OF A GOLDEN AGE

My beloved and only grandfather died in 2005 at age 87, and daily events remind me of him because he had such characteristic personality traits. One of the most prominent of these was his unending quest for very cheap or, better yet, free stuff of all stripes. In fact, my dinner plans yesterday combined some of my grandfather’s very favorite ideas: A free buffet.

Chicago’s Pizza is a bite-sized chain with a handful of locations in the city. Their menu sprawls and, well, overextends itself — but the prices are pretty reasonable and I like the range of food they offer. Surprisingly few places offer a ready-to-order salad without meat or a viable sandwich option without meat, both of which Chicago’s offers. They are also fast and open until 5 a.m., the nearest location is a block or two from my office, and I can’t think of a time when they screwed up an order.

Their online ordering system offers me frequent coupons, and I get the impression the manager spends a lot of time working on the customer experience — most recently by planning a big “Customer Appreciation Day” and advertising it by fliers distributed with orders or on neighborhood cars. Instead of something chintzy*, Chicago’s touted a free buffet of salad, pizza, and pasta, and of course word spread fast among my twentysomething colleagues. (Sadly, Nathan, both the cheapest AND the most fond of Chicago’s, is out of the country right now.)

We went over and got on the list for about a forty-minute wait to be seated, and once we got inside, the buffet was perfect: Interesting, diverse food choices, generous amounts of everything, a good-looking tossed salad and giant spread of fresh fruit, and individual-sized variety cheesecakes. We ordered sodas and they were free too.

Service was great, food was great, and the whole thing was somehow free? Yes, I feel appreciated.

* Have you seen Edible Arrangements’ “Customer Appreciation” gimmick? If you SPEND $50 they give you six chocolate-covered strawberries, which they claim is a $15 value. Get real, on all counts.

This weekend, Speaking of Faith reran a 2008 interview with John O’Donohue, Irish poet, former priest, and Hegelian (What an array of descriptors!), done shortly before his death. This moment took me aback:

Yeah, I feel like in the book I wrote on beauty, I was trying to say that one of the huge confusions in our times is to mistake glamour for beauty. And we do live in a culture which is very addicted to the image, and I think that there is always an uncanny symmetry between the way you are inward with yourself and the way you are outward. And I feel that there is an evacuation of interiority going on in our times. And that we need to draw back inside ourselves and that we’ll find immense resources there.

We have largely evacuated interiority, at least in my portion of the Western world, and I can’t think of a better way to phrase the situation. One of history’s favorite literary zingers is from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

We are all large and should contain multitudes, which is, I think, why O’Donohue suggests we “draw back inside ourselves” — plus, a nice Hegelish note there when Whitman expresses himself as the combination and synthesis of his own contradictions and dualities.

Stanley Fish really stirred up some murk last week with his column advocating a limit on curiosity. Fish himself is a source of controversy and I find it hilarious and awkward that anyone accuse this bastion of individual thought and intellect as a curiosity-hater — seriously? Someone widely revered or reviled as the best or worst kind of rhetorician or theorist, who makes his living in the world of higher education?

This is Fish’s thesis in the column, an idea originally situated in the Garden:

The provocation was to go beyond the boundaries God had established and thereby set himself up a rival deity, a being with no limits on what he can conceive, a being whose intellect could, in time, comprehend anything and everything.

I think that Fish views destructive curiosity as the end of wonder and humbled awe, the kind of smug quest for “understanding” that characterizes literary examples Faust and Frankenstein, among others whom Fish does not cite. It is the product of two competing but parallel forces: First, that we are not grounded enough by our families, communities, or otherwise to ever have reason to stop the quest for new knowledge; and second, that we arrogantly assume this quest will lead us to something better, bigger, greater.

But more importantly, as Fish’s weekly column is aptly titled, he simply encourages us to Think Again, to not evacuate our interiority.

Chances are good you’ve never even heard of Drop Dead Diva, because you probably don’t watch reruns of Frasier on Lifetime and thus didn’t see teaser ads for DDD for months leading up to its summer premier. Your loss on both counts. DDD is a dramedy (what a word!) about Deb, a barely-twenties model killed in a car crash and somehow redeposited into the body of Jane, a plus-sized thirtysomething lawyer. Brooke Elliott plays Jane.

