I was born in New York City. Therefore, I love pizza. One of my favorite childhood memories is walking down to the pizzeria on 76th street with my dad. It was usually a Saturday morning around 11. While the rest of the city was having bagels, we were ready for pizza.

Prior to last Sunday night, my husband and I would satisfy our pizza cravings with Arturo’s (on Houston) or Grimaldi’s (in Dumbo). I thought I was happy. But our friends Lisa and Eric (and baby Hudson) have been raving about Lucali for a while now and finally the stars aligned and we joined them for dinner.

Lucali is located in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. The area is named after Charles Carroll, a Revolutionary War hero and the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. The neighborhood was first settled by Irish-Americans, then by Italian-Americans, many of whom remain today. However, the gentrification of the area (and much of downtown Brooklyn) beginning in the 1970s forced out many working class Italian families, making room for upwardly mobile young professionals, baby carriages, and upscale restaurants. Few places remain where the old and new residents co-mingle, but Lucali is an exception. Over-indulgent Italian grandparents sit next to newlyweds Shawn Carter and Beyonce Knowles, while pizzaiolos roll out dough with an empty wine bottle in the open kitchen.

Lucali’s pizza is so good that any description falls short, but here goes: [Read more →]

Tags: recipes & food by Jessica Alfreds
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Seriously — I’ve found the best concoction of food you could possibly have at your Superbowl party on Sunday. And how fun would it be to make this with your kids? And how impressed would all of your friends be?

I am not sure I would eat any part of this — but man, I am so in love with Holy Taco right now. My problem with actually eating it is the combination of sweet and savory. Sure, I can just eat the chips and dip or just eat one of the 58 twinkies, but the thought of all of that food combined on one platter (or table — as may be needed) is a bit revolting. Still, it looks pretty awesome. Plus, where else are you going to find a step-by-step pictorial as fun as this one!

Tags: recipes & food, sports by Amy Boshnack
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No, I’m not talking about the book by that hack Thomas Friedman, which said the world is flat even though it clearly isn’t (it’s roughly spherical, dumbass). I’m talking about Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, the odd little science fiction novel by Edwin A. Abbott published in 1884. I finished reading it last night.

Flatland is the story of a Square living in a two-dimensional world. In this world, people are two-dimensional geometrical shapes — triangles, squares, circles (not really circles, but polygons with so many sides that they seem to be circles). Having equal angles is everything in this world — isosceles triangles are looked down upon — and the more sides a person has, the higher up in society he is. I say he because women are not shapes at all. They’re simply lines. Dumb and tempermental lines. Dangerous lines, too, since they are difficult to see when they are facing you and can run right through you with their sharp ends. 

The commentary on and satire of the social hierarchy is less interesting than the way Abbott tries to make sense of how living in Flatland works. When a strange being from Spaceland — a three-dimensional world like ours — visits the Square, the book becomes an entertaining exploration of just how difficult it is to grasp what we cannot engage with our senses or even with our minds. The Square cannot understand what it means to go up. He thinks it means go North. Going up, as in up in the air, is nonsensical to him. He can’t visualize it or see himself in it. How could he? He’s two-dimensional. There is no up.

While some scientists believe there are physical dimensions beyond the three we live in (time being a fourth, intangible dimension), it is really a mathematical belief. It is difficult to imagine what those dimensions might be like — we can’t visualize them or see ourselves in them. How could we? We’re three-dimensional.

The book is available for free as a download but is also only two dollars in the Dover Thrift Edition. It’s a good choice as an add-on when you need to spend just a little more to get free amazon.com shipping.

Tags: books & writing, science by Scott Stein
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I was almost late posting this column because I had to make a mouse out of a cashmere hooded sweater and two pipe cleaners.

I hate this part of parenting — the part with safety pins, bobby pins, boiled felt, and Elmer’s glue. But, it did remind me of how I quit smoking. Once again, I called on my inner sloth — so easy to do in the crotch of winter — and he helpfully deflated my gumption to go out.

Tonight, when informed through tears that upon her arrival at school tomorrow morning (at 7:50 a.m.) my youngest must be a recognizable rodent, I knew the options could not involve going out. That there is a 24-hour Wal-Mart 11 blocks away must not figure into my decision-making. A mouse would be made, out of dryer lint and Hershey’s Kisses wrappers if necessary, but without leaving.

Similarly, when I was 27 and breaking up with a longtime partner and smoking a pack and a half of Marlboro Lights a day, I didn’t ask that useless asshole, my Willpower, to help out. I went straight to my potato soul and he didn’t let me down. To this day, I only smoke when really, really necessary, no more than a few times a year. Willpower had nothing to do with it. It was pure laziness, the laziness of the prairie tundra. I lived across the street from a 7-11 at the time, but it was cold out and there were stairs. My laziness can beat up your honor student, any time.

