Things on the Mind

1) Enchiladas -- namely cheese and green chile enchiladas, bulked out with black beans, potatoes, and smoked almonds (which I could feed to various and sundry Seattle veggie-types).  There are times when I don't have enchiladas on the brain, most of them involve anxiety dreams about showing up to sing somewhere without rehearsals or functional sheet music.

2) Smoked salmon wraps may be the world's best nearly instant meal.  Too bad I'm headed back to the land of exile and not enough salmon, especially not the smoked kind. 

3) Moon cakes -- someday I will understand Asian pastries that aren't hum bao. It's probably not today.  For now they are on the list of foods that I find deeply inexplicable, like horchata. I feel I have had a nearly intuitive grasp on the true place of hum bao in my life since my first one, when I worked upstairs from Charlie's Bakery, and one was a buck seventy-five, which made it an even cheaper lunch than going to Taco King for tacos.  At least you can get hum bao  in Seattle.  I should check out the tacos at Rancho Bravo sometime soon.  I have a feeling that they might be an acceptable substitute.  (After all, they serve horchata, which I don't like, but it is a good marker for Mexican joints that might make me happy.)

4) The woods in Anchorage September smell like home.  This really may be the most beautiful place on earth.  (If you ignore the urban architecture, mostly.) We saw a moose. Another downside to Seattle: no moose.  (Or bears, wolves, coyotes, or lynx.  Oh well.)

5) It's been a very short time, but I am going to miss my coworkers at the UAA bookstore.  All that bouncy youthful energy.  All those interesting conversations with international students about what it's like to be a long way from home.  YU being unearthly cheerful even in the morning. 

Sorry, this post is short on literary merit, but I have to be up early tomorrow, and I want to go bond with Peter Fleming.  Peter Fleming, being the much funnier brother of the more famous Ian, wrote travel books, in which he deploys British imperturbability in the face of the insane, the outrageous, and toads hopping through his sleeping quarters all night long. I offer this quotation from the beginning of News from Tartary as an amuse bouche (because really everyone ought to read him):

It was time to take stock of the situation, and this, with a kind of luxurious incredulity, I did.  It was a sufficiently improbable situation. I found myself the leader of a party of four people who had left Peking the night before with the undisclosed intention of proceeding overland to India ( a distance of some three or four thousand miles) by way of North Tibet and Sinkiang.  For the latter province, which had until recently been rent by civil war and which was virtually closed to foreign travellers, we had no passports. Apart from a rook rifle, six bottles of brandy, and Macaulay's  History of England, we had no equipment or supplies worth mentioning. Two of us were women; and our only common language was Russian. I felt extremely cheerful nonetheless.

He goes on like this for hundreds of pages. Cheefully. Currently, I am not reading News from Tartary, but rather Brazilian Adventure which outlines an expedition at least as mad.

A Minor Offering

1)The Tall Guy characterizes the following as "a funny read, with astonishing revelations about what Allen Ginsberg ate for breakfast". I would characterize it as a funny read with hilarious discussion of unexpected gastropods. I was raised by granola smoking hippies and very little surprises me in the way of breakfast food. These two facts are not unrelated. Either way, fun: The Meal That Ended My Career as a Restaurant Critic.

2) I cannot blame the following link on my altitudinally enhance friend, but I think it's awesome: T-shirt of Awesome.

3) JVW should start a blog, because I keep wanting to post snippets of her emails.  Today she is trying to convince me that YouTube stardom is around the corner, if I just coupled my dubious singing and, I also assume, her considerably less dubious singing with carefully chosen pictures of chickens. She also shared some unorthodox experiences of the apple harvest (such as it is) in Anchorage.  The thing about Anchorage's growing season is that it is short but intense, and when apple trees are blooming elsewhere there is still snow on the ground here.  This does not make for happy apple trees, although there are few optimistic souls, and hardy trees that make the attempt. 

4) Biological accuracy about charismatic megafauna is important to me, even if the megafauna in question is shy and retiring in the forests of central Africa.  In other words, an okapi is not an antelope.  Other than that, I do recommend The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, even though I am probably just about the last person to read it. I blame the author's interview I heard on NPR about his second book.  Too much adultery in suburbia, without a really strong narrative voice to balance it out.  This has adultery in suburbia, but it also has a reasonably well done Autistic narrator.

5) Because one needs more beautiful astronomy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14792580

So Tired

An online thesaurus offers these synonyms for tired: all in, beat, bone-tired, bored, burned out, bushed, dead tired, dead, dog-tired, done in, drained, drooping, drowsy, enervated, exhausted, fagged, fatigued, flagging, out of gas, overworked, pooped, punchy, ready to drop, sleepy, spent, taxed, wearied, wearing, wiped out, worn out, zonked.  Most of these are applicable.  I am once again facing the reality that if I were getting paid for the time I spend at school, I would be pulling some serious overtime, and that's not counting the night when I was up until one am doing research.

But that's me whining.  Have some random bits and pieces instead. 

1. To your left you see the doodle that happened when I was supposed to be paying attention to a lecture about paper.  Those of you who have "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" burned into your brains may notice that there are two problems with this quotation.  One I figured out on my own, and one a friend* pointed out to me.  Only the latter was fixable.  

