The mussels fixation continues apace. Spied this garage queen in the parking lot on the way out. It looks identical to my 2013 GT, but that style was available from 2005 to 2014.

When I interviewed for my current job, I told a (true) story about my first interview in the same district 22 years prior, for a school psychologist position. When I was asked where I saw myself in a few years, I thought for a moment and recounted a memorable passage from Under the Tuscan Sun:

Tuscans are of this time; they simply have had the good instinct to bring the past along with them. If our culture says burn your bridges behind you – and it does – theirs says cross and recross.

I only thought it fitting to repeat it when I was board approved for the position.

_Under the Tuscan Sun_is a book about which you can unironically say is better than the movie. I learned about it from A Common Reader, an early online bookseller famous for its paper catalog: the book descriptions were worth reading, irrespective of the likelihood that you would buy the book. I read it in Italy, when Rhonda and I were on vacation (in the summer of 1999, I think). It was a great book.

The novel is by no means heavy, but the movie has a much lighter vibe, and it is not an improvement. The characters in the movie are mere caricatures of the novel’s.

_____ 
I was thinking about our last vacation, and how both of us are eager to go back to the same hotel in Cape May. But I was thinking about other places, too. Not necessarily that much further from home as Cape May, but I hatch plots from time to time. Maybe notions is a better word.

That makes me wonder if one is better than the other, or if it’s just a matter of preference. Exploring and trying new things is always fun for me. But I do enjoy the comforts of the routine. In all things, moderation, I suppose.

Rhonda and I are having a hard time getting back into the routine. Nipped out for mussels and calamari. And wine.

I mentioned Norman Mailer’s _Tough Guys Don’t Dance _in “Genius and Lust,” and maybe this is one of the reasons I fell into it as autobiographical: One of my enduring memories is Mailer’s representation of Provincetown as an off-season shore town, because I could so readily identify with the shift, living, as I always have, close enough to the Jersey Shore that off-season visits were common enough.

The place turned gray before one’s eyes. Back in summer, the population had been thirty thousand and doubled on weekends. It seemed as if every vehicle on Cape Cod chose to drive down the four-lane state highway that ended at our beach. Provincetown was as colorful then as St. Tropez, and as dirty by Sunday evening as Coney Island. In the fall, however, with everyone gone, the town revealed its other presence. Now the population did not boil up daily from thirty thousand to sixty, but settled down to its honest sediment, three thousand souls, and on empty weekday afternoons you might have said the true number of inhabitants must be thirty men and women, all hiding.

Tough Guys Don’t Dance by Normal Mailer

I kinda do this every year without the cute emoji.

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This is not a new dish for us, but it is a treat. We’ve had picanha, which is a rump cap or sirloin cap, at Brazilian steakhouses in Philly, most notably the now-shuttered Chima. It’s served coiled up on skewers in those places; I just sous vide and then roast off the whole thing on the grill. I kept it in the circulator for like six hours at 128 degrees before a 20-minute sit on the charcoal grill. It’s a leaner cut than a ribeye, but plenty juicy from the basting it gets from the fat cap. I had some Bellview Seraphina with mine. Rhonda did too.

M

Menuwhere is a great example of an app that makes being a Mac user fun, and highlights now iPadOS can be a staid experience in comparison.

I’ve written before about my love for Proteron Software’s Max Menus, which allowed me to create custom menu palettes for macOS that I could invoke using the mouse or keyboard. Here’s a Youtube video of the app in action. If you remember making folders of custom aliases and keeping them in your Apple Menu Bar back in the Mac OS days, it was kinda like that.

Menuwhere, from the clever developers at Many Tricks software, allows you to invoke the menu bar menus from wherever your mouse pointer is. I currently have it set to respond to control-right-click on my mouse (which is currently a Magic Trackpad).

Having the week off from work has allowed me lots of time to do fun things and post here on Uncorrected. Some obvious choices for this week’s Sunday Serial include discoveries from our mini-vacation, as well as a few other finds:

Washington Inn in Cape May

Rhonda and I finally dined at this well-regarded restaurant in Cape May. The escargots are a must-have. A rotating and inventive cocktail menu, attentive service, and fulsome wine list–complete with a sommelier–round out a worthy dining experience.

Buttonwood Boutique

A classic-yet-modern Victorian manse in Cape May offers the best of both worlds: quaint and historically true to Cape May’s theme, but a fully modern experience from booking to checkout. I’m inclined to shop around with restaurants, but I’d stay at the Buttonwood in a heartbeat again. Possibly soon.

Mussels

We’ve been trying the mussels at all of our local favorite restaurants, and a great option is to get some apps to share for dinner when you’re not looking for a big spread. Thursday nights at the local pizza shop have turned into mussels night a couple of times this spring, and it’s a great way to have a meal out without betraying your macro count.

I really miss the Mussel Bar in Atlantic City.

A Festive Spouse

Rhonda updated the spring garland in my office and added some lights. I think she’s got a Temu addiction, but they do have nice things for the house. I’m currently enjoying this seasonal layout, which is appropriately patriotic.

NJ Uncorked: A Local Wine Blog

There’s so much content out there that you really have to look for. I did a quick search this morning before getting up and found Dave Mullen’s un-sniffish blog about wine, NJ Uncorked. He’s traveling around and trying local wineries with his wife; he’s a retired school psychologist and oenophile. I’m really enjoying reading the entries and adding to my own wine wish list. I regret not getting into local wines earlier.

Buena Connection Brewing

Rhonda and I fought the temptation to stop at Buena Connection Brewing yesterday, as it was the grand opening. (Neither of us love crowds.) We’ll be there soon enough. There’s a cream ale, nitro stout, and IPA I’m keen to try.

Having just experienced Cape May “off season,” much to our mutual delight, it got me thinking about my notional love for the off-season shore town. I dug around here on Uncorrected to see if I’d expressed my affection thus in these virtual pages, but could find no record. Excelsior, then, because I wanted to wax ecstatic.

I was finishing up grad school in the spring of 2002 and had a job interview in Ocean City, NJ, for a school psychologist position that opened up. I was pretty excited about the prospect of working for a nice district, but doubly enthused about being in a familiar shore town when the tourists aren’t there. Aka off season.

I thought about how cool it would be to live there, even. But hey: I didn’t know much about the cost of living at the Jersey Shore back then.

That draw, though, continues to this day, and I think we all (as in the four of us) share it to some degree. Sure, Rhonda and I tend to set the vacation schedule, but we get no complaints: Rehoboth in the fall is an example. I’ve eyed up other spots, and I imagine we’ll keep Cape May off season as a goal to shoot for when we can. I have notions of a Vrbo near Sandy Hook and taking the ferry into the city, too.

I don’t know what it is. I think part of it is that I don’t like crowds. I’m a bit of an introvert. The notion of enjoying something more privately that is often subjected to gaudy shows of insta-lookat-me appeals to me somehow. It’s a weird balance for sure: an empty restaurant is a bad sign. To the middle, I suppose, whether in aggregate or individual circumstances.

So yeah: I’d like to go back to Cape May.

I was scrolling through Bluesky and found this cool theme. I always like Dracula themes for text editors. Here’s one for Drafts, and another for BBEdit.

I forgot to add that we stopped in Rio Grande on the way home to get some peanuts at Marshalls. (They have these big cans of Virginia peanuts that you would normally pay 20 bucks for on Amazon for $8.99. I eat them every day.) I spied this Hurley sling bag, and was intrigued. I’ve bee looking at replacement bags for my strange Amazon messenger bag I got when I fancied the notion that a Microsoft Surface Pro could be the one device to rule them all.

This bag is great in that it’s light and small, but can go from carrying an iPad Mini to a MacBook and two iPads. It’s cheaply made and the zippers require careful packing to avoid scratching your devices. That, and it’s not very deep, so attached stylii are always a worry.

I’ve avoided the multi bag ethos thus far; I have a messenger bag and I always use just it. The bag has changed over the years, but it’s always been one bag.

But there have been many times (like this weekend) where a sling with an iPad would be perfect. So I got this but only because it was inexpensive.

