The Rake Magazine

Category: Columns

  • Harvest Boon

    I love this time of year. I love having both the sun and the chill in the air, the musky scent of dead leaves and blessed, blessed school. I like having the kids out of the house for a prescribed amount of time each day. I like being alone in my house listening to loud music that the kids wouldn’t imagine I listen to. I like having the kids back at the end of the day, and though I am saddened by the fact that their homework no longer consists of coloring and word finds, I am glad that they realize they have a better chance at decent grades if they do the work themselves.

    It’s the routine I am thankful for—an orderliness to the days that helps me actually get more done. I like that it gets darker earlier, and I like cooking autumn dinners. I love baking giant dead animals in my oven. It makes me feel feminine, and also somewhat accomplished. I love it when the windows of the house fog up from cooking. I am thankful when all of the side dishes time out perfectly with the main course, and everything arrives hot to the table. It makes me feel like Houdini.

    I love mashing potatoes by hand, imagining that I am crushing the bones of my earthly enemies.

    I am thankful for my coffeepot all year long, but particularly when the mornings are dark. I love its robotic timer function. The smell of the beans beginning to brew invades my sleep. The next thing I hear is the clunking, sucking sound of the water drawing up through the reservoir. By the time the cycle is complete, I am shuffling through the dark kitchen with my big mug outstretched, softly walk-kicking the cat out of my way.

    She tries to kill me every morning by darting into my path, hoping I will stumble while trying to avoid stepping on her, and maybe fall and crack my skull on the corner of the concrete countertops. If I am ever found dead in my kitchen, this is what has happened.

    I love wearing clothes that cover my stomach. I love that the threat of being invited to something that might require a bathing suit is past. I like incorporating more cheese and less salad into my diet. I love watching television while eating cheese while wearing something that covers my stomach.

    At this time of year I love soup. It is hot, salty, soothing liquid love. That sounds dirty but it’s not, so get your damn mind out of the gutter; I’m talking chunky chicken noodle here.

    I love turtleneck sweaters, the smell of Vicks VapoRub, and having a sore throat so I don’t have to talk. I love catching cold, because I love soup and I love it when people feel sorry for me and I love complaining about my lot in life while people I love make me soup.

    I love church at the holidays. I love the swishing of fat old-lady thighs encased in thick nylon stockings. You get a hundred of them in the chapel, and it’s like crickets. I love ladies who wear sequins to morning services. Jesus would approve, because Jesus loves color, and he is happy when you wear your favorite things to his house. He wants you to feel at home.

    This time of year I love that my husband doesn’t give a rat’s ass about football. Neither do I, and I love that I don’t have to pretend to care. This leaves us free to use our prodigious powers of pretending for other, more satisfying areas of our lives. We can pretend we care about the subprime mortgage crisis instead, because that makes us seem like responsible, compassionate people, and being mistaken for responsible, compassionate people makes us feel good about ourselves. Win-win.

    I like bedtime, and heavy blankets that pin me to the mattress. I like throwing my leg up on that man of mine and pinning him down, too. I don’t even mind stuffing my ears with earplugs to tone down his snoring. I lay my head on his chest and I can still hear him sawing away, revving his engine, poppin’ wheelies to dreamland.

    This time of year I like the increasing frequency of house parties, because I like snooping in people’s medicine cabinets. I like knowing what sorts of drugs they are on, and what funguses they are currently battling, and their laxative regimens. It explains a lot of things, and helps me to feel greater empathy for them as fellow human beings. When I have parties at my house, I like to fill my medicine cabinet with ping-pong balls before guests arrive. If you think I am kidding, go ahead and try me, Snoopy.

  • Famous, but not a Grouse

    A colleague likes to talk about the Ivy League football games he went to as a graduate student at Harvard. Apparently they did not sing the Tom Lehrer Harvard fight song (“Wouldn’t it be peachy if we won the game …”); in fact, the crowd’s invective sounds as though it was scarcely more subtle than that practiced by supporters of Personchester United (as we must learn to call the English-speaking world’s best-known soccer club). The Harvard crowd, it seems, hit a nadir as it chanted at opponents “You may be winning but you still go to Brown,” with substantial emphasis on the final syllable.

    These thoughts often stream through what passes for my mind as I spend time in an England governed no longer by the gleaming grin of Tony Blair but by the altogether grimmer visage of Gordon Brown. One could say that the new British prime minister is the gray man of British politics, except that there has already been a Grey administration—the one headed by the Earl Grey, who gave us the 1832 Reform Act and that filthy tea adulterated with oil of bergamot, the English ancestor of Constant Comment.

