Girl Detective

The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words is the sixth collection of the excellent ongoing Vertigo comic-book series about a man named Tom Taylor who learns he may be the incarnation of his father’s famous fictional creation, a very Harry Potter-esque boy magician named Tommy Taylor.

In this collection, stuff happens. A LOT of stuff happens. We get some answers finally, actually, rather a lot of them. There are laugh-out loud funny lines, and the pleasing sense of many storylines converging, and finishing while a new start is made. Overall, this was a very entertaining segment of this engaging ongoing series about stories, literature, and a grown-up boy magician.

The Manhattan Projects (yes, it’s plural) by Jonathan Hickman is a graphic-novel collection of the first issues of the Image comic book series. It’s an alternate history of famous scientists like Einstein, Oppenheimer and Feynman, with sci-fi and horror. The story reminds me of Warren Ellis and Planetary, but it’s a little less gratuitously violent, while Nick Pitarra’s art recalls Frank Quitely’s. If you’re a science nerd who can stomach horror, then you’ll like this.

From my article “Tremendous Treats: Finding the Fun in Halloween” at Simple Good and Tasty, in which I defend candy:

Yet most of us also harbor happy childhood memories of coming home from a night of trick-or-treating with a pillowcase or plastic pumpkin full of goodies. The enjoyment was extended by sorting candy, trading it, and slowly (or not-so-slowly) consuming it over the next several days. It’s good to remember that there is joy in this candy-centric holiday that can easily get stifled by well-meaning adults.

In my last post, I linked to the other piece I wrote on candy. I thought I was done buying Halloween candy. Then I biked past Lund’s the other day and went in to check things out. Here’s what I found (and, if it’s not obvious, brought home with me):

Yes, those are Halloween-sized Pearson’s Salted Nutrolls and Mint Patties!

And, if that weren’t enough, which is OBVIOUSLY wasn’t, I bought these because the packages are so FREAKING ADORABLE:

Bat-black dots that are BLOOD-orange flavored–how clever is that?

In case you’re wondering, both Drake and Guppy declared that the bat dots were better than the ghost dots. Also, 2 our of 3 of us declared Pearson’s mint patties better than York. And, Drake is wrong, so it is really unanimous.

This is the end of Halloween candy buying. Really. I mean it.

I’ve been writing about Halloween Candy, and detailed my tops picks at Minnesota Monthly’s TC Taste Blog.

But in “researching” that article and another I just turned in, I may have gotten a little carried away procuring this year’s treats to hand out next week:

Every year we run out. This year might be different.

What’s your favorite Halloween candy? I did a poll of the bus stop moms and was surprised to find two of my most-hated candies were picked as most loved by others: candy corn and Three Musketeers (nougat=blerg). To each her own; vive la difference!

In which we go two for three on DVDs.

Last Friday night was family movie night. We watched the new Blu ray 25th anniversary edition of The Princess Bride with our boys, 6yo Guppy and 9yo Drake. We’d watched this movie together before, but it had been a while. Oh, what a joy this movie is. So many great moments; so many good lines. We loved it. The boys loved it. We loved that the boys loved it. And the best part? The next day, when Guppy recited Mandy Patinkin’s famous line: My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!

We put the boys to bed, and returned to the television to continue re-watching Veronica Mars season 1. We were on episode 17 of 22. We finished the first one. “Let’s watch one more,” I asked. We finished the second one. “It’s Friday,” I said, “we can sleep in. Let’s keep watching.” After the third one, my husband turned to me and said, “You may go to bed if you like. But if you think I’m going to bed before I watch to the end, you’re crazy.” So we settled in and watched the last three episodes. Till 1:30am, when I usually go to bed at 10:30pm. It was utterly satisfying. There were so many scenes in those last 6 episodes of season 1 where G and I cheered and pumped our fists. Those six episodes were on top of having watched Princess Bride. So I estimate 6 hours of screen time, which according to yet another study, has lessened our life span by 2 hours. Totally worth it.

Then, a few days later, I’d gotten a well-reviewed film from last year, The Deep Blue Sea, from the library. I figured watching a grown-up film might be a good counterpoint to our recent entertaining if not life-changing DVD choices.

But oh, did we regret it. The movie opens with Rachel Weisz’s character narrating a letter, shutting the curtains, and turning on the gas to kill herself. We are then hurtled back and forth through time as we glimpse her former marriage to a sweet, if inept, older man with mummy issues and the subsequent hot romance with former fighter pilot Freddie, played by Tom Hiddleston.

