A Tea People’s History, by Alex Pareene, illustrated by Ian Huebert: ebook, $2.99.

Happy-making sentence of the day: “Therefore, instead of New York City enduring the worst of winter this year, it will likely be Chicago.” I mean, unless you live in Chicago. In which case, my sympathies.

“The Marco Island Marriott Beach Resort in Florida adds flash mob services to its amenities list.”

Football Pick Haikus For Week 5

Sunday, October 9

At Indianapolis -2.5 Kansas City
Battle for Last Place!
Pre-empt the Fourth Quarter and
Show Heidi instead. PICK: CHIEFS

At Minnesota -2.5 Arizona
Do cardinals really
hang out in Arizona?
They must get thirsty. PICK: VIKINGS

Philadelphia -2.5 At Buffalo
You should still Bill-leave!
The Dream Team Has Crapped the Bed.
Hot Wings Beats Cheesesteak. PICK: BILLS

At Houston -6 Oakland
Andre Johnson is out.
Arian Foster scores
a bunch of touchdowns. PICK: TEXANS

New Orleans -6.5 At Carolina
I still don’t know why
The writers killed John Goodman
off on “Treme.” Boo! PICK: PANTHERS

At Jacksonville -2.5 Cincinnati
Bengals D the talk
on WKRP.
Contain Jones-Drew! PICK: BENGALS

At Pittsburgh -3 Tennessee
Steelers O Line is
as messy as a pumpkin
dropped from the Chrysler PICK: STEELERS

At NY Giants -9.5 Seattle
What’s that burning smell?
Seahawk corners getting torched?
Or Starbucks coffee? PICK: GIANTS

At San Francisco -3 Tampa Bay
I miss Tampa’s old
Orange uniforms with the
knife in the guy’s mouth PICK: 49ERS

New England -9 NY Jets
If Jets stop Welker
Patriots D will give it up.
Nine points is too much. PICK: JETS

San Diego -4 At Denver
How can we expect
Tebow to die for our sins
if he’s always benched? PICK: CHARGERS

Green Bay -6 At Atlanta
I’m not anti-Pack.
I just like point spreads a lot.
But not this point spread. PICK: PACKERS

Monday, October 10

At Detroit -5.5 Chicago
Ford Field shall rock
when Lions go 6–0
and Tigers beat Yanks. PICK: TIGERS, LIONS

Last week’s Haiku Picks went 7–9. Season to date is 25–37–2. The Big
Comeback begins now.

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

by Daniel D’Addario

In the October Vanity Fair — the one with Angelina Jolie’s most recent spin on the cover, this time in an ultra-zoomed-in portrait leaving her looking like a close-up-ready revision of Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein — Joan Didion was depicted in her biennial being-thin tour, occasioned by the upcoming release of her memoir Blue Nights. The picture, taken by Annie Leibovitz, depicts a gaunt and dimly lit Joan, her hair overtaken by wispy flyways and even a small sweater piling upon itself on her frame. Some meager light plays across her face. The photo, in uncopyrighted reproduction, has 625 notes right now on Tumblr, and the actress Zooey Deschanel reblogged it without further comment beyond the reblogging.

The surroundings are creamy — white couch, toile pillow in the background (on an immense chair), a framed picture on the floor (something which I personally have always associated with the haute-WASP lifestyle) — and fade into the background, and Ms. Didion, despite her strong lipstick, is made to loom among them, an unnatural position not merely for a woman of her bearing but for a writer who has made her living lurking on the outskirts of events and of experience. She cannot have known quite how Ms. Leibovitz would photograph her, but she seems, I think, uneasy with the faux-heroic framing, the Queen of the Realm ironically diminished by her age and weakness. Ms. Didion’s expression — pursed lips, eyes open wide — is of an unassaugeable pain, born bravely. Or it is nothing. Or it is the mere human evocation of the emotion :-|, a neutral placeholder.

Ms. Didion is one of the most important figures of both contemporary fiction and nonfiction, and a heart-stopping chronicler of experience — both her own and others’. A writer of her stature and in her time would inescapably be the subject of photography, and there is that famous author photo — reiterated, with variations — of a young and purse-lipped Didion, cigarette in hand, assessing the lens. Ms. Leibovitz’s portrait seems a cruel parody, allowing the surroundings to subsume the woman whose lissomeness became grimness. Any photograph of Joan Didion, given her very specific physicality, will seem unreal (Vanity Fair ran a photo by Brigitte Lacombe of Ms. Didion with Vanessa Redgrave, who played her in the stage adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking, and it proved nothing but their dissimilarity — but this new take on her felt unsettlingly like a lampoon of the photography-of-Didion style, taking up the most significant signifiers and filling in the rest with cruel intimations of age.

