The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orlean

I am totally unique. No one in this entire country has the merchandise we have. Also, I am practical. I will not make certain flavors. Mango I won't make. Weird stuff I won't make. Some guys who worked for me a couple of years ago, they broke off on their own, and started making the oddest-ball-flavored ices in the world - mango this and banana-something that - and, of course, they eventually went out of business. I found out some guy was carrying their merchandise and carrying mine also in his store, and I said to him, 'No way you're carrying both. Carrying both! You can drop dead.' And you know what? Three weeks later, he did. No kidding. But I had nothing to with it. He had heart trouble. The fact is, though, I am very vindictive. I am. You might think: Peter Benfaremo, he's a short guy, he's a plumpy guy, what can he do to hurt me? Well, I have my ways.

-"Nonstop," from The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

If I'm remembering correctly, my first introduction to Susan Orlean's work was via the film Adaptation. Intrigued by the wild and crazy plot, I went back to the source material, which was Orlean's book The Orchid Thief. My parents had both read it and enjoyed it much earlier, and, belatedly, I caught on. It was a fascinating read, and Orlean's name stuck in my mind.

Thus, earlier this month when I checked out my grab bag of books from the library, her collection of essays, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, was among them. I am pleased to report that it was a good choice.

The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup is a compilation of profiles of people Orlean deemed "extraordinary." Most of them were previously published in The New Yorker, and they date back as early as 1987. Luckily for the reader, Orlean really does have a knack for finding extraordinary people, who are all the more interesting because you've never heard of them before*. This isn't Barbara Walters' Most Fascinating People, in other words.

Take Peter Benfaremo, the Lemon Ice King of Corona, whom I quoted above. Or Colin Duffy, an average ten-year-old boy Orlean decided to profile instead of Macaulay Culkin, then also ten. Or the sisters who were in the outsider band The Shaggs. All actually fascinating, and Orlean has a lovely, dry wit that makes reading the profiles a pleasure. She is also adept with description ("The Maui surfer girls love one another's hair. It is awesome hair, long and bleached by the sun, and it falls over their shoulders straight, like water, or in squiggles, like seaweed, or in waves. They are forever playing with it - yanking it up into ponytails, or twisting handfuls and securing them with chopsticks or pencils, or dividing it as carefully as you would divide a pile of coins and then weaving it into tight yellow plaits.") She uses words like "bosky." She's a really good writer, is what I'm saying.

My attention did flag a few times, notably in some of the longer profiles. I also wasn't a huge fan of the title essay, mostly because I find the whole bullfighting culture pretty nauseating. In general, though, it was a very interesting book - and it really made me want to go get some ice from Corona.

Up next: A friend lent me Divine By Mistake, a fantasy novel by P.C. Cast. I think I'll try that before delving into the Keats bio.


*Exceptions: Tiffany, of "I Think We're Alone Now" fame, and perhaps some tennis players and a basketball player if you were following those sports in the mid-90s (I was not). Also, Silly Billy (aka David Friedman, although he's since changed his name) is now somewhat well known as a member of the Friedman family featured in the documentary Capturing the Friedmans.

I Want To Read: New in Mystery

I love a good mystery, as I think I've made abundantly clear. Naturally, I was excited to hear that Henning Mankell, author of the Wallander series, had written a new novel. I was a little disappointed that it didn't feature Wallander, of course, although I still have plenty of that series left to read. The Man from Beijing instead focuses on Birgitta Roslin, a judge dealing with the aftermath of a massacre in a small Swedish village. As the title indicates, she soon discovers that the case is a bit more far-reaching than it might first appear. I read this review from Entertainment Weekly, in which the reviewer calls Mankell's latest "hands down the best thriller [she's] read in five years." Okay, I'm sold. NPR is pretty positive as well, in case you'd like another opinion.



Technically, P.D. James's latest book isn't a mystery - it's about mysteries, however, so I don't feel too bad about lumping it with Mankell's in one post. P.D. James is one of the preeminent modern mystery authors, and I've enjoyed several of her Adam Dalgliesh novels. In Talking About Detective Fiction, James traces the roots of novels featuring detectives (paging Wilkie Collins) and considers their evolution to the modern day. The New York Times review makes it sound really, really good. (Those digs at Agatha Christie! Who knew?) I am 80th on the library hold list - though someone with a 600 page Keats biography sitting on her shelf probably shouldn't be placing any holds at all. At 80th, I imagine I have a while, at least.

Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris

I'd been able to read minds all my life. The ability is no great gift. Most peoples' minds don't bear reading. Their thoughts are boring, disgusting, disillusioning, but very seldom amusing. At least [Vampire] Bill had helped me learn how to cut out some of the buzz. Before he'd given me some clues, it had been like tuning in to a hundred radio stations simultaneously. Some of them had come in crystal clear, some had been remote, and some, like the thoughts of shape-shifters, had been full of static and obscurity. But they'd all added up to cacophony. No wonder lots of people had treated me as a half-wit.

