Columbine and Orson

I don't think it's morbid curiosity that has me engrossed in Columbine. It's more the idea of a pathology, psychopathy as not illness but irreversibly twisted wiring that makes a human being incapable of compassion. This concept -- the idea of a person who lacks empathy -- is so puzzling I close the book often and sit staring at the ceiling, pondering it.

The author of Columbine, Dave Cullen, was one of the first journalists on the scene on April 20, 1999. Along with all the other journalists that day, his priority was posting the story minute by minute. Over time, he realized that he had made many errors -- as had every other reporter -- and that the ideas all of us hold about Columbine are wrong.

The misconceptions bothered Cullen so much that he spent ten years on this book, talking to Dylan's parents, talking to the parents of children killed and the students who survived. This book tells a story of two boys, one depressed and one a psychopath, but the bigger story is how we share a story, how the media can imprint us with inaccuracies that we regard as truth ten years later.

Orson is the anti-Columbine. At a benefit for Project Open Hand, we sit upstairs with Deb and Janet and Elizabeth, talking about astral projection and horses, books and wines and mushroom hunting. We eat a soup so glorious that it makes you wonder how you've underestimated winter vegetables all these decades. We eat short ribs and a sous vide chocolate cake with hazelnut mousseline and a perfect little homemade Reese's cup (but way better than a Reese's cup). Jane, the psychoanalyst and dream interpreter at our table, can't finish her dessert so of course she turns to the one person at the table who can. "Ann," she says, handing her plate across the table to me. "Do you want the rest?" She's known me for 90 minutes and already she's got me pegged.

And I think about how this room feels -- peaceful -- and how we don't have as many of these warm, filled, peaceful evenings as we should but that for most of us humans this connection is the best part about being on the planet. And I think about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and how teenagers don't know. They know Bruce Willis, and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and that Arnold is governor and all kinds of awful things about destruction and anger and violence and hatred but they don't know the power of peace and good will.

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack

Persimmon Bars, Autobiography of a Face, and Truth & Beauty

My mom and dad brought me Persimmon Bars, and then my Dad emailed me the recipe under the subject line "Recipe for a pretty heavy cake." He's not kidding. It's a brick, coated with a sugar-lemon glaze. Still, I can't stop eating it. I long for raspberries and green salad, chilled cucumbers and crisp apples but I can't stop eating the Persimmon Bars even after Danny has picked off the glaze.

The books I've been reading are the same: they make me feel heavy and slow and a little dim-witted. So I'm going back to two books read last year at the recommendation of my friend Barbara Jourdonnais: Autobiography of a Face and Truth & Beauty.

To read these together is like having two mirrors side by side, each showing a different reflection. Ann Patchett carefully chooses her words and they are beautiful, inevitable, and rock solid. She writes, "When I was young and decided to be a writer, my understanding of the job description came straight from La Boheme. There would be a drafty garret, cold nights, little food, a single candle."

Then there's Lucy Grealy, who has undergone repeated surgeries on her face since the age of nine due to a rare form of cancer that causes her jaw to disintegrate. Lucy writes, "Though our whole family shared the burden of my mother's anger, in my heart I suspected that part of it was my fault and my fault alone. Cancer is an obscenely expensive illness; I saw the bills, I heard their fights. There was no doubt that I was personally responsible for a great deal of my family's money problems; ergo, I was responsible for my mother's unhappy life."

Ann and Lucy meet when they share an apartment while attending the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Ann's book is mostly about Lucy and Lucy's book is entirely about Lucy. Ann's version is full, an epic novel of a true story. Lucy's version is one-dimensional, painful, short. To read them one after the other is to see how far we are from each other, how some gulfs cannot be crossed.

Ann's writing is like flying -- you get to lift above and see the whole countryside. Lucy's writing is quick and clever but there's a lack, a hurriedness. That feels uncharitable but to look at the path of Lucy's life is to wonder how she wrote at all. And to wonder what she'd have written if her face and her heart had been left intact.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

Tea and Maira Kalman and Cary Tennis

http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/e-pluribus-unum/?th&emc=th

Sleepless night. Comforted in the early hours by Maira Kalman and Cary Tennis:

Somewhere people are laughing in a cafe.

But I am looking in a cardboard box for a tax file from 1987.

As I look for the tax file, I find a solitary button in a cellophane wrapper and try to decide whether to keep the button, and if so, whether to leave it in the box of tax files

or whether to find a new place for the button, and if so, where that place would be, and then I examine the button, noting its deep brown color and then I see that it is broken, and I wonder, Well, this button is broken, and yet the package is not opened, what shall I do?

Thusly are the hours of our days flushed down the toilet.

Thusly do we feel the crushing, deathly weight of meaninglessness.

Thusly do we abandon forthwith any such project of getting organized.

We go out into the sunshine and it is still beautiful. We sit in a cafe and laugh.

We come home and there are still boxes on the floor. We sit among them and weep and curse the gods.

I suspect I am not alone in this.

Thus we seek to become aware of the qualities of time, and the qualities of space, and try to live in this world as it is.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

The Art of the Bar and Polenta

This is not good polenta. This is polenta that stiffens immediately in the pot, is bright yellow and crunchy instead of cream-colored and silken. I've made the damn polenta three times today and now, instead of feeling polenta soothed, I want to stomp out back and hurl the pot into the cow pasture.

Instead, I open The Art of the Bar. It's like walking through an art gallery, and every room has a tasteful display of a perfect cocktail glass filled with a perfect cocktail. No people. Just cocktails in jewel tones with perfectly restrained garnishes. Forget the polenta. Look at the light on the glass stem for the Sazerac. Look at the old-fashioned lime juicer in front of what looks like a pressed brass wall. Look at the square platter with the beaded rim and tiny, perfect little cocktail onions. I'm thinking I could go on an all-cocktail diet and be very happy.

