Fading Memory

What Happened to Anna K? I wish I knew. I did read and discuss the book and I think I liked it well enough. But, now weeks have passed and I am unable to write much more than that. If I knew the answer to the question, I'd tell you what happened before the end, which if you read Tolstoy's Anna K. you probably know. Sometimes the less said the better. Who knows if this is one of those times, but there you go.

Thoughts on "Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

Brief Wonderful Life (Junot Díaz ) was our read for July-August 2009, and, other than anticipating the demise of Oscar from the title, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this book.

At first I was discouraged—no, really more like dismayed--by the raw language in the first few pages of the novel. Not out of prudishness, I hope, but because I have come to really appreciate elegant language, the kind of language I wish I could write. Somehow, coarse words (in unfailing supply) seem at odds with that. As it turns out, elegant and raw can, indeed, co-exist and even, maybe, help a reader better appreciate both.

The book became difficult for me to put down, though not so much because of plot and characters (I found many of the characters unsympathetic), but because I started looking forward to seeing how Díaz would use language—specifically rhythm and the use of symbolism related to language—as the story developed.

--

At one level, the entire book is the narrator/author’s zafa (I think of it as a talisman) against fukú (my rough translation is “Very Bad Things”). Note the rhythmic repetition of fuá as we are introduced to Very Bad Things:

If you even thought a bad thing about Trujillo, fuá, a hurricane would sweep your family out to sea, fuá, a boulder would fall out of the sky and squash you, fuá, the shrimp you ate today was the shrimp that would kill you tomorrow.

(p. 3)

--

For me, one of the book’s most intriguing characters was Oscar’s grandfather, Abelard, from whom Oscar seems to have inherited much. We learn, for example, that Abelard:

…possessed one of the most remarkable minds in the country: indefagitably curious, alarmingly prodigious, and especially suited for linguistic and computational complexity. (p. 213)

Yet, remarkably:

…none of Abelard’s books, not the four he authored or the hundreds he owned survived. Not in an archive, not in a private collection. Not a one. All of them either lost or destroyed. Every paper he had in the house was confiscated and reportedly burned. You want creepy? Not one single example of his handwriting remains. (p. 243)

Little wonder Oscar’s closest friend, the opening voice of Brief Wonderful Life, and the individual who narrates much of the story, tells us (after Oscar’s death) of:

… the four refrigerators where I store … (Oscar’s) books, his games, his manuscript, his comic books, his papers—refrigerators are the best proof against fire, against earthquakes, against anything. (p. 332)

That Abelard could have had such a friend! But such it is with Very Bad Things: fukú always eats first, and it always eats alone (p. 4). Abelard’s thoughts—Abelard—what Oscar might have learned from him—have all been irretrievably lost. Fukú, indeed.

Brief Wondrous Life may be, for me, most memorable for its use of, and commentary, on, the power of language. Not the least of which is the 800-word opening sentence to the chapter “Oscar Goes Native.” The chapter is reproduced below. I’ve tried breaking this up, counting syllables, counting words, trying to figure out what makes this chapter “tick.” Mostly this exercise has been futile, but maybe you’ll have better luck. I especially like the repetition of “after,” the parenthetical asides, and the strong and surprising finishes as Oscar goes native:

After his initial homecoming week, after he’d been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he’d gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huáscar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he’d forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he’d gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn’t dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he’d explained to people a hundred times that he’d been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he’d given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he’d watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he’d left on his plat at an outdoor café, after his mother took them all to dinner at the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola, said, they probably think you’re Haitian—La única haitiana aquí eres tú, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that’s bad, you should see the bateys, after he’d spent a day in Baní (the campo where La Inca had been raised) and he’d taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob—now that’s entertainment, he wrote in his journal—after he’d gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital—the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin’ Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica da Silva novellas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokendown shotguns, the poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth, the signs that banned donkey carts from the same tunnels—after he’d gone to Boca Chica and Villa Mella and eaten so much chicharrones he had to throw up on the side of the road—now that, his tío Rudolfo said, is entertainment—after his tío Carlos Moya berated him for having stayed away so long, after his abuela berated for having stayed away so long, after his cousins berated him for having stayed away so long, after he saw again the unforgettable beauty of the Cibao, after he heard the stories about his mother, after he stopped marveling at the amount of political propaganda plastered up on every spare wall—ladrones, his mother announced, one and all—after the touched-in-the-head tío who’d been tortured during Balaguer’s reign came over and got into a heated political argument with Carlos Moya (after which they both got drunk), after he’d caught his first sunburn at Boca Chica, after he’d swum in the Caribbean, after tío Rudolfo had gotten him blasted on mamajuana de marisco, after he’d seen his first Haitians kicked off a guagua because niggers claimed they “smelled,” after he’d nearly gone nuts over all the bellezas he saw, after he helped his mother install two new air conditioners and crushed his finger so bad he had dark blood under the nail, after all the gifts they’d brought had been properly distributed, after Lola introduced him to the boyfriend she’d dated as a teenager, now a capitaleño as well, after he’d seen the pictures of Lola in her private-school uniform, a tall muchacha with heartbreak eyes, after he’d brought flowers to his abulela’s number-one servant’s grave who had taken care of him when he was little, after he had diarrhea so bad his mouth watered before each detonation, after he’d visited all the rinky-dink museums in the capital with his sister, after he stopped being dismayed that everybody called him gordo (and, worse, gringo), after he’d been overcharged for almost everything he wanted to buy, after La Inca prayed over him nearly every morning, after he caught a cold because his abuela set the air conditioner in his room so high, he decided suddenly to stay on the Island for the rest of the summer with his mother and his tío. Not to go home with Lola. It was a decision that came to him one night on the Malecón, while staring out over the ocean. What do I have waiting for me in Paterson? He wanted to know. He wasn’t teaching that summer and he had all his notebooks with him. Sounds like a good idea to me, his sister said. You need some time in the patria. Maybe you’ll even find yourself a nice campesina. It felt like the right thing to do. Help clear his head and his heart of the gloom that had filled him these months. His mother was less hot on the idea but La Inca waved her into silence. Hijo, you can stay here all your life. (Though he found it strange that she made him put on a crucifix immediately thereafter.)

So, after Lola flew back to the Sates (Take good care of yourself, Mister) and the terror and joy of his return had subsided, after he settled down in Abuela’s house, the house that Diaspora had built, and tried to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his summer now that Lola was gone, after his fantasy of an Island girlfriend seemed like a distant joke—Who the fuck had he been kidding? He couldn’t dance, he didn’t have loot, he didn’t dress, he wasn’t confident, he wasn’t handsome, he wasn’t from Europe, he wasn’t fucking no Island girls—after he spent one week writing and (ironically enough) turned down his male cousins’ offer to take him to a whorehouse like fifty times, Oscar fell in love with a semiretired puta.

Her name was Ybón Pimentel. Oscar considered her the start of his real life.

Which of course was brief and wondrous.

--

Our book group discussion went in other directions, but because I wasn’t anticipating writing our review, you’re kind of stuck with my reflections.

I should note two other things: the book cover design won national recognition in 2007 and has been on display with other award winners from that year outside the Book Arts Studio at Marriott Library for the past couple of months.

And last week, I was traveling by train en route to Manhattan and passed through New Brunswick, home of Rutgers University. How could I not think of Oscar as we passed the Johnson & Johnson research campus, our train crossing the beautiful, long, train bridge that passes through it? Practically next door to the Rutgers campus. Where Oscar …

So, how could I not think of Oscar, indeed? I suspect, very much to my surprise, he will live on for quite some time, and in unexpected ways, in my thoughts.

Enchanted with Rushdie

Dont buy this.........but THIS!

In the midst of all the confusion over the who, what, where, how, why and when of book choosing at Hayl's, I was left stuck with a few Salman Rushdie books. I was convinced he'd be the choice but then Jackie said he bored her and we were off to another author!

Instead of giving up and returning them to the library, I chose his most recent, "The Enchantress of Florence" and fell head over heels into this story. As Lisa Shea of Elle magazine writes, " a beguiling incandescent tale of travel, treachery, and transformation set in the Renaissance Florence of Machiavelli and the Medicis and in India's Mughal Empire."

Maybe I'm going out on limb here but I cannot believe that critics don't see the similarities between him and Isabelle Allende. I adore her and this story of Rushdie's has the same elements of mysticism, foreign cultures, eroticism and romance.

Just make sure you order The Enchantress of Florence so you don't end up holding a book that has a soft porn cover on the front!

"...avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing"

Our summer of food has been quite lovely so far. Interesting books, assorted conversation topics, farmers’ market visits, and delicious food.
We, like most, have avoided the darker side of where our food comes from. With only one true vegetarian among us, we have steered away from discussing our moral positions (if we have them) about animal products.
I’ve included a link to a thought provoking article by David Foster Wallace written for Gourmet Magazine in 2003…”Consider the Lobster.”

http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster

Water Hammer

This is my "ultimate" Iron Pen entry for this year, tweaked from its original submission ... the image ("secret ingredient") to write about was a black and white photograph of a dripping water faucet. I think the idea with the ultimate category was to submit three separate pieces, but that wasn't explicitly stated in the guidelines, so here's some fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, all mixed together:

BAM!

