Judith Newton's Blog: Tasting Home Wins Silver Indie Fab Award

Emily Addams is the last person you’d expect police to be circling in a poisoning investigation. A professor of women’s studies, a foodie, and a doting mom, Emily has spent her life building a campus community and engaging in peaceful struggles against injustice. But when Peter Elliott, a Professor of Plant Biology at her bucolic Arbor State, is found comatose in a pig pen clutching a piece of Emily’s corn bread (unmistakable for its goat cheese and caramelized onions) it’s in her direction that the police turn.

At the same time she comes under suspicion, Emily and her comrades in Women’s, American, and Ethnic Studies are fighting the administration’s attempt to defund their programs and run their beloved Arbor State more like a corporation than a place of higher learning. Her efforts to save her own skin and to protect the campus community she loves converge as Emily launches an investigation to find out who really slipped the professor a piece of piece of cornbread spiked with pesticide.

Corn Bread Smitten Kitchen

She discovers that Peter—whom she had seen argue for corporate ownership of seed stock at a recent panel on GMOs—was knee-deep in secret corporate funding for his new strain of genetically modified corn. An inveterate philander, he also betrayed two of his women students and his highly accomplished wife. And if that’s not enough, Save the Fields, a militant anti-GMO group, has had him in their sights. As always, Emily turns to food and cooking for solace, community, and pleasure. Each chapter of Oink: A Food for Thought Mystery ends with a sumptuous recipe for a dish that turned up in the preceding pages.

Culminating in a twist as curvy as a pig’s tail, Oink: A Food for Thought Mystery is at once a sly send-up of the corporatized university and a reminder of why community belongs at that heart of  human life.

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Our Verandah

When previous trips have left you sick of packing and unpacking luggage, of dragging large bags over cobblestones, and of carrying them up staircases that never end, cruises can look good.  Suitcase weariness was why I decided to try another cruise this spring.  Shipboard closets are reliably large and come with drawers. I unpack once and that’s it. And after a few days of walking six to seven hours on land, I find that returning to my stateroom really does feel like going home. The plumbing is reliable and I don’t have to keep figuring out how to flush the toilet or operate the sink, and sometimes I might even get a bath tub. What luxury!  And then there’s the verandah—good for private moments with the ocean.

But cruising has its down sides, too. I don’t have time to soak up the cities I visit. It’s in and out. So it’s best to save cruising for places that are hard to get to over land. Pompeii, for example, involves a long trip to Southern Italy, Positano, an unnerving drive along what the Monastero Santa Rosa Hotel called “the most precipitous road in Europe with vertigo-inducing vistas plunging down jagged cliffs to the azure Tyrrhenean Sea.” Not for those inclined to attacks of acrophobia when looking down stairwells.  Still, just dipping in for a day does give me an experience of the place. I wade into it enough to know whether I like it enough to come back.  Pompeii, yes!  St Malo, France, not so much.

Pompeii Ancient Take Out Shop

It can be lonely on cruises, too, unless you’re travelling with a large group of family or friends. Yes, I do participate in Cruise Critic, an online site where people on the same cruise sign up for small group excursions with people they’ve never met.  And those strangers can feel like friends during the moments we travel together or maybe dine together once. But, by and large, I don’t meet many people with whom I can relax. It’s an unspoken rule that fellow travelers don’t discuss politics, but there is often an underlying politically-based strain. I’ve found it hard to warm up to those who let it drop that they park their money in Nevada to avoid paying taxes. Perhaps I’m on the wrong kind of cruise. Perhaps I need one of those educational (and truly expensive cruises) led by Berkeley Ph.Ds.

Ah, but the food! The master chef on our ship was Jacques Pepin, and the dining was sublime.  My husband, who at home refuses to let anything containing sugar sully the stern chastity of his lips, ate a variety of chocolate desserts every single night. That’s Chocolate Dessert with a capital C and D.  I mean Nine Minute Baked Valrhona Chocolate Cake with Raspberries and Vanilla Ice, Milk Chocolate Mousse Macadamia Dacquoise, Dulce and Dark Chocolate Brownie Soufflé, and Raspberry Caramelized Mille Feuille with Madagascan Vanilla Cream, covered in chocolate.

Raspberry Mille Feuille

I, in contrast, desperate to balance caloric intake with caloric expenditure, decided before I took off to eat lobster every chance I got, thus combining a protein-rich, relatively low-calorie food with a bit of gourmandizing. I never order lobster in the States because of its hair-raising cost.  Maybe European lobsters are less expensive? At any rate, it’s possible on board to eat lobster at every meal. And so I ate lobster omelets, lobster salad, grilled lobster, lobster thermador, lobster risotto (a carbo slip), and lobster and mascarpone pancake with baby carrot emulsion and rock chive cress.  I paid for all of this in advance, of course, but eating a fancy dinner every night without seeing a bill made me feel like I was rich.

Lobster and Mascarpone Pancake

And so did the ship’s décor. The two-story, Lalique, double-curved grand staircase,  a mad explosion of red, black, and ivory marble with intricate balustrades of scrolled iron and  medallions, lit by a 1,300 pound Italian crystal chandelier, and ending in a towering, flower-filled crystal vase had surely been designed to leave the grand staircase of the Titanic in its wake.