The troubles we had with the film were many. By opening on an attempted suicide, then finding later what prompted it, I found it impossible to empathize with Weisz’s character. I felt sorry for the both the men in her life, not for her. G thinks a better title might be: Mentally Ill Woman in Post War England Doesn’t Get the Help She Needs.The classical score, by Barber, rose to excruciating volume at times, bludgeoning me with “feel something NOW!” Equally unsubtle was the contrast between opening scene (closing curtains on grey day) and closing scene (you guessed it: opening curtains on bright day.) And towards the end, there were more than a few times when I sensed Weisz reading lines rather than inhabiting a character, and it became clear to me that the suffocating story was adapted from a play. I depart from critical opinion that almost universally praised Weisz’ performance in another way, too, in that I didn’t care for the long tracking shot of a flashback scene set in the London underground during wartime. It felt long, tedious and mawkish, in its singalong of Molly Malone. Much more successful was a bar room singalong to You Belong to Me.

So, my husband and I did not care for this very well reviewed film, though we loved Veronica Mars and Princess Bride. Are we philistines? Perhaps. Or perhaps we just were not in the right frame of mind for a slow film about people’s differing definitions of love. Or perhaps it just wasn’t as good as all that. In any case, not recommended.

I am one of those people who has piles of stuff and papers on most horizontal surfaces in the house. I inherited this tendency from my mother; I do not know which DNA strand it resides on. I used to be one of those people who, when asked for such-and-such random item, could picture it in my mind’s eye, go to the correct pile, and within moments, produce the desired item. Alas, no longer. More and more, I go to find something and simply can’t. I search through multiple piles with no success. This happened today when I went to look for the library copy of Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan, recommended to me as a good teen romance by my friend C. Thus, there is not a quote from this entertaining books to put right here:

It is a good teen romance, one between Paul and new-guy Noah. They meet in a bookstore that’s having a concert and dance, so right away we know we’re in some kind of gay-friendly alternate universe, in a New Jersey suburb of NYC. And the romance follows the usual trajectory: Boy meets boy in a cute manner, then loses boy, then gets boy back. Other people’s romances orbit around them and comic relief frequently intervenes in the person of Infinite Darlene, fka Daryl, who is both the star quarterback and the homecoming queen. But it’s not all sunshine and flowers. Paul’s friend Joni is dating a new guy the old friends don’t like, and Tony’s gay-unfriendly parents are slowly crushing his spirit.

This is a short, lovely book, though I enjoyed it more at the beginning, when it focused on the open nature of the fictional school, than towards the end, when things played out mostly predictably. This book reminded me fondly of Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat books, in how magical and wonderful and weird yet true it was. Highly recommended.

I got in a grocery checkout-line convo with a guy who said he wanted to move to Portland. I recommended he read Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail, by Cheryl Strayed, that I’d liked it and Oregon played a big part in it. He said he would. The cashier asked him, “Are you really going to read it?” He said, yeah, his girlfriend was reading it and he was going to read it when she was done. The cashier thought this was weird, that I’d recommend a book his girlfriend happened to be reading. We tried to explain why it wasn’t. It’s really popular, said the guy. Harry Potter popular. No, I said, because the cashier looked skeptical again, it’s Eat-Pray-Love popular. She seemed satisfied by this, asked me if I wanted my receipt, and we all moved out into our day.

Wild was beginning to get Eat-Pray-Love popular even before Oprah picked it to jump-start her book club. After getting the big O on the cover, well, bestseller-dom was kind of a done deal.

In the mid-90’s, Cheryl was in the midst of a divorce from a nice guy, dating another guy who’d introduced her to heroin, and still grieving her mother, who’d died a few years before. Standing in line at REI, she saw a travel guide about hiking the Pacific Coast Trail, and then decided that was a good way to start over. She systematically started planning the trip, sold her then-belongings for hiking gear, packed herself boxes of gear and money to meet her along the way, and went to California to hike up to Washington state.

Wild is her memoir of hiking the trail, but also of the messed up things that happened beforehand that drove her to thinking it would be a good idea. She found out quickly it wasn’t. Twenty-something Cheryl is an often exasperating narrator, especially in her flashbacks to life prior to the hike. It’s easy to see why she wanted to run away. But it’s hard not to be engaged by her travelogue, one that includes snakes, bears and torturous boots.

