Nostalgia

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Do you have time to make a vanilla ice-cream base? he asked. I did. I found the milk and cream in the walk-in, cracked the eggs. At his station, Brandon chopped shallots for vinaigrette. June’s class ended, and she sat at the counter in her gossamer skirt with a blanket tied around her shoulders. It was like old times, old times we’d never really had. On the stereo, the first notes of an Elvis Perkins album kicked in. It was one of a dozen songs I associate with the opening of Delancey, songs we listened to over and over. We’d listened as we poured the concrete tabletops and painted the ceiling, as we polished silver and stacked plates, the two of us hacking away at a project that I wished I’d wanted. Elvis Perkins in Dearland had become the soundtrack of that feeling, a preemptive nostalgia as one phase of our lives slid into the next. For years after Delancey opened, when I needed a good cry, I’d play that album like a musical ipecac, to shake loose and expel a feeling. Now, this Monday afternoon, Brandon put it on the stereo. So he noticed too, I thought, the way this afternoon was a kind of echo, an ideal echo, of times we’d had before. Stop, stop! I begged, grinning. Turn it off, or I’ll cry! Don’t make me do it! We laughed, and he put on something else. I could hear that laugh for hours. It was a relief to recognize who we’d been to each other and to not pretend we were still the same. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Nora and I talked on the phone on the nights when we didn’t see each other. That night I wanted to tell her about the afternoon at Delancey, but I hesitated. I worried that it wouldn’t land right. But she’d wanted to know about my day, hadn’t she? I wanted to be able to tell her about the things that matter to me. So I told her about it. Gosh, she said. It’s kind of hard to hear that. Why? I asked. I’d play dumb. Sometimes it seems like you’re going to get back together, she said. He’s the father of my child, I said. I want a good relationship with him. That’s not the same as wanting to stay married to him. You can understand that, right? It’s just hard to hear about the two of you together, Nora said. Something hot surged in the back of my throat. I had brought her a positive event, but to her it wasn’t good news. I had come to her with light; she took it in and became something dark. When clouds of space dust form so densely that light rays cannot pass through, they appear in the night sky as black patches, shapes even darker than midnight. Astronomers call them dark cloud constellations. I’ve got to be able to talk about my life, I said, without us falling apart over it.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Eleven OMG the Halloween Party!!! There are two big party days at HubSpot. One is Cinco de Mayo, when the company ships in a truckload of tequila and Dos Equis beer and Mexican food, and five hundred twenty-something gringos go mental in the first-floor conference room drinking margaritas and chowing down on nachos, and Halligan roams around wearing a huge straw hat—the kind that people wear in Mexico, geddit?—like a real-life version of Frank the Tank, the beer-bong- hitting character played by Will Ferrell in Old School. But Halloween is an even bigger deal, a sacred tradition in the cult of the orange people, a day when the entire company comes to work wearing costumes and spends the day running around behaving like idiots. In the afternoon the company brings in food and beer, and work grinds to a halt. HubSpot people are incredibly proud of this tradition, which they view as part of their culture. Dharmesh even included a Halloween photo in his Culture Code, with this message: “We dare to be different.” Photos of the Halloween madness are also featured on the website, so that prospective customers can see what a cool, fun place HubSpot is. The idea seems to be that this will make people want to work at HubSpot, and will make customers want to buy our software. I don’t understand why prospective customers care whether HubSpotters have fun at work. If our software can’t save customers money, or make them money, or both, all the kooky Halloween parties in the world won’t matter. (As an aside: I urge you to count the non-white faces in that Halloween photo and consider the claim about “daring to be different.”) As it happens, on the day of the Halloween party I have a friend in town. Rose is a friend of mine who works in marketing. She lives in New York and has come to Boston for meetings. She is in her forties and is executive vice president of marketing for a big sports brand. We meet for breakfast at a hotel near the Charles River. Seeing Rose makes me remember my old life, when I wore a suit, moderated panels in Washington, DC, and participated in actual journalism. I tell her what’s happened to me at HubSpot, how I was promised one job but given another. Rose doesn’t seem surprised—or sympathetic. Rose is British. She has no patience for complainers. After breakfast she has some free time, so I offer to give her a tour around our offices. She’s heard of HubSpot and is curious to see the software. She thinks her company might be able to use it.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  The new companies were flimsy, based on hype and grandiose rhetoric and the promise of making a fortune overnight. The dotcom boom of the late 1990s was followed by the dotcom bust, and then came a period when Silicon Valley felt like a ghost town. Slowly, a new generation of Internet-related companies arose, and while this second boom wasn’t a direct copy of the first one, there were some worrisome similarities, chief among them the fact that none of these companies seemed to be generating a profit. They were all losing money, and some were losing shocking amounts—billions of dollars, in some cases—and nobody seemed to mind. I covered the first dotcom bubble and crash as a reporter at Forbes. Those years have turned out in retrospect to have been a kind of golden age not just for Forbes but for magazines in general. Magazine writers didn’t get rich, but we made a good living, and the perks were amazing. We traveled the world, stayed in first-class hotels, and partied on the Highlander, Malcolm Forbes’s superyacht, with rock stars and heads of state. During my years at Forbes I met my wife, Sasha, and in 2005 we had twins, a boy and a girl. After spending my twenties and thirties bouncing around like a nomad, I settled down in my forties, with a good job and a new family. In 2006 I created a blog called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, where I wrote in a persona called Fake Steve Jobs. The idea was to satirize not just Jobs himself but all of Silicon Valley. I wrote the blog anonymously, and the mystery added to its appeal. Pretty soon it was attracting 1.5 million readers a month. The blog depicted Jobs as an insufferable, insecure megalomaniac who had turned himself into the leader of a weird cult based around electronics. Jobs ranted and cursed at the people around him; he went drunk-driving with Bono and smashed into other drivers; he threw scalding tea on his long-suffering assistant; he got into trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission and lied to investigators; he visited sweatshops in China where children made iPhones and came away feeling that he was the victim. With Sting, he traveled to the Peruvian rain forest, where they tripped on ayahuasca and ended up hugging and sobbing on a mud floor. He and his best friend, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, drove to the Tenderloin in San Francisco and fired water cannons at transvestite hookers. They made prank phone calls, dialing a local Thai restaurants to order “penis sauce” or calling a hardware store in the Castro section of San Francisco to inquire about black caulk. Eventually I got caught.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Given the paucity of evidence available on the topic, David Brody (a journalist at Christian Broadcasting Network) and Scott Lamb (a vice president at Liberty University) went to creative lengths to craft a portrait of the president that would appeal to evangelicals and assuage any misgivings some might still harbor. Though they conceded his lineage might be a little sketchy, according to “family history,” Trump’s ancestors included “an incredible soldier who fought the English at the Battle of Bannockburn (depicted as the final scene of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart ).” There was also “a good chance” that Trump had “Viking blood running through his veins.” His Scotch ancestry, too, linked Trump to “the land of John Knox,” a man of God who “spoke truth to power,” a man (like other Scots) known for his “straight talk,” a man celebrated by the likes of Doug Wilson and Doug Phillips.40 Having established Trump’s Scottish and Viking virility, Brody and Lamb turned their attention to his childhood. Of key interest here was whether or not young Donald had been “a Spock baby.” Had his parents been influenced by Benjamin Spock’s rejection of “rules, regulations, schedules, and spankings?” Although they lacked direct evidence, Brody and Lamb did not lack certainty: “In a word: No. Sure, a copy of the book might have found its way into the Trump household, but ‘newfangled parenting methods’ is not the way anyone who knew Fred and Mary Anne describes their style of parenting. They were old school.” They were parents who dared to discipline.41 The authors neglected to mention Trump’s draft deferment, but they made much of his attendance at the New York Military Academy as a high school student, where he came under the authority of a WWII vet, “a regular George Patton” whose style was reminiscent of the opening scene in the movie Full Metal Jacket . Trump adored General Patton and General MacArthur, they made clear.42 Brody and Lamb also made much of Trump’s rootedness in traditional American values. They quoted Michele Bachmann at length on Trump’s “1950s sensibilities,” by which she meant that he really did “believe in a strong America because he grew up being proud of the United States—‘a John Wayne America.’” Unfortunately, children today were being taught that the United States was “an evil country and that somehow we’ve hurt the rest of the world,” but this was “one of the biggest lies” young people were being told. America had been “a force for good.” Brody and Lamb concurred: Trump believes in “strength” and a “strong America” that corresponds to traditional masculinity. The “John Wayne America” ideal man sits tall in the saddle; doesn’t whine or complain; fights and dies for things that matter; exhibits courage in the face of danger; works hard—maybe even an unbalanced amount; provides for his family; builds things (institutions, buildings, businesses) that others inhabit; leaves the world a better place; may speak with machismo—but never effeminacy; and communicates hope even when it defies logic.

• From The World of Biblical Israel (2013)

  14 Lecture 2: By the Rivers of Babylon—Exile national deity requires being physically present in his temple or, at least, in their homeland. A god was tied to a land. • In verses 5 and 6, the references to the right hand withering and the tongue cleaving to the roof of the mouth relate to singing and harp playing. If the captives forget Jerusalem, they will never sing or play the harp again. • In verse 7, there is a sharp shift in the language of the psalm from nostalgia and lament to anger and a call for revenge. The Judeans specifically call for revenge against the Edomites, who had rejoiced in Jerusalem’s fall, and Babylon, the “devastator.” • Both parts of the psalm emphasize memory. The Judeans call on themselves to remember their homeland and capital city. Here, memory is infused with nostalgic longing and a conviction to endure. They also call on their god to remember who wronged them. This memory is infused with anger and a desire for revenge. Lamentations 1 • Lamentations is a book of poetry that laments the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. It is different from Psalm 137 because it is set in the conquered city of Jerusalem rather than in exile. psalm 137 gives us the context of exile—within which the Bible began to take shape as a historical narrative, a sacred memory, and ultimately a canon of scripture. © Getty Images/Photos.com/Thinkstock.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  clarity, like pure fantasies. I often feel, said Vera, as if I were gazing at a diorama as I once did when I was a child in Reichenberg, seeing the figures inside a case filled with some strangely translucent aura poised motionless in mid-movement, owing their lifelike appearance, oddly enough, to their extremely diminutive size. In later life I never set eyes on anything more magical than the yellow Syrian desert in the Reichenberg diorama, the peaks of the Zillertal Alps rising white and radiant above the dark pine forests, and that moment frozen in time when the young poet Goethe, wearing a short, light- brown coat fluttering in the wind, is about to climb into a post-chaise to which his traveling bags are already strapped. These days, Vera continued, the pictures of our excursions together from the Sporkova through the Lesser Quarter tend to go hand in hand with such reminiscences of my own childhood. When memories come back to you, you sometimes feel as if you were looking at the past through a glass mountain, and now, as I tell you this, if I close my eyes I see the two of us as it were disembodied, or, more precisely, reduced to the unnaturally enlarged pupils of our eyes, looking down from the observation platform on the Petrin Hill at the green slopes below, with the funicular railway making its way upwards like a fat caterpillar, while further out, on the other side of the city, the railway train you always waited so eagerly to see is making its way past the row of houses at the foot of the VySehrad and slowly crossing the bridge over the river, trailing a white cloud of vapor. When the weather was bad, said Vera, we often visited my aunt Otylie in the glove shop on the Serikova which she had been running since before the Great War and in which, as in some consecrated shrine or temple, a muted atmosphere banishing all profane ideas reigned. Aunt Otylie was a spinster lady of alarmingly fragile appearance. She always wore an outer garment of pleated black silk with a detachable white lace collar, and moved about in a little cloud of lily-of-the-valley perfume. If she was not busy serving one of the women she described as her honored lady clients, she was constantly occupied in maintaining order among her stock of hundreds, if not thousands, of different pairs of gloves of all kinds, ranging from cotton for everyday wear to the most elegant velvet or kid creations from Paris and Milan, arranged in a hierarchy of her own devising which she had preserved for decades through all the vicissitudes of time, and which only she really understood. But when we went to see her, said Vera, she gave you her entire attention, showed you this and that, let you look at the shallow drawers which glided out with extraordinary ease, and allowed you not just to pick up glove after glove but even to try them on, explaining the niceties of every model to you patiently, just as if she saw you as heir presumptive to her business. And I remember, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, that it was Aunt Otylie who taught you to count at the age of

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  On my third day in Prague, so Austerlitz continued his story, when he had recovered some degree of composure, I went up to the Seminar Garden early in the morning. The cherry and pear trees of Vera’s story had now been grubbed up and replaced by young saplings, with thin branches which would not bear fruit for some time yet to come. The path wound uphill, describing wide curves through the grass, which was wet with dew. Halfway up I met an old lady with an overfed, reddish-brown dachshund which was not very good on its legs and stopped now and then, staring with its brow furrowed at the ground ahead of it. The sight of it reminded me that on my walks with Vera I often used to see old ladies of this kind with bad-tempered little dogs, almost always wearing wire muzzles, which may have been the reason for their mute ill will. Then I sat on a bench in the sun until nearly midday, looking out over the buildings of the Lesser Quarter and the river Vltava at the panorama of the city, which seemed to be veined with the curving cracks and rifts of past time, like the varnish on a painting. A little later, said Austerlitz, I discovered another such pattern created by no discernible law in the entwined roots of a chestnut tree clinging to a steep slope, through which, Vera had told me, said Austerlitz, I liked to climb as a child. And the dark green yews growing under the taller trees were familiar to me too, as familiar as the cool air which enveloped me at the bottom of the ravine and the countless windflowers covering the woodland floor, faded now in April, and I understood why, on one of my visits to a Gloucestershire country house with Hilary years ago, my voice failed me when, in the park which was laid out very much like the Schénborn gardens, we unexpectedly came upon a north-facing slope covered by the finely cut leaves and snow-white blooms of the March-flowering Anemone nemorosa.—lIt was with the botanical name of these shade-loving anemones that Austerlitz concluded another section of his story on that evening in the late winter of 1997, when we sat in the Alderney Street house amidst what seemed to me a silence of unfathomable profundity. Quarter or half an hour may have gone by in the light of the blue, evenly flickering flames of the little gas fire, before Austerlitz rose and said it would probably be best if I spent the night under his roof. So saying, he went upstairs ahead of me, and led me into a room which, like those on the ground floor, was quite unfurnished except for a kind of camp bed standing unfolded against one wall, with handles at both ends so that it resembled a stretcher. Beside the bed there was a wine crate with a blackened coat of arms burnt into it which had

