Centigrade Scale III
New Jersey. Chris Columbus. “Are you going to kill five.” Fake meat. Peach seltzer. “If you are willing to take the chance.” “This one’s Lucas, he’s pathetic." Dish soap showers. Fans. Blueberries.
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CENTIGRADE SCALE III
This letter is another in the 100s format, originally credited to the University of Vermont English professor Emily Bernard. I have written 100s in past letters here and here, and have come to really rely on this form in times when a more coherent piece just does not feel accessible to my mind.
This set reflect a short trip I took to a family house in New Jersey with my partner and mother-in-law this past week. Send me your own summer-in-quarantine 100s if you’d like.
Photo: me and four dogs
1. Early in June, my mother-in-law has a terrible back pain. Later, an unrelated surgery. She has to stay at home, because we’re in a pandemic, and stay on the couch, because she’s in recovery. She hates it. She waddles around the house holding her stomach where her stitches are or holding her back where the pain was. Her first stop after getting better is impulse shopping for snacks at Aldi. The second is a trip to New Jersey and a family house that was previously refuge for my brother-in-law and his kid, also running from the diseased, transformed city.
2. On our way, we stop at a farmer’s market. I’m nostalgic for past summers: waking up early on Saturdays, getting farm produce before yoga. Carrie in the orange tent had the best peaches. Will I see her again? The pandemic got in the way of many goodbyes. Remembering that yoga class also saddens me. It was my favorite: challenging poses, uncharacteristically loud music, so small that I knew everyone’s name. I followed the instructor on social media and their take on current events disappointed me. In Jersey, I realize this new to me market is named after Christopher Columbus.
3. Day one. I wake up early, brush my teeth upstairs, put on running clothes. By the time I make it downstairs I have to pee again. The window in the small bathroom with the sink shaped like a seashell lets in outside voices. I catch “stopped and frisked” and “but I moved on.” When I come out, that voice turns to me: “Are you going to kill five?” I know this is about the miles, but the choice of words makes me feel like I’m about to run them all with a brick at the bottom of my stomach.
4. We visit a neighbor and check out their heated, bubbly pool. The jets are off as is the heat, but the water is clear, and the bottom painted the calmest shade of blue. I wear the only bathing suit Walmart had in my size (all my Croatian bikinis are in my three-months-empty Midwestern apartment). My mother-in-law only dips in up to her ankles and chit-chats about dinner. “It only tastes like meat because you want it to,” the neighbor says. Later, they are all smiles while telling us about wanting to buy a gun. I start missing New York.
5. The fridge situation that welcomes us is typical: door crammed with condiments, severely frosted over ice-cream in the freezer, a few wrinkled apples and one really rotten on in the produce drawer. My husband discovers a box of peach seltzers in a back room, next to trash bags and power tools. We thirstily overpopulate the fridge with the light orange cans. They are zero calorie, zero sugar, zero carb, but so aggressively peachy that I imagine T. S. Eliot’s line recast – do I dare to drink a peach? My mom messages on Instagram asking whether there’s a beach here.
***
because at last, for one summer
the only difficulty I’m willing to imagine
is walking through this first humid day
with my hands full, not at all peaceful
but entirely possible and real.
***
6. I have two ideas that I turn into two pitches and a whole lot of rejection emails. After a no and a no and a pass, one editor gives me the most tentative of maybes. They say they’ll read a thousand words if I’m “willing to take the chance.” I wonder what th chance is. A career I sunk six years into already crumbled, I know rejection well. I read, in Alexander Chee’s book:” Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It’s not rocket science; it’s habits of mind and habits of work.”
7. Family friends drive down from Philly with their four dogs. The dogs lick our hands and feet. Their owners hang back. They only talk about hugging us. Their faces remain covered. One dog is small with an impish face. One dog is a spaniel set on chasing every bird. One dog is a new rescue. He’s on edge, but we all acknowledge that he too must be a good boy. The fourth is the oldest and most likely to salivate on our extremities. “This one’s Lucas, he’s pathetic,” the friend apologizes. Lucas rolls and exposes a soft, rub-ready belly.
8. My mother-in-law gets a poison ivy rash from chasing dogs around the yard. We examine every medicine cabinet in the house. We find Benadryl and Calamine, but her daughter says she should take a dish soap shower. She throws her overalls in the wash and asks me to relocate the blue bottle of Dawn from the kitchen sink to the edge of the bathtub. I’ve done more dishes than ever during the pandemic. There’s unexpected calm in the warm water on my hands and the quiet that a household affords you when you seem to be doing something selfless.