And there’s the rub. Cruising also felt downright colonial.  Even though my ship was purported to have better labor conditions than do more famous cruise lines, even if I rationalized that the hundreds of wait staff, from all over the world, were at least employed and that the staff were receiving what seemed to be some elegant training, even though I was charged a thirty dollar tip every single day, I never felt comfortable with a uniformed army of staff attending to my every need.  The more expensive staterooms on ship came with butlers. The very idea of a butler made me break into a sweat.

So, once again, I’ve decided to return to packing and unpacking or perhaps to finding a low cost river cruise on which passengers serve themselves from a buffet. Or since the terrible labor practices on cruise lines are being exposed and since current protests might someday actually improve the status quo, maybe I can return to cruising at sea in greater comfort. How many rivers are there to navigate, after all? Or, more to the point, how soon will suitcase weariness return and settle in?

Our Verandah

When previous trips have left you sick of packing and unpacking luggage, of dragging large bags over cobblestones, and of carrying them up staircases that never end, cruises can look good.  Suitcase weariness was why I decided to try another cruise this spring.  Shipboard closets are reliably large and come with drawers. I unpack once and that’s it. And after a few days of walking six to seven hours on land, I find that returning to my stateroom really does feel like going home. The plumbing is reliable and I don’t have to keep figuring out how to flush the toilet or operate the sink, and sometimes I might even get a bath tub. What luxury!  And then there’s the verandah—good for private moments with the ocean.

But cruising has its down sides, too. I don’t have time to soak up the cities I visit. It’s in and out. So it’s best to save cruising for places that are hard to get to over land. Pompeii, for example, involves a long trip to Southern Italy, Positano, an unnerving drive along what the Monastero Santa Rosa Hotel called “the most precipitous road in Europe with vertigo-inducing vistas plunging down jagged cliffs to the azure Tyrrhenean Sea.” Not for those inclined to attacks of acrophobia when looking down stairwells.  Still, just dipping in for a day does give me an experience of the place. I wade into it enough to know whether I like it enough to come back.  Pompeii, yes!  St Malo, France, not so much.

Pompeii Ancient Take Out Shop

It can be lonely on cruises, too, unless you’re travelling with a large group of family or friends. Yes, I do participate in Cruise Critic, an online site where people on the same cruise sign up for small group excursions with people they’ve never met.  And those strangers can feel like friends during the moments we travel together or maybe dine together once. But, by and large, I don’t meet many people with whom I can relax. It’s an unspoken rule that fellow travelers don’t discuss politics, but there is often an underlying politically-based strain. I’ve found it hard to warm up to those who let it drop that they park their money in Nevada to avoid paying taxes. Perhaps I’m on the wrong kind of cruise. Perhaps I need one of those educational (and truly expensive cruises) led by Berkeley Ph.Ds.

Ah, but the food! The master chef on our ship was Jacques Pepin, and the dining was sublime.  My husband, who at home refuses to let anything containing sugar sully the stern chastity of his lips, ate a variety of chocolate desserts every single night. That’s Chocolate Dessert with a capital C and D.  I mean Nine Minute Baked Valrhona Chocolate Cake with Raspberries and Vanilla Ice, Milk Chocolate Mousse Macadamia Dacquoise, Dulce and Dark Chocolate Brownie Soufflé, and Raspberry Caramelized Mille Feuille with Madagascan Vanilla Cream, covered in chocolate.

Raspberry Mille Feuille

I, in contrast, desperate to balance caloric intake with caloric expenditure, decided before I took off to eat lobster every chance I got, thus combining a protein-rich, relatively low-calorie food with a bit of gourmandizing. I never order lobster in the States because of its hair-raising cost.  Maybe European lobsters are less expensive? At any rate, it’s possible on board to eat lobster at every meal. And so I ate lobster omelets, lobster salad, grilled lobster, lobster thermador, lobster risotto (a carbo slip), and lobster and mascarpone pancake with baby carrot emulsion and rock chive cress.  I paid for all of this in advance, of course, but eating a fancy dinner every night without seeing a bill made me feel like I was rich.

Lobster and Mascarpone Pancake

And so did the ship’s décor. The two-story, Lalique, double-curved grand staircase,  a mad explosion of red, black, and ivory marble with intricate balustrades of scrolled iron and  medallions, lit by a 1,300 pound Italian crystal chandelier, and ending in a towering, flower-filled crystal vase had surely been designed to leave the grand staircase of the Titanic in its wake.

And there’s the rub. Cruising also felt downright colonial.  Even though my ship was purported to have better labor conditions than do more famous cruise lines, even if I rationalized that the hundreds of wait staff, from all over the world, were at least employed and that the staff were receiving what seemed to be some elegant training, even though I was charged a thirty dollar tip every single day, I never felt comfortable with a uniformed army of staff attending to my every need.  The more expensive staterooms on ship came with butlers. The very idea of a butler made me break into a sweat.

So, once again, I’ve decided to return to packing and unpacking or perhaps to finding a low cost river cruise on which passengers serve themselves from a buffet. Or since the terrible labor practices on cruise lines are being exposed and since current protests might someday actually improve the status quo, maybe I can return to cruising at sea in greater comfort. How many rivers are there to navigate, after all? Or, more to the point, how soon will suitcase weariness return and settle in?

