Three Oregon Pinots Currently Available

Before I started "Thoughts About Fiction," I wrote a blog called "The Wine Commentator" for about six years, reviewing mainly Oregon and California Pinot Noir plus unoaked or lightly oaked Chardonnay.

The point was to discover what my wife and I liked about wine and what we didn't like, and to figure out whether it was worth buying more expensive wine, We learned a great deal.

In the Age of Coronavirus, we're cooking all our dinners at home and drinking wine along with them.  After getting through a certain amount of inventory in our cellar, I realized we needed some Pinot Noir that could be consumed without much aging and asked our local wine merchant what he had available from Oregon's Willamette Valley.

I bought three bottles and my wife and I subjected them to a blind tasting one evening, just like we did back in the old "Wine Commentator" days. That meant trying them all, without knowing which was which,  first before eating any food, and then during the course of dinner.  The bottles were then re-corked and opened again on a second night and sampled one more time.

The wines were:

1) Elk Cove 2017 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir  ($25)
2) Evensham Wood 2018 Dundee Hills Pinot Noir ($27), and
3) North Valley 2017 Soter Vineyard Pinot Noir ($25)

Now, you might say, wait a minute: two of those are of the 2017 vintage and one is of the 2018 vintage so it isn't an even playing field.  I would respond by saying I'm not trying to evaluate which winemaker did best with a particular year's grapes, I'm evaluating which wine a consumer should purchase and these are what were available.

Lets go straight to the bottom line.  We both independently, and on both days, picked the North Valley offering as the clear winner.  It had a nice body weight, noticeably more complexity of flavor, and good acidity. The acidity both enabled the wine to stand up to food better than the other two and it gave the North Valley pinot an attractively bright finish. And this wine was even better when re-opened on the second day (not unusual for young red wine) so don't think you have to consume an entire bottle with one dinner.

On the other end of the spectrum, we both liked the Evesham Wood the least, to the point where after the second round of tasting, I threw out the remaining more than half bottle.  This wine seemed balanced, if bland, upon first tasting, but then an aspect I would described as "dusty" appeared and the finish became less and less pleasant. In other words, the more oxygen it encountered, the less attractive it became. And once again, the two of us were on the same page with respect to this one.

Somewhere in the middle was the Elk Cove.  When we first sampled this wine, before starting to eat our food, I found it disappointingly thin and even a little watery.  My wife described it as bland.  But as time went by and the wine encountered more oxygen, it gained body weight. When the three bottles were reopened on the second day, the Elk Cove  was noticeably better. But it still lacked the complexity and the acidity of the North Valley and because of the latter, came across as a little sweet.

If you tend to drink wine on its on as opposed to with food, you might like the Elk Cove, but I would recommend swirling it around in a decanter to thoroughly oxygenate it before consumption,  This wine really needs to breathe a bit before you drink it.

So there you have it. If you want a satisfying pinot to drink with a meal and you don't plan to cellar it, go for the North Valley pinot if you can find it. This one, too, will benefit from decanting before consumption.

And in this instance, no, you don't have to pay more to get a better bottle of wine.

If you want to learn about wine, I recommend you open more than one bottle at a time, sample them blind without and with food, and on more than one day.  Wine changes.

Making Wine Coasters (2)

Belle Pente Vineyard &Winery is a Willamette Valley, Oregon, producer of wines made from Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris and Chardonnay grapes.  Above you can see one of their bottles of wine, a coaster made from the foil tops of 16 bottles and a wine glass sitting on the coaster.

More About Gender and Gender Roles

Gender issues obviously loom large for writers.

What makes a male or female character convincing in terms of personality and behavior?  It's a question that appears to be increasingly interesting -- and perhaps more problematic --  in the age of gender and occupational fluidity.

A couple of very recent articles, one in the Washington Post, and the other in the New York Times, shed some interesting light on this issue. Both are authored by writers.

In the first, "I love being a stay-at-home dad. And I still struggle with what it says about me as a man," Jason Basa Nembec, with commendable candor, agonizes on Father's Day over his decision to put his wife's lucrative career first. Intellectually, he's fine with it, but in his gut, it feels all wrong. He wishes masculinity could be "redefined."

A complementary article, "One Year on Testosterone," suggests it may not be easy.  In it, the author, Linden Crawford, a person born as a woman who eventually discovers she is gay, begins taking testosterone because she wants to experience what it does for one even though she isn't interested in making a full transition. As a result, she begins to acquire some rather classic "alpha male" characteristics, perhaps of the sort Mr. Nembec above is trying to shed.