Rhonda and I nipped out to Cape May for an overnight stay and dinner yesterday into today. And wine. And cheese. Not necessarily in that order. We really had a good time on our 20th Anniversary back in December of 2023, and were excited to go back again and stay over, which we did in December of 2024.

We resolved to go back because, while we really enjoyed our December 2024 visit, it was packed. Mobbed, as my grandfather used to say. I honestly didn’t know if it wouldn’t be crowded in April, but we figured it was worth a shot.

And boy was it. I was leery considering it was Spring Break for us and peripheral to Easter, but it was pretty empty. But went we did, following the same format as our previous trips: a nice place to stay, a classy dinner, and a winery.

Buttonwood Boutique

A coworker recommended the Buttonwood Boutique when I mentioned that we were thinking about going back to Cape May after our trip this past December. I looked it up and was able to make a rez without prepaying and a very late cancelation window.

I got a text message Saturday morning with all of the access instructions I would need. I realized that this was more in the vein of an AirBNB or VRBO situation than a formal hotel, which was something new to look forward to. You let yourself in using a passcode to both the building proper and your individual room. I never dealt with a host or reservation manager or anyone.

I guess it’s an old Victorian-era building, like so many of the places in Cape May. But there’s a nice kitchen and a beautiful sunroom and a living room. Rhonda and I opened a bottle of rosé and hung out in the sunroom to while away some time before dinner.

Cape May Winery

I’m going a little out of order here; I had an itinerary in mind that was put off because we got off to what I catastrophized was a perilously late start. I had planned for us to be winery-side by 3:30 pm, after checking in at the Buttonwood. But we didn’t leave until almost 2:45, three-quarters of an hour later than I planned. But we were asses in seat before 4 and had plenty of time to kill a bottle of their barrel-fermented Chardonnay. We split a seasonal charcuterie board too. Both were great. And we got the rosé I mentioned above to take back with us. We stopped by the Cape May Winery during our last trip, but only to score a bottle.

Rhonda and I are both lovers of our local Bellview Winery; it’s smallish, familiar, and they have great wine. Cape May Winery appears to be a much bigger operation. The tasting room itself isn’t huge, but the outdoor seating area is massive. They separate the food and the wine service; there are two counters, and two points of sale. Is it a little in convention to order twice? I suppose. But it’s no show stopper.

A special note: pumpkin seeds with the cheese plate. Nice touch. We sat outside and enjoyed the sun.

Washington Inn

I seem to recall that my mom tried to score us a rez at the Washington Inn for our 20th wedding anniversary, but the joint was booked up at the time. I was able to make a reservation with no trouble, again lending credence to my hypothesis that Cape May is packed up through Christmas, and then enters as winter hibernation and long spring of low volume.

We started off with a Manhattan, which was not featured on the cocktail menu. There was one while I was researching the joint during the planning phase, so I was disappointed. Behold:

Anyway, this Manhattan had fallen off the list, but two of the drinks they did have on the menu now featured rye and Carpano Antica, so I ordered one for us asking for those two ingredients. This caused a small crisis for the server and bartender, which our server mentioned. I apologized for the inconvenience but I’m not really sorry. You need to have the classics on hand for those of us who prize them. In any event, the drinks arrived and Rhonda pronounced them as good as mine.

One of my main motivations for trying the Washington is was the escargots. This is a dish, liked baked Alaska and lobster Thermidor, that you don’t see on menus very often, maybe because they’re old school, but like my cocktail preferences, classics never go out of style.

We both had the escargot, served in the requisite plate and swimming in butter. There was a nice chewy bread with a pillowy crumb that was served alongside. This preparation always puts me in mind of the server at Deux Cheminees in Philly, who would reverentially utter “brioche” when he would put a plate of escargots before you. I hope I’m tucking into a plate of them in my eighties and subvocalize “brioche” to myself.

As with the cocktail misadventure, the NY Strip I was eyeing up on the menu I saw during the planning phase of this trip had slipped off (but emerged as a special at a very special price indeed). So Rhonda went with the lamb chops, and I the scallops. We intended to share, and while I very certainly remembering eating a lamb chop, the details of Rhonda having any scallops evade my memory. I asked her this morning over breakfast, and she wasn’t terribly sure either.

