Glass Shallot by Adam Baer | Adambaer.com

Lost and Found, On the Way

Upon moving back to Manhattan after my collegiate and early professional sentence to Baltimore, I wrote an essay about finding specific movie sites close to my new apartment, and how it was far easier to lose oneself in a film's faux-reality than to engage in a new adult life, especially in post 9/11 Manhattan. Well, one of those essays will reappear soon in the new anthology "Lost and Found: Stories from New York," edited by writer Thomas Beller, an influential colleague, founder of MrBellersNeighborhood.com, and editor of the literary journal Open City. Pre-order the book and you'll get more than just my post-adolescent ramblings: other contributors include Philip Lopate, Jonathan Ames, and Alicia Erian.

dfw

"There's part of me that wants to get attention and respect. It doesn't really make very much difference to me. Because I learned in my 20's that it just doesn't change anything. And that whatever you get paid attention for is never the stuff that you think is important about yourself anyway. So a lot of my problems right now is that I don't really have a brass ring. And I'm kind of open to suggestions as to what one chases. There are real abstract ideas about, you know, what art can be, the redemptive quality of art, and you know, kindness to animals. All the cliches that we can invoke. But ...the people who most interest me now are the people who are old and who have sort of been through a midlife criss. They tend to get weird, because the normal incentives for getting out of bed don't tend to apply anymore. I have not found any satisfactory new ones. But I'm also not getting ready to jump off a building or anything."

David Foster Wallace, 3/27/97

yvette siegert: benching books from times square with zeal

Yvette Siegert, the young and exceedingly talented Columbia instructor, poet, and New Yorker editorial staff member, has finally been given a public forum in the form of, yes, a blog. New Yorker blogs may be obvious references, but what you should know about Siegert, the author of The Book Bench, is that she's not only a voracious and reliable book-scene correspondent; she's eminently qualified to tell us the backstories behind the books while remaining highly literate in the world literature field and so damn likable that you would never go wrong following her advice about what to read. Way to go, New Yorker! You've got a blogger who will literally change the way the magazine reaches the online book world and the readers to whom it caters. See The Book Bench as soon as possible, and watch for much, much more from Shallot friend Siegert.

preparing for the rapture

In order to set up shop in this here Los Angeles, I drove across the country in well under a week a number of years ago. My only companion was my brother, and if it wasn't for his devotion to putting the heartland on our odometer in the wee hours of the morning, it might have easily taken us an extra month. Or worse, we would have had to stop in Missouri. I mention Missouri because it's hard to forget. I don't remember the road we took to pass through the state, but I do remember that before a biblical-level storm, we passed only two types of establishments, which alternated on the interstate every 20 to 30 miles. First it was a church. Then it was a pornography village. Rinse. Repeat. And by village, I mean community: As I recall, the little porn compounds included adult video stores, strip clubs, and other types of establishments for the one-stop shopping every God-fearing Missourian needs. Well, maybe I dreamed some of that up but I don't think so. And if Daniel Radosh, author of the excellent new book "Rapture Ready," has anything to say on the matter, I'm sure he'd agree that there are some major contradictions in the world of evangelical America. In fact, "Rapture" discusses the commercialization and proliferation of this idea of devoted faith as represented in pop culture. Funny? Sometimes. Scary? Sometimes. Truthful? Always. I pray that you check the book out and visit the bitchin' multimedia appendix.

us vs. them

On Peter Scoblic's blog, the prescient TNR editor and now lauded author explains the motivation behind his very important new book, "U.S. vs. Them," taken from a post he submitted to a book club from the Talking Points Memo.

But after watching way too much of HBO's "John Adams" and Showtimes's "The Tudors" (What can I say: my wife likes the historical TV; I'm not much better for my "Top Chef" and "Magnum, P.I." obsessions) I have to wonder if the history of conservatism doesn't also fuel the creative decision-making in Hollywood, from the nearly historic writers' strike to all of last year's pro-life movies (think again if you thought Juno was "alternative") to the forthcoming Stone movie "W" and even Mssr. Ironman, portrayed by the perhaps most liberal actor Hollywood has seen since, well, Charlie Chaplin.

