→ March 22, 2010
→ By

Las Vegas and Utah eats.

I had a quick run through Vegas and Utah last week to see Kris Bryant and Marcus Littlewood and ate pretty well overall, with only one bad meal and a few gems in Utah.

First meal in Vegas was west of the Strip at Yassou Greek Grill on West Charleston, serving gyros, hummus, and other basic Greek items at very reasonable prices. Their lemon-herb chicken is heavily marinated and has a strong flavor without any compromise in the texture, and the pitas they use in their gyros are soft and thick, nothing like the dry pitas you get at the grocery store. The gyro passed my tzatziki test – when I held it perpendicular to the table, I didn’t get any glops of tzatziki, which means they sauced it properly. That gyro plus a side Greek salad and rice pilaf (just rice prepared pilaf-style, with no other ingredients) ran about $8.30 before tax and drink.

I’ve been to the original Mesa Grill location in Manhattan but haven’t had a chance to get back in nearly two years, so I dropped into the Caesar’s Palace location on this trip and decided to branch out, trying two appetizers and a dessert, for research purposes, of course. The blue corn pancake with barbecued duck was dominated by the flavor of the hoisin sauce on the duck; hoisin’s sticky-sweet flavor and texture make it the elephant on the plate, and in this case it wiped out the flavor of the duck itself. I liked the presentation and am certainly a fan of shredded meat in a crepe or pancake, but all I tasted here was hoisin. The creamy wild Mushroom Grits with poached egg, charred serrano sauce, cotija cheese, and blue corn tortilla were better, very creamy as advertised, with only the serrano sauce (which tasted largely of burn) failing to add something to the dish. For dessert, the bartender recommended the churros with chocolate dipping sauce, which were the second-best I’ve had, behind only the version at Toro in Boston.

One bad meal on the trip was at the highly-touted Hash House a Go-Go in Imperial Palace, one of two locations in Vegas. I went for breakfast and ordered the top hash on the menu, a roasted chicken hash with rosemary and asparagus. The dish was incredibly dry, especially the chicken, all white meat and often inedibly tough. Great concept – who doesn’t love a good hash? – but horrid execution.

I made a day trip to St. George, Utah, from Vegas – just under two hours each way, including a very cool drive through the Virgin River Gorge – and had an unbelievable lunch at the Painted Pony, which I would say is in “downtown St. George” except that there doesn’t seem to be much to it besides downtown. The Painted Pony is the sort of local restaurant of which Gordon Ramsay would approve, at least for lunch, with simple dishes focusing on fresh, vibrant flavors. Their torta ahogada sandwich comes on this absolutely perfect ciabatta-style roll and features roasted beef tenderloin, caramelized onions, bell peppers, and cotija cheese, with a rich red sauce on the side, so the sandwich becomes a sort of New Mexican take on French Dip. The side salad was also fresh, with walnuts and julienned apples, and none of the wilted leaves that often plague mixed greens.

I skipped their opulent desserts to hit up Croshaw’s Pies on the, um, west side of town, which was a good call. Their “very berry” pie is sweet-tart with its mix of raspberries and blackberries, and the crust was soft and butter, more tender than flaky, which is how I prefer my pie crusts anyway. It didn’t have great structure, since the filling wept slightly on to the plate, but the compensation was that it didn’t have the slightly gluey texture that comes from using too much cornstarch. Croshaw’s recently opened a second location in Mesa, Arizona, on Brown Road well east of the Cubs’ facilities.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
→ March 21, 2010
→ By

The Dolphin People.

Latest posts on ESPN.com are on three prep prospects for the draft and on Michael Ynoa and Ian Krol. I’ll be on AllNight on ESPN Radio tonight live at 1:27 am EDT, and am tentatively scheduled to be on ESPNEWS on Monday at 2:40 pm EDT.

—

“Fix? Nothing broken can ever truly be fixed again. … None of this can ever be fixed, and it will all lead to more breakage, more pain. Nothing can change that.” I said goodnight to the professor and went to my hammock. He was right – broken things couldn’t be put back together the way they used to be.

The Dolphin People, by the author writing under the pseudonym Torsten Krol, is a bleak adventure/survival story told by a young boy, Erich, whose family ends up seeking refuge from a remote Amazonian tribe that has had little contact with outsiders. These natives, called the Yayomi, believe that Erich and his family are dolphin-gods who have taken human form, but their superstitions have limits and it becomes clear that this ruse can’t last forever, leading the “dolphin people” to try to plan a dangerous escape.

