I Love This Neighborhood, Part I: What a lovely way to start the weekend: a package slip left by my friendly neighborhood postal carrier last night yielded a package from the brilliant and lovable nakedjen, who found a hardcover first edition of Alexander King’s first book, Mine Enemy Grows Older, and snapped it up for me. (She also sent me a PTMYB thematically-correct dozen-egg-photo refrigerator magnet, a card that continues the egg leitmotif and the world’s coolest wrapping paper.) Jen, I still can’t believe you found this. I knew I would have fun with it when I read the note on the jacket: “NOTE: If this jacket (the author painted it) is too strong for you, take it off. There’s a conservative jacket for conservative people underneath.” The jacket painting is a lurid and disturbing yet beautiful painting of a cellist atop a skinless horse, playing a cello that is shaped like a callipygean female torso. I had thought that the note was another joke of King’s until I happened to peer at the book from the top and saw what looked to be another jacket. I carefully unfolded the protective plastic coating. Sure enough, there was indeed a plain green cover with the title and author’s name in a bigger font, taking up all of the front cover real estate. I don’t know whether this was King’s idea or Simon & Schuster’s, but either way, it’s one more interesting flourish to a guy full of interesting flourishes.
News from the Egg Project: Research starts in earnest this week. I have enrolled in a culinary history survey at the New School, one that promises to take us from Marcus Apicius to Julia Child in 12 hours. It is taught by Andrew F. Smith, author of erudite, scholarly culinary histories on tomatoes, ketchup, popcorn and peanuts, which I will get around to linking, I swear. I have also picked up a book on how to keep a flock of chickens in your backyard, as nice a place to start as any, and, much to my surprise, I have a pair of research assistants, two friends who have offered to visit libraries and ag extension offices for me, since I can’t take any more vacation time to visit them myself. I am actually feeling a creeping sense of competency, of being qualified to research and write this book after all...but shhhh, don’t let that get out.
Because you asked: Eureka Springs, Arkansas, the town where I will be living during my fellowship, is in northwestern Arkansas, near the Missouri border. I can get there either by flying to Fayetteville and driving for about 1 1/2 hours, or by flying to Springfield and driving for 2 hours. Hmmm. Eureka Springs is also near Branson, MO, once described by Bart Simpson as “Vegas as if it were run by Ned Flanders,” and Bentonville, AR, home of Wal-Mart corporate headquarters. If you’d like me to engage in any demonstrations against bad corporate practices, or to pick up some B-list celebrity autographs in Branson, just drop me a line.
I Love This Neighborhood, Part II: Because I received so much kind feedback on Wednesday’s apple post, I have decided that Twenty Hour Apples are in our immediate future, and if I’m going to make the apples, I might as well make that tart about which I fantasized, with the sauternes pastry cream and the cinnamon shell. Unless it comes out too, er, rustic, pictures will be forthcoming. In the meantime, if yinz guys keep giving me feedback like that, I will get all swollen-headed, and have further delusions of competency, and I will become insufferable to live with, and poor Lloyd will walk around looking even more haunted than he usually does.