From Scoblic's post:

"[W]hat I found was that the Bush administration's foreign policy bore a striking resemblance to the conservatism that developed after World War II under the tutelage of William F. Buckley, Jr. and the magazine he founded, National Review. Buckley and colleagues like James Burnham advanced a view of the Cold War not as a struggle between superpowers but rather as an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil..."

Buy the book for a lot more, and when you're done with the truly important issues, see if you don't find some parallels in every form of entertainment--politically related or not--that's marketed to the world. What's frightening about the Bush policies is that they aren't even original. And that they could very well continue. As for Magnum Tom Selleck sitting on the board of the NRA, well, there are some elements of conservatism I will just have to live with.

some real new year's bubbly

In the current issue of Nextbook, Emily Barton's essay from the forthcoming anthology "Brooklyn Was Mine," takes us into a forgotten world of true Brooklyn seltzer-love, introducing us to Eli, the seltzer man. Finding this old-world, high-end delivery service that puts store-bought seltzer to shame, she writes:

Eli’s seltzer is more expensive than the kind we got in the store, so we don’t drink it with the same abandon, and the taste is different: saltier, more metallic, sharper. Learning to control the pressure was trickier than we’d expected; we had a few days of wet countertop before we mastered it. Even with soy milk, it makes phenomenal egg creams. But more important, we like having the crates and bottles in our kitchen, a tie to this city’s past. I like the connection to my father’s childhood, my aunts’ and uncle’s childhoods, and a world that was based around neighborhoods, where you knew the people who lived next door and ran the shop around the corner.

No beverage was more prominent in the home of my Sheepshead Bay grandparents than true, high-end seltzer (without the high-end price), and for the record, my Long Island born father still romances about properly carbonated egg creams. I used to even think as a little kid that seltzer was a specifically Jewish drink. But upon visiting my wife's Abruzzo-born Italian family in Bay Ridge last week, guess what I was served? One hint: It wasn't Pellegrino.

Why Glass Shallot?

Because we spit out "club soda" with verve!

A New Definition of Eco-Conscious

There was a time when Umberto Eco meant the world to me. I was a young college student, flooded with the "brilliance" of the postmodernists, and eager to lap it up. But I always found it sort of funny, all this meta-thinking about meta-thinking, all these linguistic symbolisms and academizing of pop culture. I even remember a friend and I mocking the titles of our new university classes: "Towards realizing deconstructionist comprehensions of the French fry's representation in popular culture as a symbol of both deliciousness and death." '"The Popular Semiotics of "Is": "To be" in our political theater." You get the idea.

At any rate, Umberto Eco was often our voice of reason. He took the postmodern movement somewhere sensible. He made us laugh, he laughed at himself, told great tales, and he qualified what soon became a rampant nonsense-parade.

So I wanted to like his new book: "Turning Back the Clock: Hot wars and Media Populism." That's why I reviewed it in today's S.F. Chronicle Book Review. But things didn't go exactly as planned.

Have a read:  "Eco takes critical look at war, Mel Gibson in 'Turning Back'," San Francisco Chronicle, December 16, 2007

