We grew up gourmets and never knew it

The yuppies have discovered weeds as gourmet fare. Nine bucks a pound for dandelion! By that measure there's at least ten thousand bucks worth of valuable gourmet salad out there in the lawn right now.

It's hard to believe the author of this article in The Wall Street Journal missed Chima de Rabe. I remedied that with a comment to the article. As I write this I still have two containers of this Spring's rabes in the freezer. And, I happen to be eating a sandwich of boiled ham, rabes that I thawed the other day and a little mayonnaise on slices of Corropolese split loaf. I generally prefer this particular sandwich on a seeded football roll; but we're out of them right now. It used to make Pop crazy when he would see me putting mayonnaise on a sandwich of rabes and ham; but that's not why I still invariably do it.

Also, she specifies two changes of water for boiling Pokes. I can't imagine that Mom or Aunt Mary R did two changes of water, and I certainly never have; which may explain why there have been incidents of rapid necessary movement to the necessaries room related to the consumption of Poke Salad over the years. It's very difficult to resist the temptation to pick larger and larger and leafier and leafier shoots as one gets tired when picking Polks, which also may explain the incidents.

And, she mentions Burdock but doesn't mention that the leaves are poisonous, or at least that's what Mom believed, although the internet seems not to think so. Mom and Grandmom L only used the thick stems of the leaves which they called Cardunes and prepared by battering and deep frying. Next Spring I'm going to pick Cardunes and try to recreate that recipe. As I recall they had a unique flavor somewhat like, but only somewhat like, the battered and fried celery we do at Christmas.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124338226000356493.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

And, since I'm on the subject of food, I should mention that Linda and I ate our first Swiss Chard from the garden on Tuesday, probably the earliest that it's ever been ready for picking. We've been eating lettuce for a couple of weeks; but slugs are multiplying and ravaging it now, probably due to the very rainy weather we've been having for the past week or so.

Finally, if you are one of the few people who still actually, you know, like, read, like, books, you may find this article by Ann Kirshner in The Chronicle Review interesting. She tried out all the current modes of reading and listening to Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit to see which she liked better. I can only wish she had gone further into the issue of the differences between sight reading and audio since I find them such distinctly different experiences.

Most interesting paragraph - "Readers are passionate and opinionated advocates for their preferred formats. Flip announced that she reads only hardcovers; end of conversation. "I get it," said Bill, watching me read on the iPhone: "You like your books little." Bob is no Luddite, but he insists that Steve Jobs has bribed me, since the Kindle is so obviously superior. Just wait for the Apple tablet," advises techno-sage Joe. And Judith derides my affection for audiobooks as "not really reading.""

For the record I will only read a hardback if I can't get a paperback. Something about a hardback book intimidates me and causes me to treat it too carefully. I can dog-ear the pages to mark my place or break the binding of a paperback by bending it back to hold in one hand; but I can rarely bring myself to treat a hardback book so cavalierly no matter how cheaply I bought it. And, I find listening to an audio book so different from reading the same book that I will often read an especially good novel immediately after listening to it and vice versa. Also, she doesn't mention the obvious next step, which is to combine audio with a video formatted somewhat like the succession of still pictures that Ken Burns used in his Civil War series on PBS. Soon technology should allow relatively easy mating of period pictures with text. So you could see a street scene related to a passage of audio or a picture of an animal mentioned in an audio passage as you listened, for instance.

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39b01601.htm

And, really, really, finally, since I've been on the subjects of yuppies, books, reading and cooking; here's an interesting article by Jennifer Reese on Slate about a book about a whole different way to think about cooking. One suspects that Linda will come home to find something really new and different on the table one of these days; but not 'til after she has endured Lobscouse, which I still haven't gotten around to making even though Alex tried it and praised it pretty highly.

http://www.slate.com/id/2219243/pagenum/all

Catching up on book reviews

I've been busy reading and listening to booktapes. Here are a few quick reviews.

True Grit by Charles Portis - I listened to this as an audio book last week. I had never read it, or even heard of it except as the title for the movie. This novel is a masterpiece. It's told from the point of view of an old spinster who hired Rooster Cogburn to help track down her father's killer back when she was 14 years old and then accompanied him on the hunt. It's a bit over the top, but then a good adventure story should be a bit over the top. If you liked Huckleberry Finn or Kim or Tom Sawyer or Red Badge of Courage you should pick this book up. It's short (6.5 hours on 6 CDs) and gripping. I think is it would be as good reading as listening.

