Mayonnaise

All Carolina folk are crazy for mayonnaise, mayonnaise is as ambrosia to them, the food of their tarheeled gods. Mayonnaise comforts them, causes the vowels to slide more musically along their slow tongues, appeasing their grease-conditioned taste buds while transporting those buds to a plane higher than lard could ever hope to fly. Yellow as summer sunlight, soft as young thighs, smooth as a Baptist preacher's rant, falsely innocent as a magician's handkerchief, mayonnaise will cloak a lettuce leaf, some shreds of cabbage, a few hunks of cold potato in the simplest splendor, restyling their dull character, making them lively and attractive again, granting them the capacity to delight the gullet if not the heart. Fried oysters, leftover roast, peanut butter: rare are the rations that fail to become instantly more scintillating from contact with this inanimate seductress, this goopy glory-monger, this alchemist in ajar.

The mystery of mayonnaise-and others . . . have surely puzzled over this-is how egg yolks, vegetable oil, vinegar (wine's angry brother), salt, sugar (earth's primal grin-energy), lemon juice, water, and, naturally, a pinch of the ol' calcium disodium EDTA could be combined in such a way as to produce a condiment so versatile, satisfying, and out-right majestic that mustard, ketchup, and their ilk must bow down before it (though, at two bucks ajar, mayonnaise certainly doesn't put on airs) or else slink away in disgrace. Who but the French could have wrought this gastronomic miracle? Mayonnaise is France's gift to the New World's muddled palate, a boon that combines humanity's ancient instinctive craving for the cellular warmth of pure fat with the modern, romantic fond-ness for complex flavors: mayo (as the lazy call it) may appear mild and prosaic, but behind its creamy veil it fairly seethes with tangy disposition. Cholesterol aside, it projects the luster that we astro-orphans have identified with well-being ever since we fell from the stars.

Okay, maybe that's sailing a ways over the top, yet even its detractors must admit to mayo's sheen. And nowhere, under no condition, does it shine more brightly than when lathered upon an ordinary slice of bread.

From Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins

One of My Favorite Books: A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Dust (Evelyn Waugh)

Another author discovered through Muggeridge. Many consider him the greatest of the British prose writers of the 20th Century. This book along with many of his others: SCOOP, VILE BODIES, THE SWORD OF HONOR TRILOGY, etc., are filled with his barbed wit and eloquent prose. When I ran out of his books, I moved on to his three volumes of letters.


Handful of Dust

Dirty Diapers

My sister-in-law claims she never used more than one baby wipe when her three kids had a dirty diaper. That does not even seem possible. Of course, you have to consider the source. My mother-in-law claims she never lost a sock in doing the washing and drying.

I use as many as it takes. In fact, I have a rating system that grades the movements down under.

0 --false alarm
1 --light
2 --normal
3-- "Some People Pay Good Money for this as Fertilizer"
4-- "Let's Not Feed Her That Again"
5-- "The Threat Level Has Been Elevated"

There is one more after five, but it is special. There's been a lot of talk about the "nuclear option" of late, but all I know is that occasionally when Tian assesses her options, she goes nuclear. That's when you don't count the wipes, you dump the clothes, and hose her off ASAP.

What Does a Grant Have to Do with Writing

When I first arrived in Canada, I told someone that I had had one book published, and had written for The New York Times. "Oh," she said, "I always wanted to be a writer, but I could never get a grant." I was perplexed. What did getting a grant have to do with putting one's bum on a chair, fingers on keyboard? Later (wiser), I did apply. Again, I was perplexed. The form seemed to have been designed for someone (male) in the 1930s, recently come down from Oxford (or the U of T), with neat little spaces to put in where one had studied, what jobs or teaching positions one had held, what books or papers one had published. Most of the blanks I filled in with "housework" or "nothing."

from "Margaret Atwood and After" by Joan Bodger, National Post Online, March
9, 2002

Writing Personality Profiles

An anonomous commentary from fametracker.com about the recent issue of Vanity Fair. I've just excerpted the remarks about the writing of personality articles (in this case profiling the actress in Alias)

The article, on the other hand, is, like all the profiles in this issue (George Hamilton, Michael Caine, David Arquette, DMX) written in a sort of gibberish. Yes, it's English, but it's a subset of the language you could call "Profilese." It involves writing sentences that sound good or, failing that, remind you of sentences you've read elsewhere that sounded good. It involves stringing the sentences together with a pleasing rhythm that's just distracting enough to fill the three hours or so that it takes to fly from Chicago to Phoenix, but that will leave you with no impression whatsoever. Because these sentences are meaningless, by many different definitions.

One of the tactics of Profilese on display in the Garner profile is the one by which you cram your articles with references, both high and low, to prove to the reader that you are not just a profile-churning-out hack, but rather you are well-versed in kitsch and the classics alike. You are Übermensch!

To this end, the profile makes reference to all of the following, all on the very first page, and all in service of describing just what kind of show Alias is: Bettie Page, Kafka, La Femme Nikita, Freud, Nabokov, Charlie's Angels, Michael Crichton, and Dostoyevsky. Phew! Thank goodness all those things existed, or we wouldn't have Alias today!

Another tenet of Profilese is that you must write overly literate-sounding sentences; again, to convince the reader that (a) you are really a much better writer than all this; and (b) this subject actually merits their interest, let alone their attention.

So we have sentences such as: "So those are the hands that pick the pockets that hold the keys that lock the doors that guard the secrets that threaten our sleepy world." Which sounds pretty, but makes about as much sense as the teacher's speeches to the class in a Charlie Brown cartoon.

Or this: "She is the daughter of a chemical engineer who left Texas for points east when Dow and Carbide, lured by the twin sirens of cheap land and lax pollution regulation, flooded the area with money." She's not just Jennifer Garner, she's the heroine in a Richard Ford short story!

Or this: "Like Sydney, like Elektra, Jennifer lives in two worlds." This is the I've Figured Her Out sentence. It is a requisite in every celebrity profile. Note the use of the first name, which drives home just how precisely the writer has nailed the very essence of Garner -- nay, of Jennifer.

Anyway, the whole article is made up of these meaningful-sounding but meaningless sentences. We could go on about this, but we'll just say: celebrity profiles suck. They all suck. And trying to dress them up in flouncy language and fake-resonant observations makes them suck more.

We know people have to write them and make a living and we don't begrudge those people, but understand this: the profiles suck. Sorry, but they do. You might consider yourself a chef, but you are working at McDonald's and you are making Big Macs.

Experiments in Fiction

The experiments which the modernists make all deal with form, with what they call form, with silly things‑whether to punctuate a poem or not to punctuate, whether to sign with capital letters or with small letters. This is of no value. I say to myself, why don't they look into the, human ocean which surrounds them where stories and novelties flow by the millions? It's there where my experiments take place‑in the laboratory of humanity, not on a piece of paper.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

One Book Author

I had the feeling then that my lot was to be one of those writers who write one book and become silent forever. There are such writers. But I said to myself that even if a writer writes one book which makes sense, he's still a writer.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer