Girl Detective

From Salon’s review of Food Matters by Mark Bittman:

The essence of the Bittman approach is simplicity, ease and quality, but that means he has to walk a fine and constantly shifting line. Americans’ attitudes toward what we eat are laden with class and cultural baggage.

Now Bittman has waded even further into the fray by publishing “Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating With More Than 75 Recipes,” an unusual blend of manifesto, self-help manual and cookbook designed to convince people that they can drastically improve their diets with relatively little discomfort. Not only that, but in doing so, Bittman avows, they can also save the planet and relieve some of the pressure on their pocketbooks. As promises go, that’s a whopper, a super-trifecta encompassing the major obsessions of the current moment: weight loss, environmentalism and penny-pinching.

Laura Miller succinctly notes that Bittman’s book is “applied Pollan”, referring to Michael, who wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma (reductive summary: eat more local, sustainably created foods) and In Defense of Food (reductive summary: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”)

I’ve been a fan of Bittman’s since he wrote for Cook’s Illustrated. He’s the creator of the New York Times cooking column “The Minimalist,” advocating real food cooked simply and easily. He has Bitten, a blog at the New York Times, and his How to Cook Everything, which I consult so often pages are falling out, just celebrated its 10th anniversary.

My family and I aren’t ready to try the “vegan till 6pm plan”, but I was game to give the Food Matters approach a try. This was Monday’s meal plan:

Breakfast: yogurt and cereal
Morning snack: tofu and berry smoothie and frozen waffles
Lunch: Spinach and sweet potato salad with warm bacon dressing
Afternoon snack: buttered popcorn made on the stovetop, and hot cocoa
Dinner: Beet soup with Three Legumes (From Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone)
Dessert: B.T. McElrath chocolates

The downside was the time involved in planning and making things, and having a lot of dishes to clean. The upside was that the food tasted great, the kids even tried the beet soup, and I felt good about the quality and variety, and I didn’t feel deprived or resentful. Now I see if I can keep this up, and if practice makes it easier. (Salon link from Arts & Letters Daily)

or, why movies are more likely to be great in the theater than at home. (Link from The Morning News.)

Studies have indicated that Elevation is triggered by the stimulus of our vagus nerve, described by Wikipedia as the only nerve that starts in the brainstem and extends down below the head, to the neck, chest and abdomen, where it contributes to the innervation of the viscera. It must be involved in what we call “visceral feelings,” defined as “relating to deep inward feelings rather than to the intellect.”

The vagus nerve would certainly account for what I feel, which is as much physical than mental. For years, when asked “how do you know a movie is great?” I’ve had the same reply: I feel a tingling in my spine. People look at me blankly. I explain that I feel an actual physical sensation that does not depend on the abstract quality of the movie, but on–well, my visceral feelings.

Take-Up productions hits Northeast Minneapolis with its next film series, “From the Vaults of Universal: Seven Classic Film Noirs” at the Heights Theater Monday nights at 7:30 p.m. starting 16 February 2009. Take-Up also has a page on Facebook.

February 16 7:30 This Gun For Hire (1942) dir Frank Tuttle, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake

*February 23 BURT LANCASTER DOUBLE FEATURE (2 films for 1 $8 ticket)*
7:30 Criss Cross (1949) dir Robert Siodmak, starring Burt Lancaster and Yvone De Carlo

9:15 The Killers (1946) dir Robert Siodmak, starring Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner

March 2 7:30 The Big Clock (1948) dir John Farrow, starring Ray Milland and Charles Laughton

*March 9 ALAN LADD / VERONICA LAKE DOUBLE FEATURE (2 films for 1 $8 ticket)*
7:30 The Blue Dahlia (1946) dir George Marshall, starring Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake and William Bendix

9:15 The Glass Key (1942) dir Stuart Heisler, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake (Edited: based on the Dashiel Hammett novel that was part of the Coen Brothers’ inspiration for Miller’s Crossing; the other was Red Harvest.)

March 16 7:30 The Phantom Lady (1944) dir Robert Siodmak, starring Franchot Tone, Ella Raines and Elisha Cook

Oh, I am filled with geek joy. Not for the NCAA tournament, but for the Morning News Tournament of Books 2009! They’ve published the contenders (see below), and you can become a fan at Facebook.

