Cover Your Bases 16
11/22/2020 Working from hell was supposed to be temporary
This week: A reflection on something personal and reflective. Like how working from hell was supposed to be temporary.
Ever since I saw this cartoon by PC Vey in the November 16, 2020 issue of The New Yorker, I’ve been obsessed. We are all stuck in hell together AND I THOUGHT IT WAS GOING TO BE TEMPORARY--but it’s not, yet.
Facing the surge with no end in sight for months, my coping strategies have expanded to complaining, self-pity, and irritability. Also, isn’t the pandemic the best excuse to watch bad movies? (Emily in Paris, anyone?)
Having said that, I decided that my mental health needed a little more outside time with friends. Hanging on my friend Lauren’s deck with masks, driving to Filoli, and meeting my friend Elisa for a socially distanced walk and talk, and hitting the Ruth Bancroft Garden with other friends have all made me feel so much better--and yet, real safety is time alone.
Quick takes
Reading: Later: Life at the Edge of the World by Paul Lisicky. Set in Provincetown, Massachusetts during the mid-’90s, this brilliant book tells the story of Paul, a gay man who moves to P-town for an arts fellowship, but falls in love with the Town, moving into a world of artists and writers exiled to P-town because AIDS makes them pariahs in Boston and New York. For Paul, almost every moment--even the most joyful ones--is suffused with irony and death, because there in 1994 there is literally no escape. For me, reading this book in the era of COVID-19 had extra poignancy; we’re also in the grip of a virus that can kill many of us when we come together, and when will the end be in sight?
Extra links (if you get into this book, and want to read more: Interview with the author about his writing process; an article about the book by his hometown NJ paper
Watching: Yes, of course. After devouring The Queen’s Gambit, we shifted over to Season 4 of The Crown, where Princess Diana is like a baby bird locked in a nest with big eagles. Poor girl!
On my own, my pandemic viewing is fixated on Gen-X pop culture, so I’ve finished Season 3 of Vida on Hulu (love this series), 2 episodes of Industry on HBO (well-done, but reminds me too much of my years working at America Online).
My show right now is Good Girls Revolt, a news media series focused on equality for women in newsrooms in the late 60s. I was a girl living at home in the burbs outside of New York City as the whole rise of first-wave feminism/equal pay for women started in the late ’60s, so seeing these stories brought to life now is cool. The characters are fictionalized, except for public figure Eleanor Holmes Norton, but the series is based on Lynn Povich’s book about the Newsweek case. If you want to see what assumptions about class, race, and gender looked like when Rolling Stone was still a new national magazine, this is a show to check out.
Making: My ambition for the holidays was to bake, bake, bake, so I bought flour, butter, and sugar this week to start up with chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies, and shortbread cookies. Shipping and sharing cookies sounds like a good way to express joy when you can’t see the people you’re related to, right? The recipes I am looking at include these:
Melissa Clark Oatmeal-Raisin cookies (have made these several times, and they are excellent)
Mark Bittman Chocolate Chip Cookies (have made these as well, really good)
The Spruce Classic Shortbread (planning to make a few variations)
Of course, the igniter for my oven broke last night (surprise!), so this is not the weekend test baking will commence, and maybe we won’t have a working oven by Thanksgiving (a great excuse to get take-out Indian food, if you ask me).
Some dishes I have been making repeatedly in the endless cooking marathon of my life include a roasted butternut squash and red onion dish by Ottolenghi, an oven-roasted cauliflower dish, and this addictive oven/skillet potato dish from David Tanis, which people in my household fall on and devour.
We’ve also got roasted golden beets on repeat, to add to salads, and all sorts of kale and lettuce and greens salads, sometimes with this bold anchovy-garlic-lemon dressing that would also be killer on potatoes, with parsley.
PARTING BITS: Did you think I could do a whole newsletter with nothing about COVID-19, our insane president, or the gut microbiome? (You were right.)
Some current good reads:
The Emily Ratajkowski effect by Haley Nahman: This brilliant take-down of a supermodel’s essay about her own complicity and exploitation doesn’t miss a trick, and EmRa’s essay has many, many tricks. One snippet: “Emily Ratajkowski has accumulated mass wealth by riding the very currents she is indirectly criticizing—the male gaze, female objectification, self-commodification. And by writing this piece she did not compromise that wealth or general position; if anything, she likely increased both and will continue to do so.”
Cruel Summer Book Club, Single Woman, How my Intuition is teaching me to save myself, by Jillian Anthony: I’m so much older than Jillian Anthony, but the insights in this essay are timeless. Haven’t we all experienced this? “...I don’t know what his intentions were, or what might have happened if I had silenced my intuition and tried to quietly walk by him with my eyes downturned, instead of looking directly into his eyes and speaking to him, letting him know I saw him and I was going to remember his face.”
You made it this far, here is something happy:
Wayne Thiebaud, Pies, Pies, Pies (1961). Courtesy of the Crocker Art Museum, the gift of Philip L. Ehlert in memory of Dorothy Evelyn Ehlert, ©Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York.
Artnews, ‘Enjoy It When You Have It, But Don’t Have Too Much’: Artist Wayne Thiebaud on How to Savor Cake While Staying Healthy at 100 Years Old, by Sarah Cascone. Did you know that artist Wayne Thiebaud is 100 years old--and that he lives in Sacramento? This article about Thiebaud, his retrospective, and his work brought me so much joy. More great Thibaud art here, at the Crocker virtual show.
Thanks for reading #16. #17 hits next Sunday. Subscribe if you like it. And tell your friends. And reach out--I miss you, all of you!
Best, Susan