→ June 28, 2013
→ By

Leaving Arizona.

I had columns up this week on picking players to try to win one All-Star Game and on the Futures Game rosters. I talked to San Jose mayor Chuck Reed on this week’s Behind the Dish, and was a guest on Slate’s Hang Up and Listen podcast this week. And I chatted today as well.

—

I mentioned on Twitter last week that after two years and nine months, we’d sold our house in Arizona and decamped for the east coast, choosing Delaware as our new landing spot. It wasn’t exactly a secret, but the sale of the house happened on such an odd schedule – the appraisal took forever, arrived three days before the draft and we closed just 16 days after it came in – that I never quite made the Big Announcement that, hey, we were leaving paradise.

Many of you asked why – why leave Arizona, and why choose the drive-through state of Delaware. If you don’t care about personal stuff like this, feel free to skip this post.

Why leave Arizona? That’s simple, and it’s complicated. My wife did not enjoy living in Arizona, and especially did not like being so far from family and friends in the northeast. My daughter wants everything – she loved the weather and the pool in Arizona, and she hated leaving her friends, but she missed her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and year-old cousin (my niece), all located between New York City and northern Virginia. It would be easy to just say that I go where they go, and it would be true, but the decision for me was a bit more involved than that.

I loved living in Arizona. I suffer from seasonal depression when the winter grey and the winter darkness become too much. If you thought the top 100 prospect packages were better the last three years – I did, at least – my improved mood in those three Januaries probably had something to do with it. It’s a lot easier to get up and get rolling in the morning when the sun is practically screaming at you to start your day. I loved the near year-round baseball, with spring training and Fall League suddenly home games, and access to rookie ball and two Pac-12 schools, as well as the ability to commute trips to SoCal and Vegas. The food scene in Phoenix exceeded all of my expectations for it going in, and it’s improving rapidly, with more emphasis on seasonal and local ingredients where possible. And while I’m not a particularly materialistic guy – the move reminded me of how little stuff I have beyond kitchen tools and something like 36 cubic feet of boardgames – I did love our house, which we built new through Shea Homes. (Other than dealing with their partners Foresight Security, the process overall was very positive, as was our experience as homeowners.)

I relented on the move primarily because of work – with a commitment from Baseball Tonight for a minimum number of dates, and the difficulty of getting from Phoenix to Bristol, it made more sense to return to somewhere within driving distance. It has been bothering me that I’ve only seen my niece twice in the fourteen months since she was born, and that my grandmother just turned 99 while I haven’t seen her since Christmas. (Phone calls with either of them are about equally productive at this point.) Minor league scouting beyond rookie ball was difficult over the summer as well, because the only team within driving distance is the Tucson Padres, who are about to head down the highway to Hell Paso next year anyway.

The political environment itself didn’t drive me out of Arizona, although the support for Joe Arpaio, who violates civil rights with impunity and ignores the pile of unsolved sex crimes while chasing cameras and headlines with his anti-immigration sweeps and blatant racial profiling, boggles my mind. We lived in a moderate area, highly educated and higher income, and I can’t say that the gap between the state’s overall political leanings and my own ever affected my life in any material way.

That said, I do believe Arizonans are living in a deep state of denial about what climate change is going to mean for them – for the heat, for energy usage, and for water. We had highs of 117-118 over the last two summers, and those days will become more frequent, with highs in the 120s, which are dangerous and will put ever-greater strain on the local electrical grid – one that makes far too little use of the abundant solar and wind resources available in the Phoenix area. (ASU did do something very smart recently – they covered the football/baseball fields’ parking lots with solar panels.) The state’s water policy revolves around hoarding – they have about five years’ worth of supply stored up in underground tanks, which is part of why the Colorado River no longer reaches its delta on the Gulf of California, and also is a lousy plan for long-term sustainability. Water is cheap, and there are no real conservation efforts. We had neighbors with grass lawns. Las Vegas at least pays people to replace grass with low- or zero-water alternatives. In Arizona, no one cares if you leave the sprinklers on all night.

There’s also very little attention paid to the shape and scope of development in the area. There’s no concept of zoning anywhere, and the response to sprawl has mostly been to build more highways further away from the city center, like route 303, going from out by Goodyear north through Surprise up to I-17 north of town. (My daughter often asked if there was a route 404, but I told her all I got was a “highway not found” error.) Mass transit barely exists; they just hooked up the light rail to the airport this spring, and from where we lived, it was never practical to use it whether we were flying out or going to Chase Field. When the population spreads without any planning or control, it will settle in a shape that is not conducive to mass transit solutions – which is exactly what you have in Phoenix.

All of that did add up to one very real concern for me: property values won’t just keep going up out there as they have since the market bottomed out and we bought into it in 2010. The area can only hold so many people, and water shortages could mean rapid declines in property values. I’m not keen on holding on to assets with that kind of downside risk, and the strength of the Republican Party in the state did not make me feel better, because they do not seem to have any intention of focusing on these environmental/growth issues, and because they are far more focused on things like restricting abortion or asking Obama to produce his birth certificate.

If it were just me out there, though, I would have stayed at least a few more years. I hated leaving the friends I made out there, the long list of places I loved to eat, and the spectacular weather nine months out of the year. Even the summer heat is tolerable when you have functioning air conditioning and a pool in your backyard. It also made smoking things on the grill easier, because I never had to worry too much about the temperature dropping below 180 or so unless I let the fire go out completely. The only factor that truly motivated me to move was the air – my daughter and I both suffer from seasonal allergies, and my original hope, that the dry desert air would help us, turned out to be ill-founded. The air quality in Arizona is quite poor, especially in the summer, and neither of us found much relief, while my wife had allergy issues for the first time after we moved there.

