It’s bad enough…

…to get your tongue stuck to a metal light pole.

It’s worse when the incident makes the news.

Chat today.

Klawchat today at 1 pm EST.

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Suck.

I don’t think I have completed and hated a book as thoroughly as I hated Oscar Hijuelos’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. I can hardly decide where to start in listing what I disliked.

    • The two main characters. The Mambo Kings are two brothers who emigrate from Cuba to the United States. Nestor, by far the more interesting of the two characters, is either depressed or just lovelorn, and is dead before the book’s midpoint. Cesar, the older brother, is dissolute, obsessed with his penis, drunk nearly all of the time, and depressing as hell as he approaches his own death.
      The sex. I don’t mind if there’s sex in a novel as long as it’s well-written and not gratuitous, but this entire book was full of passages that would have won the Bad Sex in Fiction award had it existed at the time of the book’s publication. The novel must hold the record for the most uses of the word “pubic” in any publication that isn’t sold with a black wrapper around it. Hijuelous treats us to images like “the head of his penis weeping semen tears;” a woman’s “bad habit of yanking hard on his quivering testicles at the moment of his climax;” almost clinical descriptions of straight-up, oral, and anal sex; and – most disturbing of all – a reference to Cesar thinking about being in his mother’s womb while he performs oral sex on women.
      The story – or lack thereof. This isn’t about the rise and fall of the brothers’ band, called the Mambo Kings. When Nestor dies, the band dies; the book is almost two separate novels cobbled together, although neither would have been much better had it stood alone. It’s not about Cesar’s descent into a physical condition that matches his broken emotional state, or his lifelong struggle to overcome the abuse he suffered as a child at his father’s hands. It’s not about Nestor’s depression or melancholy, since he’s dead before we get much insight into that. It’s about Cesar whoring and drinking and eating his way through middle age into an early death.
  • The best explanation for this awful mess that I could conceive is that Hijuelos was trying to offer some sort of meditation on mortality, how potentially short our lives are (Nestor) or how we might look back when at death’s door and consider and reconsider our actions (Cesar). What we get, instead, is a catalog of Cesar’s sexual exploits and regular references to his acid reflux. Hijuelos even manages to make food boring, with lists of foods at the huge meals the Cuban brothers would eat but none of the descriptive language needed to bring those foods to life – although, given the crude and methodical descriptions Hijuelos gives us of sex acts, perhaps we should be thankful that he didn’t ruin food for his readers as well.

    I have actually seen the 1992 adaptation, The Mambo Kings, starring a then-unknown-in-America Antonio Banderas as Nestor, but the film was very loosely based on the book, and the interpretation of what comes after Nestor’s death bears little relation to Hijuelos’ text. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

    Next up: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, by Assia Djebar, named one of the twelve best African books of the twentieth century by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair in 2001.

    IBAF rankings.

    The International Baseball Federation has released its first-ever baseball rankings, by country.

    I can’t believe they put Thailand 26th – that’s an outrage – and there will be rioting in Lahore when word gets out that Pakistan ranked last.

    TV today + Raines column.

    I’ll be on ESPNews today at 4:10 pm and 6:20 pm EST, talking mostly Hall with a little Lowe thrown in.

    There’s also a new column from me on Tim Raines’ candidacy that has been a little lost in the Rickey/Rice shuffle.

    Technical difficulties.

    I’m still rebuilding the site, so bear with me.

    The Mailbag of Malcontent, vol. 11.

    From a reader named Dante:

    Your wrong about Rice ,he is most Deserved

    Well that just settles it.

    What I really don’t get is what possesses someone to go through all the effort to find my ESPN mailbag … and then send that message.

    ESPN’s Hall of Fame ballots.

    Eleven of them, all summed up in one table.

    And to think, in January 2019, I might have a “KL” column of my very own, with an “x” in the row for Tim Raines.

    The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

    Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001, is a clever, sprawling novel about two young cousins who become almost overnight sensations in the world of comic books, helping to launch the genre’s golden age leading into World War II.

    Kavalier & Clay tells the story of Josef Kavalier, a Jewish refugee from Prague who flees the Nazis in a most unusual fashion, and Sammy Klayman (who adopts the nom de plume of Sam Clay), his American cousin with whom he goes to live. Sammy has a knack for storycraft but isn’t much for art, while Josef, in addition to being an experienced magician, is a skilled and meticulous artist. Seeing the success of Superman, the two cook up a new superhero, The Escapist, and convince Sammy’s novelty-selling employer to publish a comic book as a way to sell more useless gadgets to kids. The Escapist is a success, but after a few years of glory, the two cousins’ lives take rather sudden turns for the worse.

    Chabon’s mind and typewriter appear to ignore boundaries and guidelines, resulting in a book that often lacks direction and needed cuts both to its prose and to its scope. There’s an entire section, depicting Joe’s time serving in Antarctica during the war, that is superfluous and insanely over the top (Joe survives carbon monoxide poisoning that kills almost everyone in the camp, then survives a plane crash, then survives being shot … come on). The major plot events are usually out of the blue; the first chunk of the novel revolves almost entirely around the development and publishing of the cousins’ comic books, with side stories about their two romantic entanglements, when, roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, Chabon suddenly shifts direction, hitting each cousin with a separate, shocking, tragic event, and turning the book dark as if he’d switched off all the lights.

