→ May 16, 2010
→ By

Atlanta & Dallas eats.

The updated draft top 100 went up on Friday, and I just went into the Conversation to answer your questions.

—

I was only on the ground in Atlanta for about 24 hours last week but did end up eating at three new places.

Big Daddy’s is a well-reviewed and inexpensive soul food place just south of the airport where you order at the counter from steam trays, much like the meat-and-three places I found in Nashville a few years ago. The one surprise to me was the lack of fried dishes – they offer fried fish to order but no fried chicken, which I think of as a staple of Southern cuisine. I’m assuming that they don’t offer it because fried chicken that has been sitting is just not good eats. The service was extremely friendly, but the food – roasted chicken, cornbread stuffing that was way too salty, steamed okra that was just slimy, and collard greens – was unremarkable. Grade 45.

I met a friend of mine from high school for dinner at Milton’s in the town of that name in Fulton County, where we ended up ordering the same thing, the panko-crusted trout with black sesame seeds, which the server told us was their most popular dish. The fish was excellent, very fresh, pan-fried but not greasy, and the sweet red chili sauce underneath was a good complement to the slightly salty taste of the breading. The dish was overloaded with sides, including shrimp-sweet potato fritters that looked amazing but were kind of gummy, and some ho-hum mashed potatoes. I’d give them a 50 for the fish but they may be trying too hard with the extras.

The best meal of the trip came on a tip from Friend of the Dish Richard Dansky, whose novel Firefly Rain earned my recommendation last month. The Buckhead Bread Company is part bakery, part upscale brunch spot. I’m not normally a French toast guy, but I figured that was a smart order in restaurant attached to a bakery. The chef uses rounds cut from brioche and must finish them under a broiler to add a sweet, crunchy crumb topping, and the dish comes with a blueberry sauce and fresh blueberries, strawberries, and blackberries. I also had the sausage patties, which were on the savory side for breakfast and were overcooked, but the saltiness was a good offset to the sweetness of the French toast, which could easily have been on the dessert menu for a fine restaurant. (Pain perdu, the French version of French toast, is served as dessert in France, not as breakfast.) The menu wasn’t extensive but they had several other offerings I wanted to try, so between that and the high quality of what I got, it’s a 55.

–

My 24 hours in Dallas were less productive from an eating perspective, as I only ate one meal outside a hotel or ballpark. Spring Creek BBQ is a local chain of Q joints, and there’s one not far from UTA’s park that was reasonably convenient for me to hit before hopping my flight out of DFW. Their sliced beef (brisket) was mixed – the ends were flavorful on their own and just needed a little sauce to cut their dryness, while the center slices were almost too moist and had the texture of corned beef (one of the few foods that I absolutely despise). The mild smoked sausage was plus, a salty-sweet-smoky link of porcine goodness. The sides are serve-yourself, which makes me think about how utterly disgusting most people are, but the meal comes with unlimited hot rolls, a little like a large Parker house roll but white rather than slightly yellow inside, which I assume means it’s made with milk but doesn’t contain much butter. It’s a high 50 for me.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ May 9, 2010
→ By

Young Lonigan.

Blogging here will be light for probably the next month as I work overtime on draft content.

WGBH is auctioning off a “Scout with Keith Law” package, where the winner gets to tag along with me to a game somewhere in New England this summer, either a minor league contest or one on the Cape. We did this last year and ended up with two winners, raising over $1800 for the local public television station, which is also a major producer of quality children’s programming. I’m happy to be able to support them with my time.

—

James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan, the first book of the Studs Lonigan trilogy (#29 on the Modern Library 100), is a gritty, unflinching portrayal of urban life in the 1910s as viewed through the eyes of the city’s teenagers, complete with prejudice, petty theft, casual sex (more discussed than enacted), and worship of violence. Farrell’s emphasis on depicting the city of his youth does come at the expense of a coherent storyline, although that seems to be coming in the two subsequent books.

“Studs” Lonigan is a teenager just out of a Catholic middle school who straddles the line between wannabe and tough, striking poses, getting into street fights (and winning them), grappling with romantic feelings that to him undermine his toughness, and aspiring to gradually greater depths of antisocial behavior. He admires fighters and gangsters and flouts his parents’ authority not as much for a desire for freedom as out of a need to play the part – the older kids he seeks to emulate do the same, so he reenacts the same conversations at home, yet over more trivial matters and with less dramatic results.

Young Lonigan doesn’t have a clear linear plot or a compelling quest for its title character, and Farrell seems as happy to set the scene as he does to create some action:

About the street there seemed to be a supervening beauty of reflected life. The dust, the scraps of paper, the piled-up store windows, the first electric lights sizzling into brightness. Sammie Schmaltz, the paper man, yelling his final box-score editions, a boy’s broken hoop left forgotten against the elevated girder, the people hurrying out of the elevated station and others walking lazily about, all bespoke the life of a community, the tang and sorrow and joy of a people that lived, worked, suffered, procreated, aspired, filled out their little days, and died.

The book was controversial when first published because of its depiction of casual sex among teenagers, including the girl, Iris, who favors many of the boys with “gang shags,” but those passages – tame and almost self-censored by today’s standards – serve to highlight the disaffection of its central characters. Farrell saves his minimal action-oriented writing for a couple of fight scenes, including one where Studs Lonigan thinks he’s making his bones but finds the resulting increase in street cred only slightly and temporarily satisfying.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 1, 2010
→ By

An Artist of the Floating World.

Kazuo Ishiguro appears twice on the Klaw 101, at 96 with Never Let Me Go and at 62 with Remains of the Day. That latter novel was preceded by An Artist of the Floating World (#91 on the Guardian 100), an interesting book that seems in many ways to have been Ishiguro’s tuneup for Remains, as both revolve around older men who find themselves forced to reflect on the professional and personal decisions they made earlier in life.

The artist of the title is Masuji Ono, a widowed father of two who lost his wife in a bombing and his son in combat during World War II, who has made a name for himself as a painter of patriotic images in support of the imperialist regime that ultimately led the country into that conflict. Now retired, Ono finds his relations with his daughters strained, but seems vaguely unaware of why, as the younger daughter moves towards a potential marriage after an earlier match fell through unexpectedly the previous year.

Ono narrates the book and the reader spends most of it following his peripatetic thoughts, jumping back to his formative years as an artist, his heyday leading an artistic circle in the bars of the “pleasure district,” and through conversations with his daughters and old friends that gradually leave him reeling by forcing him to reexamine his legacy. Yet even as he moves towards a quiet acknowledgment of the current unpopularity of his prior position and role, he retains some pride in his choices – or chooses to rationalize them away:

…I start to think of Sugimura and his schemes, and I confess I am beginning to feel a certain admiration for the man. For indeed, a man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if in the end he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions. It is my belief, furthermore, that Sugimura did not die an unhappy man. For his failure was quite unlike the undignified failures of most ordinary lives, and a man like Sugimura would have known this. If one has failed only where others have not had the courage or will to try, there is a consolation – indeed a deep satisfaction – to be gained from this observation when looking back over one’s life.”

Remains of the Day succeeded because the main character was so well drawn and his cause for regret so subtle that the reader realized the cause for regret as the protagonist did, but in Artist, Ishiguro made the problem obvious to the reader as his main character fumbles his way towards the conclusion. Ono comes across as obtuse, not just in denial but simply unaware of how he’s seen or why his relations with family members, friends, or colleagues have changed over time. As Richard Russo’s Mohawk felt like a practice run for Empire Falls, this felt like a practice run for Ishiguro’s next novel, a fine read but nowhere near the quality of the two later novels of his that I’ve read.

Next up: James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan, the first book of the Studs Lonigan Trilogy.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ April 27, 2010
→ By

Mumford and Sons’ Sigh No More.

My first stab at the top 100 prospects for this year’s draft is now live for Insiders, with a companion piece breaking down the top five prospects at each position.

—

I discovered Mumford and Sons quite by accident, hearing “Little Lion Man” on WFNX while driving to a nearby Staples last Sunday, and using Shazam on my Droid to get the artist/song info, thinking maybe it was an Irish-influenced band along the lines of Flogging Molly. On the recommendations of several followers on Twitter, I downloaded the album (just $8 on amazon), and discovered – for myself, that is – a remarkable new album that, while imperfect, seems to be a harbinger of great things to come.

