Shannon Phillips

Everybody who lives in the Bay Area needs to know about this right now: you can finally, finally, finally get a proper bagel, at Beauty’s Bagel Shop on Telegraph.

I really can’t overstate how monumental this is. When we first visited Beauty’s I teared up eating a bagel.

You see, the bagels around here are shit. They’re soft, breadlike substances—buns with a hole punched in the middle. This is a known fact, and everybody in the Bay Area is heartily sick of hearing East Coast transplants complaining about the bagels. When I first moved here twelve years ago and didn’t know that it was such a cliché, I remember telling my boss that I’d had a string of really rotten bagels and did he know where I could find a decent one? He looked at me scornfully and said, “You’re in California now. Eat croissants.”

But it took me a long time to give up on bagels. I just didn’t believe that in a city with such fantastic food it could really be impossible to find a passable bagel. I stood in line for hours at all the little delis around town. Some San Franciscans swear by Katz Bagels, some by House of Bagels: these bagels, like all the others, are a cruel mockery of the form. Some people said it had to do with the water.

And maybe my twelve years of privation can explain why I nearly wept when Beauty’s served me a bagel. A lovely, dense, chewy bagel. It’s been so long. Bagels, precious bagels, never leave me again.

Robin: “Do you love me? Or not love me?”
Davy: “Love you!”

When I was a kid Hallowe’en was my favorite holiday, but now that I’m grown up Thanksgiving seems perfect. The food is fantastic and the company even more so—we are very grateful that we were able to share the day with Nonna and Pappy and a couple dear friends, and the rest of our far-flung family and friends are close in our hearts on this holiday too. A day for celebrating the bounty of the land with loved ones…what could be better?

Maybe there’s one thing better: the day after Thanksgiving. A day for just sitting around in our bathrobes grazing on all the leftovers. That’s pretty great too.

Our Thanksgiving menu this year:

slices of Pink Lady apples and Point Reyes “Toma” farmstead cheese
slices of prosciutto and fuyu persimmons drizzled with balsamic vinegar
smoked almonds
rum-glazed pecans

murderous mashed potatoes (seriously, the mashed potatoes will kill you—I make them exactly twice a year, and they are fantastic, because the Cook’s Illustrated recipe involves a stick of butter and three cups of heavy cream. I always warn everybody beforehand so those with any cholesterol issues know to take them very sparingly.)
pan seared brussels sprouts with bacon
pear-ginger cranberry sauce
BN Ranch heritage, pasture-raised turkey
and in place of stuffing, Judy Rodgers’ bread salad. (My friend Matt, who is gluten-intolerant, usually comes for Thanksgiving, so most of the menu is gluten-free…this is my single “asterisk.”)

sweet potato pie (I use Leah Chase’s recipe, substituting gluten-free flour for the crust.)
flourless chocolate cake

So as you can see, the leftovers are plentiful and delicious.

My philosophy on inviting guests with dietary restrictions is this: I feel pretty okay about gesturing expansively to a table groaning with food and saying “You can eat everything but the strudel,” or whatever. So when putting together a meal I usually allow myself a single “asterisk.” It’s a lot nicer than leading a guest to the same table and saying “This is all poisonous to you, but I made you a special bowl of pilaf.” Matt insists that he’s perfectly happy as long as there’s something he can eat, but I think it’s plain mean to invite a guest if it’s only to make them watch other people eating delicious foods they cannot have.

I joke that when I die I’d like my memorial plaque to read simply: “She ate well.” Thanksgiving is probably the day that we eat best of all, but the day after Thanksgiving features all of the food and none of the work. Best holiday ever? It might be.

You guys, I am super excited to announce that The Big Booger Bubble is now a real book!

Unfortunately the Amazon page hasn’t auto-generated a “Look inside!” previewer thingummy—I’m working on getting that up. But in the meantime, let me show you some of Ingrid Steblea‘s fantastic illustrations (clicking the image will take you to my Flickr account, where you can see larger versions of the pages):

And the story continues from there!

I have pretty much resigned myself to the fact that when I’m dead and gone, The Big Booger Bubble will be my legacy. I might write ten more novels, I might put my heart and soul on every page, but still: “Oh, Shannon Phillips,” they’ll say. “Didn’t she write something about boogers?” It’s my bequest to the literary tradition. You’re welcome, future generations. You’re welcome.

These reviews are cross-posted from my Goodreads account.

Peter S. Beagle at his best is a master conjurer, but I don’t think any of the stories here really show Beagle working at the top of his craft. “Sleight of Hand” is a good title for the collection: these tricks of the imagination are fairly slight, but good fun nonetheless—a pleasant and diverting way to spend a few hours.

It seems weird to call a book about the zombie apocalypse a “light, fun” read, but that’s ultimately what this is. I picked it up expecting something similar to Stephen King’s The Stand, a book that’s stuck with me even though it has one of the single hackiest endings I’ve ever read. But there’s not nearly as much meat to World War Z. It’s a series of vignettes, each well done, but short enough that you don’t end up really getting attached to any particular characters. My favorite bit involved the story of a downed Air Force pilot making her way through a zombie-infested swamp, guided by the remote voice of a ham radio operator who seems to be keeping some secrets.

This is Car One—the very first streetcar operated by a municipal transit authority in America. It’s exactly a hundred years old. (There were streetcars in America before 1912, but they were owned and operated by private transit companies: San Francisco’s MUNI system was the first to put public streetcars in operation.)

MUNI celebrated its centennial today, and to mark the occasion they brought out Car One. We got to ride it down Market Street:

It’s beautiful inside, with lots of wood, shiny brass fittings, and rattan seats. It was gorgeously restored several years ago, and is now generally reserved for mayors to ride in during city parades. It was pretty awesome.

Also awesome: Robin got to hang out with a real life conductor, who even let him try on the hat:

This has been a banner week for Robin’s career aspirations: last weekend we went up to visit Nonna and Pappy in Carson City, and they took him to hang out with some firemen in the local firehouse. He even got to ride in the fire truck, which thoroughly blew his mind. Ever since then I’ve been hearing an awful lot about how he’s a grown up boy who can be anything he wants to be, and what he wants to be is a fireman, because firemen save people, and even more importantly they ride in the fire trucks.

Davy, on the other hand, was intimidated both by the fire truck and by the conductor in his uniform, and hid his face in Sam’s shoulder when the hat was offered. But he liked the streetcar ride just the same!

The boys this year went trick-or-treating as an evil scientist (Robin) and a platypus secret agent (Davy), characters which may bear a suspicious resemblance to those from the TV show Phineas and Ferb. Here is Robin making his mad science face:

The device he’s holding is a ghost-inator. Originally it was a more generic raygun, but Robin decided that he wanted a weapon specifically targeted to ghosts. Maybe when he’s a little bit older we’ll let him know that there’s a whole movie about that.

Davy shed his hat and platypus beak shortly after leaving the house. His costume was never going to be particularly recognizable, except maybe to Phineas and Ferb fans, but without the props he was basically just a kid in a blue shirt. People gave him candy anyway. When they asked where his costume was, we said “he’s a platypus secret agent, and he’s working undercover.”

All Hallow’s Read is a movement started by Neil Gaiman a few years ago. The idea is simple: on or around Hallowe’en, you give somebody a scary book. It’s a promoting-the-joy-of-reading kind of thing. (Gaiman himself is giving away a short story this year, as part of a charity drive for schools and libraries.)

I want to get in on the fun, so I’m going to send a gift copy of Anna Dressed in Blood to the first commenter on this blog.

I read this book because my awesome sister-in-law, The Anti-Sara, added it to her “want to read” list on Goodreads. I was all like, hey, I want to read that too! So I did. It’s an action-packed story of a ghost hunter and the bond he forges with the spirit of a murdered girl. I thought the world-building was good (I like Blake’s take on ghosts in general) and the trio of main characters were all sympathetic. I particularly liked that the blonde, popular high school girl also turns out to be nice and smart and brave. The book’s treatment of voodoo is problematic from a cultural perspective—it’s really unfortunate that the book’s only black character is a scary villain—but the sequel, Girl of Nightmares, goes some way towards providing a more balanced perspective. Anyway, I don’t think it’s great literature, but it is a fun, spooky book, and a good candidate for All Hallow’s Read.

In the first draft of my novel, I had a chapter opening with this sentence: “That evening, Viv found herself scouring her limited wardrobe for something that looked effortlessly attractive in an oh-this-old-thing-I-just-threw-it-on way; or, failing that, dressy and cute in a we’re-just-friends way; or, as a last resort, somewhat acceptable in a not-completely-retarded-when-worn-with-a-beret way.” (There’s some backstory for why Viv is wearing a beret at that part of the book, but it’s not really relevant to the point.)

In the revision process I changed the word “retarded” to “ridiculous.” I resisted the change for a while, even though every time I got to that sentence the word scraped at me—but part of me felt that I was being true to the character, that Viv’s internal thought patterns are not particularly sensitive to “politically correct” speech, and that a more disparaging term made the line funnier.

Then I realized that even if all of that were true, it didn’t matter. Viv doesn’t exist, but lots of people with Down syndrome and other kinds of intellectual disabilities do exist, and many have been clear that they find the words “retarded” and “retard” to be very hurtful. I’ve heard a lot of pushback on this and maybe even felt swayed, at some point, by these kinds of arguments: that any term used to describe an intellectual disability will take on negative associations (witness the mocking use of the word “special”), or that an obsession with “politically correct” speech creates an atmosphere of Orwellian repression, et cetera et cetera.

For me, in the end, it comes down to this. There are people saying, “This hurts me, please knock it off.” I don’t want to hurt those people. In general, when I have a choice between hurting people or being decent to them, I would like to choose decency. That’s why I’m trying to eradicate the word “retarded” from my speech and my writing. It hurts people.

I don’t think Ann Coulter is particularly concerned with hurting people, but I’ve seen a lot of defenses of her language, and of similar words, that are essentially attempts to avoid confronting that central fact. It’s not about the PC mafia or whatever. It’s about real people and whether or not you want to be decent to them.