Nembec has a PhD in English with a focus on creative writing, but was unable to land a full-time teaching position at a university. "If I let myself think about it, I felt like a failure," he says. So he agreed to accommodate his wife's successful career in the retail industry by staying home and taking care of first one young daughter and then a second as well.

Although "an amazing privilege," the role has not squared well with Nembec's underlying makeup, which he appears to ascribe to cultural influences as opposed to human nature.

"Inside, I was starting to struggle big-time with my identity, measuring myself against some old-school societal notion of what makes a successful man"  -- most notably, in his view, that a man should provide for his family.  "It's a narrow notion of masculinity that I don't even believe in, yet can't fully break free from.  Who knows what cultural mash-up of school friends, TV, movies and whatever else even built it." 

Nembec tries to "reinvent himself" as a bartender but finds he can't work the necessary hours because of domestic needs and more than two-years into his unconventional stay-at-home role, "still sometimes feels deeply ashamed for not working to bring more income into our bank account."

"Unfortunately, shame doesn't hit me on a logical level. It's an internal voice that quickly gets visceral. It his me in the gut. It radiates out from my torso like a wound, sometimes twisting the tension in my neck into a migraine headache, sometimes bringing me to tears, sometimes both."

The bottom line: Nembec doesn't want to change. Rather, he wants the world to view masculinity, and, in particular, what it means to be strong, in a different light and then he'll be able to feel better about himself.

Turning to Crawford, who I have (with my apologies)  referred to as "she" or "her" (because Crawford's preferred "they" is too confusing for most readers), it all started with a desire to experience what having a mustache might be like. That, in turn, eventually led to curiosity about taking testosterone in order to be bigger and stronger.

"What I wanted was virility, and I was afraid to admit it," Crawford says, while at the same time conceding she didn't want to become ugly and "felt guilty for squandering my feminine beauty and grace" even though she says she never identified with such traits.

So, while Nembec feels shame about failing to live up to conventional notions of masculinity in order to accommodate other priorities, Crawford experiences guilt about throwing away conventional notions of feminine appeal in pursuit of goals that conflict with such traits.

Shrugging off warnings of adverse reactions, Crawford begins applying a gel containing a low dose of testosterone and finds her physical strength and stamina soar.  

Most significantly perhaps, in view of current criticisms of "toxic masculinity," Crawford says: "It's a bit disturbing to observe that the more masculine I feel, the freer I feel to do what I please, and not to do what merely pleases others."

The phrase "free to do what I please" brings  to mind Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, and Jeffrey Epstein among a host of other conventional males, both contemporary and over the course of history, and in fiction as well as in life.

As she continues taking testosterone, Crawford finds she smiles less, finds it harder to cry, experiences more prolonged periods of irritation and experiences a sense of justified anger that is both empowering in the sense of being a call to action, but at the same time disturbing in the sense that it is a trait women don't generally enjoy.

"I am grateful to be more in touch with my anger, but also outraged that my sense of entitlement to such a basic emotion correlates with the amount of testosterone in my bloodstream."

There's a lot to think about here -- for readers, for writers and even for the authors of the two referenced articles -- since a lot what these authors discuss appears to be unresolved,

In addition, there is what Crawford calls "gender panic" among the general public -- emotions that set in when someone can't clearly identify another person as a male or female.

"I face gender panic constantly in my daily life and my work as a bartender," Crawford says. "Since it threatens my sense of safety as well as my rapport with customers, I've learned to monitor its progression carefully."

That's an interesting statement because a trait that runs far stronger in women than in men is a sense of vulnerability. So despite her testosterone-induced added strength, stamina and virility, Crawford retains a key underlying attribute of femininity.

  

Let's Hear It For New Criticism

New Criticism, a movement that dominated American intellectual analysis of literature in the middle part of the 20th century, emphasized a close reading of text independent of the historical, philosophical or sociopolitical circumstances in which it was written. And more important in the current context, advocates of this approach believed the biographical circumstances of authors should be ignored during the process of divining the meaning or aesthetic beauty of writing.

Major figures associated with this approach were John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and, to a certain extent, T.S. Eliot.

I mention this because I read a piece in Literary Hub in which a couple of female authors were described as being upset that readers and/or critics seemed more interested in their personal lives than in what they had written, or, rather, in how their writing illuminated their personal lives.

In the piece, two women, Kendra Winchester and Autumn Privett, discuss Lucy, a recent novel by Jamaica Kincaid.

