OHC: Omnivore Herbivore Carnivore

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 20:02:00 +0000

I've set up a tumblr account for my book, which you can find here. Please visit!

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Mon, 07 May 2012 13:47:00 +0000

My updated post on the Swedish Racist Cake media-event went up last week at the NYU Press blog, here. I'm reposting below.

So, people have been sending me the link to the premier article on the ‘racist cake’ spectacle, asking me what I think of the most recent eruption of a trope that I have been talking about for years, of the black body fantasized as edible. (You can find the article I published in the Eating Callaloo anniversary issue in 2007 here; my book, Racial Indigestion, will discuss this image, as it manifests in the 19th century, at length. Below are a couple of images from the book, forthcoming from NYU Press.)

But hey, all you need is one drop, as it were, of human decency to see why this is wrong. It’s not just the image, it’s the minister’s seeming delight in the image. It’s her penetration of the black figure’s mouth with a silver spoon. It’s the photograph shot from the cake vagina-up, the shock of blackicing cooling on red velvet dainty. It’s the artist rendition of the woman’s mouth as open, smiling and jaw-broken and therefore always-already assenting to her fate. There are a thousand historical trajectories that “feed” into this, among them centuries of sugar (and now chocolate neo-) plantation slavery that tied sweetness to the laboring bodies that produced the commodity, as the thinnest form of cultural reward. Then too there is the erotic history of eating as a dissident and violent pleasure; the market in Africans that attempted to reduce them to commodities; the fundamentally damaged mode of non-relation that constitutes unquestioned whiteness as an ever-voracious lack and punitive desire for the ‘other’ – now generally understood through the now well-rehearsed but still powerful phrase coined by bell hooks: “Eating the Other.”

Living in North America, reading this image in North America, we need to first honor the pointed re-opening of psychic and affective wounds that this image must have produced.

And yet, it is worth asking, how many lenses mediate this image? A Swedish and Afro-Swedish event that became a U.S. event, more than an event, the kind of event-cascade that only the social media age can produce, there is a lot of momentum riding behind the arrival of an image like this one. Some of the response has been directed at excavating the artist’s intent (best described here); still others have criticized the response as a kind of gustatory pleasure itself, (“Have a Slice of Outrage!”). In general the response has been one of hurt, disgust, a return of historical trauma played out as shock, anger, apology, explanation. So ends another news cycle, affixed on a narrative of blame that is thus endlessly recyclable.

More interesting to me is the admixture of comedy, terror and substitution that has swirled beneath and between the dissemination of the event and its fraught reception, a critical breakdown that could only mean one thing: the West’s deep recognition of these images. After all, only last year, Penguin Australia’s accidental publication of a cookbook that called for “ground black people” instead of “ground black pepper” actually boosted the cookbook’s sales; and Naomi Campbell (magnificently unfurling her cloak here) threatened to sue Cadbury’s over an ad for Bliss chocolate that said “Move over Naomi, there’s a new diva in town.” Being represented as chocolate was hurtful, Campbell told the press, and she was considering every possible form of redress.

We don’t like to look at these images, but it is worth thinking about what is lost – what forms of political passivity are acceded to – when we turn away. These orificial politics, as awful as they are to look at, lay bare the guts and underbelly of contemporary biopolitics, making visible the rawness of the black subject and citizen’s vulnerability to multiple forms of psychic and bodily damage, and finally, debility. (The last images are, after all, of a radically disabled black woman, cut off at the top of her thighs.)

I cannot speak to the value of the artist, Makode Linde’s, work, but I want to submit that, alongside his putative intention of rendering visible the agony of female circumcision (although the fact that he also considered making a chocolate Naomi Campbell might indicate that the circumcision issue was something of an afterthought), his work ultimately resonated because it redirected the political gaze to the mouth, the one site in the body that it is socially permissible to open in public, and that therefore holds symbolic power as a metaphor for the ways that power cuts into everyday living. Whether or not they intended it, then, Linde and the media forces that detonated the initial scandal around his work, forced us to look down the gorge of alimentary politics.

It was not, in short, the vagina that shocked us, but rather the eating, laughter and – in the videos – screaming that produced the most jarring effects. In the photographs and videos of the cake event, everyone laughs, no one more than the monstrous head of the black cake-woman, whose head is actually the male artist’s in female drag. The underbelly of the joke, Freud tells us, is aggression. Here, comedy sits atop a mountain of political terror, some of it deployed by the artist on the white women who encircle his performance, secure, momentarily, in their non-implication in history. Effaced as ever is the presence of black women, as agents of self-representation, as artists and historical actors, as legible witnesses to their own ongoing survival despite the comedy that adheres to their pain.

