Call Me Ahab: A Short Story Collection (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction)

Revisionist Tales

Presuppositions are inevitable when a new book's title refers to an existing work of fiction. Some degree of revisionism will be at play, one assumes: an alternative perspective, a modernized account. Or, it may be that the title proves a borrowed frame, a means of drawing attention to particular themes in the literary parvenu's own work. However the new text incorporates the old, it has acknowledged a standard that it will, in some way, be measured against. Anne Finger's Call Me Ahab, her new collection of short fiction, engages such inevitable expectations in the stories' larger preoccupations, which have everything to do with upsetting precedent -- in fairly unexpected ways.

"Pay no attention to the story told; mark the story not told!" blusters the Ahab of "Moby Dick, or, the Leg," the story that anchors the collection. His exhortation reiterates the title of the story itself, as it identifies first the familiar tale and then refocuses our attention on what's been overlooked (in this instance, Ishmael's abiding obsession with his captain's whalebone leg). In this collection, it is always the story of the leg that is told -- what's missing, what's never seen. These alternate histories parallel the alternate bodies and minds of their protagonists; here, the story not told is brought into focus, the marginalized view is revealed and magnified in full, even lurid, detail.

By locating her characters in figures that are already part of the historical or literary imagination, Finger's consideration of their disabilities becomes a revelation -- as if we are finally seeing what has long been obscured or ignored. And this obfuscation is clearly on Finger's mind. In the daydreams of a young girl, Frida Kahlo and Helen Keller are the fully humanized and sexualized subjects of a Hollywood movie that the young girl directs and momentarily stars in (and which affords us a terrifically sensual description of hand signing). Yet the 1960s narrator, peering into a future of cineplexes that are entirely handicap-accessible, complete with close captioning and infrared listening devices for the blind, "can't yet imagine a world where these two might meet."

These moments of capitulation to a more normative reality, in which the stories are retracted or denied, occur frequently in this collection, as if Finger is reminding us of their unlikelihood. One particularly revisionist story imagines a conversation between Antonio Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg -- both comrades limping, one hunchbacked -- at a crowded socialist congress of 1912. "It never happened. It could not have happened," the story begins -- as it also must end, acknowledging the reality. "Our Ned," which suggests a "simple" man in early 19th-century England as founder of the Luddites, envisions his life in the northern textile region up to the rise of industrialism's standardizing effects, only to write him out of existence as the story closes.

Finger's stories are full of small moments of chance, of alternate routes and reactions that end up making all the difference, as if to suggest the minute contingencies of birth or history that result in a missing leg or sightless eyes. In a history removed to 1980s New York, Van Gogh's brother decides to stop sending his elder sibling money, resulting in an often homeless Vincent whose canvases are inspired by the darkness of street life and painted in the air alone -- or burned by a vindictive landlord. In "The Artist and the Dwarf," the dwarf who now stares at us, "frank and ugly," from Velazquez's famous portrait of the infanta and her female companions arrives at the Spanish royal court only after she happens to be sold by her parents on the way to market in Germany.

By placing recognizable historical and fictional characters in contemporary guises and poses, Finger reminds us of the enduring presence of atypical bodies. "Gloucester," for instance, subtly echoes the unexpected turn of the relationship between Shakespeare's benighted earl and his two sons, but this patriarch is a long-closeted gay man, nearly blind from AIDS-related complications. The story's ending faintly recalls the dispossessed earl waking next to his ragged son on the heath, both exiled, save for one another. "Goliath," on the other hand, returns us to an anachronistic Israel, where the proverbial antagonist is a nervous adolescent afflicted with giantism. His aberrant size, exaggerated by the Philistines to spook their enemy, really only makes the sinews and joints of his body ache.

While Finger's subject matter never seems inconsequential, she often approaches it with an irreverence that, at its best, illuminates as it humanizes. One unexpected instance is Frida's delight in the sensation of signing j's and z's into Helen's hand, as she lines her new acquaintance's palm with a surfeit of these letters. Finger's style falls flat, though, when it veers too close to the depersonalizing kind of political correctness that she's trying to avoid (the exchange between Gramsci and Luxemburg has the didacticism of a public service announcement) or when it settles for the easy laugh (a psychiatrist predictably mispronouncing Vincent's last name, or the stale joke of contemporary slang inflected with archaic speech in "Goliath"). Fortunately, however, Finger's eye for the idiosyncratic mostly outweighs these unconvincing moments.

The subject matter of these stories might prompt a comparison with Amy Bloom, whose fiction has become something of the standard bearer for stories of psychological and physical outliers. Finger's approach, however, is significantly different. Whereas Bloom has been careful to present her terminally ill and transgendered characters in only the most ordinary of environments, her spare prose insisting on their ubiquity, Finger offers us scenarios verging on the fantastic and prose that is as capable of sensual description as it is of conversational asides. Her imagery and language can shift effectively from the dark, rich tones of a Velazquez canvas to the hectic composition of Van Gogh's paintings or the strident speech of Ahab. The latter likens himself to the so-called crippled letters of handset type that were considered unsalvageable: "Type with a cracked leg or missing serif . . . My 'A' is a crippled letter, with one leg cracked, dismasted, dead-stumped." He then declares, "But I refuse to be smelted. I am to write this text with crippled type." Finger, it could be said, has accomplished something similar. Refusing to smooth over the idiosyncrasies of history and human life, she has, instead, successfully written her text with them.

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Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression Against Females

Despicable, Yes, but Not Inexplicable

When A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion was published nearly a decade ago, a lot of people were angered by its claims. The authors, Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, contended that rapists were men with limited social skills or limited mating opportunities who were carrying out a Pleistocene-engineered program that dictated that any attempt at procreation was better than none at all. Scholars, including myself, heaped criticism on the book because almost nowhere in it did Thornhill and Palmer present any empirical data in support of their view. And many people took exception to the assertion that rape might be better considered an act of attempted reproduction than one of violence, as it is widely understood to be.

Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans, a fine new volume edited by Martin N. Muller and Richard W. Wrangham, replaces hand-waving with hypothesis testing and should be much better received. The contributors' focus is on sexual selection -- in the form of observed patterns of sexual coercion in nonhuman primates -- and its implications for the evolution of human behavior.

