Frozen

It is mid March which means I am still freezing but also tired of being freezing. I still have to wear socks and shoes and pants instead of sandals and cute dresses, and I hate socks, shoes, and pants. I have made 61,982 pots of soup since October. I am bored of lentils. Nothing is growing yet.

Therefore I am eating my freezer.

This week in my freezer I found green chilies I bought at my farmers¹ market then roasted last summer AND half a bag of corn. Score. I added canned tomatoes and beans from my pantry (and plain yogurt because the chilies were very spicy) et voila: roasted chili chowder.

With apples and oranges because, to review, nothing is growing yet. We are very sick of winter produce in our house. (If you live smugly in Southern California or Australia, I don’t want to hear it.) (JK, of course I want to hear it.)

While I was in the freezer, I also found five half-bags of pandemic-era berries and a third of a jar of pandemic-era apple sauce. First I made compote. Is there anything more satisfying than dumping pale, freezer-burned, ice-encrusted blocks of probably iffy frozen-to-begin-with foodstuff into a pot and watching it turn this color? Yes. But not in March.

Very pretty blueberry raspberry cherry strawberry fig compote

Then, with the apple sauce, I made pancakes for dinner. How great is that?

“I made pancakes for dinner. How great is that?” is a line from the first episode of Nurse Jackie. It’s something of a reveal, so I won’t set it up for you, and it might actually be a better exercise out of context anyway. I frequently use TV pilots in class to teach plot and character. Most characters, you develop over many scenes. Occasionally though, you do it in a moment, a gesture, a single line. “I made pancakes for dinner. How great is that?” tells you a lot all at once about the character saying it and the relationship that character has with whomever they’re saying it to. This is genius-level writing, truly.

Good pun. Bad blurb. (They should have asked me.) Image copyright Showtime.

Based just on length, you’d think short stories are to TV episodes as novels are to movies. But no, movies are short stories — contained — whereas TV series are playing the same game as novels: each episode, each scene, has to be interesting on its own, has to build character and relationships, must advance the plot, but it must also simultaneously contribute to the long game, the arc of the episode AND the arc of the season AND the arc of the whole show, for however many seasons it may live.

The good news, therefore, is this: Wrapping up and hunkering down against the March chill and watching TV all day is really good preparation for writing novels and any other long game you happen to be playing, and if you haven’t seen Nurse Jackie, you have seven seasons before you of brilliant writing and character development to teach, enrich, and entertain you.

And if you have already watched Nurse Jackie? As I said last missive about books you haven’t read since high school, you probably don’t remember it, and even if you do, watching for fun is different than watching to learn how it’s done and how you can do it² too. And more to the point, sometimes warming, nutritive viewing isn’t new but rather in your freezer, waiting for you to reconstitute it and come back fresh and consume it from a different perspective. Especially in March.

Rarely do I think TV as well written and well constructed³ as novels, but Nurse Jackie is. No reason though not to also recommend a book anyway. This one begins “at the hour of sunset, on a hot spring day” and is therefore perfect for (an aspirational) March.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is not a short book and it’s not an easy book, but it is beguiling and luxurious and brilliant and subversive. You could take, say, a month to read it lazily. You could take a week to read it feverishly. The pictured cover is the Mirra Ginsburg translation, which is the one I can vouch for. The link is to a 50th Anniversary new translation and has a very cool cover. (Anyone who’s an expert on Russian translations, please weigh in with which edition we should read.)

Meantime, some of you (bless you) have asked about book tour(!) for Enormous Wings. Plans are in progress! But I can confirm two Seattle events for which please, please save the dates and come. More info and more locales soon!

Enormous Wings local launch events

Third Place Books (Lake Forest Park), May 5

Seattle Public Library (Central Branch), May 13

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1. Benjamin Dreyer, who knows whereof etc, assures me this is not possessive.

2. Whatever “it” is, and it could be lots of things.

3. Though let me add that watching crappy TV pilots is also a good exercise. Some of them take only 23 minutes to show what doesn’t work and should never be done, and that’s useful too.