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Meanwhile, Stephen, enjoying the comfortable brougham, would begin to indulge in kaleidoscopic musings, those musings that belong to the end of the day, and occasionally visit children. Mrs. Thompson’s bent spine, it looked like a bow—not a rainbow but one of the archery kind; if you stretched a tight string from her feet to her head, could you shoot straight with Mrs. Thompson? China dogs—they had nice china dogs at Langley’s—that made you think of someone; oh, yes, of course, Collins—Collins and a cottage with red china dogs. But you tried not to think about Collins! There was such a queer light slanting over the hills, a kind of gold glory, and it made you feel sorry—why should a gold glory make you feel sorry when it shone that way on the hills? Rice pudding, almost as bad as tapioca—not quite though, because it was not so slimy—tapioca evaded your efforts to chew it, it felt horrid, like biting down on your own gum. The lanes smelt of wetness, a wonderful smell! Yet when Nanny washed things they only smelt soapy—but then, of course, God washed the world without soap; being God, perhaps He didn’t need any—you needed a lot, especially for hands—did God wash His hands without soap? Mother, talking about calves and babies, and looking like the Virgin Mary in church, the one in the stained-glass window with Jesus, which reminded you of Church Street, not a bad place after all; Church Street was really rather exciting—what fun it must be for men to have hats that they could take off, instead of just smiling—a bowler must be much more fun than a Leghorn—you couldn’t take that off to Mother— The brougham would roll smoothly along the white road, between stout leafy hedges starred with dog-roses; blackbirds and thrushes would be singing loudly, so loudly that Stephen could hear their voices above the quick clip, clip, of the cobs and the muffled sounds of the carriage. Then from under her brows she must glance across at Anna, who she knew loved the songs of blackbirds and thrushes; but Anna’s face would be hidden in shadow, while her hands lay placidly folded. And now the horses, nearing their stables, would redouble their efforts as they swung through the gates, the tall, iron gates of the parklands of Morton, faithful gates that had always meant home. Old trees would fly past, then the paddocks with their cattle—Worcestershire cattle with uncanny white faces; then the two quiet lakes where the swans reared their cygnets; then the lawns, and at last the wide curve in the drive, near the house, that would lead to the massive entrance.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  One long strip mall. No single structure personifies what has happened to my city more forcefully than Show World, a one-time temple of sleaze at the corner of Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue: three stories of sin, where one could shoot up in the privacy of a peep booth, watch bruised women with tattoos spread their crenulated thighs on a revolting shag-carpeted platform in the "theater," or attend the hourly Live Sex show, where dead-eyed junkie couples would bang bony hips together lifelessly, six shows a day. Now? It's a comedy club. What happened? Times Square was, particularly for a young man with a criminal bent and a few bucks in his pocket, a wonderland of urban exotica. Not too long ago, you could buy a couple of loose joints on the street, then watch a triple bill of Lightning Swords of Death, Three the Hard Way, and Get Carter from the balcony/smoking section of one of a half dozen cavernous, moldering grind house movie theaters, the film's soundtrack accompanied by the hoots and shouts of the other patrons, for whom the theater was not a diversion but a place of business. All those theaters are gone, replaced by the Disney-owned New Victory and, across the street, the Lion King in apparent permanent residence. Where feral young men with butterfly knives tucked in their waistbands used to play video games and pinball among the chicken hawks, selling beat drugs and planning felonies, it's now stores selling Warner Brothers action figures and stuffed animals. Where Matty "The Horse" Ianello once ran an empire of clip joints and peep shows and hustler bars, it's Mickey and Bugs who are the baddest dudes on the block. Up the street on Broadway, where a midget doorman used to escort you up the dusty plaster waterfall into the gargantuan and half-empty Hawaii Kai for flaming drinks to chill you out from all the bad cocaine, and movie marquees once sported titles like Anal Rampage III and The Sperminator, there's the All- Star Cafe, a hellacious Terrordome of banality: Tourists and their spotty children chaw haplessly at frozen hamburgers, waiting listlessly for a glimpse of Michael Jordan on one of the gigantic video screens. World Wrestling Entertainment has a store. There's a Gap—unthinkable a few years back, when the shelves would have been quickly emptied by enterprising sneak-thieves and shoplifters. The MTV studios look down on the Square, attracting doughy teenage girls hoping for a glimpse of one of their nonthreatening hosts. Wasn't rock and roll dangerous once? The hideous Mars 2112 restaurant offers "Martian cuisine" and a virtual reality trip through a "wormhole in space" to thousands of children and their bored-looking parents where junkies and Johns once frolicked unfettered.