We’re big fans of Chandra Prasad at New Haven Review. She’s an accomplished novelist and greater New Haven resident. What more could one ask?

When Chandra published Breathe the Sky: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Amelia Earhart, we were all quite excited! There’s even a part in the novel when Amelia comes to New Haven!

So take advantage of seeing, listening, and breathing the same air as Ms. Prasad at Cheshire Public Library (104 Main Street, Cheshire, CT 06410-2406) this Thursday, May 13 at 7:00 p.m., where she’ll be reading.

The program is free and open to the public. For more information about Chandra, check her out at www.chandraprasad.com.

Earlier, I posted on the fruitlessness of teaching students how to write literary criticism. The argument was part tongue in cheek, part all business. In brief, I’m ambivalent about the value of this activity. This ambivalence lies in the fact that not teaching students how to write literary criticism is not the same as refusing to teach them how to do literary criticism. Perhaps this is a distinction without a difference. I don’t think so.

When it comes to the art of unraveling a literary work — or as students of literature pejoratively put it, of “dissecting” The Scarlet Letter or Death in Venice — we should instruct students in this activity. I’m just not convinced this is the most effective way of teaching students how to write better, and too often beginning literature courses are treated as an extension of one’s training in academic writing. But, in my view, the experience of writing literary criticism comes too early in the trajectory of the typical student’s college career. Unless the inability to write has burdened him with remedial composition courses — something of a norm on American college campuses — writing literary criticism within the first two years of study is just too soon to engage in the art of analyzing one of our most complex human artifacts.

A small digression: I’ve always been amused by the distinction in our culture between the “hard” and “soft” sciences. In academia, hard sciences, like physics and chemistry, are not uncommonly seen as more difficult, more challenging than the “soft” sciences of psychology and sociology. Hell, just look at the adjectives! But this bias is built on a strange notion. The soft sciences are soft not because they’re easier but because they’re the more complex of the two. And why? Because they have humanity as the object of their analysis, and human beings by nature deceive — if not the scientists who observe them then themselves. Our capacity for deception and delusion inevitably muddies the stream of reproducible results and controlled variables upon which “good” science depends. Pity the poor psychologist rather than the physicist. Grasping human behavior is enough to give even the keenest of minds a migraine. And narrative is, if anything, a demonstration of this seeming incomprehensibility, a neverending case study in the instability and unknowability of intention and response, human cause and effect. If human beings instantiate in every living moment the Heisenberg principle, stories are little more than exemplars of the principle at work. And yet we’re sending in students to write coherently about them?

Perhaps I make mountains of molehills here, but I wonder if compelling nineteen-year-olds to intelligently and (one hopes) intelligibly interrogate a literary text is an episode in the kind of all-too-human irrationality we ask them to expound on. It is difficult enough to figure out, say, a character’s ostensible motivation; to ask students to peer further beneath the literary veil and comment on the unstable source of that representation, which may range from the author’s unconscious predilections to the ultimately unknowable historical milieu of the work, seems sheer madness. Here we blithely walk students into literature’s hall of mirrors and ask them to look from reflection to reflection — the cascade of narrative ambiguities, which is generally agreed to be a good thing in a literary work done well — and then expect them to walk out loving the work and the craft of writing literary criticism.

Instructors of the art are inevitably disappointed by their charges, who leave the hall frustrated with results that are more pedestrian than not. At best, we hope for diamonds of insight in the rough. Some students who stick it out may even come to enjoy the ride — despite the results. In these are our first English majors born. But was the ride worth it for them?

In the end, frustrations aside, I have come to believe it was. Uncertainty and ambiguity in a work of literature is a good thing. I’m with the New Critics on that point. But try getting your typical first-year college student to accept that. Not so easy.