Getting Mother's Body by Suzan-Lori Parks - I also listened to this as an audio book last week. It's also short (7.5 hours on 6 CDs) and it's gripping in a different way than True Grit. It's the story of a pregnant black teenager in the 1960's South as she and various relatives set out to dig up her mother's body both to move it from where a shopping center is going to be built and also to retrieve a treasure of jewelry that they think her mother was buried with. I'll write more about this later in another post because as an audio book it's unique in my experience in that it includes professionally performed blues songs as the voice of the mother, so it's more of a multi-media presentation such as might be put on by an old timey storyteller. Probably a good read as well, but that depends on how well you can tolerate reading colloquial dialogue.

Compulsion by Jonathan Kellerman - I read this in the large print edition that all the book racks seem to have on them now as us old geezers start to predominate in the reading population. A typical Jonathan Kellerman production - well written, interesting plot, characters who are old friends if you've read his other books. It's not literature, but if you must waste time reading popular novels it's an excellent one.

The Burnt House - by Faye Kellerman - I picked this up at the same time as I picked up her husband's book (above) but, oddly enough, it is a regular sized paperback. Pretty much ditto with what I said about the book above; but if I were forced to choose between them I would say Faye writes the better novel, at least for me. She gets a bit more into the actual lives and thinking of her characters, or maybe I'm a smidgen more interested in her characters than I am in Jonathan's. Well worth reading - no, more than that - excellent.

Book of the Dead - by Patricia Cornwell - It's a sad thing to see a writer you've enjoyed in the past go over the edge and take her characters with her into utterly preposterous psychological waters. There is a phrase, "jumped the shark," which is applied to TV shows that have gone over the top and into the realm of the ridiculous. That phrase aptly describes what Cornwell did in this book, and what she has been threatening to do in a couple of previous books. The name brand critics apparently loved it; but then the name brand critics inhabit a world where it's reasonable to believe that one of a pair of very close twenty year friends and business associates suddenly tries to rape the other. Non-geniuses like Cornwell are well advised to leave repressed desire themes to geniuses. Also, the underlying plot is preposterously complex and unlikely even by pulp novel standard; and the main character's niece has now accumulated so many diverse skill sets that she puts James Bond, Sherlock Holmes and Jason Bourne to shame. The niece is now Wonder Woman with Marie Curie's brain; but still encumbered by a healthy dollop of downright Victorian emotional stupidity. I managed to finish it; but I won't pick up her next book.

The inside story for Tarzan fans

Fans of the king of the jungle who want to know the other side of the story will rush out to buy this new tell-all book now. I'll wait until it comes out in paperback.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article4875066.ece

In the meantime, I finished listening to the audio version of The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber last week. It wound itself out to a very satisfying ending and I will definitely pick it up one day as a paperback for a read. Not least I'll remember it because of the amazing coincidence I recognized as it came toward the end. I've also been reading, off and on, a paperback copy of Little Man by Robert Lacey that Sam gave me. I could be wrong; but I think Gruber based some of his characters on Meyer Lansky's convoluted life.

The coincidence comes in because I picked up Air and Shadows soley because it was billed as being abut a lost Shakespeare manuscript. Then it actually turned out to be about a complex set of characters, including Russian Jewish mobsters, searching for and fighting over a Shakespeare manusript and the clues leading toward it. What are the chances I would be reading about Lansky and also listening to a book, some of whose characters are an awful lot like Lansky?

Finally, over the weekend I learned that some of you young-uns out there think political assassinations are mainly the work of right wing nuts. This false meme probably arises from the fact that left wing propagandists have been selling you that line - including on wikipedia where die-hard lefties insist that Lee Harvey Oswald was a pawn of the CIA against the simple facts in evidence. Here's a short memory list of recent political assassinations and attempts:

Ronald Reagan - shot by a complete loon who wanted to impress Jodie Foster
John Lennon - shot by a loonie rock music fan
Gerald Ford - shot at by a loonie hippie follower of Charles Manson and then almost shot at later
by a loonie housewife whose motives defy description
Martin Luther King - killed by a loonie multiple times felon, perhaps the exception that proves
the rule
Robert Kennedy - killed by a loonie Palestinian who believed Kennedy was too much a supporter
of Israel
John F. Kennedy - killed by a loonie Marxist who had defected to the Soviet Union and then
returned to the U.S. You're free to pick your own conspiracy theory, but if I'm forced to
vote for one I come down on the side of Oswald acting for Fidel Castro in some way. Castro
had a legitimate and timely beef against JFK since JFK and his brother Bobby had actively
and persistently plotted to have him assassinated in one of the more comic opera affairs of
recent history. Google Operation Mongoose and keep firmly in mind the fact that Saint
John F. Kennedy and his brother Saint Robert F. Kennedy were the president and
attorney general who pushed for it.

