November 30, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Octavia Butler By Valerie Stivers My copy of Lilith’s Brood, with a breadfruit, soon to be made into an edible bowl. I’ve read the book six times, as the damage to my copy shows. The most perfect alien abduction scene in all of literature occurs in Dawn, the first volume of Octavia Butler’s Imago trilogy. Butler (1947–2006) was a rarity, a black woman publishing science fiction in the eighties, and the Imago trilogy is her masterpiece. On the first page, the protagonist, Lilith Iyapo, comes to consciousness with the words “Alive! Still alive. Alive … again.” She finds herself in a familiar room with “light-colored—white or gray, perhaps” walls and anonymous touches like a bed that’s “a solid platform that gave slightly to the touch and that seemed to grow from the floor.” Lilith has been here before, has undergone weeks or maybe years of questioning by disembodied voices that come from the ceiling, has lost her mind and fallen asleep or lost consciousness only to reawaken and be put through it all again. This time, there’s food—“the usual lumpy cereal or stew, of no recognizable flavor, contained in an edible bowl that would disintegrate if she emptied it and did not eat it”—and something new: clothing. She dresses and eats. She is finally ready to cooperate with her unknown captors. Lilith’s last memories from before the locked room are of an all-annihilating nuclear war, of which she recalls, “a handful of people tried to commit humanicide.” Despite the strange circumstances of her captivity, she doesn’t realize she’s on a spaceship in the hands of aliens until the first one comes through her door. She then discovers a race of humanoids called Oankali, who are covered with shaggy, grotesque, tiny “sensory organ” tentacles. The Oankali long ago scooped up all survivors of the war and have been keeping them in suspended animation while restoring the earth to a primordial, habitable state. Now they’re ready to repatriate the survivors—but only under certain conditions. Lilith has been chosen to help the Oankali manage her fellow humans. That Lilith doesn’t want to be a collaborator is the first problem. The second is that the aliens cause a visceral, bone-deep, skin-crawling horror in human beings—a sensation akin to being confronted with giant hairy bugs. And the third is that the Oankali want to have sex. More than that, they are gene traders, and they offer humanity a future only if the survivors are willing to give up human children and breed a new third race, to be left behind on earth when the spaceship moves on. Read More
November 16, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Bohumil Hrabal By Valerie Stivers Ditie, the hero of Bohumil Hrabal’s (1914–1997) I Served the King of England, begins his adventures as a “tiny busboy” under the chapter heading “A Glass of Grenadine.” He is a small man, common, filled with naive enthusiasms, a stealer of change who falls in love with prostitutes and decorates their bodies with flowers. The term picaresque seems made for him. His adventures start outside Prague in the early part of the twentieth century and, over their course, he becomes a waiter, then the owner of a hotel, somehow growing up without denting his innocence. What he does learn, with trademark exuberance, is the ways of the wealthy and powerful people who come through his doors. He watches a boss knock the chef down for putting caraway seeds in the médaillon de veau aux champignons. He waits on a general who drinks Germany’s Henkell Trocken sparkling wine and eats “oysters and dishes of shrimp and lobster,” simultaneously stuffing himself and “sputter[ing] in disgust.” The president of the country displays equally inexplicable behavior, hiding in a children’s playhouse in the hotel’s yard with a Frenchwoman. The couple have sex on a “mound of hay” and order a twee faux-pastoral snack—“a crystal jug full of cool cream, a loaf of fresh bread, and a small lump of butter wrapped in vine leaves.” Ditie observes, “I had always thought that a President didn’t do things like this, and that it wasn’t right for a President to do things like this, and yet here he was just like the other rich people.” Ditie doesn’t serve the titular king of England (the highest possible honor, which befalls a waiter friend of his), but in a scene of culminating absurdity, he waits on a table while local officials fete the king of Ethiopia with a grotesque turducken made of a camel, two antelopes, twenty turkeys, fish, and “hundreds of hard-boiled eggs to fill in the empty spaces.” The meal is consumed with Zernoseky riesling, to moans of pleasure from the guests. Read More
November 2, 2018 Eat Your Words A James Salter Dinner Party By Valerie Stivers James Salter (1925–2015) wrote about food and about sex—and sometimes about the combination of the two—in short, elegant sentences. In Salter’s hands, the topics weren’t just transient pleasures but the stuff of life. “Life is weather. Life is meals,” he writes in the book Light Years, and he later took the phrase as the title of a nonfiction book about food. It was his life’s work to evoke his characters’ fleeting moments, the picnic lunches and afternoons in bed, to assign meaning to them as they flooded by, and also to mourn the gaps between what can be lived and what can be recorded, contemplated, captured. All of this is another way of saying that James Salter was an intense guy who liked a good dinner party. More on that intensity: Salter was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, an experience that became the foundation of his first novel, The Hunters. He gave up a bright future in the military in order to become a writer, eventually scaling the heights of literary New York. On the side, he became a successful Hollywood screenwriter. He had four children from a first marriage and, in later years, living with a second wife in Long Island, New York, scooped up many prizes, including a PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Malamud Award and The Paris Review’s 2011 Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. Read More
