The collected thoughts of sportswriter, bookworm, & food critic Keith Law
So a friend/reader asked me today where he might get started with the works of P.G. Wodehouse. Here’s what I wrote:
Well, he has two primary series: Jeeves/Wooster and Blandings. Jeeves/Wooster is more famous, but I wouldn’t say it’s better, just different.
There’s a three-in-one set called Life With Jeeves
The first Blandings novel is Something Fresh
And if you just want to read a standalone book that’s not part of a series, I’m particularly fond of The Small Bachelor
So I had some ups and downs in Chicago, but I’m glad to say that after some mediocre meals to start, I finished strong.
The Oak Tree Room is in the same building as the Four Seasons, at 900 N Michigan Ave. I had read that they offered excellent cranberry-pecan pancakes, and I wanted to get some exercise, so I walked up there … and was disappointed. The pancakes were dry and flat, and the dried cranberries tasted more like candied fruit than dried.
Vong’s Thai Kitchen on Hubbard (near the Billy Goat Tavern) was another disappointment, not least because the service was comically bad. I still have no idea who my server was, and I ended up waiting about ten minutes to order (past the point where my menu was closed) and ten or fifteen minutes for someone to realize I was done and offer me the check. A waitress, maybe “my” waitress, did eventually come and ask if I wanted to try one of their “mini” desserts (which are apparently about $1.50) each, but by that point I was annoyed enough to just want to leave. Plus I had a gelateria in my sights for the afternoon.
Anyway, the food at Vong’s was also disappointing, since it’s not so much Thai food as haute cuisine served on a bed of Thai food. I skipped the pad thai, my usual bellwether dish for Thai restaurants, fearing it would be too sweet – let’s face it, there were no Thai customers in the place, and that’s not a good sign for the authenticity of the food. I ordered panang curry with “pulled” chicken, and the chicken part was very good, still moist and indeed resembling pulled chicken. But the peanut-dominated sauce was heavy and slightly bitter, and there wasn’t much else in the sauce besides the chicken and some peas. The complimentary salad of shredded daikon and carrots in a “Szechuan” vinaigrette (can we just call it a sesame vinaigrette? Is that so freaking hard? And why would I want a Szechuan vinaigrette in a Thai restaurant?) was very good, but a poor harbinger of what was to come.
Just across the street from the Oak Tree Room is an Italian deli called L’Appetito that purports to sell gelato. They don’t. That stuff is ice cream, a claim I can support by pointing out that I couldn’t get my plastic spoon into the stuff. Next.
I had dinner with a longtime email correspondent and regular on Baseball Think Factory, who goes by the handle “Shredder.” He suggested La Creperie on Clark, which is close to Wrigley Field without being right on top of it. Their savory crepes are all made with buckwheat, and I went with a chicken, goat cheese, and tomato crepe. It was delicious; the goat cheese was the dominant flavor, and it worked nicely with the béchamel sauce that filled the crepe. The chicken was white meat, a little overcooked (I assume it was cooked first before it was added to the crepe), but since it was sitting in the sauce it wasn’t a big deal. The tomatoes were fresh, but really, I could take or leave tomatoes. This was about the goat cheese, and the crepe itself, which was delicious, slightly nutty but not overwhelmingly buckwheaty.
Thursday’s breakfast was at Lou Mitchell’s on W Jackson St, near Canal. They’re known for their homemade pastries, so I asked the waitress what one pastry I should order, and I got this answer: “They’re all good.” Yeah, you’re a big help, sweetheart. I can see why you’re not in sales. I went with a coconut donut, which was one of the daily specials; it was a cake donut, very moist, but the glaze was sickeningly sweet and I only ate about a third of it. The Greek bread that came with the meal was a much bigger success, almost like a challah bread with a soft interior and a very crumbly exterior. As for the meal itself, I went with my usual EMPT, going for two eggs scrambled with bacon. The “two eggs” bit is a joke; the meal came in a seven- or eight-inch skillet, and the scrambled eggs took up half the skillet, which has to be at least four eggs considering how thick they were. They were cooked through, a touch dry, but good overall. The potatoes were sliced very thinly and appeared to be cooked solely on the flat-top in a pile, so that some were just steamed while others were nicely browned. Total $10.42 before tip.
