The Diplodocus

While tossing some arugula into a tupperware this morning (lunch), I realized that I hadn’t commented on one of the better books I’ve read recently, The United States of Arugula.  Unfortunately, it’s been about a month since I finished it and though I had some well-developed thoughts put together, my lack of follow-through means I’ve lost most of them.

What I remember: this whole local-regional-fresh-organic approach to American food is old news.  Locally sourced, seasonal ingredients have been popular with food-types  since M.F.K. Fisher, and before her time – pre-WWII – it wasn’t the preferred way to eat, it was the only way.   It’s interesting to see that as the idea of thinking about food as more than simple fuel has spread to common consciousness, a rusty old idea has been polished to look new. 

There it was, right in front of me:  material for a great post.  The inspiration?  A particular passage from Steve Almond’s excellent Candyfreak.  The objective?  To see if an admitted non-chocolate fan (me) would have the same rapturous reaction to a high-quality chocolate that he did.  The hypothesis? No, because even chocolate described as “gourmet” rarely has me begging for more.  But while typing out background, the requisite blockquote from the book, I realized I’d committed a particularly egregious error.  

In the book, Almond (previously dismissive of “gourmet” chocolates) falls in love with the Five Star Hazelnut chocolate bar.   He’s inspired to travel to the source –Lake Champlain Chocolates’ Vermont HQ – and conduct an extensive interview with the “candy engineer” responsible for the bar’s creation.  Such devotion to a single bar was enough for me to question my general policy on chocolate (no consumption in bar form). Unfortunately, by the time I’d found the Five Star bars in a store, I’d forgotten the specific variety mentioned. And purchased a peanut bar instead.

The peanut bar gets the thumbs up from Almond.  He likes it — but nowhere near as much as he likes the hazelnut.  I hadn’t noticed my purchasing error when I tasted the peanut bar, so I was more than a little disappointed.   The chocolate was clearly high quality, as was the peanut butter.   The peanut chunks were smaller than expected.  The peanut butter was smooth, earthy, and sweet, without sacrificing the peanutty smokiness I enjoy.  I didn’t get much rice crisp, but there was some there.  Overall a good bar, but I’d probably not buy it again.  Or purchase it as a gift for my chocophilic friends with hope they’d have an out-of-this-world candy experience.  This was enough to inspire piligrimage? 

Of course, with the basic supplies incorrect, my entire experiment was flawed.  I messed up before I began.   Still, this is an example of another observable phenomenon:  my love of science trumps my dislike of chocolates enough for me to go out of my way and buy another candy bar for personal consumption.           

Fully intending to give the gift of Borges, I bought a copy of Labyrinths recently.  And thus found myself getting sucked back in to a Borgesian labyrinth of my own.  I suppose it has been a few years since I’ve had my head thoroughly twisted by ProtoPoMoLit.

Having gone on Borges kicks before, I was adequately prepared for the density of the stories and their meta-narratives.  The suspicion that I’d probably need a dictionary at crucial moments was humbling – and has thus far been on point (opprobrium).  What I was unprepared for was re-reading The Garden of Forking Paths and realizing that I have absolutely no idea what the initial paragraph from the first-layer narrator means.  After reading the story about four times more, I grew weary of trying to figure it out.  A cursory bit of research offered no adequate answers, focusing instead on the hypertextual meat of the story’s spy narrative and the multiple-worlds hypothesis.  I’m coming around to the opinion that the early lines may be a way for the reader to consider (in)significant forks in the road.   But in the end, I struggle with the added value — the core narrative stands on its own without any frame.  The existence of the frame suggests either that the short anecdote was Borges’ inspiration, or that he didn’t know how to start his actual story.  I quote the relevant below. 

On page 22 of Liddell Hart’s History of World War I you will read that an attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen British divisions (supported by 1,400 artillery pieces), planned for the 24th of July, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th. The torrential rains, Captain Liddell Hart comments, caused this delay, an insignificant one, to be sure.

The Garden of Forking Paths is a favorite of Borges acolytes, the popular reason being that it was the first modern(ish) work to conceive of multiple worlds.  But in 2007, any basic comic book or Star Trek fan could give you a basic lecture on how geek favorite concepts like hypertime and the multiverse work.  And being the first isn’t a valid reason for being lauded.  Compared to other Borges short stories (for example, The Circular Ruins), The Garden of Forking Paths has never struck me as particularly interesting or praiseworthy.  The frame is clumsy, the writing is tedious, and the plot is about as clear as mud.  Maybe I’m just too dumb to get it, but I suspect what’s more likely is that it just isn’t that good.  

