I have never been a title man. I don’t give a damn what it is called. I would call it [East of Eden] Valley to the Sea, which is a quotation from absolutely nothing but has two great words and a direction. What do you think of that? And I’m not going to think about it anymore.

I’ll finish it someday.

Okay, I know I said I’d post every week, and now it’s been at least two. But I’ve been super-busy!

I’m currently reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck, and it’s pretty good so far, but I’m only a quarter into it. In my defense, it’s another really long novel, probably the longest I’ve read so far this year. I’ll finish it. Eventually.

In the meantime, I figured I’d give you an update on what I’ve been up to, along with a couple reading recommendations.

I’m about to finish my master’s degree in liberal arts. I say about to finish: I still have two-thirds of my thesis to write. Here’s a lovely rendition of what I call my Thesis Monster, drawn by my husband:

As you can tell, I’m not exactly into this thesis business. Anyway, my thesis might as well be called “Don DeLillo Writes the Same Novel Over and Over” because that’s basically it. I didn’t realize that until I was far enough into it that changing my topic would be ridiculous. So I’m stuck writing a thesis I’m not really interested in. So it goes.

But what do you mean, he writes the same novel over and over? you ask. I think I’ve talked about it before on this blog, but I’ll repeat. DeLillo basically follows a formula: his protagonist finds his world saturated with postmodern commoditization of some sort (in my thesis, it’s three kinds of media: film/video, music, books), and he tries to escape it. He withdraws from the world, but usually comes back, and his quest for an identity beyond what the media has created him is almost entirely unsuccessful. (Every time I say it, it makes a little more sense to me.)

If you’re interested in Postmodernism and what media is doing, and you’re looking for a challenge, check out Baudrillard, Jameson, and McLuhan.

Anyway, the probablility of LSUS merging with Tech has scared me into working on the Thesis Monster again, and I’ve funneled most of my pleasure-reading time into that. And I have a sick cat who I have to feed five times a day through a tube:

As I’m sure you can imagine, I don’t have a lot of time on my hands.

But! I’d like to direct you to some DeLillo! I talked about Great Jones Street early this year and Americana and Cosmopolis last year, but I haven’t reviewed what  I think is DeLillo’s best novel, White Noise (absolutely no relation to the movie that came out a few years ago with the same name). It’s about a family in the midwest and what happens when a train wrecks and causes a huge black cloud to spread all over town, forcing an evacuation. It deals with death, family, religion, and general awesomeness. It’s a good (and not boring) introduction to DeLillo. Too bad I’m not using it in my thesis!

So. I’ll eventually finish reading East of Eden, and then I’ll post a good ol’ proper review of it. In the meantime, I’ll try to post snippets about other things. If you’re really hankering for new book reviews, ask your favorite librarian to contribute to the blog!

I’ve only seen Iron & Wine live once, about a year and a half ago at the House of Blues. It was totally awesome.

Surriously, y’all. It was amazing. Certain friends of mine were convinced that there’s nothing in the world more boring than an Iron & Wine concert, but they’ve never been to one. Sam Beam played songs to the music of other songs, and I thought my head might explode.

That was a good trip.

Welllll, a few months ago, I saw somewhere that Iron & Wine is playing Jazz Fest, and I was, like, ZOMFG IRON & WINE IS PLAYING JAZZ FEST I MUST GO. Keep in mind that this is the only band I would travel like this for and that I hate Jazz Fest. I used to go when I was a teenager, but it got soooo crowded. Then I lived about two blocks away from it for a few years. I might have gone once during that time. Until now! Sam Beam will pull me out of my I Hate Jazz Fest funk, and I will brave the crowds with a smile on my face.

So! If you’re in New Orleans this weekend, and/or you’ll be at Jazz Fest on Sunday, hit me up!

BONUS: Thanks to Spotify, I’ve cooked up a little All Iron & Wine All the Time Time playlist for your enjoymentz.

I’ll start with a note: Even though I’ve gained much tastebuddy love from these lovely piles of meat, cheese, and veggies, I cannot call them my own. They belong to Nicole Peeler, who made a pot of meatz madness for a party. She’s even posted the recipe on her blog. If you’re into snark, hit hers up. It’s funnier than mine.

ANYWAY. Wanna know what is possibly the Best Thing about turkey tacos? It’s the easiest recipe ever. Remember how I said that pecan pie was the easiest recipe ever? Well, turkey tacos trump pecan pie. Yeah.

