Haute cuisine.

Interesting read from the Wall Street Journal on cutting-edge cuisine in Spain, which has become the vanguard of the cooking-as-lab-experiment movement over the last five to ten years. The famous El Bulli restaurant is mentioned, but the focus is on some of the other culinary standouts in Catalonia.

And I suppose as long as you’re on their site, you might want to check out their banking bailout FAQ, aimed at active investors but useful for everyone.

North and South.

I always keep my conscience as tight shut up as a jack-in-a-box, for when it jumps into existence it surprises me by its size.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is a somewhat forgotten (at least in the U.S.) classic of 19th century Brit Lit which I discovered by way of the Bloomsbury 100. It’s a sort of Pride and Prejudice meets Germinal, combining a romance between two people who can’t admit their feelings for each other with a commentary on Britain’s “social problem” during its Industrial Revolution in the early to mid-1800s.

North and South‘s heroine is Margaret Hale, who opens the book by rejecting a marriage proposal from Henry Lennox, the old-fashioned and paternalistic lawyer whose brother has just married Margaret’s cousin, Edith. Margaret’s father then announces that he has become a Dissenter and is leaving his post as minister in the southern hamlet of Helstone, instead moving the family north to the industrial town of Milton (a thinly-disguised version of Manchester) where he’ll become a tutor to a local industrialist named Mr. Thornton. Thornton and Margaret take an instant dislike to each other, sparring over the rights and responsibilities of labor and management in a mirror of the contemporary debates over workers’ rights in England at the time. And, of course, they fall in love.

What works about the novel is that while the romance is the foundation of the story, it spends most of the book in the background as Gaskell uses Margaret and Thornton as launching points for subplots around the labor-management strife in Milton. Margaret’s chance encounter with Bessy Higgins, who is terminally ill from working in a textile mill during her childhood, and her father creates a direct window into the life of workers in England’s factories during the 1800s. Gaskell relies a little heavily on coincidence to make sure that the lives of Margaret, Thornton, the Higginses, Margaret’s godfather Mr. Bell, and even Henry Lennox all intersect, although this was very common even in the best literature of the period, and it’s a justifiable maneuver to ensure that both the social commentary and the romance come to a conclusion in the book’s 500-ish pages.

What worked less for me was the romance itself, which felt a little too derivative of Pride and Prejudice and finds a resolution that is driven in large part by money, rather than by emotions or the development of the main characters. In Austen’s masterpiece, Elizabeth Bennet comes around as she learns more of Mr. Darcy’s character and has to admit to herself that she did him an injustice in their earlier meetings. Here, Gaskell imbues Margaret Hale with similar strength of spirit, but denies her the chance for a completely self-sufficient redemption.

Next up: I like big books and I cannot lie – John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, a parody of the picaresque novel, in all its 750 pages of glory.

I weep for our language (part 6)…

CNN’s Rob Marciano reports from hard-hit Galveston where some residents road out the storm.

Seriously.

Taking on the Trust.

There is no one left: none but all of us … The public is the people. We forget that we all are the people; that while each of us in his group can shove off on the rest of the bill of today, the debt is only postponed. The rest of us are passing it on back to us. We have to pay in the end, every one of us. And in the end the sum total of the debt will be our liberty. – Ida Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company

Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller is Steve Weinberg’s short biography of Tarbell, perhaps the first true investigative journalist in American history and one of the original muckrakers, set off against snippets of the biography of Rockefeller. It’s a good read, but it’s not the story of the battle between these two individuals, who in fact, only met once and had no direct contact even as Tarbell was laying bare the unethical practices of Standard Oil.

Tarbell’s magnum opus was the book quoted up top, an 800-page tome first published in installments in McClure’s magazine, which at the time was an intellectual rag that combined serious (if muckraking) journalism with pieces of short fiction. Tarbell’s father had been involved in the western Pennsylvania oil boom, but also saw his fortunes derailed by the monopolistic practices of Rockefeller’s firm. Weinberg presents the thesis that Tarbell’s drive to expose Rockefeller’s dirty pool, although her earlier work indicates a passion for reformist journalism, with Standard Oil as a likely target of any dogged reporter of the time. What set Tarbell apart was her willingness to work to unearth new sources, including first-person accounts that had not previously come to light, but also documents and letters that other journalists had not bothered to find. She made great use of court documents and filings from the small towns where Standard Oil set up shop, often via shell companies, and identified people who’d had contact with Rockefeller or his minions during Standard Oil’s rise to domination.

Unfortunately, we don’t get much on the direct impact of Tarbell’s book, which only merits a chapter and a half towards the end of Taking on the Trust. Standard Oil was broken up via court ruling a few years afterward, but how direct is the link between Tarbell’s work and that legal decision? And how did Tarbell’s groundbreaking efforts affect the world of journalism afterwards? I imagine that later investigative reporters would have given her at least some credit either for directly inspiring them or for opening doors through which they could walk, but Taking comes to a fairly abrupt end once the narrative reaches the breakup.

I may post something over the weekend, but I’ll be on vacation from Sunday to Saturday and probably won’t post anything next week. I’ll keep an eye on the comments, as always.