The hitch is that Erich’s family is … well, complicated. His mother loses her wits after a few days in the isolation of the Yayomi commune, probably a lot faster than reality would have it. His stepfather is a former Nazi (the book is set in 1946) who still believes in the party’s ethnic cleansing policies. And his younger brother has a rare genetic condition that puts him in obvious danger once it’s revealed.

The cover of The Dolphin People is covered with laudatory pull quotes from other authors and from major newspapers, full of adjectives that seemed to reflect the content of a different book. For example:

“funny,” “witty,” “riotously funny:” Those came from three different reviews, but if there was humor in this book, I missed it entirely. It was dry and matter-of-fact, and unless you find the odd ways in which some of the characters meet their ends funny, it was humorless.

“wild,” “absurd,” “bizarre:” It’s a strange setup, to be sure, but part of what made the book work was that Krol, having created his universe, largely abides by its laws. The characters are not that well-developed, but they do behave in reasonable ways, and he even states in a postscript Q&A that he researched primitive South American tribes to make Yayomi culture and customs as realistic as possible.

“written with relentless, breakneck velocity:” Absolutely. The book flew by in a way that few novels have for me. I had a flight to Vegas while I was reading this and read 150 pages in the 100 minutes between boarding and disembarking. That’s Rowling-Christie-Wodehouse territory.

“gruesome:” There are two unpleasant deaths, and one example of severe violence, but Krol doesn’t linger on any of them, avoiding the lurid approach and dealing more with the aftermath. I don’t see “gruesome” as any sort of compliment for a serious novel, so that adjective seemed completely out of place.

“honest:” I have no idea what that really means when describing a novel. It’s fiction. He made the whole thing up.

“thought-provoking:” I would genuinely like to agree with this adjective, as Krol was clearly after some Big Themes in The Dolphin People, but I’m split on whether he achieved them or whether they were worth tackling. I mean, Nazis are bad – we’ve established that by now, right? Human experimentation is also bad, right? The novel loses too much time to anachronistic arguments along those lines, and it detracts from what I think Krol was trying to explore about prejudice.

The real failing of the novel, for me, was the extraordinary number of coincidences and plot conveniences Krol employed to keep things moving forward. They get to the Yayomi village and, hey, whaddya know, there’s a German already there who can translate for them! They need a diversion that would allow them to escape with the Yayomi pursuing them and, hey, whaddya know, we’re just a few weeks away from the once-every-seven-years rainfall that produces massive flooding! Little of what Erich and his family do is organic, and maybe that was Krol’s point – that we are largely powerless in the face of nature and chance – but given his emphasis on prejudices and how many ideas, superstitions, and mores Erich finds among the Yayomi mirror those of our own society. If you focus on those points, and enjoy a good survival story, The Dolphin People is a very quick read without the empty calories of your standard John Grisham novel, but there was enough lacking here that I wouldn’t give it a “highly recommended” tag.

(Full disclosure – I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.)

Next up: I’ve already finished Laura Kasischke’s In a Perfect World and just started Aldous Huxley’s Island, both of which were also review copies. Island was Huxley’s follow-up to Brave New World.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ March 15, 2010
→ By

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is one of his two best-known novels, and even placed at #74 on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels of all time, a ranking I have to say I find rather dubious even though I thought it was an excellent read and a smart, realistic antidote to the standard spy novel featuring a dashing hero who’s always in great peril when he’s not in bed with a gorgeous double agent.

The protagonist at the heart of TTSS couldn’t be further from the James Bond mold, as George Smiley begins the novel in disgrace both at work, where he’s been forced out after a putsch, and at home, where his wife Ann has left him after years of infidelity. When a former agent, presumed defected, resurfaces with a story of a Soviet mole in The Circus (the top tier of what was then known as MI-6), Smiley and a few other folks on the outs at the Circus begin an effort to root out the mole, who appears to have been intimately involved in the palace coup that also resulted in a British agent getting arrested and shot in Brno and in several networks in Eastern Europe blowing up.