Care to join me in nerdishly obsessing over some of the best books of last year? I read along with the tournament last year, and found some of my favorite books of the year. I’ve only read one from this year’s list–My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru–but it was a good one. And several others were already on my TBR radar. I’m off to scan reviews and load up my library request queue.

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga

2666, Roberto Bolano

A Partisan’s Daughter, Louis de Bernieres

The Northern Clemency, Philip Hensher

The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon

My Revolutions, Hari Kunzru

Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart

Shadow Country, Peter Matthiessen

The Dart League King, Keith Morris

A Mercy, Toni Morrison

Steer Towards Rock, Fae Myenne Ng

Netherland, Joseph O’Neill

City of Refuge, Tom Piazza

Home, Marilynne Robinson

Harry, Revised, Mark Sarvas

In a recent attempt to fight back the encroaching filth in our house, I was energetically dusting–not only the obvious surfaces, but down low and up high, too. I whipped my cloth across a high-up nook and dried pine needles rained down. I gave it another swipe, and more needles came down. I was surprised; my husband and I have lived in the house since 2004, and have never had a live Christmas tree or greens in the house. This detritus must have been from the previous owners, so the dried needles were at least five years old. I shudder to think what other “surprises” lurk in the house, waiting to mock my ever-more-lax cleaning standards.

In his essay, “Kids’ Stuff” from the collection Maps and Legends, Michael Chabon notes that comics as an art form has gained credibility but lost readers:

Days when comics aimed were [sic] at kids: huge sales. Days when comics are aimed at adults: not so huge sales, and declining. (p. 90)

Children did not abandon comics; comics, in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment, abandoned children. (p. 91)

Chabon offers a number of suggestions to rebuild the legacy of comics for kids. While the number of monthly comic books for kids, especially younger ones, is small, there are a few standouts, as well as other comics to be found for kids at the comic store. Until the selection of comics swings back in favor of the kids as Chabon would like, here are a few of our family favorites:

Bone by Jeff Smith
The Adventures of Polo and Polo: the Runaway book by Regis Faller
Chicken and Cat, and Robot Dreams, by Sarah Varon
Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons by Agnes Rosenthiel
Jack and the Box by Art Spiegelman

I went to the bookstore yesterday for a title my psychologist recommended. I knew the author and the area the book would be in. I checked the shelves, but didn’t find it. I continued checking in related areas, but didn’t find it. Then I asked for help. A kind bookseller led me directly to the book. It was in the area I’d been looking, sitting face out, prominently on the shelf in its own special section.

The book? Driven to Distraction by Hallowell and Ratey. The section? ADD.

*Sigh* I do not think my difficulty finding the book and its topic are unrelated.

Elizabeth Bennet and Caroline Bingley are attending the event Take a Turn about the Room.

At Austenbook, a Pride and Prejudice homage to the Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition)

Link from Kate; thanks!

“Smoke up, Johnny!”

As an antidote to yesterday’s lovely article on gift giving to children, the Onion AV Club has “Fifteen Terrible Presents in TV and film”

My worst gift was from my well-meaning dad. I was sixteen and he got me an emergency CB radio for the car if I broke down. He was trying to keep me safe; I wanted a red-striped shirt from the Limited. Ah, youth.

Link from ALoTT5MA

From Book Design Review, a list of favorite book covers for 2008. I own only one, Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends.

A two dimensional picture doesn’t do the layered cover justice. Boing Boing shows details of the impressive, three-part cover.

I think my favorite, though, is The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. There’s a ballot at the end of the entry. Link from Blog of a Bookslut.

The connections to Dostoevsky’s classic Crime and Punishment just keep coming. S, who blogs at Puss Reboots, recently reviewed Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, which I read and very much enjoyed last year. She noted that the book, published posthumously, had been edited by Hemingway’s last wife to an unknown extent. While doing research on that point, I found Crime and Punishment named as an influence by Hemingway on the book. Hemingway’s isn’t an obvious homage, but now I knew what to look for, I found it.

