Volume 1, No. 37: Maps + Iced Cardamom Rye Cookies
Volume 1, No. 37: Maps + Iced Cardamom Rye Cookies
Greetings, book and treat people! This week I saw a pileated woodpecker in my yard! I’d never seen one before, and I got a good long look in my binocs. They are beautiful. It was exciting!
This week we’re talking maps: literal maps, metaphorical maps, emotional maps. One of these books is an atlas (an incredible one!), but the other two involve more slippery mapmaking. They’re about the maps we make in our minds—the maps we make in order to understand ourselves, the world around us, our history. They’re about maps as tools, art, and stories. I love thinking about the many ways a books can become maps: maps to specific places, to people, to emotions, to a particular time period.
The Books
Backlist: Nonstop Metropolis by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (Nonfiction)
It is impossible to capture a city on paper, but Nonstop Metropolis comes close. In this collection of twenty-six brilliant, layered, informative and imaginative maps, accompanied by essays written by a diverse group of writers and residents of the city, Nonstop Metropolis manages to translate a little bit of the essence of a city into art, words, marks on a page.
In the introduction, Solnit writes:
A city is a machine with innumerable parts made by the accumulation of human gestures, a colossal organism forever dying and being reborn, an ongoing conflict between memory and erasure, a center for capital and for attacks on capital, a rapture, a misery, a mystery, a conspiracy, a destination and point of origin, a labyrinth in which some are lost and some find what they’re looking for, an argument about how to live, and evidence that differences don’t always have to be resolved, though they may grate and grind against each other for centuries.
The maps that make up this book explore this meandering, contradictory definition of a city. Cities, in so many ways, are infinite. They exist in so many dimensions. Cities are not merely their physical geography and their history, but the sum total of the thoughts and emotions of those who live in them. Cities extend outward, upward, inward, across. There are so many ways to experience and measure them. This book gives you a sense of that untamable scale.
I am not a city person, though I appreciate them from time to time, and I’ve spent very little time in New York. But I love this book anyway. I love its specifics. A map of brownstones and basketball courts in Brooklyn. A map of the various places riots have erupted in the city, from the 1700s through the 2000s. A map noting landmarks important to whaling and publishing in the Manhattan of Herman Melville. A map of the famous theaters, jazz clubs, churches, and mosques in Harlem. Each map is its own fascinating story, and the essays, which are both personal and historical, bring the maps to life.
Many of the maps explore two disparate ideas, sometimes things in direct conflict with each other. This is mapmaking at its most complicated—maps as a way of understanding contradiction and inequality, as well as community and connection. The most powerful maps are the most discordant, the ones that expose a city in constant flux, constantly fighting with and reinventing itself.
In ‘Love and Rage’, New York City becomes a maze of colored dots, representing community gardens, 311 animal abuse complains, felony assaults recorded by the NYPD, public library branches, and popular places to propose. The inequality of the city is stark in ‘Public/Private’, which shows public and private schools, nanny agencies, youth and family shelters, preschool admissions consultants, and other symbols of the very wealthy and the very poor.
In ‘Burning Down and Rising Up’, a map of the Bronx in the 1970s showing both housing units lost to fires, and the geographical record of the birth of hip hop, the city becomes something like a phoenix rising from the ashes: reinvention birthed from destruction. ‘Wildlife’ is a map that shows the ways in which the non-human wild—the animals that inhabit New York City—and the human wild—visionaries and artists who have dared to break from the mainstream—coexist.
Another thing these maps do so well is illustrate the true stretch and extent of the city. ‘Archipelago’ reimagines New York as the Caribbean’s northernmost island, illustrating how deeply the city has been influenced by Caribbean immigrants. ‘Trash in the City’ illustrates how far New York City’s garbage travels. Some of it is transported as far away as Ohio, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Virginia.
Nonstop Metropolis is a book about New York, but it’s also a book about cities, and more broadly, it’s a book about place: how we interact with the places that we live, how those places shape us and how we shape them. Like all the best writing about place, it is both a love letter and a criticism, a celebration and a fugue. It’s a big, raucous, colorful ode to a beloved city, but it does not shy away from all the darkness and horror that is also a part of New York’s identity.
Frontlist: Dear Memory by Victoria Chang (Memoir, Poetry)
In this beautiful, genre-defying book, Victoria Chang writes a series of letters that explore her life as a poet and mother, her relationship with her parents, her mother’s death, her family’s history in China and the US, her own Chinese American identity, and so much more. The letters are addressed to her mother and father, her grandparents, to old lovers, to dear friends and mentors, to her daughters, to silence, to her body, to memory itself, to the reader.
Intersperesed with the letters are photos and documents—her parents’ marriage certificate, copies of letters sent to her mother by relatives who remained in China, social security cards, passports, a blueprint of the house Chang grew up in. Chang then turns many of these documents and photos into poem collages. Small scraps of paper, handwritten poems broken into lines, are superimposed on the images. On top of a series of photographs of her paternal grandparents is this short poem: “It is good that I can’t see / your faces. If I could I would / erase you with my words, / meaning writing has / something to do with love.”