    True, Mr. Brown has gingered things up by allowing eight ministerial colleagues to announce that they smoked cannabis in their youth, and also by appointing as a minister in the Foreign Office a former United Nations eminence who has dared to tell the United States that might may not always be right.

    Not the least gray feature of Mr. Brown is the granite town in the east of Scotland where he grew up. I once spent a whole morning behind a stall in Kirkcaldy marketplace (it’s a long story) and had ample opportunity to study the leaden clouds that lurched across the dreich wastes of the Firth of Forth before they unburdened themselves onto to the streaky concrete and dour stone of this dull burgh. The most famous son of Kirkcaldy is Adam Smith, promoter of the dismal science of economics and author of that famous page-turner The Wealth of Nations, which he actually wrote while living at home with his mother. (One wonders how many bawbees a week he gave her towards the housekeeping.)

    Mr. Brown is an apt epigonus of the dismal Smith. He has the tidy mind of an economist and, having applied it during the Blair decade to the nation’s finances, he proposes now to redesign that elegant organism, the British Constitution (it does exist, you know, even if it is not written down).

    To redesign it, that is, in all but the one particular where it cries out for alteration. When the Blair Administration invented separate national legislatures for Scotland and Wales, it allowed Scots Members of the United Kingdom Parliament to retain the right to vote not only on matters that affect the whole of Britain but also on those that affect only England. An English member now may not vote on the future of foxhunting in Scotland—pas de problème—but a Scots member may still vote on whether it continues in England.

    Many English people find this arrangement as quaint as some residents of the District of Columbia find their representation in the U.S. Congress. Mr. Brown thinks it is just fine, and for a very simple reason. The Labour Party, which he leads, has lots of support in Scotland: forty-five seats in the United Kingdom Parliament. His main rivals, the Conservative Party, have very little: only one seat. Does Mr. Brown admit that what worries him is losing all those Labour seats in the United Kingdom Parliament? Of course not; he blathers about sustaining the Union. There are plenty of Englishmen who would be happy to vote for complete independence for Scotland in hopes of resolving this anomaly.

    And to show there were no hard feelings, I am sure they would join me in drinking Mr. Brown’s health in a glass of The Famous Grouse. It’s the most popular whiskey in Scotland, available in Minnesota for around twenty dollars a liter. This whiskey is deeper and darker than most of the sweet, pale blends popular in the United States. But for all its firm flavor, the spirit rises through the eyes; there is taste but there is also tingle. It could lift the spirits of folk who dwell below gray skies. Though I suppose it is brown.

  • Small Plates, Big Egos

    We all have to eat, but do we have to obsess about it? Hell’s Kitchen is a top-ten, prime-time show, Ratatouille is teaching our kids to rhapsodize over crème brûlée, and the Food Network force-feeds us celebrity chefs 24/7. There’s a story going around about a teacher who asked her class to list words describing food and one young boy wrote, “Bam!” Supermarket delis boast bars dedicated to olives soaking in various seasoned brines and ultra-virgin oils. Don’t even get me started on Whole Foods’ organic hand-harvested herbs, artisanal gelato, and heritage livestock breeds. How did we scrape by in the days before avocado slicers and rainbow-colored peppercorns?

    This food frenzy is affecting even sane people like my husband. Although he is generous with others, he’s a skinflint with himself, refusing to accept anything but a card for birthdays and holidays. The only loophole in his anti-consumption policy is cooking gadgetry. My last few presents to him have been a diamond-edged professional sharpener, a mortar and pestle made of volcanic rock, and an Italian espresso machine covered with enough gauges and dials and switches to make it look like a little cartoon atom smasher. Our kitchen layout is more elaborate than some of the greasy spoons where I used to waitress, with a knife drawer that would be the envy of surgeons from any of the local hospitals.

    Of course, like so many others who collect gastronomical gadgetry, we’re usually too exhausted to cook dinner. So we’ll toss a pizza in our little specialized pizzeria oven—one of those suckers from Lunds, a “Chef Crafted!” morsel maybe twice the diameter of a hockey puck, dotted with baby artichokes and “rich, nutty Asiago.” It makes me feel a little rich and nutty myself.

    It’s all so precious. Kind of a new-fangled eating disorder, you know? If you had told me ten years ago that I would be eating like a deranged fashionista, I would have put down my kielbasa, wiped my greasy maw with the back of my hand and said you were nuts. Obviously, I’m still not comfortable with it. If some guy at a party tells me the pinot grigio is awfully fruity, it’s hard not to snap, “Same back at ya, Alice.”

