"Flannery O’Connor’s favorite meal at the Sanford House restaurant in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lunched regularly with her mother..."

"... was fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie.... Every morning started with Catholic Mass followed by cornflakes and a thermos of coffee in her spinster bedroom while she wrote for three hours. The writing time, she said, was her 'filet mignon.'... [O'Connor's biographer] told me that 'you wouldn’t want to eat what O’Connor ate' and described the cuisine she ate at home with her mother as a 'curdled, dry, dyspeptic kind of fare.' At home, O’Connor and her mother rarely had their meals in the dining room. Left to her own devices, O’Connor might eat a tin of sardines for lunch. Once, during the brief time in which O’Connor lived alone in New York City, she served her friend Lyman Fulton nothing but 'goat’s milk cheese and faucet water'—which later became a running joke between them.... [T]he restaurant’s recipe for the peppermint chiffon pie... looked unappetizingly dour. It called for evaporated milk, gelatin, and a premade Keebler’s Chocolate Ready Crust crust. The peppermint flavor and pink color came from melted peppermint hard candy...."

Writes Valerie Stivers, in "Cooking Peppermint Chiffon Pie with Flannery O’Connor" (Paris Review).

The recipe refers to the candy as "Starlight," and they are still sold under that name. Here's an Amazon Associates link to the product, in case you're yearning to relive old-timey hard-candydom. And here's the Keebler chocolate crust. Now all you need is a can of evaporated milk and some packaged gelatin and you can figure out how the restaurant did it. Stivers makes a posher version of the antiquated treat. She makes the crust from scratch... if you consider Oreos scratch. 

"Country Pie is not about sex, its a cute song about liking pie!"

The best answer to the question "Are there any songs where you're convinced the fan "consensus" interpretation is wrong about Bob Dylan's lyrics?" (at r/bobdylan).

Somebody asks "What do you do with this lyric though? 'Saddle me up my big white goose Tie me on 'er and turn her loose" and gets the answer "It's a riff on Mother Goose with the surreal imagery of Dylan riding a goose. Sexual? Um, maaybe..."

The lyrics at Genius are annotated with this 1987 quote from Bob Dylan: "People try and read so much into songs. You know that song, Country Pie? That’s what it was about. Pie."

Album version here.

A very special selection of TikTok videos for you today. Let me know what you like.

1. Bob Dylan sings "Happy Birthday" to Brian Wilson! (Wilson turns 80 today. Dylan preceded him in octogenarianism by 1 year, so he knows whereof he sings. Perhaps I should also mention that Paul McCartney turned 80 two days ago. Let us marvel at the greatness of octogenarian men! Thanks for hanging on all these years, o, fabulous heroes!)

2. Pieface. Not a pie in the face. A pie face.

3. One lady crosses the street in the flood, so shouldn't the second lady?

4. How you pass someone on a hiking trail compared to how your dad does.

5. "If European Americans were the cultural other: Performative Holiday Merch Edition."

6. The Italian husband is told "Use your noodle."

7. The way Mike Wallace spoke to Maria Callas in 1974.

8. Do you mean to tell me there are people who use washcloths?

9. The way department stores talk to each other.

"I should've worked in a pie factory. I knew I missed my calling."

 

It's only just now that I found a way to fit it on this blog — a goodbye to Gilbert Gottfried.

***

"I'm here to supervise balloons!" 

***

"Thank you, mein Führer"/"Only Gilbert can get away with that."

***

"You know, I can't fire you for being inappropriate, because I'm inappropriate. I do many things that are totally inappropriate."

"In Athens... the puppet will befriend a minotaur and they will explore the city together. In Naples she is tired, has had enough..."

"... and will have a tantrum which, Vesuvius-like, releases energy, which will bring hundreds of dancers and musicians to join her. In Cologne, Amal will share apple pie with elderly people and hear their stories of growing up after the second world war."

From "Puppet of refugee girl to ‘walk’ across Europe along 12-week arts festival trail/Three teams of four puppeteers will accompany Little Amal from Turkey to Manchester to celebrate refugees" (The Guardian).

