I declare today Bibliophile Friday. Why? Well, is it redundant to say that books are awesome? Because they are. Some are, anyway. A lot of them. I work at a used bookstore where a huge quantity of every-subject-you-can-possibly-imagine comes across the counter daily. I see a lot of the same stuff -- titles and authors you could probably guess at, like Danielle Steel, James Patterson or Dr. Phil self-help books. But we see a lot of great cookbooks, too, and art books, philosophy, pop culture, travel (and music and movies, too)... the list goes on.
I thought it would be good to share the scoop on some of my favorites, and new things I come across, so hopefully, if I remember ;) -- Friday will be my show-a-book day! Yay!
Because I've been cooking up a storm lately, I thought I'd start with an oldie, one that sits in my kitchen cabinet more for decoration than anything else, but one that I have referred to in the past just for fun. Betty Crocker's New Picture Cookbook, printed in 1961 by McGraw-Hill, is oh-so-quaint mid-century. Betty, Betty, you little devil, this cookbook is one of my favorites.
I remember reading somewhere that a vast percentage of Betty Crocker cookbook readers at the height of her popularity in the mid-20th century thought she was a real person, rather than what she actually is, a brand name made up by General Mills. She's gone through many makeovers during her lifetime, and I have to say, she looks pretty demure in her spine portrait. There is actually another book that came out a few years ago by Susan Marks about the history behind the icon, called Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America's First Lady of Food. The portrait comparisons on the article's page are endearing.
As far as this specific book is concerned, I'm mostly in love with the cover. The colors are adorable. The entire book is illustrated, however, by Joseph Pearson, and it's one of those typical everyone-is-SO-cheerful! kinds of cookbooks.
It's worth noting that I'm just finishing up season 2 of the show Mad Men, so I can't help thinking of Betty Draper when I look at some of the illustrations of the happy-bappy housewife whipping up dinner for her picture-perfect husband and two kids. The nuclear family, remember?
It's kind of amazing to think of the culture that these cookbooks appealed to 50 years ago. This book was geared to women and only women, as the makers of food and the satisfiers of family in the home. (Today, I just ran across an old falling-apart copy of the Settlement Cookbook, another classic from the beginning of the 20th century, and even that, right in the first page, boasts "The way to a man's heart." Gotta love it. That would never fly today.) But housewife-ing was a full-time job, presentation being the keystone.
And maybe one of my favorite photos is right in the beginning, at the Betty Crocker test kitchen in Golden Valley! Look how pristine everything and everyone is! It looks like a girl's dream come true. If only I looked that adorable while decorating cakes and lining up my loaves of bread perfectly!
Here's to a wonderful piece of nostalgia, and some darn good classic recipes.
I've never thought about the importance of the size and dimensions of a common or living room, but I realize (very much) now that having enough space is crucial.
My apartment is a fraction of the size it was meant to be. It sits above a main street business and the apartment was originally designed to occupy the entire second floor, which included a gigantic kitchen, front living area that looked out onto the street, two bedrooms, bathroom, and a screen porch in the back.
Since then, the living room and a chunk of the kitchen were separated by a wall and allocated to the business as a gallery/studio/meeting area. One of the bedrooms became the current living room, out of which the "front door" leads downstairs to the business. For me, it has proven extremely challenging to make a bedroom-sized living room feel comfortable, especially when it is used as a thoroughfare from the door to the kitchen.
The other problem is that I hardly ever use the room. It's called a living room, but it's mostly dead space. It serves as storage for my vast quantities of books, magazines and record albums, and a depository for random furniture that doesn't quite fit anywhere else. I have mad love for a pair of lucite chairs that I found at an antique mall in Waterloo, Wisconsin a couple of years ago, and though they are an odd addition to a living room, they are pretty much an odd addition wherever they go.
I have a TV, but it isn't hooked up to an antenna or a box, so it is used specifically to watch movies, and even that happens maybe once a week at most. Essentially, the room is a glorified hallway/storage space. The main problem is that I throw junk in there because I never go in it, but there is a giant open doorway leading from the kitchen (where I spend almost all my time) into the room, so no matter how untidy and ugly it looks, I have to look at it all the time.
Before:
Note the exploded, "unpacked" suitcase from a vacation to Europe two months ago. Stacks of books. Shoes. Bags of yarn and unfinished knitting projects. Random painting I did in college... And Porter, feeling the pain.
This is how we feel about dirty rooms and having to clean them. My cat, Porter says, "Whyyy do you put me through it. Why."
All those books were giving me a headache. And Porter is still exasperated.
I decided that I had to do something. For one, the rug was disgusting. It hadn't been properly brushed/cleaned in over a year, and you don't want to know the amount of accumulated cat/chinchilla fur that managed to get in it. I'm just going to say that I now have a designated rug brush and will be brushing regularly from here on out. Lesson learned.
