Recently my pal in all things literary, Miette, shared the following search term, used to reach one of her bloghs:
“my anxious young pussy eater was only priming me for the fucking i was about to get”
N0t being one to miss an opportunity, i pasted the tasty morsel into Google and found Mrs. Giggles, a reviewer of romance fiction. the book under review is an erotic e-book, The Pussyeater. But it is the review that transcends the text. It may be the best book review I’ve ever read. And it made me want to read the book! despite apearances, I don’t actually read ‘erotica’ or pornography. But then, I don’t read much sci fi either, i’m more sci fi curious. any book in any genre can be good! http://www.mrsgiggles.com/pod/christian_eater.html

Chanticleer

Last fall I bought a stewing rooster from Kingbird Farm at the Ithaca Farmer’s Market. Over the years, decades actually, I have been a big fan of the soup chicken. Mostly because a soup chicken costs a lot less than a regular chicken. They are scrawny, tough but flavourful birds. Slow cooking produces a delicious stock and enough meat to figure in the resulting soup. Putting as soup chicken into a crock pot in the morning, and returning after work to the smell of chicken stock is wonderful. In less than an hour a soup of noodles, tofu, chicken and vegetables will be on the table.   

A rooster is a different critter altogether. This bird was not years old, and had not spent its life laying eggs. It was a year old, ten pounder with lots of fat and meat on its bones a Chanticleer who died strutting about among his many Partelets. I have never seen one before but in appearance anyway it reminded me of the capons my mother used to get for special dinners, like Passover. I decided then that I would pay $4 a lb for this guy and make Coq au Vin.

I don’t know why Coq au Vin should intrigue me. Maybe it’s the idea of cooking a chicken with red wine. Maybe because it’s a French dish that appeals to me, where most don’t. And the thing is, you never see a Coq anywhere, unless you live on a farm.

There were many recipes on the web, most for either your standard 3-1/2 pound roaster, or the tough layers. I did find a couple that referred to actual roosters, but none of these was for a ten pounder. So I cobbled together a recipe and made adjustments: instead of pearl onions I would use garlic leaks, which were fresh at the farmer’s market, and instead of bacon I used some lard. Pancetta would have been fine. Bacon would have been great but daughter Q doesn’t like bacon.

The recipe:

Cooking time: all day

Preheat oven to 300 degrees

1-10 pound rooster

Salt and pepper

1 cup chopped onion

1 cup diced carrot

1 cup diced celery

2 T chopped garlic

½ cup olive oil and lard (or brown bacon and reserve the bacon)

2 bottles red wine

2 cups chicken stock

2 bay leaves

2 t thyme

1 t rosemary

1 lb portabella mushroom

1 lb shitake mushrooms

1 large leak or a bunch of garlic leaks

Chop up the rooster: thighs in two pieces, legs whole, wings in three pieces, breast in half and then each half in three pieces, back separated at the middle joint, pat the pieces dry, and sprinkle salt and grind pepper on both sides of each piece

Brown rooster pieces in several batches over high heat

Sautee onions, carrots, celery and garlic over medium heat in the same pan adding a little salt and pepper

Add one bottle of wine to deglaze the pan and let it bubble with the vegetables

Add the herbs

Arrange rooster pieces in a deep roasting pan large enough to hold them in a single layer. Pour over the vegetables and add another bottle of wine and stock. It should be at least 2/3s up the sides of the thickest pieces. Put in the oven until it is simmering and then cover with a tight piece of foil. Bake for 2-3 hours, until tender but not falling off the bone. Then put it aside and let it rest for hours. The next step is to preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Sautee the mushrooms in olive oil and add to the rooster pan. Sautee the leaks, or baby onions and add them to the pan. Taste for salt. Shake it a bit to evenly distribute everything and then bake for another hour or so, until heated through. Remove rooster and vegetables to a platter. Skim some fat and reduce the sauce on the stove over high heat. Serve with mashed potatoes, rice or pasta and a salad. We had a tossed salad and frisee wilted with bacon, garlic and olive oil and my vegan mashed potatoes: russets boiled until soft with garlic and mashed with olive oil and some of the cooking liquid. Oh yes, and a couple of bottle of red wine that was about 10 dollars better than that in which I stewed the rooster.

