Tag / Food

by Edward Champion

On the Connections Between Eating Food and Having Vivid Dreams

Ever since Winsor McCay told stories about Welsh rarebit, there’s been a largely unexamined belief that eating certain foods can inspire particular dreams.

I woke up a few hours ago at an ungodly hour, furiously scribbling down the details of an extremely vivid dream in which I reluctantly led a group of slackers after a zombie invasion. For some inexplicable reason, I had to conduct a series of tasks, ranging from spray painting certain areas of my neighborhood to signify where the zombies were to releasing benign animals who needed food and companionship, without being bitten by a zombie. The strangest part of the dream was that, if I screwed up and was bitten (and I was gnawed on quite regularly), I had the opportunity to respawn at my “save point” and conduct the series of tasks yet again. Undoubtedly, my dream reflected my worries about the present state of America, as well as the very long days I have been spending editing the second season of my audio drama, in which I have often pushed forward in a zombie-like manner to get closer to the end. After I canvassed my apartment to make sure that there were no zombies around (such are the irrational fears we act upon when we have a particularly alluring and real-seeming dream), I realized that this dream, like many other vivid ones I had, was actually my subconscious trying to tell me that I was working too hard by myself and that I needed to reconnect with the world around me, as well as practice better self-care. But why had my dream been so vivid? Well, before I hit the hay, I did have some rather tasty spaghetti with fresh tomatoes and mushrooms that I had whipped up from scratch, as well as two glasses of red wine. Tomatoes and wine tend to cause me to have extremely vivid dreams. And I had thoughtlessly consumed both. Or was it so thoughtless? Perhaps my appetite subconsciously gravitated towards wine and pasta because it needed to work out something that I was obliviously avoiding. But it did get me thinking about the connections between what we eat and how we dream.

There is surprisingly little research out there on the interesting question of whether eating certain foods results in a snoozer having particularly vivid dreams. The great Winsor McCay — anticipating the Surrealists who arrived twenty years later with their dadaist thoughts — wrote and illustrated a popular newspaper comic called Dream of the Rarebit Fiend — in which various characters would eat a rarebit that would result in a series of ridiculous and dreamy images. The rarebit was an entree that involved melting rich cheese diluted with ale on top of toast, with a bit of mustard and cayenne pepper or paprika stirred in. And the belief that Welsh rarebit had some connection with sleep extended even to an old episode of Gomer Pyle – USMC (specifically “Gomer the Welsh Rarebit Fiend”), in which the rarebit-eating Gomer was discovered sleepwalking.

But a century after McCay’s vivid visuals and commitment to cheese, there did prove to be something to the silly theory. A 2005 study from The British Cheese Board suggested that various types of cheese could produce different types of dreams. Those who ate Blue Stilton over the course of a week tended to have incredibly vivid dreams. Cheddar caused subjects to dream of celebrities. Cheshire caused nice and dreamless sleeps. Red Leicester was more responsible for nostalgia and childhood. Lancashire cheese inspired people to dream about work. Amazingly, nobody has thought to follow up on these experiments. One would think that a deep dive into fromage-fueled phantasmagoria divorced of an organization with a vested interest in getting people to scarf down cheese at all hours of the day might be one of those goofy yet useful experiments that might help us customize our dreams in the same crazed manner that yuppies hold up the line ordering baroquely bespoke beverages at a cafe.

In 2015, a Canadian study conducted by Tore Nielsen and Russell A. Powell, citing Winsor McCay, did find that dairy products were the most likely to inspire disturbing dreams. Sugar and dairy products were closely tied on the bizarre dreams front. However, the two psychologists were careful to suggest that other factors could have inspired these dreams and that further research needed to be done, since the study had been confined to merely bizarre and disturbing dreams. Additionally, the study had been confined to undergraduates rather than an all-ages group. Moreover, those who suffered from PTSD or anxiety were more inclined to stress eat. And this, in turn, could be the true factor behind the vivid and disturbing dreams. (Duly noted, Canadian dream experts! Tomorrow I’m going for a long walk and sticking with salad!)

Writing for Psychology Today, Dr. Michelle Carr suggests that this idea that eating food leads one to dream in a particular way may be a false belief. If we eat a certain food (in my case pasta and red wine; in the case of the Brits behind the cheese experiment, the gloriously stinky Stilton), this may just be one of those fateful habits, not unlike Dumbo clutching his magic feather, that causes the brain to dream bigger under certain gustatory conditions that represent more of a placebo effect. The so-called connection between tryptophan-heavy turkey and dreams, to say nothing of the spicy food connection steeped in common adages, may just be our bodies working harder to digest heavier food, thus interfering with our regular sleep cycles.

