I like Linda Cardellini but she is not doing much for me as Jess's sister. I think part of the problem is the late introduction of the character and making it a three episode arc. There were some funny parts in the episode but overall I'm not crazy about the arc in general. It seems as if this arc is to prove that Jess is a mature adult who can handle things but I feel like the show has already proven that. I will wait until next week to pass a final judgment but as of right now I'm not crazy about this story so far. Speaking of disappointment I was hoping the show had figured out how to handle Winston but that appears from this episode at least to not be the case.
Deleted Scenes
The American's sophomore season debuted last night on FX. It is worth your time
With the Olympics ending a lot of shows have began airing new episodes and that is something we can all be grateful for.
The Sound Of Things Falling
By Juan Gabriel Vásquez
288 pp. Riverhead, $17.67
My favorite, okay, only contemporary South American book I've read since my Roberto Bolaño kick a few years back is Juan Gabriel Vásquez's The Sound of Things Falling. The novel tells of Columbian lawyer, Antonio Yammara who lived through the tumultuous and violent bad old days of the drug cartel and Pablo Escobar. After making the acquaintance of a mysterious pilot, Ricardo Laverde, he is shot in a hit job, that kills Laverde and leaves Yammara with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This seemingly random entanglement stemming from Yammara's otherwise inconsequential relationship with Laverde transforms his life and leads him to obsess about the unforeseeable contributing factors that resulted in his injury.
Most discussion of the book in literary periodicals, stresses it as a “page turner”. Perhaps it's my elitist prejudices assuming something called a “page-turner” could only be a crime novel or historical thriller, but I found a very different book. In terms of plot, very little actually happens outside the mind of the narrator, who’s struggle with PTSD becomes the story’s central conflict. Sure, there are plane crashes, shootings, and the trappings of drug war, but the rising action of these material dangers are not the focus of this book as much as their ghosts that continue to haunt the mind and spirit of those whom tragedy has left behind. Most of the “action”, is appropriately conveyed via flashback, tape recording, and scrapbook.
It's hard to imagine a contemporary Columbian novel that doesn’t engage with the country’s violent past in a direct way. In a culture where the drug war and cartel violence are not relegated to the World News headlines, political apathy is not so easily affected as it is in North American novels. Because partisan feeling is so deeply felt and necessary in framing the Latin American worldview, the complex sociopolitical environment in which those stories exist can often serve as a barrier to understanding a story's context for ignorant readers. I remember an attempt at reading Bolaño's By Night In Chile as an undergraduate having no knowledge of Pinochet’s dictatorship, the left-wing opposition, or the relationship between church and the Chilean state, all of which were required for understanding the central conflict of the story. The Sound of Things Falling avoids this problem by painting the Columbian political landscape with broad strokes, which is okay, because though the national events are inextricably linked to Yammara’s life, the complexity in which they impact him occurs at the micro level. The emphasis is given to the emotional and sensory experience of living through Escobar's Columbia. According to Yammara, Bogotá was a city where "Nobody asked why [presidential candidate Álvaro Gómez] had been killed, or who by, because such questions no longer had any meaning in my city” which seems to be the most important insight about personal political feeling he can give.
After Yammara is shot, his life begins to fall apart. He becomes obsessed with understanding the uncontrollable pattern of events that have come to define his circumstances, alienating himself from his loving wife and newborn daughter. “What was driving me was neither sentiment nor emotion”, he says ”but the intuition we sometimes have that some events have shaped our lives more than they should or appear to have”. Yammara's wife, Aura, did not live in Bogotá during its most violent period. She moved to Columbia with her parents and chose to stay when they moved on. Her fate did not germinate from the same events and choices as Yammara and she seems to symbolize a life that is the result of choice and experience or "not the inventory of our pains, but rather the learned sympathy towards the pain of others". Though, Aura is Yammara’s future, he has found that he shares the consequences of a similar lineage of choices and events made by others unknown to him with the daughter of Laverde, Elena Fritts. She too is looking for reason in the confluence of chaos and bad luck that led her to lose her father and mother.
In this duality Vásquez explores the concept of fate and the act of remembering as a life-inhibiting exercise. At the beginning of his tale, Yammara confesses he is "surprised by the alacrity and dedication we devote to the damaging exercise of remembering, which after all brings nothing good and serves only to hinder our normal functioning, like those bags of sand athletes tie around their calves for training” This remembering is not the edifying act of self-reflection, but as paralysis. It is the defining of ourselves by what we have lost and expect to lose.
For Yammara, as well as for Columbia, failing to remember the seemingly senseless events of the past is simply not a possibility, however, he acknowledges “Struggling against their effects is all I can do: repair the damage, take best advantage of the benefits. We know it, we know it very well; nevertheless it’s always somewhat dreadful when someone reveals to us the chain that has turned us into what we are". The Sound of Things Falling, beautifully translated by Anne McLean, is a fantastic meditation on the interplay between remembrance and experience as well as a warning that fetishizing our loss is to become students of our own doom.
For anyone who’s never given the detective novel a try, I recommend Dashiel Hammet’s Red Harvest as one of the best examples of what the form can do. For this post however, I wanted something I hadn't read so I went with the second-most acclaimed mystery writer of all time, Raymond Chandler, and his standout, Farewell, My Lovely. The book is in many ways exactly what you would expect from the genre. Private dick Philip Marlowe, is hired as protection for a man of means, which shortly lead’s to his client’s murder. Obviously, things are not what they seem and Marlowe’s investigation leads him into the company of dangerous women, corrupt police, and a mob kingpin (the detective novel trifecta). I won’t spoil anything, however, there is a telling anecdote about mystery's place in Chandler’s work in which Howard Hawkes, the director of the film adaptation of his novel, The Big Sleep, asks him whether a chauffeur was murdered or had committed suicide. Chandler remembers “They sent me a wire…asking me, and dammit I didn’t know either”. This is all to say that in Chandler novels, the mystery is the setting, but it isn't the main event. Just as the biggest pitfall for science-fiction writers is trying to successfully predict the future, a mystery's most boring aspect is commonly focusing too hard on arranging the breadcrumbs in new and complex ways until the plot is nothing more than a literary Rube Goldberg machine. These kinds of books are entertaining for a single read, but if judged by the standard of rereadability, where a second read should reveal complexity and craft, the mystery-centric novel will feel like a magic trick that has already been explained. If the mystery was all that mattered, the best mystery writers would be watchmakers. Fortunately, the mystery writers that tend to outlive their subgenres, are simply the best writers in the lot. Hammet was a highly influential prose experimentalist who influenced Ernest Hemingway and the minimalist school. Chandler, though often accused of copping Hammet’s style, is also a fantastic writer with an eye for detail, one-of-a-kind similes, and a style all his own.
Anyone reading my previous articles on fiction know that I’ve talked myself into a corner with wild speculation about the transcendent power of fiction, and fiction being more than entertainment, and fiction being the proverbial bee's knees. In making the case for the elevated status of a genre that necessitated the coining of the term "pulp fiction" (aka throwaway literature), I have cheated a bit by picking one of the most airquote-literary examples of hard boiled detective fiction this side of post-modernism. Surely there are much more utilitarian detective stories which exist solely to entertain and engage, so I’ll level the playing field by saying I like these too. Though my favorite books are what I consider more original and experimental, there is a side of me that is fascinated by working within the confines of a tradition with a common set of symbols and rules. When an artist works within a tradition such as hardboiled fiction or the three-minute pop song, the excitement comes from slight deviations to the rule that anyone familiar with the tradition will understand. Consequently, the tension between the rules that identify the work with a specific genre and the desire to create something that make an impression is what appeals to me most about both mystery writing and pop music.