In laughter, in agony, while eating or kissing, the mouth – opened at will, wrenched open, slackened, weeping – forces our attention to the wet rawness of the sites where power lays us bare, where the line between the autonomic body and the social world softens to a mucosal wetness. The laugh opens the mouth and bares the body to the other; so does eating. But there are the eaters, and then there are the eaten.

Sianne Ngai at Pomona today, talking about affect, aesthetics and politics

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:54:00 +0000

* - poster by Blake Gilmore, Pomona College student

Eating Blackness - the Racist Swedish Cake

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 18:41:00 +0000

So, people have been sending me this link all morning, which discusses the most recent eruption of a trope that I have been talking about for years, of the black body fantasized as edible. The link to the article I published in Callaloo in 2007 is to the right, and my book discusses the image at length.

But hey, all you need is one drop, as it were, of human decency to see why this is wrong. It's not just the image, it's the minister's utter delight in the image. It's her rape of the black figure's mouth. It's the shot from the vagina up. It's the artist rendition of the woman's mouth as open, smiling and broken and therefore as always-already assenting to her fate. There are a million historical trajectories that feed into this - sugar plantation slavery that sutured sweetness to the laboring bodies that made it; the erotic history of eating as a dissident and violent pleasure; the market in Africans that reduced them to commodities; the fundamentally damaged mode of non-relation that constitutes unquestioned whiteness as an ever-voracious lack for the other.

I hope that Sweden gets a solid case of Racial Indigestion. I cannot imagine what kind of pain this is causing black communities today.

Recipe, Gesture, Time, Archive

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 03:25:00 +0000

Paper given at "The Political Sensuality of the Archive" panel, chaired and organized by Dana Luciano, at C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, April 12, 2012

* - please do not circulate or cite this article without permission - *

So I want to begin my show and tell with a gesture to what Elizabeth Freeman’s work has helped me understand is the erotohistoriography of the book that my book chapter is extracted from, a project that began with the image of one woman, let’s call her Martha Stewart, eating one thing, let’s call it whipped cream. If any of you have watched Stewart’s work lately, or recall it from its heyday in the mid-90s, you may recall that the narrative structure of her television show was always organized around the telos of her own pleasure. So: Martha Stewart wants to teach you how to beat whipped cream in the most labor-intensive and pretentious way; she sets the stage, deploys the props – copper bowl, special whisk with the extra ball inside - and explains the ingredients – 35% cream, vanilla and sugar. And then she beats the cream. I’m going to do it with a can of whipped cream: [here I spray the whipped cream into a glass]. And then every segment ends with Martha tasting the food and saying, mmmm it’s perfect. And that’s the money shot.

It was in trying to understand the ambiguously gendered, unambigiously raced, food pornography that was the white world of Martha Stewart in the 90s that I began to think about the strange and perverse stories that we tell about food in our culture, stories that, as I came to understand, the United States has been telling about itself for quite a while. I argued that we might profitably read the commercial space of food culture, in particular the strange washed-out interiors, transcendent food items, and uneaten meals of Martha Stewart’s high-WASP magazine, through related frames of race and the erotic. In particular, I came to believe that Stewart’s work was defined by its coy relationship to ideas of vice and appetite, organized around the logic of masturbation, specifically around the spectacle of Martha Stewart’s pleasure in her own product. In essence, I asked, is Martha Stewart a pornographer of (her own) white pleasure? And what, more specifically, are the histories that bolster this possibility?

Stewart’s work is now only one example of what is truly an unprecedented explosion in public and commercialized food and eating cultures. And while my questions in that paper were specific to Martha Stewart, in the book they reach back into the 18^th and 19^th centuries to ask: What is the historical relationship between food and race? How does an act which is so policed and so overdetermined—eating—also come to be affiliated with transgressive pleasure, with sex, sexuality, and an eroticism that is all its own?

In short, the key move in that paper, which became the key move in my book was to dislodge the object seemingly at the heart of the inquiry – food – in order to begin to excavate the pleasures, movements, narrative structures, and disciplinary imperatives that surround this socially-inflected, biological act. The project was, that is, less a biography of a commodity itself, a methodology central to much of the work of food studies, one of my fields of interest, and more an attempt to outline the textual and discursive history of an act whose invisibility and apparent naturalness functions in many ways as the apotheosis of the archival dream for unmediated access to the past, in this case via the apparently ahistorical perceptive work of the senses.