Sexual aggression by males toward females is widespread among social mammals. In the first article in the book, Muller, Sonya M. Kahlenberg and Wrangham define terms in order to establish "a basic taxonomy of coercion." Direct coercion, which "involves the use of force to overcome female resistance to mating" and is taxonomically widespread, may take the form of forced copulation, harassment or intimidation. Indirect coercion, which is more common, is meant to make it less likely that a female will mate with other males; it may take the form of herding (using aggression toward females to separate them from other males), punishment (physical retribution toward females who associate with other males), or sequestration (forceful separation of females from the group). When a male chimpanzee attempts to monopolize a female while she is ovulating, that is sexual coercion. When a male baboon (usually one that is new to the group or newly dominant) harasses or kills the infant of a female in the group (to shorten the period during which she will be sexually unavailable because she is lactating), that is another form of sexual coercion; the mother is harmed reproductively rather than physically. Sexually coercive males are not just attempting to have sex with particular females, they’re trying to control female sexuality in general.

The science that allows us to understand sexual coercion by males is drawn directly from Darwin's own work on sexual selection. There is, however, another layer here, because of course one cannot talk about the evolution of sexual aggression in male primates without pondering the social consequences of the same behavior in our own species. Are domestic violence and sexual assault simply human homologues of the same conduct seen in chimpanzees and baboons? Many social scientists bristle at this suggestion, with its invocation of biological determinism. This volume’s authors, many of them female researchers, do an excellent job of sensitively exploring the boundary between phenotype and environment that is the stuff of which human behavior is made.

The book is divided into four sections. The first covers the ideas that serve as the theoretical basis of the volume. Here the contributors review the most widely accepted explanatory hypotheses from an evolutionary perspective. Coercive males may seek mating access through intimidation. They may seek advantages in feeding competition, or they may be engaged in an intersexual struggle for social dominance. They may coerce as part of a mate-guarding strategy, to maintain reproductive control. Sexual coercion might even be redirected aggression between males, in which the stress of male competition leads males to vent their frustrations elsewhere.

The second section consists of a series of papers describing patterns of male sexual coercion among nonhuman primates. Richard C. Connor and Nicole L. Vollmer compare the behavior of male chimpanzees with that of male bottlenose dolphins, which serve as a useful out-group for understanding the evolutionary forces molding male aggression toward females. Male bottlenose dolphins are well known for their alliances, their group coercion of females and their generally nasty behavior toward unrelated dolphins. All these traits are prominent features of chimpanzee society, and some would argue that they are features of many traditional human societies as well.

Muller, Kahlenberg and Wrangham present the evidence regarding male chimpanzee sexual coercion that led them to organize the symposium on which the book is based. Because female chimpanzees rarely put up strenuous resistance, sexual aggression is not as physically violent in chimpanzees as it can be in humans. But harassment and physical intimidation occur, especially on the part of low-ranking males who seek to coerce reluctant females into mating despite the fact that those females risk being punished with aggression by higher-ranking males. The authors' analysis of the ways in which male chimpanzee aggressive behavior may constrain female sexuality is insightful and introduces themes that will be taken up again in the next section.

Perhaps the most revelatory paper in the second section is by Cheryl D. Knott, describing her research on the widely reported but little-documented occurrence of forced copulation in orangutans. Knott uses field data from a variety of sites to test various hypotheses. She shows that, contrary to time-honored belief, "rape" is not a mating strategy practiced solely by unflanged male orangutans (that is, those who have not yet developed protruding cheek flanges, which signal dominance and are accompanied by high testosterone levels); rather, it is employed generally in the species. However, female orangutans (unlike female mammals of other species who are objects of male aggression) are almost never physically injured in such mating attempts. Knott argues that most mating between orangutans involves elements of both cooperation and resistance. Male orangutans (unlike male humans and chimpanzees) do not use coercion as an indirect way of controlling female sexual behavior. Knott concludes that "resisted mating" might be a more appropriate term than forced copulation for what happens between orangutans, noting that the level of force involved reflects the female’s level of resistance. The likelihood of direct sexual coercion in any species will be strongly influenced by both a male’s ability to obtain matings by force and a female’s ability to avoid forced mating.

Section three concerns sexual coercion in the human species. Shannon A. Novak and Mallorie A. Hatch draw intriguing comparisons between craniofacial trauma inflicted by male chimpanzees on female chimpanzees and that inflicted by men on women. For example, female chimpanzees are most often assaulted from behind, whereas men and women fight face to face. Margo Wilson and Martin Daly present an analysis of domestic violence by men against women.

The most compelling contribution in this section is a paper by Melissa Emery Thompson, who argues persuasively that most rapes are not committed by lonely, socially maladjusted men, as Thornhill and Palmer imagined. Instead, rape is a crime most often carried out by men who are sexually experienced and connected to the victim in some way. This changing view of rape is no doubt a reflection of better reporting of crime statistics. That in turn is a result of society having begun to take a more expansive view of such criminal acts, which women of earlier generations might not have been willing to report due to fear of social stigmatization. It should not surprise us that acquaintance rapists far outnumber stranger rapists, nor that the modus operandi of sexual assaults differs in the two different contexts. Acquaintance rapists are not necessarily pathological in other social contexts; they rarely resort to the levels of physical force or violence that stranger rapists employ. All this, Thompson argues, should contribute to a view that acquaintance rape accords with evolutionary perspectives about the rationales for male dominance over and control of female sexuality. And as Thompson puts it, even if an evolutionary perspective does not help us understand how to prevent sexually coercive behavior, "it may give us a clearer picture of the enormity of the problem we are dealing with."

Section four concludes the volume with chapters on the counterstrategies employed by females to cope with the risk and the reality of male sexual coercion. A female may form an alliance with one male in hopes that he will protect her from aggression by other males, especially aggression toward her infant. Such "friendships" have been well-known for decades now, but as Ryne Palombit points out in his chapter on baboon protective friendships, it’s not entirely clear how these alliances work. Nevertheless, the data are clear in showing that such friendships do make life safer for females. Tommaso Paoli notes that in bonobos, alliances between females may be the primary factor in discouraging intense male sexual coercion.

The editors of this volume deserve high praise for having avoided the weaknesses to which such collections are prone -- the book is uniform in tone, and the papers are all of high quality. There are no polemical rantings here, nor are the contributors concerned with political correctness; the empirical evidence is what matters to them, and their analysis of it is perceptive and nuanced. One obvious quibble is that the book’s title -- presumably chosen by someone in marketing -- will annoy all self-respecting primatologists with its implication that humans are not primates too. But Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans is an important work and will be a valuable addition to the bookshelves of specialists and nonspecialists alike.

