11 a.m.: THE LITERATURE OF AIDS FROM 1981 – 1995, with David France, Michael Denneny, Larry Kramer, Sarah Schulman, John Weir, and Edmund White.

2 p.m.: THE LITERATURE OF AIDS FROM 1996 – 2011, with Rabih Alameddine, Gary Indiana, Zia Jaffrey, Amy Scholder, and Max Steele.

7 p.m. READING with Rabih Alameddine, Michael Denneny, Gary Indiana, Zia Jaffrey, John Kelly, Larry Kramer, Jennie Livingston, Amy Scholder, Max Steele, John Weir, and Edmund White.

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

2 comments

Alexandre Dumas père was a terrible and a wonderful man. He fought in wars, hunted, traveled the globe, owned a theatre, dabbled in politics and revolutions here and there, and was bankrupted a few times after spending fortune after fortune on women and high living. And he wrote, and wrote, and wrote, in jail or out of it. With the aid of a number of assistants he was able to turn out over 600 books before the end. He was magnificently ugly, and, apparently, irresistible. Which actually, I don't doubt that for a minute.

Dumas was also a dedicated cook and the author of a fine book on gastronomy, the enormous Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine. (That link takes you to the 1873 first edition, which is in French; I can recommend the 1958 English translation and abridgement by Louis Colman, a gentle and sensitive prose stylist who is also possessed of the requisite salacious edge.)

After emerging from under a series of crushing debts, Dumas set out to write this book "as a diversion" in the late 1860s. But then he got really into it, and wound up taking many months over the research and writing. In the dedication of the book to the novelist and critic, Jules Janin, he described his thorny legal troubles, and concluded: "In my contract with Michel Lévy, I had retained the right to write a cookery book and to sell it to whomever I pleased."

The Regency was a charming period in France. For seven or eight years one lived to drink, love, eat. Then one fine evening the Regent was talking with Mme de Falaris, his little crow, as he called her. His head was heavy, and he laid it on the shoulder of the beautiful courtesan, saying, "Do you believe in hell, sweetheart?"

"If I go, I hope to find you there," she said.

He did not answer. He was there already.

This anecdote is succeeded by an excellent recipe for salad dressing. "I made a salad that satisfied my guests so well that when Ronconi, one of my most regular guests, could not come he sent for his share of the salad, which was taken to him under a great umbrella when it rained so that no foreign matter might spoil it." Dumas makes the dressing right in the salad bowl; one hard-cooked egg yolk for each two persons, mashed with oil and mixed with chervil, crushed tuna, macerated anchovies, etc., "and my servant tosses it. On the tossed salad I sprinkle a pinch of paprika, which is the Hungarian red pepper. And there you have the salad that so fascinated poor Ronconi."

To the science of kitchen and table Dumas brought taste, scholarship, appetite, wit, sensuality, bragging, brazen inconsistency and the chatty, winning, urbane style that distinguishes his novels. The Grand Dictionnaire is made up of a zillion little vignettes arranged alphabetically, as the title suggests, but their titles are so capricious that the arrangement is no help at all if you're trying to find anything in there. That doesn't matter. The idea is to open the thing up and dive in.

FALCON. A bird of prey, trained and used for hunting before the invention of firearms. I have eaten roasted falcon. It had a strong flavour, but not bad.

There are suggestions for preparing toads, swan ("it is made into pies"), and (with apologies to the management) bear, which the author claims has to be marinated for ages "in a cooked vinegar marinade." For eagle, only a proscription: "The size, nobility, and pride of the king of birds do not give it a tender and delicate flesh. Everyone knows it is tough, fibrous, and evil-tasting and that the Jews are forbidden to eat it. Let us leave it to soar and defy the sun, but eat it not."

Dumas was just like Anthony Bourdain—like a really fat 19^th-century Anthony Bourdain, I mean—very proud of trying everything, eager, lively.

"Let the reader be unafraid. He is not condemned to eat a whole elephant. But next time he finds himself in possession of the trunk or feet of an elephant, we ask him to prepare them as we shall indicate, and let us know how he likes them."

He gives wonderful potted biographies of famous chefs—Carême, Vuillemot—a disquisition on truffles, a lovely long entry for wine and this, maybe the best story I've ever read in a cookbook:

TOAST. Toasts were first drunk in France at the time of the Revolution. The name comes to us from the English, who, when they drank anyone's health, put a piece of toast on the bottom of the beer pot. Whoever drank last got the toast.

One day Anne Boleyn, then the most beautiful woman in England, was taking her bath, surrounded by the lords of her suite. These gentlemen, courting her favour, each took a glass, dipped it in the tub, and drank her health. All but one, who was asked why he did not follow their example.

