Dec. 18, 1870: Writer H.H. Munro (Saki) born.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Q&A with chef and author Enzo Fargione
Chef Enzo Fargione of Osteria Elisir in Washington, D.C., is the author of the new book Visual Eats: A Behind the Scenes Look at Modern Italian Cooking. He grew up in Torino, Italy, and has worked in the United States for many years; he is based in Washington, D.C.
Q: Why did you decide to write this book, and what do you
hope readers will learn from it?
A: I felt the necessity to send a clear message
about my culinary experiences and knowledge, how easy it really
is to cook when the passion for what you are doing is present.
I wanted people to really appreciate the restaurant industry
and to learn from it while reading all the behind-the-scenes stories I
wrote in my book. After all, this is a colorful industry and chefs are
often considered or labeled as crazy.
Q: What have been the most important influences on your
cooking?
A: For sure my two mentors. The first one is my
culinary professor back home in Italy and the second a chef I worked
for many of my young years. I watched him climbing the stairs of
success internationally, while delivering a sense of professionalism and
pride in everything he did and in details in the kitchen. They
both changed my life forever.
Q: Do you have a favorite dish you like to cook? To eat?
A: I get excited when I cook pasta as well as meats,
fish, soups salads, you name it. What I feel whenever I step in the
kitchen cannot be described in words. I don't see this as a job, to me my work
is a fun playground, a vehicle that allows me to express my skills and
vision of cooking while driving to unknown destinations.
I often eat out and I love a great deal of well prepared
Chinese food, especially Dim Sums; Mexican cuisine is a weakness of mine as
well as a simple board of charcuterie and cheese with a great bottle of Super
Tuscan or Brunello. Now I 'm happy!
Q: How has the restaurant scene in Washington, D.C., changed
over the years that you've worked there?
A: Washington is a very cosmopolitan and diplomatic
town. A little reserved with a European feel. I guess this
is one of the reasons why I fit in here so well and I fell in love
with it.
Twenty-five years ago the restaurant scene in D.C.
was very poor. Over the years the culinary progress and the always
changing trends made it possible for many great chefs to settle in
Washington, bringing their quality work and their knowledge.
About 10 years ago Washington finally rose to be one of the
top 10 restaurant cities in the U.S., but frankly we are still a little far
away if we compare it to great food cities such as Chicago, San Francisco
or New York. We are on the right path; at least it is wonderful
to know that nowadays it's pretty hard to have a bad meal in D.C.
Q: Are you working on another book?
A: Yes! I constantly feel the need to tell a story. I
guess everyone comes to a point in their lives when you
feel compelled to criticize, tell the truth and share life experiences.
In my line of work there are so many injustices. Too much
success, not enough, celebrity status with very little knowledge
and others who hold the secret of the culinary holy grail
hidden away and incapable of sharing it...so I decided to write about it
involving some of the biggest international names of the culinary industry. The
book is called "I Have Something To Say."
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Everything else is in my book. Laughs, recipes,
real-life stories, celebrity chefs’ trips and so many odd and confusing moments
I finally decided to collect them all in one book.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Monday, December 16, 2013
Q&A with author Lian Dolan
Lian Dolan is the author of two novels, Elizabeth the First Wife and Helen of Pasadena. She and her sisters created the radio show The Satellite Sisters, and she also is the creator of the website The Chaos Chronicles. She lives in Pasadena, California.
Q: Shakespeare's plays have a big role in Elizabeth the
First Wife. Why did you decide to make your main character a Shakespeare
scholar?
A: I’ve had a lifelong fascination with Shakespeare’s work
and I knew I was writing a novel about family relationships, so it seemed like
a good fit....
But I wanted to find a pop culture angle to make the
material accessible. That’s why Elizabeth Lancaster is equal parts Shakespeare
and US Weekly. Yes, the Bard is
important to her, but so is the Brad (Pitt).
Q: How did you choose "Elizabeth the First Wife"
as the title?
A: I thought it was a nice play on Queen Elizabeth the
First, one of Shakespeare’s muses and patrons and the role that my Elizabeth
created for herself, for better or worse. She married her college sweetheart
and that failed spectacularly, but after the divorced, she was stuck in that
role, the “Wife of” role. A little history, a little modernity.
Q: Do you have a favorite character that you've created?
A: I think it would be hard to sustain writing characters
you didn’t like or enjoy in some one. You live with these characters for a long
time, like years! But, of course,
certain characters seem to write themselves or sneak into your heart in a
certain way.
In Elizabeth the First Wife, I’m partially to the two
romantic male leads, FX and Rafa. FX is a movie star and the ex, so it would
have been pretty easy to make him an egotistical jerk.
But I wanted to capture the idea that people do change and
mature. The guy you dated (or married!) at 20 is probably a very different man
at 35, even if he is an action star.
