MARILYN JOHNSON

How to Make Love Like a Butcher



Put some sausage in it! This was my poetry teacher's suggestion on how to improve a poem. Garlic, hunks of brown bread, rough red wine. Make the reader drool!

The food in Heat has a rustic soul and a raw sensuality. Rabbit cooked three ways, sautéed, grilled, and confit. Tortellini shaped like belly buttons. Beef shank cooked in black pepper and chianti all night long. The desire to reproduce such dishes begins for Bill Buford, an amateur cook, when he invites the famous chef Mario Batali to his house for a dinner party. Batali is a man of "remarkable girth" who wears a long red ponytail and comes bearing a slab of pig fat. This "lardo" is from a pig that spent its final months on a diet of apples, walnuts, and cream. "The best song sung in the key of pig," Batali declares, laying little slivers of lardo on the other guests' tongues. Food and poetry, all in one bite.

Buford, a literary editor and writer, knew a story when it was fed to him. He followed Batali to his Manhattan restaurant, Babbo, hung out collecting secrets and sweaty intimacies from his three-star kitchen for a New Yorker article, then talked himself into an apprenticeship. After he ran that course, he jumped on a plane to Italy and talked himself into another apprenticeship with a master pasta maker, and still another with a Tuscan butcher. There is food saturating every page of this book—- it should come with grease stains and smears of sauce on it—- but it could be about anything, wine, cars, sports, a new career. Buford was on the cusp of turning 50, and what he felt was not a hunger for food so much as a hunger for life. And look, he seems to say so eloquently on every page, our appetites are what make us feel alive.

Kitchen Confidential did the prep work for Heat, painting the professional kitchen as a macho proving ground, full of tattooed men sweating as they did the hard and dangerous work of throwing down plates of meat and bone. Buford makes it sexy, showing Babbo's pastry chef as she uses her fingers to feed morsels of almond cake in the busy line chefs' mouths, slipping a bite into the delivery man's mouth, looking into their eyes to gauge their delight.

It's delicious to read about, and after perusing the part about linguine with clam sauce—- it's not about the "snot" of meat but the juice from the clams, which give it "an ocean pungency"—- I drooled enough to make the dish myself. It was divine, though I don't see the kitchen as the setting for my life transformation. Vigor, sexual energy, and saucepans? Please. I sometimes feel my kitchen is eating me, that I'm being buried in dirty plates, beaten by wooden spoons. This might have something to do with being a female, raised in America on casseroles, but I can't help feeling if the guys want to run the kitchen, they can have it. If they have to swagger to feel okay about it, fine; I'm certainly entertained.

"You are now a member of the carnal confederation of butchers," the Tuscan butcher Dario Cecchini tells Buford near the end of the book. Buford took a lot of chances to get there. He upended his life, worked like a beast, endured humiliation and frustration to learn something new; then he moved to a little town in Italy, dragging his wife away from her job so he could learn how to break bones and wrench pieces of raw thigh and butt from dead animals. Now he's getting it, the real gold, the wisdom of centuries, instructions in how to live, and not least, great quotes from a great character. "You must now make love like a butcher," Cecchini tells him. "For the rest of the night, you must enact the dark acts of carnality, a butcher's carnality. And then you will rise in the hours before dawn, smelling of carnality, and unload the meat from the truck, like a butcher."

If you insist, guys. But first, will you take off those aprons?

A Bewilderment of Books



There's a wonderful scene at the end of Don DeLillo's Underworld where the main character is arranging the books on his shelves. It's the sort of thing he always wished he had time for when his children were young and distracting, but instead of savoring the task he finds he misses the chaos. So what if his shelves were messy all those years?

