Infinite Beauty: Rebecca Solnit Reads at Woodward's Garden with Mapmakers & Essayists from "Infinite City"

Wednesday, May 18, 6pm, $45 per person, 3-courses 

Like Venice, San Francisco is small; they are vast not in territory but in imaginative possibility. 

-Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City

I have been sitting with Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City for months now. I dip in randomly, lovingly gaze at its queer, gorgeous maps, read favorite essays over and over. It mesmerizes that way.  To this longtime San Franciscan, Infinite rings true in infinite ways. It gets the ever-shifting subtleties of place; of neighborhood (of course Solnit would). It is a muli-visioned, nuanced poem to our stunning, fragile city.  After getting caught in its infinite cosmos, you can't help but think that every city should be lucky enough to have its own beatifying Solnit.

And in a stroke of pure poetic random, Solnit has also written extensively on Muybridge (River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West), who not only haunted 19th century SF himself, but 'mapped' our city keenly, and whose gorgeous photos of the original Woodward's Gardens (1866-1891) - our namesake - are infamous.  They are images we used in our original menus.

So how perfect that Solnit - along with some fellow Infinite essayists and mapmakers - is coming to our SF Garden (located on the border of 'Love of Sex' and 'Desire for Liquids' according to the Phrenological SF map!) for an evening of dinner, readings and mappings. We'll talk zen, butterflies, gardens... We'll also make a menu of classic San Francisco dishes.  

At Woodward's Garden, Wednesday, May 18, 6pm, $45 per person, 3-courses (does not include wine, tax or tip). (415) 621-7122.

                                'Entrance to Woodward's Gardens' - Muybridge

                               ‘Animals at Woodward’s Gardens’ (1870) - Muybridge

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of thirteen books about ecology, environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory, most recently the bestselling Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, a volume of 19 essays and 22 innovative maps, for which she commissioned and coordinated contributions from 27 writers, artists, and cartographers. Other books include A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a contributing editor to Harper's and regular contributor to the political site Tomdispatch.com.

Atlas contributors Genine Lentine ("Dharma Wheels and Fish Ladders" essay and map), Paz de la Calzada (Phrenological San Francisco's hair), Lisa Conrad ("The Names Before the Names" essay and map), Ruth Askevolt (Once and Future Water map), and Alison Pebworth (Phantom Coast map, cover, title page) will be joining Solnit.

Paz de la Calzada

Cheryl Strayed, Karen Karbo & Carolyn Cooke at Woodward's Garden, Tuesday, May 10, 2011:

Spring Dinner and Three West Coast Writers Reading from New Works 

At Woodward's Garden, Tuesday, May 10, 6pm, $45 per person, 3-courses (does not include wine, tax or tip). (415) 621-7122. Menu will be posted on website soon.

I first found Cheryl Strayed on Twitter (of course), which somehow led me to me to her dazzling essay "The Love of My Life," about - among other things - death, desire, grief, infidelity... and really, about not looking away. I had not read anything like it before. My body actually stopped moving, slowed-down into the essay's unexpected, achy orbit - it was so close to the bone and relentlessly brave. 

It is a kind of ultimate memoir/essay to me now. And it made me realize how completely rare her voice is, and how much I crave it. In some ways Strayed reminds me of Rebecca Solnit, whose unique, brilliant work, it seems to me, almost always involves our lost/foundness and the unresolvable tension between the two, and staying with that hard, beautiful friction. So what a gift to have Strayed read at our restaurant.

Cheryl Strayed

Strayed’s forthcoming memoir, Wild, will be published by Knopf in March, 2012. Her debut novel, Torch (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and was selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books of the year by writers from the Pacific Northwest. Strayed’s personal essays have appeared in more than a dozen magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, Allure, Self, Brain, Child, The Rumpus and The Sun. She’s won a Pushcart Prize and her essays have twice been selected for inclusion in the Best American Essays. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and their two children.

She will read from Wild, which is about the 1187 mile hike she took alone on the Pacific Crest Trail when she was 26 and the life circumstances that compelled her to take such a long walk in the wilderness. "Wild is smart and funny, and often sublime," wrote bestselling author, Chelsea Cain. "And it’s got something for everyone. A fight for survival in the wilderness. A bad girl’s quest for redemption. Grief, sex, drugs, and the proverbial (and literal) bear in the woods, all in the hands of a brilliant and evocative writer."

