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  1. Potentially Unpleasant Lasagna

    January 30, 2012 by wendyrawlings

    Today I made a lasagna.  I like making lasagna because there’s a big margin of error. You can screw up multiple things and still come out with a decent-tasting meal. People who know me know that I am not a good cook. I’m okay at making bread and some desserts, but if my husband (the family chef) goes out of town for a few days, I will be content eating Caesar salad, tuna salad, and scrambled eggs. That’s pretty much my preferred cuisine.

    I was raised in the 70′s, when certain segments of the American population were beginning to have new ideas about how to raise girls. Both my parents are passable cooks, but neither of them taught me how to make anything more complicated than tuna salad on toast. My theory about why my parents never taught me to cook is that they wanted to reject certain notions about what girls needed to learn. Self-professed feminists,  they rejected teaching me skills associated with femininity and instead focused on intellectual development, swimming lessons, and apple-picking (I have vivid memories of climbing tall trees to get the best apples at Wright’s Orchard).  Though my mother knew how to knit and my father made all of my sister’s and my Halloween costumes on his sewing machine, neither of them taught me how to knit or sew or crochet or cook or bake or, I don’t know, make jam.

    There’s a family story about how one time I tried to cook a vegetarian meal from Mollie Katzen’s Enchanted Broccoli Forest cookbook and used vanilla yogurt instead of plain. The meal was inedible. Further, I was mortified that my parents and sister laughed at me, rather than offering encouragement for next time. So for me, there was no next time.  I can hardly remember cooking a thing all through graduate school except for the occasional group-effort Thanksgiving meal. I could manage some mashed potatoes and a pumpkin pie.

    Now I feel kind of cruddy that I’m a bad cook. My husband has a broad repertoire that includes everything from beef stew to pumpkin shrimp bisque to pork loin to tofu curry.  Many of our friends are excellent home chefs, and get-togethers at our friend Sandy’s house on the beach often include command performances by a different friend each night. Recently, our buddy Harold made salmon in a salt dome. Freaking salt dome?, the scrambled-eggs-for-dinner-again cook in me asked, as I watched my friend sculpt a giant dome of, well, salt.

    So today, in an attempt to sharpen my dull skills, I decided to try making a lasagna with only a glancing look at a very vague recipe I found online.  Okay, so I had to watch a Youtube video about how to slice up a portobello mushroom. But other than that, I tried to figure things out on my own. Do you know how stupid you feel at my age watching a video of how to cut up a large mushroom? As I was preparing the meal, though, I cheered up a little. If my husband were to run off to Shangri-La tomorrow without me, I said to myself, at least I could make a variety of pasta dishes.

    A close friend is coming over for dinner with Joel and me tonight. Let’s hope my improvised lasagna is in a forgiving mood.

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  2. Blepharoplasty . . . Blasphemous?

    January 25, 2012 by wendyrawlings

    I’ve always said I’d never combat aging with cosmetic surgery. “Growing old gracefully” is the phrase my friends and I traded back and forth. We might try to preserve our youthful looks through exercise, diet and — in several of cases, including mine — not having kids, but we agreed that paying doctors to carve up our faces and smooth out our wrinkles was out of the question. My friend Chris was particularly adamant, saying that we should be proud to wear our life experience on our faces, and I agreed.  I pictured my face softening with wrinkles and laugh lines, and the picture didn’t frighten me. Once, after my friend Rosemarie was killed in a horrible car accident and I was wondering around Fort Collins, the Colorado town where I lived at the time, like a zombie, so immersed was I in shock and grief, I met an older man outside Kinko’s.  I had just come from getting the oil in my car changed at one of those speedy oil change places, and I’d been so out of it that I’d driven my car onto the grate over the pit in the ground where the people work and half-toppled my car into said pit.  This man must have seen the pain in my face, because he stopped and struck up a conversation with me. We talked for nearly an hour, me and this stranger.  I don’t remember everything he said, but at the end of our conversation, as he was walking away from me, he said, “You’ll age well.”  It was such a strange thing to say, half compliment and half prophecy. I felt guilty to hear him say it, as one of my best friends from childhood had just died at twenty-six, right after finishing medical school at Johns Hopkins.  And here was this man telling me not just that I would grow old, but that I’d grow old well?