So it’s quite likely that food is getting in the way of the real reasons we dream like this. This does suggest that more research, independent of cheese boosters, should be done to determine once and for all how we can hack our dreams and come to greater terms with our subconscious fears. I do know that my dreams have often given me the clues of how I need to live and what I need to write. If we can’t have our flying cars, surely we can figure out better ways to coax out the crazy cinematic experiences inside our head.

by Edward Champion

Ghostbusters: The Compromise Candidate of Summer Blockbusters

Like Schrödinger’s Cat, the new Ghostbusters remake is neither dead nor alive. But the more important question is whether it needs to be big enough to defeat Hollywood sexism and the backlash of absolutist fans.

When Sony announced that it would be remaking the rightly beloved 1984 Ghostbusters movie, with women wearing the proton packs and Bridesmaids‘s Paul Feig on board to direct, you didn’t have to look too hard at the galleon being craned up for a retrofit to see the unsavory barnacles of terrified white manboys clutching onto the hull for dear life. Fan entitlement, long rooted in a patriarchal sense of childhood nostalgia that the Daily Beast‘s Arthur Chu shrewdly pinpointed as “‘pickup artist’ snake oil — started by nerdy guys, for nerdy guys — filled with techniques to manipulate, pressure and in some cases outright assault women to get what they want,” once again failed to do a little soul-searching and reflection on what its inflexible stance against the natural evolution of art truly means.

Just as some vocal fans protested the excellent film Mad Max: Fury Road for being “a piece of American culture ruined and rewritten right in front of their eyes,” the Ghostbusters absolutists knew that the studios wanted their dollars and that they could still get away with voicing their reactionary sentiments through the same cowardly anonymity that allowed Donald Trump to emerge as presidential candidate.

Much as a “silent majority” had propped up Trump under the illusion that a billionaire’s outspoken sexism and bigotry somehow represented an anti-establishment “candidate like we’ve never seen before,” these fans downvoted the new Ghostbusters trailer in droves when it was released online in April. One month later, a smug bespectacled mansplainer by the name of James Rolfe put a human face to this underlying sexism, posting a video (viewed by nearly two million), shot in what appeared to be a creepily appropriate basement, in which he vowed not to review the new remake:

You know what everybody’s been calling it? The female Ghostbusters. I hear that all the time. The female Ghostbusters. Does that mean we have to call the old one the male Ghostbusters? It doesn’t matter. But I can’t blame everybody for identifying that way. Because there’s no other way to identify the movies. There’s no other name for it.

Maybe you’d view movies this way if you’d spent a lifetime refusing to live with your shortcomings, carving the likenesses of Stallone and Schwarzenegger onto your own personal Mount Rushmore when not ordering vacuum devices or getting easily duped by Cialis scams. But the crazed notion that gender isn’t just the first way to identify a remake, but the only way to do so, speaks to a disturbing cultural epidemic that must be swiftly remedied by more movies and television starring women in smart and active roles, unsullied by the sexualized gaze of a pornographic oaf like James Rolfe.

It’s worth observing that Sony — a multinational corporation; not the National Organization of Women, lest we forget — had been in talks with the Russo Brothers well before Feig for an all-male remake, a fact also confirmed in a leaked email from Hannah Minghella. The Hollywood machine only cares about gender parity when it is profitable. It continues to promulgate superhero movie posters that are demeaning to women. It erects large outdoor ads flaunting violence against women. (Deadline Hollywood reported that the infamous X-Men Apocalypse ad featuring Mystique in a chokehold was approved by a top female executive at 20th Century Fox.) And when the studios do flirt with “feminist” blockbusters — such as Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch — the results are dismayingly objectifying.

Despite all this, I entered the press screening of the Ghostbusters remake with an open mind and the faint hope that there could be at least a few baby steps towards the game-changing blockbuster that America so desperately needs to redress these many wrongs.

carolmarcusI’m pleased to report that the new Ghostbusters movie does give us somewhat reasonable depictions of women as scrappy scientists, at least for a mainstream movie. The film is refreshingly devoid of Faustian feminist bargains such as Sandra Bullock floating around in her underwear in Gravity or Dr. Carol Marcus flaunting her flesh in Star Trek: Into Darkness. We are introduced to Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) practicing a lecture in an empty Colubmbia University classroom, having to contend with an embarrassing pro-ghost book (Ghosts from Our Past: Both Literally and Figuratively) that she co-wrote years before with her friend and academic peer, Abby Yates (played with the expected enjoyable verve by Melissa McCarthy). Erin, who dresses in wonderfully dorky plaid suits that the dean cavils about, is up for tenure and is understandably queasy about anything that stands in the way of her reputation. Leslie Jones plays Patty Tolan, an MTA inspector with a necklace telegraphing her name who serves as a counterpart to Winston from the original film, and has far more scenes to establish her character than poor Ernie Hudson ever did. Screenwriters Katie Dippold and Feig deserve credit for making Patty more than a token African-American, active enough to ensconce herself with the founding trio and provide some New York know-how in a way that Winston, confined to “Do you believe in God?” car banter and doing what he was told, never quite received in the original.