Modern-day Cheryl writes like a very balanced, serene person, intriguing to me since she says she didn’t have traditional experiences with therapy. She even has a gig as an advice columnist at The Rumpus; a collection of those columns, Tiny Beautiful Things, was recently published. For those of you who were exasperated by Eat Pray Love (which I have a theory about*), this is probably not your thing–immature narrator trying to find herself. Unlike that book, though, this doesn’t have a girl meets boy happy ending. It ends with girl confronting self and coming out the wiser for it having endured agony, both in life and on the trail. If that sounds fun, or if, like me, you like to read about adventures without actually going outdoors, then this is a page-turning read.

*My theory about Eat Pray Love is that those who dislike it never went through a gruesome breakup. Non-statistically accurate testing has so far proved this true.

Back before I had kids, I was a once-a-week cleaner. Having kids, and especially moving through a bout of post-partum depression, taught me to tolerate a greater level of filth in the interest of self preservation.

However, now that both my kids are in school all day and my work is occasional freelance writing from home, I must admit that there’s little excuse for the copious dirt and blowing and drifting piles of crap in the house. Other than that housekeeping sucks. To use one of my favorite British-isms, which I think I got from Bridget Jones’ Diary, I am a poster child for sluttish housewifery.

Yesterday the kids had off from school, and I decided to tackle the shower grout, which had reached alarming levels of yuck. It was especially icky in the corners. When I began to research home-made, less-toxic cleaners, though, I found so many options my head spun. Always very curious, though, I decided to make an experiment out of it. I pitched it to the boys, and amazingly, they bought it.

The raw materials:

First, I made solutions using various mixes of water, vinegar, peroxide, baking soda, Barkeepers Friend, Bon Ami, Borax, Dawn blue soap, Dr. Bronner’s Sal Suds:

I made a chart so I wouldn’t forget which was which. This was an official science experiment, after all:

Then I applied each solution to a section in the shower, including two control sections at the bottom of Comet with bleach and Clorox Bleach Pen.

I waited about 15 minutes, wiped off, then scrubbed off with an old toothbrush. My experiment returned meaningful results. I was chagrined to find the bleach worked best (though online sources say there’s a risk of it yellowing the grout over time.) BUT pleased to find the natural cleaners worked nearly as well. Anything with Dawn blue turned the grout a little blue, so that was out. Baking soda whitened as well as Bon Ami, Barkeepers Friend or Borax, so might as well use soda–cheaper and less toxic. Water worked as well as vinegar, but perhaps a smidge less well than peroxide.

Here, however, is what convinces me that I should avoid bleach and other toxic cleaners, no matter how effective:

After the test, the kids and I used the remains of the 12 non-toxic solutions to clean the rest of the shower. I am including this incredibly unflattering photo of myself so you can see the cleaner spattered in my hair and on my face and glasses. Cleaning the shower properly is a time-consuming and messy business. Doing it with something toxic like bleach seems ill-advised given the spatter zone, and especially because I had the kids working with me.

Full disclosure. After the boys stopped helping and went off to listen to Harry Potter #4 on CD read by Stephen Fry (which kept making me start and think that there was a strange man in the house, which was kind of true.) I used the bleach pen on some of the most-stained corners. I’m sure it is probably the most expensive of all the options, but it did provide precise application in all the grout lines.

In the end, I have vastly improved grout.

For now. Alas, based on what I read on the interwebs, which is of course always to be believed, what I should do from now on is spray the shower walls down with a solution (I recommend peroxide/water), wipe it down, clean regularly with paste (I recommend a paste of peroxide or water + soda). Alas, alack, I probably also need to remove some of the grout, regrout, then seal and maintain once a year.

Sigh. I miss being a renter and having this be someone else’s problem.

I really, really wanted to love the graphic-novel version of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, adapted and illustrated by Hope Larson. So I was surprised and disappointed to find I didn’t even much like it. And I feel terribly, terribly guilty about this. I love the novel–it was one of my first favorites as a kid. I love Larson’s work. In Gray Horses, Chiggers, Mercury, she’s a great artist and storyteller. But for me, this adaptation didn’t work.

The aspect that gave me the most trouble were the character depictions. I’ve held this book so close, for so long, that I have my own pictures in my head of what the characters look like, even the minor ones, and many of Larson’s clashed with the ones in my head. Obviously, someone coming to the book for the first time via this adaptation wouldn’t have the same issue.

Related to that, though, was the trouble I had with the character of Meg. When I’ve read the book, which I did last summer, I’ve related to gawky, socially inept Meg. When I read this book, I was irritated by her. Seeing her on the page made me less able to identify with her.

I am torn as I write about the book. I wanted to like it. I don’t want others to skip it. But it didn’t work for me. Here’s hoping it works better for you.

