, unmoored. In fact, I've implicitly and explicitly cut a whole host of ties out of some mixture of guilt and longing and desperate incompleteness -- this tenacious sensation of missing-something. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

But why did I cut ties with Woolf, or at least sequester her to my twenties? A part of me thinks that has to do with the narrowness of an academic career these days. What, for instance, might she say to film? A part of me worries that I didn't take her seriously enough to imagine her work as philosophy -- cultural or aesthetic -- beyond A Room of One's Own (which itself seemed at some point too simple, even though it has so formed much of my feminist beliefs). Did I eschew her for writers more obviously commenting on culture -- Freud, Walter Benjamin et al. -- when, in fact, she shares so much in common with them?

I want to remedy this -- hence the reading of Moments of Being now and, late this summer, listening to To the Lighthouse. Besides the fact that I am teaching To the Lighthouse in a course on "Cinema and Everyday Life" this spring, in which I am determined to challenge myself and my students to find connections (whether philosophical, aesthetic, or structural) between her novel and the films we're looking at, I am also determined to return to these ideas that so formed me for over half my life. I no longer want to worry that such notions are "romantic" (exactly what I was accused of some years ago when I attempted to revive HD and Dorothy Richardson, Woolf's contemporaries after all, at a feminist film conference). Is it not possible to live in a world in which "we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself"? That's the world I want to inhabit.

(I mustn't do it alone.)

Nothing rhymes with orange

Arlo hates Fruit Ninja. Granted, he appears to hate Temple Run more: last time I played it while lying in bed, he literally climbed on top on my chest and laid there until I put my phone down (I think it's the sound of the monkeys in pursuit that gets to him). Clearly, he doesn't understand why I play these games. Nor do I exactly. I never played video games as a kid, with the exception of an occasional game of Pong -- or, later, Space Invaders -- with my brothers. I didn't understand the appeal. And as they became increasingly violent, they appealed less. But there's something quite appealing in a video game about slicing fruit. Last summer, when my obsession began, one of my Irenes told me she had a friend who found that it helped her eat more fruit, as the juice that squirted out upon each wild slice made her crave it. (When I later repeated this story to her, she told me it wasn't a friend at all who made the claim but a writer in a fashion magazine.)

I started collecting a series of food-themed games for my phone: Cake Maker, Cupcake Maker, Pie Maker, Scoops (with choices of ice cream, hamburger, or cupcake towers), and Cut the Rope. My object was not to increase cravings, but to try to find an alternative, particularly given my already compromised sense of taste. My eight-year-old friend Miles discovered the slicing option on the Cake Maker game, and my nieces rock at cutting the rope to feed the lonely monster a piece of swirly candy, but Fruit Ninja is the only one that's really stuck to me.

It's commonplace for people to believe that as one loses a sense, the other senses become stronger. While I don't mean to debunk this belief, I think it needs some tempering. After all, our senses do adapt to such loss, but it takes a very long time for our brains to develop new pathways to allow for complex adaptation and intensive strengthening. So, whereas I immediately became more conscious of textures of food when I couldn't smell them, I would not suggest my eyesight or hearing has generally improved in some way to make up for my lack of olfaction and thus to help me survive in the wilds of the modern world. Except maybe in the case of Fruit Ninja.

Slicing the vibrantly colored watermelon, oranges, and plums is indeed exciting when their juices squirt on the screen with each successful hit. Do I have a favorite one to hit? It might be kiwi, a fruit that's lost on me in person. So much juice for such a tiny fruit! (In person I think instead: so little fruit for such labor to peel it. And the squishy texture -- yucko.) For months I perfected the "arcade" version of the game, ever hoping for frenzy mode with the flying horizontal fruit and the chance to rack up more and more points. I totally wowed a coffee seller when I told him my high score was 738. He was so impressed that he called his girlfriend on the phone that very minute. But every time I bragged about this score (for the record, my high is now 889, and that was before the update this month), people seemed especially surprised I did this in arcade mode. The fact of the matter is that I found "classic" mode impossible: one bomb hit, and the game is over. But I took this surprise as a challenge, and this is where my other senses kicked in.

