The Monday Media Diet with Jeff Gordinier

On Peter Barrett, Klancy Miller, and thinking about how poems work

Jeff Gordinier (JG) is an editor and food writer that I’ve followed for a long time. I loved his book, Hungry, about his time traveling with chef René Redzepi. Have a great week. -Colin (CJN)

Photo: Andre Baranowski

Tell us about yourself.

I am a father. I have four children: Margot, who graduated from Vassar College last year and now lives in France; Tobias, who is finishing his first year at CU Boulder in Colorado; and twins Jasper and Wesley, who are in first grade here in Los Angeles. I am a person who loves words. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t mesmerized by words. It is a blessing that I have been published all over the place for over 30+ years — I’m that rare Gen Xer who managed to work for Condé Nast, The New York Times Company, Hearst Publications, and Time Inc. (requiescat in pace) — but even if no one wanted to publish my stuff, I’d be off somewhere playing with words and sending random postcards to friends. I grew up in a Reagan Republican neighborhood in Southern California, but some serious mind-expansion took place in my teens when I simultaneously encountered Beat poetry, punk rock, independent films, and the Los Angeles food writing of Ruth Reichl and Jonathan Gold. I can’t explain why this is so, but I probably became a writer because I saw the Clash at the Hollywood Palladium when I was 14 years old. Anyway, I went on to contribute to publications like The New York Times, Food & Wine, Town & Country, Details, Entertainment Weekly, Fast Company, the Globe & Mail, Outside, Artful Living, GQ, Elle, Spin, Further, and Esquire, where I help curate the food and drinks coverage. I’ve written two books — Hungry, my 2019 portrait of the Danish chef René Redzepi, and 2008’s X Saves the World, my messy not-a-manifesto about Generation X. I also co-edited, with my buddy Marc Weingarten, 2015’s Here She Comes Now, a collection of personal essays about women in music. I have taught food writing at Drexel University in Philadelphia and I have appeared in Netflix shows like Chef’s Table and Somebody Feed Phil, which is always horrifying because I hate to look at myself. I moved back to Los Angeles last summer after 30 years of living in New York. I’m blissing out being home.

Describe your media diet.

Okay. Deep breath. This might take a while. Maybe we can enjoy an intermission halfway through? In terms of print consumption, my reading runs along five separate tracks:

1. Reading because I want to. These are books I select for my own enjoyment. In my mind, they exist outside of the realm of censure or professional obligation. These books usually have nothing to do with food. I tend to read them early in the morning, before my wife and kids get out of bed. My body snaps awake at around 4:30 — probably because I’m having a nightmare about a country descending into fascism. At that moment, I might decide to go for a long predawn walk or I might decide to sit at the dinner table drinking cold brew and reading. At about 5:30 this morning, I finished Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

2. Reading because I have to. I believe in supporting bookstores and authors, so I say yes to moderating a distressing number of conversations about new books. I probably do this too often, but it’s an ego boost to be asked. I show up at a conference or a bookstore and I sit in front of an audience (sometimes large, sometimes tiny) and I ask an author questions. People tell me I’m pretty good at asking the questions and that I probably should’ve pursued a career as a talk-show host. If so, here is my secret: I actually read the books. Talking to authors on stage is much easier when you read their books. These books are often about food. Recent examples: Uses for Obsession by Ben Shewry, Why I Cook by Tom Colicchio, How to Share an Egg by Bonny Reichert, and Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever. Pleasure is involved in this experience, except in those rare instances when a book is criminally boring and I have to force myself through it. I tend to do this reading during work hours because I classify it as work.

3. Reading because I’ve got the blues. I grew up in the church, and that experience has left me with a residual thirst for scripture. Throughout my life I’ve turned to the secular version of scripture: poetry. (See the “rabbit hole” section below.) In my office I have two tall bookshelves that contain, from top to bottom, nothing but poetry. At some point each afternoon, weary and spent, I grab one of these books and randomly start to gulp from it as if it were a glass of ice water after a tennis game. I have my own private canon of poets whose work can be counted on to clarify or deepen my perceptions of each day: Joanne Kyger, Kevin Young, James Schuyler, Kay Ryan, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, Tracy K. Smith, Gary Snyder, Sonia Sanchez, Adrienne Rich, Kim Addonizio, Sandra Cisneros, Beth Ann Fennelly, Robin Robertson, Don Paterson, Seamus Heaney, Theodore Roethke, Jane Hirshfield, Terrance Hayes, Louise Glück, Patrizia Cavalli, Cesare Pavese, Pablo Neruda, Rita Dove, Jack Gilbert, Yehuda Amichai, Robert Creeley, W.S. Merwin, Walt Whitman. To name a few.