Let’s get down to the tastiness. Here’s all you need (okay, besides cheese, etc, to top). You can use any veggies you like, really. I use onion, red bell pepper, garlic, zucchini, and carrots.

First, chop up all of those tasty, tasty veggies.

Throw your veggies into a big pot with a tablespoon or two of olive oil. Brown your ground turkey separately. When both are done, drain the turkey, then dump it into the pot with the veggies, and mix ‘em up.

Then, throw in your packets of taco seasoning and add a couple cups of water, ignoring the amount of water the packets say to add, as turkey tacos end up much wetter than regular tacos.

Let that simmer for ten minutes, or so – or while you wait for your taco shells to crisp in the oven, which is what I do because I always forget to heat them until the last minute.

Finally, stuff ‘em into those shells and put all of it into your face. Then go back for seconds. They also taste awesome as burritos, to which the husband will attest as he is on a super low-carb diet, and nobody makes low-carb taco shells.

I usually serve turkey tacos with some greenery (and in this case orangery), so I popped out some veggies and the ever popular (and surprisingly low-carb) ranch dressing.

Awwwwlz, yeah. Now that’s a meal. It’ll feed a crowd, and it even freezes well! It won a super-unofficial Taco Party vote a year or two ago. Now eat up!

Turkey Tacos

Ingredients:
2 lbs ground turkey
1 zucchini
1 onion
3 carrots
1 red bell pepper
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
1-2 Tbsp olive oil
3 packets taco seasoning
2 cups water
taco shells and fixins

Directions:

Brown the turkey and cook the veggies in separate pots over medium-ish flame. Put them in at about the same time, and they’ll be done in about the same time.

Drain the turkey, and pour it into the big pot with the veggies. Mix ‘em up a bit, and add the taco seasoning and water. Bring it to a boil, then turn the fire down a bit and let it simmer for a few minutes, or until a good bit of the liquid has evaporated.

Finally, make tacos (or burritos!), and shove as many as you can into your mouth. Because it’s that tasty.

Okay, since we know, at the very least, that The Dark Tower is about the gunslinger’s quest to, well, the Dark Tower, we can pretty safely assume that he’ll survive the first book. At the end of The Gunslinger, we leave Roland (the gunslinger) as he heads to the coast. The Drawing of the Three picks up there. He wakes up on a beach at night as some lobsterish creatures are swept up next to him with the tide. One attacks him, clawing off three of his fingers and one of his toes. He calls them lobstrosities, and I’ve already talked about them and their awesomeness.

Seriously. If you’re looking for a reason to read this book, they’re it. I digress. So the gunslinger hasn’t only lost some digits: his wounds get infected. In his world, he’s SOL. But! At the end of The Gunslinger, the Man in Black mentions something about drawing, but there’s no explanation until Roland is just about dying on the beach, and he sees a door appear out of nowhere. He opens it and finds himself looking through the eyes of a junkie named Eddie, who is about to try to smuggle cocaine through customs. Roland can control Eddie to varying degrees depending on how far into the door he goes. He can just look through Eddie’s eyes, or he can take complete control. Things Happen. I won’t spoil that part. Just keep in mind that this is a huge chunk of the novel. Like the title says, the gunslinger draws three. One of them is a schizophrenic woman in a wheelchair who is alternately a very nice person and a homicidal maniac. Do with that what you will. And that’s all the plot you’re getting on this one.

I didn’t like The Drawing of the Three nearly as much as I liked The Gunslinger, though it’s not bad. It’s just really different. Most of it takes place through the doors in the twentieth century, and that kind of disappointed me. And some parts were annoying. The gunslinger, probably coming from some post-apocalyptic time when technology is all but gone, doesn’t understand a lot of what’s going on in the twentieth century, and he uses words he knows to describe what he sees. Which is fine to a point, but it goes on all through the book. Here’s an example:

The potions that really worked were kept safely out of sight. One could only obtain these if you had a sorcerer’s fiat. In this world, such sorcerers were called DOCKTORS, and they wrote their magic formulae on sheets of paper which the Mortcypedia called REXES. The gunslinger didn’t know the word. He supposed he could have consulted further on the matter, but didn’t bother.

(In case you’re wondering, the Mortcypedia is the brain of one of the characters.) I like the shifting POV throughout the novel, but the gunslinger’s parts get a bit old.