BAM!

BAM!

. . . BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM!

 

“Water hammer!” my mom shrieks out in somewhat hysterical laughter. It’s infectious, when she gets started, and so nice to see her dark brown eyes wrinkled up with laughter. Soon my sister and I have joined her, adding a loud chorus of “Water hammer!” to her shrieks between our uncontrollable giggles as the water pipes go “BAM!” yet one more time. Tears are now streaming down mom’s face. Someone—it must have been my father—gets up quietly and turns on the bathroom faucet, just enough.

 

No more “BAM!” noises coming from behind the walls. No more shrieks. The giggles slowly subside. Life at 1232 Beechtree Drive settles down, no more tears rolling down my mother’s face: just the sound of the bathroom faucet, dripping. No more air in the pipes: water hammer, fixed.

 

Our house was built in 1957, when neighborhoods of split-level homes were springing up all around the perimeter of the town in which we lived; construction was sometimes shoddy, and perhaps a hurried or inexperienced plumber was responsible for our recurring water hammer woes.

 

On Beechtree Drive, most, if not all, of the women were stay-at-home moms. The men were almost all employed by the big three chemical giants of the day: on Beechtree Drive, mostly by duPont. Kids freely roamed the woods and streams that had been spared by the developers.

 

Halcyon days, indeed. Or were they?

 

I have long suspected, but haven’t really wanted to know, that life on Beechtree Drive was not as rosy as it appeared to us kids. Have I imagined a story about a “come as you are” party that involved invitations phoned around the neighborhood at different times of the day—this long before answering machines, when a ringing phone was always answered right away—and that a couple who received their invitation one evening was found, in nightclothes (I think they were dressed) in bed, underneath piles of coats in the hosts’ bedroom the night of the party?  I know for sure my parents once trick-or-treated with highball glasses in tow. Certainly there were tensions, sexual and other, beneath the surface on Beechtree Drive. But that’s where they remained for us kids, anyway: far, far beneath the surface.

 

It wasn’t until I was a teenager and we had long since moved to another neighborhood that my parents explained why their good friend next door on Beechtree Drive never watered his lawn. Mind you, not watering a lawn in the town where I grew up is not such a big deal: unlike Salt Lake City, where my parents were raised and went to school, it rains on the east coast. But this was the era of “good housekeeping,” and proper lawn care—weeknight and weekend tasks performed by the men of our Crestview Woods neighborhood—was part of the whole picture … or was it a charade? 

 

At any rate, our neighbor Mr. Glover never watered his lawn.  He had been in one or two of the major European battles of World War II and if those horrors hadn’t been enough, he was among the first US infantrymen to enter one of the Nazi concentration camps. Whether it was Normandy or the Battle of the Bulge, Dachau or Buchenwald hardly matters now: he knew, in ways I think would be impossible for most of us to ever fully understand, the precious nature of water to human survival. Perhaps the Glover’s house, which was a little bigger than ours—a slightly different design—didn’t have the same recurring water hammer problem. But if it had, Mr. Glover would probably have let the pipes keep shuddering and clanging behind the walls rather than turn on a bathroom faucet to the slow and steady drip that let air bubbles escape from the pipes and spelled “water hammer, fixed” at our house.

 

I guess I’ll never know.

 

I’ll never know, too, if water hammer (at least the air bubbles in pipes part—turns out water hammer is a bit more complex than that) was perhaps the one physical manifestation of my father’s work my mother really understood. Dad was, in fact, an expert on water hammer problems: he worked for DuPont doing something.  Fluid mechanics, as it turns out. But as a kid, I had no clue. His work had to do with hammering water, and when he described his office, he told me he had a steel desk. I imagined it to be shiny silver metal—like garbage cans—its seams hammered together by rivets. But at about the same age, I thought potato skins were really brown paper bags, so who knows what I thought about what he actually did at his shiny, steel-riveted desk all day:

 

Wearing shirt and tie

                        Daddy sitting at his desk

                        Slide ruler in hand

 

                        Shiny metal desk

                        Piled high with pads of paper:

                        Formulas, numbers

 

                        Hammering water

                        Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam-Bam-BAM!

                        He is not happy.

 

                        After lunch each day

                        He picks up the phone and dials:

                        Mom awaits his call

 

Afternoons go by

                        At five-thirty he is home

                        That is what he does.

 

                                                

Sometime in the 1980s, as I was driving to work (perhaps wondering just what I was doing at my desk all day) and sort of absent-mindedly following an NPR story on the country’s aging nuclear facilities, I heard the reporter say, “Here at Savannah River…” Startled out of my inner dialog, I started paying more attention to the broadcast because several years before I was born, my parents had lived in Aiken, South Carolina—a town that literally mushroomed when, in 1950, E.I. duPont de Nemours was selected by the Atomic Energy Commission to design and construct the Savannah River Plant.