Oh, holy cow, I can’t even tell you how much I like this show and look forward to it every week. The legal side is the same old ridiculous TV nonsense (frivolous lawsuits much?), but Jane and her colleagues and friends are made of compelling stuff. One of the show’s most poignant early moments came when Deb-cum-Jane realized she had lost a decade of her life in the switch, and for the first time something made her more upset than the idea that she was now a size 16. Because of the character’s natural straightforwardness and warm personality, she admits openly that as Deb she could get by on vegetables but as Jane she wants a bear claw. She is busy and intellectually rigorous, which Deb learns is as exhausting as her best friend’s booty-sculpting elliptical habit.

Tara Parker Pope praises the show in today’s Well — deservedly. Yes, the show portrays a very realistic, interesting, brilliant woman who happens to be a size or two larger than average, but its appeal goes way beyond that. Deb’s personality as it shines through Jane is admirable. She is no skinny blond mean girl and never was, and she quickly realizes the advantages she was handed in her previous life. Deb’s best friend is a ditzy blond but knows herself and her situation well and is equally warm and lovely. Really, there are almost too many genuinely likable characters on the show to keep track of (what I like to think of as House syndrome).

A recent episode dealt with Jane’s disappointment upon learning — because why would she need to know this before? — that a favorite boutique only carries up to size 10. Jane appeals to one of her colleagues to represent her in a lawsuit, and the shrill, thin woman tells Jane to stop whining or go on a diet. Ironically, this is an idea thought often but stated rarely by all kinds of people, and it is ballsy of the show to put it in the mouth of a character who has the intellectual prowess to be a driven, successful attorney.

Today was my second sick day from work. I can’t remember the last time I took two days off for sickness and it is not something I enjoy, but bringing contagions to work while I’m too feverish and phlegmy to work anyway? Well, that’s not really worth it for anyone.

My across-the-hall neighbor Ray and I were exchanging ailment stories (my cold vs. his upcoming exploratory knee surgery = clear winner?) and he said, “You know what would make your cold go away real fast? A little bit of tequila.” He gestured with his forefinger and thumb.

I said I’d give it some thought.

Today at 7-11 on my way back from an emergency food-and-medicine run, I brought an enormous fountain Diet Coke to the counter. While we exchanged pleasantries, the checker said, “You sound real bad.” I laughed and then coughed. “Yeah, I have a cold,” I said. “Diet Coke’s probably not the best cure.”

“You should drink a little bit of tequila,” the checker said.

Simon Crompton reluctantly advocates American Apparel:

If you walk into American Apparel (now seven stores just in London, and counting) it’s easy to be put off by the body suits, printed leggings and high-waisted shorts. Indeed, the caption to the image above the list of London stores on AA’s website says it all: Cotton Spandex Jersey Tank Thong. I can see the picture and I still don’t know what it is. But it doesn’t sound good.

The other night a friend and I walked past one of Chicago’s American Apparel stores and a glance in made me cringe a little. Despite their offensive marketing and a lineup of mostly ugly hipster items, AA does cut the best t-shirts on the market today, both for men and women. My friend also has a wholesale account with them, and they offer unbeatable prices (take that, “You can’t beat Walmart’s unbeatable prices”!) for what you get — almost as low as the 50/50 blend shirts I used to buy at Michaels back in the day.

Oh, internet! Please accept my apologies. Things distract me, I get caught up, I get busy at work. My brain reaches its plate-spinning maximum when I add in a great book I don’t ever want to stop reading, in this case Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. It came out in 2001 and won some awards, while many consider it to be Patchett’s breakthrough work in terms of the public eye — interesting because she has published one novel since then, and only did so in 2007.

Bel Canto embodies utopian and dystopian novels with a twist of politics: A troubled Latin American country invites both a prominent Japanese businessman and his beloved favorite opera singer for a birthday party, in an effort to woo the businessman and bring manufacturing jobs to the country. Once everyone arrives, a group of Quechua-speaking terrorists in fatigues and taped-up combat boots take the group hostage: 200 people, affluent men and women from around the world. They live in the Vice President’s mansion and the Red Cross brings in supplies.

All of that happens in the first chapter.

After that the book becomes an exploratory thesis on love and happiness, what each means to different people, and what we do to achieve the goals we choose for ourselves. The Japanese businessman in particular has beautiful internal dialogues on his life, what he thought it brought him, and what he did not see before.

And so that left his own family, his wife and two daughters. They were the question. If he had not drawn happiness from them then the fault was completely his own. [ . . . ] Could it be possible that such happiness had existed in the world all along and he had never once heard mention of it?