That is because eventually they will have to accept the fact that life as lived is rife with uncertainty, and making it through depends on learning how to navigate its shoals. Literature of any real quality demands suspending the Hollywood-driven Manichaeanism that childhood depends upon. Engaging students in the act (and if they’re further interested, the art) of literary criticism is among their first steps in exploring and accommodating the not-so-black-and-whiteness of reality. Literary criticism is essentially a safe space to pick apart life through the vehicle of narrative. The more robust and thoughtful the picking apart, the better the training the student receives for handling the blows life will inevitably deal. Better to explore earlier in a textual work why a crime was committed than later in a courtroom as a witness, plaintiff or defendant. Literary criticism for this reason, among others, is a species — maybe a subspecies — of ethical training. It is the unexamined life being examined, through the lens of narrative.

But, mind you, this describes only the act of engaging in literary criticism. It is not the same as the act of writing it. For when you write literary criticism — not a bad thing in itself — you have now more heavy-handedly codified the flux of possibilities that circulated prior to committing ideas and arguments to paper. Granted, codification will sometimes have the ameliorative effect of pushing you to think through and state more clearly your views of the work at hand. For while uncertainty may characterize the nature of reality, so, too, does stability, if only for a while. Uncertainty, after all, is not the same as chaos. And the writing of literary criticism, while difficult in the extreme at times, is not a mission impossible. Indeed with time, maturity and the ability to walk the high wire of our quotidian existence, it is even something we may want to teach. But only when it really is worth the teaching and not before. A softening up that concentrates more on discussion and more imaginative forms of engagement would do far more till then.

Some time ago, I joined friends in New Haven for a Friday night meal. Their daughter was in town, back from college, and over the course of dinner conversation, I asked if she had any professors who were stood out from the others. She immediately described two of her instructors, who were notable for the passion of their presentations and their commitment to quality literary criticism. An English major now, just as I had been when I attended the University of Chicago twenty years earlier, she asked after a half hour into her own passionate description why I inquired. I admitted that I wanted compare her experience with my own and find the link between what these special folks had done for her and what mine had done for me.

Actually, I had one particular individual in mind, one whose own presentations were responsible for my liberation as a reader. That person was William Veeder, who, I have since learned, apparently produced enough of a pedagogical impact to earn himself a Wikipedia article. The article, which outlines his literary theories, is largely a tribute. I’m especially tickled by the classroom quotes, or “Veederisms,” as they’re aptly described.

While some of what appears in the article is familiar from my classes with him, what I recall most is what fails to show up. The article rightly records Veeder’s emphasis on the how derive meaning from a literary work through the intersection of words submitted by an author for your consideration and your response to that concatenation of words. This intersubjective take is hardly uncommon, and, if anything, is an eminently practical approach to how writers, texts, and readers engage within the reading experience. But what the article’s author(s?) fail to capture is the degree to which Veeder’s application of that idea, and application of it within the classroom, empowered readers: no small thing for the first- or second-year college student seriously considering a major in English. In short, intersubjectivity was his way of reducing the authority of authors.

Now this is not to say that Veeder took great stock (or, let’s just say, all of his stock) in some variant of Roland Barthes’ “death of the author.” Veeder did believe in authors and their authority, but it was an authority much limited. To make this point he would tell a wonderful story that, even if apocryphal, rings true in the only way these things matter.

At some point in his education, Veeder had taken a course in which the class found itself reading a D.H. Lawrence novel. The classroom conversation had become lively and insightful. The classroom instructor then distributed a short essay on the work by a contemporary of Lawrence’s and asked for the students’ feedback. They all agreed that the critic had clearly misconstrued what the novel was about. The instructor then revealed that the critic was…Lawrence himself. Most interesting of all? Not a single mind was changed: the class responded — rightly in Veeder’s view — that Lawrence had simply failed to understand what he had achieved. As slippery as this slope seems, Veeder held firmly to the view that literature is always first and foremost a literary experience, and that experience takes at least two to tango — a reader and a text — sometimes three if the author insists on butting in and the reader lets him or her.

