Banana pasta; William Wordsworth essay; my cookie jar

I’m all Lost in…

Three things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#13

1) While on vacation in Manhattan last summer, I bought a box of black squid ink pasta at Eately; I never got around to cooking it. So, I left it as a house gift for the friend who’d graciously let me crash at their Columbus Circle apartment for the week while they were out of town.

I’ve been daydreaming about black pasta ever since!

This week, I tried out Solely’s Green Banana Fusilli Pasta; Solely’s is a San Diego-based organic food company that started out making healthy fruit snacks for kids. No processed sugars nor additives.

Evidently, Solely branched out, and they’re now upgrading their fruit compost into pasta. In addition to the green banana pasta, they’ve also got Spaghetti Squash Pasta.

Despite the green banana moniker, this pasta is deep black; I’m assuming it’s made from over-ripened bananas.

I tired it out as the elegant base to an otherwise smorgasbord hippie dinner this week. Bouncy and chewy, it was a tasty corkscrew centerpiece for a string beans, black beans, red peppers, carrots, peas, tofu, and miso sauce concoction.

I have since ordered four boxes.

For the record, this is the first food entry on my weekly roundup of obsessions. I hope there are more; currently seeking recipes that include black pasta.

2) I’ve landed on my first project of the year: My own Poets-of-the-19th-Century seminar. My inquiry grew out of last year’s (and likely ongoing in 2024) private City Studies seminar. My city lit crash course led me to a batch of 19th century British books: Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater; Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, and currently Ms. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. (I also dug into Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England; Communist Engels was German, but, per “the Working Class in England,” his famous Manchester expose fit right onto my Victorian England reading list.)

Loving the 19th Century mood, and feeling like I needed a new infusion of poetry, I started drawing up a list of 1800’s poets. Conveniently, I had bought Penguin’s William Wordsworth collection last September (I suppose my subconscious inquiry was two steps ahead) and so this week, I started my 19th century poetry studies with Wordsworth.

Along with the first couple of poems in the book, Old Man Travelling (1798) and the mini-epic, The Ruined Cottage (1797), I devoured Wordsworth scholar Stephen Gill’s introduction to the collection

First, Gill suggests a helpful frame for reading Wordsworth, who, he posits, wrote poetry as an exercise in “impassioned seeing,” and next, “impassioned contemplation.” With an apparently passionate eye on “the common things” and everyday “goings-on,” Wordsworth’s “wild poesy” seeks to surface the transcendent beauty therein. Gill writes: “Wordsworth’s poetry celebrates life’s mystery incarnate in the commonplace.”

Gill goes on to explain that Wordsworth’s quest for the everyday sublime is built on making “connections” and “conjunctions” and “ties,” merging seemingly different states of being, particularly bridging different time periods. Gill argues that Wordsworth was ultimately focused on consciously establishing “continuums” over the disparate phases of his own life. Gill writes: “Wordsworth’s profoundest need was to know that nothing had ever given him joy was lost.”

Gill’s thesis about Wordsworth’s pursuit to establish an overarching personal narrative exploded my brain with this related explanation of Wordsworth’s penchant of supposed pastoral escapism:

To Wordsworth the return to the mountain was emphatically not retreat. Collapse of faith in the French Revolution did not entail loss of faith in man, but rather a renewed exploration of what it might mean to say that one still had ‘faith in man.’

As a city zealot who tends to quietly recoil at the Romantic poets and their haughty pastoral moralism, Gill’s construction gave me the non-ideological segue I needed.

My Poets-of-the-19th Century syllabus currently includes other dreamers such as: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and, taking up the urban space in the Wordsworthian “continuum,” Parisian flaneur, Charles Baudelaire.

3) I’m not filing this entry under eats, but rather, under apartment therapy & care.

Cleaning my studio apartment this weekend, I ended up washing and refashioning my sad sugar jar—blasting out the hardened, graying granules coagulating at the bottom—into a vibrant glass cookie jar.

With a slight minimalist lean inherited from my 1970s Scan Furniture mom, I’d describe my apartment aesthetic as a cross between teen beanbag and Sesame Street. And I want to believe that loading up my newly refurbished jar with a pile of plant-based fudge striped treats is more a fashion statement than a Cookie Monster descent.

So far, so good: Giving me a source of quiet glee every time I come home, the pleasant cookie display remains, while not untouched, largely intact.