“And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.” – Libba Bray

I was bummed when “Straight Outta Compton” received only one Oscar nomination this year. I’d grown up in Compton, had attended Compton High School in the late 1950s, and I‘d also liked the film. Although the young men portrayed in the movie—the soon-to-be-famous rappers of the group, NWA—attended high school in the 1980s, long after the advent of Black Power and after drugs and gangs had begun to dominate the Compton scene, I’d often thought of them as the secretly angry voices of the boys I went to school with in the 1950s. And I’d felt a bond. Though I’m white and female, Compton left me with a rebel edge.

For most of my childhood, I thought of Compton as just an ugly town, its main boulevard crammed with so many glinting car lots that it was hard to tell where one began and the other one ended. Our neighborhood on North Willow St., solidly white and lower-middle-class, consisted of modest houses, small lawns, and one uncontrollably weedy front yard, the latter belonging to a family my parents considered “Okies.” Our own small two bedroom bungalow possessed a living and dining room so minute that one evening, after dinner, my father took a sledge hammer to the separating wall to create a decent living room. After that we ate in the kitchen.

Compton was a place I longed to distance myself from, but my family life had left me so emotionally fragile that I could only take leave of Compton in the mildest of fashions. I read brooding books that I was too young to understand—The Brothers Karamazov, for example, which I took from the local library’s list of “100 Best Books.” I went to the beach when I could, though it required a long drive past dried fields and aging oil rigs, the acrid smell of petrol filling my nose, and sometimes my best friend and I would ride horseback at stables near the L.A. River, which hadn’t been cemented over then and which was rumored to have quicksand along its banks. We rode bareback through the brush and trees to feel adventurous and free, which we weren’t of course, since both our family lives were laced with pain. My home, in fact, was a place I longed to escape as well, but where could I go? The only place I knew of was school, and it was school, and Compton High School, in particular, that gave my rebellious energies a new direction.

Until tenth grade I lived in all white neighborhoods and attended all white schools, but when race covenants barring nonwhites from the city’s center were finally overturned, middle-class blacks and Latinos began moving into town. By the time I entered Compton High, the changing demographics of Compton were suddenly visible, and, from the beginning—-one gesture, one person, one moment at a time-—the inequalities of Compton High got under my skin. Despite the changing population of the school, college prep classes were filled almost entirely by whites. The same was true of student government, of many clubs, and of song, cheer, and flag leaders as well. The sports teams were a different story. Bill, the young black man I knew best, a track star and a member of the football team, wrote in my yearbook, “To the best girl at Compton High.” Somehow, over the great distance between us, we’d formed a tie.

In the fall of my senior year, Hector, a smart and serious Mexican-American student with a long history of school service, was passed over for admission to the elite senior service club. I, who had been chosen, was shocked at the snub. My half-Chinese, half-Mexican sorority sister, Grace, clearly the most graceful and shapely of all the girls trying out for the flag team that fall, was passed over as well. When the announcements were made, I saw Grace bursting into tears, her head in her hands, her shiny black hair falling forward. We all knew why she wasn’t chosen. I was angry and hurt on her behalf but had no notion of protest or struggle.

I was happy when Grace was elected Prom Queen later in the spring, but I was also puzzled by the reversal of her fortunes. Then I figured out that flag and song girls were chosen by an all-white selection committee, Prom Queens by a schoolwide election. Students of color had block-voted. It was the first time I understood that marginalized people could come together to change the world. When the following year, a black young woman was elected Prom Queen for the very first time, I understood that changes in power were taking place—at least at Compton High. As a freshman at Stanford that year, which I was attending on a scholarship, I was by struck by the fact that there were only two black students in my class: one young man and one young woman. And I would be cynical enough to assume that Stanford had admitted them as a pair—so they could date each other.

Four years later, as a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley, I would read James Baldwin’s “Down at the Cross,” and my life would change. Baldwin gave form to a thought I’d vaguely entertained as an undergraduate reading Sartre in the woods at Stanford—that an engaged and passionate life was the only life worth living, that one needed to have a cause. The cause Baldwin lived for was the “unconditional freedom of the Negro,” and I had never read anyone who wrote so passionately about the “horrors” of black life or who dared talk about the moral bankruptcy of most whites who were so “far from models of how to live” that they were “unable even to envision” the changes that must be made. I thought about Compton High, about Hector, Grace, and Bill, about the scores of black students who had passed through it without receiving the few benefits and powers that it offered, and I saw that I too had been “unable even to envision” how deep the changes had to be.

Under the cathedral like ceiling of Berkeley’s Doe Library Reference Room, my view of history and myself underwent an alteration and Baldwin’s cause became my own. I joined the Civil Rights Movement, knocking on doors to register black voters in nearby Oakland, and, in the years to come, joined many movements for social change. But it was not just Sartre or the Sixties that had prepared me for this moment of transformation. It was being from Compton as well

As I watch the Oscars this year, it’s a foregone conclusion that talented people of color will be passed over once again. It will make me angry—and it will feel personal. I’m straight outta Compton—still.

Dear Friends,

Just in time for the holidays, my food memoir, Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen, will be on sale for 99 cents on Dec 9 -10.

Consider giving copies to your friends. They’re cheaper than chocolates!  And they come with recipes.

Get the kindle edition, on Dec 9 and 10 only, at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo.

You don’t need a Kindle to download the book.  Here is an app that will let you use another device.

The paperback also makes a nice gift. Get it here.