    So recently I have been noticing this thing about my face. My right eyelid does not look the same as my left eyelid.  It droops.  It’s weirdly puffy, as if it’s retaining water. Have some errant tears gotten caught up there? I perform the facial gymnastics, trying to get the lid to conform.  I massage it with two fingers.  I put a silk eye pillow filled with lavender in the microwave and then lie on my bed with the pillow over my eyes. Nothing seems to make the lid behave. It’s not like this droopy eyelid makes me look OLD, I say to myself. I just look wrong: asymmetrical, misshapen. No one ever said that part of the deal of getting old would mean that you’d look asymmetrical and misshapen. There must be something wrong with my eye that has nothing to do with age. I must have an allergy. I blame my thyroid, my hormones, my expired mascara. Certainly just a little minor surgery would be justified, I tell myself.  Just to fix this one tiny . . . and then I promise, I say to myself.  After that,  I’ll grow old gracefully . . .

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  3. The Barbarians Are Us

    January 23, 2012 by wendyrawlings

    When I first heard that an Alabama fan had been captured on video “teabagging” an LSU fan, I went to Urban Dictionary to look up “teabagging,” but it didn’t occur to me to watch the video. I’ve since heard so often about the video that I thought I would go see for myself what everyone was talking about. I imagined I’d see a video of a drunk guy in khakis gyrating near a passed-out guy’s head. People had told me that the Alabama fan had exposed himself, but I just assumed that this would be a quick flash of flesh, like Janet Jackson’s famous wardrobe malfunction during the Super Bowl halftime show.

    So, yes, I was surprised to see an adult male expose his genitals in public place with a camera rolling. And then to see him, once he’s finished performing his bizarre ritual on the unconscious LSU fan, sort of wander around with his genitals still hanging out of his pants. It’s shocking and disgusting and grotesque.  But what shocked me more deeply are the events that occur before Old Charlie Teabag starts humping his purple-shirted nemesis’ head.  For several minutes, we see Alabama fans, both male and female, piling empty fast food containers on the unconscious man’s back. People put their fingers up his nose. One young woman hands someone her cell phone and poses smilingly for a photo beside the LSU fan. The people being filmed know that they’re being filmed, but this fact seems only to encourage them to treat the LSU fan even more like an object. I found this sustained and inventive exploitation even more upsetting than the culmination of that behavior in the teabagging incident.

    Watching the video reminded me of a very unpleasant moment in my life, right after I moved to Alabama in 2000. I met a local man who invited me to an Alabama football game when the team still played sometimes at Legion Field in Birmingham.  Five or six of his friends and I got a ride to Birmingham in someone’s SUV, and people were drinking beer on the way up and then in a bar right near the stadium. By the time we got to the game, everyone was half drunk or more. My date (a man in his late 30′s) went and got an order of nachos. We were sitting behind two men with clothes and hairstyles that could have easily led one to conclude they were gay, which my date did. I glanced away from the field at one point and caught him using a tortilla chip to flick melted cheese at the back of one of the guy’s shaved head.  “Are you fucking crazy?” I asked. I was about to tell the guy, who seemed oblivious, when my date yanked me up by the arm and pulled me down the bleachers with him.  We left the game early, along with the other drunk people, though someone sober (I hope) must have driven. I remember my date calling me a cunt and a bitch as we drove back to Tuscaloosa.  I’d gone to a small liberal arts school with Division 3 teams, so sporting events until this moment had been pretty tame for me. The worst I could remember was fans at Trinity chanting “5 hour bus trip!” when we beat Bates.  I was bewildered that a sporting event had turned so suddenly into something a good deal more savage than the tackles we were seeing on the field.

     

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  4. Facebook, Mi Amore.

