→ June 13, 2011
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A Canticle for Leibowitz.

I’m not sure how I stumbled on Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, a Hugo Award-winning novel from 1961 that depicts a post-apocalyptic earth going through inevitable cycles of progress and regression. As far as I can tell, it wasn’t a reader suggestion, and I very rarely read science fiction, but somehow I added this to my queue about six months ago. I’d say it was worth reading for the obvious influence it had on later works, but found it an arduous read and a damn depressing one at that.

In Canticle, humanity has nearly wiped itself out through nuclear war, but survivors are rebuilding civilization or simply banding together in tribes habitable areas. The Catholic Church figures heavily in Miller’s book (he was Roman Catholic as well), and serves as a preserver not just of morality and faith but of knowledge after the remaining masses rise up against the intelligentsia, especially scientists, in retaliation for the unleashing of the destructive power of the atom, a passage that unfortunately presaged the real-life genocide of intellectuals in Cambodia under Pol Pot. As humanity moves forward again in fits and starts, the role of the Church changes in society in an exploration of the relationship between small-c church and institutions such as state and science.

The novel is actually a collation of three novellas, each depicting a different time period beginning about six hundred years after the nuclear holocaust, but all centered on a Catholic abbey in the Rocky Mountains dedicated to Saint Leibowitz, a former electric engineer who joined the clergy after the war and gave his life to preserve pre-war scientific knowledge. In the first section, a meek monk-in-training accidentally discovers a fallout shelter that may hold the remains of Saint Leibowitz’ wife, as well as other artifacts from his time deemed by the Church to hold great historical importance. In the second section, an agnostic scholar and researcher visits the abbey as one of the monks is preparing to demonstrate the first (post-war) electric lamp. In the third part, the abbey prepares to send several of its monks to a human colony on Alpha Centauri bearing both ecclesiastical “Memorabilia” and secular knowledge to escape an impending second nuclear war, bringing about a debate between the abbot and a nonreligious doctor over euthanasia for victims of the first attack. Through all three books a Jewish wanderer appears, perhaps the same person despite the span of centuries, waiting for the Messiah while assisting (sometimes in peculiar ways) one or more of the monks.

The three epochs demonstrated in the book mirror three major periods in modern human history – the pre-Enlightenment period where the church’s primacy in civilization and in the advancement of knowledge was largely unchallenged; the Enlightenment itself, where science took away domains of learning previously belonging to the church; and the twentieth century, with nuclear weapons, the repetition of past calamities, and, in what I presume was Miller’s view, a loss of morality tied to the gradual withdrawal of religion from the center of everyday life.

As a social document or a theological one, I imagine the book holds great value; Wikipedia – which we know is never wrong – mentions “a significant body of literary criticism, including numerous literature journal articles, books and college courses” around Canticle. That doesn’t make it a compelling read even if it might be an important one, and the lack of compelling or sympathetic characters left the text feeling more like a history than a great novel. I would imagine from the descriptions of both the local setting of the abbey and the state of humanity and its governance that the book had a heavy influence in literature and literary offshoots after its publication; On the Beach followed two years later, and the world described in part one of Canticle reminded me more than once of the post-apocalyptic setting of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Although I never got into role-playing games, I remember trying one from the 1980s called Gamma World that had to be drawn in part from Miller’s work or its literary progeny, and I’d imagine Wasteland and Fallout (which I’ve never played) drew either straight from Canticle or from it by way of Gamma World.

Influence or importance might get me to read a book, and Miller’s formal prose wasn’t as unbearable as that of Henry James or Theodore Dreiser. But I couldn’t give this much of a recommendation to anyone who reads strictly for pleasure.

Next up: J.P. Donleavy’s comic novel The Ginger Man.

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→ June 11, 2011
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Fight Club.

Am I allowed to talk about Fight Clubicon?

This one has been sitting in the Netflix queue – which we don’t use enough anyway – for years, but I knew my wife would never watch it with me, and having seen it I have to say even if she’d consented she wouldn’t have stuck it out. Even I found some of the fight scenes tough to take, although I don’t see how you could make the film without it. The film is based on the book of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk.

As with The Big Lebowski, I’m assuming most of you have seen this before I did. The basic plot, for those of you who haven’t (and I’ll warn you I am going to largely spoil the ending below): Ed Norton’s unnamed narrator is a 1990s version of Camus’ Stranger, a white collar worker who exists to work and consume but has no emotional attachment to anything and suffers from insomnia. On a business trip, he meets the charismatic soap-maker Tyler Durden, and the two form an underground “fight club” that becomes a national movement for the disaffected, eventually morphing into an anarchistic terrorist group called Project Mayhem.

