I don’t know what my readers will think of me after this, but I’ve got to be honest.
A couple weeks back I read (a library copy of) a book called Confessions of a Video Vixen. Ostensibly by a young woman named Karrine Steffans, but obviously written by a really bad ghostwriter, this book is intended, somehow, as a morality tale. Young woman grows up poor, becomes a stripper, lands herself some hip-hop celeb guys to sleep with… nothing good happens, then more nothing good happens, then even more nothing good happens. In the end, nothing good has happened.
Frankly, I’m ok with that. It seems to me that whatever woes Ms. Steffans (also known as Superhead) has suffered, with one possible exception (being raped as a teenager – no, she didn’t ask for that, but on the other hand, she put herself in a situation where it w as really really likely to happen, so… what gives, babe?), she basically asked to be shown her on a flimsy tin platter. All the better for the woes to topple off the platter and into her (scantily clad) lap. I don’t feel remotely bad for Superhead. I do feel bad for her child, though.
One thing that really infuriated me about this book – and boy, is this nitpicking, and anyone reading this is gonna be like, “This is what pisses you off?” – is that even the ghostwriter appears to be subliterate. This book is so poorly written it’s just shocking. Early in the book, Ms. Steffans claims to’ve found comfort and succor whilst reading the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, and specifically mentions two poems of his, “The Raven” and “Nevermore.”
Ok, my friends. I am not even going to really discuss why this is an idiotic thing to have in print. To be honest, I don’t expect Superhead to know what the fuck. But the ghostwriter – Karen Hunter – what the fuck was she thinking? Apparently she’s had quite the little career lately writing books for prominent Black figures – did that book On the Down Low about Black gay men, did some other thing for Al Sharpton – well and good – but Jesus fucking Christ, my friend… if you’re going to fucking namedrop, do it correctly, or don’t fucking do it at all.
Someone’s going to complain about my swearing, I’m sure; I’m not taking it out because I want to convey how totally aggravated I am by this. Weeks ago I read this book and it’s still bubbling around in my mind. Karen Hunter apparently teaches at Hunter College; she is responsible for molding young minds; and this is her idea of writing? It is a shande.
You’re probably wondering how a white girl such as I ended up reading this book. What on earth brought me to it? Well, it’s a funny thing. When I was working as the buyer for that little bookstore downtown, I remember very suddenly a lot of people who were not, shall we say, regular customers, started asking for this title about the Video Vixen. I had no idea what the hell it was, and had to go to Amazon.com to find out. My co-worker, M., as I recall, saw the book on the screen, looking over my shoulder, and screeched, “OOOOOOOOOOOO! It’s SUPERHEAD!”
She was extremely into popular culture in a way that I’d forgotten was possible. I think I turned 30 and that switch just went “off.” But anyway.
So M. was all excited. I rolled my eyes and ordered some copies of the book. Inevitably they sold. M. herself, along with a few other of my co-workers, actually borrowed a copy of the book from the store (we were allowed to do that; it was one of the very few perks of the job) and read it eagerly. I could not believe that these people, my co-workers, who, on the whole, I thought of as smart people with good taste in books, wanted to read what really looked like a piece of shit. But they did. I shrugged, at the time, and said “Whatever.”
But when I noticed the book on the shelf at the public library a few weeks back, I suddenly thought, “Gee, I’ll have a gander at that.” My husband was appalled when he saw the book on our kitchen table (“Why are you reading that????”). And it was a waste of time, certainly. But it was interesting – not for the reasons Superhead intended, but on a more sociological/anthropological level – and I’m not sorry that I spent the 1.5 hours it took to read the book. Confessions of a Video Vixen is certainly one of the worst books I’ve ever read, but it’s noteworthy for how it attains that status.
College professors, take note: an excellent assignment, particularly for professors in the fields of media or journalism,* might be to have your students rewrite Karrine Steffans autobiography so that it’s actually readable.
*this means you, Karen Hunter
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Ann Hodgman. Anyone else paying attention?
I am so slow on the uptake sometimes, it’s shocking. I mean, I’m hardly the dimmest bulb in that cabinet over my sink… so what gives?
I’ve had the flu all week. Friday I finally felt well enough that I went downtown and ran thirty errands that had needed running all week. I decided, on a whim, to pop into my friendly Public Liberry, which I love even though it frustrates me in countless ways, and while there I snagged that new book about Spy magazine, along with the Calvin Trillin book-essay about his wife, Alice. (I’d read the essay when it was originally published in The New Yorker, and was one of those saps who adored it – but since I’ve been re-reading The Tummy Trilogy, I thought… well, let's see if there’s anything in the book that isn’t in the article, which I saved. There was, a little; it’s a good book, I recommend it. But I digress.)