Karen Karbo

We are also thrilled to have Karen Karbo, whose three novels and memoir have all been named New York Times Notable Books of the Year.  Her memoir The Stuff of Life won the Oregon Book Award and was a People Magazine's Critics' Choice. Her most recent book is The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World's Most Elegant Woman. Her essays and non-fiction have appeared in a number of anthologies, including the best-selling "The Bitch in the House," and in The New York Times, Vogue, Elle, MORE, Outside, Entertainment Weekly and salon.com.  She is a recipient of an NEA fellowship in prose and a winner of the General Electric Younger Writer Award.

Karbo will read from her forthcoming book, How Georgia Became O'Keeffe: Life Lessons on the Art of Living. It is coming out in November.

Carolyn Cooke

Finally, we are delighted, too, to have Carolyn Cooke.  Her first novel, Daughters of the Revolution, will be published next month by Knopf.  Her short story collection, The Bostons, was a winner of the PEN/Bingham Award, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway, and was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Her fiction has appeared in AGNI, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and in two volumes each of Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.  Her nonfiction has appeared in New California Writing 2011 (Heyday Books) and The Nation.  She is a core faculty member in the MFA writing program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. 


Cooke will read from her new novel of the sexual revolution, which National Book Award finalist Kate Walbert praised as " Smart, visceral, sexy . . . absolutely brilliant.” 


At Woodward's Garden, Tuesday, May 10, 6pm, $45 per person, 3-courses (does not include wine, tax or tip). (415) 621-7122. 


Menu to be posted on website soon.

The Dinner: M.F.K. & Anne Zimmerman

Anne read beautiful M.F.K. things beautifully. Celia sold many gorgeous books with charm.  I got to dig deep into the M.F.K. cosmos again.  It couldn't have been sweeter...

Photos by John Clayton: http://www.claytonshot.com/(except where noted) 

 Paris Brest snap courtesy of lovely Marcia Gagliardi 

See here this post for more details.

MENU

M.F.K. FISHER DINNER, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13, 2011

& ANNE ZIMMERMAN’S EXTRAVAGANT HUNGER

YES IT IS CRAZY TO SIT SAVORING SUCH IMPOSSIBILITIES, WHILE HEADLINES YELL AT YOU 
AND THE WOLF WHUFFS THROUGH THE KEYHOLE. YET NOW AND THEN IT CANNOT HARM YOU, 
THUS TO ENJOY A SHORT RESPITE FROM REALITY. -M.F.K. FISHER/HOW TO COOK A WOLF

PATÉ FIN: HARE PATE WITH KUMQUAT COMPOTE & MUSTARD CREAM

POTTED SHRIMP

•

FRENCH CREAMED OYSTERS (STEAMBOAT), TOASTS, WATERCRESS

•

GRIMAUD DUCK LEG WITH LITTLE TURNIPS, NEW CARROTS, SNAP PEAS & CIPOLLINIS

OR

BOUILLABAISSE: COLUMBIA RIVER STEELHEAD, MANILA CLAMS, PEI MUSSELS & ROUILLE

•

PARIS BREST: CREAM PUFF WITH WHIPPED CREAM FILLING & FRUITS AUX SEPT LIQUEURS

•

DOMAINE DAULNY SANCERRE, LOIRE, 2009  

DOMAINE D’AERIA CAIRANNE, COTE DU RHONE VILLAGES, 2007

DOMAINE DE COLETTE, CRU REGNIE BEAUJOLAIS, 2009
 

M.F.K. Fisher Dinner and Reading by Anne Zimmerman (from An Extravagant Hunger), Wednesday, April 13, Woodward's Garden

I think that eating and sleeping and making love...

are so much entwined - M.F.K. Fisher

I mean, of course Fisher is etched into me.  How not for anyone even tangentially moved by food?  I read her way before I flirted with my first oyster; impulsively chose the long haul of cooking school; before it even occurred to me that cooking might be a prayer that could carry me.  She may have sparked it all.  M.F.K. Fisher tenaciously read hunger as inseparable from other desires in all of her work, so that to eat was never, ever just to fuel up. Which always struck me as both right and radical, too, in a culture more and more invested in our choosing soul sucking prepackaged.  She called food out as one of the great madnesses, and she was wildly formative.