I'd go find that scene right now and quote DeLillo himself, and incidentally check to see whether it was children or just one child (and what was the narrator's name, anyway?), but I can't find my copy of Underworld. It isn't on the den bookshelf, where a brave little fleet of 60 or 70 novels are filed by author's name. It isn't in any of the stacks or shelves in my office, or in the hall bookshelf where I file some of my favorite books, also alphabetically (though the newer books stacked on top and squeezed around the edges are making the whole structure precarious). It isn't in the heaps and stacks in my bedroom—at least I don't think it is. There are several cabinets where I've stuffed books on tape and CDs, and, since slipping on one of those shiny cases, I've begun sliding audio books under the bed too. My house is a beautiful, stimulating mess. It's pig heaven for book lovers—but try to find a particular book. There are times I've actually given up and gone to the library to check out books I know I own. How pathetic is that?

Information is useless if you can't find it when you need it. I know that. I know that I need a system. I used to organize by genre, with poetry in the bedroom, fiction in the den, nonfiction in the office, and a few themed bookshelves here and there. Books have been migrating, though, and nobody's been grooming the shelves. It's a kindergarten structure, staggering as it tries to absorb a graduate school onslaught. It's time for a complete overhaul, with a fixed, retrievable core of classics, references, and touchstones, and a fluid zone that can accommodate the waves of written and spoken volumes rippling through the doors. I don't want to compile a catalog on cards or the computer, though the idea of spending my afternoons fussing over librarian details with a tray of tea and scones at hand is a pleasant thought. Then I think, nah—more fun just to read a book.

Meanwhile, I'm buried here. I must make some basic decisions about how to sort and shelve a thousand or more books. Should I separate poetry and prose? Then what do I do with the work of my wonderful old teacher, Charles Simic, master of both? The first rule has got to be all of one author's work together, genres be damned. Then should I alphabetize the authors, an obvious strategy, and string them all through the house, A's in the kitchen to Z's in the bedroom? That seems boring, even a little arbitrary. What does Doris Lessing have to do with Elmore Leonard? Alphabetizing, like strict genre borders—it's just not me.

I have to invent an idiosyncratic system, with special shelves for Great Books I Remember Reading On Vacation, Cool Hispanic Writers, and My Morgue—the authors I discovered reading the obituaries. Maybe I'll group everything thematically. Laura Kasischke's novel The Life Before Her Eyes will be next to Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World on the Mind-Boggling Mental Trips shelf. I'll make little jokes and put Philip Roth next to Anatole Broyard. It will be a map of my brain. Of course, I'll never finish. But maybe someday I'll stumble on Underworld.

“We have bookshelves built in the cool room at the back of the house, my mother’s old room, and you know how time slips by when you are doing books, arranging and rearranging, the way time goes by untouched, matching and mixing inventively, and then you stand in the room and look.

“I’ll tell you what I long for, the days of disarray, when I didn’t give a damn….”

Remember the Great War



A 108-year-old Frenchman, Rene Riffaud, died the other day—a veteran, believe it or not, of World War I. How incredible is this? The war ended almost 89 years ago. Even more amazing, Riffaud isn't the last of its veterans to go; three Frenchmen survive him. Last year there were a couple dozen WWI vets living in the U.S.; I think we're down to three as well, ancient history still alive in our nursing homes.

They didn't call it World War I at the time. They called it the Great War. I got a glimpse of it from my grandfather, who wrote a poem about the gold stars that the mothers of the fallen soldiers of the Great War, his war, posted in their windows. What else did I know or even care to know? It sounded like one of the bloodier wars, stinking of mustard gas and trench rot. Worldwide, 37 million casualties. A big flu cleaned up afterward.

Then I read Regeneration.

Regeneration is an intense novel short enough to read in a day and vivid enough to send me out hunting for more stories of World War I, more books by its author, Pat Barker. Barker was a working-class British girl who became a history professor and then started writing smart, boiled-down dramas, saturated with atmosphere and tough dialogue. Regeneration gives off the sharp odor of authenticity, though it's not even set on the battlefield. It's set in an institution for broken-down soldiers in Scotland, where a sensitive psychologist tries to patch together the shell-shocked so they can be shipped back to the front. Among the damaged is one soldier, who's on strike, he says, because the people in charge have no strategy and deceived the troops.