Lunch was at the Frontera Grill, accompanied by Jayson Stark. I went with the tacos al carbon, and asked the waiter whether I should get the skirt steak (traditional) or the duck, and he said it was a coin flip but he’d take the duck. Thank God for someone with the cojones to answer one freaking question. Anyway, before the meal came we had some chips and two salsas, one green, the other a dark red with some sort of roasted peppers in it, and both were outstanding, with the red salsa spicy but not at all hot, and both boasting gorgeous bright colors. The tacos al carbon ($15) came with a delicious and clearly fresh guacamole that had never seen the inside of a food processor, with good chunks of avocado still in it and hints of garlic and cilantro that didn’t overwhelm the fresh avocado flavor. The duck was delicious, but unfortunately had some gristle in it, something I haven’t encountered before, although to be fair I usually go with duck leg rather than breast. The meat was medium-rare, but more rare in some parts (where the gristle was) and medium in others. The best part of the dish was something I can only call a Mexican version of baked beans (frijoles charros), with red beans perfectly cooked (soft but al dente) in a reduced, smoky-sweet sauce redolent of bacon. Jayson ordered a shrimp dish ( camarones en salsa verde con hongos) that he said was one of the best things he had ever tasted.
My last meal in Chicago was probably the most interesting of the trip, mostly good, some less good. The place is called Twist, and it’s a tapas bar (tapas here meaning “small plates,” not Spanish food) down Sheffield, a block or two south of Wrigley Field. Overall the food was good, made from fresh ingredients and prepared right in front of anyone who sits at the bar (as I did). I ordered three dishes: braised beef tenderloin on a corn cake with feta and a spicy aioli, dates wrapped in bacon, and grilled “vegetables” (zucchini and yellow squash, as it turns out) on crostini with goat cheese. The last dish was the biggest hit for me; the bread used for the crostini was delicious, and there was just a dab of goat cheese sitting on a small spread of roasted red pepper purée sitting on the slab of squash. It was perfect, with accent flavors from the toppings complementing but not overwhelming the flavor of the squash, finished with a nice crunch.
The dates wrapped in bacon were excellent, except for one thing: the dates themselves were sugared, making for a bizarre, sweet note to finish the dish, not a flavor I’m used to experiencing in a savory dish. The bacon was perfectly cooked, and the dish came with a thick balsamic-based sauce with a gravy-like consistency, although I couldn’t tell you how much it contributed since “sweet” was the dominant flavor.
The big question mark for me was the beef tenderloin. The beef was marinated in something strong and acidic, most likely a red wine concoction, and was served shredded in a mound on a corn cake (very soft, with a consistency more like grits than polenta, and oddly enough, no actual corn kernels), with large hunks of feta cheese, chopped red onion and tomatoes, and then lines of a spicy “aioli” that was really mayonnaise with chili oil or hot sauce added. (True aioli doesn’t have egg yolks in it, but this sauce did.) Think about that flavor combination: the beef, cheese, onions, and tomatoes are all acidic and tangy, pleasant flavors in small doses but overwhelming in large doses. The only other flavor in the dish is the heat from the spicy aioli. The corn cakes weren’t sweet, and weren’t really salty, although it’s possible that all the sour/tangy/spicy numbed my mouth to the point where I couldn’t taste what they offered. The shame of it all is that the ingredients in the dish were good and the concept was as well: a piece of braised beef tenderloin, preferably served whole, on a sweet corn cake with corn in it, with a spicy aioli or mayo would have been perfect, simpler, cheaper to make, and less of a mess on the plate. There was a good dish hiding in here, but I couldn’t make it out because they went overboard with the additions.
All that said, I’d definitely recommend Twist as a pre-Cubs game hideout. At 5:40 on a Thursday game night, there was no wait, and the place wasn’t full when I left. The food was good, the place is nice, and you don’t have to deal with Cubs fans or tourists who view the game as an excuse to get hammered. I’m just hoping that the Twist chefs simplify some of their dishes to let the clean flavors of the ingredients come through.
I’m a big Hitchcock fan – I’ve seen over twenty of his movies, and when AllNight’s Jason Smith asked me (off air) the other day which was my favorite, I scuffled a little, because it’s hard to pick one. I eventually went with North by Northwest
My wife had a copy of Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn
Rebecca is a different kind of suspense novel than Jamaica Inn, eschewing the protagonist-in-mortal-danger motif for a more psychological one, with jealousy as its dominant theme. The narrator, a never-named 21-year-old woman, marries Maxim de Winter, a 42-year-old widower who lives on an estate called Manderley in rural England. Maxim’s previous wife, Rebecca, was killed in a boating accident just under a year prior, and it appears that the staff, particularly the sinister Mrs. Danvers, are none too pleased about his quick remarriage. The discovery of the boat Rebecca was sailing when she died sets off a chain of events that put Maxim, his wife, and Manderley into danger, but largely danger of a psychological sort rather than a physical one. Jealousy flies in all directions from multiple characters, notably the narrator’s jealousy of her deceased predecessor and Mrs. Danvers’ jealousy of the narrator for taking Rebecca’s place.