And this thought before I go scrub out the polenta pot: one story of how cocktails may have gotten their name describes Betsy Flanagan, a tavern-keeper during the American Revolution who garnished her drinks with a rooster's tail feather. "The soldiers were so enamoured of her drinks that they would toast her with the chant "Vive le coqtail!" Every time I open the book I wonder about Betsy and those feathers, and how I can have such a vivid idea of what she was like without knowing anything else about her.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

Charlotte's Web and Soif

While Rachey and Ari stand in line for the Boardwalk rides, Steve, Brad, Danny and I go to Soif, my favorite wine bar. I order a flight of rose, and the guys try a sip from each glass while we eat fingerling potatoes with aioli and plate after plate of padron peppers, perfectly salted and roasted.

Then the guys head off to watch Inglorious Basterds. I don't like Quentin Tarantino in general and am irritated by misspellings in particular, so I skip the movie. (Prissy!) But I'd choose a bookstore over Quentin any day, so I'm happy to cross the street to Logos. I find a battered copy of Charlotte's Web, (a bargain at $3) and soon I'm curled up in the warm, cozy barn with Fern, listening to Charlotte and Wilbur and Templeton. A small thrill, remembering Templeton the rat and his me-first-ness, his slightly ominous presence. I think about E.B. White, making the untrustworthy personality the smallest one on the barn floor (Charlotte's obviously smaller but she's up above). It's the opposite of Stephen King. Shrink down what scares us so we can stand over it, feel more noble and bigger than the selfishness and greed.

And the words that Charlotte wove into her web: Some Pig, Terrific, Radiant, and Humble, which Charlotte says means "not proud and near the ground -- that's Wilbur all over." There's something there for all of us, choosing words carefully because weaving each word takes such effort.

"Why did you do all this for me?" Wilbur asks Charlotte.

"I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that."

And then, all too soon, this passage, which stops me and causes a pang of grief:

She never moved again. Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon deserted. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people who had visited the Fair, knew that a gray spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.

I almost don't want to keep reading. But then there are Charlotte's daughters to rediscover, Joy, Aranea, and (the one that Wilbur names) Nellie. And that last page (go find your copy because it won't be the same if you read it on a blog). And when you turn the last page, you sigh, and you sit there on an old stool, looking up at the ceiling thinking for a little while. And then you go look for your friends.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

A Homemade Life and Cream-Braised Green Cabbage

I love Molly Wizenberg and envy her in equal measure. I envy her petite mother trotting around Paris in high heels. I envy Molly's years spent in a tiny apartment in France as well as her naturally red hair and funny, endearing writing style. "A Homemade Life" is my favorite book right now, and every recipe I've made from it makes me like Molly even more.

She saved me with her Cream-Braised Green Cabbage. Rachey read about cabbage soup (maybe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?) and has been hounding me to make it for weeks. I keep saying, "Cabbage soup is what you eat when you have no money for good food," but Rachey persists with her unreasonable belief that I will make a cabbage soup that she likes.

Suddenly, there's the answer right in front of me. Molly says,

"Cabbages may be homely, hard-headed things, but with a little braising, they're bewitching. Cut into wedges and cooked slowly in a Jacuzzi bath of cream, they wind up completely relaxed, their bitter pungency washed away and replaced with a rich, nutty sweetness."

Okay, worth a shot. I find a lovely delicate petit chou, cut it into wedges, and braise it in cream with salt and a little fresh lemon juice. Oh my God. OH MY GOD. Rachey takes a bite, serves herself a bowlful and curls up with it in her lap, watching Grey's Anatomy, completely happy. Danny comes downstairs, and sniffs at the pot. "What is this?" "Cabbage," I reply, sure that he'll snort in disgust and walk away. "Can I have some?" he asks. Sure. He polishes off the bowl and says, "That's so good. Can you make more? Can you make more now?"

So tomorrow I'm going to buy another green cabbage, braise it in cream, and serve the kids cabbage as an after-school snack. Thank you Molly.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

Everything Matters! and Jellybean Tomatoes

Don and Gary's backyard holds miracle after miracle. The praying mantis, stock-still on a plant leaf that's exactly the same shade of green. Don's little chapel of a greenhouse with its pepper plants and lemon tree. And the tomato wall -- a construction of plumbing pipe and wooden poles that holds a prodigious number of tomato plants. "I want this," I say over and over, like a child and Gary laughs. "This just about killed us" he says about the backyard, their weed-free, purple-flowered, blue-sky haven of a backyard. Don carries a large basket and carefully snips the tomatoes free of the wall, filling a bag for me. "Try this," he says, holding out the tiniest tomato I've ever seen. "I call these jellybean tomatoes because they're so sweet."

Somehow this fits in with Ron Currie's novel "Everything Matters!" Junior, who knows from the time he is born that a comet will hit the earth and destroy it, somehow manages to screw up his entire life. Heartache after heartache and I become more and more angry as he loses the love of his life, loses his mother to drinking, his brother to drugs. I read and scowl and keep reading. And then, when I'm about to lose patience and throw the book to the ground, a shift again. A moment of grace, of starting over.

This passage won't reverberate unless you read the book -- or maybe it will matter, because everything matters in the end:

"You wish they understood, as you do, that there is no escape and never was, that from the moment two cells combined to become one they were doomed. You wish they understood that there is joy in this fact, greater joy and love in this last moment than they experienced in their entire lives."

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack