Oxford American Articles

SoLost: Two Giants of Civil Rights Reporting :: June 19 2013

When one legendary reporter mentors a future legendary reporter, good things happen—especially when their beat is civil rights in Mississippi.

Bill Minor and Jerry Mitchell have witnessed and shaped history, and they've been doing it for a combined sixty years. They sat down with SoLost to share their stories. Witness the witnesses with us, and see how their storytelling changed the world.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Chris Offutt :: June 17 2013

We see plenty of “real Southerners” in the “real world” on television these days. Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty show us those grotesque versions of Southerners that many have come to expect and even celebrate as the cultural norm. The people of the South, whether dirt poor or nouveau riche, are perfect Hollywood fodder.

“I absolutely despise watching television,” said Kentucky author Chris Offutt in 1994, shortly after publishing the collection of short stories Kentucky Straight and the memoir The Same River Twice. “I would advise you all to shoot your TV...I don’t have one.” Eleven years later, after writing The Good Brother, Out of the Woods, and No Heroes, and being named one of the twenty best young American fiction writers by Granta magazine, Offutt turned his pen to screenplays. His television work—for shows like Treme, True Blood, and Weeds—doesn’t focus on Kentucky settings or characters in particular, as his books do, yet I feel immense relief that a Southern author of such talent and understanding (a man who rejects terms like “hillbilly,” “redneck,” and “cracker”) writes for television.

In 2011, Offutt left Hollywood “depressed” and eager to take a break from screenwriting. Now he writes pilots from Oxford, Mississippi, where he teaches at Ole Miss and mainly focuses on his true passion: literature. He’s working on a new novel and completing his third story collection, Luck, which has been more than twenty years in the making.

More than a decade after his last book, Offutt is still publishing writing with the same insight, humor, and skill that won him accolades in the past. "Bible Cake," the first installment of “Cooking with Chris,” is in the OA’s Summer 2013 issue.

I sent Chris questions via e-mail, and he responded from Kentucky via his “two-way wrist radio.”

JAMES MADISON REDD: Will you describe your move to Mississippi?

CHRIS OFFUTT: My wife and I left Iowa and drove through Missouri and stayed the night at a small motel in Arkansas. The next day we ate breakfast and drove to Oxford.

JMR: Larry Brown has said, “I believe Mr. Offutt knows the same world I do, and his talent for writing about it shines on every page.” Would you agree? Now that you live in Oxford, what do you see as the main difference between Brown’s Oxford, Mississippi, and your Haldeman, Kentucky?

CO: A) Yes, I agree. B) Hills.

JMR: You have always deeply cared about Haldeman. Why are physical communities important to artists like yourself?

CO: I can’t comment on other artists but would enjoy meeting one who is like me.

JMR: What value does an exploration of people from rural Kentucky have for readers in the technological age?

CO: The same value as it had during the pre-technological age, which is none.

JMR: Do you feel a kinship with Faulkner, who went to Hollywood to write screenplays but inevitably returned to Mississippi?

CO: No. But I’ve met some of his family members. They are nice folks.

JMR: Writer Tom Franklin feels you haven’t gotten the credit you deserve as a Southern or rural writer. Do you think that’s the case, and what would that acknowledgment mean to you?

CO: A) No writer gets the credit he or she deserves. B) Money, cars, women, moonshine. And a complete set of The Jetsons on DVD.

JMR: You’ve said that Flannery O’Connor, not Faulkner, has been your most important literary influence. How has O’Connor’s work affected your writing?

CO: I don’t know because I forgot what I stole from her.

JMR: Publisher’s Weekly claimed you were attempting to “break out of the regional writer mold” in Good Brother. Would you agree?

CO: No, but I’m glad they reviewed it.

JMR: Early in your career as a writer, you commented on your distaste for television. Now that you’ve spent some time studying television shows and writing them, have you developed some hope for the medium?

CO: Maybe a little.

JMR: You’ve often said that you “write for immortality,” yet your introduction to The Same River Twice calls books “fragile.” If achieving immortality through art is your goal, why weren’t you a rock sculptor instead of a writer of books?

CO: Rock sculptors need strong muscles.

JMR: What can we look forward to in your OA series, “Cooking with Chris?” Will there be any possums in the pot?

CO: Yes. That essay was very difficult to write because the possum is my totem animal.

