I've trekked down to Oxford, MS this weekend for more than a glimpse at Faulkner's house-- and for more than a book-buying spree at Square Books. This weekend is the Southern Foodways Alliance's annual symposium, and once I learned that Jessica Harris (famed culinary anthropologist, southern food genius and English professor all in one) AND Kevin Young, one of my favorite poets, would both be speaking, there was no way I'd have missed it. Joe Allison, don't tell me you're not jealous!
So, anyway, Kevin Young speaks tomorrow but I sat right across the aisle from him today and kept stealing star-struck glances. He busted me a couple of times. And Dr. Harris spoke this morning and was not a let-down in any way. Though I'm already pretty familiar with most of her research, she leads the room as though she is queen-- and for her contributions to this field of scholarship, she most certainly is. And so, she's something pretty fantastic to hear.
Now, for the purposes of concise reportage, I'm going to regurgitate just a few of the amazing tidbits I've learned today.
1. The sensors for bitterness in our mouths warn us of poisons. Sourness sensors indicate spoilage.
2. Absinthe never was poisonous or hallucinogenic. The only reason people were thought to go crazy from drinking too much of it was because unscrupulous distillers often added poisonous copper derivatives and the like to cut costs. Also, they're re-legalizing absinthe in this country as of next week. I tasted some once when I was in college and am excited about the opportunity to do so again.
3. I'll freely admit that I don't know a hell of a lot about alcohol, but I was unaware that "cocktail" isn't a generic term used to indicate all mixed drinks. A cocktail, in order to be considered a cocktail, should have whiskey, cognac or brandy in it and MUST have bitters. A drink with whiskey, cognac or brandy without bitters is called a "slide."
4. I learned of several new restaurants that I MUST try in the DC area, including Gillian Clark's Colorado Kitchen-- where I just might get a decent mess o' greens in the big city.
5. Conceptually speaking, American barbecue is to white Americans what curries are with white Brits. If we can take it for granted that barbecue is a cooking method that we southerners have co-opted from the natives of this continent-- usurped, fetishized, mythologized and developed conoisseurships around-- through the vehicle of the objectifying "colonial gaze" (I just learned this term and I love it and equate it with the "male gaze" terminology you'll find under that gender-relations lens), well, then, Brits have done a very similar thing with the conoisseurship they've developed around their very Brit interpretation of Indian curries, post-British-Raj, that is. After hearing this analogy come straight from his mouth, I immediately high-tailed it to Square Books to buy Andrew Warnes' lit crit book, Hunger Overcome?: Food and Resistance in Twentieth-Century African American Literature.
6. Katrina pervades. Present tense. This is not an historical event here in Mississippi-- or in NOLA, obviously. Though there are at least two different kinds of fried chicken you can find in the Quarter by now, this hurricane and her after-effects are a wound in the souls of Southerners. And there is fury when multi-millionaire white San Diegans claim those fires are "their Katrina" on the evening news. 800 homes burned? 800 pieces of the most valuable real estate in the country? one woman asked,then adding: try 150,000 people displaced! Maybe it's petty to compare, and to put tragedy within the framework of race and economics. But how can I help but think in those terms when a touchstone of my culture-- native? adopted? abandoned? I don't even know anymore-- continues to flounder?
7. I think I might have wagered my soul to Square Books.
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