Du Maurier’s prose is fantastic, as she has a clear eye and an easy way of imparting the details of the environment, particularly anything out of doors, to the reader, and her dialogue is quick and intelligent. The story itself flows brilliantly, hinging on small twists of fate and relying more on the realistic actions of its characters to drive the plot forward. And the characters are given multiple dimensions, although the narrator’s timidity – overcoming which is a background theme in the novel – made me want to slap her a handful of times after she first arrived at Manderley.
Rebecca also owes a significant debt to Jane Eyre, another novel of a somewhat-forbidden relationship set in a large, foreboding country estate. I hate to apply the word “gothic” to any novel, given the connotations the word has today, but these are two clear masterpieces of English literature and transcend the limitations that “gothic” might seem to impose on a work of fiction.
All that said, I think I preferred Jamaica Inn for its intensity and the way it builds to a big, long climax to Rebecca‘s more grounded and perhaps more realistic drama of speech and situation, even though Rebecca stands up better to literary analysis … and is the only one that comes in a non-purple, trade-paperback edition.
Let me do this one a little differently by starting with the one out-and-out hit of the trip, the new king of gelaterias, one apparently already well-known to Manhattanites but new to me: Il Laboratorio del Gelato. Founded by Jon Snyder – also the founder of Ciao Bella, which he sold in 1989 for $100K – Il Laboratorio is his new venture and beats the pants off of what Ciao Bella is producing, which is high praise. Il Laboratorio’s primary revenue source is in creating customized flavors for the city’s top chefs, but they run a tiny retail outlet at 95 Orchard St on the Lower East Side, selling about a dozen flavors of gelato and four or six of sorbet (I don’t remember, but who cares about sorbet when there is gelato in sight?). Although they make a ton of unusual flavors for restaurants, and the wall is papered with reviews that recommend some odd ones for the retail customer (sesame and hazelnut were the flavors getting the most mentions), the flavors on the day I was there were fairly straightforward. I went with the dark chocolate and the coconut. The coconut tasted more like coconut than an actual coconut does, if that makes sense – rich, creamy, sweet but not sugary, ultra-smooth. The dark chocolate was about as dark as any chocolate ice cream or gelato I’ve ever had; Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy might be darker, but that’s a much higher-fat product. Which brings me to my only question – gelato is typically a low-fat, low-overrun (which refers to the air content of ice cream) product that gets its smoothness from egg yolks and the fact that there’s only about 10% air by volume. This gelato was the thickest and smoothest I can remember having on either side of the Atlantic, and I’m wondering if they ticked the fat content up a bit to boost the smoothness. That wouldn’t make me like it any less, but if they’re using a lot of butterfat, it’s not real gelato. (Speaking of which, one of the reviews on the wall said that they use a lot of “buttermilk” in their gelatos, saying this was traditional. One, it’s not traditional, and two, it would make the gelato sour. I’m thinking this was a non-food writer writing a food article. Bad idea.)
Since I started with the best food of the trip, let me follow with the dud, Dinosaur BBQ in Morningside Heights or whatever they’re calling that part of Harlem these days so that white people are willing to go there. Profiled on the Hungry Detective show on Food Network, which hadn’t let me astray before, Dinosaur’s Q is just not good. I had the pulled pork, which had too many hunks of fat left in it and virtually no smoke flavor. I went with Joe Sheehan (of Baseball Prospectus), who got a combo plate with the pork and with the brisket; the brisket was tender, but also had zero smoke flavor. I got the baked beans, which were soupy and overcooked, and apparently were cooked with Italian sausage in the pot. The cole slaw was the only good part of the meal, as the cabbage was fresh and it was pretty lightly dressed. Joe swears that Virgil’s, which is right near the hotel where I stay when I’m in Manhattan, is a thousand times better.
