This is the first winter I’ve had a clothesline and I find I use it fairly often. If it’s sunny, and above freezing, I’ve been hanging things outside. Today is very windy, which is a bit of a challenge, but there they are, some clothes, getting dry without using my dryer. It’s a small thing, but makes me weirdly happy. (Plus the sheets smell so nice.)
It’s funny, when I make up a dish, I don’t really think of it as a recipe. I was watching the Superbowl with a couple of friends the other night and I told them how I’d cooked a pork shoulder roast that afternoon even though I knew I wasn’t going to be home that evening. It just feels wrong not to have something cooking on a Sunday afternoon (and leftovers are what I live on all week). I was saying that I’d sort of crossed the Italian pork braised in milk technique with something Southwestern-y because a girlfriend sent me a big bag of delicious New Mexico Chile. Deb wanted the recipe, so I told her I’d try to write it down.
When I had my pig butchered I had Matt cut the pork shoulders into small roasts — about a pound and a half probably. I started by salting and peppering the meat then browning the roast on all sides in my Le Crueset. When it was done browning, I deglazed the pot with about a cup of white wine, then sprinkled each side with a heaping soupspoon of New Mexico red chile, medium hot. My friend Debra from Tucson bought me half a pound of chile from an old woman when she was in Santa Fe this fall, and it’s lovely. Fruity and warm, not hot, but just delicious. Because it was the end of the week I had nearly a quart of Isabelle’s good milk from her Jersey cows leftover, so I poured that over the meat, then added 2 bay leaves, six or seven cloves of garlic, the zest of half an orange and a generous sprinkling of oregano (from last summer’s garden). I put the whole thing in the oven at 250 degrees and left it there while I went off to watch the Superbowl.
When I came home that evening, my house smelled lovely. I put the pot of pork out in the cold frame for the night, then last night I reheated it. Like all braises, it was even better for having sat overnight. I defatted it as much as I could, then when it was time to serve, I pulled the meat out, removed the bay leaves, then emulsified the sauce with my stick blender. When you braise pork in milk, the milk proteins separate out and it can look a little funky. But once you whiz it up, you get a nice smooth gravy I suppose. I don’t really come from a gravy people, so I’d never thought of it that way, but that would be what we’re dealing with. Slow cooked pork like this is delicious over rice with chopped scallions and some cilantro. It also makes a terrific taco or burrito for lunch. I’ll put about half of it in the freezer for later, and will eat pork with chile in many forms for the rest of the week. My favorite kind of recipe, when you look around your kitchen or pantry and start thinking, hmm, these might be good together. Pork, chiles, orange, garlic and a nice winey, creamy sauce. What’s not to like?
There’s no shortage of praise going around for Updike’s work in the wake of his death, and I’ve been hesitant to jump in because well, there’s that prohibition against speaking ill of the dead. For all I know, in his personal life he could have been an exemplar of many fine qualities — I wouldn’t know. He was certainly productive, writing three pages a day over a lifetime he produced more than 40 novels, collections of essays, and short stories.
However, I found his work repellent.
The pervasive and unrelenting misogyny is only a part of what I hated about the airless worlds John Updike created. David Foster Wallace names this quality “phallocentric narcissism” which seems a pretty apt description. The only characters with interiority in his books are the protagonists, and his protagonists are a series of men so stupendously narcissistic as to believe the entire universe exists only to fulfill or thwart their desires. There is no agency in any of the secondary characters, nor is there empathy for the lived experience of any characters except the protagonists.
If exegesis is your thing, go read this terrific entry over at TigerBeatDown, or Anna Shapiro’s piece in the Guardian. I can’t bear to go back into the books to pull quotes. It just depresses me. Just as the many comments justifying or denying that misogyny is a driving force in Updike’s work depress me. These are such old old arguments. Such old old denials. It makes me tired that we’re still, after all this time, having the discussion about whether or not Updike was a misogynist rather than discussing what effect his solipsism and misogynism will have on his legacy.
There’s a whole generation of them — the Great American Novelists: Roth, Bellow, Updike, Mailer (and I’d throw Kundera in even though he’s not American). Triumphalist. Battling it out for their place at the top of the heap. Contemptuous of everyone who isn’t themselves. Dismissive of all artistic projects that they don’t share (which would be all artistic projects other than their own). The voice of my Phd advisor who said about the feminist critique of traditional plot that I wrote for my qualifying exam in literary theory that “just like your subject, the essay didn’t make any sense.” (Exams I passed unanimously, by the way.)
To those who will reply that Updike was of his generation and these things are to be expected and it’s all different now, I’d reply, go into a chain bookstore and give me a count of the serious novels being published by women, novels that don’t have a pink shoe on the cover. It’s enough to make a person want to revert to publishing under gender-neutral initials.
And so whatever John Updike’s qualities as a person, I will not be mourning the the death of his artistic project which was, as far as I could tell, to express a repellent world view in lapidary prose. I am also not mourning the passing of those lions, the ones who believed in singular world views, who believed it was all a contest, a contest that could only have a single champion.
And here’s to the thought that into the inevitable vacuum the passing of the lions will create, that there will be room for more voices, expressing the lived interiority of all those whose existence was denied in those Great American Novels.