My inquiries as to the recipe, as I followed him to the table, were met with an equally nonplussed response. The sense I was beginning to get from Dan was this: eggy bread is self-evident. This is something basic. Simple. And definitey recipe-less. So bugger off.

In my sleepy haze I was of course failing to grasp the basic truth of the situation, which others reading now from the comfort of soberness might have already ascertained.

Eggy bread, a slice of white loaf dipped in egg whisked with milk and fried in butter, is simply French toast without the sweetness. It is a food I've consumed in countless American diners, and on countless Sunday mornings as a kid. But that morning I found eggy bread unrecognizable without its sheen of maple syrup and its fragrant nutmeg and cinnamon spices. Still, there it was, plain and obvious. And it floored me. A savory French toast. (A British toast?) Something deliciously simple, seasoned with just salt and pepper.

I proceeded to make my own that morning, and then again. And it has since become a very fond breakfast of mine, ready in minutes and a little something out of the ordinary compared to normal cereal fare. For some reason, making French toast seems like a laborious affair for lazy Sunday mornings—but eggy bread is as simple as dropping an egg into a bowl, whisking it with a splash of milk, soaking the bread while the pan heats and the butter melts, and frying it until crisp. Easily completed half-asleep before heading to work.

A quick breakfast that's genuinely good is hard to find, especially a variety of ideas to keep life interesting. And so Eggy Bread has entered my repertoire. And if you're so inclined, it might be a good one for yours as well (that is, if you happen to be as ignorant of Eggy Bread as I was, which, judging from the Google results, may not be the case).

And if you have any other genius quick breakfast ideas, please do share them in the comments.

“Giant orange balls are here, Robyn!” exclaimed Adam.

…Huh? I had no idea what he was talking about. And then he showed me the contents of the package and it all made sense. Kind of.

The mystery package contained two bags of Giant Cheetos in regular and “Flaming Hot” flavors. The bags made it seem like the corn-based snacks inside would be the size of baseballs. Never before had I thought, “Man, I wish this Cheetos puff were larger,” while eating a regular-sized Cheetos, but now that I held such a product in my hands, I felt mildly excited.

Receiving the package on April 1 made it seem like a joke, but the bags were actually filled with edible substances. So how giant is Giant Cheetos? Find out after the jump.

Thank you to mouth model Erin Zimmer.

It’s pretty big, about the same size and shape of a regular marshmallow. So in the marshmallow world, it is normal sized; in the cheese puff world, it is a fat monster.

Does bigger mean better? Not necessarily. Here’s my comparison of Giant Cheetos to three of its diminutive counterparts (actually, they’re not that much smaller; they’re just not spherical).

Giant Cheetos

Shape: Marshmallow-sized ball. A fine shape for something soft and slightly chewy—like a marshmallow—but awkward and ultimately uncomfortable when the substance is dry, crunchy corn matter. Methinks there's a reason that cheese snacks larger than bite-sized tend to have a stick-like shape; it's easier to eat that way.

“It’s a ball you can eat,” said Frito-Lay marketing guru Ann Mukherjee to USA Today, likening it to the stress-relieving properties of a stress ball. I’m not sure eating a crunchy ball is a fair comparison to squeezing a round, squishy object.

Texture: Porous and too hard. I imagine this is what eating a ball of Styrofoam is like. The skin inside my mouth felt sore after being repeatedly scraped by Cheetos shards. Admittedly, I probably ate too many of them.

Nutrition Facts: Per ounce, has the least calories (150), sodium (250mg), and fat (10g), and most carbohydrate (17g) of the four types of Cheetos.

Overall: The least enjoyable of the four.

Regular Cheetos

Shape: Craggly, skinny non-uniform stick. This is my optimal cheese curl shape.

Texture: Less porous than the Giant and not as hard. Satisfyingly crunchy.

Nutrition Facts: (per ounce) calories, 160; fat, 10g; sodium, 290mg; carbohydrate, 13g

Overall: My favorite of the four.

Cheetos Puff

Shape: A smile-shaped log.

Texture: Soft and airy. Not much crunch, just kinda disintegrates in your mouth and then sticks to your teeth.

Nutrition Facts: (per ounce) calories, 160; fat, 10g; sodium, 350mg; carbohydrate, 13g

Overall: Kind of a different beast from regular Cheetos, but better than Giant.

Cheetos Swirl

Shape: A coil. In turn this could remind you of a well-swirled cone of soft serve. Or dog poop.