The relevance is a bonus. The psychologist and the soldier are based on the real people, Dr. W.H.R. Rivers and the poet Siegfried Sassoon, also a bonus for those who want to run to the library and learn more. Another great character, Billy Prior, an officer from the working class, is invented. Prior basically jumps anything that moves; he'll have sex with anyone. He meets a girl in a bar, and like everything in this novel, the particular details of the encounter describe both her and her era: she has thick dark hair overlaid with a coppery yellow sheen, and her skin has a yellow tinge, both the result of working in a munitions factory. Prior wants to know why she doesn't have a boyfriend. " 'I did have one,' she said. 'Loos.' "

Those are all the words she needs. "Language ran out on you, in the end, the names were left to say it all. Mons, Loos, Ypres, the Somme. Arras."

There are lots of reasons to admire this story, which continues with The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road, layering and deepening with each book. I love all three because they're tough and smart, explicit and literary, and though written in the '90s, they're about a war in which the people in charge had no strategy and deceived their troops. By the time Barker sends one of her characters to the battlefield, the claustrophobia of wartime London, the paranoia and persecution of the era's homosexuals and pacifists, and even the tragic struggles of a tribe of headhunters (subjects of the doctor's previous anthropological field work) have ratcheted up the stakes. This is a tragedy, and its characters bleed off the page.

Why are the soldiers breaking down? Why do the officers twitch and stutter? "This Great Adventure, the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys, consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity." The 108-year-old veteran said it in his obit. A man who was alive last week had been there, and he left behind his account: "The war was a massacre," he said.

New American Pilgrim



If a mother or a teacher wrote a book about American history and everything you could learn driving around the country, it would bomb. Packed with goody-goody facts, it could never convey the right tone, never be cool. Did you know this? Did you know that? (said bitterly, mockingly, like a resentful fifth grader). I imagine such a book, The Purpose-Driven Vacation, and start to feel the sweat trickling down my armpits, the mosquitoes of annoyance biting as I trudge up and down a thousand steps to the stupid site of something that happened long ago to dead people.

Sarah Vowell, neither a mother nor a teacher but sounding at times like a mocking fifth grader, has found her calling in rejuvenating the quaint field of heritage tourism. Generation-X scamp, deadpan voice coming out of the funky radio show This American Life, and also incidentally, the disaffected daughter in The Incredibles, and—well, check out her photo—dead ringer for the creepy girls in The Addams Family and Beetlejuice, that Sarah Vowell has written a wise and funny and inspiring book about our history called Assassination Vacation. Her trip to discover where Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were shot, buried, and memorialized is a search for the meaning of America.

Vowell brings her alert, funny, offbeat attention to every relic and ruin, aware that, as she quotes a friend in her previous book, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, "When you declare your genuine passion for something, you are so setting yourself up." She tracks down the sites where a bullet changed the course of history (except in Dallas, which might have overwhelmed the book), and her fierce opinions, trove of knowledge, and droll observations make her a great traveling companion. She digs up quirky history, the fact that Robert Todd Lincoln was nearby for three assassinations "like some kind of jinxed Zelig of doom," or that Charles Guiteau, the man who shot James Garfield, lived for years in the free-love colony of Oneida, New York, but couldn't get laid. Her sharp eye zooms in on the last lines on an obscure plaque at 15th and F Street in D.C., on the site where, among other things, Guiteau purchased the gun he used to shoot Garfield: "Ballot initiative to preserve the building approved by Washington citizens, 1983. Razed, 1984." Then she realizes that as she's been scribbling, several families of tourists have crowded around to videotape whatever it is that she finds so fascinating. "This is a new development in Garfield pilgrimage—other pilgrims," she writes coolly.

This revisiting of our history by a smart young Democrat should interest people of all parties. She keeps finding our common patriotic ground, whether she's admiring phrases like Lincoln's "with malice toward none" or the skills of the volunteer docents who recite history for tourists. There's something fierce about her insistence on our ideals, in spite of our messy reality, something deep that focuses her writing and brings purpose to her playfulness.