I think I’ll take a break from this series for a while because, after this book, I’m not too enthused anymore. And a friend told me that the third one gets pretty bad, and he stopped reading it about halfway through. I’m in the mood for some good writing, anyway, so I think I’ll go for Cormac McCarthy‘s Suttree. McCarthy is a dependably good writer, and Suttree has been on my to-read list for quite a while. If you’re reading along, break out your dictionary! You’ll see why.

Bonus: There’s a Tumblr for everything these days, and I happened on one about The Dark Tower. Enjoy. Oh! And here’s another with an NSFW title. I bet you can guess what it is.

e.e. cummings

e.e. cummings is just about the springiest poet I can think of. He was a Modernist, and he’s known for playing with language. Here’s a good example:

                             r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
                      who
  a)s w(e loo)k
  upnowgath
                  PPEGORHRASS
                                        eringint(o-
  aThe):l
             eA
                 !p:
S                                                         a
                          (r
  rIvInG                         .gRrEaPsPhOs)
                                                         to
  rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
  ,grasshopper;

Whaaaaaaat? you ask? This is a poem about a grasshopper leaping. cummings, though, doesn’t stop at describing the leap – the words themselves form a visual image. Without the spaces, it might make a bit more sense: “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r who a)s w(e loo)k up now gath PPEGORHRASS ering t(o-aThe): leA!p:s a (rrIvInG.gRrEaPsPhOs) rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly ,grasshopper;” Remember Poetry in Motion from the 1990s? It’s like a performance on paper.

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have started with such a (only seemingly) tough poem. Here’s another:

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and from moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

This one’s about the coming of spring and how gradually it appears and how subtly. e.e. cummings takes some brainwork, but he’s totally worth it.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Here’s another poet I associate with spring. And another modernist. Like e.e. cummings, Hopkins plays with his word choices. Here’s “Spring”:

Nothing is so beautiful as spring—
  When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
  Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
  The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
  The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
  A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
  Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
  Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

This is a good poem to say out loud so you can appreciate the lushness of the wording. Where cummings makes his poem look like the grasshopper, Hopkins uses a traditional sonnet (14 lines, set rhyme scheme) to emulate the sounds of spring – the growth and blooming and beginning.

Here’s another poem by Hopkins that you might recognize from high school or college English classes. It’s called “Pied Beauty.”

Glory be to God for dappled things—
     For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
        For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
      Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
        And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

    All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
      Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
        With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
                                           Práise hím.

This poem isn’t specifically about spring, but it gives a similar sense of freshness. It’s about how things that might not appear perfect really are. Hopkins is playing with sounds again. Note the accents over some of the letters. Hopkins wanted the reader to hear the poems just like he thought they should sound, so those accents are over syllables he thought should be emphasized even though they might not be naturally stressed. (I read this poem for the first time when I was in high school, and I thought it was the Corniest Poem Ever. I don’t think I learned to love Hopkins until grad school. Which also goes for the next poet.

Walt Whitman

Ahh, Whitman. I have a love-hate relationship with Whitman. I really like some of his stuff, and I hate the rest equally. I’m not sure he doesn’t fall into the summer category rather than spring. Most of his poetry is a bit long for a blog post, so I’ll just post bits and pieces. Here’s part of “Song of Myself”:

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if eer there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, [take that, Yeats!]
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

“Song of Myself” isn’t one of my favorite Whitman poems – I find it annoyingly celebratory – but I love this part. I read it a couple of times, and my eyes tear up. Whitman, by the way, is another modernist. He goes to show how diverse the Modernism movement was.

William Wordsworth

Just one more. How can there be spring with no Wordsworth? I’m including his poetry last for contrast. Most of my favorite poetry is modern or postmodern, and sometimes I skip over the roots. Wordsworth was a Romantic poet whose major works appeared around 1800, a century before the Modernists. Wordsworth (and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” fame) tried to write in common language, as opposed to the super-formal language of his poetic peers. It might not seem that that’s the case now, but Wordsworth was a revolutionary. Here’s “Lines Written in Early Spring”:

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played:
Their thoughts I cannot measure,
But the least motion which they made,
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

See the difference? This is a totally different kind of poem than that of the Modernists. All of the poems here are of the optimistic variety – if you want some rainy day spring stuff, I might direct you to my favorite poet, T.S. Eliot, and his Waste Land (“April is the cruellest month”) or A.E. Housman‘s Shropshire Lad, both of which are totally awesome.

So happy spring! It’s my favorite time of year.

Bonus: All this poetry reminds me of a Joan Baez song:

I remembered this song as I started to put together this blog post.

