Inputs:
Memorial by Bryan Washington: Mike and Benson are a Houston couple, Japanese-American and Black respectively, whose relationship is petering out when Mike decides to go to Osaka to care for his terminally ill estranged father just as his mother arrives from Japan for an extended visit. The book shifts in perspective between Benson, at home with Mike’s mother who is pulsating with rage at her abandonment, and Mike as he works in his dad’s bar and tries to make sense of the time he has left with him. This is a juicy book- fluids of all kinds abound, you feel the humidity practically beading on the pages, and I am not normally a book crier but Memorial cupped my heart in its slightly sweaty palm and squeezed out copious weeping.
Dirt by Bill Buford: This book is a sort of sequel to Heat, the story of Buford’s quest to understand Italian cooking in Tuscany and the kitchens of Mario Batali’s empire. Now he has a wife and twin toddlers, who he moves to Lyon so he can work in a Michelin starred restaurant and master the essence of French food. For a book about pursuing a passion in France, it’s not exactly escapist. Lyon is grimy and inhospitable, the kitchen is full of sadomasochists, the food sounds awfully organ-forward for American tastes. He lost me when probing the historical ties between French and Italian cooks stretching back to the Medicis, or going into the weeds on the etymology of the word “vinaigrette”. But with his titan connections to the food world Buford could have written a perfectly nice book about French cooking from the perspective of the dining room, and instead he decided to move his entire family to a foreign country for years and spend long hot hours in insulting and sometimes violent company learning how to carve vegetables into perfect ovoids; and you get caught up in his single-mindedness. He captured a glimpse of a tradition-bound craft and agrarian culture that are vanishing, and I’m glad I at least got to see it secondhand.
Outputs:
My strangest Thanksgivings fit into two categories. There were the ones where I was away from my family in a foreign country, a little sad to be eating instant noodles for dinner but also relishing the melancholy glamor that seemed to overlay my circumstances. Then there were the ones where we grimly went through the motions, whiteknuckled our way through a tense drive, soggy turkey, and bitter post-dessert recriminations, all of which were foreseen but seemed inevitable, a duty that couldn’t be shirked.
With both foreign travel and a convergence of extended family off the table, it seems like this year will be an entirely different animal. The vibe I aspire to recreate is that of the first year T and I lived together in Durham, when my family wasn’t showing up until the weekend and one by one the friends we had invited for lunch peeled off until it was just us and T’s benumbed classmate who had broken up with his girlfriend the previous day and came over mostly because he wasn’t sure what else to do with himself. He and T sat outside tending the turkey in its peanut oil bath while I puttered around in the kitchen churning out side dishes in blissful tranquility. After we ate, we were halfway through watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when the friend abruptly stood up, said “I think I need to go,” and left. (He was fine.) I have a toddler now so I don’t know if blissful tranquility is in the cards, but at least there will still be fried turkey and at least some of the people I care most about on earth, so I feel like I’m making out alright with this particular variety of weirdness.
Condiment Corner:
As previously noted my usual grocery routines are out of whack and some of my preferred sources are unavailable, which is why I had to resort to buying this bougie kimchi. I haven’t tried it yet and maybe it’s perfectly fine but every time I see it in the fridge I just resent it so much for not having been bought at H-Mart, a place that used to feel like a slightly indulgent adventure in a way that even the most amazing supermarket can’t now and won’t for a long time. When I imagine how I’ll look back on the pandemic later, I imagine a wall in which small inconveniences like having to buy this lesser kimchi are the mortar holding together the great stones of loss and hardship demarcating our tragic era.