And here I’m thinking about the huge boom in single-commodity histories over the last decade - the it-narrative of our generation - or for instance, figures like Lucy Worsley or Ivan Day who reconstruct historical menus, like King George the Fifth’s stuffed swan or whatever. Worsley is the chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces in England, and Day runs the Leeds Symposium on Food History and both of them teach via historical reconstruction. Worsley is also a student of the discipline of experimental archaeology.

My argument then, and my critique of this kind of historical work as it takes place in relation to, if not the idea of taste, then the experience of flavor, is that this desire for the presence of the past critiqued by Derrida in Mal D’Archives, finds structural homology between the drive for an authentic and unmediated experience of the past, and the affective and sensual promise of advertising and food television, which seem to guarantee reproducible pleasures, which are themselves paradoxically first experienced by proxy. Arguably the other formal homology would be between these fields and pornography itself – both of them promising modes of sensory pleasure reproducible across time via, you know, viewer participation.

Still, and here we are indebted to Beth Freeman’s work we might mark the ways in which the archival work of the scholar of affect and sexuality is driven by “what arouses, kindles, whets, or itches.”

My own book offers very few recipes, and doesn’t ask the reader to make anything, however, it is similarly organized around the search of erotic pleasure that, as Linda Williams tells us, formed the basic narrative structure of the golden age of pornography, more specifically for the links between erotic and gustatory pleasure. This lead me, in the paper that appears in Unauthorized States to revisit the writing of Sylvester Graham, the reformer who channeled European anti-Onanist thinking into the republican political energies of the reform movements of the 1830s.

Propelled by Bruce Burgett’s work on considering eros and eroticism beyond the limits of what we have come to think of as “sex,” the paper rethinks eating as an act that is key to the history of biopolitics in the nineteenth-century United States and whose relation to discourses of vice and appetite continue to underline its contemporary representation. Grahamite biopower is located in the interspace between the state, from which it was excluded as a radical movement, the public sphere, where it competed with other reform movements to gain the people’s ears, and the nation, which it figured as an ideal futurity against which the present might be compared and regulated. As the child of both the temperance movement and anti-Onanism campaigns, the dietetic movement also styled itself as an attempt to press politically on the most intimate sphere of domestic life. Just as drink and masturbation decayed the body and the mind, so too did a diet embracing the foreign commodities made available by the expanded sphere of consumerism have a subversive and perverting effect on the antebellum American body – and a key figure in the chapter is the masturbating girl, whose vices Graham chases down with real zest. More specifically, to eat luxuriously was to stimulate oneself sexually and vice versa – fueled by these decadent foods the girl runs around the house rubbing up against guests and furniture - the cure for both was correct eating, in particular of farinaceous foods.

In doing so in a period of rapid national expansion, dietetic reform encountered the challenges generated by increasingly fraught definitions of race and empire, which it sought to manage by anchoring the nation to ecological and increasingly essentialized ideas of racial embodiment, in essence regulatory ideals of bodily performance that reformers like Graham sought to bolster via repetitive and ritualized acts of bodily hygiene, like eating. To eat white, for Graham, was to become white. But of course in his detailed narration of the failure of these ideals to be realized Graham succeeds most of all in outlining – and textually and aesthetically deploying - exactly those dissident pleasures – masturbation, luxurious eating – that he is most dedicated to stamping out. In other words, although the farinaceous foods have an important role to play in Graham’s work, it is the erotic possibilities seemingly offered by eating that Graham is most interested in containing.

Stewart of course, a century and a half later, does something different: whereas Graham is interested in maximizing the citizen’s capacity for virtuous national belonging organized around race and against dissident pleasures, Stewart appropriates the masturbating girl’s energies to offer consumerism as a sphere of erotic energy and pleasure deployed against the debilitating routines of the everyday and figured as a surplus of time, of leisure, of money. Which is in turn represented as a surplus of healthy, happy whiteness.

The larger methodological question I want to consider then is what happens when we step back from the object at the center of the inquiry – in this case food - and instead consider what circulates around it. I am arguing that in doing so we move away from the fantasy of an archive of reproducible senses and forward towards a more materialist analysis. Such attention, I argue, opens a window into the daily intertwining of past, present and the future, inscribing time and suggesting both circumscribed and agential movements and pleasures as they happen on the local scale of quotidian aesthetic production.