The recipe? I got it initially from one of Marcella Hazan’s great books. It works best with smallish birds (I’ve done 4-1/2 pounders, but it’s not as good). So when Autumn Harvest had  chickens only a little over 3 lbs, I was set. I bought two, then from Stick and Stone Farm I bought a head of escarole and fresh salad greens. This is the boon of a mild winter and summer temperatures in March. (I also cut three stalks of asparagus yesterday!) I had some left over tomato sauce, so dinner on Sunday was grilled chicken, whole wheat spaghetti with tomato sauce and a salad.

Split a 3-3 1/2 pound chicken down the back and spread open. Then using a heavy iron frying pan literally smash the chicken until it flat. In a mortar and pestle coarsely grind two T of black peppercorns and 2 T of whole coriander seeds. Put chicken in a shallow glass dish and squeeze two lemons over it, rubbing the juice into the skin and flesh. Rubbb  2T of smashed and chopped garlic. Then sprinkle rock salt to taste on both sides. Rub the coriander black pepper mix into both sides, in all the nooks and crannies (don’t neglect any part of the bird, pound more if need be). Let it marinade in the rub for at least 4 hours. Then, fifteen minutes before cooking time heat the grill on high, with the lid down. After fifteen minutes is up clean the grill and lower the heat on the middle two burners to low, keep the outer two on high. Lay the chicken skin side up over the coolest part of the grill and lower the lid. Total cooking time will be about 45 minutes. Turn the bird every ten minutes or so and rotate it around to cook evenly. When it is golden and crispy on the outside (with that intoxicating, spicy perfume of lemons, black pepper, garlic and coriander infused in the crunchy skin) remove it to a chopping board and let it rest for 5 minutes. Toss the salad and the pasta. Chop the chicken into serving pieces with a cleaver and serve with a great  rose from France or Italy if it’s a warm day, a light red wine or strong white, like Riesling, if it’s a cold a crappy day.

GAHA: Babes of the Abyss is finally finished, at least, provisionally finished: I am editing the manuscript to send out to my first readers. This implies I have more readers in reserve, which is true, but we are talking 4 people here and 5 people there. And grateful I am for having them! We would need two cars to get to a reading.

The past few months I’ve been reading source materials on the southwest and California, as research for the book. During the early stages of composition I did a lot of online research, and brought many books home for the library, but it was just enough information to feed the story, I hadn’t yet done the excessive reading I love doing for a novel. I read two books, one about Crazy Horse, and one on early exploration of the southwest by Europeans, from 1500-1846. In that book there was a reference to Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession. My Confession is a memoir of fighting in the Mexican American war. Chamberlain was 16 when he ran away from his New England home and headed west. Written in the years preceding the Civil War, it recounts in rollicking detail his adventures fighting, whoring and drinking, falling in love with not a few women along the way. At the end of the war he deserts his unit and joins up briefly with the Glanton Gang, a notorious band of terrorists who killed indiscriminately for profit and pleasure, selling scalps to Mexican authorities. He barely escapes their destruction, lives briefly in California and then returns to New England, where he marries and lives out his life as a colourful and prominent man in his community. The book is source for Cormac McCarthy’s incredible Blood Meridian. My Confession lacks that book’s literary power but is instead full of humanity, romanticism and bravado.

After finishing My Confession I was going to read the massive trilogy about the fall of Hungary by Miklos Banffy, but instead found a book I’ve always wanted to read by Blaise Cendrars, Gold. Gold takes place in the same years as My Confession and is also an exaggerated true story about an outsized figure, in the case John Agustus Sutter, the Swiss ne’er-do-well who deserted his family and came to America to make his fortune. He heads out west, knocks about the Pacific coast, heads to Hawaii and Alaska and finally lands in san Francisco Bay, where he founds a dynasty on a Mexican land grant called New Helvetia. In 1848 he is on his way to being the richest man in the world when Gold is discovered on his land. The discovery of Gold destroys him, and he spends following decades trying to recover his land and rights. He never does. The story gives Cendrars and opportunity to indulge all of his interests. There are paragraph long lists of the languages Sutter learns, there is a pipe smoking dog that does tricks, and there is Sutter, strutting like Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood. It is Cendrars first novel, but it reads like a masterwork. Oh yes, it violates all of our country club, MFA rules of good fiction writing. Bravo. Who needs them? The rules I mean. the book is extremely short, and, I was surprised to learn very close to the ‘facts’ at least in so far as they are available online.

