Book Review: Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris

Oh, my goodness.  I've been in a bit of a book-reading slump lately.  I say "book-reading" not to be redundant but rather to differentiate from my fanfic reading, which has most decidedly not been in a recent slump.  Up until today, it was taking me on average about three weeks to finish a single book, not least because I was actively reading about a dozen different ones and making no good headway in any of them.

Today, though, I began and finished David Sedaris' wonderful new essay collection, Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls. Maybe it's because it was purely fun to read and not something I had to read for work is what did the trick, but my goodness, I was positively chortling through most of it.  Much to my husband's and my cats's dismay; the former because he actually has to do work today and the latter because it's much more difficult for them to sleep on my lap when I'm doubled over and shaking with laughter.

I had the pleasure of meeting Sedaris once when he was on tour for Me Talk Pretty One Day, a terrible day in July in Jackson, MS, when the store's air conditioning wasn't working and there were no windows to open. He was a serious trouper and very good natured about it, and for which I admired him.  Since then, I've listened to most of his books on audio, and a couple of years ago at the same bookstore, I attended another reading: this one in the comfort of air conditioning, accompanied by $2 beers.  Sedaris told a bizarre poo-in-hand story that prompted me to write one of my favorite blogposts [because apparently I never moved beyond the scatological phase, developmentally speaking], which you can find here.)

 That same night, I remember that my husband and I were the first to laugh at one of jokes in his "book titles that take on a whole new meaning when you remove one letter" sketch: The Count of Monte Cristo. Since it was in Mississippi, perhaps the crowd initially went to Crisco (which admittedly isn't all that funny) and it wasn't until Sedaris, waiting for the other shoe to drop, kept saying, with emphasis, The *Count* of Monte Cristo. At which point the crowd just hooted.

Speaking of owls, I loved this book.  I almost wasted a perfectly good cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee over breakfast this morning by snorting most of it through my nose. My husband, driven to distraction, actually had to crank up his music in the studio today while working in order to drown out my laughter. (Though this gesture somehow loses some of its potency since it was Sibelius he was cranking up.)

As with any collection, some pieces are stronger than others, and I particularly loved "Author, Author" and "Laugh, Kookaburra." There are some darker, "imagined pieces" (for lack of a better term, since "fiction" doesn't quite fit) in between the first person essays/anecdotes that sometimes veered beyond Sedaris' traditional balance of humor and sardonicism into uncomfortable territory.

Anyway, here are some passages that spoke to me.  Maybe they'll speak to you, too.

On things he wants to say to parents when their children are being obnoxiously whiny: "Listen, I'm not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap the child across the face. It won't stop its crying, but at least now it'll be doing it for a good reason."

On those creepy old men at church who constantly ask young people if they're dating yet: "[They'd] even refer to newborn babies as "lady-killers" and wonder how many hearts they had broken. Like it wasn't enough to be dating at the age of three weeks, you also had to be two-timing someone."

"Gambling to me is what a telephone pole might be to a groundhog. He sees that it's there but for the life of him doesn't understand why. Friends have tried to explain the appeal, but I still don't get it.  Why take chances with money?"

On mocking people: "It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, 'Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.' If [the person's] criticism was coming from the same place as mine, if she was just being petty and judgmental, then we could go on all day, perhaps even form a friendship. If, on the other hand, it was tied to a conservative agenda, I was going to have to switch tracks."  (Oh, God, that's so true of me, too, that I read the passage twice and was embarrassed for both Sedaris and myself.)

Sedaris doesn't pull any punches when it comes to his observations of human behavior.  He must be uncomfortable to live with sometimes, but then he turns around and skewers himself with the same sense of vicious patheticism and I think, "well, okay, then."

NB: Little Brown will publish Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls later this month. I read an advance reading copy that was provided at my request from my sales rep. I will probably seek the audio version, too, for my car so I can enjoy it all over again!

Eating (and Drinking) My Way Through Jackson

As soon as I learned that my husband and I would be traveling to Jackson last weekend, I began compiling a must-visit list of restaurants and foods that would complete our trip. There are many things that I love about New England compared with Mississippi, particularly the politics and the summers, but  regional cuisine ain't one of them.  Up here in the Kingdom of the Yankee, bbq is more like a noun than a verb, and if you can find grits or sweet tea at all, even mediocre samples, you're lucky. We were traveling so that DH could promote his newest middle grade book, The Cheshire Cheese Cat, and as such we were tied a good bit to the itinerary that Peachtree Publishers and the host bookstore, Lemuria, had planned, but that still gave us plenty of room to maneuver, as you'll see.

