Holiday 2022 Edition: Three Things Newsletter
The Three Things Newsletter
Santa Kiss Hot Chocolate
Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hannukah, Diwali, Kwanzaa, Festivus, or just grumble about the whole thing, this time of year is just too much. Too much buying, too much hurrying, too much expected of you. After decades of being an over-holidaying person, I'm pulling waaaay back. I probably won't get to major baking projects and I will definitely not get to sending out cards, but I will make a cup of Santa Kiss hot chocolate and sit at the kitchen table with a book and probably eat the extra whipped cream out of the bowl with a spoon. HIghly recommended. Link to the recipe here, but PLEASE, PLEASE use peppermint vodka. Trust. :https://bakerstable.net/the-santa-clause-hot-chocolate-cocktail
I've Been Thinking and Reading About: Intimacy and Tenderness
Yeah, that's what I've been thinking and reading about. The painting here, by my wife Carol Saft, is of me, sitting at the table, eating french fries and drinking wine (observant readers may notice a theme already in this newsletter having to do with me, kitchen table and indulging alone). At a recent exhibit of her paintings, some people commented on the intimacy of these portraits. (You can read a review here.) She created those paintings during the Covid lock-down, when we spent all our days and nights together and I rarely changed out of my pajamas.
Doesn't everyone want to be known well enough that that their beloved could portray them with all their customary and awkward gesture?.
There's a poem by our newest Poet Lauerate, Ada Limon, that captures that closeness in a relationship:
A Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance
Sometimes, I think you get the worst of me. The much-loved loose forest-green sweatpants, the long bra-less days, hair knotted and uncivilized, a shadowed brow where the devilish thoughts do their hoofed dance on the brain. I’d like to say this means I love you, the stained white cotton T-shirt, the tears, pistachio shells, the mess of orange peels on my desk, but it’s different than that. I move in this house with you, the way I move in my mind, unencumbered by beauty’s cage. I do like I do in the tall grass, more animal-me than much else. I’m wrong, it is that I love you, but it’s more that when you say it back, lights out, a cold wind through curtains, for maybe the first time in my life, I believe it.
And then, the next thing I know, I'm thinking of the link between intimacy and tenderness, for surely they come together. George Saunders, who has been one of my literary touchstones since I read Lincoln in the Bardo, had this to say about the relationship between tenderness and literature:
“Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves. It is the basic psychological mechanism of the novel. Thanks to this miraculous tool, the most sophisticated means of human communication, our experience can travel through time, reaching those who have not yet been born, but who will one day turn to what we have written, the stories we told about ourselves and our world.”
Making Something
Right now I'm trying to make a good book. Two places I'm turning for advice are the email bookclubs for writers by David Daniel Wallace and George Saunders.
I'm participating in reading club with Wallace, where we read books together and he points out elements of craft that we can use to make our writing better. Right now, the club is finishing up Daisy Darker, which may be just your cup of tea if you fancy an isolated mansion story owing a debt to Agatha Christie along the lines of And Then There Were None with a side helping of woo-woo, and a thoroughly dysfuctional family. And one of those really twisty twists at the end.
Here's a link to Wallace's bookclub:
https://danieldavidwallace.com/reading-with-daniel-info-page/
and here's a link to a review of Daisy Darker:
nytimes.com/2022/09/15/books/review/new-pyschological-thrillers.html
George Saunders' email bookclub newsletter also examines short stories, novels, what-have-you, for techniques writers can use in their own work. He just finished a discussion of Chekov's "Lady with a Lapdog", but what knocked me over was his recent discussion about how to experiment with "freakniness" in your writing. Saunder's work is, of course, very freaky indeed, and I've always thought of myself as a solidly, boringly, unfreaky writer, and now I'm going to try the experiment he suggests and see if I can let my writing freak flag fly. I'll let you know what happens. Check Saunders's newsletter out here:
https://georgesaundersbooks.com/newsletter
If you want to come along for the ride with me on this newsletter, here are some things I'm thinking about sharing with you in the future: the most amazing barbeque rib recipe from my brother, the recipe for Laurie Colwin's Black Cake, and what her novels meant to me, and how I'm trying to write about something close to my heart: the Gulf of Mexico.
I'd love it if you'd write me and let me know what food you'd like to talk about, what you are reading and thinking about, and what's going on with your creating life. That last one includes everything: quilts, scandals, sculptures, whatever it is you make.