The Dozen Words Game

Here's how it works. I picked a dozen words at random from each of eight books. Just from the words, which are whatever my finger lands upon, you guess the book. Even if you don't know all the books, just guess. It's like one of those matching worksheets we got for busy work in school, but fun and interesting.

a. Collected Works of Emily Dickinson
b. Asheville Yellow Pages
c. The Tao Te Ching
d. Night and Day by Woolf
e. The Great Gatsby
f. Mythologies by Barthes
g. Don Quixote
h. The Brothers Karamazov

1.
explain, youth, live, faith, behaviour, destroy, humanity, promise, money, shouted, murder, universal

2.
nowadays, readiness, analogy, brain, extravagance, romantic, bended knees, attribute, sufficient, suburbanite, schism, child-like

3.
unpretending, bird, stuns, heaven, school, future, souls, embers, cattle, died, clock, fumbles

4.
steward, magistrate, lie, stones, pitched, squire, arms, broken, home, letter, chastisement, figure

5.
sewing, eighteenth, mantelpiece, walking, generation, happy, deeper, simultaneously, chokes, female, alone, bent

6.
heady, arrogant, contingencies, dance, barrier, seventeen-year-old, doctor, yacht, island, smart, triumph, garden

7.
two, sea, not, farther, soldier, detached, doing, refuge, learning, sense, sage, enough

8.
above, urban, since, medicine, private, office, quality, explosives, we, churches, precision, agency

P.S. If it's actually a boring game & you don't like it, you can tell me.

The Day Dawned Auspicious...

My nose was against my handlebars, my weight was pressed down on one foot, on that pedal, but it would not go down an inch. The sinister growl of a gas machine approached. Too steep. The bike and I hung for a moment on the roadside, not moving, then the handlebars lurched and I plopped straight over into the ditch just as the truck passed. The truck braked, backed up, and I heard a laugh. It was kind of funny, so I started laughing, too. "Just throw that bike in the back and get in," he said. He drove me two hundred yards to the top of the hill. Now that is what I call neighborly.

After this adventure on the winding French Broad jungle road, I arrived at the job interview location. "All the way at the end of the business park, in a little white building beside the river," he had said. I rode through the warehouses, between big striped tents and men buzzing by on colorful motorcycles, past a heap of kayaks, across mysterious rails that zigzagged through the road and ran straight into a building. I looked and looked, but in all this gypsy circus I could not find a little white building. I stopped and got off, puzzling. Then I looked up, and there it was. A white shoebox shack on long legs like Baba Yaga's hut, with a rusty steel ladder climbing to the door. And on the door: "Cinema Preservation." A youngish man came out and waved to me. I climbed up into the office-nest. The walls were papered with huge maps of the states, spangled with rivers, cities, and county names. An enormous nautical map of some islands hung over the desk.
"This place is weird," I said.
"It used to be a coat factory," he told me. "The people who made all the knives for the Last of the Mohicans movie are right over there, and upstairs is the warehouse for the biggest used book store around. Anytime I want a book, I just climb up."

I knew he would hire me. Very few people do. It takes a special type. I knew when he opened up a google map to demonstrate the job, and found the town-speck of Cameron, Louisiana, and zoomed in and in and said, "My God, just look at that place. I bet the hurricane wiped them out... Look at that river... And right on the border..." and nosed around aerially until he remembered that I was still there. "Sorry, sorry. I really like maps..." Here was a man who could appreciate my long-distance romance with the place called North Mud Lumps, LA, initiated through just such idle mapping.

So this is my new job. There used to be little theatres that showed all the latest moving pictures in nascent American towns. These theatres are mostly demolished now, but some remain, maybe as churches or restaurants or bait shops, but they are still there, in disguise. And sometimes in certain of these theatres, someone did not remove every last vestige of the old equipment. Sometimes there are wires left there in the attic, all crusted with bat droppings and wound up in pigeons' nests. The goal is to locate these odds and ends via telephone, by calling anyone in the town who may have a memory of the old theatre. Nothing is off-limits: the library, the nursing home, the truck stop. Find someone, somehow, who will remember. And if someone remembers something, even if it's just a little something, then these guys go there and look for the bits. If they find anything, they buy them and send them to Chicago to be reassembled and restored. I have been assigned a large chunk of the state of Louisiana. Where the money comes from for this bizarre project, I have no idea. It's just weird enough to have a rich madman behind the curtain.

Pigs get fat; hogs get butchered.