"I am waiting for the toast," he said. Which was not bad for an Englishman.

***

The cookbook author rarely confines himself to the kitchen; whether consciously or not, his work may also prove to be a study of manners, or aesthetics, or social climbing, or politics, or it may be a comic work of a very high order. But like the Grand Dictionnaire, any good cookbook is likely to be mainly a work of moral philosophy. The means by which virtue and happiness are related has been one of philosophy's chief concerns from classical times onward; as the Socratic scholar Gregory Vlastos once wrote, "how man should live is every man's business"; and any thoughtfully written cookbook, concerned as it must be with the satisfaction of one of our deepest needs, will have gone into this matter deeply.

Dumas, for example, an incorrigible voluptuary whether in literature, wine or romance, was the kind of person who pours every bit of himself into this moment, now: this single taste, this laughter, the scent of a single flower; this woman, this company, this night. I am a little bit in awe of his unrestrained "being in the moment," which is a kind of mindfulness, though it is the obverse of the ascetic, Buddhist or Eckhart Tolle variety. It's the kind of "being in the moment" that keeps nothing back, that spends everything now, that gives itself over completely, body and soul.

I admire the brio of Dumas very much, but I can't live that way. I much prefer the model of Elizabeth David, whose cookbooks provide a better provisional answer to the question of how to live than Plato or Kierkegaard or Richard Rorty ever could.

David's personal life was kind of a minefield. She was a libertine, a black sheep really, from a rich aristocratic English family whom she scandalized first by running off to be an actress, and then by taking off on a boat for Greece with her married lover. But it's not the story of her personal life that calls forth my devotion; it is her writing, her cooking, her appreciation of the world and the way of life she proposes to the reader. Here the taste for pleasure is restrained, disciplined. Where Dumas is all about the overkill, in David's view excess equals vulgarity or waste, whether in writing or in cooking, and there isn't a speck of it in her work. Yet the effect is one of nonstop beauty, pleasure and profusion; she is all elegance and economy, and wit as dry and cool as champagne.

Staying in Toulouse a few years ago, I bought a little cookery book on a stall in the marché aux puces held every Sunday morning in the Cathedral Square. It was a tattered little volume, and its cover attracted me. In faded pinks and blues, it depicts an enormously fat and contented-looking cook in white muslin cap, spotted blouse, and blue apron, smiling smugly to herself as she scatters herbs on a gigot of mutton. Beside her are a great loaf of butter, a head of garlic, and a wooden salt box, and in for the foreground are a table laid with a white cloth and four places, a basket of bread, a cruet, and two carafes of wine.

The promise of the cover was, indeed, fulfilled in the pages of this delightful little book, called Secrets de la bonne table [...] The dishes described are not spectacular, rich, or highly flavoured, the materials are the modest ingredients you would expect to find in a country garden, a small farm, or in the market of a quiet provincial town. But it is not rustic or peasant cooking, for the directions for the blending of different vegetables in a soup, the quantity of wine in a stew, or the seasoning of the sauce for a chicken reflect great care and regard for the harmony of the finished dish. This is sober, well-balanced, middle-class French cookery, carried out with care and skill, with due regard to the quality of the materials, but without extravagance or pretension.

She wasn't uniformly crazy about all things French, though.

Torn, most willingly, from an English boarding school at the age of sixteen, to live with a middle-class French family in Passy, it was only some time later that I tumbled to the fact that even for a Parisian family who owned a small farm in Normandy, the Robertots were both exceptionally greedy and exceptionally well fed. Their cook, a young woman called Léontine, was bullied from morning till night, and how she had the spirit left to produce such delicious dishes I cannot now imagine. Twice a week at dawn Madame, whose purple face was crowned with a magnificent mass of white hair, went off to do the marketing at Les Halles, [returning] at about ten o'clock, two bursting black shopping bags in each hand, puffing, panting, mopping her brow, and looking as if she was about to have a stroke. Indeed, poor Madame, after I had been in Paris about a year, her doctor told her that high blood pressure made it imperative for her to diet. Her diet consisted of cutting out meat once a week [...] On Wednesdays, the day chosen, Madame would sit at table, the tears welling up in her eyes as she watched us helping ourselves to our rôti de veau or boeuf à la cuillère. It was soon given up, that diet.