    Nostalgia alert: reminiscences on How It Used To Be forthcoming. When I was a kid, growing up in a working-class neighborhood on St. Paul’s East Side, having a spice rack with more than four little McCormick tins was hoity-toity. Gourmets lived in France. They ate crêpes, which was funny to say, and brie, a cheese that echoed their national character by being soft, pale, and runny. Here in America, if you wanted to get creative you’d find interesting things to do with a packet of onion soup mix. The East Side word for a guy who thought a lot about food was chowhound.

    Mancini’s, on West Seventh Street in St. Paul, was the place to go for a fancy meal. It was a sprawling, bustling supper club that billed itself as a Char House and cooked your meal on giant, open charcoal grills. Anything other than beef or lobster on the menu was a misprint. This was the ’80s, but the food was unchanged from the days of tailfins and V-8 Oldsmobiles. Every neighborhood had its version of Mancini’s: Nye’s Polonaise Room, Jax Cafe, Little Jack’s, Murray’s, Caspers’ Cherokee Sirloin Rooms (“Steaks the Size of Idaho”), Lindey’s, the Manor, Kozlak’s, Jensen’s, the Hopkins House, the Carpenter’s Steak House. You’d go there for a big, burned piece of meat, demolish it, down a fishbowl of Johnny Walker, burp, and go home stuffed and content. These places were as honest and Midwestern as the Chicago stockyards.

    The restaurants that get all the attention now are image-conscious temples of hipness, frequently raided by glamour vigilantes and given makeovers to keep them up-to-date. Which leads me to wonder if today a lot of us are using food to satisfy complicated emotional cravings. Plagued by economic insecurity and status anxiety? You could take a Prozac for that, but how about a twelve-dollar duck-breast spring roll instead? As you bite into it, your mouth tells your brain, “If we can afford to eat like this, we must have no money problems whatsoever.” It’s kind of like how wearing a Ralph Lauren shirt indicates you own polo ponies. Worried about your health and the ecosystem? You can save both with organic heirloom tomatoes.

    But this behavior is placing demands on food that it can’t fulfill. Expecting a meal to cure alienation and boredom leads to mental malnutrition. Gourmets must be unhappy. They’re always on a quest for the next thrill. I’m content to remember the Embers.

  • Pinot Noir for the Masses

    Archaeologists have all the fun. Mere historians spend their summers sweating over hot computers while those on expeditions get fresh air and exercise, often in agreeable places. I have just heard from a student who is spending great swaths of his summer making a new map of the Boundary Waters. There are less pleasant ways of spending your days than sitting in a canoe cuddling a GPS. Such canoodling in the Boundary Waters will not reveal any Roman roads (this student’s first love), but he might make his reputation by finally fixing the coordinates of Mist County. No one has ever looked for it that far north.

    Of course he would need a time machine. Lake Wobegon, so I have heard its chronicler assert, is really your grandfather’s rural Minnesota. One doubts if many Norwegian bachelor farmers use GPS to direct and regulate their seed drills; there won’t be a lot of agribusiness done in the Chatterbox Café.

    All the same, the portrait of this place is at least grounded in realism, which is more than you can say for a lot of pastoral literature. When the Hellenistic wordsmith Theocritus had the wheeze that you could compose clever poetry about country life, he meant it as metaphor; the dysfunctional affections of the nymphs and shepherds who sport in his delightful pleasant groves represent the abstract attachments of urban intellectuals. It is the same with Tudor madrigals. If fair Cloris actually met her swain in a pigsty she would surely have been far too worried about the mud on her multiple petticoats to celebrate their happy, happy loves. Clint Bunsen, by contrast, is not afraid of a little axle-grease.

    What is even more remarkable, the good folk of Lake Wobegon are described with optimism and affection; Powdermilk Biscuits are good for you—mostly. Everyday stories of countryfolk are often distressingly cruel. Take Sinclair Lewis. He seems to be the first writer ever to have used the pejorative term “hick” as an adjective; it is a wonder the good people of Gopher Prairie’s real-world counterpart, Sauk Centre, did not chase him all the way down Main Street and into the next county, however many Nobel Prizes he had to his credit. Perhaps their revenge is not to read his novels.

    The true masters of metropolitan disdain, though, are the French. M. Eiffel may have been born in Burgundy but he built his tower in Paris. The French intellectual even has an epithet which puts simple countryfolk in their place: They are the petit peuple. Whatever the feminists tell you, Madame Bovary was the victim of the French failure to embrace the simple pleasures of provincial life (though I guess you could say her enthusiastic embrace of a number of other pleasures also contributed to her decline and fall).

    It was not ever thus. In the fifteenth century, Burgundy in the east of France was a self-governing duchy capable of pursuing its own foreign policy—it was a Duke of Burgundy who captured Joan of Arc. Much of what one thinks of as characteristically medieval is associated with the Burgundian court—the high, pointy hats of the ladies, Books of Hours embellished with luminous blue and gold, the angular elegance of the music of Dufay. The distinctly unhick lives of John the Fearless and Philip the Good were fuelled by good local wine whose terroir had already been nurtured (not least by Cluniac and Cistercian monks) for centuries.

