Lazy Sunday: 9 March 2014

Charleston Food and Wine Festival really did me dirty. I need to remain still. Remember me as I was.

  • Because it’s Mississippi, I’m friends with the family this story is about. I think that means I’m almost friends with Woody Harrelson.
  • Related, this time with 100% more Richard Simmons.
  • Fantastic long read by Rachel Monroe in The Oxford American. I’m not even going to tell you what it’s about.
  • I think my friend Brad summed up PUA culture really well when he said it’s a 200 page book that says “wear a red shirt, wear a red shirt, wear a read shirt” and on the last page it says, “actually go talk to women” and then everyone thinks its the red shirt. That said, I really thought this article about the Asian Pick-Up Artist (aka JT) was an interesting angle to consider.
  • An archived copy of a 1992 Dallas News story about the man Dallas Buyers Club is about.
  • People send these things to me, and usually they are really easy, but this is a Southern food IQ test that is a little tough!
  • Shirley Temple, child actors, and what it means to be a natural.
  • Fantastic NPR piece on a cowboy stunt double.
  • I will forever champion the virtues of a good-to-excellent hostel. Here are some fancy ones in Europe that I’m going to check out.
  • The EPA AND political intrigue? Yes, please.

Book Club: The Golem and the Jinni

I am really, really into the Golem. When people go to Prague, I always get a Golem of Prague postcard. I did some serious squealing when there was a hitman on Sherock called The Golem. I have little golem figurines, a matchbox with the golem on it…you get the idea. So when I had a blind date with a book over my birthday weekend in Asheville, it felt like kismet.

Mine is on the left. His is on the right-- another favorite, Devil in the White City.

Mine is on the left. His is on the right- another favorite, Devil in the White City.

The Golem and the Jinni is the debut novel by Helene Wecker, and I don’t even really know where to begin with it. If you came of age in the 90s or have a soft spot for Disney movies, you’re probably familiar with the concept of “genies” so I’m not going to explain that to you. I gave you a link to the Wiki page for golems, but briefly, they’re Jewish folk monsters made from clay that are basically clay slaves that can become ungovernable and are quite strong. This book tells the story of one of each of these things that end up in New York around the turn of the century and become unlikely friends. Trying to “pass” as human is tricky for them both, what with having superpowers and all. The Golem is conservative, quiet, and careful; the Jinni is impulsive, quick to anger, and less willing to integrate himself into polite society. Neither needs sleep nor food, and they meet one night in the streets of Manhattan, each instantly recognizing the other as Other.

Oddly, Washington Square Park doesn't really figure into this book at all.

Oddly, Washington Square Park doesn’t really figure into this book at all, but Central Park does…not really sure why this is the cover.

The research that had to have gone into this book must be staggering. There are so many novel-to-me turns of phrases, tiny details, and minor moments that are like a muted wallpaper in the background of the house that is this book. So many little jewels glinted at me from the text, the spoils of hours and hours and hours buried in some obscure archive or another. As a person obsessed by my research, I understand intimately how thrilling those finds can be, and I was excited that she was so forthcoming with them chapter in and chapter out. As an author, Wecker seemed really comfortable in the Jewish tenement life of 1899. The characters moved freely in and out of the story in an insular immigrant community that felt very round and dynamic. I’m not sure if she’s MOT or not- information about her on the intertrons was scant- but she was less facile when talking about the Maronite Christian community called Little Syria. There’s a vast amount of background on the Jinni’s genesis on the outskirts of the Bedouin communities of the Sahara, and it’s pretty hard to parse for most of the novel. Even in New York, the Jinni goes to a wedding, has some love affairs, hangs out with street bums, and makes a real fancy tin roof and subsequently some jewelry. There’s considerably less back story for the Golem, and that functions more practically. It’s more linear, and involves less explaining. She gets made in Eastern Europe by a corrupt kabbalist, comes to life on the boat to America, and gets a job in a bakery. I’m not sure if her story is less exciting to tell for Wecker, or if she feels like its less alien to her typical reader, but simply put, it has fewer detours. She breezed through a lot of details that might be confusing for someone who doesn’t have much background in Ashkenazi culture. Everything comes together neatly in the end and suddenly you understand why things came in this order and with these details (ugh, I can’t tell you), but wow, it takes 500 pages to get there.

