| | | Retta talks about how she became a Kings super fan, the true meaning of bangs, and more in issue No. 33. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | May 10, 2016 | Letter No. 33 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hiya Lennys,
A lot of our self-definition can come from our deeply held enthusiasms. When I was in college, I sustained an 18-month-long romance based almost entirely on a shared love of indie-rock bands in the Elephant 6 collective (needless to say, it didn't work out). If this week's issue has a theme, it's about exploring experiences and ideas that are outside your preconceived notions of what you like or believe.
First we have the hilarious and delightful Retta, writing about how she, a black girl from Jersey, became an ice-hockey fan. It involves a personalized jersey, a bonding session with Colin Hanks, and an epic Vine called "They Can Get It." Next up we have the novelist Caroline Kepnes, whom you may remember from our winter-fiction issue. Caroline writes about deciding whether or not to get bangs cut, but, of course, her moving yet funny essay is about so much more than a little fringe. It's about how changing your hair can give you a sense of control over a world that sometimes feels chaotic, cruel, and deeply unfair.
At Lenny HQ, we have lots of political disagreements and differing ideologies. But the one thing we all agree on is the matter of abortion. (We're pro-choice. Duh.) This week, Mattie Kahn explores an assertion made by the anti-choice side: the notion that the widespread availability and dissemination of ultrasounds has made Americans in their 20s and 30s less supportive of abortion rights. It's a fascinating, wonderfully reported look at the social impact of a Facebook feed full of sonogram images.
Then we have Sadie Stein writing an impassioned, heartfelt defense of "retro food" — the prefab stuff that appeared in '50s cookbooks and usually involves canned soup of some kind. And finally, Jami Attenberg is back, with an essay about buying her first home. Jami had a fantastic, and cheap, New York apartment, and she defined herself, in part, by living there. The view became marred over the years with new construction, and she writes about finding a new self, and a new home, in New Orleans.
In the spirit of Lenny No. 33, your assignment for this week is to try something out that you thought you'd hate, just to see if maybe some part of you might like it. For me that means tasting matcha, which I refused to do previously because it is too trendy and I'm obnoxious. I just drank a few sips of some matcha iced tea my husband bought, which contains other thoroughly hippie ingredients like apple cider vinegar. It was earthy and not entirely unpleasant!
I hope trying a new activity means something semi-joyful for you.
Xo,
Jess, Lenny editor in chief | | | | | | | | | | | | How I Became a Hockey Fan | | | | By Retta | | |
If you follow me on social media, you may know that I am an LA Kings fan. I'm not kuh-ray-zee, but I am definitely enthusiastic. I love me some Kaaannnngggsss. I know that meeting a black woman with a love for hockey is a bit like stumbling upon a unicorn in the woods … or a unicorn anywhere. I'm sure it'd be just as surreal finding a unicorn in downtown Chicago. But here I am.
So how does a black girl from Jersey become a hockey fan?
I was on Twitter one night reading my @ mentions when I saw a tweet from the LA Kings account inviting me to come to a game:
That last one was just so y'all would know I AM LEGEND.
I decided to go, and took my friend Ted with me to the game, because I didn't know shit about hockey. He's a big sports fan, so I figured he'd be interested in this version of "lacrosse on ice." We had the VIP hookup, which means we had free valet parking. And while valet parking at Staples for Kings games is wayyyyy cheaper than, say, for a Lakers game, free is free. It made me feel fancy.
When we got there, we were greeted by Pat, a handsome bearded young man who is the director of digital media for the Los Angeles Kings, a.k.a. the guy behind the tweets. He was with Heather, a delightfully sunny blonde. They introduced themselves, and then Pat handed me an official jersey that read TREAT YO SELF on the back. Pat was a big Parks and Rec fan, followed me on Twitter, thought I was funny and "legendary" at the live-tweet, which is what led to the now-monumental invite. He had had the jersey made for me. For ME. A total stranger had gifted me a personalized piece of clothing. I mean, the free parking was already enough to make the trip worth it, but now this? Needless to say, I was helluh geeked. I basically made this trip for the beer and ended up with a new article of clothing! The Kings coulda been the worst team in the league, but that simple gift opened my heart to these yet-unseen ice Vikings.
(Pat would later say in a radio interview that getting me to become a Kings fan is one of his proudest moments. And I told him it was the jersey, homie. It. Was. The. Jersey.)
