Mashed Potatoes Are Easy

I am pretty sure I never mashed a potato before yesterday, and the reason for that is because, well, partly because I’m no genius in the kitchen, but also because I imagined that in some way mashed potatoes were both complicated and involved a good deal of physical exertion in the mashing portion of the potato mashing.
Had I known how easy it was to make mashed potatoes, I might have started mashing a long time ago. Ben enjoys potatoes in many forms. I recently bought a potato masher, you know, a tool with a wavy metal thing at the end?
It is not complicated and does not require very much physical exertion at all. It is safe to say that not many calories were burned in the mashing of the potatoes. In fact, the simple potato masher is what I find to be a brilliant utensil – whoever thought of it designed the perfect thing to mash through the potatoes with ease. So if there’s one person out there who shares my fear of mashed potatoes? Here’s my very own recipe:

Mashed Potatoes (serves 2)

boil potatoes (2)
mash
add a little bit of cream and a little bit of garlic
mash a bit more
put on plate


You can of course, make as many or as few as you like, and however many you boil is how many servings you’ll have.
I found this whole process very exciting and revelatory, in that I am the sort of person who can imagine anything, including things like the making of mashed potatoes to be difficult, stressful, and emotionally complex.
And plus also? They tasted good.

Everywhere Betsy

The other day Ben mentioned that he’d heard a band called Eight Inch Betsy, and I was reminded that at one point I was collecting a list of band names that had Betsy in them, proving what I’m not sure but probably my pet theory that Betsy was an irretrievably dated name that is now being used ironically. So this morning this led me to try to search band name databases, but I couldn’t find a free one, so the only other Betsy band names I could come up with were thus:
Bullocks to Betsy
Fire Up Betsy
(of course)
Heavens to Betsy
Betsy and the Boneshakers
and my favorites so far:
Betsy in the Gene Pool
and
betsy!
BUT, in my search, I had one of those totally wonderful accidental childhood flashbacks, because it turns out that eight inch Betsy, I’m almost positive, is a reference to the size of a “Betsy McCall” doll, which I did not personally have, but I was an avid fan, for obvious reasons, of the Betsy McCall paper doll, and today is one of those rare days when I really really wish I had a color printer. Dig Betsy’s awesome a-line dresses. I had some just like those, in that era, and I’m pretty sure my mom made them. In fact, I bore a rather strong overall resemblance to Betsy McC if you figure in a little photoshop magic leg-chubbening.

Dang

Okay, it’s great and all that this review for “Consider the Lobster” is more or less glowing, but if David Foster Wallace’s last two story collections are throwaways, I never ever ever want to know what mine are.

Are They British?

Why do I feel like it would upset some delicate balancc over at Netflix if I decided one day to refer to my queue as a line?

I read two really awesome stories last night, one by Joyce Carol Oates and one by John Edgar Wideman, but I don't have time to tell you about them right now. Except to say, Damn, if I add another name can I start writing like that?

I Don’t Know What The Title Should Be Here, I Only Know You Need To Know It

The other day I brought home a black and white cookie from Olivia’s Market, the only place I know of that sells them in Chicago. (I have a recipe from the Times, and I made them once, and they tasted okay, but not the same, and if you haven't ever had one, but had my homemade ones first, even if you happened to love them, you wouldn't really have any idea what the real thing was, and, if you haven't ever had one, you should go get one right now.) Anyway, when Ben got home, I said, “Hey, I brought you a treat.”
He said, “Is it astronaut ice cream?”

Stop it, Kevin

I’m rooting for you and Brit, no lie. We share an anniversary that means something to me, and you and Britney have a child. But this needs to stop. This is something that can be very very funny in the privacy of your own home, assuming you are making it up on the spot, but in the general public is just all kinds of unfortunate.

From The Department Of Does It Get Creepier Than This - Don't Answer That

On the very next page of Harper’s, is a reprint of the instructions for “REALdoll”, a $6500 life-size silicone sex doll. Now, okay, whatever. I know people have their sexual weirdnesses, and you know, it would seem that this could potentially meet certain no-muss no-fuss needs with a little more illusion of verite than a simple blow-up doll. But because this doll requires a certain amount of upkeep (the title of the article is “High Maintenance”) – instructions for use include, when cleaning your doll, “carefully remove the tongue…” “always remove the face slowly, working between Velcro pads to separate…” “tightening the jaw can be done with a Phillips-head screwdriver…” and my personal favorite, “when you wish to use your REALdoll in the ‘face down’ positions, it is highly recommended tar you remove her face.”

I’m thinking, if my lover’s face is you know, detachable, and I have to be the one to detach it, before lovemaking? Mmmm, I might just lose the mood. Because I’m thinking, Westworld? Not a turn-on so much.

And the Award for Best Collection of Linked Short Stories by A Former New Yorker in Chicago, Using A Lot of Parentheses and (award title cont'd below)

Not So Much in the Way of Periods, Occasional Elements of Fantasy and or Flights of Fancy, and Featuring the Word "Glory" in the Title Goes To...