As for Delaware, it’s two hours from my in-laws, three hours from my parents and my sister, four hours from Bristol, two-plus from New York City, and has low taxes. The Wilmington area offers good schools, and I’ll have three different minor leagues within 90 minutes of me, possibly four. We’re taking a little bit of a leap of faith, but given that I had no interest in returning to the tundra of New England, wouldn’t touch the tax rates of New Jersey or New York, and won’t abide Pennsylvania’s Puritanical liquor store system, Delaware kind of won by default.

It does seem like I have quite a few readers living here in New Castle County, so if there’s interest, perhaps we could try a meetup before a Blue Rocks game at the Iron Hill Brewery that’s right by the stadium. It’d be great to get to meet more of you in person, and perhaps to learn some insider tips on living around here. So far we’ve had good meals at Two Stones and at the slightly pecular Matilda’s/Mad Mac’s in Newark, but I’m sure there’s far more for us to discover.

One final note, unrelated to why we moved, but about the fact of the move itself. I’ve mentioned a few times here and through other venues that I suffer from anxiety, and have been receiving treatment, including medication, since last summer. The move hasn’t been good for me in that department, in part because of the stress of moving itself (especially with a daughter and two cats in tow), and in part because I liked living in Arizona so much. I’ll write more on that at some other time, but the last three weeks have been less than fun.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ June 24, 2013
→ By

Last Man in Tower and The Member of the Wedding.

Aravind Adiga’s first novel, The White Tiger, won the Man Booker Prize and was a late cut from my last book ranking, earning a very positive review from me when I read it during spring training in 2010. His second true novel, Last Man in Tower, replaces some of the bitterness and irony with a more open-ended approach to characterization, without losing the scathing social criticism of the new India that made The White Tiger so powerful.

The man of Last Man in Tower‘s title is the retired teacher known affectionately as “Masterji,” who lives in a dilapidated coop apartment building in the Santa Cruz neighborhood of Mumbai, near the city’s massive international airport. Redevelopment is advancing quickly into this district, and when their coop society receives enormous offers to sell out so a developer can tear the buildings down and put up luxury condos, one by one all of the society’s residents accept, until Masterji is the only holdout, insisting that he wants “nothing.” His refusal to sign is not about price or money, but, in his view, about principle, holding back the wave of corruption and gentrification that is destroying the old India and widening the gap between the country’s wealthy and poor.

Adiga strikes a better balance here between satire and storytelling than he did in White Tiger, but in the process lost much of the dark humor that made the first book so memorable. Masterji deserves a more thoughtful treatment than Balram Halwai, and he gets it, with explanations of how the deaths of his wife and daughter and his distant relationship with his son affect his view on the developer’s offer and the threat of massive change spawned by a forced move to another community. Masterji’s apparent obstinacy – his refusal to sign the offer means no one in the building can sell – has its justifications, and while in the end I found myself siding with his neighbors on the matter of the offer, Adiga creates enough ambiguity to prevent the reader from coming down wholly on either side of the matter.

Adiga’s other key decision was to try to personalize the developer as an independent character, rather than leaving him as an unseen, amoral force in the shadows; while he wasn’t entirely successful, it did help to round the book out more fully. Shah is not sympathetic, but he is also real, and is shown as motivated not just by greed, but by ambition, shame, and an unsatiable desire to overcome his humble beginnings. Yet any sympathy his history might engender is rather quickly wiped out by the horrible treatment he dishes out to his assistant and to his mistress, details that I assume indicate that Adiga’s distaste for hypercapitalism on to the page twon out over his desire to craft a fully developed antagonistic force to pull on the reader’s emotions.

Last Man in Tower‘s other characters are all very well-developed, giving Masterji a few friends and many foils just within the coop society, several of whom get their own backstories, often just enough to make you want more; for me, Mary, the building’s maid, who herself lives in a nearby shantytown with her son and whose livelihood is threatened by the potential redevelopment, deserved further screen time. I could see Adiga building up to a longer, even more complex novel from here, one with multiple interwoven storylines involving a multitude of well-developed characters, perhaps rewriting the wrongs done to India by E.M. Forster and Rudyard Kipling. I enjoyed White Tiger more, in part because I enjoy funny, incisive satire like that, but Last Man in Tower is just as strong a novel, less witty yet more ambitious, indicating Adiga’s maturation as a novelist.

–

I picked up Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding at Changing Hands bookstore in Tempe – I’m going to miss that store quite a bit – because it was on sale and because McCullers’ best-known novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, is among my favorite novels ever written (#15 on my last ranking, in fact). McCullers’ signature work includes a cast of flawed, mostly sympathetic characters, inhabiting the same world despite narrow and wide gulfs between them, a sphere filled with grief, alienation, and sadness. Member of the Wedding doesn’t reach the same emotional depths, but does turn the conventions of the coming-of-age novel upside down with its story of a motherless girl who fills her life with fantasies to replace what she’s lost.

Frances “Frankie” Addams is a 12-year-old girl living with her mostly absent father, with help from a live-in African-American woman named Berenice, and the frequent presence of Frankie’s young cousin John Henry. Frankie’s brother Jarvis returns from a stint in the Army in Alaska with a fiancee and an announcement that they’ll be getting married in a few days in the nearby town of Winter Hill. Frankie decides that she’s going to run away with her brother and sister-in-law after the wedding, building up a vague, exotic fantasy about a life other than the one she has now.