I hit two breakfast spots, both okay, neither great. The Comfort Diner, on East 45th between 3rd and 2nd, does a daily pancake special, and I think that’s the best bet. The day I tried it, the special was blueberry and pear pancakes, which I ordered with a side of sausage links. The pancakes were very light and had plenty of fresh fruit in them, but there’s one hitch. I usually taste any pancake or waffle without syrup first, just spreading a fine layer of butter on and taking a few bites. I like syrup, but it tends to overwhelm the flavor of anything it’s on. Usually, it’s not a big deal because the pancake or waffle has some sweetness in it, but the cakes at the Comfort Diner tasted like they had almost no sugar in them. I guess that’s fine, but you could give a brother a warning, too. The sausage links were very good, not straight out of a box from the freezer, although they were a little overcooked. The second day I went to the Comfort Diner I went with the standard two eggs-meat-potatoes-toast option. The bacon was greasy and the potatoes were deep-fried and a little dry (but very, very crispy, so it wasn’t all bad), while the eggs were nothing special. They do get points for offering a selection of Harney’s teabags.
The other breakfast spot was the Red Flame, a really popular diner on East 44th just east of 5th Avenue. Their eggs-meat-potatoes-toast plate – I’ll just call it the EMPT from now on – was much better. It’s the first place I’ve been to in a long time where I ordered two eggs scrambled and got two eggs scrambled, clearly cooked in their own skillet to order. They were very good, and the bacon was cooked just right to that point where it’s crispy but not like balsa. The potatoes were nothing special, and I’m trying to figure out if I’ve ever been to a place where I’d compliment the toast. Second visit was a Belgian waffle, which was solid-average, maybe a tick above, pretty light inside, a bit crispy on the outside. On the downside, order hot tea at the Red Flame and you get Lipton.
I also made a trip to Flushing, having lunch at a place called Spicy Taste, a block away from the last stop on the 7 (Flushing Main Street). I ordered a lunch special: shredded pork with bamboo shoots, which comes with rice and hot and sour soup. The soup was fine, but generic, and not all that hot or sour. The pork was very good, perfectly cooked, and the bamboo shoots still had good crunch. One of my dining companions warns that the chicken with garlic sauce was a “bad call,” as the chicken wasn’t trimmed and was still on the bone – which I realize is somewhat traditional, but I find it’s really hard to eat.
I couldn’t leave Flushing without a trip to the Tai Pan Bakery, which has amazing Chinese pastries, some savory and some sweet, at ridiculously low prices. I’ve had their barbecued pork bun before, which is excellent, but since this trip was about dessert, I got a coconut bun (filled with a coconut-sugar paste) and a cream-custard bun (sort of like pastry cream inside, but not as smooth), plus a sago or “bubble” tea. The buns are big, five or six inches long, and are made of a sweet dough that’s somewhere between a Parker House roll and a brioche. If you’ve ever had tsoureki, a Greek Easter bread that usually has citrus in it, it’s like that without the citrus flavor. Best part: total cost was $4.65.
Reader Abel Wang was kind enough to first recommend and then lend me a copy of Karin Fossum’s Don’t Look Back
Don’t Look Back is a very quick read, and I knocked it off in a few subway trips over a 24-hour period in New York City. The main character, Chief Inspector Konrad Sejer, isn’t the hard-boiled type I like most (Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade), but is more of a stoic without a strong personality trait to define him. He’s a young widower and a grandfather, and both characteristics bring some touches of humanity to his approach to this particular case, but given that he’s the central character and now has appeared in a series of detective novels that followed this one, he could use something to set his character apart.
The story is set in a small Norwegian town, where a fifteen-year-old girl is found dead near a lake, her body naked except for an anorak laid on top of her. What set this novel apart from most mass-market detective books was the gradual unfolding of the back story behind the victim and behind the various suspects and witnesses Sejer and his partner Skarre interrogate. Most pulp detective novels today unfurl the story in a small number of very large discoveries, wow moments that seem more designed for a film adaptation or just to shock the reader into feeling excited. Fossum instead brings out the details slowly, in small doses, often presenting them as facts without immediate relevance, which strikes me as a lot more realistic and is definitely a lot less contrived.
Fossum also manages to fold in small details about characters who ultimately have nothing to do with the resolution of the main mystery, but whose interactions with Sejer lead to something small further down the line – for example, when he interviews a Turkish family that has had some trouble assimilating into the community, the father offers a suggestion for Sejer’s eczema … and several chapters later, in an offhand sentence, it appears that Sejer has followed his advice, implying even that Sejer went to the family’s store to pick up the folk remedy in question.
