at midweek
What I'm reading, cooking, listening to, enjoying (presented in a completely disorganized manner)
It’s been a while since I shared a midweek list with you. Book deadline; eldercare.
There are a lot of these kinds of lists floating around substack these days. My lists are not culled from weekly internet searches, but from the Romeo spiralbound notebook that sits on my desk at all times (gorgeous paper, if you’re interested), and is a scribbled-in repository for everything from to-do lists to the things I love that have crossed my actual and digital transom, and that I don’t want to forget about. This is a habit I started years ago when I lived in Manhattan; thanks to my easily distracted mind and bombsite/desk I found that making notes for myself is important. When I remember to do it. And then I have to remember to look at it. But that’s another story.
In the meantime, what is it that I’m loving?
Andrea Gentl’s flourless Mexican chocolate cake with rose petals.
If you make any chocolate cake in the coming weeks/months/years, please make it this one. I admittedly do not have a sweet tooth, but when brilliant photographer/author/forager/fermenter/ polymath Andrea Gentl made this chocolate cake in my apartment kitchen at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown back in 2019 after the memoir workshop I was teaching was over, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Susan and I have tried to replicate it over the years from memory, to no avail. You can imagine my glee when I came upon the recipe here, even though I can see by its date that the post is two years old. How did I miss it? No idea. Anyway: make the cake. Trust me. Here it is in mid-process and presentation.
My Netherton Foundry Prospector Pan
Over the years, I have whittled down my kitchen tools to only those I love and use. On the one hand, it’s a space issue (my kitchen, while not small, is also not big); on the other, it’s respect for the things themselves — how they’re made, whose hands touched them, the care with which they are produced, the history behind them. I am also vehemently anti-plastic, and although a close friend of mine wisely reminded me that a plastic peeler that she’s used for years is just as worthwhile as a metal one, I am not a fan of landfills or anything that has a half-life of a thousand years. In Soetsu Yanagi’s classic The Beauty of Everyday Things, the author writes Things that are used on a daily basis must stand the test of reality. They cannot be fragile, lavishly decorated, or intricately made; such objects will never do….They cannot be flimsy or frail in nature; neither can they be overly refined. They must be true and steadfast to their use. My Netherton Foundry pan, which is crafted from spun iron, is a thing of quiet beauty: if you enjoy cooking in iron, you will love it because it is lighter weight than cast iron, heats evenly, is easy to season and clean, and goes from the stovetop to the oven to the broiler (and even to the grill top) very easily. Lots of places to find them here in the US — here’s one — and in the UK, or you can order directly. (Also, the Netherton folks are absolutely lovely people.)
A Weekend Haiku Workshop at Upaya with Roshi Joan Halifax, Natalie Goldberg, Jane Hirschfield, Pico Iyer, and Taz Kanahashi
The first time I ever considered haiku as something other than a poetic form was when I was in attendance at Krista Tippett’s On Being Gathering in 2018. During the gathering, Krista introduced us to Mennonite peacemaker, John Paul Lederach, who, in his own words, discovered haiku during his peace-building journey as a contemplative practice. When I saw a posting about a hybrid (in person and online) multi-day haiku workshop at Upaya Zen Center, I was drawn to it immediately not only because the program speakers are among my favorite writers and thinkers, but because I have found myself of late in need of a new way of expressing myself — even just to and for myself — at a time when I feel like I simply have no words for what is happening around me. Does beauty have language? Does violence? Does love? Frustration? Yearning? When is silence enough? I came away from the weekend feeling like haiku is a lexical form of negative space: we write what we see, and we write what we don’t. Upaya offers many wonderful hybrid talks and workshops, so consider signing up for their newsletter.
My Annual Reading of Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home
There is not a lot written about platonic friendships between two women that is not dripping with innuendo, or snark, or that ties itself into narrative knots in an attempt to retain the reader’s interest. So-called quiet books seem to betray the demand for a dopamine rush — isn’t there violence in it? sex? more sex? is it salacious? has the author fled her ho-hum life to walk to Everest base camp from her apartment in Brussels? — and it is precisely for that reason that I am forever drawn to Gail Caldwell’s writing about her friendship with author Caroline Knapp, who died of lung cancer in 2002 at 42. Plaited together in this story about two very different women from two very different worlds — Caldwell is a Texan, Knapp was from Cambridge — is the sense of hard-won equanimity: both had gotten sober long before they knew each other (and were so old-school about it that they didn’t tell each other for a long while into their friendship), their love of dogs, their quiet search for peace. In the wrong hands, this book could have been maudlin—a sentimental voyage that maybe begins in the same way that Love Story did (“What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved Mozart and Bach, the Beatles, and me?”) — but it’s about as far from maudlin as any memoir of friendship could get. It is pure poetry; Caldwell, formerly a Pulitzer Prize-winning chief book critic for The Boston Globe, is a natural poet. Every sentence is magic, and when I read this book once a year (like clockwork) I linger over her words and let myself breathe them in like air. Let’s Take the Long Way Home is a masterclass in narrative possibility, and in kaleidoscopic, circular storytelling at which so many fail. If you have ever been lucky enough to have a platonic friendship so strong that it is an almost crystalline evocation of the Latin Amicitia, please read this book. With Kleenex.
The Best Drug-Free Sleep Aid You Never Knew You Needed
I am not generally a raver-about-things (except for cookware, see above, and maybe the amazing Quince cashmere sweaters which I discovered online for $50), but this essential oil diffuser by Vorda has absolutely changed the depth of my sleep. In 2016, when my mother had a life-altering accident and I made some unfortunate discoveries — she had no directives, no papers, no will, no nothing, nor did she have any intention of creating them or letting me hire an aide — the way in which I handle stress changed, radically. As it almost always does, the stress impacted my sleep dramatically — I was sleeping three or four hours a night — and so someone turned me on to very high-quality lavender essential oil. I bought a small diffuser for my bedside table, and discovered that lavender oil had the same effect on me as general anesthesia. That was the upside; the downside was another humming, water-filled plastic electric device on my crowded nightstand which got knocked over, a lot. I stopped using a diffuser when the downsides outweighed the upsides. A few weeks ago, this all-wood, cordless/batteryless diffuser found its way into my life, and I am hooked, and with high-quality lavender oil, I am again sleeping like the dead. I am not one hundred percent sure how it works, but I am assuming it has to do with the porosity of the wood. Dribble a few drops of oil onto the top, set it by your bedside, and that’s it. You can easily travel with it, or move it from room to room. No plastic involved. And sleep is a beautiful thing.
I hope that wherever you are, you are able to smell spring in the air the way I have. Be well, and please feel free to add in the comments anything you’ve found that has had meaning for you this week.
Good morning. What type of wood is your diffuser? Did you buy the oil from the same company?
Chalk up another purchase of a walnut diffuser to reading your post!