One of the pleasures of writing novels is doing research, especially research I will never use. It is the saturation in a place and a series of ideas and events that energizes the story. One small detail that comes from reading makes the massive amount of work worthwhile. My mother-in-law, the great novelist Mary Anderson, once remarked that she always felt sad when she realized she wasn’t researching a novel.

In my review of Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square I asserted that the protagonist’s schizophrenia was a literary, not psychological diagnosis. I will admit to a certain flippancy in the comment, but I was disturbed by the diagnosis, it was not what my understanding of schizophrenia is. But it may have been close. The idea that a schizophrenic has multiple personalities went out the window with Sybil, at least and has found other windows to jump out of since. But poor old George Bone, while presented as having two personalities, can be seen as having a single personality subject to two states. That would indeed be closer to a both psychological diagnosis and the literary facts, his behaviour in the novel.

It brings up a vexed thing. I am now writing a book about people whose behaviour is clearly psychopathic. And yet I want my protagonists to feel love and guilt, two things we are assured psychopaths do not feel. Recently I listened to Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath test. It was hilarious and disturbing, yes, but even more disturbing to me because no matter how much he plays with the problem of psychiatric diagnosis, and suggests that psychopathology is a creature of a definition, he also makes a persuasive case for the reality of the personality type. So much so that Macbeth, as if we needed a psychiatrist to tell us so, is a textbook psychopath. He feels no remorse. He is a narcissist. He kills. He is hungry for power. His actions appear to himself to be inevitable. But what about Bonnie and Clyde? Are they psychopaths? Certainly. But the film can hardly suggest it because the film requires romantic outlaws. Noir anti-heroes like Walter Neff and Frank Chambers commit psychopathic acts but are not psychopathic. They have feelings of empathy. They are not crowing narcissistic con men but depressed, self-lacerating losers in love with women. My 500 year in the future LA noir required three bad people to get worse without being psychopaths. I didn’t want to write Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer on Mars. It is not going to be Hannibal Lector in the year 2525. 

Nevertheless…I find myself eliminating feelings, insights, empathetic sensations from Bob Martin’s palette. Those colours don’t belong! I see-saw between the literary diagnosis, which is standard Noir, and a more realistic psychological angle. And it leaves me wondering if the literary profile of the killer even exists in the real world.

I can recognize Macbeth as a textbook psychopath, and Shakespeare, who is credited with creating modern psychology, even inventing the psyche modern psychology analyzes (I should not say psychology but rather psychoanalysis, a huge difference), actually believed in a humoural psychology. Even as he was exploring/creating the inner depths of the modern personality his theory was based on the Renaissance synthesis of Graeco-Roman philosophy and mysteries. It included in its grasp physiology, psychology, and cosmology. Alchemy is a branch, as is astrology. Robert Burton, Shakespeare’s near-contemporary (ten years separate their births) wrote the great psychological tome of this synthesis, the Anatomy of Melancholy. And Shakespeare himself was able to dramatize differing psychologies. Brutus is a Stoic who believes in fate, that character in some sense is destiny. But Edmund, a Machiavellian bastard, laughs at such notions. For him a man is sui generis. But then, this tells us nothing of what Shakespeare actually believed. Nevertheless, the prevailing, conventional theory of the time defined character types based on bodily humours: Choleric (yellow bile, hot and dry); Melancholic (black bile, dry and cold); Phlegmatic (phlegm, cold and wet); Sanguinary (blood, hot and wet), just as surely as today authors and others will tell you that the mind is made up of id, ego and super ego, that we project, introject and repress, and that there is a phenomenon known as transference and counter-transference..

