Five Things: July 27, 2015
1. A few weeks back, my friend Izzy got to hear Ta-Nehisi Coates speak at a church in West Baltimore. He met up with me afterward and pulled a copy of Coates’ new book, “Between the World and Me,” out of his bag, then flipped it open to show me that Coates had signed it. I started swearing profusely at him out of jealousy until another friend sitting next to me finally nudged me and made me realize that Izzy had gotten it inscribed to me. Oops.
It’s not a particularly long read—I finished it in only a few hours—but it’s a crucial one, packed with plenty of points that you’ll be thinking about long after. It’s especially useful for white people to read it, to realize their role in perpetuating racism and racist systems. I agree a lot with Mark Gunnery’s review of the book that calls us as white people to become aware “the layers of power and history we carry with us through the spaces we occupy.”
2. Another book I recently read: “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” by Jeanette Winterson. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf for the past year or so, and after finishing it I sorely regret not having read it sooner. It’s a memoir, but it’s also an ode to the role that books and libraries have played in her life, a portrait of mid-century working-class Manchester, and a beautiful rumination on what love is and how to learn to give and receive it after being deprived of it and abused as a child.
In some ways I’m still learning what it means to love someone, and how, and Winterson’s book felt like a comfort and a guide. One passage in particular that stuck with me:
Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and guide us a bit, and scoop us up when we fall.
Listen, we fall. Love is there but we have to learn it - and its shapes and possibilities. I taught myself to stand on my own two feet, but I could not teach myself how to love.
We have a capacity for language. We have a capacity for love. We need other people to release those capacities.
3. I wrote a few restaurant reviews last month (La Cuchara, La Tolteca, plus some Cheap Eats), plus an essay on international barbecue with some food history mixed in. I feel like I’m finally finding a groove with food writing, though I’ve found that, as I write more restaurant reviews, it’s increasingly difficult for me to do any cooking. It’s hard to come home from work after thinking about food all and then feel motivated to think creatively about making food. Helen Rosner wrote about this feeling in her essay “On Chicken Tenders”: “on my own time, ordering delivery or cooking dinner or out with friends, I reverted to the palate of a suburban six-year-old. All I ever wanted was toast with butter, pasta with the thinnest-possible coating of red sauce, or—my salvation, my obsession, the only thing I ever reliably wanted to eat—chicken tenders.”
I’m not quite to toast-and-butter levels yet, but I have been eating a lot of chicken tenders lately, and thinking of things to cook has become a major struggle. I didn’t realize quite how bad this had gotten until I went to Whole Foods last weekend and felt utterly paralyzed by the number of options. So many ingredients! So many ways to combine them! How are you supposed to choose!? My boyfriend asked me if I wanted to get anything, and all I could do was stare at everything, though I eventually managed to pull a box of plain-ish cereal off the shelf.
But I woke up early this morning and walked down to the farmers market while it was still a little cool out, and ended up doing laps around and around the produce stands, admiring all the goods and feeling at ease with the crowd. Eventually I bought a few ingredients, went home, and improvised a pesto pasta dish with vegetables. At least I haven’t entirely succumbed yet to chicken tenders territory.
4. This news is a bit old at this point, but Baynard Woods’ Conflicts of Interest column won first place in the AAN awards in the columns category. If you somehow haven’t read his column, you can read it here. I’d recommend “A blue Beattirakis monster” and the classics “Pussy Riot hates me” and “Stephanie and me.”
5. A few weeks ago I took a long weekend trip up to Pittsburgh to visit a bunch of friends. I had a companion with me who’d never really spent time in Pittsburgh before, so we did some sightseeing, which allowed me to view the city with fresh eyes on everything from its diversity (way more white than Baltimore) to its walkability. It also gave me an intense appreciation for the free admission at Baltimore’s two major art museums--admission to the Carnegie Museum of Art is $20, as is admission to the Mattress Factory, a contemporary art museum. One of my friends told me, “You know, Pittsburgh doesn’t seem like your city anymore. Baltimore is.” She was right. By Sunday, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to my friends, but I did find myself ready to go back home, to Baltimore. When we got back, the area outside the Greyhound station reeked of garbage, and our Uber driver, who had a hardcore Bawlmer accent, chattered away at us about his other job at a crab house in Essex. Ah, home sweet home.