I wonder how they do it — or don’t do it — somewhere like California, where there’s no excuse not to go out into the mild night, when it’s even kind of nice to feel the soft warmish air, where you could run in your pajamas to your car and drive barefoot to the store and not have to be chipped out of your driver’s seat later by hordes of uniformed people bundled up and leaking steam like something out of E.T. How do you quit anything when everything’s so easy to obtain? In the time it takes me to get psyched, get dressed and warm up the car to buy a gallon of milk, somebody in California can buy a pound of crack, smoke it, do some Pilates, have unsafe sex with someone unsuitable, and work on their screenplay for half an hour.

So, I stay here. I make some unsightly dents in my cashmere sweater and I use every safety pin in the house and I write my column after all because my desire to be warm and inside has never let me down yet.  I saved 8 bucks tonight easy due to pure unwillingness to be shod.

Maybe you’re asking the wrong inner voice to help you out. Virtue is fine, but sometimes a good vice can keep you off the streets and out of your wallet, too.

Stay warm. Write more.

Tags: advice by Ruby Mac
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I thought I wrote a satire. My novel Mean Martin Manning, as a satire, exaggerated certain realities for the purposes of entertaining readers and criticizing a prevalent attitude among politicians and bureaucrats and too many citizens. One of these realities is the American nanny state, the growing government involvement in and regulation of the everyday personal and health decisions of citizens, always for their own good, of course. Almost weekly, something in the news makes my exaggerations seem not all that exaggerated.

New York’s Mayor Bloomberg appears to be on a mission to make my satire into, not a satire of an exaggerated near-future, but a humorous and critical conveying of the present, actual reality. Don’t believe me? Consider Bloomberg’s newest idea, the War on Salt. If you’re familiar with my novel and Caseworker Alice Pitney, I ask you, in the below, couldn’t you replace “Thomas Frieden” with “Caseworker Pitney”?  

Thomas Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, said he wants manufacturers and restaurants to join the war on salt voluntarily. If they don’t, the city could pass legislation making it the law.

In other words, “Volunteer or we’ll pass a law that forces you to volunteer.” If I wrote that, readers would recognize it as satire, an exaggeration of government bullying, and maybe even accuse me of being unsubtle. In fact, reflecting the proposals by some to require community service of all citizens, and the service some schools require of their students, I did write something very much like that.

In Chapter 36 of Mean Martin Manning, Caseworker Pitney informs Martin Manning and the rest of the group that they will be spending the day volunteering [Read more →]

Tags: creative writing, Pitney patrol by Scott Stein
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I feel badly about John Updike’s passing, for several reasons. First, I regret that my one and only review of an Updike novel (at PopMatters.com) was mostly negative. The Widows of Eastwick was not his best novel, by a long shot, but I wrote about it looking back at many great books and looking forward to reviewing a better. And I regret, deeply, the passing of another great literary lion — with Bellow, Mailer, and Updike gone, that leaves only Philip Roth from the pinnacle of that great literary era I was lucky enough to live through. (Live long, Philip!) But most of all I regret that the great, protean outpouring from Updike’s pen is now stoppered. There’s probably a novel or two more finished, and another collection of non-fiction, to come, but the end is here. And that is just plain depressing news.

I met Updike at a cocktail party before a reading and he signed my copy of Brazil. (My review refers to a discussion we had related to that book.) I remember asking him about Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I was upset by Franzen’s making humor of Alzheimer’s in the book, which had struck close to home for personal reasons, and I wanted to know from Updike if he’d read it and was similarly offended. He said he hadn’t, which, considering all the hooha about it at the time, was surprising. He said, though, “Well, now I’ll have to read it.” I’ll never know if he did or not, since he’s never written about the book to my knowledge.

My favorite Updike includes the first two Rabbit books, all of the Bech stories, “S”, Brazil, Gertrude and Claudius, Marry Me, The Witches of Eastwick, The Centaur, and the many many short stories I’ve read over the years. Books like Memories of the Ford Administration, In the Beauty of the Lilies, and Villages, left me cold, but I couldn’t deny the sustained beauty of the writing even while I found the story or the structure of the books disappointing. Some have complained of Updike (and Joyce Carol Oates) that perhaps if he had written less, he might have written more great books. That, to me, is like saying if Babe Ruth had been fewer times at bat he might have hit more home runs. The home runs Updike did hit will go on forever.

Tags: books & writing by Christopher Guerin
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A mysterious new follower of ENC Press just posted this link on Twitter: a collection of 21 reviews of Updike works from London Review of Books.

Tags: books & writing by Olga Gardner Galvin
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January 15, 2009
I dream I am at my parents’ house and Mr. Giraffe comes to visit. Mr. Giraffe has a human appearance, but he is clearly part giraffe — extremely tall with light brown coloring. Mr. Giraffe speaks for the environment and calls recent infractions to our attention. He wants to take me by the hand and show me the places on the lawn where we have misbehaved. Even though his hands are enormous, and I am conscious of the possibility that he could easily crush me, I take his hand. I am not sure what we did, but a visit from Mr. Giraffe is serious and we will have to correct our environmental mistakes.

