Shelter Cove, Beauty Bay, West Arm of Nuka Sound, Alaska, 5-Aug-2021 — Yesterday was overcast and a mild day. But there was some wind. We motored some 10 or 12 nmi to a lagoon that we wanted to see.
Technically, looking up the definition of a lagoon in the dictionary, it was not a lagoon. By definition one cannot sail into a lagoon because it is blocked off from the ocean by a barrier, typically a natural wall or beach.
The lagoon was defined by tall walls, I presume cut through by a glacier, and a beach, which is just outwash from a stream that flows down from that receded glacier. The walls are tall, impressively so, but as I looked at them, and I’ve been dealing with friends and support people in New Zealand, I remember Milford sound where the wall is a statute mile tall.
From the lagoon, we sailed on an easy port, broad reach directly to Shelter Cove.
Communications through the Iridium Go is often likened to breathing through a straw, a cocktail straw at that. But on this trip where the world we are in is so very different than the world outside; we have yet to see another recreational vessel, and it is more than 24 hours since we’ve seen any vessel of any sort, we have yet to share an anchorage.
I think more of a book I read in the late 1970s called Thrice Upon a Time. It was the first of the then current science fiction I read. Previous to that I mostly read Bradbury and the other classics from the 1950s.
I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation in those days as did the author. My social fears were at their zenith then, I seem to have been afraid of almost everyone. It was a pity, I kept me out of the clubs of the 1970s in New York, and kept me from meeting the type of people who in my later years I would actively seek out and befriend.
A friend, Mark Maxson, who was outsize by all metrics, personality and physicality, befriended the author and invited him to New York next time he was in the states on a business trip.
I met his 15-year-old daughter waiting in an office after business hours. There is no marker on a girl’s face that tells you what country she’s from. I asked her, I was all of about 25 at the time, something about if I could help her, and she responded to me with a distinct northern UK accent, ”I’m waiting for me dad.” That way of speaking was something I’d only seen in the movie version of My Fair Lady.
The author later went on to become a Holocaust denier, and then when the world came down upon him like a ton of bricks, he became a Holocaust questioner. But, does that make his work any less valuable or remarkable. They say Elvis was a racist, and Manet a pedophile.
The set up of the book, which entranced me at the time, was that there were multiple parallel universes and at every moment the universe further divides into what might be. Some people, men, always men, are doing some research using sub-atomic particles for communication, when they receive a message not from their own equipment but from what turns out to be themselves in a parallel universe telling them not to knock over a container of liquid. The messages are short, never more than a text sentence because the communications of the day was only about the speed of the communications I can get through this satellite connection.
But the feeling of a tiny communications portal to another world is the sense that I have on this trip when we communicate using the satellite connection to two vendors in New Zealand, a business partner in Atlanta, and the University program that Flora is applying to. They are all out there in the rich spheres of cities. And we are here connected through a cocktail straw in an entirely different sphere, almost as if we have gone back in time before people. It is an entrancing model.
I travel through time reading the books of MFK Fisher, Mary Francis was her first name, and the surname she used for her career was originally spelled with a ‘c’; the ‘c’ was discarded during the second world war.
Fisher is seen as the founding god of modern day food writing. Her auto biography is viewed in the foodie community as a great milestone eclipsing the other food writers that I have come to like so much like AJ Roebling and others.
I’ve written that none other than the famous Ruth Reichl used Fisher’s autobiography as the template for her own.
I don’t know what to think about Fisher as I read more of her work.
Jennifer was lovely enough to find me a 1970s printing of The Art of Eating that contains Fishers best known, and perhaps only, five books.
They are in the collection in chronological order, though I read the last book, written in 1954, first. In it she tells many illustrative stories, many are retellings fron previous books, it turns out.
I should mention here that at this time in my life, a lot of the books I read and the movies I see are not always the best or the most enjoyable, I’m reading them to learn other things: what the culture was like, what people thought, gender roles and other things.
Fisher may have been most important in her day because her personal life is never far from her writing and mentioned often. As are continual references to sex, virginity and lack thereof, and the role of food In courtship, seduction and love making.*
On the boat I don’t have access to internet so I don’t know exactly what year Fisher was born, but I believe it was about between 1910 and 1912 so when her first book is released she’s 25 years old. Her writing is bombastic, the know-it-all confidence of youth, that of someone who is privileged, talks about the trappings of her privilege and at the same time believes that everyone has this upbringing, that the audience she is writing to is just like her, and at yet there is a layer of people that are not quite ”others.” They are people she enjoys and likes and oftentimes feels honored to be accepted by, but they are the people who actually do the cooking, like her own cook.
She writes in her second book about her husband Al, of the surname Fischer one presumes. And in her very last book mentions that she has been widowed twice implying Al’s future.
Fisher’s pomposity and indeed naivete about many things, despite how widely she traveled she is, are not something she is afraid to correct.
She wrote a book in 1941 about dealing with hunger, deprivation and inadequate access to food during the first year of the second world war. In the revised edition for this collection, which she almost doubles the size of the book with square bracketed additions and comments, she’s not the least bit afraid to say ”I no longer believe this,” or ”I can’t believe I thought this.” She also confesses, I guess the better word is discloses, that she didn’t cook most of these recipes.** She collected them. She confesses that she has never been able to cook an egg properly, despite her many directions on how to do so.
Her pronouns are entirely male except in the most specific cases, but by 1954 when she is rewriting, she questions that and referring to a sentence where she talks about sons, questions why not daughters? By this time she has two daughters of her own. I believe she has stopped identifying with men.
There is a remarkable chauvinism about the roles of gender. She is truly someone who likes men, likes to be around men, and it is quite clear that she likes having men as lovers. She discusses marriages with ”arrangements ” to free each party from marital vows.
She believes that the role of women is to be domestic, running a household, cooking, etc, something that she seems to do none of. Her life is one of hired domestic help, lunches and business meetings in Hollywood’s movie community.
It is an interesting view into a time and into the life of a woman who became an icon.
It is a view of someone who came from privilege and wrote to whom?
The magazine she references are the New Yorker and Gourmet, and French food writers who at that time I don’t think were translated into English. To whom was she writing, and who were her readers? Were they people who always had to cook, or people with cooks?
Born around 1910, I presume Fisher lived into the 1980s or ’90s perhaps even into the early 2000s. Reichl, refers to Fisher by her first two names, Mary Francis. Did Reichl know her, or did Reichl use the license she is famous for?
I’ll reread Fisher’s autobiography, I think it is one more book further on in the volume. I will know this time I read it how old she was when she wrote it.
She was 25 when she wrote her first book, entering her 30s in her second book, and in the notes that she adds to it, mentions that she is now well into her 40s in 1954, the mother of two daughters who feels that perhaps a chicken might not feel no pain when it lays an egg based on her own experience of issuing forth two daughters.
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I am beginning to relax and, one always second guesses one self, but all of the repairs that were done on Caro Babbo were successful and worked well.
There is always that second guess, or is it perhaps the third or fourth, that if I relax and stop paying attention to these repairs I made, they will instantly fail.
It is a wonderful trip so far.
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* Like Lynn Pardee, the sailing writer, a generation later.
** In her 1954 notes, Fisher mentions being poor while living in Paris as a student, and does talk about cooking, herself, by 1954. She also mentions, with some resignation, in her 1954 book, about firing a cook who didn’t have some basic skill.
Sent from Iridium Mail & Web.
Sent from Iridium Mail & Web.
