Sour Cream: The Book

Another book that really should be written....

Sour Cream

Discusses the invention of sour cream (many Eastern Europeans use it, and they may have "invented" it. It seems to have traveled to the USA with Russian Jews (like my great grandparents). Eventually spread over Europe in many variants (creme fraiche in France, yogurt in many places, kefir in Turkey and the Balkans, different cheeses in Italy and Yugoslavia).

Mentions many uses for sour cream (food and a few other interesting things..)

And then, provides recipes for many many dishes.Standouts:  sour cream over ice cream.  Sour cream apple cake. Chocolate sour cream frosting.  Radishes and cucumbers with sour cream. Sour cream onion dip. Sour cream chipotle dip. Tiramisu with mascarpone sour cream filling.

Anything that contains ice cream or whipped cream in any form may also be eaten with sour cream. (If this were a class, I would make this a question and would add, "Discuss." )

Flying While Fat

Another book that needs to be written:  Flying While Fat


Chrissea Abarvem decides to fly around the world. She is a proud, feisty, spunky fat woman with a few tattoos and an attitude. She wants to experience the excitement of flying to places about which she has only read and dreamed.  She has previously read that certain countries don't appreciate fat people, but while she does take this into account while planning her schedule and itinerary, she also eschews easy classifications and categorizations in favor of seeing what she wants to see and being where she wants to be.

First stop:  Greenland. She finds it dark at times, icy in most places and absolutely compelling as she visits two areas and stands by different seas/bodies of water. She finds that most Greenlanders don't seem to care that much about body size. She eats some dynamite seafood. She hears someone whispering outside her door at 4 am, figures they are drunk and goes back to sleep.

Second stop:  Scotland. Chrissea visits Aberdeen in honor of Byron, who adored fat women, especially strong ones. She goes to a pub, joins in singing, gets asked to perform a striptease by a drunk man with a kilt. Scots wa hae!


There are twenty six stops on the tour, some in familiar places, some way off the beaten path. The common denominator: Chrissea is up for anything and everything!

Paradise Lost in 21st Century Prose (story)

Vikram Seth wrote at least a couple of books in verse, and they were pretty good.

Conversely it would be fun to have John Milton do Paradise Lost in prose/fiction - not instead of poetry. It is inspiring and daunting as it is. Just in addition. (Well, he has been dead now for a while, but perhaps he could pen something posthumously.)


Imagine:

Satan and his gang are seated in hell. Since they have never had actual bodily shapes before, there is some exploration taking place. One male fallen angel says to Satan, "Hey, man, what the hell is this?" He holds something in his hand.

"Oh for goodness' sake," Satan says contemptuously, "that's your male member."
"My what?"
"It's what you use when you feel like wanking off or making the object of your affections very happy."
"I don't know what you mean," the confused male angel says.
"Gog," Satan says to one of his squad leaders, "show Anneus here what one does with it."
Obligingly Gog takes out his member and starts to push it with his thumb, then rub it from the base.
"You try," Satan tells Anneus.
Anneus pushes his organ with his thumb, then starts to rub it from the base. "Wow," he says. "This is cool. But why is it growing and why do I feel as if hot needles are pushing through me? Is it because we're in this Hell place?"

"You can't do this in Heaven," Annie Gog, one of the female fallen angels, says. "Shall I rub it for you?"
"Please."
Annie rubs Anneus's member up and down. Anneus looks in surprise and then gasps. "I don't understand why- " He stops as his stream flies up, then onto the floor. "Why did it do that?"
"How do you feel?" Annie asks.
"Good," he says.
"Would you like to touch mine?"
"You have one, too?"
"Not exactly," Annie says. "But I have something else." She places Anneus's hand on her vulva, then puts his finger on her clit.
"This feels weird," Anneus says. "Kind of slippery."
"It is," Annie agrees. "But it feels good if you touch it."
"Really," Anneus says, pushing Annie's clit and making her moan.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," Satan says as he walks back to where many of the angels have now discovered their organs of pleasure and what they can do. "This is meeting time, not play time. How are we ever going to revenge ourselves on God, who has sent us here by tossing us out of heaven?"
"You meet and plan revenge." the fallen angels tell him. "It's fun having a shape and being able to do weird things. Maybe God wasn't so unfair as we first thought."

"Wanks and slackers," Satan fumes. "I get thrown out of Heaven with a tough strong bunch, and what do they do? They start screwing. This must be God's revenge on me."

