Language Addiction

‘River of Smoke’ is the second in a series of historical novels by Amitav Ghosh.  The book deals with the period leading up to the Opium Wars in China in the early nineteenth century.  That period of history is fascinating for today’s readers.  Drugs were hopelessly entwined in the fabric of life then, just as they are now.  The personal, political, and economic consequences of addiction were serious.  The complexities of addiction are fascinating, and the connections between the personal and political realms are manifold.  Our ‘War on Drugs’ has its antecedents in this earlier time, but at that time Westerners were playing the roles of merchants and drug lords.  Profits were huge and the moral justifications elaborate and stretched thin.  For these connections alone the book is a fascinating read.

But the real strength of the book is its obsession with language.  Ghosh manages to capture something of the spirit of the time by using bits and pieces of many dialects and languages.  Many cultures mix and clash, and the resulting linguistic hodge-podge is wonderful to behold.  Ghosh seems to be addicted to the pleasures of language just as some of his characters are addicted to opium.  His playful use of language is fascinating, fun, ribald, and ultimately revealing of the time he describes.  I know of no other author who manages to pull this off.  Go too far in this direction and the language becomes incomprehensible.  Not far enough and much of the richness of the reading experience would be lost.  More often than not Ghosh strikes the right balance.

Approach the book with an open mind.  Don’t be put off by the dialects.  Stick with it even if you’re a little confused.  Read it aloud.  Rejoice in the complexity.  Enjoy.

Amazon (not dot com)

After reading a bunch of ‘experimental’ fiction lately,  Ann Patchett’s latest novel ‘State of Wonder’ came as a welcome relief.  It’s old-fashioned storytelling at a very high level.  She keeps us interested and entertained, and in the long run she also offers some valuable wisdom.  More about that later.

Much of the book takes place in the Amazon jungle, and Patchett’s descriptions are so vivid as to be both horrifying and fascinating.  As travel writing alone, the book is memorable and worthy read.  The story is well crafted without being particularly inventive or non-traditional.  Chapters are well formed and flow convincingly from one to the next.  The writing is lively but did not strike me as mannered or exaggerated in any way.

Patchett touches on many themes here, including ‘going native’, overcoming our past failures and traumas, the complications of cross-cultural similarities and differences, and the inevitability of choice in our lives.  No matter how many alternatives we have, we can only choose one at a time.  We may never know the ultimate endpoints of the other paths, but we can make the most of the one we choose.  And we can keep ourselves well informed from our experience and our intelligence so that the next choice will take us closer to where we want to go.  There is a sadness in considering the paths not taken, but to try to combine all of them in a single life will probably not do justice to any of them.

‘State of Wonder’ (not a great title for this book, I fear) is a fast and rewarding read.  Pick a shady spot on a sunny warm fall day and enjoy.

Thinking in the Kitchen

Michael Ruhlman’s books have long occupied a special place in my collection of cookbooks and books about food.   Ever since ‘The Making of a Chef’, Ruhlman has opened my eyes to the value of concentration and discipline in working in the kitchen.  ‘Twenty’ is his latest contribution.  It’s not a book for everyone, but it is a distillation of Ruhlman’s approach to the kitchen:  “Think before all else.” 

Ruhlman attempts to condense basic cooking principles into twenty basic concepts.  Some are ingredients, some are approaches, some are techniques.  I don’t think you could get a single authority to agree that these are the twenty that really matter, but Ruhlman’s choices are fascinating.  Number One is “Thinking”.  He insists that having a well considered concept of what you’re trying to accomplish in the kitchen is THE most important tool of all in the kitchen.  It’s better than following a recipe, better than spontaneous improvisation.  For me thinking is one of the joys of cooking.  As I’ve said elsewhere here, figuring out what to make is almost more enjoyable for me than actually preparing it.  What do I want to create?  How can I accomplish it?  If things aren’t working out correctly, how can I make corrections?  Or maybe I just have to adjust my thinking to what’s really happening.

Admittedly we’re in very personal territory here.  Like how we dress, how we write, how we travel, how we go about any activity in life, how we cook is a direct reflection of who we are.  It just so happens that for me Ruhlman is a kindred spirit.  I find it fascinating to think about water as an ingredient.  In what ways do we use it?  What are the properties of water that allow us to use it in those ways?  Why is it better than other substances in many cases?  Why doesn’t it work well in others?

Salt.  It’s crucial to all Western cooking.  Why?  How does it work?  What do we use it for?  Why?