A mixed blessing: realizing your meandering, random, seemingly fascinating thought actually has an exact historical answer that is possibly definitive.

The thought (cooked up while doing situps and watching CNN): When did we start metaphorically mapping ”theater” to warfare?  Is it part of human nature to try and separate ourselves from the ugly nature of war by mapping it to the artificial world of theater?  Is this symbolic mapping only in English?

The answer: Clausewitz.  Thanks, wikibrain!

A new subject I now realize I’m completely ignorant in: Theory of War.  I guess Sun Tzu doesn’t cut it.        

Julie and Julia was good Metro reading material: light, simple fluff, kind of like a good meringue.  Definitely not a book that kept me thinking after I closed it, though it certainly did a good job of making me hungry.  (And no, I’m not envious of Julie Powell at all.  Not utterly jealous of the fact that she managed to transform a blog into a career — or, perhaps better put, an avocation into a vocation.  Accidentally. Oh, and that she has a big dog.  No envy from me.) 

Now I’m torn between two (seven?) novels.  Cloud Atlas has been on my reading list forever, and I just realized I have a copy of Absurdistan buried somewhere in the basement.  The decision is complicated by the fact that I really, honestly, authentically tried to start Cloud Atlas at a time when starting a mindbending novel with six different plots was probably not the best idea in the world.  Still, I feel like I need to give it a second chance, if only to redeem myself for past lapses into intellectual laziness.  On the other hand, Absurdistan: a novel about visas!  Who wouldn’t want to read a novel about someone trying their hardest to circumvent 214(b)?  Sounds awesome to me.

Until I decide, it’s time to re-read issues of the Atlantic.  And spend Metro time idly wondering why its virtually impossible to predict how crowded the blue/orange line is during rush hour. 

Suggestions, as always, are appreciated (for both the book and the Metro thing, I ain’t picky).

1.  My Favorite Author from 1994-1996 or so was Kurt Vonnegut, and I think he’s an ideal Favorite Author for anyone going through that horrible time of life known as adolescence.  Vonnegut’s propensity to boil down many of his stories to koan-like phrases is both seductive and reductive; when you’re searching for identity, they make sense in a bumper-sticker kind of way.  That isn’t to denigrate Vonnegut as a writer, but complexity and nuance were never his strong suit.  I’m pretty sure he’s okay with that.  It doesn’t make him a worse writer than any other — just an ideal writer for certain times in your life. 

Despite an overall love for Slaughterhouse-5 as an introduction to his oeuvre, my favorite Vonnegut novels are Mother Night and Bluebeard.   Neither compare to Welcome to the Monkey House, which, all criticism aside, is one of the finest collections of short stories ever written.

2.  By the time my violin teacher handed me Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas (age: 17), my attitude was pretty poor.  I started playing the fiddle when I was 5, and never really took to the whole “practice” part of it.  Better to play what I wanted, and not Suzuki etudes, or so I figured.  These are the things that attitude got me: poor violin posture, a crappy arm vibrato, and a perpetual seat as lead 2nd violin or 3rd chair.  It didn’t help that there were seriously talented violinists ahead and behind me in school, and that other things (that litany is very, very long) often got in the way of learning to play in fifth position.  So after hacking away at the 2nd movement of Partita #2 for months, I got tired of trying.  It’s precisely when I decided to give up the violin.

To this day, I maintain that I had no natural or innate musical talent.  I can parrot pretty well and I have a fairly decent ear, but I have no real skills.  There’s a causality question buried here: was I unable to nurture innate talent because I was lazy and unfocused?  Did I realize I was lazy and unfocused early enough that I never gave the violin my all?  I’m not sure.   I’m fortunate that those Sunday morning violin lessons gave me an ongoing appreciation of classical music.  That doesn’t make it any easier to admit that I gave the violin up primarily out of self-centered laziness.  That Partita — and I remember it well, in the yellow book, staring back at me, mocking my fingers and their lack of grace — was a breaking point, and it wasn’t long before I put my violin in my bedroom closet and stopped thinking about it.  Well, sort of. 

