Do you think of yourself in terms of a "type"?

Do you think of yourself in terms of a "type"? As in, "He's totally my type," or "Nah, she's not my type." Do you know whose type you are?

I was just emailing with my friend Liz and realized that I do think of myself as a type (i.e., not for everyone), but I don't think I'm necessarily very good at predicting whose type I am. I sense that some savvy people walk into a party or "da club" and know immediately who would be interested in them. In general, until I see ample evidence to the contrary, I just assume I'm not your type.

What's the norm here? Do most people have this figured out?

This isn't dating research, obviously; I'm a married woman now! (I guess?!) Just idle curiosity.

(See also "Some notes on beauty" parts one, two, and three.)

Still unstable after all these years

A few more pieces from The Self Unstable are up at The Offending Adam. I love Whitney Holmes' introduction:

With what voice do I want to read out loud from The Self Unstable? Do I read with a full-throated Poetry voice or a playful wink-wink voice or with the voice of an oracle or a mystic hippie fortuneteller? I can’t decide, and maybe that’s part of the instability to which the title of this work alludes. Who is the self in these declarative prose poems? Elisa Gabbert uses the force of her tone and sentence structures to create authority, despite the fact that the identity of the speaker is neither fixed nor always recognizable. At the junction of aphorism, confession, and armchair philosophy, these prose poems delight in their ability to make profundity flippant and flip profound. Gabbert writes, “History is the news via consensus.” The speaker here doesn’t say anything we don’t already know, nor does she say it in a new or nuanced way. This axiom could, at first, be met with a little eye roll, with a “duh.” But Gabbert subverts the power of her declarative tone by playing with the declaration: “And then they add mood music.” And then I laugh out loud.

I reviewed the proofs for these pieces about voting and violence and history and war and the news during the week of the Boston marathon bombings. I was in the coffee shop in Golden where I spent many mornings this semester (I had finally stopped thinking of years in terms of semesters, when John started teaching college). John's intermittent vertigo and dizziness prevented him from driving for several weeks, so on days he felt well enough to teach, I would drive him to his 9 a.m. class and work down the street, drinking iced coffee even on the days that it snowed. We listened to the news obsessively that week, though half the time John couldn't hear it. Reading those pieces again, it struck me that my poetry has never seemed more topical or politically relevant. But weeks have passed; perhaps they're irrelevant again.

Thanks to Whitney and to Andrew Wessels for featuring my work.

*

In other "news": My pal DB just sent me a link to an article in The Atlantic by the guy who teaches the "Navigating Pornography" course at Pasadena City College. He sort of lost me here though:

Part of equipping students to navigate porn means giving them the tools of feminist analysis. Pornography traditionally revolves around the production of images of women for the pleasure of heterosexual men. Feminist critics like Andrea Dworkin, Gail Dines, and Robert Jensen help my students to see the ways in which porn can construct and reinforce misogyny. At the same time, my students examine the limitations of familiar feminist anti-porn critiques. Research suggests that nearly as many young women as men watch (or, if you prefer, "use") porn for masturbation fodder, making it increasingly difficult to characterize porn watching as a primarily male pastime.

If you click through to the links in the highlighted section, neither of them says that "nearly as many young women as men watch porn." According to the second link, which hyperlinking protocol suggests should include the relevant stat: "In the first three months of 2007, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, approximately one in three visitors to adult entertainment Web sites was female; during the same period, nearly 13 million American women were checking out porn online at least once each month." If 1 in 3 visitors were female, that means 2 in 3 were male. Hence, twice as many. How does half as many translate to "nearly as many"? Is that the new math?

Have I mentioned how much I hate The Atlantic? Of course I have. Nevertheless, this comment thread about chickens gave me great pleasure this morning:

Chickens are highly sentient. They form long-term friendships. They seek pleasure. They have good memories. They learn to play video games. They grieve (I've seen it). They have empathy. They play. They are curious. They understand object permanence sooner than a human baby does. They are aware of others, which is more important than self-awareness. 

Chickens play video games?

Mothers

I don't go in much for Hallmark holidays, but I do love my mother. I like old pictures too. This is my parents at their house in Madison, Wisconsin, before I was born. Aren't they adorable?