JMR: What attracted you to writing about food?

CO: I crashed a Southern Foodways Conference for the free food and liquor. This resulted in some minor legal problems. The judge told me to write about food and maybe I’d get invited next year.

JMR: For pleasure reading you turn to books on “quantum physics, Zen thought, histories of the various clandestine intelligence services, and histories of stage magic.” What interests you about these topics, and how do they influence your writing?

CO: A) Intelligence and stage magic are about keeping secrets. B) Quantum physics and Zen thought reveal secrets.

JMR: What did you learn about country music while you were writing the screenplay for Tough Trade?

CO: Rhymes. Such as bail and jail, gun and run, wife and life, train and rain.

JMR: Your forthcoming story collection, Luck, is the third in a series focused on Kentucky. Will you tell us more about the collection’s main character, Lucy, who appears in every story?

CO: I love Lucy.

JMR: In the Iowa Review, you describe yourself as a “restless” writer who is always looking for “new challenges.” What challenges are you working on now?

CO: Answering interview questions.

JMR: Can fiction heal?

CO: In an emergency situation, you can use book pages to stanch serious bleeding.

JMR: “The Leaving One,” a story in Kentucky Straight, is full of ritual and superstition, such as when a mother repeats a prayer like a mantra while washing dishes. Some might call The Same River Twice a spiritual meditation. Why has spirituality and superstition pervaded your writing?

CO: I can’t answer because I think it would be bad luck. Sorry.

JMR: Are you willing to talk about your views on writing commercial fiction?

CO: I never tried writing commercial fiction. One day I will, and then I’ll have some views.

JMR: I want to know more about the novel you’re presently writing.

CO: Me, too.

Dispatch from Fayetteville: Listening to J. Cole at the source :: June 17 2013

On a Monday morning in June, the patrons of the YMCA in Fayetteville, North Carolina, are almost all adults, and almost all white. White guys stomping on treadmills. White women in glossy exercise outfits performing chest-presses with dumbbells the size of dog biscuits. Two smiling young ladies work the front desk, neither of whom has heard of Jermaine Cole, Fayetteville’s hip-hop hero. In fact, there appear to be only two fans in the whole building: myself and Jerome, a seventeen-year-old North Carolina transplant nailing threes with ease on the neatly waxed basketball court. After listening to a leak of J. Cole’s forthcoming sophomore album Born Sinner, I drove two hours during a statewide tornado watch to ask what, if anything, Cole’s ascent means to people back home.

“Cole is special no matter where you’re from,” Jerome tells me, seated now, relaxing into his sweat. “I mean, I’m from D.C. originally, you know, so I’m more about Wale. But nobody’s gonna deny that Cole is now a major player.” Jerome has heard one single—“Power Trip,” a collaboration with neo-soul crooner Miguel—off the new album. “It’s strong,” Jerome nods. “That could be a money track. My friends around here are just waiting for J. to come home once it’s official, once the album is really out.”

Cole and his devotees are banking on such “money tracks,” and Cole has hastened his album’s release date to coincide with Yeezus, Kanye West’s new album, coproduced with industry heavy Rick Rubin. That’s a bold move for Cole, especially since he doesn’t have a proper crew to rep for him the way someone like 50 Cent had among the Dr. Dre diaspora.

Cole returns to Fayetteville semi-regularly for promotional and charity work, but he spends the rest of the year in New York. On Born Sinner, he sounds increasingly dissatisfied with this arrangement, which traps him in New York when perhaps he’d rather be back home. I float this idea. Jerome says it’s plausible. “One of these times when J. comes back, he’s coming back for good,” he tells me, and he speaks these words with a conviction that startles. I simply nod. Part of me can’t help but believe him.

“Hey, I’mma put us all on the map...baby you can bet the bank on me."
— J. Cole, “Sideline Story,” 2011

J. Cole knows Fayetteville from all angles, having lived at different times in its trailer homes and houses, and on the army base. Fayetteville is several cities in one. Its downtown is a shiny brick monument to gentrification and the American brasserie movement; Fort Bragg’s largesse keeps the city’s median income above the poverty line, if not by much. Driving in from the west, one passes countless pawn shops, army surplus stores with handwritten signs, Southern Sons Tattoo, billboards advertising “no-money-down bankruptcy,” the Tropical Motel offering RATES DAY WEEK MONTH, a trailer fire sale labeled “Choo-Choo Homes,” above-ground pools for sale that don’t seem to be selling, and at least four very dubious-looking self-storage centers. The twenty-eight-year-old Cole knows these social strata with a familiarity that may well fuel his expressed wariness toward wealth. As he sings on the new album, “money don’t last.”

Without parading a Dickensian childhood before us—the way lesser rappers tend to mistake the studio for a therapist’s office—Cole turns his un-self-pitying scrappiness into his most charming characteristic. Fayetteville may not appear by name in each of his songs, but it’s there in the wry, money-ain’t-shit attitude and the fluent but boisterous patter of Cole’s lyrics. Although Cole is well educated (he graduated magna cum laude from St. John’s University), his delivery sounds unstudied, even as he reduplicates internal rhymes and uncoils a verse at breathless speed. Among other improvements, his tongue is fleeter on the new album than ever before.

J. Cole is of a generation of rappers, including Kendrick Lamar and Danny Swain, who knock on the old street misogyny trope just to show how hollow it is. Cole addresses women with empathy and honesty to the point that the ladies in his songs are far more interesting than the men. And if hip-hop is slowly expanding its gender politics, the hustle is also expanding to include things like getting scholarships and not siring children until you’re good and ready.

The kind of good advice that Cole offers may not be the traditional purview of rap, but make-it-in-America stories fall very much within rap’s ken, and Cole’s ability to merge these two, while making asses shake, is of great value. More important—at least to his fans in North Carolina—is the fact that Cole is acknowledged as one of the most legit voices in Southern rap—and he’s not from Atlanta. This is a big deal, something Fayettevilleans remember whenever Cole returns to work on the literacy program he started, or to film the odd music video on Bragg Boulevard.

“I’ll take y'all back to them school days, yeah / Fayettenam, what up, man?” — J. Cole, “School Daze,” 2007

Terrance is waiting for his buddy D.A. in a parking lot across from Terry Sanford High, where Cole hustled to earn the scholarship to St. John’s. The long game was to get a foothold in New York, and then to get Jay-Z’s attention. Cole succeeded on both counts. Terrance dangles a leg out the open driver’s-side door and smiles when I ask about Sanford High.

“I was two years ahead of J. Cole,” he says. “He was a real kind, goofy, smart kid. You’d see him, like, scribbling in these little black notebooks. I didn’t really think much about it back then. Oh, and he played basketball.”

“Was he any good?”

“Oh yeah,” Terrance nods. “Nigga had speed, and well you know how smart he is. He wasn’t the tallest out there, but he got his.”

I ask whether Cole has any hometown nemeses. “Well look, there was a lotta kids who dropped raps and made beats, so when he made it out you had jealous kids calling him a ‘fake-ass nigga.’ But you don’t hear that anymore.”

D.A. arrives in very high spirits and is overjoyed to talk Cole. “Did T. tell you Cole’s next move?”

“Naw, D., we was talking about school.”

“So we all know Cole doesn’t want to roll with Jay-Z too long,” D.A. shrugs. “Think about it! Would you wanna roll with a nigga who held your first album for years?”

I agreed that I would not.

“What’s going on in Fayetteville right now—you have these young acts that can truly throw down, I mean it, and Cole’s gonna be positioned to come down here and start his own label, go all Michael Jordan on it. Look, you go to the mall, you can’t throw a rock without hitting some kid who’s freestyling. We got a whole talent pool here.”

“And Fayetteville can be the new Atlanta,” Terrance adds.

“Exactly.”

“This the shit I used to roll down Lewis Street with / Finally got my own bedroom in this bitch.” — J. Cole, “Land of the Snakes,” 2013

As I roll down Lewis Street, I’m surprised to see well-tended lawns, and I get the sense of a wholesome residential area; Cole’s songs had me expecting a working-class, block-party neighborhood. A lot has changed in the ten years since Cole left. Now, for every black twenty-something drawn to the familiar sounds emanating from my car, there is a white household. Two Romney/Ryan signs protrude from the ground at a bend in the road, holdovers from last year, like rotten pumpkins at Christmastime. I circle back to friendly territory.