Ruhlman’s collaborations with Thomas Keller are also interesting, but Keller takes basic principles far beyond where we mortals can venture.  I have managed to incorporate a few simple Keller techniques into my special-occasion cooking, but most of it is beyond me.  It sounds good on paper, but I just don’t have the time, energy, and devotion to find out if it would really work for me.  ‘Twenty’, on the other hand, is approachable.  Take it or leave it.  There are plenty of recipes that illustrate the basic concepts.  I’ve tried a couple so far.  One was a total failure, but the shortcomings were mine.  The other was simple and a big success.

But what I most appreciate is the encouragement to be who I am:  a guy who likes to think about food, about cooking, and about eating.

Just My Type

A book for the general reader about fonts.  Who’da thunk it?

‘Just My Type’ by Simon Garfield opened my eyes and mind to font design and use.  Yes, it’s more than I ever wanted to know about typeface.  You might find yourself skimming through some of the more detailed history, but for the most part the writing is hip and the subject matter interesting.  Here are some of my own conclusions.  Anyone who’s worked even casually in the world of graphic design will probably react with a resounding ‘Duhhhhhh!’.  Nonetheless:

-          Font choice is yet another resource available to us for expression.  Fonts do influence the way we read and the way we interpret what we read.

-          It’s fascinating to look at our modern world through the prism of fonts.  Look around you and notice the fonts that are used in print material, online, on public signage.  Some choices are perfect; others downright offensive.  It’s fun to notice.

-          To some extent fonts reflect historical and artistic trends.

-          Readability is partly objective, but not entirely.  We learn to read what’s put in front of us.  We grow accustomed to the fonts we see most often, and they can become optimally readable, no matter what the objective criteria might indicate.

-          Font choice changes over time, and not just because the times change.  Also because we just plain get bored.  Even if a font is perfect for its time, sooner or later it will fall out of favor simply because we’re bored with it and we fail to notice it.

Maybe the book could have been a third shorter, but I don’t regret the time spent reading it.  As you would expect, the fonts being discussed are actually used in the book, so as a reader you get to experience the font in context.  Not sure how the E-book version works.  E-readers generally present text in a uniform font chosen by the device.  Some offer a limited choice of fonts.  But in this book the variation of fonts is crucial.  Maybe the E-book is presented as a series of images?  If not, this is one case where hard-copy is essential.

What’s next?  A book about the history of book binding?  It probably already exists.  For now, I’ll happily return to reading fiction, but maybe I’ll bring to it a new awareness of the influence that the shape of the letters on the page is having on my reading experience.

Something New

She won the Pulitzer.  Enough said.  Jennifer Egan’s ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ has been hailed as ‘wildly ambitious’, ‘audacious’, ‘dazzling’.  Far be it from me to disagree.  Sure enough, Egan seems intent on breaking new ground in this book. 

There’s nothing new about a novel which consists of a serious of interlocking stories.  Think of Colum McCann’s ‘Let the World Spin’.  By comparison with Egan, McCann’s book is strikingly traditional.  Even though the stories (chapters) are somewhat independent, the common threads are in plain sight, the plot clear, and the emotional tone is generous and full of deep feeling.

How different is Egan’s approach.  The writing is downright virtuosic.  Many distinct voices and tones.  Very snappy writing that pleased me over and over again.  But here the discontinuities rule, and the emotional tone is detached.  She seems so intent on perfect execution of the difficult technical tasks she set out for herself that there is little energy left for emotion.  Chronology is intentionally and cleverly jumbled.  Voices change with time and character.  The conscious effort required to bring that off seems evident to the reader, and it gets in the way of a more straightforward emotional experience.

I love the opening chapter and the chapter about an African safari.  Also, the chapter culminating with an attempted rape was funny, brilliant, and disturbing.  Wonderful writing here.

But for me it was a book that spoke more to my head than to my heart, and in that sense I was disappointed.  Perhaps in order to find a truly new way of writing a novel it’s necessary to destroy much of the old ways first.  Do we really have to explode the old ways in order to forge something new?  Maybe, but I do hope that the emotional detachment is not something that endures.  Call me old-fashioned (many have).  I’m willing to do some conscious intellectual work in reading fiction, but I prefer to do it in the service of a rich and rewarding emotional experience. 

Kitchen Thoughts

I’ve been doing some serious cooking for at least ten years.  I don’t bake very much, but I do cook quite a bit.  While my interests in the kitchen have taken several different turns over the years, I tend to steer towards the classics (often French), or at least dishes that grow out of traditional recipes.