The central conflict in the book lies between that fantasy, of escape or just change from a destiny that seems predetermined, and the reality of life in their small, slightly backwards town, where blacks and whites intermingle but exist on separate planes, and the army is one of the only ways to leave the track into which you’re born. (Death comes up on the story’s margins as one of the other ways, and probably the most commonly utilized.) Frankie’s narrative touches on themes of oppression, racism, and gender identity, but the one that kept coming back to me was that she’s a girl who needed her mother, and is trying to fill that void, as well as the one left by a father who’s barely present in her life, with anything she can find, real or imagined. That also leads to a disturbing interlude with a soldier on leave in the town, perpetually drunk or in search of it, who seems to mistake Frankie’s age by a hard-to-imagine distance.

The overriding sadness that permates The Member of the Wedding isn’t well balanced the way that a similar vapor in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is, where McCullers pairs the gloom with a deeper understanding of its origins and dimensions. Here, Frankie is a little more pathetic than sympathetic, especially when her vision of escape with her brother doesn’t quite come off as planned, leaving me with the sense of having read something superficial, not the immersive emotional experience imparted by McCullers’ masterpiece.

Next up: Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The Keeper of Lost Causes, a Danish detective novel and first in the “Department Q” series.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ June 15, 2013
→ By

Agricola iOS app.

Agricola is among the top-rated board games on Boardgamegeek’s rankings, and one of the best-reviewed board games ever released, a complex strategy game with very little luck or randomness involved that requires players to make a ton of difficult decisions. I like the game, but I’ve never rated it as highly on my own rankings because of its extreme complexity: The decisions and tradeoffs are so tight, the game straddles the line between play and work. A successful game brings as much relief (that you didn’t screw it up) as pleasure (which is the point of games, no?), and it can take two hours to play a four-person game, more if you don’t really know what you’re doing. The design of the game is brilliant – it is so balanced, and the idea of forcing players to choose among a host of imperfect options, accepting that they can never check all the boxes, is pretty unusual even with all of the games on the market. But good grief is it frustrating to play, even when you’re doing it right.

Playdek just released its long-promised Agricola iOS app earlier this week, and as adaptations go, it’s just about perfect. The app runs smoothly, without a single crash through a half-dozen games so far. Rules and requirements are easy to access within the game. The graphics are superb, very clear and very bright, easy to stare at for the 10-15 minutes it takes to play a solo game against AI players. And the AI players are solid competition, even the “easy” opponents, at least for a novice player like me.

I’d only played the physical game twice, so I came to this app as a near-rookie, only understanding the basic concept of the game and the part of the mechanics that resurfaced in the later game Le Havre. In Agricola, each player is trying to build a farmstead, beginning the game with a husband and wife, each of whom can handle a work assignment every round. Tasks on the farm include collecting resources, plowing fields, sowing plants, rearing animals, and building additions. The point is to maximize your scoring opportunities while ensuring that you can feed your family at the game’s five Harvests, which occur more frequently as the game progresses. The catch is that you can lose points in any area where you don’t accomplish something – leaving any farm area undeveloped, failing to rear any of the three animal types, etc. And getting enough food each harvest is no easy task; it would be ideal to get a steady food supply going, but that’s hard to do early in the game, and by the time the game is nearly over, the harvests are happening faster and you’re also trying to max out your scoring.

One way the game reduces the potential for frustration is by giving players a slew of choices for work assignments, adding another choice in each of the fourteen rounds of the game, so that players can vary strategies and won’t often find themselves blocked from all of the moves they need. (Most work assignments appear on only two spaces on the board, and some appear on only one.) Another is with Minor Improvements, which appear in the full game but not the shorter “family game,” a quicker, simpler version that only includes Major Improvements. Improvements offer players ways to gain extra resources or convert resources to more food. Players can also choose Occupations, which function much like Minor Improvements and can also provide point bonuses or spend less on future construction. (Hardcore players of the physical game may be interested to know that the app only includes the E deck so far, but other decks will be available as future in-app purchases.) Understanding what Improvements and Occupations can do for you allows you to tailor slightly more focused strategies – fun, but also again skating dangerously close to ‘work.’


The town.

Playdek’s biggest challenge beyond crafting the AI players had to be the interface itself, as Agricola takes up a lot of space when played on a table. There’s a central board with the ‘town,’ containing all of the work assignments, which gets larger as you include more players. Each player has his own farmstead, with up to a dozen or so squares, as well as his own resource piles and room for Improvements and Occupations. And there should be central piles of those cards as well. The app does a solid job of including all of those views without sacrificing too much information. The player can switch from town to farm view with one click. A bar at the bottom of the screen shows his/her current resource levels, including a food counter that shows how much he’ll need to feed his family this round. The player can find out what an assignment space or a card does by double-clicking on it, and there’s an option to include the labels on all assignment spaces if you want. When you drag one of your workers to a space, it’s grey if you can’t place your worker on it (because you don’t meet the resource or space requirements), and beige if it’s available. After two games, I was familiar enough with the town to know where everything was without having to keep all of the labels visible.


A player farm.

I’ve only found tiny flaws in the app version so far, nothing that seriously interfered with gameplay but, when the big stuff is all done right, these are the little things that stand out. The AI players seem to hang on basic decisions for five to ten seconds at times, and sometimes it becomes unclear what the app is waiting for (as in, is it my turn?). The tutorial is a little sparse and seems to be written for players who’ve tried the physical game at least once. The default animation and gameplay speeds were too slow for me, but turning them up in the options panel solved that problem. It might be easier if a greyed-out assignment space also explained why you can’t place a worker there. It also took me a few games to figure out that if you acquire more animals than you can house in fenced-in pastures or with stables, you can cook the extra beasts immediately if you have a fireplace or oven. They’re all minor issues – considering how many boardgame apps have crashed on me, the fact that one this complex played six games without such a hitch puts it in the best-of-breed category.