We’ve had family movie night the last two Fridays. We broke one of my cardinal rules by eating home-made pizza and then ice cream in front of the TV to watch a movie we all agreed on.

Two Fridays ago, we watched The Avengers on Blu ray.

The boys loved it even more than they did when we saw it in the theater. They found the Hulk segments even more funny, especially “Target angry! Target angry!” G. Grod and I watched that entire 2.5 hour movie with them, then hustled them into bed so we could watch the extras and before the weekend was over had watched them all AND the movie with director Joss Whedon’s commentary. That’s how much we liked this movie.

Last Friday, we watched Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, which I consider his masterpiece.

Then again, saying that unfairly denigrates his other masterpieces, so best of the best? We tried to watch it a few years ago with the kids, but they were scared by some of the imagery. We watched it this time, and things seemed to go well. Both 9yo Drake and 6yo Guppy enjoyed it, as did G. Grod and I. But that was before bedtime.

After we tried to put the boys in bed, they got up again three times. Drake was disturbed by memories of the image of a monster from the movie that went on a rampage, ate several characters, and then vomited for a very long, long time. Interestingly, nothing from The Avengers the week before fazed him as this did. We finally got him into bed, and by the next day seemed happy to take our suggestion to remember the funny and cute and beautiful parts, like the return of soot sprites from My Neighbor Totoro, and adorable duck creatures, but still, Spirited Away was only a qualified success.

After pizza, dessert was my favorite combination of Ben & Jerry’s flavors, Chocolate Therapy and What a Cluster (formerly Clusterfluff).

Chocolate Therapy is chocolate ice cream with chocolate cookies & swirls of chocolate pudding ice cream, formerly only available in scoop shops.

What a Cluster is peanut butter ice cream with caramel cluster pieces, marshmallow swirls & peanut buttery swirls.

Chocolate Therapy on its own is quite something, but when combined with What a Cluster, well, something rather magical happens.

I found this page when I was scanning Drake’s handwriting book from last year (he was 8):

Jaded, already, at such a tender age. And yet, I wonder at all the things that I could add to the list that have been moved beyond, His passions burn bright and fade fast:

Ninjago
Bakugan
Hot Wheels
Wipe Out
Fetch w/Ruff Ruffman and any number of PBS tv shows

The Dispreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart had been on my to-read list for years and a recent resurgence in my reading of young-adult books bumped it to the top and oh, I’m glad it did.

To: Headmaster Richmond and the Board of Directors, Alabaster Preparatory Academy

I, Frankie Landau-Banks, hereby confess that I was the sole mastermind behind the mal-doings of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds. I take full responsibility for the disruptions caused by the Order–including the Library Lady, the Doggies in the Window, the Night of a Thousand Dogs, the Canned Beet Rebellion, and the abduction of the Guppy.

Frankie, who over the summer gained four inches and twenty pounds, all in the right places, is a sophomore at an expensive northeast prep school. She is suddenly surrounded by boys who want her attention, and enjoys it, all the while questioning whether it’s the kind of attention she wants. She makes a gradual but believable shift from nice girl in the dorm to criminal mastermind, and it’s a blast to make it with her. This is a novel that turns the romance on its head, while still taking time to appreciate some of it along the way. But it’s also a story of a girl coming into her own power, making the shift from sweet to bitter to bittersweet, and in that it reminded me of Veronica Mars. This is a fun fast read that yet has some nice heft to it.

What better way to follow up a Toni Morrison bender than with a young-adult romance? An Abundance of Katherines was a good sorbet after a lot of tough reading.

The morning after noted child prodigy Colin Singleton graduated from high school and got dumped for the nineteenth time by a girl named Katherine, he too a bath.

Colin worries that he’ll never cross that liminal space between prodigy and genius. Devastated by the latest dumping, he and his friend Hassan (who is an unfortunate trope: the fat, funny one) leave the Chicago area for a road trip to the boonies of Tennessee. There they meet a girl named Lindsay, her odd mother Hollis, and end up with oddly high-paying jobs as documentarians.

Colin is an engaging, if sometimes whiny narrator. I liked his asides and DFW-esque footnotes. The book zips along to an enjoyable, if not all that surprising, conclusion. Fun, but not life changing.

A slim, non-fiction volume based on a series of lectures, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison is a dense, thought-provoking read.

From the back cover:

Toni Morrison’s brilliant discussion of the “Africanist” presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree–and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.