"When I’m alone late at night on a deserted road, I like to walk on the double yellow lines. One time I decided to stop and lie down..."

"... right there in the middle of the road. I kept myself narrow, arms pinned, so cars could pass on either side. But I wasn’t invisible, and I alarmed a kind policeman who happened to drive by me. After determining that I was not dead, drunk or high, he concluded I was suicidal. We had a long talk. It didn’t help for me to explain that if I had wanted to be run over I would’ve moved several feet in one direction or the other. And picked a busier road. He wanted to know, why, if I didn’t want to be run over, was I lying in the middle of the road? There were so many reasons. I wanted to see the night sky from the perspective of the road; I wanted to be in this secret spot that always got passed by and never occupied..."

From "Unruliness" by Agnes Callard, a 2018 blog post, which is discussed in a new New Yorker article by Paul Bloom, "The Strange Appeal of Perverse Actions/Why do we enjoy doing things for no good reason?" Callard is a philosopher, Bloom a psychology professor.

Bloom writes:

Callard is careful to distinguish unruliness from rebellion. By lying down in the road, she wasn’t critiquing the status quo or sticking it to the Man. Unruly people might flatter themselves as rebels, but unruliness is nothing so determinate—it’s just an unwillingness to play by the rules. It’s a near-neighbor, therefore, to perversity, a topic long central to theology and philosophy...

Perverse actors—I won’t call them “perverts,” since that word evokes distracting connotations—can also be creative or funny.... The blogger Scott Alexander points out that four per cent of Americans tell pollsters that they think reptilian aliens rule the Earth....

Unruliness, perversity, pigheadedness—psychologists have long been interested in this bestiary of paradoxical thought and action. Perversity is a puzzle. It’s hard to explain, scientifically, what Edgar Allan Poe described as “the imp of the perverse.”...

A friend of mine tells how his family made him a pie on his birthday, as a surprise. His young niece was repeatedly instructed not to reveal the secret, and she solemnly agreed. But, when he came into the house, she suddenly screamed, “There is no pie!”...

Much more to this article — I'm skipping over a lot of good stuff — but it, perversely/harmoniously, ends with pie:

It’s said that a waitress once asked [the Columbia University philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser] what he wanted for dessert—apple pie or blueberry pie. He chose the apple pie. Then she returned with news: there was also cherry pie. “In that case,” Morgenbesser said, “I’ll have the blueberry.”

"I know a guy — he collects unemployment even though he’s employed — who just had his teeth veneered bright white, with ceramic laminates."

"I ran into him recently, and he dropped to his knees to coo over how my puppy has grown. As he went to kiss her freckled nose, he flashed his crocodile smile. That same week, I heard from another guy — last I knew, he was a real mess, drove his marriage off a cliff, with his kids in the back seat — letting me know he’s now a life coach and focus counselor. He wants to help me live my best life and was offering me a 20 percent discount."

I just think it's funny that those are the first 5 sentences of an article about artichokes — "Don’t Fear the Artichoke. Cook It Whole."

Vegetables have gotten so meaningful lately. There was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez politicizing cauliflower and yearning for "yucca" (presumably yuca).

By the way, for a meaningful dose of artichokes, you might want to see the revival of the Sam Shepard play "Curse of the Starving Class," which is off Broadway until June 2. They throw a lot of artichokes around in that play. I literally got hit by artichokes, sitting in the front row in 1978. I can't remember what the artichokes meant, but they were important. I remember getting hit and I remember the line "So that's what artichokes smell like" but I don't remember what they were supposed to mean, though of course they had to mean something, since everything in a play means something.

The artichoke is the most fearsome vegetable. All those points, and if one sticks you, it might still hurt the next day, as if those stickers are venomous.

