The Hot Nice

Goodreads

2009-08-15T17:50:00.001-07:00

I know that a lot of people aren't crazy about Goodreads, but I love it, not least because it helps allay my fears about ever-more-intense cultural fragmentation. I find it genuinely comforting to know that a book I've read has been read by people I know, particularly since I live in a place where discussion of reading is exceedingly rare. Based on a quick survey of the site, I came up with this list of all the books that have a) been published in the last decade or so and b) have been been read by me and marked as "read" or "to-read" by at least four of my Goodread friends. Of the 16 books, 13 are novels, which is unsurprising. Of the three nonfiction books, one is about Iraq, and the other two are all or in part about food (and The Omnivore's Dilemma doesn't even appear here because I haven't read it yet). What will historians say about our preoccupation with the politics of food during wartime?

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (13 people, including myself)
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (8)
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (8)
Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (7)
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (7)
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (6)
Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (6)
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire (6)
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (6)
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (6)
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation (6)
Keith Gessen, All the Sad Young Literary Men (5)
Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants (5)
Arthur Phillips, Prague (5)
Thomas Ricks, Fiasco (5)
Richard Russo, Straight Man (5)

Some Boxes

2009-08-13T18:06:00.001-07:00

People sometimes ask what I "am." Now I can just refer them to this blog post.

Green = Native Hawaiian
Red = Chinese (some combination of Han and Hakka)
Blue = Some combination of English and Scottish
Grey = German

Biography

2009-08-12T21:56:00.000-07:00

I'm not a huge fan of biography, and in fact I've only read six (or rather, six and a half) biographies in the past decade. But recently, a friend's enthusiasm about Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy has got me thinking about the genre, and about what my sparse biographical reading list suggests about me:

Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (read in 2009)

Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (2009)

Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921 (2006)

Lewis Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (2006)

Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life (2004)

Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (2001, never finished)

Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (2000)

India is Really Big

2009-07-03T22:52:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lot about India in preparation for an upcoming trip. Even though I know, like everyone else, that the nation's total population is about 1.3 billion, I'm still astounded every time I read about how many people live in a given state. Inspired by this map, which replaces the US states with the flags of countries of equal population, I created the map above. As in the United States map, each state or territory is represented by the flag of the country whose population is roughly equivalent to that of the state. I took a few liberties, such as omitting the smaller union territories and leaving out the boundaries that are disputed by India and its neighbors.

Here are a few unexpected things that showed up in the map:

- The state of Gujarat is closest in population to South Africa. Gandhi, who was born in Gujarat, spent over two decades in South Africa before returning to India.

- Because Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are represented by the UK and Australian flags, respectively, they appear at first glance to be connected. In fact, Chhattisgarh split off from Madhya Pradesh in 2000 to become its own state, so the connection is appropriate.

- The flags of Swaziland, Botswana, and Namibia, real-life neighbors in southern Africa, here represent the adjacent northeastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and Manipur (though it can be hard to tell because the northeast's already-crazy jumble is made more confusing by multicolored flags).

- The state of Haryana, here represented by the flag of Syria, is shaped a lot like Iraq, whose flag looks a lot like that of Syria.

Gmoticons

2009-03-11T01:36:00.000-07:00

I don't use GChat as much as I used to, because the IT department at my current job monitors employee internet usage. However, I've recently discovered (or rediscovered, in the case of the monkey) the following "hidden" commands within the program. Though they are secret only in the sense that "animal style" at In-N-Out Burger is secret, these functions surely deserve greater acclaim and usage:

:(|)

V.v.V

[:|]

Street Names

2009-01-11T22:54:00.000-08:00

Amazing streets in whose vicinity I have resided:

Melville Street. Probably named around the turn of the century, before the resurgence of Melville's literary reputation. In West Philadelphia Melville St. is a tiny north-south street tucked between wider, numbered streets.

Sigel Street. Apparently Beanie Sigel's name is derived from the South Philadelphia street (though he lived on the west side of Broad Street).

