The news is there’s no news — if there were, would NYT be hooking us up with Marilyn Monroe’s stuffing recipe?
It’s often said that an individual’s complexity is belied through their relationship to food.
No it isn’t. I made that up. But so did the New York Times (not to mention Farrar, Straus and Giroux) when they thought it would be interesting to their widest-in-the-country news readership to hear what Marilyn Monroe’s stuffing recipe says about her hidden depths. Depths which, even if there were something about them that remained hidden after decades of cultural obsession and conjecture, were probably no deeper than those of any modern celebrity.
The moral, in Marilyn’s case, only remains slightly more interesting than in the case of, say, Paris Hilton, because she was way hotter and more talented. But the general message is, don’t get too famous, and don’t let people think that you’re greatest talent is being a babe. Even if it’s true.
To be fair, the NYT has not totally run out of ideas. They are just doing what they usually do, which is to review a book which has probably more of an audience than it should have, but otherwise no relevance whatsoever.
The book is “Fragments,” which sounds exactly like what it is — random notes and shit that Marilyn wrote. Mostly the kind of minutia that would have been published already if it weren’t so boring. But the NYT have found something of note: a recipe for stuffing dated from 1955-6. And a revelation in itself, as only stovetop recipes can be.
The suggestion implicit in the fabled stuffing recipe is, according to the NYT, that Marilyn ‘cooked confidently and with flair’. But what exactly are we supposed to take away from this? I realize that newspapers are divided into subcategories for a reason, ranging from the life-altering front page to the slightly more trivial Arts and Leisure section to the downright unnecessary travel page (does anyone else think it’s weird to assume that people who can afford the New York Times can afford yearly trips to Ibiza?). It’s good to have a bit of minutia, a bit of variety, lest we turn into a culture that must hold concern for foreign wars and middle eastern troubles in its immediate consciousness, and hence into a culture more suicidal than we already are. Still, there is a limit.
There’s also a limit to the exposure that the most exposed celebrity (sorry Lindsay) of the past seventy years can tolerate. It just doesn’t feel purposeful looking at Monroe’s take on traditional stuffing–no matter how quirky it might be (three kinds of nuts!)
But then, what does feel purposeful to read about nowadays? Last time I checked Lil’ Wayne was still a topic of discussion.