Vampires were silent. That was the great thing about vamps, at least from my point of view: They were dead.

-Dead as a Doornail

Oh, Sookie. Remember when things were simple, and the only thing Sookie had to worry about was her burgeoning relationship with Vampire Bill - well, that and that pesky serial killer? By the onset of Dead as a Doornail, the 5th novel in the Sookie Stackhouse series, our heroine has become hopelessly enmeshed in the supernatural community, and her life is just getting more and more complicated.

There's a new threat to Sookie's world in Dead as a Doornail: someone is shooting shifters. This hits particularly close to home now that Sookie's brother, Jason, has been tentatively welcomed into the shifter community. And after fire is set to her home, Sookie has to face the fact that someone wants her dead as well. Not to mention that Merlotte's has a new vampire-pirate(!) bartender, Alcide Herveaux is pushing Sookie's involvement in the campaign for a new leader of the Werewolf community, and Vampire Bill has a new girlfriend. Definitely complicated for our girl Sookie.

The plot really rolls along in this one, which I found to be the biggest page-turner of the series since the first book. Now, once you're about three-quarters in, things start to become a bit easier to figure out, but Charlaine Harris does an admirable job of keeping the reader guessing for the bulk of the book. The confluence of these different supernatural communities and persons, all with their different allegiances and motivations, makes it challenging to suss out a culprit for quite a while. It was definitely an enjoyable read.

That having been said, I was a little disappointed in the route Harris went with Alcide Herveaux. When he was first introduced, Alcide seemed like a strong match for Sookie, particularly once we learned how flawed (to put it kindly) Bill was. By this book, Alcide has become much less sympathetic, which I think is too bad. I'll be curious to see whether Alcide can redeem himself in the future, or if Harris is more interested in the new romantic interest she introduced in Dead as a Doornail (whom I didn't find terribly exciting, to be honest). If not, I'll be happy if we get more of the ever-fascinating Eric.

Up next: I've started reading Susan Orlean's book of essays, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup.

From Esquire: "Roger Ebert: The Essential Man"

Ebert grabs his tray and laptop and taps out a few words before he presses a button and speakers come to life.

"What else can go wrong?" the voice says.

The voice is called Alex, a voice with a generic American accent and a generic tone and no emotion. At first Ebert spoke with a voice called Lawrence, which had an English accent. Ebert liked sounding English, because he is an Anglophile, and his English voice reminded him of those beautiful early summers when he would stop in London with Chaz on their way home after the annual chaos of Cannes. But the voice can be hard to decipher even without an English accent layered on top of it — it is given to eccentric pronunciations, especially of names and places — and so for the time being, Ebert has settled for generic instead.

From Esquire: "Roger Ebert: The Essential Man"

It's really a well-done article about a compelling subject. That Ebert has been able to bear up, and even flourish, creatively, in a situation that would cause many of us to buckle is quite inspiring.

Edited to add: Ebert's response to the article

Underground London by Stephen Smith

There were rivers, streams, creeks, buried wharves, conduits, culverts, cellars, shelters, basements, eaves, lower ground floors, walk-downs, disappearing staircases, grottoes, dungeons, graves, tombs, crypts, a disused morgue at the foot of Tower Bridge, catafalques, sepulchres, catacombs, brick arches at Waterloo station where cabbies sat and chatted in each other's taxis, tunnels, subways, lost terraces, warrens, mazes, kitchens, lock-ups where supermarkets stored their goods, shunting yards and railway turntables, wrecks, ruins, dregs, the Elephant Man's hat in the archives of the Royal London Hospital, precious relics, forgotten booty, buried treasure. I wanted to know more about this subterranean landscape. It was going to be an escape from the city above, but an escape in another sense, too, an adventure to make me forget my inner-city blues.

-Underground London

I will fully admit that Underground London is one of the more peculiar reading choices I have made since having started this blog. As much of an Anglophile as I am, I really don't know that much about above-ground London. Starting underground seems to be a bit of a backwards way of going at it.

Of course, London and what lies beneath it are inextricably intertwined, so in learning about one, one can't help but find out a bit more about the other. It turns out to be quite a vast subject. Stephen Smith approaches the underground from a variety of angles. He explores the sewers, the Tube, and the system governing the Thames. He looks at parts of London that date from the Roman era all the way up to Cold War bunkers. One cannot fault his thoroughness, but it is rather disappointing to discover that not all of these places or eras are equally fascinating.

