Bookish Love in the Time of COVID-19

It’s been almost four years since the last time I did a book dinner. Although I’ve missed doing them, I can’t say I haven’t been busy: I’ve gone to grad school, moved cities, started and ended relationships, continued playing roller derby, and tried to keep up with all the other minutiae of life. Hosting dinners requires a lot of time and money that I haven’t really had for the last few years. But I really want to get back into it, because talking about books is one of the few things I get unquestionable, unrepentant joy from. I guess it’s more than a bit ironic that the first one I do after all this time happens in the middle of a quasi-global quarantine. Oh well. Sometimes you’ve got to just roll with the punches.

Since I wasn’t able to invite people over for a home-cooked Cuban meal, I instead invited whoever was interested in participating to a Zoom-enabled cocktail hour, in which the goal was to talk about the book and its themes in a way general enough that even those who hadn’t read the book would be able to participate. Having been living life almost exclusively in leggings and t-shirts, I also took the opportunity to dress up as if I were myself walking the cobblestone streets of Havana, complete with hoops, braids, winged eyeliner, and a halter top–the exact look I’ve worn on many a day of wandering in Caribbean climes. Southern California weather even supplied me with some humid heat to complete the charade, boob sweat and all. Sometimes the act of pretending can make strange circumstances feel a little less unsettling.

Everyone was encouraged to make their own Cuban cocktail. My dad, the person I can always rely on to support all my bookish endeavors, took it a step further and made his own ropa vieja, a Cuban dish consisting of stewed flank steak and flavor-packed onions and peppers. I made a classic Cuban daiquiri, adapted from this recipe. Be warned, I used less rum and less sugar than the recipe called for since, as the host, I didn’t want to sink into rum-soaked babbling. Irregardless, I was still more than a bit buzzed at the end of the call.

Our conversation mostly revolved around the themes I brought up in my previous blog, such as women’s relationships to and representation in horror films, disappearing (either from one’s own life through various methods or from death), and the generally ignored misogyny of famous men. My derby friend, Iggy Cox (a.k.a. Nikki), brought up the fact that the aggressors in horror movies are almost never women and, if they are, their motives are generally those of a jilted lover and fall into the hackneyed stereotypes of the hysterical woman. Later, we all talked about the likelihood that each of us would emerge victorious from a horror movie (most of didn’t think we would).

Every time I talk to other women about the kinds of violence that happen around and to us, I feel extremely grateful. I often worry that I talk about violence against women and my own traumatic experiences too often, that I “protest too much”, and I begin to feel like perhaps I’m over-exaggerating, maybe the world isn’t so scary for women as I tend to think it is. When the group was talking about historically terrible men, I brought up one quote that was and is (and also may forever be) continually circling my brain like an unsinkable deuce. It was from Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House, wherein she mentions Norman Mailer’s assessment of women writers. It goes something like “the sniff off the ink of women is dykily psychotic.” I seem to collect all the horrific things men say about and do to women, often in order to pull one out at the appropriate time and say, “See?! I’m not making this shit up!” But when I hear that other women have the same worries, think about the same things that I do, when I read books like van den Berg’s or Machado’s or Laura Westenberg’s Queer Gothic or Rebecca Solnit’s new memoir Recollections of My Unbecoming, I realize that that feeling of being hysterical is a tool that the patriarchy uses to maintain the status quo. If even I think I might be crazy, then my ability to speak truth to power is lessened. Gaslighting is one way to keep women and other marginalized people silent. So it is profoundly healing to me, even as it is also saddening, to hear my own experiences echoed back to me from the mouths of women I love and trust.

Another profoundly healing thing is to have a father that will sit and listen while women around him talk about their experiences. Unfortunately, it seems all too difficult to find men who don’t feel the need to defend themselves from what they see as accusations against them and all their kind. In keeping with his general sweetness, in order to close out the conversation on an uplifting note, my dad brought up a quote from The Third Hotel in which the narrator, Clare, reflects on her first “moment of wonder” and asked us to think about our own. I have a notoriously terrible memory (I often forget what show I’m watching whenever a commercial comes on), but the exercise of attempting to look back into my childhood and remember the first time I was in awe of the world around me brought up an image I hadn’t thought of in ages. It was one of climbing what felt like a very tall tree at a park my parents used to bring us to all the time as children. I remember climbing as high as I could go and, once there, staring out above the playground and surrounding houses to the ocean a few miles away and feeling the wind move the branches I stood on, as if I myself were swaying in an invisible sea, and feeling as though I were alone in the vast expanse of the world, and yet powerful in that loneliness. I couldn’t have been more than eight, but I can still feel the branches shift beneath me and the wind gently lifting my hair.