Also, it's worth noting that I hadn't a penny to spare to buy new shelving or wall art or anything like that. So I essentially rearranged and borrowed items from other rooms to revamp. There is one wall by the record player that could really use a floating shelf, but other than that, a couple hours of cleaning, organizing, and rearranging really made a difference.
The results:
Nice clean rug! Polaroid cameras and picture frames on the table instead of stacks and stacks of miscellaneous books. The rug is turned at an angle to complement, as you will see, the angle of the bookcase. The little black chair that held the exploded suitcase is gone (reclaimed by its rightful owner, my sister) and replaced by one of my lucite lovelies. Porter still seems exasperated, though this time with me moving things around, I'm sure. And it was hot.
The Hokusai wave is a little high, but my "Nothing is Black and White" painting sits by the front door now, and the stereo has been moved into the corner rather than sitting along the wall. Check out my sweet homemade Slinky lamp also. ;)
The bookcase (I color-coordinated the books! See what I did there!?) and my album covers in something of a media corner, although forget I used the phrase "media corner."
This is taken standing right inside the front door. I think the suitcases add a little something extra, if purely decorative, so that when entering through the door, one doesn't just see an ugly chair back.
I'm really happy with the feel of the room now. I've got a paint swatch stuck in the window frame in a yellow hue -- I'm trying to decide if I'd like a light yellow wall in here. Until then, at least it's inhabitable, and I enjoy looking at it so much that I might even choose to live in my living room from time to time now...
I thought a lot about writing today. I work at a bookstore, so it may not come as much of a surprise. But the truth is that I've thought about it a little more today than I do most days.
I've always been a writer. In various forms, and for various reasons (some embarrassing), I've always been a words-down-on-paper sort of person. Tonight, out to dinner with my family, we were getting nostalgic about old-school computer games for MS-DOS, and I thought about the ancient computer that used to sit in the corner of my 6th grade classroom that I used to spend free time on crossing the Snake River or fixing a broken wagon axle en route to the Willamette Valley. But I also wrote stories, and even though I don't have a copy of what I wrote at the time, I remember writing very in-depth about something happening in the wilderness of Alaska. I was taken in by it, whatever it was, and it absorbed me fully until the bell rang and it was time to resume math or social studies or whatever it was. Nothing compared to losing myself in an alternate world in which I controlled absolutely everything that happened.
Just shortly after that, I became rabidly obsessed with the band Hanson (cue laughter; I was 13, come on!) and I used to write hundreds (hundreds.) of pages of what I later learned was known as "fan-fic." There were entire web domains devoted to hosting the stuff. I even had a couple stories online (and fans, what!). Of course they were wish-fulfillment stories, mostly plotless, starring myself, but when I look back on it now, knowing they were probably terrible (I'm not sure any of them exist anymore), the thing I like most is that I was writing. Didn't matter what about; I was planning chapters and outlining "plot," building characters and describing settings. I mean, I was big into it. I permanently calloused the middle finger of the right hand, I wrote so-so-so much. Secret notebooks, you know, nothing that could be easily accessed on a computer hard drive or anything! Duh!
In high school, the writing tapered off, the visual arts taking up most of my creative attention. And in college this also continued, but I never totally stopped writing. Dozens of unfinished plot outlines, chapters, and stories remain on my hard drive or on CD backups and I've never shown anyone a word of it.
The last several months have provided a funny, unexpected opportunity to write and to share it with people -- something I would have cringed at the thought of.
A couple of friends have lovely old black typewriters at their houses, which tend to become a focal point at some point during occasional late-evening get-togethers. Poetry, letters, stories, and plain old nonsense are spewed from these machines, a tiny bit of which I've kept, and much more of which has fallen into other hands or into the ether. I would have expected to be anxious that my gut feelings, my sometimes drunken sentiments are in other people's hands -- things that I have written when my guard was completely down. Some might call it "stream-of-consciousness," but what it really is, is scary. And a typewriter doesn't have a delete key!
Typewriters give way to notebooks and napkins; even I carry around a Moleskine with me at all times in case an idea strikes. But I'm coming to terms with the fact that writing, although it may serve a cathartic purpose for me, is truly enjoyed when shared.
My own lone Smith-Corona Skyriter, sleek and utilitarian and running very low on ink has produced some interesting pieces; things I'm not even embarrassed about. Writing is actually visceral. If it's too intellectual, it loses meaning and depth. I'm learning to embrace the writing that happens naturally, with the flow of my thoughts and the keys of the typewriter, my notebook keyboard, or my nearly-broken Moleskine. Whatever works, just keep writing and writing and writing. Maybe I'll never get published, but if ideas aren't released onto paper, they are in danger of disappearing, as if they had never been thought up at all.