Daniel, a black resident in his early twenties, stands on his porch. A spindly four-year-old plays hide-and-seek between his legs as he explains that the neighborhood used to be something of a party destination for Sanford High upperclassmen. “I was younger than Cole, so I never really spent time with the guy,” Daniel tells me. “Lotsa my boys know him, though.” He pauses and grins, adding, “And lotsa girls, well, they know Cole too.”

I submit the idea of Cole-as-feminist, without using the word. Daniel puts it well: “Cole is the kind of smart, honest rapper you could play to your old lady and she wouldn’t get mad.”

“And to your kids?”

Daniel smiles, looking through the screen door behind which his son has disappeared. “Well, my boy too young to listen to the uncensored shit. But if what you’re saying is Cole doesn’t do lines about cash and crack rocks and bitches, then yes. He reminds me of Run-D.M.C., the subject matter, I mean. This is righteous rap.”

How does Cole rank in Daniel’s personal hip-hop pantheon?

“Oh he’d have to be top five.” Number one? “Kendrick Lamar.”

“And I’m going rep the Ville in every city that I’m at / And I guarantee I’m bringing home plaques.” — J. Cole, “Royal Flush,” 2009

The mall, I discover, is far from the hip-hop salon Terrance and D.A. described. I find a rather upscale food court. There are multiple frozen yogurt emporia. The canned music is atrocious and has very little to do with R&B.

Matt, a charismatic young salesman working a basketball-shoe maintenance kiosk, credits the death of mall rap to the “escort policy” enacted close to a year ago, which requires that minors have a parent with them after 5 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. “Frankly,” Matt says, “This place is a lot more like a real mall now, as opposed to . . .”

“A YMCA?” I offer.

“Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I liked those guys, I’m all about Fayetteville rap of course, but we were sometimes the epicenter of rap battles that turned into all kinds of scuffles.”

No scuffles today. Just a little muzak, a lot of docile shoppers, and security all over. Matt says the mall hired a slew of new mall cops over the past year.

“I once watched Cole recording a music video down here,” Matt tells me, almost certainly referring to “Who Dat,” Cole’s 2010 major-label debut single. “He’s famous for giving back, you know? Being a normal-ass dude. Like, I have buddies who go to Xscape with him, this pimp nightclub, and Cole just brushes off the V.I.P. booth and the bottle service.”

“That’s pretty different from R. Kelly.”

“Tell me about it,” Matt says.

Across the hall at Lids, a chain that sells expensive, flat-brimmed baseball caps, a salesman named Ian hears us talking about Cole.

“J. Cole? I was in his freshman class!” (This is one idiosyncrasy of a city premised around a military base: If you stick to the civilians, it feels like a very small town.) We talk about Cole’s trajectory, about Jay-Z’s patronage and whether the relationship is becoming fraught. Ian notes that Cole is still contending with major hype (much of it, naturally, of his own making) and marvels at the rapper’s consistency and confidence.

“He sounds young, you know, but his style is so solid that it’s like he skipped a few steps in the game. He’s where other rappers dream of being when they’re, like, thirty-five,” Ian tells me. “I only know that one new single, but Cole is that level of rapper where you trust him to keep getting better every day.”

So is J. Cole Ian’s favorite rapper? Ian takes a diplomatic pause.

“I’d put him at number two.”

Number one? Kendrick Lamar.

ISSUE 81: Bible Cake :: June 17 2013

"Margaret's Picture of Pneumonia" by Susan Worsham

My approach to cooking is one of passionate intensity that traditionally involves a great deal of what used to be called “blue” language, or plain old-fashioned cussing. My current kitchen project will be a trial, since I intend to follow a recipe for “Bible Cake.” It seems crucial that no matter how much flour swirls in the air, how many eggshell fragments enter the batter, and how poorly my preparation goes, I shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.

For a while I tried to convince myself that cussing in English wouldn’t matter since the old-timers in the Bible spoke Aramaic, a language nearly lost. And the Almighty had a lot more important concerns than worrying about the relative chasteness of my mouth during something as minor as baking. Then again, God is no doubt a polyglot in order to understand all the imprecations and requests from every corner of the globe. (A phrase that always perplexed me—if earth is round, it lacks corners.) Since I undertook to build a Bible Cake, I needed all the luck I could muster. So I composed an advance list of words to use under culinary duress, language that would not offend the Lord, the cake, or my wife.