Granted, this limited scope does lead to some redundancy and contributes to the limited life span of the hard boiled genre. The sexism, racial slurs, and generally myopic worldview of the disillusioned middle age white guy is probably the leading cause of the disappearance of Chandler's less talented peers from the public consciousness. However, what I find satisfying about these stories is that they entertain with stylized facts without being patently false. If you read these books for the pulpier elements like heists, shootouts, and murder, you also have to accept the social cost of the intrigue which are crooked cops, corrupt politicians, and a society complicit in criminal activity. At a time of great American cultural and economic power, there was an alternate flip-side. The genre also treats its preeminent subject, murder, with the weight it deserves. Taking a life is not an exotic or heroic thing in these stories, and Chandler's praise of Hammet, saying he gave "murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish" as the desperate and utilitarian actions they tend to be. For a genre that requires a body or two with each story, the act of taking a life is treated with the levity and seriousness that reflects our own healthy fear of death as apposed to action movies where the objectively good hero kills all the objectively bad guys culminating in a feel good ending. Like many great books, the hard boiled novel may contain a large dose of escapism, but it is an escapism more akin to slumming in a bad neighborhood versus, being taken to an alternate universe.
The first thing that needs to be discussed is my {former} practice of salting noodles so that they wouldn’t stick. This practice is what you call falling into the trappings of tradition. By all accounts I haven’t found anything to support this theory. In fact, upon an ever so slight moment of introspection, it seems dubious at best to expect noodles to stick to one another in water, especially given the practice of shocking cooked noodles by placing them in cold water if you aren’t using them right away[1].
So why do we salt water then? One, it raises the boiling point of water; however, as the magnificent Harold McGee has opined, it is pointless in practicality as it requires heaps of salt to do so even a negligible amount[2]. The main reason/only reason we salt the water for our pasta or rice is to flavor that ingredient. Salting the water flavors the water, which is in turn absorbed by the pasta or rice. Seasoning the water enriches the noodles rather than salting the finished product.
So how much salt should you add? Although it is primarily a matter of taste preferences, a nice rule of thumb is the One Percent Rule. The water should have a 1% salinity ratio, meaning that the salt to water ratio should be 1%. Next time you find yourself cooking a pasta or rice, measure the water in ounces that you pour into your boiling pot. Now multiple that amount by .01. The product is how many ounces of salt to add to your water.
For example, I typically find myself cooking for two, which usually requires around six cups of water, or 48 ounces. 48 x 0.01 = .48 oz. If you remember that ½ oz is one tablespoon, then add a tablespoon of salt to your water. Of course, an easier way to remember is ½ oz/1 tbsp of salt for every 50 oz of water.
Don’t believe me? Seems like too much salt? Try it and taste your noodles as you drain them. I guarantee you’ll consider eating them straight.
*Thanks to Michael Ruhlman for setting me straight when it comes to salt, as well as most other cooking matters. I recommend his excellent treatise Rulhman’s Twenty to both the novice and experienced cook.
[1] This is useful when you need more burners than you have or are unable to time everything “just perfect.” Obviously this works best when you are then placing the noodles in a warmed sauce or broth or are serving them cold.
Hitler's Furies
German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields
By Wendy Lower
288 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, paper, $12.30
This scathing (and I believe fair) critique of the enterprise of holocaust studies behooves each new study to ensure it is offering something new to the conversation. It is fortunate, then, that Hitler's Furies doesn’t read merely as an exercise in the noble Santayanian edict to not forget the past, but a reconciliation of past viewpoints which overlooked the crimes of "impressionable" women with the modern perspective that women possess agency and the consequences that follow.
Thought it is debatable to what length that the fairer sex's role in perpetrating the holocaust has previously been investigated, we can confidently assert that the ambiguities of complicity have not been explored to the same extent as the male masterminds of the holocaust. In her book, Lower breaks down these layers of complicity into several chapters, discussing the witnesses, the accomplices, and the perpetrators separately. The women eager to gain acceptance in male circles through her acts of cruelty to Jews have been studied the most extensively since their acts were so extraordinarily cruel that they were found guilty of war crimes, but Lower's main point is that there were thousands of women who assisted the Holocaust who were never investigated such as nurses who assisted in eugenics programs and performed sterilizations, as well as bureaucrats that made arbitrary decisions about who would live and who would die, and teachers who sent children away to the camps.
The case studies of specific women and their experiences in the east that Lower uses are sadly exceptions to the rule of scarce data on this subject. Due to a massive miscarriage of justice we will probably never arrive at a perfectly clear picture of just how many women were knowing accomplices to murder; however, if nothing else, this book is a spotlight on what we lose in removing half of the human population’s story from the historical record. For we cannot effectively understand the past, if we only have half the story.
Those three magical words are out and now it's time to move forward. (Also Prince was great on that episode). Now that that's been settled it's time for Nick and Jess to deal with the past as they bumped into Caroline at a farmer's market. Nick, and everybody else feel that you shouldn't remain friends with exes but Jess makes Nick meet with Caroline. Naturally Nick doesn't tell Caroline that he is with Jess and she catches them together and begins a bit of a mental break. Meanwhile Schmidt has finished decorating and wants the guys to come hang out when they finally do he gives them keys. Then naturally Winston and Coach both bring girls to the loft. It being his loft Schmidt also wants to bring home a girl. The whole thing is a pretty basic trope but the show does it well and honors how each character would handle the situation while keeping it funny(also they brought back Birdie from a few episodes back). Down the hall things are a little more manic as Caroline is banging on the door while Jess's ex that she invited over to help with the situation is telling Jess that he loves her. This all sets up for Nick to apologize to Caroline and tell Jess that he fell in love with her the first time he saw her. Strong back to back episodes this week. It will be interesting to see where the show goes in the future. Nick and Jess are firmly entrenched but there are lots of questions for everybody else.
Brooklyn 99
While 99 might not have seen a bump from it's Golden Globes victory it did receive a post Super Bowl bump which is good and hopefully some of those people stick around. Those extra people were treated to an episode that saw Jake and Amy's relationship progress some more. Meanwhile last night we were introduced to an already formed relationship in the form of Captain Holt's husband. It is Holt's birthday and he has invited the 99; which was probably a mistake. Sgt Jeffords feels that it is his task to make sure the precinct is ready for the occasion, which they are decidedly not. After everyone meets up, all with the same wine, they enter the party and immediately fall apart. After getting new rules from Jeffords they begin socializing. Peralta feels that the Captain doesn't want them there and that his husband invited them. He is right that they are not wanted; but he is wrong about who doesn't want them there. The episode brings back something that was initially addressed in the pilot and I'm glad that they aren't afraid to bring it back. We found out in the pilot that Captain Holt was held back in his career for being an openly gay officer. It is natural that Holt's husband doesn't have much affection for the NYPD nor it's officers. After failing to back up his pro-slavery stance and then ruining the party Peralta figures this out and with the help of the entire precinct makes up for it by treating them to a special birthday dinner. Brooklyn 99 might not be the funniest show on tv but it is still just its first season and is setting a good foundation to build on in the future. Hopefully Fox agrees with me and the gets the opportunity to use that foundation.
I’m sure it’s safe to say that we’ve all had 3/$1.00 packaged ramen at some point in our lives. Some of you may be enjoying a bowl right now as you read this. If you have spent anytime on a college campus, then I know you’ve had instant ramen.