The work of vision is obvious. I watch the fruit appear in order to slice it; I look for bombs in order to avoid them. But what I've realized is that the best way to watch for the bombs is with my ears, as they make a sneaky hissing sound the second they hit the screen. I stop mid track in my slicing: I'm on the alert with my eyes, my ears, my fingers. The pleasure of victory is in the visual details of the exploding fruit, surely, and in the mechanical and tactile action of my fingers. But it's also in the sonic "smack" that rings with a successful hit or the background drumroll that appears the more combos I rack up. My best score in classic mode is now 617, and I am mulling over whether I want to rest on my substantial laurels or try for more. Obviously, these games are built on a desire for more. But more exactly of what? What desires does slicing virtual fruit for virtual points satisfy?

I was recently told these games are an act of anesthetizing for me. I don't disagree with that diagnosis. As my father's health has worsened these past weeks and as my stress at work increased, so my games of Fruit Ninja (and Ski Safari and Spider Solitaire and Bookworm) have multiplied. I even play these games when I watch particularly emotional television, to keep whatever emotions that are on screen at a distance. My phone provides a screen indeed -- sometimes from what else awaits me on the thing itself or what other uses I should put it to. Funny that a thing that helps to dull my senses also, at least on some level, enables me to enjoy them.

Pilgrimages (part 1)

I'm wandering through the city, on a food pilgrimage. I'm retracing memories - of pierogi, of candy shops; I'm following more recent paths of delight -- the French cafes of Chelsea; and I'm trying to open up other doors of taste, or testing where I've come without quite knowing it. I'm drinking out of deep bowls -- a cafe au lait in the morning, a "Brussells Breakfast" in the afternoon. I'm drinking the tea with milk, loving the light creamy texture and tasting the wisp of sugar amidst the sharpness of the steeped leaves.

Monday night I went to Rice, a restaurant on its way out of town. After an especially comforting meal for a boyfriend recovering from a terrible hangover (at a bar the night before, my third braniversary, he laid on the bathroom floor, literally spooning a toilet), Rice became my go-to place when I wanted something familiar and easy, a blend of tastes that are simple (as almost nothing at all, in the best way), sweet, and hot: vegetarian meatballs with black rice, or arepa corn cakes with fresh corn, cheese, and cilantro. Now with the owner's imminent plans to close, it's as if the restaurant is having a fire sale: no ice cream for cookie sandwiches, no black tea, and half-empty tables at its one remaining shop, in Dumbo.

Tuesday I returned to Veselka, my former comfort food haven in the years I lived in Brooklyn and the East Village. I sat around a table with my brother, my two nieces, and their Peruvian exchange student, Naylamp (fifteen years old and the new "closer" of the family when it comes to cleaning plates). Everyone loaded up on meat and carbs, as one is wont to do in the Ukranian restaurants of the East Village. An homage to my old favorites, I ordered a small plate of pierogis (half mushroom-sauerkraut and half potato). Boiled not fried. I used to love that fantastically bland food, smeared with sautéed onions and sour cream. I barely tasted it now but kept the loss at a distance, imagining instead, as in the olden days, what taste I wanted to end with (potato?) and relishing the apple sauce as my new favorite condiment, so sweet and tangy. I also had a lentil salad -- something I wouldn't have ordered back in the day, both because I'm not convinced it was on the menu then and because it would have been too rich for my budget. In the late '80s and early '90s, I'd have a bowl of lentil soup instead. As we sat in the now airy and open space, I could still imagine sitting at a table with my friend Aline, both soaking wet from the rain on a dark night, with our coats and umbrellas dripping water to make a pool behind each of our chairs. Was this my first taste of lentil soup? I'm not sure. Aline and I started ordering it regularly when we needed something comforting, or we'd get a can of Progresso lentil soup for home, sometimes to be followed by a pint of Haagen Daaz Vanilla Swiss Almond ice cream. But now I may be collapsing different seasonal comfort foods into one big pot.