Texture: Even softer and airier than the puff. Kind of chalky.

Nutrition Facts: (per ounce) calories, 160; fat, 10g; sodium, 350mg; carbohydrate, 13g

Overall: Great if you like foods that are shaped like coils. I assume this appeals to kids or something.

Closing Thoughts

I don’t want to eat Cheetos again for a long time. The Giant Cheetos gave me some sort of Cheetos hangover.

I’ll take this opportunity to give a shout-out to my favorite childhood cheese puff: Barbara’s Bakery Original Cheese Puffs. Not to say that eating a bag of that wouldn’t make me feel gross either, but at least they’re not fluorescent orange.

This “new kind of writing” is necessary for realism’s sake. Even if it is true that each succeeding generation of writers “has different ideas of reality,” that “the classicists believed that it is classical, the romantics that it is romantic, the surrealists that it is surreal,” the task of coping with “the objective modifications of reality” that have continued to develop at an ever increasing pace since the 19th century requires that the novel remain open to the kind of formal innovation that might—for the moment, at least—begin to “account for what is real today.”

But Robbe-Grillet didn’t think that the “realism” of novels consisted of merely reflecting the “real world” it encountered but that it actually worked to create reality:

The style of the novel does not seek to inform, as does the chronicle, the testimony offered in evidence, or the scientific report, it constitutes reality. It never knows what it is seeking, it is ignorant of what it has to say; it is invention, invention of the world and of man, constant invention and perpetual interrogation. All those—politicians and others—who ask of a book only stereotypes, and who fear above all the spirit of contestation, can only mistrust literature.

Robbe-Grillet comes a little closer to commenting on the kind of realism one finds in his own books when he reflects on a trip he once took to the Brittany coast:

On the way I told myself: here is a good opportunity to observe things ‘from life’ and to ‘refresh my memory.’ But from the first gull I saw, I understood my error: on the one hand, the gulls I now saw had only very confused relations with those I was describing in my book, and on the other hand it couldn’t have mattered less to me whether they did or not. The only gulls that mattered to me at that moment were those which were inside my head. Probably they came there, one way or another, from the external world, and perhaps from Brittany; but they had been transformed, becoming at the same time somehow more real because they were now imaginary.

Those gulls inside the head are the gulls that make it into Robbe-Grillet’s novels, even if they are described with a kind of obsessive exactitude that makes us believe they’re a copy from “real life.” Or, for example, we get this, the opening paragraph of Jealousy, which describes the south side of the house that will be the immediate setting for all of the novel:

Now the shadow of the column—the column which supports the southwest corner of the roof—divides the corresponding corner of the veranda into two equal parts. This verana is a wide, covered gallery surrounding the house on three sides. Since its width is the same for the central portion as for the sides, the line of shadow cast by the column extends precisely to the corner of the house; but it stops there, for only the veranda flagstones are reached by the sun, which is still too high in the sky. The wooden walls of the house—that is, its front and west gable-end—are still protected from the sun by the roof (common to the house proper and the terrace). So at this moment the shadow of the outer edge of the roof coincides exactly with the right angle formed by the terrace and the two vertical surfaces of the corner of the house.

Already we can see Robbe-Grillet beginning to “constitute” the reality of the novel’s setting, which will extend to the banana plantation of which this house is the center, all described in the same painstaking, concentrated manner. And it is a particularly literal-minded kind of description: no fussy, unnecessary adjectives, no figurative flourishes to get in the way of a full-on apprehension of the house and its wooden walls, its veranda flagstones and “vertical surfaces.” Robbe-Grillet’s approach has at times been called “cinematic,” but what could be less cinematic than this description of the banana trees:

In the second row, starting from the far left, there would be twenty-two trees (because of the alternate arrangement) in the case of a rectangular patch. There would also be twenty-two for a patch that was precisely trapezoidal, the reduction being scarely noticeable at such a short distance from its base. And, in fact, there are twenty-two trees there.

But the third row too has only twenty-two trees, instead of twenty three which the alternately-arranged rectangle would have. No additional difference is introduced, at this level, by the bulge in the lower edge. The same is true for the fourth row, which includes twenty-one boles, that is, one less than an even row of the imaginary rectangle.

