Don Quixote Was a Steel Drivin’ Man

I’ve been taking swimming lately. A few months ago, L. talked me into taking a weekly joint swimming class with our younger daughter’s swimming teacher at our community pool. It’s been great fun going to the pool with Laura, although I have recent progressed so much that I am even willing to go alone. One day recently I went alone and the pool was completely empty. I felt that I had to perform some wonderous feat of water-borne altheticism. As this impulse rapidly faded, I wondered where it had come from. I think the only time you ever see someone alone in a pool or gym is in a movie or TV show when they are in training for the big event, and they are showing both intense dedication, and a surprising depth of previously unrevealed talent.

I am happy to report that I completed more than 2 or 3 complete laps all alone in that pool.

I love swimming. I got my red cross swimming card when I was a kid–through the vigorous intervention of my Aunt Edna, herself a famous swimming crusader–but it turns out my technique had gotten worse and worse over years of neglect. Indeed, I thought the embarrassing thing about going to the community pool was going to be changing and showering in public, things I managed to avoid in high school by signing up for gym units like “women’s self-defense” and “modern dance.” Turns out, that doesn’t really bother me anymore (although it took me a while to realize that).

Instead, the most embarrassing things about swimming all have to do with… swimming. Our swimming teacher is great and has completely reconstructed my stroke from the violent flailing I started out with into something workable. Indeed, I can now, as revealed on my date with destiny alone in the pool, actually swim complete laps either with a crawl or a backstroke. And, if I remember to put on my googles, my eyes don’t sting all day. But (embarrassing thing #1) I still have crazy, uncontrollable happy feet in the pool. Try as I will, I cannot stop my feet from kicking wildly in the water. The only cure so far that works is (embarrassing thing #2) swim fins. Swim fins are awesome; they make you cut through the water like you know what you are doing, and I highly recommend them. What’s embarrassing for me is that I feel obliged to take them off and try to actually swim across the pool unassisted now and again… And let’s just say the results ain’t pretty. Which leads to embarrassing thing number 3. I was backstroking along happily, with fins on, cutting through the water while freely breathing as much oxygen as I wanted, contemplating something fascinating, such as why Doc Rivers lets Sam “Alien Baby” Cassel play so much in the playoffs, or what to post on my blog next, when KA-thunk. What’s that? Oh. My skull connecting with the edge of the pool. Ouch. That was too weeks ago, and the old noggin is still quite sensitive. Worst of all, my backstroke has deteriorated, as I now spent the entire lap worrying about hitting my head again.

OK, the really humiliating thing is that I breath with my mouth in the water. Can’t get the nose-breathing working. I guess there’s no reason anyone needed to know that.

An ancillary benefit of swimming is that it has awakened in my for the first time ever an interest in what my friend Patrick refers to as “products.” I’ve been packing little bottles of shampoo and lotion I’ve collected from hotels in my gym/pool bag, and I’ve discovered that a)if I remember to rub lotion on my body after my shower, far from having that horrible chlorine ich all day, I feel all glowy; and b) Aveda Mint-Rosemary shampoo not only doesn’t make my scalp feel like it’s burning, it actually smells good… Not unmanly, but less like a roasted lamb than the name suggests.

Woke up this morning after a lovely book party that Laura threw me to find out that we had no electricity. Here in rural southern Illinois (jocular t-shirt abreviation: So. Ill.) we lose our electricity–quite literally–in a stiff wind. Luckily my brother was here and figured out how to open the garage door manually . But the most frightening problem, worse than missing mother’s day bagels if the car was trapped, worse even than the potential loss of all our party leftovers–how to make coffee when we had only whole beans and electric grinders? We generally use a French Press (despite the fact that it has burned Laura with an explosion of boiling water a few times), and I could light the stove with a match to boil water, so there was hope. But what to do about the beans?

I came up with–I thought–an ingenious solution. I got out the rolling pin and scattered coffee beans on a wooden chopping board. But, slick oily little guys that they are, they refused to stay still for crushing, particularly when the crusher was a long round tube.

I tried covering them with wax paper (weird idea, I know) and that did little to fix the problem. Finally I tossed them into a plastic bag (we have no zip locks due to a conspiracy between disorganization and environmental concern). That worked. It was crude, and they tore the bag, but I could crush them.

Unfortunately, I got frustrated quickly, and I tried to make a pot with mostly large bean framents; no good, too weak. Then I tried again, first wrapping the beans in wax paper, and then putting the wax paper packet into a plastic shopping bag. I beat it with the pin for a few minutes, and then rolled it for a long while.