In it (the transcript of a Podcast), Ms Winchester says at one point: "I interviewed Meena Kandasamy earlier this year about The Portrait of the Writer As a Young Wife, and she talked about her experience with autofiction [fictionalized autobiography] and saying that she wanted to separate, you know, the art and the artist. And she didn’t want people looking into her own personal life to find out what was “real” and what wasn’t real. And I am reading up on the research for this episode. There a similar conversation with Jamaica Kincaid that, yes, a lot of her work is based on some of her experience, like loosely inspired by. But she didn’t want people to think that she was writing like word-for-word or experience-by-experience upon her own life. And she wanted that separation as well. And I find that interesting that so many women are just having to have this conversation like over and over. It’s like people are just so obsessed with women writers, like what is real from their life and what is fiction."

In other words, these women would that what they have written stand on its own terms.

This preference, it is fair to say, is then largely ignored by Ms Winchester and Ms Privett during their discussion of Lucy.

Early in the piece, for instance, Ms Winchester says: "So I thought we could talk a little bit about her and her background and where she comes from because a lot of her own personal life has informed her writing in a lot of ways."

And on it goes from there.

Well, people are fundamentally voyeurs and perhaps that's what the listeners to the "Reading Women" podcast really want to hear.

 

 

 

Making Wine Coasters in the Age of Coronavirus

001 - 2013

I got the idea of making coasters from the foil on the top of wine bottles in 2013, having for many years saved the foils along with the corks when opening bottles. These coasters are meant to be utilitarian objects as opposed to works of art, and, indeed, we use a rotating selection every night at dinner.

I think I picked out this size wood  — a strip 1/4 inch thick and 3 1/2 inches wide —because if squares were cut from it, they would look about the right size for coasters. Initially, I didn’t realize that the foils could be cut to exactly fit this format so the foils on the coaster above were cut so as to have borders around them.

The first coaster was made from a fairly random selection of foils including:

—Chateau Puligny-Montrachet, a high-end Burgundian producer of white wine from the chardonnay grape

—Vietti, a prominent producer of wines in the Italian Piedmont. Grapes include Nebbiolo (Barolo, Barbaresco), Barbera, Dolcetto and Arneis

—Andrew Will  Winery & Betz Family Winery; from the State of Washington (“Bordeaux blends” and others)

—Bethel Heights, Broadley, St. Innocent and Penner Ash; all  Willamette Valley, Oregon, producers known mainly for pinot noir.

Wallace Stegner, Political Correctness and Who We Are

Here in America, we live in an age of political correctness. From time to time, it mutates, or morphs, or goes so far as to shoot itself in the foot (the election of Donald Trump, for instance), but it refuses to go away.

And as a result, "ideological pigeonholing" has, in the words of  New York Times critic A.O. Scott, "become our dominant form of cultural analysis."

This observation appeared in Scott's lengthy appreciation of Wallace Stegner, an author known primarily for his depictions of the American West, both in fiction and in other forms of writing. Scott's piece, the lead article in the June 7, 2020, NYT weekly Book Review section, was identified as the first in a series called "The Americans" -- profiles of "writers who show us who we are."

The point, an introduction to the series explained, is to restore a sense of complexity to an America that is increasingly being parsed through the medium of "the simplified, sloganized language of politics."

A certain paradox associated with Stegner  makes him worth reading at a time "when we spend so much time mapping the fault lines between privilege and resentment and fighting over who is part of the elite and who is entitled to victim status." So said Scott.

Although known during his lifetime as "the Dean of Western Writers," the author,  who died in 1993,  thought of himself as an outsider, but not in the usual sense of the region. He was an advocate of community and a critic of the rugged individualism so central to the mythical ethos of the American West and what it long appears to have stood for.

The Times said the new series will include a variety of American authors -- "some well-known, some unjustly forgotten and some perpetually misunderstood."

Stegner probably fits into the middle group -- largely forgotten.

His work "is hardly a fixture on college syllabuses or in the pages of scholarly journals," Scott said. In addition, one might add, his name is pretty much totally absent from popular cultural.

Moreover, Scott noted, "there is no Library of America collection of his writings."

In the context of political correctness, Scott noted that Stegner's work has been criticized by, among others, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a writer and member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe on the grounds that his works fail to significantly address the indigenous peoples of the region or a variety of non-white immigrant groups.

Well, Stegner's novels ("Angle of Repose" perhaps the most well known) are works of fiction, not sociological treatises. Novels certainly can be sociopolitical in nature, but they don't have to be. As Scott points out, Stegner was most concerned about marriage and, in particular, the nature of monogamous marriage. Stories generally need a setting and he chose the West.  All he needed to tell readers about the West is what was important to the lives of his particular characters.

Then again, one can argue Stegner's main concern -- monogamous marriage -- is sufficiently sociopolitical in and of itself.  Monogamy, with its "crags and chasms" is "the human undertaking around which all the others are organized," Scott said.