Craig Stanford is professor of anthropology and biological sciences at the University of Southern California. He has spent many years studying the behavioral ecology and social behavior of wild great apes, especially chimpanzees, and is the author of many books and journal articles on primate behavior and human evolution. He is coauthor with Maddalena Bearzi of Beautiful Minds: The Parallel Lives of Apes and Dolphins (Harvard University Press, 2008).

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Just Kids

Songs of Innocence

My first introduction to Patti Smith, as it probably was for most listeners, was through her remake of "Gloria," where she transformed Van Morrison's ode to teenage lust into a frenzied whiplash of ur-punk bliss. Hearing her croon "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine," like the forgotten love child of Howlin' Wolf, was the most transgressive thing this Catholic schoolboy had ever heard. Listening to her music and reading about the New York punk scene in magazines like Creem opened my mind to the fact that there was more to music than "Freebird" and Kiss.

In her memoir Just Kids, Smith chronicles those down-and-out days when she transformed from the product of a thorough middle-class upbringing to the poet/high priestess of the bohemian demimonde of 1970s New York. Accompanying her on this journey of self-actualization was Robert Mapplethorpe. What began as a chance meeting between the two became a lifetime of mutual inspiration as each pursued their artistic ambitions. Smith, a slavish devotee of Rimbaud, sought to express herself through poetry and sketching, while Mapplethorpe, not yet a photographer, struggled to find his ideal medium.

The artist's journey is never easy, and Smith writes candidly about this period of her life. Of their first apartment together, she explains, "The walls were smeared with blood and psychotic scribbling, the oven crammed with discarded syringes, and the refrigerator overrun with mold." Money was so tight that debates would emerge as to whether they could afford Mapplethorpe's beloved chocolate milk, as it cost a dime more than plain milk.

As each begins to find their voice, however, their tranquility is threatened when Mapplethorpe is forced to confront his homosexuality, despite his promise to never leave Smith's side. At this time, there was no mainstreaming of gay culture, and neither Smith nor Mapplethorpe knew how to deal with his yearnings. Smith chides herself, writing, "In my literary imagination, homosexuality was a poetic curse, notions that I had gleaned from Mishima, Gide, and Genet. I knew nothing of the reality of homosexuality." Eventually, Mapplethorpe was able to channel this awakening into his art, creating, as Smith describes, "a diary of his internal evolution."

Getting equal credit in this story of two artists is the city where it all happened. In Just Kids, Smith vividly describes a pre-Giuliani (heck, pre-Ed Koch) New York, the city as it appears in films such as Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy but without either film's nihilism. Smith's New York is a city of clubs like Max's Kansas City and CBGB, Warhol's Factory and Automats (where Allen Ginsberg, thinking the androgynous Smith was a boy, buys her lunch). Her life in New York includes stints as a cashier at FAO Schwartz and a steady gig working at Scribner's bookstore. As much as this book is biography, it's also an evocative topography of a city that survives only in memory.

Smith has always been a gifted wordsmith, and while her lyrics and poetry resonate with the personal and confessional, Just Kids probably does more to situate the artist and her relationship to the world than anything she's previously done. Stripped of both the intensity that accompanies her music, and the metaphor and mysticism of her poetry, Smith's writings here are still vividly observant and sometimes painfully self-aware, but now they possess a voice not only of yearning but also of experience.

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John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression

Last Man Standing: The Acquisitive Music of John Zorn

Saxophonist and composer John Zorn was found dead last night in his Manhattan apartment, a victim of his own success.

Zorn rode into town on a white horse, his yarmulke flapping in the breeze. He didn't know why he came back. He didn't know how he'd gotten roped into another war with desperadoes. The day was hot. A gun was in his hand.

Zorn pushed the fedora back on his head. Maybe he had a taste for death. Maybe he liked it too much to taste anything else. The day was cold. He lit a cigarette, had a pull of whiskey. Maybe the blonde in the trenchcoat was lying. Maybe she wasn't even blonde.

Spaceman Zorn, lieutenant first class, prepared to leave Planet East 2nd Street, bound for the Valhalla Quadrant in search of humanoid listeners for fun and profit. He radioed for clearance, and clearance he received. He closed his eyes, opened his ears, and accelerated his ship deep into the black circumambience. His return would not be so peaceful.

Such parodies of pop tropes might be as close as prose can get to describing, or embodying, the deliriously acquisitive music of John Zorn. The obituary, the Western dime, the detective pulp, the space opera; not to mention their more recent incarnations on television, in movies, and on the Internet -- Zorn samples, then reshapes, the equivalent chaos of the musical world, both with the improvisations of his own bands, in which he's played alto saxophone, and in his formally notated compositions.

But we'll stick with writing for a moment. In order to reproduce Zorn's musical process in a piece of criticism about that process, one is thrown back not only on postmodernism, especially on the Beat-era, film-inspired cutups of William S. Burroughs, but even further into the ludic realm of surrealist parlor pastimes. To demonstrate, you can take the words of any sentence in this essay, cut them out of the page, and redistribute however you want -- "and want you redistribute however" -- intending the loss of sense to be literature, not senselessness.

But musical notes do not have meanings like words do. This lack of meaning has allowed Zorn to rewrite Arnold Schoenberg's "Serenade" in his own "Chimeras" for flute, clarinet, piano, violin, cello, soprano, and percussion; it has allowed him to redo Anton Webern's "String Trio" in his own string trio, "Walpurgisnacht"; to redo Alban Berg's "Lyric Suite" in his string quartet "Memento Mori"; and to refashion Pierre Boulez's "Le Marteau sans maitre" for a similar ensemble plus turntables in "Elegy". These appropriations cannot be heard, however, because the pitch sequence, the musical equivalent of narrative, has been disrupted, rearranged. One would not know it without studying the scores, but Zorn's "Cat o'Nine Tails" scrambles blocks of quotations from quartets by Elliott Carter, Iannis Xenakis, Schoenberg, and Berg; his "Aporia" for piano and orchestra appropriates, on the most fundamental technical level, the "Requiem Canticles" of Igor Stravinsky.

The note "C" should not be looked up in the dictionary under "C"; the note itself signifies nothing, functioning only with regard to whatever note comes before it and whatever note comes after. Instead of literary meanings, then, musical notes have relationships. And what's most important to the reception, to the hearing, of a musical note is that relationship, or context. These contexts are resolvable into systems, and these systems dominated Western music for centuries. In the system known as tonality -- the system of Mozart, the system of Lou Reed -- the scale has seven notes, with seven relationships per octave known as intervals. In the dodecaphony pioneered by Schoenberg in fin-de-siecle Vienna, all twelve notes of Western tuning were used, with twelve relationships per octave, in a system described by Schoenberg as being made of "twelve tones related only to one another."