The most powdery crushed coffee stuck to the wax paper, and some spilled out into the bag through rips. It took a while to shake it all into the french press. But man did that strong cup of coffee taste good when I finally got to drink it.

Reminds me–I better get some ground coffee and stash it in our emergency kit (which doesn’t yet exist) in case a tornado knocks down our house. Imagine how awful it would be to have your house knocked down AND not to be able to have a cup of coffee in the rubble. Just think of the headache.

PS: Sorry about the bad taste in posting this today. I only heard about the actual tornado disaster today after I posted it, due to not having electricity until the afternoon…

A very smart former student wrote to me (well, emailed me) last week to ask me for reading recommendations. The way he put it was that he wanted recommendations for 5 books, other than stuff I teach (so there goes Clarissa). I have been thinking about this often since getting his message, and it is really, really hard. How do I balance factors–the impact a given book had on me at a certain moment, vs. those that later helped me make sense of many other things? Should I make sure to include an array of genres, or centuries, or styles, or nationalities? Should I credit things I read 20 years ago and loved intensely but haven’t thought about much since then? Should I prefer authors who’ve written lots of great books over those who’ve written one undeniable masterpiece? Should I prefer neglected classics over more obvious things? Should I work in the fact that I probably read Trollope and Wodehouse more than any other authors these days (for fun, anyway)?

I’ve decided to err on the side of what might be called “pure reading experience.” And I had to break it down into separate categories for all-time and recent books… Mixing the two just seemed ridiculous.

All Time:

Cervantes–Don Quixote

Rousseau–Confessions

Jorge Luis Borges–Labyrinths

George Eliot–Middlemarch

Henry James–The Bostonians

“Recent” books

J M Coetzee– Disgrace

Robert Hass– Praise

Jhumpa Lahiri–Interpreter of Maladies

Anne Carson–The Beauty of the Husband

Ian McEwan–Atonement

Bonus:

Wallace Stevens–The Palm at the End of the Mind

(could go in either category really)

Seems like sandwiches are becoming a theme on this blog, even though I don’t actually believe in sandwiches. They aren’t real food, just snacks.

Ah, the good old days when I used to put my beliefs, like the above, into practice. Back then my slogan was “fat is flavor.” Now I am into reality-based views, such as “I am too fat.” And “I want to live long enough to see my kids grow up.” Oh well.

Anyhow, this weekend was Easter for Orthodox Christians, so we celebrated by eating a feast. I was proud of myself for preparing the whole meal in only 3.5 hours, which for me is a very brief feast preparation. I also was proud that I didn’t employ my normal “restaurant” method, which is to pretend that a clean-up crew will come in later and the mess isn’t my business. Of course, one reason for the relative brevity and the leisurely pace is that I didn’t take any pictures. Sorry.

I made a 7 3/4 lb roasted leg of lamb–the smallest leg of lamb available in town–roasted for about 2.5 hours at 375, with slivers of garlic and cinnamon stick poked into little holes all over the lamb, and then a layer of sea salt and oregano rubbed on.

I also made Greek roasted potatoes. For this, you slice potatoes into about 6-8 slices lengthwise. You then cover the potatoes with water, in a long pyrex dish, and squeeze half a lemon or so onto them, and then splash in some olive oil (and if you don’t do the next step, some salt). Only this time I made two dishes, and put the lamb over the dish (I switched the lamb from one dish to another and moved the lamb drippings between pans with a baster). Ridiculously delish, but very fat-is-flavor.

Then I made veggies: dandelion greens (ie leaves) that L collected from our garden; I washed and soaked and picked through them about 4 times each to get rid of dirt, grass, stray flower stems etc. Then I boiled them for over an hour in a full pot of water, chopped them thoroughly, and put them in a dish with lemon, olive oil, and sea salt. This makes very authentic Greek “Horta”. When they were done I cleaned the pot and boiled four large artichokes (I split them each in half and served them with vinagrette rather than butter).

Finally, I prepared what my family calls “shredded salad.” This is an all-green herb-based salad that is very authentically Greek. You start by carefully washing and drying a Romaine lettuce. You then shred it with a sharp knife into strips of less than a quarter inch. Then you prep and shred a third of a bunch of flat-leaf parsley, a big handful of fresh dill, and chop them both fine. Then cut four scallions into quarter inch or smaller bits. You throw ‘em all together into a decent sized salad bowl, drizzle with olive oil, and squueze in the juice of one very small lemon (or about 3/4 of a medium one), toss in a small palmful of sea salt, and toss vigorously.