 

From my parents’ photos, I knew about Aiken’s red clay soil and red clay dust, red clay that got in everything. Red clay that had turned their white cat, Bessie, kind of a rusty pink. Other things, things that seemed more sinister, yet, than the dust, seemed ever-present there, too: I remember hearing a story about a woman who went to a bridge club event my mother attended. This woman asked the other women at her bridge table if their husbands, too, wore radiation badges: after that afternoon, the woman was never seen by the bridge group again. I’ve often wondered if she was whisked away in the night. And what about her husband and his career?  Probably whisked away in the night, too. One learned not to ask questions.

 

I knew “Savannah River,” as the period was called at our dining room table, had been a particularly difficult and intense one for my father. But I hadn’t realized, until that morning in the 1980s, driving in to work, that the Savannah River Plant was built to produce fuel for thermonuclear weapons. 

 

Dad, to this day, still doesn’t talk about that part of living in Aiken, South Carolina.

 

But he doesn’t have to for me to understand the magnitude of the pipes he would have been working with there. The volume of water coursing through those pipes. The importance of those cooling-waters functioning flawlessly. Why dad might have been concerned about water hammer—BAM—in kind of a big way.

 

And why quietly turning on the bathroom faucet to a slow, steady drip was an easy solution.  To the water hammer problem, of course: or was it really to address the problem of our laughing at something that, writ large, could prove catastrophic?

 

Questions that can’t be answered, perhaps, are questions not to ask.  But we either learn, or make up, the answers, anyway: air bubbles trapped in pipes create water hammer, just as the empty holes trapped in stories we tell about ourselves create our fictions. 

Decks, food, traveling and motorcycles... (and a dog with pink toe nails)

Luckily we have many things to share and discuss other than books. Since our local library system had one copy of this month's book, only two of our nine read it. "In The Devil's Garden" proved to be an interesting concept poorly executed. Add that to the fact that the writing was terrible, and we quickly moved on.
Two of us also read "Plenty" by the couple noted for the 100-Mile Diet (Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon). http://100milediet.org This is a lovely book with an Animal, Vegetable, Miracle feel to it. A welcome change after the Michael Pollan books. The writing is engaging with each author alternating chapters, giving the reader an interesting look into how this real-life-couple faced this challenge. The setting is urban Vancouver, a small apartment, no yard and a rented plot of land just bigger than a bread box for growing produce.
We had a great conversation about the raw food movement after Karen read "Raw Food Life Force Energy" by Natalia Rose. The book offers a way to "break out of our destructive, energy-draining patterns of poor eating, unsuccessful dieting, and stressful living to lift ourselves to a whole new stratosphere of well-being." Found that info on http://www.rawguru.com.
In between stories about vacations, ex's, weddings and meeting my dad, we also talked about small batch preserves ("Well Preserved" by Eugenia Bone) and a blogger of interest at pantrydiva.com.
From here we plan to continue devouring books about food and the people who get us thinking about our traceability, while easing our way back to stories we can sink our teeth into.

A useful mantra...

It’s interesting how fired up we can get over books about food. Based on the discussion last night, it’s clear that I should not be the one to provide feedback on “In the Defense of Food.”
Let’s just say we loved it and hated it. The audio version seems to be the best way to absorb Pollan’s dry style. A couple of us think he should have stuck with his original essay format…not letting his editor persuade him to repeat himself enough times to make a full length book. Oops…I’ve said too much.

Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

Cloud of Magical Smells

Michelle emailed me about a food writing workshop at the Community Writing Center. Here's what resulted:

A Cloud of Magical Smells

There are sub shops on almost every city street corner where I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. Not the big chains but rather small, crowded, “mom and pop” affairs. They have distinct characters—the stores and the people behind the counters. They are entirely take-out businesses. And every family has its favorite neighborhood shop.

Ours is Casapulla’s. The store hasn’t changed much, if at all, in the more than thirty years since I’ve called Wilmington “home.” It is on an otherwise quiet residential street, and sees a steady flow of traffic all day, and well into the evening. The red brick storefront itself is understated , unremarkable. But open the door and you are enveloped in a cloud of magical smells: olive oil and oregano, grilled steak and onions, hot peppers, fresh bread.

The women behind the counter (and they are almost always all women) are young and old. The older ones have been behind the counter for years, their faces reflect their tired feet; I have always wondered what fate has in store for the younger ones. The phone rings constantly with incoming orders. There are sizzling, scraping, flipping sounds at the grill, and, nearby, those of crinkling paper: torpedo-shaped sandwiches being wrapped from piles of pre-cut, grayish, and very porous newsprint, and then stuffed into brown paper bags … bags and wrappers that will have little spots of olive oil on them by the time they reach their destination. Bags that will, when opened in the car, release their own cloud of magical smells.