Feel free to share this page. And, if you’ve read and liked the book, please consider saying so on Amazon.

Happiest of Holidays to you!

Judy

A Review of Mayhem by Elizabeth Harris

“A young woman climbing out of an old Essex in a cloche hat and a flowered maroon rummage-sale dress in front of the Prince Carl County courthouse, that’s what some observers will remember . . . part of her fascination, escorted and left waiting in the lemony light of the October morning, is that she seems almost in custody . . . she is the trial’s most intriguing spectacle, the origin of the crime, the modest, obedient, well-regarded woman taken in adultery.”

Thus begins Elizabeth Harris’s elegantly written novel Mayhem about a frankly fictional female, Evelyn Kunkle Gant, whose imagined life story suggests how women, in particular, can be reduced to oft-repeated caricatures such as “the adulterous wife,” a woman on whose account a crime was committed that “made men cross their legs.” This is the kind of story that often attached itself to “a category of able-bodied white women who ‘lived in’ and took care of invalid old people. . . Stories of wrong clung to these women . . . .” And the author, who makes herself a character in the novel at times, has grown up with them in a small rural town in Texas.  Always curious in her youth about their lives, Harris feels she is “just a college degree and a few decades of change” from having been one of them.

And so Harris tells her own story about this woman named Evelyn, giving her a fuller life than the stereotype of the “woman taken in adultery” can possibly do. Harris speaks for Evelyn, on her behalf, telling her “secret” for her, and she gives her character “a feeling for everything she has lost to this local immortality.” Harris speculates that Evelyn may dwell upon her losses “to remain a person in her own world, understanding that she has already become a character in a local story.”

Harris’s emphasis upon the fictional nature of Evelyn’s tale might seem distancing at first, but its deeper effect is to suggest a deliberate expression of empathy on the part of the author, who makes careful choices about how to shape the story of her character. It is an empathy that powerfully draws the reader into Evelyn’s experiences and into the life of the small rural Texas community in which she lives. It pays homage to Evelyn, expresses solidarity with marginalized white women from small rural towns, performs a sophisticated act of sisterhood.

The novel is also deeply about community and place. Set in rural Texas from 1909, when Evelyn is born, to the middle of the 1950s, it makes vivid the way in which country neighbors, and especially men, need each other to survive and prosper — they mend fences together, butcher cattle, and maintain communal fishing docks. Rural people, and especially women, need family, as well, for a sense of belonging. And it is the power of these needs that accounts for the way in which families and communities so easily impose traditional habits of mind and action on those who live within them.

Violence, for example, which Harris’s roots historically in the settler’s early wars with Native Americans, is so deeply ingrained a tradition in this rural southern world that it seems like nature itself. Hence the title of the novel, Mayhem, alludes not only to castration, the focus of the book’s central dramatic action, “a willful and permanent deprivation of a bodily member resulting in the impairment of a person’s fighting ability,” but also to the “needless or willful damage or violence” that is a part of everyday life for men and women both.

It is mainly white men who damage, and damage each other, largely to prove they are men according to the community’s code. White men must be richer, more skilled in enacting status than other males. They must take revenge for perceived insults or threats, and, above all, they must control their women.

It is not a good life for white men, who direct male coalitional violence against each other — a group of men, turned vigilantes, lynch a white man, one of their own, who is suspected of stealing. Men who are victimized can become subjects of local stories too. Such is the fate of the young man hanged from on an old oak tree, the menacing roots of which seem to appear on the novel’s cover. There are traces of racial violence here as well, largely alluded to in memories of people once enslaved, but the book is on another trail.

It is white men’s need to prove their manhood, often through violence against each other, that makes control of  women so essential, since controlling females is a form of asserting masculine superiority. And control of women, especially wives, is the one thing white men can agree on in this novel. This need for control shapes the whole course of female experience in rural Texas.  Evelyn expects nothing more of life than to get married and become a good, obedient wife, taking small pleasures where she finds them–in the smell of clean sheets and clothing and in organizing her time and her household chores. She also quietly endures martial sex, such as it is: “. . . it was over so quickly.” And she reflects on how “a woman’s fate and that of her children was determined by the man she married.”

When Les Gant, Evelyn’s husband, refuses to believe that a ne’er-do-well neighbor, Charlie, is making sexual advances to his wife, as she has claimed, when he angrily insists that Evelyn maintain his fishing lines at the pond where Charlie hangs out, he engages in an act of male bonding that is specifically aimed at discrediting Evelyn’s assertions — and the assertions of wives in general.

And so, the inevitable happens. Charlie approaches Evelyn and whines to let him “put it in you.”  He has a knife, so Evelyn agrees, and though Charlie fails to complete the act, Les, seeing them through the screen of the communal fishing cabin, assumes otherwise. He takes off after Charlie, ultimately slicing off one of Charlie’s testicles with Charlie’s own knife.

The greater violence, however, is enacted against Evelyn — for being the “cause” of this crime. She becomes a pariah, a woman reduced to a false story, a woman who loses her place and her identity in life, except that Harris refuses to end her character’s tale there. Instead, Harris gives Evelyn a hunger to live and the strength to make a new beginning.  Evelyn’s gradual and limited healing, in the life Harris has created for her, implies the possibility of partial recovery from the violence of the past and, more than that, suggests the bigger story of female compassion for, and interventions on behalf of, other women.