October 19, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Georges Bataille By Valerie Stivers It is an unfortunate quirk that when I try to think of food scenes in literature, one of the first that comes to mind is from the opening pages of a 1928 classic of transgressive pornography, The Story of the Eye, by the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897–1962). In the scene in question, Simone, the female protagonist, lifts up her skirt and dips an exposed body part into the kitty cat’s saucer of milk while the sixteen-year-old male narrator looks on. Simone is wearing “a black pinafore with a starched white collar.” She says, “Milk is for the pussy, isn’t it? … Do you dare me to sit in the saucer?” “I dare you,” the narrator answers—“almost breathless.” The scene is sexy and also a perfect riff, with the cat, the body part, the milk, and the potential lapping up. Strangely, when I have this thought, a dish springs to mind as well—a terror of haute French cuisine called floating islands, or iles flottante, in which meringue towers drift lazily in a pool of crème anglaise. The meringues can be baked or poached and, in a recipe I found from The Cordon Bleu Cookbook, are served dusted with crushed pink Jordan almonds. The dish’s relevance to The Story of the Eye is that it’s made mostly from milk (starring in the passage above) and eggs, which participate in one of the text’s main metaphor chains, linked to eyes and testicles. Eggs, for the narrator, are “extraordinarily meaningful” and are used for bizarre and grotesque purposes. He explains, “Another game was to crack a fresh egg on the edge of the bidet and empty it under her: sometimes she would piss on it, sometimes she made me strip naked and swallow the raw egg from the bottom of the bidet.” Milk in the book participates in a second metaphor chain, this one of fluids, primarily semen and urine. (Coincidentally, the meringue of my iles flottante floats in a pool of creamy yellow liquid. Mmm … ) Read More
October 5, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Richard Brautigan By Valerie Stivers “In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I will tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.” These are the opening lines of In Watermelon Sugar, the third novel by Richard Brautigan (1935–1984), a poet who was published twenty-three times in Rolling Stone between 1968 and 1970 and who has been called the last of the Beats. The next lines read: “Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.” Brautigan achieved literary fame after his second novel, 1967’s Trout Fishing in America, captured the hearts of the counterculture and sold two million copies. He went into decline in the late seventies and early eighties and died by suicide in 1984 at age forty-nine. His books had a groovy design, which he controlled, and a kind of Hemingway-influenced minimalism. They’ve sometimes been called lightweight or dated, but his cult status has held nearly forty years after his death, so it seems his work will stand the test of time. In Watermelon Sugar, my favorite of Brautigan’s books, is a funny little dislocated story about people living in a commune called iDEATH. The novel’s plot, such as it is, concerns possessive and materialistic urges leading to tragedy. In this story, the mysterious substance of watermelon sugar makes up shacks, lives, a dress (which “smelled sweet because it was made from watermelon sugar”), a chair, a state of being, and many things besides. Mixed with trout oil, watermelon sugar powers lanterns and other machines. Its definition slips around, but Brautigan is saying that the things we love form an interchangeable currency at the heart of our lives—it’s all watermelon sugar in watermelon sugar. It doesn’t quite make sense, but it feels true. Read More
September 12, 2018 Eat Your Words What David Foster Wallace Ate By Valerie Stivers The writer David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) didn’t really eat food. When I met him, in 1996, when I was twenty-three years old, I really couldn’t cook, though it wouldn’t have occurred to me to consider this something we had in common. Wallace, who died by suicide on September 12, 2008, ten years ago today, burst into fame in the late eighties with experimental metafictions that took on the modern junk culture of advertising, celebrity, addiction, and alienation through technology. He struggled with those entities himself and was famous among his acquaintances for living mainly on packaged foods. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, the excellent Wallace biography by D. T. Max, is littered with information like “he lived on chocolate pop tarts and soda” and “he had a love of showering, Diet Dr Pepper and blondies” and “there were only blondies and mustard in the fridge.” In 1995, the journalist David Streitfeld saw a kitchen with little more in it than a case of Dinty Moore beef stew and elicited the confidence from Wallace that “what’s really sick is I like to eat it cold.” Read More