This is where the world’s greatest sandwich comes in. The roast lamb came out beautifully. The top have was medium well-done, gray with streaks of light pink; the bottom half was cooked but entirely pink (not bloody or purple, but entirely pink). I cut very thin slices off the leftover roast–for me mostly pink but a little grey too, making sure to get bits of garlic and cinnamon in some slices– and then I layered some nice Feta cheese, four small slices of meat, and a final layer of shredded salad onto a good baguette.

And voila, the world’s greatest sandwich. With a small side of the potatoes (quickly warmed) it is heaven.

(yes, everything had lemon-olive oil-sea salt in it). The below is a stock photo; mine would have little bits of cinnamon stick poking out all over, but looked otherwise similar. The potatoes here look about right.

Laura Cantrell has a new electronic-only “EP” out and it’s fantastic. I put the term EP in quotes because, while it is the term Laura has chosen to apply to this release, it is actually long enough, at 34+ minutes, to qualify as an album. I guess it’s not an album because it is all covers, and includes some tracks that have been floating around for a while.

But it is great, simple, stripped down country music, perfectly adapted to her evocative and understated voice. Three tracks are highlights, the kind of tunes you would have built mix-tapes around back in the day. The greatest of all is her version of New Order’s “Love Vigilantes.” Now, recording 80s hits in in the idiom of very different musical genres is no longer a revolutionary gesture, given that there is a band out there that does nothing but record 80s music in Bossa Nova form, but this one is a stunner. I remember lying on my bed and listening closely to the lyrics when the New Order single came out, and being totally caught up in the bizarre sentimental tragedy being described. The song’s narrator comes home from the war only to witness his wife receiving a telegram informing her of his death. The lyrics were extremely out of place in a 80s club dance track, to put it mildly.

Laura Cantrell performs another dizzying act of estrangement with the song, but she does so by appropriating it to a genre (country weeper) and to a historical moment (an endless, tragic war) for which the song makes perfect sense: “you just can’t believe the joy I did receive/ when I got my leave.” She has made an excellent choice in actually keeping close to the original rhythmic structure of the song (although the arrangement has transformed the pulsing beat from dancey to ballad time, the beat is still emphatic).

Coupled with her compilation cover of “Sam Stone,” Laura has now recorded two of the most interesting war-themed songs during the Iraq debacle, both notable for being narrated by very sympathetic soldiers.

The other absolutely killer tracks here are the title tune, a Burt Bachrach number that also sounds utterly at home as a country standard, so much so that listening to Laura sing it made me forget where it came from and I had to go look it up, and one of my very favorite Merle Haggard songs, the picture-perfect composition “Silver Wings,” about a lover flying away on an airplane, that manages to sound both ultra-country and ultra modern despite being composed in the mid 70s.

There are many other great moments on the EP too, these are just the ones that stand out the most. If you download it, make sure to go over to Laura’s website and throw in some of the great free covers she has made available there, such as her (in my mind definitive) version of Elvis Costello’s “Indoor Fireworks.”

to recap:

Trains and Boats and Planes EP at Emusic

More free DLs at Lauracantrell.com

And listen to “Love Vigilantes” and “Trains and Boats and Planes” at her Myspace

These two pictures of the Dem candidates were on the front of my print copy of the NY Times today, despite the NY Times claiming to have printed a picture of HRC celebrating under a rain of confetti instead.

I find the pictures very interesting from the perspective of the semiotics of food. Although it is cropped out in the version of the HRC picture on the web, the words “On A Roll” clearly hover over her head in the print edition. Is this an example of the AP photog being “in the tank” and on message for Hil? She’s “on a roll” given her PA victory? Or is the implication, given the context, that she is lunchmeat? Most crucially, the salads and sandwiches mentioned on the awning above her are adorned with adjectives like “innovative.” Is she using the awning to claim that she is indeed the candidate of change?

This blog posting claims she’s in trouble because of the lack of evidence that she actually ate her cheesesteak. Indeed, for all we know, she actually has an innovative salad in that closed bag.

In contrast, Obama was photographed holding a visible sandwich, unwrapped and ready to eat, and he also had his Cheesesteak photo op set for Pat’s, the temple of the cheesesteak. But here’s the problem. He seems to be claiming gritty, urban authenticity with his “real” Pat’s in his own hand, as opposed to HRC’s random suburban cheesesteak, purchased at an inauthentic cheesesteak shop which even serves salads!! However, I think that rather than connecting Obama with the “lunchpail” crowd as it might seem to, Obama’s overly obvious bid for authenticity via Pat’s could backfire. After all, who makes a bigger deal out of “authentic” urban food like Pat’s than chowhounds… And who is more likely to be a chowhound than the kind of urban, latte-sippin’, college teachin’, elitist snobs who write blogs and are already totally on the Obama bandwagon??? He needs to dissociate himself from people like that, not embrace their values. After all, there is a picture of Kerry actually biting a cheesesteak floating around the web. How well did that work out? Plus why is Obama looking up like that? Is he ruining the meaty goodness of having a cheesesteak in his hand with another easily mockable messiah moment?