A cookbook is liable to reveal the inner workings of an author's mind far more clearly than the most barefaced tell-all memoir could dream of doing. The form itself forces him to reveal so many intimate features of his own character; is he methodical, patient? Can he describe well (but not too minutely) the techniques required in order to achieve some particular effect? How fussy is he? Has he taste, humor, discernment? You can't fake this sort of stuff as easily in a cookbook as in a novel, because you must be specific in the last degree; no finessing. Is the author a snob? The answer to this question is impossible for the cookbook author to conceal, try as he might. Martha Stewart, for example, is a titanic snob, and her clenched-teeth attempts to seem friendly and accessible have ever been doomed, much as I admire her skill and perfectionism (a lot).

By contrast, Irma S. Rombauer, the original author of the The Joy of Cooking is the matiest, most hilarious companion and teacher anyone could hope to have in the kitchen (just look at her!). Make sure to get the oldest Joy of Cooking you can lay your hands on; mine is a 1953 one, and I do not doubt that the versions published in 1931, 1936, 1941, 1942, 1946, 1951 and 1952 are all equally entertaining and informative. But the newer models, edited and re-edited after Mrs. Rombauer passed on to the great Kitchen in the Sky in 1962, are all but unrecognizable.

Mrs. Rombauer's sunny, enlightened presence has, alas, slowly faded not only from modern versions of her book, but from the world at large. There may be no one left like the original Rombauer. Such modesty and charm she had. "For years I was unfortunate in having what a foreign woman called 'a preconceited idea' in connection with all recipes calling for yeast." "Watch your fingers!" she shouts.

Henriette Davides, the German counterpart of the fabulous English Mrs. Beeton, says that the heat under this pancake must be neither "too weak nor too strong," that it is advisable to put "enough butter in the skillet but not too much" and that the best results are obtained in making no more than a 4-egg pancake at one time. Henriette's recipes make mouth-watering reading. That, as Archie of "Duffy's Tavern" would say, is the "ipso," but "facto" is that they are almost impossible to follow. Only a strongly intuitive person on speaking terms with his imagination has a chance of success.

(Martha Stewart, one feels sure, would never admit to so much as a stray peanut-butter cookie inadvertently scorched at the age of seven.)

Mrs. Rombauer wears her mantle of greatness so lightly, so easily. She does not shrink from steaming brains with you, nor drawing wild birds, nor squirting paper cornucopias full of icing into daisy shapes ("although the botanist might not recognize these structures as such"), and never in 1,013 pages does her giddy bonhomie fail her.

Our own neurotic age is in danger of losing the graceful art of tempering competence with such gentle self-deprecation. Now what have we got, some irritating Microsoft kazillionaire/patent troll demanding 600-plus clams so he can tell you how to make freeze-dried lobster tail. Though it must be said that the works of Mark Bittman, Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver retain something of Mrs. Rombauer's classically friendly DIY appeal.

"My roots are Victorian," Mrs. Rombauer writes in the foreword to The Joy of Cooking, "but I have been modernized by life and my children." Modernization in Mrs. Rombauer's case extended to such newfangled contraptions as the home freezer ("Excess air within the frozen food package is a real enemy"). Her chapter on Frozen Foods is still the most detailed and useful primer on this confusing subject I have seen anywhere; and best among its many virtues, it begins with one of the most charming passages in modern letters:

We are indebted to an Arctic explorer for the following Eskimo rule for a frozen dinner:

"Kill and eviscerate a medium-sized walrus. Net several flocks of small migrating birds and remove only one small wing feather from each wing. Store birds whole in interior of walrus. Sew up walrus and freeze. Then two years or so later, find the cache if you can, notify clan of a feast. Partially thaw walrus. Slice and serve." Simplicity itself.

The loveliest thing about this formidable recipe is Mrs. Rombauer's tacit acceptance of the idea that one might easily lose track of a frozen walrus in two years' time; a contingency totally excluded from the dream universes of our modern arbiters of taste. Real cooking, like real life, is full of such accidents; Mrs. Rombauer understood this, and reveled in it.

***

In the novel 2666, Roberto Bolaño considers two real-life authors who recalled themselves to reality by writing cookbooks. One is the 17^th-c. Mexican poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and the other is Barry Seaman, who is a reimagining of Bobby Seale, co-founder with Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and one of the Chicago Eight (who became Seven, after Seale's indignation in the courtroom reached such a pitch that the judge had him bound and gagged right then and there—in the courtroom—severed him from the trial, and sentenced him to four years for contempt of court.)

At one point in the novel, Barry Seaman gives an extended account of his life after jail. In tone it falls somewhere between sermon and memoir.