Behind the counter are tubs of prepared ingredients: shredded iceberg; sliced tomatoes, white onions, black peppercorn-studded capicola, ham, provolone, and cheap dill pickles; squeeze bottles of inexpensive olive oil; shakers full of salt, pepper, and oregano; a tub filled with spicy pepper relish. These ingredients are the hallmarks of the sandwich of my youth—the order at the counter (taken with the distinct Philadelphia-area accent that is nearly impossible to describe, other than it being simultaneously nasal and phlegmmy; “Coke” sounds like “keewk;” “water” is “woooter;” the day is “bee-u-tee-ful,” emphasis on the “bee”) would have been for a “regular Italian sub with extra pickles and hot peppers.” This is the sandwich I craved while away at college, and then well into my twenties, and beyond. I should note, too, it is a cold sandwich: there are no “baked” subs at Casapulla’s or pretty much anywhere in northern Delaware (except at the increasingly ubiquitous chain eateries). And they can be packed “for travel” so the roll doesn’t get soggy; but they never quite seem like eating the real deal. Close, but not quite right.

Maybe it’s having turned fifty, perhaps it’s an as yet un-researched kind of menopausal change, but now the sandwich I seem to crave when I need comfort food is the cheesesteak. Like they’re made at Casapulla’s—only they’re better, because while they’re cooking, and for several hours afterward, my kitchen (and I) are enveloped in a cloud of magical smells: ones that I thought could only exist in that one place, but that I now know I can create, pretty much whenever, and wherever, I want.

Cheesesteaks Like Casapulla’s—Only Better

You will need: rib-eye steak, onions, red bell peppers, button mushrooms, thinly-sliced provolone, and the best torpedo rolls you can find—not too crusty, and most definitely not whole wheat if you’re shooting for authenticity—in what you think will be appropriate quantities for the number of sandwiches you will be making. While optional, I think you also need hot red cherry peppers. You can find them in the condiment or Italian section of most grocery stores; they are usually sold whole, though sometimes you can find them already pureed to an almost relish-like consistency.

Start by putting the meat in the freezer while you prepare the vegetables. Thinly (this does not mean “paper thin, “ just “thin”) slice the onions, red bell peppers, and mushrooms and set aside. If you have whole red cherry peppers, pull out the stems, put the peppers into a food processor, and pulse them until there are no more large pieces of pepper, and you have a bright red hot pepper relish. Leftover relish keeps indefinitely in the refrigerator. My leftover relish, if there is any, never lasts too long, however … I eat the stuff on everything. Then slice the rolls, not quite all the way through.

Pull the meat out of the freezer. The chilling process makes it easier, I think, to trim away pretty much all of the fat and to slice the steak thinly (here, more toward “paper thin” end of the spectrum). You are now ready to cook your cheesesteaks.

I’ve taken to putting a roasting pan on two burners of the stove on medium heat, pouring in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in half the pan, and then adding the onions and peppers to the oil, sautéing them relatively slowly so they melt, rather than brown. Once the onions and peppers have started to melt, add the mushrooms to the other half of the pan (I usually turn on the second burner when I add the mushrooms), and let them begin to lose their liquid; they’ll absorb oil from the peppers and onions as you combine them together, moving the sautéed vegetables to one half of the pan. At this point, I like to put the open rolls on the vegetables to steam. To the empty half of the pan, add the thinly sliced steak and sauté until cooked through. When done to your liking, divide the steak into sandwich-size portions and cover each pile with one or two slices of the provolone, and let the provolone melt. If you have space, briefly covering the meat pile(s) with a saucepan cover can help the process move along … if you are like me, you will be so ready to dive into your cheesesteak at this point you won’t want to wait … even for quickly melting cheese.

So, after the cheese has pretty much melted, turn off the burners and begin to assemble your cheesesteaks. Scoop up a portion of the steak and cheese mixture and put it on a roll. Add as much of the vegetable mixture as you like. Then spoon (I am quite liberal with this step, as you might have gathered) the hot cherry pepper relish over all, smoosh shut the bun as best you can, grab some plates and napkins, and you’re ready to feast.

When you return to the kitchen to clean up (or to make yourself a second cheesesteak—it happens), stop for a moment and breathe it all in: your very own cloud of magical smells. You may not want to shower for days.

Edible Summer…

Having decided to spend some of our summer reading time immersed in all-things-food, we begin with Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.” A few of us have already read it so the others will be moving it to the top of their lists for a common starting place. From there all bets are off. Anything food related is up for grabs and discussion. As a group, we plan on trying and sharing new recipes, visiting many of our local farmers markets, learning more about the negative impacts of giant agribusiness, sharing meals from our gardens, and possibly dining with a local sustainability guru.
The potential reading list is endless, so here are a few suggestions:

By Michael Pollan:
Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education
Omnivore’s Dilemma
In Defense of Food
Harvest for Hope by Jane Goodall
Super Foods Rx by Steven Pratt
Fresh Food from Small Spaces by R.J. Ruppenthal
Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew
The Measure of Her Powers by M.F.K. Fisher

Mark your calendars: Wasatch Community Gardens annual plant sale is May 9th. http://www.wasatchgardens.org

Visit: http://www.localfirst.org
http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com
http://utahsown.utah.gov

The End of the Affair...

Our group didn't discuss who would write this "review" but we did have an interesting discussion. Our conversations about books seem more robust when one or more of us doesn't care for a particular selection. Definitely the case this time. "The End of the Affair" left us unsatisfied. Unanimously disconnected. The characters felt flat and one-dimensional...leaving the reader without too much compassion for their situation. We talked about marriage, religion, adultery, obsession, hate, suffering and faith. Learning that Maurice's character was a glimpse into the character of Graham Greene, left me liking the book even less.

A year of food life

Although this book has surfaced a couple of times during our gatherings, other terrific suggestions have won the final selection. This has been on my must-read list for some time and it finally made it to the top of the pile. A miracle indeed.
The Kingsolver's decision as a family to embark on this journey of food begins in the desert where sustainable, local food is a constant challenge. The book is balanced between their road trip east, difficult shopping list choices, the changing seasons, and lobbing the heads off turkeys with abundant respect and honor. Each chapter also contains contributions from husband Steve and recipes from oldest daughter Camille.
There is no preaching to be found here. Only choice. For anyone interested in sustainable food practices, local and organic farming, and the impact big agribusiness is having on our food chain, I highly recommend this book.

The Count of Monte Cristo

Our latest selection was The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Although we agreed to read the 1,000 plus page unabridged version, Marissa unknowingly picked up an abridged volume from her school library. Not all of us finished the book (Marissa of course did!), but we all seemed to be in agreement that we enjoyed it and found it to be very readable.

For a story that has been perceived as more for a male audience (even though there wasn’t as much swashbuckling as expected), we felt that it was just as much a romantic tale – Marissa even managed to make some of it sound racy when read aloud. It was difficult at times to keep up with all the characters and how they were related. Tina had the great idea to diagram this and Michelle found something similar on the Internet, but warned us that the character descriptions also gave away important plot points. The prison scenes were some of the favorites, as were the Count’s interactions showing themes of hope and salvation rather than revenge.

Since the story was driven so much by plot and characters, there wasn’t much to discuss about Dumas’ writing style. I found his interjections of “as the reader will remember” and “when we last left Albert” slightly distracting, yet understandable considering that this was originally released as a serial novel. It was also interesting to discuss his use of other writers’ material in the work – either as research assistance, in planning out the storyline, or writing actual sections of the book – and how this was rather frowned upon at the time the book was released, yet now so commonplace.

After reading the book, I wanted to see the movie again (2002 version with Jim Caviezel). It was so disappointing, and almost like an entirely different story! Dantes and Mondego are best friends? Albert is really the son of Dantes? I spent most of the first half of the film telling my husband how much of it was not at all like the book, but then I had to stop because I want him to read the book and I didn’t want to spoil it.

Big thanks to Jackie for hosting! It was so great to see her new place, and she had some delicious treats. Espresso cheese…who’d have thought it would be so good? I probably won’t be reading the next book since we’re meeting on my due date – I hope everyone enjoys “The End of the Affair” by Graham Greene! Maybe I’ll put it on my Netflix list.