The brilliance of TTSS is that the novel is gripping with very little action, and no action in the novel’s present day until the final sequence where Smiley and his group set a trap for the mole. Apprised of the possible existence of the mole – the source for that info is dodgy at best – Smiley sets to work like an old-school detective, unraveling the story by talking to others ousted in the putsch and going after documents related to the compromised operation in Czechoslovakia as well as the Soviet leak who may in fact have been handling the double agent at the Circus. Le Carré carries it off through an intense dedication to realistic dialogue and actions – if there was a false note it fell below my detection threshold – and with flourishes of clever writing:

“Pulling the rug out when we’re all but home and dry.” His circulars read that way, too, thought Guillam. Metaphors chasing each other off the page.

He interlaces personal and professional issues for several of his characters, including Smiley and Peter Guillam, Smiley’s main accomplice in the investigation, the emotional counterpoint to the ironically-named Smiley’s stoicism, yet the book never drags as so many pensive novels do, where the characters’ inner thoughts overwhelm the story at the novel’s heart. There is no question that Smiley and company are detectives solving a mystery and that we are ultimately headed for some sort of denouement – a capture, a confrontation, an attack, whatever, you know that you’re driving towards a finish line, and even those asides into the minds of Smiley or Guillam or another character are just fuel for the engine that’s taking us there.

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, which Le Carré wrote before TTSS, relies on more traditional sources of tension, with the spy of the book’s title finding himself behind enemy lines and eventually in some jeopardy, although it is still relatively light on action. It’s a better place to start than Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but if you’ve read and enjoyed it I’d recommend coming here next.

—

One thing that struck me while reading TTSS: Out of the seven main characters, three bear the names George, Percy, and Bill. And on the penultimate page of the book is the line: He wished he had brought her fur boots from the cupboard under the stairs. Anyone else think J.K. Rowling read a little Le Carré when she wasn’t reading Anthony Powell?

Next up: Something current, The Dolphin People by the author writing under the pseudonym Torsten Krol.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ March 12, 2010
→ By

Recent articles & radio.

First up, chef Dan Barber’s incredible talk on how he fell in love with a fish, one that’s really about sustainable aquaculture and his hopes for the future of food. I’m also fascinated by this post on waffle-fried chicken and waffles, although the chicken in that photo doesn’t appear breaded.

Next, my radio hits from this week: Thursday on the Herd, Wednesday with Ryen Russillo, and Wednesday with Mike and Mike. I also appear a few times in the Fantasy Focus draft preview video, with a half-dozen or so taped segments on the top 2010 prospect at each position.

I’ve been blogging daily from Arizona, and my most recent pieces are on:

I just fired in a blog post covering several Padre prospects, including Adys Portillo, plus brief notes on a few Cleveland and White Sox pitchers.

Filed Under: Food, Sports
→ March 10, 2010
→ By

The White Tiger.

Winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is a twisted, funny, angry book with a deadly serious core that takes aim at modern India and skewers every part of it that appears within a kilometer of the target. It is a 21st-century antidote to Horatio Alger’s novels, one where the hero is an amoral anti-hero who charms the reader while clawing his way out of poverty and into the upper class he despises and yet wants to join. Adiga presents you with the conflict of the rags-to-riches hero who gets there by being an amoral scumbag, rejecting all the traditional mores that most people hold dear (religion, marriage, culture, etc.) and arguing that he had to reject them to get where he was going.

The narrator and hero/anti-hero is Balram, known as the White Tiger, a poor boy who is determined from a young age not to remain poor and stupid and in the Darkness of rural India. He lies, cheats, and eavesdrops his way into opportunities like a job as a driver for the son of a local oligarch, one that brings him into contact with greater wealth and with the urban chaos of New Delhi. This new experience brings him greater opportunities for advancement and for stepping on or destroying people in his way until his actions eventually escalate to murder. Through this diary of his experiences, told through seven letters to the visiting Premier of China, Balram is cheerful, mocking or criticizing everyone from his idiot rich boss to the traditional Indians who remain happy stuck in the mire to the rich classes whose government and the gods to keep the teeming multitudes in penury.

White Tiger is a disingenuously quick read, with fast, witty prose, but underneath it Adiga is posing tough questions without really answering them. Was Balram a hero or an anti-hero? It’s tough to justify most of what he does in the novel, except that just about everyone he stepped on or hurt or killed had it, or at least something, coming. And who can blame someone raised in that kind of poverty and hopelessness for grabbing indiscriminately at an opportunity to escape it? Does one’s environment determine the morality of one’s actions? Does Balram feel guilty about any of his actions – hence his rationalizations – or does he believe that he’s fully justified?