The primary innovation of American popular music was to transcend such relationships. Within two decades of pop music's post-World War II ascendancy, the first generation of critics for magazines like Creem and Rolling Stone began naming, if not describing, new genres strikingly unconcerned with the interactions of tones: "hard rock," "glam rock," "prog rock," "punk," "postpunk," "New Wave," "No Wave," "metal," "heavy metal," "death metal," "thrash," "hardcore," "noise," "skronk," "avant-skronk." A century after the demise of classical tonality, the local language of Western music had become a global language of styles, of sensibilities -- racial, sexual, political. Before the culture of celebrity transcended mediums and every recording artist suddenly was also an actor and memoirist with a line of energy drinks and perfumes, the ancient technical systems of music would be replicated by a greater system or organizing principle -- a music business in which forms of music were related to one another only by genres and anyone who transgressed a given genre was said to be, in the cliches of criticism, "pushing boundaries" or "crossing over."

For the past three decades, John Zorn has led a ragtag avant-garde in rebellion against this new music theory and against the late aggression of reckless celebrity; his theater of war has been the streets of Downtown New York. John Brackett's Tradition and Transgression, the first book about Zorn's music, has just been published, and its considered evaluation of a rambunctious career appears toward the end of the publication run of Zorn's own Arcana series -- a projected set of five books written by nearly a hundred underground musicians, and edited/published by Zorn himself, intended to fill the vacuum of critical silence that surrounds them and their work.

The record company boardrooms are located floors above the grittiest asphalt and blocks north, too, in Midtown Manhattan: Warner Music Group at Rockefeller Center, EMI at 150 Fifth Avenue, Sony/BMG Music Entertainment at 550 Madison Avenue, Universal Music Group at 1755 Broadway, near Carnegie Hall (these companies are known as the Big Four; the Big Five included an independent BMG, bought by Sony in 2004; the Big Six also included Polygram, bought by Universal in 1998). But Manhattan's music is south, and began south, where the city itself began -- "Downtown," a subjectively delimited district that spawned the music known even outside of New York as "Downtown Music."

Accounting for what makes Downtown "Downtown" can easily bring us deep into the past -- to before World War II, when the neighborhood's lofts had not yet been converted from sweatshop factories and warehouses affiliated with Manhattan's port, and the white ethnic immigrants who worked there had not yet moved out to the suburbs. This Downtown was a bustling city-in-itself, whose culture -- whose diversity, set between radically political Union Square and moneyed Wall Street -- was distinct from that of the rest of New York. Artistically, however, Zorn's Downtown can be said to have begun in earnest with the movement known as Fluxus, a concatenation of plastic artists, poets, and musicians centered around George Maciunas, whose 1963 manifesto announced that his group would "Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be fully grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals." Early Fluxus concerts were held at 112 Chambers Street, in a loft occupied by Yoko Ono half a decade before she met John Lennon and, later, moved Uptown to the plush fixtures of The Dakota. (Regular audience members included Marcel Du champ and the inventor of the silent concert, John Cage.) It was the intermedia and collaborative community spirit of Fluxus -- its "living art" -- united with its subversively accidental perspectives -- "anti-art" -- that found its most explicit expression with Zorn, whose interests assimilate a scene of hundreds into the praxis of a single musician.

Fluxus performances of the music of La Monte Young (whose composition $50 featured him getting paid $50) and Terry Riley (whose In C featured the note "C" repeated indefinitely) were taken as models by two younger musicians who drove taxis and ran a moving company together: Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Their performances of a minimalist, partially notated, partially improvised music closed the gap between Downtown's experimentation and classical music culture, which lived at Lincoln Center, an arts complex opened in the mid-1960s, many subway stops Uptown, where the grid dominates and decorum reigns supreme. Glass's and Reich's own ensembles -- The Philip Glass Ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, each dedicated to presenting the work of their respective composer-conductor -- were influential for Zorn, who would perform his own music live with his bands, Naked City and Masada particularly. As for performance venues, Downtown's "Lincoln Center" was diffuse: The Kitchen, opened in 1971, was a major Downtown stage -- among the first in an unheated, and un-air-conditioned, line that involved The Experimental Intermedia Foundation, Roulette, The Alternative Museum, Dia Art Foundation, and Artists Space, and continued through the opening of The Knitting Factory in 1987, Tonic in 1998, and Zorn's club, The Stone, in 2005, located on 2nd Street and Avenue C in a former Chinese restaurant.

Obviously, throughout this period a more official culture kept on keeping on. The #1 album of 1976 was "Frampton Comes Alive"; disco's ball cast its shadow across city dance floors; while Uptown, for the formal-dress folks, it was Mozart and Beethoven as usual. When the 1980s arrived, representing for majority America a homogenization of culture at the end of the Cold War, Downtown proved the infamous exception: genre distinctions, in the mean streets, were meaningless, as a mess of the loudest, angriest music imaginable rose up amid the squalor, IV-drug addiction, and AIDS suffering of the New York of Mayor Ed Koch. The conversion of New York from cacophonous wasteland to yuppie functionality began with Rudolph Giuliani, who as a young federal prosecutor led a landmark police action in 1984 that cleared Tompkins Square Park -- Zorn's immediate neighborhood -- of its narcotics trade. By the time Giuliani became mayor ten years later, "gentrification" was not just a buzzword they taught at university but a program that expanded New York University, while spattering Downtown with luxury boutiques.

CBGB, the punk club that debuted The Ramones, was shuttered in 2006 and is now a men's fashion store selling $130 T-shirts and $800 pants. The Knitting Factory and Tonic, two clubs whose schedules Zorn frequently curated, were forced to close due to rent increases. Downtown jazz clubs now cater almost exclusively to European and Asian tourists who pay inflated prices to sip watery alcohol and not smoke in the most storied bastions of American music. In November 2008, Christie's held its inaugural auction of punk memorabilia. A Patti Smith poem sold for $375; a poster advertising a concert by Television, signed by Richard Hell, "realized" a price of $313. In December 2008, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC opened Downtown. Its collection boasts the ultimate readymade relic: a urinal from CBGB.

John Zorn's career is a parallel street to Downtown's decline -- one-way, but in the opposite direction. He was born in Queens, on September 2, 1953, making him a Virgo, making him ingenious but petty, gifted in languages and attracted to foreign cultures; that his moon is in Cancer makes him both likable and overly sensitive; all of this might make him the sort of person who believes in astrology. Zorn has always existed on this knife edge: he is earnest but defensive, a wiseass and skeptic but also a mystic, a magus.