The inevitable first question will be whether I liked the movie; I did, and I didn’t. I think it tackled big themes, although I’m not sure how well it did in addressing them. Most of the film was riveting, but sometimes it was simultaneously revolting. Although the narrator has an everyman quality, the film never fully gets at the causes of his alienation from society – that alienation is a symptom, but of what we never begin to learn. It’s anchored by several terrific performances, even in some of the smaller parts. I thought the final scene was cheap. I thought the twist was clever, even if they gave it away earlier in the film.

I keep coming back to the question of what exactly Fight Club means, as I can’t accept this as just some anti-consumerist (did this film coin that term) manifesto that presents nihilism as an equally valid and equally abhorrent alternative. The film also tackles – sometimes literally – the question of reduced masculinity in late 20th century western civilization, from the narrator’s wandering into a support group for testicular cancer sufferers, where he befriends a man named Bob who has grown breasts as a result of his reduced testosterone levels. Through sheer violence and the spilling of blood, are the men in Fight Club suddenly self-actualized through a return to primitive roots?

The fact that Fight Club and particularly Project Mayhem seem more than anything else to attract disenfranchised men – it’s full of service-workers but seems very light on white-collar workers beyond the narrator – made me think perhaps there was an up-with-the-proletariat message, but the latter group’s all-black uniform seemed more Nazi than communist, and whether or not you agree with Marx’s views (I certainly don’t), his philosophy had an end beyond sheer destruction.

Another possibility was that Palahniuk was describing how numb we have become in a world where basic needs are taken for granted but emotional (or, although the subject barely comes up in the film, spiritual) needs are unfulfilled. The characters’ reactions to getting the tar kicked out of them reminded me of porn star Annabel Chong’s comment from the documentary on her, where she mutilates herself and says that she did it just to feel something (she’s later recanted, although the credibility of the later statement has to be questioned, but that’s another story entirely). They get hit, and they smile, because they felt something.

…spoilers below…

I didn’t think the big twist was that surprising. You can see Tyler Durden spliced into at least two early scenes where he flashes in and out for a frame, and it’s not like they didn’t give you a big fat clue about that. (Second clue: The scene where Ed Norton leaves a building (Marla’s) with the words “MYSELF MYSELF MYSELF” in graffiti behind him. Third clue: Tyler lives on Paper Street.) Catching on to that from the start gives the middle of the film a whole new meaning – I wonder what it would be like to watch it without knowing the real relationship between the two main characters. But watching this essentially as a cult that takes the words of a madman with dissociative identity disorder as gospel was fascinating. And it did have me wondering for part of the film if Marla was real. Speaking of which, she’s basically Bellatrix Lestrange with shorter hair, right?

Despite my general dislike of unreliable narrators, though, this conceit worked beautifully until the final showdown between the two personalities. The idea that he developed this alternate personality in response not to the trauma of sexual or physical abuse but to the abuse of everyday life in our society is incredibly clever. (Speaking of which, that “How’s that working out for you?”/”What?”/”Being clever.” exchange had to be my favorite exchange in the movie.)

And I suppose I’d be remiss – or reminded by you of it – if I didn’t link to the surprisingly funny Jane Austen Fight Club.

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→ June 9, 2011
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Disneyland eats.

I did promise a review of the food at Disneyland, with a warning that it’s nowhere near as good as the food at Disneyworld is. Disneyland’s options are more limited of necessity, but we also found the execution wasn’t as good and had more disappointments than favorites. (I’ve written several posts on the food at Disneyworld over the past four years.)

I’ll start with the two best things we ate. The best meal was at Downtown Disney at the unfortunately named Tortilla Jo’s, which serves much better upscale Mexican fare than you’d expect after hearing the casual-dining name. The server talked me into his favorite dish, the achiote citrus-grilled chicken, which was very good, correctly cooked (that is, not dry) with a ton of flavor from the glaze. It came with chipotle mashed sweet potatoes that didn’t stint on the heat or mask it with sugar, charro beans, and roasted corn on the cob, for a meal that probably could have fed two. My wife was also impressed by her enchiladas suizas, saying they compared well to her favorite Mexican place from back in Massachusetts, and also finding herself full after eating about half her meal. They have aguas frescas although I found the tamarind a little watery. They don’t offer guacamole as a small side item, unfortunately – it’s made tableside, which isn’t ideal for flavor development, and is something like $9 for a very large bowl of the green stuff.

The other hit was the beignets served at the French Market at New Orleans Square, at a side window on the side facing the railroad station. The beignets are thinner than you’d get in New Orleans and are shaped like Mickey, airy inside, freshly fried and golden brown, handed over in a bag with powdered sugar. Skip the “fritters” served elsewhere in New Orleans Square (they were undercooked inside, but also had the wrong texture) and get the beignets instead.