I’ve met actors and directors who seem to have a little
lucky shadow following them, allowing them to get the work, the fame and the girl
and still be a good guy. That’s what I wanted FX to project, that lucky
confidence.
And with Rafa, the political operative and policy wonk, I
wanted him to be a real man, not perfect, but a grown-up with a demanding work
and a personal life that took a back seat to work. I wrote him for all the
women I know looking for a guy who appreciated their life experience.
Rafa can cook, get his hands dirty and has a romantic
history that’s a little patchy, but he has great forearms, so that’s a plus. I
ended up liking both men a lot—and so do readers.
On the fun side to write, I love Candy, the Disgraced Rose
Queen who is now a society columnist. That’s why she appears in both Helen of
Pasadena and Elizabeth the First Wife. She been to the top of the mountain as a
17-year-old Rose Queen and then travelled down the fast way, an unfortunate
nude photo that went public. As a result, she has nothing to lose. Candy says
everything I think but have too much restraint to say.
Q: Do you know when you start writing a novel how the plot
will develop, or do your characters sometimes surprise you?
A: I am an avid outliner. I have about 70 percent of the
book “figured out’ before I start. But the other 30 percent is the work of
inspiration, unexpected turns and the magic of imagination. It’s the good stuff
that shows up when I’m in the middle of the writing process and the story
starts to overtake my life.
Q: What are you working on now?
I’m working on another novel that I’m calling an art history
caper. I’m just working on the plot now. I’m also developing a TV show that
involves history, romance and archaeology, but I live in Los Angeles where
people do steal your ideas, so that’s all you’ll get out of me.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Q&A with Professor Faye Halpern
Q: How would you define sentimentality,
especially as it relates to the 19th century authors at the
center of your book?
A: With reference to the mid-century women
writers I talk about (whom Nathaniel Hawthorne famously referred to as “the scribbling
women”) literary critics have often identified “sentimentality” through the kinds
of characters or plots: the child who dies too young, the reprobate converted
to the right path, the family cruelly separated from each other but eventually
reunited.
But I noticed something about this way of
identifying sentimentality: that one can find these characteristics in books
that no one ever accused of being sentimental.
I actually prefer the term “sentimental rhetoric”
to “sentimentality,” even though it unfortunately sounds much more nutritiously
academic (eat your vegetables, hapless readers!).
However, the phrase does allow me to get at some
things that really do, I think, distinguish these sentimental novels: for one
thing, there’s their relationship to the (male) discipline of rhetoric and
oratory, which was flourishing at the time these novels were published.
The reaction these sentimental novels had to this
discipline explains their own strange persuasive techniques. These authors were
trying to create a particular relationship with their intended readers: they
want their readers to identify so completely with their characters that the
readers won’t register they’re reading a text (in the sense of artful
representation) at all. Instead, their readers should be completely absorbed in
what they’re reading, see it as artless and real.
So I’m hoping to show that “sentimentality” is
less about certain kinds of plots or characters and more about a particular
relationship between author and reader that the sentimental authors strive to
create.
That this particular relationship is impossible
for most modern literary critics to take seriously is unfortunate for the
sentimentalists but also illuminating—it can tell us a lot about how we modern
literary critics like to read “texts.”
Q: You write, “In general, the sentimentalists
further their own position in the battle of the sexes not by showing women to
be the equals of men but by rendering men, especially good men, ridiculous.”
How, and why, do they do that?
A: You can see this move pretty clearly in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Minister’s Wooing: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s white male characters aren’t
mean; they’re incompetent.
They don’t know how to sew on a button or calm a
howling baby, but more than that, their commitment to rationality and ignorance
of issues of the heart and kitchen lead them to make basic moral mistakes.
Senator Bird, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, votes for the Fugitive Slave Act because he’s
too committed to high-flown principles and political eloquence to see what’s
really going on. It takes his wife, the extremely diminutive Mrs. Bird, to
gently show him the error of his ways.
Her lesson consists of the arrival of a
beleaguered fugitive slave mother, Eliza, showing up at their door—Eliza’s distress
allows the senator to realize how wrong he has been. He immediately offers to
help Eliza in any way he can, and presumably this encounter will also cause him
to vote differently in the future.
Although I don’t know for sure why these authors
depict privileged white men this way, it does seem a sensible strategy for a
group of women who, in their efforts to reform their society, were committed to
moral suasion rather than overt resistance (no separatist womyn’s community for
them).
The strategy has a real benefit: it shows that
men are not actively resistant to women’s (better) ideas about human relations;
instead, they’re simply unschooled in the areas in which white middle-class
women were thought to excel: sympathy and morality.