Last week I (hopefully) beguiled you with a review of a non-existent cookbook, mirroring the literary trickery of Poe and Borges. This time, however, we will look at a very real and very fascinating one, Momofuku. The cookbook, which is a history and inside look into the restaurant by the same name, is authored by chef/owner David Chang. He named his restaurant after the inventor of insta-ramen, which also translates to “lucky peach;” coincidentally, the name of a fantastic food and writing journal published by McSweeney’s and edited by Chang.
Each section of the book begins with a brief history of how that particular restaurant was opened – Chang now operates three unique venues. Following the memoir segments are recipes derived from that location. Chang, through Peter Meehan, tells an interesting history, especially the sections detailing his self-study of ramen. For instance, at one point Chang was visiting every ramen shop he could to taste different styles of ramen. Once he was served, he would note his thoughts on the dish and attempt to decipher how each aspect of that particular bowl’s taste could be derived. Each memoir section successfully showcases the Mind of a Chef[1].
I knew that preparing Momofuku Ramen for the first time needed to be an event. A group of friends and myself have dinner and a movie once a week. Each week a member of the party cooks a meal and chooses the movie based upon his or her menu. For my inaugural evening of 2014, I chose Twenty-Four Eyes and tried my hand at Momofuku’s ramen. Two disclaimers before we proceed. One, since I was starting from scratch, this took me three days to prepare. Second, since ramen is the central appeal to both the restaurant and the memoir/cookbook, I won’t actually present the recipe here. If you are intrigued, and I hope you are, I recommend you visit one his restaurants in New York City or purchase his book here.
The first thing you’ll need to prepare is tare. I had never made nor tasted it before, but having done so, I can tell you that you need it. Not merely taste it, but to own it. Love it. Care for it. Nurture it, so forth. Tare is simple to make. Take the discarded bones of a chicken[2] and brown them in the oven for about an hour. Once browned, remove from the oven and place on a burner on the stovetop. Add a splash of sake to scrape the fond off the pan. Add a cup of sake, a cup of mirin, and two cups of soy sauce to the pan. Bring to a boil and then simmer for an hour. Finish with a bit of freshly ground black pepper. This will prove to be the backbone[3] of your ramen broth.
The ramen broth. Well, go ahead and clear a good twelve hours from your schedule. That being said, this is worth your time. It turns out that a James Beard award-winning chef knows how to make ramen broth. Who knew? One thing I did notice is that this isn’t necessarily a healthy broth as it developed quite the solidified fat “lid” once it had cooled in the refrigerator, but what’s the fun of a thin, light broth anyways?
Chang includes a recipe for his alkaline noodles that he crafted alongside the legendary Harold McGee; however, I chose to purchase ramen noodles from my local Asian market. I also included poached eggs, bamboo shoots, collard greens, and nori to each bowl. Once you have your broth and tare, the meal actually only takes around 40 minutes to an hour to prepare.
The take away? This is a meal to be shared at the dinner table among friends and family.
Aren’t the best meals always shared? Always communal? When was the last time you had a repast alone and remembered it?
[1] Chang hosted the entirety of season 1 (available on Netflix) and I implore you to check it out. Also, pun.
Maps and Legends
Reading and Writing Along The Borderlands
By Michael Chabon
256 pp. Harper, paper, $16.60
House of Rumour
By Jake Arnott
448 pp. Little A. $15.60
Let me tell you, it's a real buzzkill to write a few month's worth of blog posts plumbing the depths of high and low literature only to find not only that it's been done––because of course it has––but also the reference points for all your previous arguments have been used to greater effect, not to mention collected in one place. I have found just such a collection in Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon. Maps and Legends has a lot in common with the novel I originally intended to review this week, House of Rumour by Jake Arnott, so I am rolling both posts together in hopes of avoiding retreading old ground. All of Chabon’s essays deal with his relationship with writing and span the topics of genre, comic books, Cormac McCarthy, and the whole entertainment vs. more-than-entertainment argument, i.e., everything I’ve written about since we started The Reserve and The Well. There are also pseudo-biographical vignettes which serve as the origin story for many of Chabon's own literary totems and symbols (comics, golems, amateur cartography) which are loaded with creative parallels between life and writing.
He then doubles down:
"I could adduce Kafka’s formula: 'A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.' I could go down to the café at the local mega-bookstore and take some wise words of Abelard or Koestler about the power of literature off a mug. But in the end—here’s my point—it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles."
A spirited argument, but he starts to tilt the pinball machine, saying “Therefore I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature”,
Now, “entertaining” as we use it today, is a fairly rigidly defined term. Neither it nor any of its synonyms can satisfactorily finish the sentence “I was reading Schindler's Ark and it was so ____”. It seems, our reasons for reading are varied and complex. We read to be in awe, we read to be repulsed, we read to be convicted, and we read to be identified, amongst other reasons. Granted, entertainment and pleasure are vital to every great work because, even in the case of Schindler's Ark, they are the vehicle in which previously enumerated states of being are delivered. I understand it is way easier to use “entertained” as shorthand for the state of being when partaking in that experience, but when shorthand causes us to forget the very nature of the thing being invoked, its usefulness is doubtful. If Chabon wants to roll all those things into a single term, it may serve to underscore the importance of entertainment as the vehicle, or act as a tidy conceptualization of human behavior for lazy anthropologists, but it's a rather thin blooded illustration of the complete relationship between the mind and the written word.
However, in as far as entertainment is the vehicle, and not the essence of the thing as Chabon formerly asserts, I totally track with the bulk of his thoughts on genre including his conviction that entertainment shouldn’t be denigrated (as it probably seems I’m doing) but that "The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two way exchange of attention, experience and the universal hunger for connection”.
Though I have no truck with Chabonian etymology, my beef ends here. Running throughout the remaining essay is a respect for under appreciated genres and a championing of the crossroads of the freak fringe of genre-fiction and the old guard of literary minded writers. He calls this crossroads "the borderlands” which is populated by both post-moderns and less difficult authors who use the tropes of genre to produce great art such as Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy, and Jake Arnott, who I'm getting to momentarily. His thoughts on the arbitrary division of bookstore shelves and his petition for more great comic books aimed at their original audience: children, as well as his defense of all critically maligned genres; horror stories (M.R. James, McCarthy’s The Road), young adult fiction (His Dark Materials), sci-fi, and mystery novels, all ring true.
Jake Arnott’s The House of Rumour is an overlooked curiosity that seems to embody what Chabon means by “the borderlands". I found it on an under the radar best of 2013 list, expecting it to be a more traditional sci-fi novel. Instead, Rumour turned out to be a novel about genre writing and its place in our culture. Like sci-fi itself, the prose isn’t stunning, however, the imagination that strings Jonestown to sci-fi B-movies to Rudolph Hess's flight to Scotland to James Bond is not lacking at all. The story centers around the fictional sci-fi writer Larry Zagorski who begins his career paling around with older sci-fi writers, talking shop with L. Ron Hubbard, and crushing on fellow writer Mary-Lou Gunderson. The story is cocooned within a jumble of interlinked conspiracies dealing with the occult, counterfactual World War II and Cold War campaigns, and the ravages of time on each character, with each chapter named after a card from the major arcana.