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  As for the fish section, where perch, pike, plaice, sole, and eels lay heaped on black slate slabs with fresh water constantly running over them, Pereira described it as a whole underworld in itself, said Austerlitz, and if it hadn’t been too late he, Austerlitz, would go round the place again with me. He added that he would particularly like to show me the temple, with its omamental gold-painted picture of a three-story ark floating beneath a rainbow, and the dove just returning to it carrying the olive branch in her beak. Oddly enough, said Austerlitz, as he stood in front of this attractive motif with Pereira that afternoon he had been thinking of our encounters in Belgium, so long ago now, and telling himself he must find someone to whom he could relate his own story, a story which he had learned only in the last few years and for which he needed the kind of listener I had once been in Antwerp, Liége, and Zeebrugge.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Conversation at bars tends to lean toward back-end points and development deals rather than hijacked loads and who's got the bag. Upper Amsterdam Avenue? You'd think the former Crack Boulevard would retain a vestige of its glories. Now it's a cluster-fuck of frat-boy bars, serving girl drinks and Jello shots to a bunch of towheaded projectile-vomiting college boys for whom Ecstasy is a dangerous drug. New York used to be a tough town. It demanded of its visitors a certain vigilance, a certain attitude. If you didn't walk the walk and talk the talk you could end up naked and walletless in a hot-sheet motel, wondering how the hell you got there. The wrong look at the wrong person and you could be looking at the business end of a Saturday Night Special (a cheap .38). Buying drugs without getting beat or cut up was an accomplishment, visiting some neighborhoods an adventure. Everyone was always admitted—but not everyone could stay. Survival required speed, flexibility, volume, aggression. If you stopped to look up at the skyscrapers or decided to linger over a friendly game of three-card-monte the locals would be all over you like carnivorous beetles. I saw a New York comedian a while back, talking about the Boston subway system— how they had, to his amazement, cash machines right there on the train platforms. "Of course, we have cash machines on our subway platforms too," he said knowingly, "only we call them 'tourists.'" Now the tourists are scarier than the locals. They don't even look worried, consulting their maps and adjusting their lederhosen without fear of discovery. Who's gonna stop them? You can't even spray-paint your name on the subways anymore. Subway cars used to be an exciting showcase for dedicated artists, a place where they could create masterworks two and three hundred feet long that would rocket across the boroughs, write their names in the sky, every wild style "piece" more outlandish and distinctive than the one that came before. Now, every subway car, like every American city, looks the same—another soulless space, filled with slack-jawed, sleepwalking bodies, unconnected to anything, running from nothing, to nowhere. Giuliani's right, of course. That increased "quality of life" enforcement leads to a lower violent crime rate. Let's face it—you get rousted every time you crack a can of beer on a particular corner, you're less likely to shank a visiting tourist there. But with the diminishing threat of violence comes a deadening torpor, an end to life. Movement and thought become optional. It's been a while since I felt that adrenaline-juiced exaltation, that "I can't believe I'm still alive!!" feeling that made me proud to be a New Yorker. A half- decaf mochaccino is a pretty poor substitute. I'm not alone. I can see it sometimes—the vestigial memory of sleaze past—in the faces of my fellow smokers, huddled in the cold outside their glass and steel office buildings, stoking up on nicotine before reentering their antiseptic, climate-controlled towers.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  But then that's what the piece is about: the acknowledgment that there are things you don't know, an acceptance of the possibilities and pleasures of the new. BRAZILIAN BEACH-BLANKET BINGO My first assignment of travel/food writing, written for Food Arts. I'll never forget getting the call, in the middle of my first book tour, while still working at the restaurant (with extended breaks). "You want me to go . . . where? Brazil? And you'll. . . like pay me for it?!" I've since been back to Brazil a number of times and have come to love Sao Paolo more (I didn't the first time), Rio less (a friend was shot to death there shortly after I last saw him), and Salvador more than ever. Sushi Samba has gone on to become an empire of restaurants all over the country. Michael and Taka are no longer with them. THE OLD, GOOD STUFF I love the "old school" stuff and tend to wax sentimental about it. Michael Batterbury, the publisher of Food Arts, took me to Le Veau D'Or, knowing I'd love it, and over many glasses of wine, and the kind of food I've always believed to be the enduring glory of France, inspired me to write this piece about "dinosaur" classics and some of the few places you can still find them. Pierre an Tunnel closed its doors in August 2005. DIE, DIE MUST TRY Like I said, I've really come to love Singapore. A CHEF'S CHRISTMAS About as sappy, romantic, and idealistic as I could muster, this was an honest attempt to write a children's Christmas fable—but with language that children probably shouldn't read. In a departure from just about everything else I've ever written, and everything I've ever experienced, for that matter, I wanted very much to write just one story with an unambiguously happy ending. A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR Chef and author Anthony Bourdain wrote the New York Times bestselling memoirs Kitchen Confidential, Medium Raw, and A Cook’s Tour; the collection The Nasty Bits; the novels Bone in the Throat, The Bobby Gold Stories, and Gone Bamboo; the biography Typhoid Mary; and the cookbooks Appetites and Les Halles Cookbook. Bourdain was the host of the Emmy and Peabody Award–winning docuseries Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown on CNN, and prior to that hosted the Emmy Award–winning No Reservations and The Layover on the Travel Channel and The Taste on ABC. BY THE SAME AUTHOR Nonfiction Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook A Cook's Tour Typhoid Mary Kitchen Confidential Fiction The Bobby Gold Stories Gone Bamboo Bone in the Throat Copyright © 2006 by Anthony M. Bourdain Trust UW All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  In my own career, there have always been two soundtracks for each kitchen: one for the workday and another for the late hours after work, when, pumped up with excess adrenaline, my fellow culinarians and I