This was part of the swath of books I read around re-reading Morrison’s Beloved. It’s written in what one of my grad-school professors would have called “high academ-ese” and thus interestingly brings into question the poet Audre Lord’s assertion that one can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. Morrison is able to wield ivory tower rhetoric like a weapon, and her argument about the necessity of an other to the American myth is a compelling one. Not a fun read, but a rewarding one.

“Magnificent Five-Story Book Mountain Library”:

via The Morning News.

In preparation for leading a recent discussion on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, I raided my public libary, which had a number of books on Morrison and Beloved. Since I didn’t read them all in their entirety, I’ll put them all on one entry, though my annoyance with Harold Bloom’s guide was such that I thought it deserved its own entry.

Columbia Critical Guides: Toni Morrison “Beloved”, edited by Carl Plasa. Much more intellectually rigorous than Bloom’s guide. Five chapters cover the major aspects of the novel and gather and summarize some of the best scholarly works. Warning: tiny type. I showed a page to my husband who is something of a typesetting geek. He recoiled and cried out in disgust. I kid you not. If you were to read one book on Beloved, this would be the one I’d recommend.

Contemporary World Writers: Toni Morrison by Jill Matus. The chapter on Beloved is smart, well-written and well informed by earlier scholarship.

Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison by Gurleen Grewal. The chapter on Beloved is very good, tying together many aspects of it without being overwritten. I especially liked Grewal’s take on the ending as a communal working-through.

Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison, ed. and with an introduction by Harold Bloom, who decries evaluating Morrison’s fiction on political, rather than simply aesthetic, criteria. He also writes that while Morrison has said she wishes to be contextualized in African-American literature, Bloom feels more that she is a potent mixture of Faulkner and Woolf, both of whom were subjects of Morrison’s graduate thesis. I was troubled by the pains he took to identify her with white writers while dismissing some specific other writers of color. But I appreciated that this collection was capped by an essay from Morrison herself, about a conspicuous lack of the Afro-American presence in American literature. In it, she argues so eloquently that the essay itself disproves Bloom’s attempt to diminish her work. As with the other Bloom guide, this one does have good essays in it by other authors than Bloom, including one by Margaret Atwood, and another by Margaret Mobley that is often cited in subsequent scholarship on Beloved.

Bloom’s BioCritiques: Toni Morrison. From his introduction:

Beloved is certainly Morrison’s most problematical work. Some readers whom I esteem set it very high, while other [sic] share my skepticism as to its aesthetic persuasiveness. It is a narrative intended to shock us into an ideological awareness, but its contrivances of plot are tendentious, and the personalities of its protagonists do not always cohere. I regard Beloved as a Period Piece, albeit one written by a woman of genius.

Note that he didn’t just say “genius” but qualifies it as “woman of genius.” Note the typo, one of many I found in the three Bloom books I consulted. I did appreciate the essay by Malmgren on Beloved that highlighted what odd companions the historical novel and the gothic ghost story make.

I am not saying that Bloom isn’t entitled to his opinion on Beloved, though I disagree with it. I _am_ saying he deploys terms that are belittling and condescending. I find this a kind of intellectual bullying, and all the more troubling for how many books on Morrison in general and Beloved in particular that Bloom has put his name on, and therefore made money. Yes, they may not be best sellers, but many are expensive ($35 to $45), and likely to be staples at most public and university libraries. He’s made money off Morrison’s Beloved by less than fair critiques, in my opinion.

Toni Morrison Explained by Ron David. Davis says he sought to write a guide that would be appeal to all levels of readers, from newbies to experts. I think he’s playing more to the groundlings with smart-ass comments that disrupt what might otherwise be a decent, readable guide. He has an interesting take on Morrison’s Paradise.

I went to the Half-Price books Clearance Event in the grandstand at the State Fairgrounds and got a whopping two hours to cruise up and down the boxes of children’s books. Interestingly, 2 hours was not enough time. For just children’s chapter books. There were THAT many books. Also, my knees and thighs were sore the next day from the constant knee bends of looking through the box atop the table, then below it. Up, down, up, down for two hours. Ouch. Yes, used book shopping made my muscles sore; I’m THAT out of shape.

In my defense, about a third of these are for Drake and Guppy. But oh, last summer’s Shelf Discovery Readalong has made me a junkie for old YA MMPBs (i.e., Young Adult Mass Market Paperbacks)

“That doesn’t look like banana bread,” my husband G. Grod remarked. My normal banana bread recipe has maraschino cherries in it, which makes it fairly easy to identify.

“New recipe. Smitten Kitchen,” was all I had to say.