I was going to punch up this post with other vegetables in pop culture (other than those artichokes in "Starving Class"), but it was hard to Google. I thought I had something in "Eating Your Cultural Vegetables," a 2011 NYT article, but it's about watching movies and TV shows that are supposed to be good for you (i.e., metaphorical vegetables).

In college, a friend demanded to know what kind of idiot I was that I hadn’t yet watched Tarkovsky’s “Solaris.” “It’s so boring,” he said with evident awe. “You have to watch it, but you won’t get it.”...

A friend messages me: “Oh, you have to see ‘Mildred Pierce,’ ” and she’s right: I do have to.... But that doesn’t mean that, as Kate Winslet bakes yet another pie, I won’t sometimes wonder if those five hours might be more profitably spent aspiring in a different direction: exercising, maybe, or reading a book or just watching 10 episodes of the hilarious (and not at all contemplative) cartoon “Bob’s Burgers.”...

Yes, why watch something long if you prefer reading or exercising, both of which are at least as good for you as some aspirational film or TV series? Lately, the only TV I watch is "Jeopardy!" Do you think James Holzhauer has had his teeth veneered with bright white ceramic laminates?

"I said, 'Jackie, I want to stay home and eat lemon meringue pie in my pajamas, in front of the T.V. at the Beverly Hills Hotel.'"

Jackie was Jacqueline Susann, and the "I" there is Rex Reed, describing how he turned down a dinner invitation to Sharon Tate’s house the night of the Manson murders.

Quoted in "Rex Reed Bangs a Gong on the Mediocrity of Modern Life" by Alex Williams in the NYT.

Lots of great pictures and stories at the link, including life in the Dakota building, where he bought a place for $30,000 in 1969 and where John Lennon was shot in 1980:

He once signed a petition supporting John Lennon when the government was trying to deport Mr. Lennon because of his drug use and political activism. Mr. Lennon thanked him with a one-year subscription to TV Guide, Mr. Reed said, adding, “That was his bible. All he did was lie around stoned watching television.”

Pie in the face.

A reader, whom I won't identify, emailed me about the story (which I hadn't blogged) about the accusation that White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders had falsely presented a photograph of a pecan pie as her own. Here's the tweet that baited the Sanders haters:

I️ dont cook much these days, but managed this Chocolate Pecan Pie for Thanksgiving at the family farm! pic.twitter.com/rO8nFxtly7

— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) November 23, 2017

The reader writes:

A blogger at something called the PalmerReport apparently did a reverse image search of the claimed "Huckabee" pie and came up with no matching images and therefore concluded that the allegation of April Ryan was false.

But look at the website of the Whaley Pecan Company...

Wtf? Is Sanders a colossal liar or the most unusual troll in Washington?

A couple hours later the same reader emails again:

I sent the email below from my iPhone. I've looked at the Whaley Pecan Company 9" pecan pie photo and it isn't Sarah Huckabee Sanders' photo. Extremely close, but not the same.

My response:

It was always obvious to me that Sanders's photograph was not done by a professional because the photographer's shadow is on the pie.

I guess other people are looking very closely at the arrangement of the pecans and the details of the crust crimping. Stare deeply enough into the face of a pecan pie and the pecans stare back at you.

We started out in Richfield, where the newspaper served with the hotel breakfast seemed ominous...

... to me, a non-farmer, who takes a while to think about the connection between "reaper" and rich fields and thinks first and distractingly of the Grim Reaper.

We made it to Route 89 after getting distracted by a tandoori tacqueria and not hanging a left turn, then getting our mistake helpfully called to our attention by a sign that read — my all-time favorite road-direction sign — "This Is Not 89."

Out on Route 89, there was "ho-made" pie...



... and we found our way through the tunnel...



... to our beautiful destination.

The morning after: Why did I do that last night — not blog about Neil Gorsuch?

I'm asking myself that question in the cold dark of pre-dawn. All I wrote last night was "UPDATE: Gorsuch." Not even an exclamation point after "Gorsuch."