To look at the young Didion (who holds a cigarette like a weapon but whose tight lips seem, perhaps by sympathetic magic, to betray at once a beatific smile and a derisive laugh) and then the current iteration is to see all of what Didion has written about growing older and losing all that once had mattered, without the grace of her prose or the sympathy one allows oneself to feel for an author using her own voice.

There is a reason, based not upon the creation of one’s own image but on a certain intensity and rhyme with her written work, that Ms. Didion’s image adorns so many paperback editions of her books. She is peering spuriously from a car’s driver’s seat on The White Album and clad behind sunglasses, jaw set, on Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The look is her white suit, but even Tom Wolfe isn’t as recognizable.

I have been in the same room as Ms. Didion once ever, at an awards ceremony for student journalists at which she spoke, dedicating an award to the daughter whose death Blue Nights chronicles. She is, as reported by herself, “so physically small,” but she was not, in performing the dedication, shaky. Instead she spoke quickly and robotically as if trying to get through the speech before some catastrophe. She electrified the room to a degree Ms. Leibovitz’s creamy neutral nothing completely elides, not merely by virtue of reputation but by some demonic charisma she still possesses, a cool an inch thick over bottomless reserves of rageful heat.

She also offered the honoree of the prize in her daughter’s name carrots off her plate, which he refused.

The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the loss of Ms. Didion’s husband (while the new book is about the loss of the pair’s daughter) occasioned a spread in the Times magazine, shot by Eugene Richards. Here, Ms. Didion is frail — there is no escaping her physical smallness, no trick a photographer might use to morph her in that way — but dwarfed by her surroundings. Rather than dominating the frame, Ms. Didion, in the most memorable shot, hangs back, in a doorway, her face lower and smaller than a portrait of her dead husband. She does not look at the lens. There is bravery here on the part of subject and artist. There is real contrast with that earlier portraiture, of the confident political essayist, of the former president of her Upper East Side co-op board, all the other many things she is, that makes a statement. All Ms. Leibovitz, ever seeking sensation, shows is disgust with the frailty of the body that masks itself as reverence for the travails of the heart.

Daniel D’Addario is a writer living in Brooklyn who has contributed to publications including The New York Observer, Slate, and Capital New York.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

A Working Bear

They say he was good at picking pockets,
especially if you were wearing pants.
It’s hard to get your jaw around, much
less your heart. So ‘less you forget,
the fighting’s to be done in the hallway,
the loving in the tub on the cedar deck.
I’ll be the pommel, you be the horse.
Be negotiable. Be kind, decline.
So many ducks walked into a bar
that the janitor had a hell of a morning.
So, a miniature duck walked into
a bar. The bartender said, “Well,
this should make the janitor happy.”

Notes and Propositions from Space

1. My age in lightyears is none.

Dear Timothy, I built it
totally twenty-first century,
but I’m afraid parabolic
curves failed to cure
blank-wall syndrome — 
please send a Hawaiian
landscape that moves.

New entry: flying fortress meets Flynt’s penthouse — 
invitations to include illustrations of spacesuit-pajamas.
Do hope you’ll come.

Games: Rings Around Saturn,
Slipping the Dry Dock,
I Missed the Tang,
Space Walk & Weld My Rivets,
My Lover’s the Moon,
Jogging in Circles,
Zero G Bingo,
One Man Recon

2. I hope we’ll always be binary.

Her airline’s lost to the refracted
supernova off my prow, and breath only
blurs the glass your lips can touch.
Still — if my favorite dream comes
knocking when I’m play-navigating
through the twinkle of Taurus’ eye,
sleep-lost and not better-able — 
I have a space-arm but lack
the heart to reach out and use it.

3. You can’t flip a coin in space.

Four haikus for the famous fall men of the stars:

Albert I: Albert, we’ve put in
your request for air — but who
takes orders from apes?

Albert II: How to avoid death
by impact: attach a chute
to a monkey’s back.

Albert III: Albert III, your death
was no accident — V2s
are built to explode.

Albert IV: Albert IV: also
dead on impact, but at least
he made it to space.

4. Hard science is a solitary pursuit.

I’m having trouble balancing
priorities — inside it’s all buttons
and dials, and outside

you ask questions my calculator
can’t answer. I made a grid
for you — you blew condensation

into improbable existence,
drew with your human
finger the outline of a heart.

5. I’m worried that you’re a space ghost with no medium.

Does the Prince of Pisces VII steal the show?
Who intervenes when the minister’s down?
“Tell Nero to can his drives and return Lady Diligent — 
surface command grows impatient.”
Three cheers for Lady Diligent — she swept
the DMZ, and the loneliness went away.

Dear mom, thinking of starting a toothpaste company.
Probably call it Rocket Fuel.