The two most comparable games in app form are Caylus, not as complex but with a similarly long view; and Le Havre, which takes many of the best features of Caylus and Agricola in what might be the most complex game I’ve ever seen. Caylus and Agricola both have bright, sharp graphics, while Le Havre’s are dimmer and less attractive. Le Havre gets everything on to one screen, while the other two force you to jump around or scroll more for the sake of larger images and clearer text. Caylus has the easiest AIs for me to beat, which means Agricola will probably have far more staying power for me – if it doesn’t turn out to be too frustrating when I’m playing the stronger computer opponents. It’s absolutely worth the $6.99 price tag, especially for a game that usually retails in physical form around $50, but with the caveat that the learning curve for this game is steeper than what fans of games like Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne might expect.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 13, 2013
→ By

Yes, Chef.

Marcus Samuelsson stands out in the world of celebrity chefs for several reasons – he’s a star here in the United States, but was raised in Sweden, and his cuisine is global in many ways … but he’s black, and that fact alone would make him close to unique in the clique of American celebrity chefs. Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia, but his birth mother died of tuberculosis when Marcus was only about four, after which he and his sister were adopted by a couple in Goteborg, Sweden, where his soccer career stalled out because he was too slight to keep up with his competitors, only to lead to a career in the kitchen that forms the basis for his memoir, Yes, Chef.

Samuelsson came to national prominence during a lengthy run as the executive chef at New York’s Aquavit, a Swedish restaurant that included a casual menu serving traditional Swedish fare and a fine-dining menu where Samuelsson could stretch out and use Swedish cuisine as the basis for a more progressive and comprehensive approach to food. I tried Aquavit shortly before Samuelsson departed and was highly impressed, especially by the fish, both its quality and preparation, including a hot-smoked salmon plate that forever hooked me on smoked fish. He’s also responsible for the best food item Starbucks has ever sold, a chocolate cinnamon “bread” (in the sense that banana bread or Northern corn bread are “breads,” when really they’re just cakes) that was both delicious and paired quite well with coffee, even the stuff they call coffee at Starbucks. The recipe was included in a cookbook only sold at Starbucks locations, although I believe many of that book’s recipes ended up in his The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa. His new venture, Red Rooster, has been a huge success despite a slightly off-the-radar location in Harlem, where Samuelsson lives, borrowing the name of a classic restaurant of the area while integrating old and new culinary traditions.

Samuelsson’s life and career follow a somewhat unexpected narrative path: After his very difficult beginning, he finds himself in a comfortable setting, raised by loving adoptive parents in a country where racism existed but not to the extent we face it here. Instead, Samuelsson’s challenges increased after he reached adulthood, facing institutional racism in the kitchen and his own naivete on the business side of cooking, while also watching several friends and colleagues die far too young and eventually finding himself in a little trouble of his own making. He clearly has tremendous drive, as well as a deep passion for food (for flavors, in his words, and in finding new ways to combine them), but there are hints of regret sprinkled throughout the book for what that singlemindedness may have cost him when he was younger, some of which can’t be regained now that his success has given him the flexibility to have a personal life.

The book is written in the first person, in a style evocative enough to put the reader in the kitchens alongside Samuelsson, even though the prose likely came from his friend and co-author Veronica Chambers, who first received widespread plaudits for her own memoir, Mama’s Girl. I was never conscious of the story coming through the second filter of a co-author, even though it’s hard to imagine Samuelsson writing so clearly in what is at best his third language (he seems to speak at least four). First-person narratives can suffer from excessively florid prose, but here Chambers stays out of the way and lets Samuelsson’s story, which is compelling enough to require no embellishment, take center stage.

If Yes, Chef has a flaw, it’s that the treatment of the highs and lows of Samuelsson’s life often feels a little cursory; friends and colleagues die, and we get a page or less of grief, and Marcus has moved on. He’s up for the James Beard Award against some amazing competitors, and then, boom, he’s won it, and we’re on to the next subject. His victory on Top Chef Masters, coming right as he was preparing to cook the first state dinner of Barack Obama’s presidency, receives very little discussion, even though his win that season had its own interesting narrative – he wasn’t near the top in any challenges until the final sprint, like his friend and season three winner Floyd Cardoz. Samuelsson appears to open himself up to the reader at many points of the book, like discussing his daughter (the result of a one-night stand when he was still just 19) or the experience of reconnecting with his extended family in Ethiopia when he was in his 30s, that it’s jarring to see other significant life events receive superficial treatment in a book that could easily have added another 20 pages without feeling long.

The obvious comparison here is to Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones, and Butter, another memoir by a successful chef, but one written by a chef with more training in creative writing than in the culinary arts. Hamilton’s prose shines, elevating her story from good to great; Samuelsson’s story is stronger, and might have suffered from Hamilton’s literary flourishes, but could have benefited from the level of introspection she showed in her book. Nothing in Yes, Chef goes as deep as Hamilton’s examination of her marriage to an aloof Italian doctor and, by extension, into his family in Italy, yet a similar treatment of Samuelsson’s visit to Ethiopia would have made the book even more compelling.

Next up: Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga, author of the Man Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger, which I read and reviewed in 2010.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ June 9, 2013
→ By

pop. 1280

My draft reviews are all up now – full recaps for every NL team and every AL team, plus my chat from early on day two, my day one recap, and Friday’s Behind the Dish podcast where I talked a bit about day one.

—

When I reviewed Jim Thompson’s The Grifters a few weeks ago, a reader said I should read his Pop. 1280 next, as it was his best work. It’s much tighter, definitely funnier and yet in ways far more fitting of the “noir” label, setting up the reader again and again for twists that turn a situation that seemed almost silly into a vision of paranoia and sociopathy.

