Meryl Streep’s uncanny film portrayal of Julia Child in Julie & Julia (based on Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen and Child’s My Life in France) has now occasioned Michael Pollan’s New York Times Magazine piece, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” which, contrary to what you might expect (or at least what I expected), quotes veteran food-marketing researcher Harry Balzer:

“We’re all looking for someone else to cook for us. The next American cook is going to be the supermarket. Takeout from the supermarket, that’s the future. All we need now is the drive-through supermarket….You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short, and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want—just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”

With Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows (Continuum), Kathleen Collins, a prodigious researcher, has surveyed the cooking show landscape from the foggy origins of television, past Child’s 1962 The French Chef (which among other things demystified French haute cuisine), to the present. Even if you do not give a fig for the new foodie culture (include me in that disinterest), this social history is a litmus of social and cultural transformation. Barbara Haber, former Curator of Books at the Schlesinger Library (which has a legendary cookbook collection) and author of the invaluable From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals opines:

In her lively and informative narrative of television food shows, Kathleen Collins captures the phenomenal growth of food as entertainment, what has evolved into a new form of spectator sport in America. The rise of TV celebrity chefs within the context of the nation’s growing sophistication about food are stories that needed to be told, and Collins has told them well.

So, where does that leave us? —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 13, 2009

At some point, someone will probably fabricate one of those pop-sociology books about the generation that is averse to reading instruction manuals: The Dummies’ Guide to Dummies. (Who is buying all those self-help books and keeping windbags like Tony Roberts in silk?) As I belong to that set and to the subset that reads nothing of a blatantly self-improving mode, I would not normally read a guide to fatherhood, accidental or not, like Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood (W.W. Norton & Co.) by Michael Lewis. However, I have read Lewis’s recent books, The Blind Side and Moneyball (which may or may not be made into a Brad Pitt film with Steven Soderbergh directing and a Steve Zaillian script. I asked Lewis about the film’s status: “They don’t tell me anything.”) What with those alongside a number of his pieces for the New York Times Magazine, I am hard put to find a better reporter working today. (Jon Lee Anderson, Alma Guillermoprieto?)

Not to mention, he can write. This tome collects his bulletins to Slate magazine in which he frankly and relatively lucidly recorded his thoughts about his three children. The book’s dedication is to those kids—“If you don’t want to see it in print, don’t do it”—sage advice for us all, especially in this YouTube life. Parenting (was it just in my lifetime that the word became a verb?) is of course serious business—so serious that some clear-eyed, honest humor is required, and which Lewis amply supplies.

Incidentally, Lewis made his bones doing financial reportage (Liar’s Poker) a subject he revisited for the late Portfolio magazine. —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 20, 2009

David Foster Wallace’s suicide last autumn sent shockwaves through the literary world unleashing a torrent of verbiage, opinionizing, and hand wringing—it seemed as if anyone who ever read a book weighed in on the sorrow, D.F.W.’s legacy, or somesuch. How to explain the reaction? Wallace’s relative youth (46 years)? His zealous protection of his privacy (Michael Pietsch, then the editor responsible for acquiring Infinite Jest, “David was extremely uncomfortable at anything having to do with success, power, competition, anyone sort of putting themselves forward”)? Some residual cultural memory of Infinite Jest being tagged as “the grunge American novel” by the New York Times Magazine (truly one of the silliest editorial gestures in my recall)? Certainly that book, his opus magnum, with more than 1,000 pages and 100 pages of endnotes, gained him fleeting pop/mainstream notice in the mid-’90s (one wonders how many people actually read it?) such as the above referred-to Times idiocy. Now in this season of college graduations, we are treated to This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life (Little, Brown), a slender volume containing Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement oratory at Kenyon College. I inquired of Pietsch, now the publisher at Little, Brown about the circumstances of This Is Water’s publication. His response:

An editor at another house proposed making it a book to David’s agent. I had thought it was too short and intended to include it in an uncollected-works volume, but once we tried putting one sentence per page it worked wonderfully!

Wallace’s address in large part deals with the commonplace notion that the value of a college education was to teach one to think:

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

And then there is Wallace’s conviction concerning “true freedom”:

[It] means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

(By the way, my colleagues here at The Morning News have sponsored an interesting initiative to encourage the reading of Infinite Jest.)

Apropos of nothing, here is David Foster Wallace on the publishing business:

There’s a weird illogic about it, because the less important literary fiction gets to the culture, the harder those corporations who for whatever reason keep wanting to publish it, have to market it. So in order to keep it alive, you have to murder it to save it.

A book is also a product. At least the books that we’re talking about…Even a book that’s about living in a culture that relentlessly turns everything into a product is a product. There are not very complicated ironies built into that situation. But you know that happens maybe four or five times a year. There are these legions of very smart, nice, usually Seven Sisters-educated young publicists for all the different publishing houses whose entire job is networking and lunching and hanging out with the book reviewers and opinion makers again and again…hoping the cultural and marketing motor will catch, which one out of 200 times it does.

And finally, The Pale King, Wallace’s unfinished novel discovered posthumously by his widow, is scheduled for publication next spring. Though I am generally opposed to this kind of fiddling around, in fairness I should withhold comment until I can read it, yes? —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 8, 2009

[Photo by Robert Birnbaum] I was a reader of Robert Stone (A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, as well as assorted entries in Harper’s—one on Havana and one on the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans) before I knew anything about him. My biographical enlightenment came about with the publication of his fifth novel, Outerbridge Reach, in 1992. I arranged to converse with Stone as he toured the country to tout his latest novel. Coincidentally, The New York Times Magazine published a profile of him around the same time; of course, I found his personal story as compelling as those he wrote. I since have had the opportunity to chat with Robert Stone a number of times, most recently when he published Bay of Souls in 2003. I am aware that last year he published a reminiscence, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, and most recently a short story, “High Wire” in Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas’s Open City.

Since I view Robert Stone as one America’s (both hemispheres) greatest living writers, the appearance of anything with his byline warrants serious attention—dare I say, it’s an important publishing event? His new story features Stone’s hallmark of people in trouble sinking deeper in their travails. The narrator is a journeyman writer (Tom) who frequently finds work in Hollywood and its global suburbs. He attends a movie premiere “At Grauman’s about midway between the death of Elvis Presley [1977] and the rise of Bill Clinton [1988?]” Stone’s chiaroscuric vision is exhibited early: “The camera flashes and demented fans crowding the velvet rope were all memories. Hollywood Boulevard was even rattier than it is now. The only people around the marquee that night were frightened looking Japanese tourists and bright-eyed street freaks with slack smiles.” Tom sees Lucy: “My first impulse was to leave her alone in her distress. I was certainly not impelled to a hypocritical display of concern. But it was one of those bells; I was unattached, still single, due to leave town in a week. Maybe I’d had a drink or smoked a joint before the appalling show. Anyway, I moved one seat toward her.”

Lest these remarks devolve into the degraded form known as a review, let me conclude by observing that we have a sense that Lucy, a moderately talented actress from California and of Armenian extraction, is doomed. Some of the story’s tension stems from whether her sometime lover and admirer also falls to bad fortune. And so it is with Mr. Stone’s fiction. And always well worth the effort. —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 28, 2008