Goes to Krista Albright!  Who just blasted out these three little treasures in a row – 

Elongate your short sword to fit her scabbard better!  (”Scabbard”?)

She is craving to be penetrated by your big rod!

You won’t need to furtively put socks in your trunks anymore!

Thank you, Krista.  You’ll receive your Teresa DiFalco dot Com coffee mug in the mail shortly.  After I openly put some socks in my trunks. 

Actually I don’t know what it is in Texas, it’s cold here.  Cold.  Freezing.  The heat doesn’t work and my teeth chatter.  Still, there’s Pauline Kael.  You, and everyone you know, should have the Complete New Yorker on DVD.  Because when it’s freezing in the house you can read the cartoons from 1957 (Disk 5), or read Pauline Kael who just spent three pages trashing Scarface (December, 1983 — Disk 3). 

“The film’s message is like a sociopathic moron’s interpretation of Robert Warshow’s thesis in his famous essay, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.”

Isn’t that funny?

I don’t know what I’ll do when G. and A. become aware of my blog, and then begin reading it.  “Do as I say, not as I write!” I’ll tell them.  That oughta work.  They’re not reading today so I’m reprinting my favorite SPAMs. 

I’d like to meet these people, my favorite SPAMMERs, and have a party with boxed wine and crackers.   I’d most certainly invite Gregg Hart, who today addresses one of the universal struggles of mankind: 

“Wondering how to greaten your meat stick without using drastic methods?”

Ah yes, the age-old “greatening your meat stick” problem.  Stumps the best of us.

A. and I are arguing about our Christmas list. 

I want: Furniture; a Wall Knocked Out in the Bunkhouse; the Bile Gray Carpet that Poisons the House like an Incurable Disease to be RIPPED UP, Beaten and Burned. 

A. wants sex. 

[Junior, for the record, wants an R2-D2 robot.] 

I’m hung up on letters this week.  The writing and sending of them.  I just vowed to do it, write and send one, each day for a year.  I’m behind today, should have started one.  Have none of you, even, in mind.  Anyone want a letter?

Meanwhile.  While you wait, here’s one from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, poets both.  They wrote back and forth for 30 years, until they died.

July 2, 1948 

Dear Elizabeth:

Would you like me to write Mrs. Ames about inviting you to Yaddo?  Get Miss Moore to write too.  You can’t invite yourself, though, of course, almost all the invitations are planned.  It would be marvelous to have you there.  I know the solitude that gets too much.  It doesn’t drug me, but I get fantastic and uncivilized. 

At last my divorce is over.  It’s funny at my age to have one’s life so much in and on one’s hands.  All the rawness of learning, what I used to think should be done with by twenty-five.  Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing — I suppose that’s what vocation means — at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction, so I’m thankful and call it good, as Eliot would say. 

Robert

There is nothing like the feeling of raw terror filling up all the empty space in a room then choking you, like smoke. 

I lost a document.  I can’t find it, it’s gone, there’s no recovered this or that, no scrap nor morsel of it.  And no one heard at all, not even the chair.

It was mornings like this that made Hemingway drink.  He didn’t have Word 2007 to contend with, but Hadley once left an entire manuscript he’d asked her to bring him, on the train.  The entire thing.  She was in France going to meet him in Spain.  No one found it.

My little lost document, in comparison, is small potatoes.  Still.  It’s no way to start a Monday.

A. and I made an omelette together yesterday.  Simply, like Alice says.  I chopped up some chervil and thyme and parsley and we mixed it in with the eggs and salt and pepper.  A. did the skillet work.  Gruyere cheese went in just before he folded it over.  It was delightful to cook with A., and then eat at the table together something so simple and lovely as an omelette.   

The aioli, however, haunts me like a lost document. 

If you want to tell me to “hang in there”, click here.

I’ve unofficially launched the Year of Alice Waters.  A catchier title might be in order.  Prizes if you have one.  (Send here).

Anyhoo.  The expected challenges rear up – lack of time, patience, farmer friends, and time.  I’ve also got a weak forearm.  You can’t make aioli with my forearm, you need a bionic one.  You need a bionic forearm to do almost everything Alice says should be done with a whisk, or a mortar and pestle.  A. likes to whisk, and he has a strong forearm (stop giggling, pervos!) but A.’s not here all day.  He’s not here until 6 and by 6:00 I need to have kneaded and whisked and braised and pounded and roasted everything already.

Last night was big.  It didn’t go perfectly smooth, I made both kids cry, but I still checked the win column. 

I roasted a locally grown chicken.  I don’t know the guy who raised or killed the chicken, but it had a stamp on its neck at Roth’s — “locally grown”.  I also don’t know what the chicken ate while it was alive, but I’ll get there.  I didn’t have it all seasoned the day before roasting it, but Alice wasn’t completely adament on that, she just suggested.  I did loosen the skin to stick in thyme sprigs and garlic, and I DO know the farmer who grew the garlic!  Heh, heh.  I not only know her, I drank wine with her on Sunday.  I sang ”Happy Birthday” to her husband! 

Back to the chicken.  I haven’t roasted one in 10 years — why the hell would I when they’re sitting beneath the warmer, for five bucks, at Safeway?  So while you might be Ina Garten and roast three a day, for me, on a Thursday, it was a stretch. 

There were sweet potatoes — unknown organic farmer, but they’re in season and full of vitamins.  I microwaved them (bad), had the kids scoop out the flesh (good), added some milk (unknown dairy), butter (local), pureed garlic (see above) and had the kids take turn mashing them up (good). 

Then we made some polenta, according to Art of Simple Food (good), with a little salt and some parmesan cheese, and I sliced up the brussels sprouts from my CSA box this week (good), sauteed them with bacon (pig’s place of birth unknown) and voila, my sides.  I roasted the chicken, somehow, exactly perfect.  A. even thought it was store-bought – his highest form of compliment!  And I made a five-second simple gravy from the “juices in the pan”. 

The kids ate the bread and the bacon. 

I’m having serious problems with my aioli, however, and there will be more on that later. 

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