It was the follow-up question in my class, and Veeder’s answer, that sealed the deal for me. A classmate asked if an author’s assertion about what a text is “about” should have any standing in our interpretations of a text. Veeder’s response was artful: authors do not have the kind of authority that we (and sometimes authors) imagine. Once the text is born, it is, like a child, sent out into the world to fend for itself; the author may have brought the work to term but her relationship to it thereafter changes forever as she becomes just another reader.

OK, well maybe not just any other reader. Veeder’s term of choice was a “privileged” reader, but a reader nonetheless. Privileged, in Veeder’s construction, meant that the author had a special, not definitive, relationship to the text— in the D.H. Lawrence case, as the abovediscussed novel’s progenitor. But need I add that if the author’s work were about, say, his mother, such as Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors, wouldn’t the author’s mother also be something of a privileged reader, one with her own special relationship to the text?

But even this “privileged” relationship is problematized by the fact that we all have unique relationships to texts, not only because we are unique in relation to one another but because we are unique even to ourselves over time. In my mid-forties, I’m just not the same person reading Heart of Darkness that I was when I struggled with it at 18.

The net effect of Veeder’s insight was to empower me as a reader by depriving authors of the kind of mystical authority that they simply do not have. True, authors are bound to be frustrated by perceived misreadings of their work — think Salman Rushdie, certain Muslim readers, and his Satanic Verses — but there is no getting around the reality of the situation. Readers will make what they will of what they read, which is why, though it be a classic, I still find The Scarlet Letter a dreadful bore while my neighbors consider it a thrilling and tragic romance.

Let me add that this does not make all readings equal in value or cogency. But that is an entirely different issue. The first step in reading well that Veeder taught was not about being right but about being bold. And in order to be bold, a painfully obsequious deference to the author is the first thing to go out the window. It’s a mantra by which I still read.

Now sing!
Let’s all be jolly
Banish melancholy
Life is but a party
A never-ending ball

And if you will or if you won’t
And if you do or if you don’t
‘Tis a choice of folly
La la la la
For nitwits are we all.

Thus the opening song, sung by the raucous cast of Carlo Goldoni’s commedia dell’arte masterpiece, The Servant of Two Masters, adpated by Constance Congdon, now playing at the Yale Rep.  The song is an invitation to a celebration of silliness, slapstick, stupidity, and, yes, sincerity — for true love carries the day on all levels.  En route to betrothed bliss are mistaken identities, disguises, love-lorn histrionics, jealousies, subterfuge, foolery involving food and letters and trunks, banter and sexual innuendo, lovely tableaux, and graceful, lyrical song.

What’s not to like?  It’s a play anyone can enjoy, bursting with vitality and love of stagecraft in all its crowd-pleasing showiness.  The costumes (by Valérie Thérèse Bart) are gorgeous, the use of space, backdrops, and props playful, the timing precise, the comic bits keep coming, and the gears keep shifting.  Just when you think the play is about to settle into a predictable series of convolutions to keep the right innamorati from getting together, something unexpected comes along — like fish and pots being flung toward the audience to be doggedly snatched from the air by the intrepid Truffaldino, a buffoon in motley, who tries to serve two masters  in hopes of doubling his meal ticket.

And when you think, by Intermission, you’ve seen all Steve Epp has to offer in the role, guess again. In the second half, his dialogue with one master — the preening, effete Florindo (Jesse J. Perez in a role that takes playing ‘broad’ to new lengths and heights) — becomes an astounding series of non sequiturs and verbal pratfalls.  And it’s then that Truffaldino, who has been winking at the audience throughout in asides, seems to become the naively inspired master of ceremonies in a plot that exposes the foolishness undergone in the name of love, pride, hunger, but that also let’s us all off the hook.  Nitwits we may be, but we know a happy ending when it’s coming.