Both Arnott and Chabon seem to share a similar view for what makes fantastical writing important. Chabon’s essay on the comic book, American Flagg! dismisses the purely speculative aspect of science fiction which Rumour’s sci-fi devotees seem to grow into, leaving behind the optimism and wonder of the 50’s for darker fare as their personal lives fall apart. Zagorski, looking back in his old age, maintains that "Fantasy can be the most honest of literary genres when it doesn’t pretend to be realism”, rejecting the hard science school of speculative fiction which seems more interested in what calendar year we'll be using jetpacks to get to the feelies than offering anything entertaining or meaningful. Though this is coming from someone who wouldn’t call himself a sci-fi purist, It seems that the best sci-fi has always sprung out of a concern for the present. This is why Orwell’s 1984 is still considered prescient despite his inability to predict global geopolitical developments since 1949.
The influence of Jorge Luis Borges also links Chabon and Arnott, who's “The Partial Magic of the Quixote” considers a scale size map of Britain where “there is no detail of soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map”, including the map itself, which contains a map of itself ad infinitum. Borges submits that the troubling aspect of considering this hall of mirrors is that “these inversions suggest that if the characters of the fictional work can be readers or spectators, we its readers or spectators, can be fictitious." To Arnott’s characters, this can be both troubling and empowering. Ian Flemming, the creator of James Bond, is depicted in his old age as someone very much controlled by the character he created. "I tried to kill him off, you know" he says, "I'm even writing his bloody obituary this time, but it won't do any good. I even had him in a health farm in one book, just so I could go and relax. But he won't lie down. He'll kill me first." Larry, the aged Sci-fi writer complains that the world has diminished and that "what we believe in just seems to get smaller and smaller and smaller. Diets, therapies, exercise regimens, support groups. Little superstitions. We worship household gods." Meanwhile a Cuban artist on witnessing the the construction of his countrymen's handmade rafts, creates his own miniatures and was soon asked to repeat his work for each departing raft. The miniatures had become a protective talisman for their dangerous trip over the ocean. The recursion becomes a calming act because it lends a sense of control over the otherwise chaotic nature of the world.
There are other allusions to Borges within Arnott's novel but this exercise of interpreting our world in miniature seems to be something shared between him and Chabon. Though he never directly invokes Borges in his essay, Chabon’s own Maps and Legends title story is part biography and part homage to the map as something that can both transform the world that contains it and live on past its usefulness as a resource for lost travelers. The essay tells how his childhood self was enthralled with his map of the then "imaginary" city of Columbia. The map was populated by future streets and neighborhoods yet to be developed. The streets, for lack of other original street names, were named after great authors and references to famous books. These unpeopled spaces were his. He explored the limits of developed neighborhoods and watched houses go up and eventually visited their occupants. He would stand in their kitchen thinking “I saw your house being born”. He possessed the neighborhood in the same way someone trained in the technique of painting, appreciates a painting's full achievement in ways the owner may not, though it is hung in the latter's living room. Though the full potential of what the map was meant to represent failed (Columbia did not become the urban utopia it was intended to be), he held on to the thing which no longer represented the literal Columbia he inhabited. Chabon concludes that "just because you stopped believing in something you once were promised does not mean that the promise itself was a lie.”
It is a sentiment that dovetails well with the jaded misfits of Rumour. Through the writing, copious grade-A conspiracy theories, and the structure of basing each chapter on the tarot, Arnott sets the novel up for a metaphysically tolerant story, i.e. sci-fi, without any scientifically unbelievable occurrences. In this way House of Rumour stays planted well within the realm of possibility, relatively speaking, while using the language of genre fiction. If, to quote Borges quoting Carlyle, "the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written”, House of Rumour is a map of our world where the blank spots of knowledge are embellished, which is in turn shaped by the worlds it contains.
Thursday nights on NBC has long been was the crown jewel of television programming. The demise of Must See TV has been talked and written about for years now. But what NBC's inability to find hit shows has done is allow smart funny shows that have a loyal, albeit very small, audience that would never have lasted in NBC's prime.
The fact that last week Parks aired its 100th episode is something that very few would have predicted including the people who allowed it to happen. Parks has been on the brink of cancellation from the very beginning and has witnessed its own funeral enough times to make Tom Sawyer jealous. Which fortunately is something they won't have to do this year as Bob Greenblatt, NBC's president, recently gave Parks an unofficial renewal for a seventh season. This is great news for fans of the show as it is currently in a transition period and it would be great to be able to see that transition through to an excellent finale. Currently Leslie is in flux having been booted from City Council and has found herself back in the Parks department where it has been made abundantly clear she is not long for; she is losing her best friend with Ann and Chris moving to Michigan. There have been a lot of arcs in Parks and I'm excited to see what the next one brings for Leslie and the Parks department. So while it might not be perfect, Andy singing for kids is a rehash from season 2, it's still a fantastic show that I'm amazed we're still getting new episodes to nitpick.
If Parks and Recreation airing it's 100th episode is surprising then season five of Community is mind blowing. No I take that back season five of Community with Dan Harmon back is mind blowing. Community has had two things working for it from the beginning in a studio, Sony, that pushes hard for its show to make syndication and a premise and characters NBC felt could become a hit show. After three seasons and seventy five episodes of paintball, homages, fake clip shows, and lots of Winger speeches Sony decided what was keeping the show from finding that audience was the man behind it all, Dan Harmon. To be fair it's been well known that Harmon's management technique was less than ideal. Far less. With new writers in charge, Community was ready to take the world by storm and become the hit show that was always lurking behind the My Dinner with Andre homage. The only problem was that the fourth season was an homage as well; an homage to Community itself. Harmon may be hard to work with but he is also the heart and soul behind Community and what makes it special. So here we are, five episodes into a reinvigorated Harmon-lead Community that is back to clicking on cylinders. However, Harmon coming back isn't the only change this season, as Chevy Chase's Pierce is gone. As of last night so is Donald Glover's Troy Barnes who has long been one of the show's most like-able and funny characters. With paintball having been declared dead, Troy was sent off with a game of the floor is lava that once again tears the school apart. There was a general apocalyptic vibe as well as a heavy Waterworld vibe with Jonathan Banks a dead-ringer for Dennis Hopper. Because that's how it felt to Abed who wasn't ready to accept that he was losing his best friend. The best high concept Community episodes have always been the ones that have a strong emotional grounding as a foundation for the hijinks. Last night's episode certainly had that and gave a fitting farewell to Troy Barnes. So that's where we stand five episodes into a thirteen episode fifth season. Ratings have been a little higher recently but there's been no word on what the future holds but for right now, I'm enjoying the present.
I first learned of Jack Barnes’s restaurant, The Hodgepodge, through a friend of mine. He had taken an internship in California one summer during law school for some tech company. Upon his return in the fall, he clamored to tell me all about this fantastic restaurant that was pushing the boundaries between the other four senses and taste. He claimed to have been on the waitlist the entire summer and literally received a call on his last night in town telling him of a cancellation and there was now a vacant table if he could confirm his availability at once. He spoke of specially manufactured plates, which contained microscopic speakers that emitted sounds conjuring up the spirit of the evening’s menu. For instance, the evening that he attended dinner service, the night was dedicated to fresh fish, hence the sounds of the ever-rising tide whispered from his plate. I don’t recall the particular fish he undoubtedly enjoyed that evening, but he enthusiastically told me how the head was baked with the fish and it wasn’t until halfway through the meal that he realized the head was not the head after all, but a more edible reconstruction of one.
So how is the book organized? Barnes includes four sections in his first foray into the publishing world: History, Recipes, Ingredients, and Future. The story begins (yes, story) with a detailed account of how Jack Barnes came to be Jack Barnes and eventually open The Hodgepodge. I don’t want to ruin anything for anyone as this is actually the best part of the book, but I will give a few details of note away.