Obviously I’m not alone in discovering cooking as a hobby in recent years.  Interest in food (especially high-end food) has ‘mushroomed’ in this country.  Some of it probably grew out of the affluence of the tech boom.  Some was just a reaction to the all-too-common boring home-cooked meals that we grew up with in the 50’s and 60’s.  And now we have the local/organic food movement that provides us with high-quality ingredients.  How great is that?

While I’ve had almost no formal training in the kitchen, I have experienced cooking with lots of friends and family, and I’m fascinated by the different approaches that people bring to it.  Some treat cooking like a chemistry experiment: every ingredient is carefully measured and the recipe is honored as if it were holy scripture.  I started out that way, but that all changed for me when I discovered the simple sauté.  No measuring, just choose your protein, think a little about the flavor profile you’re looking for, and start cooking.  I was quickly amazed by what can happen without much of a plan.

I’ve worked with some cooks who really don’t know what they’re going to end up when all is said and done.  They have a very vague idea of what they want when they start.  They’ve done some shopping.  In executing the dish, the dish changes significantly a few times along the way.   For those who like to work this way and are good at it, the results are both unpredictable and surprisingly good.

After all, those enshrined published recipes were developed by somebody.  And usually the recipe is just a snapshot in time of an ever-evolving dish.  If it were published a few years earlier or later it would be quite different.

For me the process of developing the menu is just as enjoyable (maybe more so) than the actual cooking.  Usually it starts with an idea for one dish, that one dish that I’ve made before but want to alter somehow, or a dish or ingredient that’s new to me that I want to try.  Then it’s a long fun process of figuring out what goes with what.  What sides, appetizers, dessert, drinks, etc.  Flavors, colors, textures all have to work together.  I often map it out on paper over and over.  Some of those dishes are specific recipes, some just general concepts.  Things change many times before I even do the shopping.  If I’m lucky, the menu I settle on is balanced, has some kind of unifying theme, and includes enough variety to keep the diner interested, pleased, and maybe even surprised here and there.  Virtual cooking, I guess.  I could almost stop there and be satisfied.

Then there’s the execution.  That’s lots of work, which can be a problem by itself.  Sometimes the concepts I’ve settled on are perfect but require more work than I can comfortably get done by myself in the allotted time.  Sometimes the opposite will happen, and I’ll be inspired to add a course at the last minute.

I wonder what these different approaches say about the cook?  What am I trying to accomplish when I cook?  Sometimes it’s just plain sustenance, sometimes fun, sometimes an experiment, sometimes a performance, sometimes I’m just keeping myself occupied during a crisis.  I love that it can be whatever I need it to be at the time.

How lucky are we that we live in a time and place in which procuring something we need to stay alive can be fulfilling in so many other ways?  The trick is in knowing what approach is appropriate for a particular occasion given my state of mind at the time.  Have I ever screwed that up any number of times!  But when I get it right, I have a good time in the kitchen and my guests enjoy themselves in the dining room.

Nicholson Baker: The Mezzanine

Reading fiction is an important part of my life.  I have no academic literary pretensions.  I read because I enjoy it.  My choices tend to the serious.  I read a mixture of classics and contemporary fiction.  Only in the last few years has writing itself (and appreciating the writing of others) become important to me.

I cannot claim to have read every important novel of the last twenty years.  But I don’t think there are many important contemporary authors that I’ve totally missed.  (But then again if I’ve missed them, how would I know?  That’s what it means to have missed them.)

Nonetheless Nicholson Baker has managed to stay below my radar completely.  I have no idea why.  The publicity, promotion, and advertising sides of current fiction are a mystery to me.  I listen to some podcasts.  I read some journals, newspapers, and magazines.  And I’ve totally missed Nicholson Baker.  Shame on me.

So I decided to start with The Mezzanine, a short novel that has garnered considerable critical acclaim.  I’ve never read anything like it.  The novel is a description of the narrator's trip on a escalator back to his office at the end of his lunch hour.  There are diversions and flashbacks here and there, but the strictness of focus is drastic .  The attention to detail (reflected in the footnotes) reminds me of David Foster Wallace.  The Mezzanine is full of remarkably detailed observations of contemporary life.  The attention to detail is microscopic and wonderfully expressed in prose.  Yet there is no explicit emotional life.  None.  Zippo.  Total zero. 

In some writing the absence of emotional vibrations is a cry for help, a searing plea for feeling and sensitivity.  But in The Mezzanine the narrator seems at peace with his detached view of life.  He’s not totally human; he’s almost  a robot programmed with an advanced AI application that observes incredibly, but cannot truly feel. 