An arresting story about an ordinary woman, about the inner life of small communities, and about the dynamics of rural southern culture — so important now in the political sphere — the quietly insightful and beautifully written Mayhem intrigues and enlightens.

Riding to the opera through the New Mexican landscape of twilight mountains and ever shifting clouds, I wondered why Jennifer Higdon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning female composer, had chosen the novel Cold Mountain as a basis for her first opera.

Photo: J.D. Scott

The program notes emphasized the fact that the novel was about a man, W. P. Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army, who was trying to get home to his beloved, Ada Munroe.  Inman’s journey, according to the notes, was much like that of Odysseus returning from the wars and encountering many battles along the way.  What the heck? I thought.  This was my first opera by a woman. Why had she chosen a man’s story, and especially a story based on Homer in which manhood is defined by wiliness and violent action?

During the first act, as the sun turned the sky orange and lavender, I realized that the classic notion of a male hero had been redefined. The hero of  the opera “Cold Mountain” leaves before the war is over and his long journey home, although involving Odessian encounters with a blind seer, with sirens, and aggressive enemies, is characterized nonetheless by compassion and understanding.  This Odysseus protects isolated females, saves a baby from being thrown into a gorge, and shows empathy toward the slave woman who picks the pockets of dead soldiers and wishes she could kill all white people with a single bullet.  (The hero of “Cold Mountain” is also a stark break from Hollywood versions of Odessian heroes, which also emphasize cunning and fighting—with a lot of car chases and explosions worked in.)

But that was not the only reason Higdon chose the story, or so I speculated. The segments of the opera which featured Inman’s journey, his recapture, escape, and encounters with scenes of war dead, were interleaved with the story of two women—Ada, the hero’s beloved, the protected daughter of wealthy planters, and Ruby, a lower-class woman, a neglected and abused daughter, who came to help Ada after the latter’s father died, leaving her alone at Black Cove Farm.  The two women became friends and partners. Ruby taught Ada how to catch chickens, build fences, and plant crops, while Ada taught Ruby how to read. The two formed a deep bond, each helping the other to become a stronger, more capable woman, and they were further linked by images of planting, growing, and coming to life.  Without the women’s tale, the story of the compassionate hero moving through scenes of death and dying would have been hard to bear.  Life is more than struggle, the opera seemed to be saying. It’s equally about the work of growing, caring, and giving birth.

Life is more than a heterosexual love story as well. Because the women’s connection to each other was so powerful, my desire for a reunion between Inman and Ada was made complex.  When Inman finally reached Ada, I worried that he would take Ruby’s place. I wondered what would happen to Ruby if he did, though, in another departure from gender norms, Inman asked Ruby’s permission to live with her and Ada on the farm. The lovers did unite and have a night of love, but when the hero, almost immediately, was killed, I was far from bereft. Ada had Ruby. Would the opera leaves us with two women, I wondered, as the sky turned softly dark. That would be new.

But the opera moved beyond even a female couple, suggesting a more alternative family to that of “the couple” at all.  Ruby married the “Georgia Boy,” who had attached himself to the household. The final scene showed us Ruby, her husband, and several children, with Ada and her daughter coming along behind. It was an affirmation of breaking from the gender roles and love rules of the past, an affirmation of the idea that we can move beyond the rigidities of the past into creative new directions. Families are not one thing.

As the opera came to an end, I thought of the many operas I’d seen which concluded with the heroine flinging herself from a tall edifice (“Tosca”), getting herself stabbed to death to save her unfaithful lover (“Rigoletto”), or dying of tuberculosis (“La Boheme”).  I thought of a book entitled Opera: The Undoing of Women.  For that evening, I was in a different world.

“Cold Mountain” was that rare thing, an opera with a strong feminist bent. But there was more. Put this together with the fact that I’d never seen an opera by a woman, (women were only 11% of opera composers premiering work over the last twenty years), that Higdon is an out lesbian, that she was premiering her work at the Santa Fe Opera, which many regard as second to the Metropolitan, and that she appeared in person at the end, the sky full of stars. It was a feminist evening at the opera, and I was thrilled. How many times had I had such experiences? Exactly never, until then.

See “Cold Mountain” if you can.  The singing is a mix of the atonal and the lyrical, and the story, in its break with the norms of opera, the Odyssey, and Hollywood will recharge you and lift you up. Given the current political climate for women, we desperately need feminist nights at the opera—and everywhere else as well.

I hadn’t come to Amsterdam for the food.  Although I meant to sample regional dishes—mainly Dutch apple pie and pancakes—what I’d really come for was the art, the seventeenth-century houses, and the canals. I‘d reserved a place on a food tour that would take place the day before I left. It was later in my stay than I had hoped, but in the end,  the very timing of my culinary excursion would reveal, as never before, the role that food tours can play in finding intimacy with a city—and, in this case, a city I hadn’t initially liked that much.

I’d read a book on Amsterdam’s history, one on sixteenth-  and seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and another entitled Rembrandt’s Eyes¸ and I’d arrived expecting to see a treasure load of  work by Rembrandt and Vermeer. During my visit to the Rijksmuseum, however, it became apparent that many of their most famous paintings resided somewhere else. I googled a list of Rembrandt’s paintings and was astonished to find that out of 324 canvases (Rembrandt was a very industrious man) only twenty-two or so were to be found in Amsterdam. The rest of the 322 were scattered from Russia to Australia. Had the Dutch, a people known for their prominence in world trade, sold Rembrandts, along with pepper and pearls, on the global market?