Mayo Dispatch 7: Digital Nature Interlude

There's probably nothing better for your spirit when you're foxholed up in a medical society--and this *is one contained medical community; everyone here has something to do with Mayo--than to escape it as thoroughly as you can. That proved physically impossible for us over the past few days. But thankfully we arrived with an academy screener of Sean Penn's "Into the Wild." I don't know that the movie was the best I've seen. But I do think Penn outdid himself in terms of visual and visceral scope. The film transports you (and in my case, reminds me why I've avoided a fulltime corporate job since the year following my undergraduate degree). I also don't believe like others that the flick necessarily glorified its protagonist: it showed him in frequent states of potheaded smuchkification for all his innate intelligence, ascetism, and Emory degree. Some people are just goofballs, and the film seemed to be honest about that. That Supertramp died so closely to supplies, a highway, and help seems only to enforce that notion. Maybe Penn could have made that more explicit about those facts. And maybe there could have been less original Vedder in the soundtrack. But locking up in a dark hotel room with a laptop DVD viewing session of this film after spending a day grappling with the unique blend of Mayo invasiveness and impersonality really brought Lina and I back home. L.A. may have the worst air in the country but it provides a lot more access to nature than Hell's Kitchen. After the flick, I put myself to bed re-reading Krakauer's Outside article, and thought yet again: This man is an extremely clear writer, but I don't know what his prose legacy will be. Which is not to say that every writer needs to be a great stylist. I love my plain sentences, my purist storytellers, my adventurers who return with tales that defy linguistic elan. But it seems to me that Krakauer's greatest feats have been finding (or living) content and packaging material with his pen. No pun intended. Still, "Into the Wild," the film, was about the best thing I could have watched last night, and Penn deserves some serious recognition for his work. Perhaps Krakauer or the new gen of Krak-type writers should look into the young pioneers who venture into the depths of the elite medical world as patients; these extended trips and transfixing diagnosis procedures should be viewed as intensely as wilderness. There are certainly more ways out of Denali--if you're smart.

pw likes the leaky tent

Bonnie Tsui's "A Leaky Tent is a Piece of Paradise" just got a great review from Publisher's Weekly! Go, B!

[Click on the post-continuation for a text version of the review]

pitching: our leaky tent

A little birdie tells me that an awesome new anthology of writing edited by Shallot supporter and writer extraordinare Bonnie Tsui will make its way into stores this April. The book is called "A Leaky Tent is a Piece of Paradise," and it will feature an essay by yours truly on tennis courts, their identities as built landscapes, and how they can serve as stages for people to play out social dramas. Want more info?

Here's the catchy description:

Warning: This is not your parents' nature writing! A distinctly contemporary take on the genre, "A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise" features original essays by twenty gifted writers, all 30 and under, whose strong and diverse voices redefine nature writing for the 21st century.  Editor Bonnie Tsui's cast of accomplished contributors wrestle with integrating nature into daily life while putting down roots—often in urban environments. Included here are The New Yorker's Andrea Walker on learning to hunt with her father; noted fishing author and painter James Prosek on the mythology and mystery of eels; writer Hugh Ryan on being taught how to pitch a tent by a six-foot-tall drag queen at a Radical Faeries camp in Tennessee. Other stories are unusual in subject, like Christine DeLucia's meditation on life cycles in Massachusetts's Mount Auburn Cemetery, and Adam Baer's argument that the outdoor tennis court -- carefully constructed as it is in a natural surround -- is the built environment in which is he is allowed to be primeval and, at last, to grow into a man. Theirs and the other writings in this collection illuminate questions about self and place, belonging and rootlessness, and the meeting of created and natural landscapes. Brimming with insight and humor, "A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise" rewards us with new perspectives on personal identity in relation to nature, and on the impact of landscape and place on our lives.

Want more? How about an excerpt from my piece? Oh, fine, you convinced me.

A tennis court isn’t nature dressed up but nature objectified, manipulated, pounded even by bulldozers and will. .... A tennis court, explicitly manufactured—grass courts don’t look like grass, chain-link fences offer views of what's outside—feels open and closed. You can often see a tennis court's limits and setting at once. It’s an honest construct...A tennis court placed in the outdoors is as much a way to think about your place in the world as it is a space to think about your place in the service box. ...In the end, a tennis court is a metaphor for humankind’s progress and the limits of that progress: it’s a product of the industrial, and yet it’s most useful to people interested in accessing their primal selves... For all of their civility, tennis courts are revelatory, confessional spaces that, in their uncommonly organized nature, expose contradictory elements, forcing powers to struggle with one another or vibrate in rhythm, or both. Tennis courts are like music staffs. Systematic but open to invention, they’re breeding grounds for anomie and communion altars at once—natural imaging centers where you can’t help but submit to a CAT-scan of your spirit.

I've obviously left out all the juicy stuff: the blood and guts, the fights, the sex scenes. Pre-order the whole book for this story and a whole lot more from Bonnie's impressive karass!