Now on the cusp of 50, Bissell has learned not to obsess over the things he fretted over in his youth. “I just don’t really think about capital L literature anymore. I write because it pleases me and I write stuff that I would want to read and I don’t really think terribly much about how other people think of me. I think that’s a healthy place because you realize when you get older that people aren’t thinking about you terribly much anyway.”
Inhabiting the minds of people who care a great deal what others think of them became a way of working out what Bissell calls the “residual shame” of falling short of some impossible standard. “Part of the goal of growing up as an artist is making art that makes you happy and brings you satisfaction, stuff you can feel proud of — even if it’s for-hire work. And the rest of the career stuff, where you slot into the contemporary literary reader’s pantheon of important writers, is beyond your power to determine.”
Restaurant operators like me are still not okay. There are exceptions, of course. Some restaurants are full, you can’t book a table, and they have enough folks working for them. I call those unicorn restaurants — and I am so happy for them. But I can look at a restaurant that might have a full dining room right now, and I see it in those operators’ eyes: They are so exhausted, and they don’t have the staff. Either they can’t afford them or they can’t find them. They aren’t okay.
I think people might have changed, too. Maybe people are not making as much money, or they can’t dine out as much. A lot of people have really enjoyed cooking at home. A lot of people are acclimating to ordering takeout. If restaurants were a priority for someone before, it’s quite possible that they’re not a priority now.
From the beginning, Harrison wrote about two primary and intertwined themes: pleasure and death. The pleasures of Harrison’s writings tend to the Hemingwayesque, and are set largely in his native Midwest: hunting, fishing, hiking and generally being outdoors; cooking, eating and drinking; sex, women and conversation. Sometimes the pleasures are more reflective, more mental than physical; in all the talk about women, for instance, one senses that for Harrison the talk was half the fun, and the wanting often mattered more, or was more satisfying, than the getting.
The book’s hybrid of ethnography, journalism and disclosure might have been disastrous in the hands of someone without Lasley’s candor and style. Instead, “Sea State” accomplishes what many memoirs do not: It organizes a messy life with a clear vision.
Paul Freedman’s Why Food Matters opens with a lament on the lack of intellectualism – indeed, discourse – around food and drink. They are considered “eminently compatible with conversation, just not worthwhile as its objects”, and he puts this down to three things: “materiality, necessity and repetition contribute to the apparent banality of food”. While repetitiveness might well put off a passing intellectual, the same way housework is such a turn off for economists in the Adam Smith tradition, arguably materiality is the main block.