Leanne Shapton: Swimming Studies

Yesterday my friend brought my attention to the recently released book, Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton. After a quick trip around the internet, I knew I was going to have to get a copy – for myself and maybe even a couple as gifts. When I read and looked at some of her descriptions and swim-sensory memories, I knew them as my own. The smells especially. It was like she climbed into my head and woke up the old swimmer in me. I can't believe how relatable everything is. And then she combines it with her drawing and painting talents and – I'm just floored. Especially love the swimming watercolors. So beautiful!

Seriously the moments, colors, textures she's captured! How wonderful to discover these with the Olympics about to start. I was already feeling nostalgic about my years as a competitive swimmer and so so so looking forward to watching the events. I'm coming out of my skin in anticipation for the Men's 400 IM tomorrow night. Finding this "memoir" right now – it's just perfect.

Read more about this author and artist here.

Chicago Chef's Table @ Province.

Two weeks ago, Marcia and I went to a book launch party for Ameila Levin's cool new cookbook, Chicago Chef's Table, which features over 50 of Chicago's best chefs, restaurants and recipes. It's a beautiful book, well designed with wonderful photography – a great addition to any cook's library, but especially for one with ties to Chicago.

The party was hosted by Province, and we got to enjoy not only champagne and several passed appetizers, but a 5-course dinner with accompanying wines, all put together by the restaurant's chef Randy Zweiban. It was amazing! I wish I had written down the appetizers (bummer!), but here's what we had for dinner:

Course One: Nichols Farm Asparagus Salad | goat cheese, pretzel chip, preserved lemon. Tomero, Torrontés, Medoza, Argentina, 2009.

Course Two: Tortilla Soup | Laughing Bird Farms shrimp, avocado salsa, smoked tomatillos. El Albar Lurton, Tempranillo Rosé, Castilla y León, Spain, 2011. (image sans soup)

Course Three: Alaskan Cod | fingerling hash, piquillo romesco. Hermanos Sastre, Tempranillo, Roble, Ribera del Duero, Spain, 2008.

Course Four: Becker Lane Pork "Cubano" | Nichols Farm black beans, rice, orange mojo. Cedro do Noval, Syrah/Touriga Nacional, Vinho Regional Duriense, Portugal, 2007.

Course Five: Chocolate and Orange Flans | orange-dulce de leche ice cream, orange salsa. Casa de la Ermita, Late Harvest Viognier, Jumilla, Spain, NV.

In looking up the Province website again now, I noticed they have a Spring Menu Dinner tasting event this Thursday.  It's $75 and totally worth it in my opinion – there's so much to try complete with great service and atmosphere. Unfortunately, I'll have to miss this one – I'll be enjoying a steak at Ruth's Chris.

One more thing. I think my favorite of the meal was the Tortilla Soup. I just happen to have the recipe!

Chicken Tortilla Soup by Randy Zweiban. (Serves 8)

3 chicken legs
3 chicken thighs
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
6 cups canola oil, divided
6 white corn tortillas, cut into 1/4-inch strips
1 cup diced red onion
6 tomatillos, diced
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 serrano chile, stemmed, seeded, and minced
3 medium red peppers, stemmed, seeded, and chopped
2 quarts vegetable broth or stock

For the avocado relish:
1 ripe Haas avocado, peeled, pitted, and finely diced
1 tablespoon minced red onion
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lime juice
1 teaspoon chopped fresh cilantro
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Preheat oven to 350°F. Season chicken with salt and pepper. Heat two tablespoons of the oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat. Saute chicken until nicely browned, about 2-3 minutes per side. Remove from pan, set aside.

Add remaining oil to the pan and heat to 175°F, checking the temperature with a thermometer. Return chicken to pan and cover with lid or heavy-duty foil.

Roast in oven for 35-40 minutes or until meat is fork-tender. Remove chicken from pan, reserving the oil. When chicken is cool enough to handle, shred, discarding skin and bones.