And here's an old snap of my father's mother, Dorothy. Pretty lady:

Tale of a Thursday elopement

Yesterday started off as a pretty normal day ... except that it was raining. In Colorado?! So ironic! (Alanis was right.)

Things got a little weird around 3, when we headed down to the county clerk office to pick up this phony-looking Old West–style thing:

We had a little time to kill before our 5:15 appointment with the judge, so we swung by Beast & Bottle on 17th for a little liquid courage.

The bartender there used to work at Encore – our favorite spot in Denver before it closed – and called out, "Hey, Boston!" when we walked in.

The sun came out just in time.

Phew, irony-free wedding.

The judge was super nice. Whole thing took about ten minutes. I cried!

Then a funny little security guard who didn't know how cameras work took our picture:

We took advantage of the evening light and got a celebratory drink on the roof of the MCA.

Then we went to our favorite sushi place. It was delicious.

So, yep, we're married now.

Quick FAQ:

• Please please don't anyone feel left out. We literally decided to get married on Monday, made the arrangements on Tuesday and told only our families. There was no one at the ceremony but us. But we love you all and want to celebrate with you when we see you.
• No, we're not registered anywhere! We're also not going on a honeymoon and we don't have wedding bands yet ... I do have a lovely family ring from the Cotters that I'm going to wear once it's resized for my elfin fingers.
• No, I'm not pregnant, really.
• One of my most viewed blog posts is "Why I don't want to get married." In principle, I still believe all that. I also don't think our relationship will be functionally different in any real way; we've lived together for 6+ years. Here's what tipped the balance: John has been having some pretty serious health issues. If he should ever take a turn for the worse, I want to be sure I have the legal rights to see him in the hospital, make decisions, etc. I'm not getting any younger here either. So I want to be sure that the various powers that be see our relationship the same way we do, and (unfortunately) that requires making it legal. These aren't the happiest, most romantic circumstances in the world, I know, but we made the most of it anyway.
• I guess I have to start calling John my husband now?! I've never liked the words "husband" and "wife," but oh well: "boyfriend" sounded pretty infantalizing. 
• I know my perfume people will be curious: I wore Sweet Redemption. John wore Chergui. 

Recursive cooking

On a whim this weekend, I picked up this combination cookbook–food diary at the library: My Year in Meals by Rachael Ray. I then proceeded to basically read it cover to cover, twice.

I'm weirdly obsessed with it – weirdly because ... Rachael Ray? I obviously don't despise Rachael Ray as much as so many food people do or I never would have picked it up in the first place, but the recipes from her show and the other cookbooks I've seen tend to be cutesy and gimmicky, and she has all these annoying verbal tics like always calling sandwiches "sammies."

This book is different. It's a super-casual, almost bloggy approach to a cookbook. Instead of categorizing the recipes into appetizers, salads, fish, etc., the meals appear chronologically, like "JUNE 23 / BREAKFAST" and "JUNE 23 / DINNER." They aren't, for the most part, recipes that she developed for public consumption; they're family favorites or just the basic stuff that she actually cooks and eats at home (but sometimes for guests, so there are varying degrees of elaborateness). The photos are non-professional snaps she and her husband took themselves. Half the recipes are the kind of pseudo-recipes that I write: no amounts, just guidelines; everything is to taste.

What I love most about it is that it illustrates the way home cooks cook when they're not trying to impress anyone. We tend to make variations on the same meals over and over, especially within a three- to five-month period (I'm currently in a "taco period"). If you're like me and my girl Rach, you don't use recipes most of the time; you have certain templates in your head (like a vinaigrette template) and you vary it up based on what you have on the kitchen, what's in season, etc. So you might use lemon instead of sherry vinegar one day, garlic instead of shallots, etc. And there's something at work I like to think of as recursive cooking: using leftovers in a kind of "upcycling" fashion in new but familiar dishes. In Rachael Ray's case it often involves cooking an enormous hunk of meat and then later using the leftovers in some kind of soup or "sammie." Or cooking extra risotto so she can make arancini the next day. In my case I might make an herb oil to use up some on-the-edge cilantro and then use it in different applications throughout the week: in salad dressing, scrambled eggs, stirred into cooked rice, etc. Or I'll start a new slaw (for tacos) using yesterday's leftover slaw and adding some new ingredients. Or use leftover roasted broccoli as a topping for pizza. RR makes her own giardiniera and uses it in everything; I make a batch of salsa every week and use it in everything. It's a smaller-scale, evolving version of using the same starter in your sourdough for years/decades. Recursive, see?

