Author: Andrew Sullivan

John Birdsall makes the case that today’s foodies owe a debt to three gay men – James Beard, Richard Olney, and Craig Claiborne – who propelled American dining past the “stale international haute cuisine of the 1950s.” Consider Beard:

Beard’s cookbooks have the whiff of sublimated desire: the open-air fantasies, stout flavors, abundant fats, and tons and tons of gorgeous meat. Beard’s public persona was the bow-tied bachelor gourmand with an unquenchable appetite, and he remade American food in his own triple-XL image. Even before McDonald’s mass-produced them, burgers had always been cheap lunch-counter food. Beard made them seem as monumental as an Abercrombie model’s torso: three-inch dripping slabs of sirloin you’d ground yourself, grilled over charcoal, and hoisted onto thickly buttered homemade buns—they’re the burgers on menus of serious restaurants across America. Beard convinced us that burgers had always been that way, a reinvention that made the pursuit of pleasure seem like some timeless American virtue. Beard made it okay for Americans to be hedonists at the table.

(Hat tip: Daniel Fromson)

Annie Lowrey expects the big money in legal pot will come from mass-market products, noting that “thousands of people and millions of dollars are hard at work to make [marijuana] as predictable and dependable” as a fast-food hamburger:

In spite of marijuana’s significant popularity, there is still an element of roulette when it comes to smoking a legal joint or eating a legal brownie. Federal law does not require companies to test for and disclose levels of the drug’s active ingredients, like tetrahydrocannabinol. (Federal law does not hold that pot is legal, after all.) Many dispensaries and producers fail to test for potency, contaminants or mold. And different states have different disclosure laws with different levels of efficacy. As such, a gram of “AK-47” bought in an Oakland dispensary might affect you differently than a gram of the same purchased in Colorado. …

Sensing the opportunity for something more predictable, [Jon] Cooper and his partner at Ebbu, a Colorado pot start-up, are creating a variety of predosed products – like prerolled joints, or little Listerine-style strips. They have eschewed the silly strain names, instead labeling their products “high-energy,” “relaxed,” “bliss,” “create,” and “giggles.” Lauren Ely, a librarian from Erie, Colo., is working on a start-up called DisposaBowls – prepacked, disposable ceramic pipes. “I joke around and tell everyone I’m the old, fat Nancy Botwin,” she said, referring to the character from the HBO show Weeds. She said that she hoped the product would appeal to experienced smokers looking for a convenient way to bring the product with them while they go on a hike, for example. But she also saw it as a good way to introduce novices, seniors, and medicinal smokers to pot, with gentle, predictable results.

Citing a slew of recent novels told from the perspective of “we” or “us” – such as Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to an End, Justin Torres’s We the Animals, and Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea – TaraShea Nesbit suggests that the rise of the first-person plural may be especially suited for our times:

Is life in the 21st-century social network less about the node and more about the links between nodes? In first-personal plural fiction, individuated characters can dissolve into the background, as our relationships and responsibilities to our fellow humans are foregrounded. This social awareness is not exactly new – it also exercised Victorian authors writing about town consciousness, as George Eliot did in Middlemarch. However, this new iteration is perhaps a move away from the character-driven plot of the individual “I”. How does one create one’s self in relation to the groups we are a part of? Where do our loyalties lie? What gets lost, and what is gained by group membership? This sense of social responsibility and selfhood, as well as uncertainty about how to act on such feelings, describes, in part, our contemporary moment.

In a similar vein, Art Edwards considers how an author’s method of narration helps him identify with a piece of fiction as a reader:

That’s where the power of fiction truly lies: Despite my wanting to know more about the novelists who write the novels I love, reading one isn’t the act of me learning about the writer’s life. It’s a metaphoric meeting place outside both writer and reader where the two come together. The novel can bridge further physical, cultural, emotional and experiential points, creating a connection that feels deeper. “Look at how different we are on the outside, how similar on the inside.”

Writers shouldn’t be looking for narrators to hide behind but to understand the effects their narrator choices have on the reader, and to make decisions accordingly. If the writer’s story is the whole point, and the writer doesn’t mind being front and center, then it’s best to employ memoir (or its longer sibling autobiography). … A first person point of view (The Name of the World [by Denis Johnson]) keeps the author in the fiction to the greatest degree with third person (Rabbit, Run [by John Updike]) the more distant mode, although even it doesn’t provide perfect cover. Having a detached third person narrator (most of Madame Bovary) leaves only the vaguest shadow of the author, but it’s still there, if only in its conspicuous absence. While fiction may always on some level be a disguise, its imaginative elements invite us to contemplate why the writer bothered to imagine them at all, and therefore, perhaps, to know him best.

In an excerpt from The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading, Phyllis Rose explains how librarians decide which books to cull from their collections. Perhaps not surprisingly, it involves a lot of acronyms:

CREW stands for Continuous Review Evaluation and Weeding, and the [industry-standard] manual uses “crew” as a transitive verb, so one can talk about a library’s “crewing” its collection. It means weeding but doesn’t sound so harsh. At the heart of the CREW method is a formula consisting of three factors – the number of years since the last copyright, the number of years since the book was last checked out, and a collection of six negative factors given the acronym MUSTIE, to help decide if a book has outlived its usefulness. M. Is it Misleading or inaccurate? Is its information, as so quickly happens with medical and legal texts or travel books, for example, outdated? U. Is it Ugly? Worn beyond repair? S. Has it been Superseded by a new edition or a better account of the subject? T. Is it Trivial, of no discernible literary or scientific merit? I. Is it Irrelevant to the needs and interests of the community the library serves? E. Can it be found Elsewhere, through interlibrary loan or on the Web?

She adds, “People who feel strongly about retaining books in libraries have a simple way to combat the removal of treasured volumes”:

Since every system of elimination is based, no matter what they say, on circulation counts, the number of years that have elapsed since a book was last checked out, or the number of times it has been checked out overall, if you feel strongly about a book, you should go to every library you have access to and check out the volume you care about. Take it home awhile. Read it or don’t. Keep it beside you as you read the same book on a Kindle, Nook, or iPad. Let it breathe the air of your home, and then take it back to the library, knowing you have fought the guerrilla war for physical books. This was the spirit in which I checked out the third book in Etienne Leroux’s Welgevonden trilogy with no intention of reading it.