[O]ne day I realized there was one thing I hadn't forgotten. I hadn't forgotten how to cook. I hadn't forgotten my pork chops. With the help of my sister, who was one of God's angels and who loved to talk about food, I started writing down all the recipes I remembered, my mother's recipes, the ones I'd made in prison, the ones I'd made on Saturdays at home on the roof for my sister, though she didn't care for meat. [...] I learned how to combine cooking with history. I learned to combine cooking with the thankfulness and confusion I felt at the kindness of so many people, from my late sister to countless others. And let me explain something. When I say confusion, I also mean awe. In other words, the sense of wonderment at a marvelous thing, like the lilies that bloom and die in a single day, or azaleas, or forget-me-nots. But I also realized this wasn't enough. I couldn't live forever on my recipes for ribs, my famous recipes. Ribs were not the answer. You have to change. You have to turn yourself around and change. [...] So those of you who are interested can take out pencil and paper now, because I'm going to read you a new recipe. It's for duck à l'orange.

This passage is very close in feeling to the actual book, Barbeque'N with Bobby, which yes, is a real cookbook written by Bobby Seale in 1982. Seale steers pretty well clear of politics in the text, but there are hints, as in the acknowledgements to colleagues, friends and family: "I thank them in the spirit, realization, and principles of cooperational humanism." Seale seems to have mellowed out in much the way Bolaño suggests, and there's a humility and humor to his book that is fascinating and powerfully attractive. I haven't tried the recipes yet (they are very involved, with five pounds of meat at a go being about the minimum per recipe, hot marinades, liquid smoke and all that jazz) but they look awesome. Meaty! But awesome.

The author who aims at literary glory in the conventional way, say by writing an immortal novel or a definitive biography, is apt to price himself out of the market regarding practical solutions to the problems of daily existence. Jim Behrle addressed this with great elegance in an essay he wrote for the Poetry Foundation: "Most of the True Genius poets can’t tie their own shoes. They are beautiful creatures—too beautiful to exist on earth and, for example, eat soup."

Dumas, and Elizabeth David and Julia Child, Marcel Boulestin and Alice B. Toklas and Bobby Seale and so many others, have the eating of soup figured out and a good deal besides; as literary artists and beyond this, as artists of savoir faire, of life itself. Given that one must eat, how then to do it? Historians and philosophers as well as poets tend to come up short where advice on questions urgent and as homely as these is required. Nor do the feral rich (a serviceable phrase coined in the recent London riots) or those who serve them appear to know much of interest about these things. The rich must always believe that elegance and wisdom are there for the buying, and by their ostentation and excess demonstrate only the lack of taste and sense, rather than the possession of either.

Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and the great authors of gastronomy offer us all an explicit and conscious acceptance of this temporality, of the demands of the flesh. They teach us to embrace sensuality not only because we are drawn to it, but also because we are condemned to it; a condemnation which, it turns out, may be borne both humbly and happily.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like A Gentleman, Think Like A Woman.

---

See more posts by Maria Bustillos

6 comments

The author of that list makes a useful confession in the comments section: "Sebastian Flyte totally would have made the list if the text of Brideshead were available online." Of course. Alas, it is difficult to work with an incomplete library. Especially when it concerns fashion-an obvious matter of personal taste and moral proclivities. (A professor of mine said: "Brett Ashley? Really? Or Scarlett O'Hara? She makes a virtue out of curtains, rather like the von Trapp children.")

Here are some more suggestions from texts that, for the most part, can be found online:

• Pyrocles in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (written around 1580) quite appropriately navigates toward the aesthetically pleasing and falls in love with a portrait of Philoclea. He cross-dresses as a gorgeous Amazon and everyone, both male and female, falls in love with him. Sidney devotes long passages to describing doublets of "sky colour satin, covered with plates of gold" and "crimson velvet buskins, in some places open (as the ancient manner was) to shew the fairness of the skin."

• Who can forget Chaucer's Wife of Bath from the Canterbury Tales (written around 1400):

Her kerchiefs were of finest weave and ground;
I dare swear that they weighed a full ten pound
Which, of a Sunday, she wore on her head.
Her hose were of the choicest scarlet red,
Close gartered, and her shoes were soft and new.

• Spenser's Duessa from The Faerie Queene (1590) is "adornd with gold and jewels shining cleare" and "in garmets gilt, / And gorgeous gold arrayd." The personification of Falsehood, Duessa quite appropriately finds herself covered with shimmering jewels.

• As long as we're looking at visual interpretations of words, what about Shakespeare (1564-1616)? His characters were written to be seen. Hamlet didn't just give melancholy a new emotional low, his customary suit of "solemne blacke" has been faithfully donned by sad young men ever since. Forget artistic redeployments of Ophelia, what about her monologue that depicts Hamlet in all his perfect misery:

Lord Hamlet with his double all unbrac'd
No hat upon his head, his stockings foul'd
Ungartred, and downe giued to his Anckle
Pale as his shirt."