katemckinnonThe sole disappointment among the new quartet is Kate McKinnon as weapons expert Jillian Holtzmann. McKinnon mugs artlessly throughout the film, almost as if she’s channeling William Shatner or Jim Carrey at their worst, too smitten with an impressionist’s toolbox of overly eccentric tics. While McKinnon’s performances have worked in five minute doses (especially in her very funny impressions of Hillary Clinton on Saturday Night Live), this is not an approach that is especially suited for ensemble work on an IMAX screen. McKinnon quavers her bottom lip and enters each shot with a distracting “funny” walk that contributes nothing whatsoever to her character or the scene. The effect is that of an actor exceedingly ungenerous to her colleagues, one that not even the continuity person can track. (Jillian’s glasses disappear and reappear several times during any given scene.)

loripettytankgirlMcKinnon seems to be doing a caffeinated and charmless impression of Lori Petty from Tank Girl. She’s a terrible stage hog throughout the film, whether by her own choice or by Feig’s design. Even accounting for the script supervisor’s absenteeism, one gets the suspicion it’s more of the latter, perhaps shoehorned into this movie because of a studio note. How else can one explain an early moment in the film where McKinnon stands passive before a ghost and says, “You try saying no to these salty parabolas” while chomping potato chips? This line, which sounded more like bottom-of-the-barrel Madison Avenue than a honed sentence written by Parks and Recreation alumni, justifiably did not get much of a laugh, not even among the ringers who were planted in the middle rows at the screening I attended. And when your source text has indelible lines like “Back off, man, I’m a scientist” and “You….you’ve earned it,” it’s probably best to work interactive human behavior rather than commentary upon a snack.

haroldramistwinkieI’ve long maintained a loose theory that you can tell a lot about a comedy movie by the way it refers to food. Weird Al Yankovic’s gloriously underappreciated UHF celebrates its benign strangeness with a Twinkie wiener sandwich (and the original Ghostbusters, of course, features Harold Ramis holding up a Twinkie with some class). Zoolander revels in its splashy flash with an orange mocha frappuccino. Shaun of the Dead features a completely invented snack called Hog Lumps, suggesting the mad invention pulled from cultural reference.

The Ghostbusters remake features a tired repeat gag of Abby constantly complaining about the lunch delivery man not including enough wontons in her soup. And there’s really no better metaphor to pinpoint what’s so wrong about this movie. Because while I loved 75% of the ladies here (and grew to tolerate McKinnon’s annoyingly spastic presence as the film went on), there weren’t enough dependable wontons floating in this movie. Not the dialogue, which isn’t as sharp and snappy as it needs to be. Not the generic CGI look of the ghosts (including Slimer), which can’t top the organic librarian and taxi driver in the original film. Not the story of a bellhop who hopes to unleash a torrent of trapped spirits into New York (although this is better than Ghostbusters II‘s river of slime). And based on the exasperated sighs and silence I heard around me, I wasn’t the only one. It says something, I think, that the Ghostbusters end up fighting a giant version of their own logo at one point.

I really believe that there’s a very smart story buried somewhere within this somewhat pleasing, if not altogether funny, offering. For example, Dippold and Feig have replaced the original film’s EPA as meddlesome government entity with the Department of Homeland Security, which wants the nation to believe that the Ghostbusters are cranks. This is an interesting and timely premise to pursue in a reboot made in a surveillance and smartphone age. (Indeed, there’s even an appropriate selfie stick gag halfway through the film.) It’s moments like this where the Ghostbusters remake wins back your trust after a clunky moment. But there comes a point when the movie decides to throw its hands in the air, becoming yet another loud, boring, and predictable romp featuring the destruction of Manhattan. Again?

And there are cameos. Annoying, purposeless, time-sucking cameos from the surviving members of the original Ghostbusters cast. This not only adds needless bulk to the story, but it isn’t especially fair to the new cast trying to establish themselves, especially in a movie that is already on somewhat shaky ground. Bill Murray as a famous debunker is the only cameo that is fun (and it also buttresses the film’s half-hearted exploration into belief). But instead of confining Murray to a walk-on role, the filmmakers have Murray show up at Ghostbusters HQ (a Chinese restaurant instead of a firehouse), where one can’t help but be reminded of the original’s considerable strengths.