    The Pinot Noir grape is the characteristic grape of Burgundy—it first enters the written record (as Noirien) in documents from the reign of Philip the Bold. The good duke resented growers who wanted to make quick profits from the higher-yielding Gamay variety, and ordered them to mend their ways; so much for the magic of the market. You can benefit from this ducal forethought. In Burgundy, 2005 was a particularly good year, warm but not scorching and wet at just the right times. The long-established shippers Bouchard Ainé et Fils have generously made available a very pleasing red burgundy, full of fruit and flavor, labeled simply 2005 Bourgogne Rouge Pinot Noir, at a shockingly affordable price: under $20 a bottle. Local taste (rather than price) might prompt drinkers at the Sidetrack Tap to give it a miss, but I can imagine this burgundy being sipped with pleasure (from glass, not plastic, glasses) once the canoe has been parked, the GPS put to bed for the night, and the sausages (scholars cannot afford steak) have been set to sizzle.

  • The Poop on Perky

    Never Google yourself. You might find something you don’t like, and it might bum you out. I’m saying this, of course, because that is exactly what I did, and exactly what happened.

    I wish I were a stronger person than I am, but I’ve been thinking about this random critique from this random guy ever since I clicked across it. He says that he hates my stuff because it is typical perky white female crap. Also, he hates my stuff because it is full of poop jokes. Um, what?

    First, I am a perky white female. I was born white, and also female. Despite my legitimate street cred as a blue-collar, high-school dropout, single mother who worked her way from the welfare system to respectable middle-class society, I choose to be perky. I do this because a life spent wallowing in the throes of ennui is a life wasted. So have a nice day, jackass!
    Second, poop jokes are funny. However, there is a distinct lack of them in my act as well as in my columns. I have no idea what material of mine this guy was referencing, but he is in luck. I do take requests.

    But first—and I promise this will come around to poop—a storytelling primer on the trilogy of common experiences at the root of the human condition: Food, Sex, and Dying. Every single one of us will experience life-building-block scenarios within these three contexts, no matter how widely the circumstances of our births and life paths may vary. As a storyteller, it is imperative for me to understand this. If I work from this base—a strong base, like a tripod, since it has three elements—my reach can be darn near universal.

    As a comic, I must imagine my story several steps ahead of my listeners in order to exact surprise from them; people can’t laugh unless they are surprised into it. (Sure, people laugh at classic schtick out of nostalgia, but that is more of what I call an “audible smile” than a true laugh.)

    The poop story is coming. Hold your horses.

    But first, more categories. As we live and create our life stories, each topic can be sorted into categories: Drama, Comedy, Action, Horror. Obviously, there are subcategories, but in truth, everything falls under one of these. The secondary category includes any experience that is derivative of the three main elements mentioned above.

    Hence, “That time I crapped my pants at the Walgreen’s in Des Moines after eating a family-size bag of fat-free potato chips,” translates into an Action + Food story, with “Food” being the root topic, and “crap” being the derivative subtopic. The public location of traditionally private activity is an action that creates surprise.

    Women are uniquely connected to poop in a way that men aren’t. The fact is, most of us clean up more of it in our lifetimes. And yet, just as many of us are bound by our biology to be primary caregivers, we are also bound to deny the existence of poop in our lives. As attractive women, we must distance ourselves from anything as elemental or base as, say, “The time my golden retriever got up onto the kitchen counter, ate an entire Jell-O mold, then misted explosive lime-green dog-arrhea all over the house before company came.” (PG13. Food+Drama+Horror.)

    So, now I get to Mr. Hater out there in Blogtown. He wants to get up on his high literary horse and say that because I am white, cheerful, and a woman who feels free to talk about all aspects of life, I must be a hack who automatically goes to the lowest common denominator—e.g., poop stories—to get her laughs. Whatevs.

    So now, a poop story.

    I have a friend who was fresh out of nursing school when he accepted a position at a hospice care center. One of the residents, “Gertie,” took a shine to him. On his second day at work, Gertie soiled herself. My pal was the first responder. Though he had been trained in the art of cleaning up a fellow human being, it can take time to develop a cast-iron bedside manner in such situations. As he bent to his task, Gertie sensed my pal’s case of nerves and she started laughing, which only made the situation worse. Trying to make conversation, my buddy asked her:

    “What’s so funny, Gertie?” To which she replied: “When you’re done with that, why don’t you make love to me!”

    Death+Drama+Food+Action+Horror+Sex+Comedy=funny.