Sigh No More comprises twelve songs in three rough categories: fast songs, slow songs, or slow-then-fast songs. The entirely-slow songs came off as too precious, especially with hypersensitive recording that captures little cracks in Mumford’s voice or the scraping of fingers against acoustic guitar strings, but the songs that find the band, led by singer Marcus Mumford, picking up the pace all worked, with some sounding like back-country hoedowns while others bringing to mind pints raised in the air (and sloshing on the floor) as the bar sings along. They use tempo changes effectively and go from sparse instrumentation to lush within the span of a single song, tricks that only felt like tricks when the underlying music wasn’t strong enough to support it.

“Little Lion Man” is far and away the best song on the album, opening with a staccato guitar pattern and incorporating hints of bluegrass, folk, and even jug-band country as it moves through verse and chorus, with Mumford’s wailing (in a good way) over the bridge leading into a final, devastating pair of choruses, the latter a cappella, that lay bare the singer’s shame at his (unstated) actions and the implications for his character as a whole. The group’s harmonies, strong all over the album, are razor-sharp here, and the track’s production is crisp and clean, letting the music take center stage without some of those minor frills that mar later songs on the disc. If you’re going to start with Mumford and Sons, start with this song.

On the whole, the disc represents a marriage of British/Irish folk music as it might be played in a blue-collar pub, but with the addition of a bluegrass-inflected banjo and three- and four-part harmonies that you’ll feel in your bones. The second-best track on the disc, “Winter Winds,” features a brass backing behind the repeated couplet “And my head told my heart…” that’s reminiscent of the best of Animals That Swim, a British band that married brilliant stories with music I could only describe as tunes to which you should get drunk. I heard hints of AWS all over this record, but this track in particular is more like a brilliant cover of a song the earlier band never actually wrote. The one slow-ish track that works, the seething “White Blank Page,” gets needed roughness when Mumford accentuates the natural rasp in his voice, while the title track starts slow and accelerates to the point where the track’s end may make you forget where you begun.

Mumford and Sons strive to offer intelligent lyrics, and there are flashes of that all over the disc, but if held to that higher standard it falls short, with too many cute phrases and platitudes and overreliance on discussion of the metaphorical soul. Mumford speaks of the soul not in a spiritual or transcendent sense, but as some critical part of our being that must be protected, kept free, or nourished, but these mentions are all vague and ultimately empty. If someone tells you “your soul you must keep totally free,” that sounds great, but what exactly does that mean? They’d do well to replace much of this superficial profundity and delve into the imagery that sets apart truly great lyrics and elevates them into (or perhaps just near) the realm of poetry.

“Roll Away Your Stone” exemplifies what’s right and wrong with the album. It begins with a soft, lilting pattern that morphs into a bluegrass stomp while maintaining the core melody, transitions into a down-tempo chorus with their standard soaring harmony, and finishes with a quiet couplet of just Mumford’s voice over guitar. It’s effective and rousing, and there are hints of lyrical greatness within, yet that promise remains unfulfilled when Mumford misses a chance to extend a metaphor throughout the song. The one image in the opening line, “Roll away your stone and I’ll roll away mine,” never recurs, even with an ideal spot in the closing lines: “And you, you’ve gone too far this time/You have neither reason nor rhyme/With which to take this soul that is so rightfully mine.” Substitute “stone” for “soul” and you’ve opened a world of possible interpretations, not to mention the amusing image of Mumford fiercely protecting a rock (or pebble) that someone is trying to snatch.

Returning, again, to the standout “Little Lion Man,” the lyrics – a despairing offset to the rapid bluegrass-inflected music – are more advanced than those on the remainder of the album, from the image of the title (a nod to the Cowardly Lion?) to the admonition to “learn from your mother or else spend your days biting your own neck” to, by far, the most effective use of the word “fuck” in a popular music song since Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” with a far less crude connotation. If Mumford and Sons can craft a song like this, they can craft a half-dozen or more, and in that skill lies the potential for a tremendous album, one that will do more than reach the top of Billboard‘s folk charts.

I was originally going to compare Sigh No More to Colby Rasmus’ 2009 season, where the performance was littered with the promise of great things to come, but I think Brett Anderson’s 2009 would be more apt, as Sigh is still a terrific album despite its hiccups and flaws, one I’ve listened to repeatedly over the last week not because I needed to do so to write about it, but because five or six of its songs have become lodged in my head to the point where I feel driven to play them again and again.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 25, 2010
→ By

The Makioka Sisters.

Quick update on the baseball front – my editors have scheduled the top 100 draft prospects list for publication on Monday night, which gave me a chance to make a few major changes based on some last-minute dope.

—

Junichiro Tanazaki’s The Makioka Sisters appears on the Bloomsbury 100 as the only Japanese-language novel on the list, which covers novels written prior to 1950. It’s a dense period piece, an observation on the decline of traditional Japanese culture, depicted through the declining fortune of the Makioka family and their struggle to find Yukiko, the third of four sisters, a husband.

Japanese tradition dictates (so I infer from the book) that the youngest daughter may not marry until her older sisters have all done so, and that provides the only real conflict at the heart of this wordy book, as Taeko (also called “Koi-san,” meaning “small daughter”) has already run off once with a beau and is clearly chafing under the thumb of tradition and her hidebound family. Both Taeko and Yukiko live with the second daughter, Sachiko, and her husband, but their lives are also run from afar, the “main house” in Tokyo where the oldest of the four sisters lives with her husband in gradually diminishing surroundings as their family grows.

The entire plot revolves around the family, particularly the three sisters in Ashiya, and repeated failures in the search for an arranged marriage for Yukiko; where the family had once rejected suitors because of their high standards, by the novel’s opening it’s clear that the tides are shifting, where their standards are becoming outdated while the desirability of a Makioka daughter for a wife is lessening. Yukiko herself is slowly revealed as a stuck-up, insular, immature woman in her early 30s, and it’s possible (but never made explicit) that her disinterest in every candidate presented to her is more a function of her fear of change, or a lack of desire to leave a comfortable, easy family life where she’s supported by her sister and brother-in-law and serves as a second mother to Sachiko’s daughter, Etsuko. Taeko, meanwhile, is the most compelling character but is given the least exploration, with Sachiko sitting closer to the novel’s center. Sachiko is trapped by the family’s rigid adherence to tradition, and her escapades become more serious as the novel moves on, some understandable even today (affairs with men of questionable reputation) and some not (she becomes an expert doll-maker and seamstress and earns some money for herself through her work). The same story, told from Taeko’s point of view, would have been twice as compelling, and I wish I’d had her thoughts on why rebellion was preferable to separation from her domineering family.

And, unfortunately, that was my major problem with The Makioka Sisters – 500 pages that hinge on a conflict that now feels dated without enough focus on the most interesting character in the worst position of any of the sisters do not make for a compelling read, and when the prose is dense and rich, it required some effort to get through it.

There was one moment of unintentional humor from this 1957 translation by the eminent Japanese-English translator, Edward G. Seidensticker – this footnote:

“Balls of vinegared rice, highly seasoned and usually topped with strips of raw or cooked fish.”

Yes, in 1957, the word “sushi” was sufficiently foreign to English-speaking readers that it required further explanation.

Next up: Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 23, 2010
→ By

Mohawk.

We’re having major work done on our house, so we’re living out of a nearby hotel this week (frequent-guest and -flyer points are one of the few compensations for a high-travel job), which has cut down on blogging time, which is a long way of saying I’m sorry for the long gap between posts. I did chat yesterday on ESPN.com, and my top 100 ranking for the upcoming draft is already with my editors, so I’m hopeful we’ll see that on the site later today.

—

Richard Russo’s first novel, Mohawk, has most of the elements that made his next four novels (The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, and Empire Falls) so good, but in many ways it’s obvious that it’s his rookie effort, since the well-drawn characters are existing rather than traveling through a coherent plot, and the humor isn’t as easy as it is in his later books.

There’s no single central character in Mohawk, although the ex-spouses Dallas and Anne and their son Randall are fairly close to the center of the book, involved in much of what goes on even though Dallas is more actor than active emotional participant. Anne has to be one of Russo’s best female characters, a middle-aged woman who is still paying for a mistake of teenaged rebellion while pining for a man she knows she can never have and feuding with her mother, a passive-aggressive shrew who would drive the Dalai Lama to drink. Russo fills Mohawk with many of the usual cast of blue-collar characters, including the greasy-spoon owner, the bookie, and the dirty cop, each of whom finds himself woved into one of the various plot strands when he’s not there for comic relief.