These opposites collided on the corner of 175th Street and Jewel Avenue in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens. Zorn's subway, his umbilicus to Manhattan, was the F train, which brought in the bridge and tunnelers for their weekend doses of kulcha. Flushing was Jewish; the Zorn family was Jewish; but John, the youngest of two, was sent to a church's Sunday school, and the family celebrated Christmas (Zorn's mother was an education professor at NYU; his father, who emigrated from Ukraine at age six, a hairdresser). After graduating from the United Nations High School, Zorn went on to Webster College in St. Louis, where he studied music for three semesters. The piano, guitar, bass guitar, flute, and clarinet he'd tinkered with as a teenager were gradually supplanted by the saxophone, and, after a float to the West Coast, Zorn returned to New York in 1975, ensconcing himself in the Colonnades Building on Lafayette Street. The apartment he slept in by day moonlighted as The Theater of Musical Optics, a prime setting for concerts of improvised music whose attendance seldom exceeded four.

Zorn's next decade was spent composing improvisational frameworks on blackboards and index cards, while personalizing an approach to his instrument, negotiating between the black vernacular of jazz "sax" and the wild, extended techniques of contemporarily classical woodwinds. In 1985, Zorn signed with the label Nonesuch and recorded "The Big Gundown", his eclectic arrangements of the music that Ennio Morricone wrote for director Sergio Leone's 1960s Spaghetti Westerns. A recording of Spillane followed, Zorn's noirish homage to the Mike Hammer detective novels.

But in 1987, at the height of success, a restless Zorn moved to Tokyo and proceeded to split his time between New York and Japan until the mid-1990s. At the time, his chief project was the band Naked City -- named after the 1958 TV show, itself named after the 1948 film -- featuring Bill Frisell on guitar, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, Fred Frith on bass guitar, and Joey Baron on drums. (Frisell has since emerged as a significant guitarist of Americana music.) Although he learned to speak Japanese and played a troublemaker role in Tokyo's musical underground, Zorn has spoken in interviews about his alienation from artistically inclusive but socially hierarchical Japanese culture. Apparently, this disaffection, along with the death of his father, returned him to New York, and to Judaism, homecomings that informed "Radical Jewish Culture" -- a movement that marked a retaking of Downtown aesthetics, and their intermingling with Downtown ethnicity, by the secularly Jewish generation born in America after the war.

Two projects emerged from Zorn's relocation: his 1993 founding of Masada, an acoustic quartet named after the Judean mountain where, in 73 a.d., an army of Jews martyred themselves instead of surrendering to the Romans; and the 1995 founding of Zorn's record label, Tzadik, which is a Hebrew word meaning "righteous." During this time, Zorn also collaborated with a number of hardcore musicians, including the quartet Blind Idiot God and Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton. Subsequently, definitive marks of Uptown approval began arriving for Zorn's compositions: a MacArthur "Genius Grant," in 2006, and Columbia University's William Schuman Award, in 2007. With The Stone programming six nights a week and Tzadik releasing almost fifty albums per year, many of its owner's own music, Zorn has become Downtown's premier impresario, a DIY success story and a simultaneous vindication and betrayal of anti-establishmentarianism.

Zorn's first compositional innovations were evident with his "Game Pieces", structured improvisations in which the composer acted as conductor, cuing musicians through gestures and signs (including doffed baseball caps and holding up a prearranged number of fingers). Happily, maximally, Zorn used improvisation to challenge his composing amid the rise of his city's best improvisers -- the denizens of Naked City and Masada, and such peers as pianist-composer Uri Caine, guitarist-composers Marc Ribot and Elliot Sharp, and conductor-cornetist Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris. These were perhaps the most consummate musicians of the century, hyphenated performer-composers who could not only read music but also make up better versions of it on the spot. Although once established as the first-call saxophonist of this scene that was, on street level, ten scenes or more, each with its own subgroups and ephemeral cults, Zorn again improvised a dance on the outer rings of counterintuition: at the turn of the last century, he relinquished his reeds, abandoning nightly performance to focus on composing.

From the beginning, Zorn's compositional systems were always his own, not just personal but hermetic. Just as his "Game Pieces" rewrote avant-garde aesthetics through a new skill set, Zorn's take on popular music was belated yet total. Naked City audaciously defined the popular as a certain intensity or energy, and proceeded to gather under that heated, insatiable rubric of Zorn's private invention a host of related sonics: blues, jazz, cartoon music via Warner Bros. composer Carl Stalling (Looney Tunes) and MGM composer Scott Bradley (Tom and Jerry), both kinds of cowboy music (country and western), and all those old/new varieties of rocks and metals. Throughout this madcap amassing of repertoire that could be played only by ensembles of close friends and neighbors, Zorn was also composing scores for export and for traditional reproduction -- thoroughly notated pieces orchestrated for classical instrumentation.

There has not yet been a complete catalogue made of Zorn's compositions, or a compiled discography, and such a task can seem beyond even the most enamored biographer. Since there are over a hundred albums, and thousands of compositions (Masada alone boasts a book of 613 "tunes," reflecting the number of mitzvot, or commandments, in the Torah), it might be better to just account for their highlights with one of Zorn's signature forms, the list: there are the soloist showcases (Aporias and Contes de Fees, a de facto violin concerto); five string quartets ("Cat o'Nine Tails", "Memento Mori", "Kol Nidre", "The Dead Man", "Necronomicon"); chamber music ("Amour Fou" for piano trio, "Le Momo" for violin and piano); solo music, whose extremes are exemplified by the antic Carny for piano and the stridencies of Goetia for violin; vocal music, notably Rituals, for mezzo-soprano with "wind machines, wooden gears, gravedigging, bull roarers, bird squeakers"; and then there's the film music, including soundtracks for television commercials by David Cronenberg and Jean-Luc Godard, Japanese animations, a documentary about Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, and a gay porno entitled "Latin Boys Go to Hell".

Zorn, then, is the most we can ask of a modern artist: prolific. In an age of excess, the more excessive the artist, the more important he seems. In an earlier age, when composers accepted musical systems without question, creating their works within not only a single system but also a single style, Zorn might have been accused of exploitation, of thinking too big with too little.

This accusation would still ring true if Zorn were actually a creator, or foremost a creator, a composer in the olden mode: pen-and-piano, five-lines-to-a-staff. But he's not. He's something newer -- an artist as browser, as curator, an amasser of references, a filcher of licks and riffs, a relentlessly curious collector of kitsch.

