fiction & caffeine

The first true spring day always sucks me back through time. There have been falsely warm days already, but today you can smell the warmth; the air is silky like the petals of purple crocuses you’re surprised to see already in bloom. This day sucks me back through my life, to a recess spent playing kickball, to the quiet of the halls between the final bell and softball practice. “I know this air,” my body says. It remembers it passing through the wool skirt of my Catholic school uniform between my stocking-less thighs (against regulations). It remembers it going through my hair on the deck of my Upper West Side college campus as I sped through Saramago’s Blindness before the quiz, running on sugar and reeking of coffee after a morning spent working at Starbucks. This air sucks me back and pushes me forward, reminding me time never stops, which has always been the thought most comforting to me.

This morning I’m eating my oatmeal and contemplating brownies. I’m going to make Thomas Keller’s recipe from Ad Hoc at Home today. They’re proven rich chocolate clouds of comfort and joy. As I went over the recipe again, I smiled at the moderately involved procedure necessary for something so seemingly simple—melting the butter, using the stand mixer to beat the sugar and eggs. Yesterday I’d been considering making vegan ones from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. The process there involves a blender, a bowl, a pan.

This difference is in tune with the most recent issue of Lucky Peach, which I’ve been reading this weekend: “The Cooks and Chefs Issue.” There are a couple of pieces on the Food Network and its shift from having chefs like Batali to cooks like Ina and Giada. Though Ad Hoc at Home is full of ostensibly simple recipes, Keller also can make you feel a bit foolish if you don’t have two bowls for your KitchenAid. You will never feel that way going through Isa Chandra and Terry Romero’s cookbooks; they will anticipate any blushes of foolishness and swipe at them with a witty parenthetical. (It helps that vegan baking never requires the folding of a delicate meringue into cake batter, but the principle stands.) There’s also the anticipation of labor after the fact: the chef’s recipes will be intense without an eye toward the towering pile of dishes, and the cook’s will recognize it and do its best to alleviate it.

Neither approach is better. Each has its place. It’s funny to me that every Legitimate Chef I’ve read talk about the Food Network has the utmost respect for Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, whose show was a fixture in my house growing up and whose cooking most closely resembles my mother’s. But that’s not how most people have lived.

And I’ve been lucky enough to have lived a good food life, even when everything else was shit. My grandma died when I was five, but I have vivid recollections of lamb chops and strawberries dipped in sugar. There is a picture of her sitting on the couch reading a cookbook that immediately came to my mind when I did the same a couple of months ago, connecting me back to something I had spent some time rejecting. My mother’s David Eyre pancakes and empanadas and everything defined happiness in a not-always-happy home. When my parents’ marriage began to truly fall apart, it was marked by the decline of dinner—mashed potatoes began coming from a box before they disappeared altogether. This is why I’ll often say it depresses me to eat some combination of food or at certain restaurants. I’m not being dramatic (maybe a little); I just want to eat food that feels real and cared for.

When I was a teenager I would say I’d secretly like to be a pastry chef, as though it were already determined I couldn’t be. Vocational school seemed out of the question. Of course I used the high-falutin term instead of shooting for “baker.” Now that’s all I care to be, though I’ll take influence and recipes from chefs and cooks alike, because the goal is just to get some rich chocolate clouds of comfort and joy, stuff that makes happiness in the midst of misery, no matter how many dishes I need to do. (And of course, my boyfriend refuses to consume tofu.)

While sitting here snacking on organic mini-wheat cereal wet with organic almond milk, wearing glasses and ostensibly working on a book review, I take a look at my Facebook feed and see a girl I knew in elementary school posing for a picture in a smoky club. She and her friends wear tight, insanely short dresses. I wonder what my parents would have had to have done differently to make me that person instead. We were in the same class every year, often compared because we were both very short and had Puerto Rican dads. Her legs were always stick-thin, though; mine have always been thick and muscular. Maybe it was only that that caused us to have opposite lives. I think it’s as simple as the nature of your thighs when you’re a girl.

In my brain, Roberto Bolaño and I are friends. We sit at the bar and he drinks a lot and I’m full after one beer and I listen to him. He speaks. I nod, laugh, relish his company but worry for him. My personality, like everyone’s, is dependent upon context. Here, with Bolaño, I am straitlaced and together; with someone else, I’m the one gesticulating, drinking too much, getting overexcited. I am happy here at the bar with him. Probably because this could only exist in death.

I think with everything I write, you can tell that I start out trying to go somewhere, and then end up not having enough time to do my ideas justice. I’m working on it. In related news, Specter published my ramblings on Nine Inch Nails and tweendom in light of reading the Pretty Hate Machine 33 1/3 by Daphne Carr.

A week ago, an interview I did with translator Kerri Pierce went up at The Awl. Her translation of Kjersti A. Skomsvold’s The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am is out from Dalkey Archive this week. It’s really freaking good, and this woman works in seven languages. This is the second interview with a translator I’ve done for Awl, a site I super-love, and I’m really appreciative of the opportunity. I am a feeble interviewer but hope to improve.

“That’s the thing about writing, the accomplishment is in spending the day with the page, it doesn’t matter if there’s anything on it.” —Stephen Elliott in today’s Daily Rumpus. (P.S. I’ve been very busy lately.)

“It’s not hero worship,” she said, explaining this sense of affiliation and identification with other artists, living and dead. “It’s not that I have low self-esteem. I feel magnified by these people. I had a very good conversation with Allen Ginsberg about this very thing. He was like me, in his own way. He felt that he walked with Blake and Whitman. They were his people.” —A.O. Scott profiles Patti Smith. Many of her pictures are included, most important among them, of course, the one of Bolaño’s chair.

Remember when I said I was reading some poetry for a review and was in way over my head? The review’s up at PANK. It was a lot of fun to try to review poetry…

Though I know it’s wrong, I water down the grinds in the French press and begin to pour them down the drain. As the brown sludge hits, a police siren sounds on a nearby block and I think they’re coming for me.