Frank Norris and Emile Zola also believed that character was destiny, and their naturalism included the popular psychology preceded Freudianism. At the same time there was literary impressionism, the stream of consciousness of Henry James or Ford Maddox Ford’s accumulation of shifting, subjective details, which were more like a pointillistic account of the mind. This is closer to our own cognitive understanding.

I find modern psychologies disturbing perhaps because they are closer to the character as destiny view, as opposed to say, character as process. There is a Calvinist edge to the idea that we inherit mental illnesses like schizophrenia and psychopathology. Schizophrenia is believed to be highly treatable whereas psychopatholgy is a throw-away-the-key illness. Yet we do believe a psychopath can be made, if not un-made.

A question: aren’t all killers psychopathic, it is just the context that changes? Does the lone contract killer actually exist, a man in total control? Joey, of Joey the Hit Man, tries to convince us it is so, but Joey is a total psychopath. He only kills for money, sure, but he feels nothing. He abides by a code, but he has little impulse control. He understands order, and order maintained by violence, but in other areas, like gambling, he is out of control. He’s the real Tony Soprano, another lovable, redeemable (almost) sociopath.

Classical tragedy, as defined by Aristotle, has this Calvinist aspect. A plot is supposed to unfold like a trap. To the extent that character and plot mirror each other, there really can’t be another outcome once the thing gets going. The big bang of plot sets the parameters. It will end in death. Death is the mother of narrative! Death creates all that precedes it.

Still, going back to Shakespeare, it is easy to see that Iago is psychopathic, purely so, and a jolly, fun character because he has the actual hero as a foil. The play is about Othello and how a man like Iago can drive a good man to destroy the one thing he loves. Much is made of his motivation, but to me Iago’s motivation is clear: he was passed over for promotion. Edmund is also a jolly psychopath. One committed psychopath can do a lot of damage, but he doesn’t bring down the kingdom, Lear does. Lear creates the context where a monster like Edmund can thrive.

I will keep my characters true to literary life. I do need and want a psychological theory behind what I do, but I’m embarrassed by Freudian and Jungian understandings at this point. I suppose my real belief about the mind and how it works is pitched somewhere in-between traditional psychoanalysis (which appeals to my romantic, literary side, and is after all a scientistic continuation of traditional arcane mysticism) and contemporary cognitive/neurological/evolutionary understandings of the mind. Both seem to leave out something essential about human beings. The former is richer, because it includes in its portrait our portrait of ourselves, as accumulated in the wisdom traditions of the world. But things, as we know, can be very different from what they appear. That’s why we don’t have a Grand Unified Theory of mind yet.

“What about your cousin?” I asked.

L said, “My cousin was severely injured in Afghanistan when a man riding a motorbike blew himself up beside him. He’s lost both legs, one arm and one eye. He has third degree burns over 85% of his body.”

Silence. Around the table a rush of tears and sadness.

L went on. “He had one week to go before coming home. It was his second deployment.”

Then the questions. How on earth did he survive those wounds? What happened?

“They flew in a medical team from Texas, who took him to Germany. He had a fungal infection, so they had to remove the muscles from his face and jaw. The burns were so bad they couldn’t find one of his eyes. The legs were blown off instantly, but he lost the arm later, also to the fungal infection. He’s in Texas now. If he lives he’ll be in the hospital for at least 3 years.”

It was the first time any of us knew someone injured in the war, after 10 years of fighting. Even Z and L, who have many friends in the military, had not been affected by the war. We wondered, in the glow of the candle light, our food growing cold on the plate, how he could live. In any other war he would have died. And who decided, with those injuries, to keep him alive? It was his father and his 20 year-old wife who could not face him dying. What if he wakes up?

“He will be so pissed off,” L said.

Z said, “Me too. If that ever happens to me, pull the plug.”

“85% of his body?”

“Does he know?”

L said, “No, he has no idea. He’s in a coma.”

“But he’s chewing on the ventilator. That means he knows it’s in there,” Z said.

“All for nothing,” I said.

Then L said “You don’t know what to pray for. Do you pray for him to live, or pray for him to die?”

I ask myself that question same question, about America.

I thought George W. Bush had gone into retirement with his bush hog but no, it turns out he took a job as an Italian Cruise Ship Captain…MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!