Recent favorite books (part 1)

 

1. Love Dog, Masha Tupitsyn (Penny-Ante)

"Emmanuel Lévinas wrote in 'Peace and Proximity':

'The face as the extreme precariousness of the other...'"

2. I Love Dick, Chris Kraus (Semiotext(e))

"'Because we rejected a certain kind of critical language, people just assumed that we were dumb,' the genius Alice Notley said when I visited her in Paris. Why is female vulnerability still only acceptible when it's neuroticized and personal; when it feeds back on itself? Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?"

3. Speedboat, Renata Adler (New York Review Books)

"Matthew, the man I had arrived with, was drinking brandies. I was drinking gin. Suddenly, my zabaglione vanished, cream, cup, strawberry, and all. I had a distinct, an eidetic memory of seeing it there before me. It was gone. I looked for it. Matt looked for it. It was nowhere. Somebody's handbag was on the floor beside my chair. I felt that a whole zabaglione could not have fallen, tidily, into a stranger's handbag. I couldn't search in a stranger's handbag, anyway. We stopped thinking about it."

4. Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread and Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking, Joseph E. Dabney (Cumberland House)

"Speaking of interesting old-time fruits with interesting flavors, whatever happened to all the Appalachian pawpaw trees? In days past, pawpaws were found everywhere in the country--on wooded slopes, under bluffs, and along streams. Poet James Whitcomb Riley once described pawpaws as custard pie without a crust. Others have linked their taste to a combination banana, pear, and sweet potato custard or to 'custard apples.' They were used to make puddings, pies, jellies, and pawpaw brandy. Largest in size of native North American fruits--about like a cucumber--the pawpaw was one of the staunch dietary standbys of Appalachian and Amerindian folk in times past."