Jack Barnes started out in insurance before deciding to risk it all in the culinary industry.
He tried to stage at the The Fat Duck, but was not accepted.
This led to depression fueled by a string of doubts until a rather humorous incident in a Los Angeles’s farmer’s market involving pork belly, a cucumber, and a mime.
His first restaurant failed miserably.
His second restaurant failed miserably.
His third restaurant failed, but not miserably.
He only mentions offhand his fourth, so think whatever you want.
It wasn’t until his fifth and current restaurant endeavor that he began to see any success.
Of course the true measure of any cookbook is the recipes. Well, where do I begin?
First, this is not an “at home” style cookbook in the vein of Modernist Cuisine at Home or Heston Blumenthal at Home. “At home” is a type of cookbook that takes restaurant style recipes and simplifies them for home use. Barnes did not opt for this direction, however, as I guarantee that you won’t be able to make any of these recipes. Doubt the veracity of this claim? The simplest recipe calls for 60 POUNDS of garlic. The recipe, “Duck Feet and Garlic,” requires 60 lbs of garlic and feeds 6-8. This is ultimately my problem with The Hodgepodge as a whole. Barnes can’t seem to decide on which audience he is trying to achieve – professional chefs or the home cook. The ingredients and techniques befit the professional, but the servings are more amateur oriented. This is one of the “controversies” in the cookbook industry – should recipes be readily accessible or not? I would imagine that most people who purchase a cookbook do so out of a desire to be able to replicate the recipes therein, but there do exist those where that really isn’t an option. Three easy examples come to mind. Take Modernist Cuisine, which requires a centrifuge, or how about some of Heston Blumenthal’s work? Thomas Keller’s Sous Vide is specifically for restaurants even though it's considered the greatest single work on the subject, which brings us to the next consideration in buying a cookbook – what about the learning opportunities it provides? Even if you are not considering opening a sous vide restaurant kitchen, you could still learn the ins and outs of sous vide cookery as well as the food safety aspect of it from Keller’s restaurant-oriented cookbook. However, there is a large portion of the populace that would find the notion of purchasing a cookbook that you can’t “use,” i.e. replicate the recipes, as moronic. However, I believe the best use of a cookbook isn’t to necessarily decide on tonight’s dinner menu, but as an instructional manual on the how-to’s of cooking. Akin to last week’s article, remember to think through each recipe you encounter. Study it. Learn from it.
I should really step down from my soapbox and finish this review. Ingredients. Will you have them on hand? No – see above. Do you have twenty duck feet in the freezer? How about the spines of muskrats for a muskrat stock? (Honestly, I didn’t even know this was legal.) His favorite vegetable to use in almost everything is the colloquial “fish-radish.” This is my harshest criticism of his work. In his kitchen we want pretension – it's what we pay for; however, the amount of it collected between the pages of his first work is excessive. The only way it could have been more so is if the title had been in Latin.
The final section of Barnes’s book is aptly titled “The Future,” in which he dictates a manifesto on the future of cooking. He postulates that sous vide is on the way to becoming the norm, not only in restaurants, but in home kitchens as well. Restaurants will soon be forced to use sight, sound, smell, and touch all in the application of taste. Alternative and scarce ingredients are the future of fine dining and anything less is too mundane for your pocketbook. The question is this: does the future belong to the Alice Waters-es of the world, or to the Jack Barnes-es?
EVERY LOVE STORY IS A GHOST STORY
A Life of David Foster Wallace
By D. T. Max
356 pp. Viking. $27.95.
David Foster Wallace disdained the literary biography. In his review of Edwin Williamson's Borges: A Life, he wrote, “Part of the appeal of the writer’s work for [fans of an author] will be the distinctive strain of that writer’s personality, predilections, style, particular tics and obsessions—the sense that these stories were written by this author and could only have been done by no other. And yet it often seems that the person we encounter in the literary biography could not possibly have written the works we admire.” According to Wallace, most cases of literary genius are the product of years spent with one’s head stuck in a book rather than, say, a career in the British merchant navy in the case of Joseph Conrad. Sadly, the price of becoming a brilliant writer is a profoundly dull life, at least outside the perspective of his own imagination.
The second offense authorial biographies typically perpetrate is connecting the dots between biographical fact and its corresponding impact and representation within the author's writing. Here, Max is guilty in the first degree of drawing specific parallels between Wallace’s life and the characters and settings in his writings. Granted, when an author loads a book with enough biographical info to cause a rift between himself and his own mother, one could argue it is a worthy subject to be considered, if not pinned down in a manner such that we are making direct claims as to where the author drew which exact detail (which Max does), not to mention whether he drew it from any physical location at all. Bear in mind, fiction writers aren’t always alchemists, working with existing materials, but oftentimes magicians, conjuring matter seemingly out of the ether. On the whole though, the biography is a smart first swing at outlining the intellectual and artistic trajectory of one of the most important writers of his time.
Though beginning his career as an admittedly brilliant post-modern fiddler, Wallace was originally more concerned with pushing the stylistic boundaries of the novel rather than with something as righteous as crystalizing the the human condition in prose form. Eventually though, he became convicted of a moral imperative for fiction to do more than dazzle with clever tricks, telling his editor upon beginning his legacy-defining Infinite Jest, “I want to improve as a writer, and I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff…”. His new mission statement was to not only write well, but in a way that offered some sort of spiritual or intellectual nourishment and, as he put it, "make the head throb heart-like.”
Though this theory is entirely my own, I feel like the main complaint about Wallace’s writing, leaving aside groans about the physics of reading (i.e. the perceived difficulty of his writing compounded by the length of the book vs. the feeling that time invested in book is “worth it”.), is that he loads the act of reading and writing with baggage many people don’t see. The claim of fiction as a fundamentally moral exercise is in Wallace’s eyes a shot at writers as varied as fellow post-modernist Mark Leyner and writers of trash fiction such as Sydney Sheldon.
Stating that fiction is a moral exercise is a strong claim and a sentiment that most readers don’t use as a guiding principle when making a trip to the library (at least not consciously) nor do writers, upon picking up the pen, consider themselves engaged in a virtuous act. So what does Wallace mean when he makes this claim? In an interview with The Review of Contemporary Fiction he speculates that "if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.”
Wallace, an admitted binge-watcher, was perhaps the most in tune to television’s effects on writing and worried that trash writing was replacing fiction's foundational goals which he enumerated as “demanding of [the reader] any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an important activity” Why then, must writing be more than entertainment? I’ve suggested in a previous post that mankind as a species cannot help but produce stories. Before the written word, there were oral traditions that explained the world to a society. Even now in a post-faith world, stories are essential to communicating ideas, wether it be the P.C. narratives constructed for a political candidate’s campaign or a commercial designed to connect some Freudian urge to a Doritos Locos Taco, a la Mad Men’s master storyteller, Don Draper. So if storytelling is a default mode of society, why must it be scrutinized on the level Wallace wishes? I'll refer you to our introductory roundtable where The Reserve And The Well’s own Alec Berry made the distinction between the arts and a trade. During the conversation he made the claim that cooking was not an art because it could be taught to anyone, unlike writing which requires a unique unteachable vision of the world. To further unpack the Berry schema of art versus trade with writing in mind, I propose that there are three broad categories of writing. First, there is the small minority of "great art” writing who’s proportion of total writing output ranges from being very, very small to the quite small indeed if we are being generous. Second, there is a great majority of writing that tries and fails at being great, but through the simple act of trying, is still art. Then there is another great mass of writing that, unlike bad art, is quite effective in achieving its purely economic ends. Is it putting it too strongly to label these very successful though artless writers as tradesmen? To be sure, there is a very real distinction between the narrative’s Don constructs, and art of the caliber that Mad Men itself embodies. The difference, to Wallace, was the difference between delivering content like any ad man can, and the artist’s “transfiguration” of our "now" into something beautiful or at least recognizably true. Now, if you let me classify the story as an unconscious need for which we all grasp, as well as one that can be easily manipulated, it becomes more clear why Wallace see the need to protect its purity from the money guys.