would head out to the clubs or the bars, where we'd drink and review the events of the day. We'd tell stories, share our pain, gripe about bosses and customers, and do what chefs and cooks do when they travel in packs: talk shop. The things I cooked, like the people I knew, I associate with certain songs, certain bands, nightclubs long gone, bars both nearly forgotten and still with us. The places and the songs changed, but certain patterns have held true over the years. During the mornings, while prep cooks roasted bones and chopped vegetables for stock and the line cooks set up their stations, portioned fish, and made sauce, it was a time for fairly melodic fare. The kitchen sound system, usually a food- encrusted boom box with considerable functional eccentricities, would play nothing too jangly or nerve-racking: Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, Depeche Mode, Neil Young—sentimental, atmospheric fare likely to make us feel good about ourselves while cleaning squid or tearing the abductor muscles off scallops. The service period (when, admittedly, most chefs don't allow music, but read on) was usually given over to the large and usually omnipresent Latino contingent: salsa, soca, mariachi, and Mexican pop. When the rush was over, while last orders dribbled out and the cooks began to break down their stations, I usually stepped in with louder, more nihilistic sounds, designed to get us through the last hours of cleaning drudgery and off to the bars with hearts still pumping: mostly mid-seventies/early-eighties punk: the Clash, the New York Dolls, my beloved Ramones, and others whom I still associate with my first happy years of cooking professionally in New York. Those were the bands we went to see then, after our kitchens closed and we'd had a few freebies at the bar. Most of those places—in fact, all of them—are closed now: Max's Kansas City, CBGB's, the Mudd Club, Club 57, Hurrah, along with after-hours venues like AM/ PM, the Nursery, and the Continental. All day long, the job was about control and maintaining command of one's ingredients, environment, and personnel. After work it was about losing control. One constant, then and now, is my still ironclad ground rule regarding music both during and after work: In any kitchen where I am in control, there is a strict NO Billy Joel, NO Grateful Dead policy. If you are seen visibly enjoying either act, whether during or even after your working hours, you can clean out your locker now. You're fired. Like a lot of my peers, I'm much older and maybe even a little nicer now and pretty much done with nightclubs and any place where there are likely to be crowds or dancing.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  A state bond,’ 1 he explained, ‘they gave it to me at the museum.’ . . . Having won a hundred thousand roubles, Ivan’s mysterious guest acted thus: bought books, gave up his room on Myasnitskaya . . . ‘Ohh, that accursed hole! . . .’ he growled. . . . and rented from a builder, in a lane near the Arbat, two rooms in the basement of a little house in the garden. He left his work at the museum and began writing a novel about Pontius Pilate. ‘Ah, that was a golden age!’ the narrator whispered, his eyes shining. ‘A completely private little apartment, plus a front hall with a sink in it,’ he underscored for some reason with special pride, ‘little windows just level with the paved walk leading from the gate. Opposite, only four steps away, near the fence, lilacs, a linden and a maple. Ah, ah, ah! In winter it was very seldom that I saw someone’s black feet through my window and heard the snow crunching under them. And in my stove a fire was eternally blazing! But suddenly spring came and through the dim glass I saw lilac bushes, naked at first, then dressing themselves up in green. And it was then, last spring, that something happened far more delightful than getting a hundred thousand roubles. And that, you must agree, is a huge sum of money!’ ‘That’s true,’ acknowledged the attentively listening Ivan. ‘I opened my little windows and sat in the second, quite minuscule room.’ The guest began measuring with his arms: ‘Here’s the sofa, and another sofa opposite, and a little table between them, with a beautiful night lamp on it, and books nearer the window, and here a small writing table, and in the first room—a huge room, one hundred and fifty square feet!—books, books and the stove. Ah, what furnishings I had! The extraordinary smell of the lilacs! And my head was getting light with fatigue, and Pilate was flying to the end . . .’ ‘White mantle, red lining! I understand!’ Ivan exclaimed. ‘Precisely so! Pilate was flying to the end, to the end, and I already knew that the last words of the novel would be: “. . . the fifth procurator of Judea, the equestrian Pontius Pilate”. Well, naturally, I used to go out for a walk. A hundred thousand is a huge sum, and I had an excellent suit. Or I’d go and have dinner in some cheap restaurant. There was a wonderful restaurant on the Arbat, I don’t know whether it exists now.’ Here the guest’s eyes opened wide, and he went on whispering, gazing at the moon: ‘She was carrying repulsive, alarming yellow flowers in her hand. Devil knows what they’re called, but for some reason they’re the first to appear in Moscow. And these flowers stood out clearly against her black spring coat.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  interior, which appeared to be very spacious, contained only the most essential furniture and no curtains or carpets. The walls were painted a pale shade of matt gray, and the floorboards were also gray, but of a rather darker hue. Apart from what seemed to me a curiously elongated, old-fashioned ottoman, the front room, into which Austerlitz took me first, had nothing in it but a large table, also varnished matt gray, with several dozen photographs lying on it, most of them dating quite a long way back and rather worn at the edges. Some of the pictures were already familiar to me, so to speak: pictures of empty Belgian landscapes, stations and Métro viaducts in Paris, the palm house in the Jardin des Plantes, various moths and other night-flying insects, ornate dovecotes, Gerald Fitzpatrick on the airfield near Quy, and a number of heavy doors and gateways. Austerlitz told me that he sometimes sat here for hours, laying out these photographs or others from his collection the wrong way up, as if playing a game of patience, and that then, one by one, he turned them over, always with a new sense of surprise at what he saw, pushing the pictures