Particularly memorable, besides Epp and Perez, are Allen Gilmore as Pantalone, father of the bride, a cartoon come to life, with a voice modulating all over the scale, from full-throated rage to unctuous glissandos; and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, of the Yale School of Drama, as his daughter — petulant, heart-felt, sassy, with but a heartbeat separating her moods.  Her duet of longing with her maid Smeraldina (Liz Wisan, also of YSD), smitten by Truffaldino, offers lyric relief from all the comedy, and the sensible Smeraldina gets to deliver with gusto the somewhat dated  imprecations about a sexual double standard: how women are held up to scorn for infidelity, while no one says a word about male trespasses (sure, sure, tell that to Tiger Woods).

But, lest you think this show has nothing to say to our modern sensibilities, check out the menu duet — in which Truffaldino and the master cook Brighella (Liam Craig) ponder a five course dinner with evocative gestures and sound effects for each creature slaughtered for the feast.

In many such moments, director Chris Bayes, Head of Physical Acting at YSD, demonstrates what is meant by that term: the choreography of repetitive gestures, reactions, and vocal registers create a comic thread that runs through play’s various encounters, making the characters themselves, ably abetted by the trio of musicians on stage, seem part of a vast musical composition, a comic folk opera that recalls the antics of the Marx Brothers, the early Woody Allen, and any good comedy duo or troupe you’d care to name.

For a good time . . .

The Servant of Two Masters
by Carlo Goldoni
Adapted by Constance Congdon
From a translation by Christina Sibul
Directed by Christopher Bayes
March 12 to April 3, 2010
Yale Repertory Theatre
Photographs: © 2010 Richard Termine

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 3rd week with readings at Bru Cafe, 141 Orange, Street, this Tuesday, March 23, at 7� p.m.

Our theme?
“Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”

Our stories?
Bobbie Ann Mason’s “Shiloh” and Bernard Malamud’s “The Jewbird”

Why these?

Two great writers, masters, in particular, of the short story: what could go wrong?

For those who don’t know Bobbie Ann Mason…shame on you!  One of America’s best short story writers, she offers in “Shiloh” a quietly moving meditation on what breaking up is really like: that onerous sense that not all is right in the world, often sneaking up on us before we know it.  Two lovers look at one another and, lo and behold, they’re strangers.  And then there’s the story title.  Wikipedia describes the Civil War battle at Shiloh as follows: “The Confederates achieved considerable success on the first day but were ultimately defeated on the second day.”  If that’s not a good description of breaking up, then I don’t know what is.

Malamud’s “The Jewbird” was one of my favorite stories as a kid and remains so to this day.  It’s Malamud at his magic realist best, taking the “Jewish problem” and realizing its substance in a way that few works of “straight” fiction do. In many ways, it reminds one of the trickster tales of Native American legend, of coyote who knows things all too well, and yet all of this with a distinctly Jewish twist, featuring equal parts cynicism leavened by wisdom and  hope threatened byour failure to understand, really understand.

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series gets off the ground this week with its first readings at Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea at 194 York Street, at 7 p.m.

Our theme?
“What Did She See in Him?”

Our stories?
Raymond Carver’s “Fat” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Jelly-Bean”

Why these?
“Why not” would be too glib an answer. First and foremost, they’re really good.

Second, did I mention that they’re good?

“Fat” is one of Raymond Carver’s finest tales. In the tradition of Carson McCullers’ Ballad of the Sad Cafe, it takes what would otherwise be a classic sideshow freak and turns one customer’s gastronomic compulsion into a story of salvation for the waitress who must serve that compulsion. It’s a tale marked by the quiet bittersweetness and powerful subtextual currents that typify all of Carver’s stories.

Fitzgerald’s “The Jelly-Bean” was published in the October 1920 issue of Metropolitan Magazine and was later collected in Six Tales of the Jazz Age. This classic short story wonderful captures a generation’s embrace of the imminent freedoms promised by the Roaring Twenties, but not without pain and wasted possibility. Sympathy and pathos mix liberally in a story about a time when both were so deeply needed after the terribleness of the Great War.

OK, call me lazy, but I’m reposting something I had written once upon a time for my personal blog and still find to be the case, not that currency always justifies repetition.  But, in this instance, I’m making an exception.