Keanu Street. I would like to believe that the actor, who is part Hawaiian, was named after the street. I find parking on this street to be oddly satisfying.

Bastille Day

2008-07-14T20:19:00.000-07:00

Five French people I like:

* Claire Denis

* Fernand Braudel

* Pierre Mendès-France

* Franck Ribéry

* Jacques Vergès

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page

2008-05-08T20:18:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of reasons to like this book. Michael Hofmann, reviewing it in the LRB, liked it so much he had to use two foreign terms to label it. "The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is vast fun and a vast life," he writes, "a Kulturgeschichte and a roman à thèse."

Edwards's book convinced me of something I'd never truly believed in the past: that it is possible to lead a full, complex life without leaving home. Ebenezer Le Page leaves Guernsey only once in his long life, for a day trip to neighboring Jersey; and he only reads one book, Robinson Crusoe. Yet his life, as Hofmann writes, is vast.

Of course, I'd encountered this idea before, but I didn't buy it--not from historians, and certainly not from anthropologists. Spending one's life in a single place, I thought, was a curse (think of Bodie in The Wire, who doesn't realize that the radio stations are different outside of Baltimore).

In part, this was why I had trouble getting used to Philadelphia, a sedentary city where even rich people stay in the same neighborhood for generations, and where newcomers are regarded with distrust, like the Englishmen in Le Page's Guernsey. The book of my own life will still be a Bildungsroman, not a Kulturgeschichte, but at least I understand Philly a little better than I used to.

Bookshelf from Staples

2008-03-26T21:11:00.000-07:00

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about bookshelves on publishing and book criticism blogs. People talk about how to deal with overflowing bookshelves, how to make amazing bookshelves that double as staircases, and the etiquette of displaying unread books. What I don't see a lot of is praise for particular shelves.

I have a wonderful shelf that I bought at the Staples in University Heights, Providence, in August 2002. It cost me $20, and I have used it ever since, over six years and in six or seven different residences. What distinguishes this extraordinary shelf from all the other cheap bookshelves? Two things, really:

1. Shelves made of real (albeit cheap) wood instead of particle board with a "wood effect" exterior. This means that the shelves don't sag from the weight of the books.

2. A collapsible structure (the shelves swing up and the sides swing in to cover them). When moving apartments, this factor separates a $20 bookshelf that is taken along from a $20 bookshelf that is trashed or given away. I don't understand why Ikea and the suppliers for Target and Wal-mart continue to design non-collapsible shelves that require assembly AND cost the same amount as my shelf from Staples.

Cafeterias

2008-03-26T20:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I ate at the cafeteria in an Ikea store. Like most things at Ikea, the concept was better than the reality, but it was still a memorable experience. Best of all, it made me think about my love of cafeterias as a means of distributing food. In elementary school, I eagerly awaited the cafeteria's weekly pizza lunch. One of my family's favorite dinner destinations was Souplantation, which is cafeteria-like in its setup. In college, I stayed on the school meal plan longer than most of my peers, and actually looked forward to eating at the dining hall. Now, I sometimes fantasize about working for a large corporation (or at least, a government agency) with its own employee cafeteria. Here are some reasons why I enjoy cafeterias:

* I love to eat, and I like to exercise total control over the content of my meals, but I don't enjoy cooking.

* Busing one's own tray and plates is a reminder that someone has to clean up, even if it's not the person eating.

* I'm not a big stickler for knowing where my food came from, or whether it was produced locally. In fact, I think the current tendency to view food consumption as an urgent political matter is a bit misguided.

* Cafeterias are associated with large institutions--schools, corporations, museums, hospitals--and I am fond of large institutions, probably because people love to complain about how faceless and impersonal they are, which I think is stupid.

* The constraints established by cafeterias provide a ready-made framework for expressions of creativity in consumption.