While it’s a fun and quick read, like the other four Russo novels, Mohawk doesn’t offer the strong, compelling story of those books, as it’s more a slice of life in a dying northeastern industrial town with the sort of folks Russo has since shown he loves to create. It’s worth reading for Russo fans, especially because it’s a look at a great writer in a formative period, but I wouldn’t recommend this as a starting point to readers just starting out with his work.

Next up: Still slogging through Junichiro Tanazaki’s The Makioka Sisters, kind of a dense, slow period piece. Best part so far is the footnote defining the word “sushi.”

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 13, 2010
→ By

Street Gang.

Michael Davis’ Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street is one of my new favorite non-fiction books, both because it’s thorough, well-written, and shows the author’s strong affinity for his subject, and also because of my own affinity for its subject, a television show that defined my preschool years and introduced me to the Muppets, whose later “grown-up” variety show was in turn my introduction to both vaudeville-style humor and dark comedy.

Street Gang focuses primarily on Sesame Street‘s prehistory, from conception to launch through its first season, a period loaded with bold ideas, coincidences, and enough drama to sustain a compelling narrative. Davis weaves personal histories of staff members, cast members, and Muppets into the overall history in a way that keeps the tale from becoming monotonous – as much as I enjoyed the book, it’s hard to create much tension when you know everything more or less works out in the end – and also enlightened me by giving new dimensions to people I’d only known as characters or names on the screen. Bob McGrath’s history as a successful singer and the amazing coincidence that launched Carroll Spinney’s puppetry career stood out as two of the more interesting back stories, excluding, of course, the stories of Muppets from Kermit to Bert and Ernie to Elmo, Zoe*, and Abby Kadaby.

*The Zoe story is as close as the book comes to out-and-out controversy, to me at least, because she was part of an entire makeover called “Around the Corner,” a show change that came from a top-down business plan rather than an organic development from the writers and Muppeteers. That plan was a direct response to the scourge of children’s television known as Barney – a show I have forbidden from my house, even though my daughter has at times asked to watch it, and if that makes me mean so be it – but also included elements of merchandising strategy, a reflection of the declining age of the typical Sesame Street viewer, and questions of whether a sanitized part of the neighborhood strayed from the show’s original goals of reaching inner-city kids and was perhaps motivated by the most subtle racism. The fact that a successful character emerged from this mess only adds to the relevance of the story, and another 20 pages on Zoe would have been welcome.

The star of the book is Joan Ganz Cooney, the determined, willful, yet wholly inexperienced (at first) life force of the project who sold the vision, got the show launched, and saved it (at the expense of The Electric Company, sadly) in a 1970s anti-public-television push in Congress. I felt grateful while reading about her refusal to let the show die or deviate from its mission, even through a difficult period in her personal life, because of how important those two shows have proven in my life. Sesame Street and The Electric Company influenced me in a number of ways – I watched both programs voraciously, as well as other PBS education fare from 3-2-1 Contact to Write On to the Letter People to a now-forgotten show called The Metric System to which I can still hum the theme song to another one with teenagers working at a newspaper and fighting some villain named “Dunedin” – of which their educational influence was only a part. I grew up in an almost completely white neighborhood; it wasn’t wealthy, or privileged, but it was nearly devoid of minorities; Asian-* and African-American students constituted under 2% of my high school’s total enrollment while I was there. Most mainstream television programs were all-white at the time, and if there was a minority character, the writing was forced and he’d end up somewhere between a mildly offensive stereotype and a horribly offensive one. Yet I grew up not just tolerant, but largely ignorant of skin color – it’s never really crossed my mind, no more relevant to the discussion of someone as his hair or eye color. I can’t prove the source of that character trait, but I think the ethnically mixed cast of both Sesame Street and The Electric Company played a major role in it – if you present an impressionable child with daily images of people of different races or ethnicities interacting in normal, even boring ways, he’s going to believe that that’s the way everything should be. And I also believe that these shows helped shape the dramatic change in attitudes from my parents’ generation to the generation after mine, or even from mine to my daughter’s; racism isn’t gone, but it’s been driven underground in much of our society, and overt expressions of racism or sexism will often get you shunned or fired.

*One of those Asian-American students was the best man at my wedding and remains my closest friend, even though he kicked my ass in Zooloretto the other night.