This subtle, fine-pointed approach has an obvious downside, which is that readers used to the big wow are going to find the book dull and the climax anticlimactic. That approach felt a lot more real to me than the constant crescendos of the typical detective novel and of the typical TV crime drama, and I enjoyed the way Fossum depicted Sejer slowly gaining understanding through diligence and through dialogues with his partner. While I prefer the stylings of Hammett and Chandler, for a more contemporary and straightforward detective story, Don’t Look Back was right in line with what I like to read.
A.S. Byatt has briefly been a target of mine for her criticism of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, so I thought it was a good idea to read one of Byatt’s novels to get a better idea of her views on literature. Possession
Possession revolves around the discovery by a milquetoast poetry researcher/grad student type of two unfinished letters by the great (fictional) English poet Randolph Henry Ash to a previously unknown correspondent, the minor (also fictional) poet Christabel Lamotte, who has become a cult hero to those who study literature from a hardcore feminist/lesbian point of view. That researcher, Roland Michell, and another researcher whom he contacts for help, the sort-of feminist Maud Bailey, begin to follow the trail of letters like a pattern of clues to unravel what exactly the relationship was between Lamotte and Ash, while their attempts at secrecy attract attention from several competing researchers who want to find the answer and/or any related documents for their own purposes. Through the correspondence of the two poets, and some further correspondence from Ash’s wife and Lamotte’s female companion (it’s not clear whether we could call them lovers in any modern sense of the word), we gain windows into discussions of the nature of love, poetry, literature, religion, and the afterlife.
And if that doesn’t sound like a thrilling plot, you’re right. Possession‘s major problem, to steal a phrase from Michell and Bailey themselves, is that it lacks “narrative greed.” The characters are driven forward by an almost primal desire to learn what happens next in the story of Ash and Lamotte, but it rang hollow for me. These characters have invested much of their adult lives in learning about one of the two poets, giving them a sense of urgency that it would be impossible for the reader, who has never heard of either poet because Byatt invented them both, to acquire. Add to this the fact that the plot’s denouement ultimately hinges on a quirk of English copyright law and there’s not enough narrative greed to keep me rolling through 555 pages without having to push myself forward at times.
Compounding the problem with the plot was the lack of a single compelling character. Michell is a dull, meek man, whose emotions all seem variations on the color gray, and who is completely tone-deaf to the feelings of the woman with whom he lives (Val) and is sort of seeing. Bailey is sort of prissy, emotionally restrained, often curt, and tinged with a sadness that is never explained. Ash, Lamotte, the various “villains” (including the American researcher Mortimer Cropper, a ridiculously two-dimensional character who almost seems inserted to provide one person against whom the reader can root), all are thin, and the various people with whom we’re expected to connect emotionally are unsympathetic. In fact, the most likable character of all is Euan, a lawyer who ends up playing roles in two plot threads and who has a sense of humor and a set of bollocks that would make him a good protagonist for his own novel.
I give Byatt credit for ingenuity, including the creation of miniature catalogues of material from Ash and Lamotte, with several entire poems, excerpts of epic poems, and a short story by the fictional writers appearing in the book. Unfortunately, those were exceedingly boring, and when I came across the occasional chapter that comprised only verse written by one of the characters, I skipped to the next batch of regular prose. Possession felt more to me like an achievement, a demonstration of cleverness and of ways of using different styles of narration (mixing poetry, omniscient narration, and the epistolary novel) to weave concurrent plot lines together into a cohesive whole. It just would have been a lot better if she’d done anything to make me give a damn about what was going on in the book.
Just wanted to point out a very well-written article on what’s behind the A’s struggles this year. Hurd does a nice job of laying out some possible drivers and examining them in turn, and he does it all in a very non-judgmental tone. It’s an insightful article without the “look at me!” tone that has really turned me off of so much of mainstream sportswriting.
First dinner was at Sadaf, a Persian restaurant in the Gaslamp area. The food was good, but it wasn’t quite the homey, downscale ethnic place I thought I was entering. Like every restaurant I saw in the area, it was upscale, with upscale prices to boot, not really justified by the food. I went with chicken barg, a marinated, grilled chicken dish served with a huge mound of rice. The chicken was moist and mostly flavorful – again with the lack of salt; I’m starting to think it’s a state law out here – and the rice was delicious. But $20 for that? I don’t see it.