It’s hard to describe the impact of this hybrid book, this collection of stories and memories, photographs and poems. It’s a record of her family’s life, a record of memory and not-memory, of what it is possible to remember and the times when memory fails. It’s an excavation, too. It’s as if Chang is digging into stories to understand something about herself. She interrogates her own memory, returns again and again to the same stories, weaves her own experiences of growing up in an immigrant family with the experiences of her parents, who left China for Hong Kong and then America, with the experiences of her relatives who stayed in China. These stories overlap and blur into each other. It’s a living history.
Chang asks question after question, and with each question, the answers shift. What is it possible to know about the people who made us? How does adulthood change our memory of childhood? What is memory, and what is only the narrative we tell ourselves about our lives?
Chang is a poet, and the letters in this book read like prose poems. Sometimes they are straightforward, certainly. She writes about her childhood, about becoming a poet, about her mother’s death and her father’s illness, about writing seminars and falling in love and the Chinese restaurant her parents owned in Michigan. But she often answers her own questions with sentences that feel like poems, like this:
Our childhood was the moon—entire bare, oil;ent, and overflowing. Each night, I do the only thing I know how to do—I climb back into it.
Or this:
Daughters, I have felt incomplete for most of my life. Please don’t follow me. What I worry most is that you have already started following me. That you are from me. You both have my freckles. What else have I passed on?
And sometimes she asks questions directly, like this: “But what happens when memory’s place of origin disappears?” Or this gorgeous, intricate line, from a letter to silence: “Do I want to risk going into you in order to come out with words? To let the words build into something that is no longer me?…Will the language I make murder me?”
The whole book feels like a map to an unknown destination. With each word, each question, each photograph, each though, Chang adds another piece to the map, another road, another landmark. It’s not a map that leads to a particular place. It’s a map though a life, a map to the messiness of grief, a map of a family’s journeys across continents, a map to being a daughter, a map to losing, and finding.
I’ll leave you with one of my favorite passages, one of many gorgeous collections of words that took my breath away while I was reading:
Maybe memories are not to be forgotten but also not exactly to be remembered. Maybe that glorious, lumbering moose that stops us for a moment isn’t death after all. Maybe it’s memory, which is the exit wound of joy.
Upcoming: Spell Heaven by Toni Mirosevich (Short Stories, Counterpoint, 4/26)
This book of linked short stories is set in a small coastal town in Northern California. The narrator is a gay woman in her sixties (I’m guessing? She doesn’t specify) who lives there with her wife of thirty years. She grew up in a Croatian American family, with a mother who worked in the tuna canneries and a father who was a fisherman, and who died at sea when she was a teenager.
She moved through a variety of manual labor jobs as a young person, and has now settled into a career as a creative writing professor at a nearby university, which she likes but also feels some ambivalence about. Most of the book consists of her walking around town, and especially along the pier, talking to the people she meets and musing about her life.
It’s a quiet book that kept growing on me as a I read. The narrator is the kind of person who is fascinated by everything, and who’d rather look outward than inward. She’s been living in town for years, and the stories take place over an undefinable period of time—several years at least? So we get to see her slowly befriending her neighbors and fellow walkers. There’s the man who sits on the same bench outside the town’s cafe every day, drinking. There’s the retired FBI agent, and the man who leaves two bars of chocolate under the same tree at the same time, every Saturday. The narrator describes this whole collection of “outsiders” as she calls them—drifters and fishermen and houseless people and townsfolk who converge along the path by the pier. She writes about them all with a lot of warmth. She genuinely cares about them, and her relationships with them. There’s a softness to it that I appreciated. This is a woman who cares about her routines, who likes to think, and talk, and observe the world. It’s a pleasure to observe it with her.
The book, then, becomes a kind of map to the town. It’s full of physical descriptions of the place—the sea and the fog and the weather on any given day. The path along the pier, the walkers on the path, the architecture of the place where the crabbers cast their nets. The residential streets, the maze of houses between the narrator’s house and the ocean, the cafe, the Safeway. The narrator maps out this place she lives, this place she cherishes, and she also maps out the people who live there with her. What they care about, what makes them angry, their obsessions and quirks. Very little actually happens in this book. It’s a record, and a fascinating one.
The book also becomes a kind of map of the narrator herself. She doesn’t like to look inward. She’s the sort of person who’d rather look outward than inward. She’s constantly wondering about other people, and thinking about the state of the world and the town, rather than her own emotions. But she lets parts of herself slip. We learn about her mother’s loneliness in the years after her father died. We learn about the care and thought she puts into teaching. We learn quite a bit about her wife, Stevie, who is always present, though usually in the background. She’s always telling stories about Stevie: Stevie said this, Stevie thinks this, Stevie tells me I’m this way. And as she begins to open up more to the people around her, we also get to see her tenderness, her desire for connection and companionship, her surprising humor.
It’s a very solitary novel, made up mostly of the narrator walking and thinking. Yet it’s also about community, and what it means to live in one. In one story about someone who has gone missing, and is presumed to have drowned, the narrator says:
When what we imagine is too much to consider alone, we join with others, we stand as a group to face the tragedy so that we might bear the answer—already guessed at, already imagined—together. We form a body to look for a body.