So how perfect that Celia Sack of glorious Omnivore Books hooked me with Anne Zimmerman (through twitter!), who will read at our restaurant from her beautiful new An Extravagant Hunger (a book that digs into Fisher's lifelong hungers).  And she'll do it alongside a 3-course Fisher meal.  Celia has also kindly offered to supply the book for sale at the dinner.

So I'm pouring through all my M.F.K. again for dishes (and my she's a world).  Will post the menu as soon as it takes shape.  


And a word of wolfy wisdom:


When you think you can stand no more of the wolf's snuffing under the door, and keening softly on cold nights, throw discretion into the laundry bag, put candles on the table, and for your own good if not the pleasure of an admiring audience make one or another of the recipes in this chapter. - M.F.K Fisher/How to Cook a Wolf


Oh, we'll make some of the recipes, all right.  And, of course, there might be an oyster somewhere too...


At Woodward's Garden, Wednesday, April 13, 6pm, $45 per person, 3-courses (does not include wine, tax or tip). (415) 621-7122. 


See, too, Omnivore Book's newsletter.

Enchanted

Well, if ever there was a day for enchantment, for love sparks, sweet Valentine’s is surely it.  But even something as gorgeous as enchantment has its edge.

My beloved OED tells me that to enchant is to be “influenced irresistibly as if by a charm; to hold spellbound,” yet it is also to delude or befool (a word alone worth the price of the volumes). Brilliant Jay Griffiths says we humans are endlessly enchantable, which both ennobles and damages us. We have dreams, art and love because of it, yet our enchantability also puts us in deep thrall to power and artifice. We create and support artificial structures, economies that undo us.  See recent ravaged financial systems, our increasingly plundered earth... Enchantment is not as sparkly as it seems on the surface.

Food, too, is one of the enchantments.  We are lured, lulled, loved by it.  Food is as love itself.  But, as with love, there are difficult edges to it too.  And rather than dwell in these, we enchantables like a good airbrush.   

Recently, a SF chef, known for his molecular sway, said of a vaporized beet dish he developed that he wasn’t seeking the beet itself, but the dream of a beet. Which is lyrical in its way, but troubling too. What do we lose when we seek the fiction of a thing rather than the thing proper?  We are deluged in stylish, tight, expensive food images (as well as over-manipulated food). All of it luminously beautiful, of course, but life-sucking as well, this too manicured beauty.  

What's more, we are afraid of our food.  Push it around our plates furtively; worry the salt, the sugar, the fat of it. Is this why we want it immaculate?  Unfoodish?  Soul-stripped?  I had a friend, years ago, who said food was the devil she couldn’t tame. (The devil!)  She couldn’t eat it and she couldn’t stop thinking about it.  Now there's a certain cruel enchantment, no?

And some personal knotty edges:  My teenaged brother and I lived, for a period, on cans of Hormel chili with melted Velveeta. There’s love and grit in that fact - food, class, enduring.  In a room full of people eating companionably, joyously, among the dazzling chime of forks and voices, I'm constantly aware of how we're opening our bodies so intimately, so publicly to our deepest need. There's always ache in this for me. This human vulnerability. This unbearable beauty. I sit and sit with it.

There is food as power, entertainment, class, food that can't be had, enjoyed or shared, food had too much, food as exposure, fraud, as torture, as seduction, as trickery. 

There is no food or love without hardness, friends. These things go hand in hand. Our ever wise Rebecca Solnit wonders of our ultra-pasturized creations, "what are... landscapes and bodies without biology, without threat, without mystery, without darkness?” And I would add: What is food without its crude original life, striped of its ability to sustain? What have we, enchanted, conjured and of what possible use could it be to us?

There is food that creates exile, food that sparks love.  We live in the thick of this.  I say food that sparks love contains flora, flaws, fecundity.  It is food that sparks life. The world enchants us delightedly and enchants us to death. By all means let’s enchant, be enchanted, be enchantable this Valentine's Day. Let's make a hard feast of it, consciously, with all the knotty edges, all the dirt on the beet.


(And praise to love sparker Jasmine Lamb for so charmingly nudging me into this enchanted project.) 

*Jay Griffiths, "Artifice v. Pastoral: The world of fakery and its war on all things natural," Orion March/April, 2009: 20-27.

*Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) 280.