How are there currently one hundred and eleven of you out there reading these little dispatches? Thank you all! I’m having fun writing them. In this season of caring, which is increasingly busy as the semester chugs into motion and the daycare maladies keep coming, it feels very good to write here, into the fiction of time and freedom (and into the time and freedom of fiction, as it were, although not in this post. My copy of Sally Rooney’s new book has not arrived yet. More on fiction soon).
Oh, also! If you’re in Chicago, come see me reading at the Seminary Co-Op tomorrow (Friday 9/27), with poetry superheroes Joyelle McSweeney and Michael Dumanis?
Anyway. Something about this platform encourages confession in the way Twitter used to, when I had like three Twitter followers and felt like no one was watching – and so, a confession: I joined Costco. I joined Costco and it was entirely my idea. Is this the most U.S. suburban thing I could have done? The baby and I went on a Sunday night last week and it was absolutely fucking terrifying. We arrived about an hour before closing, but before we could shop we had to get our picture taken for an ID. The whole place was packed and the toilet paper was stacked to the ceiling still and the carts are oversized and unwieldy and I picked up a 30-pack of seltzer and almost dropped it on my foot and the lighting is terrible and rotisserie chickens are five bucks (how?) and in the end (also how?) I spent $300 on toothpaste and canned legumes, basically.
It seems reasonable to ask myself why, after many years of living in houses with ample storage space, basements and such, I finally and reluctantly began to experiment with shopping in bulk. Not even my parents, ur-surbanites of Tennessee new construction proclivities, shopped in bulk. I’ve held stubbornly to my obnoxious habit of near-daily grocery shopping, even when this meant, in South Carolina, a trek to buy mushy onions at Walgreens, since there was nothing else in walking distance.
I think there might be something animal about my new impulse. The northeast Ohio days are getting shorter and the weather, when it isn’t unseasonably sticky, is getting cooler. Like a good mama squirrel, I’m stocking the nest. It also has to do with the approach, just on the horizon and coming closer every day, of Julian’s transition from bottles to solid foods. I woke up the other morning and thought, oh my god, he’s going to need breakfast and lunch and dinner. Every day.
Another confession: I am not very good at feeding myself during the day. Dinners I love. Dinners are for sitting down with people, for new recipes, for a glass of wine and some real food. Vegetables and savory things are for dinners. Left to my own devices, the rest of the time I would just as soon subsist on peanut butter, toast, yogurt, fruit, and more peanut butter. Days are for working, not cooking, unless it is a weekend and there is a project happening. When I’m really working, you can tell by the number of peanut butter spoons that end up in the sink.
A baby, though, cannot eat like this. A baby must be introduced to all the foods there are, one by one. Some of them—the allergens—must be introduced carefully, and then served often. In one book about feeding babies, I read a description of what seemed to me to be a very well-rounded baby meal (a grain, a meat, a vegetable) followed by the sentence, “you might notice that your baby has not been offered any fruit.” In that case, the book continued, you could consider offering your baby some fruit. I cannot stop thinking about this phrase. “Have I offered the baby any fruit?” I ask myself.
In order to offer, you must have on hand. Suddenly I want to be surrounded not just by staples, but by a whole pantry of things, a rainbow of healthful and wholesome foods, so that I can offer my baby all the things that should be offered. I don’t eat meat, but I started cooking it. Hence, Costco. The freezer in the basement is full of frozen chicken thighs and cod filets, bags of frozen berries. We have peanut butter and almond butter and what we call “the big tahini” (not from Costco but from the most wonderful market on Cleveland’s West Side, a place I am happy to rave about to anyone local). I am feeling unspeakably bereft at the idea of no longer feeding the baby his bottle, when he’s quiet, when his lids flutter closed and he plays with my fingers and I kiss his forehead again and again, but there is some consolation in this new world of preparing things in wedges and bites, even if lots of it ends up, well, everywhere.
This kind of domestic preoccupation seems like it might exist at the furthest possible remove from any vaguely academic or artistic thinking. There is nothing particularly poetic about scrubbing sweet potato off the underside of a kitchen table. But! I mentioned a while ago that I was working on a translation, a book about blur in film. The book sent me back to the Lumière brothers’ early films. The cinephiles here can probably guess where I am going: among these films, famous, canonical, is Louis Lumière’s Repas de bébé, “feeding the baby.”
A single shot, the film is something like forty seconds long. In it, the father (August Lumière, Louis’s brother) gives the baby (Andrée Lumière) two spoonfuls of some kind of porridge or mush or soup. It’s something she has—to my eye, at least—tasted before, since she doesn’t make that surprised baby face about it. She more or less swallows, some of the mush remaining on her upper lip. The mother (Marguerite Lumière) keeps glancing over while she puts some sugar in her coffee cup and drinks fast. The baby is interested in her plate, in the object itself. The father gives her a biscuit, which she does not seem inclined to eat but which she—charmingly—offers first to someone offscreen, possibly her uncle, and then to her father. Abandoning the biscuit idea, the father then spreads some more food on her plate before offering her another spoonful. As the film ends, she’s raising her chin to avoid the spoon, still more interested in that plate.
Understandably, most film people seem interested in the miracle of the way the new cinematograph was able to capture motion: it’s a windy day, and the mother’s and the baby’s wide sleeves and collars flutter and flap, as do the leaves of the trees behind them. But look, here it is, here we are: Andrée Lumière with mashed potatoes on her face, refusing a cookie. The first spoonful, the second, the third, each one an effort, each one a choice. This is more than what I would once have called a “dramatization of domestic labor” or something like that. It’s more like—this is not a side theme to be drawn out or made visible. It’s the stuff of the film itself, more so than the movement of the wind. It’s part of the miracle of film, that film shows the act of feeding a baby as what it is: ordinary, not easy, a process and a miracle. (It is also political.)
All of this feels particularly personal, too, because in fact last summer we were in La Ciotat, in the French seaside town where the Lumière Brothers made their films—including, I think, this one—and where the oldest surviving movie theater, the Eden, still stands. It was sort of an accident that we were there: we’d gone to Marseille to meet poet Liliane Giraudon, and then in the middle of pregnancy, I wanted to be somewhere pretty and quiet, by the ocean. I ate fresh figs off the roadside trees and swam in the Mediterranean twice a day and it was invigorating and wonderful, like a good dream. But there’s some kind of convoluted coincidence in the fact that I’m writing this now. If babies are in cinema’s blood, can I also claim, ridiculous as it is, that cinema is in my particular baby’s? In any case, it does not seem overstated to point out that this strange messy new life, offering another spoonful and another and another, is there on film, central to it even, from the very beginning.