Of course, the educational aspects to these PBS shows weren’t lost on the two-year-old me – I read at a very young age and always had a thing for numbers, which I’m sure is a shock to you all, but my parents have never described doing anything unusual to teach me letters or words or math. If you watch an old episode of either Sesame Street or The Electric Company today, it’s hard to miss the almost propaganda-like educational agenda: They hammer the letter and number of the day into the child’s head, through repetition and through context, and the fact that thirty-plus years on* I can still remember songs and sketches is testament to how powerful and effective they were.

*We own the Sesame Street Old School Volume 1 DVD set, which I recommend more for parents than for today’s kids, and when my wife saw a sketch she hadn’t seen since the 1970s, about “two little girls and a little dollhouse,” she got all teary-eyed. That’s the power of Sesame Street.

Davis finishes the book with some notes on how the show has changed, including the shift in format to suit the Sesame Street‘s ever-younger audience. The original show had a single storyline of street scenes that carried through the entire show, with cartoons and sketches interspersed throughout. The new format gets that entire story out of the way in a single uninterrupted segment off the top, and of course the final 20 minutes are now devoted to “Elmo’s World,” a scourge on my existence that seems to insult the intelligence of any three-year-old who might have learned something from the first 40 minutes of the program. Unfortunately, it seems to me that they’ve dumbed the show down – yes, they’re trying to reach the one-year-olds plopped down in front of the set, but they have to be losing the three- and four-year-olds along the way. Shouldn’t “Elmo’s World” be its own show, rather than altering such a long-term success to serve an audience outside those covered by its original mission? My daughter seems to agree; once she outgrew Elmo’s World, that was it for Sesame Street in our house. She’ll watch Word World and Peep and the Big Wide World and Sid the Science Kid and Dinosaur Train – I haven’t gotten her hooked on the new The Electric Company yet, although I think it’s very good – but Sesame Street just bores her. Maybe I’m just being nostalgic, but that makes me a little sad.

Speaking of which, my one warning on Street Gang: Buy a pack of tissues. The prologue is a long description of the memorial service for Jim Henson, and his was but one of a series of major, often premature deaths to hit active members of the show’s cast and crew. Many of you are the right age to remember the episode when Mr. Hooper (played by Will Lee) died, and Davis includes the portion of the script where the adults explain to Big Bird that “Mr. Looper” isn’t coming back. It was a brilliant, award-winning episode, and the text plus the description of the cast members’ reactions will bring anybody down even as you appreciate how well it was written.

Next up: I’m halfway through Richard Russo’s Mohawk. I’ve also got Junichiro Tanazaki’s The Makioka Sisters lined up after that – if anyone has tackled it, I’d love to know how you liked it and whether it’s worth the time.

Filed Under: DVDs, Media, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ April 10, 2010
→ By

Firefly Rain.

Richard Dansky has been a reader of mine since not long after I joined ESPN and started the dish, even interviewing me about two years ago on his own web site. He’s one of the premier writers for videogames, writing for Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy Splinter Cell games while also dabbling in horror and fantasy; you can read more about his work on his official site. In addition to a shared love of baseball, Richard and I have a reasonable overlap in our reading interests, including hard-boiled detective novels, so he sent me a copy of his first novel, recently out in paperback, Firefly Rain.

The novel centers on Jacob Logan, the prodigal son of North Carolina parents who returns home after their deaths to deal with the mundane details around the family house, now his, in the tiny town of Maryfield. The community is populated with your standard assortment of local characters, although Dansky keeps their number manageable and all are well drawn, especially Carl, the cantankerous neighbor who’s been keeping an eye on the house for Jacob for several years, and Reverend Trotter, the laid-back clergyman who dispenses common-sense advice without florid phrasing or excessive sermonizing.

Not long after Jacob arrives, however, weird things begin happening – his car disappears, items move around the house on their own, windows won’t close until they’re damn good and ready, and the phenomenon of fireflies refusing to fly on to the Logan property. When the weirdness escalates to a blackout, an attack by an insane dog, and worse, Jacob summons help in the form of a friend from Boston to try and help him piece together whether this is a series of crimes or a full-on haunting.