Runway link.

I’m not going to lie: I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more Karalyn. (She’s the blonde, second from right … as if you noticed anyone else in the pic.)

Karalyn West is one of the models on Project Runway – the drop-dead gorgeous one, to be specific. Turns out she’s also blogging about the show, and she’s not afraid to dish a little dirt. For example, her post on that weird car-parts challenge has her dumping on two designers:

On the topic of stupid designers…. THANK THE LORD KEITH IS GONE! AGH! it’s about damn time, don’t you think? His cocky attitude was getting really old… I mean come on.. Its one thing to be cocky and talented, but cocky and UNTALENTED is another thing. …

Shannone (Kenleys Model) Left the show on her own will because the girl booked an ass-kicking (well paid) job! If you ask me, Kenley deserved it. Me no Likey Kenley, and you cant nack Shannone for going where the money is…

Outstanding. We need more Karalyn (and more skin on Project Runway).

We watched this week’s episode last night … I know sweet F.A. about fashion, but the winning dress was fugly. The model’s hips looked a mile wide; the eye was drawn directly to the freaking test pattern across her pelvis. I don’t know many women who are looking for that kind of shape in a dress.

I was fascinated to see how the judges ripped into the two designers who ultimately went home, but when it came time to criticize that weird thing Kenley made (were there turbines in the shoulders?), their words, tone, and body language all softened. Obviously, they already know who’s going home before they go through their trashing of the bad designs, but it was also clear that they liked Kenley and were disappointed in her design, whereas they could take or leave the two they sent home.

You Shall Know Our Velocity!

I don’t remember who recommended Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity! to me, but I liked the title and have seen a few things on McSweeney’s that made me laugh, so I figured I’d give it a try. The book is funny in places, especially in the first third or so, but as Eggers tries to become more serious (well, I think he was, at least), the book started to unravel for me.

Eggers’ prose is his strongest point as a novelist. He’s got a great knack for descriptive text, whether in analogies (“Down a low-ceilinged hallway and down again and then through a swinging double-door and finally we were in a sort of basement den, the basement of an ancient building, almost surely once this structure’s dungeon or crypt, where hay would be stacked in one corner and men tortured in the other.”) or just in piling words together – and I do mean piling, to the point of overflow – to create a mental picture. Some of the reviews I found compared the running internal monologue of the narrator to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but Eggers crushes them on readability, and contrasting those monologues to the actual dialogue – what we say, versus what we should say or want to say – gave the book an extra layer of complexity and ultimately of meaning.

Much of the book’s humor comes through the fact that neither of the main characters (Will, the narrator, and Hand, his friend – you could write a thesis on the meanings of those names alone) is all that bright. They plan a trip around the world to all sorts of random countries, without thinking that they might need visas or that there may not be a direct flight from Ulaan Baator to Greenland. Will doesn’t want to bring the heavy Churchill biography he’s reading on the trip, so he rips out the first two hundred and last two hundred pages instead. Hand puts on a pretty good smart-guy act, giving us some clever one-liners:

“The mafia here is organized.”
Here I knew what Hand was going to say – I saw it coming from miles away, a slow steamtrain chugging and hooting – and I could do nothing to stop it.
“So you might call it … organized crime?”

The novel starts out as something of a madcap quest to travel around the world for a week, giving $32,000 (a windfall won by Will in appropriately silly circumstances) to deserving people. As the two men travel – and often fail to travel through their own incompetence – they find that giving the money away isn’t as easy as they expected; or, perhaps, that they’re judgmental assholes who keep finding reasons not to give the money away. Or maybe both. Will engages in some internal monologues, rationalizing away his reluctance to give money to certain deserving people, and often gives the money away in hit-and-run fashion – here, take this money, don’t talk to me, don’t look at me, I’m just going to run away now thanks bye.

The descent into vague self-loathing, accented with small doses of existential doubt and and unresolved but never quite explained issues between the two friends, gets old quickly. Will tells us about their longtime friend Jack, who was recently killed in a bizarre car accident, and it’s possible that this is all a reaction to their sudden loss … but the treatment is superficial, just some scraps that could let us speculate wildly but not enough to let us talk intelligently. A novel that started out funny and clever with great prose ended up dull and slow and almost difficult to read.

There are two versions of Velocity! out there, one of which contains a roughly 50-page addendum narrated by Hand that, among other things, casts doubt on Will’s reliability as narrator. The section was apparently written after the book’s publication and is available on the McSweeney’s site if, like me, you get the original edition of the book. If the additional material is meant as satire – a self-deprecating review of sorts, written by one of the principal characters – then it’s clever and kind of funny. If it’s meant as a serious addition to the book, then I wish I’d never seen it.

Several of you have suggested I read either of Eggers’ other books, and since I liked his prose style, I’m sure I’ll give A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius a try.

Next up: I have already started and finished a nonfiction book, Taking on the Trust , about investigative reporter Ida Tarbell and her groundbreaking series about the Standard Oil trust. I’m now into a Brit Lit novel, North and South , by Edith Gaskell.

Quick links.