It's the kind of cookbook I would want to write. And she's inspired me to make a kind of green huevos rancheros tonight using some leftover enchilada sauce (which I made last week with tomatillos, cilantro, jalapenos, sour cream, etc.) as a starter. Let's start a recursive cooking movement!

Response to a response to my response to the response to Heroines

Being a full time literary critic must be exhausting. So much writing about writing. But since I don't often write 5000-word manifestos on the purpose of criticism, I'm going to indulge myself and take this meta stuff one step further. Heather Cromarty wrote some "random thoughts prompted by (but not limited to)" my essay on Heroines. She reviewed Heroines herself in Lemon Hound earlier this year; I read the review at the time but did not comment on it in my essay, except perhaps obliquely, because Cromarty's review does seem a little judgmental on a personal level to me. Anyway, some thoughts. Here's Cromarty:

The first thing I want to address is in Gabbert’s piece is this:

[B]ecause some of the reviews have served essentially to trivialize and dismiss a book whose subject is in fact the historical, systematized trivialization and dismissal of work by women writers, it seems all the more urgent to question those responses. … I don’t wish to perform a meta–hatchet job on these reviews—just to show that their authors don’t reveal enough knowledge of or intimacy with the book and its purpose to give their judgement what Mendelsohn calls “heft,” and to put out a call for a more considered criticism, a criticism that teaches us how to read, to be better readers, not simply encouraging our worst habits and validating our laziness by telling us what not to bother with. 

First, I don’t believe that topic confers merit. It is possible, in general, that a worthy project can be executed poorly. Second, I have real issues with saying that the two reviewers just didn’t do enough with the book, otherwise they would have been less (or differently) critical. Keeler mentions in her LARB piece that she read the book twice, which I doubt is all that common in book reviewing, given deadlines and all. Gabbert calls Jessica Winter’s review “snarky, dismissive” but the whole thesis of “I just read better than you” seems pretty snarky to me. Am I misreading that?

1. I don't believe that topic confers merit either. It seems pretty clear to me that that's not what my introduction says.

2. If Keeler really read the book twice, I feel pretty comfortable saying that I'm a better reader than her, or at least that I was a better, more careful reader of this book. If that's "snarky," so be it. I did and still do find it absurd that Keeler quoted the list of items of clothing, removed from its context, in order to make Zambreno look superficial. I go to great length, in my essay, to show all the layers of meaning that Keeler removed from the passage in question, so I won't rehash that here. In principle I agree that "I'm a better reader than you" is an annoying tone to take in a piece of criticism, but anyone who is going to be writing and publishing reviews in big publications like the LARB (not "random thoughts" posted on your own blog, not college comp essays) should be a better reader than that. We can all be better readers; I'm often a lazy reader myself. But when reading a book with aims to review it, we have to be better than that. Otherwise you get crap criticism.

Cromarty again:

I mention in the comments at the LARB that people laud Zambreno for trying new forms, but that the reviews of Heroines are expected to follow some pre-defined structure of how reviews must work (in Gabbert’s essay, ironically, it’s a male penned definition too!). Keeler expressed her frustration with Heroines and that’s somehow not okay, but the book itself (like it or not) is a howl against just this sort of caging of the way women write or think. It just doesn’t make any sense.

3. There is nothing innovative about the "structure" of Keeler's review. It's plain-flavor review-review. Read it yourself and argue with me if you think it's innovative. My issue with the review is not that it doesn't follow some pre-defined format, it's that it (willfully) misrepresents the book. 

4. I quote Daniel Mendelsohn on the purpose of criticism (to teach readers how to think), not the format/structure. I'm all for formally innovative criticism if it gets the job done. And I'm all for reviewers expressing frustration if that frustration is the result of careful, informed reading, but Keeler doesn't convince me that she's a careful reader, so her frustration isn't very interesting. The frustration feels irrational. When I'm irrationally frustrated by books, I usually don't finish them and I definitely don't review them. 