Nick Corey is the narrator and protagonist of pop. 1280, the apparently hapless sheriff of the sparsely populated county of Pottsville in an unnamed state (probably Texas). Corey finds himself disrespected by the local criminals, including the two pimps at the town’s whorehouse, and verbally abused by the haughty sheriff of the more populous neighboring county. His manipulative, domineering wife Myra rules the roost at home, where they live with her simple-minded peeping-Tom brother. Nick presents himself as the amiable dunce, but the reader learns quickly that he is anything but friendly or a fool, and is either coldly rational and without empathy or is delusional and psychotic.

Thompson’s portrayal of the character is skilled and precise, crafting boundaries and expectations for the reader and then knocking them down as the character develops before the reader’s eyes. I don’t know if Nick is actually a sociopath – he might have a personality disorder, like narcissistic p.d., although that’s a better question for a psychiatrist who likes to diagnose fictional characters with mental illnesses – but he commands your attention. I found myself hanging on his words; I was eager to read what happened next, because he was unpredictable and his schemes were clever, but also because I wanted to hear what he said next because his words were less predictable than his actions. One by one, Nick identifies his problems and “solves” them, without significant regard for the consequences because he seems to believe that the rightness of his actions will protect him from any negative results.

One question the book didn’t and likely couldn’t answer was whether Nick’s standing in the town was a function of the public’s fear of him – did they recognize how dangerous he was, and leave him in office out of fear? I couldn’t view Nick as a reliable narrator, but at the same time we receive no other information beyond what he tells us, leaving us with no choice but to accept his version of events. Myra manipulates Nick, and cheats on him, and yet there are times when her demeanor towards him changes from condescension to fear, as if she’s witnessed a change in his personality from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. He’s one of the most interesting antiheroes I’ve come across in any genre.

Next up: Marcus Samuelsson’s memoir Yes, Chef.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 5, 2013
→ By

A Game of Thrones.

I posted my final top 100 ranking for this year’s draft, and had draft expert Jim Callis on today’s edition of Behind the Dish.

—

I received George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones as a gift, and gave it a shot after many of you encouraged me to do so, even though I am generally not a fan of the sword-and-sorcery genre. Unfortunately, the book met my expectations, and while I finished its bloated length, I won’t be sticking around for book two.

The plot appears complex, but at heart is quite simple: two main factions are competing for control of the Seven Kingdoms, jockeying for position under the current King, the slightly naïve Robert, and preparing for an eventual succession. There are two separate plots only loosely integrated in this novel with that main strand – one leading to the possible birth of an heir to the previous king, the “mad king” Aerys II, the other set on the ice Wall that separates the Seven Kingdoms from the unknown denizens of the North. Martin based some of the plot on the English Wars of the Roses, which pitted the Houses of Lancaster and York against each other over a thirty-year period that ended with the rise of the House of Tudor.

The false complexity of the plot was not my main objection to A Game of Thrones, but it is one of the book’s three major flaws. Martin populates the book with far too many people, even requiring an appendix to list most of them by the houses to which they belong or have sworn fealty, and as a result almost no characters receive any kind of depth or development, and most of those outside of the central core are utterly disposable. Martin separates the book into numberless chapters, each of which revolves around one of the main characters, of which there are at least eight: Ned Stark, Lord of Winterfell; his wife, Catelyn; four of their five children; Tyrion Lannister, a dwarf who belongs to the rival house of Lannister; and Daenaerys, the daughter of the mad king. King Robert, Tyrion’s sister Cersei, his brother Jaime (“the Kingslayer”), Daenaerys’ brother Viserys, her eventual husband Khal Drogo, Catelyn’s sister Lysa, and Robert and Cersei’s son Joffrey are all significant characters in terms of ink received, yet all are one-dimentionsal and their presence quickly becomes tiresome. The result is that Martin can weave lengthy plot strands, yet never has to do much more than set the swords in motion to advance any of the storylines, because he’s got so many people running around and never chooses to (or needs to) develop any of the characters.

The quality of the writing is also extremely poor, which I was warned about ahead of time; Martin spends much of the book forcing awkward middle-English phrasing on the reader, or altering spellings the way that bad bars and stores like to include “Olde” in their names to make them seem authentically crappy. His syntax is clumsy, and he spells far too much out for the reader in little details, both scene-setting – his descriptions of food are embarrassing if you’ve read any Murakami, and the made-up foods thing is just annoying – and emotions, where he explains far too much of what characters are thinking or feeling, which ends up leading the reader around by the nose. And I have no explanation for the line where he said a character was behaving like he had a “dagger up his butt.”

But nothing in the book was as awful as Martin’s obsessions with sex, violence, and especially sexual violence; it is the most rape-y book I have ever read, treating its women as objects and reveling in degrading them, especially female side characters, Martin’s equivalent of the red shirts of Star Trek. Women are raped, often, quite violently (not that rape is ever nonviolent, but Martin chooses to make it more violent), both in the present of the novel and in descriptions of the past. Victors in war in Martin’s universe engage in gang-rape, and it is accepted. Forced prostitution is rampant, and it is accepted. And when he describes rape, or even semi-consensual sex, Martin chooses to describe it in detail to further the degradation of the woman. (The idea that a woman might enjoy sex, or even assume an equal or dominant role in it, is completely foreign to him.) Martin’s women are props, and the only woman of clear strength in the book is a sociopath. That doesn’t even get at the incest in the book, made explicit in one scene but hinted at many other times.