    January 22, 2012 by wendyrawlings

    In the beginning of our relationship, I had complicated feelings about Facebook. Call it Love/Hate.  I worried that I was spending too much time with Facebook. I worried that I was spending time with Facebook friends at the expense of spending time with my so-called “real” Friends. And I worried I was disclosing too much about myself and that I’d someday regret said disclosures.  In the five years since Facebook and I have gotten together, though, those concerns have faded away. I’ve come to love Facebook and to feel that the time I spend there is time well spent. And the 942 Friends I have on Facebook might not be my BFFs, but I’m genuinely delighted and interested to find out what’s going on their lives each day, their Likes and their Gripes and, yes, even their Endless Kid Photos. In fact, I’ll admit here that I often grab my iPhone and check my feed first thing in the morning, while I’m having my first pee of the day and taking my thyroid meds.  I love to see what the night owls have been up to while I’ve been sleeping, or my Friends in Ireland and England. When Steve Jobs died, immediately my feed lit up with people’s shock and instant thanks and remembrances.

    Since I’m in a listing mood, here are 10 things I’ve gotten the biggest kick out of during my relationship with Facebook so far (in no particular order). I don’t think any of these things could have happened were it not for the great and powerful Facebook:

    1) reconnecting with Denise Minicozzi, one of my very best friends from childhood. Her brother John once exposed himself to me and then threw burrs in my hair while I was playing on a neighbor’s swingset. I found out John is now institutionalized.

    2) Having my sorority sister Liz Cahn Goodman ask me to come speak with her all-female, Jewish reading group in Tampa about my novel, The Agnostics.

    3) The uber-weird experience of seeing photos from my high school boyfriend’s wedding.

    4) Chatting with one RachelMizRayonce Davis, a young African-American woman in Chicago who loves to talk smack about “General Hospital” my favorite soap. I even put her in a forthcoming essay. We discovered we both voted for Obama.I have never met her in real life.

    5) Realizing that some people I went to high school or college with are exactly the same people they were in high school or college.

    6) Realizing that some people I went to high school or college with are entirely different and more interesting people than I thought they were in high school or college. Plus also, gay!

    7) Finding out that some people I went to high school with actually hated it as much as I did.

    8) Photos of people’s dogs sleeping on their beds.

    9) The photo someone posted to my page of my high school crush Rich Nagle reclining with me on a chaise lounge. And I have killer legs, which I didn’t even know I had in high school.

    10) Actually having a pseudo-argument during a dinner party for 8 when we discovered that exactly half of us were Facebook Groupies and the other half Nonfacebookers. I really need to make a movie with this scene in it.

    Viva la Facebook!

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  5. The Mens’ Club Plus One

    January 16, 2012 by wendyrawlings

    This week’s Riff in The New York Times Magazine sounds yet another alarm about the imminent or at least probable at some point in the not-too-distant future death of the novel. In making his case, one Garth Risk Hallberg (he should drop the “Hallberg” and just go with “Garth Risk”) identifies two groups of The Anointed among novelists. On the one hand, we’ve got the “Towering Figures”: Don Delillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.  On the other, we’ve got “The Breakfast Club” (his terms): Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, and Nathan Englander. These youngsters are apparently doing all that’s worthy of note in contemporary novel writing.

    Notice the race and gender composition of both these groups. Is it deliberate that there’s only one woman in each and both are women of color?  I’ve noted before (say, when the book awards get handed out) that often a single woman of color gets chosen, as if choosing her can kill two birds with one stone (“No one can say we discriminated against women or people of color: look! Here’s Toni! Here’s Zadie!”). I do find it eerie, though, that white women writers get elided in these anointings. I wonder if, during the late-night convos on The State of the Novel Today that the Towering Figures and The Breakfast Club are having, Toni and Zadie are expected to fetch coffee for the fellas.

    Hope not.