The narrative pacing in The Golem in the Jinni is something like driving in suburban traffic. Sometimes, you’re hitting all the lights and moving really fast, but then sometimes you get behind a school bus or a mail truck and you’re idling in front of an IHOP for fifteen minutes getting really frustrated. After wrapping this up, I’m not sure if the cruising is worth all the honking and background noise. I’m glad I read it- I relish any opportunity to fantasize about the possibility of supernatural beings walking among us undetected- but I can’t say I’d put it on my must-read list for the year. It’s a little too intricate for a vacation read, but not quite engrossing enough to warrant taking the afternoon off from responsibilities.

Anyone else read this book? I haven’t met anyone who has even heard it. Furthermore, do you have extra golem literature I could be reading?

Next up is this, in solidarity with my new home’s inane college reading list policing, which is suddenly up for debate in the state legislature!

Lazy Sunday: 2 March 2014

I’m attending a breakfast with Maya Angelou (I don’t know how this happened either), so enjoy these while I try not to hyperventilate:

  • I scored well on the SAT as a teenager, and I have no doubt whatsoever that my score would probably be about half of that now.
  • All I did this week was listen to isolated vocal tracks. Can I recommend the David Bowie ones specifically?
  • When things get rough at work, I go pet the petting goats near my office. When things get really rough, I turn to GoatCam.
  • This story came to me as if it were a dream, so I dug through the People archives to find it.
  • An interesting piece on how Dallas Buyers Club came to be and how the film industry works.
  • No one brought me my pants the time I lost them, but then again, they were in the oven, not Michigan, and it was a Thursday in college and not my wedding.
  • A total knockout Modern Love column.
  • Let’s all agree not to click this.
  • Really sad that Cosmo doughnut tip didn’t make the cut here.
  • This has been your daily reminder that Carmen Electra’s ex-husband is the United States’ most legitimate diplomatic tie to a nuclear state.

You Should Know How to Do This: Chocolate Syrup

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I would take a bath in it, I would.

Syrup is a many-splendored thing. A two-to-one ratio of water to sugar can turn into virtually whatever sweet concoction you can imagine. When I was working in fine dining, we had ginger syrups and jalapeno syrups and hibiscus syrups and I don’t even remember what else for our highly fancy cocktails. A dash of simple makes making sweet tea much, much simpler, whatever weird syrups you care to concoct make your Sodastream a thing worth the counter space, and of course the omnipresent bottle of Hersey’s will trick small children (okay, and also me) into drinking their milk. I see pre-made syrups hanging out at the grocery store, and it makes me ultra-crazy because it takes under a minute to make and the sky’s the limit. I’m going to show you how to make chocolate syrup today, but I’ll make some notes after the jump for how to customize it. The method’s the same no matter what.

Continue reading

Book Club: Beautiful Ruins

Happy first book of 2014, buddies! As promised, we get to talk about Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walters, a book I would not have read were it not for very, very limited options in the airport bookshop.

This cover does it no favors, but bear with me.

I’m glad they didn’t have much, because I enjoyed reading this, and I wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise! The design of the cover does it no favors, and I think “Jess Walter” sounds like a Confessions of a Shopaholic kind of author name, right? I know I’m being a big jerk, and I guess I forgot about The Financial Lives of Poets or his myriad pieces I’ve read in magazines and liked. Oops.

The story is about a man who keeps an tiny inn on the coast of Italy and the glamorous actress who visits there in the 1960s. No, wait, the book is about Richard Burton and the Donner Party. Ah, no, I’m sorry, it’s about modern day Los Angeles and a disillusioned young woman working in film as a glorified assistant. Forgive me, I forgot- it’s about her boss. Maybe it’s about her boyfriend, or an alcoholic Spalding Gray knockoff. It’s about all of them, together and apart, at once and over time. The word “high-wire” comes to mind when describing the feeling of the novel, and the whole thing feels like a movie from “go.” While reading it (and I tore through like a woman possessed), I felt like I could cue the suspenseful music here or fade to black there; Beautiful Ruins walks a fine line between hokey and workin’ it with play-within-a-play-as-device, and it almost completely succeeds throughout. Dude’s a great storyteller.