Rijksmuseum

I’d also looked forward to being charmed by the seventeenth-century houses, and I was, at least by their silhouettes. Squeezed together like herring—one was only eight feet wide—most had peaked or curlicued roofs with hooks on the front for hauling up furniture. They were delightful in outline, but the brownish red of their exteriors struck me as somewhat dreary.

Amsterdam Houses

Amsterdam as a whole, indeed, seemed full of somber colors—grays, darkened ochers, browns, and brownish reds. Were they an expression of the city’s historical devotion to business and, in the seventeenth-century, to a Calvinist ethic requiring modesty?

Royal Palace

Wealthy male citizens, after all, appear in seventeenth-century paintings dressed in black. Had Rembrandt, in his preference for browns and ochers and a splash of red, redone the colors of Amsterdam so as to render them mysterious, gleaming with bits of light, soulful rather than industrious?

Rembrandt Self Portrait

The canals had their loveliness—spring trees had leaved in tender shades of green. And in time I saw that changing skies gave them different moods—cheerful in the sun, reflective, harboring unspoken depths when the sky was over cast. No wonder Rembrandt worked so much with light.

But my attempts to get in tune with the changing moods of the canals were continually disrupted by whizzing bicyclists—perhaps on their way to work? — who always seemed to have the right of way. It’s hard to cozy up to a city in which one false step so often put one’s arms and legs, not to mention more tender body parts, in danger.

Bicyclists

It was the food tour that opened the door to bonding with Amsterdam. Any four-hour small-group tour can give you a feeling of intimacy with fellow travelers, but eating together, three times at tables, and four hanging outside on a cobbled street, deepened my sense of connection because it evoked the thousands of times I’d cozily shared food with people I actually knew. Our Afghan taxi driver had warned us that the Dutch were “cold,” but our tour guides were warm and inviting. They had to be, of course. That’s how they earned their living, but the effect, nonetheless, was of being taken in by natives.  The intimacies generated by the tour made me feel closer to Amsterdam.

Food Tour Guides

Our guides, indeed, felt less like guides than hosts throwing an ambulatory dinner, and although the joke in Amsterdam is that the Dutch are so careful with their money that when they serve coffee to their guests at home, they give them only one cookie, provisions on the tour were bounteous. The bounty of the tour made Amsterdam itself seem more generous in its delights. And in the process of eating, I also learned a lot about the city’s psyche.  From one perspective, it was married to business, from another, secretly engaged to indulgence.

We began our tour, for example, with Dutch apple pie at 10 a.m. The pie, really more of a cake, crunchy with sugared topping and smelling of cinnamon, was served with a large dollop of whipped cream. The Dutch, we learned, frequently ate this confection for breakfast. Dessert for breakfast, hmm.

Dutch Apple Pie
Photo from eatyourworld

Next we visited a take-out place and sampled  broodje pom, a dish from Suriname, a former Dutch colony, involving sautéed chicken, a grated native plant, and a sauce of onions, tomatoes, and nutmeg spread on a piece of bread. Also fried plantain with rich peanut sauce. Then, onto the butcher for sasauge with spicy mustard, to the fishmonger for fragrant deep fried bits of cod, and to the candy store for tangy licorice.

Butcher Shop

 The licorice store was run by a large, laughing woman with bright red hair. Licorice, she told us, is the candy most favored by the Dutch who eat an astounding four and a half pounds per capita a year. They buy bags of it, she said, to stash in their cars and kitchens for all day snacking. Licorice is an acquired taste, especially when heavily salted—I had to spit mine out—and, not surprisingly, it has been used in the past for medicinal purposes—the treatment of coughs, liver disease, and peptic ulcers. It is also fifty percent sweeter than sugar. This blend of the officially practical with the privately indulgent was beginning to seem deeply ingrained in the city’s psychology. “I’ve come for my medicine,” one customer joked.

Licorice Store

The most indulgent moment of our day came on our canal ride, the group gathered closely around a table in an elegantly-turned-out boat, full of dark wood, red cushioned seating, red velvety drapes, and tiffany lighting. As we slid, without care—without bicycles!—along the glimmering canals, we drank Prosecco with three kinds of Gouda cheese and Dutch beer with prosecco and deep fried croquettes of ground veal and potato, ending the day with small, puffy pancakes covered in powdered sugar. Yum. Our trip had led us into Amsterdam’s sensuous interior, into its penchant for indulgence—when it wasn’t dashing off to work.

Interior of Boat

Our journey had also taken us into Dutch interiors of the physical kind, where browns and dusky reds, so dreary on the outside of buildings, became welcoming, offered refuge from the bustling world of business just outside. There was the lush interior of the boat, and we had started and ended the day in two of Amsterdam’s “brown cafes,” known for their dark wood and smoke-stained walls and for being gezellig, which means something like cozy.

Brown Cafe

Vermeer’s’ paintings of domestic interiors,  most often pristine, filled with light, and peopled by women, also capture a sense of refuge from the rumble of public life.

Vermeer’s the Milkmaid

But the interiors of the brown cafes were originally male spaces, the kind of cozy settings Rembrandt himself frequented, when he wasn’t furiously painting and marketing his wares. Now open to all genders, they were one of the snug interiors behind Amsterdam’s sometimes sober public face, and it was the food tour, however momentarily, that had made us part of them.