Perhaps the great evil isn't trash, because no one has misidentified Always Sunny in Philadelphia as great art yet( see forthcoming article on great trash), but trash that passes itself off as good writing. For example, like everyone else, I divide my time among activities of varying merit. I save my reading time for more personal and contemplative moments of the day when I have enough time to process what I'm reading. However, what if the books I read, which I have come to trust as being able to relate the aforementioned intellectual or spiritual truths i read books for, are no more intellectually edifying than the cheap thrills I get from a Viacom owned radio station or a News Corp television channel? With the amount of time involved in reading an entire book, shouldn’t I expect more than to simply be entertained?
This is why Wallace's critique was aimed at more than simply trash novels but "smart" books that use irony as its vehicle to critique whatever social norms needed upheaving. He viewed this knowing and cynical passivity to injustice with equal disdain because both are effectively a reverse Trojan Horse: a vehicle who's contents we expect to be revolutionary, but which is opened to reveal emptiness. Though his standards for “nourishing” books might be more exacting than yours or mine, I think the demands Wallace places on writing and the threats to its continued cultural relevance are on point. Though the market for serious writers is diminishing, the fact that people still choose to spend their time reading for nothing but escapism when there are mediums that can deliver pleasure quicker, more seductively, and on-demand may bely an expectation, memory, or faith in what books can deliver that goes beyond simple entertainments.
This week the Dads are saving the world from an intergalactic threat, Boyle is being honored at the 99, Jess is being Jess, and The Mindy gang is headed to LA.
Dads
Brooklyn 99
It's a big week at the 99 as Boyle is being honored for his bravery, Peralta and Santiago's bet is coming to a close, and the show picked up two Golden Globes. While most award shows are meaningless (especially the Globes) it is a nice publicity bump and could make a big impact when it comes time for renewal decisions. If there was going to be a post awards bump this was a good week for that to happen. Once everything else is stripped away, this is a show, much like it's forefather Parks and Recreation, about people doing something they like and are good at. While Boyle may have been upstaged by a horse at his ceremony, he was still receiving a medal. He was receiving this award for, as he tells a shocked Diaz, doing what any good cop would do. And as Holt tells an equally shocked Mrs. Jeffords that Terry should be up on the stage with him for saving Holt's life. Peralta and Santiago may have a silly bet, which ultimately leads to them doing their job really well and pushing each other. So while Peralta may rent a tiger cub by the hour adding to his debt, sorry, crushing debt, he can also work a stakeout and make a clean arrest. Even if he gets a little snacky. It was also nice to see Boyle dropping painkiller induced truth bombs. Joe La Truglia has shown through the past few episodes that he will do whatever is asked of him. It's nice to get some dignity and have the pendulum back the other way a little. So if you'll excuse me I'm going to pretend I'm receiving a text message.
New Girl
This was an episode that had to happen if Coach was sticking around even if it's just for this season. Coach and Jess had no connection and even team drug store wasn't enough to remedy the situation. She had worked her way into the other guys' lives in one way( even though Nick had five other reasons he wanted to be her friend). She decides that Basketball will be her in; the only problem is he's a Pistons fan and Nick is a Bulls fan. Meanwhile Winston is continuing his career search by shadowing Schmidt who has a new shark to deal with in the form of an old man who stole his idea, and has a thing for avocados. Winston cracks the case on how to beat him with the aid of a rambling Nick that was quite a treat. Meanwhile Nick and Jess are engaged in the sex standoff trope which I thought they did quite well with. Zooey Deschanel and Jake Johnson are both good physical performers and this allowed them to play to that and ultimately it showed how good of a partner they make for each other. The Coach story line ended kind of weirdly with him bringing up his abandonment issues, but that might be something the show can use in the future. As I mentioned Winston cracked the case and this led to an also freshly job switched CeeCee helping him decide that he should try to become a cop. I'm not sure how the show is going to handle this, but if it means more of Winston's Denzel impression then I'm in. As I've said quite often it will also be nice if this helps to solidify Winston as a character.
The Mindy Project
After a string of solid shows, TMP has hit another bump. Dr. Reed is sending Mindy, Danny, Peter, and Morgan to LA for a conference. This is the first problem with the episode. The past few episodes have been good because they have focused on the office and sticking mostly with the regular cast members. Here we have a certain set of characters shuttled out to LA and no focus at all on anybody else. And suddenly Peter and Mindy are bffs out of nowhere. Speaking of Peter his storyline just had no flow to it and ended abruptly. I will say I enjoyed the Entourage stuff but it seems like they did this episode just for the entourage stuff. This was the problem last year. I felt they were trying to do something big every week instead of focusing on building a show and a cast of characters. It was inevitable that Mindy and Cliff would break up, but I don't think throwing Casey back into the mix was the way to go about doing it. If they are going back to this style, then it's not the end of the world. It is going on hiatus.
Deleted Scenes
Archer came back on Monday and nothing is the same. ISIS is no more and the gang is now trying to sell a literal ton of cocaine. Creator Adam Reed was bored with the spy angle and wanted to try something new. If the first episode was any indicator, we are in for a treat.
It's been a big week for Louis C.K. As Louie has been announced as coming back in May. And FX has ordered a pilot that he is Executive Producing starring Zach Galifianakis
*This did not happen on Dads. This is the plot of Independence Day.
I had an idea. Remember my first post in which I promised that we'd be making mustard the following week? Well, I finally decided to return to that premise. When you make your own mustard from scratch, you must allow it to rest for several days (typically ten). I had this great notion to try to quick "rest" it by using the whipping siphon, akin to a quick infusion or quick pickle. If you noticed the picture that greeted you at the top of the page, then you can probably predict how this played out. Alas, we are somewhat in media res at the moment - let's take a few steps back.
Roasted Tomato Mustard
Follow the recipe from here, sans the waiting period. You will need the following:
Emulsion Blender or Blender
Whipping Siphon
1-3 Nitrous Dioxide Chargers
2 Cups of Basic Mustard
10-15 Grape Tomatoes
Cut the tomatoes in half and place cut side up in a small oven safe pan. Drizzle with olive oil, thyme, and pepper and roast in the oven for 45 minutes or until lightly browned and dried out. Flip once or twice during their tenure in the oven.
Pour your basic mustard in a bowl, toss in your tomatoes, and use your emulsion blender to quickly blend. Tada!
If you stop here, then seal for ten days in the refrigerator before use. Ten days seemed like a looooooong time, so why wait? Grab a whipping siphon. The premise was simple enough - charge the mustard once or twice for a quick infusion. Taste to see if we eliminated the waiting period. Well, I poured the mustard into the container, checked for the removable seal(!), sealed, charged, shook, waited five minutes, vented, and BAMMMMMM.[1]
My assumption is that I didn't vent properly. Well, a very aerated mustard began spewing out the top of the siphon, I'm running to the sink, and my immediate thought is to further vent out the gas. So in my brilliance I pull the trigger and a burst of mustard flies out to the mirror, ensuring my marital demise.