Once we got inside, Heather took us through some heavy double doors that were manned by a security guy who was very serious about checking that our tickets allowed us on this level. We entered a hallway that looked like it could serve as the passageway for deliveries, i.e., it was not pretty, so I was wondering, Where the hell is this chick taking us? As if reading my mind, she told us: "We're going to the Chairman's Room." Not gonna lie, my posture straightened a little, and I strode as though newly knighted. Your girl was doin' big thangs.
The Chairman's Room turned out to be a li'l barroom that had snacks and TVs playing sports channels. There was an older black couple at the bar, and for me it wasn't a big deal cuz this is LA. Black folks are everywhere, right? But the novelty was lost on me because I forgot where I was. I was at a hockey game, in the Chairman's Room, where people with the baller-baller/shot-caller tickets hang out. The novelty was not lost on the older gentleman, who, upon seeing me, lit up with such excitement that I thought maybe I knew him. I didn't. He was like, "Hey, sistuh!" A little thrown by his eagerness, I was like, "Heyyyy … sir." And then it dawned on me. We were THREE unicorns in a basement bar. Even this unicorn couldn't believe it.
When it was time for "tip-off" (that's what I called it cuz, as I mentioned, I didn't know shit about hockey), we left the Chairman's Room. Heather directed us toward a group of people gathering near a tunnel, and that's when I saw the players. They were click-clacking right toward us. They were fucking HUGE. They looked like the Chicago Bears defensive line if they wore lifts in their cleats. Just enormous. This piqued my interest. Nothing makes a big gal like myself feel petite and feminine like a pack of giants striding by on the way to a brawl — literally. Hockey is basically a melee on skates with a few goals here and there. I like to call it the Clash of the Ice Titans.
We had second-row seats and were next to Colin Hanks and a friend of his. Colin and I had recently met at a staged reading, so it felt as though I had a crew. I placed my beer in the seat cup holder and opened the program to see what these titans looked like without helmets. I was pleasantly surprised to find that more than one of them was hot like fish grease. Coupled with how large they were, this made me feel warm things inside. I promptly pulled out my phone and created my first hockey VineVid/tweet, called "They Can Get It."
Both Colin and Ted tried to explain the game to me, but they might as well have been speaking Swahili for as much as I understood. I did, however, make an analogy that Colin was impressed with: "icing" is to hockey what intentional grounding is to football. He said, "I can't believe I've never thought to make that comparison," and I thought I was a sporting genius. But that was as far as my genius went. To this day, I don't get how the players know exactly when to substitute from the bench without so much as a hand gesture.
I was having such a good time that even Bailey the Lion had me in stitches, which is quite a feat, seeing as mascots freak me the frack out. By the end of the second period, we were down 2–1, but no matter. I was in hog heaven because I had a cold Newcastle and live, thrilling, action-packed entertainment.
My bubble was burst when Ted told me that if the Kings lost the game, I would be considered bad juju and would likely not be invited back. I panicked as though I were about to miss the last flight home for Christmas. That third period started, and I'd never cheered so hard for something I didn't understand in my LIFE. We scored two goals that period and won that game. I looked at my Twitter feed at the end, and there were tweets regaling me as good luck! I reveled in the honor as though I had actually had anything to do with the night's win.
After that, I was hooked. I attended several games the following season. I would always bring my jersey and put it on once I got there, because I didn't want to do anything different from my last "good luck" effort. Because I attended games as a guest of the organization, I was given prime seats. A few times I sat in the owner's box, but more often than not, I was seated on the glass near the team, and that was my favorite. I was ALL IN. I was a superstitious, jersey-wearing, glass-banging, full-fledged Kings fan.