With that we signed off and I wandered (a little drunkenly, admittedly) off to bed.

Thank you to those of you who joined me to drink Cuban cocktails and chat about Laura van den Berg’s The Third Hotel. It is supremely validating to talk about things I love with like-minded folks. If you’d like to join me in reading my next book for this blog, I will be reading Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite, an illustrated book of recipes and a “memoir of the senses.” Depending on the state of the quarantine, I may be able to host a dinner or I might once again host a video meeting. Either way, I’d love for you to come along.

You’d Better Shoot Them: On Women and Horror

Sometimes it takes me forever to get words on “paper”. I sit down to make an attempt and then clip my nails or pluck wayward hairs instead. Or I finally go read all the articles that are taking up tab space on the top of my screen. Meanwhile, the germ of what I want to write spins lazy phantasmal circles around me. It lacks a definite shape but I can feel it, gently begging to be exorcised into writing or let go into whatever ether unrealized ideas disappear. But generally, eventually–mostly–I get it done. Sometimes, while I’m shuffling my feet and realphabetizing my books, the world shifts into the perfect environment for what I’m trying to write. As now.

Many people around the world, myself included, are quarantined. Even those without the means or opportunity to shelter in place have seen the world shift into a strange new reality where people avoid touch, wear face masks and gloves in public, and glare suspiciously at anyone who so much as coughs. An insidious virus, a very real fear that lacks shape or any characteristic that would allow us to see it coming, is burrowing into our collective hearts, into some of our very real, very vulnerable bodies, and reshaping the world into something currently unidentifiable. Many of our daily lives have shrunk drastically, our actions dictated by a paranoiac fear of contagion–not in the sense that our fear is baseless, but in the sense that we have such limited information that it’s hard to know if what we are doing will save us. This is what fear does. When we are afraid of sharks, we stay away from deep water. When we are afraid of being hurt, we hide our hearts away. When we are afraid of being attacked–or infected–, we walk around poised to defend ourselves, or we don’t walk around at all. But the ghosts, the manifestations of those fears, are harder to avoid.

Laura van den Berg’s The Third Hotel is largely about grief transmogrifying into ghosts, fear metastasizing into isolation. It’s the story of Clare, a woman whose husband, a horror film scholar, has recently been killed in an unsolved hit and run. The couple had intended to travel together to Havana, Cuba, to attend a film festival where the first ever Cuban horror movie was to be screened. Clare decides to go on her own, “to do the things her husband had planned on doing himself but was in no position to do any longer” (4). Semi-delirious from the reality of life post-husband, Clare gets drunk, talks to strangers, wanders around Havana, and begins seeing her husband. When she calls to him, he ignores her. When he walks away, she follows. Is he real? Is she losing her mind? Could both be true or maybe neither? Below and beyond the plot, however, this story is about the way women struggle to exist in a world bent in many ways on their annihilation.

One of the things I was most intrigued by in this book was the way in which van den Berg uses film theory to parallel the deepening alienation Clare feels to the world around her. Van den Berg references tropes in horror films such as the Final Girl, the lone female who survives in most horror movies, and the Terrible Place, where “the killer and the Final Girl [are] forced into their ultimate confrontation” (18). Horror movies are arguably excessively hyperbolic representations of the trauma of female experience. Laura Westengard, author of Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma, states that gothic novels, which I would argue The Third Hotel is, “circulate around the pain of female characters as a kind of repetition compulsion to work through the trauma of feminine socialization” (220). Westengard further defines trauma as “unspeakable”, an unhealed wound constantly reopened by its social invalidation. Like the heroines of these stories, women in real life are often targeted by men more powerful than themselves and then disbelieved when they’re brave enough to tell someone about it. Examples of this in the real world are legion. I myself have often considered whether I am Final Girl material, how long I might survive in a zombie apocalypse or the Hunger Games. Clare ponders this as well, when at one point she compares herself to the two women in the Cuban horror film she came to see.

