Mostly local

Key West writers are in the news, folks. First of all, there's James Gleick, the esteemed science writer who has recently published his book about information called The Information. And so far it's getting boffo reviews, in Big Important Publications like The New York Times and the New York Review of Books and coverage on NPR's All Things Considered. I only hope future generations of library and information science students get to read this book instead of the ... stuff I'm having to read for my current course. But the less side about that on a public forum the better. Another interesting read is Gleick's blog, Bits in the Ether. I'm told he'll be doing a reading and signing at Voltaire Books some time this month; I'll update here when I learn more. The other item of local interest which I cannot resist posting is this video of our own Meg Cabot, promoting her forthcoming young adult novel Abandon, a modern take on the myth of Hades and Persephone. I like this because it's shot in one of my favorite places in our tiny town, the Cemetery -- which, by the way, is now open to access at the Frances Street gate again. Thank you, City Commission!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n6XZbgqTSk]

Finally, on the subject of local authors, please keep in mind that this week is the final week of One Island One Book, which will wrap up on Thursday morning with the library's Cafe Con Libros program -- featuring a talk by Alison Lurie herself about her novel set in Key West, The Last Resort.

My epic problem

Last week, while home from work with a sore throat, I spent the whole day reading the new highly-touted novel, A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. I liked it, as did the folks at Publisher's Weekly and Booklist (which gave it a starred review). Even more impressively, it showed up at number 2 on the New York Times' hardcover fiction bestseller list in its first week -- nice to see a first-time novel by an English professor up there in Patterson/Larsson land. Yet. Toward the end, I found myself racing through -- not quite skimming but definitely not paying close attention. This is a bad habit of mine, especially if I'm reaching the end of a book at the end of the day and know I won't be able to sleep until it's done. But I found myself also getting a tad annoyed and I realized what that was about.

It's the "Wait, there's more!" syndrome, commonly seen in action/epic movies (Wyatt Earp and The Dark Knight come to mind) where there is just one denouement/near death experience/ultimate showdown too many. Or three.

I realize that's kind of the point of an epic book like this one -- and it's the first part of a trilogy so there's more to come. But after awhile, especially in a single volume, it starts to feel like Too Much. This is the reason I've given up on Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. Each single volume just involves too many James Bondish escapes. Even in a fantasy where you've suspended disbelief (time travel and all that not to mention a brawny, sexy Scotsman who's also really smart and thoughtful, too), it's asking too much to follow these characters through yet another traumatic event. I think if you're going to follow the same people on epic adventures it helps to break it down into more digestible episodes like your standard mystery or thriller series. And one of the geniuses of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin series, I realize now, is his ability to take us along on extended periods where nothing much actually happens, plotwise, but we're still enthralled by just hanging out with those characters in those settings.

I feel the need here to repeat that I really did like Harkness' book -- which contributed the new (to me, at least) feature of supernatural beings doing yoga together as well as great European settings and the always-alluring enticement of ancient secrets hidden in an old book in the archives of the Bodleian Library. This book, like Justin Cronin's blockbuster from last year, The Passage, (which I also read and liked but felt a little annoyed at its super-hype) is getting a lot of props as a sort of genre/literary hybrid, although the vampires in A Discovery of Witches are more traditional dangerous romantic hero types, not the viral predators of The Passage. I rated A Discovery of Witches 3 1/2 stars on LibraryThing which is my standard "enjoyable read" rating and I will probably read the next installment. The fact that I'm spending so much time thinking about this book indicates that it's good, good enough to stay inside my head for a bit. And I am glad to see a non-Patterson-violent-male thriller book up there selling well. As the review in the Miami Herald pointed out, Harkness's book uses elements from fantasy, romance and historical fiction, and I'm all for all those genres getting more play.

Maybe it's the English major in me, or the romance reader, but the parts I like best about these books are the characters and their idiosyncracies. I know you need lots of action to keep people interested and I know if you're talking about some kind of supernatural showdown there has to be lots of conflict with lots at stake. I just hope Harkness, Cronin and others (I'm sure their success means there will be tons of others) trust their readers, and themselves, to know that we're reading these stories for more than just one more Incredible Cheating of Death.