On top of his loathing of women, Martin absolutely loves to devote ink to the carving up of the human body by knives, swords, and even weapons found along the way. Characters are cleaved, dismembered, burst open, disembowed, and eviscerated, and one can almost hear Martin panting at the keyboard as he describes these acts of violence. Given that he takes the rascal’s escape from a plot he can’t untangle – he sends everyone to war and kills a bunch of people off – there’s a lot of cleaving and disemboweling going on, and copious quantities of blood spilled, enough that you’ll need to wash your hands to get the damned spots out before you’re through.

When I commented on Twitter the other day that A Game of Thrones was one of the most misogynistic books I’d ever read, a few of you said that I needed to stick with the series to see some of the female characters develop. That may be true – the situation might improve in later books – but I should not have to read beyond the first 670 pages to see a female character with any kind of depth. That’s not to say that his male characters are much better developed, but they might reach two dimensions while his women are limited to one.

I’ve never seen the HBO series, so I have no idea how that compares or if it addresses any of the book’s flaws. A thin plot in a novel can often seem rich on screen with the right adaptation. All I can say is that I won’t be moving on to book two of the series.

Next up: Jim Thompson’s grim, darkly funny novel Pop. 1280.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 31, 2013
→ By

Persecution.

I posted a new projected first round for next week’s MLB Rule 4 draft yesterday, with a new name up top, and did a brief Klawchat as well. I’ve already heard some fresh things since that mock went up, including that the Astros aren’t entirely off Bryant after all.

–

I enjoyed Alessandro Piperno’s debut novel, The Worst Intentions, even though it often turned crude, because it was funny and featured so many cleverly crafted characters. His second novel, Persecution, shows far more polish and greater empathy with its flawed protagonist, with Piperno’s dry wit now applied to a tragic story, the fall from grace of a pediatric oncologist whose aloofness leads to his undoing.

Dr. Leo Pontecorvo had what he thought was a perfect life – a loving wife, two sons, a lucrative job with meaning as well as social importance, a freelance gig writing about health issues for a major Italian newspaper – until it is shattered by two accusations of wrongdoing, presented to us in reverse order. The novel opens with the Pontecorvos sitting down to a family dinner with the TV news on in the background, only to have the broadcaster announce that Leo stands accused of a sexual relationship with his 13-year-old son’s girlfriend, Camilla. Through flashbacks, Piperno’s unnamed yet omnipresent narrator leads the reader through Leo’s rise and fall, including allegations of financial impropriety and the disastrous consequences of his mishandling of Camilla’s crush on him, as well as the less-than-perfect truth below the surface of his marriage and family life, so that he is by turns sympathetic and deserving of his fate.

Pontecorvo’s emotional immaturity mirrors that of the lead character in The Worst Intentions, but without the earlier book’s emphasis on sexual immaturity (although Leo has his moments). He’s never quite cut the cord with his domineering Jewish mother, and has floated through so many difficult situations through either the force of his intellect or the power of his personality that he’s unable to cope with actual crises, often leaving the management to his doting wife. He’s hopeless when faced with people who have competing agendas because he assumes others will be rational and thoughtful, and can’t imagine them pursuing actions that might do him harm. That gullibility leads him to lend money to a wayward student who tricks him into appearing to commit usury, which also points to the scientific, rational-minded Leo’s inability to responsibly handle anything to do with money. It also means that when Camilla’s crush on him first takes form, he has no concept of how others might perceive his responses, and walks right into what might have been a trap – although the reliability of the narration is an open question even as the book ends.

At heart, Leo believes himself to be a good man, but his actions speak to a superficial and pretentious inner character. He loves to take photographs, but refuses to take family pictures, even on vacations, because they’re not artistic:

Her husband only photographed dead things. And, even worse, he lavished all the care in the world on doing it. But ask him to take a “normal” photograph, who knows, the boys learning to ride a bicycyle, his wife in evening dress or posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, or wherever the hell he wanted? Certainly not, not a chance. When you asked him, the artist felt outraged.

He’s not an artist in any sense of the word, of course, but the aspirational nature of his behavior in every one of his endeavors, even in parenting (which leads to acts of emotional cruelty toward his sons), reveals his own insecurity – which becomes fully apparent when his reaction to the public nature of the scandal is to hide, literally and figuratively, in the basement, abandoning his wife and children while believing they’ve actually abandoned him. He’s an overgrown child, incapable of handling true adversity in an adult fashion, of proclaiming his innocence to his wife, or working to regain the trust of either of his sons, or doing much of anything to fight the charges against him. He goes underground – ironic for a man whose surname begins with the Italian word for “bridge” – and never emerges.

Piperno’s strongest resemblance to Philip Roth and other Jewish-American writers – Piperno’s father is Jewish, and both of Piperno’s protagonists are Italian Jews – lies in that strong sense of irony evident in Leo’s name. (His actions don’t reflect the courage of the astrological lion of his first name, either.) The pediatric oncologist undone by the accusations of a child, the

The main weakness of Persecution is the depiction of Leo’s wife, Rachel, although she may get a fuller treatment in the sequel, The Inseparables, still unpublished in English but intended from the start as the second half of this diptych. Rachel Pontecorvo has much in common with her Biblical namesake – married to a doofus who is so naïve that he’s tricked by his brother and then father-in-law, she bears him two sons, and ends up suffering for her choices – but she’s a shadow in the book, nearly always the voice of reason when Leo is acting like a child. She’s never given the chance to reject him outright after the allegations, and we don’t see any curiosity about whether they’re true. Giving her character a third dimension would have improved the book beyond the study of Leo’s character, although I’ll reserve judgment until I read part two, which won the Italian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize last year.