Once, while I sat schmoozing in the home of  New Haven Review editor Mark Oppenheimer, we started speaking of our respective experiences as college instructors. He noted how much he preferred teaching nonfiction writing to literature because he neither wrote nor knew all that much about literary criticism—a gross understatement on his part, really. I chimed in, stupidly perhaps, “I don’t really understand why we teach students how to write literary criticism at all.”

But is such a sentiment all that stupid?  In spirit of making a go of this bit of devilish advocacy, I thus ask: why do we teach students how to write literary criticism? Make no mistake, it is a type of writing that can approach the status of art in the right hands. But even for experts it is a far more difficult form of nonfiction to produce—in my humble view—than those ol’ classroom chesnuts: narration, description, and argumentation.

Now, technically, literary criticism is a subdivision of the last, but it remains one of the hardest to do well. I attribute this difficulty not only to the inability of students to read and write well but to the inherent complications of trying to formulate an argument about something as slippery as a well-wrought story or poem.

In my experience, the slipperiness of the literary artifact comes directly from the story-like nature of this species of discourse. When I taught the art of litcrit—and probably not all that well, to be honest—my students continuously wrestled with the Herculean (or more likely Sisyphean) task of unwinding authors from characters, storytellers from their stories, the telling from the showing. Even I still have difficulty with the boxes-within-boxes or wall-of-mirrors (pick your metaphor) nature of this discursive mode. And, mind you, I have a doctorate in literature.

I’m currently convinced that high school teachers and college professors teach students how to write literary criticism not because it instructs them in how to “think critically” or “formulate an argument” better. These can be done just as easily—actually more easily—focusing on more seemingly concrete topics, like reproductive rights or drunk-driving laws. Instead, I believe many teachers, in their heart of hearts, would rather not teach students how to write literary criticism at all. What they’d prefer is reading works of literary quality and talking about them intelligently—like a book club but with the teacher’s authority intact for guiding novitiates. That certainly was my experience as a college instructor.

I loved selecting, teaching, and discussing (or more appropriately discoursing on) the work at hand. What I despised to no end was marking my students’ papers, which were poorly written, generally incoherent, and pretty pedestrian in their interpretations. And most literary instructors I speak with tend to echo this sentiment—although I’m happy to be flamed to the contrary.

Marking papers probably explains why I became an editor: I grew tired of commenting on people’s dry runs. If someone is going to write poorly, and I’m going to have to redline it into readable prose, I might as well make sure the fruits of my labor see light of day in published form.

In some ways, I miss those halcyon days of teaching literature. I even sometimes miss the stress and strain of writing literary criticism—no easy task, even for me. But the idea of teaching students to write literary criticism, as if that constituted training for a profession other than, well, writing literary criticism (which is not even a solid basis for the art of book reviewing), is a misbegotten notion that serves no one else other than the instructors who recognize this chore as the price they must pay for the pleasures of reading and discussing literature worth talking about.

One of my favorite people in New Haven is my second cousin Andy, who happens to live two blocks away from us, down the street, with his wife, Karen. Lest you think this is all about how wonderfully tight-knit my family is, and how great it is we live so near to one another, blah blah blah, let me jump right in and say that it sounds that way, but in fact, it’s not true, and the reality is weirder. Andy grew up in Chicago and I never even met him until I was 25 years old. He moved to New Haven about four years ago because of Karen, who, it turns out, grew up just outside of New Haven. But they met in Ann Arbor and courted there, and as for their winding up living two blocks away, that was a total fluke. Karen landed a job in Westport, and rents there were so high that they chose to live in New Haven instead. And the nicest apartment they saw, when they were looking around, was on my street. So heigh-ho, here’s my cousin Andy and his wife Karen, and we see them all the time, and believe you me, our parents are all thrilled. It’s very cozy.