Feig and his collaborators have forgotten what made the first film become a classic. It was the funny human touches of Rick Moranis parroting William Atherton’s pointing as Louis was possessed by Vinz Clortho or Bill Murray wincing as he opened up the lid of Dana’s leftovers or Janine peering around a partition in the back (a shot repeated in the remake, but with tighter focus and less art and subtlety) as Venkman and Walter Peck squared off at the firehouse. There simply isn’t enough of this in the remake. Today’s filmmakers — even somewhat decent ones like Feig — seem to have turned their backs on why we identify with characters and why we go to the movies. And who the hell needs to pay a babysitter and bust out the credit card for a far too large tub of popcorn when there are far more interesting characters on television?

I want to be clear that I am not here to write a hit piece. This remake isn’t awful in the way that Ghostbusters II was, but it’s far from great in the way the original film was. This should have been a groundbreaking motion picture. It damn well needed to be to beat back the James Rolfes and the Gamergate trolls and any other boneheaded atavist with a keyboard and an Internet connection.

We sometimes have to vote for compromise candidates in two party political races. But when the summer gives us several dozen blockbusters to choose from, is the half-hearted Ghostbusters remake really the progressive-minded movie we should accept? Is an incremental step forward in mass culture enough to be happy with? Or should we demand more? I’ve thought about this for the past few days and I’ve increasingly come around to believing that audiences — and women in particular — deserve far better soup and a hell of a lot more wontons.

by Edward Champion

Among the Distasteful: A Jeremiad Against Pizza

We were very honored when Leon Wieseltier contacted us to share his thoughts about an apparent pizza cultural crisis, but we’re not so sure he knows what he’s talking about.

Amid the bacchanal of culinary dilettantes, let us pause to honor and pontificate upon the Seamless junkies, the strapless smartphone whores of Babylon, and the editors who will never edit my prolix copy. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of pizzerias and Italian restaurants, which have been invaded by the greatest, biggest, plus-sized, vilest, ugliest, most malicious, thorniest, and savviest of hooligans in the history of the food industry. There are baleful brutes who stab at their slices with forks and knives, and these include a Gotham City Mayor elected by delusional liberals who now complain of turned backs from those stalwart officers in blue rightly wishing to uphold the old Paul Anka white bread standards in the name of American justice and the occasionally playful choke hold or wrestling move gone wrong. Eaters, when they are not hanging from a trapeze, hover between a decent share of a pie and an indecent bite cadged off some smelly bum; they are expected to open a plastic wrapper containing a mass-produced square of spiral noodles produced in some exotic export processing zone when they are not eating a gluten-free meal at gunpoint, and all the miracles of electronic pizza dissemination somehow do not suffice for the experience of a home-cooked meal cooked and curated by a bromidic homemaker who no longer exists in our world of career equilibrium and gender parity. There is not a stove in the New York City area that is turned on, unless it compensates for a tetchy radiator in the blistering cold. Everybody — and by “everybody” I mean the three magazine articles I read in a drunken, self-loathing haze over the holidays — talks frantically about pizza, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as if the prospect of tomato sauce vanishing into a bed of “cheese” is a cataclysmic event rivaling the First Battle of Ypres. “Cheese” must be contained in quotes, for it is very much a part of the crisis; its ineluctably paralytic hold was once embraced in rap by a hip young man named Marshall Mathers, from whom I quote: “Here I go again hammerin stammerin grammerin and eat it like cheese, pass me the crackers please / I’ve got a craving.” But what does this understanding of “cheese” contribute to to the understanding of life? Pizzerias and restaurants have slowly transformed themselves into hammerin stammerin grammerin venues in which customers willfully fill their stomachs with subpar Mozzarella and pepperoni from questionable meat vendors, without regard for last century’s pizza standards, the greatest pizza generation, or the way pizza used to be, and the gurgling of bellies bellows above all stabs at grace and thrusts at aesthetic consideration. As the frequency of hammerin stammerin grammerin expression grows, the force, nay the power, of proper pizza consumption diminishes: Pie expectations of plentiful toppings and extra crispness confer the highest prestige upon the masticating cacophony of stertorous belches and promotional coupons promising a two-for-one special during the next vulgar visit. It was always the case that all pizza eaters, especially those too indolent to saunter down to the local establishment and pick up the pies in person, must pass gas, but this is ridiculous.