The Kings made it to the Stanley Cup Finals the following season. I was there when we won the Stanley Cup in game five against the New York Rangers. I screamed, cheered, and howled as loud as any die-hard fan there that night. The energy in Staples was like nothing I've ever experienced. As a Duke alum and Blue Devil fan who was in the stands at our last national-championship win away from Cameron Indoor, I can tell you it's nothing like being in your home stadium and having nearly all 18,000 in attendance lose their shit because their boys just did their damn thing. So, yes, I'm officially a hockey fan. Like a first-time gambler hitting the Vegas progressive jackpot with only a $20 bill, or a newbie winning a superfecta on their first trip to the track, it's been a perfect storm for a vuh-ry suh-rious problem. This unicorn is hooked! #GoKingsGo
Retta is a codependent actress, clotheshorse, coffee drinker, handbag aficionado, joke slinger, sometime vocalist, and apparent "writer" who owes a world of gratitude to both cachaça AND Uber. | | | | | | | | | | | | In Sickness, Health, and Bangs | | | | By Caroline Kepnes | | |
A few months ago, I woke up in that Hmm, should I get bangs? state. Your friends always say no. The Internet mostly says no. But those who say yes are loud, passionate. Guys who don't know what a topknot is know how they feel about bangs. Everyone has an opinion, everyone is right. The anti-bangs camp claims victory over Kate Middleton's rumored regret about her bangs. They point to Michelle Obama's return to life without bangs as proof that she also thought fringe was a mistake. The pro-bangers offer pictures of the New Queen of Bangs, Zooey Deschanel. The anti-bangers counter, they brandish the very same photos, they scream at us: You are not Zooey Deschanel, and you will not look like her if you get bangs. And my favorite of late: the adorable three-year-old girl who steals the scissors to shorten her bangs and give herself a meme-worthy mullet.
Her defense of bangs is simple, playful, spirited. "I was just practicing!"
With any decision pertaining to your body, the advice leads you back to you, to what feels right in your skin. I was fixated on this sensation that my hair wanted to go forward. You know how it is. One day you're a productive member of society, the next day you start pulling the hair forward and trying to figure out how the bangs would look. Then you see a random picture of your young self with bangs, and my God, look how they framed your face. Look how they work! And then it's back to the Internet, where you are warned of this dangerous path that starts with your mistaking your childhood face for your adulthood face. The Internet says you can't get bangs because of a second-grade classroom photo. Oh well.
I was driving myself crazy, and it was a waste, because this isn't life or death. It's fucking bangs.
A sudden flash of my dad, back when he had just been recently diagnosed with bladder cancer, asking the oncologist if he would lose his hair during chemo. Probably not. My dad was excited about that, a true optimist. Stage IV cancer and he's nodding, raising his eyebrows, this was good news about the hair. And then he started chemo, and it was horrible. ER trips and vomit, decreasing health, weight loss, hell on earth. But he didn't lose his hair. And he would brush it in this way that was so specific and tender, like he was thanking it with his eyes, focusing on it, treasuring it, believing it, the way it whispered, What do these doctors know about anything? Look at me, look at you, you're gonna be fine. It let him crack jokes about losing his life and keeping his hair. Hair is comforting. It's warmth, shelter. This is why it's tragic for people when it goes away.
So now this was a philosophical debate. I could go through life like, It's just hair! It grows out. Be one of those YOLO people, stop scouring the Internet for pros and cons. Just be grateful that I have hair. Health. Why waste my precious time thinking about hair? Well … we all know why: It's. Your. Hair. You can be dying, but if your hair looks good, you feel good. Also, you deal with your hair every day. This isn't should-I-buy-that-dress or even should-I-get-that-tattoo, this is in the aching middle. And then the crescendo into meta-melodrama: BANGS WILL RUIN YOUR FUCKING LIFE AND YOU WILL WANT TO DIE BECAUSE YES. YOLO IS RIGHT. YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE AND IMAGINE WASTING YOUR LIFE PINNING YOUR BANGS BACK WITH BOBBY PINS THAT ARE TOO DARK FOR YOUR HAIR?
My brother was in town during my Pre-Holiday-Season Bangs Crisis of 2015. We went out to lunch, and he's talking about the Lamborghini parked by the restaurant, and I'm like, Do you think I should get bangs? And he's like, Sure! We finished lunch. I dragged him to a hair salon, promising it would be quick. And then I got bangs. Thick, true bangs. That first walk down the street past the Lamborghini was a mind fuck. I was shaking.
I forgot about what it feels like when they blow up off your forehead, even though I read about this, have sense memories of this. It's not that they looked so bad, but it's that in-your-skin feeling, the sensation of having these many short hairs, knowing you're going to have to deal with them.
More bad news: I would have to go to salons to get them trimmed. I am not a blowout/salon person. Most salons are not like Truvy's in Steel Magnolias. They're not oozing with the appealingly relaxed malaise of the Roseanne episodes where she's sweeping the floors of Arthur's Beauty Parlor, building her confidence. Nowhere do I feel less authoritative and communicative than in a fucking hair salon when I'm trying to describe long layers. I leave feeling like a tired toddler. Depleted. I know all this, but still I went and got bangs, which is like signing up for weekly trips to the salon.