Cromarty:

Gabbert says that we needn’t like Zambreno, we need only to take her seriously. Again, I may not have been totally clear on this in my review, but I can take Kate Zambreno the person who wrote Heroines seriously (and I do) while sometimes not being able to take Kate Zambreno the character in Heroines seriously. I approached the book knowing that these two people weren’t precisely the same thing.

5. It really feels here like she is defending her own review, but again, I never referred to Cromarty's review in my essay. Anyway, "Kate Zambreno the character" is sort of "unlikeable," but I don't think people in books need to be likeable in order for the books to be good. In fact, I like unlikeable characters; characters aren't your friends. 

Things I wrote

Happy May Day, y'all. My sweetheart is still quite sick and it's snowing (AGAIN), so I'm not sure what's happy about it yet, but maybe I'll see a herd of elk in Golden again?

I wanted to point you to some new work up online. First, a selection of poans (poem-koans!) from The Self Unstable at Boston Review. They look like this:

I was bitten by a feral cat, who left her fang behind in my hand. My dream life has its own past, memories I only access when asleep. When something hurts in a dream, where do you feel the pain? Is there an analog in the real world? And likewise, for the beauty? If we can’t change the past, regret is a waste of time, but not worry or longing. Still, I prefer regret. If time is a vector, we are passengers facing the rear of the train.

Many thanks to Timothy Donnelly for selecting these pieces for the annual National Poetry Month feature.

Second, a long essay (refill your coffee) about Kate Zambreno's Heroines and its critical reception: "The Madwoman and the Critic." Here's a paragraph from the essay:

It’s risky to write a memoir, or anything resembling one, because you will inevitably be judged on the basis of your self, your personhood, and not simply your writing. You may find yourself to be an “unlikeable character.” And if a reader takes a strong dislike to you, they may have trouble disentangling that from their opinion of the book. Reading reviews of Heroines, even before I had finished the book, I wanted to argue with their authors, because the rhetoric felt suspect on its face. There has been a tendency to get personal, to reveal judgmental attitudes toward Zambreno’s life choices or her emotional responses. (Has she any right to be unhappy, to complain? Isn’t her life relatively cushy? But this of course is not how depression, how happiness, works.) But I’m not going to try to convince you to like Kate Zambreno. I just want you to take her seriously. Zambreno is a radical, and we need radicals. We need people who go too far and say too much, people who are so passionate they’re angry, who are a little out of control. Like a Michael Moore, she is probably not going to convince anyone on the far right to become a feminist, but she might convince a leftist that they’re not progressive enough.

It's basically an act of meta-criticism, and I use most of the space to dismantle two reviews of the book that I found particularly "problematic," in that they either misrepresent the book or attack it using the same dismissive language, used for years against women, that is essentially the subject of Zambreno's book.

I'd like to say more about my complicated feelings re: writing and publishing this essay, but I'm not sure how. Suffice it to say that I am not against "negative reviews" done right; I don't believe in sparing the artist's feelings. However, I take issue with spiteful, unfair, or manipulative hatchet jobs. To avoid what I call dismissive criticism, you should come to a book generously, read it carefully, and engage with it honestly before laying down judgment. If you're incapable of doing that (because you hate the book on sight, say), maybe don't review it?

Order of Operations

I just ragged on John for putting on jeans and boots while he was still wearing his robe, and he sent me this video (subject line: "guess who you remind me of?"):

The most memorable meals of my life, in chronological order

1. Staying at some dinky motel in New Mexico with my family and my maternal grandparents, we cooked some kabobs on an outdoor grill: chunks of beef and cherry tomatoes on skewers in some kind of tangy marinade. This is the first food I remember finding unusually delicious, beyond the level of Fruit Roll-Ups and Pudding Pops, and it's one of my first memories period. I must have been four or five.

2. I went to kindergarten and first grade at a little private school called St. Luke's, out in New Mexico farm country. Once a year they did a fundraiser where they sold make-your-own-pizza kits. The resulting pizza was probably pretty lousy in the grand scheme of things, but I truly loved it.

