Topical Guide 243
Mark Dorset
Books, Real and Fictional
Cover Illustrations
Food: as Significant Element of a Remembered Incident and Its Literary Reproduction
Richard served his guests beer, wine, and root beer in the parlor and urged them into the dining room, where the table was covered with food: hams, sausages of six kinds, breads and rolls, honey and preserves, smoked mackerel and eels, sprats, cheeses, a smoked goose and a smoked turkey, and, at either end of the table, two enormous bowls of potato salad. …
In the dining room, Lorna’s sister Bertha stood in front of one of the bowls of potato salad, mechanically and purposefully filling a plate with it, piling the potatoes in a mound, as if she were daring gravity to make the uppermost chunks fall. One did, and Bertha stooped to pick it up from the floor, mashing it a bit as she did, perhaps from clumsiness alone. Another fell. She was making a fine mess. …
When Bertha’s plate was as full as she could make it, she began making her way toward the door to the porch, scuttling sideways, so that her illicit heap of potato salad was hidden. …
Bertha sat on the porch railing, and, just as methodically as she had filled her plate, she ate all the potato salad she had taken. Clara watched, amazed and terrified. She tried to emulate Bertha’s methodical determination, but she couldn’t come near to finishing all the turkey she had taken. Quietly, she slipped back into the dining room and replaced most of it. When she came back outside, Bertha was under the porch, vomiting.Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 1
One wonders (at least this one wonders) how much that incident, whether real or imaginary, influenced Peter’s later work as the pseudonymous author of two of the books in the Adventures of Larry Peters series.
See also: Books, Real and Fictional TG 99; Cover Illustrations TG 18, TG 61, TG 93; Food: as Significant Element of a Remembered Incident and Its Literary Reproduction TG 34
Listening during the morning workout:
Gary Shapiro interviews artist Eric Fischl: Painter, printmaker, sculptor, educator Eric Fischl discusses his career and his memoir, Bad Boy: My Life On And Off The Canvas.
[more to come on Friday, April 22, 2022]
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.