My salad was delicious -- filled with lentils, some peppers, onions, greens, feta cheese. Cheese was a staple at the house with Aline: we would go to East Village Cheese and pick up wedges of Brie for a dollar, alongside a box of Carr's wheat crackers. My brother stopped at the cheese shop -- still standing, thank god -- on the way to Veselka while I dipped into the bookstore. Sitting at the lunch table I thought about the cheese we would have later that night. Would I taste it? What kind of crackers did he get? How much did it cost? As we prepared to go, Matt said he wanted to use the bathroom and asked where it was. As I looked around, I realized we were likely sitting in it, or where it used to be. A whiff of the sweet cherry cleaning smell rampant in East Village bars twenty years ago wafted into my memory. I honestly don't remember if Veselka used the same stuff, but I couldn't imagine the space of the bathroom without it coming through.

The second half of the day included a visit to Economy Candy, one of my favorite places in the world -- as much for the economy as for the candy. The girls wandered about in a daze, as does almost anyone I've ever brought there for the first time. Matt found a tin of "chocolate straws" which he remembered having at my Grandma's house in Wyoming when we were kids. I was surprised and delighted by his nostalgic sentiment. My memories of those visits with my grandma are bound with food and with comfort, but I imagine my brother would more likely associate those days with adventure, as he was constantly climbing some giant rock or another with my cousins, turning into some other rowdier boy while I daydreamed in the back bedroom or visited relatives with my grandma. When I visited her on my own, she'd take me to the grocery store and let me pick out anything I wanted. We drank iced tea in the evenings as we watched television together. She sat in an easy chair with her feet up, and I sat on the orange-red couch -- the couch I tried to duplicate years ago when I was shopping for a new sofa. It's not the same, of course, but I realize that much of my house is an attempt to duplicate hers in some form or another. The death of my grandma when I was 13 was the greatest loss of my life. I remember her house as a sanctuary, in which I formed many habits for life, and in which I became a kind of historian, but the sort of historian who loved her grandma's collection of doorknobs and who pored through her yearbooks over and again. My grandma wanted to be a journalist, but she became a pharmacist. I harbored dreams of journalism but found other forms of writing. I know she would be so proud of my books, but of this blog? I honestly don't know what she would say.

Later that evening, Matt brought out the can of chocolate straws for dessert. I reached for an orange one and was disappointed at its flavorlessness and the fact it wasn't filled with chocolate. Had I misremembered these treats myself? Was it that I could not taste them anymore? I tentatively took another, this time a pink one: it was sharper, crunchier, and filled with chocolate. A vague memory washed over me that this was how they were: some were cheats, without chocolate and without the flavor I imagined they would have, while others were exactly what they should have been.

Bergamote 22

for Irene


This is not about eating.

Most of my friends, at one time or another, have offered some variation of the question "Can you smell that?" since my surgery. I don't mind this question, though of course many of my friends do appear mortified when I just say, "no." I usually go on to ask them to describe the smell in the air at that moment: some try to do it as quickly as possible, others offer very resonant descriptions, and some even decline ("no, that's okay"). Smells (maybe more than "scents") are incredibly hard to articulate, so I understand both the problem people have in answering this question or the impulse to avoid it altogether (as if to mention smells will remind me I can't smell or will just make me feel sad -- the latter being utterly possible on a given day!). Therefore it's a rare friend who voluntarily describes what she smells when we are together.

Lucky I have rare friends. Ever since she learned about my case of anosmia, my friend Irene has become extremely thoughtful about my experience: she cooks to my condition, she is the only friend to do blind taste tests with me, and she's the person who recommended I start this blog. On Sunday, as a birthday present, she took me to a perfume shop.

Having scouted out some options in advance, she found a clerk who was interested in describing perfumes to a woman who couldn't smell but, as Irene explained, "was very precise with words." We met in New York for a birthday brunch (and spontaneous shoe-shopping), and she took me to Le Labo on Elizabeth Street. Happily, the clerk Irene had met, Isaac, was working. After introductions and a review of my situation, Isaac asked me what kinds of scents I had liked in the past, and I also interjected what I didn't like: rose, vanilla, patchouli (imagine those three scents together, and I think you have a nouvelle mud pie). He immediately led us to Bergamote 22, and then and there commenced a nearly indescribably exhilarating experience.