It is generally assumed that film provides a more immediate and more distinct rendering of perceptible objects (at least visually), but passages like this demonstate that verbal depictions of such objects are, potentially at least, capable of a far greater range of effects, of bringing us much closer to the palpable qualities of things. In his essay, Robbe-Grillet writes of Kafka that “if there is one thing of which an unprejudiced realing convinces us it is the absolute reality of the things Kafka describes. . .Perhaps Kafka’s staircases lead elsewhere, but they are there, and we look at them, step by step, following the detail of the banisters and the risers. Perhaps his gray walls hide something, but it is on them that the memory lingers, on their cracked whitewash, their crevices.” The same is true of Robbe-Grillets descriptions; they force our attention on what is there. We remember (or should) the arrangements and textures of the plantation house, the symmetries of the banana rows.

Some might say that Robbe-Grillet’s descriptions don’t qualify as “realism” at all, since they appear to reject the principle of selectivity of detail and renounce the effort to enhance the real through figurative language, both of which are believed by such guardians of literary realism to be among its most crucial enabling conventions. But this is to confuse the practice of a certain kind of commercialized storytelling with realism, the latter of which probably becomes more genuine the farther away it gets from storytelling. It is to pin the concept of realism down to a few customary gestures that assume a stability of reference to “the real” and denies that this is a state of affairs to be discovered rather than presupposed. In abandoning these gestures, Robbe-Grillet’s “experimental” fiction is actually an experiment in the further possibilities of realism, a realism that accepts, as Robbe-Grillet puts it in his essay’s conclusion, that “everything is constantly changing” and that “there is always some
thing new.”

The realism of Jealousy is about as far away from modern “psychological realism,” and especially the mode of narration James Wood defends as the “free indirect” method, as it could be. Our access to the characters and their environment remains entirely on the surface, our knowledge of what they are “thinking” confined entirely to what we can infer through their actions. This, is, of course, faithful to the way we do in fact experience reality, and the spurious notion that fiction is some magical way for writers to open up consciousness to our direct examination beyond what people say and do is duly dispensed with in Robbe-Grillet’s novel. This is not to say that we don’t ultimately gain access to a character’s mental state, but this character is neither A. . . (not further named), the plantation wife, nor her possible lover, Franck (we’re never entirely sure they are lovers), the ostensible protagonists of Jealousy. One could say that the true protagonist of the novel is the emotion named in the title, which we finally come to understand is expressed by the narrator, who is not the detached omniscient narrator we first assume him to be (or at least is also more than that) but the husband of A. . . and an observer of her suspicious behavior.

Thus we do almost literally inhabit the consciousness of this character, and we are determined in our experience of Jealousy‘s fictional world by the skillful manipulation of point of view—in this case a third-person/first-person hybrid. But, since we can’t rest comfortably in the author’s probing of the character’s mind in a “free indirect” way, the effect is if anything to provoke us into re-reading the novel in order to direct our attention more carefully on the details and the actions through which, and only through which, can our awareness of the narrator’s jealousy be raised. Jealousy encourages the reader to be an active participant in assembling whatever “meaning” we’re to get from it; it doesn’t allow us to settle passively for the “insight” afforded us by Wood’s preferred strategy of “inflected” narration.

What this hybrid point of view allows Robbe-Grillet to do most thoroughly, however, is to create an intimately “realistic” world that both mirrors the narrator’s own fixated absorption in detail—his “perpetual interrogation”— and uses that absorption to “invent” scenes and circumstances of dense realistic detail. So dedicated is Robbe-Grillet to the invention of these scenes that he repeats many of them, enlisting his narrator in a repetition and return to specific details and events—the remains of a centipede killed while walking across a wall, workers fixing a bridge, etc.—as if making sure they have been surveyed for all of the attributes they can be made to reveal. The ultimate effect is of a scrupulously observed, enclosed world that is wholly imaginary, constituted through the writer’s determination to invoke it in his words, and thus also wholly real.

Sunnyside is one of my favorite neighborhoods Queens to go and eat. The main reason is that I’m lazy and I’m not always in the mood for an hour-plus train ride to Flushing to eat at the secret places where the really cool people go. It takes 30 minutes or less to get to Sunnyside from most places in the gentrification corridor of Brooklyn (Greenpoint to Red Hook), it’s relatively uncrowded and pleasantly weird.