A flash of college: the time I tried to trim my long hair with fabric scissors and wound up with an accidental bob and little above-the-brow bangs. Like way above the brow.
A flash of middle school: that day I stubbornly got a Big Bad Bangs Perm. I cried. My mom tried to comfort me with that it-will-grow-out logic. But who cares about what will happen when you look like a poodle? She promised me I didn't look like a dog, and I promised her she was wrong. We got home, and I heard her whisper to my dad, Go easy. She's upset.
And then he saw me. He hit the mute button on the remote. At first he didn't say anything. He smiled, he furrowed his brow. But then he started barking. Like a dog. We were a laughing family, lots of teasing. I knew he was being funny, trying to distract me, lighten the mood. My mom tried to keep a straight face — not easy, because I did look like a poodle. But I fought to hold my ground, railing against this inconsiderate, inhumane barking! How dare they make light of this tragedy? I wanted to be mad, serious. When you mess up your hair, there's a special kind of darkness. You failed to listen to the most important voice of all, the one in your head whispering, Don't get a perm, you won't look like Elizabeth Shue in Adventures in Babysitting. It's on you.
In spite of all this, of course I'll get bangs again someday. You mess with your hair because it's there, it's yours, and you think you know best. Never mind the commercials that tell us that we have the goods and we just need the products, or the stylists who tell us that we need their skills, or the websites providing simple instructions (ha-ha) for a fishtail braid that will change your life. When your hair is on point, it's a sublime, volatile answer. It's a temporary outer peace.
Another flash of my dad: sicker now. In the weeds with spreading disease, barely moving. His hair started to get wiry. It wasn't falling out, but it was changing. It was turning his back on him. It was as if he had secretly thought he was going to be OK because of his hair, no matter what the doctors said. Now it sighed: Sorry, buddy, it's not gonna work out for us after all. My dad didn't talk about it much, didn't brush with the same gusto. I could see that he was different. Something in his hair reached him and spoke to him when nothing else did.
Right now I'm in the weeds in my low-stakes hair battle, growing out the bangs, so life is all wisps and bobby pins. Not so many blowouts, because those were disorienting. I look in the mirror, Who is that? I overthink and marvel, How do they use your hair to make you look like a different person? Hair is creepy contradiction, Medusa, Cher, back and forth. If you screw it up with a bad cut, if you go and catch a nasty cancer, if you commit a murder and leave a telltale strand, or if you spawn a child, whatever you do, your hair holds your identity. It's with you every day, reflecting your vitamin deficiency in a mirror, your insides, things you decide like bangs, things you had no say in, disease, your home life/proximity to scissors without parental supervision, everything, all of you, all the time. No wonder we get a little sensitive with our hair. In sickness and in health, in bangs.
Caroline Kepnes is the author of You and Hidden Bodies. | | | | | | | | | | | | Is This the Ultrasound Generation? | | | | By Mattie Kahn | | |
A fetus became Internet famous in July 2014. Redditor meancloth shared a scan of the not-quite baby. It was giving the world a thumbs-up. The web dubbed it "Fetus Fonzie." Within 24 hours, two million people had seen it.
"Ultrasound looks good," meancloth commented. And it did. At 18 weeks, the Fonz was as adorable as the contents of a gray-scaled amniotic sac can be. The Today show covered the story. So did Jezebel and People and the Daily Mail. Six months later, a writer for the conservative magazine The National Review, Howard Slugh, deemed the shot of "Fetus Fonzie" in utero "one of the most profound pro-life moments of 2014."
"When a matter is as hotly charged as the abortion debate, the mechanism for sharing a message can prove as important as the message itself," he wrote. "Ultrasounds, and other improving technologies, can help the pro-life movement persuade previously unreachable individuals."
Slugh wrote that as science and medicine advance, pro-choice advocates would have to face a new set of facts: "A mother looking at an ultrasound of her ten- or twelve-week-old child will know that this is no mere clump of cells, bit of tissue, or tumor." Instead, finer-tuned technology and clearer ultrasounds would force people to reevaluate "the entire abortion debate."