San Diego Padres

2007-08-25T22:35:00.001-07:00

If I were a less disciplined blogger, I would write something mean about the Philadelphia Phillies. Instead, I'd like to praise the San Diego Padres, my hometown club.

I haven't really cared about the Padres since 1998, the year they made it to the World Series (only to be swept by the Yankees, of course). In fact, I didn't really follow them throughout the 1990s, either -- the high point of my fandom was in kindergarten, when Bip Roberts and Steve Garvey came to my school to present me with the first of my many Citizen of the Month awards.

This weekend, however, the Padres have been in town to play the Phillies. They've won twice, in dramatic and controversial fashion, and I can only hope that they prevail again tomorrow. Yesterday, there was nearly a brawl after Carlos Ruiz slid in high on Marcus Giles, and today Milton Bradley -- who's hit three home runs so far this weekend -- called hitter-friendly Citizens Bank Park "a joke." Best of all, though, the Padres' home runs off of the vile Brett Myers occasioned the following:

After the game, Myers got into a shouting match with a reporter and had to be restrained by teammate Pat Burrell.

When Myers was asked about the two home runs, he said they were really "just pop ups."

A reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer questioned whether Myers really thought they were pop ups, and Myers got angry.

"You're not even a beat reporter, you're a fill-in, you don't know anything about baseball," said Myers, who then called the reporter "retarded."

The Inquirer reporter asked if Myers could spell retarded, and Myers stood up. Burrell then restrained Myers, and Myers refused to speak any further.

I'll never understand why Phillies fans hate Pat Burrell -- who, though overpaid and indifferent, seems like a decent guy -- but have no problem with Myers.

Fennesz + Sakamoto

2007-08-16T19:22:00.000-07:00

I'm not usually thrilled by Christian Fennesz's collaborations. But Cendre, his new album with Ryuichi Sakamoto, is quite a pleasure. Its mournful piano-and-white noise texture reminds me, more than anything, of the soundtrack to the best Final Fantasy game never made.

Pac Sun

2007-07-31T14:46:00.000-07:00

It brings me great pleasure to know that I can walk into a mid-sized mall in an exurb of Philadelphia and purchase a short-sleeved Western-style shirt of the type that I once assumed was unique to my home region, and which is perfectly suited for such summer pastimes as:

• skating at the mini-mall
• driving to the beach
• chilling with one's bros

Beverages

2007-05-30T15:47:00.000-07:00

This past weekend in Providence, I ate in the basement of Apsara, surrounded by friends and a modest selection of beverages. I don't particularly enjoy consumption per se, but I love having a wide variety of beverages--preferably at least four of five of them--arrayed at my fingertips. BYOB restaurants like Apsara are the perfect venues to satisfy this urge, as I can set up my hoard of beverages, in quasi-feudal style, wherever I please, and in ridiculous quantities. In an ideal world, I would prefer to have before me not four or five but rather dozens of types of beverages, particularly the following:

• Tap water, with ice, in a plastic cup, preferably poured from a pitcher (for ease of refill).
• Hot green tea, poured from a pot, in a small porcelain cup.
• Coke (not Pepsi), with ice and a slice of lime or lemon, in a plastic cup.
• Iced coffee, with ice and milk, in a pint glass, with a straw.
• Orange juice, no pulp, with ice, in a large glass.
• Inexpensive, and preferably regional, lager beer, such as Yuengling or Narragansett, from a pint can.
• Imported beer, variety depending on mood and season, from a pint glass.
• Red wine, in the $15-$30/bottle range, from a wine glass.
• Hot coffee, nearly black with a drop of whole milk, in a mug.
• Syrupy, cognac-based liqueur, from the bottle.
• Inexpensive bottled water, chilled, from the bottle.
• Orange Vitamin Water, from the bottle.