Atlas felt a sense of déjà vu

Feb 26th 2009 from The Economist print edition

The economic bust has caused a boom for at least one author

BOOKS do not sell themselves: that is what films are for. “The Reader”, the book that inspired the Oscar-winning film, has shot up the bestseller lists. Another recent publishing success, however, has had more help from Washington, DC, than Hollywood. That book is Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”.
Reviled in some circles and mocked in others, Rand’s 1957 novel of embattled capitalism is a favourite of libertarians and college students. Lately, though, its appeal has been growing. According to data from TitleZ, a firm that tracks bestseller rankings on Amazon, an online retailer, the book’s 30-day average Amazon rank was 127 on February 21st, well above its average over the past two years of 542. On January 13th the book’s ranking was 33, briefly besting President Barack Obama’s popular tome, “The Audacity of Hope”.
Tellingly, the spikes in the novel’s sales coincide with the news. The first jump, in September 2007, followed dramatic interest-rate cuts by central banks, and the Bank of England’s bail-out of Northern Rock, a troubled mortgage lender. The October 2007 rise happened two days after the Bush Administration announced an initiative to coax banks to assist subprime borrowers. A year later, sales of the book rose after America’s Treasury said that it would use a big chunk of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Programme to buy stakes in nine large banks. Debate over Mr Obama’s stimulus plan in January gave the book another lift. And sales leapt once again when the stimulus plan passed and Mr Obama announced a new mortgage-modification plan.
Whenever governments intervene in the market, in short, readers rush to buy Rand’s book. Why? The reason is explained by the name of a recently formed group on Facebook, the world’s biggest social-networking site: “Read the news today? It’s like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is happening in real life”. The group, and an expanding chorus of fretful bloggers, reckon that life is imitating art.
Some were reminded of Rand’s gifted physicist, Robert Stadler, cravenly disavowing his faith in reason for political favour, when Alan Greenspan, an acolyte of Rand’s, testified before a congressional committee last October that he had found a “flaw in the model” of securitisation. And with pirates hijacking cargo ships, politicians castigating corporate chieftains, riots in Europe and slowing international trade—all of which are depicted in the book—this melancholy meme has plenty of fodder.
Even if Washington does not keep the book’s sales booming, Hollywood might. A film version is rumoured to be in the works for release in 2011. But by then, a film may feel superfluous to Rand’s most loyal fans; events unfolding around them will have been dramatisation enough.

Atlas Shrugged, Abridged - Fall 2008

A couple of months ago, I decided to go back to see if there were any patterns in short passages I'd marked in Atlas Shrugged. Funny I should go back to my handwritten notes today to translate into this post - just picked up this week's "Economist" out of the mail - and the cover reminded me so much of the book:  a rusted, padlocked gate, sickly green background sky, and the cover story title: "The Collapse of Manufacturing."  

The patterns I discovered were both mirrors of today's society and some things I've been mulling in my own private universe. So by way of having missed the discussion, here are the short passages I marked:

Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with its fingers sunk into the soil and he thought if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.

One night, lightening struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside--just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it.

 

Years later he heard it said that children should be protected from shock, from their first knowledge of death, pain, or fear. But these had never scared him; his shock came when he stood very quietly, looking into the black hole of the trunk. It was an immense betrayal--the more terrible because he could not grasp what it was that had been betrayed. It was not himself, nor his trust; it was something else. He stood there for a while, making no sound, then he walked into the house. He never spoke about it to anyone, then or since.

p. 13

... watching them, Dagny thought suddenly of the difference between Francisco and her brother Jim. Both of them smiled derisively. But Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted nothing to remain great.

p. 94

...there's nothing of any importance in life--except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only symptom of morality that's on a gold standard...

p. 98

She knew, even though she was too young to know the reason, that indiscriminate desire and unselective indulgence were possible only to those who regarded sex and themselves as evil.

p. 107

Whenever she saw him in the office, she thought of his hands as she'd seen them on the wheel of a motorboat: he drove the business with the same smooth, dangerous, confidently mastered speed. But one small incident remained in her mind as a shock: it did not fit him. She saw him standing at the window of his office, one evening, looking at the brown winter twilight of the city. He did not move for a long time. His face was hard and tight; it had the look of an emotion she had never believed possible in him: of bitter, helpless anger. He said, "There is something wrong in the world. There always has been. Something no one has ever named or explained." He would not tell her what it was.

p. 108

He told himself that he had to attend the party--that his family had the right to demand it of him--that he had to earn to like their kind of pleasure, for their sake, not his own.

He wondered why this was a motive that had no power to impel him. Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically. What was happening to him? -- he wondered. The impossible conflict of feeling that which was right--wasn't that the basic formula of moral corruption? To recognize one's guilt, yet feel nothing but the coldest, most profound indifference--wasn't it a betrayal of that which had been the motor of his life-course and his pride?

p. 126

He saw the article, "The Octopus," by Bertram Scudder, which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public--an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without proof necessary.

p. 134

... I don't like people who speak or think in terms of gaining anyone's confidence. If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others, only their rational perception. The person who craves a moral blank check of that kind has dishonest intentions, whether he admits it to himself or not.

p. 140

If you consider that for thirteen years this institute has had a department of metallurgical research, which has cost over twenty million dollars and has produced nothing but a new silver polish and a new anti-corrosive preparation, which I believe is not as good as the old ones-- you can imagine what the public response will be if some private individual comes out with a product that revolutionizes the entire science of metallurgy and proves to be sensationally successful.