I’d give a passing grade to Naples, the “authentic” pizzeria also at Downtown Disney. The crust was solid, better texture than flavor, mildly charred in the wood-fired ovens, and the quality of the ingredients was top-notch. Unfortunately their basic tomato sauce is badly underseasoned and both the pizza and the pasta with sauce tasted flat. (Get it? Pizza? Flat? Never mind.) I don’t know if we hit them on the wrong day; the executive chef is Italian and I can’t imagine he’d give his imprimatur to this sauce, which tasted more like pureed canned tomatoes than a cooked, seasoned sauce. If they tweaked that, they have everything else in place to have a restaurant I could preach about.

What’s most peculiar about Naples is that the restaurant management group behind it also runs Via Napoli, the new authentic pizzeria at Epcot in the Italy pavilion (which I reviewed earlier this spring). I’ve eaten there three times in the last six months across two trips and there is no comparison – everything at Via Napoli is better, from the crust to how it’s baked to the sauce to the ingredients to the menu, which includes more options for toppings, more ability to customize your pizza, better appetizers (including a verdure fritte that I recommend), and way better desserts, led by ricotta zeppole served with a warm chocolate sauce.

Returning to Disneyland, we had breakfast at La Brea Bakery just at the entrance to the promenade as you walk into the complex from the theme park entrances. The bread was good, the pastries were not (they were tough and gummy), the bacon was high quality, the potatoes served with the egg dishes were also ordinary. It does the job if you want a filling breakfast, which we did, but it’s not something to go out of your way to hit.

Ariel’s Grotto in California Adventure has a prix fixe dinner special that includes admission to the World of Color light show, which was just amazing. My daughter was riveted almost from the start and for days afterward would spontaneously ask us, “Remember when we saw the World of Color?” Clips from Disney films are projected on to sprays of water over the artificial lagoon, interspersed with colored lights and the odd bit of pyrotechnics. That made up for a meal that was just average. You have a choice of antipasti; we went with the vegetarian one so my daughter would have more options; the cheeses (manchego and fresh mozzarella) were excellent but the vegetables were undermarinated. For my main course I chose the grilled redfish with pineapple chutney over wild rice pilaf with sauteed vegetables; the fish was perfectly cooked and well-seasoned, although it needed the sweet/sour flavors of the chutney to boost the flavor, while the sides were just filling the plate. The family-style dessert options were mostly disappointing, led by the “chocolate lava cake” that was around 40-50 degrees, so the inside was thick like grainy fudge, not oozing like lava. (And the server said this wasn’t a kitchen error.) The French macarons, however, were phenomenal, perfect in color, shape, and flavor, the kind for which you’d pay at least $3 apiece at a bakery in LA or Manhattan.

We did one character meal, breakfast with Minnie and Friends, at the Plaza Inn. The character part was fantastic and my daughter was over the moon to meet characters she’d never met before (Eeyore, Tigger, Captain Hook, and Chip). The food was like a hotel buffet, and there were execution problems all over the place, like trays not being replenished, waffle/pancake toppings still at refrigerator temperatures, and slow service everywhere.

The quick-service Mexican place in Frontierland, Rancho del Zocalo, was also very disappointing, the one place where we ended up leaving most of the food on our plates. I tried the grilled fish tacos, which were bitter, overcooked, and badly seasoned. The rice we were served was dry and flavorless. My wife got enchiladas with carne asada and said the steak was too tough to chew – and she typically orders steak or burgers well-done.

What’s so odd about this is how different it is at Disneyworld, where the restaurants are like well-oiled machines and the food is consistent. We have places to which we look forward when heading to Florida, from Raglan Road to Jiko to Flame Tree and now to Via Napoli as well, and plenty of options that are more than just “fill the stomach” even if they’re not automatic favorites. I don’t know if we hit some kind of lull in Anaheim but it didn’t live up to my expectations.

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→ June 8, 2011
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The Big Lebowski.

The 2011 draft is safely in my rearview mirror; you can read my team-by-team recaps for day two, separated into the American League and the National League. I also wrote a recap of day one on Monday covering ten teams who did well or made me scratch my head.

—

I finally rectified a major hole in my movie-viewing history by seeing The Big Lebowski. (It’s also the first movie I’ve watched on the new iPad, and, well, f-yeah-movies-on-the-iPad and all that.) So how exactly do you write about a movie that 90% of your audience – conservatively speaking – has already seen, many of them more than once? I’m guessing I’ll say nothing that hasn’t been written before about the film, so please forgive any unoriginal thoughts that slip in here.

There’s no real reason that I never watched the film; I liked Fargo despite its brutality, and might be one of the few people on earth who liked The Hudsucker Proxy (too saccharine for Coen brothers fans?). I like quirky comedies and dark comedies and films with great characters. I just never got around to this one when I was watching movies more regularly in the early 2000s, then my daughter was born and I ended up in a job that often has me watching baseball games at night rather than films or TV, and now I look up and realize many of my readers/followers have been speaking a dialect I didn’t understand. At least I finally get the title of Matthew Leach’s blog (which, by the way, got the biggest laugh out of me of any line in the film).