Look this all up for yourself if you don't believe me; but be careful to read deeply because propagandists on the left are very persistent and ingenious at twisting and embroidering the actual facts. Assassinations are mostly carried out by lone true believers, a species of lunatic which the left spawns much more frequently than the right. This makes sense because the left persistently sells the idea that simple and radical plans and actions can bring about Heaven on Earth while the right more typically believes that most attempts to change the existing order of things end badly.

Read the wikipedia entry on Immanentizing the Eschaton for more.

A sublime confection

For the past couple of weeks I've been listening on and off to an audio novel titled The Book of Air and Shadows by one Michael Gruber, who I’ve never heard of before although I find he has five recently published novels on Amazon. He must have achieved significant success with one and then had publishers eager to bring out his former efforts.

I’m only about halfway through Air and Shadows; yet he has already managed to include a bookie, an intellectual property lawyer, the Russian mob, Shakespeare scholars, a document ciphered in the 16th century, a discussion of world class weightlifting, a Palestinian driver who formerly served as one of Yassir Arafat’s bodyguards, a detailed discussion of bookbinding, a pistol formerly owned by a decorated member of the SS and a world class model. What a sublime confection. When I have such an audio book in the car I yearn for the days of long commutes.

In enumerating the list above I’m only scratching the surface of the complexity; yet he makes it delightfully readable, or rather listenable. I have to be careful of that distinction because on more than one occasion I've found novels that enrapture me in audio to later bore me on the printed page - and not because I’ve read them as my second go around, already knowing the plot. I often reread novels, yet I only rarely find my first judgment faulty on second or third reading. The very best novels, in fact, become like old friends, improving with the rereading at different stages of life. In that class I can name, off the top of my head: Tai-Pan, Hawaii, The Godfather, The Mote in God's Eye, The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, Shogun, Stranger in a Strange Land, Shibumi, A Soldier of the Great War, Kim. . . I'd better stop; the list could go on for a long time.

Lest you think me a total time wastrel I should point out that I took a one credit hour speed reading course way back when at Illinois Tech. I came out of that course barely able to sustain eleven hundred words per minute, almost a page of easy material at a glance; although a headache would stop me after about a half hour. So, when I say I read something, I might mean I savored it at a couple of hundred words per minute, and I might mean I slammed through it at six or seven hundred words per minute. There was a time when I could slam through an interesting novel of a certain sort at almost a thousand words per minute without the headache.

Here's a cheery thought for you young folks - the performance of one's central processing unit, among other things, does not improve with age; and furthermore, as a general rule, what does not improve over time degrades over time. I used to see more than a dozen stars in The Great Square of Pegasus - now I see two. That is not all the result of light pollution.

The physicist Richard Feynman did a long running study of his own central processing unit by regularly doing certain mental calculations and recording the time and accuracy in his notebook. If you find his writeup of that study it will not improve your mood. There's another great book - What Do You Care What Other People Think - and another - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. Not for nothing did Freeman Dyson once refer to him as "all genius, all buffoon" - what a character. I once believed that I had attained a glimmer of understanding of why his seemingly simple little idea of Feynman Diagrams was worthy of a Nobel Prize in physics but I gave up on thinking I understood that kind of stuff a long time ago.

Another related story, Albert Einstein once wrote a simple little book in plain language about general relativity. I can't remember the title; but I remember foolishly thinking I understood what he was saying - this was back when I foolishly thought I grasped the Lorentz Transformations because I could ponderously follow the equations when they were laid out in front of me. Later I read that Niels Bohr, I think, once said that there were perhaps a dozen people in the world capable of fully understanding the implications of Einstein's simple little book. Taking Bohr as speaking figuratively, I knew one of those "dozen" once, and had a bit of a chance to appreciate the workings of her mind - in fact that has a lot to do with why I'm a words schlub rather than a science schlub; but I see that I have digressed a bit - that's a story for another day.

Anyway, I’ll definitely find The Book of Air and Shadows as a print book after I finish the audio. I hope it doesn’t disappoint.