There were two women in the film: a prostitute, whose death occurred within the first ten minutes and was treated like a joke, and the hero’s estranged daughter…. She was an elegant beauty, lithe and damp-eyed, and implied to still be a virgin. Clare herself had simple, pleasant looks–the kind of woman people might call pretty, never beautiful–and was certainly not a virgin but also not having sex all the time. In the average horror movie, she estimated her time of death would arrive approximately halfway through (28).

In my own ruminations, I’ve always thought that I might be the person who dies towards the end, a contender for the Final Girl, but never quite Her. For one thing, feminine virtuousity has never been interesting to me and once I made it to college and lived on my own, I got rid of my virginity as expediently as possible. But on the other hand, I think my success in an apocalypse world would hinge upon who the enemy was. In the book, Clare recalls her husband telling her what it took to be a Final Girl: “…many Final Girls had androgynous names—Laurie, Ripley, Sidney—because to be less feminine than the other women, the ones who stupidly wandered into clammy basements and shadowed alleys and got gruesomely murdered, was crucial to their survival…. To survive, it sounded like, the Final Girls had to be willing to transform into the men pursuing them” (29). In order to emerge alive, we must embody the very patriarchal violence that so threatens us. If I had to kill others like myself, others also caught within the homicidal/suicidal patriarchal structure, in order to emerge victorious, like in the world of The Hunger Games or The Walking Dead, I don’t think I’d make it. But in horror movies, especially ones in which the killer is a man, I think I’d have a better chance. Why? Because I, like many women, have a lot of experience with men who threaten me.  Moreover, the ghosts of what could have been or what still might be, the ever-present threat of patriarchal violation, haunt me constantly.

In a world in which violence against women remains routine, pardonable even, where men who assault women can still become president, where would-be writers gush over acknowledged and unapologetic misogynists like Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and Ernest Hemingway as literary heroes (the latter who once said you might as well shoot a woman if you’re going to leave her), where our most famous film directors–Hitchcock, Kubrick, Hooper (of Texas Chainsaw Massacre)–all recommend torturing the women to get the best effect… in such a world, how can women do anything but try to conceptualize the probabilities of their own survival?

Okay. So I’ve gotten away from the plot of The Third Hotel, but if you’re looking for reviews, there are plenty of places to find them. Here I chose to focus on what themes the book brought forward for me. While Clare wandered around Havana in pursuit of her dead(?) husband, I couldn’t help but focus on the men around her, who watched her, laughed at her, ignored her. We bring our own experiences to the things we read and The Third Hotel’s underlying tones of uncanny horror reverberated through me. And as I procrastinated on writing this by plucking chin hairs and binge-reading other things, the world around me took on an uncanny horror of its own.

The time we are living in now resembles a horror movie that might be screened at an independent film festival. The fear of contagion, which is, as far as I can tell, well-founded, is keeping us apart from one another, relegating us to the crypts of our own homes. Unlike a horror movie, we cannot fast forward to the end in order to assure ourselves it will all turn out okay. People are dying and, like in horror movies, those dead and suffering are disproportionately made up of people of color. When it’s over, those of us who are privileged under white supremacist patriarchy will probably be able to return to normal. I hope we don’t. I hope we listen to this fear, pay attention to the ways this cataclysmic event is making clear the structural inequality our privilege is built on and examine the ways we are complicit in that. But also I hope that we as a society might recognize that this fear is the same one that women feel every day. Women fear violence in the same way that we have all come to fear COVID-19. We can’t see it, we don’t know who might infect us, but what we do know is that we are susceptible, vulnerable. And it might kill us.

Jane Eyre, A Party, and a Melancholy Cook

“My world had for some years been in Lowood: my experience had been of its rules and systems; now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.” –Jane Eyre

How often we turn a corner in our lives and suddenly find ourselves in a place where we feel off balance. For me, it’s like crossing a river by jumping stone to stone and suddenly landing on an unstable one, then wavering momentarily in the vertigo-inducing inbetween, before either falling and getting doused (if, hopefully, the current is gentle and the waters shallow) or continuing on. This feeling, in my experience, generally accompanies big life changes—break ups, deaths, births, coming home. I’m there now, still stuck in that place of weightlessness, unsure of how to regain my balance and move forward.

For now, I cling to the small pleasures.