Malvolio fantasizes about lying on a daybed, wearing a "branched velvet gown" and his fetishistic desires culminate as he continually insists "my lady... did commend my yellow stockings of late, she did praise my leg being cross-gartered." Further, if clothes are a manifestation of a character, Petruchio's wedding outfit of "a pair of old breeches thrice turned, a pair / of boots that have been candle-cases" is a prime example.

• Less is more in Robert Herrick's short and seductive Upon Julia's Clothes: "Whenas in silks my Julia goes, / Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows / That liquefaction of her clothes." Indeed, if simplicity is a virtue, then the prize goes to John Milton's Adam in Paradise Lost 1667), who is "Accompani'd then with his own compleat/ Perfections, in himself was all his state."

• May we jump several centuries? Even when in a rush, Maria Wyeth from Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays (1970) is stunningly on key (even if the rest of her life is out of whack):

She dressed every morning with a greater sense of purpose than she had felt in some time, a cotton skirt, a jersey, sandals she could kick off when she wanted the touch of the accelerator, and she dressed very fast, running a brush through her hair once or twice and tying it back with a ribbon, for it was essential (to pause was to throw herself into unspeakable peril) that she be on the freeway by ten o'clock.

• Alternately, some sartorial descriptions demand to be milked. Gabriel García Márquez's lush One Hundred Years of Solitude (1969) displays the beautiful Fernanda del Carpio, whose bridal trunk is "so well organized that the schoolgirl knew by heart which were the suits and cloth slippers she would wear crossing the Atlantic and the blue cloth coat with copper buttons and the cordovan shoes she would wear when she landed." During the scene of her husband's death, he vividly describes Fernanda "wearing a pink silk dress with a corsage of artificial pansies pinned to her left shoulder, her cordovan shoes, with buckles and low heels, and sateen stockings held up at the thighs with elastic garters." Please, let's never translate this into film.

• Of course, it makes sense that the era of naturalism would produce novels concerned with detailing clothing. Jean Des Esseintes from Joris Karl Huysans's À rebours (1884) is the archetypal aesthete and dandy. (Oscar Wilde modeled Dorian Gray from him.) Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter (1850) expresses her erotic and aesthetic desires both through the clothes she makes and wears. Prynne's sewing of her red "A" acts as a symbolic resistance to the ruling social elite. Charles Drolet-Sister Carrie's first boyfriend from Theodore Dreiser's 1900 novel-might be considered the first metrosexual in literature. Absolutely mad about clothes, he introduces Carrie to the dizzying world of shopping.

• The athletically built Queequeg from Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) is known and revered most as a character who externalizes himself through his full-body tattoos. His clothes are assembled from a mixture of global cultures and thus Queequeg epitomizes the dandy as a cosmopolitan worker of the world. Also, who can forget the image of Queequea smoking from his tomahawk?

• As much as I adore Edith Wharton and her novels that stage unspoken narratives through characters' clothing choices, perhaps Lily Bart, May Welland, and Ellen Olenska should not get all the attention. What about Undine Spragg from The Custom of the Country (1913)? She is surrounded by people who are "all crazy to dress" her–and she welcomes them with open arms. Like most of Wharton's female characters, Undine cunningly conducts her social transactions through necklaces and dresses. For walks around the public park, she "put[s] on her most effective dress."

• One must also give a shout out to Henry James's Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer and Bram Stoker's Dracula, who are all, if anything, immaculate. Daisy Miller: A Study does take its sweet time to inspect Daisy–the word "pretty" is employed 43 times in this short novella. But that can't be helped in a world where "white muslin, with a hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale-colored ribbon" does not mean excess, but perfection. The 19th c. list goes on and on (Walter Elliot from Jane Austen's Persuasion (1818), Rosamond Vincy from George Eliot's Middlemarch (1869)) that it ultimately must come down to a matter of personal taste.

* * *

If one's simply looking for books concerned with how fashion articulates desire, Wharton would certainly be a good place to start. And let's face it, who really can authoritatively define "best dressed"? Perhaps we are more likely to remember the eye-catching over the stylish. Some novels of interest might be Colin MacInnes' Absolute Beginners (1958) with its overdressed mod fashions of late 1950s London or Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997), filled with outlandish and foppish costumes. A personal favorite is D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1950), with its cast of characters who wear "clothes in pure defiance." Ursula and Gudrun's bright, bohemian clothes, Oprah's "beautiful oriental clothes," and Gerard's "blue silk wrap" are all delightfully sensuous.