Raskolnikov is a man whose guilt and crime prevent him from accepting the love of Sofya until the very end of the novel. To me, A Moveable Feast felt like a loving apology from Hemingway to his first wife Hadley; before the editing the book included an overt apology. Like Raskolnikov, Hemingway left his love for dark reasons but came to his senses much later, and asked forgiveness. Unlike Raskolnikov, though, Hemingway did not reunite with his earlier love.

Doesn’t it seem like post-Halloween is too soon for holiday decorations and best-of lists?

In any case, Publishers Weekly has their picks for the year in several categories: fiction, poetry, nonfiction, mystery, sci fi, kids and more. I’ve read only one from the fiction list, My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru, which I recommend. (Link from Minnesota Reads)

I left out two important things from my recent post on Macbeth.

One, a taste of the play itself. The witches get many of the good lines, but Lady Macbeth’s speeches stirred me most:

…Come, you Spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood,
Stop up th’access and passage to remorse;
That no compunctious visitings of Nature
Shake my fell purpose, no keep peace between
Th’effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murth’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on Nature’s mischief! Come, thick Night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’ (I. v. 40-54)

Also, as I did with Hamlet, I saw details in Macbeth that I think Dostoevsky echoes in Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov: a murderer torn by doubt, whose guilt nearly destroys him, but who eventually acknowledges his deed and seizes back his own destiny. Macbeth and Raskolnikov met with very different fates, perhaps because they had very different women by their sides–Macbeth’s ambitious Lady M versus Raskolnikov’s hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Sofya. Since many things in Macbeth echo those in Hamlet (e.g., Lady Macbeth’s wish to “pour my spirits in thine ear,” I. v. 26), I’m not surprised to find echoes of both in the later Russian work. I hope, in my not-very-copious free time, to research this Shakespeare/Dostoevsky connection I detect.

Neil Gaiman’s new picture book, illustrated by Gris Grimly is the frightfully entertaining Dangerous Alphabet. It is not, however, for the squeamish or faint of heart.

A piratical ghost story in thirteen ingenious but potentially disturbing rhyming couplets, originally conceived as a confection both to amuse and to entertain…featuring two brave children, their diminutive but no less courageous gazelle, and a large number of extremely dangerous trolls, monsters, bugbears, creatures, and other such nastinesses, many of which have perfectly disgusting eating habits and ought not, under any circumstances, to be encouraged.

The text and illustrations might scare some children, but my two boys, 2 and 5 years old, love this book. The tale unfolds visually, with finely etched painted drawings accompanied by Gaiman’s rhyming couplets. There are a lot of clumsy rhyming books, but Gaiman, with a background in Shakespeare, executes seamless and flowing poetry. Often, though, Grimly’s detailed illustrations cause the boys and me to pause, which interrupts the rhyme of the couplet. It’s a nice problem to have. As with many alphabet books, there are more items on each page than are named. I would guess it’s unique, though, in its depiction of maggots and meat on the M page. I see something new each time I read the book.

The Dangerous Alphabet is great fun for fans of ghoulish humor books for kids, like those of Roald Dahl, Edward Gorey or Lemony Snicket. Others might want to keep their distance. And thus their lunch.

The Film Club is a memoir of Canadian novelist (NOT Pink Floyd guitarist and vocalist) David Gilmour, who lets his 15yo son Jesse drop out of school if he agrees to watch three movies a week together. So begins a wild adventure in parenting. Gilmour starts with Truffaut’s New Wave classic, The 400 Blows. But as almost every review of the book crows, he follows it up with “dessert”, the eminently watchable, if made by sleazy people, Basic Instinct.

I picked the movies arbitrarily, in no particular order; for the most part they had to be good, classics when possible, but engaging, had to pull him out of his own thoughts with a strong storyline. There was no point, not at this juncture anyway, in showing him stuff like Fellini’s 8 1/2. (1963).

It’s this unconventional, anti-film-snob approach to movies that probably helped their film club to work for the next few years. Gilmour never forgot, or stopped trying to impart to his son, that films were created as entertainment. So while Jesse got a full run of classics, like Citizen Kane and Chinatown, he also watched horror films like Rosemary’s Baby and guilty pleasures like La Femme Nikita.