Here would be the place for the diligent writer to perform an Internet search for "collecting," then to collect those results into a paragraph, copy-'n'-pasting quotations from (in alphabetical order) journalist Joseph Alsop, philosopher Jean Baudrillard, and Walter Benjamin. That German Jew was the first to consider seriously the activities of the Collector, whom he established as an emblematic urban personality, flaneuring through a rush hour's undifferentiated mass in desperate search of only one thing -- whatever other people miss. This person used to be Benjamin himself, and it used to be Marcel Proust, who collated and rewrote easily ignored, easily forgotten observations and overheard remarks into a novel that provided the deepest possible literary engagement with the surface reality of his time. But when, through technology, that reality became overwhelming in its stimuli, this person -- this, as Saul Bellow would have put it, "first-class noticer" -- went from being a participant or social commentator to a sort of attending trashman, a searcher through the detritus that an accelerant culture had left behind. The refined collector of the bourgeois nineteenth century was to be recycled as me, as you, and, iconically, as disposophobic Zorn.

With the advent of the Internet, the accumulation of dreck finally fits everyone's budget. In an era in which culture is becoming ever more free -- people expect free music in these downloading days, as concert attendance perceptibly wanes -- everyone becomes his own archivist, his own immediate nostalgist. Just as Zorn pieces together with saxophone spittle the shards of pop and unpopular records, we, too, from the comfort of our living rooms, customize our lists of Top 10s and rotating Favorites; we've become DJs of the self, montage-makers or editors of the films that are our lives.

But when we select and shuffle musics, we seek the entertainment to be had in comfort, whereas Zorn -- working with musicians and not computers, sampling not through clicks but by transcription -- is determined to entertain us through challenge. His goal seems to be the imprinting of a local sensibility on an unprecedented wealth of source material, giving both an angry finger to skyscraper corporatism and a human face to technological hegemony. This means that his music is very specific -- while listening, it helps to have a sense of humor, preferably Zorn's sense of humor -- and driven by noisy outrage. This outrage is most enjoyably evinced when Naked City improvises on traditional jazz and blues forms at outlandish volumes and speedfreak tempi, imbuing the familiar chord changes of Tin Pan Alley with visceral force; or else when Masada pursues its brand of klezmer and transitions from a sort of Eastern European kitsch -- a snaky synagogue melody -- into a variant of "free jazz," as the tightly spaced Oriental intervals are expanded into yelps, the disconsolate howls by which multiculturalism mourns Culture.

Essentially, Zorn's provocative brilliance lies in this: For all that he encompasses every powerchord and emcee front, stripper swing and ragtime ostinato, he persists in turning that plenitude inward, encoding the very experience of influence. When we listen to his transformations of canonical classical music especially, we are listening to music by listening to listening, as what has to be called Zorn's music, and nothing but Zorn's music, reveals itself in its newness and shocking historicity. In the same way, the New York -- the Downtown -- that sounds through his music is not the city that is or was: it's the city that Zorn has always required it to be.

To that end, Zorn's Arcana reads like an attempt to ensure that we're living not just in the same neighborhood but on the same block, on the same page. It represents a hope that our musicians, regardless of style or instrument, might once again be able to speak a common language -- what would be the broadest language in musical history, still more focused than Babel's. Arcana's multiple volumes -- three to date, with a fourth volume due this fall, and a fifth and final volume slated for 2010, surveying the writing of nonmusicians on music -- amount to a public rehearsal for this revolution, impracticable but utterly committed. Its sections on two-handed cello-bowing and copyright law, interspersed with chapters on evolutionary analogies in music ("The Counterpoint of Species") and stray thoughts on the morality of distortion (should one use a distortion "effect"? or instead push the amplifier as loud as it goes?), are reports vital to any city that has lost its avant-garde, whose underground has been outsourced not overseas but into virtual dreams.

John Brackett's book-length study of Zornithology is a close technical rendition of this same hope of re-creation. Although never once venturing into the biographical, Tradition and Transgression does try to harmonize the occasional echoic strain of musical Downtown, if only to save the scene from the oblivion of the un-academicized and unmarketed. But nowhere among his discussions of Zorn's interests in numerology, anime, and S+M sex does Brackett ever mention why this musical world -- this Downtown that dabbled in Magick and transgressive erotics, loud clothing and hairstyles, and louder volumes -- moved on; a whiz at music theory, he says nothing about politics or real estate, the record industry or MTV. The impression one gets from Brackett's painstakingly professional analyses is that Zorn arrived late to the experimental party, then experimented himself by staying even later. Zorn came of age at the end of New York's last musical avant-garde, when its techniques and potency were being absorbed by more popular music, leaving the die-hard avant-gardist so underground as to be basically dead. Zorn came in from the boroughs to live in a city that, the moment he settled in, started changing, and changed around him, as he remained the same -- a fearless believer; not the most avant of the quickdraw advance guard but the rearmost soldier, the last man standing.

Indeed, no matter where we maintain residence, we also lately live in one great cyberspace city, a megalopolis monstrously located nowhere, or entirely inside our own heads. With this virtual rise comes the physical's fall, and so it feels, here in New York, where I'm writing this, that there are, particularly among younger artists, no common corners anymore, no shared streets. The Internet's disruption of New York's socioeconomic ripple that historically located arts neighborhoods concentrically further from Midtown's concentrated power means that Downtown could be anywhere -- that the underground has, finally, moved. But where to? Brooklyn? Or www.brooklyn.com? The most notable new music after Zorn's might be the whirring hum of the fan that cools a computer's circuits from fevered searching.

Joshua Cohen's most recent novel is A Heaven of Others.

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Day Out of Days: Stories and Journals

On the road with Sam Shepard as the last exit approaches

I remember reading in Motel Chronicles, Sam Shepard's 1981 memoir of growing up in the American West, that the thing to do when driving and someone drunkenly pukes out the car window is to turn up the radio. I thought, then, that was a pretty decent way to live.

Nearly 30 years later, Shepard, no longer young at 66, is still driving, revisiting where and how he's lived, and searching for reasons to continue. It could be birdsong, or the "rippling sorrel muscle" of a 2-year-old colt, or a red sunrise in Mexico, or a woman's face "broken in grief" when her husband dies in the airplane seat beside her, any moment of grace or violence to keep the heart beating, that convinces a man he is still on a mission as the last exit approaches.