Heat the oil back up to 325°F. Fry the tortilla strips until crispy, about 1-2 minutes. Drain the strips on paper towels. Pour off all but one-quarter of the oil.

Heat the remaining oil over medium heat. Sauté the onion, tomatillos, garlic, and chile until lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Add the peppers, broth, and all but 1 cup of the crispy tortillas.

YUM!

Stonehouse on Cedar.

I went to the best little store on Saturday. Everything in it was perfect. The house itself was perfect. The weather outside was perfect. The woman who owns it was delightful.

As I browsed around inside for a while, I thought to myself, I bet I could buy all my Christmas gifts in this one place. I didn't want to leave. I need to go back. As I drove away I couldn't believe I didn't take any pictures.

Stonehouse on Cedar, St. Charles, IL – for antiques and simple objects.

Infinite Jest - Attempt No. 2.

So I'm about 160 pages in to this monstrosity. That's 30 pages past the point where I gave up last time. I'm going to tell you what this book is about (to me*).

There's a family who runs a tennis academy/boarding school in New England for elementary-through-high- school aged students. The family has three boys. One is a professional football kicker in Arizona, one is currently enrolled in the school and a pretty decent tennis player, and the other is mentally disabled somehow, but allowed to live on campus and seems to be a bit of a pal to everyone at the school.

The father has died and the mother and uncle took over the operation. He was apparently raised by an alcoholic, failed, pro-tennis player father who began teaching him, at age 10, a little bit about tennis while sipping whiskey. They lived between Arizona and California, depending.

There are a bunch of drug addicts that live in and around Harvard mugging people for their fixes. One's a transvestite. One dies during an overdose of something (drano?) while the rest watch. Then they put him in a dumpster.

There's another group of seemingly very uneducated, possibly drug-addicted other folk, but I thought they were Southern?

There is also a drug treatment center and the character who started it, in a run down neighborhood outside Boston.

One of the kids at the academy lived in this neighborhood. He is talented and does not come from money, like many of the other students. Almost all the kids participate in some form of drug use, and this kid deals in clean urine to keep them all eligible and enrolled.

Ok, now up in Canada, some Prince's Eastern European physician is comatose after watching a video that arrived in the mail. Everyone that goes to rescue him also finds themself fixated on the looping video in the playing device.

There's another dude that gets massive quantities of weed and locks himself up in his apartment to smoke it until it's gone. I forget the quantity. Maybe he smokes like two ounces in a weekend? Something insane like that. He keeps trying to quit but then goes back for one more bender. You might imagine he's a little paranoid.

Finally, there's a couple of guys sitting on a mountain outside of Phoenix. One's undercover dressed as a woman. The other is in a wheelchair. They are sitting and observing something. They might be in the military or some kind of police force. They sort of seem to work together but not.

Sometimes it seems like maybe the tennis academy is in the Southwest also, not in New England, but I'm pretty sure it's in New England. There is a big tournament discussed that IS in Phoenix.

This middle kid (youngest?) of the family, the one who can play pretty decent tennis and is an upper-classman at the academy seems to have had some kind of mental breakdown. He's a secret pot smoker. It's often unclear whether he (and his disabled brother) can actually talk – or if they are just imagining their conversations. He was of the sort of smart where he can memorize an entire dictionary and recite definitions, including the page number where they appear (depending on which dictionary you'd like him to reference). He's trying to gain entrance to a school in Arizona, when he cracks under pressure.

*I really have no clue if any of this interpretation is accurate. At this point I just keep reading when I can, as much as I can. Sometimes that's just a few paragraphs – before I get overwhelmed and have to close my eyes.

The Hunger Games.

Read The Hunger Games in about 2 days for Book Club. It's funny – since it still feels no where near summer, and most of the weekends have been grey, cold and rainy, I've found myself spending a day under the covers – just reading. My rational is, if it were nice, I'd be spending my days under the sun on a deck chair – just reading. So what's the difference? Even though it doesn't feel like summer – it is! – and I think it's my right to have days of guilt-free doing nothing but reading.