6. Relativity’s important, but I’m not moving.

Progress comes in the form
of mice-in-cages, of night-terrors, of man-
alone-in-a-tin-can. I’m taking steps to merge

astro-fluff with ether and frequencies
with astral knockings. I’m trying
to translate the conjurer’s talk, but it leaves

me cold, cold and waiting for magic.

Daniel Carter lives in Columbus, OH.

Would you like to go to a place where there is only poetry? Step this way, to The Poetry Section’s vast archive. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

by Emerson Beyer

Because I live in a college town, the back-to-school season gives me one awful flashback after another. The sidewalks are a cringe-worthy pageant of undergraduates reenacting the libidinous idiocy of my own youth. It’s not unlike re-reading the middle chapters of Brideshead Revisited each fall, if Waugh had added in sorority girls. Though autumn may evoke spiced cider to the innocent of heart, to me it’s the season of the margarita — the season of puking on a bouncer and getting kicked off public transit late on a Sunday (yes, Sunday) night. Over the past 15 years, I have gradually reclaimed my ability to have a healthy, adult friendship with tequila, rebuilding the trust we once had step by delicious step.

So much reconciliation happens over a good meal, when we live in the sensory moment and let past hurts drift into history. I am going to help you reclaim your dignity and trust by spending some time with tequila in the kitchen. The results will put you in a mind of Mom and home, rather than Mom would be ashamed and How will I get home?

Don’t jump immediately to the assumption that cooking with tequila means Mexican food. Tequila is a liquor, not a theme. And even if I wanted to steer you to Mexican cooking, I couldn’t teach you much. I have an enormous respect for the variety and complexity of Mexican food, and I’d be happier if you consulted an expert.

Sin embargo, in crafting a tequila-fortified meal, the old adage applies: “If it grows together, it goes together.” Many of the central ingredients and tastes of “Mexican” food (indulge the shorthand) belong in these recipes: acidic fruit and tomatoes, corn, herbs, mild cheese, and peppers both spicy and sweet. My goal is to help you cook, not force you to shop, so I assure you that you can do a lot with ingredients you have at hand no matter the grocery situation in your neighborhood.

No fevered hunts for the best tequila, either. Buy a bottle you’ll like sipping while you cook. I suggest cooking with tequila reposado, that is, tequila that’s been aged a few months in oak. It retains the traditional vegetal tequila flavors but is a little sweeter and more wine-like, so it melds with other components better than unaged tequila (labeled blanco or silver). I chose Tequila Espolon because it had the least shameful/racist/douchey branding of any on the shelf. It turned out to be pretty good!

SAFE AND SWEET
A way to reunite with tequila without the risk of getting up to your old shenanigans is to do it during the day among friends who don’t know your embarrassing past. Tomorrow at work, invite some colleagues over to watch the Texas-Oklahoma game on Saturday&emdash;a frozen tequila dessert will be great during the second half (after nachos, of course, in the first half). Tequila goes so well with citrus juices and tart fruit purees, it requires almost no instructions at all to figure out how to make a lime- or pineapple-tequila sorbet. Here’s a recipe to build on. If you don’t have an ice-cream maker, put the mixture in a baking pan in the freezer, and stir it up with a fork every 20 minutes until it’s all frozen and slushy. (This won’t stay slushy forever, so make it Friday night.)

For something more adventurous, you can make a simple syrup with tequila and one of the “woodier” herbs (rosemary or thyme); you can use this to flavor anything from ice cream to buttercream to pound cake, substituting all or part of the sugar in a recipe. Of course, you already know about Margarita Cupcakes.

SIZZLE
Your most basic, minimal-prep use of tequila for dinner is in the sauté pan. A shot of tequila in there with fish, sliced skirt steak, or even firm veggies like green beans or bell peppers will come through very nicely. You can even flambé, though you won’t get that syrupy, reduced sauce you’d get from whiskey.

If you’re going the vegetable route, you need to make sure there’s a good deal of fat in the pan. Tequila will play up some of the “green” and bitter flavors (in a good way!), but this needs to be balanced. I suggest sautéing in butter (rather than oil) and also crumbling some nice salty, mild cheese like queso fresco over the dish.

With a little more planning but a lot less effort, you can also marinade meat in tequila that you’ll later grill. A booze marinade is particularly good if you want to impart spiciness from, say, jalapeños into the meat, because capsaicin is soluble in alcohol and fat.

A simple tequila-and-fruit sauce will be great on sautéed or grilled meat or seafood. I made one with nectarines, rosemary and jalapeño. (NB: I wanted to use fresh cayenne but mine overstayed its welcome in the crisper, so I used jalapeño instead. As for the fruit, you could substitute anything tart and firm-but-not-hard, like plums or green mangoes.) Here’s how to do it: Reduce a cup of tequila over medium-low heat to about half. Meanwhile, soften a diced onion in another saucepan. Add two peeled, chopped nectarines to the onions to start them softening. Pour the tequila in with the fruit and add the chilis and herbs. You want to keep this on the heat until the fruit is pretty well cooked. Partially smash the resulting mixture with a wooden spoon before serving. This particular combination is great on crab cakes, which I served with spicy mashed turnips.