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  6. Female Public Intellectual Blues

    January 12, 2012 by wendyrawlings

    Goddammit, Susan Sontag, why’d you have to go die on us? Now there are hardly any female public intellectuals left in America. Who else do we have? Anyone?  I’m teaching an undergraduate class this semester for the first time called “The Way We Live Now,” after Sontag’s brilliant and prescient short story of the same name. The animating idea of the course came from my realization, after reading Sontag’s story for the 5th or 6th time, that very few story writers approach historical or cultural or political issues head-on. Sontag manages to convey the feeling of that early era of the AIDS epidemic when people were only beginning to sense the magnitude of the impact of the disease. We were still compartmentalizing in ’86 (“only gay men can catch this”), but Sontag’s story conveys the viralness of the virus — in our bodies, our consciousnesses, and our narratives. It’s not the easiest story to read, but hell, neither is Kafka.

    So the premise of the course is that we can write creatively in ways that encompass both our inner and outer lives (false dichotomy though that may be). That we have milestone personal events in our lives and milestone cultural/political/historical events, and we can write fiction or poetry or nonfiction (well, duh in the case of nonfiction) out of these twin impulses.  As an exercise to get the conversation started, I had students interview each other in order to discover said milestones, and then we discussed them. It was one of the most startlingly personal classroom moments I’ve had in my twenty-plus years of teaching. I paired off with one student because we had an odd number in the class. He was a young guy wearing an Alabama baseball cap. I asked about his milestone personal events: “Well, one was getting married,” he said. I wrote this down.  “And I guess another is having my three kids.”

    Gulp. What??

    I had to ask him to repeat that last one. Turns out he’s 28 years old and has three kids. When I asked him about milestone personal events, he thought for a moment and said tentatively, “Kurt Cobain?”

    From other students in the class I learned that a mother had committed suicide. The student of the mother who committed suicide has 14 tattoos. Another student had survived childhood leukemia. Another, a member of her high school track team, had, during a training run, witnessed a close friend get hit and killed by a car. She was the one who called 911. The disclosures shocked me. I had only asked the students not to report prurient personal milestones such as “when I got a sexually transmitted disease.” And here I had so many of the great pains of their lives laid out right in front of me.

    We talked about the “outside” milestones after that: 9/11, Obama’s election victory, the death of Princess Diana, the advent of mobile internet technology, the death of Heath Ledger. For next week’s assignment, students will read “The Way We Live Now” and write their own “The Way We Live Now” based on some milestone public occurrence/event/transformation that has affected their lives. I told the students who Sontag was and about the signature streak of gray in her mane. I was going to tell them that she probably got that streak from living through so much, but after I heard what they’d lived through, I decided I didn’t need to lionize anyone just yet.

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  7. Elegy for Soaps? These Are Real Tears.

    January 11, 2012 by wendyrawlings

    I have been watching “General Hospital” since 1979. My grandmother watched “Days of Our Lives.” My mother watched “GH” when she was home sick or had a day off from work.

    Once I aspired to graduate school, I hid my love for my soap, believing that an intellectual doesn’t bottom-feed in pop culture. Now I’m not ashamed anymore to say that I love my soap.  For me, it’s part of my imaginative/fantasy life in the way that Harry Potter or video games or role playing activities might be for others. I suppose one thing that makes me different from some soap viewers is that I like to read articles and books that help me to articulate why soap viewers love their shows.

    Here are some reasons why I love my show so much I have been watching it for thirty some-odd years:

    1) It never ends. Other people find the glacial pace of soaps incredibly frustrating and boring, but for me the drawn-out story lines are comforting. The narrative is huge and many-pronged and complicated, but after you watch for a few weeks, you’re completely situated.  Then you can kind of go on cruise control and teach yourself how to knit while you watch an episode.

    2) Male characters are always talking about their freaking feelings (even with each other). So awesome. It’s like a little Wendyutopia every time I turn on the set.

    3) When two characters are discussing something prurient about a third character, the third character always arrives around the corner just in time to eavesdrop and find out exactly what they think of her/him. A perfect world.

    4) Characters generally recover from illnesses (and look fabulous while doing so) or just, like, die — without suffering. There’s no freaking hospice on “General Hospital.”