    Writer, performer, and femme fatale Colleen Kruse can be reached at mscolleenkruse@yahoo.com.

  • Liquid Incense

    I must say I have never understood what the Playboy bunnies saw in Dr. Kissinger. Perhaps they’re professionally equipped to detect charm and wit where mere men miss it. Who knows, the long fluffy ears may contain hidden sensors programmed to relay subtle messages to secondary brains located in the bunnies’ gluteal powder puffs, which, when they are not using them to the same end as the brontosaurus did its rear brain—to regulate the wagging of its great tail—can then transmit in appropriate code to the State Department in Foggy Bottom.

    Certainly one of the most delicious moments I ever heard on the BBC Home Service was an interview with Dr. Kissinger conducted by Jeremy Paxman, the Rottweiler of English political radio. It was a Monday morning, and the return leg of the school run. I had what MPR calls a “driveway moment” so powerful that I had to pull over. Dr. Kissinger clearly thought he had been invited to talk on the wireless so he could puff the sales of his new book. Instead he was asked some rather direct questions about the bombing of Cambodia. The scraping of the chair as the bodacious doctor rose to his feet was punctuated by Mr. Paxman’s running commentary: “Dr. Kissinger appears to be leaving … Bye, Dr. Kissinger.” Gee, those Brits are so polite.

    I guess what irks me most about him, though, is the well-known Kissinger dictum on academic politics, namely that infighting in universities is so bitter because what is at stake is so insignificant. Insignificant to whom, one may ask. Intelligent folk give their lives to enterprises like the breeding of fruit-flies or the study of Shi’ite theology because they think them important (and you never know when such pure study may come in handy—Foggy Bottom could perhaps use a spot of Shi’ite theology). More to the point, pure research is an enterprise often lonely and always imaginative. That is why it engages the passions. When someone whose intimate life has been engaged from an early age with understanding the Middle Ages is told that professional mediaevalists do not actually need to know Latin, it is scarcely surprising that he suffers an acute sense of humor failure. Of such differences are academic disputes made. They may seem insignificant to folk like the erstwhile plenipotentiary, but they are bitter for the rather prosaic reason that they often involve principles that the participants care about passionately.

    It is the same in churches. You can get good Christian folk to disagree about lots of things, from civil unions to the Doctrine of the Trinity. But in my experience the easiest way to incite a spirit of uncharitableness is incense; I am sure Uncle Screwtape would not disagree. For some folk, incense is insincere show, the reek of Rome, the epitome of vain repetition. For others, holy smoke is the prayer of the faithful rising up before God, swirling, shot through with sunlight, shared; they recall how early Christians witnessing the martyrdom of their comrades remarked on the sweet smell emanating from their seared flesh. Incense matters because it has to do with the way Christians pray, and that, presumably, is something they really care about.

    For those who find incense makes them wheezy, let me suggest a method of appreciating it in liquid form. It comes in slim green bottles containing wine made from Carignan grapes by Cline Cellars of Contra Costa County in California. Carignan is a variety with few friends. It has long been widely planted in southwestern France, where it has generally been blended with other varieties to produce vin very ordinaire, promote hangovers and cirrhosis, and sustain full employment in the French agricultural sector. Carignan vines contributed copiously to the Common Market’s “wine lake,” and in recent times French growers have been encouraged to grub them up.

    But where many Frenchmen have failed, Cline Cellars has made a distinctive, strong, dry red wine from Carignan grapes. I sipped it recently at a local hostelry alongside a plate of good oily spaghetti Bolognese. The acids cut right through the oils. But what was most remarkable was the smoky aroma that rose through the roof of the mouth directly from the tannins at the center of the taste. I have seldom met anything like it—the nearest thing I can think of is a nobly nutty, dry Oloroso sherry drunk a quarter-century ago. This is not a wine for everyone—bunnies, I am told, prefer champagne. But those who do like it should find it feeds the imagination. Give it a try.

  • The Language of Lunge

    There’s no love lost between me and the cat that lives in our house. She’s not really my cat; I bought her for one of the kids a while back. There had been a specific Christmas wish for a white kitten with a red ribbon round its neck. I had worked a lot of overtime that year. And I am theoretically smarter than what I am about to say:It was December 23rd, and I just wanted to make it all better with presents.

    I found her at the St. Paul Humane Society, the only kitten who fit the Christmas Wish description. I ignored the bloodstained Post-It note attached to the wee beastie’s cage: “Can’t go home with children—behavioral issues!” I bought the snarling, pointy-eared succubus, and invited the devil into our home.