Akin to Alfred above, failures in the kitchen are wonderful teachers - only when we listen, of course. That is amazingly easier said than done, right? Today it was easy. I was making this mustard solely for this blog post. If it doesn't work, so what. The problem arises when you are cooking for more than one. Maybe it's your family on a weeknight. Maybe it's just you, but you splurged on a $40 cut of steak. Maybe it's a simple 15 minute meal, but you're tired and stressed from work and this is the last straw.
Every failure is an opportunity.
Allow me to be redundant - every failure is an opportunity. If something doesn't work in the kitchen, if your dish doesn't look, taste, feel like it should, then stop and think. Did you do anything differently than before or from the recipe? If yes, what was it and could it have an adverse effect that you didn't realize when you were alternating?
If you did nothing differently, then think through your actions. Start from the beginning and imagine every variable - was the heat too high? Too low? Fresh vs. canned ingredients? New ingredient or technique that you are not familiar with?
If you are able to isolate the issue, then you are half-way to the land of opportunity. It's not enough to recognize the issue. You must now understand it (to the best of your ability). So you had the heat too low. Why does that matter? What can you take away from this opportunity?
I won't pretend that I always perform this way. I've messed up a dinner or two, cooked a tough steak, and lost my temper along the way. However, every time I did so, I lost an opportunity to learn and better hone my craft, and that, my friends, is the true failure.
208 pp. First Second, cloth, $24.99; paper, $15.99.
The other day, I was discussing books over a drink with a friend and used the word “literature” as shorthand for "serious writing". This friend, a sci-fi and fantasy head, promptly rolled his eyes and assumed the body language of someone who is politely not listening. I have probably become more comfortable with the “L” word than most and throw it around generally to mean any form of writing as art including novels, comics, poetry and song lyrics. But from time to time I also use it to mean "writing that self-consciously tries to be taken seriously for its craft” and I understand why it carries negative baggage for certain readers.
The big issue here is the unfortunate entanglement of the word “literature," and the term “literary fiction," which is simply fiction the critical establishment agrees to take seriously. Henry James is literary fiction and yet somehow, so is Gertrude Stein, a radically different writer. Though James is a realist writer and Stein is highly experimental, both have been accepted into the critical pantheon and thus, they are both literary. This is how I will use the word for the purposes of this post. My friend probably didn’t appreciate me drawing the distinction, not because he doesn't see the difference in literary and genre fiction, but because of the puffed-up image it confers on the “accepted” books. He thinks it's silly that the critical establishment has constructed a genre unto itself whose criteria for inclusion is so subjective it has almost no real meaning and then gives this fake genre the name “literary fiction," a moniker that seems to claim all of literature for itself, as if to say, "this is what it looks like if your doing it right." Its implications for non-literary fiction are understandably insulting.
Upon realizing these conceits, my first instinct was to reject the oppressive idea of genres. What are genres anyway but artificial constructs used to close yourself off from the world? Why not cast off these shackles and just vibe with whatever strikes you as good? It was a cute phase but then, alas, I thought about graphic novels. Comics are by now recognized as highly esteemed forms of literary art and are also proof that genres at least in their broadest forms exist. Anyone willing to question the differences between a mystery novel and a realist novel will at least be able to agree that the very mechanics of comics and traditional novels are fundamentally different. AND YET, most everyone would concede that both are literature. Though the comic may be limited in terms of how much dialogue you can stuff into the frame, attacking a comic for not using artful prose would be an exercise in missing the point.
One then must ask whether there can be other less obvious examples of defined genres that resemble the traditional realist novel enough so as to be mistaken for a failed attempt at the form. I’ve heard it said that great books teach you how to read them. That is, the books that deviate from the rules successfully become a genre unto themselves and often influence other writers and sometimes foment entire literary movements such as Minimalism, Post-modernism, and The New Sincerity. Truly there are many actual genres within literary fiction that, unlike the word “literary," actually describe the writing it labels; however, for reasons pertaining to the perceived level of “reality” in which the story takes place, some genres are located in different departments of your local Barne’s and Noble. There are simply too many exceptions to the rule of realist novels being synonymous with literary fiction to take this partition seriously.
But how much of this ghetto is self imposed? That earlier conversation with a friend was actually about this blog and how we are championing all kinds of writing, though my friend, sadly turned off by the “L” word, would hear none of my grand unifying theory. It seems genre readers have positioned themselves in opposition to literary fiction and thrown "Desiree’s Baby" out with the bathwater due to some douchebag in their past who wanted kudos for reading a hard book. In actuality this oppositional stance reinforces the wall between writing that stresses craft and writing that stresses imagination. In my experience, I very rarely encounter readers of literary fiction who consciously limit themselves from specific genres other than romance novels. Usually the reader that “doesn’t go for that fantasy crap” is more of a cinema-man anyway. I get more pushback from genre readers when suggesting more cerebral novels. The typical line I get is that they work hard during the day and the last thing they want to do with their free-time is work at reading a difficult book. The assumption that enjoyment should be divorced from work holds no water in other hobbies such as sports and video games, as well as most careers typically described as fulfilling, so I find its persistence in pleasure reading troubling to say the least. Please keep in mind I am not talking about your mood or even your own personal tastes. I spent my holidays devouring graphic novels because I wasn’t in the mood for something super dense. But when it becomes one’s general opinion to be blind towards the merits of a certain kind of book, well, then your probably just being willfully ignorant.
This also isn’t to say that genre books necessarily need to become more literary. Case in point: Paul Pope’s Battling Boy, which is one of the most noteworthy graphic novels of 2013. Battling Boy is in many ways a comic reader’s comic and proof that you can work within the confines of a genre (in this case, the super hero comic) and still produce really great art. It knows exactly what it is and goes H.A.M. in that one direction. This assured exuberance is what makes it so refreshing and vital.
Though the story is pretty formulaic, like any rhythm and blues song that bops around in your brain longer than the 3 minutes it lasts, it is the subtle deviations from the form while remaining true to its spirit that make for a really great comic. You’ve got evil villains; they eat cars, kidnap children, and blow stuff up while being humorous and unique; and you’ve got a hero. The hero is a boy who’s coming to terms with adulthood which also entails saving the world. He’s sent to earth to save it from the aforementioned monsters and uses magical t-shirts to give him different powers(!). Within the traditional hero/monster tradition, Paul Pope has injected his own voice of eastern-meets-western comic book styles to stunning effect. Each frame is given the detail of a western comic, though it is infused with the energy one would expect from a manga. It's a light read in the best way, though I hate to use the word escapism. No matter how fantastical art can be, when it’s good it usually makes us look harder at our own world. Because, yea, humans are complex, but we also contain some pretty universal traits which comics excel at working within.
Battling Boy is the perfect example of a book that's genre is so clearly defined it gets its own shelf in the book store, that makes no apologies for itself, and thrillingly succeeds.
After a holiday break we are back on track with #seentv: Fox Tuesday Night Comedy is back. Dads is Dadsing it up, Jess is going through a crisis, Peralta has the Pontiac Bandit in his sights, and Mindy has to wear a bikini in January.