I was quite interested in his exploration of the Tube - dead stations are particularly compelling, though I can't quite explain why. Perhaps because they're left just as they were, and give the impression of being frozen in the moment of time when they were closed. (City Hall station in New York is a beautiful example.) Or perhaps I just watched Ghostbusters II too often as a child.

I also enjoyed the oldest areas Smith explored, such as the section of Roman wall he found in a carpark, or the remaining bits of one of Henry VIII's tennis courts. With the exception of the Tube, I found the more modern sections to be considerably drier. I guess I am just not terribly interested in how one keeps the Thames from flooding London. If that sounds like it's up your alley, well, you should find the last chapter to be spellbinding. Otherwise, like me, you'll find that the book ends on a rather dull note.

Nonetheless, I do feel as though I learned a lot. In fact, Smith used enough particularly British vocabulary and references that I took to jotting notes on my bookmark so that I could look things up at my convenience. And this is how I learned that a reference to the noise of rhubarb coming from Parliament had nothing to do with the plant. Fun fact!

Up next: Planning on taking a bit of a two-pronged approach. I checked a book out of the library a couple of weeks back on the differences between British and American English. I've read the beginning, but I have a sense that I may skim it more than read it, particularly when it hits lists of terms that I don't find terribly exciting. So, I plan to do bits and pieces of that along with the 5th Sookie Stackhouse for more of a proper read.

Thursday Links Roundup

Just a few odds & ends from around the web.

St. Martin's Press announces the first adult Sweet Valley High book (Entertainment Weekly) - Forget Elizabeth (too boring) and Jessica (too irritating) - inquiring minds want to know what happened to Bruce and Lila. (And even Enid!)

Neil Gaiman to write Doctor Who episode (The Guardian)- Yes, please. I've had that in the back of my head ever since I read this blog entry (scroll down), in which Gaiman rewrites Hamlet's "To be or not to be" in the style of the 10th Doctor.

Top 10 Victorian detective stories (The Guardian, again) - Okay, I admit that I'm totally unfamiliar with the work of James McGreet, but I can't pass up a list like this. Also, look at the cover of his book - you can judge a book by its cover when it's a totally awesome cover, right? (I wasn't a huge fan of his #4 choice, The Suspicion of Mr. Whicher, sadly. But you know how I feel about #3.)

And for your non-bookish link: Charlie Brooker's hilarious take on how the news covers snowstorms (reposted from Gawker). (This is neither here nor there, but I think Charlie Brooker looks like a cross between Dominic West and Jared Harris. Anyone else?)

Adaptation: Bright Star

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, -
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

- excerpt from "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats

Oh, Keats. I must confess straight-off, I was almost entirely unfamiliar with his poems prior to seeing Bright Star. I had chiefly come into contact with his work in crossword clues like "__ __ __ on a Grecian Urn." (Ode is quite the popular crossword answer.) I am definitely undereducated when it comes to poetry*.

Nevertheless, I was quite intrigued by everything I'd read and seen of Bright Star, which tells the story of the last years of Keats's life. (He died at age twenty-five from tuberculosis). I'm quite the sucker for period romances (A Room with a View is one of my very favorite films), and I found the trailer to be flat-out beautiful. So while I didn't quite make it to the theater, it got moved up to the top of my Netflix queue soon after it arrived on DVD.

Keats is played by Ben Whishaw, an actor so captivating and otherworldly that I'm not entirely convinced that he's not some sort of fairy prince. At the point that we meet him, Keats is sharing a home with his friend and fellow poet, Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), on a property shared with the Brawne family. The eldest Brawne daughter, Fanny (Abbie Cornish), is a clear-headed young woman with an interest in designing clothes. They begin to get to know each other. Then they begin to fall in love.

Their courtship scenes are absolutely lovely. Keats, whose poetry had been released to no great acclaim at that point, had neither the wealth nor the status to propose marriage to Fanny. Fanny didn't care, of course, but this was the early 19th century - things were not so simple. Brown, for his part, urges Keats to spurn Fanny, as he believes her to be toying with him. (Brown's jealousy is clearly an issue, and Schneider really handles it well.) All the same, we see their great, ever-growing passion for one another, relayed in the smallest of gestures - my particular favorite was the flutter of Keats's eyelids when he realized he was separated from Fanny by only the wall between their respective rooms. It's not hard to imagine that this is the man who once ended a poem ("Bright Star," actually) with the line, "And so live ever - or else swoon to death."

So their romance is doomed - doubly so, as we the viewers know that Keats does not have long to live. This knowledge does not make it seem any less tragic, though credit goes to Jane Campion for imbuing the film with so many lovely moments that the tragedy is not overbearing. I really cannot overemphasize how gorgeous the film is.


