The March Hare

Aside from the fact that it sounds like a vibrator you might find advertised in the back pages of 'Cosmopolitan', the Magic Bullet has many endearing qualities.

I have been trying to make decent soup for a long, long time. Tonight, in five minutes, I made such spectacular asparagus soup that Clurg, who had already gorged on leftover fajitas, tasted it and said "Wow. Wow, that's really good." Five minutes. I cut the tips off some asparagus, I opened a can of chicken stock, I added a little butter and salt and pepper, I microwaved it for two and a half minutes, I added a tablespoon of sour cream, and I put the "Tall Cup" on the "Torque Power Base" for five seconds, and I had soup!

The possibilities are endless. Tomorrow I will make portobello and sundried tomato soup. The next day I will make fresh pesto sauce. I will even make extra and freeze it so that when I don't feel like cooking I can resist the temptation to bicycle to Foosackly's (local chicken finger emporium). The Magic Bullet is going to change my life. I can feel it already. Why should I continue to eat the giant bowls of pasta rosso that I get half price at work, when I can just bicycle home and have gazpacho in five minutes? Huh? Why?

'Shirley Jackson's American Gothic', by Darryl Hattenhauer, is a really, really good piece of criticism on the major works of Shirley Jackson, who I have a new obsession with that was set off by James Harris in the collection 'The Lottery, or the Adventures of James Harris'. See American Nerd for full details.

'Gothic' begins with a really insightful chapter on Jackson's life, and, my God, how could the woman not be damaged? Apparently her husband, realizing that her stories for women's magazines were keeping them in high style, set regimented work times for her, forced her to do all of the housework, childcare, and driving, as well as signing her up for extracurricular activities so that she wouldn't have time to be depressed. Comparing that with her two longer works on domestic foibles, 'Life Among the Savages' and 'Raising Demons' and you can see places where the fiction and the reality merge. However, the husband in the books never fucks a coed while his wife is in the next room yelling at them.

So far, so good, but I'm only to chapter three.