Inputs:
Arbitrary Stupid Goal by Tamara Shopsin: I never went to this landmark restaurant in its original Greenwich Village location and one of its late founder Kenny Shopsin’s rules was “No allergies” so perhaps I’m not destined to experience it even in its current iteration. His daughter’s autobiography weaves and loops between the founding of the restaurant and the grocery store that preceded it, the biological and spiritual family that formed around it, and her present day travels on photography assignments with her partner. The New York she describes, which as she says is held together by the people at its periphery, feels both intimately near and irretrievably lost.
The King at the Edge of the World by Arthur Phillips: A doctor brought along on a delegation from the Ottoman Empire to the court of Queen Elizabeth is caught up in a series of schemes and machinations that find him left behind, batted from castle to castle, while he tries not to get swept away in the chaos around Elizabeth’s succession. It makes a good counterpoint to Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Oliver Cromwell with a much less formidable scale. Would love to see a streaming service throw obscene sums at making it into a 6 part series.
Outputs:
When I look back to last year it’s hard to believe that there were parts of 2020 when life still normal. It got me thinking about 2014, another very weird year that I started on what would be my last trip to Kabul, then quit my job, got married, moved to a city where I knew no one except my new husband (and although we had been dating for seven years at that point, the move and the changes it brought to each of our circumstances made us very new to each other), made a career change that has been unfruitful without being quite catastrophic enough to force me to figure out something better, my father died (not unexpected and, at that point, something of a relief, although there is still plenty of sadness about a life that ends with the people nearest you feeling relieved), and I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer (I’m fine now). That year was so disorienting in all its highs and lows that when I washed up on shore at the end of it I had turned into someone else. The past year on the other hand has felt inert (a gift, compared to the devastation so many others have experienced) but as the months pass and the end sometimes seems farther away than ever I can’t imagine the degree of change won’t be just as large. Since relatively speaking I haven’t been too buffeted by the pandemic at this point, I suppose there’s no reason I can’t take advantage of that luxury and exercise a bit more agency as to what type of change I want it to be. We’ve sure got time.
Condiment Corner
Despite growing up in a predominantly Italian-American milieu I had never heard of passata before I saw it at Wegman’s. It made me feel defensive, like it was daring me to pretend I knew exactly what to do with it. I put it in pasta con ceci, which is what you make when you really feel like boxed macaroni and cheese but you are feeling twinges of guilt about how much neon food you have been giving your child. It was a substitute for tomato paste and it worked fine, but I can’t imagine any application for passata in which you couldn’t just use tomato paste instead and save yourself a bunch of fridge space. Dear Lord, there is still so much passata. It’ll be marinara for months around here.