Dock Mike’s Pancake House

This was literally across the street from the Buttonwood Boutique, and visible from our room’s window. So it was an easy choice. Rhonda was bullish about pancakes last night (and I thought that maybe I’d get some waffles myself), but we both ended up getting omelettes. Mine was pretty health, I’d say; it was a Mediterranean omelette with some ham, feta, onions, mushrooms, and avocado. Literally green eggs and ham.

Hawk Haven Winery

We stopped at Cape May Winery to grab a bottle of rose to stash in the fridge, but it wasn’t open yet. I looked up Hawk Haven on a recommendation and we decided to head there, as it was on a route amenable to getting home. We sat outside for about ten minutes and then got a quick history of the joint before ordering a bottle. The gentlemen who checked us out added that any wines that are listed as “Signature Series” are made with grapes grown on the premises. I added several of their signature wines to my wine wishlist.

In writing “Always Merry and Bright,” I dug out my copy of Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller by Normal Mailer. I purchased it used on Amazon, I think, probably back in the late 1990s.

It’s a strange book, where Mailer’s commentary is brief compared to the long passages taken from Miller’s books, unedited and uncommented. But his introductions are lucid and penetrating.

Rhonda saw the book out last night after we came back from sushi and did a double-take. I read a lot but not paper books. But this isn’t one you can find electronically, or at least not easily. I didn’t look very hard, although you can read it on Internet Archive if you’re so inclined. I’m not.

Novels Don’t Always Seem Like Novels

I got into a little bit of a Mailer back in college and shortly afterward, and I was thinking about this a little this morning. Tropic of Cancer was an awakening in part because it wasn’t a novel in the sense of the word that I understood it; it was a loosely auto-biographical book that does not attempt to tell a story from start to finish. If you imagine a novel that you enjoyed recently (or ever), you can summarize it in the way that might make an English teacher proud: plot, characters, rising action, resolution, all of that. Tropic of Cancer doesn’t really fit into that analysis, and I think it’s one of the things about it that struck me when I read it.

In an unfocused way, I found myself reading things in my later college years that fit into this vein. I also found myself assuming that some of these pieces were in fact autobiographical in the same way that Tropic was, when in fact I was reading a novel in the classic sense.

Mailer’s Tought Guys Don’t Dance was once such example. I was picking through the stacks at Myrin Library at Ursinus and found a copy of it, and started reading it. I don’t know how far I got before I realized that this was kind of a mystery novel. It was so carefully narrated by a first-person voice that I fell into the story and had to remind myself it wasn’t autobiographical. I remember being a little disappointed even.

It was another Henry who put me on to Miller: Henry Rollins. I was reading his journal of being in Black Flag, Get in the Van, and if I remember correctly, he was talking about reading Miller’s Black Spring. I read Tropic of Cancer soon thereafter, and then Black Spring.

Tropic of Cancer has loomed large in my mind as the first “serious” book I read. It was by no means the first book that I chose for myself and read that I enjoyed, but it was certainly the first of its kind: Tropic of Cancer isn’t a novel in the classic sense of the word; there’s not a plot or characters contrived to symbolize ordinate human types or exemplars. Or is it? It’s just Miller, free in Paris, having cast off the shackles of quotidian responsibility, living a kind of beat existence before there was a name for the thing. So while I held up Catcher in the Rye as an example of literature that wasn’t handed to me by a teacher, Tropic was a choice I made, a book that I wanted to experience.

If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality.

As with Dune, I re-read Tropic of Cancer again, perhaps for the third time. I was maybe 20 when I read it the first time; I’ve lived more than half of my life since then. And as with Dune, it didn’t hold up in my mind the way I remembered it, although unlike with Dune, I remembered very clearly what I liked and what I didn’t.

Someone once wrote, “There’s nothing like Miller when he gets rolling,” and that’s absolutely true. When he’s railing against the diminution of the human spirit by some human contrivance–medical science, impersonal bureaucracy, or the affectations of personal preference–he is likely to fashion an immense list of the beloved barnacles of thought and action that we loll about in our mouths and minds without much thought. These are hysterical moments in his writing.