My favorite aspect of The Big Lebowski was its connection to the hard-boiled detective stories I love, even though The Dude isn’t actually a detective by trade. He’s intricately involved in the crime, which itself involves at least one con (I don’t want to ruin it for the four of you who haven’t seen the film), and ends up threatened by multiple elements, a standard of Philip Marlowe novels. The motives of everyone else involved are generally unclear. There’s a lot of drinking, although the Dude’s drink of choice seemed a little more soft- than hard-boiled, and a lot of petty violence like whacks on the head. He spends a good chunk of the story suspecting the wrong people. The familiar story arc made the movie much more enjoyable for me and I could concentrate on the witty dialogue*, from “obviously, you’re not a golfer” to “he fixes the cable” to “thank you, Donny” to “I’m just gonna go find a cash machine.” And John Turturro … well, now this makes a little more sense, too**.

* Did anyone else think Tara Reid’s one significant line was delivered a little too, um, naturally?

** I was convinced that Turturro’s character would somehow figure more prominently in the main plot. The fact that he is pure comic relief turned out to be even better.

About the only criticism I could offer is that there was no question how the scene with the new red car was going to end. Maybe that’s the point – you’re supposed to cringe and laugh simultaneously as you watch the metaphorical trains collide – but for a movie with so much obvious attention to detail, like The Dude’s obsession with making sure the half-and-half is fresh, the car seemed a little like a cheap laugh. It’s not like we didn’t already know Walter had a temper to match his exceptionally bad judgment.

That’s sort of like saying that Troy Tulowitzki should steal more bases, though. Julianne Moore was phenomenal. The nihilists (and the nod to Kraftwerk) were hilarious in their mannerisms and their incompetence, and I loved the cameos by Flea and Aimee Mann. (Pretty good German accent from her, by the way.) I can see why it’s such a cult hit and hang my head in shame for not watching it sooner. Anyway, tell me what else I missed about this film’s greatness while I figure out what to watch on my next flight.

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→ June 1, 2011
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A birthday and an anniversary.

I suppose it’s no secret that today is my 38th birthday – at a certain point you can’t hide your birthday any more, not in an era of Facebook and Wikipedia and lives lived largely online – but it’s also the fifth anniversary of my first day as a full-time employee of ESPN, a milestone of special significance for me, as I’ve never worked for any company for that long before.

Prior to joining the Jays in 2002, I was chronically bored at work. In fact, I was bored at several workplaces, one more boring than the next. My first job out of college was in consulting and was interesting for about ten months, until the powers that be figured out that I was handy with a spreadsheet and decided I should be used exclusively on cases that required a lot of spreadsheet work. Being handy with a spreadsheet – which at the time meant I could use Excel without adult supervision and maybe write a macro or two – is not equivalent to enjoying working with spreadsheets, and as I’m sure many of you know, that kind of work gets old fast, especially when you’re doing nothing with the results of your analyses. Every job after that was, in one way or another, more boring, and when I’m bored, I’m not exactly a model employee, either.

Baseball offered one clear escape from boredom beyond the obvious love-of-the-game factor: The challenge of the sport is never-ending because the product is people. We can analyze and estimate, project and value, but we will always be wrong at least some of the time, and being wrong drives us all to learn from our mistakes and develop new methods or metrics or heuristics to be less wrong in the next cycle. I was hooked on the draft after just one year in the room because it might be the area in which teams get it wrong most often, even smart teams run by smart guys who’ve thrown a lot of resources at the question of how to get it less wrong. When you’re dealing with teenagers and guessing how they’ll mature physically and emotionally over the next six years after you’ve handed them a big pile of cash, you’re going to be wrong with a capital R a lot of the time. That promise of an unending challenge is thrilling, and it exists even on the other side of the wall, where I never put money on the line on players but have all of my opinions out there for the public to tear apart (and use to construct lengthy complaints of bias). But after five draft cycles with ESPN on top of five with Toronto, some small amount of sameness has set in. The challenges remain, but the calendar doesn’t change, and the task list is the same every year.

What has kept the job interesting and rewarding over the last five years, more than anything else, has been my interactions with you.

I have written before what a great privilege it is to write for you, and to know that so many of you choose to pay to read my work every year. But my compensation for this effort goes well beyond money. You challenge me to be better – to evaluate better, write more clearly, to take strong stands, to keep up with the latest analyses and statistics, but also to be funnier, quicker, sharper, because I know it’s what you want, and if I’m not any of that, I’ll hear about it in short order. And along the way you will make me laugh, or teach me something, or tell me about a great book to read or a place where I must eat or a game I have to play. That interaction, more than anything else, is what makes this job so interesting and so much fun, even for a peripatetic mind like mine that ten years ago seemed destined to be bored no matter what I did for a living.