Meanwhile the discussion of higher dinners is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of “bidness” – a shorthand slang term I first heard from this Mathers fellow and that a young African-American friend (I assure you that, as a cultural expert, some of my best friends are black, although only one returned my call for this essay) recently educated me on. Apparently, today’s youth is now pronouncing “business” this way. Are they ashamed of sibilant consonants? I haven’t a clue, but I’m not at The New Republic anymore and unpacking these seminal and intricate issues is a more complicated and arcane professional task in the pages of the New York Times Book Review. For example, it was my “bidness” to write this paragraph with my trousers tousled around my ankles, gaping at my study window to ensure that nobody was looking. Scummy little pizza! Kill the bastard! Am I straying from my point? Perhaps. But I was guaranteed a 3,000 word count. I am scared.

Anyway, “bidness.” There are no known “metrics” between the relationship between “cheese” and “bidness.” Numerical values are assigned to orders that ping from the deepest recesses of the electronic vortex, as a voracious digital consumer logs onto Seamless and contributes to the “cheese” industrial complex. Economic concepts grow into great kaiju destroying our proudest metropolises: There is, in fact, an economist standing next to me right now! He does not answer to the name of Krugman but he is growing big bigger BIGGER! Oh shit! There goes my 19th century bronze chandelier! To paraphrase Yoda (and I’m not sure this benign, large-eared, fictitious creature actually said this; I have not actually seen these movies), where ceiling once was, bitter tears will now be. Ergo, pizza is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. This draconian hold is enabled by the video game characters Mario and Luigi, two Italian stereotypes from Nintendo who should rightfully be employed as co-owners of a pizzeria (this was, after all, Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto’s source of inspiration), but who were ignobly cast as jocular plumbers, thus subverting the consumer’s expectations and therefore the pizza scholar’s. Yet in a Pavlovian salivation tactic worthy of America’s most craven marketers, one looks at Mario’s red and Luigi’s green and sees tomato sauce and bell peppers. Beyond their predatory and symbiotic relationship with pizza, all distastefully clandestine, Mario and Luigi penetrate even deeper levels of identity and experience, to cognition and consciousness. Such transformations embolden certain high culinary priests in the church of nostalgia to espouse the doctrine of “transmarioism” and to suggest, without any recollection of the bankruptcy of Atari or the guy who created the Pong game, that our pizza-eating acumen will carry us magnificently beyond our affinity for Mario and “allow us to, like, chill out with an old GameCube if you can bring the weed, bro…Smoke a few bowls and there will be no distinction, post-Luigi’s Mansion, between human and Mario.” (The author of that frivolous nonsense, a random email that someone forwarded to me to help me pad out this piece, is a twenty-five-year-old pizza delivery man known among his peers as something of a beer pong champion. One sees how transmarioism and the great pizza lie feeds on itself.)

And even as pizzaism, which is not the same as pizza and not the same as “cheese” and not the same as any other sinister neologism I may coin, asserts itself over more and more police precincts that subjugate human life the thrill of a warm fascist bath, so too does hamburgerism, which is not the same as hamburgers and not the same as hot dogs and not the same as pizza and not the same as pizzaism and if you send $9.99 to my home address I will provide you with a flowchart on all the terms I am establishing in this highly intellectual essay (not even my editor could figure it out!). I am Leon Wiesltier, which is not the same as Leon Wieseltierism and not the same as Wiener Schnitzel and not the same as the emotionally cleansing experience I have when spilling my guts out to my therapist, which may very well be better for me than accepting these assignments. The notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of pizza must be explained in terms of the material dimensions…OH WHO THE FUCK AM I KIDDING? I AM A 62 YEAR OLD MAN AND I HAVE NEVER EATEN A SLICE OF PIZZA! THERE! I SAID IT, GODDAMMIT! PIZZA, I JUST DON’T GET YOU AND NEVER WILL! DAMN YOU KIDS AND YOUR FUN AND YOUR SUPER MARIO AND YOUR CHEESE AND YOUR HAMMMERIN STAMMERIN GRAMMERIN!

Okay…calm down, Leon. Let’s get it together. We can get to the end.

A complacent eater is an eater who has not picked at his pizza closely. But never mind the pizza. Our solemn responsibility is to stop writing dull and incoherent essays that fail to inspire anyone and that say absolutely nothing at all.

by Edward Champion

Guns, Part One (Follow Your Ears #1)

Our debut episode of Follow Your Ears (the first of a two part episode devoted to guns), we talk with people in the Bronx about their gun experiences, learn why acclaimed Porochista Khakpour fell in love with guns, address Alex Jones’s CNN meltdown by untangling the Second Amendment’s true roots with historian Saul Cornell and constitutional scholar Adam Winkler, and meet Craig Whitney, a pro-guns liberal.