Unfortunately, the list does grow rather Eurocentric. Characters in Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956) do not possess the luxury to dress in "pure defiance." As immigrants rejected by London society, they try to impress–and so blend in– through their clothing choices. Eye-catching in the wrong way, they employ style as a means to fashion a new identity.

For another look at identity and clothing, Yinka Shonibare's Diary of a Victorian Dandyuses not literature, but visual art, to respond to Dorian Gray-esque figures. Shonibare's work exposes the relation between styles of dress, class and imperial domination. Using so-called "African fabrics" (bought and made in Europe), he reimagines famous 18th c. paintings to expose the artificiality behind one's concept of both Africa and British Victorianism. Maybe someone will make a movie out of it.

---

See more posts by Jane Hu

27 comments

1. On your way to a week-long house party in Rhinebeck, you miss your train. On the platform, you encounter your true love, Lawrence Selden. He invites you to take tea with him in his rooming house while you wait. You...

A) Insist that he preserve your reputation by taking you to a public tea-room instead.
B) Rebuff him and remain on the platform.
C) Accompany him to his apartment unchaperoned, insult the dinginess of his surroundings, and inform him that his legal salary disqualifies him as a husband.

2. Upon leaving Selden's apartment, you run into the unfortunately Jewish, and hence socially dead, Simon Rosedale who asks what brings you to a street consisting entirely of male rooming houses. You...

A) Tell him the reasonably innocent truth, and butter him up by accepting his offer of a lift to the train and making friendly conversation.
B) Make up a weak story about visiting your dressmaker, and butter him up by accepting his offer of a lift to the train and making friendly conversation.
C) Make up a weak story about visiting your dressmaker, then insult him by jumping into a hansom cab and dashing off.

3. On the train, you spot the unbearably dull but extremely wealthy Percy Gryce, en route to the same party. You flirt with him successfully, and ask after his unbearably dull collection of Americana. It occurs to you that you should marry this unbearably dull man and use his money to buy many dresses. Selden arrives unexpectedly. Over the course of the week, you...

A) Maintain a meek, sedate demeanor, attend church with Gryce, avoid Selden like the plague, dress conservatively, ask more questions about Americana.
B) Behave in a reasonably neutral manner, sneak two cigarettes behind the fountain in the garden, treat Selden civilly, do nothing disastrous in public.
C) Lose tremendous amounts of money at cards, and skip church... twice... in order to continue your flirtation with Selden, who you still refuse to consider as a husband. Then, let your rival for Selden's affections, the adulteress Bertha Dorset, use your distraction as an opening to terrify Gryce away with tales of your poor impulse control and nicotine addiction.

4. Despondent at your decaying financial prospects, you go to pick up your hostess's husband, Gus Trenor, at the train station. You reveal your debts, bat your eyelashes, and play on his sympathies. He promises to take over your failing investments, and you begin receiving generous cheques as a result. His manner towards you becomes increasingly friendly and familiar, and culminates in an awkward scene in which his romantic designs are made clear. He also accuses you of having an affair with Selden. Selden sees you leaving the house with Trenor, assumes that you have become Trenor's mistress, becomes enraged. Then Rosedale proposes marriage! So you...

A) Reveal all to Selden, pledge your undying love, marry him.
B) Become either Trenor's mistress or Simon Rosedale's wife, achieving financial security.
C) Tell your horrified aunt about your gambling addiction and clothing debts, rebuff Rosedale, Selden, and Trenor, and jet off to the Mediterranean for an impromptu vacation with the Dorsets.

5. It becomes clear that Bertha Dorset has invited you to the Mediterranean to provide cover for her own illicit adultery. Spotting her chance to frame you for an imagined tryst with her husband, she takes it, booting you from their yacht, devastating you socially and leaving you literally stranded in Monte Carlo. After making your own way back to New York, your aunt dies, almost completely disinheriting you, and removing your financial safety net. Happily, compromising letters proving a previous affair between Bertha and Selden have come into your possession, allowing you to...

A) Use the letters to blackmail Bertha Dorset into restoring your social position, then reveal all to Selden.
B) Take a job as a milliner, a trade you understand nothing about, and which requires more speed and manual dexterity than you currently possess or have any hope of acquiring.
C) Marry Simon Rosedale.

6. Oh but Simon Rosedale no longer wants to marry you. You find an unfulfilling but reasonably lucrative job as a secretary to the divorcee Mrs Norma Hatch. Examining the limited options available, you...

A) Use the letters to blackmail Bertha Dorset into restoring your social position, then reveal all to Selden.
B) Remain in the employ of Mrs. Hatch, and attempt to gradually work your way back into society's graces.
C) Take a job as a milliner, a trade you understand nothing about, and which requires more speed and manual dexterity than you currently possess or have any hope of acquiring.

