On my ESPN blog.
Milwaukee writeup soon.
The collected thoughts of sportswriter, bookworm, & food critic Keith Law
On my ESPN blog.
Milwaukee writeup soon.
Those of you looking for a live blog for the final day of the regular season should check out Vegas Watch, where our favorite degenerate gambler will be providing commentary on the four games of relevance.
I’m in Milwaukee, eating and writing up a storm. To tide you over, here’s a great WSJ article on the rise of the reusable bag, replacing the so-called “T-shirt” disposable plastic bags that have become the environmentalist’s new bête noire. It’s a well-written, balanced piece and brought a few things to light for me (like how the “I used to be a plastic bag” slogan has two interpretations).
Chez Law, we have more of those reusable bags than we really need, but many are the products of trips to the store without our bags and our subsequent refusals to take disposable ones. I think we have five from Whole Foods and at least four from Trader Joes, although I will take any bag to any store. I always tell myself I’m going to leave one in my car, and sometimes I do, except that then I take it into the store, fill it, bring it inside to empty it, and never restore it to the back seat.
From today’s chatters:
(1675) Adam (Roselle, IL)
Keith, some good breweries to check out in Milwaukee: Lakefront and Sprecher. Other good local beers are Point, Capitol, and New Glarus.
(1674) Kyle (Chicago)
Ack! Take my advice and thank me later, Wisconsin is the 2nd fastest up-and-comer on the US craft beer scene (after Michigan). Here’s what you need to look for; New Glarus, Sprecher (German style stuff), Central Waters, Furthermore, Capital (more German) and Tyranena. If you want the best of those, the Black Bavarian from Sprecher and anything wheat or fruit-based from New Glarus are all world class.
(1533) Shawn (WI)
See if you can get your hands on some Capital Brewery or Lakefront Brewery Beer.
(2552) DTK, Troy, NY
In Milwaukee, try Sprecker. Little homestyle brewery. They have awesome rootbeer and ginger ale, too.
(2163) Jon UK
From a Chicago beer writer Milwaukee beers:- I’d pick Lakefront, although Roger Protz would opt for Sprecher instead. Plenty of other Wisconsin micros to pick there, too.
(1709) Evan (Philly)
Keith, try Lakefront Brewery in Milwaukee. Good craft beer.
Someone asked what “Old Mildred” is … it’s Old Milwaukee, a bad beer made by Pabst.
I’ll be on KJR radio in Seattle tonight at 8:05 PDT. And, while I’m here, I’ll have a chat at the Four-Letter on Thursday at 1 pm EDT.
So reader ajd posted this in the comments on my Vanity Fair review, a follow-up to his question of whether I ever read lesser-known works by great authors:
My original question was, in part, based on criticism in works like Myers’ _Reader’s Manifesto_, i.e. that certain “great” literature is only considered great because it is deemed so by the keepers of the kingdom. I’ve always wondered how useful certain lists of great books are for this very reason — do the authors pick the best books, or do they pick the books that make them look the most intelligent and the most in tune with what other literati value?
Obviously this is moot to some extent, as one simply has to start somewhere. And some of your less-favorable reviews seem to indicate that you agree with this general premise above; I’d just wondered if, once you’ve read other works by authors on these lists, you’d found you preferred them over the best-known books.
I’m with Myers and ajd to a point; there is no question that some books are considered great because they’ve always been considered great, and I think there are a few books that are considered great because they’re incredibly hard to read. There’s also the whole stream-of-consciousness movement started by Joyce – like a viral infection through the world of fiction – that gets praise from academics but that leaves most readers cold or on the outside altogether. I admit I haven’t read Pamela or Clarissa, but their greatness has to be almost wholly derived from their influence on contemporary or near-contemporary authors, since they’re scarcely read today.
However, there’s a limit to this absolute-contrarian view. Some books are considered great because they’re actually great. One Hundred Years of Solitude (in the top 20 of the Novel 100) is one. Most of you who’ve read The Master and Margarita (which is in the honorable mentions for the Novel 100) agree that it’s phenomenal. I don’t hear anyone saying that Don Quixote (#1 on the Novel 100) isn’t anything special.
I also run into a fair amount of disagreement on the rankings of novels by prolific authors. What is Charles Dickens’ greatest novel? In high school, we read Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. The Novel 100 includes the former, but adds Bleak House and The Pickwick Papers (the latter being my favorite). Some cite Hard Times for its blend of comedy and biting social commentary. And when the Guardian did its list, the only Dickens novel on it was David Copperfield.
Part of why Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is typically considered his best book is that it’s his most serious, and there is absolutely an academic/critical bias against comic novels. (That said, Modern Library put A Handful of Dust over Brideshead Revisited, while the Bloomsbury 100 includes the former but omits the latter.) It is almost as if a comedy has to be very old (Fielding, Austen) or the author’s only great work (Heller’s Catch-22) to be taken seriously.
Most people associate “pesto” with basil pesto, also known as pesto Genovese, a mixture of basil, Parmiggiano-Reggiano, garlic, pine nuts, and olive oil. The term “pesto” just means “smashed” or “beaten,” and can refer to any sauce made from pureed ingredients in an emulsion with oil. On my last trip to Italy nine years ago, my wife had pasta with olive pesto in a little restaurant in Assisi, and liked it so much that we went back the next night so she could have it again. My personal favorite non-basil pesto is one with roasted red peppers.
This is ridiculously easy to make if you just want to use jarred roasted red peppers, although roasting your own is easy – do it on a grill or in a 400 degree oven until the skin of the pepper is charred (not burned to ash), then let it rest in a bowl with foil covering it for ten minutes, then peel the skin off. To use them for this recipe, make sure the peppers have no seeds or rib meat remaining.
1 roasted red pepper
1 clove garlic, pressed or chopped
3 Tbsp pecorino romano cheese, grated
3-4 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
pinch salt, pepper, crushed dried chili pepper (optional)
Puree the first three ingredients, then gradually add the olive oil while continuing to puree to form an emulsion. Season with salt, pepper, and red pepper as desired. Serve over pasta (with grilled chicken, if you like) or use in place of tomato sauce on pizza.
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 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.
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