This is the first episode of Follow Your Ears, a new weekly radio program committed to original inquiry and the pursuit of a specific subject through several unusual angles.

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Aurora, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech. We’re shocked by the massacres and the loss of life, but how did we get to this? This is the first of a two part program examining guns at length.

1a

Edge of the South Bronx

On the edge of the South Bronx, everybody we talk with has an opinion about guns. One man, held up at his store twenty years ago, developed a lifelong fear. (Beginning to 2:49)

1b

Falling in Love with Guns

Before she was the acclaimed author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects, Porochista Khakpour fell in love with guns. In an essay for Slate published in December, Khakpour wrote that she thrived on the attention, even posting a series of sexy shooting range photos on MySpace. Khakpour talks about why she could relate to Nancy Lanza and why guns proved both seductive and problematic. (2:49 to 7:51)

1c

“1776 Will Commence Again”

After Alex Jones’s meltdown on CNN, we talked with Saul Cornell, a a professor of American legal history at Fordham University and the author of A Well-Regulated Militia to untangle the Second Amendment’s true roots. Cornell points out that the Second Amendment has a good deal more to it than the right to keep and bear arms and the “Red Dawn fantasy” and discusses how militias and civic obligation were more what the Founding Fathers had in mind. (7:51 to 23:26)

1d

Interpreting the Second Amendment

Adam Winkler is a professor of constitutional law at the UCLA School of Law and the author of Gunfight. He provides more answers on the Second Amendment, describing how the NRA was originally for gun control before a fateful meeting in Cincinnati when gun rights radicals took over an annual meeting and pointing out how recent Supreme Court decisions such as District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago have helped to curtail regulation efforts. (23:26 to 44:46)

1e

Living with Guns

Our final guest is Craig Whitney, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times and author of the book, Living With Guns. He is a liberal who believes that the Second Amendment should be honored. (44:46 to end)

Follow Your Ears #1: Guns, Part One (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Diana Abu-Jaber

In this one hour radio interview, we discuss food, easily offended readers, and Florida gutterpunk culture with Birds of Paradise author Diana Abu-Jaber.

Diana Abu-Jaber appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #419. She is most recently the author of Birds of Paradise.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Salivating in tandem with his diminishing wallet.

Author: Diana Abu-Jaber

Subjects Discussed: The dangers of French pastries, Abu-Jaber’s propensity for describing food in lurid terms, growing up with food-obsessed parents, wooing people and readers with food, Abu-Jaber’s former life as a restaurant critic, the atmosphere of revolving restaurants, getting irate letters from restauranters, early skirmishes with vegans, faux meat and tofurkey, the differences between foodies and egalitarian food lovers, Brillat-Savarian, MFK Fisher, needless food elitism, gourmet food trucks and gentrification, people who shy away from cooking, overpriced farmers markets, the dark side of sugar, writing without a routine, writing while cooking and while being stuck at a red light, Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap, studying elements of craft, consumerism and literature, finding precision within a chaotic work environment, outlines, laborious revision, setting imaginary deadlines, working with artistically-minded editors, characters who play with their hair throughout Abu-Jaber’s novels, writing about hair loss in women, being bitten by a brown recluse spider, suppurating wounds, when writing about a subject leads you to people who are living with the subject, the difficulties of cutting curly hair, exploring the Florida gutterpunk culture, real estate and Glengarry Glen Ross, talking with street kids, predatory people in their thirties living with kids in abandoned shacks, income disparity in Miami Beach, the dregs of club kids culture, earning the trust of street kids, maintaining an optimistic sheen while writing about victims of capitalism, readers who have complained about Birds of Paradise being too dark, Last Exit to Brooklyn, whether fiction has the obligation to solve problems, Dickens, Cristina Garcia’s review, Cynthia Ozick, Amazon reviewers who demand uplifting stories, unlikable characters being stigmatized in contemporary fiction, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, literary audiences and competing reader desires, Meghan Cox Gurdon’s uninformed YA stance, Sherman Alexie’s response, encouraging readers to take risks in fiction, commercial forces and offering novel samples, the origin of Origin, the pros and cons of having a genre-reading husband, the benefits of having a writing group (as well as having actual human beings in your life), character names names after notable American figures (Muir and Emerson), Idiocracy, autodidacts and American spirit, finding the good qualities within monstrous people, serial killers and the 1%, being very inspired by sunlight and water, cinematic imagery within Abu-Jaber’s prose, colons, Graham Greene, laziness and thwarted screenwriting ambitions, Elizabeth Taylor as a model for Felice, Richard Burton, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, tinkering with the idea of beauty, steering readers away from flattened culture, the narcotic allure of cooking shows, how food can enlarge a story, European novelists and food, T.C. Boyle, Kate Christensen, and food memoirs.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Abu-Jaber: Writing about a French pastry chef? All these venues are bringing in French pastries. People are bringing me pastries.