He walks off to explore the limits of the realm of hell. But he is to have a no privacy. A female fallen angel runs after him and says, "Satan, baby, I want you." She points to her newly acquired place of pleasure.

"Oh, what the hell," Satan grumbles and proceeds to take out his own member, which is five feet long and covered with spikes. He pushes the former female angel down on the ground and starts to rub her new breasts and bite them.

"Ohhh..ohh," she moans.

"Make me sweat," he whispers to her, and brandishes his new, fearsome member.

"You have great thorns," she whispers back as she takes his long thing in her hands and rubs it against her vulva.

"Yeah," he says sarcastically. "That's me - Satan with the great thorns." He sighs. Then he pushes into her gently. "Ohhhh!" she yells.

"Nothing like a long prick in hell," he says, and proceeds to push harder. The female fallen angel screams in pleasure.


Up in heaven, God looks down and sees the fallen angels going at it with each other. "Heavens, they're strange," God says to her lieutenant angels. "I can't believe I made them."

"You didn't make them," an angel says.
"How could anyone else make them?" God asks, annoyed.

"They didn't," the angel replies. "That's what they turned into when they acquired bodies."

"So my thought made them into that?"

"Sort of. It's like putting something in the freezer when it's soft. It becomes hard."

"Don't go all 20th Century on me," God says. "I can't believe my thought made that whole thing."

"Maybe you should stop thinking for a while," the angel says.

"God forbid," God says. "Then all the heavens would collapse."

"Don't stop them," the angel says. "Just give them a vacation."


So God stops thinking the heavens. But She gets a headache and has to lie down. Angels fan her.

When the headache stops, she goes to the heavenly bathroom. When she comes out, the planets are spinning in their orbits.

"You  forgot to wipe," the angel says.

"No, I didn't," she says. "But I did have to pass a lot of gas."

The Art and Craft of Intelligent Seduction

Sometimes it's fun to write blurbs for books that you wish existed.

The Art and Craft of Intelligent Seduction

Ronette has had a crush on her close gay male friend, Arn, ever since she was younger than she can even remember. Or, as she realizes, there is something about him that she needs, that is happy in his presence. However, lately she finds herself wanting to make love to him as a gay man would. She asks herself if she would like to become a gay man. Part of her says that she would. Part says that she would not. The compromise she can live with is that she dresses like a gay man and disguises herself as one.

She reads some books by gay men and watches some gay porn. They accord with what she feels Arn would like.

She starts to frequent the places he shops, hoping that he won't see her enough to recognize her. Finally, one autumn night, she picks him up. Her name is Ron, of course.

When she and Arn get inside his apartment, she bites his lip very hard as she kisses him. Then she unveils a whip and orders Arn to strip and get down on his knees. She flicks the whip across his back, but not very hard. Then she kneels and bites the places she whipped, then kisses them, then bites them, then whips them again. She then dresses and leaves.

She picks him up again in the same place. A repetition ensues, with a few slightly different moves on her part. As before, she dresses, then leaves. Does not say anything about another meeting.

The third time she picks him up, she pushes Arn down on the ground, invades him with a vibrator and scratches her name across his back (Ron,that is).

Then she leaves. She does not return to the store.

The next week Arn calls her and tells her about the man who broke his heart.  "I understand," she tells him. "I guess that's how you've broken hearts up to now."

"I guess it is," he agrees. Then, of a sudden, he says, "Would you like me to break yours?"

"Yes," she whispers.



Read the book to find out what happens :)

Blurb for Fat Poets Speak (1): Voices of the Fat Poets' Society (in a strangely biblical register)

Fat Poets Speak (1):  Voices of the Fat Poets' Society


So it came about that in 2006, in a suburb of Boston, NAAFA did meet at its annual Convention. And many NAAFAns attended, and it was good. And they gathered further for the purpose of writing poetry about themselves, about fat people, about fat women, but poetry that was not of hatred for themselves, but of appreciation and celebration.

And it came to pass that after the completion of the workshop, Mary Ray of Worley saw fit to have those who had attended sign a sheet which would list their names and emails. Verily, it did occur that most of the poets present signed, and it fell out that they did start writing and used the group name assigned to them by Mary Ray of Worley. And they wrote many poems of many kinds. They did gather to themselves a number of them to write and comment and change and work further on them.

And thus it came about that the book Fat Poets Speak: Voices of the Fat Poets' Society was born, and that the doughty and wise Peggy of Elam saw fit, after much work and thought on her part and on the part of the writers and editor, one Frannie of Zellman, to publish this fair book and take it to those of the people who would read and appreciate poems by fat poets.