Adiga’s targets are wide, but a huge portion of his satire – or just his ire – is aimed at “modern” India, which he views as segregated and corrupt, ruled by idiots who are simply smarter than the “slaves” in the country’s massive underclass. The corruption is endemic, from bribes paid to government officials to sinecures in local towns, but the characters’ mass acceptance of “how it is” is terrifying, and the one person who objects – because he has spent time in the United States – is too weak-willed to do much more than complain. The party that purports to represent the poor is every bit as corrupt as the one that rules the country for the rich, and both parties promise reforms to the masses without delivering anything.

I also read White Tiger while wondering if it was possible to write a book this funny and compelling with a moral central character. Balram simply has no moral center – he has rejected the dictums from his family, the faith of his caste (although he hasn’t given up on its superstitions), and the respect for authority that the authorities demand. He lies and acts to get what he wants, and has no compunction about his deception. A book like this almost requires a central character – or maybe just a narrator – who respects nothing and no one and is unflinching in his rejection of old institutions. Anything he does believe in, religion or tradition or family, would have to be home-brewed. If you’ve read a book that disproves this theory, I’d love to hear about it.

And, since I know someone will ask, yes, I expect The White Tiger will be on the next iteration of the Klaw 100, whenever that comes.

Next up: John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; his The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is my favorite spy novel and made both versions of the Klaw 100.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ March 7, 2010
→ By

Jazz.

I posted a blog entry on Matt Harrison, Aaron Crow, and two other pitchers yesterday, and my latest draft blog entry is on Christian Colon and Gary Brown; I was going to see Greg Peavey today but was rained out. I’m tentatively scheduled to be on ESPNEWS on Monday in the 2 pm hour but it’s not confirmed.

—

Toni Morrison’s Jazz is the second part of what she later termed a trilogy that began with Beloved, one of my favorite novels by any author, #5 on my ranking of my favorite novels, and while it’s not as strong as its predecessor it’s still an above-average novel that explores the post-slavery experience while using a very different plot and narrative style.

Jazz is built around the same core theme as Beloved – the weight of history on African-Americans, and how much responsibility they bear for how that history has affected them. The novel opens with the story of how Joe Trace killed his young mistress, after which his slightly crazy wife Violet becomes unhinged and attempts to mutilate the girl’s corpse at the funeral. From there, Morrison turns the clock back in fits and starts, with abrupt changes in style and narrator that apparently are an attempt to mimic jazz in prose form, in a way that uses Joe’s mistress, Dorcas*, as a symbol for vices that hold the African-American community back while also explaining the appeal of those vices by rooting her own bad behavior in the violent deaths of her parents. Joe and Violet come from similarly complex backgrounds that explain their actions and have them standing in for their genders or for classes of African-Americans in the fifty years after slavery had ended but freedom was still an elusive goal, as shown in one of the most powerful lines in the book: “I don’t want to be a free nigger; I want to be a free man.”

*I took the name as ironic, as Dorcas is the name of a dressmaker in the Bible, while Morrison’s Dorcas is raised by an aunt who mends clothes. Dorcas herself doesn’t make or repair clothing, but she was mended by her aunt.

Jazz‘s second theme, the core romance between Joe and Violet, wasn’t evident to me until the final section of the book, and I imagine I’d interpret many of the earlier sections differently if I reread it. (And that’s why I’m telling you about it.) The tragedy that lies at the heart of the plot is nowhere near as simple as it first appears: Joe has killed his mistress but didn’t face charges, while Violet seems to have lost her mind as a result of the betrayal and crime. While I wouldn’t call the book’s ending an absolution for either of them, Morrison creates enough moral ambiguity as she unfurls the story of Joe’s upbringing and the affair that she creates a path for the two of them to emerge as a stronger couple once a small chance encounter gives them a measure of closure. There’s a whiff of blaming-the-victim in the back story, but I had to wonder if that was part of Morrison’s point – that our actions, especially selfish ones, can have dangerous consequences. And maybe I just like the idea of a couple surviving tragedies personal and societal and making use of a somewhat undeserved second chance.