A week later, Ashley McGuire, a senior fellow at the Catholic Association, elaborated on the culture wars in USA Today. "[T]he pro-life movement is growing younger and stronger," she wrote. Because of the prevalence of prenatal scans on social media, young people know that fetuses are people. She celebrated the fact that in the first four years of the 2010s "more pro-life laws [have been] passed by state legislatures than in the entire previous decade." It is the mission of the movement to protect "the most innocent lives," McGuire wrote. "And we won't stop until we've won."
She titled her op-ed "The Ultrasound Generation."
It's a good headline, neatly expressing the anti-choice movement's conviction that millennials raised in a culture that celebrates and even fetishizes the prenatal picture have been hardwired to oppose abortion. And it's backed up by some research, which finds that liberal-leaning millennials tend to consider the moral valence of abortion more than traditional liberals once did.
Except most of the hard data is messier. Is it true that more millennials believe abortion should be outlawed compared to previous generations? If they do, how did social media influence them? And how many "likes" would it take to make, say, me a convert?
Scottish physician Dr. Ian Donald started to develop the ultrasound in 1958, realizing it could help doctors locate and treat tumors. But he soon decided to try the machines out on expectant mothers. He reasoned that "the most common abdominal tumor in women is pregnancy," which is charming. With a peek into the shadowy womb, the scans could reveal once-obscured fetal anomalies, the size of the fetus, and the placement of its organs. By the 1980s, the ultrasound was standard obstetric practice.
Later in his career, Donald started printing photos from the ultrasound to give to patients. Women could have a medical procedure and take home a keepsake — two-for-one. By all accounts, Donald wanted both to reassure his most nervous patients and to facilitate a deeply felt prenatal bond. When he retired from medicine, he became a fierce anti-abortion activist. He produced a film, Human Development Before Birth, which screened on international television for at least a decade.
When the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade to legalize abortion in the United States in 1972, the anti-choice movement became even more convinced that the ultrasound could be marshaled in service of the movement. Johanna Schoen writes in her book on abortion in a post-Roe world that the dissemination of the ultrasound in the media was intended "to provide the public with a view of abortion from the perspective of the fetus." That is, the personal is political.
According to the most recent data, 55 percent of millennials think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That statistic is consistent with a Pew report released in 2014 that concluded that 56 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 32 believe in widespread abortion access. But those numbers do not deter McGuire. She points out to me that a full 59 percent of Gen Xers support legalization in all or most cases, which means that millennials are less pro-choice than previous generations. The dip may not seem substantial, but McGuire and so many others contend that it is just the start of a newly invigorated pro-life movement. Eighties and '90s babies were raised in an environment that normalized the prenatal picture, McGuire says. She reminds me that a scan "taped to the refrigerator door" is how many of us met our brothers and sisters. Raised on social media, millennials know what even one photo can do.
"This is the culture," McGuire observes. "It seems almost expected now that when you're pregnant, and as soon as you feel comfortable telling people, you put the ultrasound picture up, and people immediately respond." It's anecdotal, she concedes, but McGuire tells me that pregnancy announcements rack up more likes than any other type of status update on Facebook. "It's unifying," she says. "It's not like anyone is going to say, 'I'm pro-choice. I can't like this photo.'" For McGuire, that demonstrates a common cultural conviction. But research is more equivocal on whether a "positive response" online translates into an IRL stance on abortion. Does what we see on Facebook and Twitter predispose us to certain real-world values? Is it even possible to empathize on the web?
Science says: sort of. A 2015 study circulated in Computers in Human Behavior revealed that "virtual empathy was positively correlated with real-world empathy." That is, people can commiserate and celebrate and even really emote online. Empathy may be less potent on the web than it is in the real world, but it exists. It's possible that a person could feel for a fetus she saw on a computer screen. Social media has made abortion "a much more personal and much less political issue for millennials," says CNN commentator and conservative pundit S.E. Cupp. When a fetus shows up in our newsfeeds, chances are we know the person who shared it. Even before that child is born, he or she can exist in our world.
Dr. Katrina Kimport, a faculty member at the University of California–San Francisco, specializes in making sense of women's individual and social experiences of abortion, and she has spent years researching the impact that prenatal scans have on women. According to her most recent work, about 42 percent of women who get an abortion in a state that gives them the option to view the ultrasound choose to do so. And, she continues, a woman under 25 is even more likely than an older woman to want to view her ultrasound. "So, these anti-choice activists are correct" that millennials have an increased interest in viewing, Kimport says.
