My Life and Thoughts

Remember how in an earlier post I said that the sad young literary men didn’t supply any recipes to the Muskogee Daily Phoenix, and only the resourceful young literary women came through?  Well, this was not entirely accurate.  The situation, it seems, is more complicated than I thought.

I recently received an email from Melony Carey, author of the combined book-review–recipe column in the abovementioned Phoenix (check out her latest: NASCAR-themed recipes to accompany a novel narrated by a dog belonging to a Formula One racer), to the effect that Guillermo Martínez, former grad student and current writer of math-themed mystery thrillers, had, in fact, contributed a recipe for “almond chicken baked on a bed of salt,” which had been blocked, for reasons yet unexplained, by the Norton anti-spam software.   

If that wasn’t enough complication for you, Caleb Crain wrote a very interesting blog post suggesting that sexual orientation could be a factor in gender binarism.  Crain reminisces about one of his favorite grad school recipes, “which consisted of putting a gob of peanut butter and a sprinkle of soy sauce onto some just-cooked spaghetti, and mashing it up and telling myself it was ‘sesame noodles.’”  The interesting thing about this recipe is that, sexual orientation notwithstanding, it belongs to the same “self-talk” school of cooking as Gessen’s “pizza” (black bread with pasta sauce).  And although Crain did also contribute what I would call a “real” recipe, for rice and beans… he attributed it to his sister.

Surely there is some sweeping generalization to be made here about sad young literary people of different genders.  Take me, for example.  I certainly ate my share of squalid peanut-butter-based econo-cuisine back in the day… but is that what I told the Muskogee Phoenix?  It is not.  Partly because (a) I feel like, once you accept the basic premise of ”recipes from the kitchens of starving graduate students,” you’ve already subscribed to a certain amount of retrospective touching-up; but also because (b) looking back at my penurious past doesn’t afford me the same kind of satisfaction that it seems to do for some of my colleagues, especially some of my male colleagues. A certain glamour attaches itself to the idea of a sad young literary man subsisting on day-old bread and fricasseed carrot-peelings, which doesn’t quite transfer to women.  Most of the women I know would be embarrassed to say that they ever knew what day of the week is $1 night at Burger King.

Reciprocally, it seems, some literary men are embarrassed to say that they cook anything.  (Other literary men are not embarrassed; but Norton anti-spam takes care of them.)  I’m thinking of you, Gessen.  You see, it was recently brought to my attention that, following the precedent of the ”Lunch with [Nation editor] Katrina vanden Heuvel” which recently sold for $1,575 on Ebay, the n+1 editors briefly debated a new fundraising concept: “Dinner with an n+1 Editor,” featuring such favorite editorial dishes as a “mess with eggs,” concocted, using the diner’s choice of either seitan or hot dogs, by none other than the versatile Gessen!   

Well you could have knocked me over with a feather.  He told me that all he cooked was that so-called “pizza”!  And here were eggs being broken!  You can just imagine how I felt a minute later, when my interlocutor went on to mention that Gessen had recently started a blog.  ”A seitan recipe and a blog?” I thought.  “Gessen, you have been holding out on me!”  

I then somehow forgot about this entire conversation.  But I remembered it later, when my tireless web master informed me that My Life and Thoughts had gotten 80+ hits from… Keith Gessen’s blog!  It exists, and I am embarrassed, because what do I have to offer Keith Gessen’s 80+ fans, now that I am clearly no longer the foremost web resource on Keith Gessen? 

Nothing, that’s what.  Nothing… but admiration.  Here is why Keith Gessen’s blog is so great.  First, he posts like every other day!  Second, he has a truly incredible talent for making people mad!  I don’t understand it myself, but check it out: like one week into the existence of this blog, he has already generated so many angry emails, largely as a function of his public fielding of earlier angry emails, that he is driven to post a picture of a cute puppy.   Observing this astute rhetorical maneuver, the reader might think: “Good move Gessen! That will calm them down!”  But the reader would be wrong!  The puppy just inflames them more!: 

Takebacktheinternet accuses my puppy-posting of being “a borderline felonious sham. It’s a thinly-veiled attempt to mix in CUTEZ PAHPPEE PIXZ (what the Internet IS for) with your typical prattling on about bogus intellectual frivolity (what the Internet IS NOT for).  This tactic will not secure you the Internet.”

Well, that may or may not be true-but I ask you, is this a borderline felonious sham?  

(Then comes a picture of a cute puppy.)  Try it and you will see: there is something very addictive about this cocktail of angry reader mail + puppies. 

This same combination, I add in closing, has recently made me addicted to the novels of Sara Paretsky: financial crime mysteries, set in Chicago, featuring a female detective with an amazing Gessen-like talent for making people mad.  Dudes whom she barely knows are constantly calling her on the phone and saying terrible things, e.g. “You meddling bitch, you are a pain in the ass!”  Then she is like, “That made me so offended that I put on a hard hat and marched over to a construction site run by corrupt felonious arsonists, just to see if they were doing anything bad.” 

That’s what’s so great: half the detective-work in these books has no rationale whatsoever in the mystery plot—it only makes sense in the context of meddling in the lives of people who have been mean to the detective (her ex-husband, a grouchy neighbor, etc).  And yet, she solves all these mysteries! 

Where, you ask, do the puppies come in?  Well, in one book, she unearths such a damning fraud scheme in a private hospital, that one of the doctors commits suicide… and then she gets to keep his dog!  In a later book, the dog has puppies.  QED. 

P.S.  Guess who is the SkyMall reader from San Francisco? 

Tags: academic life, animals, comparative literature, d-list, Keith Gessen, keith gessen blog, keith gessen crisis, n+1, politics, recipes

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.