Last week, I did the dinner for Jane Eyre as a celebration of my mother’s birthday, as it is her favorite book. For two days, I prepared and cooked and fell peacefully into that brilliant and noiseless place in my head where I go while doing something I enjoy. Some of her oldest friends came to share the meal with us, most of whom I’ve grown up with, providing an extended family that Jane Eyre could only have dreamed of. The dinner was full of laughter and warmth and shared histories. I rarely manage to take pictures of the actual event itself, as I’d often rather enjoy myself and the fruits of my efforts, but I think the photos of the process tell their own story.

Preparations for the vegetable stock that would later become the soup.

The makings of a Sweet Blueberry Buttermilk Pie with Chamomile Cream: Recipe from Half Baked Harvest

Roast Chicken & Vegetables (Chicken not shown)

Blackberry, Mint, and Cucumber Gin Spritzer: Recipe from The Broken Bread

Roasted Cauliflower and Garlic Soup with Caramelized Onions: Recipe from Brooklyn Supper

Jane Eyre knew the feeling of coming to terms with the turns of life well. Once she left Lowood to be the governess at Thornfield Hall, she would’ve had to reestablish her sense of self in a vastly different environment, where different things were expected of her. As for me, I’m trying. I’m looking for a way to do the things I want to do, the things I need to do, and moreover regaining that sense of joy I felt so often in Ecuador, where for a while I felt that I was using my strengths and interests as tools for shaping the life I wanted.

I know that coming home was still a step towards the life I want, but the path ahead is unclear and branches in many directions. It took courage to buy a one-way ticket to Ecuador, as I well know and as everyone tells me. But it takes a different kind of courage to have the strength and resilience to pull the life you want out of the miasma of the daily struggle.

Until I choose a path and start walking, towards that mythical marriage of life ($1,000 a month on a barista’s paycheck does not quite count) and passion, I will cling to this blog which, in a way, is a micro version of just that.

The Babe with the Power: Rejecting Compromise

How dare I, Mrs. Reed? How dare I? Because it is the truth. You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so...

As we grow from larvaceous little rolls of baby fat into semi-conscious, babbling beings, we learn many things about how to exist in the world. These lessons come from those around us, generally from those who have taken it upon themselves to ensure our survival, to a greater or lesser degree. These lessons are not always directly taught, but rather absorbed through experience. The luckiest among us learn, for example, how to give and receive things like empathy and compassion. We all learn the varietals of shame. Some of us learn to protect ourselves from a world that wants to view us a certain way. We learn to take what we want (entitlement/privilege) or to accept what we are “allotted” (meekness/humility) or, more commonly, to compromise (neutral, possibly).

Compromise is the idea that if two entities want non-complementary things, they must come to some kind of agreement–meet halfway. Long touted as a necessary skill to interacting and being a successful player in society, not all compromise is created equal. In fact, compromise is largely gendered and, if we have learned anything from the news of late, that which is gendered is so rarely equal.

If a man and a woman disagree on something, you can pretty much bet that the woman has been socialized to be more amenable to compromise than the man. Women have been compromising forever, making themselves smooth so others can move more easily over them. Children or a career? A partner or freedom? Though past iterations of feminism have claimed that we can have it all, most of us can’t and frankly, don’t want to. Compromise is fine, I think, when talking about where to eat lunch or go on vacation, but when it comes to life’s big decisions, to dreams and aspirations, I say, to hell with them. Take what’s yours. You are entitled.

In literature, compromise is often the end of a woman’s journey. When she lets go of some part of herself in order to fit more snugly into someone else’s idea of how their life should proceed, often in the guise of marriage, something is forfeited, something the man would never be asked to pawn. But not so Jane Eyre. Although her story ends in marriage, it is marriage on her own terms. There seems to be nothing ideal about her eventual reconciliation and marriage to a newly blind and one-handed Mr. Rochester, and yet she has remained true to herself and her integrity, and thus does she, in the end, triumph.

Throughout Charlotte Brontë’s novel, the eponymous heroine is anything but your average girl turned woman. She does not meekly bow her beribboned head in the face of slander and misplaced blame while in the house of her cruel aunt, nor does she tremble beguilingly when Mr. Rochester enfolds her in his arms and entreats her to stay with him, despite the fact that he tried to marry her without informing her that, not only was he already married, but was keeping his arguably insane wife locked away in a room above Jane’s own. Jane maintains an iron grasp on what she believes to be good and true, on her sense of right and wrong, sacrificing superficial contentment for the furtherance of a deeper, more soul-saturating, though by no means guaranteed, happiness.