(Image found online)

Now, I'm not a fast food fan.  I eat meat but I try my best to avoid any factory-farmed food, which eliminates most fast food options.  I cannot, however, resist the siren call of Krystal Burgers when I head South, and thus our pilgrimage began during our layover in concourse A in ATL.  My DH also confesses to a deep-seated fondness for these sliders, as the chain began in his hometown of Chattanooga, TN.  It really is the perfect blend of mustard, pickle, and onion, and oh, those warm, pillowy buns.  We each ate two burgers and shared an order of fries and sighed with satisfaction before boarding our connecting flight to JAN.

Patrick & Elizabeth, a dynamic sibling duo! Note the stained glass.

Next up was dinner at El Charro, a Mexican restaurant that has opened in Jackson since I lived there.  My dear friends, Patrick & Elizabeth, and I have a tradition of eating Mexican food together when I'm in town and El Charro was a good addition to our food ritual.  The atmosphere is a fun one, filled with both families and local college students, and the food was really quite good.  I had one of the vegetarian platters with chile relleno and spinach enchiladas.  Not, perhaps, thoroughly authentic, but I was more than satisfied, and the price simply cannot be beat.  My entire platter was only $7.99.  My main complaint about Mexican food at home is that it is either good or affordable, but never both, so I wish there was a place like El Charro in western MA.  Plus how can you not like a restaurant with fun stained glass windows like those?

Broad Street Bakery

Those grits are mmm-mmm, good!

On Friday, Emily Grossenbacher, the children's bookseller at Lemuria, had arranged for us to visit a couple of local schools to talk about Cheshire Cheese Cat and the art of illustration.  To use my DH's own colorful language, the thought of talking to hundreds of 3rd-, 4th-, and 5th-grade children makes his ass suck wind, so clearly we had to fortify ourselves with breakfast at Broad Street Bakery, housed in the same building as Lemuria.  As a transplant from WI to MS, I was leery of grits, but once I embraced them, it was with the fervor of the twice-saved finding salvation through Jesus.  So believe me when I say that Broad Street's cheese grits are unparalleled--I've paid twice as much for half as good in the heralded breakfast restaurants of New Orleans (Brennan's, Commander's Palace, etc). Creamy and cheesey and hot and delicious and yummy and I'm about to run out of ways to praise them 'cause my mouth is watering at the sheer memory.  You don't know from grits if you've never eaten them at Broad Street. Just a cup of grits and a side of their minted fruit salad was enough to send us once more into the breach of those middle schoolers. 

After DH's last presentation for the day, all three of us were hungry so we stopped in at The Hickory Pit to nosh on some pulled pork sandwiches.  I'm afraid that I inhaled my own sandwich so quickly that I neglected to take a photo of it, but I found a photo on the Jackson Metromix website that shows the unsauced pulled pork, served up with coleslaw (on the sandwich, not the side) and a side of chunky fries where you can actually taste all of their potatoey goodness.  Note to Yankees: if you're served a pulled pork sandwich that's already doused in sauce, you're not getting authentic BBQ.  The customer should always be the one to add the sauce, and ideally there should be more than one option.

photo credit: Jackson Metromix.  Note lack of sauce.

At Hickory Pit, you get your choice of hot, mild, or sweet sauce.  They're all good. Plus, it's affordable.  It's done fast-food style, so you pick up your food at the counter and bus your own tables, which keeps overhead down.  Many so-called bbq places up north where I live charge you three times what we paid for our sandwiches AND they have the gall to serve wine.  No, sir!  Beer or sweet tea, or water in a pinch--those are the only three permissible beverages to accompany bbq.  (I nearly drank my weight in sweet tea that day at Hickory Pit.  They've got the best ice and their lemon wedges ain't stingy.)

Primo's Cafe & Bakery

We had one mission to complete in-between leaving the bookstore and meeting friends for dinner, and that was procuring a caramel cake for the following evening.  I don't know why, but caramel cake doesn't seem to exist north of the Mason-Dixon line.  Come to think of it, that might be what the War of Northern Aggression was really about.  (Just kidding--I don't really think that, or call the Civil War that, except around Yankees who judge me based on my accent.)  Anyway, back to the cake.  Caramel cake is nothing but a yellow layer cake with caramel icing.   It's not complicated to make, exactly, but it is a little fiddly to get the icing right since there's a small window of temperature between grainy icing and burnt sugar.  We called Campbell's bakery first, but they need 2-3 days' notice to make a caramel cake. We found one at Primo's bakery, which is cute as a button. Best $37.50 I've ever spent.  We also picked up a small round layer of strawberry cake, which is another Southern delicacy not easily found up  north, more's the pity.