Sunday’s Post magazine had a heavily blogged article about Joshua Bell giving an impromptu violin performance in L’Enfant Plaza.  The results of the “sociological experiment” (no spoilers — read the article!) were entirely unsurprising.  Some of the corrolary observations (Children like music!  People recognize beauty!) were painfully banal.  But the article struck — ahem — a chord. That’s probably because a large part of it was devoted to the violin, and specifically to the Chaconne, the fifth movement of Bach’s Partita #2.   Maybe I’d have stopped and listened to Bell that morning, and maybe not.  But the article did inspire me to get some more classical music in my collection, for the sake of reminiscing (if not outright self-flagellation).  

Well before zombies (zombies!), I had an on-again, off-again genre fixation for novels about me.  Not Me with a capital M, but little-m me, the “South Asian male with identity issues” me.  If you haven’t read the usual list of novels  about him (no need to rehash that here), you’ve probably seen him in the movies.  But after reading the thoroughly disappointing Londonstani, I decided to give the genre up.  Because after a few years of enjoying literary popularity and prominence, it had become boring. 

I guess I should qualify the “thoroughly disappointing” statement.  Yes, I did read Londonstani in about two sittings.  The use of Punjabi/Urdu/Hindi patois was amusing, and the whole “gangsta Desi” thing was fairly graphic – and titillating, at least for the male id.  The author threw in lots of nice references to suck in south Asian readers, the stereotypical ones about pickles and Stardust and bhangra that hit the sentimentality button.  The first hundred pages, if not artful, were at the very least amusing in an “aww, he lived like us, but with crime!” sort of way.  Unfortunately, that steam wore off around the fourth or fifth bhaji reference, and the novel went way downhill from there, to the point where the final twist will most likely have you banging your head on the nearest hard object.  

With some crucial details (primarily racial) changed, Londonstani would probably be on the high-quality end of the “pulp ghetto lit” genre.  Not a bad novel, per se — but definitely not good, and not deserving the hardcover with dust jacket packaging the book received — or the brief review in the New Yorker, for that matter.  Middling is probably the best adjective.  Also: boring, fetishistic, and sloppy.  In a perverse way, perhaps that’s a service for the entire sub-group of aspiring South Asian writers.  Ten years ago, my personal take on Londonstani would have been to call it an outrageous and irreverent commentary on race relations in contemporary London.  Granted, that’s as much an indictment on my relative immaturity as it is on the publishing machine that sees the success of comparables and tries to ride the wave.  But books like Londonstani, by being mediocre and uninspiring, are an antidote for the critical adulation of “exotic India!” that allowed it to be published.  In the company of other well-known trainwrecks, now there’s some chaff to be separated from the metaphorical wheat.       

I was a little surprised when I saw that one of my favorite recent reads, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, was chosen as this month’s selection for Oprah’s book club. At the expense of seeming Franzen-esque, the selection seems to deviate significantly from many of those prior to it. For example, I’m fairly sure that it’s the first book on the list that features brain-eating cannibals in a post-apocalyptic nightmare world. The quick-to-generalize part of me (you know, the one that suspects Oprah’s audience is primarily made up of overly sentimental hausfraus) thinks of this and is particularly gleeful. The more charitable and even-headed side actually shares part of the excitement (if not the kind-of unfair cackle): Oprah’s a very, very smart woman and The Road is pretty fantastic — it deserves any sales bump it gets, from any source. Still, I’m having a lot of fun picturing my personal stereotype of Oprah’s audience reading a book that’s basically about a walk through unimaginable hell.

Clearly, Oprah has joined me and The Pygs in being into reading about the Zombie/cannibal thing. If you also fall into that category (one of us! one of uuuuuussss!), here’s another recommendation: The Terror. Probably the longest book I’ve read in some time, and one of the most engrossing. Given our absurdly short and temperate winter and the lovely weather outside, you may feel hesitant to read about 120 men trapped in Arctic ice, struggling to survive and not doing a very good job at it — but it’s worth reading, especially on those (hopefully forthcoming) rainy Saturday afternoons of April. Unfortunately, The Terror is also a difficult book for anyone who’s a slow reader or totes their reading back and forth on the Metro (carrying it around made a significant contribution both to my shoulder muscles and my back fatigue). But: still the best book about the Arctic I’ve ever read, and unlike Moby Dick, the boring parts about working aboard ship are almost unnoticeable. And! Eskimo Mysticism. And Massive Beasties That Want to Eat You. And (though you have to wait for it) Zombie-Cannibals.

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Also: The AV Club: surely one of the most reliably excellent web publications around, and not just for the obligatory Dan Savage. Discuss.