Michael Nutter

2007-05-18T15:15:00.000-07:00

In my life, I've made campaign contributions to just three candidates: Paul Wellstone, David Segal, and Michael Nutter. After this Tuesday's election, Nutter is now set to become the next mayor of Philadelphia. He polled strongly in the white liberal enclaves of Chestnut Hill, Mt. Airy, and my office, but he also crushed Chaka Fattah in West Philly. Whether or not he'll be able to make a dent in Philly's current problems is another matter.

By the numb3rs

2007-05-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

Last May, I set a goal: Henceforth, I would read about 30 to 45 books per year, or 10 to 15 per "season" -- the three seasons in my system being January through April (Spring), May through August (Summer), and September through December (Fall). Over the past year, I kept a list of books read, along with pertinent information about each book:

2006-2007 STATISTICS

Total books read: 41 (14 in Summer 2006/16 in Fall 2006/11 in Spring 2007)
Books read per month: 3.42
Books read per week: 0.79
Books read by category:
Literature: 9 (4/2/3)
History: 7 (2/2/3)
Theory and Criticism: 7 (1/3/3)
Misc. Nonfiction: 6 (1/4/1)
Political Science: 4 (1/3/0)
Urban Studies: 4 (2/2/0)
Genre Fiction: 4 (3/0/1)
Books read by publisher:
All trade and non-UP academic: 27 (13/6/8)
All university press: 14 (1/10/3)
Penguin: 6
Vintage: 5
Penn Press: 5
Norton: 3
Chicago: 3
Cornell: 2
Random House: 1
Pelican: 1
Harper & Row: 1
Mariner: 1
Viking: 1
Verso: 1
Knopf: 1
Westview: 1
Modern Library: 1
New Directions: 1
Ace: 1
Continuum: 1
Monthly Review: 1
Princeton: 1
Yale: 1
Harvard: 1
MIT: 1
Books read by binding:
Cloth: 15 (36.59%, 3/8/4)
Paperback: 26 (63.41%, 11/8/7)
Duration in possession before read:
Less than one month: 30 (7/14/9)
One month to six months: 5 (3/0/2)
Six months to one year: 1 (1/0/0)
More than one year: 5 (3/2/0)

There's something pleasing about rendering reading in terms of numbers and categories. To be sure, part of the pleasure comes from violating the unspoken taboo against treating reading as a quantifiable activitity (Full disclosure: Moneyball was one of the 41 books I read last year). But making this list also helped me reflect on what I've read, and why, and how my reading habits are changing over time.

The New NHL

2007-04-13T21:22:00.000-07:00

I'm on record as a fierce critic of the NHL's post-lockout rule changes. While I still agree with much of what I wrote in that angry, convoluted missive, I have to admit that the "new NHL" hasn't turned out as badly as I'd feared. In fact, for the first time in almost a decade, I'm actually excited about the start of playoff season. Two of the league's recent moves have been particularly reassuring: first, in contrast to stodgy old Major League Baseball, the NHL has not just tolerated but in fact actively encouraged the dissemination of game footage online; second, Gary Bettman has reiterated that fighting remains an important part of the game, despite recent debate about abolishing it. After all, as long as there's room in hockey for nice guys like Georges Laraque, fans like Lil' Jon and myself will show up to watch.

#5: Times Literary Supplement

2007-04-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

Compare to: As-yet-nonexistent American Review of Books

But not: Myopic New York Review of Books, Middlebrow New York Times Book Review

From the letters section of a recent issue:

"Sir, -- Paul Barker (February 9) places Brown University 'on Rhode Island'; Diana Edwards (Letters, March 2) doubts that there is any such island. They are both wrong. ..."

Paul Robeson

2007-03-28T19:01:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago, there was a piece on the radio about Paul Robeson, the performer, activist, and lawyer. I was planning to write at length about his life -- and this stately mural, which is located a couple blocks from my apartment -- but I decided that was a little too easy. In fact, the only non-nice thing anyone can say about Robeson is that he wasn't quick enough to criticize Stalin, and I find that kind of post-Cold War anti-communism a little suspect. Necessary, perhaps, but still suspect, even if Robeson singing the Soviet national anthem does make me cringe.

