ABAW: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

I have some catching up to do.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, William Morrow & Co. via Harper & Row Perennial Fiction, 1988 (personal copy)

Art Bechstein sets out to have a summer of dissolution in Pittsburgh following his college graduation. He doesn’t want to think about what career he’ll begin when the summer ends, or about his gangster father, or his recent ex, Claire, or his dead mother, and he certainly doesn’t want to think about himself.

So of course, everything that happens over the summer comes back to questions of Art’s identity and his relationship with his family and the family business.

The friends and lovers Art finds that summer - chiefly Arthur, Phlox, and Cleveland - reflect back to Art a portion of his character, even as he feels like he is bending and morphing himself around his feelings for them.

The attention to language, the subtle foreshadowing, the way Chabon manages to take the wasted summer of a bunch of college kids and make it into something epic and tragic, all add up to a satisfying and lyrical novel.

Favorite lines:

“I never understand how people can be perfectly frank all over the sidewalk like that in public.”

“[Cleveland] would breach the barrier that stood between my family and my life, and scale the wall that I was.”

“They have vultures everywhere they have food chains.”

Now, I love Pistachios

Before I tell you why I love pistachios now, I should tell you why I didn’t like them before, right?

I’m sure the best reason I did not like pistachios was because pistachio ice cream is green. The idea of green ice cream does not appeal to me. Yes that includes mint-chocolate chip. But I will make exceptions for lime sherbet because I never claimed to be consistent, and limes are awesome. I expect limes to be green. I do not expect nuts to be green. 

Until our recent foray into New Mexico I had not eaten pistachios since I was about four years old. My grandmother visited and brought pistachios and dates with her. She loved them. They were strange, exotic foods for me. Perhaps the dates were too much like cockroaches? Perhaps the pistachios were too little like peanuts? I didn’t like them. There’s no real accounting for my four-year-old taste though. I didn’t like beer and onions then either. In fact, my dad will tell you that the only food I ate for a very long time was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He was sure there was something wrong with me. My diet worried him. But I am living proof that it didn’t kill me. My steady breakfast of a Dr Pepper and a Twix bar in high school didn’t kill me either, but neither I nor any scientific entity will recommend that as a sound nutritional practice.

But I digress. I was talking about pistachios.

What was the cause of my recent reconsideration of this nut? Perhaps it was an encounter with the World’s Largest Pistachio near Tularosa, New Mexico? No, while that strangely vulval roadside attraction may have softened my attitude a bit, the credit really goes to my parents-in-law. They’re the ones who bought a bag of pistachios and left their innocent, partially-cracked, lightly-saltedness on the counter in the condo in Ruidoso, inviting anyone to share. 

One nut was meh. The tenth greenish, tannish, reddish nut though, probably caused a bit of an obsession. Perhaps my brain was softened by the relaxing and happy trip we were having. Surely that didn’t hurt. Perhaps it was just that the pistachios were Just. So. Good.

And it’s not just me. Partner had a similar turnaround in his pistachio-tude as well. We’ve had pistachios of three different origins since returning to Texas and find the New Mexico nuts far superior. Not just because of the fond memories they prompt of our lovely vacation, but because they were much more crisp than their farther-flung counterparts.

This is not, by the way, a paid endorsement for any pistachio grower or distributor, but if anyone wants to send me some of those Tularosa pistachios, I WILL happily eat them.

That's It, I'm Breaking UP With My Paintbrush

Tomorrow I will put away the hammer and break up with my paintbrush. Then I’m going to try to remember all the crazy, stupid, sublime shit I thought about writing while I was painting, so I can finally write it down. Painting and home repair and daily showering has been a blast, but I’m ready to go back to being the shoeless, semi-hermit writer who only bathes a couple of times a week.

In the meantime, apropos of nothing, here’s one of my favorite vacation pictures. 

Dani’s stained knee, with knitting and camera bagThis was taken somewhere along I-10W, between San Antonio, Texas and the great big batch of nowhere that reaches out from there. I was NOT driving, as evidenced by the shifter almost visible next to my leg. From left to right (after the shift indicator strip): blueberry yogurt stain, coffee drip, robot knitting, empty camera bag, robot-knitting pattern. On the return trip, I sported a coffee drip on my left boob. Sorry, no gratuitous boob shot of that one.

In which I dream of a space-worthy restroom

Early this morning I had one of those vivid, bizarre dreams that must be shared, but probably shouldn’t be.

In the dream, I was at a fair of some kind: exhibits, rides, games, food, squealing. A very standard community festival, arranged in a broad, grassy field. One section of the fair included demonstrations of wonderful new inventions, the most fascinating of which was the walking tree house. People lined up to get a chance to climb up the ladder into the observation room. Once the seats were full, the ladder would be pulled up, and the mechanical tree would walk on leg-like roots around the perimeter of the festival, giving riders a dramatic moving view of the revellers below. Cool, right? 

The best part of the walking tree house though? The restrooms.

At each end of the observation room were restrooms. Inside the restroom was a wall of tubes, each large enough to hold a grown person. To use the facilities, one would crawl inside the tube and evacuate one’s waste systems and the excreta was whooshed away with a high powered blower of some kind. Sort of like those Dyson Air-blade hand dryers that are popping up in public restrooms here and there. In between users, the lavatory tubes were self-disinfecting, so the entire restroom was clean, dry, efficient, and strangely quiet for a place made entirely of brushed stainless steel. 

Because it was a dream, behaving with dream logic and dream physics, I was never quite clear about what one did with one’s pants when crawling into the lavatory tubes. Perhaps they were Heisenberg pants.

This is what I might talk about when the DIY is done

July in Coastal South Texas is the perfect time to re-side and repaint the exterior of our house, right? RIGHT?!!! 

Wait. Don’t answer that. As demolition, reconstruction, scraping, caulking (I love caulk), painting, cutting in, and such continues around here, my brain is swimming with ideas. Here are a few that might come along to the blog in the near future:

-I think I’ll give up pants for my 38th birthday.

-We recently completed Porching Tour 2011, which included several scenic stops throughout New Mexico.  My feet were dirty the entire trip. I knit a lot, read a lot, and drank a fair bit. On the trip we saw many interesting things including some sort of NASA pod on a truck on the highway, a truck with spikes on its axles, a license plate that said “SMOOTER,” some barf, existential road signs, a giant pistachio, White Sands Missile Range, the New Mexico Museum of Space History, The Inn of the Mountain Goats, The Inn of the Mountain Gods, The Valley of Fires, Mama’s Minerals, Santa Fe, Zombie Fluxx, virga, a cool shade structure over a Japanese maple in the desert, The Railrunner to Santa Fe, smoke, smoke, smoke, The Rio Rancho Pork & Brew, aliens, and much more.

-I wonder what is the plural of ‘precipice.’

-I found four bobby pins at White Sands.

-We were in a parade. On a train. 

-Books, books, books. Rudopho Anaya was the theme of this trip. We brought home several of his books, including some Chupacabra stories with deliciously lurid covers. I finished several books that I’ve already reviewed. Coming up will be comments on The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. 

-The entire family can knit now. 

-My grandmother knew a thing or two about earth movers.

-In the continuing series on The Thermodynamics of Creativity, I am thinking about how to ritualize what’s important.

Time’s up. Work is waiting. What else should I think about while I scrape and caulk?