I hadn’t come to Amsterdam for the food.  Although I meant to sample regional dishes—mainly Dutch apple pie and pancakes—what I’d really come for was the art, the seventeenth-century houses, and the canals. I‘d reserved a place on a food tour that would take place the day before I left. It was later in my stay than I had hoped, but in the end,  the very timing of my culinary excursion would reveal, as never before, the role that food tours can play in finding intimacy with a city—and, in this case, a city I hadn’t initially liked that much.

I’d read a book on Amsterdam’s history, one on sixteenth-  and seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and another entitled Rembrandt’s Eyes¸ and I’d arrived expecting to see a treasure load of  work by Rembrandt and Vermeer. During my visit to the Rijksmuseum, however, it became apparent that many of their most famous paintings resided somewhere else. I googled a list of Rembrandt’s paintings and was astonished to find that out of 324 canvases (Rembrandt was a very industrious man) only twenty-two or so were to be found in Amsterdam. The rest of the 322 were scattered from Russia to Australia. Had the Dutch, a people known for their prominence in world trade, sold Rembrandts, along with pepper and pearls, on the global market?

Rijksmuseum

I’d also looked forward to being charmed by the seventeenth-century houses, and I was, at least by their silhouettes. Squeezed together like herring—one was only eight feet wide—most had peaked or curlicued roofs with hooks on the front for hauling up furniture. They were delightful in outline, but the brownish red of their exteriors struck me as somewhat dreary.

Amsterdam Houses

Amsterdam as a whole, indeed, seemed full of somber colors—grays, darkened ochers, browns, and brownish reds. Were they an expression of the city’s historical devotion to business and, in the seventeenth-century, to a Calvinist ethic requiring modesty?

Royal Palace

Wealthy male citizens, after all, appear in seventeenth-century paintings dressed in black. Had Rembrandt, in his preference for browns and ochers and a splash of red, redone the colors of Amsterdam so as to render them mysterious, gleaming with bits of light, soulful rather than industrious?

Rembrandt Self Portrait

The canals had their loveliness—spring trees had leaved in tender shades of green. And in time I saw that changing skies gave them different moods—cheerful in the sun, reflective, harboring unspoken depths when the sky was over cast. No wonder Rembrandt worked so much with light.

But my attempts to get in tune with the changing moods of the canals were continually disrupted by whizzing bicyclists—perhaps on their way to work? — who always seemed to have the right of way. It’s hard to cozy up to a city in which one false step so often put one’s arms and legs, not to mention more tender body parts, in danger.

Bicyclists

It was the food tour that opened the door to bonding with Amsterdam. Any four-hour small-group tour can give you a feeling of intimacy with fellow travelers, but eating together, three times at tables, and four hanging outside on a cobbled street, deepened my sense of connection because it evoked the thousands of times I’d cozily shared food with people I actually knew. Our Afghan taxi driver had warned us that the Dutch were “cold,” but our tour guides were warm and inviting. They had to be, of course. That’s how they earned their living, but the effect, nonetheless, was of being taken in by natives.  The intimacies generated by the tour made me feel closer to Amsterdam.

Food Tour Guides

Our guides, indeed, felt less like guides than hosts throwing an ambulatory dinner, and although the joke in Amsterdam is that the Dutch are so careful with their money that when they serve coffee to their guests at home, they give them only one cookie, provisions on the tour were bounteous. The bounty of the tour made Amsterdam itself seem more generous in its delights. And in the process of eating, I also learned a lot about the city’s psyche.  From one perspective, it was married to business, from another, secretly engaged to indulgence.

We began our tour, for example, with Dutch apple pie at 10 a.m. The pie, really more of a cake, crunchy with sugared topping and smelling of cinnamon, was served with a large dollop of whipped cream. The Dutch, we learned, frequently ate this confection for breakfast. Dessert for breakfast, hmm.

Dutch Apple Pie
Photo from eatyourworld

Next we visited a take-out place and sampled  broodje pom, a dish from Suriname, a former Dutch colony, involving sautéed chicken, a grated native plant, and a sauce of onions, tomatoes, and nutmeg spread on a piece of bread. Also fried plantain with rich peanut sauce. Then, onto the butcher for sasauge with spicy mustard, to the fishmonger for fragrant deep fried bits of cod, and to the candy store for tangy licorice.

Butcher Shop

 The licorice store was run by a large, laughing woman with bright red hair. Licorice, she told us, is the candy most favored by the Dutch who eat an astounding four and a half pounds per capita a year. They buy bags of it, she said, to stash in their cars and kitchens for all day snacking. Licorice is an acquired taste, especially when heavily salted—I had to spit mine out—and, not surprisingly, it has been used in the past for medicinal purposes—the treatment of coughs, liver disease, and peptic ulcers. It is also fifty percent sweeter than sugar. This blend of the officially practical with the privately indulgent was beginning to seem deeply ingrained in the city’s psychology. “I’ve come for my medicine,” one customer joked.