On this particular day, the first friday of the month, you needn't even live in a punkhouse to know that in any major metropolitan area, you may simply put on your loudest thrift store gear and place your chin on your fist in front of some heinous canvas to get as much posh food as you can eat without embarrassing yourself. (It surprises me that art gallery folks don't seem to have noticed that, at least with the young people I know, the art gallery has followed the theatre into death, and so these colorful, earnest-looking youths are in fact present for the basest of reasons.) Colorful? Check. Hungry? Hell yes. Washed? Meh. No need to knock myself out.

To understand what came next, you must know that it requires some amount of effort to get downtown from where I live. The hills take a steep toll on any bike travel. So I had to make the trip worth it, calorically speaking. The first stop was a gallery on the river. I saw the refreshment table in my periphery vision, but I avoided it strictly for some time despite my intense thirst and grumbling belly, and focused on the paintings. "Garish. Good heavens. Does everyone have to rip off Dia de los Muertos?" Emboldened by my lengthy homage, I firmly stepped up to the refreshment table to see what I had caught. Hawaiian Punch. I skipped it, though I was thirsty as hell. I put a log of funfetti bread on my plate, then the topping... cream cheese? With pimentos... meat chunks?... and... is that -- marshmallows? What the hell. This is an art gallery. Where's the pineapple and goat cheese? Where's the wine? Then, like Gulliver stirring on the beach, I realized: I'm in the Appalachians. I could spend the rest of the night choking down spam on saltines. I continued to feign interest in the paintings, but I was concerned, to say the least. Someone yelled. It was a huge boy. Huge. "THAT'S THE ROCKET MAN I SAW!" He was pointing at the painting. The man he had approached cringed and nodded, "Oh, really?" "YEAH!!! MY ROCKET MAN!!!" That was the artist. I left quickly.

It took me a while to find the other galleries. They were further up in the hills. I followed the sound of drums to an extremely well-attended drum circle. I counted about fifty drummers, whaling away as only Euro-Americans can on various Africanesque percussion instruments. Another couple dozen people danced the expiatory dance of the Euro-American left. A few darker faces observed with expressions of mild concern.

The second gallery had wine. I chugged a glass. The art wasn't so bad. Chugged another. The sprinkle bread-cream cheese-meat goo revolted. Unfortunately I have Sancho Panza's belly. So I drowned my agony in more food. It pretty much worked. *Sparkling* mineral water and chocolate cookies. Cheese and crackers. Hummus. (And there I was getting down on Appalachia. Shame on me.)

By the time I went home, the drum circle had swelled to include all of downtown Asheville. Some very sad mariachis were playing all alone outside the circle. I felt a little homesick for them, and me... or maybe just sick.

Doesn't that just say it all?

Emily, the other apprentice at BBH: "It's like one of those... those... fuck. What's the word? And I was an English major. Every year after college, a few more of those big words get replaced by 'fuck'."

Prickly Pear Jelly

Late every summer, the prickly pears in south Texas turn a deep purple. And every summer since I was a little kid, I've tried to eat them. Usually I would just peel back a corner and lick the juice. They're sweet, gooey, but not quite palatable. And just about every summer I would ask my grandma if we could do something with all those pears, fat and inviting like purple balloons. And she always, always says, "One summer we made prickly pear jelly, but you don't want to do that. It's too much trouble." This summer, all of these things happened, but, being a big girl now, I decided that the trouble was worth taking. And this morning, in far-off NC with the rain pouring down, I had a bit of bread with my prickly pear jelly on it. It is so worth the trouble. If you live in prickly pear country, I cannot recommend it too highly. And it isn't much trouble. It only took me a few hours. The recipe follows.

First, collect about a gallon of the pears. They must be almost black.
Burn the prickles off. I used a pear-burner, but any flame will do.
Rubber gloves are kind of important, but I guess not utterly necessary if you're careful. At this point, scrub the remaining prickles off in water, wearing gloves, and peel. If you've burned 'em good, the skin comes off pretty easily.
Quarter and throw in a pot. Add some water... enough that you can see it through the pears, but not enough to cover them.
Simmer for an hour.
Strain through cheesecloth or thick papertowel to get 3 1/2 cups of juice.
Put juice back in the pot. Add a package of no sugar needed gelatin. Not just any gelatin, no sugar needed gelatin. If you add the regular kind, you have to use too much sugar.
Add one cup of sugar. Raw sugar is best because it doesn't leave that bleach taste.
Dissolve.
Taste it; if it's too sour for you, add some stevia powder or leaves.
Add half a cup of lemon juice. This is important. Don't leave it out.
Stir it all up.
Put in it hot jars, seal, and leave to congeal.

Prickly pear regulates blood sugar. Whether this holds true when it's combined with a cup of sugar is anyone's guess. Nonetheless, I'm sure there are health benefits. The natives used to eat tons of them, I'm told. The flavor is... unique, something like cranberry sauce.