He began with bergamot, the scent infused in Earl Gray tea. A peculiarly pungent citrus fruit, it has the essential characteristic of an orange with a more bitter quality. This is my version of what he said. What *he* said was far more evocative, but I wasn't quite prepared for it to come so quickly so I wasn't fully focused when it did. But as I imagined the bergamot (with a brief glance of memory towards a cup of Earl Gray tea), I began to pay more attention. He moved on to vetiver, an "upright" scent, which helps to counter the bitterness of bergamot. The combination is sweet, fresh, "clean." (He later compared this to a different perfume, which he said gives you the sensation you've been rolling on the ground in a bed of flowers, whereas Bergamote 22 leaves you with the feeling that you've just stepped out of the shower. Sometimes, he said, you actually want to feel like you've rolled around in a bed of flowers. It's like the difference between shoes and sandals, he added.) He described, too, the trajectory of aromas that would develop over time. Upon the initial application, you smell a whiff of grapefruit. But within a few minutes, this settles into vetiver and orange blossom. It increasingly moves towards a sense of balance between dualities, usually sharp and sweet in this case (as Isaac said, perfumes are all about attempts towards balance -- a strong fleeting one with a subtle lasting one, so that they appear at different moments over time). Thus the third layer combines cedar and orange, and it emerges after an hour or so. The cedar's dense woody scent counters the sweetness (and, I'd say, ephemeral-ness) of orange. I began to image a cedar box containing an orange. This makes a certain sense, I think -- not just visually but aromatically.

If only I could retell Isaac's perfume narrative more perfectly! I could imagine him breathing in multiple scents, viscerally feeling olfaction. These scents are designed to be applied to the place our blood runs hottest, where our veins are closest to our skin. This is why we spray perfume on our wrists, our necks, the backs of our knees. I don't know if it's that entry point on the body that does it, but I could sense how our host felt perfume with his body and breath at once. Scents surround us, after all. I believe that they touch us. Sometimes this is quite literal. From the moment he sprayed the perfume onto my wrists, I could feel it there for fifteen minutes, a weighted layer over my skin. A tiny part of me was willing myself to smell it by some miracle, while the rest of me watched and listened to Isaac spin this tale of olfaction, my hands outstretched, feeling the heat of my own wrists as my blood warmed the perfume.

Cookies-Divine

Since my surgery, I have worked very hard at eating cookies. There was a brief moment in my life when moderation ruled: in the years before the surgery, my sweetheart and I would stop at two cookies after supper. But after, it seemed, what did it matter? Occasionally I like to make the anosmic’s joke that “those who can’t smell, don’t.” As a parallel form of reasoning, if you can’t taste it, it’s as if you haven’t eaten it in the first place, so have another cookie.

A little over a year after the surgery I traveled to England, where I was reacquainted with the biscuit. Cheap and plentiful, they tasted of crispy sugar flavored with chocolate or ginger or textured with oats. And when I later went to visit the man I thought I loved, he had filled his cupboards with a variety of biscuits to greet me. He was, I suppose, another boyfriend who sought to fatten me up – though in this case it was for the kill (he traded me in for a newer-younger-thinner-and-quite-possibly-duller model two years – and approximately twenty boxes of biscuits – after he fell in love with me; I haven’t eaten a British biscuit since).

As store-bought delicacies go back in the States where I live, I’ve always preferred the crunchy: Oreos (the low-fat are crunchiest), ginger snaps, chocolate wafers that snap too, and shortbread that offers a soft crunch and that tastes clearly before and now as butter-sugar-flour. But lately I’ve been baking cookies again myself. I blame/credit my brother Bowman, who gave me the Milkbar cookbook for Christmas after we spent a fall day trolling New York in search of Milkbar peanut butter cookies for our peanut-butter-loving older brother. This cookbook is a revelation, its author Christina Tosi a genius. For me, it’s done for cookies what Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Cake Bible did for cakes. Making cookies with Tosi’s methods is like making cookies for the first time.