Licorice Store

The most indulgent moment of our day came on our canal ride, the group gathered closely around a table in an elegantly-turned-out boat, full of dark wood, red cushioned seating, red velvety drapes, and tiffany lighting. As we slid, without care—without bicycles!—along the glimmering canals, we drank Prosecco with three kinds of Gouda cheese and Dutch beer with prosecco and deep fried croquettes of ground veal and potato, ending the day with small, puffy pancakes covered in powdered sugar. Yum. Our trip had led us into Amsterdam’s sensuous interior, into its penchant for indulgence—when it wasn’t dashing off to work.

Interior of Boat

Our journey had also taken us into Dutch interiors of the physical kind, where browns and dusky reds, so dreary on the outside of buildings, became welcoming, offered refuge from the bustling world of business just outside. There was the lush interior of the boat, and we had started and ended the day in two of Amsterdam’s “brown cafes,” known for their dark wood and smoke-stained walls and for being gezellig, which means something like cozy.

Brown Cafe

Vermeer’s’ paintings of domestic interiors,  most often pristine, filled with light, and peopled by women, also capture a sense of refuge from the rumble of public life.

Vermeer’s the Milkmaid

But the interiors of the brown cafes were originally male spaces, the kind of cozy settings Rembrandt himself frequented, when he wasn’t furiously painting and marketing his wares. Now open to all genders, they were one of the snug interiors behind Amsterdam’s sometimes sober public face, and it was the food tour, however momentarily, that had made us part of them.

Young people, and especially our children, can revive our capacity for wonder at the world and a sense of intimate connection to it. I felt closer to the landscape because I saw my daughter come alive to it with an intensity that no longer comes so easily to me.

I stand on high ground looking out at the Vale of Evesham, a wide expanse of grass, rows of darker trees, and distant hills of patchwork green. Clouds cluster overhead, sometimes threatening rain, sometimes parting to admit slants of sun and patches of bright blue sky.  My daughter, who’s come with us on this trip to England, becomes part of the landscape, her scarf adding a splash of azure against the many shades of green, her face lit with a touch of light. I feel a rush of love for her and for the landscape as well.

On our flight to England, I’d read Mark Doty’s Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy. It is a book about still life pictures, but also about love, loss, and our hunger for intimacy. The book moved me, and in, in the course of a ten hour journey, altered my understanding of why I travel, of why I need to travel.

I’d had a surface grasp of what I looked for in getting away–to break with my work as a writer, with the discipline, the effort, the disappointments, the unending nature of revision. I also longed to escape our distinctly American culture of individualism and overwork. My English friends work hard too, but their lives have always seemed more balanced, more leisurely, and more pleasurable than mine.

Traveling for me, also involved what I thought of as an opening to the world, an expansion of the capacity for pleasure.  When I travel I begin to focus, to concentrate–not on my work–but on landscapes, art, music, food.  Reading Doty, however, made me aware that there were deeper layers, emotionally speaking, to this opening, this concentration, and to their accompanying delights. The effect of looking and looking, Doty writes (he is gazing at a still life involving oysters and lemon) is “love . . . a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.”

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

Reading Doty changed my perception of what I was to experience in the English countryside.  It was more than pleasure, it was love I felt in looking out at the Vale of Evesham, more intensely green than I’d seen before, and at my daughter in her blue scarf. It was tenderness toward experience that I felt in Hidcote Gardens when I came across a velvety green path, bordered by tall hedges that seemed to go on forever and to promise unseen possibilities for my life.

Hidcote Gardens

Doty asks “is that what soul or spirit is, then, the outward flying attention, the gaze that binds us to the world?”  I can’t answer his question, but I know that reading him made me understand for the first time that my own “looking and looking” gave me a sense of being bound to, and rooted in, the world– of feeling at home in it. As a child of distant parents, feeling at home in the world is something I’ve pursued for most of my existence.

Describing what we have seen, Doty writes, is an “inexact, loving art, and a reflexive one.” In writing about what we see, we “come closer to saying who we are.”  Though, in my case, writing what I see feels more like trying to become the person I want to be.

I carry love of my daughter within me no matter where I am, but I want to feel intimacy with green paths and leafy vistas and to hold that love within me too. And I want that connection without my usual ache of nostalgia, without my familiar longing to re-experience what I once felt for the English countryside when I was much younger, when I taught nineteenth-century British literature, was married to a man I loved, who later died of AIDS, when the lush verdure of the English landscape was overwhelming. I want to feel that the intimacy I experience in the present is–enough.

I began to see that it had been a desire for intimacy without nostalgia that prompted me, in part, to persuade my daughter and her boyfriend to come with me and my husband to England. Young people, and especially our children, can revive our capacity for wonder at the world and a sense of intimate connection to it. I felt closer to the landscape because I saw my daughter come alive to it with an intensity that no longer comes so easily to me. She shares my passion for gardens, for ancient doors draped with ceanothus, for pink roses splayed against a brick wall. My connection to them was more palpable because she felt it too. And, more simply, my love for her magnified my tenderness toward all three.

Hidcote Garden Door

Of course, Doty reminds us that everything is “evanescent. “  In still life pictures the bounty of shimmering  things artfully arranged on a table always bear signs of decay– an insect, a flower whose petals are coming loose, a fruit that is overly ripened. The intense intimacy we feel when we study a landscape or a painting passes–as will we. But we can carry the imprint of that tenderness within us.  And, despite, or because of, their evanescence, the moments we do spend “wrapped in layers of intimacy with the world” can feel like “perfection,”can  feel like being at home in the world.