Perhaps Stegner's exploration of that topic, more than is depiction of the West" is his salient contribution to "who we are."

"American Dirt:" Cultural Appropriation, Polemical Fiction?

"In contemporary literary circles, there is a serious and legitimate sensitivity to people writing about heritages that are not their own because, at its worst, this practice perpetuates the evils of colonization, stealing the stories of oppressed people for the profit of the dominant."

That paragraph jumped out at me when it read Lauren Groff's review of the recent, rather controversial novel "American Dirt," by Jeanine Cummings, because it seemed to call into question the fundamental nature of fiction: it's invented so no holds barred.

Here's the very first thing the contemporary God of Knowledge, Wikipedia, has to say about it: "Fiction generally is a narrative form, in any medium, consisting of people, events, or places that are imaginary—in other words, not based strictly on history or fact."

Let's repeat that: not based strictly on history or fact.

So, whether "American Dirt" gets Mexican culture right or not doesn't matter. No one has to read -- or finish reading this book.  On the other hand, if you like the story whatever you think about the verisimilitude of the setting (how about any number of movies?), you can brush aside certain perceived shortcomings.  Groff said that despite her objections, weeks after reading "American Dirt," the story remained alive in her.

Novels are arguably mostly written to provide entertainment for readers and income for authors. But according to Groff, not all of them.  "American Dirt," she argues, falls into a category known as polemical fiction -- in effect, propaganda masquerading as literature. Polemical fiction, Groff says, is designed to make its readers act in a way that corresponds to the writer's vision and in her view, the purpose of "American Dirt" is "fiercely polemical."

If then, it is essentially propaganda, why was it  awarded a full-page review in the Jan. 26, 2020 New York Times Sunday "Book Review" section? Perhaps like the old comic strip "Pogo," which some newspapers eventually banished to the op-ed pages, Groff's review should have experienced a similar fate.

I wonder how she might characterize certain of Charles Dicken's novels, or Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness?"

But, then, when I first sent drafts my novella "Gina/Diane," which centers on a botched abortion, to female friends for comment, some were quick to see it as polemical, or to argue that if could be so interpreted even if I didn't intend it to be. But arguments could go either way, I pointed out. Because Gina's abortion had not gone well and had life-long consequences, it could be seen as a treatise against a woman's right to choose.  But it could also be seen as an argument in favor of safe, legal abortion procedures.

But what about perpetuating the evils of colonization by writing a story about a culture that is not one's own? I think I'll leave that one for another day -- and perhaps put on a CD of Puccini's opera "Madam Butterfly" to help me get through the pandemic.

 

Gender: a Contemporary Curiousity

Does gender matter? 

It's not a new question, but one that came freshly to mind when I read a book review in the June 4, 2020 New York Times. The piece, by Jennifer Szalai, takes a look at a recent book entitled "Surviving Autocracy" and as I perused it, I became more interested in the manner in which the piece was written than by what Szalai had to say about the book, or by what the book apparently has to say about the all-too-familiar state of American society.

The book is written by Masha Gessen, identified as an immigrant from Russia, and a gay parent who at one point confronted a Russian regime that threatened to remove children from same-sex families.

Does Gessen have a gender?  It's hard to know. The headshot accompanying the article is androgynous -- could be either a male of a female based on appearances.  But female perhaps, based on the name "Masha" -- in Russia traditionally a nickname for a woman named Maria, which, as it turns out, was Gessen's first name at birth.

But when reading Szalai's piece, what soon begins to strike one is the absence of any gender pronouns for the author.  So as Szalai quotes from or references the author, it is never "he  said" or "she said," but only "Gessen said" or, frequently, "Gessen writes."

The effect is a little like traditional Coca-Cola advertising where the name of the drink is simply repeated endlessly. One is almost gagging on the word "Gessen" by the time the article -- a third of a page spread -- is finished.

According to Wikipedia, Gessen is "non-binary" and uses they/them pronouns. But for Szalai to reference the author in that fashion would make it sound, to most readers, as if more than one person wrote the book. I've previously read articles written along those lines and they come across as not just confusing and disconcerting, but narcissistic.  It's all about me: I'm so important I can insist the meaning of the English language be changed. Plurals can be made singular if that's what happens to suit me personally and the rest of you are just have to go along with the ensuing confusion.

But that's where we are these days and I'm sure that what I've just written is about as politically incorrect as it gets.

Which brings me back to does gender matter? In this case, I suppose the answer has to be perhaps. Would one think differently about "Surviving Autocracy" if it were written by a woman, or a man as opposed to by a non-binary when Gessen's specific gripe about Russia has much to do with personal identify?