3. On a family trip to San Diego when I was 13 or so, I ordered shrimp tacos at some divey Mexican joint, and they were covered in chopped fresh cilantro, which I may have tasted a couple of times, but certainly not in such quantities. This was before you could buy cilantro just anywhere. It blew my everloving mind. I had no idea what I was eating until later, back in El Paso, when I smelled that taste in the produce section at a grocery store and was stopped in my tracks. (I feel like cilantro isn't that fragrant anymore; I wonder if we use different cultivars now that there's higher demand.)

4. In high school, the gorditas from Pepe's Tamales on Mesa, in the same little strip mall that housed our Blockbuster Video. The crispiest, daintiest little gorditas in history, served in a little paper tray, delicious every time, RIP.

5. Once in college my brother and I stayed in a house on the beach (near Corpus, maybe?) with our friends Robo and Stacey (now married) and Stacey's mother and sister. One night we bought a bag of shrimp fresh off a boat, and I made a batter with a lot of Tony Chachere's (salty Cajun seasoning) and fried them up, and we ate them hot as they came out of the pot. Possibly the best shrimp I've ever had.

6. College again: At Jazz Fest in New Orleans, dripping in sweat, my roommate Kate and I stopped and bought a shrimp po'boy to share from a food stand. Just shrimp in a remoulade sauce with cold shredded iceberg lettuce on French bread. We looked at each other in disbelief as we took our first bites. That sandwich was so fucking good!

7. On my 21st birthday I went to Mark's, a beautiful restaurant built in an old church on Westheimer, and had some kind of carpaccio (tuna, I think, not beef) and seafood risotto garnished with – and this is the most memorable part – the most delicious sliver-thin slices of roasted fennel. This still stands out as maybe the most I've enjoyed a meal at an upscale restaurant.

8. John and I once spontaneously stopped for dinner at Bin 26, an Italian restaurant on Charles Street in Boston, and had an amazing mussel dish. It was just mussels in marinara, but there was a thick slice of grilled bread, that kind of really porous airy peasant bread that gets super crunchy, olive-oiled and almost blackened in spots, sitting on the bottom of the bowl soaking up the sauce, so you could eat it when the mussels were gone. If I could eat real bread one last time, that's the bread I would want. We also had an incredible Cabernet that tasted like coconut. We went back for a birthday or anniversary or something later that year and it wasn't as good, and they were out of the wine.

I'm sure I can think of others, but those are the standouts right now. Some conclusions:

• I've been to lots of fancy restaurants. Simple foods really are best.
• A lot of memorable meals occurred in Texas and/or involved shrimp. Of course, you can chalk up the first part to the fact that I lived in TX until I was 22, and we tend to form our most intense memories when we're younger. I still think Texas has better food than most places, though. I don't eat shrimp much anymore because John is allergic to it; also it's just not that great when you're not on the Gulf. Most seafood is flown in from wherever anyway (so it's silly when people are squeamish about eating sushi away from a coast), but shrimp is the one thing I've noticed varies wildly in quality from place to place. I never had exceptional shrimp in Boston. Gulf shrimp may suck now too, in a post-Deepwater world.
• None of the food I ate during my two weeks in Europe was particularly delicious or memorable. I think you have to spend a lot to eat well in Europe. I mean, you can just buy bread and cheese, but I tend to disagree that random bread and cheese from Europe is any better than random bread and cheese you can get here. I still obviously had an awesome time, but the food was neither here nor there. The food we ate in Spain, in fact, was straight up bad; when we crossed into France, we bought a rotisserie chicken and devoured it like characters in a Goya painting on the floor of our hotel room. For some reason we ate pizza in Monaco. 
• I think of New York City as a great food city but can't pinpoint a great meal I've had there. Maybe in NYC, as in Europe, you have to spend a lot to get past the abundance of mediocrity. 

It's Spring o'Clock Somewhere (Mini-Reviews)

Although it continues to snow once or twice a week here and it's currently 19 degrees, I'm in a horrible mood and have a chronic nosebleed, I've been testing some springy floral scents. I make no claims toward objectivity or perspective this week, for what it's worth.