Richard described the novel to me up front as a ghost story, but I think that undersells the book. A ghost story, to me, revolves around the ghosts – you read to be scared or spooked or maybe even freaked – whereas Firefly Rain has a good story that may or may not involve ghosts. I’d compare it to Agatha Christie’s novels – yes, her Poirot and Miss Marple books were mysteries, but they’re compelling stories that you can read and enjoy on their own merits without trying to solve the puzzle (which is good, since I never get those right anyway). And Richard’s book does have an element of mystery to it, with a few clues left lying around if you care to try to decipher it, although I preferred in this case to let the story carry me along.

The best aspect of the novel is that Jacob makes few bad choices – the way he loses his cell phone might be the only one you could call “truly dumb” – and as the narrator Jacob dissects his own thinking, you can buy into some of his questionable moves, rather than seeing them as plot conveniences to keep the story moving. Even the lost cell phone ended up of marginal importance at best. I did find some of the folksier dialogue a little dissonant, but I’ve spent no time in rural North or South Carolina and can’t credibly discuss its authenticity or lack thereof. I also thought the cover text didn’t sell the book that well – it concentrates on the ghost aspect instead of the story aspect, which explores a pretty basic theme about the responsibilities of a child to his parents, both in life and after their deaths. I’ll cheerfully admit to bias here, as I’ve always enjoyed chatting with Richard, but I wouldn’t recommend a book I didn’t like just because I knew the author (in fact, I’d just pretend I’d never read it), and Firefly Rain is worth your time.

Next up: I’ve finished Michael Davis’ marvelous Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street and am now working through an early collection of Dame Christie’s stories, published under the title Poirot Investigates, after which I’ve got Richard Russo’s Mohawk lined up.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ April 8, 2010
→ By

Pressure-cooker carnitas with blue corn pancakes.

Pressure cookers cook foods faster by utilizing the fact that water boils at a higher temperature when it’s under higher pressure; the typical pressure cooker works at 15 psi, a pressure level at which water boils at 250 degrees. For stews or other long braises, this can reduce cooking times by 75% or more, yet you don’t lose the braise’s power to break down connective tissue or extract gelatin (or its precursors) from bones, and of all my pressure-cooking escapades only beans come out substantially different when cooked under pressure. (It causes beans to pop out of their skins, which is fine if your intent is to mash or puree them.)

Cooking with pressure requires no special skills or other equipment beyond the cooker itself, and unlike your mother’s (or grandmother’s) pressure cooker, today’s models aren’t likely to explode and leave your dinner on the ceiling. The model I use is no longer in production; this Presto 6-quart model seems to be the best starter cooker available, although I can’t tell from the item description if it has two pressure settings or just one.

Somehow, I got the idea the other day to try to make carnitas, which I had often in Phoenix and now miss, via the pressure cooker. Pork carnitas refers to a pork butt (really the shoulder), the same cut you would smoke to make barbecued pulled pork, but braised low and slow in a slightly salty liquid with aromatics and spices, especially cumin. A quick Google search for recipes that might tell me how long to cook the meat turned up this recipe, which didn’t require much modification. After thirty minutes under pressure, the chunks of pork held their shape but could pull apart easily with a fork, and the oven finish brought out the flavors you’d ordinarily get by browning the meat before braising or roasting it. You could take the meat, wrap it in a tortilla with some rice, beans, and salsa, and make a burrito; you could serve it with guacamole and rice as a main course; or you could do what I did: Toss a bunch of it on some blue corn pancakes as a sort of Mexican/New Mexican take on chicken and waffles. A recipe for those pancakes follows.

Pressure-cooker carnitas

One 3-4 lb pork butt (shoulder), trimmed of exterior fat and cut into large (two-inch-ish) chunks
1.5 Tbsp salt
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
1 Tbsp ancho chili powder
1/8-1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (optional)
1 bay leaf
1 onion, roughly chopped
1 jalapeño pepper, seeds and stem removed, chopped
3 cloves garlic, bruised

1. In a large bowl, toss the pork with the salt and seasonings.
2. Add the pork, bay leaf, and aromatics to a pressure cooker with enough water to cover – it took just over a liter for me to cover 3.3 pounds of meat.
3. Close the cooker, turn the valve to its maximum setting, and put over high heat until the cooker begins hissing loudly. Reduce the heat to bring the cooker to a faint hiss and cook for 30 minutes. With about ten minutes to go, preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
4. Release the pressure according to the cooker’s manual – usually that means turning the dial down a level at a time – and remove the pork. Transfer it to an oven-safe skillet or rimmed sheet pan and lightly press each piece with a fork to expose more surface area to the oven’s heat. Re-season with more salt, cumin, etc.
5. Roast the pork with a very thin layer of either the braising liquid or hot water for about 15 minutes, until much of the exposed surface has turned brown. Do not let the pork burn or dry out – check it at the ten-minute mark. Serve.

