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.   

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In my capacity as one of our prominent internet resources on Keith Gessen, I was recently contacted by Melony Carey, author of a column called “Food by the Book” (in the Muskogee Daily Phoenix), which combines book reviews with recipes from the books’ sociohistorical milieux.  Carey was working on a review of All the Sad Young Literary Men and wanted to know what the sad young literary men ate.  I wrote to Keith, asking what he cooked in grad school; in this way, I learned that Keith apparently didn’t cook a whole lot in grad school:

Oh gosh Elif! While I was in Syracuse I mostly took to dipping black bread into pasta sauce and calling it pizza. You are going to have to carry the load on this one, I’m afraid. If I think of anything else…. but I’m fairly certain that’s all I ate the entire time. That and coffee. And beer. I’m afraid. And yet here I am. 

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Could the world survive one more day without learning the further developments in the story of my beautiful friendship with the German literary establishment?  I thought it was safer not to find out.  

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