And some among them vowed among themselves that one day there would come a second volume, as well.

(I don't know what got into me here...maybe a lot of holidays?  Passover, Easter, Patriots' Day, Earth Day, 4/20..)

Bubbe Meisehs by Shayneh Maidelehs: An Anthology of Poetry by Jewish Grandaughters About Our Grandmothers - compiled by Leslea Newman

Love. Overwhelming, intense, sometimes complicated love. I don't know how there can be more love expressed in one volume of poems than in this one.

Something about Jewish women and their grandmas. The relationship is often extremely close, loving, nurturing, caring. Many of us had grandmas who babysat or were with us for long periods of our lives, if we were lucky. Some of us were also lucky enough to have grandmas who shielded us from sadness and bad times that our parents were experiencing. Somehow nothing ever seemed quite as bad when we were at grandma's house or apartment.

Many of us also were lucky enough to have grandmas who acted on their convictions and organized marches and picketed and chaired committees to stop landlords from evicting tenants who had lost their jobs. Many of us have our grandmas to thank for thinking globally and acting locally long before this was a popular slogan.

And many of those same grandmas made the best Jewish food this country and world will ever know. And they saved the best pieces for us.

Even if you aren't Jewish, you will probably find your grandma here. And you'll cry and smile along with the rest of us.

Historical and Literary Blurb for Caravans, by James Michener

If you can, visit the James Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, the town in which James Michener grew up. Not only does it feature some wonderful art exhibits, but it also features a compact but amazingly informative and well-placed exhibit on James Michener himself.

You will see, among other things, all the novels and articles he wrote, gathered on shelves and under glass. Hawaii and The Source were two of his most ambitious efforts. Then there were the books about American States and their origins, and his earlier autobiographical works. There was Tales of the South Pacific, which inspired the show of almost the same name. There were books about other areas of the world.

And then there was Caravans (1963). A bestseller at the time, it garners little attention today. And yet, it was perhaps one of his most prescient -and for me, likable- works. He pontificated the least. Somehow it came across to me as having been written more from the heart, although I am sure he himself would have said that all his books were written from the heart. He did serve in the area of South Asia (and also Southeast Asia) and stayed there for a few years.

The new kid on the block, Mark Miller, an American of German Jewish origins on the staff of the American embassy in Afghanstan, has been told to find a young American woman, married to an Afghani engineer, who disappeared. This is 1946, when Afghanistan is just coming out of the stone age and its cities are also just starting to become somewhat cosmopolitan. There is a stark rift between the educated upper class and the strongly religious, less educated class of the villages. (Interestingly, though, there are mullahs -holy men of Islam- in both camps.)

It turns out that Ellen Jasper, a young woman bored with insular, middle class values of the small American town in which she grew up, also left her Afghani husband, not because she had problems with being his second wife -she loved and respected his first wife- but because she felt he was too bourgeois, too middle class. She seemed to yearn for something she could not name, according to the accounts of those who knew her.

Michener seemed to have predicted the rise of  anti-establishment, hippie women and feminists as well, for women like Ellen Jasper would flood campuses and become the spokeswomen for the Women's Movement, as well as its writers, speakers and artists.

Not that Michener is always kind to her - he suggests that she is promiscuous and selfish, perhaps narcissistic. But she is beautiful, intelligent and powerful in her wants and articulate in their defense.

The characters who come in contact with each other and with her are memorable and powerful in their own right, as well:  Mark himself; Dr. Stiglitz, the German doctor who fled Germany with war crimes on his conscience for which he is still trying to atone; Moheb Khan, the urbane, intelligent, ruthless son of Shah Khan, leading warlord of the area; Ellen Jasper's former Afghani husband, Nazrullah; Mira, the nomad girl who falls in love with Mark, and others. Besides populating his book with vivid characters, Michener provides a magnificent travelogue of the main settlements and towns of Afghanistan, and horrifically accurate historical accounts of their origins and the battles fought for them. The customs and traditions of Afghanistian, religious and cultural, are present as well, inseparable from the plot and story, and grounding it in sober realism and believability.

And the scenery drawn in each chapter becomes so much more than a backdrop - almost a character, a presence in its fierce and foreboding way.

Somehow Caravans hits home for me more than Michener's other novels; he is less preachy, definitely more understanding and tolerant of Afghanistan than he seems to be of other countries about which he writes. And he has drawn a powerful, confident female protagonist in Ellen Jasper, one whose vision both infuriates and fascinates.

And if you couldn't tell, I fell in love with Moheb Khan...