The first rule of eating in Queens is to skip breakfast. You will get into a fight on the way there because everyone is grumpy and hungry but tough it out so that when you get off the 40th Street/Lowery stop you can sprint for Chinese-Indian fusion place Tangra Masala. I could easily get distracted talking about the elaborate, mirrored dining room but instead I’ll just tell you to order the lolly-pop chicken (breaded in spicy pakora batter) and a mango lassi. Other things not to be missed are the hot and sour soup (the finest in NYC), the Tangra fish fingers and the curry chicken roll. My only other advice would be to be wary of any of the sizzling chili platters that are served on fajita pans as they tend to give off a pepper spray-like steam that will blind you at close range. The best part is that most items on the appetizer list clock in at well under $5.

Natural Tofu Restaurant is Tangra Masala’s competition for best lunch in Sunnyside. While the warm roasted barley tea they give you when you sit down may not be for everyone, pretty much everything else on the 15 or so item menu is a) thoroughly delicious and b) under $10 for more food than you could ever hope to eat. Recommended are the Kimchi pancake with pork and the hot pot that features their house made tofu. Be warned that the tofu hot pot is in no way vegetarian and the broth is the closest thing you may come to drinking a beef short rib. Add a bottle of Soju (Korean distilled spirit) or a bottle of beer and you’re still out the door for way less than a salad and a couple drinks at most places in Manhattan.

By now you will be entering a deep food coma and the idea of scaling the stairs back onto the 7 train platform will seem like a very bad idea. Not to worry! If you’re lucky something fun and cheesy will be playing at the New Center Cinema, a broken down movie theater a few blocks away that charges $5 admission before 5pm. I can’t vouch for the popcorn as I’ve always been too full to eat any, but watching an action movie there on a Sunday afternoon will take you back to the second-run theater where you saw Pulp Fiction re-runs in high school (or college). Keep an eye out for movie titles written above the theaters in dry-erase marker.

After you’ve had time to digest in the dark for a few hours you have some decisions to make: Eat more, shop for dinner or get a drink. Why compromise? Right next door to the Center Cinema is Flynn’s Inn, one of the MANY Irish pubs in this section of Sunnyside. I like Flynn’s because they have Irish cider and a backyard for smoking. Feel free to find your own favorite pub as there are three on that block alone.

After a drink or two I like to head to Baruir’s, the Turkish coffee place, for some freshly roasted beans and Halavah before hitting the Euro Shop where you can buy anything you want as long as it is either Hungarian salami or some type of paprika. My favorite is called Strong Steven. It comes in a jar and is a great base for BBQ sauce.

At this point I’d love to tell you that I always duck into what must be on of the strangest Key Foods in the city to buy some bitter melon and dried mackerel to take home and cook, but I don’t. This Sunday I bought a bottle of wine and a couple bottles of Nigori Sake from Lowery’s Wine Factory. If you were looking for that Japanese Scotch from Lost in Translation or a nice bottle of unfilterted sake, this is your place.

The last stop on my typical Sunnyside day trip seems to always be Mangal (46-20 Queens Blvd.), my favorite Turkish place, for a chicken and lamb sandwich and some salad. This place has a takeout counter and now a sit down place right next door that all comes out of the same kitchen. I usually get the take out but it’s a worthy venue for a third date with that somewhat special someone. No matter what happens make sure you get your meal with plenty of “home bread” which they constantly bake fresh in an old school pizza oven.

Eating well in Queens is cheap but climbing onto a Flushing bound 7 train to save a few bucks on a night out is missing the point. Eating in Queens is about stepping outside the narrow confines of gentrify-Thai and Sysco bistro food to taste things that are cooked for the people that make them.

A final note: This is not some sort of comprehensive guide to eating and shopping in Queens. It’s more like an easygoing Sunnyside primer where you can explore the wonders of Queens without ever being out of eye contact with the 7 train. I don’t want to get a bunch of comments about how I forgot to mention someone’s favorite ethnic dive. This is not that post. If you want to add your favorite place to eat in Sunnyside (I didn’t even touch the Mexican and South American places to the east of Queens Boulevard) feel free to pitch in and comment.

James Wood’s greatest strength as a critic is that he does not spend much time and space on “what lies beyond the literary.” He certainly could not be accused of lacking “a passionate involvement” with literary texts—even if he can be charged with restricting his involvement too exclusively to a certain kind of text—but to his credit he devotes most of his attention to a close reading of the fiction he considers and leaves what’s “beyond” to those less interested in literature than he is.