    Thankfully, the cat never attacked the kids—just us grown-ups. Over the next few months, my husband and I sustained several hairline lacerations—one that almost sliced my left cornea to ribbons—before I broke down and had our precious baby declawed. The cat resorted to biting. Like a cobra strike, she would sit quietly in a corner, waiting for me and my insolent stocking feet to dare walk past her without offering a semi-soft “fish-flava” niblet in tribute.

    “Fool!” she seemed to say. “How would you like tiny puncture wounds in your Achilles tendon? Or perhaps you would rather just be startled out of a sound sleep by the terrifying sight of an eight-pound hissing bomb poised on your chest? As the glowing coals of my beautiful yellow eyes laser beam at you through the darkness, I’ll watch you weighing the chances of covering your face with the thick blanket for protection before I can lunge, jaws snapping. I would laugh, but I am a cat, and such things are beneath me. Instead, I pity you.”

    My friend the animal behaviorist told me that our baby was probably suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, possibly the result of an abusive past. My friend said that our cat was also probably depressed, and suggested Prozac—for the damn cat.

    See, I come from a long line of practical, uninsured working-class folk. The kind of folk who would not scoff at shelling out for antibiotics for an honored animal who had been injured in the line of duty, but who would definitely draw the line at mood meds other than Leinie’s, and would never, ever waste good beer on a cat.

    I decided to approach the problem like any good East Side grandma would: Feed the depression, starve a cold—or something like that. I started double-filling the cat’s food dish; she stopped attacking and started napping more. Presto, no more midnight raids, no more surprise attacks in the hallway. She’s simply too fat and too tired. My husband recently likened the cat to a mini Tonka dump truck; she exists solely to empty out her food drawer, then lumber downstairs to the laundry room to unload her cargo into the shit box.

    I disagreed with him, saying that I could see the feelings etched in her angry eyes, hear them in the petulant pitch of her meow if I am late shaking the kibble into her dish. My hub then stated that he thought I was willing to assign the cat feelings because I had feelings about the cat.

    I countered that he also must have feelings about the cat, but he insisted that he didn’t. He then shrugged and said that men were different, that men have about one-fourth the feelings that women have, and they certainly wouldn’t waste any of them on murderous psycho house cats.

    I’ve come across this before. The old “men and women are different” line. And I’ll tell you what I know is true: We are different, but it’s all in the language.

    Over the last few years, I’ve had a lot of feelings for this weird cat who shares our home. I’ve felt anxiety, terror, hope, and relief. And I think my husband has experienced many of the same feelings, only he would classify them as thoughts, opinions, or gut reactions. Go ahead and try this at home—pick a topic, any topic, ask a guy what he feels about it, and then listen to the crickets. Wait a day or two, and ask him about his thoughts, opinions, or gut reactions on the same topic. Just make sure you’ve got a comfy place to sit. And if you want to calm him down you can always double-fill his food bowl.

    Writer, performer, and femme fatale Colleen Kruse can be reached at mscolleenkruse@yahoo.com.

  • Fresh Pink Innocence

    End-of-term gifts from one’s pupils are a recurrent pleasure of professorial life. Like the boarding-school boy who thanked the aunt for the bottle of cherries pickled in brandy, one enjoys them not only for themselves but also for the spirit in which they are given. Only once have I been given an apple (and then in a spirit of irony). Port, of course, is always welcome.

    Some of the offerings that have thus come to ornament my office enjoy an oblique, even recondite significance. There is the plastic McNugget that for nearly twenty years has been ever ready to perform the function kindly envisaged by its thoughtful donor, namely to differentiate between two senses of the present participle neuter of the Greek verb “to be.” Unadorned, the McNugget is mere Being, pure Essence. But accoutered with his little ten-gallon hat and his red-and-yellow McGunbelt, he becomes a Specific Being, That Which Is.

    The token of appreciation that most often catches the visitor’s eye is my Plastic Action Figure of Pope Innocent III. His Holiness stands about six inches high in a maroon vestment, pallium, and triple tiara. He holds up a number of fingers in a gesture, perhaps of blessing, and has at hand a scroll reading, “Filii Hohenstaufenin, osculamini asinum meum.” I guess this is meant to allude to Innocent’s political manipulation of the Holy Roman Empire; rendered roughly into the vulgar tongue, the words might mean, “Sons of the Hohenstaufen, you are kissing my donkey.”

    Innocent must be one of the least aptly named of all Roman pontiffs. He gave ecclesiastical backing to the unspeakable Fourth Crusade of 1204, which one historian has called the last of the barbarian invasions. Its knights never went near the Holy Land; instead they appropriated Constantinople, the venerable capital of the Christian Emperors of Byzantium, who had formed an intelligent symbiosis with their Muslim neighbors.