    5) Air travel is a piece of cake.

    6) You can fuck like 27 different people in your town and generally not permanently lose friends over it.

    7) No one talks about religion or politics.

    8) There are like a million sets, most of them interiors, though since GH is set in a fictional city called Port Charles, NY, there are some great cheesy waterfront exteriors, complete with fog horn sounds.  I love seeing which characters are important enough to get their own interior spaces. On General Hospital, for instance, the Quartermaines are only seen in living rooms or bedrooms, as none of them has to cook (“Cook” does that). And if you are an African-American character on GH, you’re not really an actual full-blown character because you don’t get an interior unless you want to count your place of business. The head nurse, Epiphany Johnson, doesn’t have a home, for instance.  I’m not saying I like this, but I’ve always been interested in the stories that soap operas tell via their use of interior spaces. The soap opera is fundamentally a living room drama, after all. Exteriors are so rare that when they appear, you REALLY notice them.

    It’s no secret to TV viewers that soaps may be coming to an end.  Not individual soaps, but the whole genre. To me this is like hamburger joints coming to an end.  Two of the other long-running soaps on ABC, “All My Children” and “One Life to Live,” were canceled this year. “GH” is the last ABC soap standing.  Chances are, it’ll be canceled and replaced by “The Kardashians Buy Toiletries.”

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  8. Arrested Development?

    January 10, 2012 by wendyrawlings

    So last night my husband and I went to a friend’s house to watch the BCS National Championship, as the football team of the university where we work was playing in it, and as we have become rabid fans of said football team. Except that we’re not really “rabid” fans. I don’t even understand football particularly well; I’ve gone to a couple of the games and realized it was a waste of time because I couldn’t figure out what was going on without the commentator and the cameras helping me, so now I watch all the games on TV. And I do watch all “my” team’s games, but I never watch any other football, which is proof to me that football itself doesn’t interest me at all. What I’ve become attached to, instead, is the sense of community and belonging football creates.  Scrape your fingernail along the surface of that sentiment and just beneath it is another reason (the real reason?) why I love Alabama Football.

    It allows me to act like an 18-year-old.

    In the service of fandom, it’s permissible for me to wear silly clothes (and hats), wander around the Quad while drinking beer, scream at the television, text friends nuggets such as “FUCK YEAH” and “RMFTR!” (for the uninitiated: ROLL MOTHER FUCKING TIDE ROLL), and write off days (like today) when I wake up with a raging hangover after double high-fiving with total strangers at the local college dive.

    One of the reasons I can indulge in the behaviors outlined above — probably the main reason — is that I don’t have children. Hence, I don’t have to worry about breastfeeding the little whippersnapper at midnight, or heaving myself and my massive hangover out of bed in the morning to make waffles for the adorable twins, or embarrassing the tyke by posting photos of myself mugging for the camera in my dopey Tidegear.  Being child-free allows me to spend four hours in a bar just to watch a college football game, and it also allows me disposable income to buy premium stuffed animals (the most recent a remarkably lifelike squirrel) for my three dogs.

    Sometimes I grow concerned that not having children AND teaching at a university has resulted in a form of arrested development. if I had children, I wouldn’t be able to act this way.  I’d have to manage my time better than I do now, and the prospects of (1) paying a sitter to take care of my kids while I wandered around on the Quad on Game Day or (2) taking my kids with me in their strollers so I could wander around the Quad on Game Day, would likely lead to me spending less time wandering around the Quad on Game Day. And I would certainly be drinking less bourbon out of other people’s flasks.

    But I’m never convinced when I make this argument to myself. For one thing, I’d probably be angry if I had to give up the excellent adolescent parts of myself that have emerged in midlife (I was never much of an adolescent when I was an actual adolescent). And being child-free has also allowed me time for a kind of intellectual development I don’t think would have been available to me if I were changing diapers and chasing after a toddler. My sister, who has three young children, lives in a kind of vacuum from which nearly all adult pursuits are excluded. She watches kid TV shows and reads kid books to her kids.  She listens to kid music with her kids (rather than the news), and if she’s online, she’s buying or researching something for her kids. I know that not all parents live like this, but I fear my perfectionism might have extended to motherhood if I’d gone that route.