We’re quick to see the conservatism of this men-are-bumbling-idiots
view—it’s reinforcing familiar ideas of what women are like and how they’re
different from men—but you can also see its radicalism.
As Jane Tompkins points out, Stowe makes the
argument that if women were actually listened to the way they should be,
society would have to be completely reordered and a kind of heaven on earth
would be put in place.
But beyond that, Stowe’s idea that it’s more
ignorance than malice that was supporting the Slave Power seems to have been
right: witnessing slavery via the scenes depicted in Uncle Tom’s Cabin really did galvanize a huge number of people at
the time to become anti-slavery.
Q: Can you discuss further what about the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and also that of Louisa May Alcott, makes it
important to your argument?
A: Stowe became a focus because Uncle Tom’s Cabin was so popular and so
influential at the time and is still read and written copiously about today.
That is, it has generated a lot of criticism, both contemporaneous and modern,
which I was as interested in analyzing as the book itself.
In addition, I love that the novel is so damn
long. I think its length is a result of Stowe’s pedagogical aims. I realized
after reading it a number of times that its incidents are repetitions of each
other in the sense that they’re all trying to teach the same lesson: not just
that slavery is wrong but how people can convince other people of their world
view. It’s a comprehensive handbook on sentimental rhetoric.
Louisa May Alcott became a focus because I see
her as the direct inheritor of Stowe’s methods of persuasion, yet she
inevitably modifies some of Stowe’s techniques. I’ve been interested in
exploring what happens to sentimental rhetoric later in the century, when it is
said to have faded from view (just like a consumptive sentimental heroine).
With her interest in acting and in women’s work,
Alcott invites, mostly inadvertently, a kind of skepticism about the
authenticity of sentimental rhetoric that I think presages the response that a
lot of modern day literary critics have to it.
Q: You write, “I hope to convince readers that
sentimental rhetoric is not as distant from us—or below us—as we might think.”
How are today’s readers still connected to sentimental rhetoric?
A: Of course, many readers are still moved by
contemporary sentimental fiction and movies, but in the quotation above I was
trying to say that even readers who think they’re too sophisticated to indulge
are not above it.
In terms of contemporary literary critics, I was
suggesting that despite our tendency to unmask sentimental writers as shams or
as shills for the status quo, we still might learn things from sentimental
rhetoric.
Stowe makes a pretty good argument against something
that a lot of literary critics like: textual indeterminacy, the idea that
literary interpretation is an endless process. Stowe shows us some of the bad
things that can happen when someone has this view.
She shows this via a character from Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Augustine St. Clare.
St. Clare, the only ironic character in this novel, cannot take a stand against
slavery and dies before freeing his slaves, and Stowe connects these moral
failings to what we would consider his sophisticated reading practices.
But there’s a more subtle way that we’re close to
sentimental rhetoric when it comes to our pedagogy, how we teach beginning
students how to interpret literary works.
To explain what I mean, I first have to note that
sentimental authors relied on the process of “identification” (even though they
wouldn’t have used the term) for the success of their novels: the ability of a
person to put him or herself in the place of someone else.
Getting back to modern professors of English, we
claim to hate when students try to “identify” with characters; it seems like a
very limited and simplistic way to read a text. But I wanted to point out that
even sophisticated critics very often “identify” in their own reading
practices, not with particular characters but with what they take to be the
author’s political or moral views.
I’m advocating we look on students’ form of
identification with less annoyance. We should see it as more continuous with
what we professional literary critics do, and we should explain to students how
their kind of identification differs—but not that much—from what many of us
like to do ourselves.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m not quite done with writing about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I’m working on a
piece that expands on an idea I touch on in the book: Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a literacy primer but with the twist that it’s
actually teaching anti-literacy.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, I became really
interested while working on this book in what happens to sentimental rhetoric
later in the nineteenth century. The going assumption is that sentimental
novels are eclipsed by the rise of realism, which rejected sentimental modes of
writing.
Clearly, realist novels are doing some things
differently from sentimental ones, but I don’t see it as a wholesale rejection.
In Huck Finn, for example, Twain has
a very funny send-up of a sentimental poetess, who spends her short life
writing atrocious poetry about dead children and dead birds, and this attack on
sentimentality diverts attention from Twain’s own sentimental rhetoric. You can
see it in the scene when Jim talks about hitting his daughter, not realizing
she’s deaf.
Apart from the realists, I’m also investigating
how Frederick Douglass uses (or rather, modifies) sentimental rhetoric.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I have a theory that many of us modern
literary critics do in fact cry at sentimental novels and movies but that we’d
never admit it in our own criticism. It makes us seem like bad readers. I’ve
been trying to collect anecdotal evidence about this, so if you’d like to add
to my cache, please let me know: fhalpern@ucalgary.ca.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Sunday, December 15, 2013
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