That's one of my favorite scenes. It seems so simple, but the wind blowing the curtain in while Fanny sits, contemplative, upon the bed is almost achingly beautiful.

I'm almost glad I didn't see Bright Star earlier, because I think I would have been far more disappointed upon hearing the Oscar nominations last week if I had. I would put it right up there for Best Picture, and it deserved a nod in many of the other categories as well - I'd particularly single out Schneider for Best Supporting Actor, as well as the cinematography. It is a bit frustrating when films of this quality don't get nominated for awards, but I'm glad I discovered it, at least.

Oh - and Andrew Motion's biography of Keats (upon which Campion's screenplay was based) is totally on hold for me at the library.

*Although I am still trying, intermittently. I recently dug out Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled again, and now I'm well informed about villanelles ("Mad Girl's Love Song" by Sylvia Path is a brilliant example, if you are unfamiliar with the style, as I was.)

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

I share with almost every adult I know this crazy quilt of optimism and worries, feeling locked into certain habits but keen to change them in the right direction. And the tendency to feel like a jerk for falling short of absolute conversion. I'm not sure why. If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It's the worst of bad manners - and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society - to ridicule the small gesture. These earnest efforts might just get us past the train-wreck of the daily news, or the anguish of standing behind a child, looking with her at the road ahead, searching out redemption where we can find it: recycling or carpooling or growing a garden or saving a species or something. Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered.

-Animal, Vegetable, Miracle


The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

-"The World Is Too Much With Us," William Wordsworth

Oh yes, I'm back to write about food some more. I had no idea when I started this blog how many food-related books I would be reading. It's an interesting development for me.

In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, author Barbara Kingsolver and her family document the year they've pledged to spend eating locally. Month by month, we follow Kingsolver and her family, who have recently relocated to a farm in southwestern Virginia. Kingsolver tells the bulk of the story, which is supplemented by short articles by her husband, biologist Steven L. Hopp, and by essays and family recipes from her teenage daughter, Camille. The going is tough, at first. When they begin in March, they are heavily reliant on the local farmers' market, and there's not much there, either. They persevere, allowing only a few non-local exceptions in their diet: coffee, quite understandably, and flour to make their daily bread. As the weather gets warmer, they are able to plant and reap their own crops, though they remain dedicated customers at the farmers' market. They are overjoyed when their first asparagus starts tentatively pushing its way above ground.

It is Kingsolver's belief that people are too disconnected from the sources of their food. (Hence my inclusion of the Wordsworth poem about the growing alienation of man from nature. Oh, snap.) When people consume food grown locally, they know where it came from. It's as simple as that. Eating food from far away is unhelpful in a lot of ways. It's worse for the environment, since it takes energy to move the food around. It's worse for animals, who are often existing in appalling conditions prior to their slaughter - and non-local animal meat generally comes from these Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). It's worse for family farms, who are being edged out by large corporations. And it's worse for us, the consumers, since we are often getting inferior food, already days old before it's available in a grocery store. Pretty much the only winners in this system are the corporations - and with some corporate giants practically twirling their mustaches as they tie farmers down to the railroad tracks, it hardly seems like helping them out is our best choice.

So what to do? Kingsolver has ideas, and I especially love that she is not so militant that she expects everyone to do as she and her family have been able to do (see the excerpt above). She's not Jonathan Safran Foer, either. Eating animals is okay, but there is a line to be drawn. Yes, you have to kill an animal to eat it. But do you need to support, through your buying power, the existence of a system that allows such suffering? No. I'm trying to take the advice of Camille, who warns against self-righteousness when talking about food. It's something I feel more and more strongly about, though. I'm not perfect (I'd have a hard time turning down a Chik-Fil-A chicken sandwich), but I'm becoming more aware of my choices. Once you have the information, I have trouble understanding the lack of motivation (assuming you have the means and opportunity) to choose food more deliberately. For me, it's like trying to understand another person's politics. Logically, I can understand having different ideas, but really I only understand what feels right to me. Maybe it's sanctimonious of me, but that's why I am going on about it in my blog and not as much in real life. Perhaps it's more forgivable if you think of it as a particular pet peeve of mine. I mean, everyone's allowed to have a few of those, right?

I always tend to go on and on when it comes to food books. Obviously I enjoyed this one a lot, although it wasn't a particularly quick read. It was informative and it was entertaining (the section on breeding turkeys comes to mind). I actually think I enjoyed it more that either of Kingsolver's novels that I've read (The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible).

Related: I thought this profile of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey was really interesting.

Up next: Remember my mentioning an eclectic haul from my last library trip? Well, I've just started Underground London by Stephen Smith. It's a nonfiction book about...underground London. Well, it's something I know very little about, so I'm preparing for a lot of (potentially useless) knowledge coming at me.