Not Really Cooking with Pooh

Day 164 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and my book group is going to be reading The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman, because Kim and Suzie heard about it on the radio coming to the meeting where we discussed The Wishbones, by Tom Perrotta.

I have read Intuition by Allegra Goodman, and enjoyed it, and so has Kim, who borrowed it from me, but she doesn't remember that right now, because she has been drinking red wine. Intuition is about science, what goes on during research projects, and the male/female competitive aspect. And the different ways men and women may approach science. I found it fascinating and made little marginal notes that I forgot about when I lent her the book, but she enjoyed them, even if they were personal.

Cookbook Collector is about sisters! AND antiquarian book collecting. Oh, gosh, this is going to be one of those books I wish I'd written. AND about business, so I hope to learn a lot about a world I do not understand, just as I did with Jane Smiley's book about real estate and greed in the 80s, Good Faith.

The discussion of The Wishbones was fun. We had:

--wedding cake

--Cheetos (for cheating)

--wine (including Red Guitar and one with a cock on the label)

--almonds (like Jordan almonds but not; instead Almond Joy almonds and York Peppermint almonds)

We mused on whether Dave had done the right thing (at various times, no spoilers here), and the patterns of panic and cold feet before weddings, and whether guys can really grow up in time to marry, or at all. We are a mixed bunch--gay, straight, married, not, etc.--but all women, so we have a fine bunch of experiences and perspectives and appreciated seeing how men think in this novel. Perrotta was compared to Nick Hornby, called an American Hornby, and there was talk of The Wedding Singer, with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore.

And then we watched this, made for and shown by the daughter and son-in-law of one of our members:

The Road to the Reception (8 minutes of fun that the wedding guests watched while waiting for the new couple to enter the reception)

You will know which one she is when you get there.

The History of Men's Wishes

Day 158 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project and the local men's history book club is reading Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West, by Mark Wyman, because they are history buffs, and this is great history! I've mentioned the book here before, because Wyman is a local historian and author, but I mention it again because one of the book club members came into Babbitt's yesterday, hoping for it. Hoping perhaps the boss, who is in the local men's history book club, might have ordered in bulk, at a discount, but no..... We don't really do that.

This fellow can't make this month's meeting, but he wants to read the book anyway. "Well, after the meeting, a few copies will probably come in," I suggested, knowing these guys are good about clearing their shelves, making room for more, sharing with the less affluent but just as avid readers.

"Then I've got to be reading the next book!" he said.

I've finished The Wishbones, by Tom Perrotta, and I loved it. In fact, in addition to making me laugh, it made me cry, unexpectedly. It is subtle and real. I love books like that, especially if they are also hilarious. It taught me a lot about men's wishes, and that tendency to hang back and be boys, man-boys, forever. How, inside a man-boy, even a man-boy with a desire to be a rock star, there can be a sensitive, goofy, aware, mistake-making real man.

You know, I am easily pleased. Sort of like the dead duchess in "My Last Duchess." Sigh.... I will read anything, and I am open to the unexpected. I have set books aside...to read later...but the only book I never got back to that a bunch of people told me was wonderful was The Lost Father, by Mona Simpson. I'm sorry, Mona. Maybe I should give it another try. But I don't want to.

Other than that, though, I am able to set aside judgement, for the most part, even if what I am reading isn't grabbing me. Oh, dear, Julie, I have set aside Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome. I know I will pick it up again, on vacation. I am taking it with me to water. Along with Barbara Pym, just in case.

Speaking of the duke who was speaking of his last duchess, while preparing to marry the next, in the mall today (where I had gone for Beer Nuts treats, including Insane Grain, to take to an upcoming poetry reading, coming up tomorrow, in fact, in a gallery in Arlington Heights, Illinois), and waiting for my daughter and her friend, who were looking for shorts and did not find any, I saw a man reading The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert A. Caro. More men's history. Not unexpectedly about power. And the wish for it.

I observed him, imagined him waiting for his wife to shop, as might a character in The Wishbones, got interrupted in my imaginary history of this stranger in a St. Louis Cardinals shirt by a call from my daughter in a dressing room, and suddenly noticed he was up and walking ahead of his pregnant wife, who had no shopping bags. Where had she come from? He was walking very fast, and ahead and away from her. That was sad, until I realized she had nothing to do with him. Her real husband appeared. And the power broker was power walking the mall.

And now, for some odd reason, I offer "Opal Innocence," a poem that seems unlikely to be published anywhere else but here, and seems both pertinent and off topic.

Opal Innocence

It keeps on blooming in the big green pot:
pink bonnet, fat white lip, yellow eye.

An ugly baby
if that’s what you pictured in the stroller

of line two. I can’t pretend
this is not a poem. We all know it is

unwise to hang on too long
to innocence. It’s a kind of arrested development

say fathers and psychologists
(also a favorite TV show, cancelled—

too smart, too quirky—
but we have it on DVD, because, yes!—

I grew up, my reproductive organs functioned,
and I have a family that watches TV….

Remember the ugly baby
episode on Seinfeld, the show about nothing?

Now, be kind. Consider the poem’s parenthetical emptiness
and what it might possibly mean.)

Balsam & The Grassy Knoll

Day 156 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and I am reading Mid-American Review, the fat giant 30th Anniversary Issue, because it came in the mail today, and, specifically, the Tony Trigilio poetry feature, "I'm Going to Bust This Case Wide Open," because it is a set of poems about the grassy knoll and I have just come to The Grassy Knoll section of The Wishbones, by Tom Perrotta.

Actually, I have gone past The Grassy Knoll section, because I am loving the book--so funny, so tenderly human, all at the same time. A very fine, spare prose style here--people and their behaviors acutely rendered. People and their vulnerabilities gently exposed. And there's a poetry reading in it.

I don't think it is a spoiler to tell you 1) that The Grassy Knoll is a musical or 2) that the Trigilio feature looks at people who died (suspiciously, even if it looked like natural causes) during the conspiracy investigations into the JFK assassination.

As a lover of coincidii, I just looked in the New York Times for a grassy knoll musical, which I vaguely remembered, but I was probably vaguely remembering a play by Tennessee Williams, recently mounted on Broadway with Elizabeth Ashley in it, not a musical. Has there been a grassy knoll musical? Someone let me know!

This is yesterday's balsam, from the My Girls entry on Austen and Alcott, the A-list girls. Remember Wella Balsam? Shampoo that smelled pretty good, like a forest, so I always got it confused with balsa wood, and model airplanes. Farah Fawcett sold it with her popular hair.

Anyway, balsam is that flower I told you about yesterday, and pictured above, also known as Touch-Me-Not, as I learned from my favorite wildflower book, Wild Flowers of North America, by Pamela Forey, which pretty much has everything in it, meticulously drawn in color by Norman Barber, Angela Beard, Susanna Stuart-Smith, and David Thelwell, all of Bernard Thornton Artists, London.

"Touch-Me-Not" is perhaps the opposite message if you want to sell a nice shampoo, but it's possible Farah's hair had a lot of hairspray on it. Anyhoo!

Anyhoo, nothing.