9. There are four fans in our living room, in addition to a window AC. One small clip-on fan, two box fans, one self-standing. Everyone in this family loves fans. They bring them on trips to generate white noise while they sleep and power them up in bundles in the summer seeking a perpetual indoor breeze. The fans all buzz at different frequencies. They are my own personal version of the Hum, headaches and all. Except, I have found its source, but don’t dare pull any cords, or flip any switches. Everyone keeps asking whether I’m also feeling too hot.
10. Technically, we are staying in the blueberry capital of the world. Blueberry bushes are taller than the wild ones I remember from my childhood, and the berries plumper. Every morning, I run by one blueberry field then another. They’re studded with no trespassing signs, but I boldly turn into the third. I accumulate half-a-mile of steps and sweat between the neatly planted, bluish rows. When I come home, my Nikes are dusty, accusing me of mild infringement. My mother-in-law has already beaten my crime though. A small bowl of blueberries is waiting in the fridge, uncovered and also dusty.
Photo: blueberry fields
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ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: I guess it’s a two-paper kind of summer, a manuscript collaborators and I just finished will appear online as a preprint in a day or two, ironically making these last few months following my Ph. D. defense some of my most outwardly productive in years. This is an exciting paper, combining experimental work with efforts by two different theory groups, and I hope that it will be well-received by both journal editors and other physicists. It focuses on a quasiperiodic system – a repeating structure where the period for the repetition is an irrational number – which is something that has always piqued my scientific curiosity. If I were writing this a year ago, this would be the place where I would insert some hopeful statement about chasing this problem some more in the future. The past year, however, has been such a whirlwind and I was faced with so many surprises that I really don’t dare speculate whether I’ll do any follow-up work, regardless of how interesting this system is. The last few days before submitting a paper are always a bit wild, filled with long email chains about precise word-counts, exact ways to phrase an idea that makes so much sense in a casual conversation but escapes translation once on the page, and last minute double- and triple-checks of every single calculation. This I my fifth paper since starting a PhD and I think I can finally see that I have become a better writer. I feel like I can confidently write “because” instead of posturing with “due to the fact that”, and I hedge less when trying to describe a punchline. I don’t love 3AM emails about a parameter in a numerical simulation being slightly off, but I do like being a team player, and despite all of my physics-related bitterness and heartbreak it is nice to see another project actually completed.
I did a lot of other frantic emailing while we were in New Jersey. I followed up on job applications and interviews without finding out much and I pitched magazine and blog editors and got regretfully negative responses. To break up all that digitally induced negativity, I did also have an excuse to briefly re-connect with a college mentor for an article I am working on, and gladly jumped on it. Although nostalgia and I are not exactly friends these days, remembering our work together and being able to say that I kept doing it for six more years gave me at least some smidgeon of an excuse to feel accomplished.
LISTENING: The latest season of the You Must Remember This podcast, telling the story of Polly Platt. Platt was a movie art director, a set and costume designer, and later a producer that was remarkably successful throughout different decades of Hollywood. She was also the wife of the famous director Peter Bogdanovich so her story has typically been told in connection with his. Host and producer Karina Longworth takes a different approach, drawing on Platt’s unfinished memoir and interviewing her family and friends to tell her whole story and wholly from her perspective. However, this is much more than a story about a woman whose genius was clouded by being married to a famous man. Sexism was certainly a big factor in Platt’s life and the public perception of it, but Longworth is as meticulous and compelling as ever as she explains the context of the film industry, what exactly it is that producers and art directors do and how Platt factors into that picture as much as the one about the forgotten women of Hollywood. I’ve loved this show in all of its previous iterations and this one is no exception.
WATCHING: Through some convoluted scheme of account sharing and family bundles, the big TV in the house we were staying at was hooked up to a Disney+ subscription so we spent most of our late nights there watching The Mandalorian. I really liked it. It is simple, unpretentious and full of familiar characters and sites. It does not have that emotionally heavy, attention sucking prestige TV feeling to it even though it is clearly extremely well made. It also leans pretty heavily into a monster-of-the-week format, not being overly wedded to the fairly thin main plotline and it is probably better for it. I always forget that I like Star Wars until I see something from that universe that has echoes of that original feeling, the initial childhood wonder of space and dusty planets, and the naivete of wholeheartedly buying into the journey of an unlikely hero. There could be deeper versions of this show that would lean more into childhood traumas or intricacies or religion or fatherhood, but the Mandalorian is such a joy to watch exactly because all of that is mostly avoided. I could watch ten more seasons of this comfort food bounty hunter content while anything trying to be more highbrow would have probably exhausted me already.