Dads
This tale of the Old South from the start of the Civil War through to the period of reconstruction focuses on the beautiful Scarlett O'Hara. Before the start of the war life at the O'Hara plantation, Tara, could only be described as genteel. As for the young Scarlett, she is without doubt the most beautiful girl in the area and is always the belle of the ball. She is very much looking forward to a barbecue at the nearby Wilkes plantation as she will get to see the man she loves, Ashley Wilkes. She is more than a little dismayed when she hears that he is to marry his cousin Melanie Hamilton and in a fit of anger, she decides to marry Melanie's brother. War is soon declared and as always seems to be the case, men march off to battle thinking that it will only last a few weeks. Now living in Atlanta, Scarlett sees the ravages that war brings. She also becomes re-acquainted with Rhett Butler, whom she had first met at the Wilkes barbecue. Now a widow, she still pines for the married Ashley and dreams of his return. With the war lost however, she returns to Tara and faces the hardship of keeping her family together and Tara from being sold at auction to collect the taxes. She has becomes hardened and bitter and will do anything, including marrying her sister's beau, to ensure she will never again be poor and hungry. After becoming a widow for the second time, she finally marries the dashing Rhett but they soon find themselves working at cross-purposes, their relationship seemingly doomed from the outset.*
Brooklyn 99
This wasn't the strongest episode of Brooklyn 99 but it also features Andre Brougher holding two puppies for most of his screen time so I can't complain too much. Puppies aside the episode focuses on Peralta working with Diaz on capturing the Pontiac Bandit and Boyle's return to work following his butt shot. Diaz has a suspect in custody, played by Craig Robinson, who says he can get The Pontiac Bandit who Peralta has been looking for eight years. This allowed for some good work with Diaz and Peralta which is a grouping they haven't really used much. It allowed for some background that can be used in the future and built a solid character in Robinson's Doug Judy that we will hopefully be seeing in the future. Boyle's coming back from his injury cast and leg warmers in tow. Naturally Boyle doesn't want any help and as anybody with a body cast is pretty gross. There's a few laughs but nothing revolutionary here with everybody slow leaving the office with Boyle knowing what's going on. Not the best but a serviceable midseason episode.
New Girl
New Girl went back to the flashback well last night to mixed results. Jess is having second thoughts about being a teacher after being offered a job at a museum and has only 20 minutes to decide whether she should take it or stick with her poorly ran, poorly funded school. This allows for everybody to run down why they became what they are. This is nice not only for Winston's Rodmanesque flashbacks but because it allows for a change for Winston and gives him something to do moving forward. Winston has had some good laughs but he is also the least defined character and hopefully moving forward this will allow the writers to define him more. Schmidt's fatsuit has lost some of it's freshness and hopefully it will be a bit before they break it out again but credit to Max Greenfield for continuing to be game. Nick got to break free of his law school dropout shackles and be happy with his choice to be a bartender which sets up the future nicely. Ultimately CeCe saves the day by showing Jess that she should be a teacher and gains employment at the bar. This might not have been the strongest episode but it built a solid foundation for future story lines.
The Mindy Project
It's a bit of a shame that TMP will be going on hiatus because the last few episodes have been pretty strong. Aside from Glenn Howerton at the beginning it was also nice because it was just the main cast. There has been so much stunt casting and guests the first part of the season it pushed some cast members to the edge. This was also an extremely physical episode there were falls, slaps, spitting, and bare skin aplenty and that's not counting the focus of the episode, exercise. Mindy is going on a trip with her new boyfriend and that trip includes a hot tub, in January. This thwarts Mindy's system she has in place that assures her boyfriend never sees her naked. (There will be lots of body image talk surrounding this episode. But it won't be from this column.) This allows for Danny to train Mindy and builds even more towards the will they won't they of their relationship. Elsewhere Pete is finding out what it's like to be in charge and is not enjoying it while Dr. Reed is regaining his charming ways having ditched the office for the day. It's a shame the show will be going away but hopefully off the strength of this run of episodes it will be back.
*This is a summary of Gone With the Wind. I didn't watch Dads and plan on never watching it again.
Seriously. Last night, with the help of Bob Pelligrino (See Life as Bob), we made cake…in 60 seconds. Some of you are thinking that we are a regular Siegfried and Roy and others of you out there in Internet land are way ahead of us. To those initiated, why yes, I did receive an ISI Whipping Siphon for Christmas; and yes, we did make way too many mini cakes with it yesterevening.
First, one doesn’t want a whipping siphon; one needs a whipping siphon. A whipping siphon is a metal container in which you can seal and pressurize liquids typically with nitrous oxide (N2O) or carbon dioxide (CO2). You use “chargers,” which are mini capsules of the gas, to pressurize the siphon. Pressurizing a liquid can be used to make foams, infusions, or carbonations. By forcing the pressurized gas out of the nozzle, the gas escapes, aerating the liquid as it does so. The end result is a foam. If you pressurize the liquid and then release only the gas, then you can perform quick infusions and carbonizations.
A Mini Word on Nitrous Oxide and Carbon Dioxide
These are the main gases that one uses in the siphon. Nitrous oxide is used for foams and infusions; whereas carbon dioxide is used for carbonating. N2O is readily absorbed by fats and liquids and leaves quickly; consequently, there isn’t much flavor left behind. Enter CO2. It becomes trapped in the liquid, resulting in carbonation, and leaves a slightly sour taste.
Cakes on Cakes on Cakes
After a mere 4-5 hours in the kitchen, we decided it was dessert time. What could be a better idea at 10 PM on a Monday than to make cakes. We chose the easy route and used a box of cake mix…sorry. As I was mixing the mix, eggs, water, and oil, Bob had the idea to use stabilizers in the mix. I happened to have an inordinate amount of xanthan gum on hand as my last trip to the store I blanked on the differences between grams and ounces and brought home 6 ounces instead of 6 grams. This is a classic Bob move. See, Bob is a doctoral candidate in Food Science. I would have been happy to just make my little 60 second cake with very little support, but instead we can make a structurally sound cake with Bob’s advice. We added 0.1% xanthan gum to the mix – and, well, - talk about your thickening agents. We made concrete instead.
Actually, it thickened up nicely, but it did turn out to be a little too thick for the siphon nozzle eventually. However, I’m moving too far ahead. After mixing it in, we poured it into the siphon, sealed it, and charged it with nitrous oxide. I gave it two shakes (tried to, is more accurate – it was really thick!) and foamed a little out into a plastic cup that I had cut four tiny slits into the bottom (this allows the cup to steam). Finally, we moved it to the microwave, punched in 60 seconds, and watched that bad boy turn into cake! It really is fascinating to realize that you made something in 1/20th of the time.
We cut it in half to inspect the density and aeration of the cake. Perfect. Extremely light, multiple large air pockets, tasty. Then we moved on to making more; or, then we moved on towards lesser cakes. The siphon nozzle is now blocked because of the thickness of the liquid, so we release the gas, pour it back into the bowl, and add a few splashes of club soda to lighten and carbonate our mixture. Now back into the siphon, charge, and Bob gives it quite the shaking down. Actually too much. Our second attempt and we over shook the siphon, creating a very dense foam, which in turn creates a dense cake. So we start again – pour, seal, charge, shake (NOT TOO MANY!); and yet, we were still making denser foams than our original.
Our guess? The original batch thickened with xanthan gum was the best. Maybe a little less than our 0.1% to ensure that the siphon can still discharge it.
Moral of the story? Don’t pull The Hangover, and stop while you’re ahead.
For more information be sure to check out THE book on modernist cuisine, coincidently titled Modernist Cuisine at Home by Nathan Myhrvold and Maxime Bile, as well as the lesser known The Whipping Siphon by Jason Logsdon.