But this is good. Talk about normalizing Trump! Trump named someone on his pre-vetted list, just as he said he would do. The man, by all observable indicia, appears perfectly appropriate, including the humble demeanor.*

Trump looked and sounded very presidential in the classic East Room setting. Those who want immediately to trash anything Trump does were invited to look like fools.

I was watching CNN, and the first (and only) attacks I heard were about Gorsuch's opposition to assisted suicide. I laughed. The Trump antagonists are going to rage about the value of suicide?!

We're supposed to get outraged because Gorsuch is against suicide? The Trump-haters think they can rally us with our enthusiasm for suicide?! Maybe they think they can. After all, younger folks may hanker for euthanizing us baby boomers, and arguments about suicide resemble arguments about abortion. Knock yourself out, Gorsuch opponents, you crazy nuts.
_____________________________

* If I had live-blogged my every thought last night, I would have dinged him for wearing a plaid tie and wiping his nose a few times and turning the pages of his written speech with undue amplitude. I'd have complained about his incantation of all the usual pieties,** but that wasn't enough to get me up out of my comfy TV-watching chair last night. Perhaps Trump planned it that way. Make it a prime-time TV show and people will be deactivated in their comfy chairs. They'll watch and feel that Gorsuch is a very fine man. Look at his education credentials. Clerked for Whizzer White and Anthony Kennedy. And doesn't his wife look like my high school teacher in that white blouse and a-line skirt? Zzzzz.
_____________________________

** "'Pieties' — is that not a word?" I ask the room as Blogger impugns it as a typo. Before looking it up and ensuring that it is indeed a word — it is — I'm distracted by its silliness — "pie ties," just as I'm writing about the man's tie. I'm contemplating the American slapstick/protest history of pies in the face of dignified tie-wearing men....





... it's so perfectly the opposite of pieties. But the dignified men of the present are well-defended nowadays, and I haven't seen a classic pie-in-the-face protest in a long time. The one in those 2 pictures is a mayor deliberately taking a pie-in-the-face challenge.***

_____________________________

*** The answer to the old question Can a footnote have a footnote? is: Yes!

"White people walked out of Kuso because it wasn't 50 years a slave, bye hoe."

Tweets Zachary Fox, who worked on the film, which is by the black artist Steven Ellison, AKA Flying Lotus. The film "Kuso" played at Sundance and a lot of people walked out. Presumably these were the same sort of Hollywood glamorous people who talk prettily about wanting to support black filmmakers. But what happens when those filmmakers do not stick to the conspicuously admired dutiful stories about the history of racism in America?

Kuso's official plot synopsis describes a collection of semi-connected short films that chronicle the lives of the mutated men, women and children of Los Angeles, after an earthquake...

Various scenes are said to feature a man having sex with a talking boil on a woman's neck, genital mutilation, and a doctor, played by George Clinton, who keeps a medicinal cockroach in his anus.

One reviewer, explaining the walkouts, said:

"Some folks stuck around after a woman chewed on concrete until her teeth disintegrated, but still peaced out when an alien creature force-yanked a foetus from another woman's womb (accompanied by a Mortal Kombat sound clip: 'Get over here!"), then smoked the tiny corpse."

It sounds awful, but Fox's tweet rang true.

MEANWHILE: A white actress has a scene where she just eats pie and the Sundance people were absolutely fascinated and can't stop talking about it.

... I thought it was oddly suspenseful. Rooney attacks that pie like a cake person, engineering such unusual fork scoops (she stabs the pie at least four times before each bite) that I started to wonder whether the actress had even ever seen a pie before. We all do weird things when dealing with grief, but I was tickled by the fact that Mara's bizarre pie-eating method still managed to leave the crust mostly intact....

And yes, I know, "The Help" had pie... and that was another one of those serious, instructive movies. The black characters were involved with pie in order to teach us a lesson about race in America. Where is the movie that expects us to fixate on a black actress eating pie as a way of revealing something about her deeply individual, personal problems?

"Cherish some flower, be it ever so lowly/Labor! All labor is noble and holy!"