One thing I’ve always marveled about Miller: the no-fucks-given sense of self-ownership, of being free. In Tropic , he’s often wandering, looking for the next meal or drink, penniless, without a plan. Free, but broke. It’s hard for me to consider life like this, but that’s the point of reading, isn’t it?

Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middleclass men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.

It’s not that Miller didn’t express worry about money, or find himself doing things expressly to make a living: he writes about teaching and editing copy, both of which are temporary arrangements that he only engages long enough to stave off deprivation. But there’s never a sense that his existence tracks closely to a profession. It’s a diversion that funds other diversions.

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” –Kurt Vonnegut

Tropic of Cancer is existential: Henry Miller is living his life, and has some boundaries around how much of it he’ll sell off to do so. His avocations are certainly writing and painting, but carousing is a big part of it, too.

Miller’s rampant sexism is hard to read, too, and I always found this to be the case. Growing up in the early to mid-nineties, “PC” was a word that people were fighting against in the way “woke” is today cast as pejorative. I don’t think I was being “PC” in eschewing some of his most indelicate, selfish passages; that’s a value matter to me. The calculus you have to make with a book such as Tropic of Cancer is whether you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater–is there anything of value here that demands our attention, objections notwithstanding?

I’m not going to answer that question here. I still found some of those passages skippable, not because they appeal to the prurient interest, but because I don’t think people should think of each other that way, that objectively, as means by which to satisfy ourselves. Again, values.

I was a psych major trying not to be one. I was a lapsed catholic looking for a new organizing principle outside of a punitive god. I needed a new immortality.

With this attribute goes another which I prize above everything else, and that is the sense of wonder. No matter how restricted my world may become I cannot imagine it leaving me void of wonder. In a sense I suppose it might be called my religion. I do not ask how it came about, this creation in which we swim, but only to enjoy and appreciate it. -The Measure of a Life Well Lived: Henry Miller on Growing Old, the Perils of Success, and the Secret of Remaining Young at Heart

Two Henries

Reading Tropic of Cancer, you realize there are two Millers: there is the joyful poet, busking, yes, beside the smoldering ash heap that is modern civilization, who yet yawps and celebrates life. The other Miller, tangled up antithetically with Whitman , is the harbinger of decay, a chronicler of all the ways humanity has screwed itself: this is nihilist Miller. The only escape is another flood, or an ice age, or something that will render asunder the decadence we’ve allowed to ruin us… until the paragraph ends. Both Millers are consonant with his taciturn soul, the mercurial writer who alternately celebrates life and castigates the machine we’ve created.

My idea briefly has been to present a resurrection of the emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium…

Poet Miller loves us all and edges us towards art, towards defining our own values, towards bringing into a totality those fragments and elements of our perfect, if fragmented, souls. Nihilist Miller has thrown up his hands, paddled out onto an island big enough for just himself, and hurls Molotov cocktails at the culture.

The earth is parched and cracked. Men and women come together like broods of vultures over a stinking carcass, to mate and fly apart again. Vultures who drop from the clouds like heavy stones. Talons and beak, that’s what we are!

It’s a Novel and He Could Have Done the Easy Thing

As I hinted above, Tropic of Cancer may, in fact, be a novel. Norman Mailer sagely observes that of course this is so. And it would have been easy for Miller to do it again.

These few details are enough to suggest Tropic of Cancer is a fiction more than a fact. Which, of course, is not to take away a particle of its worth. Perhaps it becomes even more valuable. After all, we do not write to recapture an experience, we write to come as close to it as we can. Sometimes we are not very close, and yet, paradoxically, are nearer than if we had. Not nearer necessarily to the reality of what happened, but to the mysterious reality of what can happen on a page. Oil paints do not create clouds but the image of clouds; a page of manuscript can only evoke that special kind of reality which lives on the skin of the writing paper, a rainbow on a soap bubble. Miller is forever accused of caricature by people who knew his characters, and any good reader knows enough about personality to sense how much he must be leaving out of his people. Yet, what a cumulative reality they give us. His characters make up a Paris more real than Its paving stones until a reluctant wonder bursts upon us.

– Henry Miller on Turning 80