Working on a book writeup, but two links worth seeing:

  • Someone did, in fact, estimate where the Twins would be if they’d done nothing this offseason. I think the answer is pretty aggressive, but a three-win swing is probably the difference between playoffs and no-playoffs for them.
  • Tom Brady is worth 1.35 Albert Pujolses. Or something like that. Of interest: Matt Cassel went to the same high school that later produced Mike Moustakas and Matt Dominguez (corrected – never blog before the double-espresso).
  • If you didn’t get the Rob Dibble stuff in today’s chat, here’s what he said about me. I’m terribly broken up about it.
  • Bad news for libertarians … and anyone else who dislikes corruption and subsidies for billionaires.

More shortly…

Chat today.

I’ll be chatting in approximately … well, now over at the Four-Letter.

TV/radio today.

I’ll be on Outside the Lines (ESPN) on the 3 pm EDT show, wearing a plastic pig’s snout and lipstick. I’ll also be on ESPN 890 here in Boston at about 5:25 pm.

NYC Eats, September 2008 edition.

Those of you who track me on Twitter or Facebook know that I hit Bar Americain on Friday, after getting recommendations from several readers and even people in the business who saw my note on Mesa Grill from April. At BA, the smoked shrimp salad sandwich was very much as promised. Served on a dark Pullman loaf with watercress inside, but the salad had a rich, sweet smoky flavor (I think hickory, but I’m no expert on smoking woods). I had never had or even heard of “smoked shrimp” before, and other than an excess of dressing (mayonnaise-based, but thinned out with vinegar), the sandwich was outstanding. It’s served with real French fries – no batter or coating, just potatoes, served with a remoulade dipping sauce – and all meals come with a bread basket that includes these amazing, savory cornbread sticks with black pepper.

The one new breakfast spot was Mon Petit Café, which does indeed strive for that Parisian-café look and feel. I met BP’s Joe Sheehan for the meal, and I am pretty sure I ordered wrong: feeling the need for a big protein infusion, I went with the ol’ EMPT, scrambled with bacon and a baguette, although I ordered a croissant on the side. The bacon was ridiculously good – I could have eaten a half-pound of it, no problem – while the eggs were sort of overcooked on the inside so that some of the eggs’ liquid had leaked out. The croissant was amazing, as was the chocolate croissant that Joe Sheehan ordered (dessert for breakfast is a big thing over in France). Joe noticed on the restaurant’s Web site that they have good-quality bagged tea if you ask for it; the alternative is Lipton, which just makes dirty water. I’m giving a grade of “incomplete” here, because I need to go back and order something more appropriate.

Virgil’s BBQ was right across the street from my hotel, and though I’ve seen it fifty times I never managed to make it inside. Their pulled pork sandwich (ordered without sauce) was solid average, but not above it. The meat was extremely moist and I received plenty of burnt ends, but they apparently didn’t trim the meat at all, which meant first removing a huge portion of pork fat from my mouth, then lifting the lid performing surgery on the mound of meat to remove any other slimy bits. The meat had no clear smoke flavor or flavor from the dry rub used before smoking, but because it was smoked properly, it could rest somewhat on the laurels of the flavor that pork develops no matter what wood is used to smoke it. The side of barbecued baked beans was a waste of time, and the iced tea was too bitter. I wouldn’t mind trying their brisket, and the pork was good enough to go again since I’m usually staying in the vicinity. Incidentally, the sides that come with the sandwich are French fries or (cole slaw with potato salad). Not only is that weird (one side vs. two), but who the hell orders French fries in a BBQ joint?

Between doubleheader games on Sunday, I went to Flushing’s Chinatown and tried Sentosa, a refugee restaurant from Manhattan’s Chinatown, now on Prince Street a block away from the Main Street stop on the 7. I’ve had Malaysian food twice in my life, including this meal. I stuck to dishes that were obviously Malaysian, since the menu was sort of a pan-Asian thing with lots of Chinese or even Chinese-American options on it. The roti canai with chicken curry featured a large, thin, slightly sweet pancake that is meant to be dipped in the curry sauce. The dish got the obligatory one-pepper label for “spicy” (there were no degrees of spiciness, which is apparently a binary variable in Malay cuisine), but I’d give the coconut milk-based red curry about a one or two out of ten in terms of spiciness. The chicken was dark meat, of course, and there were two potato cubes in the tiny bowl. For an entrée, I went with nasi lemak, which I think is the most famous Malaysian dish out there, a sort of deconstructed fried rice that’s served with a giant mound of white rice that was cooked with coconut and cloves and is surrounded by accompaniments: curried chicken (more of a brown curry this time), a sweet/spicy mixture that apparently contained anchovies (whatever it was, it was very chewy), picked vegetables (mostly cabbage and carrot), sliced cucumber, a hard-boiled egg, and roasted peanuts. I mixed and matched haphazardly, skipping the hard-boiled egg entirely and trying to avoid the temptation to just eat all the rice, which was completely infused with coconut flavor. Everything but the anchovy mixture was excellent, and unlike the barbecue lunch, it didn’t push me into a meat coma afterwards.