Beloved remains, for me, the better and more powerful novel, but Morrison opened up her style a little to allow for more wordplay and humor, which wouldn’t have been appropriate in the earlier novel’s darker plot. When one fringe (white) character’s father learns that his daughter has become pregnant through an affair with a black man, he is displeased, and even in the middle of a slow-motion train wreck Morrison still slips in a little wit:

His left hand patted around the air searching for something: a shot of whiskey, his pipe, a whip, a shotgun, the Democratic platform, his heart – Vera Louise never knew.

But a major part of why I love Morrison is the way she handles words like an expert chef handles his ingredients, making the finished product more than the sum of its parts. If Morrison wasn’t slyly referring to herself in this line about people in a long march who came from different parts of the country, she inadvertently described her own style in the process:

… and who, when they spoke, regardless of the accent, treated language like the same intricate, malleable toy designed for their play.

If you haven’t read Beloved, you should start there, but Jazz is worth your time once you’ve tackled that book and perhaps Song of Solomon as well.

Next up: Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel, The White Tiger.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: ,
→ March 3, 2010
→ By

The Droid.

Klawchat Thursday at noon EST.

I’ll be on ESPN 1250 in Pittsburgh on Thursday at 11:40 am EST and on KNBR in San Francisco at 12:20 pm PST. Wednesday’s hit on Mike and Mike is now online, although my voice doesn’t sound very clear. And on that note…

—

So my Blackberry Curve stopped making any sounds last week, which meant no ringer on the phone and no alarm on the, uh, alarm, and after a year of getting annoyed with how difficult it was to access the Web even with the superior Opera browser (the Blackberry’s native browser was apparently coded in 1997), I decided to upgrade to a Droid – specifically, the Motorola DROID A855, which is just $50 if you get a new account with Verizon but $529
without the plan. Several of you asked me for thoughts on the phone, so here goes:

* Web browsing rocks. Clear, simple, and compatible with most sites so far. Happiest with this feature by far. In fact, switching applications and moving within applications, all of which is accomplished by tapping or sliding a finger on the screen, is easy and intuitive, and I’ve experienced no lags.

* The screen quality is absurd. This is far, far easier on my eyes than any other phone I’ve seen. Video quality is also very high.

* Pretty good set of productivity apps available. I guess this doesn’t quite compare to the apps available on the iPhone, but given time I think they’ll catch up, and while I’m disappointed that I can’t get Zooloretto on the Droid yet it’s hardly the end of the world.

* Sound quality from the speakers sucks but is better through headphones. It’s still not replacing my iPod, but it’s serviceable.

* Typing sucks. There are three options for typing – a slide-out landscape keyboard, a virtual landscape keyboard, and a virtual portrait keyboard, with the latter two depending on how you’re holding the phone. The virtual portrait keyboard is awful – the key size is appropriate for my three-year-old daughter’s hands. The true keyboard is awkwardly spaced and doesn’t play well with the protective case I bought for the device, which overlaps with the tops of the first row of keys. The virtual landscape keyboard combined with the Droid’s predictive-typing feature works best, but I think I’m only typing at about 75% of the speed I could achieve on the Curve. (I could type on the Curve with my eyes closed, which will never happen with the Droid.) A better mechanical keyboard design would have remedied this.

* I don’t think the call quality on the phone is as clear as it’s been on phones I’ve had before, although I haven’t had trouble completing calls or with calls dropping. I don’t know if the issue on Mike & Mike was my phone, my location, or both.

* The worst feature is the Sync feature, where Google syncs your contacts with … I don’t know, the master server in California where they hold all the data in the world so that they can continue to control our lives through radio waves directed at our cerebral cortices. When it’s syncing, your contacts may become temporarily unavailable, and if the sync fails, you are SOL until it syncs successfully. It’s just a stupid idea – the Contacts should reside on the phone and be accessible at all times.

Despite all those flaws, I do like the phone, since the way I use my phone has changed so much over the last two years. The ability to look things up or stay on top of information has become as important as the ability to communicate outward through the device, but that balance will vary depending on your job and travel schedule.

Also, I’ve found these apps to be useful so far:

* chompSMS. A solid management system for text messages.

* NewsRob. Excellent RSS reader.

* Seesmic. Pretty intuitive Twitter client.

* Google Maps. Impressive. If the voice giving the directions didn’t sound like a computer-generated voice from 1976, it would be a viable replacement for a GPS device.

* RingDroid. I made my own ringtone from Handsome Boy Modeling School’s “Rock and Roll (Could Never Hip Hop Like This).” Win.

