Miss Nell would start her cooking shows with, “Now as everyone knows I hate to cook so let’s get started and get out of this kitchen.”

Sordid Snout
The Herald
Feeble Grass Moth
Dead-wood Borer
The Betrothed
The Little Wife
Serene Underwing
The Consort
Dejected Underwing
Inconsolable Underwing
Tearful Underwing
Sad Underwing
The Penitent
Sappho Underwing
Youthful Underwing
Darling Underwing
The Sweetheart
Joined Underwing
Semirelict Underwing
Once-Married Underwing
Girlfriend Underwing
Connubial Underwing
Delilah Underwing
Steely Underwing
Wonderful Underwing
Sweet Underwing
Indomitable Melipotis
Merry Melipotis
False Heather Drasteria
Confused Zale
Once-charred Punkie
Blurry-patched Nola
Beautiful Looper
Sandstorm Tumbler
Tricolored Angel
The Laugher
Fingered Dagger
Fragile Dagger
Splendid Dagger
Afflicted Dagger
Hesitant Dagger
Night-Wandering Dagger
The Hebrew
Cadbury’s Mystique
Cherry Agate
Overlooked Paint
Asteroid Paint
Scribbled Sallow
Turbulent Phosphila
Boreal Sprawler
Shivering Pinion
Sloping Sallow
Roadside Sallow
Straw-eyed Tentmaker
Tawny Tentmaker
Smoky Tentmaker
Adorable Sallow
Subdued Quaker
Cunning Woodling
Stormy Arches
Explicit Groundcat
Disparaged Groundcat
Cynical Groundcat

Carole Corlew.

She was skinny, quick-witted, disarmingly unprofessional, alternating between stand-up patter, bardic intonations, and the hypnotic emotional sway of a chanteuse, and she was sexy in an androgynous way I hadn’t encountered before. The elements cohered convincingly; she seemed both entirely new and somehow long-anticipated. For me at nineteen, the show was an epiphany.

Luc Sante on Patti Smith.

Springtime 1976, I was living in the cinderblock building on the glorified median strip there where they split Highway 13, and one day I went over to this one girl’s apartment, she lived right by the guy who dealt me speed, and she said, “Hey, you know who you remind me of? You remind me of Patti Smith!”

Gave her a possum grin I’m still grinning.

by Kim Noble

(Did you spot the stormtrooper?)

posted by Pete

The Blue Fairies laid on the table from the tree en masse. These were created by a former greensman employee three or four years ago. I remember, as he made them, into a box-top in the backroom of the greensman offices, I entered the room he was working in. He said, as he shook the boxtop, “Look, they live! ” He giggled and grinned a grin somewhere between the grinch and the baby jesus. That vision will forever live in my heart.

Read between the lines of an old family recipe and you’re liable to read the story of the family itself. The scrawled marginalia and cooking stains, the collective memory of shared feasts—they might as well be alleles in the genome. Maybe it’s the chicken soup your aunt makes by the gallon during flu season, or the roast your mother overcooks every Easter. Maybe, if you’re lucky, your dad has taught you the secret to a perfect Old Fashioned, which he learned from his uncle, who learned it from his bookie. For my family, the recipe that defines us as a tribe, and whose origins best reflect our idiosyncrasies, is my grandfather’s babka.

If my grandfather didn’t exist, Philip Roth would have had to invent him. Seymour Byock grew up in Newark, between the wars, during the Depression and the golden age of stickball. He left school at 13 to man his father’s soda fountain, and a few years later he married pretty Ruthie Grubstein, literally the girl next door. He was Sy to his intimates, a constituency that comprised half of Northern Jersey. He was garrulous and funny, a humanistic Jewish patriot with an irrepressible passion for food. After he was conscripted into the Second World War, a clerk at the local draft office asked if, by any chance, he had experience as a baker. “As a matter of fact, sir, I do!” Sy said. This was not, strictly speaking, the truth. But he could grill a hamburger and pour a root beer float; how hard could baking be? Uncle Sam had tossed him a life preserver and Sy intended to seize it.

and helpless and hopeless, then I heard this on the radio, and my heart rose up in spite of me.