back and forth and over each other, arranging them in an order depending on their family resemblances, or withdrawing them from the game until either there was nothing left but the gray tabletop, or he felt exhausted by the constant effort of thinking and remembering and had to rest on the ottoman. I often lie here until late in the evening, feeling time roll back, said Austerlitz, as we passed into the sitting room at the rear, where he lit the little gas fire and invited me to sit down on one of the chairs standing on either side of the hearth. This room too contained hardly any furniture; there were just the gray floorboards and the walls on which the light of the flickering blue flames was now cast in the gathering dusk. I can still hear the faint hiss of the gas, and I remember that while Austerlitz was making tea in the kitchen I sat entranced by the reflection of the little fire, which looked as if it were burning at some distance from the house on the other side of the glazed veranda doors, among the now almost pitch-black bushes in the garden. When Austerlitz had brought the tea tray in and was holding slices of white bread on a toasting fork in front of the blue gas flames, I said something about the incomprehensibility of mirror images, to which he replied that he often sat in this room after nightfall, staring at the apparently motionless spot of light reflected out there in the darkness, and when he did so he inevitably thought of a Rembrandt exhibition he had seen once, many years ago, in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where he had not felt inclined to linger before any of the large-scale masterpieces which have been reproduced over and over again, but instead stood for a long time looking at a small painting measuring at most nine by twelve inches, from the Dublin collection, as far as he remembered, which according to its label showed the Flight into Egypt, although he could make out neither Mary

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  2. Iron Age glimpses of Asherah: ( left ) pottery fragment from Kuntillet Ajrud (north Sinai) with a trio of figures, two bovine; in the inscription above, ‘I bless you by Yahveh our Guardian and his Asherah’; ( right ) figurine of Asherah in a common Judaean ‘pillar figurine’ type, with hands emphasizing her nursing breasts. The subsequent narrative in the Hebrew Bible (which, it has to be said, is not much reflected in archaeological discoveries) portrays David as conquering most of the tract of territory in which the Children of Israel lived, though never subduing their main rivals in coastal cities. His son Solomon (reigned c .970– c .930) brought extra swagger to the resulting kingdom – though probably not nearly so much as the biblical sources claim. Solomon’s most lasting achievement is undeniable: he built a new Temple for God on a hill beside Jerusalem, a spectacularly sited small city conquered by David a few decades before. There God reigned along with his consort Asherah, though she found herself unceremoniously ejected in later centuries. This monumental Temple became increasingly an unchallenged symbol of Judaic faith and identity, and though its successor was finally destroyed by a Roman army in the early years of Christian emergence a thousand years later, it remains a potent presence in the imaginations of Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. It may have been in Solomon’s time, the tenth century BCE , that the combination of monarchy and Temple priesthood spawned a bureaucracy of record-keepers. In turn they began producing what are probably the first large-scale fragments of text to remain in the Hebrew Bible: works of history chronicling and celebrating the monarchy, including a suitably edifying presentation of the rather awkward transition from Saul’s to David’s dynasty. Overladen with much long-term adaptations and preoccupations, these form the backbone of the books of Samuel, Kings and the later reworkings of them which Christian Bibles label the two books of Chronicles. [23] Solomon’s realm quickly split after his death into two kingdoms, southern Judah and northern Israel; their political union had probably never been robust despite their common worship of the God of Abraham. That political disaster led to constant nostalgia for the remembered and now much- exaggerated glories of David and Solomon, through two or three centuries of dual monarchical rule which the Hebrew Bible portrays as repeatedly falling short of earlier standards, not least in faithfulness to God and his laws. Because of this, alongside complex narrative history the Hebrew Bible enshrines a remarkable genre of literature rarely surviving from other ancient cultures: passionate denunciations of the society around the divinely inspired speaker, who is known as a prophet. Centuries later, Christians ransacked the texts inherited from these prophetic performances for clues about the coming of Jesus and the radical change of direction for the Judaic tradition that it represented.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Beside her, almost as tall as she was, walked a Belgian sheepdog now gray with age who answered to the name of Billie and was very timid. In the bright spring light shining through the newly opened leaves of the lime trees you might have thought, Austerlitz told me, that you had entered a fairy tale which, like life itself, had grown older with the passing of time. I for my part could not get the story of the cemetery in Alderney Street with which Austerlitz had taken his leave of me out of my head, and that may have been why I stopped in Antwerp on my way back from Paris, to see the Nocturama again and go out to Breendonk once more. I spent a disturbed night in a hotel on the Astridsplein, in an ugly room with brown wallpaper looking out on fire walls, ventilation chimneys, and flat roofs separated from each other by barbed wire at the back of the building. meer

