Gotham Diary:
What to do?
28 May 2014
Every once in a while, Kathleen gets a bee in her bonnet and has to discover the origins of a popular idiom. This weekend, she unearthed an arresting history. What did “to fly off the handle” refer to when it entered the language? It referred, among the American pioneers who introduced the phrase, to an insufficiently-bound axe-head, which might literally, at a moment of great centrifugal force, “fly” off its axe-handle, risking all sorts of mayhem. A vivid image, indeed! Bear it in mind, next time you caution someone who seems to be getting out of control.
“Bee in the bonnet” was apparently first used in print by Thomas DeQuincey, in 1845. The development of this idiom is, compared to that of “to fly off the handle,” relatively gradual and obscure.
***
I thought it would be simple, but I was reckoning without the warm, still air that hugged the city until well past eleven. By the time Kathleen got home, at 9:15, everything was ready but me: having sat down (with The Crimson Petal and the White — I’m deep into the adventure, and half the time I think I’m living in late-Victorian London, or have at least just flown home from a visit), I didn’t want to get up again. But I did get up, and we had our simple dinner, and I was almost in tears at the prospect of washing the dishes.
I had taken a three-pound eye roast of beef and covered it with a paste of salt, pepper (tablespoons of each), minced garlic, red pepper flakes, and olive oil. Then I set it in a roasting pan and put it in a preheated 500º oven. After fifteen minutes (five minutes per pound), I turned the oven off, but left the roast sitting in it for another two hours. Later, I made something called Henry Bain sauce, named after the long-ago maître d’ at a posh Louisville club. More or less equal amounts of chutney, chili sauce, steak sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and ketchup were combined in a small saucepan and not-quite-simmered over the low heat. As water cooked off, the sauce became thick and silky. Kathleen wound up liking it a lot better than she thought she would, because she doesn’t care for chutney at all (it’s too sweet). These recipes, by the way, were all published by Mark Bittman in the Times Magazine last year.
I ate very slowly, partly because of the heat and partly to delay washing the dishes. There were hardly any dishes, but they could be washed only in the kitchen, and I didn’t want to be in the kitchen at ten-thirty on an unseasonably warm night.
Now I have a small pot of Henry Bain sauce and a piece of meat that is not perceptibly smaller than it was before I cut two slices for dinner. With the help of the meat slicer, I’ll be able to make some great roast beef sandwiches. But my appetite for sandwiches has flagged somewhat, and I know that I won’t get through the whole roast in time. So I’ll cut it in half, and freeze one of the halves. I’ll also make the cold-beef salad that Julie Child includes on page 250 of The Way to Cook. (Salade de boeuf à la Parisienne in her earlier books). The secret to this dish seems to be to marinate the beef in the mustard vinaigrette, basting it often. I’d like to master the salad because the other principal ingredient, French potato salad, is simple to make, and the composed salad can be garnished with all sorts of goodies. It’s really something that can be thrown together with ingredients on hand, in an hour or less.
***
Now, what to do about Karl Ove Knausgaard? On the face of it, his gigantic opus, My Struggle, now half of it translated from Norwegian into English, is a grotesque demand for time and attention by a prima facie unworthy subject. Critics say the most awful things about it, not meaning to, and then they claim to love it. Here’s Dwight Gardner in today’s Times:
For all this Oedipal drama, Book Three of “My Struggle” isn’t grueling. There are expert, almost Mark Twain-like observations about being a boy, and for every scene in which he cowers from his father, there’s one in which he does something like stick his erect little penis into a discarded Heineken bottle, only to have it stung by an angry beetle.
Mr. Knausgaard writes well about lust and music (two of his great themes); throughout this novel, his young self escapes into records or cassettes of bands like the Police, Roxy Music, Motörhead, the Specials and Queen. He plays in a band and, at one concert, politely explains the meaning of punk rock before ripping into a song
(Why am I not surprised that Garner fails to offer an example of Knausgaard’s writing well about lust?)
A friend — my daughter’s age — told me that he read the first volume of My Struggle with great interest; I understood him to say that reading the book was like spending time with a good friend. But I cannot imagine having a friend like the Knausgaard Garner describes. If ever I were to conduct an experiment like the one with the Heineken bottle, I should never tell a soul, and certainly not a friend. I should, rather, endeavor to forget all about it.
So I’m inclined to put My Struggle in the “Not For Me” pile and move on. Lately, this pile has taken on a new, strangely lighthearted name in my mind: “Things That Happen After I Die.” I pretend that something has occurred prematurely, ie during my lifetime, but that it’s a mistake, to be noted as such. (The first glimmer of such developments came with the advent of rap, which still makes me wish that I didn’t know it existed.) This fiction cuts the cord that might bind me to an interpretation or evaluation of extremely uncongenial things.
I’m rarely wrong about music — wrong, I say, to dismiss works that I haven’t experienced. I’m somewhat more often wrong about movies, a fallibility that I attribute in part to marketing campaigns. But I’m often wrong about books. I was wrong about Edward St Aubyn right up until the appearance of the last Patrick Melrose novel, prior to which I had dismissed him as a catty, neurasthenic, and disaffected twit. Patrick Melrose may be all those things, at least at times, but Edward St Aubyn is a great writer. Bad News, the second Melrose novel, ought to be the gruesome and repellent account of a drug-addled weekend in Manhattan. Instead, it is the most gorgeous parody of War and Peace, with pills instead of soldiers lined up in battle. It was easy to catch up and efface my misjudgment: the Melrose books are short. I’ll be in a terrible pickle if I wait for the last of My Struggle!
Daily Blague news update: National Socialist.