If you can't get rid of your gas stove, use the microwave more! Use the "toaster oven, air fryer, Instant Pot... or an electric kettle or hot water heater."

I'm reading "Worried about having a gas stove? Here’s how to limit risks" in The Washington Post.

I think most people with a gas stove are saying they have it because they like it and they're just worried the government will take it away, not looking for workarounds because they can't afford to replace it voluntarily. 

But maybe you'd like to shun your own stove and maximize cooking on the various electric appliances you already have. There's a section of this article that reads like the chirpy women's magazines I read in bulk in the 1970s (because it was my job).

We're told that there are "creative ways" to use these appliances. The uncreative use of the microwaves is to heat foods — that is, "zap cold leftovers." So what's creative? Apparently it's "creative" to "bake (remember mug cakes?), steam vegetables and in some situations even toast, fry or caramelize food." This is the kind of thing I found depressing reading about in the women's magazines in the 70s. The idea that you could feel clever by frying something in the microwave.

By the way, what's a "hot water heater"? Aside from the common silly redundancy that makes a smart ass want to say, Why do you need to heat water that's already hot?, what is this appliance if it's not an electric kettle? You've named the electric kettle, so what are we talking about? An immersion heater?!

Are you suggesting running the tap until it yield hot enough water from the only thing I ever call the "water heater," that thing that gives me a nice hot bath? I thought you weren't supposed to drink that.

You've got me thinking of Glenda Jackson in the 1971 movie "Sunday Bloody Sunday":

I have remembered that coffee-making — and the audience gasping in horror — for over half a century!

"In a way, it’s impossible to review Gold’s staging of 'King Lear,' because, in the arrogance of its conception...."

"Gold has set the play in what I took to be a contemporary universe, but I have no idea why the great hall where Lear (Glenda Jackson) meets with his family to divvy up his kingdom is covered in gold leaf. Are we in a North Korean palace? Trump Tower? A Russian oligarch’s apartment?... Goneril (Elizabeth Marvel, overreaching as usual) has an American twang, while Regan (Aisling O’Sullivan) speaks with an Irish brogue, and Ruth Wilson, doing her very best as Cordelia, and later as the Fool, has clear, British stage diction. Wouldn’t Lear’s daughters have grown up and been educated in the same place? Are their accents meant to indicate that they’ve already retreated into separate territories? Or does Gold mean to telegraph who the daughters 'really' are by giving them their own voices?... [R]ather than allow these actors to do what they do so well, Gold degrades their grace. He has [Pedro] Pascal’s Edmund... simulate a quickie with Goneril, after which she smears his lips with their sexual fluids. Is this a shocking gesture or a 'shocking' gesture? There’s much talk of body parts and copulation in 'King Lear,' as well as a great deal of nasty paternal derision, as when Lear calls his elder daughters 'unnatural hags.' When Glenda Jackson, the butch girl of my dreams from all those incredible seventies movies, utters such lines, the other actors shrink...  In the first half of the play, she is ferocious and loud, grandstanding and bellowing. She calms down in the second half, when Lear’s mind disintegrates, and I wish she could have shown some of that nuance sooner."

The New Yorker's Hilton Als does not like Sam Gold's version of "King Lear." The "butch girl of [his] dreams" just isn't doing it right, for some reason that I suppose I'd have to see the production to understand. The headline extracts Als's point like this: "Sam Gold’s Self-Serving Vision of 'King Lear'/In a new staging, the director uses Shakespeare’s words as a launching pad from which to explore his own theatrical concerns."

Why "Self-Serving"? Gold is pleasing himself and not the audience? But why is the audience disserved? There are so many productions of "King Lear." It's not as if the audience needs one particular approach and not another. At one point, Als asks, "But where do you draw the line between an interpretation that is freeing—and thus freeing to the audience, too—and one that is just frustratingly and bafflingly self-indulgent?" And that's a question I would ask about this review.

Speaking of self-indulgent, Als spends a good part of his column talking about Duke Ellington, whose connection to the subject is nothing more than that he once recorded an album full of instrumentals inspired by Shakespeare plays. It is, according to Als, "a sensual, undulating, and thoughtful album" that shows "the value of great artists’ being driven by the work of other great artists to create something new." So what? That has little to do with putting on a play with actors that have to speak a pre-determined text that has been interpreted and reinterpreted thousands of times.

"When you’re younger, Lear doesn’t feel real. When you get to my age, you are Lear in every nerve of your body."

Said Laurence Olivier, some years back. He's quoted today in "At 82, Glenda Jackson Commands the Most Powerful Role in Theater/'King Lear' has long been the crowning performance for actors who know how to dominate a stage. As a longstanding member of Parliament, Jackson has unique insight into authority" (NYT).

Remember Glenda Jackson, half a century ago, in "Women in Love"?



Are you excited to see her now, as King Lear? I'd love to see this in the theater. I saw "King Lear" in the theater half a century ago. Playing King Lear was Lee J. Cobb. Remember Lee J. Cobb?

"Tell all the truth but tell it slant..."

Wrote Emily Dickenson, quoted by the novelist Mary Gordon, leaving out the word "all," talking with the actress Glenda Jackson, in "Mary Gordon & Glenda Jackson Talk Poetry, Theater and the State of Feminism" (NYT)"

GJ: I’m so pleased you said that, because I’m a big fan of Emily Dickinson. The view of both Stevie [the British poet Stevie Smith, played by Jackson in "Stevie"] and Emily Dickinson seems to be that here were these two solitary, depressed, lonely women, but they lived in these fantastic worlds!

MG: They’re great, greater than anybody around at that time. But their forms are small. And so, female gets defined as minor. Some of American women writers’ best work was done in the form of the short story: Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford. I think what’s funny is around the same time that Emily Dickinson wrote, “I’m nobody! Who are you?” Whitman wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

***

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise,
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

ADDED: This seems to gesture, differently, at the "fake news" problem we fakely fret about these days. Maybe the participation of women has changed public discourse in a way that we haven't quite acclimated to. Consider the benefits of circuitous truth. It's the only way to get the "all" that even Mary Gordon let slide.