But the statistics do not speak to what a woman who views the screen chooses to do about it. To grasp the effect that ultrasounds have on women, Kimport studied over 15,000 abortion visits over the course of one year. For the 85 percent of women who said they were "highly certain" abortion was the best decision for them, Kimport found that the choice to view the ultrasound had no impact on their plans to terminate. Even for a woman who was in what Kimport deems "a less certain space," the decision to see the sonogram only slightly increased the odds that she would continue with her pregnancy.
"So what does that tell us? That tells us that for people who are unsure, this may be part of how they make a decision," Kimport says. But Kimport adds that she thinks it would be a mistake to use that data to conclude that ultrasounds have the power to make women suddenly want children. The women who see an ultrasound and decide to carry pregnancies to term haven't recanted some previous conviction. They haven't changed their minds, even, because their minds were never made up to begin with.
When Kimport asked women who chose to view a prenatal scan how it made them feel, the results were even more revealing. "These were women at all gestational ages," she explains. "We're not just talking about women who were looking at a six-week embryonic sac. Some of these women were at the 22-week mark." Kimport and her team decided to let women write in responses, eschewing a traditional multiple-choice model. "Women had a really vast array of reactions," Kimport says. But the most common was not having one. After looking at the screen, most women reported feeling nothing at all.
"We know this from decades of research," Kimport continues. "Women make abortion decisions in relationship to the circumstances of their lives. And what you see on a screen is not going to change your financial situation. It's not going to change or reduce the needs of your existing children. It's not going to make a partner supportive or stop him from being abusive. The visualization on the screen doesn't change the reasons that make women seek abortions in the first place."
Advocates will tell you that ultrasounds are facts. They tell the truth — that fetuses are babies, that cells grow into people. Anti-abortion lawmakers want to keep it that way. Twenty-five states have passed bills that dictate how abortion providers administer ultrasounds. In Louisiana, Texas, and Wisconsin, laws insist that they not only give any woman seeking an abortion an ultrasound, but also describe it to her. In Oklahoma, a provider is required to tell his or her patient that personhood starts at conception.
The idea is that when a could-be mom sees a heartbeat flash across a screen, she will think better of her choices. This is no surreptitious aim. When the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Texas "verbal description" law to be constitutional, it did so based on a conviction that the procedure communicates only "truthful, accurate information." The fact that the practice "may cause a woman to choose not to abort her pregnancy only reinforces its relevance to an informed decision."
But an ultrasound is not incontrovertible truth, Kimport explains. The circumstances that drive a woman to seek an abortion dictate how she sees it, scrutinizes it, makes sense of it. That is, we find a thumbs-up when we search for one. "There is not an automatic way that a picture is going to make all women feel," Kimport says.
So, is this the ultrasound generation? That really depends on how you look at it.
Mattie Kahn is a writer at elle.com. | | | | | | | | | | | | In Defense of Retro Foods | | | | By Sadie Stein | | | |
My grandmother cooked one thing well: wine cake. She cooked other things constantly — a 24–7 parade of scorched stews, gray hamburgers, blackened pancakes — but this one thing was actually tasty. It somehow managed to break the curse that lay over the land of my grandparents' kitchen.
Where did she get the recipe? Hard to say. Versions of this cake were all over the place mid-century and can still be found in any community cookbook. Basically, you dump cake mix, eggs, vegetable oil, instant pudding, and really cheap cooking sherry into a bowl, bake it, then soak the resulting bundt with plenty of sherry-sugar icing. It's chemical and gooey and (obviously) keeps forever. If you want to serve it in a truly authentic way, stick an old, dusty, scented pink candle in the hole in the center, and never light it.
The general quality of the food wasn't really her fault, or at least it was only partially her fault. Her husband, my grandfather, was "a character," but only because he proudly refused to go to a doctor for a real diagnosis. The short, funny version is that he was an eccentric rocket scientist from Arkansas who never met a used pressure cooker or brass animal he didn't like, bought books by the metric ton, and covered his once-valuable Northern California property with sheds, boats, piles of salvaged rubble, and the occasional tractor-trailer. The reality is somewhere between that and Faulkner, with some Hoarders: Buried Alive thrown in for good measure.