Café 222 on Island Street does waffles, and it does them really well. They had several options on the menu – I remember the “basic” waffle, a cornmeal waffle, and a pumpkin waffle that was listed in ALL CAPS, so it must be good – but since I’m a waffle purist at heart, I went for the basic. It was outstanding – crispy exterior, light and airy inside, a classic Belgian-style waffle in a world that thinks that the crap they give you at make-your-own waffle stands in hotel lobbies is good. The basic waffle was $6.25; that plus a big side of sausage patties (generic) and tea ran $13 before tip.
For Friday dinner, I headed up to Pacific Beach to try the lobster tacos at World Famous. I sat at the bar, which I guess is the only way you can get the lobster tacos, and I ordered one fish taco, one shrimp taco, and one lobster taco. On the whole, they were quite good; the fish/shellfish was perfectly fried, not greasy and not overcooked, and the tortillas (flour) didn’t taste like they’d just been thawed. The shrimp taco was easily the best of the three. However, there was one huge problem: All three had cheese, probably cheddar, melted-glued to the tortillas. This is just not right. First of all, outside of a small number of Italian varieties, I despise cow’s-milk cheese. It tastes like spoiled milk, which, actually, is what cheese is. Cheddar is very high on my list of retch-inducing styles of cheese. But the bigger issue here is that even if I liked that disgusting goop, cheese should never be served with shellfish. The flavor of shellfish is far too delicate to stand up to the tangy/rancid taste of cheese. It didn’t even occur to me that they would put cheese on these tacos, so I didn’t ask them to leave it off and ended up doing the scraping trick, watching the cheese as it took some of the tortillas with it. Anyway, World Famous also gets points for serving Thomas Kemper root beer, which made up for the fact that all four beers they had on tap were pale and therefore not worth drinking.
Gelateria Frizzante is tucked away on Island Ave in the 400s; I only discovered it when I walked to a bank over that way before breakfast. I went for a small cup of chocolate gelato, which looked dark in the tray, but the flavor was very disappointing – mild and thin, like milk chocolate, failing to take advantage of the way gelato can deliver very intense flavors due to its low air content (called “overrun”) and melting speed. The texture, on the other hand, was very good, and they do make all their gelato on the premises.
I wasn’t going to give up that easily, so I tossed the last half of that gelato and walked six more blocks to Mondo Gelato on 10th, just south of Island. They actually had a flavor called “dark chocolate” that delivered – ultra-smooth, rich, cocoa flavor, like a cocoa pudding or custard, with that trademark bitterness of good cocoa. I split the cup between dark chocolate and coffee, but the texture of the coffee was grainy; I think they might have flavored it by using double-strength coffee or espresso, which introduces too much water into the mix. (The best way to make coffee ice cream or gelato is to toast a handful or two of coffee beans just until they glisten, then to simmer them in the milk and/or cream to let the liquid absorb the flavors without requiring the addition of more water. But I digress.) Mondo also had a selection of non-traditional flavors like green tea and Hilo malt (!), and about a half-dozen soy gelatos.
Saturday’s breakfast was at Richard Walker’s Pancake House, a pretty popular joint that already had a line by 8:15 am that morning. I’m still trying to figure out why. I ordered banana pancakes, which, it turns out, were make with a sourdough batter – and that’s all I tasted. “Sour” is not a desirable quality in pancakes, and drowning them in syrup isn’t really my idea of breakfast. I also ordered scrambled eggs on the side, and they were dry and clearly came from a giant pan of the stuff. It’s been a long time since I left that much food on my plate at any restaurant.
I never had lunch on Sunday so I had an early dinner en route to the airport at El Indio, a counter-service Mexican restaurant in the Mission Hills neighborhood. It was solid-average, nothing spectacular, although I give them credit for making their own tortillas (you can buy them by the bag). I had the daily special, carnitas with salsa verde, which came with Mexican rice, beans (pinto beans in a mini-tostada shell), three fresh and super-hot tortillas, and a drink for $8.25 or so. It was fine, but totally unremarkable.