Correspondent: Oh no.

Abu-Jaber: People bring me cookies and croissants and Napoleons. I mean, it’s just fantastic. But it’s kind of like, oh my god! How am I going to fit into my airplane seat on the way home? Because it’s wild. And, of course, I have to eat them all.

Correspondent: So you have to eat them all? You can’t give them away to generous readers who have been standing in line?

Abu-Jaber: (laughs) Yeah, right. My excellent interviewers. Actually, I have given out some of my pastries. But I have to admit. I want to eat all of them, if possible.

Correspondent: I noticed that with Ron Charles, the first sentence of his review in the Washington Post was “Diana Abu-Jaber’s delicious new novel weighs less than two pounds, but you may gain more than that by reading it.” So this seems as good a time as any to talk about your propensity for describing food in very lurid terms. I mean, to offer an example, you even have those moments between dialogue. In Crescent, you have, “She starts splitting open heads of garlic and picking at the papery skin covering the cloves.” Now this is between lines. So it forces one to both be engaged with the text and it forces one’s saliva to start running. And so the question is how this business with food started.

Abu-Jaber: Oh! It’s not something I did deliberately. I didn’t choose this metaphor. It’s weird. I think that a lot of it came up because of being raised by a food-obsessed parent. My dad always wanted to have his own restaurant. As an immigrant from Jordan, he used food as a way of giving his children culture. And so I grew up with a sensibility just informing the very fabric of our days. And then my grandmother was a very serious Irish Catholic baker. And so my grandmother and my father waged this war over our souls — the children — to try and woo us through their separate crafts. And so I grew up between falafel and cream puffs. And between Dad’s wonderful Jordanian cuisine and my grandmother’s incredibly yummy cookies and cakes and pastries.

Correspondent: And no doubt, along with that, came a very imposing exercise regimen.

Abu-Jaber: (laughs)

Correspondent: I mean, that’s got to be terrible. Wooing people through food. You’re wooing your readers with food. Why was food the ultimate axe to wield here? As opposed to, say, fashion or conversation or what not?

Abu-Jaber: It’s something that kind of happened organically in this book. I saw this woman. I was thinking about the book. And I had this image in my head of a woman wearing a chef’s apron. And I could see her back. And I could see that she had these very strong arms and shoulders. So I knew that she was someone who worked with her hands. And it became very clear to me that she was a pastry chef. And I had worked in food journalism for a while. I used to have a restaurant column.

Correspondent: You were a restaurant critic?

Abu-Jaber: I was.

Correspondent: Did you ever tear a restaurant to shreds?

Abu-Jaber: I think…I’m a pretty nice person! I tried to offer constructive criticism.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Abu-Jaber: But you are aware that you’re doing a social service by being a food critic. So you have to help the consumer, as well as the purveyor. And I might have shredded a little bit.

Correspondent: Like…such as what? What kind of constructive criticism was the worst that you possibly endowed?

Abu-Jaber: Oh jeez! Well, you know what I would do? I would try to offer people little guidelines about what to avoid in general. And I remember one of my big ones was that, if a restaurant has a great view, beware of the food.

Correspondent: (laughs Yeah. That’s actually very true.

Abu-Jaber: Uh huh.

Correspondent: Especially in this city too.

Abu-Jaber: Yes. Exactly. Or if it’s in a railroad car. Or if there’s a gigantic playground in the middle. It’s probably not going to be the best.

Correspondent: Or the infamous revolving restaurants.

Abu-Jaber: Ah, yes! If it moves, don’t chew. (laughs)

Correspondent: Which is a shame! Because it’s such — I’m a big fan of revolving restaurants. Not for the food, but for the kitsch of the experience.

Abu-Jaber: Sure. Sure. Just remember that some people are going for experience.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Abu-Jaber: I am somebody who likes to eat for the food. But I know that for many, many people, atmosphere trumps all.

Correspondent: Did you ever get a restaurant wrong during these early days? Did you get irate readers sending you letters saying, “Diana! You are absolutely off! Who do you think you are?” Anything like that?

Abu-Jaber: I used to get irate letters from restauranters.

Correspondent: Yes.