If you appreciate Roth, or Joseph Heller, or the more mundane elements of Kurt Vonnegut’s works (as opposed to the sci-fi trappings around them), you must give Persecution a shot. Even during the moments when you’d like to give Leo a hard slap across the face, this portrait of a man whose superficially perfect life has lost its veneer to reveal an empty interior is searing, bitter, and funny.

Next up: As I mentioned on Twitter, I’m reading, but not enjoying, A Game of Thrones.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ May 30, 2013
→ By

Underbelly and 800 Degrees.

My updated ranking of the top 25 prospects in baseball went up Tuesday for Insiders. This week’s Behind the Dish podcast features my chat with Aaron Hill about what it was like to be evaluated and drafted back in 2003.

On the recommendation of two scouts, I went to Underbelly in Houston with a friend last week, getting there a little on the late side but still having a tremendous meal. Everything they serve is sourced within 150 miles of the restaurant, a trick that works when you’re located near a large body of water.

They were out of the sourdough bread appetizer – I almost called it a “starter” but that would be a very different dish – so instead we went with the carrot cooked three ways, coffee-roasted, pureed, and pickled, an interesting way of showcasing the vegetable’s flavor and texture, although the plate was sparse and the roasted carrots would have been better served hot and with some sort of fat, even a drizzle of olive oil. The “gyro” style meatballs were stronger, lamb meatballs barely cooked through with just a hint of pink – one reason I don’t usually order lamb is that it’s best eaten when it’s still bleating – served with a thin layer of tzatziki (herbed yogurt sauce) and tomato relish that’s mostly just halved sweet grape tomatoes.

The star dish was the roasted pork belly with tomato-bacon jam and bruleed peaches, which was a special that night but is apparently sometimes a regular menu item. The plate came with two large chunks of pork belly that pulled apart like a boneless short rib, but still had plenty of tooth like a well-roasted pork shoulder. The pork itself was just lightly seasoned, with a little bark on the top of each chunk, but the smoky-sweet peaches and the saltiness of the jam complemented it well – if you worked a little to get all components in each bite.

The one dish I didn’t like was one of their signature items, the Korean braised goat and dumplings. The goat is braised until very tender, shredded (or perhaps just allowed to fall apart), and then doused in a very spicy, sticky-sweet sauce that I found unpalatable, more for its sweetness than its heat – it was like a chile pepper candy, and the meat could have come from any animal given how pungent the sauce was. The dumplings weren’t much better, very tough, chewy gnocchi-shaped pellets that didn’t absorb the sauce or have any browning or other flavor of their own. The server noticed we’d barely touched it and offered to remove the charge from the bill even over our protests, which I thought was impressive. At a restaurant of this caliber, I wouldn’t send a dish back unless it was completely inedible – raw, or burned, or somehow ruined. This plate just wasn’t to my tastes, and since I ordered it, I expected to pay for it no matter what.

Dessert was tremendous – a warm chocolate cake, almost the texture of a brownie, served with a giant quenelle of spicy chocolate ice cream that was warm enough to develop the consistency of a gelato or even a perfectly smooth mousse. The spice in the ice cream was more of a suggestion than the in-your-face heat of the goat dish, and balanced out the dark, rich cocoa flavor of the cake. The portion was very generous, plenty for two adults to share.

Underbelly has a huge wine list but no license for hard liquor, and they even permit you to bring your own wine for a $15 fee as long as it’s not something already on their list and you limit your importation to three bottles per table. Prices for the small plates we ordered were reasonable, given the high cost and quality of the inputs; after the server removed the charge for the goat, but including two glasses of wine, the bill was under $100 for two people.

* I also managed to get to 800 Degrees, the pizzeria opened by the folks behind Umami Burger and Umamicatessan, in west LA in mid-May. It’s not table-service; you order at the counter, and they assemble the pizza as you walk down the glass, where you can see most of the possible toppings and can either order a set combo or create your own. The ingredient quality is high, but the crust was the standout – cooked at, well, 800 degrees, it gets a little char on the exterior and remains soft in the center, almost Neapolitan style (which would have something akin to soup in the middle), with enough structure to hold together when lifted. The salad offerings are a little meager, however, with the “greens” lacking the “mixed” portion and too light on the olive oil for me. This is the fifth of the pizzerias on Food and Wine‘s list of the best pizzerias in the United States that I’ve visited, better than Stella Rosa (Santa Monica) or Punch (Minneapolis), not as good as Bianco (Phoenix) or Lola (Minneapolis), definitely good enough to hit any time you’re near the UCLA campus.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ May 17, 2013
→ By

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

I’ve got my first projection of the first round of this year’s MLB Rule 4 draft up, and chatted on Thursday.

The banana on your table or in your bag right now is a specific variety called the Cavendish, and is genetically identical to every other Cavendish banana in the world, a peculiar trait among comestibles that means that one of our most essential foodstuffs is at risk of being wiped off the commercial market by a fungal disease it can’t fight. Because most banana plants are parthenocarpic (in lay terms, sterile), producing no seeds, humans cultivate bananas by transplanting part of the plant’s underground stem, known as the corm, which means each new plant is a carbon copy of the last one – and therefore the plants have never developed immunity to common fungal diseases that ravage entire plantations. With no help from evolution, the first widely commercialized banana, the Gros Michel, became nonviable as a cash crop, and the same disease is now threatening Cavendish plantations as well.

Dan Koeppel’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World discusses how we reached this point, going back through the history of the fruit and discussing its importance to subsistence farmers in Africa as well as its economic importance in Asia and Latin America. Now, with Panama disease, a fungal disease that is resistant to fungicide and causes banana plants to wilt by attacking their roots, marching across the globe, there’s a race on to try to genetically engineer a replacement for the Cavendish, one that suits the market’s demands for a portable, sweet fruit that is also resistant to Panama disease, black Sigatoka, and other fungal maladies that can devastate a plantation.