    Look westward and Innocent’s effect is no brighter. The Cathars are not heroes of mine, a set of dismal dualists who denigrated the flesh and whose promotion as early avatars of modern hedonist (sorry—liberal) theology is (shall we say charitably) difficult to understand. But whatever the Cathars’ faults, there was no need for Pope Innocent to fire up knights from northern France to invade the Cathar region—what is now southwestern France but was then a distinct land with its own language, the langue d’oc (so called because its word for “yes” was oc rather than the French oui). One of the northern aggressors was so ferocious that he exhorted his subordinates, who could not tell Cathar enemy from innocent bystander: “Kill them all; God will recognize which ones are His.”

    The city walls of Carcassonne, one of the great Cathar strongholds, no longer echo with the clash of swords. They were extensively rebuilt in the nineteenth century by the Gothic fantasist Viollet-le-Duc, and breathe a heavily romanticized version of the last enchantments of the Middle Ages.

    A reassuring reality is to be found a few miles northwest of Carcassonne. The Château de Pennautier is the leading winemaker in the small, relatively new appellation of Cabardès and its 2004 rosé, available for about $12, is a proper summer tonic. It is made from Syrah and Grenache grapes, varieties one most associates with the Rhône valley, but it is much less heavy than most Rhônes.

    When I first poured this, I found it confusing. The color is a clear carroty pink, the nose subtly sweet. The initial flavor recalled soft fruit, then tannins kicked in, redolent of mild black pepper, and finally came a series of aftertastes, including the slightly numbing sensation that wine folk associate with pear-drops. But for all its lightness, this wine stood up well to a small steak. What I really liked, however, was the way the wine settled into the glass. A day later it was no longer confusing. The wine had achieved the boldness one associates with innocence. It had come together in a combination of sweetness, acidity, and salutary bitterness—as refreshing as a fine, fleshy, pink grapefruit. Now that’s something no student has ever given me.

    Oliver Nicholson is a classicist at the University of Minnesota and former secretary of the Wine Committee at Wolfson College, Oxford.

    Read more of Oliver Nicholson’s wine selects at www.rakemag.com/restaurants

  • The Problem with Positive Thinking

    Because I am writing this column almost two months before it will show up in print, we can have ourselves a little scientific experiment. See, I just read The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, a book designed to help me tap my hidden personal powers, and I’m going to think convincing thoughts in order to test once and for all whether the universe will rearrange itself according to my desires.

    Trying to harness my thoughts is a daunting prospect. If I were to describe my typical mental process, I would say that it works like a machine I used back when I was a waitress at Embers: The Hokey. The Hokey is one of those manual rotary rug cleaners. It doesn’t employ suction. In fact, I’m not sure how it works—early waitresses are rumored to have thrown rocks at the first Hokeys, believing them to be the work of demons.

    Stay with me. Say you had a three-year-old in your section. For an hour and a half, Harried Mama would keep asking for MORE CRACKERS. So you kept giving Harried Mama more crackers and she kept giving them to the three-year-old, who did not eat them, but instead crushed them in tiny fists, sprinkling them all over the carpet below the booster seat. After they would leave, you would get your Hokey. You pushed the Hokey over the crumbs, but it only picked up the big ones, leaving the cracker sand behind to be ground into cracker dust.

    I have always been terribly afraid that my brain, like the Hokey, only picks up the big crumbs. Those morsels are then transferred to the bingo tumbler cage of my frontal lobe, which is hand-cranked by Agnes, who chooses random thoughts one by one and announces them loudly to my nervous system. But Agnes’s eyes aren’t so good anymore and that means sometimes I come home from the grocery store with buttermilk instead of milk and butter.

    The Secret promises to push Agnes down a flight of stairs and turn my Hokey brain into a powerful Dyson, unfailingly sucking up whatever I aim my mind at. Real estate, riches, Rice-A-Roni, it doesn’t matter. It will all be mine if I can only harness my juju and THINK POSITIVELY.

    I bought The Secret by accident, originally thinking that I was buying The Seacrest, a quickie autobiography for beach reading. (I wonder if Ryan Seacrest was in on The Secret a couple of years before everyone else, and that’s why he has his career.) God. See? This is the problem. I just spent the last half-hour thinking about Ryan Seacrest’s bitch strips. Does this mean I will manifest a spray-tanned face framed by blond-highlighted streaks?

    If we could control our thoughts in the first place our lives would probably be much better. It’s not unimaginable that an average person could experience a ten percent increase in quality of life simply by daydreaming about positive things all day instead of brooding about negative ones. Under these circumstances, it will seem as if The Secret works, and those horrid self-help people will continue to fill their Olympic-sized swimming pools with the chicken soup of our souls.