p. 180

It's as if they'd heard that there are values one is supposed to honor and this is what one does to honor them--so they went through the motions, like ghosts pulled by some sort of distant echoes from a better age.

p. 258

They drove through small towns, through obscure side roads, through the kinds of places they had not seen for years. Days passed before she realized what she missed most: a glimpse of fresh paint. The houses stood like men in unpressed suits, who had lost the desire to stand straight: the cornices were like sagging shoulders; the crooked porch steps like torn hemlines, the broken windows, like patches, mended with clapboard.

p. 263

There was no action she could take against men of undefined thought, of unnamed motives, of unstated purposes, of unspecified morality.

p. 280

Rewards were based on need, and the penalties on ability.

p. 301

... they made the kinds of fortunes they had dreamed about: fortunes requiring now  competence or effort.

p. 325

He did not know whether the impossibility of acting had given him this sense of loathing or whether the loathing had made him lose his desire to act.

p. 347

Money is the barometer of society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed.

p. 383

Why speak of rigid, unbreakable laws? Our modern laws are elastic and open to interpretation according to circumstances.

p. 581

People would not employ a plumber who'd attempt to prove his professional excelllence by asserting that there's no such thing as plumbing--but, apparently, the same standards are not considered necessary in regard to philosophers.

When thinkers accept those who deny the existence of thinking as fellow thinkers of a different school of thought--it is they who achieve the destruction of the mind.

p. 680

A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest--but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

p. 931

... all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others .. that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and on borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay.

p. 933

They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth--

p. 939

This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of of truth. You are asked to sacrifice you intellectual integrity, your logic, your standard of truth--

p. 943

... you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you have known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe.

p. 978

In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindlessness in those who have never achieved ...  Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is in an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your spark be put out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.

p. 979

Giving Wings to the Angels of Gondar

These angels -- all looking in different directions -- are on the ceiling of the Debre Birhan Selassie (Trinity and Mountain of Light) church in Gondar, Ethiopia.  They are trapped in two dimensions for eternity ...

... this book gives them wings.

Improbability

From the Artist's Book class, our assignment was to take one or two sheets of Bristol weight paper and create a textless book based on a word we drew out of a jar.   The blue silk threads mark each of the original four corners of the paper, which was cut and accordion-folded ... no glue. So it's improbable it will ever look the same way twice as it is fluid and changes shape every time it is handled.

The Book Thief

Death: the compassionate narrator. Who would've thunk it? Marcus Zusak (the cute, creative Australian author to the left). His use of this unusual storyteller, whose tale is intertwined with the writings of the story's main character, is just one of the many, many things I love about this book (which will certainly be in the running as my fave of 09). I am not alone in my love of our post Atlas pick- almost the entire group was enthusiastic about this one. Katie can be forgiven for not having time to read at the moment, what with the pregnancy and the hot husband and all...

But I digress. I am sure our blog readership is not interested in the fact that much of the discussion at our annual Cinco gathering (yes, we celebrated Cinco de Mayo in January this year and it was well worth waiting to celebrate in Michelle's beautiful, newly remodeled living space, complete with multiple fireplaces and comfy new furniture!) was centered around answering the clever questions posed on Angie's awesome mojito cups (sample: what is the worst date you have ever been on?). I don't know about the rest of you, but after hearing the winning story, I feel like I have never really been on a bad date (sorry friend!).

Back to the book. Liesel Meminger is a memorable character- a young foster girl living outside of Munich in Nazi Germany. Death is all around her (figuratively and literally). Yet Liesel also manages to find love- in the books she steals and eventually learns how to read, and in the mayor's wife who enables her life of thievery; in her accordian playing foster father, the wonderful Hans Huberman; in Max Vandenburg, the young Jew hiding in her basement, and in (alas, alas too late!) her neighbor, the unforgettable Rudy (how about a kiss, Saumensch?).

We like the fact that the book focuses on a neighborhood full of "ordinary" Germans (some of whom end up being extraordinary), because much writing set in Nazi Germany is centered around soldiers and prisoners (and a few of these stories are told here, though often briefly and rather beautifully). Someone remembered that Suite Francaise (from our 2008 reading list) also contains stories about European citizens during this time period.

The author is a big fan of foreshadowing, and this technique definitely adds to the tension and makes some of the characters' deaths somewhat more bearable (though it did not prevent me from shedding buckets of tears toward the end of the story). The writing itself is simple but gripping and the novel's unique layout and intertwined story telling adds to its interest. I was so smitten with the characters and their stories that I read it in about two (longish) sittings. But though it is a relatively quick read, it is not one that will soon be forgotten.