The rise of the banana as a trade good to become the West’s favorite fruit (mangoes are more popular in the rest of the world) has had tragic consequences, from which Koeppel doesn’t shy. The company you know know as Chiquita has a lengthy history of labor abuses in Latin America, including exposing plantation workers to highly toxic pesticides and fungicides; corrupt land deals with autocratic governments that were often put in place by the United States in part to aid Chiquita; and circumventing land-ownership restrictions in former “banana republics” (not just a clothing store!) to maintain strict cartel-like control over the banana trade. The autocratic governments were responsible for oppression, torture, and even genocide of native populations, often while the U.S. stood idly by, content that our economic interests were protected. Chiquita’s sins, and those of its billionaire owner Carl Lindner – also part-owner of the Reds at the time – were documented in a massive expose’ in the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1998, only to have the paper issue an apology and pay the company $10 million for illegally obtaining voice mails. Chiquita never disproved any of the paper’s claims, and only had to threaten a lawsuit for theft and invasion of privacy before the publisher folded his tent.

Banana farming in other parts of the world, such as Malaysia and Brazil, “only” led to substantial deforestation, while the blight now affecting the Cavendish and that nearly drove its predecessor, the Gros Michel, into extinction is threatening subsistence farmers in developing countries who depend on banana plants as a food source. Koeppel uses that latter point to launch into descriptions of those genetic engineering efforts, with brief thoughts on the anti-GM movement and the rather clear conundrum that our choice is to accept GM bananas or likely live with no bananas at all unless they grow in your backyard.

Koeppel does well to largely keep himself out of the narrative, only appearing to introduce certain characters or to describe his experiences tasting other varieties of bananas, most of which aren’t cultivated for export. (He has special praise for the Lacatan banana, found in the Philippines.) It’s compelling on several levels – as a chronicle of corporate greed and corruption, as the story of how a largely tropical fruit became a global commodity, and of course in the unfinished story of whether scientists can use traditional and modern methods together to craft a disease-resistant replacement for the Cavendish. I loved it because I love popular science books and also love to cook, but this book should be required reading for anyone who likes to eat.

Next up: Alessandro Piperno’s second novel, Persecution.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ May 14, 2013
→ By

The Battle for Hill 218.

I have a new column up discussing the game’s top young shortstops, and recorded a new Behind the Dish podcast, speaking with ESPN’s umpiring analyst Jim McKean about last week’s great moments in MLB jurisprudence. My projection of the first round of this year’s Rule 4 draft will be posted on Thursday morning.

—

Based on a two-player card game that is currently out of print, the app version of The Battle For Hill 218 ($2.99) plays incredibly simply, making it perfect for an adaptation to iOS, with a strong AI because the number of potential moves at any given time isn’t that large. It also plays very quickly against an AI opponent, with an entire game taking maybe five minutes, and the skill of the Hard AI player was strong enough that I found myself playing again and again because I was going to beat that sucker come hell or high water. (It took about 30 tries if you count my earliest screw-ups.)

The game revolves around a battle for the titular hill, which sits at the center of the playing area, between each player’s home base. Players have decks of cards representing unit types that are distinguished by the strength and direction of their attacks and by the directions in which they can support or be supported by other units, and on each turn a player places two cards. The goal is to take your opponent’s home base (by eliminating the unit there and then placing one of your units on it) before he takes yours; in the event that the players exhaust their decks and hands before either base falls, the player with the most active units still on the table is the winner.

The limited number of unit types available makes strategy fairly simple – you must set up a position on one turn that would allow you to knock out your opponent’s home unit and replace it on your next turn. That means that you need to set up a position that your opponent can’t overcome with his two card plays on the intervening turn, which, as I’ve played it, means that control of the two positions adjacent to the central hill are the critical ones, and most of the game will involve back-and-forth battles over one or occasionally both of those spaces. Controlling that space at the start of a turn means almost certain victory, as a player can use one of his two Airstrikes (eliminating any single opponent’s unit, with no card placement) and then place a Special Forces card (which, unlike other units, can be supported by another unit to which it is connected diagonally) on his opponent’s home base.


The hill is at the center, with the two home bases above and below it.

The randomness of the order of the cards mitigates the fact that the game revolves around the same basic battle each time. You start the game with five cards drawn at random from your deck, discarding two, and then on each turn you play two and then draw two. (One exception: The start player plays just one card on his first turn.) If a player’s home base is empty, s/he must play a card there first, but otherwise there’s a lot of flexibility with a typical hand of five cards and six different unit types. You have to think through each move based on all of the possible combinations your opponent might hold, and, in the case of the hard AI, assuming the opponent makes the perfect move in response. Learning to anticipate combos like the air-strike/special forces move – which beat me more times than I’d care to mention – and planning moves to prevent it, even a move or two in advance (to the extent that such a thing is possible) is a big part of the fun of the game. I don’t care for chess, because it involves so much long-term planning that it begins to feel like work to me, but nearly all good two-player games involve some of that element, and Battle for Hill 218 strikes a solid balance.

The tutorial in the app is insufficient, so you’ll need to either play the game a few times and figure out how the cards work via context, or go back into the Help/Manual menu to read about what the Supply, Attack, and Support symbols mean. The app is currently only available for the iPad, although the developers mentioned in an interview today on boardgamegeek that an upgrade making the app and offering async gameplay is in the works. At $2.99 it’s absolutely worth the cost even if you only intend to use it for local play.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,