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  19 Choices and Lady Chatterley (1950– ) Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP. Philip Larkin, Annus Mirabilis An elegiac verse from the patron saint of university librarians rather accurately dates the emergence of the permissive ‘Sixties’, more a state of mind than an exact decade – a change of social mood which mass media spread across the world, enfolding in itself the concept of a youth culture entitled to challenge the assumptions and mores of a previous generation, not least on matters of sex and gender. D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover may now seem a pretentiously overheated celebration of integrating mind and body in human love, but it was then notorious: after its first private publication in 1928, the unexpurgated text of the novel had never been legally available in Britain. The prosecution of Penguin Books in 1960 for publishing an obscene book was a deliberately symbolic case, quietly arranged between the UK Director of Public Prosecutions and the publisher in order to test the boundaries of the recent Obscene Publications Act (1959). A policeman called at Penguin’s London offices by prior arrangement to collect a proof copy that counted as publication and therefore the basis of the court action. Among the expert witnesses lined up to defend it were prominent Anglican clergy, including an Anglican monk. Penguin’s acquittal ensured handsome sales across the world. [1] AWAKENINGS OLD AND

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  "So Doc says, 'Well, Arch, you gotta sign the book. Name, address and date of purchase. It's the law.' "So I asked Doc what the day was, and he said, 'Friday the 13th.' "So I said, ' I guess I already had mine.' "'Well,' Doc says, 'there was a feller in here this morning. City feller. Dressed kinda flashy. So he's got him a RX for a mason jar of morphine.... Kinda funny looking prescription writ out on toilet paper.... And I told him straight out: "Mister, I suspect you to be a dope fiend." ' "'"I got the ingrowing toe nails, Pop. I'm in agony."' he says. "'"Well," I says, "I gotta be careful. But so long as you got a legitimate condition and an RX from a certified bona feedy M.D., I'm honored to serve you." ' "'"That croaker's really certified," he say.... Well, I guess one hand didn't know what the other was doing when I give him a jar of Saniflush by error.... So I reckon he's had his too.' "'Just the thing to clean a man's blood.' "'You know, that very thing occurred to me. Should be a sight better than sulphur and molasses.... Now, Arch, don't think I'm nosey; but a man don't have no secrets from God and his druggist I always say.... Is you still humping the Old Gray Mare?' " 'Why, Doc Parker... I'll have you know I'm a family man and an Elder in the First Denominational Non-sextarian Church and I ain't had a piece a hoss ass since we was kids together.' "'Them was the days, Arch. Remember the time I got the goose grease mixed up with the mustard? Always was a one to grab the wrong jar, feller say. They could have heard you squealing over in Cunt Lick County, just a squealing like a stoat with his stones cut off.' "'You're in the wrong hole, Doc. It was you took the mustard and me as had to wait till you cooled off.' "'Wistful thinking, Arch. I read about it one time inna magazine settin' in that green outhouse behind the station.... Now what I meant awhile back, Arch, you didn't rightly understand me.... I was referring to your wife as the Old Cray Mare.... I mean she ain't what she used to be what with all them carbuncles and cataracts and chilblains and hemorrhoids and aftosa.' "'Yas, Doc, Liz is right sickly. Never was the same after her eleventh miscarriaging.... There was something right strange about that. Doc Ferris he told me straight, he said: "Arch, 'tain't fitting you should see that critter." And he gives me a long look made my flesh crawl.... Well, you sure said it right, Doc. She ain't what she used to be. And your medicines don't seem to ease her none.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  with her left hand. She smiled at me from time to time and then looked out at the street again, deep in thought. It was quiet in the shop except for soft voices coming from the little radio which stood beside Penelope, as usual, and these voices, which at first I could hardly make out but which soon became almost too distinct, cast such a spell over me that I entirely forgot the engravings lying before me, and stood there as still as if on no account must I let a single syllable emerging from the rather scratchy radio set escape me. I was listening to two women talking to each other about the summer of 1939, when they were children and had been sent to England on a special transport. They mentioned a number of cities—Vienna, Munich, Danzig, Bratislava, Berlin—but only when one of the couple said that her own transport, after two days traveling through the German Reich and the Netherlands, where she could see the great sails of the windmills from the train, had finally left the Hook of Holland on the ferry Prague to cross the North Sea to Harwich, only then did I know beyond any doubt that these fragments of memory were part of my own life as well. I was too alarmed by this sudden revelation to be able to write down the addresses and phone numbers given at the end of the program. I merely saw myself waiting on a quay in a long crocodile of children lined up two by two, most of them carrying rucksacks or small leather cases. I saw the great slabs of paving at my feet again, the mica in the stone, the gray-brown water in the harbor basin, the ropes and anchor chains slanting upwards, the bows of the ship, higher than a house, the seagulls fluttering over our heads and screeching wildly, the sun breaking through the clouds, and the red-haired girl in the tartan cape and velvet beret who had looked after the smaller children in our compartment during the train journey through the dark countryside. Years later, as I now recalled again, I still had recurrent dreams of this girl playing me a cheerful tune on a kind of bandoneon, in a place lit by a bluish nightlight. Are you all right? I heard a voice say suddenly, as if from very far away, and it took me some time to remember where I was and realize that Penelope might have felt concerned by my sudden seizure. I remember telling her that it was nothing, that my thoughts were elsewhere, in the Hook of Holland as a matter of fact, whereupon Penelope raised her face slightly with an understanding smile, as if she herself had often been obliged to wait in that cheerless harbor. One way to live cheaply and without tears? she then immediately asked, tapping the tip of her ballpoint pen on the crossword in her folded newspaper, but just as I was about to confess that I had never been able to solve even the simplest clues in these tortuous English puzzles she said, Oh, it’s rent free! and scribbled the eight letters swiftly down in the last empty spaces on the grid. When we had parted I sat for an hour on a bench in Russell Square under the tall plane trees, which were still leafless. It