One thing I learned about Robeson from the radio program is that the US government revoked his passport because he refused to swear that he was not a communist -- hence, I suppose, the mural's claim that Robeson was a "Citizen of the World." Call me nostalgic and insufficiently anti-communist, but if the spirit of an age is reflected in its singer-activists, I'd much rather live in Robeson's time than Bono's.

Good

2007-03-12T05:35:00.000-07:00

I could say all sorts of mean things about Good magazine's list of the top magazines of all time, but that would be silly and, well, mean -- and thus contrary to the generous spirit of this blog. Instead, allow me to congratulate them on having devised a much-del.icio.used feature, and thank them for having inspired me to come up with a magazine list of my own.

Mine is much shorter, since I limited myself to magazines to which I have subscribed, or which I bought (or continue to buy) consistently on newsstands. Since this is a great opportunity to write nice things about periodicals I love, I plan to post about these magazines from time to time.

Dudes among dudes

2007-03-08T14:53:00.000-08:00

I've grown fond of most of the guys I play hockey with, but two deserve special mention: JL and PH.

- On a Penn roller hockey team filled with future (and present) physicians and nanotube-obsessed engineering students, JL stands out nearly as much as I do. Recently he tried to bring up dialectics as part of the locker room conversation, and I was the only one who knew what he was talking about. He lives in a bizarre condo development in New Jersey.

- My ice hockey team is remarkably diverse, at least by the standards of the sport, which often seems to be the exclusive province of boorish, middle-class white men. Our squad boasts women, senior citizens, accountants, and honest-to-God POCs (myself not really included). But the most unlikely team member of all is PH, a Russian history professor at Penn, whose father translated Mikhail Bakhtin's major works into English. I sometimes wonder whether PH is a better player than the 'sphere's most famous hockey-playing academic, and given that he's scored three goals in the last two games, I'm inclined to say yes.

Some books

2007-01-28T13:58:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking of applying to graduate school in English, and by way of weighing my options, I've been thinking about examples of literary scholarship I admire. Here are some nice things about four of them:

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

A few weeks ago, I brazenly touted Postmodernism as the most important book I’d ever read, but JHB was right to point out my error. For world-swallowing ambition, sophistication of argument, and sheer beauty, the first chapter of The Political Unconscious is second to none in the (admittedly small) body of recent literary scholarship I’ve read. In Jameson, the subordinate clauses are what hurt, and they never hurt so good as this:

Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it.

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

I’ve never been terribly interested in the First World War, and I’m not sure the British poetry associated with it is all that worthwhile. But Fussell’s book is a fine model of how to write convincingly about the confluence of literature and history, and one comes away from this book understanding as much about the lived experience of soldiers in the trenches as one does about, say, Siegfried Sassoon. Fussell also has an abiding fascination with Gravity’s Rainbow, which looms in this book as something like the absurd culmination of a modernity birthed from the blood and mud of Passchendaele.

Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel

Even more so than the underwhelming (but brilliantly titled) Graphs, Maps, Trees, this book is truly exhilarating. Written in choppy, effervescent prose, Moretti’s book is an insightful investigation of genre and geography, and it sketches a genuinely new approach to literary history -- one which provides far more questions than answers, and which manages to make these questions seem worthy of a lifetime of investigation. Atlas of the European Novel is also the book that first whet my appetite for the “big” later novels of Dickens: Bleak House, Little Dorritt, and Our Mutual Friend.

Robert Scholes, Textual Power and The Rise and Fall of English

Anyone who thinks that literary theory inevitably leads to pretention and irrelevance would do well to read Scholes, who approaches abstruse theory and practical pedagogy with equal seriousness. What unites these two books -- aside from a prose style which radiates decency -- is a belief that studying literature and literary theory can be a useful -- and indeed empowering -- experience for students. In The Rise and Fall of English, Scholes provides a sobering account of the present state of English as a discipline, but it is an account which nonetheless leaves me half-convinced that becoming an English professor might not be such a bad idea.