* Pandora. I used this once for an hour and its selections were pretty good despite the fact that I had only uploaded eight songs to my Droid.

* Secrets. Password-protected password storage.

* WaveSecure. Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean Google isn’t after me.

I’ve downloaded several others, included MLB At Bat, Astro Player, Shazam, and Urbanspoon, but haven’t used them enough to comment.

—

Unrelated, but if any of you have new suggestions for Phoenix-area eats, I’m all ears. We’re staying in Scottsdale and most of my travels will keep me near the various major league parks, with one brief detour to Tucson.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ March 2, 2010
→ By

Houston eats, 2010 edition.

I had three meals out in Houston, one plus, one solid-average, and one fringy. The plus meal was a reader recommendation on Twitter when I put out a call for Q joints. Pierson & Company, a two-year-old restaurant up on TC Jester north of downtown, made a stir when they finished first in a local competition for best brisket and second to Luling City Market* for ribs. When I asked the woman behind the counter what she recommended, she asked if it was my first time at the place, and a few moments later I had a sampler plate in front of me with a small chunk of brisket, a shred of pulled pork, and a hunk of house-made beef sausage – probably close to a quarter pound of meat, gratis. All three were outstanding, with the sausage really standing out for its mix of flavors (beef, smoke, and hot pepper), but I went with the brisket since that’s Pierson’s main claim to fame. I could eat the bark of Pierson’s brisket all day long; the sliced brisket sandwich came with easily a half pound of meat, more than the roll could hold, with a deep pink smoke ring and the perfect mix of smoky flavor and internal moisture. (They’re known for closing early if they run out of meat – the mark of any great barbecue shack, because it says that they’re smoking meat daily and won’t serve anything that’s been stored and reheated.) Their cole slaw was freshly made but a little oversauced, although anyone familiar with the use of a fork could get around the issue, since the vegetables were still extremely crisp. Skip the peach cobbler, though, as it tasted of the can. All that including a bottle of water ran about $10.

*I have read many times over that Luling City Market in Houston is but a pale imitation of Luling Bar-B-Q in the city of Luling, west of Houston. If any of you can vouch for this or contradict it, I’d love to hear about it.

The solid-average meal was a recommendation from a scout who’s worked Texas for a few years: Dolce Vita, a pizzeria/bar on Montrose in what I think is Houston’s trendy-restaurant district. Dolce Vita does a respectable Italian-style pizza, with a thin crust and a mix of traditional and non-traditional pizzas. (I don’t believe you can do toppings a la carte, although I didn’t ask since they offered something I liked.) The prosciutto and arugula pizza was generously topped with both items and properly sauced underneath, which is to say there wasn’t much tomato sauce at all – deconstructed, it was a sparsely-topped margherita pizza with a significant helping of arugula and several slices of prosciutto added after the underlying pizza was cooked. The roughly twelve-inch pizza ran about $13 and I inhaled it despite ripping through more than half of an appetizer, the grilled broccoli with pecorino romano, which despite coming cold (a shock to me, since it didn’t say anything about it on the menu and “verdure” more often refers to hot vegetable dishes) was one of the best broccoli dishes I’ve ever had. The broccoli was grilled and then chopped or shredded and tossed with salt, lots of fresh black pepper, and thick short ribbons of pecorino romano, so in every bite you’re getting salty, bitter, sweet (from the caramelized parts of the broccoli), and umami (from the cheese). Total bill without a drink was $25 including tip.

The fringe-average meal was around the corner from Dolce Vita, a place called Little Big’s. One of a handful of restaurants from Bryan Caswell, a Houston native who’s both a chef (his higher-end restaurants are Reef and Stella Sola) and a sports fan, Little Big’s combines two recent food trends, sliders and gourmet burgers, with middling results. You can order their three-inch-diameter sliders individually, but the standard order is three sliders in any combination of four types – beef with caramelized onions, southern-fried chicken, pulled pork (smoked for twelve hours), or black bean. In the interests of serving you, the reader, I ordered one of each of the first three types. The beef burger was dominated by the flavor of the caramelized onions, which were brilliantly sweet with just a hint of their natural acidity, but the beef itself ended up in the background – and, worse, it wasn’t hot, just warm when I got it. The pulled pork was similarly lukewarm, although I can at least understand why Q might not be served piping hot (it’ll dry out if you smoke it and then hold it too long), but the smoke flavor was strong and it was only slightly sauced so the smoke could come through. The chicken was boring and the crust, while very crispy, had no intention of staying anywhere near the meat and half of it slid off the first time I picked the slider up. Their hand-cut fries are on a par with Five Guys’ (that’s good) and maybe 2/3 the cost, although sitting in a basket they started to steam themselves and became a little soggy. The chocolate milkshake was thick and creamy and redolent of chocolate syrup stirred into vanilla ice cream. I do really like what Caswell’s trying to do here, and with better execution – quality control on the burgers, serving the fries in a paper bag or just a wider basket, using actual chocolate ice cream instead of syrup – it could be plus, but this time out it fell short.

