I secretly like it that (for right now) everything posted on this site has my name on it. hee hee. Karen has to put all this "NOT Ellen's Blog" on her entries and dress them with a designer background just to show her unique distinction from the practical twin. Let's keep it this way a while, Dwight, just to "stir the puddin'." My off day wasn't all daffodills blooming in the sunlight like Karen's. Just sludgy and dreary, and when I stepped out of the car my three dogs came running up, shaking their smelly skunkedness in my general direction. BUT, Karen and I did get out for a belated birthday lunch. We've found a new place in Woodstock that is Delicioso. That's cajun for OMG. GG's Creole Cafe is on Hwy. 92 just before you get to Trickum Rd. (when you're headed toward Roswell). The owner, Gigi, moved here after Katrina. She is the most loveable little woman EVER, and you'll just want to squeeze her when you meet her. But, even more importantly, her food is to die for. Currently, I've sampled: catfish (lightly breaded, not battered), gumbo, beans & rice, pecan pie and sweet potato pie. The best I've eaten. On Fridays, she makes crawfish pies that you "sop up with french bread." Can't wait. Gigi has written a cookbook, too, and when it comes out (hopefully April) she'll be in the store signing copies and handing out some of her specialties. But don't wait until then to try it out.
As for books, I just finished The Soul Thief, by Charles Baxter. He's the author of Feast of Love. Some of you may have seen the movie with Greg Kinnear and Morgan Freeman? Karen and Jackie and I went to see that one during a particularly trying time, and the movie added to our angst, to put it mildly. But I digress. Baxter is, quite simply, one of the most creative writers I've ever read. Sometimes you shake your head and go, "huh?" but his use of the language is magnificent. He makes up words as he goes along, like the police officer who "copsauntered to the car." I love his descriptions: "Michael is a trickster, a wily pipsqueak shape-shifter." "Sometimes the telephone can look like an instrument of studied malevolence." A screaming child on an airplane is "in the full flower of his own hysteria, red as a turnip and loud as a megaphone . . . an infant Pavarotte bellowing up to the third balcony." And his characters do and say the most inexplicable things. For instance, the main character encounters a burglar in his apartment -- a burglar who complains loudly about the lack of bounty worth stealing there -- so he, Nathaniel, fixes the burglar dinner and lets him spend the night. He continues to have a relationship with the burglar and various other people who abuse him in hilarious ways. The book reminded me a little of the script of the "Orchid Thief" movie (with Nicholaus Cage) with its circuitous twisted logic. If any of you read "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" back in the 70s, you'll appreciate this one. And if you haven't read Feast of Love, start there.
Next on the list: Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg. Get ready for this one (to be published in May) by reading All Over But the Shoutin' and Ava's Man. You will not be sorry! If you want to hear someone GUSH, just ask Karen what she thinks of Bragg. We will absolutely have to tie her up if we manage to get him in the store for a book signing.
Leave a comment