Eight Below and The Terminal

2007-01-15T18:05:00.000-08:00

I like to watch movies on the bus. Sleep, cell-phone chatter, and headphones inevitably interrupt my viewing, leaving the plot denatured and the dialogue incomplete. In 2003, for example, on a bus to and from the anti-war protest in New York, I watched Crocodile Dundee and When Harry Met Sally in this fashion. (I was lucky; on the ISO-chartered bus, the riders were subjected to documentaries about Palestine.)

This weekend, traveling to and from New York again, I watched two more films, about which I'd like to say a few nice things. Eight Below, in which the huskies out-act Paul Walker and the dude from American Pie, is a triumph of extreme anthropomorphism, radically familiarizing the Antarctic landscape fully as much as the dogs. In The Terminal, Tom Hanks, whose character's accent now seems like a bizarre imitation of Borat's, gives us a bumbling, tragic portrayal of statelessness, and bare life appears in the guise of romantic comedy.

JST, or, Kulturkampf on Ice

2006-10-31T16:13:00.000-08:00

I’ve been playing a lot of hockey lately, and I have only abject failure to show for it. On Sunday, my ice hockey team was beaten 9-0 by the Wharton School of Business team, an experience which is all the more disheartening because I have delusions about these games serving as verdicts on the cultural affinities of their participants.

This has left me feeling nostalgic for the Free Agents, so named because we were the players no one else wanted on their low-intensity intramural team. For a year and a half, we were truly terrible, beaten even by the marching band’s team. I suggested that we call ourselves The Wretched of the Ice, but no one else on the team had read Fanon, and they didn’t think it was funny.

Why did everything change? According to the traditional narrative, we would have acquired self-belief, some cool new jerseys, and a back-to-basics work ethic. Instead, our path to success was far easier: like Emilio Estevez scouring the Dickensian alleyways of Minneapolis-St. Paul for defensemen with booming slap shots, we acquired JST, who looked and played as if he had stepped straight onto the ice from the Deep Springs ranch, Hegel in hand. Politely declining to show up on time, change out of his skinny jeans, or pass the puck, he scored at will, completely changing the fortunes of our team.

His defining moment came after an overtime playoff victory over the field hockey team and its male hangers-on, in which JST nearly got into a fight and, rightly ignoring high-pitched complaints from the opposing team about the inexperience of its goaltender, showed her no quarter. Thanks to a quirk of History, both teams had to share a single locker room after the game. The other side (rather loudly) looked to Fish Co. (or as they called it, “Fishies”) for consolation; JST was busy enlisting Brandon and me for the May 1, 2006 march for immigrant rights.

Scott Rolen, or, Against Identity Politics

2006-10-25T17:25:00.000-07:00

Since my affinity for professional athletes is purely egocentric, I had expected to find myself drawn this October to the exploits of David Eckstein, the Cardinals’ plucky, diminutive shortstop. But Eckstein seems to revel in the novelty of his shortness, even going so far as to permit the Austin Powers theme song to play over the Busch Stadium loudspeakers before his at-bats (alluding, one assumes, to the character Mini-Me). For some, this may be called ‘having a sense of humor,’ but to me it is tacky, even complicit. Dennis Wise and Theo Fleury remain far better models of short sportsmen, for the simple reason that their example encourages me to regard my five feet and seven inches as a weapon, not a joke.

But right there, in the Cardinals infield, is an able substitute for my affections: Scott Rolen. Bitter, inscrutable, and bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mark Loretta, his unsmiling success in the past three games has kept me interested in the World Series, very much against the odds. Like Philip Marlowe (or Mark Loretta) in southern California, Rolen makes the intolerable landscape of a Red Sox-less playoffs seem acceptable, even meaningful.