The question of the place of the refrigerator is not a scientific question. It is an issue of taste and instinct. Refrigerators, being elephantine appliances that I despise with every fiber in my being, can’t account for why people purchase so much food. And yet these mammoth boxes grow bigger and bigger, and it is not an insult to one’s aesthetic sense to say so. If the refrigerator can be said to be the cornerstone of any kitchen, then it would be difficult indeed to top the disgust I feel every time I enter my own kitchen and make a roast beef sandwich.
There is a certain orthodoxy to these midnight pilgrimages, the tedious rumbling of the stomach that promises indigestion after a meal, these strenuous efforts to keep me alive through ignoble viands while applying my poison pen for a Tanenhaus assignment or declaring my appreciation for any and all assfucking memoirs. Again, I refer not to the refrigerator alone, but the general notion that one must keep up a kitchen. Why am I compelled to keep the kitchen stocked rather than order takeout? There is a malicious havoc when contemplating these trusted routines and realizing that my expansive home possesses a room for the preparation of food, with its cabinets which must be filled with cans that I may never use and its drawers filled with limitless kitchen gadgets and Emeril-manufactured pans. My kitchen then is a document which reveals my own bitter impulses. I cannot find a way to transmute this room into a source of joy. I stopped feeling euphoria when I turned thirty.
The kitchen flatters itself that it is some kind of second-string dining room. And for those ignoble apartment dwellers in the Bronx, I suppose it is. The kitchen theatens to subsume my attention and does not absolve itself. Its cabinets demand that I stock it with limitless cans and its drawers expect me to fill them with flatware. I believe it was Aristotle who once said, “If things do not turn out as we wish, we should wish for them as they turn out.” I have been wishing my kitchen into some kind of resolution for many years and it still does not prove pliant or complaisant.
If my kitchen could be styled a corporeal entity, I would want to sodomize it. I would want to snap its head back and pull its hanks of hair hard with my hands. I’d want the kitchen to be my bitch. I would want to apply painful clamps to its nipples and hear my kitchen scream, “Leon, my master! Please! Please! Please don’t stop!” My kitchen is such a disreputable millieu that I wouldn’t even give it a safe word.
What this shallow and self-congratulatory room establishes most conclusively is that there are many architetural hymens to be borken.
Magic Hours by Tom Bissell: This marvelous collection of essays chronicles everything from film shoots to novelists rescued from oblivion. (The essay on the Underground Literary Alliance, with its portrait of raucous factions, unexpectedly reveals how soft today's literary world has become.) But if you peer between the cracks of these smart pieces, you may very well see how cultural lives are formed from the most unexpected life choices. And as we follow Bissell's development as a writer over the years, that goes for Bissell as well. (
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway: Harkaway's latest novel greatly improves on his previous book, The Gone-Away World, which I'm already on record as praising. Angelmaker adopts genre elements without ever feeling like a genre book, and it leads me to believe that Harkaway is well on his way to a narrative grace close to China Miéville's. Yet inexplicably this very fun book, which includes an eightysomething badass named Edie Banister, a mysterious mechanical object that may destroy the world, farcical scenarios involving lawyers and the police, and some unexpectedly moving moments about fatherhood, doesn't appear to be getting much attention in American newspapers. Nothing from the snobs at The New York Times Book Review, nothing from The Washington Post. And since I can't get Harkaway on Bat Segundo, I hope this Jump Up and Down mention gets you hopping as well.
The Age of Insight by Eric Kandel: Unless you're really pressed for time, forget Jonah Lehrer. If you want to understand creativity and its relationship to neuroscience, then the bowtie-wearing Nobel laureate is your man. In addition to being a physically beautiful book (you will drool over many of the paintings), there are helpful overviews on optical illusions, science, biographical backgrounds, and many vital figures from the Vienna Secession. Kandel's enthusiasm (and his call for greater unity between the humanities and science) is contagious.
you took the words right out of my mouth.
now put them back.