The Difference Between Frenchy and Me

I have discovered the Frenchy's weakness, and it is brownies.

I made brownies a few days ago, to go with the utterly satisfying Mint Ice Cream. The Frenchy doesn't eat any ice cream that isn't vanilla, but nevertheless he wouldn't let me put chocolate chips in the mint ice cream. Yes, I love him anyway. It's hard sometimes.



So I made these brownies to go with the ice cream. This photo (weirdly sideways, I can't get it to straighten out) is about a day and a half after they came out of the oven. By this time I had eaten two reasonably small-sized squares. Frenchy ate the rest. For breakfast.

Normally it is me and my sweet tooth that pigs out on the cookies, brownies, cake, etc. I've been known to vacuum up an entire pint of Ben and Jerry's in one sitting. Frenchy, in his best Frenchy manner, takes three spoonfuls and says "That's enough for tonight." (How can he resist the caramelly crunchiness of Americone Dream?) I scarf it up and don't even feel guilty. If it tastes good, I'm eating it. End of story.

I have long avoided reading French Women Don't Get Fat, partly because I'm convinced I came up with the idea by myself after living in France ten years ago (dirty plaigiarists!) and partly because I suspect the book will annoy the living daylights out of me. If you haven't read it, basically it comes down to this: American women are scared of their food, and like a horse that can sense fear, the food attacks back in the form of guilt, flab, indigestion and cottage cheese thighs. French women, on the other hand, savor the flavor, get the most out of the small amount of food they eat, and therefore can consume horrendously buttery and cholesterol-laden foodstuffs with no avoirdupois impact.

(You see, the difference between me and French women is that I combine the American and French technique: no-guilt eating, but I don't stop with just one helping. Lord knows how I keep this svelte figure.)

But there is one thing that will break a French person's resolve to have just a cubic centimeter of food at once, and it is Duncan Hines Extra Fudgy Brownies. I am rather gleeful over the discovery.

1001 Movies

And of course, here's the celluloid version. Full list here. These are the ones I've seen.

106. Grand Illusion (1937)
110. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
123. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
145. Dumbo (1941)
152. Casablanca (1942)
166. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
188. Beauty and the Beast (1946)
233. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
245. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
258. Roman Holiday (1953)
278. The Seven Samurai (1954)
285. Guys and Dolls (1955)
339. The 400 Blows (1959)
341. Some Like It Hot (1959)
351. Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
373. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
375. Jules and Jim (1961)
381. West Side Story (1961)
383. Cleo de 5 a 7 (1962)
417. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
419. My Fair Lady (1964)
421. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
437. The Sound of Music (1965)
453. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
459. The Graduate (1967)
463. Belle de Jour (1967)
517. M*A*S*H (1970)
525. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
527. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
544. Cabaret (1972)
550. The Godfather (1972)
575. Amarcord (1973)
593. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
595. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
612. Network (1976)
620. Annie Hall (1977)
636. Grease (1978)
652. Life of Brian (1979)
655. The Muppet Movie (1979)
661. The Last Metro (1980)
667. Airplane! (1980)
680. E.T.: The Extra-Terestrial (1982)
693. A Christmas Story (1983)
712. Paris, Texas (1984)
714. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
721. The Breakfast Club (1985)
722. Ran (1985)
727. Back to the Future (1985)
736. The Color Purple (1985)
742. The Decline of the American Empire (1986)
745. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
760. Babette’s Feast (1987)
764. Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)
768. The Princess Bride (1987)
783. A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
786. Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
792. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
798. When Harry Met Sally (1989)
818. Europa Europa (1990)
819. Pretty Woman (1990)
828. Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
847. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
856. Farewell My Concubine (1993)
860. Philadelphia (1993)
861. Jurassic Park (1993)
862. The Age of Innocence (1993)
863. Schindler’s List (1993)
866. The Piano (1993)
871. Forrest Gump (1994)
872. Clerks (1994)
873. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
874. The Lion King (1994)
890. Toy Story (1995)
892. Braveheart (1995)
894. Clueless (1995)
897. Seven (1995)
908. Independence Day (1996)
911. The English Patient (1996)
917. L.A. Confidential (1997)
930. Titanic (1997)
933. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
936. Run Lola Run (1998)
941. The Idiots (1998)
947. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
955. Fight Club (1999)
956. Being John Malkovich (1999)
959. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
961. The Matrix (1999)
976. Memento (2000)
978. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
979. Amelie (2001)
987. Moulin Rouge (2001)
995. The Pianist (2002)
999. Chicago (2002)
1000. The Barbarian Invasions (2003)


For comparison's sake, let's apply the same metrics. Except this time I'm going to divide them by decades. This is the number of films in each decade in the original list:

1900s: 2
1910s: 5
1920s: 39
1930s: 85
1940s: 92
1950s: 131
1960s: 149
1970s: 151
1980s: 153
1990s: 151
2000s: 39 (2000-2003)

This is a bit more spread out over the decades. I suspect there was a deliberate attempt to equalize the number of films in each decade of the 60s to the 90s.