* - please do not circulate or cite this article without permission - *

Closing Comments for Q19 - As Yet Unnamed, Queer Theories and the Nineteenth Century

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:10:00 +0000

(picture found at Utne Reader, from an article by Rebecca Solnit,

Image by Newtown Graffiti)

I’m going to try to out Whitman Whitman by way of mirroring your work back to you, or perhaps out-femme Whitman by borrowing from a respondent-performance of Jennifer DeVere Brody's that I once had the privilege to witness. Some keywords from the last two days:

Occupation; sensation; aesthetic pleasures; Eros deployed from genitality; Geographies or atlases of desire; question of secularization and sacralization; Residual and emergent formations; palpating quality of sentimental formations; tastes and sensations not yet hardened into practices or identities; three, very different, single ladies; three autopsies; ten bad ladies; quite a few scary mommies; no daddies; many isolated and abandoned boys and girls; isolation as social exclusion and suffering; but also pleasure; both alloerotic and autoerotic; Depravity, vice and perversity; porosity between subject and object – each in this dyad exercising various forms of agency – depravity caught – in our work - in advance of a future biopolitical intervention; masturbation, moral turpitude, office-supply addiction; masochism, Plasticity – the shaping of language, the shaping of selves - Vulgar homosexuality; Queer literalism; Analogy; synecdoche comparison chiasmus, the limn, and sublimation; uh yes, uh no, uh yes.

We are ending up where I hoped we would, which is in the middle. I often tell my students that if we end our classes with the vertiginous feeling that there is more left to say, if we leave with the phrase, “it’s complicated” in our mouths we will have ended at a productively uncomfortable, a still-open place. I think we have – I hope we have - arrived at exactly that critical pedagogical space.

As you will be able to see by now, the nineteenth-century has served less as the framing device for the conference and more, as I had hoped, as the backdrop or the centrifugal force against which these scholars have staged their inquiries. Similarly, queer theory has cross-hatched these papers working in constitutive vectors.

I spoke yesterday morning about the keywords that catalyzed my own interest in bringing these wonderful scholars together but I suppose my curation of this conference started about a year or so ago when the Claremont Colleges library, putatively because of budget cuts threw out, actually tossed into the garbage, thousands of books. I found myself grieving not only for those books, because books are perhaps one of my own erotic objects, but also grieving the accidental encounters in the stacks that our students have had taken from them, chance encounters with new and familiar books, or between books lying next to each other on the shelf, on restacking carts or study carrels, or mis-shelved, or tripped over when turned around somewhere between PS and PZ call numbers where I spent my twenties and thirties.

I think I brought something of that nostalgia for intellectual accidents and surprises – that freshman intoxication with knowledge - to my curating of this event: I asked myself: what would happen if we put a critic of contemporary art next to a theorist of nineteenth-century novels? If we think about indigeneity and sovereignty alongside slavery and abolitionist affilation? Warhol next to Whitman? What happens if we introduce the putative automaton to the chain-smoking diarist, each in their different seriality? What ideas emerge from the conversation between an early modernist and poet and three pervy nineteenth-century novelists. And Hawthorne? The brothers Caballa and Chang and Eng? More to the point what happens when we put scholars at different ranks, in different disciplines and subfields into conversation with each other across what is often the divide of very different methodologies. We have actually found some, even quite a bit – congruence and also some challenges, some knots to work through.

One knot that we arrive at – and I take this point from our two Heathers very seriously – is that in focusing on the 19^thcentury in working within this temporal moebius strip that I gestured to earlier – between the 21^st and the 19^th centuries - we work in danger of emptying out the twentieth century; that critical individual, governmental and communal strategies of repression and survival stand between us and the strange pleasures of the nineteenth century, and not only should we not forget them but it is also true that those strategies are and should still be available to us for mining.

Another knot is that we continue to work through is about loosening whiteness from the centre of queer studies, just as we need to continue to work at putting non-white women’s erotic and aesthetic agency at the heart of our endeavor. I think that Uri McMillan’s paper pointed us toward the fact that part of this work is about reformulating our basic understanding of both agency and aesthetics, particularly performance. This in turn points us to necessary conversations about genre and disciplinarity – and something we have really done quite nicely this weekend I think is allow ourselves to think across multiple genres, to loosen up those bonds ever so slightly. But there is more to do.

What the papers from this weekend make clear is that the work of historicizing race itself reveals the gendered, non-normative but also politically narrow relations that hide behind narratives of racial supremacy, racial uplift or scientific and medical objectivity. And that this work is still important.

Some other concordances.