Today my beloved Most Ethical Man in the World has come down with what he claims is a cold but which I know is the beginning of the flu. We spent the cold, grey afternoon in our living room, Ethical Man on the couch under a blanket, me in my pink brocade chair under another blanket, the cat prowling around making noises like he was disgusted with us, which he probably was since we weren’t busy doting on him. While Ethical Man slept, I read the Trillin book and then the Spy book. At some point while reading the latter, it dawned on me that they were mentioning this woman, Ann Hodgman. I glanced up at the bookcase across from me, which holds my recently alphabetized collection of used, rare, and out of print cookbooks. (Well, it holds a fraction of said collection. I have a lot of cookbooks. I’m a dealer, man, it’s my job.) There, on the fourth shelf, was a cookbook called Beat This! , which was written by a woman named Ann Hodgman. I thought, “Well, gosh, I’ve never really thought about it, but it must be the same woman.” So I snag the book from the shelf, glance at the back, and lo, the blurbs are by Graydon Carter and Tony Hendra.
Duh.
I breeze through the rest of the Spy book because frankly now I'm much more interested in the cookbook. As soon as I closed the large coffeetable Spy book, which, frankly, I found interesting but not as much fun as I’d hoped it would be, I read the Ann Hodgman book.
Readers, if I have any, let me tell you something.
For one thing, I’m an idiot to’ve never looked at this cookbook long enough to put it together that it’s Ann Hodgman who wrote it – I mean, I must have noticed it at the time I acquired the thing, right? But then why hadn’t I read it eagerly when I bought it – which I did aeons ago? I ought to’ve realized that this was someone who I’d enjoy reading for for reading enjoyment’s sake. It’d’ve been like if Fran Lebowitz wrote a cookbook (god help us, what a concept); I’d be stockpiling copies of it because you know I’d read my first copy so many times it’d be falling apart within a year.
For another thing – and this is my more significant point – this book deserves a real following and it doesn’t seem to have one. I admit that I have not cooked a damn thing out of it; give me a chance, friend, I only finished reading it 45 minutes ago, if that. But I’ve read it and read it and read it and everything in there looks plausible if not way way better than plausible. (Some of the recipes had me really itching to get into the kitchen.)
Ann Hodgman is someone I’ve been sort of dimly, in-the-back-of-my-head, aware of for some years, mostly, I admit, because of a cookbook she did that was illustrated by Roz Chast. I don’t own it, though I’d always been tempted by it; it’s a book about feeding picky kids. I don’t have kids, let alone picky ones, so I’ve never really been able to justify buying a copy. (That will probably change now.) But Beat This!, from the very beginning, had my heart, on the basis of her set piece on brownies, which is utterly true, and which has infuriated me and made me feel guilty for years.
My kitchen touchstone, the thing that warms my heart when I feel blue (well, one of them) is Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking. And I don’t want to complain about Colwin’s book, because I believe it to be a great thing and it changed my life for the better in many ways. But it is true that in this book, Colwin urges us to make Katharine Hepburn’s brownies, and they suck utterly. I mean, really bad. I’ve tried making them at least a dozen times, convinced that I was missing something, doing something wrong, and that’s why they always came out dry and boring and stupid. But no, I accept this: Katharine Hepburn’s brownies are just awful.
Ann Hodgman starts her book discussing this very fact. And I admire her for taking the bull by the horns.
I have not, obviously, prepared the recipe she offers as an excellent – nay, the best – replacement for Hepburn’s brownies, but I have read the recipe and it looks an awful lot like the recipe I use, which has my friends and loved ones swooning every time I serve it, which I do a lot, since it’s basically the only dessert I ever serve guests. I use Maida Heatter’s recipe for All-American Brownies. (It has a ridiculously small amount of flour, and you think, “This can’t be right,” but oh, it is so right.) So on the basis of proportions, I believe Ann Hodgman is at least on the right track, if not totally correct, and I laud her loudly and with vehemence for telling the truth about Katharine Hepburn’s brownies.
The other thing I really liked about Hodgman’s book was her honest discomfort with ingredients that so many people regard as basic but which are somehow creepy – at least to me. That is to say, I feel vindicated by Hodgman’s biases, since I share so many of them. I keep a very slightly kosher kitchen, which means I don’t share Hodgman’s love affair with bacon (though my goyische husband definitely does). But I do share her disgust with Crisco. I mean, just as a product, as a thing, Crisco is really quite vile. In my own case, I’d certainly heard of it, growing up, but I had no idea what it was or what it looked like until after my boyfriend (now husband) moved in with me. For some reason, he wanted to make something that called for Crisco – a piecrust, perhaps? – and so I obligingly bought a small tub of it. I had no idea what it would be like, but it was cheap enough and I was told that it was absolutely necessary.