Thank you all for letting me entertain you these last five years, and for giving me so much in return. I’ve gotten more from you than I ever could have hoped to receive.

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→ May 30, 2011
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The Fixer.

New mock draft is up. Updated top 25 pro prospects list goes up on Tuesday, followed by another projected first round on Friday.

Free Brandon Belt.

–

”So sleep now, without fear for your life, and if you should ever manage to get out of prison, keep in mind that the purpose of freedom is to create it for others.”

Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1967, a bit surprising given the award’s focus on works that deal with the American experience. The Fixer is a fictionalized account of the arrest and trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Russian Jew falsely accused of the murder of a young Ukrainian boy for the purposes of some arcane blood ritual. Malamud indicated that Bok was also inspired by the Dreyfuss and Vanzetti affairs, but the case in his novel is undeniably Beilis’.

The fixer of the title is Yakov Bok, a Jewish carpenter who leaves the countryside for the city of Kiev after his wife leaves him for another man. While in Kiev, he finds a job working for an anti-Semitic factory owner, with an apartment included in a district forbidden to Jews. When the boy’s corpse is discovered, Bok – who had once chased the boy out of the factory’s brickyard – becomes an unlikely suspect given the accusations because he’s alienated from God and his own religion, but he finds himself steamrolled in a Kafka-esque legal process designed to produce a confession or a guilty verdict.

While in prison for the remainder of the book – the novel ends as Bok heads for his long-delayed trial – the fixer endures numerous physical and psychological torments, but finds or develops an inner strength that previous to his arrest he lacked or simply didn’t know he had. Even through attempts to dehumanize him and force him to confess, he retains some vestige of freedom by choosing not to submit – the only choice he’s allowed in the unconscionable conditions of his imprisonment. That becomes his victory even before the ultimate victory of an acquittal. (Beilis was acquitted amid an international outcry over his arrest and trial; Dreyfuss was also exonerated after Émile Zola’s famous “J’accuse!” editorial. Vanzetti and his co-conspirator Sacco were executed, although their guilt is still in question; shortly before Malamud wrote The Fixer, historian Francis Russell published a major book on the case called Tragedy in Dedham that concluded that Vanzetti was innocent.)

Malamud’s work covered not just anti-Semitism but prejudice, injustice, corruption, and mob mentality in the midst of the U.S. civil rights movement and barely two decades after the end of the Holocaust while also exploring how the human spirit can survive in unbearable circumstances. Bok himself is harsh and unlikable during the brief period before his arrest, but becomes sympathetic because of the cartoonishly evil nature of his captors. (His one ally of sorts is eliminated far too soon from the novel’s pages, making most of the book’s second half even bleaker than the first.) But despite the often graphic descriptions of Bok’s life in solitary confinement and the faint hope of any redemption or rescue, The Fixer was compelling because of its bigger themes, ones that probably apply just as well in Bosnia or Rwanda or even today in the Middle East. Malamud’s irreligious Jew stands in for every oppressed people throughout human history.

Incidentally, Beilis himself wrote a memoir of his imprisonment and trial called The Story of My Sufferings that appears to be long out of print and probably in the public domain. I imagine it’s a difficult read, but I hope its historical significance encourages some e-book publisher to put it out there in electronic form.

Next up: I won’t have much time to read this week, so I picked Graham Greene’s brief “entertainment” The Captain and the Enemy.

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→ May 16, 2011
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Money: A Suicide Note.

Here’s another piece about that chick who’s dying in her teens because, according to the Line, she’s allergic to the twentieth century. Poor kid … Well I have my problems too, sister, but I don’t have yours. I’m not allergic to the twentieth century. I am addicted to the twentieth century.

Martin Amis’ Money: A Suicide Note, which appeared on the TIME 100 and at #90 on the Guardian 100, is a hilarious modern picaresque novel that marries crude, over-the-top humor with serious themes of materialism and modern identity as well as a healthy dose of metafiction that called to mind Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds.

The protagonist of Money, John Self, is an English director of TV adverts who is tabbed by Fielding Goodney to write the treatment for a new feature film titled Good Money, except when it’s instead titled Bad Money, although the film within the film is largely a Macguffin, with a plot that sounds comically awful but allows Amis to work in several caricatures of Hollywood actors and actresses. Self does very little actual work, spending most of his time drinking, whoring, masturbating, and spending gobs of money that Fielding provides, promising that there’s always more to be had. Along the way we meet Self’s live-in, transparently gold-digging girlfriend; his even more transparently dodgy father; and a number of friends and business acquaintances who may only tolerate Self because he serves as their connection to money.

