Posted on December 9th, 2009 by Gavin M.
Stanley Fish,2 New York Times ‘Opinionator’ blog:
Sarah Palin Is Coming to Town
When I walked into the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan last week, I headed straight for the bright young thing who wore an “Ask Me” button, and asked her to point me to the section of the store where I might find Sarah Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life.” She looked at me as if I had requested a copy of “Mein Kampf” signed in blood by the author, and directed me to the nearest Barnes and Noble, where, presumably, readers of dubious taste and sensibility could find what they wanted.
This is funny, because when I walked into Balducci’s last week, I headed straight for the bright young Miss Thing who was wearing a “C’est Cheese”3 button on his plum and silver torreador jacket and giving out samples of acai flavored Pont-l’Évêque, and asked where it might be that I should find a candy shotgun to blast rock candy through the roof of my mouth and all up into my head, where it would blow pink candy brains as well as candy hair tufts through my top hat like a candy death toot-toot whistle, and also I hate cheese so fuck you. And this is the funny part, because he looked at me as if I was Stanley Fish, and then Stanley Fish came in, all rowdy-dow and heighdy-ho, advancing with a meaty paw extended and a shifty smile working one way and then the next as though clearing brush from his path, all pink-eared and soapy of collar like a Corn Belt tack wholesaler — oleoresinous of eye, exuding cheap 1970s tenure — and he walked up just like that and asked the guy whether he had any Fromunda Cheese.
A few days later, I attended a seminar on political and legal theory where a distinguished scholar observed that every group has its official list of angels and devils. As an example, he offered the fact (of which he was supremely confident) that few, if any, in the room were likely to be Sarah Palin fans. By that time I had begun reading Palin’s book, and while I wouldn’t count myself a fan in the sense of being a supporter, I found it compelling and very well done.
While we wouldn’t count ourselves as fans of Sarah Palin in the sense of liking things about her, we’d find it compelling to hang around before one of her book appearances wearing T-shirts that say ‘Jack-Out-Of-the-Box eSolutions, Inc., IP In the Front and RAM Sticks In the Rear,’ and warning people about the snew on the wang-4, and advising that they updock. “Muggle says ‘what?'” we’d mumble in salutation, and then after a time of that, we’d go back and write up a big thing for The Times about walking into a Cracker Barrel and asking how come there’s no Barrel for African-Americans or Hispanics, and then being like, Aah, whatever. Say, we have a peanut allergy and a tree nut allergy, so I guess you can say we’ve had to scratch all kinds of nuts, heh-heh, so look, is the food here handled by anyone who’s into Balzac, or who blows sax? I mean, if someone tosses my salad, what if I order the aspic and he forgets to hold the pickle?
Whee! Ha ha! But there was work to do as well, for we sought to establish to the Times readership, with a great shared archedness of brow, that we were in a place of business that was unlikely to be able to meet the reasonable and easily-anticipated requests for bourgeois amenities that readers of The Times are accustomed to making. “Oh, never mind the peas-and-trees, nutwise,” we said. “Could we just get us some of that ol’ Foie Gras Brûlée with Roasted Strawberries like they do it over at Nougatine?4
Not, that is, that we would count ourselves as fans of Jean-Georges Vongerichten, unless by ‘fans’ you mean having helped at one time or another to throng crap restaurants like Spice Market in a self-worried ecstasy of Ewige Spießer arrogance-cum-suckerhood. Those Spießbürgers don’t just eat themselves. But you ought to have seen the faces of the low-income retail employees at the Cracker Barrel when we sneezed back and forth like “Aah-ah-ah Vongerichten!” and asked if there were any ordinary Vongerichten! Americans there, and if so, why did their man at The Times, that David Vongerichten! Brooks of theirs, split up with uh, what’s-his-name, Dunn? And also, did they like Stanley brand fishsticks — did they like as much as we do at The Times to put a Stanley fishstick in their Vongerichten! mouths?
“Ainsi,” we replied in remembered French-club French — with ‘remembered’ in the more literal sense than usual of the arms and legs having been stuck back on — “Il nous semblerions que vous soyez un poisson qui pêche de l’autre rive.” And we laughed, oh yes, we laughed when the retail employee who wore a ‘Smiles Are Free’ button said we ought to try the Barnes & Noble, “Because you folks act like you grew up in barns, and that’s no bull.” He looked at me as if I had requested a copy of Dreams From My Father signed in Adolf Vongerichten! Hitler’s blood by the author, William Charles Ayers. “Smiles are free, eh?” I said to him. “Well, free dumbness isn’t…smiley.” And I scowled like the smoke from a tar truck as we walked out, not just from a weighty heart, but because of all those fish puns left untouched. “That’s a moray,” offered my partner. “Abalone!” I explained.
1 A.k.a. ‘Troll Bridge to Nowhere,’ a.k.a. ‘Stanley Steamer.’
2 Cf. Fish.
3 This needs to be available by mail from a Nazareth, Pennsylvania specialty foods retailer called Cheeses of Nazareth, just as it is necessary that there be a Suffern, New York delicatessen called Suffern Katz’s whose catalog boasts of ‘our famous local succotash.’
4 An unfinished joke of long standing has someone funnily referring to Chez Panisse, the demesne of chef Alice Waters, as “Cheese Penis.” The speaker may or may not be a restauranteur named Al Swatters, who may or may not be opening porn versions of restaurants. (London’s The Fat Duck represents low-hanging meat, as it were, while New York’s Momofuku Ssäm Bar might as well be a gay leather-porn version of a pan-Asian bistro as its name currently stands, needing only a menu full of Rad Prik, Tung Sum Gai, and Gang Phuk to circle, double-underline, and star-with-smiley-face the point in order to attract the out-of-town conventioner and/or the ecclesiastical trade. Also, a Swatters version of the now-closed Lespinasse would be called Not As Much Dick.) The joke may also, or may also not, have something to do with Waters’s second and smaller redoubt, Café Fanny. Something about its tight quarters serving a more select group of patrons — it’s all pretty vague still.
Another long-unfinished one concerns a historical schism between boatswains and bo’s’uns, with the resulting foundings of the countries of Botswana and Bosnia. Maybe one country is governed from a forecastle right up in front, while the other is run from a hole in the ground such as a fox might dig, i.e. a fo’c’sle. Ah, but then what? Anyway, these are the kinds of problems we solve here, and now you see how it is.