The minuteness and accuracy of the observations is stunning, and in that way the writing is a tour de force.  But nonetheless I felt empty at the end.  I didn’t feel that the narrator wanted his life to be different.  He’s just fine as a detached observer of the world and of his own thoughts.  Large amounts of mental energy go into just categorizing, counting, and sorting out his own thoughts.  Yet he never crosses the line into longing, love, pain, hate, jealousy, or envy. 

So as I appreciate the level of magnification that Baker manages to bring to bear on his own thoughts, I miss the larger emotional context that is often present in the fiction of DFW.

I will definitely read more of Nicholson Baker.  There’s a new novel out that focuses on sex.  Does he bring the same level of observation and detachment to this subject matter?  Is that possible?  No idea.  Can’t wait to find out.

We Learn What We Do

Is that the good news or the bad news?

We try to learn to play the piano or to play tennis. Both involve complex physical motions that comprise many component parts. Both are expressive large-scale gestures that need to fit into a rewarding emotional and/or competitive experience. Each minute segment requires relaxing here, exerting there, moving this way, looking here, thinking there. Lots of moving parts. But without the overall context it’s dry as bones.

So how do we practice?

If we take a strictly analytical approach, we break down each large piece (tennis forehand, piano scale, etc.) into multiple segments and we practice them (focus on them) separately and slowly. By breaking it down, the number of moving parts becomes manageable. We can devote conscious attention to each of them, and we have at least a chance at getting it right by lavishing conscious attention on the mini-movement.

But by breaking it down into tiny parts, we miss the whole. We miss the meaning, the joy, the purpose, the fun. But if we go for the meaning when we practice, we’ll screw up some of the details.

Unfortunately, we learn what we do. Play a difficult passage at the piano up to tempo over and over before you've mastered it? You’re just learning to be sloppy and inaccurate. Play it very slowly or in tiny chunks and focus on the small technical details? You’re missing the overall meaning and learning to be unexpressive.

It’s possible to hide the overall meaning from yourself through excessive attention to the technical details. It’s also very possible that many important technical details will never be mastered if the larger context is not at least temporarily sacrificed.

There just isn’t an easy answer. That’s why people with an extraordinarily high level of natural talent have such an advantage. The details fall into place for them without thinking about it. What an edge! The ultimate “Just do it”. But for us mortals, we have to practice. We alternate between focusing on the details (and sacrificing the overall meaning) and letting it fly (go for the overall effect even though the execution of the details will be flawed). Both are fatally flawed.  But we do them.  And we learn what we do.

If we’re lucky, there’ll be a moment when the two come together.  A spark, a leap of faith happens.  It's like a welder’s arc that suddenly connects two points.  Somehow the meaning-deficient yet perfect details and the meaningful overall gesture with sloppily executed details come together in a truly magical moment. I’ve experienced it countless times myself and with students. For me, it’s the essence of learning.

Reminds me of breeding dogs. You breed together breed A and breed Z. You’re hoping for the best of breed A to combine with the best of breed Z in the offspring, and you make your selections for breeding accordingly. You’re also hoping that the worst of breed A and worst of breed Z will be suppressed in the offspring. When that welder’s arc moment happens, you make progress towards your goal. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the best of the two breeds won’t be suppressed and the worst preserved in the offspring.

We learn what we do. So do it slowly and get every damned detail right. Then do it at pace and learn about the overall meaning, even if the hygiene of the details is suspect.  Do both over and over and hope for the spark. If you’re lucky and skillful it will happen. The two experiences will come together to produce a real ‘ahaaaa’ moment. It’s the ultimate reward for both student and teacher. It’s learning at its best.

Attention Deficit vs. Attention Surfeit

Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Seems to be running rampant, doesn’t it? We hear about it in both children and adults. “Experts” point to many potential causes: diet, heredity, environment, stress, chemical imbalance, hard-wiring. Who knows?

I’m reminded of a clever description of a map as a kind of filter. When we look at a map of Manhattan subway lines we see the general outline of the

island and the subway lines and stations. For the most part we don’t see streets, buildings, power lines, water lines, bus routes, or mail delivery routes. All of those items (and many others) have been filtered out so that we can direct our attention to the subject of the map: subway lines. Similarly, our ability to focus on a particular task is really an ability to filter out all other tasks and distractions for a period of time. The person with ADD is less good at that filtering. He tends to be distracted by the next ‘shiny metal object’ that he comes across. The word “deficit” puts this tendency in a negative light.

But what about the person who is very good at focusing on a single task, the one who is very good at filtering out ‘distractions’? That ability is usually seen in a positive light, and the individual often praised for his ability and singled out as more likely to succeed in the world.