Money is the true central character in Money even if it never has a line of dialogue. Characters are treated differently based on how much money they have; the more Self has at his disposal, the more doors open for him in the boardroom and the bedroom. When the money runs out, and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything to say that it does at one point, Self undergoes an existential crisis but still can’t let go of the dream of more money around the corner. And that question of identity – who are we without our things, or without our ability to do or buy more things, in an age of rampant materialism – fit the times in which the book was written (the 1980s, with the action in the book happening in the leadup to the last big royal wedding) but seem just as applicable today. Self himself comes to take the money for granted; there’s certainly no accounting going on, and he just assumes its supply is infinite and that he’s entitled to it, even though he’s doing little to no actual work within the book.

The humor, meanwhile, is decidedly lowbrow, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Self gets drunk, falls down, embarrasses himself, starts fights, deals with a stalker, cheats on the women he’s using to cheat on his girlfriend, says awful things, and blacks out on a regular basis. Amis is clearly a fan of creating silly character names in the P.G. Wodehouse tradition, and inserts himself into the book as a novelist who annoys Self and ends up working on the script to Good Money, while portraying the language of the slovenly, sodden Self (as narrator) as you might expect from the son of a great author who enjoyed a good tipple.

There was one line that struck me as familiar in a coincidental way – when Self says (of his time in a pub on one of his many benders, “I play the spacegames and the fruit-machines,” the song “Faded Glamour” by Animals That Swim came to mind with its line about “You tell me about cheap tequila/Place names and food machines.” I have no idea whether they’re connected, although I always thought the back half of that line might have been lost in translation.

Next up: I’ve already finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and just started Richard Russo’s That Old Cape Magic.

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→ May 14, 2011
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Charlottesville eats.

Thanks to all of you who fired over suggestions for my two meals in Charlottesville. (Except the guy who suggested Jimmy John’s. Why not just tell me to go to McDonald’s?) I wish I could have tried more places – and spent more time in Charlottesville, which looked like a very cool town with plenty of interesting places to eat.

Three popular suggestions from regulars that I didn’t try but wanted to pass along are Wayside Chicken (classic southern fried chicken), Bodo Bagels (although I am highly skeptical of claims that the bagels are better than any in NYC … come on) and Bellmont BBQ (known for their pulled pork). If and when I get back there – the one drawback of Charlottesville is it’s not that easy to get to, what with an airport straight out of Wings* – those places are at the top of my list.

*Before anyone gets the wrong idea: I hated that show.

The two I did hit were Peter Chang’s Chinese Grill and Mas Tapas. Peter Chang is both famous and infamous, earning a Wikipedia entry largely about his peripatetic ways and a New Yorker profile by Calvin Trillin titled “Where’s Chang?” The chef focuses on Sichuan cuisine, quite different from what we ordinarily and inaccurately refer to as “Chinese food” (making us, I suppose, a nation of synecdouches), generally spicier and with stronger flavors. I have very little experience with Sichuan cooking, so I can tell you that Peter Chang’s was fantastic but can’t speak to its authenticity.

After some discussion with the waiter, who seemed to know the menu but wasn’t all that quick to offer suggestions, I ended up with the spicy fragrant duck, a Peter Chang signature dish that delivered on both adjectives. This was probably a 60 on the 20-80 spiciness scale, about where I get off the spicy train. The duck is cut into chunks, mostly bone-in, coated in a thin layer of flour and cornstarch, deep fried (skin and all), and covered in a spicy rub or paste heavy on red chili and tossed with cilantro and garlic. It’s not for the light eater, but it’s big and bold and more than just hot, with the duck remaining tender through the heavy frying and the skin becoming impossibly crispy. I started with a hot and sour soup that gained its spice from red chilis rather than the traditional American-Chinese version with black peppercorns, giving it a more well-rounded flavor.

Mas Tapas does tapas right, heavy on the traditional Spanish fare, but also making good use of the wood-fired oven right behind the bar. (I was fortunate enough to sit in a little corner that looks directly into the fire.) I went with four of their most popular dishes, three hits and one miss. Their boquerones – white anchovies marinated in good olive oil, garlic, herbs, and vinegar – were solid, maybe just a touch fishy but I figure those are just the omega-3’s doing their thing, and if you get those you must get their house bread, a crusty, cold-fermented European-style loaf perfectly made to sop up the oil and vinegar from the fish. I am guessing that these boquerones were preserved rather than fresh, since I’ve only had fresh at one place (Toro in Boston) and they’re not easy to find in the U.S. Mas also has a bacon-wrapped date dish, not quite as good as Firefly’s (where they stuff the dates with almonds) but perfectly cooked; the way I see it, the omega-3’s from the fish cancel out the copious amount of bacon fat I consumed about five minutes later.