Aside from the miniature treats made in my Easy Bake Oven, cookies were the first sweet I baked by myself. I always made them by hand – creaming the sugar and butter with a wooden spoon, beating in the eggs and vanilla, adding the flour and baking soda and salt. The batter was reasonably smooth, but it sat in thick doughy masses, like a series of small mountains rather than one big sphere of yum. Now I’m mixing with my Kitchen Aid (orange, of course). Blending the eggs after the butter and sugars takes up to ten minutes in the Milkbar way. This changes the texture completely: the cookie dough becomes smooth, more like batter, actually, than dough. And Tosi tells me that you have to refrigerate cookie dough to get the right consistency when baked. As for baking, I have been experimenting to get the perfect texture; it took me more than three batches before I got it right. I’ve learned to let the cookies appear to be not entirely done when I take them out – the sides are browned, but they haven’t quite flattened, and unlike a cake they most definitely do not spring back to the touch. Instead they fall when they cool, so that the look is ultimately what one expects in a cookie, but the texture is just chewy enough, like the Milkbar delights I’d come to love and thought I could never reproduce myself.

At some time of in-between singlehood, a friend told me that it was a crime I didn’t have a family to cook for. Today I’m baking cookies for my students. Is this a relocated maternal instinct? Perhaps. But it’s also bred of the knowledge that they have quicker metabolisms than most of my friends and they don’t yet eschew cookies like grown-ups are supposed to. In any case, everyone needs an audience – readers, listeners, cookie-eaters. The best audience members – and you know who you are – are all three.

Eating in Color

Orange marmalade. Black licorice Scotty dogs. Red wine. I’ve been making mental lists of what I can taste – and what I like to taste – and these three keep coming up. I like to think I’m eating in color.

Orange is bitter and sour and sweet all at once. It’s the color that accents my kitchen (and much of the rest of my life). It covers my bedroom walls. It’s the color of my favorite mugs for tea. It houses my phone and notebook. Some mornings I carry my orange mug, my orange phone, and my orange ipad into the living room to start my day and feel both mortified at my apparent predictability and happy with this bounty of color all at once. But there was a time when I shunned orange. I wouldn’t wear it because I didn’t want to call any more attention to my hair than it already did on its own. And when I was in college I spent a weekend at an aunt’s house while she was having a breakdown; she had a downstairs hall or room that was bright orange, and I began to associate the color with this frightening and formidable white-haired woman who chastised my mother on the phone about her poorly raised children, making her cry 3,000 miles away from us. None of this was anyone’s fault – not mine or my brother’s or my mother’s or my aunt’s – but for years I worried that liking orange too much was a sign of some slight instability. My orange walls have been different tones, of course – yellow balances out the red, softening the shade I see. My oranges are the ones children use to color in the sun or the exact duplicate of a naval orange. And when I taste the marmalade my friend Irene gave me this last New Year’s, I taste not just the fruit but the very color of orange.

In another register entirely, I’m also drinking in color. My younger brother has changed his eating habits. When he visited me this winter, he had me get out my vegetable juicer to share his new tricks. He brought a box full of fresh beets, spinach, carrots, apples, cucumbers, and ginger. We experimented with combinations, which for me was an experiment in both taste and color. Though I loved the freshness of the light green pure cucumber and the sweetness of carrot, what I ultimately like best is a totally mixed concoction. Though I revel in drinking such virtue, the pleasure for me is in the process: washing and slicing the vegetables, then feeding them through to see what colors they make when liquefied. I might start with spinach for a deep dark almost moldy green, then add carrots for a layer of orange, which softens the green at first and then, with more layers, simply alters the orange. The beets turn everything deep dark pink, of course. And then the apples soften the shade again. When I drink it I swear I am tasting, in turn, green and pink and orange. I close my eyes and try to imagine the fruits and vegetables individually – carrots, spinach, beets, apples – but all I taste is delicious color. 

Sensation-less

Today I snuggled up against my skin after baking little French buns. At another time I would have smelled of almonds, butter and eggs, milk and sugar. I don't sense it, of course – not really anyway – and there's no one here to describe what I smell like to me. Lying in bed in the early afternoon, I try for a faint whiff of my lotioned arms after a shower, and I imagine the aroma from the oven of just a few minutes before.

I've been eating more. Baking more, eating more. It's compensatory, I know. But compensation for what? Missing smells? Missing family? I live within the barely perceptible sensation – barely because I don't actually want to feel it – that smell and love are commingling in their absence. My breath, my literal intake of air, feels empty. Love and being loved feel like the fullness of breath. Imagine this empty air. Breathe in. There's a clarity to it, but also a lightness. That's my missing-sensation.