Because, you know, I like to bake. It’s really one of my favorite things to do. I even started up a little baking business called King Bakes. And I really enjoyed it for a while. I set up a Facebook page and a simple website and started taking orders. King cakes year-round. Except king cakes are temperamental and a bitch to make. Every time I made one to sell, I was a ball of anxiety. That, and each one takes three-and-a-half hours to make. Urrgh. There were also the mini king cakes, cupcakes, and cookies. (I talk about all of this in past tense, but I’m still taking orders.) That was all fine, too, until we went to the Texas Avenue Makers Fair last weekend. If it wasn’t for Palmer, his mom, and my mom, I wouldn’t have made it there in the first place. King cakes are a lot of work, and since they don’t have much of a shelf life, they all had to be baked before and iced the morning of, only to dry out in the heat of the day. Then there was the Great Cupcake Disaster, but I’m not talking about that. The day wasn’t terrible.

That said, I’m never doing it again. Once was certainly enough for me. And after that, I don’t even want to see another king cake.

Which brings me to my point. I love baking, but baking for money made it totally un-fun. Sure, if I worked constantly, I could make decent money, and I might be able to open an actual bakery someday. Except I’d rather be working on my “real” job than this second one. And that’s a problem.

So now I’m back to baking what I want when I want. Today, it’s a pecan pie, and I figured I might share the love.

For some reason, I thought making a pecan pie was complicated. How’d you get the pecans to sit so perfectly on the top of the wonderful sugary goodness? My grandmother always made them, and I didn’t even try until a year, or so, ago. That’s when I learned that pecan pie (and most pies, in general) is the easiest and tastiest thing ever. And what’s funny is everybody uses the same recipe. Think you have a super-secret recipe handed down through the generations? Nope, you don’t. Your Famous Family Recipe is most likely printed on the back of a bottle of good ol’ Karo Syrup. Everybody uses it because it’s the best, and I defy you to prove otherwise.

And as I said, it’s really easy. Here’s all you need:

You really don’t need a mixer for this one. A spoon will do. I just couldn’t help but use the shiny red KitchenAid my husband just got me (have I mentioned that he’s awesome?). Anyway, you throw everything in a bowl

and stir it up.

Then pour in your pecans and give them a stir. Don’t use a mixer for this part or you might hurt the mixer. After that, just pour it on into your pie crust. (I use rolled-up pie crusts from the refrigerated section. They always work well. A note, however: store brand crusts are slightly smaller than name-brand crusts, which causes problems for things like chicken pot pie.)

Then put it into the oven for an hour or so. You’ll end up with a steaming, shifting, bubbling pile of tastiness that needs to cool for two whole hours before you can eat it.

But once those loooooooong two hours are up,

In case you’re not using Karo brand Karo Syrup, here’s the recipe:

Karo Syrup Pecan Pie

• 1 cup Karo® Light Corn Syrup
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted
• 1 teaspoon Spice Islands® Pure Vanilla Extract
• 1-1/2 cups (6 ounces) pecans
• 1 (9-inch) unbaked or frozen** deep-dish pie crust

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. Mix corn syrup, eggs, sugar, butter and vanilla using a spoon. Stir in pecans. Pour filling into pie crust.
3. Bake on center rack of oven for 60 to 70 minutes (see tips for doneness, below). Cool for 2 hours on wire rack before serving.

See? Baking is soooooo much more fun when the only money involved is to pay for the ingredients. So. Who wants a piece of pie?

The Gunslinger

An aside is in order here: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is about a little girl who gets lost in the woods. She has a little radio with her, and she listens to baseball games and is encouraged by her favorite player, Tom Gordon. Something creepy has been following her the whole time, and it gets creepier and creepier. You might think it’s something supernatural. But (spoiler!) it’s not. It’s just a bear. You’ve wasted several hours of your time reading a Stephen King novel, thinking you know what to expect, and in an M. Night Shyamalan-like twist, you get a bear. Seriously, yall. I still want my money back on that one.

Anyway, that should explain my ambivalence toward Stephen King. I do have a little confession to make, though: I love the made-for-TV movies. I even spent last night watching the third episode of The Stand. And then there’s The Langoliers, which I’ve seen dozens of times over the years. I’m embarrassed to say that I even own several of the DVDs. So: TV, yes; books, sometimes. But I digress. Again.