And my percentages of movies seen in each decade. I predict this will be the opposite of the books: that I'll have seem primarily the last couple decades. I also predict that my showings will be far poorer than the printed matter.

1900s: 0%
1910s: 0%
1920s: 0%
1930s: 3.5%
1940s: 4.3%
1950s: 6.1%
1960s: 7.3%
1970s: 8.6%
1980s: 12.4%
1990s: 19.9%
2000s: 17.9%

Yep, pretty much as I expected. Although I thought that foreign movies were not very well represented in this list. I've seen my fair share of those.

1001 Books

A recent book, 1001 Books To Read Before You Die, lists the thousand and one most essential books, in their opinion. In my opinion, it's heavy on the more recent ones, which have not yet stood the test of time. There are far too many books from 2000-2008 on there: certainly we have not perfected the craft of writing in the last eight years. And of the whopping 716 books of the 1900s, I'd guess that two-thirds of them are from the last one-third of the century. The full list can be seen here. Here's the breakdown of the number of books listed in each century:

2000s: 69
1900s: 716
1800s: 157
1700s: 46
Before 1700: 13

Of these, here is the percentage of each category I have read:

2000s: 1.4%
1900s: 6.8%
1800s: 29.9%
1700s: 13%
Before 1700: 30.7%

Hmm, you can really tell what I like to read from this. And I have to say, the majority of the "ooh, I really want to read that!" were from the 1900s category.

Other inferences: The same authors tend to reappear. For example, the first Thomas Hardy book I read was Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I liked it, so I went on to read quite a bit of the rest of the Hardy opus.

We can also safely assume that I read the French books in the original French. Practically all the French books on the original 1001 list I've also read. Only a few were missing. (Come on, who actually gets through In Search of Lost Time?)

Here's the ones I have read:
2000s
1. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon (book on tape)
1900s
2. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
3. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
4. Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
5. Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
6. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
7. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
8. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
9. Perfume – Patrick Süskind (in the original German, boo-ya!)
10. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
11. The World According to Garp – John Irving
12. Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
13. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
14. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
15. Manon des Sources – Marcel Pagnol
16. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
17. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
18. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
19. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
20. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
21. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
22. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
23. The Plague – Albert Camus
24. Animal Farm – George Orwell
25. Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
26. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
27. The Outsider – Albert Camus
28. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
30. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
31. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
32. Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
33. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
34. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
35. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
36. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
37. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
38. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
40. Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
41. Ulysses – James Joyce
42. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
43. Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
44. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
45. Straight is the Gate – André Gide
46. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
47. The Immoralist – André Gide
48. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
49. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
50. Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
1800s
51. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
52. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
53. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
54. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
55. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
56. The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
57. Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
58. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
59. Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
60. The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
61. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
62. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
63. Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
64. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
65. Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
66. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
67. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
68. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
69. Thérèse Raquin – Émile Zola
70. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
71. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
72. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
73. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
74. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
75. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
76. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
77. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
78. Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
79. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
80. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
81. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
82. La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas
83. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
84. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
85. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
86. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
87. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
88. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
89. Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
90. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
91. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
92. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
93. Persuasion – Jane Austen
94. Emma – Jane Austen
95. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
96. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
97. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
1700s
98. Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
99. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
100. Candide – Voltaire
101. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
102. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
103. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Pre-1700
104. The Princess of Clèves – Marie-Madelaine Pioche de Lavergne, Comtesse de La Fayette
105. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
106. Metamorphoses – Ovid (much of it in the original Latin, double boo-ya!)
107. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

The Gutenberg Invention

This video, the first of six installments, shows the BBC team replicating an original Gutenberg printing press, from building the press to casting the type to making the paper. (It skipped the ink; I wish it had taken a small look at the fourth essential ingredient.)



It's fascinating, funny, insightful and spine tingling, if you're into the printed word as much as I am. I think I'm going to add "operate a manual printing press" to my list of things to do before I go.

All six parts total more than an hour, but a thoroughly worthwhile hour it is.

The Human Animal Body

Oh, the Stupidity

So, I've been unemployed for exactly eleven days now (Oh, I didn't tell you that? Must have slipped my mind. Anyway, thank you for not asking.) and only today got around to scrubbing the bathroom. For all my professed amour de cleaning, I sure have managed to put that one off for a while.

I've baked cookies, made pelmeni from scratch, hung a hat rack, done oodles of dishes, drank buckets of tea, but have avoided cleaning. Today I could put it off no longer.

