Feast on this!

As you sit down to gorge yourself today, and give thanks for our many modern conveniences like stretchy pants, we invite you to gorge your mind on a literary feast, as well.

• Take last year’s Thanksgiving post, which features an O Henry short story that’s a strange mix of “The Gift of the Magi” and the pie eating contest from “Stand by Me.”
• Or there’s the Cheever Story we posted for Christmas which provides a more humorous take on the theme of abundant feasting.
• You could smack your lips as you watch an ad for this innovative literary treat.
• Or take in a couple paragraphs from this Ray Bradbury post, which speak to the gifts of a good cook.
• You could dream of the food of San Francisco, like Kerouac
• Or enjoy a Proustian bite with Anton Ego.
• Or take a seat next to William Least Heat Moon as he feasts in one place or another.
• And when you’re ready to belch out your approval of the massive meal you’ve consumed, we invite you to examine the belching prowess of one of the great southern belles of the literary world.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Proustian Memory

Sometimes I’ll discover a half-written essay or unfinished book review months after I initially sat down to write it. The other day I turned up some incomplete thoughts on Swann’s Way  by Marcel Proust- a book I read clear back in April. 

To get me in the mood to finish it (and to prove to you that the world of kids movies and classic literature are not as far apart as you might think), I’m posting this brief scene from Ratatouille. It’s the perfect example of involuntary, Proustian Memory:

Mealtime with William Least Heat Moon, Vol 2: Swamp Guinea's

"The road through the orange earth of north Georgia passed an old, three-story house with a thin black child hanging out of every window like an illustration for “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe”; on into the hills and finally to Swamp Guinea’s, a conglomerate of plywood and two-by-fours laid over with the smell of damp pine woods.Inside, wherever an oddity of natural phenomenon could hang, one hung: stuffed rump of a deer, snowshoe, flintlock, hornet’s nest. The place looked as if a Boy Scout troop had decorated it. Thirty or so people, black and white, sat around tables almost foundering under piled platters of food. I took a seat by the reproduction of a seventeenth-century woodcut depicting some Rabelaisian banquet at the groaning board.

"The diners were mostly Oglethorpe County red-dirt farmers. In Georgia tones they talked about their husbandry in terms of rain and nitrogen and hope. An immense woman with a glossy picture of a hooked bass leaping the front of her shirt said, “I’m gonna be sick from how much I’ve ate.”

"...I was watching everyone else and didn't see the waitress standing quietly by.  Her voice was deep and soft like water moving in a cavern.  I ordered the $4.50 special.  In a few minutes she wheeled up a cart and began off-loading dinner: ham and eggs, fried catfish, fried perch fingerlings, fried shrimp, chunks of barbecued beef, fried chicken, French fries, hush puppies, a broad bowl of cole slaw, another of lemon, a quart of ice tea, a quart of ice, and an entire loaf of factory-wrapped white bread.  The table was covered."

-from Blue Highways , by William Least Heat Moon

Mealtime with William Least Heat Moon, Vol 1: Brenda

"…and inside hung an insurance agency calendar and another for an auto parts store. Also on the walls were the Gettysburg Address, Declaration of Independence, Pledge of Allegiance, a picture of a winged Jesus ushering two kids who belonged in a Little Rascals film, and the obligatory waterfall lithograph. The clincher: small, white, hexagonal floor tiles. Two old men, carrying their arms folded behind, stopped to greet each other with a light, feminine touching of fingertips, a gesture showing the duration of their friendship. I went in happy.

"I expected a grandmother, wiping her hands on a gingham apron, to come from the kitchen. Instead I got Brenda. Young , sullen, pink uniform, bottlecaps for eyes, handling her pad the way a cop does his citation book. The menu said all breakfasts came with grits, toast, and preserves. I ordered a breakfast of two eggs over easy. “Is that all you want?”

“Doesn’t it come with grits and so forth?”

“Does if you ast fort.”

"I want the complete, whole thing. Top to bottom.”

"She snapped the pad closed. I waited. I read the rest of the menu, the Gettysburg Address, made a quick run over the Pledge of Allegiance, read about famous American women on four sugar packets, read a matchbox and the imprints on the flatware. I was counting grains of rice in the saltshaker (this was  the South), when Brenda pushed a breakfast at me, the check slick with margarine and propped between slices of toast. The food was good and the sense of the place fine, but Brenda was destined for an interstate run-em-thru. Early in life she had developed the ability to make a customer wish he’d thrown up on himself rather than disturb her."

-from Blue Highways , by William Least Heat Moon

The Food of San Francisco

“In the window I smelled all the food of San Francisco. There were seafood places out there where the buns were hot, and the baskets were good enough to eat, too; where the menus themselves were soft with foody esculence as though dipped in hot broths and roasted dry and good enough to eat too. Just show me the bluefish spangle on a seafood menu and I’d eat it; let me smell the drawn butter and lobster claws. There were places where they specialized in thick red roast beef au jus, or roast chicken basted in wine. There were places where hamburgs sizzled on grills and the coffee was only a nickel. And oh, that pan-fried chow mein flavored air that blew into my room from Chinatown, vying with the spaghetti sauces of North Beach, the soft-shell crab of Fisherman’s Wharf- nay, the ribs of Fillmore turning on spits! Throw in the Market Street chili beans, redhot, and frenchfried potatoes of the Embarcadero wino night, and steamed clams from Sausalito across the bay, and that’s my ah-dream of San Francisco.”

-from Jack Kerouac's On the Road

Dickens' Fruit Corners

Yesterday’s post may have been a little grim for some of you, so why not lighten things up on a Monday morning?

Go ahead and grab a snack, or curl up with a good book. Heck, do both. Enjoy your favorite Dickens' Fruit Corners selection!

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Happy Holidays!

As usual, we mark the holiday with some short fiction appropriate for the occasion. Here is John Cheever's "Christmas Is A Sad Season For the Poor," (which is hardly a sad story, it should be pointed out.)

Christmas is a sad season. The phrase came to Charlie an instant after the alarm clock had waked him, and named for him an amorphous depression that had troubled him all the previous evening. The sky outside his window was black. He sat up in bed and pulled the light chain that hung in front of his nose. Christmas is a very sad day of the year, he thought. Of all the millions of people in New York, I am practically the only one who has to get up in the cold black of 6 a.m. on Christmas Day in the morning; I am practically the only one.

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Happy Thanksgiving

We always try to mark significant holidays by offering up some relevant short fiction for the occasion. Today we give you Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen, by O. Henry.

You'll see shades of O. Henry's most famous story in this tale- two men make sacrifices unknown to the other for the sake of upholding tradition. It's a hokey little yarn with a nice twist ending, something that became a trademark of the author.

Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen

by O. Henry

Stuffy Pete took his seat on the third bench to the right as you enter Union Square from the east, at the walk opposite the fountain. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years he had taken his seat there promptly at 1 o'clock. For every time he had done so things had happened to him--Charles Dickensy things that swelled his waistcoat above his heart, and equally on the other side.