The stories themselves blur into each other, but together, they are about what to takes to form a body—to give yourself to something bigger than yourself.
It’s out April 26th, and you can preorder it here.
The Bake
Cookie Extravaganza is right around the corner! If you enjoy looking at pictures of a truly ridiculous amount of cookies, you can follow along on Instagram. And if you like baking cookies, you’re in luck, because I’ll be sharing a few of my favorite cookie recipes for the rest of the year. These are the ones I make every year, the ones I love so much I just can’t bear to skip them. I first made these cardamom rye cookies a few years ago and now they’re a must-bake. They are exceedingly simple: rye flour, butter, a little cardamom. They’re buttery and crisp and nutty and perfect. You do not have to frost them at all, let alone paint little scenes on them like I do. But, you can! It’s a lot of fun.
Iced Cardamom Rye Cookies
These cookies are so simple and so good: toasty, nutty, and buttery, with a satisfying snap. They’ll last for weeks (I’ve eaten them into January in years past), as long as you don’t expect the texture to remain exactly the same. They’re great with a cup of tea.
Ingredients:
2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
66 grams (2/3 cup) toasted sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cardamom
1/4 tsp cinnamon
240 grams (2 cups) all-purpose flour
106 grams (1 cup) rye flour
2-3 Tbs cold water
Royal icing (optional, I like this extremely simple recipe)
Preheat the oven to 350. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
In a stand mixer fitting with the paddle attachment, or in a bowl with electric beaters, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add the salt, cardamom, cinnamon, and flour and mix on medium low speed until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Add the water, 1 tablespoon at at time, mixing on low after each addition, until the mixture just starts to come together. Turn onto the counter and knead gently to form a ball. Flatten it into a disc. If it’s very soft, you can chill it for 15-30 minutes, but you don’t have to.
On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough out to roughly 1/8-inch thickness. Cut out shapes using the cookie cutters of your choice and place on the prepared baking sheet, about 1 inch apart. Bake for 9-12 minutes, depending on the size of your cookies. They should be just browning around the edges and firm on top.
If you want to decorate, let cookies cool completely before icing them. You can dip the tops in royal icing, or use a piping bag to pipe an outline and then fill it in (this way always works best for me). All you need to paint the cookies is food coloring, water, and a foodsafe paintbrush. Mix a few drops of food coloring with a splash of water on a small plate, and then paint away! Make sure the royal icing is completely set before starting. This is a nice tutorial. This is the only food coloring I use anymore.
The Bowl & The Beat
The Bowl: Quickest Peanut Noodles
I can’t count the number of times a quick peanut sauce has saved me. This is one I whip up all the time. You can add whatever veg you have around, or none. I like to cook an egg and slice it up on top.
Cook some noodles—rice or udon noodles are great, linguine works too. If you’ve got broccoli, cut it into florets, toss with sesame oil, and roast at 400 until soft and crispy. I like to toss in a handful of peanuts and sesame seeds about five minutes before the broccoli is done. Meanwhile, make the sauce. My go-to recipe: 2 tablespoons each rice vinegar and sesame oil; 3 tablespoons each peanut butter and soy sauce; 1 tablespoon brown sugar or honey; 1 tablespoon grated ginger; 2 cloves garlic, pressed; and 2 teaspoons chili oil or paste. Toss the sauce with the cooked noodles and broccoli. If you want, lightly beat two eggs and cook them like you would an omelette. Flip it onto a cutting board and slice. Scatter the pieces over the noodles.
The Beat: The Three Mothers written and read by Anna Malaika Tubbs
I’ve only listened to the introduction of this book, but it’s so good so far! I love it when a book’s introduction makes me super excited to get into the rest of it. This is a combined biography and history of Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little: the mothers of James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Tubbs explores the lives of these women and the influence they had on their famous sons. But the book is also about Black motherhood and womanhood more generally, and especially about the ways in which the achievements, lives, stories, and experiences of Black women have ben erased throughout history.
The Bookshelf
Around the Internet
On Book Riot, I made a list of perfect queer books without romance.
Now Out
Hooray! Personal Attention Roleplay by Helen Chau Bradley is now out. I absolutely loved these weird queer stories.
The Boost
Image: An Instagram post, orange text on a blue background, that reads: You cannot “decolonize” Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is a holiday that marks a genocide. This is worth a read. Here is a list of Indigenous-led mural aid funds you can donate to. This is where I’ll be donating the money from sales of my cookie boxes later this year. I’ve learned a lot over the past two years from this Instagram account (you can tip them here). You might also want to read about the National Day of Mourning.
As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I got to visit the island where I used to live last week, and while I was there, I pruned the roses. My grandparents planted them in the 50s, which means they are almost 70 years old! I remember them being big and beautiful when I was a kid, but after my grandparents died they went through a period of neglect. At one point they were so deer-eaten they were only about a foot high. I brought them back to life when I in 2016, and I’ve been looking after them ever since. These might not look like much, but pruning them now encourages them to put out lots of new growth in the spring. Roses are so resilient. I am continually amazed by their tenacity.
And that’s it until next week. Catch you then!