I laughed at him as he said this. “I am not an angel,” I asserted; “and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me–for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.

As a woman, the expectations Jane Eyre faced in her little world of 407 pages (in my edition) were varied, diverse, and deeply-embedded in the society in which she lived. Despite her extraordinary resilience and loyalty to her own integrity, these societal influences showed. She referred to her boss as Master. She almost, almost married St. John, the (in my opinion) slightly sociopathic wannabe missionary, just because 1) he asked, and 2) he cited the impossibility of an unmarried woman being allowed to do much good in the world. Yet her resolve held, and in the end led to the fulfillment of her desire to marry Mr. Rochester legally and honorably.

“Keep to common sense, St. John: you are verging on nonsense. You pretend to be shocked by what I have said. You are not really shocked: for, with your superior mind, you cannot be either so dull or so conceited as to misunderstand my meaning. I say again, I will be your curate, if you like, but never your wife.

The compromises routinely asked of today’s women are not so different, and are still largely ruled by the whims and behavior of men. Women want free and easy access to birth control and reproductive freedom, but those who claim to have our interests in mind preach abstinence and strip away our “alienable” rights, as Roxane Gay calls them, one by one. Women want to wear clothes that make them feel good, men take that as an opportunity to catcall, leer, or W.C.S. (worst-case scenario), rape. So the compromise is that women should wear more conservative clothing.

I admire Jane Eyre. She thrived in the face of insuperable obstacles, but we have come a long way and times have, in some ways, changed. She had no friends, no vehicle of voice with which to protest. She lived in such a small world, and that world has grown large. We, women, have choices and voices she could never have hoped for, and we need to take responsibility for them. We need to make what is alienable inalienable. The time for compromise is over. Our bodies are not board room tables over which compromises are made. We must show the same kind of integrity that Jane showed and keep the greater goal in mind. We must not be tempted by momentary appeasement to give up the game. Charlotte Brontë’s heroine knew the merit of not compromising, and she suffered for it. She was homeless and hungry and near death, yet she persevered. We would have pardoned her for giving in, but she never did. We need to show the same resilience. We need to acknowledge that when it comes to our bodies, our futures, the time for compromise has passed.

Though the world would have you believe otherwise, believe this, tell yourself this in moments of doubt:

I am no bird, and no net ensnares me.

 

A Long Ago Dinner with the Don

How funny time is–in the moment it seems to crawl, but then, looking back, how deceptively quickly it flew by. Sometimes, when remembering an event in the past, time–a thing without form, measured only by how it is felt–seems to bend in upon itself to bridge the gap.

I wrote the review for Mario Puzo’s The Godfather over a year ago, on the eve of my second departure to Ecuador. Since then, I’ve left and come back and left again, but here I am, back in Orange County, and it feels like only yesterday that I slipped into my vintage polka dot dress and put liberty rolls in my hair before putting on an apron and making spaghetti with meatballs, only after which I ran out to Santa Monica Seafood to buy cannoli for dessert, having forgotten to do so beforehand.

On that night, the men of my family dressed up in pin-striped suits and dagger collars, the women rolled and blow dried and sprayed their hair and sipped wine while balanced on tasteful heels. It was a night on which my heavily Irish-blooded relatives played Italian for a day, drinking grappa, spearing olives on toothpicks, passing the tomato sauce from hand to hand. We ate, and we talked. We drank, and we argued, about politics and gossip and culture–more openly, one would think, than the real Don would ever have permitted. At our table, however, with my uncle Bob assuming the role of Don Kinsch, seriousness made way for levity, family business was fair game, and the women made their voices heard just as loudly as the men. Despite being neither so serious nor so jowly as Marlon Brando, I think he carried it off quite well.

 

It may almost feel like yesterday, but here’s the god’s honest truth: I don’t remember many details of this dinner. Technical difficulties kept me from writing this entry until I came home for good, so what I do remember has the tang of exaggeration, the lemon-lit glow of embellishment. It was a long time ago and so much has happened since. What my memory does provide is the smell of simmering tomatoes and garlic, the laughter as we each appeared wearing what we considered to be 1940s attire, the crunch of the cannoli, the gleam of the beautiful bottle of expensive grappa, but what I actually remember (scout’s honor) is exactly the reason I continue to do these dinners and maintain this blog: I remember my family together, enjoying themselves, and being happier than any Puzo character ever was.