The other show that we have been making steady progress on, and are close to completing, is FX’s Atlanta. Save for one episode that I found pretty offensive and reckless, this show is near-perfect. It is weird, it is smart, it makes commentary while also being genuinely funny and it isn’t afraid to takes risks. The offensive episode, first season’s “B. A. N.”, may be one such risk that didn’t pay off. It does feature some really cutting and clever satire but ultimately it is overwhelmed by a really harmful wink at transphobia. However, many other similarly experimental episodes do deliver. Fully aware that when it fails, this show really fails, I still want much more of it.
Because I have been binging You Must Remember This, I was willing to shell-out a whole dollar to rent the Peter Bogdanovich screwball comedy honoring and one-upping all past screwball comedies What’s Up Doc. I have seen this movie many times as a kid since my parents were fond of it and its many physical and utterly over the top gags. I did not realize, though, how much it was a brainchild of not just Bogdanovich and Barbara Streisand, but also Polly Platt. Platt suggested how the roles should be cast (a very early idea had Streisand playing a whiney straight man and her role was ultimately swapped with that played by Ryan O’Neal in the film) and where the movie should be set (the ending car chase really does not work if it is not in San Francisco). Streisand even wore some costumes inspired by Platt’s own style. Every movie always seems different after you learn a thing or two about its making and the various visions behind it but knowing more about Platt endeared me to this movie on a level beyond remembering its utter cheesiness and how terrible yet funny all of its characters are. I’m not sure that this is a good movie, but it has so much of some something that is rich and captivating, and its bright, almost garish, design is certainly a part of that.
In the category of movies people often talk about, and the category of absolute classics, we watched Do the Right Thing because some streaming service thought they would show their commitment to the conversations currently in the zeitgeist by making it free to rent. In many ways I feel unequipped to criticize this movie, but discomfort of this sort does seem to be one of its central features. This film undoubtedly has much to say and even today its filmmaking, and the voices it features, stand out. Having married into a Brooklyn family, I recognized a lot of the notes it is trying to hit. Having been trying to engage with the way we talk about race these days, I was also fairly uncomfortable with the possible ambiguity of its political commentary. Much like with his more recent BlacKkKlansman, director Spike Lee is working to complicate the way we view racial inequities and he’s letting different approaches to activism stand in contradiction. This contributes to both edginess and timelessness of his films. In this current moment, however, I wonder whether some white or less-woke (for the lack of a better term) viewers may watch either of these films and come away with a conclusion that reinforces the biases they brought to the viewing experience in the first place. Maybe it unfair to expect Lee to spell out what the titular Right Thing really is, and maybe my discomfort reflects some of my whiteness. I can worry about the educational value of his work because I don’t have to live the tensions and complexities it deals with. It’s certainly a movie worth watching, if nothing else than for this grappling.
READING: This thread by adrienne maree brown that feels like necessary reading for anyone with any semblance of privilege (or heritage of it), and this thread of hers about practicing and working towards belonging and making space for others to belong.
Singularity by Marissa Davis, a poem about everything touching everything before the Big Bang (in theory).
The book of essays by Alexander Chee titled How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Chee’s essays are about being biracial and seen as foreign, about queerness and the weirdness of gender, about writing and protesting, and about having an active imagination as a child and crushing on pretty boys often. His style is dynamic and light and quick, packing a punch where it needs to without getting overly wordy or pretentious. I’m about a third in and I really love this book. There is certainly a lot to aspire to in there, both in how he reflects on himself (rather comfortably), and in terms of his essay-writing craft.
EATING: Since our trip was supposed to be a vacation of sorts, though more so for my mother-in-law than for my husband and me, I tried to cook foods that have a vacation feel to them.
That first day after the farmer’s market I made a big salad with spring greens, apples, avocado, Kirby cucumbers and a lemon tahini dressing that we spooned not just on top of the salad but also all over tiny, well-seared sweet potatoes from the same market. We brought a watermelon with us, cut into it that day and proceeded to stuff ourselves silly with its refreshingly sweet and watery bites after every consequent meal.
On day two I made the nectarine crumble pie I am sharing below, baking it late at night in a hellishly warm kitchen and watching a parade of family members thoroughly clean it off their plates during the next day. I didn’t cook dinner that day and inhaled a saucy Chinese dish instead, noting to my husband that I’ve already gotten spoiled by the good New York City take-out, but unable to stop eating, nonetheless.
On day three we had vegan Italian sausages sautéed with onions and peppers, a balsamic dressed arugula salad and gnocchi in vegan pesto I made with basil from my sister-in-law’s garden because everyone kept talking about old Italian folks having once lived in the house where I was making fast friends with the stove and the oven.