I want to note an ongoing concern with sovereignty – we are still, I think it is clear, trying to map both Foucault and Agamben’s work onto the historical specificities of the different nineteenth and twentieth centuries engaged with here; we still need to ask, I think, about the place of the state in relation to reform formations; to continue to ask about what biopolitics looks like as a non-state formation, about how it becomes a state formation. This is the movement, for instance, within Mark Rifkin’s paper but also from Mark’s paper to Kyla Schuller and Molly McGarry’s papers.

I would also make a meta-note about the relish with which almost each and every one of us read to each other from our own intellectual archives, a performance that I think says something about how very funny – and also moving - we all find our work to be, and that funniness, that joyfulness is itself a political and aesthetic relation that deserves more attention.

Finally – I am left with questions about the place of love in our work.

As a person with an overabundance of feeling – which you may have encountered this weekend - I think that queer studies leaves love a bit thin and untheorized in our cynicism towards its normalizing functions; we talk about lust and desire a lot more easily and with a lot less shame. Whatever love is, and I don’t know what it is, I imagine – I want to conjure up the idea - that love constitutes and defines, is embedded in, the effort it takes to sit down and write. It is so hard – so hard – to write. Perhaps love, however, structures queer and liberatory intellectual labor, both the production of it and the generosity with which we offer it – with which we offer ourselves – to each other. How lucky we are – and here I want to end where we began two days ago, with the question of labor – how lucky we are to have this occupation, this work to do.

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:55:00 +0000

The conference I have organized at Pomona College, for the weekend of March 2-3.

Please visit our Facebook page. Or the events page at Pomona College.

Friday March 2, 2011

9:30 Opening Comments – Kyla Tompkins

10:00-12:00 All The Single Ladies

Dana Luciano, Georgetown University “The Way We Read Sex Now”

Uri McMillan, University of California, Los Angeles, “Mammy-Memory: Staging Joice Heth, or the Curious Phenomenon of the "Ancient Negress"

Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania, “"Absolute Zero: The Scandal of Love Outside the Family”

Chair and Respondent Jennifer Doyle, University of California, Riverside

LUNCH

1:30-3:00 Come Here Often? Geographies of Desire and Political Selfhood

Mark Rifkin, University of North Carolina, Greensboro “Loving Oneself Like a Nation: The Autoerotics of Settler Selfhood in Walden"”

Sarah Mesle, University of California, Los Angeles, “A Queer Place”: The Garies and Their Friends and the Economics of Black Masculinity”

Chair and Respondent, Rodrigo Lazo, UC Riverside

COFFEE BREAK

3:30-5:00 Oh Behave: Bad Women, Deserving Orphans and Social Welfare

Kyla Schuller, Rutgers University “The Evolution of Affect in the Age of Darwin”

Molly McGarry, University of California, Irvine “"Base, Vile, and Depraved": On Sex, Secularism, and Moral Turpitude in the Long Nineteenth Century”

Chair and Respondent, TBD

Saturday March 3, 2011

10:00-12:00 Sextualities

Chris Looby, University of California, Los Angeles, “Elizabeth Stoddard's Depravity”

Jordan Alexander Stein, University of Colorado, Boulder, “Writing Conventions: Melville's Love Letters”

Heather Lukes, Occidental College, “Something in the Air: Analogical Collapse and Homoerotic Intimacy in Henry James's Roderick Hudson”

Chair and Respondent, Aaron Kunin, Pomona College

LUNCH

1:30-3:00 Can I Touch You (There): Perverse Racial Anatomies

Jesse Aleman, University of New Mexico, “Bodies that Don't Matter: Tracing Race in Nineteenth-Century Mexican America”

Cynthia Wu, SUNY Buffalo, “Nineteenth-Century Medical Perception and Medical Homosocialities in the Autopsy of Chang and Eng Bunke”

Chair and Respondent, Chris Guzaitis, Scripps College

COFFEE BREAK

3:30-5:00 All Together Now: Whitman, Warhol, Songs for a Queer Future

Gus Stadler, Haverford College, “Aural Drag: Warhol as Listener”

Elizabeth Freeman, University of California, Davis and Peter Coviello, Bowdoin College "Never the Usual Terms: A Song for 21st-Century Occupations"

Chair and Respondent, Karen Tongson, University of Southern California

I've moved....

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:09:00 +0000

...to Tumblr, with everyone else. Check me out here.

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:04:00 +0000

My book is available for pre-order at Amazon, right here.

more meat, please.