One Island One Book, Volume 2

Last year at the Key West Library we held our first One Island One Book program -- and if I do say so, as a member of the staff, it was a great success. We chose Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, a novel set in Key West in the 1930s, and had lots of rousing discussions, presentations, a screening of the film (even though its plot bore almost no resemblance to that of the novel) and, as a capper, the designation of the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum in Key West as a National Literary Landmark. This year, we've decided to do it all over again -- with a different book, of course. We've chosen another novel set in Key West, this one more contemporary and with an author who is still alive, still in Key West -- and who will appear at the Library for our Cafe Con Libros group to discuss the novel as the progam's finale. Our choice is The Last Resort by Alison Lurie.

Lurie is a longtime Key Wester and this is actually her second novel set here -- the first was The Truth About Lorin Jones and when people ask me for a Key West novel, that's always the first one I recommend. The Last Resort is more recent and tells the story of a woman married to a much older, successful man who has basically made serving him her life's work. Until he gets depressed and withdrawn one winter, and she suggests they repair to Key West and ... well, you should read the book to find out what happens.

To find out more about Lurie, check her website -- which, I was extremely touched to see, suggests finding her books at your local library, even before it suggests purchase, which is an extremely generous and civic-minded gesture on the part of a writer.

We have lots of copies of The Last Resort in the Library's collection -- as of this writing most if not all are checked out but it's a quick read so if you request a copy, you shouldn't have to wait long. I have it on good authority, too, that they have a good supply of them at a good price at Key West Island Books, so that's another option.

The program starts March 9 with a discussion of the book by Cynthia Crossen, who writes the Dear Book Lover column for the Wall Street Journal, lives in Key West and is vice president of our own Friends of the Library. We are blessed indeed with our literary community on this little island. For more information on events, keep an eye on the Library website's Key West page or check the One Island One Book blog. You do not need to have a Monroe County Library card to attend events at the Library.

The day after

For some reason I don't really want to think about too hard, I am not hung over today but Billy Collins, at some point (I think it was yesterday) read a poem called The Hangover which included the most poetic rendering of the children's pool game Marco Polo one could imagine. You should look it up, or better, find a recording of Billy reading it. It's entirely possible you will find such a recording in the near future on Littoral, The Key West Literary Seminar's entirely excellent blog. At least I hope so.

In the meantime I can now recite from memory the poem Bacon and Eggs by Howard Nemerov, like Billy a two-time Poet Laureate and apparently like Billy a funny guy, too. This is the entire text:

The chicken contributes

But the pig gives its all.

It's a good poem and it bore repeated recitation, along with Roy Blount, Jr.'s poem Oysters, of which I cannot recite the entire text though I do know the last lines:

I prefer my oysters fried

That way I know the oyster's died.

A sentiment with which I agree after reading The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky, in which he reports that if you have to shuck an oyster, it's alive (once it's dead, it relaxes the ligament holding the two sides of the shell together). I always liked them Florentine anyway, plus that way you don't have to worry about that pesky liver thing that can kill you.

All of which is to say, I learned a lot over the last 10 days and had a great time, too. It was cool to see New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik in action -- if you weren't at his keynote you'll just have to wait for the podcast because there's no way I could possibly describe it except as a cultural history of the concept of taste. My take-home from that talk: E Pluribus Unum, our national motto until 1956 when they replaced it with In God We Trust, came from a recipe. Pretty cool. (June 10 update: It's here! Download now for your auditory enlightenment!)

As usual, the Seminar makes me want to read almost every book by almost every writer who appeared, but this year's Seminar had the added effect of also making me want to eat almost everything described (except the human lung mucus from "Alive" -- thank you, Kate Christensen!) and cook almost everything, too. I had been wavering the entire time about buying American Food Writing, Molly O'Neill's anthology published by the Library of America. I knew we had it in the library collection but I also knew that you don't just check an anthology out of the library for two weeks and read it straight through; you dip in and out as the mood strikes you. The factor that put me over the edge yesterday was that it includes recipes, including James Beard's recipe for Beef Stroganoff, which seemed to come up multiple times. I might even attempt the damned thing.