7. You are a terrible milliner, and find yourself fired at the end of the season. Circling the drain, you...

A) Use the letters to blackmail Bertha Dorset into restoring your social position, reveal all to Selden.
B) Try to get your job back with Mrs. Hatch, and accept Simon Rosedale's offer of financial assistance.
C) Give Gus Trenor your tiny inheritance to repay him for his earlier cheques, leaving yourself penniless and unemployed. Rebuff Selden a final time, and burn the letters that represent your one hope of salvation.

8. You've become accustomed to supplementing your sleep with a heavy dose of chloral. This particular night, sleep continues to elude you. You....

A) Take your usual dose with a mug of hot milk, count sheep. In the morning, reveal all to Selden.
B) Take a slightly higher dose, fall asleep more quickly. In the morning, accept Simon Rosedale's offer of financial assistance.
C) Think, "at least I won't have to make any more damn hats," and chug away.

Nicole Cliffe lives in Sandy, Utah. As a pending legal resident of the United States, she neither travels to Arizona nor accepts money in exchange for goods, services or blog posts about Edith Wharton. She used to work for a successful hedge fund, but was not allowed to touch the money there, either.

---

See more posts by Nicole Cliffe

28 comments

With an income quite sufficient to their wants thus secured to them, they had nothing to wait for after Edward was in possession of the living, but the readiness of the house, to which Colonel Brandon, with an eager desire for the accommodation of Elinor, was making considerable improvements; and after waiting some time for their completion, after experiencing, as usual, a thousand disappointments and delays from the unaccountable dilatoriness of the workmen, Elinor, as usual, broke through the first positive resolution of not marrying till every thing was ready, and the ceremony took place in Barton church early in the autumn.

THE END

Yep. It's all there.

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

19 comments

Say you were to make a list of every American who has ever run for the vice presidency. Say you were to take that list to your local library. Say you were to sit at the reference computer, and say you were to type the names on your list into the "author" field of the electronic catalog, and say you were to run a search on each and every one. Among the results would be Doing Business by the Good Book: 52 Lessons on Success Straight from the Bible.

The authors are named David L. Steward and Robert L. Shook. Now, oddly, neither of these men has ever run for Vice President. But say that you are interested in the book anyway. Say that sitting in your local library (in the middle of the morning, in the middle of the week, in the middle of a recession) has given you the feeling that you could use a lesson on success-or fifty-two lessons on success. In other words, say you were to retrieve Doing Business by the Good Book despite the fact that it is not vice presidential literature. What would you learn? From Chapter 13, you would learn that the Bible contains the following lesson on success:

BE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN COMPANY

From Chapter 25, you would learn that the Bible also contains this lesson:

BE A TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN COMPANY

And from Chapter 52, you would learn that the Bible contains this lesson:

GOD BLESS AMERICA

Messrs. Steward and Shook make a good case for the Bible as a kind of DIY MBA. They write: "In Exodus 18:17-27, Jethro told Moses to stop wearing himself out by attempting to do everything himself." Lesson on success?

DELEGATION

Or, "in Exodus 4, Moses asked God to send someone else to speak on his behalf, explaining that he was not articulate. When Moses persisted in his plea, God told him to seek Aaron, who was a fluent speaker." Lesson on success? That it is important to hire good salespeople, or, as Steward and Shook put it ...

NOTHING HAPPENS UNTIL SOMETHING IS SOLD

You might think that "Nothing happens until something is sold" is a lesson on success that would be better exemplified by the story of Judas and the thirty pieces of silver, but you would digress.

At this point, having received the Gospel of God and the Gospel of Wealth (and having been impressed by the fact that Mr. Steward's company, WWT Inc., is the largest African-American owned company in America), you might begin wondering why the electronic catalog of your local library suggested Doing Business by the Good Book to you when all you were interested in was vice-presidential literature. Which is when you would notice, at the very top of the book's dust jacket, this advertisement:

With a Foreword by Former U.S. President George H. W. Bush
Former U.S. President, and Former U.S. Vice President!

Bush's foreword is about 250 words long, and is lukewarm in its praise. ("David Steward has come up with an idea that betters the way we live and work. The idea that he embodies is not actually new-it is a 2000-year-old philosophy that makes as much sense today as it did back then.") So, no, this foreword provides no evidence that Former Vice President Bush actually read the book.

Rather, it is evidence that someone owed someone a favor-or evidence that certain Republicans are eager to be seen in the company of the man who owns the largest African-American owned company in America. Still, however thin it may be, however venal it may be, the foreword to Doing Business by the Good Book is enough to get G.H.W.B. credit as a co-author in your local library's electronic catalog. And so here is a lesson on success straight from the vice-presidential canon:

THE PRICE OF POWER IS INDIGNITY.