Substituting ingredients is a long tradition in cooking: milk for buttermilk, margarine for butter, Crisco for lard, but every cook knows the result is never satisfactory. There is absolutely nothing as good as lard. The same holds true for cussing. Bellowing “gold doggit” doesn’t have the same calming emotional effect as the original. In fact, the alternatives to curse words are pretty lame. Here’s a quick rundown. I’m counting on you, gentle reader, to know the originals.

Darn. Dang. Ding dang.

Heck. Heck-o-Pete.

Gee whiz. Jiminy Christmas. Jeezum crow.

Baloney. Bullpucky. Bullhockey.

Son of a gun. Son of a buck.

Son of a biscuit eater.

Shoot. Sugar. Shucks.

Freaking. Flipping.

Fudge.

The last one is my personal favorite. In moments of high irritation, the phrase “Oh, fudge” will pass the lips of the most pious and devout women in town, ladies who never miss a Wednesday night prayer meeting, who are perpetually willing to assist the needy, sit with the grieving, and tend to the sick. But in the kitchen they’ll drop a stick of butter and say, “Oh, fudge,” then glance about with a quick pang of minor guilt. The thing I always wonder is this—are they thinking the other word? Because when I hear anyone mutter, utter, or scream “Sugar!” I know in my heart they’re talking about dooky. The original word springs fully formed into my mind, with all its attendant sensory attributes. And I bet it’s the same with that devout church lady, too. (Maybe this is why fudge is so frequently offered at church bake sales.)

As a student of the Bible, I’ve always sympathized with Aaron, a pretty smart guy, priest and prophet, who lived his life in the shadow of his more famous brother Moses. Aaron is mainly known for challenging the Pharaoh’s magicians by turning his walking stick into a big fat serpent. The magicians countered this assault by throwing all their rods to the ground and turning them into a bunch of snakes. Things looked bad for Aaron until his serpent began eating all the Pharaoh’s snakes! Eventually it got down to the final battle between Aaron’s snake, swelled up from eating, and the Pharaoh’s last snake, desperate and demoralized from watching his buddies get swallowed up. Combat was neck-and-neck, which is pretty much always the case when it comes to snakes. The stakes were high, and I am willing to bet cash money that during such an anxious moment Aaron muttered a few Hebrew versions of “fudge” and “sugar.” You couldn’t blame him if he did. (His snake won, by the way.)

Thinking this way was giving me the willies about making the cake. If I couldn’t trust myself not to cuss, how could I trust myself to include the requisite amount of baking powder? I wondered if even thinking cuss words would offend God. Since the Lord knows all, I have to rely on His compassion and understanding that a lowly sinner (a multiple repeat offender) would at least make an effort to still his nasty tongue even if the thoughts remained wicked as heck.

The recipe for Bible Cake is from a cookbook sold by the Haldeman P.T.A. in 1967. (I attended all eight grades at Haldeman Elementary, graduating as class valedictorian, the apex of my academic career.) For cover art, my mother photographed the school with a Brownie Hawkeye camera, which she pressed tight to her abdomen, bending her neck at a harsh angle to peer through the viewfinder. The perforated pages of the cookbook are held together with tabs that tuck beneath a long plastic spine, known as “comb-bound.” It was printed by the Women’s Clubs Publishing Co., Inc., a firm specializing in cookbooks, police calendars, and civic directories. The last few pages contain temperature charts, ingredient substitution lists, and recipes for “Supper Quantity Cooking,” such as Chicken Shortcake for 135.

Local women supplied the recipes, including my seventh grade girlfriend, Annabelle Sparks, her mother, Gaythal Sparks, and my first grade teacher, Mary Alice Jayne. Annabelle recently informed me that she chose a recipe for Jam Cake because it was her teacher’s favorite dessert. (Ah, the intricate politics of cooking!) Lela Watson, who at this writing still lives in Rowan County, Kentucky, at age 101, contributed Bible Cake.

The idea behind this recipe is ingenious since all kids love cake and dislike reading the Bible. Typically, children assist an adult in the kitchen with this undertaking. The recipe is laid side-by-side with the Old Testament and New Testament. Young kids learn how to negotiate the numerical format of the Bible, and older children help interpret Scripture to ascertain the ingredients. The adult must take great care to check and double-check and triple-check each step. It’s easy to mess this cake up. Then the whole deal backfires. Dessert turns out lousy, children are less inclined to peruse the Bible, and grown-ups are angry at all and sundry. In short, Beelzebub wins. So plan carefully, gentle reader, and give yourself time to work out the details, for that is where the devil resides.