Unrelated to food but worth a mention: I was very impressed by Rice’s baseball field, Reckling Park. I’ve been to minor league stadiums that weren’t that nice and I can see why the NCAA might love to have regionals there when the Owls earn it through their play. I know college baseball is still a poor cousin to its big-revenue brethren on campus, but Rice should be able to convert their history of good clubs and a beautiful stadium into fan support from outside the campus. After all, would you rather go see Anthony Rendon … or Brandon Lyon?

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 1, 2010
→ By

Straight Man.

I’ll be on Mike & Mike on Wednesday morning at 9:40 am EST, and on ESPN Radio’s Baseball Tonight that evening in the 7 pm hour. Chats are completely up in the air until the end of spring training due to conflicts with games.

—

I don’t dislike Gracie. At least I don’t dislike her when I think about her. When I’m in one place and she’s in another. It’s when she’s near enough to backhand that backhanding her always seems like a good idea.

Hank Devereaux, the narrator and title character of Richard Russo’s brilliant
Straight Man, is a serious man wholly incapable of being serious, even when the situation calls for it. A tenured professor at a small public university in west-central Pennsylvania, Devereaux holds the temporary chairmanship of the English department (a job he doesn’t really want), believes that his brightest students “have concluded that what’s most important in all educational settings is to avoid the ridicule of the less gifted,” finds himself at the center of various family crises, and desperately needs to take a good, long piss*.

*Indeed, if talk of urination or male genitalia offends you, this may not be the book for you. I also wouldn’t recommend reading this if you’re drunk and trying not to break the seal.

Russo fills Straight Man with his standard menagerie of irresponsible men, generally responsible if somewhat inscrutable women, and small-town characters, but he aims his satirical instincts squarely at liberal-arts universities and their fatuous faculty members, including a couple of grade-A wackos in Devereaux’s department. The school is under pressure from the legislature to cut costs, an annual event, but this year a persistent rumor of a mass firing in the English department has everyone edge, with even tenured professors concerned they’re about to be let go and all members convinced that Devereaux has acceded to the demands of higher-ups by drawing up a proposed list of instructors to be cut – a fear he does nothing to dispel even though the legend is false. And he manages to escalate the issue by threatening on live (and very local) television to murder a goose if he doesn’t get a budget figure from the state by the following Monday, a spontaneous (if inspired) move that, of course, has unintended consequences.

While not quite as nuanced as his prior two novels, Straight Man is the funniest of the four Russo books I’ve read. Devereaux is sarcastic, but complex, carrying the burdens of an upbringing by two parents incapable of showing much love (one of whom, his father, eventually skipped out for an affair with a graduate student) and a daughter incapable of making responsible decisions (the one truly irresponsible woman in the book) as well as the weight of a career that went neither as far nor as well as he’d hoped. Devereaux published one book twenty years earlier and it turned out to be the only book he had in him. While that doesn’t make him a failure, it hasn’t given him the confidence of a history of success to drive him forward in his academic career or make him recognize the unusual stability of his home life. It probably has, however, prevented him from growing out of his sardonic (dare I say “snarky?”) personality, which is all the better for the reader.

The one hitch in Straight Man, a minor one at that, is the lack of a really strong female character. Hank’s wife, Lily, is a little too perfect, and spends much of the book away on a job interview, giving Hank a chance to really get himself into trouble. Hank’s secretary, Rachel, appears in every Russo book in some form – the sweet, somewhat attractive, meek woman with horrible taste in men – and his mother, an aloof, haughty woman largely devoid of maternal affectins, feels a little recycled as well. None of this detracted from the book’s humor or Russo’s compassion for his central male characters one iota. I enjoyed Straight Man on multiple levels and I’d recommend it to just about everyone.