December 30, 2008
I dream I am having a party at my parents’ home on Clark Street. Obama has just been elected president and there is much rejoicing. Every guest is a significant buxom woman from some period in my life. I have not dressed for this party; I am wearing nothing but a bathrobe. The women think it’s cute, but I am straining to conceal my tumescence. At the end of the party I have to get dressed because I am to give a couple of the women rides home.

June 14, 1999
I dream my life is a movie and I live with my father, Jack Nicholson, in a luxury condominium. I am playing with a novelty grasshopper hatchery in a paper bag and I see that they’re about to hatch. I leave the condo and run down the hall. I’m careful to hold the bag tightly, but I trip in front of the elevator and lose my grip. A few grasshoppers escape and crawl up my arm and under my shirt. By the time the elevator door opens, the walls, floor, and ceiling are coated with a thick layer of grasshoppers. I run for the stairs, covered with grasshoppers, and I try to get as many of them out of the building as I can. I fear the condo board will find out and get me.

Tags: Fred's dreams by Fred Siegel
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John Updike died today.

In the summer of 2000, about a year after we married, my wife and I went to Montana’s Glacier National Park and stayed for a couple of days in Many Glacier Lodge surrounded by Swiftcurrent Lake and towering mountains. After hiking, we read in a stiff breeze on the massive back porch overlooking the lake and at night around the huge firepit in the great hall, sitting by the crackling warmth with two dozen strangers. Then we drove Going to the Sun Road and stayed in the Village Inn on the other side of the park. Our second-floor window faced Lake McDonald. The inn was on the shore, not more than 10 yards from the water. We canoed and hiked and in the morning pulled up green plastic chairs to the shore’s edge and read as the water lapped the pebbled beach, before we headed to Banff, where we read a bit less because of all there was to see and do.

The book I read in Montana was John Updike’s novel Gertrude and Claudius. The events of the novel take place before and lead up to the events of Hamlet. It’s a love story. Poor Gertrude falls in love with the King’s brother, Claudius. Claudius is in love with her. The King, cold and pragmatic and concerned with his own power, stands in the way of their love, which is as genuine as any love you’re going to find in an Updike novel. I don’t think I’m giving away plot points when I tell you that the King is eventually killed. It is a testament to Updike’s prose that the suspense is not lessened by every reader knowing how his novel must end. In the afterword, Updike must have taken great delight in tweaking his readers with this final thought (from William Kerrigan’s Hamlet’s Perfection):

Putting aside the murder being covered up, Claudius seems a capable king, Gertrude a noble queen, Ophelia a treasure of sweetness, Polonius a tedious but not evil counsellor, Laertes a generic young man. Hamlet pulls them all into death.

In his book-length fiction, I prefer Updike when he veers from his home territory as he does in Gertrude and Claudius. True, this is a novel with adultery at the center, but it didn’t seem to me that cheating is the point of it. I like every character in this book more than I like Rabbit Angstrom, whose self-absorption bored me early in the first volume. The Rabbit novels are mentioned prominently in all of the obituaries today, along with the prizes and where Updike ranks among great American authors. But when I heard that he’d died, I didn’t think of any of that. I thought of the glorious few days reading an entertaining and beautifully written book about earthbound royalty, with majestic mountains all around.

Tags: books & writing, travel & foreign lands by Scott Stein
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It’s an unfortunate fact of life — or, rather, of death — that it takes the passing of a great artist for many people to first become acquainted with his work. So be it. If you haven’t yet read any John Updike, or know of him primarily from his somewhat, though not entirely, unfair reputation as a horny chronicler of suburban marital disfunction, you owe it to yourself to discover what an effortlessly insightful, memorable, and clever (in the best sense of that word) writer he was. 

Fortunately, it isn’t difficult at all to make his acquaintance, because he was at his best when his writing was most compressed. The Rabbit novels had their moments, but for pure spine-tingling genius, there is no substitute for his short stories.  

I discovered just how amazing his short stories are when I was a freshman in college. I was majoring in psychology at the time, for reasons I no longer can recall, when I happened to read one of his stories in a beat-up paperback collection. I also can’t remember the story’s title, but there was a paragraph in there — something to do with a brief encounter between a man and a woman in an apartment doorway — that contained more insight into human behavior than all of my psychology classes put together. 

Within days, I’d switched my major to English. 

Since then, I’ve read almost everything he’s written, except for some of his lesser novels (and there were a few too many of those, unfortunately.) Second only to his short stories is his incredibly generous literary criticism, which cast its glow over some of the greatest writers of our time, including some that you and I would otherwise never have heard of.   

It’s sad, in a way, that there is nobody like Updike around today to write a proper appreciation of Updike himself. But at least we still can savor Updike’s appreciations of his fellow writers — even if, in most cases, his genius far outshone theirs.

Tags: books & writing by Michael Antman
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