Bible Cake

1 cup Proverbs 30:33

2 cups Jeremiah 6:20

6 Isaiah 10:14

1/2 cup Judges 4:19

4 1/2 cups Leviticus 24:5

2 heaping teaspoons Amos 4:5

1 cup Nahum 3:12

1/2 cup Samuel 16:1

1 teaspoon 2nd Chronicles 9:9

1 teaspoon Exodus 30:23

3/4 cup Numbers 17:8

A pinch of Mark 9:50

Blend Proverbs and Judges with Jeremiah. Beat in yolks of Isaiah. Sift Leviticus, Amos, Exodus, and Chronicles. Cream all together. Blend in Mark. Beat whites of Isaiah until stiff, blend in. Stir in slivered Numbers, chopped Nahum, cut Samuel 16. Mix well.

Turn into greased pans dusted with Leviticus. Bake at 325 degrees one hour until Gabriel blows his horn. (Oven timer!)

(Out of respect and a certain delicate maturity, I shall refrain from making any comments about beating Isaiah until stiff, adding a cut Samuel, and creaming all together.)

Like most Southerners, I believe myself familiar with Scripture and gospel. And like most Southerners, I didn’t know it nearly as well as I thought. For one thing, I had no idea who Nahum was. I couldn’t recall him in the least. Fortunately for my fragile ego, it turns out that not much is known about Nahum in the first place. He was from Alqosh, a city originally known for its worship of an Assyrian moon god whose name was Sin. As the religious wars of yore reached their peaks, the word sin was appropriated by the winner and used to describe the worst of human endeavor. (Take that, moon!)

Contemporary religious scholars debate the significance of Nahum: Did he prophesize the fall of Nineveh, or did he record its destruction after the fact? Was he truly a prophet or “merely” a poet? In a form of compromise he is recalled as a “minor prophet,” a term that belittles even as it elevates, a sad fate indeed. Still, I suppose it is preferable to being merely a poet. This has a personal and painful resonance for me. Apparently my writing has been nominated twice for a MacArthur grant, the so-called Genius Award, but unfortunately this honor has eluded me. Does the status of having been in the running make me a “minor genius,” or am I lumped into the vast category of merely brilliant? Due to the intense shroud of secrecy surrounding the MacArthur process, I will never know. My sons, however, delight in calling me “Not-a-Genius Dad.” Though this sobriquet stings, I take some small solace that it beats “Minor Dad.” (Then again, all fathers become minor as the children grow, and all prophets become major with time.)

Possibly the very strength of Nahum’s lyricism contributes to the controversy over his status. He’s simply too good a poet to be a prophet. Nahum clearly devoted more time to writing than pursuing the intellectual metaphysics necessary to attaining the post of “major prophet.” Describing the triumphant attack on Nineveh, Nahum pens powerful imagery:

The shields of their warriors are gleaming red,

Their fighting men are all in scarlet;

Their chariots in battle line flash like fire.

The squadrons of horse advance

They charge madly on the city

They storm through the outskirts like torches

Like the zigzag of lightning.

Then, as now, the justification for invading a foreign state required clever reasoning by political leaders. Nineveh was a city that worshipped Ishtar, a goddess whose sacred rites allegedly involved sexual activity, possibly between women. This served as fodder for war. (Nobody really wants a city like that lying around the desert.) Nahum informs us, with his trademark brilliant (not-a-genius) poetry:

Woe betide the blood-stained city, steeped in deceit

All for the persistent harlotry of a harlot,

The alluring mistress of sorcery,

Who by her harlotry and sorceries

Beguiled nations and peoples.

(Personally, I would like to test my endurance against persistent harlotry but that is neither here nor there.) Nahum’s attempt to legitimize war makes about as much sense as the never-found weapons of mass destruction. But no matter, a coalition of Babylonians, Scythians, and Medes banded together to destroy Nineveh. Now the city is little more than an archaeological site in present-day Iraq. (Surely a coincidence.)