    The prose suffers similarly from the lack of editing. His vocabulary is immense, including a handful of Chabon neologisms, but he uses a number of words that will be unfamiliar to the majority of readers and would have been better replaced by more common terms. Does he really need to describe an after-lunch event as “post-prandial?” Why would he add the last two words to the sentence, “Lit thus from behind by a brimming window, Josef Kavalier seemed to shine, to incandesce.” Why refer to the “ordinary wailing and termagancy of the dogs” instead of referring to their temper or peevishness or (if he wanted to use a fancy word) choler? These words may all be perfectly cromulent, but it doesn’t mean they were the best words for Chabon to use in his prose. He’s clearly a man in command of the language – referring to an expanse of Antarctic water as “this grievous sea,” calling a dictionary simply “the unabridged” – but his verbal brake pads appear to be worn through.

    The first two-thirds of the novel, before it turns dark, is witty. Chabon is deft at writing quick dialogue and providing dry, almost Wodehouse-ish observations (“He drank an extremely cheap brand of rye called Brass Lamp. Sammy claimed that it was not rye at all but actual lamp oil, as Deasey was strongly near-sighted.), adding the occasional flourish of grin-inducing detail, as in the footnote that tells us that the compendium of one character’s pulp-fiction works was found a half-century later in an IKEA store “serving as a dignified-looking stage property on a floor-model ‘Hjörp’ wall unit.” But those occasional footnotes are another symbol of Chabon’s expansive vision and unwillingness to narrow his scope for the novel’s own good; whereas the miraculous Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is fully committed to the novel-cum-historical-document approach, with copious footnotes and consistent use of fictional reference works, Chabon is a footnote dilettante and gives only splotches of fictional history as it suits him.

    Kavalier doesn’t fare well in comparison to Jonathan Strange beyond their different approaches to adding realistic historical notes and details. Susanna Clarke created two flawed but compelling main characters, putting them in partnership and then in conflict, giving the reader incentives both to support and oppose each character in response to individual thoughts and actions. Neither Kavalier nor Clay is as fully-formed as Strange or Norrell; Sammy’s character, in particular, is only briefly explained by an odd chapter about his odder father, and Clay’s homosexuality is there almost as a plot convenience, with little exploration at all of the conflicts a gay (and mostly closeted) man would have faced in that time. Sammy is gay because it allows Chabon to mess with him twice in crucial plot points that wouldn’t have worked if he was straight. When he’s finally outed, the consequences are almost nil, which doesn’t seem remotely realistic for the time period.

    Kavalier is worth reading for Chabon’s sheer vision – he researched his topic thoroughly and created a paean to the golden age of comics that also covers the Holocaust – and some of the book’s more successful inventive ploys, but the disjointed story and incomplete characters left me disappointed and unaffected at the close.

    Next up: Another Pulitzer winner, the oddly out-of-print The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos. About a quarter of the way through it, I’m not impressed, although I’ll save the biting commentary for the writeup.

    The freezer.

    Try this link for today’s KlawChat at 1 pm EST.

    Michael Ruhlman has an interesting post today on the “freezer pantry” – things you keep in your freezer so you always have them on hand to add to dishes. I’ve been doing something similar for years now, although I had never thought of tomato paste as freeze-able. (I’ll certainly try it now, because I never go through a can of tomato paste – something I only use occasionally – before it passes its prime.)

    Here’s my list of freezer staples, some of which overlap with his:

    • Bacon. I buy a package, use what I need right away, roll up each individual slice, and bag them. Rolling them separately makes it easier to pull out just the number of slices I need, and they thaw quickly if you dunk them (in a plastic bag) in cool water because of all the surface area.
      Chicken stock. I freeze it in one-cup and three-cup containers. You can really never have enough of this stuff. I usually have at least one chicken carcass in my freezer for the next batch. Right now I have three. I also keep frozen bits of vegetables that might go into the stock – ends of celery, peppers, and onions that I wouldn’t include in a dish but that still have plenty of flavor for a stock.
      Oat bran. You should keep whole grains in your freezer, and mine is full of them: brown rice, barley, whole-grain coarsely-ground cornmeal (better for polenta than what’s sold as “polenta”), and whole wheat flour, at a minimum. I love the taste of oat bran and, given its nutritional benefits, like to add it to all kinds of baked goods. My wife was hooked on Trader Joes’ pumpkin bread in the fall, and I found that you could add 2 Tbsp of oat bran without affecting the texture of the finished product.
      Raw nuts. Again, like whole grains, they can go rancid. Toasted or roasted nuts can lose a little something in the freezer, but raw nuts need to be toasted before you use them, so the freezer is a great spot, and they never freeze together.
      Pancakes. Granted, not an ingredient, and more about feeding the toddler than about actual cooking. But pancakes, cooled on a rack, freeze beautifully and separate easily. For my daughter, I put two on a plate, microwave about 30 seconds, top with pure maple syrup, then nuke for about ten more seconds.
      Lemon juice. Buy a separate ice tray for this. You cut a lemon to get a bit of juice and have half a lemon left over. Squeeze out the rest, measure out 1 Tbsp increments, freeze each in its own compartment, pop them out and bag them. (Don’t leave them in the tray. I have no idea what the process at work is, but they shrivel and become gummy. It won’t happen in a bag with most/all of the air sucked out.) You can do the same thing with egg whites, although I don’t recommend freezing these for more than a few weeks.
      Legumes and corn. Right now, I have frozen peas, lima beans, and corn in my freezer, which is about my minimum. I never cook any of these on their own, but include them in all kinds of stews, soups, and rice dishes. If you have rice, an onion, peas, and corn, you have everything you need for a great and colorful pilaf.
  • I know a lot of people swear by food-saver devices; I bought the inexpensive Reynolds Handi-Vac, because I couldn’t bring myself to buy a $100 device (that’s eight pounds of coffee! nine or ten new books!) that would just take up more space. It works very well on dry goods, and it works quickly. I would link to Amazon, but you’re better off getting it at Target.