I do not understand why a deadly white, gloppy, completely plastic looking substance is regarded as absolutely necessary to make food. I could see if it were a sort of raw form of Play-Doh (“Add your own coloring agents! Make Play-Doh that matches your kitchen wallpaper!”). But it isn’t. I’m supposed to eat this crap. Well, let me tell you. We still keep a tub in the pantry, but… it does not get used often. Fortunately, it has a half-life comparable to Twinkies, so I don’t worry about it much. But the fact that I speak of it as having a half-life… you know, that’s not exactly a good thing.
Basically, Hodgman acknowledges that food is supposed to be made of food. When she uses a canned thing, or a pre-packaged ingredient, she says, forthrightly, “Look, I know this is vile, but you’re not eating this every night and it really does make the difference with this recipe.” And you accept it because she’s being honest about being dishonest, basically. I admire that. This is how I cook, myself – I am a stickler for using ingredients that I recognize as being not too far removed from their original form. If I have to use something that has a list of chemicals on the side longer than my ruler, well, that’s not normal and everyone I feed knows it. It’s an anomaly. Oddly, today’s New York Times Magazine has an article by Michael Pollan that basically addresses the issue I’m speaking of (it’s now Sunday morning, so it’s today’s Magazine section; had I written this paragraph yesterday, it’d’ve been tomorrow’s Magazine section, which might have been confusing to the kind of readers who don’t live in the metro area*). Pollan lays down a number of rules about eating that seem like sort of basic good ideas to me. The one that sticks in my head is, Don’t eat anything that your great great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. I.e., something with a label on the side where the list of ingredients is longer than etc. etc.: Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
Eminently sensible, if you ask me. I know you didn’t. I’m just saying.
Please check out Ann Hodgman’s cookbook. I am going to dig up a copy of the sequel and see if I find it equally satisfying.
*If you live within a certain radius of New York City and subscribe to the Times, you get certain sections of the Sunday paper the Saturday before. Hence, you can read Sunday’s NYT Book Review and Magazine on Saturday morning when you’re drinking your coffee and contemplating the errands you’re going to run. In my case, I read it while contemplating the 11 a.m. showing of The Big Lebowski that I knew my husband and I would be going to. It was wicked fun.
I’ve had the flu all week. Friday I finally felt well enough that I went downtown and ran thirty errands that had needed running all week. I decided, on a whim, to pop into my friendly Public Liberry, which I love even though it frustrates me in countless ways, and while there I snagged that new book about Spy magazine, along with the Calvin Trillin book-essay about his wife, Alice. (I’d read the essay when it was originally published in The New Yorker, and was one of those saps who adored it – but since I’ve been re-reading The Tummy Trilogy, I thought… well, let's see if there’s anything in the book that isn’t in the article, which I saved. There was, a little; it’s a good book, I recommend it. But I digress.)
Today my beloved Most Ethical Man in the World has come down with what he claims is a cold but which I know is the beginning of the flu. We spent the cold, grey afternoon in our living room, Ethical Man on the couch under a blanket, me in my pink brocade chair under another blanket, the cat prowling around making noises like he was disgusted with us, which he probably was since we weren’t busy doting on him. While Ethical Man slept, I read the Trillin book and then the Spy book. At some point while reading the latter, it dawned on me that they were mentioning this woman, Ann Hodgman. I glanced up at the bookcase across from me, which holds my recently alphabetized collection of used, rare, and out of print cookbooks. (Well, it holds a fraction of said collection. I have a lot of cookbooks. I’m a dealer, man, it’s my job.) There, on the fourth shelf, was a cookbook called Beat This! , which was written by a woman named Ann Hodgman. I thought, “Well, gosh, I’ve never really thought about it, but it must be the same woman.” So I snag the book from the shelf, glance at the back, and lo, the blurbs are by Graydon Carter and Tony Hendra.
Duh.
I breeze through the rest of the Spy book because frankly now I'm much more interested in the cookbook. As soon as I closed the large coffeetable Spy book, which, frankly, I found interesting but not as much fun as I’d hoped it would be, I read the Ann Hodgman book.
Readers, if I have any, let me tell you something.
For one thing, I’m an idiot to’ve never looked at this cookbook long enough to put it together that it’s Ann Hodgman who wrote it – I mean, I must have noticed it at the time I acquired the thing, right? But then why hadn’t I read it eagerly when I bought it – which I did aeons ago? I ought to’ve realized that this was someone who I’d enjoy reading for for reading enjoyment’s sake. It’d’ve been like if Fran Lebowitz wrote a cookbook (god help us, what a concept); I’d be stockpiling copies of it because you know I’d read my first copy so many times it’d be falling apart within a year.
For another thing – and this is my more significant point – this book deserves a real following and it doesn’t seem to have one. I admit that I have not cooked a damn thing out of it; give me a chance, friend, I only finished reading it 45 minutes ago, if that. But I’ve read it and read it and read it and everything in there looks plausible if not way way better than plausible. (Some of the recipes had me really itching to get into the kitchen.)