The famed battle occurred around 2,600 years ago. It must be noted that transmitting a 2600 hertz tone over a long-distance phone line gains access to the telephone system, allowing intrepid gray-hat hackers to explore Internet protocols. A magazine with the name 2600 was founded in 1984, coincidentally the name of a prescient novel by George Orwell about a tyrannical country perpetually at war and engaged in constant surveillance of its citizens. The coincidences continue apace: the 2600 hertz tone anomaly was discovered by blowing a plastic whistle into a telephone, the whistle itself being the prize in a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal. Today it is possible to purchase, via tele-phonic Internet, a container of crunch biscotti from a website supervised by a gentleman by the name of Nahum Ephraim Teitelboim. That’s right—Nahum, the minor poet of antiquity!

Lastly, I would like to remark upon one ingredient—the absolute necessity of a pinch of Mark. The Scripture quote is as follows: “Salt is good; but if the salt loses its saltness, how will you season it?” This is among my top ten favorite lines from the Bible. It has about it a flair of the Far East, a Zen-like insight. I admire the blunt pronouncement that salt is good, the repetition of the word “salt,” and a comment on its state of being salt. What I most admire is that practically any noun can be substituted into the sentence and maintain its essential wisdom, to wit:

“Fudge is good but if the fudge loses its
fudgeness, how will you fudge it?”

“Instant messaging is good but if the instant message loses its instant messageness, how will you instant message it?”

“Treats are good but if the treat loses its treatness, how will you treat it?”

Bear in mind, gentle reader, if you bake your treats with love, your family will love you. (And keep the cuss words to yourself.)

ADDENDUM:

To assist any and all bakers—professional, amateur, or savant—I’ve included the Scriptures in which the ingredients are found. This will reduce your Biblical sleuthing and speed your cooking time. I’ve taken the liberty of abridging the longer passages to avoid confusion and specify the individual elements. Otherwise you may wind up with a cake that includes frankincense, wine, a heifer, talents of gold, myrrh, and calamus. This will not please your diners.

Proverbs 30:33 --– Butter

“For the churning of milk bringeth forth butter.”

Jeremiah 6:20 – Sugar

“To what purpose cometh there to me frankincense from Sheba and the sweet cane from a far country?”

Isaiah 10:14 – Eggs

“And my hand hath found as a nest the riches of the peoples; as one gathered eggs that are forsaken, have I gathered the earth.”

Judges 4:19 – Milk

“And he said unto her, Give me, I pray thee, a little water to drink; for I am thirsty. And she opened a skin of milk and gave him drink.”

Leviticus 24:5 – Flour

“And thou shalt take fine flour and bake twelve cakes thereof.”

Amos 4:5 – Baking powder

“And offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving of that which is leavened.”

Nahum 3:12 – Figs

“All your fortifications are like the first ripe figs; shaken, they fall into the mouth of
the eater.”

Samuel 16:1 – Raisins

“David was met by Ziba who had with him a pair of donkeys saddled and loaded with two hundred loaves of bread, a hundred clusters of raisins, a hundred of summer fruit, and a skin of wine.”

2nd Chronicles 9:9 – Allspice

“And she gave the king a hundred and twenty talents of gold and of spices great abundance.”

Exodus 30:23 – Cinnamon

“Take spices as follows: five hundred shekels of myrrh and half that amount of cinnamon, and of sweet calamus.”

Numbers 17:8 – Almonds

“The next day Moses went into the tent. He found that Aaron’s staff for the tribe of Levi had not only begun to bud, but it bore ripe almonds.”

Mark 9:50 – Salt

“Salt is good; but if the salt loses its saltness, how will you season it?”

Also in the OA: Read an intervew with Chris Offutt

EYES ON THE SOUTH: Trish Gibson :: June 14 2013

Tennessee photographer Trish Gibson's Shared Names is a series of portraits focusing on siblings. Gibson writes:

The connections that are shared by siblings have always interested me because of the way in which people can be bound together internally in a way that isn’t always seen or understood by others. Siblings share their lives with each other to a point that causes tension, struggle, and sometimes resentment but can be accompanied by a strong desire for approval and the presence of genuine love.

Trish Gibson is a photographer based in Johnson City, TN. She is currently attending East Tennessee State University and will graduate in the Spring of 2014 with a BFA in photography. She has been working on Shared Names since November 2012 and is continuing to make work for the project. To see more of her work visit her website.