RECIPES & REVIEWS: 4/30/25

No-Time Pasta, “The Accountant,” “Juror #2,” “Carême,” John Lithgow’s Real-Time Lack of Irony, a Christmas Day with Penny Marshall, and Why JK Rowling Makes the L’il Mississippi Sissy in Me Seethe

As I say in the video while I was cooking this dinner (down below the other video featuring choreographer William Forsythe talking about his work full of parenthetical movement), I wanted to make a dish with scallops on Tuesday night when I got back to my Airbnb from seeing a remarkable performance by Friends of Forsythe at the Dance Festival now going on here in Porto but couldn’t find any scallops earlier at my local supermarket. So I turned to this reliable dish that takes about five minutes to make and to which I refer as a suggestion rather than a recipe. I call it my No-Time Pasta although if I were being a stickler like time itself long ago became in order to satisfy our hunger for its order, five minutes is not nothing and is, in fact, a measured segment - an ingredient - that is part of the temporal recipe we humans have come to rely upon to digest the dish that is served to us as a day, another parenthetical, one within a week, a parenthetical that moves us toward a month which parenthetically yearns in a dozen ways to become a year. Yearning. Movement. The parentheses of partnering. The dance of time. It’s all relative, I thought, as I diced some garlic, and connected everything as is my parenthetical wont, the patter that is the batter always being stirred inside my head into the half-baked ideas that keep me writing. It doesn’t take an Einstein to come up with such thoughts but sometimes it does. I don’t know if he really said that dancers are the athletes of God - or even the gods - but he did think that time was a concoction. “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once,” he claimed. “Time does not exist – we invented it. Time is what the clock says. The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion … Reality (too) is merely an illusion, albeit (as well) a very persistent one.”

No-Time is not only the easiest concoction I have come up with on my pilgrimage in the many communal kitchens where I have found myself on this journey to find myself but also one of the most delicious.

In one of those kitchens, a young man asked me what kind of pasta I was eating because I was actually moaning with pleasure while downing this dish I’d newly invented.

“No-Time,” I said for the first time and tried not to moan (there) (where) that hyphen is (located).

The name was met by a confused look but we often exchanged such looks trying to understand each other across our by-then only slightly guarded borders where languages crossed (back) and (forth). I was waiting to swallow before I answered with a (fuller) explanation but he beat me to filling in the silence. “I guess that is easier to place on your spoon than more time,” he said not waiting for me to explain since he seemed satisfied by the koan that he had forked over by misidentifying my own fork I so pointedly held there between us. “More time would be more hard for your mouth to hold to your tooths,” he concluded.

We shared a chuckle as he left the kitchen and I wondered if he had also misidentified time (as thyme) and I had thus done the opposite.

I returned to my moaning.

I had more No-Time (to finish.)

I never however seem to finish thinking about time itself since I think of it as simultaneous and not linear and as I stood over my sauté pan on Tuesday night basking in the aroma of the garlic I wondered if maybe I finally would when my time was up. Or is that when the real contemplation of time begins (that moment we are no longer tethered to it) (and become one with it)? Or will conflation instead be what it takes to stop such contemplation’s clock? Garlic can get you thinking of things like that. Maybe that’s why humans created the narrative that vampires who otherwise live forever - like time, they’re timeless - can’t survive the stuff. They’re all id and action. Hunger. It’s the humanity that is smelted from the rumination which wafts into their being that ruins them not the smell of the stuff on which it wafts.

Before I started cooking I pulled up a video of William Forsythe discussing his work, which is so often gestural within its parenthetical movements, each moment a justification (like time’s constant adjustment) for the next one, a choreographic recipe of measured suggestions. He had this to say: “Time is expressed through sharing a lived rhythm.”

(I) (liked) that).

I like it (…)

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The photo below is from the film version of John Irving’s novel, The World According to Garp. That’s John Lithgow as Roberta Muldoon and Glenn Close as Jenny Fields. They each were nominated for an Oscar for their performances. I was thinking about Lithgow as well on Tuesday night as I was preparing my No-Time. He became a parenthesis himself.

“If you are careful,” Garp wrote (wrote Irving), “if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day, what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love.”

In 1998, I visited Charlize Theron on the set of the film version of John Irving’s The Cider House Rules. I was writing a cover story about her for Vanity Fair. Irving had written the screenplay but I used a couple of quotes from his novel about the character she was playing, Candy Kendall, to help me describe Charlize. (“She took to both labor and sophistication with ease.”) (“The beauty in her face was that she was still free of guilt.”) But there is another quote from that novel that has always haunted me. It haunted me on Tuesday while I cooked and contemplated. It haunts me today. (“What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.”)

Onward.

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[TO VIEW MY KITCHEN VIDEO AND TO UNDERSTAND WHY I POSTED THE PHOTO FROM THE FILM VERSION OF GARP AND TO READ MY THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ACCOUNTANT, JUROR #2, CAREME, JK ROWLING - AND MY REMEMBRANCE OF THE CHRISTMAS DAY I SPENT WITH PENNY MARSHALL (MOSTLY HELPING HER COOK IN HER OWN KITCHEN) - PLEASE CONSIDER JOINING OUR PAID SUBSCRIBER COMMUNITY FOR ONLY $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. THANKS. YOUR SUPPORT MEANS A LOT.]