On our fourth day I threw together a bean chili and a really crunchy and fresh green cabbage, cilantro, lemon and scallion slaw (the secret is in plenty of salt, patience and a touch of coriander powder) that paired perfectly with this vegan cornbread recipe that my partner tackled to great success.
The next day I made tofu and noodles inspired by Pad Thai and spent the whole dinner explaining to an older relative what exactly soy is, why GMO soy is trouble with regards to superweeds, and why it is not unhealthy.
I didn’t do myself any favors conversation-wise on the last day when I made a roasted beet and arugula pasta salad and paired it with a salty and sweet maple, soy and paprika tempeh crisped up on the stove. Having to explain tempeh aside, I was reminded how much I love pasta salads and how bad of a reputation they get only because certain home cooks don’t know what to do with them other than pile on mayo. My take on the dressing was to roughly whizz some olives, lemon juice, cilantro, nutritional yeast, garlic and red pepper flakes in a food processor then mix this tapenade-like, pungent-in-the-best-way mixture with some grassy, golden olive oil. I might have to try this again as it would be great on potatoes or roasted zucchini as well.
This pie recipe is something of a mash-up of this vegan peach pie and this crumb-heavy dessert. The crust is not too difficult to make and quite successful. I chose to make the filling pretty chewy rather than jam-like since I prefer my summer fruits to shine through more than something you may buy in a can. You don’t have to chill the whole thing overnight as one of the recipes suggests, but it certainly is good cold so I would recommend indulging in it for at least two days in a row.
For the filling:
4-5 medium-sized nectarines or peaches, cut into very thin slices (peeled if using peaches)
8 ripe yellow peaches, about 4 ½ cups, peeled and sliced (see tip below for peeling peaches)
5 tablespoons maple syrup
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Pinch of salt
Juice of 1/4 of a lemon
For the crust:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tablespoon white cane sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
9 tbsp vegan butter or margarine, grated through the biggest holes on a box grater
1/4 cup ice cold water (pour cold water into a measuring cup and keep it in the freezer until you need it)
For the crumb topping:
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 (75g) cup vegan butter, grated through the biggest holes on a box grater
1. In a mixing bowl mix all the crust ingredients other than butter and water
2. Add the butter (I just grate it into the bowl) then mix it in with your hands, squeezing the bigger chunks of butter until the mixture looks sandy and crumbly
3. Add the cold water and mix until you can make a ball of dough that sticks together. Try to handle the dough as little as possible, pushing the ball together more than any sort of traditional kneading
4. Wrap the dough ball in plastic wrap and let it chill in the freezer while you make the filling and the crumb topping
5. Preheat the oven to 400 F
6. Mix the thinly sliced nectarines with all other filling ingredients and mix with a spatula so that the slices get sticky and covered in the maple and lemon mixture. Set aside.
7. Make the crumb topping the same way as the crust: mix the dry ingredients then add the butter and use your hands to get a sandy, heterogenous mixture. Store in the fridge while you roll out the crust
8. To roll out the crust, put down a piece of parchment or wax paper then place the dough ball in the center and use a rolling pin to flatten it into an even circle of dough slightly bigger than the pie plate you’d like to use (about 9 inches in diameter is optimal). You should be able to see streaks of butter in the dough as you roll it.
9. Pick up the piece of parchment your dough is residing on and, working quickly, invert it on top of the pie plate so that the dough “falls in” and you can peel away the paper
10. Press the dough into the plate where needed, prick the bottom with a fork and trim the edges if they go over the edges of the plate
11. Arrange the nectarine slices so that they cover the bottom of the crust, overlapping them as much as needed, and making two layers if you have enough slices. Pour any of the liquids from the bottom of the nectarine bowl over the layers.
12. Sprinkle the crumb topping on top of the nectarines, making sure it is evenly distributed and doesn’t have any overly high mounds or bumps
13. Put the pie on a large baking sheet and bake for 20 minutes.
14. After 20 minutes, turn down the temperature down to 375°F and bake for an additional 25-30 minutes until the edges of the crust are golden and the crumb topping starts to slightly brown. You may see some bubbling around the edges of the pie where the crumbs and the crust meet
15. Let the pie cool in the pie plate (but off the baking sheet) for about an hour then cut into wedges and serve with ice cream, whipped (coconut) cream or just as is
16. Store leftovers in the fridge and enjoy them cold
Notes: I think this would work rather well with plums or pluots instead of nectarines, and adding some ground ginger or cardamom to the filling would certainly be great as well.