Guerlain Champs Elysees - I've had a sample of this tucked away for a couple of years, and finally pulled it out of storage when Victoria Frolova mentioned it in a post on mimosa at Bois de Jasmin. Not the simple, raspy spring floral of L'Artisan's Mimosa pour Moi, nor the more intense, gourmand treatment of mimosa as in YSL's Cinema, Champs Elysees is a shrill, rosy mimosa floral with fruity apple-pear top notes, very close in effect to DKNY Be Delicious or the nicer niche version of the same idea, Rose d'Ete from Parfume de Rosine. Luca Turin called it "the second-worst perfume Guerlain ever made." Certainly, it has none of the depth of a typical Guerlain and smells a bit like a high-school bathroom (hairspray and body splash). But it's nonetheless kind of pretty in its way (as is Roucel's Be Delicious – which, to be fair, post-dates both CE and RdE). I don't wear stuff this high-pitched, but I don't find it particularly offensive either.

Vero Profumo Mito - An intensely green citrus chypre, like Parfum d'Empire's recent Azemour but with much more bitter bite in the top notes. In citrus terms, this translates to more of the peel and less of the juice. As is often the case in contemporary chypres, the galbanum is doing as much work as the oakmoss. Very well done, but this really isn't my kind of thing, and when I do want something in this genre, I'll take the earthy, herbal Eau Dynamisante or the smooth resinous lemon of Monsieur Balmain at something like 1/10 the price.

MCMC Noble - A good, natural jasmine soliflore has the same clean/dirty dichotomy as a good musk: equal parts fresh, lovely petals and a dirty, human, post-sex kind of smell. Noble is supposed to involve vetiver and incense and "chai tea" among other things, but all I really smell is jasmine, unadorned, in all its soap-meets-crotch glory. Except that I don't personally experience jasmine as glorious, perhaps because it doesn't grow around where I grow up. So this is merely nice to me. If you're a jasmine lover, though, this may be just the thing.

Michael Storer Stephanie - I don't really understand this fragrance yet, but I'm writing about it anyway. For a white floral (a gardenia construction, necessarily, since gardenias don't yield oil), it's very surprising – most perfumes in the genre exploit the creamy, falling-apart end of the life cycle of a white flower, when the sweet headiness almost approaches rot. Stephanie, instead, feels like a blossom that hasn't really opened yet, green and waxy, almost like the grassy, slightly bitter note of extra virgin olive oil. It's not indolic, and it's not sweet. Initially, it's really rather austere, especially for a tropical floral. The drydown, however, smells uncannily like Champagne de Bois. When Natalie gave me my decant, she told me as much, and sure enough, the ghost of Laurie Erickson emerges after an hour or so. Oddly, the listed notes for Stephanie don't include any base materials, but there must be a good dose of something woody – cedar? sandalwood? – in here interacting with the jasmine. What gives, Michael Storer? Very interesting, though I can't comment on how realistic it smells – El Paso isn't known for gardenias either.

Tauer Perfumes Zeta - Oh dear. You know I'm a Tauer lover from way back, but the combination of strident citrus and linden blossom in the top notes here conspires to turn into cleaning products on my arm. I'm sure this is full of natural materials; all the same it gives me lab chemical vibes. Better as the lemon burns off a bit, but still too close to furniture polish for me. Many people love this one. More for you all, I guess! 

DelRae Amoureuse - Amoureuse combines the waxy, woody green of Stephanie, the faint animalic stank of Noble, and the complex, honey-like sweetness of some white flowers into something very much like the warm, humid air in the tropical conservatory at the Denver Botanic Gardens right down the street. A surprising tangerine note weaves in and out of perception, so at one moment it smells strikingly like a hothouse flower, and the next more like an abstract, made perfume. I find it reminds me very much of Tauer's Carillon pour une Ange, another juicy green spring floral built of similar materials. Like eating a creamsicle in an overgrown garden – overblown, even. Can flowers be blowsy? Why does this perfume make me think of B words, like buxom? Why do I think of "blowsy" as a positive word when the dictionary suggests it's used for slut-shaming? In linguistics, the idea that phonemes carry meaning in themselves is known as "sound symbolism" or "phonosemantics." When a group of words with similar meaning all start with the same sound (as in slip, slide, slosh, slurry, etc., or blowsy, buxom, boisterous, bootylicious...) that's called "clustering." The more you know!

Gardenia image via miamism