The collected thoughts of sportswriter, bookworm, & food critic Keith Law
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
I don’t remember who recommended Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity!
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
Next up: I have already started and finished a nonfiction book, Taking on the Trust
Working on a book writeup, but two links worth seeing:
More shortly…
I’ll be chatting in approximately … well, now over at the Four-Letter.
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.