Please note full moon rising above the restaurant

Source: Char's website.  Our booth is in the bottom left corner

It's truly a shame that we ate lunch so late in the day because it meant we weren't able to do justice for dinner that night.  DH and I met up with Elizabeth and her husband, Tim, for dinner at Char, another restaurant that has opened since I departed Jackson.  Well, it was wonderful. The four of us had a cozy semi-circle booth and we celebrated our first reunion since their marriage two years ago in New Orleans with a round of cocktails--all good, all generous pours.  Tim and I each ordered the house salad with comeback dressing.  (Lawd, but do you know how long it's been since I've seen comeback dressing on a menu?  Too long!)  They were good, and Tim gave his an A while I would award mine a B for being overdressed.  Elizabeth and DH only ordered one course each: a salad with grilled salmon for the former and an appetizer-portion of marinated crab claws for DH.  Tim and I then moved on to the filet mignon special and the bbq shrimp & grits appetizer, respectively.  All four main courses were excellent, and despite everybody at the table pitching in to share DH's crab claws, there were still some left over.

Tim obligingly demonstrates the size of the cake compared to the human head.

The piece de resistance, however, was dessert.  We ordered two for the table: the chocolate cake as big as your head express and their award-winning pecan caramel butter crunch.  I'm not a big chocolate cake person, but even I could tell that Char's was something special, but for me it was nothing compared to the butter crunch, topped with vanilla ice cream and a Granny Smith apple cinnamon glaze. That might be one of the best things I've ever put in my mouth.  It pained me to leave any of it on the plate, I tell you, but eating dinner less than four hours after a big lunch was simply not a challenge I was up for.

Besides the opportunity to catch up with Elizabeth and Tim, one of the best things about our dinner was our server, Lloyd.  He was soft-spoken, pleasant, knowledgeable, courteous and he possessed the rare instinct of knowing the exact number of times to check in with us without making us feel rushed, interrupted, or neglected. When I discovered that I had forgotten to photograph the chocolate cake the size of a human head before we all demolished it, he had another one made up in the kitchens for us.  That Lloyd.  What a sweetheart. 

This post is getting a little long in the tooth, so let me be brief about two meals on Saturday so that I don't waste space and readerly goodwill.  We breakfasted at Broad Street one more time before DH's booksigning: more cheese grits, some freshly-squoze orange juice (feel free to say "freshly-squeezed" if you want to, but don't expect me to say anything but squoze), a biscuit. My dad drove up from Purvis, MS, to have lunch with us, so we took him to Bravo, which was really good, but I have no photos to share, plus it's a restaurant owned by the same folks as Broad Street, so I've given them enough bandwidth for now. 

Cathead Vodka logo

That afternoon we met up with our  pal Mel Evans, who drove us up to Gluckstadt, MS, to see her son's new company, Cathead Vodka, the only legal still in MS.  Austin Evans and his business partner Richard Patrick started Cathead nearly two years ago as a means of combining two of their favorite things: booze and the blues.  We got a tour of the facility and sipped some of the goods, too.  Austin and Richard are joining forces with Lazy Magnolia Brewery (founded by my ol' MSMS classmate, Mark Henderson) to produce a whiskey made in part from the latter's Southern Pecan Nut Brown Ale.

A portion of Cathead proceeds goes to support music & the arts

Richard & Austin in front of their still

Label maker for Cathead Vodka (it's yummy!)

After a while we bid adieu to Austin & Richard and headed back to the hacienda, Chez Evans at Fox Hollow, to get ready for that night's gathering. John and his bookstore staff work harder than anybody I know during the month of December (they elect to work every single day between Thanksgiving and Christmas--I remember doing it myself back in the day), so John decided to invite his booksellers out to his place on DH's and my last night there to kick back, share stories & beverages of the adult variety, drool over his library, and make fools of ourselves over his pool table. Some pizza pies and that fabulous caramel cake topped off this wonderful evening of books, blues, and brews.

'Tis a fine, fine thing

Look at all of that caramel goodness!

Yes, caramel cake is a fine, fine thing.  But I really need to end with a photo of the two men I love most in the world: my DH and John Evans, the man who is mentor, friend, and father figure, all rolled into one.  They love each other, I love them both, and I would not have met (and married) the one if it were not for the other.  To friends and fellowship, I raise this particular glass of bourbon, and if it happens to go well with the caramel cake, so much the better.

My DH and John

 NB: Interested in winning a copy of  Pandemonium, Lauren Oliver's much-awaited sequel to Delirium? Click here!