I was enjoying this book well enough... quick, easy, suspenseful. It was a page-turner. It reminded me in a way of Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, even though that was set in the past and Hunger Games is futuristic. There is a lot worth discussing, symbolism, analogies to be made, etc. It made me think of our future, 2012 predictions, a need for self-sustenance, basic human survival.

I didn't realize it was a trilogy until I was about half way into it. I thought, I can see reading all three of these maybe. But then I heard it was being made into a movie, and I don't know, I just sort of lost all interest in the story. I hate it when books become movies, especially ones where your imagination is allowed to create rough characters and elaborate landscapes and exciting scenes so easily. I know a movie will pale in comparison to the experience of reading this.

I highly recommend this book.

I recently finished In the Heart of the Sea – The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.

This book sat next to my bed for several months. I never wanted to start it. Then one day I opened it and I could hardly put it down. It's the true story that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick, about a ship from Nantucket that sails around South America in search of sperm whales. The crew members, about 6 to a small boat that launches off the main ship, catch these huge whales – 65 feet long and weighing on average 60 tons (120,000 pounds!) – which they then chop up into slabs and boil down the blubber, harvesting the oil.

The statistics in this book are mind-boggling. Just the details about the whaling industry (not to mention life in general) in the 1800s are fascinating. But then the story gets more impossible when main boat gets attacked by an 85 foot, possibly 80 ton whale. As it sinks, the men are stranded in 3 of the whaling boats, which I think were only 21 feet long, floating in the vast Pacific ocean.

I seriously don't know if I'll ever be able to complain about being thirsty again.

Invisible by Paul Auster

On Saturday, I woke up at 7 am and started this book. I took my first of three naps around 10 am. I spent the entire day just reading and napping, until I finished it at about 7 pm.

I don't know if I've ever read a 300-page book in one day. I decided to make finishing it Saturday my goal – er, excuse for doing nothing but reading and napping all day. When that wasn't enough I just told myself I HAD to finish it for Book Club.

I have never read Paul Auster before, but I think I'm going to have to read another one. Or, as the NYT review states in the first sentence, just go ahead and read this one again. My review: Huh. Or maybe, Double Huh.

Just Kids.

I just finished the book Just Kids by Patti Smith. I loved it.

I love biographies, and autobiographies even more, but either one about an artist is for sure my favorite. This was like an autobiography and biography about TWO artists - Jackpot! I had always known there was a special relationship between Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, but to get to read about what was happening behind the scenes as they emerged together as artists was truly a gift.

In the summer of '92 I saw an extensive exhibit of Mapplethorpe in Japan. One of my souvenirs from the trip was the museum catalog of the show, a thick, beautiful book illustrated in both English and Japanese. I was only generally familiar with him and his work at the time – photographer, gay, "risky" imagery – and I remember loving the images of Patti the most as I flipped through the pages. I never forgot that blank stare looking right back at you. (Him).

What was especially exciting in reading her description of their story was getting details and discovering the relationship behind these easily recognizable portraits. At the time I was looking and learning about Mapplethorpe, they were both already famous and he had been dead for a couple of years. What a treat to read about their individual explorations and the journey they were on together as they worked so hard to achieve success as artists in multiple mediums, before eventually discovering their own strong voices – and then the acknowledgement for each that followed.

This book made me think of the "artist" from a different perspective. She was not simply a musician, nor he "just" a photographer. But rather they pursued artistic expressions on all levels, drawing, painting, styling, writing, building, making, collecting. I really like that we don't have to be limited to the development of one art form, that creating is creating, and that the word "artist" means so many different things.

I got all these images off a Google Images search. I'm going to go ahead and credit Mapplethorpe for all of them. Not really sure about two though.

Purging and Organizing.

Spent the weekend, almost the ENTIRE weekend, going through drawers, cleaning out cabinets, dusting, sweeping, organizing closets... the works. Baked a loaf of bread and made meatballs and spaghetti sauce, too. I'm tired!

My hands are like, raw. Must have washed them seriously about 950 times.


