> to find enough rooms for the gathering
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: peeling clementines, fidgety puddings, reading recommendations, and Waffle House vistas.
Hello friend,
> I’m not really cooking (aside from adapting Rick Martinez’s florentines), but I am getting a lot of satisfaction from peeling clementines. When my mother used to pack my lunch, she would often pack two. I didn’t like them then as much as I do now: the perfume, the snap, the stickiness.
> Instead of cooking, perhaps you could watch this gingerbread showdown between two dream duos: Priya/Seth vs. Sohla/Ham. When the model starts with “a traditional gingerbread topography base,” you know it’s going to be good.
> Or might I interest you in Chen Chen and Meg Gabbert’s new recipe poem zine, Fidgety Puddings? I’m a fan of “Family Recipe Thrown Over a Period Drama Cliff.”
> I started knitting this blanket when I was in high school, abandoned it in college, and finally finished making it this week. It smells kind of weird and the color scheme is not exactly what I had planned, but it’s really satisfying to finish making a thing. If you’re interested, the pattern is here.
> Last podcast episode of the season! In which Genevieve and I talk about college classes that changed us, the books we would bring with us on a trip, and science-ish writing. Get it here!
> This week my preferred form of procrastination, i.e. not-thinking-about-what-I’m-worried-about, has been reading. Would recommend Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. I wish I could have seen it performed live.
> Read Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police on Phoebe’s recommendation. It’s a novel about an island in which items disappear, along with everyone’s memories associated with them. The Memory Police enforce these disappearances and forgettings. It’s spooky, a reminder of how easily people adapt to new, terrifying normals and forget (i.e. how life felt for most of 2020), but somehow I find the prose comforting, perhaps because of its clarity. Phoebe also wrote an interactive review of the novel, which you can find here.
> Also read E. J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others and cried so much. It’s a memoir about Koh’s relationship with her mother, interspersed with letters from her mother (photocopies of the letters in the original Korean with Koh’s translation). It’s mostly about the time when her parents moved to Korea for her dad’s work, leaving Koh with her brother in California for seven years. It’s also about lineage, ancestors, grandparents, inheritance, poetry. Maybe I was crying so much because I was thinking of my mother, especially toward the end of the book, but maybe I was also crying for myself.
> One of the poems Koh references in her memoir is “The Vegetables” by James McMichael. From that poem:
Bell Pepper
To find enough rooms for the gathering
The walls go on alone not waiting
For corners but thinking of sleeves
And how the wind fills them and the snow
Fills them and how cold it is without
Fires when there are not enough rooms.
> Waffle House vistas, a photo series and essay, brought to you by Micah Cash.
Cheers,
Tiffany