His food scavenging could not be contained by the "traditional kitchen." It would not be an exaggeration to say that he added a room to the house to accommodate an immense, never-cleaned deep freezer. Or that, on one notorious occasion, he picked up a half-eaten sourdough-bread bowl from the beach, caked with sand and residual chowder, and brought it home for his lunch the next day. Everyone was sick, a lot.
Several times a week — far more often than necessary — he went shopping: a produce stand that sold him stuff they'd been about to throw away; a Navy commissary with a bargain bin; and — my favorite — the Rainbow: a discount supermarket that carried only discontinued or damaged products and out-of-season Christmas candies. My grandfather regarded expiration dates as academic, weevils as a valuable source of protein, and mold on cheese as something that suckers paid large sums for.
In short, wine cake was a blessed relief, and a staple at every festive gathering.
Wine cake is, to modern eyes, gross. A lot of recipes from that period in America are: many used mixes and canned goods and other convenience foods that today just seem low-rent. And it's not just that they used them — that anyone can understand, when women had to put three meals on the table a day — it's the zeal. It's the weird, baroque combinations: psychedelic, mayo-filled gelatin salads; bananas wrapped in bologna and napped with packaged hollandaise; avocados in various now-horrifying permutations. It's like anything in its natural form needed to be disguised, heightened, touched, and improved by man and science.
In their 1981 Square Meals, the cultural anthropologists Jane and Michael Stern devote a whole section to "The Cuisine of Suburbia," with subheadings on dried-onion soup, Jell-O, Bisquick, and can-heavy casseroles. This was a pace of life set by returning soldiers and the prosperity of the boom years — a far cry from wartime austerity — and like so many things about that era, it's a fascinating combination of optimism and nihilism. As the Sterns write, "This problematic cuisine is irresistible. Encouraged, indeed created as it was by food companies, it is far from innocent."
This was not fundamentally home cooking; this was social food. Intended to impress, competitive. It was like, who could depart the most from nature? Who was furthest from the drudgery of the farm, and by virtue of her multiple TVs and family sedan, most exposed to advertisers' wiles?
It's easy to make fun of this kind of recipe: five-can casserole (containing five random cans, one definitely chow mein); five-cup salad (one of the cups is mini-marshmallows); Sterno-luaus and luridly hued Polynesian punches. It's everything we don't eat now: bad for bodies, landfills, and other living things. Not so much farm-to-table but chemist-to-table. For the past ten years or so, or ever since postmodernism came to a gift shop near you, people have been laughing at gross, old-fashioned recipes. Galleries of regrettable food, grotesquely flavored aspics, combinations that seem like emetic exercises are all over the Internet, the gift-book table. And it's true: to our eyes, a mayo-and-banana mold with pimento breaks about every aesthetic rule we've been taught to value.
But there's something that doesn't feel good about mocking the aspirations of another generation of women. What we're making fun of, after all, is effort: we can deal with Spam and the canned soup, but maybe only as long as people didn't try too hard. And people tried so hard! Convenient though the components may have been, every package of Bisquick, every pouch of Jell-O, every can of tuna suggested a canvas for a sort of unironic excess that we can't even imagine! It's difficult, at least for me, to see Douglas Sirk without seeing Todd Haynes, or Campbell's without Warhol. In fact, it's kind of scary, because it evokes a world where we're not onto everything.
Anyway, a recipe like this is not good in spite of its toxicity; these same chemical components are what make it so good. Although I admit to a Proustian obsession with wine cake, I will happily go on the record saying that it is objectively delicious. The flavor is rich, buttery, refined but accessible. The cake, rich with oil and pudding and soaked in glaze, is almost unbelievably moist. Obviously, it's cheap.
I think of my grandmother, with her tiny piece of modern aspiration in that recipe binder, the one thing that she wanted to get right and couldn't mess up. The one that, for a moment, made everything normal. A recipe that can survive that much dysfunction and emerge edible is a family heirloom.
Sadie Stein is a writer and a contributing editor at The Paris Review. She lives in New York. | | | | | | | | | | | | Appreciating the View | | | | By Jami Attenberg | | |
This is not a "Goodbye to all that" essay, this is a "Hello to everything" essay.