Previously: Edmun Muskie's 'Journeys'

Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn. He has won no awards and earned no distinctions. His novel "Maynard & Jennica" is now available in paperback.

---

See more posts by Rudolph Delson

6 comments

Here is the quintessence of vice-presidential literature.

It is 1972. It was four years ago that President Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek re-election. It was four years ago that Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy dead. It was four years ago that the sitting Vice President, Hubert H. Humphrey, became the Democratic Party's nominee, and it was four years ago that Humphrey chose as his Vice President a dove, an intellectual, a liberal, a native from the distant northern state of Maine: Edmund Sixtus Muskie. And?

And it was four years ago that Muskie and Humphrey lost. But that was four years ago! That was 1968! This, as we can all agree, is 1972! And now Ed Muskie is running for President himself. He has returned to avenge Lyndon Johnson, to avenge Bobby Kennedy, to avenge Hubert H. Humphrey, to avenge the entire Democratic Party-and Muskie's vengeance begins with a memoir.

And from the first page of that memoir, you realize the poor man stands no chance. Muskie begins his book by quoting an adage: "When you have nothing to say, don't try to improve on silence." And then, heartbreakingly, he writes:

I don't know whether this little book will be an improvement on silence, but at the time it is being written, there is some curiosity about who I am, where I'm from, and what I am for.

We lived across the road from a hill of fir trees. On a certain Sunday afternoon in December, my father would trudge up and over that hill with his ax. "I'm going to get us a Christmas tree," he'd say. He would come back by late afternoon with a beautiful tree and set it up. When lit, those trees of our would have a hundred candles on them.

We headed for an area called Four Ponds. We went by caboose on a freight train to a station called The Summit and we took along a week's supply of groceries and clothing. Then it was a four-and-a-half-mile hike uphill. We had to carry all our stuff on our backs. But once there, we found paradise.

I wandered over to where the high jumpers were practicing and joined them. I seemed to do as well as they were doing. The next day, I ran my event, the half mile, and lost, and then went over to the high jump and won the event. Few other events have come that easily for me.

The poor man wants to be President! And the poor man thinks he can do it by spinning clichés, by telling old yarns!

Muskie picks up his pace when he gets beyond "who I am, where I'm from" and tells us "what I am for." (He is for peace and for ecology-facts that make his memoir even more melancholy). But no artist can fake brilliance, no memoirist can fake insight, and Muskie can be embarrassing when he aims to be profound.

He attempts to describe the plight of black America, but does so in a way that reveals that Muskie presumes his readership to be white. (In this memoir, blacks are "they.") He attempts to show off his foreign policy credentials and sounds like an innocent abroad. ("Much of the travel through Israel was, for me, like a journey through the Bible.") There are sophomoric efforts at reasoning from first principles. ("Let us assume a society in which every person is free to seek and find his or her own level of creativity, attainment, achievement, or prosperity."). There are stunning misjudgments. ("Africa will be one of the most important factors in our foreign policy concerns in the next fifty years.") There are puns. ("Much of our Gross National Product is truly gross.") This, then, is Edmund Muskie: half wise, half foolish, and irredeemably platitudinous.

But in 2009, platitudes may be what is needed. And so, for the newest entrant into the annuls of vice presidential literature, Sarah Palin, from one of the greats, Edmund Muskie, here are some platitudes:

Americans in every section of the country are frustrated by the number and complexity of our problems ... the backlog in educational needs, persistent unemployment, inflation and housing shortages, unfair taxes, pollution, inadequate health care, poverty, and racial tensions. They wonder if there is any real way to make a change. In such a climate the way of the demagogue is easy. He...

can play on fears, exacerbate frictions, exaggerate difficulties and differences. There is in the successful demagogue a touch of genius, but such candidates make effective speeches and poor Presidents.

Sweet Muskie! Rest in peace!

Previously: 'Standing Firm: A Vice Presidential Memoir' by Dan Quayle

Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn. He has won no awards and earned no distinctions. His novel "Maynard & Jennica" is now available in paperback.

---

See more posts by Rudolph Delson

5 comments

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

19 comments

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

5 comments

Just like the first novel, he leaves, but this time he's not at a prep school, he's at a retirement home in upstate New York. It's pretty much like the first book in that he roams around the city, inside himself and his past. He's still Holden Caulfield, and has a particular view on things. He can be tired, and he's disappointed in the goddamn world. He's older and wiser in a sense, but in another sense he doesn't have all the answers.

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

8 comments