Book Review: What There is to Say, We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell

 This review has been a long time coming, I'm afraid. I requested an ARC of it from my Houghton Mifflin Harcourt sales rep, Holly Ruck, back before Christmas 2010 as soon as I saw it catalogued.  You see, the woman who edited this correspondence is my beloved college advisor, Suzanne Marrs, and as a former resident of Jackson, Mississippi, I have long been enamored of Eudora Welty.  I had never read Miss Welty until I attended Millsaps College, located just across the street from the neighborhood where Miss Welty grew up.  (You'll soon come to find that those privileged enough to meet Eudora Welty refer to her as "Miss Welty."  To call her Eudora presumes too much acquaintance and to call her merely Welty in anything other than an academic setting feels too cold.  She is always "Miss Welty" to me, a lowly college student and later a bookseller, privileged to meet her a few times during my sojourn in Jackson. My DH, who collaborated with her as an illustrator of her work, sometimes forgets his Southern sensibilities and thus vexes me every time he calls her "Eudora" in my presence.  My dear mentor, John Evans of Lemuria Bookstore, who was a bourbon drinking buddy of hers and thus knew her better, always refers to her Miss Welty, or at least Miss Eudora.)

I should start off by admitting that I do not often read collections of correspondence.  My most recent one before this was the extraordinary collection of letters between Avis DeVoto and Julia Child, As Always, Julia, published last fall by the same publisher.  It was a revelation, I have to say.  It feels so intimate to read somebody else's correspondence, and when the correspondence is between two women as extraordinary as those two women were, reading the book is like a revelation.

My experience with Child and DeVoto, plus my personal connection to the Welty/Maxwell book, prompted me to request it. I've been an avid fan of Miss Welty's short stories and her memoir since my first year in college, when I first read One Writer's Beginnings, followed by The Golden Apples, in an advanced standing freshman English course that Suzanne Marrs taught, and I've been a devotee ever since of both writer and professor.

Since I moved north to New England from Mississippi, I frequently find myself in the position of defending the South, particularly my home state, from accusations of everything from not owning indoor plumbing to illiteracy.  I always retort that Mississippi certainly has its share of problems, but that I'm not sure any other US state can boast that it has produced the country's greatest novelist (William Faulkner), short story writer (Miss Welty), playwright (Tennessee Williams) AND musical contribution (Elvis Presley) of the twentieth century, so they'd better back down or be prepared for fisticuffs.  After hemming and hawing (Uh, Hemingway...Steinbeck...uh...oh, nevermind) they inevitably back down.

Miss Welty is famously funny among her circle of friends and family but has somehow acquired the reputation today of being somewhat dour or stodgy (from those who have never read her, I suspect).  Yes, her story Why I Live at the P.O. is frequently cited as humorous, but there is an impishness that lurks beneath the surface of her writing, as this excerpt will show.  It's from early on in the book, when Miss Welty writes to The New Yorker in 1933 to apply for a position.  Maxwell went to work there just three years later.  If you don't find this funny, you either don't read English as a first language, or there is something wrong with you:

Gentlemen,

I suppose you'd be more interested in even a sleight-o'-hand trick than you'd be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can't have the thing you want most.  

I am 23 years old, six weeks on the loose in N.Y. However, I was a New Yorker for a whole year in 1930-31 while attending advertising classes in Columbia's School of Business.  Actually, I am a southerner, from Mississippi, the nation's most backwards state...I have a B. A. ('29) from the University of Wisconsin, where I majored in English without a care in the world.  For the last eighteen months I was languishing in my own office in  radio station in Jackson, Miss., writing continuities, dramas, mule feed advertisements, and life insurance playlets; now I have given that up. 

As to what I might do for you--I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15 cent movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse's pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple.  That shows you how my mind works -- quick, and away from the point.  I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards.

...How I would like to work for you! A little paragraph each morning--a little paragraph each night, if you can't hire me from daylight to dark, although I would work like a slave.  I can also draw like Mr. Thurber, in case he goes off the deep end. I have studied flower painting. 

There is no telling where I may apply, if you turn me down; I realize this will not phase you, but consider my other alternative: the U of N. C. offers for $12.00 to let me dance in Vachel Lindsay's Congo.  I congo on.  I rest my case, repeating that I am a hard worker. 

Truly yours,   

Eudora Welty

I defy anybody to read that application for employment letter and not want to immediately delve into this collection of letters!  Let me just iterate that it's a treat to read the gently humourous and gently refined correspondence between these two literary giants of the twentieth century.  I feel that those who embark on this journey with them will not be disappointed.  This is not so much a pick-it-up-and-read-straight-through kind of book, but rather one to dip into from time to time, to travel back on the wings of these letters to a more courteous time, where casual cruelty and barbed words held no place with these writers.  The letters span nearly 50 years of the twentieth century and thus are not immune from the difficulties of their time.  While the civil rights movement isn't a huge presence in this correspondence, it still colors much of it.  Medgar Evers was murdered in cold blood in Jackson, not far as the crow flies from Miss Welty's house, which prompted her writing the chilling and eerie story, "Where the Voice is Coming From," published later in The New Yorker.