Andy and Karen are completely brilliant and wonderful people and they prove it to me on a fairly frequent basis, the most recent of which was when Andy suggested that there be created a Slow Mail movement, akin to the Slow Food movement. As someone who has pontificated at some length about the glory of letter writing, and how sad it is we don’t do it more, I glommed onto this right away, of course. (I’m sure Mark Oppenheimer would too — I seem to recall hearing his NPR-friendly voice over NPR airwaves recently talking about this very subject.) Andy posted a status line on Facebook saying something along the lines of “Hey: Slow Mail. Anyone else think this is a great idea?” And he generated more than a few comments, among them someone’s suggesting that he do a Google search for something called the Letter Writers Alliance.

Well, I don’t know if Andy ever did that Google search, but I sure as hell did, and within an hour I’d convinced myself to join the organization. If you go to http://www.16sparrows.com/shop/Letter-Writers-Alliance.html then you too can join the LWA. It doesn’t cost a lot of money, which is good, because it’s kind of a silly thing to do, but boy, when I got my packet in the mail from them, I thought, “This is worth every penny.”

The LWA was founded by some stationers who make what they describe as “greetings cards for sarcastic, quirky folks.” (That phrase along made me desperately wish that I was still the buyer for Atticus; how I would have loved to put these cards on display.) So they’ve got a lot of snarky cards, which are way fun (if, all right, not for everybody), and clever stationery designs, and then they’ve got the LWA, which has a mission statement as follows:

“In this era of instantaneous communication, a handwritten letter is a rare and wondrous item. The Letter Writers Alliance is dedicated to preserving this art form; neither long lines, nor late deliveries, nor increasing postal rates will keep us from our mission.

As a member of the Letter Writers Alliance, you will carry on the glorious cultural tradition of letter writing. You will take advantage of every opportunity to send tangible correspondence. Prepare your pen and paper, moisten your tongue, and get ready to write more letters!”

I have several friends who gave up Facebook for Lent. One of them, a guy who lives in Idaho, sent me a Facebook message about two weeks before Lent began, asking if I would write to him, on paper, during Lent. I said, “Of course!” I did, using LWA stationery. I admit that I didn’t use a fountain pen, but even so, it was a pleasure.

It’s Valentine’s Day (aka VD).  Maybe you’ve got it covered with your favorite mating personage, your significant other(s), your steady, your squeeze, your spouse (or the person who would be that if the laws of the land permitted), but … maybe not, maybe you’re looking to connect, somehow, someway.

Maybe you turn to craigslist, home of the online hookup, or maybe you’re not quite ready to go virtual yet, so you look at “Missed Connections” hoping against hope that someone out there, someone whose path you’ve already crossed — in line at Subway, at the bank, on that same path you walk every day to class, on the subway — is desperately seeking you again, to get your digits, your screenname, the key to your city . . .

Chad Raines, of the local band The Simple Pleasure, has concocted the music, lyrics and book for Missed Connections, a guilty pleasure based on online personals, up for its final showing today at Yale Cabaret, and it’s a blast of sound, movement, and cagey, collective jeering at the pathetic losers we all risk being when we’re lookin’ for love, or, if not love exactly, then at least that special someone who will let you massage his or her feet …

Pick your favorite moment: the phys ed girl, suffering from diarrhea, pining for the guy who will examine her stool (how much more intimate does it get?), or the guy at the Subway, intoning, in a hilarious Barry White take-off, how he noticed that girl in line with him, but was scared off when she ordered for two; or the gent with binoculars who likes to watch his neighbor take out her trash; or the pissed-off, stood-up woman who gives us a lesson in etiquette: if you’re married and seeking discreet connection on the side, it’s just not cool to be a no-show to someone else who’s married and seeking same … there might even be a sitter’s fee involved!

The songs are high volume and extremely active.  Jennifer Harrison Newman once again choreographs the impossibly small “stage”at the Cabaret — including a line dance, led by Raines, that’s so close you might catch a spray of sweat.  Director Christopher Mirto keeps the show loose and juicy, but also cheerily inviting — it feels at times like we’re at “dating camp” and the cast are our counselors, trying to get us out of our shells.