The one miss was the croquetas de jamón, thick grilled cakes of potato, Manchego cheese, bacon, and jamón serrano, dusted in cornmeal on the outside. The edges were crispy with a little sweetness from caramelization but the interior had the texture of baby food. If I could do it over again, I’d swap these out and try their tortilla española. I’ll also give bonus points to Mas for having Guinness on tap and not too cold and for plenty of eye candy on a Friday night.

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→ May 6, 2011
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A Wild Sheep Chase.

Haruki Murakami’s English-language debut novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, gives an early glimpse of the mind-bending plot twists that define his two best novels, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, along with the usual measures of food, cigarettes, nonchalant sex, and characters that alternate from three-dimensional to transparent, sometimes within single passages. While it can’t match either of the other novels I mentioned, it’s a good read on its own both for plot and for its expansive thinking, and also interested me as a look back at Murakami’s formative years as a writer, like watching video of a big leaguer from when he was a prospect in high school.

None of the characters in A Wild Sheep Chase have names; the best we get are the Boss, the Rat, and J, while the protagonist and his girlfriend don’t even get so much as a nickname or a single letter. The main character is in advertising and, as the book opens, his wife leaves him for one of his closest friends (although he’s more numb than mad or grieving, as the marriage seems to have been long dead), shortly after which he receives an urgent summons from a mysterious businessman about a PR flier his firm put out that included a photograph of a very unusual sheep. That photograph, sent by our hero’s friend the Rat, seems to show a sheep that, by all accounts, shouldn’t exist, at least not in Japan, but the businessman’s interest goes beyond mundane questions of taxonomy, as this sheep appears to have powers beyond any other ovine known to man.

That businessman represents a shadow organization that controls many aspects of Japanese industry, particularly on the advertising side. He offers the protagonist a deal, without much say in the matter: Find that sheep within a month or find your life ruined. So the hero and his girlfriend – whose ears are, as it turns out, fairly important in their subplot, if not the main plot as well – set out to figure out where the Rat is and thus, they hope, find that sheep.

The wild chase is anything but wild; it’s slow, halting, and in some ways quite realistic, even if the sheep they’re chasing and the people they encounter aren’t. And it’s not clear, even after the chase is resolved, whether the protagonist was searching on behalf of the Boss’s minion or for his own personal growth. Before the sheep tale appears, he has no real anchors left in his life – no wife, no kids, a routine job, a scarce existence in the physical or emotional planes. The chase itself provides much of what’s missing from his life, including purpose and urgency, but of course the chase will end, after which he’ll either find his life in tatters or he’ll have the riches promised him … and he’ll have to find a new purpose. Explaining my thoughts on the end and what Murakami may have been trying to express would give away too much of the resolution, but I can say that I found that payoff a little underwhelming. The physical plot was resolved, but the philosophical questions and answers remained vague. It’s a better read as a suspense novel that makes you think a little differently than as a book pushing for any specific philosophy or emotional reaction, whereas his best works provide more clarity without devolving into sermons.

Next up: Martin Amis’ Money: A Suicide Note, which seems to be just the book to buy your sister if she’s already read At Swim-Two-Birds. it’s currently on sale through that link for $6 in the Penguin Ink paperback, with cover design by tattoo artist Bert Kerk.

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→ April 30, 2011
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Home & A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

My latest top 50 ranking for this year’s Rule 4 Draft is up. I’ll also be back on College Baseball Live this Thursday night at 7 pm EDT and on the postgame show as well.

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The old man nodded. “Maybe I’m finding out I’m not such a good man as I thought I was. Now that I don’t have the strength – patience takes a lot out of you. Hope, too.”
Jack said, “I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it’s gone, it’s like there’s nothing left of you at all. Except–” he shrugged and laughed “–what you can’t be rid of.”

She’s only written three books, but Marilynne Robinson has to be in any discussion of the best living American novelists, and there is no living writer whose prose I’d rather read. Saying a writer writes “from the heart” can be like saying a player “sees the ball well,” but Robinson produces some of the most moving, heartfelt scenes and passages I’ve ever seen and does so without the excess of sentiment or cloying language that could turn a book with a similar setup into mass-market chick lit.

Home, currently on sale for $10 through that amazon link, is the parallel novel to Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead. (It’s worth mentioning that Robinson’s three novels have each won a major award – Housekeeping won the PEN/Faulkner award for the best debut novel of its year and Home won the Orange Prize for the best English novel written by a female author.) Gilead was a series of notes or journal entries from an older priest named Ames who, nearing his death, wishes to leave a testament for his young son. That journal also showed scenes of his complex relationship with his friend and fellow preacher Robert Boughton and Boughton’s prodigal son Jack, named for Ames, who returns to Gilead after a twenty-year absence. That return is the subject of Home, as Jack, a lifelong alcoholic who didn’t even come back for his mother’s funeral, shows up carrying two decades’ worth of secrets and memories, with arguably four decades’ worth of loneliness and sorry as well. His timing is propitious, with his father’s health declining even more rapidly than Ames’, and Jack’s sister, Glory, living at home again after a disastrous courtship that has left her resigned to spinsterhood.