I also organized my books by color (not the bottom over-sized). I've been wanting to do this for a long time. Finished putting them on the shelves, turned around, and an entire stack of black ones didn't make it in there.

Book Club.

I just started An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin for my book club. Looking forward to reading something different!

I finally, finally finished A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole on Tuesday morning. FINALLY. I hate to say I didn't really like this book at all. But oddly I did like the last 40 or so pages.

I (might) write like...

David Foster Wallace.

I thought it was kinda funny that when I cut and pasted a sample of my writing on the I Write Like site, I matched David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest has been sitting on my night stand stuck on page 131 since this time last year. It's not that I don't like the book. I quite like it actually. But it's a commitment to read it. I think this would be a great one to take on a leisure vacation where all you have to do all week is read. Those footnotes are kind of brutal. I tried skipping past them to keep a flow going, but found that impossible to do as well. I didn't want to miss anything. So there it sits.

I realize I don't update or keep track of what I'm really reading like I had originally planned. Maybe I should try to do that a little more diligently. I'm about to finish The Sound and the Fury. This also took me a ridiculously long time to read. I'm going to read Oscar Wao next, which everyone seems to really love, so maybe that will get me back on track.

For the record the last book I read that I really loved was Any Human Heart, by William Boyd.

Image via here.

My 2009 Cookbook.

Hi friends. I think I'm going to do another cookbook this year. Opening the last one I'm somewhat distraught to realize it's been FOUR years since the original, which I feel was only 2 years ago. Regardless. If you got one of the 2005 cookbooks, maybe you used it once or twice. (Hopefully more – lots of classic recipes in that one).

*Click to enlarge. From the 2005 edition – worth repeating.*

If you are interested in getting the 2009 version (no repeat recipes), let me know. They are kind of a pain in the a** to make, but I think I'm going to do another round this year, and I want to make sure everyone who uses and enjoys them gets one. SO – leave a comment if you're interested.

Van Gogh.

I can't wait to sit back, relax, and soak in this whole post on BibliOdyssey. A million years ago, Lindsey gave me the book Johanna (his sister-in-law), a fictional account through correspondence and journal entries about Vincent Van Gogh. Back then, I thought it was excellent and believed a lot of it had to be true. I lent it to someone and never got it back. I'd love to see it again, so if you have it, please return.


These sketches are so powerful and moving. Van Gogh's style is truly unique and recognizable in the popular, well-known works, but see this? He mastered the art of drawing and painting in a traditional manner, too. The history behind the phenomenon that was to be is so remarkable. Johanna was no slouch either.

Tons more letters, drawings and paintings can be seen on Amsterdam's Vincent Van Gogh Museum website under The Letters. But start at BibliOdyssey if you'd like to get an idea – it's really well done.

Via 2 or 3 Things comments from Monday, October 19, 2009.

I should have been a professional lifeguard.

I think lifeguarding was just about the best job ever and I'm pretty thankful that I know that first hand. Now that summer is officially over (some say UN officially, but really, it's over when the pools close) I can't stop looking at these images by Matt Albiani. The lifestyle that is to a guard is so classically captured in them that it makes my heart ache to look. I'm not alone in feeling we got gypped out of summer this year, and it makes it's ending even more painful to me. I kind of want the book. And I kind of don't.



Via Habitually Chic.

I'm Grinning.

This is really very exciting. The fabulous Lisa Borgnes Giramonti, who keeps the blog A Bloomsbury Life, arguably my favorite blog on decorating, travel, and attitudes about life in general, has agreed to use my design as her banner!

I've been a regular reader of A Bloomsbury Life since January and had often thought about designing a banner for it because her posts are filled with gobs of imagery and inspiration for creating one. She writes with such personality and has impeccable taste in decorating, fabrics, shops, art, travel, literature... I could go on and on. It's like she takes you on a little journey with her as she continues to design and enhance her home. And she's so REAL about it – it totally adds to the allure. I've written before about her here and here. But really you should just go read it for yourself.

Chicken and Normandy Cow.