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:35:00 +0000

An old friend of mine from grad school, Pete Attia, has just started a nutrition and health blog called War On Insulin. The critic in me has always been a bit cynical about neanderthal diets and such - I'm suspicious of romantic ideas of what a primitive or pre-modern body might have been. Peter, on the other hand, is about as obsessive and focused a scientific researcher as I've ever met. I'm going to follow along and think about his nutritional advice.Truth be told, I'd like to go back to a more meat-centered diet; his suggestions look pretty decent to me.

roast, mash, mix, roll, toast

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:14:00 +0000

tortilla and salsa verde, pictures taken during a cooking class in Silverlake.

Against Gluttony

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 20:39:00 +0000

In the conclusion to my first book I have a line where I say: I am sick to death of food. I wrote and erased that line about ten times before leaving it in; as the copy edits are just now under way, I suppose that I may still take it out.

The truth stands, though: I am so tired of food. Tired of food as event (the expensive restaurant), tired of food as performance (cf: wine people), tired of foodie-ism (class pretension disguised as self-expression and "taste" or "preference"), tired of pretensions to earthiness (the whole DIY movement as the most recent narcissistic expression of commodity citizenship).

That feeling washed over me the other day at Whole Foods. I thought: look at how greedy we are. And I felt so ashamed to be participating in that greed. I looked back at my early foodie self, you know, over twenty years ago when I began to write and think about food and, well, the connection between that girl's class aspirations and her food tastes seemed raw and painful to me.

Don't get me wrong: I still do food studies and my next project is arguably a food studies project. I still like restaurants; sometimes I like wine (though I prefer beer); I still love to feed people delicious (truthful?) food; I still have strong opinions on and preferences for certain foods, and I like to can. Some might say I'm about as pretentious as you can get; I certainly would. But I guess what I'm saying is that I wish people would stop talking about food and just eat it.*

Lately I've been thinking about how to recuperate simplicity in food, how to make meals for my family that have an element of what I would call, maybe, elementalism. One ingredient at a time, doing a perfectly adequate job at being edible. I don't mean this in the California sense of ingredient-centered romanticism, that is, in some fantasy of food pastoralism. I can't wax precious about late summer tomatoes - though I do like them. I myself am not in love with farming or gardening, or growing anything with my hands - though I appreciate the people who do, and do it well.

The other night, for instance, I made us a meal of brown rice and scrambled eggs. Some sliced raw cucumbers on the side. A little hot sauce on top.

Shut. Up. A perfectly fine dinner. More than that: my son eating it and me watching him. Perhaps I have become more interested in how people are eating, in the intimacy of the everyday, than in what they are eating. This may be the theme that extends from the first book to the second.

Perhaps what I'm saying is that just fine is good enough.

* - I get the nauseating irony.

Pasadena Taco Truck

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 20:01:00 +0000

I'm toying with the idea of having a chapter on food blogs in my next book. I've been thinking about it ever since I read a quote in a magazine article about this being the generation that photographs everything it eats.

Why DO we do that, anyway? Are we afraid every meal is going to be our last?

Carne Asada, El Pastor and Pollo tacos, respectively, $1.25 each.

Pizzeria Mozza: dessert (Hollywood, August 2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:13:00 +0000

So on Mondays through Thursdays, Pizzeria Mozza offers a lunch special where $20 gets you a pizza, a glass of wine and a dessert. Here's my dessert from last week: caramel ice cream with marshmallow cream and salted peanuts.

Shut. Up.

I had to buy marshmallows at the store this week but of course it doesn't compare. Must make my own marshmallows one of these days: I think I'm scared of working with egg whites.

Europane (Pasadena, August 2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:10:00 +0000

I'm a little in love with the idea of using a watermelon slice as a plate for an appetizer or salad course: this salad has tomatoes, feta and - I think? - mache?

The manuscript is in!

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 17:40:00 +0000

Phew! Now I just wait to see if the editors want more changes.

Also I need to get image permissions, scan my images properly, and write two book reviews and two articles, all by September 1. But my brain won't let me work: I've spent the last ten days lying on my couch reading the entire Sookie Stackhouse series -- all eleven books -- and, sadly, the very last Robert B. Parker mystery.

I've been telling people that handing the book manuscript in has felt like being relieved of chronic pain -- there's this radio silence in my head that's totally unnerving. I'm looking forward to filling the silence with a new project and most of all to getting out from under all of the publishing/performance pressure of a revised dissertation to find a writing voice I really want to inhabit. I'm pretty sure my next project will be about recipes, and I have a third book planned as well.