You can also see my previous reviews of three other Russo novels – Empire Falls, Nobody’s Fool, and The Risk Pool – all of which were excellent.

Next up: Toni Morrison’s Jazz.

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

Middlesex.

My draft blog entry on Jameson Taillon is up, as is a new post with scouting reports on Rice players Anthony Rendon & Rick Hague as well as thoughts on James Paxton’s decision to withdraw from Kentucky.
—

There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex is obsessed with the nature of our genes, or how our genes determine our nature, and understandably so, as a rare genetic mutation has left the narrator, née Calliope Stephanides, a “hermaphrodite,” or more accurately a boy born with underformed genitalia so that the doctor who gives birth to him and his parents mistake him for a girl and raise him as one until he’s fourteen. At that age, a car accident leads to the discovery of his true biological nature, a trip to a noted specialist who seems more interested in his papers than his patients, and Calliope’s decision to live out his life as the male Cal.

The novel spends more time on the history of Cal’s family and the path of the one renegade gene that affects his life, only spending the last third or so on Cal’s story. It begins in Turkey, where his Greek grandparents – who happen to be third cousins, as well as siblings – marry during their flight from the sacking of Smyrna and start a new life in Detroit amid a population of cousins and fellow Greek immigrants and a backdrop of Detroit’s brief boom and gradual decline after World War II. This family history was, to me, predictable, uninteresting, and rife with cliched characters. Cal’s cousin, Father Mike, is the worst of the lot, right down to his final act in the book; the only thing more cliched would have been if he’d molested a kid, but even without that, obvious author is obvious. The author’s antipathy toward religion made it clear that Father Mike was, and would be, one of the bad guys.

Where the book picked up in interest was when an ER doctor in Michigan discovers, if you’ll excuse the indelicacy, what exactly is between Calliope’s legs. The rapid-fire chain reaction that comes next, even with a hackneyed plot twist or two, opens up a world of questions and ambiguities that get at the heart of what the book is (or should be) about. Eugenides/Cal reject biological explanations for our nature and character, but at the same time reject the nurture argument (Cal is, after all, raised as a girl, but at fourteen decides to be a boy). In a more spiritually-minded book, I might argue this was the author’s defense of dualism, but here, I think Eugenides was really arguing for free will. We are not fully determined by our genes, our circumstances, or our upbringing, although all three are factors that contribute to our ultimate identities. We decide who we are, and we can even flout the rules laid down by our genes or our environment. Until Eugenides gets around to focusing on Calliope/Cal, however, the book drags with neither narrative greed nor clear point; I put the book down after one trip and read just twenty pages over four days before finishing it on my next flight.

I was also put off somewhat by Eugenides’ disdain for so many of his characters, even the “good” ones, other than Calliope/Cal, who is by her nature uncomfortable with himself even after his choice to live as a male. Desdemona, the traditional grandmother, is an eccentric, neurotic kook with her half-pagan spirituality and practiced martyr act. Milton, her son, is an angry, skeptical son who supposedly loves his kids but certainly shows little affection for them until Calliope disappears after her diagnosis – and it’s probably not a coincidence that at that point her older brother is also incommunicado, meaning that he chased the second AWOL child, probably because she was cushioning him from the blow of the first.

I can understand, to some degree, why the Pulitzer committee would choose Middlesex for the highest honor in American fiction. There’s certainly a modern, edgy angle to using an intersex person as the narrator and central character of a book. The biological motif is novel, and the question of nature versus nurture is ever more relevant as we hear headlines about how love, religion, altruism, and other feelings are nothing more than chemical interactions in the brain or reactions predetermined by our genes. There are two ways to read any novel: A straight read – I’d call it “superficial” but the term is too derogatory – where the reader focuses on plot and prose, and an academic read where the reader looks for meaning, metaphor, and symbolism. Middlesex is a better book in the latter vein, as it’s thought-provoking and intelligent, covering ground I haven’t seen before in a mainstream novel. Unfortunately, Eugenides’ ham-handed character development and the long buildup to the most interesting plot strand in the book made it a mediocre read for anyone who reads just for the pleasure of compelling characters or a gripping plot.

Next up: I’m almost finished with Richard Russo’s Straight Man, after which I’ll start Toni Morrison’s Jazz.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,