Picked these two* up from my frame guy this week thanks to a surprise visit from my parents and I'm absolutely in love. I'm guessing I've had them for about 6 years. The price tags on the plastic sleeves were worn yellow. Not sure if you can tell but the wood frames have a little detail and are both brown and black. This morning I got a little sidetracked before work trying to fit them into the wall they belong on without hammering in any new nails. The placement isn't right yet, but they go so well with the room and what's up there – and I am so crazy about them – I wanted to share.

This wall is all sort of farm and old west stuff. That little black and white photograph on the bookshelf is my Mom on a tractor, about 3 or 4 years old. She's wearing those old school leather, sorta like high-top, little kid shoes. Also on the wall is my "Cowgirls at the Round-up 1911" framed poster** that I also love. The message underneath it reads, "The emancipation of women may have started not with the vote, nor in the cities where women marched and carried signs and protested, but rather when they mounted a good cowhorse and realized how different and fine the view. From the back of a horse, the world looked wider". Oh, how I love a big sky.

*The artist is Julian Williams, but they are actually greeting cards from the company Two Bad Mice.

**Photo adapted from a portrait taken at the second annual Pendleton Round-up in Oregon, courtesy Hamley & Co., Pendleton, Oregon. Quote from The Cowgirls, courtesy Joyce Gibson Roach.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Remember this book? It's title popped into my head today for some reason.

This is how I felt earlier. Fitting that I noticed it. Maybe it was the gas leak from the truck that blocked 3 out of 4 lanes of expressway, doubling the time I normally spend on my morning commute? Or perhaps it was the demolition going on in half our office, which is so bad it's actually comical. The blister I got when I walked to have a rubber stamp made, an order to be placed by the slowest employee in the universe? The endless construction and congestion at every turn along the way today? All the stuff it seems like I always have to do?

In an attempt to turn my frown upside down, I went for a run and long stretch at the practice fields, one of my favorite places to unwind when I remember it exists. Afterward, I decided to pick up my fave, Peanut Butter & Chocolate from Baskin Robbins and make one of my most loved salads for dinner. The combination below originally came from my sister-in-law Kathleen (UPDATE: via Danielle).

K's BEST SALAD

Chopped Romaine
Chopped Green Onion
Skinned, Seeded, Cubed Cucumber
Pitted, Chopped Dates
Chopped Avocado
Pistachio Nuts
Goat Cheese

Use however much of the above as you'd like, depending on your taste, number of servings, etc. I prefer a chopped salad, so that's how I make it.

Dressing: Mashed up avocado, olive oil, vinegar (I used pear), sugar. Sometimes I add red pepper flakes and fresh lime juice. Shake it up. Pour on. Enjoy.

Yay, Tuesday!

The Late Bloomer's Revolution.

Started The Late Bloomer's Revolution by Amy Cohen yesterday after it arrived in the mail from Ruth. (Thanks!)

She also sent me the NYC Moleskin Notebook and I can't wait to start filling it with ideas for my trip in August.

Perks of Being a Wallflower.

I finished The Perks of Being a Wallflower last week. It took 11 days, but that's only because I was trying to make it last. I loved the main character Charlie, so much. I broke down and cried several times at his sweet, thoughtful, sensitive self. So cute was this book, I highly recommend.

Dear Troy posted this image while I was in the middle of reading the book. It reminded me of something Charlie might have written down.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

So I finally admitted defeat and gave up on 2012. When I realized that I hadn't read anything in over two months (with the exception embarrassingly being Chealsea Handlers, Are you there vodka? It's me Chealsea in the Austin airport during an 8-hour delay) I decided to give up.

I really liked what I was learning about, but the state my mind needed to be in, and the time commitment to really sink into what I was reading seldom existed simultaneously. This is definitely not a book I could read before bed – and now with pool season coming... Next.

So I picked up The Perks of Being a Wallflower Sunday, wrapped myself up in a quilt and climbed in the hammock out back, and I could barely put it down.

Also, I know you're not supposed to judge a book by it's cover, but I do. And I love this one.