4. Reading to my children. Our twin sons, Jasper and Wesley, turn 7 this spring. That means that we have a short time left to read bedtime books to them before they grow out of that practice and want to be left alone. Reading books to your children is an important and rewarding thing to do, sure, but let’s be honest: it takes place at the exact point in the day (after dinner, after homework, after loading the dishwasher, after showers) when everyone seems to be collapsing into exhaustion. I try to put my heart into it because I know that this window won’t stay open forever. Jasper and Wesley have parents who are highly active in the world of restaurants and food, so it’s probably no surprise that their favorite books — the ones they request night after night — are food-centric: Just Try It! by Phil & Lily Rosenthal, Sankofa by Eric Adjepong, Soul Food Sunday by Winsome Bingham, Gazpacho for Nacho by Tracey Kyle, Lunch from Home by my Esquire comrade Joshua David Stein, Birthday Soup by Grace Seo Chang, and Kalamata’s Kitchen by Sarah Thomas. I love Phil Rosenthal, he’s a friend, but we have read Just Try It! so many times that it has melted my brain. I can’t take it anymore.

5. Reading about what’s happening in the world. I still subscribe to many publications in print. I like to read them that way; I like to support them. Especially these days. (You want to “do something” about our national orgy of madness and idiocy? I recommend subscribing to a magazine that’s reporting the truth. View it as a donation to the First Amendment.) There are seven publications that I think of as my pillars, in terms of understanding Things That Are Happening: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, Esquire, Alta Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times. Then there are publications that I subscribe to because they bring me pleasure and they have been nice enough to publish my work and pay me for it — publications such as Food & Wine, Town & Country, Artful Living. And, yes, for whatever reason, I read magazines and newspapers at night, before dissolving into sleep. (This might surprise you but the one publication I will never abandon is The Economist. I learn so much from The Economist. I learn about things happening around the world, things that I don’t seem to get exposed to anywhere else — news from Turkey and Nigeria and India and Argentina. Obviously The Economist is coming from a specific area of the political spectrum; it is not a magazine in which you are apt to find fierce attacks on the extractive tapeworm of capitalism. It’s called The Economist! That said, it remains independent. It’s a source of information that hasn’t been sinkholed into the culture wars. No shouting, no mewling, no pundits, no kowtowing to one administration or another, not even any bylines — just the facts, Jack.) As for my alma mater, The New York Times, I click to it online throughout the day, every day, several times a day, but I do so in a way that’s the opposite of how I consume The Economist. What I mean is that when I read The New York Times I’m looking for particular bylines — the names of journalists whose work I relish and respect. Among them: Wesley Morris, Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs, Alex Vadukul, Molly Young, Pete Wells, Frank Bruni, Ligaya Mishan, Melissa Clark, Julia Moskin, Kim Severson, and the amazing Tressie McMillan Cottom. Looking at these names now, I’m realizing that I’m drawn to Gen X voices — or at least voices that, to my ear, strike Gen X chords. And I’m realizing that I tend to skip over the Smug Boomers.

What’s the last great book you read?

If we’re talking about consciousness-altering, stunned-into-awe greatness, I need to name two: Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing and Miranda July’s All Fours. All Fours made my eyes roll back in my head as if I’d been handed a wedge of gooey French cheese and I got to eat it slowly, quickly, voraciously, all by myself, with grapes and figs and dates and fresh bread and cultured butter. It made me want to run down the street like Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha.

What are you reading now?

I’m enjoying a delectable moment of anticipation. Having finished the Anne Lamott book, which I should’ve read 30 years ago because it would have improved my writing, I’m staring at a ziggurat of possibilities on top of our broken printer. (Are all printers broken, or does that just happen in our house?) I see Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon, which is the frontrunner; Kara Swisher’s Burn Book, which beckons me in this bewildering moment of DOGE; and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a literary landmark that I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never read.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

Since no one is paying me for this, I’m going to hijack the question and talk instead about my Instagram story. As you may have noticed, by this point in the MMD I have written almost exclusively about print — about words on paper. Which is idiotic. I mean, am I trying to make myself look obsolete? (And how much of a stubborn print freak am I? Well, here’s the truth: I am writing this on paper. No joke. I’m jotting down my thoughts in longhand — yes, with a felt-tip pen — and I will transfer them to a Google doc later.) But of course I lead a digital life. Of course I am addicted to Instagram. I toggle all day between paper and screens. And people seem to have a lot of opinions about my Instagram story, which is a constant flickering groovy dissociative barrage of breaking news, scandals, cooking clips, scenes from famous movies, glimpses of paintings and sculptures, mellow nature vibes, snippets of songs that I love, and portraits of people that I consider cool. (Among the regulars at Bar Gordinier are Iggy Pop, Bob Marley, John Coltrane, Patti Smith, Sonic Youth, Nina Simone, Thelonious Monk, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hockney, Grace Jones, the New York Dolls, the Stone Roses, Brian Eno, Françoise Hardy, Jane Birkin, and David Bowie.) I’ve been doing this for years. I was brain rot before brain rot was cool. Why do I do it? Not sure. It’s fun. It reminds me of being a college radio DJ in the 1980s and pasting all sorts of crazy shit together on the air. I’m a Gen X magpie. I love randomness and I love exposing people to stuff at random, particularly in our era of cultural amnesia and algorithmic monotony. Am I doing it all day long, as some friends have asked me with looks of grave concern in their eyes? No. I do it while waiting to pick the twins up from school, waiting for water to boil, waiting to walk into a restaurant because I’m pathetically early for a reservation. It’s interstitial digital snacking. Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

I shall take this opportunity to tout three friends who are revving up their engines here on Substack: (1) Peter Barrett, whose Things on Bread is a soul-nourishing and thought-provoking paean to the deep satisfactions of gardening, fermenting, slowing down, making stuff, and cooking at home. His recipes are accessible and easy, which is what we all want, yet they’re full of umami curveballs. We live in a world that’s flooded with recipes but Peter Barrett’s recipes are unlike recipes you’ll see anywhere else. (2) Klancy Miller, whose new Klancy’s Potluck percolates with the joie de vivre that Klancy brings everywhere she goes. There are exclamation points, there is rampant Francophilia, there are recipes so tantalizing that they make you want to dash immediately to the kitchen to try them out. (3) Jason Tesauro, whose L’Avventura wittily unspools the story of how he secured Italian citizenship and now plans to move his family from Virginia to Italy — in a matter of weeks! Jason, like Klancy, radiates joy — in person and on the screen. We could all use more of that. Jason doesn’t know this yet but I plan to move in with his family a few days after he gets to Italy.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

I mostly think of apps as things I plan to delete, but I’ll confess to being freshly addicted to Places, an elegantly designed app on which you list places that you like — restaurants, museums, beaches, bookstores — and share them on a global map. Thanks to the wonders of geolocation, the map moves when you move. Full disclosure: I am part of a team of curators for Places. Chefs such as Enrique Olvera, Wolfgang Puck, Niki Nakayama, Nina Compton, and Francis Mallmann are also curators. So if you’re walking around somewhere — anywhere on Earth — you can peek at Places and see that Enrique Olvera’s favorite coffeehouse happens to be two blocks away.

Plane or train?

How is this a question? Few things on Earth can beat a long journey via train. Buy a ticket. Hop on. Start moving. No fuss. Open a book.

What is one place everyone should visit?

I’m lucky. I’ve spent a good deal of my career as a journalist in transit. I’ve had the good fortune of landing assignments that have sent me to Korea, Denmark, Mexico, Argentina, France, Japan, Russia, Italy, and all over the United States. At certain times of year I float from city to city scouting out places for Esquire’s annual list of the Best New Restaurants in America. That said, I believe that one of the best things you can do — especially in this era of toxic social atomization — is to wander around your own neighborhood on foot. Wander around early in the morning. Wander around at night. Strike up conversations with the people delivering fresh bread to restaurants before the sun comes up. Chat with the people walking their dogs. Tell a beleaguered postal worker how much you appreciate what they do. Introduce yourself. Get to know where you live. This simple act of walking around can invigorate and transform you.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

I am 58 now. When I turned 40, I returned to poetry. Poetry had rocked my world when I was a teenager, yes, but I had drifted away from it after I had graduated from college. Then suddenly I sensed that I needed it again. Urgently. I began buying hundreds — yes, hundreds — of books of poetry. I bought them whenever I traveled to one city or another on a reporting trip. I bought them on vacation. I bought them while passing through Grand Central Terminal in New York City. This morphed into a strange practice that I still cannot fully explain: to understand how the poems worked — to understand them as music, or as recipes, or as feats of engineering — I began typing up my favorite poems. I would flip open a Frank O’Hara book, for instance, and let my eyes float around until they’d landed on something delicious, and then I would type up the entire poem into a file so that I could commune with it more deeply and immediately. I’m not making this up. Ask my friends. I began sharing these poems with a circle of friends. In no way did I have the free time to do this and yet I did it anyway. I did it from the spring of 2008 to New Year’s Eve 2023, at which point I abruptly stopped. (I guess I sensed that I was done.) I will never know the exact number, but I’d estimate that I typed up around 5,000 poems during that period of time. I suppose it represented a sort of spiritual practice — a mode of secular prayer. How did it affect my work? In some ways it made my writing better. In some ways it made my writing worse. Either way, it changed me irrevocably. (JG)