Here, in no particular order except roughly chronological, are some of my highlights from the second session of the Seminar. Despite having a number of panelists (or seminarians, as Adam Gopnik suggested we call them) in common, it was very different -- but both were excellent.

• "The key to writing is to take the mental task and turn it into a physical task." -- Adam Gopnik, during a panel that compared cooking and writing
• "One advantage pro cooks have over pro writers is they get to yell at people." -- Gopnik again
• "It's a really dangerous moment when you sate the desire in a piece. I always feel like I've lost the reader and it's time to do the dishes." -- Molly O'Neill
• "Obsession is required" in cooking and writing -- Michael Ruhlman. Also, he notes, an immense capacity for repetition, aka practice
• Kate Christensen said she always notices a novel's "prandial plot" and "I hate novels that have no food in them."
• "Our relationship to food is revealing of our characters in the way that nothing else is." -- Christensen again
• On the page, "food isn't a metaphor. It's a thing in itself that explodes in the verbal part of your brain." -- Christensen a third time
• Take This Job and Shove It is "a ditty disappointed in itself" -- from Kevin Young's poem "On Being The Only Black Man At A Johnny Paycheck Concert"
• "Food is what distinguishes us as human beings, cooked food." -- Michael Ruhlman
• "If my peaches are successful, they are no longer mine." -- David Mas Masumoto, organic peach farmer and essayist
• "When you grow thousands of peaches, you don't bother sucking on the pit." -- Mas again
• "Without me, you would never have seen the poem 'Nebraskans eat their weiners.' " -- Mark Kurlansky, discussing "The Food of a Younger Land," the collection of WPA food writing from 1940
• "Locavore is a movement today. It was a way of life then. You had no choice." -- Kurlansky again
• The reason French food culture is so much better than English food culture is red wine, according to Adam Gopnik. "I don't think a beer and whiskey culture will ever have quite that same relationship to its food as a red wine culture."
• Gopnik recommends "The Feasts of Autolycus: The Diary of A Greedy Woman," published in 1900 by Elizabeth Robbins Pennell, saying that "a woman writing about her right to be greedy is writing about her right be sexy, to have sex."
• "Catullus would have loved Facebook. He would have been on there all the time." -- Billy Collins
• "Sometimes you write a poem because you don't want eating alone one night in Pittsburgh to come to nothing." -- Collins again, discussing his poem "The Fish."
• "Fat is good!" -- the refrain Michael Ruhlman had the entire auditorium calling out. "Salt and fat are two of my great passions."
• "Food is about generosity, not about withholding." -- Ruhlman again
• It turns out a buckeye is, in addition to being some kind of hard little nut, a delicious candy made with peanut butter surrounded by chocolate, a big favorite in Ohio. I had no idea.
• In a discussion of, er, food porn, we learned that magazine and cookbook editors demand the "hero shot" of food that presents it at its most, er, appetizing. Ahem.
• "Always pick the thing that is not a chain is one way to save the world." -- Elizabeth Berg, from her story "The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted"
• Favorite recipe: Buy two boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. Make one box of macaroni, use both envelopes of cheese. -- Berg again, from the same story
• "The whole history of America was of gobbling up the continent." -- Mark Kurlansky
• "We don't eat money." -- An Icelander telling Mark Kurlansky why they eat haddock, not cod
• "I have never followed a recipe in my life. I read them and I'm inspired by them but then I just go do what I was going to do anyway." -- Molly O'Neill
• "We think of recipes as instruction manuals but recipes are sheet music." -- Michael Ruhlman
• "There are several generations of people now who think recipes know more than they do." -- Molly O'Neill
• "My overarching goal is to have more people cook for themselves because I think life is better that way. The world is better that way." -- Michael Ruhlman
• Judith Jones is "absolutely the last of the great cookbook editors. Everybody else is just trying to make the sucker fit on the page." -- Molly O'Neill
• The first line of the first edition of The Joy of Cooking: "Stand facing the stove."
• "A great meal in China has themes; it has a narrative arc." -- Nicole Mones
• "Where else can you win an international cookbook medal for a novel that doesn't contain any recipes?" Mones again
• "My childhood was not defined by the grand meals my mother cooked. It was defined by trips to Waffle House with my father." -- John T. Edge
• Recommended reading from Edge: Southern Fried Plus Six by William Price Fox
• And I'll give Billy Collins the last word: "I'm surprised more people don't read poetry. It's so short."