SAUCE
I promised that we wouldn’t dwell on dumbed-down Tex-Mex because tequila is more versatile than that, and frankly we don’t need to be dredging up any spring break memories you may have from San Padre Island.

So, remember how tequila’s “green” flavors benefit from fat? To play that up, you can make a creamy, mildly peppery sauce that is great with fried fish, chicken or pork.

Do you know how to make béchamel? Definitely memorize this, because it’s very versatile. (I never know how much and where to cuss in a recipe, so please revise according to your own fucking preferences.)

1. Warm up a saucepan on a medium burner. Put two cups of milk in a glass measuring cup in the microwave for three minutes. (If you have no microwave, just do this in a separate pan. Bring it to a boil.)

2. Melt two tablespoons of butter. Wait for the foam to subside.

3. Sprinkle three tablespoons of flour over the butter, one tablespoon at a time, whisking between each. Make sure it gets very well combined. After the third tablespoon, keep whisking for about a minute. Let it get half a shade more golden so you can be sure the flour is cooking a bit. Nothing bad will happen if you let this darken a little, but the resulting flavor will be more gravy-like. (FYI, this is roux.)

4. Slowly pour the hot milk into the pan while whisking vigorously. It will thicken pretty quickly. Add a generous amount of salt (and white pepper if you have it). Don’t let it get too thick, which will happen if you keep cooking it or if you let it cool off. Keep it warm on a low burner or in the oven

Okay, so now that you can make a béchamel, you can modify it a zillion different ways. What I have done is softened diced poblano peppers in butter, reduced a cup of tequila by half, then added the tequila to the peppers and simmered them together for 10 minutes, then poured the mixture into the béchamel. This is not at all spicy, so a few shakes of Cholula bring it to life. I served the sauce over cornmeal-crusted fish with cumin-scented pumpkin on the side.

SUNSHINE
Nothing can help you recapture a wholesome, platonic friendship with tequila like having it for a civilized breakfast — and not in the “hair of the dog” sense. Tequila is definitely a late riser and doesn’t come easily to the morning meal, though you could overcome that resistance quickly and simply by pouring a shot into a pan of sausage hash.

A more adult approach to getting tequila at breakfast might be a tequila tomato sauce to serve with corn and a fried egg. The sugar from slowly stewed fresh tomatoes works into tequila’s woody, slightly sulfuric structure beautifully. Here’s how to make tequila tomato sauce — bear in mind that you could use dry white wine instead of tequila. Also bear in mind you’ll need to make this in advance unless “breakfast” for you is in the middle of the afternoon.

1. Sauté three cloves of garlic in a thick layer of oil over medium heat.

2. Throw six chopped tomatoes in the pan. Do not peel or seed these tomatoes; you’ll lose flavor, and it’s not worth the effort. I like to add chopped oregano at this point, but parsley, tarragon or the traditional basil would be great, too. Sprinkle everything with salt.

3. Add 3/4 cup of tequila to the pan and reduce the heat to low. Simmer for 1–1/2 to 2 hours. Stir periodically, ensuring that nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pan.

4. After everything is really soft and soupy, put it all in a mesh strainer over a bowl. Use a rubber scraper to push it through. Tomato skins and some other undesirable bits will be left behind.

This weekend, I served this sauce with both grits and corn salad, though a reasonable person would have done one or the other. For the corn salad, I cut fresh corn off the cob, sautéed it in a little oil, squeezed a lime over it and crumbled queso fresco into the bowl. If you add a fried egg, don’t let it be too runny — you already have a sauce, and you don’t want a weird, goopy mess.

There should be no doubt about what is the perfect beverage to serve with this breakfast: Tequila Sunrise.

K. Emerson Beyer, environmentalist and gadabout, lives in Durham, N.C. and tweets as @patebrisee.

Thanks to Martin Solem for his experiments in tilt-shift photography.

@donohoe
michael OH “I pre-ordered the book BEFORE he died” #wtf
Oct 06 via Twitter for AndroidFavoriteRetweetReply

Related.

It played festivals so long ago that I forgot about it and now it’s opening in New York and Los Angeles on October 14! (Followed by an extremely annoying and slow rollout to the rest of the country.) Let’s revisit the trailer! Says Almodóvar, of the feedback in Europe: “People like it more the second time.” CAN DO!

“WITH his ratings at record lows, scandal-hit Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi today quipped his party should change its name to ‘Go Pussy!’ in the latest gaffe likely to incense swathes of voters.”