Cooking With Cormac McCarthy

This parody of Mr. McCarthy is from an old issue of Vanity Fair but my friend reminded me of it today and I just had to repost:

Cooking with Cormac McCarthy as told to Craig Brown

Pasta. Plain. But Good.

INGREDIENTS:
Pasta.
And salt.
And water.
And Fire.

DIRECTIONS:
Place the pasta in the water and the salt in the water and the water in the pot and the pot on the fire.
In the pot? The fire in the pot?
No. The water in the pot. The pot on the fire.
The pasta in the water?
Yes, in the water.
And the salt in the fire?
No. The salt in the water.
And the water on the fire?
No. The water in the pot and the pot on the fire. Not the water on the fire. For then the fire will die and dying be dead.
Nor will the water boil and the pasta will drain dry and not cooked and hard to the teeth.

The salt falls nor does it cease to fall.
The water boils. So be it.
Cease from placing your hand in the boiling water. Place your hand in the boiling water and it will cause you pain.
Much pain?
Very much pain.

In the pot the bubbles bubble up and bubble some more. The bubbles are bubbly. Never more bubbly bubbles bubbling bubbliest. And having bubbled the bubbles still bubbly.
Or bubblier?
Or bubblier.
Across the kitchen a board intended for chopping. Here. Take it. Chop.
What will I chop? There are no ingredients to chop.
Just chop. Don’t cease from chopping. To chop is to become a man.

After 10 minutes. The pasta stiff and dry and upright no more. The pasta lank and wet and soft. In the eternal damp of water.
Pour water free like some ancient anointing. The pasta left alone in the pot. Alone and naked.
The salt? Where’s the salt?
The salt is gone. Lost to the water and gone forever.
I grieve for the salt.
It is the salt for which I grieve.

Tip the pasta out.
The pasta?
Yes. Tip it out. Onto.
A plate?
Yes. And stop.
Finishing your sentences?
Yes.
Why?
Because it's so.
 Irritating?

Nothing in your memory anywhere of anything so good. Now the pasta is eaten. Disappeared. The pasta disappeared as everything disappeared. As the comma disappears and the semicolon disappears and the inverted comma disappears and the apostrophe disappears and the adjectives and the pronouns all disappear.
Leaving just full stops and And.
And And?
And And.
And And.

The Symbol's the Thing

I feel like I've just woken up from a long dream.

Yesterday I finished reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods. The novel is a brilliant epic of godly--yes, godly-- proportions. Readers follow Shadow, a recently freed convict on an adventure across the American landscape that transcends all genre limitations. Channeling elements from noir, adventure, and mythology literature, Gaiman defines America in completely new terms. Not only a melting pot of people, Gaiman's America is the sorry last stop for the Gods of Africa, the Orient and pagan Europe. Immigration tales embedded within Shadow's story narrate how jinns and piskies, traveling in the minds of their respective immigrants, have found America to be the land of inopportunity. Memories of them quickly fade on this new soil and they come to resemble nothing more than lesser men and women. +/-

While this book contains elements of magical realism, it somehow seems more easily believable. The humanization of the Gods, while not complete, is particularly American, perhaps fostering its authenticity. They are characters familiar to the American landscape--con men, taxi drivers, factory workers and the like. All seem human in their attitudes, actions and morals. American Gods is not quite an indictment of America, and nor is it a glorification. Gaiman's is a complex and layered conception, defining America by our obsessions with money and power, our compulsion to define our lives by what's real and what's not and, most literally, by our treatment of the less familiar gods of yore. In the end, readers will feel like they've emerged from a sweat lodge with a new cultural understanding of the world around them.

Required Reading

I read the cliffnotes of Joseph Stiglitz's new book on the Iraq War in this month's Vanity Fair and I highly recommend either that or the real deal to anyone who reads this. Its simple, wonderfully coherent and well-researched, and devoid of all the high-minded theorizing that conservatives usually love to deride liberals for. The book looks beyond the 'emergency supplemental' budget requests and other official expenses and strives to estimate the full range of Iraq-related costs — including future costs like long-term care for veterans, oil acquisition and workforce losses— that the nation will face for years to come.

Having broken down the War to its dollars and sense, Stiglitz's readers will come to the conclusion that going to war was, inarguably, a mismanaged mistake. To say this isn't to discount the sacrifices made by good men and women. It's meant to both shame and undercut the bravado of the feeble-minded warhawks who have crafted a literal Wag the Dog scenario to fatten their larders and their egos. Please take a look at it!