I’ll cut to the chase: Turns out The Gunslinger isn’t a western. Yes, there’s some desert and some good ol’ gunslingin’, but that isn’t the point. It’s a fantasy novel, and I like fantasy. Especially the good vs. evil kind of fantasy that thinks it has higher implications. This series totally fits the bill. I thought I’d be able to stop after the first one, but that’s not gonna happen. I’ve already loaded the second, The Drawing of the Three, onto my Kindle.

I guess a bit of a plot rundown is in order. I’m not giving you much this time. A gunslinger tracks a “man in black” across the desert. He meets a few people on his way, and you get just a piece of the backstory as he progresses. He meets a boy at a way-station and takes him along. Things Happen.

This is the kind of book that you’ll enjoy more if you don’t know anything about it. I had no idea except that it involved a gunslinger, but I’ve already talked about that. The Gunslinger was a very happy surprise. Now, of course, I’m hooked: I’ve already started reading the next book in the series, The Drawing of the Three, and it’s really interesting. In a good way, so far. Once you finish The Gunslinger, you have all kinds of fun to look forward to, including my very favorite creature yet, the lobstrosity. If you can’t find any other reason to read The Dark Tower series, read it for the lobstrosities.

Which reminds me: These novels have pictures!

Anyway, I’m a huge fan of Margaret Atwood, which you’ll know already if you’ve read my reviews of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood from last year or my dystopia rundown from a couple of weeks ago. I especially enjoy her writing style, which is easy to read but not condescending at all. And we all know how much I like dystopian fiction.

I can’t give out too much information on I’m Starved for You without a Super Duper Spoiler, which, in this case, I don’t want to do, especially since this story is so new. It’s a dystopian novella about a near-future city in which the residents (voluntarily) alternate months between prison and home. They go to prison for a month and have a job, etc, there, and then they return home to their houses and families for a month. While one couple is in prison, Alternates stay in their homes until the Alternates go to prison, and so on, and so one. Families and their Alternates are allowed no contact. Except the protagonist, Stan, finds a note under the refrigerator and starts to investigate. Which is where I stop.

I think I discovered this novella from Margaret Atwood herself: she’s very active on Twitter, which is soooo cool. (Incidentally, one of my other favorite writers, Salman Rushdie, is, too.) It’s a Kindle Single, and it’s only $3. You can’t, of course, check it out from the library because publishing companies make it as hard as possible for libraries to offer ebooks. But that’s another story.

I don’t have that much to say about I’m Starved for You except that it’s very Atwood-y and that it’s fantastic. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can read it anywhere that there’s Kindle software, which includes PCs. Here’s a handy link!

Northanger Abbey

It’s about Catherine Morland, an eighteen-year-old, and her adventures in finding a man. Various things go wrong, and some of them go right, etc, etc. It’s basically a run-of-the-mill Jane Austen novel. (I should note, here, that I generally don’t like Jane Austen, but I did enjoy Pride and Prejudice, the only Austen novel I’ve read all the way through. I tried Sense and Sensibility but hated it and stopped. Maybe I would have had better luck with Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, but I digress.) Here’s the Wikipedia rundown, which follows most of the book blurbs I’ve seen: “The most famous parody of the Gothic is Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey (1818) in which the naive protagonist, after reading too much Gothic fiction, conceives herself a heroine of a Radcliffian romance and imagines murder and villainy on every side, though the truth turns out to be much more prosaic.”¹ That description is true, but only for about 20% of the novel: the remaining 80% is husband-finding and related girly issues. Seriously: There is no mention of the abbey until 63% into the book (I read it on my Kindle), and they’re only there for a little less than 20%. And there is nothing creepy, just a frightened kid who reads too much into everything around her and then makes stupid assumptions. She’s silly.

And that’s about it for the plot. There’s really nothing special. Your time will be much better spent if you read one of the actual gothic novels. I suggest starting with The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole, simply because it’s the shortest one I know of, and these novels can be a bit of an acquired taste – and most of them are looooooong.

I really disliked Northanger Abbey. It was boring. And the book blurbs seem like false advertising: the vast majority is classic Jane Austen, not even the parody part. Yes, there are some funny parts, like when Catherine and her friend Isabella are reading The Mysteries of Udolpho and are unreasonably intrigued. And that part is only funny if you’ve read at least one gothic novel. I was expecting more of Northanger Abbey, or at least something creepy, but most of the novel is about a silly kids ridiculous emotionally-charged, false conclusions. Not an interesting read.

That said, if you’re a huge fan of Jane Austen, you’ll probably like this one as much as any of the others.