I wonder if there isn’t a disorder on the opposite side of the spectrum that is characterized by excessive filtering and focus. What’s the downside of too much focus? I sometimes find that after I set myself a task I focus on it to such an extent that I can no longer see alternatives. I stubbornly persist in plodding down the path I’ve envisioned, even though the going may be tough. The tougher it gets, the more I persist. I'm in harness and I keep moving forward. I lose awareness of anything off the path. I don’t see other paths, I don’t reconsider the task, I don’t go back and rethink. I don’t even take a break. I just push on. I may well get to the end, but I’m probably miserable by the end, and I might have accomplished something that was ill-considered in the first place. I’ve wasted valuable time and mental energy. Excessive focus can deny me the ability to see outside the box. It can prevent me from seeing what I need to see when I need to see it. It can stifle creativity and bog me down in tedium. I can fall into this trap in many areas, including professional work, relationships, and even ‘leisure’ activities. Yes, I can take something that is supposed to be fun (a hobby or pastime) and make it into a real chore. Now that’s an accomplishment.

I’m no psychologist but I presume that there is such a disorder and it has a name (or two). I’ll call it ASD (Attention Surfeit Disorder). I can tell you from personal experience that it’s neither fun nor productive.

Surely we need a healthy balance between focus on the task at hand, and the ability to step back and see ourselves in a larger context at all times. How do we achieve that? Beats me. Awareness helps. If I’m able to see how small I’ve made the box for myself a few times, I’m more likely to recognize the feeling the next time it happens.

For now I’m content to remind myself that the ability to focus is not an exclusively good thing, and allowing oneself to be ‘distracted’ is not an exclusively bad thing. Sometimes a few good distractions (enhancements, observations, adjustments, second thoughts) are just what the doctor ordered. At least for this donkey.

Jokes

It's no secret that jokes reveal something about the teller, but also provide some benefit or comfort to the teller.  Jokes are a way of socliciting allies to secret causes.  I love jokes, and I love thinking about them.  It's fascinating that some jokes just resonate with me, and others leave me flat.  I'm not qualified to speak to the hows and whys or the particulars, but I want to share some of my favorites. It may well be that many aspects of myself will be revealed in the choices that I make here, but so be it.  I have no need to hide. Or do I?

Nixon: A Joke

For those of us that lived through the late 60's and the first half of the 70's, there's nothing like a Nixon paranoia joke.  The man was brilliant, but was crippled by paranoia.  So in the height of the Watergate mess Nixon decides to relax a bit and go to an NFL game.  He goes to a Baltimore Colts game (yes, the Colts were in Baltimore then, and the only Manning was Archie, the father).  He enjoys the game and decides to exercise a presidential prerogative and go to the Baltimore lockerroom after the game.  While there he can't help but notice that so many of the players are remarkably well endowed.  He is so fascinated he decides to inquire.  He tentatively approaches Bubba Smith (Police Academy) and asks him why the players are so generously endowed.  Bubba says that the technique is a secret, but since it's the President asking, he'll have to tell the truth.   "Mr. President, all you have to to is whack it against the bedpost three times every night
before you get into bed.  After a few weeks, you'll be amazed at the results."  Nixon is incredulous, but thanks Bubba nonetheless.  That night Nixon is about to get into bed.  Pat is already asleep in the big bed at the White House.  Nixon thinks about what Bubba said.  "What do I have to lose?"  So he whacks it three times against the bedpost.  Pat stirs a bit and mumbles, "Is that you, Bubba?".

Bread and Butter: A Joke

A destitute Polish peasant lives alone in a one-room hut with a dirt floor.  He has only a table, a scrap of bread, and a bit of butter.  He awakes in the morning not knowing how he'll get through the day.  Nonetheless, he spreads the little bit of butter on the scrap of bread.  He puts the bread on the table so he can get some water.  A noise outside startles him.  He jumps up and bumps against the table.  The bread falls to the floor.  It lands on the dirt floor butter side up and is still edible.  He can't believe his good fortune.  He can't understand why he should be so lucky.  He decides to try to find out why.  He goes to the local rabbi, but the rabbi can't explain it.  It makes no sense to him either.  After considering the problem for a while, the rabbi says they have to ask the big rabbi in the big town.  They travel together to the big town and ask the big rabbi.  But he too is stumped.  No explanation.  So they all go to the head rabbi in Warsaw.  They explain what happened to the head rabbi.  He strokes his beard and thinks for several minutes, then says "I understand what happened. Here's the explanation.  You put the butter on the wrong side of the bread."

Why is good fortune so hard to accept?