Despite the presence of just three characters for most of the book, with everyone else accounting for maybe 10% of the dialogue and whatever passes for action in a Robinson novel (she has never in three books resorted to plot twists or other tricks of the trade to spice up the story), Home is Robinson’s most complex work. The developing relationship between Jack and Glory, separated by enough years that they were never close as children, is one side of a highway where the other direction contains the gradual yet accelerating deterioration of the relationship between Jack and the dying father who has confused decades of worry over his wayward son with decades of love; it’s not clear that anyone was or is capable of helping Jack, who has what would today most likely be diagnosed as depression, but Boughton, already starting to lose control of his emotions in the earliest stages of dementia, faces the crushing disappointment of seeing the failure and tragedy of Jack’s life incarnate, in his kitchen or his living room. And yet Jack, first welcomed and then rebuked by his own father, draws closer to the old man and to his sister … but never so close that he can make the place he refers to as “home” his actual home, instead revisiting the childhood feeling that he wished he lived there in spirit rather than simply in body.

That dualism symbolizes one of Robinson’s central themes, the gulf between our spiritual selves (or souls) and our corporeal existence. Robinson writes honestly of religion, or more specifically of religiosity, as her many religious characters are neither caricatured nor placed on pedestals; religion is simply intrinsic to their lives, and Home is suffused with conflicts between religious tenets and human behavior, as well as the doubts that have plagued Jack for his entire life, further isolating him (although it was far from the main reason) from a family of believers.

And part of Robinson’s gift is that she can write about religion without creating an overtly religious novel. Home is very much about life on earth, about the weight of memories, about choices gone awry in the distant past with ramifications in the present day. Glory’s broken engagement has left her back at home, unemployed, and without romantic prospects; one of the most heart-rending scenes comes near the book’s end as she remembers her own daydreams about her own future family, about children that will probably never exist, a warmth and happiness that she feels is now permanently denied to her. (I don’t believe the characters’ ages are mentioned, but Glory is probably in her early 30s, and I suppose in a small Midwestern town in the 1950s this would make her marriage prospects fairly slim.) Jack, meanwhile, slowly exposes layers of his sorrow to Glory, but not to his father, a permanent barrier to the old man understanding his son; the woman who helped Jack get back on his feet and remain at least partially sober for the past ten years is now denied to him, a severance that seems to have driven him back to Gilead and, in his mind, has cut him off from salvation in this life or any other. Unfolding these relationships in a way that gets at the heart of family dynamics, of loneliness, of regret, and of the ultimate comfort of home without ever relying on unrealistic plot twists to force characters into false corners is more evidence of Robinson’s mastery of language and of character. She went 25 years between her first and second novels but just three years between Gilead and Home; I can only hope the gap before her next novel is as short as the last.

–

Flannery O’Conner’s first short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, is even more theologically-minded than Robinson’s work, combining stories about the meaning of faith, salvation, and what it might mean to be “good.” The stories are largely twisted, even macabre, as in the title story where an escaped convict wipes out an entire family so O’Conner can show us the difference between saying you’re a good person (or, more specifically, a good Christian) and actually being one. O’Conner dreams up killers and con artists, thieves and rascals, putting “good” people in bad situations to see how they might react.

Aside from the notable title story, the most interesting to me was the longest story in the book, “The Displaced Person,” about a rather high-minded Southern widow named Mrs. McIntyre who takes in, under some duress, a family of Jewish refugees from Poland who fled the Nazis. Her ignorance of conditions in Europe at the time is particularly stark to us now, given the passage of time and our deeper understanding of the extent of the genocide and the horrible conditions in and outside of the camps for Jews. But her lack of charity and her unusually defined ideas on race/origin stood out for her post hoc construction of ethnic identities; even as the Jewish husband works harder, without complaint, than anyone else she’s ever had on her farm, she is appalled to find him trying to bring over relatives trapped in German death camps and potentially marry them off to black workers on the farm. The priest who organized the placement of the refugees is no help, as he’s a single-minded, simpering man who sees Mrs. McIntyre only as a shell, as a person to be saved and as a settlement place for the refugee family but not as an individual, an oversight that leads to the story’s ultimate tragedy. That climax is one of the strongest depictions I’ve seen of the banality of evil, a phrase which, not coincidentally, was coined to describe the complicity of German citizens with the Nazi’s plans for extermination of Jews and other minorities.

Anyway, the title of this collection inspired me to create my second Tumblr post.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s English-language debut novel, A Wild Sheep Chase.

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