I should try to remember to update the image tomorrow with the fix.  I should also try to remember that I now want to do a gigantic Prufrock poster when I have time and energy.** 

2.  The second item is vaguely related two the first.  My shoddy memory dropped "sirens" into Eliot's deathless verse in place of "mermaids".  I drew a mermaid anyway.  (I like drawing mermaids, and have been drawing more or less rubenesque mermaids since sometime in high school. This may be because I don't particularly love drawing feet.)  A quick google image search, which I don't actually recommend, will show you that most sirens in the popular imagination are fish tailed temptresses (or else scantily clad women lounging on motorcycles).  However, the ancient greeks, imagined the Sirens as bird women.  Often just a woman's head on a bird's body.  Sometimes a winged woman with duck feet.  The webbed feet are fairly constant though (or possibly, they are the most memorable).  Temptresses with duck feet.  Get your head around that.  

Now consider this, the Ancient Greeks adorned their funerary monuments with images of the Sirens. Yes, at least some Greeks apparently hoped to be conducted into the afterlife by duck footed women.  This fact is not mentioned enough during the acquisition of a liberal arts education.   

3. Today is the 110st anniversary of my great grandmother's birth.  Today I learned that she, like me, loved canned peaches.  I also learned that, unlike me, her first name was Alvira (I've probably been told this fact before).  For reasons that are probably obvious, she went by Belle instead.  

4.  The strangest search term to find me in the last 24 hours was "Happy Giant poems."  Apparently this search points you at the Giant Cephalopod Awareness Day post, which does contain links to poetry.  And yet somehow I don't believe it was what they were looking for, although what they were looking for puzzles me.   

5. Breyer's ice cream at my local safeway is $2 a carton this week.  They have found my Achilles heel.


*To the best of my knowledge, this friend does not have Prufrock burned into his brain.  The fact that there are people in the world with perfect pitch for scansion would be the a cause of much teeth gnashing if I were not all of the things the thesaurus claims I am.  

**I do have Prufrock burned, however imperfectly, into my brain thanks to a college habit of dramatic reading duets with my roommate.

Shark Fins and Sichuan Peppercorns

I just finished Fuchsia Dunlop's Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper:  A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China.  Fascinating book, which doesn't really say much about it.  Let me try again.

Ms. Dunlop writes eloquently about her experiences taking in Chinese culture(s) as food.  It's a book both humorous and elegiac as she describes her experiences in the shifting landscape of Chinese culture in over the last fifteen or so years.  She arrives as a student who was determined to eat everything served to her.  She ends up making a career out of writing about Chinese food.  She begins with the thing that Westerners "know" about Chinese food -- namely that the Chinese will eat anything, much of it disgusting.  Dog, chicken feet, sea cucumber, bird's nests, shark fins, insects, and bear paws all show up in the typical Western list of the horrors of Chinese cuisine, and they all show up in the book.  Ms. Dunlop does, in fact, succeed in eating everything, and thinking critically about it.

She holds up these exempla of the cultural divide between East and West, and succeeds in explaining some of their cultural significance.  That was what I hoped for, and expected since my friend JVW had handed me the book.*  I did not expect that I would spend most of the book ravenously hungry.  Discussion of deep fried rabbit heads do not usually do this too me, but Ms. Dunlop's descriptions of her enjoyment and her growing understanding of a culture that sees them as a delicacy left me staring into my fridge in the middle of the night.  I settled for a quesadilla, but found it vaguely unsatisfying as a solution.

Owing to a soy allergy, Chinese food is largely a closed book for me, so the author's achievement was even more notable.  Food that would make me very sick if I were to eat it filled me with longing.  It was this glimpse of something so alien that gave Shark Fins and Sichuan Pepper its power over my imagination.  Something so alien made comprehensible.


*JVW's understanding of my taste in books is exemplary.

Literature Ministry

This has nothing to do with food.  If you were expecting food writing, and a recipe, I am afraid you will be disappointed and ought to stop reading right now.

The following conversation, while not actually made up (mostly), was edited.  The dialogue at the time was stilted and improbable, possibly even more so that what I write here.  If my life were a movie, the script would be sent back for serious revisions to the self-indulgent dialogue.  Most of my friends are just as bad.  Some of them are worse. 

The Tall Guy and I are walking down one of the residential streets in South Anchorage near the Bluff.  I'm in my gigantic black parka.  The Tall Guy is pacing along crane-like beside me looking meditative*. 

"We look like cultists."

The Tall Guy's look of meditative inquiry became more inquiring.   

"We could knock on doors.  'Excuse me, ma'am, have you heard the good news about George MacDonald?'"**

"Have you let the Lord Peter Wimsey into your life?***"

"Good one, if I had one of my omnibus editions with me it would look like a Bible.  'Can I interest you in twentieth century literary modernism?  If you have any questions, we'd be glad to come back and talk with you about W.H. Auden.'"

We've been friends for a long time. 

*The Tall Guy's default expression seems to be meditative inquiry.  My default expression looks a lot like a scowl.  Some people might suspect that this was indicative of our characters.

**A nineteenth century Scottish fantasist.  I'm outrageously fond of some of his stories, and in the same breath driven to argue myself blue in the face with them.  MacDonald being dead, I tend to direct my arguments at The Tall Guy, who bears patiently with my flights of literary criticism.  If The Tall Guy and I were going to go around handing out literature that we found important, we would get in fights on people's doorsteps about which MacDonald we ought to be handing people. 

***  If you read fiction, and suffer from a touch of Anglophilia, you ought to do so.  I would suggest starting with Strong Poison or Murder Must Advertise.