In food news, I've ordered a new, smaller, canning kit, after we stupidly sold our old one. I think I'm going to try doing some small-batch canning this summer. Since I had my initial canning phase during my first sabbatical 2007-2008 there's been this explosion in canning culture, part of the new bourgeois DIY domesticity. Makes me wish I had followed through on my plans to write a preserving cookbook.

I've got lots of theories on the new DIY culture, and a lot of them have to do with the unconscious ways our culture deals with massive environmental degradation, financial trauma and general cultural rootlessness. As Lauren Berlant said in an amazing talk given at the Hammer Museum a few weeks ago: we are in a period of massive cultural turmoil and we have no idea what is going to happen next. I think ~~people~~ the privileged classes are reaching out for something solid to hold on to, and as we so often do in this late-national period, we reach back to the past. Lauren also said this other amazing thing, Delphic Oracle that she is. She said: maybe we are all always thinking about futurity, but we don't have the genres to express those ideas yet.

I've been thinking a lot about genres since I heard that talk.

Writing in this blog, at one point in my life, was about reaching out for a writing voice that was easier and more joyful than my academic writing voice as a way of getting back to my academic writing when I was really blocked. I've spent a lot of time over the last few years rewriting my dissertation and manuscript - multiple times - trying to find an easier tone of voice, trying to make my intellectual prose more beautiful. I don't think that's a process that will stop now. Rather, I am hoping that reaching for the next project will open up new genres of writing for me, that somehow tie together what I do here and what I do in my scholarly life. If you look back at the last few posts, where I keep promising to start writing here, that's really what I've been struggling with.

So: what do canning, writing, political and cultural theory, genre and the nineteenth century have to do with each other? And with other worlds? I just don't know. If I keep up the writing here, maybe I will get a bit closer to an answer. I have a feeling that just writing this is helping me understand what my next book is about. I wish I could can this feeling.

what is left to say about food?

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 19:44:00 +0000

What is there left to say about food? Though I haven't kept up with any food bloggers (maybe Molly and Jessica's) since I dropped the blog to concentrate on my manuscript quite a while ago, it seems to me that a lot of food blogging follows along the lines of:

a. domestic narrative, plus recipes
b. recipes, with a message (weight loss, health issues, allergies, vegetarian/veganism etc)
c. love of place including city food blogs (paris, new york, san francisco, los angeles, tokyo, etc) and country food blogs (farm life, living sustainably, etc)
d. gimmicky food blogs, in manner of Julie/Julia
e. what-I-ate-today blogs
f. photo-rich blogs, my personal favorite
g. restaurant blogs

I think what I might be looking for is a food essayist approach. The downside of that is that it means taking the writing part of this blog far more seriously, so that I'd have to forego some of the pleasure of writing a post quickly, which I've loved about blogging as opposed to my scholarly work. On the other hand, the upside of a longer food essay approach is that it means taking the writing part of this job seriously.

So, with that in mind, who are the great food essayists? MFK Fisher, Calvin Trillin, Jeffrey Steingarten, Laurie Colwin... De Montaigne. Bourdain, regretfully. Reichl, at least her first book. John Thorne, absolutely one of my favorites.

on writing about food, again

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 21:32:00 +0000

On New Year's Eve, another pledge to start food blogging again. I'm hoping that the addition of various camera apps to my new IPhone will help; I put my SLR away almost a year ago and haven't had it out since.But no excuses: between baby, the business of teaching and my book, my blogging has been thin on the ground, to say the least. In part it's because of my real exhaustion with food-as-performance; after twenty or so years thinking and writing about food, I need to find a new way into being interested in the thing I'm most interested in.
Part of it is that I really don't want to join the food blogging hordes, publicly snapping away as they eat. I do believe in smart and sustained food criticism, and I don't have the time to do it anymore. Nor do I have the time or patience for the crazy canning fevers of yesteryear. Perhaps it's that I need to find a way to better integrate my two writing voices, the bloggy one that is much more interested in immediate pleasures, and the scholarly one that finds pleasure in my more sustained interests. I like the anonymity of the latter more but I miss the conversations that came with the former, many of which have moved to other social media. I like the texture of my scholarly work, if that makes sense. And I'd like to find a way to write in the first person that is less ego-bound. It is, one has to admit, very hard to find a way into writing about food that isn't hobbyist, or dull, or uncritical. Or pious. But I suppose one could say the same thing about scholarly writing. I'll try to do better in the New Year. I'll try, perhaps, to bring a sense of commensality back to the blog.