There’s never a dull moment because you never know what’s coming next — erotic tableaus, condoms flung to the crowd, a get-up and boogie number with lyrics shouting “woman for woman, man for man” rather than “celebrate good times, c’mon!”

And who knows, when it’s over there might even be a line on craigslist for you: You were at Yale Cab last weekend with some bozo and/or bimbo you clearly weren’t that into. I was the ____ with the ______.  Hope to see you there in two weeks (Feb 25-27) when the Yale Cab will feature Radio Station, inspired by the work of Shogo Ohta and the Pacific Performance Project/East.   Come alone, if you dare…

Missed Connections
a new musical by Chad Aaron Raines
directed by Christopher Mirto

How you gonna meet your missed connection?

If you’re not interested in food skip this piece.

No, I take that back. You don’t have to be interested in food as in Food. What I want is people who like to eat. Do you like to eat? Good, then keep reading.

Everyone talks about Alice Waters. Alice Waters this, Alice Waters that. Berkeley is Heaven (unless you’re Caitlin Flanagan, in which case it seems to be a special circle of hell, and I don’t know why she doesn’t move to the East Coast, but there it is). Fa la la la la la. I’m tired of it, and I am really damned tired of reading proclamations on food and eating from someone who just can’t seem to get it that most of the country does not live in Berkeley, California. I know I’m not the only person who’s got serious Alice Waters Fatigue. So for those of you who like to eat, and to Eat, and who like food and Food, and who like reading about it, let me make a recommendation. I promise I’m not about to tell you to read Michael Pollan.

Please go read any book by John Thorne.

I know he gets reviewed sometimes Big Places and I’m always so thrilled for him. The food magazines have always sung his praises. But at the same time, not once in my life have I ever talked to someone who knew who he was. I’ve never had someone idly look at my bookshelves and see all the John Thorne and go, “Oh, you like him too?”

I had no idea who John Thorne was until I read Laurie Colwin (sorry to bring up her name again, but it’s true); in one of her cookbooks she mentions a pumpkin tian that he wrote about. I have no interest in eating pumpkin so I didn’t really think about John Thorne again until several years later when I was browsing in a bookstore (why do I remember this? it was Atticus) while coming down with a cold. On a whim I bought Thorne’s Simple Cooking, and while nursing my cold at home I read the book from cover to cover and could not believe how incredibly good it was.

I mean not that it was an incredibly useful and informative cookbook — which it is — but that it was just so well written. John Thorne is, hands down, in my top five American writers writing today. But nobody reads him except diehard foodies (as far as I can tell). Even though he’s smart and opinionated and reasonable and funny and wonderful. Even though the books are beautifully designed, about as appealing as books can be (all published, I think, by Farrar, Straus, Giroux, and designed by Jonathan Lippincott, who’s from New Haven by the way; Lippincott has designed some of the most handsome books in my recent memory, and Thorne’s are right up there)…

One of the great things — the noble things — about John Thorne is that he writes about food that is born out of and meant to be eaten in climates harsher than the Bay Area. Thorne currently lives in Maine, I believe (or maybe the Berkshires, I can’t remember now); he’s writing always about food for cold climates. Food in places that really do have four very distinct seasons, maybe even plus mud season. Which is a totally different thing from what Alice Waters is always pontificating about, which is food in what would be for most of us a seriously alternate reality. John Thorne’s reality is much more like mine. It’s sloppy. It’s not really very virtuous. It’s not about having truffles on hand at all times, or mincing about talking about the divine walnut oil I found in the South of France. It’s about buying a bag of beans because it’s cheap and then figuring out the best way to make the best damn meal out of it (his chapter on baked beans — oh, how I love it, almost as much as I love baked beans). Foodies who are in New Haven ought to read John Thorne, for sure, but foodies everywhere who want an antidote for Alice Waters Fatigue (not recognized by the DSM-V, but maybe in future editions) should please go find his books.

Simple Cooking
Outlaw Cook
Serious Pig
Pot on the Fire
Mouth Wide Open