Blue corn pancakes

I find these sweet without sugar because of the corn, but if you want to make these more breakfasty, you could add 1 Tbsp of sugar, agave nectar, or maple syrup to the mix.

2 cups blue corn flour, preferably whole grain (I like Arrowhead Mills, available at Whole Foods)
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup AP flour
3/4 tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder (more if you want thicker pancakes, but for the pork, I like them thinner)
4 cups milk, 2% to whole
2 sticks (1/2 pound) butter, melted and cooled slightly
4 eggs

1. Mix the flours, baking powder, and salt in a bowl.
2. Whisk the milk, butter, and eggs until well combined. Pour over the dry ingredients and beat just until moistened with no visible lumps. Cook on electric griddle or skillet as you would regular pancakes, on one side until brown at the edges, then flip and cook roughly half as long on the second side. If the pancakes aren’t cooking through, you can thin the batter slightly with a little more milk, or reduce the heat on the griddle.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ April 3, 2010
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Tales of the South Pacific.

My 2010 Predictions post is up, including standings, playoffs, MVPhe/Cy winners, and a top 3 for each RoY award. There’s also a straggler post from Arizona on Fabio Martinez and two other Angel prospects, and I did a chat on Friday afternoon.

I’m scheduled to be on the Herd on Monday morning, but the weekly ESPNEWS hit is off next week.

—

James Michener won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his short story collection Tales of the South Pacific, later adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein into a Pulitzer- and Tony-award-winning musical, which later became a hit movie*. The stories in the collection are connected, so while there’s no single narrative through the series (aside from World War II itself, a fairly compelling plot even sixty-plus years later), characters appear in multiple stories and you couldn’t read them out of sequence without missing some history or the occasional inside reference. They’re interesting, often funny, frequently romantic (in the classical sense, not in the Harlequin sense), but nothing Michener wrote could compete with his concise recap of the assault on the (fictional) island of Kuralei and the brief story that follows it, as the narrator walks through the cemetery that holds the fallen from that battle.

*I actually had no idea that “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” was from South Pacific until I sat down to write this post. I figured it wasn’t originally from that hair-coloring commercial, but I couldn’t have even guessed what musical contained the track.

Some scattered thoughts from this book:

* This had to be an inspiration for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in multiple ways. I could imagine Heller writing his novel as a sarcastic, almost angry response to Michener’s somewhat antiseptic take on a brutal war – but at the same time, Michener mined subtle humor from incompetent officers, and the character Tony, who flies all over the Pacific trading one good for another in pursuit of liquor, seems like a precursor to Heller’s Milo.

* Tales of the South Pacific would never win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction today. The first 30-odd years of the award largely rewarded novels told stories highly illustrative of some aspect of the American experience. If you look at recent winners, particularly the last ten years, the emphasis has been on edgier fare – Oscar Wao, Middlesex, The Road, even the blacks-who-owned-slaves backdrop of The Known World – with the occasional exception for an old-school winner like Empire Falls (which handled several major and very modern themes) or Gilead (I imagine the gorgeous prose and raw emotion won out). Michener’s novel today is almost more like a smart beach read, enjoyable, set in a serious time, but not a novel for the ages.

* The mere title of this novel reminds me of the best musical that never existed, found in an episode of the TV series Amazing Stories called “Gershwin’s Trunk,” in which a songwriter with writer’s block uses a psychic to contact the ghost of George Gershwin, who provides him with (among others) a song called “I Discovered You,” leading with the couplet: “Balboa thought it was terrific/When he discovered the Pacific.” Twenty-five years I have had that song in the back of my brain. It’s a hell of an episode.

Next up: A book written by a reader! Richard Dansky’s first novel, the ghost story Firefly Rain, which is excellent through the first 100 pages.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,