I moved into my crumbling loft building in Williamsburg in the early aughts for three reasons: It was affordable, I loved the barren beauty of the neighborhood, and there was a remarkable view. All day I sat at my desk staring at a computer screen, trying to write something that would make a difference, so what rose beyond that screen needed to be inspiring in some way. And it was special, this view. There was the Williamsburg Bridge, both stoic and solid, yet constantly in motion with traffic, and the city behind it, with the Empire State Building changing its lights every night. Sure, I also had to look at the garbage-strewn rooftops of a few shitty warehouses beneath that, not to mention the burned-out cars on the street below, but look up and out, my friends! Look up and out.
I never dreamed of much beyond the view. It's hard to make a living as a fiction writer, not to mention my first three books didn't sell particularly well. Once, I floated the idea to my accountant that someday I might buy a home, and she laughed at me. No one will ever give you a mortgage, she said. Your finances are too unstable; for God's sake, you're a fiction writer.
So I committed to the life of an artist: I would write my books, tell my stories, work until I was dead. I didn't care much about the money anyway. You can't. You have to make your art because you love it and because it will kill you to stop. Not because you want to buy a house someday. That dream was for someone else.
And so for many years, the two things that defined me were my writing and my apartment. My life was a whirlwind, and I didn't care about finding the center of it. I threw myself into my work and my career and my life in Brooklyn, with Manhattan always outside my window. Frequently I caught myself dazed, staring. That sky was good for maintaining an open mind and visualizing hundreds of pages. I would never own a home, or have savings, job security, or benefits. I always felt as long as I could look out at Manhattan through a wall of windows and was still publishing my work, I was doing something right.
But how long did I think that view would last? A fool would say forever, but New York City is no fool. Five years ago, one apartment building went up in my neighborhood, blocking most of the bridge, then three years ago the warehouses were torn down. One was replaced with an apartment complex for the Hasidic population last year, and then a fancy condo went up this past summer; another is in progress. Chipping away at the view. There was more street traffic, more construction. My neighborhood was barren no longer. Every winter, for four years, I went to New Orleans to write, and each spring, I returned to Brooklyn to find a different chunk of the skyline gone. I have uttered the phrase "I had a good run" approximately a thousand times, never once taking consolation from it.
Somewhere in there, my career turned. The hard work paid off. My accountant no longer scoffed at the idea of my buying a new home. I fell more in love with New Orleans with every visit. It wasn't my shimmering city full of big dreams; it was something calmer, deeper. The slow strolls I took at sunset quieted my soul. What if I just bought a house in New Orleans? What if I just threw everything into that life? It had been so many years since I had considered it as a possibility. Was I there now? Had I become that person?
A few months ago, I began to look at houses to buy in New Orleans. I couldn't afford much, so I allowed myself only a few requirements, the most important of which was a good writing space. I'd never have that view back in New York, but maybe I could find something just as special, even if it was completely different.
One day I walked with my real-estate agent into a tiny shotgun house. I felt myself drawn straight through the side hall to the back room. There were two large windows plus a windowed door. Sunlight everywhere. A green backyard, with an enormous, sumptuous loquat tree hanging low over the fence from the neighbor's yard. Weeds and wildflowers. A shack in another neighbor's yard. More trees in the distance, and a big, blue, unstirring sky.
And then I found myself uttering these words: "If I lived here, I would never want to leave." No one was more surprised than me when I said it; they rose up from somewhere new in me. I didn't even know that was what I was specifically looking for — to find a place I never wanted to leave — but there I was, almost immediately feeling at home.
A flurry of negotiations followed. I signed away the contents of my bank account, a decade's worth of work. It always feels crazy right before your life changes, but I don't think you should question the crazy; you should embrace it. And anyway, changing your life, being in control of where you live, securing stability for yourself, carving out a new space for yourself, getting an identity as a homeowner, that's not crazy at all. That's a goddamn gift you give yourself.
A month later, the house was mine. I type this now staring out into the backyard, my dog asleep in the grass after a long, contemplative morning walk through the streets of our neighborhood. Here, I think, is the new place I will grow into the next version of myself. I can hear a train whistle in the distance. There are mourning doves that alight the fence, and I think of them as my birds. At night, I am no longer greeted by the ever-changing colors of the Empire State Building, but my neighbors turn on the string lights hung alongside their house and a soft glow illuminates my backyard. Who is to say that someday that view won't change? I don't like to think about what could replace it, so precious a place is New Orleans. But I promise to treasure it while I have it. I have learned now never to take my view for granted.
Jami Attenberg is the author of five books of fiction, including The Middlesteins and, most recently, Saint Mazie (@jamiattenberg). | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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