Abu-Jaber: From the people who felt that I’d gotten them wrong. I remember that I did a vegetarian roundup once. The vegetarian restaurants of Portland. And one of the local restaurant owners wrote to me irate. Absolutely irate. Because he had some vegetarian dishes on his menu. And he just thought that I should have included him. And he just really wanted to let me know that I had disrespected him.

Correspondent: Be thankful that you didn’t get involved with the vegans. Because they weren’t around back then.

Abu-Jaber: Yikes! Oh, lord in heaven. I think at that time — now this was the late ’90s.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Abu-Jaber: So at that time, there was maybe one vegan restaurant. And what they tried to do was present faux meat. So you’d go and you’d have turkey sculpted out of soy bean.

Correspondent: Tofurkey.

Abu-Jaber: Yeah. Exactly. So that was a whole other can of beans, so to speak.

Correspondent: So just to be straight here on the food issue, I mean, you would not identify yourself as a foodie, but a more egalitarian food person?

Abu-Jaber: Yeah. I’m sympathetic to the whole foodie idea. But I think that foodieism — if that’s a word — tends to elevate food to this sacred thing. It’s like this exalted object on an alter place, basically. And I just have never felt that that was never the point of enjoyment of any kind of primary activity like eating. That food is something that adds enormously to our lives, but that it’s a simple thing. And that we’re animals and that animal enjoyment is just a natural easy part of our lives. Or it should be.

Correspondent: Well, it went from something that was fairly harmless. Like Brillat-Savarin and MFK Fisher, who offer the perfectly sensible advice, “Well, if we’re spending so much of our time eating, we should probably pay attention to it,” but who are also championing food culture during the Great Depression. And this is the thing. It went from this rather egalitarian place to something that was ridiculously elitist or Ortega y Gasset-like, you know?

Abu-Jaber: Yes. Yes. We have started rhapsodizing about food and nobody wants to make it. People go out and buy cookbooks because they love the images and they love the idea of it and reading the cookbook like literature. But really nobody tries the recipes.

Correspondent: Yeah! I know, that’s the fun part!

Abu-Jaber: Yeah.

Correspondent: Especially when you make it with other people, who are as clueless as you are.

Abu-Jaber: You’re all in it together. You know, as an individual and as a parent, I want to make good, easy, nutritious food. And as a writer, I like the metaphor of food. Because it’s so malleable. It casts light on all these different elements in our psyche. All the different ways that we look at relationships in general. I don’t write about food to stop in food. That’s not the point. It’s more a filter through which to look at experience.

Correspondent: Sure. Have you seen, while you’ve been here in New York, some of our ridiculous gourmet food trucks? It totally defeats the purpose. Where before you’d get a hot dog for a dollar.

Abu-Jaber: Right.

Correspondent: Or you’d get some shish kabob or some sort of falafel really cheap. Now they have gourmet food trucks here. You should check these out. Empanadas that are really overpriced. Like six bucks.

Abu-Jaber: Oh really.

Correspondent: It’s now become — they’ve taken our food trucks!

Abu-Jaber: (laughs)

Correspondent: The food trucks have gentrified!

Abu-Jaber: (laughs) Wow.

Correspondent: I mean, this leads me to wonder, just as a fiction writer, whether you may explore this in a future book. This issue of, well, we make our food, but now even the price of food goes up and the experience of eating food goes up.

Abu-Jaber: Right.

Correspondent: And even something like white trash cuisine, even the good parts of that, becomes taken away from us. So there is no affordable base. Like there used to be. The traditional kind of food.

Abu-Jaber: Right.

Correspondent: I guess I have some feelings on this issue, now that we’ve talked about this.

Abu-Jaber: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, because it’s an economic issue. It’s health and it’s relationships and family and economics, for sure. And that’s part of the problem with the foodie movement. Foodies indulge in a kind of extreme experience. They’re the top of the pyramid. The people who can afford to go into Williams-Sonoma and buy a special strawberry huller. Or just that experience of going into a glorious kitchen in which none of the instruments in the kitchen have been touched. You know, it’s s more like an operating room than it is a kitchen.

Correspondent: It’s almost like the Trail of Tears.

Abu-Jaber: (laughs)

Correspondent: Because you have to find the produce places that the middle-class people have not found yet.

Abu-Jaber: Right.

Correspondent: So I’m never going to name them on the air — the places where I get really kickass produce.

Abu-Jaber: Yeah. And you see that in the farmers markets.

Correspondent: Overpriced. Needlessly organic. God, don’t get me started on that.

Abu-Jaber: Absolutely.

Correspondent: We will discuss fiction. Don’t worry!

The Bat Segundo Show #419: Diana Abu-Jaber (Download MP3)

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