So the funny part is that last year when I made this trip, I stayed in Old Town, and one night I ventured out in search of ice cream, heading first for a gelateria called Gelato Vero that has won some plaudits and at least one award for the best gelato in San Diego. I found it no problem, but couldn’t park. There are a handful of spots on the street in front of it, but nothing else close by, and the whole street was jammed because of all of the restaurants there – Saffron, a Thai/noodles shop; a “New York-style” pizzeria (no idea how authentic it was, but I liked the fake NYC subway sign over their front door); Shakespeare’s Corner Shoppe, serving afternoon tea and selling goods imported from the UK; and the aforementioned El Indio. Since I was already in the area, I wandered up the block to Gelato Vero. They had just eight flavors, and the stuff didn’t look right in the trays, but the texture was pretty good (not as good as Frizzante’s) and the flavor was nice and strong. Their espresso bean was really dark, almost like Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz Buzz (still my gold standard for real coffee flavor in ice cream), and their chocolate was rich although it lacked that slight bitterness that comes from using good cocoa and lots of it. Gelato Vero sells their gelato by the ounce, which is kind of clever, given how different the “small” cups were at Frizzante (generous) and Mondo Gelato (a little skimpy) the night before.
What makes George Crile’s book Charlie Wilson’s War
The story itself is fascinating for its windows into the bizarre worlds of Washington politics and CIA bureaucracy, and how Wilson and Avrakotos manipulated the former and avoided the latter enough to wage the biggest covert war in history. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the mujahideen – poorly-armed Muslim men who fought the Soviets as part of a jihad, or an Islamic holy war – became a pet cause of Wilson, who believed both that the Afghans were noble warriors whose dedication should be rewarded with support, and that this was a good way to stick it to the Russians. (Wilson repeatedly says he wants to turn Afghanistan into the Soviets’ Vietnam, but given its role in hastening the collapse of the U.S.S.R., it would be more accurate to call it the Soviets’ Waterloo, or, if you enjoy morbid irony, their Leningrad.) Avrakotos came to the Afghan cause somewhat by circumstance, as he was an outlaw within the CIA whose future had been dimmed by internal politics and his suggestion that one of the top men in the CIA go f— himself, but he quickly became a true believer in the value of this conflict within the broader battle with the Soviets. The two men, with plenty of help, independently and then together engineered a large effort to arm and train the mujahideen to fight the Soviets, originally with the goal of just inflicting heavy casualties and expensive damage, then later with the goal of driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan entirely. The tale spins through global arms manufacturing, back-room deals (including the willingness of the Israelis to manufacture and sell arms to the CIA for use by Muslims in Afghanistan), the internal politics of Pakistan, and eventually, the Iran-contra scandal, which nearly killed the Afghan program by association.
But it’s the characters who drive the book. Wilson is almost a caricature of a politician, a man who makes Diamond Joe Quimby look dull and two-dimensional by comparison. In his political mode, Wilson plays the country boy, speaking with an exaggerated southern drawl and, despite his Democratic affiliation, voicing a lot of conservative views. (One notable exception is on abortion. Wilson’s sister Sharon was chairwoman of the board of Planned Parenthood, and despite the fact that his constituents overwhelmingly opposed abortion, Charlie Wilson voted according to his sister’s wishes.) Wilson was a classic political horse-trader, but a shrewd one who gathered his favors over a period of years before calling them in. He backed up John Murtha – still in Congress, I might add – when Murtha was caught up in the Abscam scandal, telling one of the undercover operatives that while he wouldn’t take the bribe just then, he’d be open to it down the road. When Wilson needed Murtha’s support for the Afghan program years down the road, he got it.
But in his personal life, Wilson was a mess. He nearly drank himself to death, got sober, and started drinking again a year and a half later. He was caught with two showgirls in a Vegas hot tub, with cocaine in the room (earning himself another nickname, “Cocaine Charlie”). He had a succession of girlfriends and insisted on bringing one along on each of his junkets to Pakistan and to the Middle East. And he nearly killed a man in a hit-and-run accident that by all rights should have ended his political career – although Ted Kennedy’s continued support from the ignorati of Masschusetts makes it clear that voters will even overlook manslaughter if they want to.
Given that history, it’s all the more amazing that Wilson is a clear second fiddle among the characters to Avrakotos. A Greek-American born in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, Avrakotos speaks his mind regardless of the consequences, both to Crile and to everyone he encountered during his nearly thirty years at the CIA. Avrakotos was on assignment in the CIA’s Greek detachment when the Greek army overthrew the country’s left-leaning government, and as a result he became one of the most powerful men in Greece during the early years of the junta’s rule. Avrakotos later survived a near-firing and the above-mentioned telling-off to land in the CIA’s Near East group just at the time that the Afghan rebellion was getting under way. Avrakotos hated the communists as much as Wilson did, partly borne of his upbringing in an area of Pennsylvania heavily populated with people from all over Eastern Europe who could only agree on one thing: that they hated the Soviets. Although it’s never spelled out, it was clear to me that Avrakotos also got a significant charge out of the Afghan operation itself, such as its cloak-and-dagger aspects and the way he was subverting the higher-ups who wanted him out of the CIA.