My book is now out! I’ve been debating with myself whether I should associate my very serious academic work with this somewhat silly blog, but I decided that given that my blog readership is, so far, limited to my high school buddies, former roommates, and my mom, what’s the downside? Unfortunately, this group also includes all the likely (early?) buyers of my book.

It is quite expensive as a non-library purchase ($95 list price, HC only). Two sites are offering it at a significant discount right now: bn.com and Amazon.ca.

Amazon and Cambridge UP both offer free access to parts of the book online; google books does not yet.

My Amazon rank is around 500,000, which I think means at least someone has ordered my book. My BN rank is a respectable (for an academic title) 150,000 ish, and the page reports that people who bought my book also bought books by Emily Bronte, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Francine Prose, which, as the author, I find infinitely fascinating.

My older daughter’s birthday was this weekend. Interestingly, she requested a brunch of bagels and lox, and a Sushi dinner, but not a party with lots of kids. She did spend Sunday with her Girl Scout troup, and managed to colonize their pizza dinner as another celebration of her birthday. Much fun was had by all.

Anyway, I am just proud of myself for decorating her cake.

Now, she asked for a “Car Cake.” My wife looked at the finished product and said, “that looks like a baby carriage, not a car!” I was originally planning to make the cake look like Lightenin’ McQueen, but my daughter actually provided me a sketch of what she wanted. She was blown away that her cake looked so very much like her design for it:

Note, despite the failure to capture the spirit of jauntiness, the careful matching of the stripe colors between sketch and cake.

The outside of the shop is truly uninviting: a squat little square tarpaper-roofed building stuck between an improbable high-rise semi-private UT Austin dorm (The Dobie tower) and an abandoned fast food taco joint with its now logo-less Sombrero shape hovering between landmark and eyesore. When you walk into the tarpaper box, you find yourself in an unruly florist shop, specializing in leafy green plants, with nary a cut flower in sight. You are likely to be distracted by the tables of hippyish “Native American Jewelery” in the right hand margin of the space, apparently sub-leased from the Vietnamese family running the show. In fact, I walked into a few times and retreated quickly, fearing an encounter with Patchouli-scented knickknacks, without noticing the two little tables for lunch in front of the cashier’s booth of the florist shop. On closer inspection (actually, with the guidance of my friend Stephanie, who is apparently less frightened of Patchouli than I am), I discerned a small menu listing items such as “Vietnam Coffee” and “Sandwiches: Pate and Chicken, $2.00.” That cashier’s booth, it turns out, was also a food shack capable of working miracles.

You all know the wonders of Vietnamese iced coffee. But even those of you who love Bahn Mi So haven’t had ones like these. The bread was a quite serious baguette, very French in style with thick crust and a crumb with some heft to it (as opposed to the almost gossamer quality of many Bahn Mi So rolls, which could, ungenerously, be mistaken for decent-quality supermarket Italian rolls). Toppings were lettuce, shoelace thin mandolin slices of carrot and cucumber, and carefully plucked cilantro leaves. The meat (if you ordered it) was freshly pan fried and nicely warm. And the sweet, chile-peppered dressing with just a subtle hint of fish sauce, coupled with the thick, tasty slices of apparently home-made pate, was perfection.

Tragically, the family sold out on this business and instead opened a dry-cleaning business a few blocks away on MLK. While I hope they did well—they certainly earned good karma with every delicious sandwich they essentially gave away for $2 or so—it was galling that their new business was actually the third dry-cleaning operation located at that one intersection.

While I recommend any Bahn Mi So that you can get your hands on, the other ones I’ve had are generally so light on the pate that you hardly know it’s there…

Editor’s note: this shop operated in the Austin, TX in the early to mid ninties. It was subsequently replaced with a chain used-CD shop and then a chain sandwich joint… Neither of which was capable of performing miracles. And note that the above picture is not one of the Florist’s miracles.

I was woken up this morning at 4:30 by the earthquake, which was centered here in southern Illinois. It was great to have a native Californian in the bed with me. I was freaked out by the very palpable and quite extended shaking of our bed (and our entire house)… but Laura just rolled over, muttered “just a little quake,” and went right back to sleep.

Usually, being in a bi-coastal couple is useful for extended and exhausting summer vacations, and for confusing native midwesterners. (ie, Where are you from? LA. So you are both from California? No, I’m from Boston. And which place did you meet? Actually it was in Texas).