From the recipe for macaroni pie — which contains "wild duck, birds, or squirrels" — in "Mrs. Elliott's Housewife: Containing Practical Receipts in Cookery" from 1870:



I traced the poem fragment to "Labor" by Frances Sargent Osgood. Osgood (1811-1850) was pals with Edgar Allan Poe:

Oddly, Poe's wife Virginia approved of the relationship and often invited Osgood to visit their home. Virginia believed their friendship had a "restraining" effect on her husband. Poe had given up alcohol to impress Osgood, for example. Virginia may also have been aware of her own impending death and was looking for someone who would take care of Poe. Osgood's husband Samuel also did not object, apparently used to his wife's impetuous behavior; he himself had a reputation as a philanderer. 

"Opposing the John Wayne Day resolution is like opposing apple pie, fireworks, baseball, the Free Enterprise system and the Fourth of July!"

Said California state assemblyman Matthew Harper (a Republican), who "sought to declare May 26, 2016, as John Wayne Day to mark the day the actor was born" and encountered opposition:

He had disturbing views towards race," objected Assemblyman Luis Alejo, D-Watsonville, leading off a 20-minute debate. Alejo cited a 1971 interview with Playboy in which Wayne [said] "I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people"....

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, cited his comments defending white Europeans' encroachment on American Indians who Wayne once said "were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."

The article — at Fox5ny — nudged me to assume that we were approaching the 100th anniversary of the birth of John Wayne, which skewed me against the Alejo/Gonzalez position. But I caught myself, Googled for info, found out John Wayne was born in 1907, and must come down against Harper. Let it go. The second-most-liked John Wayne quote at Good Reads is: 

"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday."

Think about it, Pilgrim.





For reference, here's the full text of the Playboy interview — PDF. Key passage:

"A bear has broken into a Colorado bakery and chomped his way through 38 pies, even taking two for the road."

"He devoured 24 cherry and 14 apple pies - but left strawberry-and-rhubarb pies completely untouched in Tuesday night's raid."

No one wants rhubarb pie.

"Indeed, we at FiveThirtyEight are mildly bearish on Bush relative to the consensus."

"If he’s not able to make a good electability case — and his favorability ratings don’t help — Republicans have little reason to pick him ahead of alternatives who are closer to the base ideologically."

But it’s Bush’s nomination chances we’re bearish about — in many ways, the nomination is the tougher hurdle since it’s a multi-candidate race. In analyzing the general election race, it’s only the conditional probabilities that matter. If Bush is good enough to win the primary, he’s probably good enough to give Republicans about a 50-50 shot of winning next November.

 That's from 4 days ago. So's this: Jeb eats pie.

At the Pie Shop...

... you can show a little humility.

"Maybe there’s a difference between a blowjob and a slice of pie — one that is occluded..."

"... when all types of service work are collapsed into one, a difference that today’s young left feminists don’t want to think about."

A sentence from Katha Pollitt's "Why Do So Many Leftists Want Sex Work to Be the New Normal?" that has it all. Blowjobs, pie, the word "occluded," an absurdly unnecessary and timidly stated observation that 2 things may — may! — be different, and daring lefty-on-lefty/feminist-on-feminist/old-on-young action.

"But then most things in Des Moines in the 1950s were the best of their type."

Wrote Bill Bryson in his memoir "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid":

We had the smoothest, most mouth-pleasing banana cream pie at the Toddle House.... We had the most vividly delicious neon-colored ice creams at Reed’s, a parlor of cool opulence near Ashworth Swimming Pool (itself the handsomest, most elegant public swimming pool in the world, with the slimmest, tannest female lifeguards) in Greenwood Park (best tennis courts, most decorous lagoon, comeliest drives). Driving home from Ashworth Pool through Greenwood Park, under a flying canopy of green leaves, nicely basted in chlorine and knowing that you would shortly be plunging your face into three gooey scoops of Reed’s ice cream is the finest feeling of well-being a human can have.

Babb, Montana... we came for the pie — huckleberry pie.