Ann Hodgman is someone I’ve been sort of dimly, in-the-back-of-my-head, aware of for some years, mostly, I admit, because of a cookbook she did that was illustrated by Roz Chast. I don’t own it, though I’d always been tempted by it; it’s a book about feeding picky kids. I don’t have kids, let alone picky ones, so I’ve never really been able to justify buying a copy. (That will probably change now.) But Beat This!, from the very beginning, had my heart, on the basis of her set piece on brownies, which is utterly true, and which has infuriated me and made me feel guilty for years.
My kitchen touchstone, the thing that warms my heart when I feel blue (well, one of them) is Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking. And I don’t want to complain about Colwin’s book, because I believe it to be a great thing and it changed my life for the better in many ways. But it is true that in this book, Colwin urges us to make Katharine Hepburn’s brownies, and they suck utterly. I mean, really bad. I’ve tried making them at least a dozen times, convinced that I was missing something, doing something wrong, and that’s why they always came out dry and boring and stupid. But no, I accept this: Katharine Hepburn’s brownies are just awful.
Ann Hodgman starts her book discussing this very fact. And I admire her for taking the bull by the horns.
I have not, obviously, prepared the recipe she offers as an excellent – nay, the best – replacement for Hepburn’s brownies, but I have read the recipe and it looks an awful lot like the recipe I use, which has my friends and loved ones swooning every time I serve it, which I do a lot, since it’s basically the only dessert I ever serve guests. I use Maida Heatter’s recipe for All-American Brownies. (It has a ridiculously small amount of flour, and you think, “This can’t be right,” but oh, it is so right.) So on the basis of proportions, I believe Ann Hodgman is at least on the right track, if not totally correct, and I laud her loudly and with vehemence for telling the truth about Katharine Hepburn’s brownies.
The other thing I really liked about Hodgman’s book was her honest discomfort with ingredients that so many people regard as basic but which are somehow creepy – at least to me. That is to say, I feel vindicated by Hodgman’s biases, since I share so many of them. I keep a very slightly kosher kitchen, which means I don’t share Hodgman’s love affair with bacon (though my goyische husband definitely does). But I do share her disgust with Crisco. I mean, just as a product, as a thing, Crisco is really quite vile. In my own case, I’d certainly heard of it, growing up, but I had no idea what it was or what it looked like until after my boyfriend (now husband) moved in with me. For some reason, he wanted to make something that called for Crisco – a piecrust, perhaps? – and so I obligingly bought a small tub of it. I had no idea what it would be like, but it was cheap enough and I was told that it was absolutely necessary.
I do not understand why a deadly white, gloppy, completely plastic looking substance is regarded as absolutely necessary to make food. I could see if it were a sort of raw form of Play-Doh (“Add your own coloring agents! Make Play-Doh that matches your kitchen wallpaper!”). But it isn’t. I’m supposed to eat this crap. Well, let me tell you. We still keep a tub in the pantry, but… it does not get used often. Fortunately, it has a half-life comparable to Twinkies, so I don’t worry about it much. But the fact that I speak of it as having a half-life… you know, that’s not exactly a good thing.
Basically, Hodgman acknowledges that food is supposed to be made of food. When she uses a canned thing, or a pre-packaged ingredient, she says, forthrightly, “Look, I know this is vile, but you’re not eating this every night and it really does make the difference with this recipe.” And you accept it because she’s being honest about being dishonest, basically. I admire that. This is how I cook, myself – I am a stickler for using ingredients that I recognize as being not too far removed from their original form. If I have to use something that has a list of chemicals on the side longer than my ruler, well, that’s not normal and everyone I feed knows it. It’s an anomaly. Oddly, today’s New York Times Magazine has an article by Michael Pollan that basically addresses the issue I’m speaking of (it’s now Sunday morning, so it’s today’s Magazine section; had I written this paragraph yesterday, it’d’ve been tomorrow’s Magazine section, which might have been confusing to the kind of readers who don’t live in the metro area*). Pollan lays down a number of rules about eating that seem like sort of basic good ideas to me. The one that sticks in my head is, Don’t eat anything that your great great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. I.e., something with a label on the side where the list of ingredients is longer than etc. etc.: Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
Eminently sensible, if you ask me. I know you didn’t. I’m just saying.
Please check out Ann Hodgman’s cookbook. I am going to dig up a copy of the sequel and see if I find it equally satisfying.
*If you live within a certain radius of New York City and subscribe to the Times, you get certain sections of the Sunday paper the Saturday before. Hence, you can read Sunday’s NYT Book Review and Magazine on Saturday morning when you’re drinking your coffee and contemplating the errands you’re going to run. In my case, I read it while contemplating the 11 a.m. showing of The Big Lebowski that I knew my husband and I would be going to. It was wicked fun.
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