G. and I celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary last week, which I unintentionally made a big deal of by putting a couple things on facebook and now here, so forgive me if I seem to be going on about it, but I have to say it’s one of those nice things about being married to someone for so long that I can just say “Smitten Kitchen” and he knows what I’m talking about.

Then again, there are probably at least half a dozen friends who would get that, too. So maybe I am just flagrantly boasting about our anniversary. Sorry. Anyhoo.

I’ve been making Marvelous Metropolitan Millet Muffins for a while, so I am a fan of millet and was eager to try the new combination. I took it to a sukkot party this weekend, and people really liked it. I’m not going to give up my normal banana bread recipe. And after mentioning to G. Grod, I may also try SK’s Jacked-Up banana bread. It’s good to switch things up once in a while.

Crackly Banana Bread, adapted slightly from Smitten Kitchen
makes 1 9-in loaf, or 3 mini loaves

My grocery co-op sells uncooked millet in the bulk aisle. Whole Foods and their ilk would likely have it, too.

1/4 cup uncooked millet
3 large ripe bananas
1 large egg
1/3 cup virgin coconut oil, warmed until it liquefies, or olive oil
1/3 cup dark brown sugar
1/3 cup cane sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon table salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Pinch of ground cloves
Salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole-wheat pastry flour

Preheat oven to 350°F. Place millet on rimmed baking sheet and toast for ten minutes, shaking once or twice, while oven warms.

Butter and flour 9×5-inch loaf pan or 3 mini loaf pans.

In the bottom of a large bowl, mash bananas with a potato masher (smoother) or a fork (more toothsome/lumpier). Whisk in egg, then oil, sugars and vanilla extract.

In medium bowl, whisk together soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves and flour, then millet. Sprinkle over wet ingredients and stir till just combined with no streaks of flour.

Pour mixture into prepared pan(s) and bake until a tester comes out clean, about 40 to 50 minutes for a large loaf, about 30 for mini loaves. Cool loaf in pan on rack for five minutes, then remove from pan and let cool on rack. Serve warm or at room temperature.

This book has cemented my low opinion of Harold Bloom, with this sentence from his intro:

Beloved divides many of my acquaintances who possess critical discernment; for some of them it is a masterwork, for others it is supermarket literature. I myself am divided: not character in the novel persuades me, and yet much of the writing has authentic literary force. (emphasis mine)

He goes on, but I will spare you. Bloom’s name is on the book, as it is on two other books I read as I researched Beloved, so he is making money with this book that contains what I see as a low blow. Bloom may not regard Beloved as a masterpiece. But, as he notes, many people of critical discernment do, including those at the New York Times who, in 2006, named it the best book of American fiction of the past 25 years.

To use the term “supermarket literature” (deliberate deployment of damning oxymoron), in the preface to a scholarly collection of essays on that work, even while passively saying that it’s not him but others of his acquaintance, is insulting, not just to Morrison and the authors of the essays, but to me as a reader. Why should I read a book about a book that someone of critical discernment thinks is supermarket literature?

Then, to add further insult, the book is full of typos (could they not hire a competent copyeditor?) and the final essay has several outright factual errors, e.g. the rooster is misidentified as Brother, not Mister and thus Morrison’s careful strategies of naming characters are undermined.

Poorly done, Bloom, poorly done. It’s not enough to condescendingly admit that you think Song of Solomon is a masterpiece. You’ve outed yourself as an intellectual bully. After reading Beloved and the two other books with your name on it about Morrison, I would much rather live in a world that had Morrison’s literature than Bloom’s if I had to choose. But then, perhaps he’d think I don’t have critical discernment, and thus my opinion would not matter.

It’s too bad that Bloom’s churlish, petty comments in the introduction soured me at the start, because there are several very good essays in this book on Beloved that highlight interesting interpretations. If they had been treated to a good copyeditor, and not capped by a less-good essay, they might have been done justice.

9yo son Drake returned from a birthday party: They had cupcakes and ice cream, but I didn’t have any.

Me, knowing the mom who made the cupcakes and that they would have been good: Why?

Drake: I’m trying to cut back on sweets.

Me, carb-monster, utterly bewildered: Why?

Drake, rolling eyes: I’m going to tell my other parent. Maybe HE’LL appreciate it.

Then, we went to a Sukkot party over the weekend where he skipped chili and egg strata and ate only banana bread, pumpkin-nut squares and chocolate-chip cookies. Cutting back on sweets, my a$$. I bet he just ate too much pizza at the birthday party.