 

Coming up! I’m back in the country and back on track, so expect posts much more often. June’s book is a surprise, as the dinner will be part of my mom’s birthday celebration! If you’re interested in what I was doing in South America for all this time, check out my other blog, La Güera Viajera.  In the meantime, keep reading!

Voulez-vous Manger Avec Moi Ce Soir, Monsieur le Empereur?: Chicken Dinner Napoleon-Style

The world of food is one of limitless potential for creativity and innovation, yet it’s common to find that any given person’s favorite dish is a simple one, though they may harbor a weakness for pot au feu or Puebla mole. Napoleon, for example, fancied himself the predestined emperor of the world, and so could have eaten any number of delicacies at any time of the day or night. But no, his favorite dish, at least according to The Passion by Jeanette Winterson, was a simple roast chicken. “[He] had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock. What a kitchen that was, with birds in every state of undress; some still cold and slung over hooks, some turning slowly on the spit, but most in wasted piles because the Emperor was busy” (3). I have to agree with him on this even if I’m not quite on board with the whole world domination schtick. For this dinner, I made roast chicken the main course and focus of the meal, and then took advantage of some artistic liberties to fill in the rest. Luckily for me, I was not preparing this meal in a soggy, miserable army camp on the banks of the English Channel like poor Henri, but instead was in one of my favorite places in the world: my grandmother’s house on the California Central Coast, in Cambria. But hey, you gotta give a girl points for effort.

It was one of those serendipitous weekends when things just come together on their own. My grandmother called me to say she and her boyfriend would be going up to Cambria for the weekend and couldn’t I come to? It happened that I could (there aren’t many things I wouldn’t move around in order to go to Cambria with her). Then, even more luckily, my dad was able to come up as well. I figured one of my book dinners would be a fun way to celebrate being able to come together so spur of the moment-like, even though so much of The Passion is about being separated from the places and people you love. But one big theme in this novel is taking advantage of the present as its the only point in time you have any control over whatsoever.

It’s hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment (19).

I only recently learned how to make roast chicken from my new chef roommate, so for once I was able to make something without a recipe. It’s amazingly simple. Just salt it, put some thyme on it, tie it up like some Sadeian submissive, and roast for 45 minutes.

While that was in the oven, I prepared the side dish of sweet potatoes and fennel, sprinkled with olive oil, salt & pepper, and herbs de provence. I love this dish. It’s so freakin’ easy and the fennel and sweet potatoes complement each other so well. It’s instant comfort food.

While I did that, my dad (one perk of making dinner for others is sometimes they help!) blanched and peeled peaches from Cambria’s Farmer’s Market for a cobbler. Like I mentioned, roast chicken was the only thing actually mentioned in The Passion but I figured that sticking with simple, country fare with basic ingredients was still appropriate.

One of the things I love most about making food with fresh ingredients is the naturally vivid colors of certain ingredients like sweet potatoes or peaches. At a loss for certain ingredients generally found in cobbler crust, my dad substituted granola from the local Corner Bakery. It’s one of my favorite granolas because it has macadamia and pine nuts in it, and it made an excellent topping.

Finally, it was time to eat. We all sat down, opened a bottle of Venetian wine, and got to it. There weren’t many instances in the novel where characters got to sit down and enjoy a meal with good company. Henri sure didn’t get to partake in the delicious chickens he roasted for Napoleon, whose appetite never waned even in the vast frozen wastelands of Russia. Even in such desolation however, Henri never lost sight of the overall goodness and beauty of life, an attitude which unfortunately makes him more of a martyr than anything else. I’ll end this entry on a happy note, though the ending of the novel was somewhere between sadness and contentment. I read this book twice, almost immediately, and loved it both times. I’m looking forward to doing more Jeanette Winterson books on this blog.

Our ancestors. Our belonging. The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich. Thus the present is made whole (62).

P. S. Just so you understand the context when I say I had the pleasure of cooking this meal in my favorite place in the world, just check out the view from the kitchen… I mean, really.