Author Archives: Angela Mears

Then, butter

Posted on September 13, 2011 | 24 Comments

Nothing can cure the senses but the soul, just as nothing can cure the soul but the senses.

Oscar Wilde said that. Or a character in one of his novels did. It reminds me of me, of the bad habits I’ve been nursing. These days I come home, swearing to do some useful, necessary thing, but instead plunge headfirst into the pursuit of pleasure. I’m a walking appetite. Salt, water, moon, bread, tang, sweat, sweets. It’s extraordinary, the way things taste.

Fun fact? Sasha Grey took her stage name from A Picture of Dorian Grey. An interesting study in appetites, Sasha. And the book. And the name.

Continue reading →

→ 24 Comments

Posted in All Posts, Breakfast, Vegetarian

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Song of summer

Posted on September 5, 2011 | 7 Comments

There’s a wordlessness that exists just beyond softspoken, down some gentle inexorable incline.

It threatens tenderly, terribly, like a cooler season. Today the lakewaters churn and foam and savage the buoys. A wind quivers the leaves. So ends the world of yesterday, the world I’d most like to inhabit, the season of skin and sweat and burn and the cool fire. And here we come down the easy slope, pulled on by free fall, this controlled stumbling-forward, the cruel logic of forward, into the wordless valley.

Continue reading →

→ 7 Comments

Posted in All Posts, Etc.

Tagged , , , , ,

A new place

Posted on August 29, 2011 | 17 Comments

Tonight I’m writing you from somewhere different.

I moved to a place on the water. “I think you can make a real home here,” my mother said, stepping in, weighted down with boxes. I felt the dark wood moldings and breathed in the lake, a salt-dusted almost-sea smell, and agreed.

Now the place has some furniture in it, and I’ve stacked its shelves with what little I own, and it still feels like something borrowed. You can hear the waves in every room. You sleep to their pull, wake to their breaking. It gives new meaning to the thing we say about sadness, that it feels like living underwater. The waves, it turns out, don’t sound so different from under water than from three floors above it.

Continue reading →

→ 17 Comments

Posted in All Posts, Appetizers, Salads, Sides, Vegetarian

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Shuck

Posted on August 7, 2011 | 7 Comments

As I write this I’m eating cold corn on the cob, roasted yesterday in its husk, and it’s as good as anything I’ve ever eaten.

It’s been a trying month. I feel myself getting a little weird. My belly is pregnant with apricots and corn and spelt bread. I don’t think I’ve spoken a single word since digging for beets in Cabrini Green yesterday and don’t mind it. I bought goggles for swimming in the lake. At first it terrified me, being way out there in the water, to see the smallness of my belongings on the shore. But then it got all weightless and quiet and profound.

Continue reading →

→ 7 Comments

Posted in All Posts, Etc., Sides, Vegetarian

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Slow.

Posted on July 20, 2011 | 10 Comments

This is what I know.

Today I laid out in the sun on a patch of grass outside my apartment. I have been ill, but not so ill that sunlight doesn’t seem a remedy. My elbows, knees, wrists and ankles were bandaged with drug store patches that delivered a burning, chemical heat (or cold?) that alleviates pain, or distracts from it.

According to an essay in a book I’m reading, Carly Simon did something similar to alleviate the psychic pain of stage fright: before confronting her audience, she asked band mates to slap and spank her hard. She went onstage pink-cheeked and red-assed.

Pain beats fright.

Continue reading →

→ 10 Comments

Posted in All Posts, Etc.

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Salmon Rillettes (One Good Thwack)

Posted on July 13, 2011 | 7 Comments

The sun loses itself behind a scrim of melted butter-clouds.

I move a mason jar filled with wildflowers so they catch the caramelly light. They die so quickly. The hardwood glows amber-gold. The sun burns beauty into our shoulders and thighs. We try to make the most.

I’m embarrassed to find myself these days writing mostly about weather. It can’t be helped. Last week I wrote about not writing, of all things, about the feel of quiet. What I meant then was not that I have nothing to report from that quiet. I meant I’m troubled about what to possibly mean.

Continue reading →

→ 7 Comments

Posted in All Posts, Appetizers, Breakfast, Seafood

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Keeping

Posted on July 2, 2011 | 4 Comments

It’s been observed that these posts read like love letters, and I suppose they are.

I don’t write as often as I used to. There’s a mood to achieve–quiet, still, sad–and these days are unforgiving of moods, unforgiving of all but hard work and frantic play. But these can so weary the soul and I hope I’m forgiven for fleeing from them from time to time, for holing up in my tiny home and laying in bed and looking out at branches, out at nothing at all, and feeling for that quiet again. I have been at it for a day and it’s nearly here. This is who I am. I’m beginning to remember.

Continue reading →

→ 4 Comments

Posted in All Posts, Breakfast, Desserts

Tagged , , , , , , ,

On Flesh

Posted on June 5, 2011 | 15 Comments

Some thoughts on what it means to have a body:

One: All the good street art faces east. We are riding the train north, passing one of the Red Line burning men—long-faced, suited men engulfed in pink and green flames—when the suited middle-aged lady beside me extracts a roll of toilet paper from her large straw bag. She begins to blow her nose, emitting this percussive, unrelenting, glottal-sounding sound, the relentlessness and percussiveness of which I am powerless to describe.

Continue reading →

→ 15 Comments

Posted in All Posts, Meat, Sides

Tagged , , , , , , ,