Kelg? Kela? Kely? All of the above?

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:06:00 +0000

Kevin's post today reminded me that I hadn't posted the latest creative reinterpretation of my name at Starbucks. I think this is the best yet! Kelg! If my name was Kelg I would be a creature on the Starship Enterprise who worked on trans-warp somethingrather-whatchamacallit. Kelg is distinctly Gene Roddenberryian.

MS. 8A suggests that I should just give them "Trudy" or something. In fact, I do have a secret name, something I think every woman should have in case of irritating unwanted advances. If you internalize a fake name, as I once told my younger cousin the awesome CW, you always have it on the tip of your tongue for people who don't need to know, in bars and such. I don't think I'll do it when ordering my iced green tea though: I get a perverse pleasure from seeing my name misspelled on coffee cups.

Oddly enough, Meg suggests "Trotsky" and David suggests Stalin. Coincidence?

Classic

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:22:00 +0000

Seriously?

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:34:00 +0000

Best one yet.....

Misspelled coffee cups, part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:36:00 +0000

I've actually been meaning to do this for some time; put up a series on misspellings of my name. And not just at Starbucks; it just so happens that in the last few weeks I've been hitting Starbucks regularly and remembering to take the picture and post it on Facebook. To be fair, baristas often ask me to spell my name for them, but then I usually have to do it three or four times so I figured, why not just let them make it up?

I like how the guy in Pic #1, above, split the difference between the "e" and the "i". On the other hand, the guy below invented a whole new letter: the "l" with the umlaut. Or maybe it's a new kind of smiley.

Roasted Banana Ice Cream

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:20:00 +0000

..is like ice cream crack.

To make: sprinkle bananas with butter and brown sugar, and roast at 400F until they are caramelized. Scrape with syrup into a food processor, puree with milk and vanilla until thick and custard-like, then process in your ice cream maker.

All of this via David Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop, the best ice cream cookbook ever....

When the cat's away.....

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:52:00 +0000

...the mouse has a burger! T. was away last weekend and so the A-man and I indulged in a burger. Which he didn't like and which promptly made me feel ill. Here they are half-formed and under-cooked in the frying pan. Besides roasted chicken, I'm not convinced I know how to cook meat well....

Plans and experiments continue on the cooking front. Above you will see the A-man chowing down on an orzo-peas-pesto-asiago combination that I made and froze up last week. We are still tweeking the weekly cook-a-thon but these days I'm thinking that Sunday should see two complete sets of frozen entrees for the week, one container of roasted veggies and something sweet. With that to count on, some fresh fruit and dairy, eggs, a few fresh-cooked meals and a couple of prepared foods like the shu mai that we've taken to buying every week, that takes us through a full week of three meals-a-day plus two snacks.

Last week's other major frozen dish was chana masala, but it's clear that the A-man likes dal better. Coming up: roasted banana ice cream, via David Lebovitz...

Now Under New Culinary Dictatorship: All Hail the Toddler!

noreply@blogger.com (Kyla) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:03:00 +0000

As you can see, like most kids the A-man loves his pasta. Which is great because even though I've bragged that he eats everything, we do have to do some concealing of vegetables to get as many down as we'd like. Pasta is a good way to do it.

In order to save time during the week I've taken to cooking two or three pots of food on Sunday and then freezing them into individual servings. This way T. gets food to take to school and I don't have to cook every day or think about planning meals more than just minimally. Honestly, I never thought I'd be the kind of person who planned out weekly menus but, yup, here I am with a menu sheet on the fridge and a master grocery list written out in OmniOutliner. Gone - at least temporarily - are the days when dinner was a glass of wine, a hunk of epoisses berthaut and some bread.

This week I did three dishes: orzo with cheddar, peas and carrots; berry compote for yogurt, and spaghetti with a red pepper-tomato sauce, spinach and feta.

I know there are some people out there that can do a whole fresh meal every night, but these days, if I want to get any of my own work done at night - and sometimes I'm way, way, way too knackered to - I have to plan ahead. At least this way I'm not defrosting Duncan Hines pizza every night.*

I think I'll do a chana masala this week, and maybe some sheperd's pies... Or maybe I'll pull out that Le Creuset tagine I've been ignoring for the last five years and do a chicken with preserved lemons and olives dish and some couscous.

* -- I'm not saying we don't do pre-packaged foods, either. We aren't afraid of a good frozen organic burrito, that's for sure.