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Weekend Butler: What’s your Covid trauma? (I’ll go first.) NPR: “the best song of the last decade.” What prevents addiction? (You’ll be surprised.) And a great use for tomatoes.
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Published: Aug 25, 2022
Category:
Weekend
ABOUT THE PHOTO: Rachel Maddow, high school prom.
MY COVID TRAUMA…AND YOURS?
When I meet a new person now, I want to ask about their Covid trauma — the personal moment that defined the pandemic for them, what hurt them the most, what they learned about themselves, what sustains them now.
A real icebreaker, wouldn’t you say — cocktail chat in the Age of Edibles. With the right celebrities contributing, a front-page compendium column in the Sunday Times Opinion section.
It’s not fair to ask questions of others that you can’t answer yourself. As I believe there’s no such thing as fiction — it’s all memoir — I thought I answered the question in my almost-finished novel about a Long Island kid who’s chosen to be the Dalai Lama. In this exchange Billy — that’s me — is 13 years old and being interviewed for local TV news:
“Do you remember what the pandemic was like for you?”
“Oh, Alix…”
“If this is too painful…”
“What I mostly remember is…”
Billy closed his eyes and recalled a moment too sad to share: He was going somewhere with his parents, and they slowed the car at the hospital’s emergency room entrance to see if it was true that refrigerated trucks were parked there. One was. “So many more in the city,” Jane whispered, and they drove on. The emotion of that memory played across Billy’s face, and the camera operator moved closer. He opened his eyes.
“Rain and sirens.”
“Sirens and rain.”
“Mostly the rain.”
And that is what I remember most vividly: a month of rain at the start of the lockdown. My days were solitary before — I was writing a book — and I told myself that nothing was really different for me. But it was. Isolation triggered loneliness, and as we know, loneliness cuts deep and hangs around, even when other people show up.
And something else, something bigger, something I’ve only recently come to understand: from the beginning of my career, my creative choices for my big projects were influenced by my sense of myself as a permanent outsider. I’ll spare you the guided tour. Let me just share my experience of my first big project.
In 1983, I optioned The Queen’s Gambit, the can’t-put-it-down novel by Walter Tevis. This has the same title as the Netflix series you probably watched in 2020. The Beth of the series wouldn’t recognize the girl in the novel. In the series, Beth is gorgeous and wears great clothes. As The New Yorker described her, “There’s no question that Netflix Beth will land on her feet. She walks into every room like she owns it.” If she has so much, what does she want? More. Hard to make a sympathetic character of that.
In the novel and in my screenplay, Beth is far from beautiful, badly dressed, insecure, and so very lonely. The Beth of the book has one superpower — she’s a genius at chess — but it’s not sufficient to take her all the way to the championship. That can happen only when she acknowledges that she’s worthy of love and, more, is capable of loving — when she discovers a superpower that leads to an escape from her loneliness.
Beth Harmon, c’est moi. Also, JFK and Mary Meyer in my novel. Also, the couple in Married Sex, who try to protect their precious marriage, only to risk it and almost ruin it. Also, The Color of Light, my play about Henri Matisse, the second most celebrated artist of the last century, old and sick and alone until he’s rescued by his deep spiritual love for a nun. And now the child Dalai Lama, isolated by his job description.
The legacy of Covid? I can make this banal — people need people — but that’s to distance myself. Better to say that I believe people who find their people have more successful, happier lives than people who go it alone or, in relationships, wall themselves off. So I write adult love stories. And if the ending affirms hope for the writer — and the reader — so much the better.
If you’ve noticed that I’ve been recently recommending books, movies, and music that suggest connection is a major priority and attainable – for me, for you – that’s not accidental.
Here’s to better.
SONG OF THE WEEK: BON IVER
“Holocene” was nominated for a Grammy for Song of the Year and Record of the Year. In 2019, NPR named “Holocene” as the best song of the 2010s. The viewer comments on YouTube explain why: When you’re stressed, or grieving, or lonely and sad, this song calms you and reminds you there’s great beauty in the world. To watch the video, which was made in Iceland, click here.
What’s it about? Justin Vernon explains:
“It was Christmas night, and my brother and I watched ‘Inglourious Basterds.’ And we had a little smokey-smoke and took a walk down our road, and it was so quiet and it was like a really icy night and it was already quiet ’cause there’s not a lot of people traveling, and it was kind of spooky. The air’s just hanging, and we walked over to this bridge over I-94, and there wasn’t a single car, nothing for miles and miles, and the air was hanging in such a way with the ice storm kinda going on, and it looked like this sheet of ice on the road and this glow of the distant lights of Eau Claire, and — at once I knew I was not magnificent. It was one of those moments where you’re not really sure if you’re the creator of something or if you’ve just been handed something to share. I’ve worked hard and everything, but sometimes you just feel like you really are a conduit for describing an idea.”
THE OPPOSITE OF ADDICTION IS NOT SOBRIETY. THE OPPOSITE OF ADDICTION IS CONNECTION
from Fulcra Design
Put a rat in a cage and give it 2 water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with heroin or cocaine. The rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself in a couple of weeks. That is our theory of addiction.
Bruce Alexander comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It has nothing to do. Let’s try this a bit differently.” So he built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything a rat could want is in Rat Park. Lovely food. Lots of sex. Other rats to befriend. Colored balls. Plus both water bottles, one with water and one with drugged water. But here’s what’s fascinating: In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use it. None of them overdose. None of them use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction.
What Bruce did shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. The right-wing theory is that it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is that it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.
Now, we created a society where significant numbers of us can’t bear to be present in our lives without being on something, drink, drugs, sex, shopping… We’ve created a hyper-consumerist, hyper-individualist, isolated world that is, for many of us, more like the first cage than the bonded, connected cages we need.
The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of it, is geared toward making us connect with things not people. You are not a good consumer citizen if you spend your time bonding with the people around you and not stuff. In fact, we are trained from a young age to focus our hopes, dreams, and ambitions on things to buy and consume. Drug addiction is a subset of that.”
TOMATO BUTTER FOR ROAST CHICKEN
from Canal House: Cook Something
Roast chicken… again? This tomato butter adds a new dimension. When you’re ready to use it, don’t warm it up, just slather it on the roasted chicken and let it melt.
serves 4-6
2 lemons
2 anchovy filets packed in oil, drained and finely chopped
6 sprigs fresh thyme
¾ cup dry sherry
2 big tablespoons tomato paste
8 tablespoons (1 stick) cold butter, cut into 8 pieces
Put the anchovies, thyme and sherry in as heavy medium saucepan. Bring to a simmer over medium heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Strain the sherry through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl. Discard the solids. Return the sherry to the pan. Boil over medium-high heat until the sherry has reduced to ¼ cup. Whisk in the tomato paste. Add the butter one piece at a time, whisking until it has melted before adding the next piece. Whisk until all the butter has melted and the sauce is smooth. Remove the pan from the head and cover to keep the tomato butter warm.