I vacuumed six times, getting up all those obnoxious rubbery pellets from artificial turf that hate to be vacuumed, getting up every last sneaky shard of broken glass (total glasses broken by Frenchy since we moved here: 3; total broken by guests: 2; total broken by me: a big fat ZERO. I'm just sayin'.) every cookie crumb, and every stray bit of dirt. I hung up all the clothes on the floor. I dry swiffered. I wet swiffered. I took the wet swiffer pads and got down in the kitchen floor and scrubbed the gook out of the corners. All fine and good, although gross.

Then I took a big breath and tackled the bathroom. Toilet, sink, shower walls, tub. At the end, I can't figure out why the last bit of dirty water in the tub is not draining. I select one of our two plungers (please don't ask) and start to plunge away.

No deal. The water stays, and just gets dirtier. I plunge more emphatically, and get an image in my head of, well, something that my boyfriend thinks I should do more often. Still nothing happens.

Out of breath, (wow, the similarities are stunning!) I sit back on my heels. What could possibly be blocking the drain? All of a sudden, it comes to me.

I lean forward and flick the lever which had accidentally been switched, allowing the stopper to rise. The water drains away merrily and I realize why I had been avoiding cleaning the bathroom: Soft Scrub must really do a number on my brain.

Food and Sensibility

I have an interesting relationship with food.

I have always been slim, except for two months right before college, which I'll get to in a moment. A combination of an old-fashioned childhood, common-sense parenting and obedience made me try everything, like most things, and never have to worry about gaining weight. Rather, I was the shortest and skinniest kid in class all the way up to tenth grade, when I shot up to be tall and skinny.

My mom, bless her femme au foyer heart, made decent food every night, packed our lunchbags in the morning, and surrendered the weekend kitchen to Dad. A true homemaker, she shows her affection by providing and nurturing. She never liked cooking, but did it and did it well. As she always said, "Veg, meat and starch at every meal, the dinners are ideal."* Predictable, yes, but my family never pretended to be anything else.

We ate dinner together every night, most of the way through high school. The dinnertime conversation ebbed or flowed, according to our loquacity of the evening, but was always familial and cordial. So food was a comforter, a sustenance, a conversation, and a source of love.

*Well, she never actually said it, but I bet she will now.

Then I went to France, gained weight, obsessed about it surprisingly little, went to college and danced it off in a few months. Then I went back to France, probably gained less weight than I thought I had, came back, broke up with a boyfriend, took an overload of courses one term, stressed myself out, and briefly flirted with anorexia.

I wanted to lose my French weight, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I liked food too much, liked the taste of it, the warmth and comfort, the sociability of it, the feeling of satiety, and the adventure of trying new things. So I shook myself out of it by discovering ways to de-greasify dining hall fare: steam salad bar veggies in a microwave, crack the free peppermints over vanilla ice cream, and assemble your own 'grilled" cheese sandwiches in the toaster. Talk about cooking on a budget. I also took fewer credits the following semester.

Even though I had lived in France, the place where they invented meals as an excuse for conversation, I never really *got* the connection between the two until I had gained enough confidence to be able to hold my own in such a conversation. I've written before about the "Wednesday Girls' Night," and I can't think of a more enjoyable way to spend an evening than with friends around a table of good food. I don't want to go to a bar, just give me a casserole. I loathe the idea of a bachelorette bash at a club; give me a potluck with my friends and a sleepover and we're good.

But it was another meal that made me turn the corner and look the label of Foodie in the eye. A friend and I had started spending a weekly meal together, sharing our photos and memories of abroad over a glass of wine and a plate of delicious. At one point he served me a cold three-bean salad that was sublime, yet simple. I have never been able to recreate it, although I've tried. In return, I introduced him to eggs Florentine, one of my favorite go-to fixes. Anyhow, I was hooked on good food, well made.

Since then, whether I'm cooking for one, two or twenty-seven (cf: last Thanksgiving!) I try to cook the best I possibly can. Lately this has meant eschewing processed foods in favor of original sources. Just as I felt utterly granola for joining a yoga spa, I feel organic and earthy for dropping half a grand on a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Every two weeks starting in June, we'll get a full basket of fruit, vegetables and eggs, all straight from a Long Island farm. (No kidding, the contract makes sure these durn city-dwellers understand the food may have DIRT ON IT!! Gasp!) I can't wait for it to start. I'm already planning on canning my own tomato sauce from the reddest, ripest tomatoes I'll ever eat that I didn't grow myself and filling the house with the fragrance of applesauce cooking down.

I can't think of anything else that I spend so much energy and time on, try to be creative with, or take more pride in doing well. Cooking is a challenge for me, and the moment that I get to sit down at the table with my Frenchy is the moment I wait for all day. We quietly talk over the day's happenings, the news, share ideas for handling work problems, and just be. And food continues to be the reason for intimate moments, for nurturing and for enjoying life. There's nothing better than a good meal.