Shepard's protagonists in Day Out of Days -- a collection of 133 stories and snips of dialogues on 304 pages, told by men whose lives and careers mirror Shepard's -- are trying to escape the "almost constant swirling chatter going on inside my head." Sometimes they do it with drink; sometimes, they weep. Sometimes they go the most direct route: decapitation, though this does stop the head from chattering and pleading for a lift. Always, the men get in cars and go, from Montana to Mexico, California to Minnesota, never away from catastrophes but to them, whiteouts and jack-knifed 18-wheelers, Hurricane Katrina and drug murders along the Mexican border, barely remembered girlfriends and the men's own failing bodies. People are haunted, and some are still puking, but there are also luscious Mexican actresses to watch on TV, and the taste of cold beer, and possibility down the road.

While there are a few hard cases here, such as the man who skins another man's face and rolls it like a taquito ("Mean Green"), Shepard also can be funny as hell, and he's spot-on when he describes, as he does in "Land of the Living," the anguish and weariness of a man being shut out by a histrionic spouse. And always there's the tremendous poetry of Shepard's language, as in "Gracias":

"What little town was that where we drove for miles weaving through hills and hills of olive groves poured out like little oceans. ... I remember, walking hand in hand with our children, talking of living somewhere idyllic just like this somewhere suspended in time and then all of us brought to a stop by a pianist practicing some lovely lilting waltz outside a window with iron bars in a narrow backstreet and we all just stood there entranced and applauded from the street when it ended for the unseen player and from somewhere deep inside the thick stucco walls, very faintly, came a woman's voice, very very soft, and the voice said 'Gracias,' and we walked on. "That was one of those days I remember."

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Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

Philosophy's Comic Book Heroes

It isn't surprising that Logicomix has already received a couple of high-profile reviews: it's the kind of book that makes reviewers feel necessary and important. On the one hand, it's a good and deserving read in the history of mathematics, logic, and philosophy, yet because it comes in the form of a graphic novel, it could have some trouble finding its widest and most appreciative audience. Reviewers to the rescue!

The book tells and, of course, illustrates the life story of Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), British philosopher, logician, and mathematician -- or rather his life story until he turned from mathematical logic to moral and political philosophy. The heart of the story follows Russell's doomed but highly influential attempt, with his colleague Alfred North Whitehead, to establish unshakeable logical foundations for mathematics in their Principia Mathematica. It also explores, to great effect, Russell's personal biography, especially his erotic life and his ongoing relationship with madness via his family, his son, and many of his colleagues.

The authors of Logicomix do a number of things extremely well. They seem to have realized they were facing a tricky problem from the outset: how to build narrative tension while telling a "story" far too technical and abstract for most lay readers to follow. To create additional suspense they fall back on one of the most pervasive devices in all of literature, telling their tale in "frames," or stories-within-stories. This ubiquitous literary device is common for a reason, and once again it proves its worth, allowing Logicomix to pull its reader right in, along, and through.

In the inner frame, Russell is giving a lecture in the United States on the eve of America's entry into World War II. A mob of rabid pacifists, aware of Russell's pacificism throughout World War I, want him to come out against an American entry into the war. Russell, in his 1939 cartoon self, promises to answer them by telling the story of his life and work.

Meanwhile, in the outermost frame, the authors and artists of Logicomix are themselves characters in their own book, debating among themselves how to tell the story and what its central themes are, and also giving the reader interesting glimpses of present-day Athens, where the book was written and illustrated.

This widest frame was presumably designed to counter the easy objection to any comic book version of a complex and contentious subject. It allows the authors to present their version of events forthrightly as subjective and reduced accounts, insufficient and debatable. It isn't just the book's synopses of complicated ideas that are framed as tentative, but also its main themes. Throughout the story the graphic doppelganger of one of the authors, Apostolos Doxiandis, argues that they are telling a tragedy rooted in human passion. His foil in this argument is the cartoon version of the second author, Christos Papadimitriou, who holds that the events in the story are driven primarily by ideas.

It's possible to critique this whole subjective structure, as well as the resulting ambiguous answers to the story's core questions, as cheap attempts to blunt criticism. But at the same time it's hard to know how else the authors could have both told an enthralling story and also avoided the ire of specialists in the field. At the end of the book, when the authors have the intellectual integrity to detail the many parts of their story that have been invented to fit narrative goals, it's not much of a scandal since the story's outer frame has already hinted as much.

Taking a few factual liberties turns out to be important to the other thing the authors do extremely well. Despite their insistence, on the second page, that this book is not a "Logic for Dummies," the reality is that the graphic form is powerful not because it can go as deeply as hundreds of pages of closely-packed text but because the combination of visual experience and ideation lodges in the memory more vividly than text alone. Logicomix is too passionate and personal to be Logic for Dummies, but it's still a great way for a beginner to grasp and retain some fundamental concepts that were important in European fin-de-siecle proto-analytic philosophy, and also a great way to keep the biographies and personalities of the key figures distinct. The authors help the didactic function of their book considerably by having Russell meet, in their story, a number of mathematical luminaries he never met in person.

Unfortunately the inner frame doesn't work quite as neatly as the outer frame. Suffice it to say that the cartoon-Russell's eventual answer to the pacificists -- presumably the entire point of telling the story -- is disappointingly facile and recursive, whether considered as logic or as political philosophy. Russell's answer is not inconsistent with his later career as a celebrity social philosopher, when he was always bold and articulate, but seldom brilliantly original. Logicomix gets a little too excited about what is basically a tenable but depressingly self-evident insight into social dynamics.

Beyond that relatively small caveat, there's every reason for anyone even vaguely interested in 20th-century mathematics, logic, and philosophy to spend some enjoyable hours with this book. The biographical details are well chosen and well researched, the exegesis of the ideas is memorable and supportable, the artwork is superb, and the glossary at the back is simply excellent. Let's hope that Logicomix signals the beginning of a new wave of engaging "comic book" versions of the history of thought and science.

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The Pleasures of Cooking for One

On Eating Alone

I spent the vast majority of my adult life living alone. During all that time, while I might not have cooked full meals every night, it never occurred to me not to cook for myself. My mother taught me to cook in middle school when she went back to work, and we grew up in the sort of household where the core set of assumptions were: You can make it cheaper than you can buy it, processed food is "junk," and eating out is a treat, not an everyday occurrence. When I was a starving editorial assistant in New York during my 20s, cooking was just about my only form of entertainment. I mean, a girl has to eat, right? So you might as well get some fun out of that portion of your budget. On Saturdays I roamed Manhattan, from the Union Square Greenmarket to Little Italy, back up to the tiny shop just off Second Avenue where two old Italian men sold only olives and fresh mozzarella. I didn't have any money at all, but I ate well. All through graduate school and my ski bum years, I cooked real meals for myself, and sometimes for my friends, and I never understood people like one roommate I had, who lived on cereal. Just because I was alone, I was supposed to eat badly? While I love cooking for other people, I'm with Judith Jones who says in her new book, The Pleasures of Cooking for One, that while she loves cooking for others, "I can't see taking in my neighbors every night."