    Okay, gotta go re-read Anna Karenina and then do some volunteer work. I’ve got the time.

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  9. Dieting + Writing = Wrieting?

    January 8, 2012 by wendyrawlings

    To further explore the connection between dieting and writing (“wrieting?”), I find myself turning back to Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s 1997 book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. I count this book among the most influential I’ve ever read. Brumberg argues, through a fascinating series of photographs, diary entries, and historical texts, that the body itself has become girls’ primary project in the 20th (and now 21st) century, that their interest has shifted from performing “good works” (whether sewing or knitting or canning or care of younger siblings) to “good looks.” Popular culture and media have contributed hugely to this female obsession with perfecting their bodies.

    For me, this argument was revelatory, if not corrective. One of my first poems in college contained an image of a naked woman lying on a pitched roof in a snowstorm, snow slowly covering her body so that a viewer from above wouldn’t be able to distinguish the body’s outlines.  The woman must have been white. Honestly, where did I come up with this shit? Years later, I wrote an essay that contained the line, “When The Challenger exploded, I was in my dorm, making a little salad.”  Which was true. Dieting made me unable to see much beyond the bridge of my nose (or the numbers on the scale). How could I possibly be a writer if I had no vision, if the long view was obstructed by my almost atavistic need not to contain multitudes, but to grow ever smaller?

    The obsession with attaining physical perfection (erm, impossible) is connected, I think, to the obsession with attaining writerly perfection.  I hate an ugly sentence, one that’s baggy and redundant. Most of my favorite books (James Salter’s Light Years, Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, the brilliantly miniature world Evan S. Connell creates in Mrs. Bridge) are models of linguistic economy.  Those big, sprawling books by Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace give me vertigo.

    But dieting’s difficult because the delicious things are off limits, and writing’s difficult when you won’t let yourself make a big mess on the page.

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  10. The Write Diet Part Dieux

    January 7, 2012 by wendyrawlings

     

    http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51dyF7ANuUL._SL500_AA300_.jpg I abandoned the Agatha Christie mysteries that had sustained me for so long and began checking diet books out from the library. Two diets I tried in the early days were the ones pictured here. I can’t remember a thing about The I ♥ NY Diet, but I do know it was my first planned weight loss program. My family had recently moved into a split-level ranch house, and I paired my dieting with an exercise program that involved running up and down the stairs (pausing to pant on the landing) as many times as I could before collapsing in exhaustion.

    By the time I found Harvey and Marilyn Diamond’s Fit for Life, I was well into my teens. All I remember about the diet was that you weren’t supposed to eat anything but fruit before noon each day. There were a bunch of recipes for smoothies involving frozen bananas. I lost a good deal of weight on this program, but I remember being spacey and lightheaded all the time. And in winter, I was damn cold until lunchtime. But by the time I went off to college, I weighed about 108 lbs. soaking wet. I’m nearly 5’6″, so that was pretty thin for me. In college, I first adopted the school’s meal plan, but I later dropped the plan and began a diet consisting entirely of a banana mashed with a little bit of tahini in the morning and a single serving of Progresso Lentil Soup the late afternoon. I kept a case of Diet Coke under my bed.

    The ways in which dieting and writing are intertwined for me are interesting. I wonder if other female writers see these two pursuits as intertwined. It certainly hasn’t helped my writing any to be spacey and lightheaded from dieting, that’s for sure.

    Once, in the library at Trinity, I was reading Mansfield Park and I suddenly had a roaring headache and realized it was because I was so FUCKING hungry. My sister had sent me a care package that I could tell was a shoebox full of homemade cookies, and the wrapped box still sat on my library carrel shelf, but I couldn’t open it. Instead, I went home and lay down on my bed and waited for the headache to pass.

    It’s ironic that my favorite Agatha Christie book is titled And Then There Were  None.

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