But is it literary?

The Key West Literary Seminar is underway -- we just wrapped up the first session; there's still room in the second session and if you're a literary foodie at all, this is one of those rare opportunities for your passions to combine. One topic that keeps coming up, as it has since we began discussing food as a theme for the Seminar, is the question of literariness (if that's a word). One of my fellow board members, whom I respect a lot and like even more, dislikes it when the writers get off the topic of writing and literature and just start talking about food. I disagree. And here's why:

First of all, there is plenty of talk about writing itself and to be honest, a diet of just that gets to be too much for me, especially since we're dealing with a double session here.

Second, we have gathered some of the smartest, most articulate people in the country who know from food. Why on earth would we NOT want them to talk about this subject, about which they are passionate and knowledgable -- and often quite funny. Not just the known funny people like Calvin Trillin, Roy Blount and Billy Collins, but Julia Reed was a revelation to many of us -- the woman should have her own standup act -- and even an eminence such as Madhur Jaffrey had the auditorium laughing out loud many, many times. Isn't their foodiness the very reason we brought them, along with their proven literary chops? When the subject is "more literary," say a genre like memoir, we don't object when the writers discuss some topic that is the focus of their work, do we? The whole point of the Seminar, to me, is to hear directly from the writers telling stories, about themselves, their own work and about other people, stories that are funny or sad or significant in some way. It's stuff you just wouldn't hear otherwise and it is very different hearing spoken by the writer herself than it is reading on the page.

I may be a bit oversensitive, having come from journalism and feeling like nonfiction generally is considered a literary stepchild compared to the exalted realms of fiction and poetry. And there were a few times when I agreed that the discussion veered a bit too far into the purely topical -- once about America's current crises in obesity and diabetes -- but in most cases that was driven by questions from the audience and I don't see what either the Seminar planners nor the writers can do about that.

So overall -- a rousing success, I must claim on my own behalf and that of the people who did most of the work putting this thing together, namely Miles Frieden and Arlo Haskell. There's still room to sign up for the second session, which I'm excited about -- it's going to be interesting to hear the new voices in the mix, especially the novelists (Kate Christensen, Elizabeth Berg and Nicole Mones) as well as a more historical perspective from Mark Kurlansky. And I'm excited to hear more from Madhur Jaffrey -- she's one of those people you could listen to all day even when she's just describing how to create a simple rice dish.

And here, to whet your appetite, are some of my personal highlights from the first session:

"It took a long time for American writers to feel comfortable admitting that they were actually writing about food."

and,

"It's ironic that, just as people stopped cooking they started reading cookbooks."

-- Ruth Reichl in the opening keynote address

Jonathan Gold said he hates the term "ethnic" when applied to restaurants. "Nobody ever calls French cooking ethnic."

We had Julia Child impressions from at least four the panelists -- the best by far was from Judith Jones; the worst was Roy Blount, Jr.

Diana Abu-Jaber describing the adoption of dishes from different cultures into the American diet, such as hummus with roasted red peppers in the grocery store: "There's fusion and I guess you'd call it confusion."

"The reason there's a taboo against cannibalism is that it must have been a powerful temptation."

-- Jason Epstein, after quoting a chef who says chefs cook for other people "so they don't eat us."

Someone asked Madhur Jaffrey if we should travel to India or if it's been ruined. She replied that India is like an onion with many layers existing together, from medieval to 21st century. "It is a rich, irritating, uplifting experience to go to India," she said. She recommends it.