According to Deresiewicz, the exemplars of modern criticism are the so-called New York critics, specifically Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe:

Wilson, who wrote about everything during his teeming career, from politics to popular culture, socialist factions to Native American tribes, warned about “the cost of detaching books from all the other affairs of human life.” Trilling’s whole method as a critic was to set the object of his consideration within the history of what he called “the moral imagination.” Kazin, whose criticism, like [Elizabeth] Hardwick’s, focused on the literature of this country in particular, sought to illuminate nothing less than “the nature of our American experiences.” The goal of Howe’s criticism, he said, was “the recreation of a vital democratic radicalism in America.” The New York critics were interested in literature because they were interested in politics, culture, the moral life and the life of society, and all as they bore on one another. They placed literature at the center of their inquiry because they recognized its ability not only to represent life but, as Matthew Arnold said, to criticize it—to ask questions about where we are and how where we are stands in relation to where we should be. They were not aesthetes; they were, in the broadest sense, intellectuals.

With the possible exception of Wilson (who did indeed write about many subjects but whose essays on literary works were attentive to form and style and did mark him as, in part, an “aesthete”), Wood is a much better critic than any of these writers. Trilling is one of the most overrated critics of the 20th century, unwilling as he was to consider works of literature as anything other than what even his acolyte Leon Wiseltier describes protectively as “records of concepts and sentiments and values,” apparently unable to describe “the moral imagination” except in platitudes. Kazin is simply hopeless, a truly awful critic whose essays and books on literary topics are simply useless to anyone interested in criticism that might enhance the reading experience. On Native Grounds is a bloated assemblage of historical generalizations mostly about writers, not writing. It’s full of “remarks” about literature but no actual criticism. Like Trilling, Kazin bypasses the literary in order to arrive at banalities about “the nature of our American experiences.” Howe is somewhat better—he does often enough really examine the texts on which he is pronouncing—but why would anyone want to rely for insight into literary texts on a critic who confesses he is most interested in “the recreation of a vital democratic radicalism in America”?

It’s really rather amazing that Deresiewicz seems to believe that the approach to criticism represented by the New York critics has somehow been lost. In reality, criticism that obsesses about “politics, culture, the moral life and the life of society” is the dominant mode of criticism today, especially in academe and even more especially among so-called “intellectuals.” These critics condescend to put “literature at the center of their inquiry because they recognize its ability not only to represent life but. . . to ask questions about where we are and how where we are stands in relation to where we should be,” blah, blah, blah. James Wood stands out as a critic willing to challenge this tedious preoccupation with “context” and to make an “inquiry” into the literary nature of literature his “center” rather than the intellectual pomposity of “questions about where we are,” questions that for Deresiewicz’s preferred kind of critic take precedence over all that “aesthetic” fluff, finally over literature itself. In my opinion, it is all in Wood’s favor that “what has happened in England since the end of World War II—anything that has happened in England since the war, politically, socially or culturally—simply doesn’t enter into his thinking,” and a testament to the force of his style, sensibility, and, yes, learning that he has managed to become widely known as a critic through publication in magazines that otherwise insist on relevance to politics and “the life of society.”

Some of the responsibility for casting Wood in this particular sort of negative light undoutedly lies with the magazine publishing Deresiewicz’s artice, The Nation. Left-wing editors, journalists, and “intellectuals” have always been particularly suspicious of “aesthetes,” of writers and artists who emphasize the formal elements of their work and are too far “removed from commerce with the dirty, human world.” Indeed, one hardly ever finds in The Nation reviews of fiction or poetry that isn’t either obviously politically intentioned or can’t be made to seem so. (Mostly, it has increasingly seemed to me, the magazine just doesn’t review fiction or poetry much at all.) Attacking James Wood as a pointy-headed aesthete is a convenient way for the magazine to restate the long-standing “progressive” disdain for art in any of its non-partisan manifestations. I don’t question that Deresiewicz believes all the things he says about Wood’s failure to engage with the world “beyond the literary,” but his conception of the role of both literature and criticism is clearly enough consistent with the Left’s utilitarian attitude toward both.

Deresiewicz observes that Wood “ignores the meanings that novelists use [their] methods to propose. . . Wood can tell us about Flaubert’s narrator or Bellow’s style, but he’s not very curious about what those writers have to say about the world.” This actually makes me feel reassured about James Wood’s prominence in current literary criticism. At least there is one critic with access to high-profile print publications who knows it isn’t the novelist’s job to “propose” anything and focuses his attention on writers’ art rather than on what they allegedly have “to say.”