So there’s an article in this month’s Harper’s by some Harvard dude about the dubiousness of prizes and awards and basically it makes a strong case for why the proliferation of these awards diminishes the value of any of them, from the Oscar to the Booker to the Nobel to some virtually unheard of awards.

But and still? I want to win.

Art and Whatever

Ben and I watched this PBS documentary on American art in the second half of the 20th century last night and I have to say I love documentaries about artists, I love reading about artists, I love artists, obviously, since I married one, but one of the things I always end up thinking about is what I do as art. (Not blogging so much, for me, but actual story-writing.) OF COURSE, I know it’s one of the arts. But art art, fine art, was always something I was interested in and never pursued not just because I didn’t think I was great at it, but because writing floated my boat more than anything. (Another discussion for another time is why I didn’t pursue music, which is perhaps complex and perhaps as simple as TOTAL FEAR.) In any case, listening to artists talk about their art and other people’s art, I moved up on my mental netflix queue of passing thoughts, the idea that while Ben, for example, works with paint and wood, I work with words and letters and punctuation. Which helps a little in terms of being less frustrated by my ability to come up with/execute art art, because not only does it hopefully result in a thoughtful reflection of the world, it is, albeit in a different way, still a visual art, and, I think, this interest of mine in art art, goes some way toward explaining why I like to experiment with language and even with punctuation. I like the way words look on a page. I care about the look of the font, the slant of the italic.
Anyway, another thing they talked about a lot on the program was the idea of nature and landscape as not only being, you know, things that are green, but cities and I daresay the very concept of change as nature. I like to describe myself as a person who does not like change. I look at old film footage of the 60s and 70s, when I was alive, and even earlier and wish really hard that I could time travel. I am not a person who rearranges the furniture (which I liken to the difference between cat and dog people). I am not a person who throws things out, I am not a person who leans toward modern architecture. I like picture moldings. I like detail. My dad has a wall of rusty old tools, many that were my grandfather’s, some of which are truly beautiful with detail and even just in design. Take a walk through a big old Home Depot – I’ll spend money there, but would the word beauty come into my head? Not so much. And – I love the country, I love small towns with tiny little main streets and fantasize about the day I will move to one, and yet I continue to live in the city, and I actually love a lot of cities big and small and even though I will tote around the New Yorker cartoon with the guy in a t-shirt reading “I have mixed feelings about New York” which sums up my entire existence there in spite of the fact that I am not sorry at all to have grown up there, and, I think y’all know how much I love this one, Chicago, in particular. And yet. Andy Warhol was able to find beauty, able to make others see beauty, in a Campbell’s soup can. Could there be beauty in bin after bin of screws and nails and wingnuts and what have you? Could there be beauty – and brutality – and many other things worth looking at – ANYWHERE? (Ok, I’m really sorry about the caps here, you have to imagine italics, which I’m too lazy for today as all these BRILLIANT thoughts pour out of me.) I’ve digressed a bit, but if you take the actual definition of nature, is it natural to develop and pave and invent and destroy and fight the developers and pavers and inventors and destroyers and do it all over again in different ways, like, throughout time? I think so, whether or not I like it at any given moment.
Welcome to my head, by the way.
Not unrelated and actually kind of funny, speaking of Warhol, is that they had some old footage of him being interviewed, and his answers were quite terse, Yes. No. Yes. No. and Ben added that he would often turn to the person or the interviewer and say something like I don’t know, what do you think? So in this footage, the interviewer asks him something deep about the importance of his art and he responded by saying, with a chuckle, Can I just say, Llllaaaaaaallllhhh? And I have to say, man, he was an odd bird, but I kind of want to co-opt that for the next interview, because sometimes I get asked questions about my work and I really just want to say I. Don’t. Know. (This from the girl begging George Saunders to tell me how he does it and what it all means.) Of course, Warhol was probably being coy about the significance of his work, but what would anyone with even a tiny bit of humility say? Yes! I HAVE masterminded a new generation of art. Even the people who could say that probably wouldn’t. Similarly, though, if less cagily, Jean Michel Basquiat was asked about why he worked the way he did, specifically about why this one word was crossed out a couple of times on a painting – Is it to represent the messiness of life, Basquiat? No, man, he said, it’s a mistake. Well then how come this one is crossed out with an X and this other one only with one line? Because that was a better mistake.
Anyway, I could go on here, but my loose plan is to retire in twenty years and only do crafts. Because I can execute in certain ways, sewing, embroidering, knitting, even the occasional gluing, and enjoy the process very much – but the brilliant and original idea that make the crafts into arts? Not so much. That’s ok. In my retirement, I’ll write for fun. Oh wait, I do that now.

Federline Yo Dot Blah di Unhhh

Just in case y’all thought I dropped the ball or whatever, I am totally on top of the news that Kevin has a website. Unfortunately I am unwilling to spend the time to download FlashPlayer to view it, especially since I hear there isn’t really anything on it right now. But don’t let that stop you from having at it, kids.