Vowell, like most of us, is mainly mutt—part Swedish, Scottish, English, and French, but a slice of Cherokee gives her passion for this country an interesting twist. As she wrote in her 2000 book, Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, the Cherokee watched the new American republic take shape and embraced its ideals and institutions. The tribe established its own three-branch government, wrote a constitution, even started a newspaper. "Always a nerdy, overachiever, bookish sort of tribe," Vowell wrote, they "married whites at a fairly fast clip." This didn't prevent them from being betrayed and banished, and a quarter of their people died struggling along the Trail of Tears on the forced march from the east to Oklahoma. A hundred and sixty years later, Vowell and her sister followed the trail by car, blasting a Chuck Berry tape and trying to figure out where they came from.

She doesn't discuss her Cherokee heritage in her latest book, but it's something to marvel about while reading Assassination Vacation. Even when her flip delivery makes her look like she couldn't care less, she actually couldn't care more.

My Clear Plastic Bag



When I turned up at Heathrow to fly back to New York, days after the discovery of a terrorist plot to blow up airplanes with liquid bombs, I was less afraid of being blown up than I was about spending seven and a half hours without a book. No carry-on luggage allowed, according to news reports. Only essentials like passports and documents, prescription medicine, tissues, and glasses in a clear plastic bag—everybody a bag lady. (You could bring baby formula, but only if you drank some in front of a security officer.) I could imagine the gruesome possibilities—explosions, flames, hurtling into the ocean—but I couldn't imagine sitting in steerage for all those hours with nothing to read but an airline magazine, crossword puzzle already inked in.

We waited outside the terminal on a gray wet day in mid-August, mushed up under the awning with families of every stripe—Jamaican, French, Hassidic, Arab, Indian. We had to stay outside until an airline rep walked through the crowd with our flight number on a card. There was a white tent thrown up by the entrance for us, with heaters blasting in its middle and a few folding chairs, stacks of water bottles and a woman serving hot drinks in disposable cups from the back of a car, that whiff of refugee in the air…. What was missing were books. Everyone seems to read in England—you could see people reading bestsellers and classics, Ian Rankin and Sherlock Holmes, on buses and park benches—but nobody had his nose in a book for this gathering. We were all on alert, quick to share rumors, bending eagerly as one of the orange-vested security people passed by with more clear plastic bags and scraps of official words. When they finally let us through the door, to join the first of many queues, searches, and pat-downs, I felt thrilled, chosen.

Security people, some bearing snubby machine guns, were everywhere, and answered questions patiently, but each one contradicted the next; we were told that the individual airlines set their rules and the individual pilots had a say in what was allowed onboard. It seemed the electronic devices that had been banned yesterday were permitted today, and you could bring a book. Jubilation! Once you got through the first layer of security, you could buy other things to carry on, too, as long as they weren't made of liquid or gel. I grabbed the first book I felt in my bulging suitcase, Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles, sent it off to the x-ray machines and the cargo hold, slipped off my shoes, belt, jacket, held out my arms for the pat-down, and headed for the newsstand. Maybe I was greedy to want newspapers, too; when I tried to pay, the clerk asked which airline I was flying, then wouldn't sell them to me. Why bother, they won't let you bring them on, she said. As it turned out, she was wrong, I had a generous pilot, and I could have had those beautiful newspapers, too….

But here's where, in this tale, I almost lose it. I am a sheep, one of many, many sheep bleating through these bleak pens of Heathrow, on our way to green pastures or slaughter, none of us can tell which. I think of the 9/​11 hijackers, rehearsing on those early flights, standing out in retrospect because, unlike the other passengers, they didn't read, only stared ahead, marking time. I kept looking up during the flight, at the screen where the little drawing of the airplane moved along the trajectory from London, over Dublin, under Iceland, across the Atlantic, over Newfoundland, down over Boston, until it finally, finally hovered over the little dot marked New York. The book I held was full of information and stories that snagged my attention for a moment, then let go. I had to keep turning back to reread and pick up the connection, and now I can't remember a word.

* These essays were originally written for AARP magazine online.