    I have a friend who keeps her house like a modern-day Fred Sanford, calling the mess “creative” rather than recognizing it for what it is—a reflection of stone-cold laziness. She is genuinely stupefied when her dates don’t want to see her again after she invites them over. Time and again she attributes these negative reactions to unassailable forces in the universe. Eventually, I suppose, she will attract someone who loves a little creative mess, or who is a pathological neat freak thrilled to clean up after her. But to me that seems more like waiting the situation out rather than actively conjuring something desirable.

    I use this as an example because there is a significant portion of life we can’t control. Housecleaning is one of the parts we can. If my pal kept her house clean, she could invite somebody over and feel pretty secure that they were judging her on the basis of her personality rather than on the dirty dishes piled in the sink. The secret of The Secret is that it encourages thought rather than action. And that, my friends, is where the heart of all sin lies. And I mean that in a completely secular, universe-embracing way. But what the hell? I’ll try The Secret anyway.

    If it works, I’ll let you know. If not in my next column, then on my TV show.

    Writer, performer, and femme fatale Colleen Kruse can be reached at mscolleenkruse@yahoo.com.

  • Echoes of the Empire

    I shall spend a lot of this summer reading Polybius. The rise and fall of empires is in the air, and Polybius is the most coherent historian of the rise of Rome—not least because he was a Greek and smart. When Polybius describes how the Roman general Titus Flaminius accomplished his mission in the Second Macedonian War of 200-196 B.C. and then promptly promised that the Roman army would withdraw so that Greece might now be free, one cannot avoid a sense of déjà vu all over again.

    Such Roman blandishments did not on the whole fool Polybius, but, in general, the old Greek admired Rome; he saw it as the new world called into existence to redress the balance of the old. What other people considered Roman aggressiveness he extolled as efficiency; what others deemed their unthinking arrogance, he thought of as honest confidence. For all Polybius’ praise of Roman discipline, I admire more the Romans’ fierce adversaries, the bright-eyed Celts who threw themselves in waves against the solid wall of Roman shields at the Battle of Telamon in 224 B.C., ululating their wild war cries, wearing nothing but their weapons, their long hair, and the gold collars round their necks.

    Of course not all empires are the same, either in the trajectory of their rise and decline, or in the spirit animating them. It would be hard to find in Roman imperial verse such a sense of the fragility of human aspiration as that expressed in the High Victorian ode that Sir Edward Elgar turned into his cantata “The Music Makers.”

    One man with a dream, at pleasure,
    Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
    And three with a new song’s measure
    Can trample an empire down.

    More remarkable still for its humility is “Recessional,” the ode written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897 by Rudyard Kipling, the archpoet of Empire:

    Far-called, our navies melt away—
    On dune and headland sinks the fire—
    Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
    Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

    Try getting a Roman emperor (or American president) to utter the final couplet of “Recessional”:

    For frantic boast and foolish word,
    Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

    Of course no empire ever entirely dies. The Romans brought the cherry to Italy and the grape to France, and they seem to have survived. Go to Nîmes in Provence and admire the Roman temple known as the Maison Carée, which still has its Roman roof. Then head out on the old pilgrim road to Compostela ’til you come to pebbled slopes facing south across the marshes of the Camargue, famous for its wild gray horses and pink flamingoes (naturally pink, not kept that way by being fed carrots or shrimp shells like the ones in zoos). Here are the vines of Château L’Ermitage, makers of a wonderful white wine that can be had for around eleven dollars hereabouts.

    The 2005 vintage of Chateau l’Ermitage has a trajectory like that of an empire. In the beginning, the color is clear and cloudless, the immediate aroma redolent of flowers from the south. I was reminded of a snuff I used to take that was scented with North African carnations. The initial taste is fresh and light, like melons, almost like watery Chenin Blanc, followed by no sharpness but lots of low and dirty tannins, like Melba toast. Wait, though. The wine grows upon your very tongue. Roussanne grapes, a rather rare variety grown mostly along the Rhône, contribute half of the juice in this vintage (the rest is Grenache and a little Viognier) and in a warm year they produce wine of great richness. The flowery first impression and the forceful tannins fuse into a flavor that is full bodied, powerful, and pungent like gunflint. Enjoy it with old-home chicken—potatoes, garlic, onions, and boneless breasts of chicken (never understood that—I thought most breasts were boneless), fried together and mixed with yogurt just before dishing up. (Make sure you use the plain yogurt, not the strawberry flavor.) Eventually, a day or two after the wine has been exposed to the open air, acid will creep in round the edges. Sic transit gloria mundi. Time to open another bottle.

    Oliver Nicholson is a classicist at the University of Minnesota and former secretary of the Wine Committee at Wolfson College, Oxford.

    Read more of Oliver Nicholson’s wine selects.