Luckily I don't seem to be cooking for one as much these days, but my frugal nature and ongoing interest in why people do or don't cook at home, seems to have taken over this month. For some reason, it was the pile of books about what people eat when they are alone that called to me. I started with the Judith Jones, in part because she's sort of a bridge between the present and that first generation of women food writers that I think of as the grandes dames, writers like Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David and Patience Gray. Jones' memoir The Tenth Muse is a gem, and frankly, I erroneously assumed that The Pleasures of Cooking for One was another memoir. Even better, it's a cookbook full of not just recipes, but lots of advice for how to deal with single portions in a world made for twos and fours and families. As she points out in the introduction:

Fifty-one percent of the population in the New York metropolitan area lives alone. Yet no one seems to cater to their needs. Supermarkets do everything they can to make us buy more than we need, and the food industry has for more than a century been selling the idea that it is demeaning for women to cook and a waste of time when they can buy ready-made products instead. So I felt compelled to write this book to share with you the strategies I have devised for beating the system.

While there are any number of recipes in the book, it's this rebellious approach that really endeared her to me. Jones not only wants you to cook nice meals for yourself when you're alone, but she wants you to make the most of your money, resources and time. In particular, Jones shares my love of leftovers, a mania that has my current swain somewhat terrified of my refrigerator (he seems to believe that all food has a built-in timer, and that it must be thrown out after what I think is a ridiculously short time period). Leftovers, Jones notes "are like treasures in the fridge that inspire me to do something imaginative" and many of the recipes in this book come complete with ideas for "second and third rounds." There were years on end when I relied on a big meal cooked on Sunday afternoon, a roast chicken, or a pot roast, or lamb shanks, for instance to see me through the bulk of the workweek. I wish I'd had some of Jones's ideas for second and third acts, even if some of them are a little old fashioned like mince on toast. And unsurprising from the doyenne of cookbook publishing, she's tirelessly worked out small-portion recipes for unexpected dishes, like the beautiful cheese souffle that graces the cover, or -- astonishing though it might seem -- a small cassoulet.

In contrast, Deborah Madison and Patrick McFarlin's What We Eat When We Eat Alone is a collection of anecdotes and recipes that the couple began collecting on trips with the Oldways Preservation and Trust foundation (a sort of slow food organization), and later, in a delightfully unscientific manner, from people they knew. As much as I love Deborah Madison's other cookbooks, and rely on them, I found the conceit of this book problematic, that dining alone is some sort of secretive ritual that is essentially deviant from the norm, which is dining with a partner or family. The book is full of funny little stories of oddball things people eat when they are alone, but it is not until page 169 that the idea is even raised that there are people who dine "Alone Every Day." I think what I hate is that they make dining alone every day sound like some sort of death sentence: "In these cases, solo meals are not the fruit of one of those rare and welcomed spells when a spouse is out of town or the kids are away. This is when every night is likely to be an eat-alone night -- unless something is done about it." Ugh. Why does this feel like the pushy aunt has just accosted one at the third family wedding in a row wanting to know when you plan to settle down? There are some fun stories in this book, and some amusing recipes, and Madison's husband, an artist, did the delightful drawings, but there's just something that grated on me about the general assumption. The book seems to posit that eating alone is some sad state to be endured with humor, or self-indulgence, or even with a sort of stoic grace, but, nonetheless, a sorry state of affairs.

A more congenial middle ground can be found in Jenni Ferrari-Adler's anthology, Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant. Ferrari found herself at twenty-seven, living alone for the first time ever, while in the MFA program at the University of Michigan. She ate her share of odd solitary meals, going through a series of phases "everything raw, then everything baked. I prioritized condiments. What wasn't delicious with Siracha Hot Chili Sauce?" She turned (as do we all at some point), to M. F. K. Fisher's classic essay "A is for Dining Alone," and to Laurie Colwin's "Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant" for company. Eventually, she decided to create the book she wished she'd had when learning to shop and cook and value the process of feeding herself. The anthology includes these two classics, as well as essays by established writers like Marcella Hazan, Beverly Lowry, and Paula Wolfert. She also commissioned essays by younger writers like herself, including one from Laurie Colwin's daughter, Rosa Jurjevics. These essays run a larger gamut than those in the Deborah Madison book, and give a more nuanced view of what it means to dine alone, eat alone, or be alone for various periods of time. Perhaps it's due to the fact that she solicited writers, oddball people who spend more time alone in rooms than the general public, but I'm glad to have Dan Chaon's reminiscence about chilis he has concocted, or Courtney Eldridge's meditation of food and class, or Colin Harrison's essay about the elusive perfect lunch joint in New York. These essays cover a large range, and indeed, could serve as the sort of dining companion one might want when trying to navigate the tricky task of learning to feed oneself in all the ways that are important.

But of all these books, it's Judith Jones's that sticks with me. Perhaps it's because a few years ago I too had to learn to feed myself while grieving. She notes that after her husband Evan died, she "was not sure that I would ever enjoy preparing a meal for myself and eating it alone." I spent one very long winter sitting on my couch with the dogs, eating baked potatoes with a fried egg inside, watching whatever was on TV and wondering how I was going to get through the rest of my life without the person who had been my stalwart companion. But like Jones, I too reached a point where I realized that "the pleasure we shared together was something to honor. I found myself at the end of the day looking forward to cooking, making recipes that work for one, and then sitting down and savoring a good meal." It is a way back into the world, the kitchen. And whether you are cooking just for yourself, or for your loved ones, or for the folks at the local soup kitchen, it is one of the most elemental things we can do for ourselves and for one another. And for some of us, it's a source of ongoing creative joy...what can I make tonight? What is there in the house and what can I do with it? And perhaps when it comes right down to it, it is this courage and fortitude that I admire most in Judith Jones' The Pleasures of Cooking for One. Life changes on us, and like those grandes dames who preceded her, she picked herself up, and made something useful and lovely out of her experience. Really, what more can any of us hope to do?

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