I love an ensemble cast, as I mentioned when we read Bel Canto, but I often struggle with feeling like the characters are as round and dynamic as I’d like, and I frequently feel as though I don’t get closure with all of them in the ways I’d like. Beautiful Ruins succeeds at fifty percent of these. By the last pages of the book, I had a great sense of what everyone was about, and could reasonably guess who was a cornflake person and who was a Frosted Flake person, which of these people I’d call to get me from jail, and if any of the characters were the sorts who pronounce it “Tar-ZHAY.” By the same token, I did feel like I got rushed out of a couple rooms in an effort to close all the doors on the way out of the house. I wanted to know more about the outcome of the aforementioned disillusioned assistant, and I felt a little confused about the ultimate motivations of her boss. These were both great characters, and I wanted to know more, which I never will. The outcome of Richard Burton, well, that one is available on Wikipedia. (Spoiler alert: he dies.)

A game I often like to play with pieces of real-enough fiction is this: I ask myself if I can assume that a character can name the principle characters in Saved By the Bell. Not that specifically, but I very often wonder if the world my characters are inhabiting has already upgraded to iOS whatever, or if Barack Obama is president, or if they get their oil changed at JiffyLube. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose, but it’s kind of fun to think about, in the way that Donnie Darko blew your mind in 10th grade (you’re a liar if you say it didn’t.). Beautiful Ruins is a rare piece of art that I feel like I could answer that about (another is Sherlock on BBC, if you were wondering). I have no idea if Harry Potter knows about The DaVinci Code but I am damn sure who is a Verizon customer and who is on Sprint in this book. Jess Walters created a fictional, almost-real world that is both completely fantastical and tight as a drum; if it weren’t for the fact that most of these people don’t exist and that the story is so wow, I feel like I could step right in to it, wearing my Gap jeans, joking in Doge, and not really draw much attention to myself. That’s pretty amazing, when you think about it.

So, have you read this? What did you think? I heard from a reader who loved it infinitely more than his other work, and made a suggestion for a future book club herself (coming soon, miss!). Next week, I’m finishing this, which I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. Please join me! I’d be delighted.

Lazy Sunday, 5 January 2014

It’s our first lazy Sunday of 2014! I really did it up by sleeping 17 hours. Enjoy these links!

  • Watch this urban skiing video set in Detroit, but do it on mute.
  • Anything that says my workplace could be muppetier is a thing I’m going to take very seriously. Viva la Fraggle! Viva Henson!
  • Once, my sister threw a magazine at my head and accused me of ruining her life, but never did she assault me for eating too many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, so we’re ahead of someone, at least.
  • Bummer and Lazarus. I’ll say no more.
  • Found this awesome, fourteen-year-old profile of Martha Stewart in the New Yorker, written by none other than Joan Didion herself. Say what you will about how much you’d like to have a beer with Martha, but she gets. stuff. done. and knows how to do seemingly everything.
  • Life lesson: If you’re ever an extra on a movie and they tell you they’ll pay you double to pretend to be a couple making out in a crowded pool scene, DO IT!
  • “God is just as invisible.” I like how a high-ranking official of the state will neither confirm nor deny his own certainty about the existence of hidden people.
  • Why is Spinoza the sexed-up philosopher? By which I mean, when will this be available in English?
  • I will miss no opportunity to tell people that Rob Sheffield, David Berman, Steve Malkmus, and I all worked at the same community radio station at different times, and are all distinguished alums of Mr. Jefferson’s School. Here, they chat about UVA in Rolling Stone.
  • In 2014, I’m going to let someone bully me into going to karaoke, but I’m going to do it on my terms, which is to say, I will come armed with lots of facts about karaoke history and tell them to you loudly.

Welcome, 2014!

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I hope we are best friends, like this baby monkey and this pigeon.

I can’t believe how lucky I got in 2013. I got a new job, I landed a fantastic apartment in a cool town, I made amazing new friends, and I found a hairdresser who did not give me the soccer mom bob of doom. I’ve been on this track where each year is the best one I’ve had so far for the last couple years, and I’m trying to stay on that train as long as I can. Here’s to an awesome year! I’m glad you’re here and reading Chronderlust, and I hope you feel as excited about the coming 365 day as I do.

In the meantime, there’s always room for improvement, so I’ve started by making some resolutions. I’m going to clean my house every day to stay in front of it. I’m going to take control of my finances. I’m going to get back into the shape I was in before I got hit by the car. I’m going to hang out with y’all more often, and I’m going to take more time to be grateful, aware, and kind.

What are your big plans for 2014? Any resolutions you’re trying to keep? What would you like to see more of on Chronderlust? Happy New Year, friends! This will be our year!