To Crile’s tremendous credit, he avoids offering judgments on what these men were doing, and in particular avoids the facile explanation we’ve heard since 9/11 that the United States somehow created al-Qaeda or otherwise facilitated the attacks through its Afghan operations in the 1980s. The Soviet Union was headed for an economic collapse at the start of the 1980s, and the CIA’s involvement in Afghanistan hastened that collapse and produced a relatively good outcome when the communists in Russia gave up power voluntarily; since the Soviets were the clear enemy of the United States at the time, a strategy to undermine them made sense. And Crile also makes it clear that one possible reason for the anti-U.S. sentiment of the Islamic militants we supported in Afghanistan is that the CIA was so careful about disguising our involvement that the mujahideen had no idea where these arms came from. The relationship between the covert war and the eventual rises of the Taliban and al-Qaeda is far more complicated than the “it’s the CIA’s fault” side would have it, and Crile refrains from offering his opinion, letting the story tell itself, only delving into the aftermath in Afghanistan in an illuminating epilogue where even Wilson himself offers his thoughts on the matter.
I listened to the unabridged audio version
Closing Sohrab’s door, I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.
I’ve touted Beloved
Until The Kite Runner
Published in 2005 and headed for theaters in a film adaptation this fall, The Kite Runner is easily one of the best novels I’ve ever read and meets all the criteria one could ask for in a work of literature. The plot is riveting. The emotions it describes and that it elicits are genuine. The characters are fleshed-out and compelling. The prose sparkles. The story behind the story is real, and the layers of metaphor only make the surface plot more interesting and believable. And the novel relies on very little in the way of coincidence or other ridiculous plot contrivances that ruin a lot of novels, especially first ones.
The main plot itself revolves around the narrator-protagonist Amir, starting from his youth in Kabul and his childhood friendship with Hassan, the son of the family’s servant and a member of an ethnic minority known as the Hazaras. Hassan is a completely devoted friend to Amir, and Amir eventually betrays him, setting off a lifelong quest for redemption through his acts, a redemption – or, perhaps more accurately, self-forgiveness – he can’t find until he leaves America (his new home) and returns to Afghanistan. It’s a sad tale with flashes of hope and a certain streak of faith and even spirituality in the face of horrors, both personal and societal.
And much as Beloved tells the history of African-Americans and Absalom, Absalom! tells the history of the American South, The Kite Runner tells the history of Afghanistan, through actual events that the characters experience and through characters who serve as metaphors for peoples and nations in the history of that country. The rape of Hassan represents the rape of Afghanistan, with Hassan’s loss of innocence standing in for the end of the one period of stability and economic progress in Afghanistan’s history. One female character’s barrenness stands for the devastation wreaked on Afghanistan, first by the Soviets, then by the Taliban. And so on.
While these other attributes contribute to the book’s literary value, Hosseini’s storycraft is what really sets The Kite Runner apart as a reading experience. His plot twists are rarely outrageous and never gratuitous; he doesn’t provide pat resolutions or twist characters to make them act differently in key situations. Instead, he lets the story unfold in a natural if accelerated way, directing his lens in and out of the action as needed. It makes a melancholy book where a handful of scenes of frenetic action are separated by long periods of thought and descriptions of emotions into a page-turner that you can’t put down.
Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns
One other point that really hit me while I read The Kite Runner was the richness of Afghan traditions, particularly around Amir’s engagement and wedding. Although it is a typically Western view that such traditions – particularly if they’re tied to religion – are dated and restrictive and profoundly anti-intellectual, rituals and traditions are a part of our culture and they help define who we are. I often talk about my Italian heritage, but my identity is unabashedly American. I have no Italian traditions; even the simple Italian tradition of the long evening meal, still practiced at least on occasion in Italy, has never been a part of my life. Anyone I could ask about these traditions has forgotten or is already dead. I have no traditions, and as a result, I know less of who I am. If you have those traditions in your family, or still have someone who can teach them to you, do all you can to sustain them, so that you, your children, and their children will all know better who you are.