TRICK OR TREAT!

Happy Halloween! A non-Staircasey post for the candy-laden occasion:

According to one of the dodgier surveys I have seen (not that I would ever be the one to say there's anything wrong with making up facts to enhance a story, but something tells me this one was planted by Hershey), you can strategize and optimize your trick-or-treating if you bear in mind that:

Houses with black shutters are 77 percent more likely to hand out Kit Kats.

Trick-or-treaters have a 37 percent greater chance of receiving a Kit Kat from a ranch house.

Those who prefer Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups should focus on ringing the doorbells of two-story houses.

Knock on brown doors if seeking chocolate. Trick-or-treaters have a 32 percent greater chance of receiving a Hershey’s Bar from homes with brown doors.

Meanwhile, in Maryland, Indiana, Illinois, and Louisiana, along with countless cities, towns, and counties across the country, registered sex offenders are required to display a "NO CANDY HERE" sign on their doors on Halloween. In True Confections (pub date is now eight weeks away), when the main character, Alice Ziplinsky, is assigned to the distribution of those signs, she doesn't follow instructions at all.

Why Are Milk Duds called Milk Duds?

Why are Milk Duds called Milk Duds? Yet another candy factoid I didn't know when I was writing True Confections. This new candy piece developed in 1926 by F. Hoffman in Chicago was supposed to be perfectly spherical, much like a malted milk ball, but each batch of the dense, milk chocolate covered caramels kept collapsing into misshapen lumps. They were duds. Say, they're made with a lot of milk, they're duds, let's call them Milk Duds!

Shortly after they were developed, Philo J. Holloway took over the company and called them Holloway's Milk Duds. In 1960 he sold out to Beatrice Foods. Leaf purchased the brand in 1986 and took over production, until a decade later, when Hershey, that great swallower of large and small candy brands, took over the Milk Dud franchise from Leaf, which had by then been sold to Huhtamaki Oy of Helsinki. I wonder, what is the Finnish word for "dud"?

Until last year, all was status quo in the land of Milk Duds. But then Hershey decided to swap out costly cocoa butter for more economical vegetable fat in a range of their products, Milk Duds among them. This means they cannot legally call Milk Duds "chocolate" any longer. Thus the change on the label in recent months from "milk chocolate" to "chocolatey." Now that's a dud.

SPIDER SILK

My forthcoming novel True Confections is not only about chocolate and a crazy family. There is also a part of the story that takes place in Madagascar over several generations. Although I mentioned orb weaver spiders, and Merina people, I did not know about the history of Madagascar spider silk-weaving, nor about the woven object now on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Producing the spider silk to make this piece—apparently a unique enterprise in the world—required 70 people who were employed collecting spiders daily (using long poles) from their legendary webs strung across telephone wires, during the rainy season, which is when they produce silk. A dozen people would then draw out the silk from the immobilized female spiders, who were then turned loose. (Somebody has to determine the gender of these spiders! What do you call these jobs on your resume? Spider sexing? Spider milking? Spider silking?) An Orb Weaver spider's silk gland can produces some 80 feet of this amazing golden silk filament at a time.

The woven piece on display in New York is based on a weaving tradition known as lamba Akotifahana from the highlands of Madagascar, an ornamental art created for the royal and upper classes of the Merina people. I dearly wish I had woven some spider silk into my novel.

The Other Three Sisters

**************************************** My third novel, The Little Women, has a Balthus painting, The Three Sisters, on the cover. This is an essential image for the novel, because the final scene invokes the painting (also true in my first novel, Objects, in which the final scene invokes The Arnolfini Wedding). I was able to persuade the art director for the FSG hardcover, the brilliant Susan Mitchell, that the cover really needed this particular image, and she agreed. But then the first jacket design proof came through, and to my surprise, while there was a Balthus painting of The Three Sisters, alright -- it was the wrong painting. Balthus revisited a number of subjects and scenarios in his lifetime, and these three sisters were represented several times over the decades. The painting I needed for the jacket was a different, earlier one. This painting on the proof did not match the final scene in the novel at all. Finally, an image of the Balthus painting I had in mind was located. It was a relief, too, when Picador agreed to use the painting on the paperback edition a year later.

Vermeer Moves the Earth

Every time I pass a construction site and see one of Vermeer's diggers or chippers at work, I regret that I didn't make a reference in The Music Lesson (which features a stolen Vermeer portrait) to the curious coincidence that the uncommon name of one of the greatest painters who ever lived on earth is shared by a company manufacturing construction equipment.

The Corner of Winter and Summer

The middle section of my first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, takes place in a New York suburban neighborhood very much inspired by my childhood surroundings, Forest Hills Gardens. The narrative in this section takes the form of a series of linked third person stories about Harriet in her childhood (in narrative strategy contrast to the epistolary first person of grown-up Harriet in Part One or the straightforward third person of Part Three that returns to the present of the Part One notebook of Harriet's letters).

As Harriet bicycles through those "Oxbridge Gardens" streets, it would have been just right for her to observe the uncanniness of a certain Forest Hills Gardens street corner a block from my childhood home: the intersection of Winter and Summer.

True Mirror

Harriet, the photographer obsessed with reflections (and the main character in Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear), would have been deeply fascinated by the True Mirror, which lets us "see ourselves as others see us."