More than a movie memoir, it’s one of parenting, as Gilmour coaxes Jesse through some typically disastrous adolescent romances. Gilmour won’t be nominated for parent of the year anytime, but he’s got the critical basics down: empathy, honesty, and the ability to apologize. As a parent I often wonder if I taught my kids my own foibles, or if they go through them because its in their genes, so the best I can do is help them through it, as Gilmour does with humor and self-effacement in this winning book.

It took him about a month of hauling around a very heavy messenger bag, but my husband G. Grod finally finished the late, lamented David Foster Wallace’s 1,079-page (nearly 100 of which are end notes) magnum opus, Infinite Jest.

His response? “That was good, but there was so much going on. I’ll have to read it again.”

I’m happy for, and proud of him. It’s been on our shelf for about a decade, and I hope to get to it soon. After Will by Christopher Rush, The Film Club by David Gilmour (latter two from the library; I broke my only-one-book-on-hold at library vow), The Return of the Dancing Master by Henning Mankell (for book group), The Likeness by Tana French (on hold at library), My Name is Will by Jess Winfield, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and various graphic novels.

Yeah, I’ll be getting right on Infinite Jest.

I didn’t make it to the Junot Diaz reading at the UMN last week, but I’ve taken the Geek Q test from Confessions of an Aca-Fan, that lists a huge number of the often arcane geek touchpoints from The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. How many can you identify? I scored 115. Bonus point if you detect the misspelled item on the list that is abbreviated plus misspelled here, often. Want to up your score quickly? Read Watchmen. Which you should have read already, even if you’re not a geek.

Muhammad Ali
Akira
Lloyd Alexander
Appleseed
Isaac Asimov
Atari
Jeans Pierre Aumont
Balrogs
Billy Batson
Battle of the Planets
“Beam Me Up”
Big Blue Marble
Biggie Smalls
Blake’s 7
Ben Bova
Bon Jovi
Brotherhood of Evil Mutants
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Captain America
Captain Horlock
Chaka
Chakobsa
Champions
Clay’s Ark
Daniel Clowes
Dark Knight Returns
DC
D&D
Samuel Delaney
Deathstroke
DM
Doctor Who
Dr. Manhattan
Dr. Zaius
Dorsai
Dune
Eightball
Elvish
Encyclopedia Brown
The Exorcist
The Eyes of Mingus
Fantasy Games Unlimited
Final Fantasy
George Foreman
The Fountainhead
Galactus
Galadriel
Gamma World
Gen. Urko
Ghost
Gondolin
Good People of Sur
Gorilla Grod
Gary Gygax
Green Lantern
Hardware
Hector Lavoe
Robert Heinlein
Frank Herbert
Herculoids
Hernandez Brothers
Tracy Hickman
Harry Houdini
Robert E. Howard
Ill Will
Incredible Journey
Intellivision
Jabba the Hutt
Jack Kirby
Jedi
The Jeffersons
Kaneda
The Great Kazoo
Stephen King
Land of the Lost
Stan Lee
Ursula Le Guin
Lensman
Lothlorien
H.P. Lovecraft
Luba
Magic
Manhunter
Man Without a Face
Marvel
Mary Jane
Master Killer
John Merrick
Frank Miller
Minas Tirith
Miracle Man
Maria Montez
Alan Moore
Mordor
Morlock
My Side of the Mountain
“Nanoo-Nanoo”
Neo Tokyo
New Order
Andre Norton
“Oh Mighty Isis”
Palomar
Phantom of the Opera
Phantom Zone
Planet of the Apes
Roman Polaski
Project A
Rat Pack
Lou Reed
Return of the King
Robotech Macross
Rorshach
The Sandman
Sauron
Doc Savage
Shazam
Sindarin
Slan
“Doc” Smith
Robert Smith
Solomon Grundy
Sound of Music
Space Ghost
Squadron Supreme
Olaf Stapledon
Star Blazers
Star Trek
Street Fighter
Tom Swift
Sycorax
Take Back the Night
Teen Titans
Tetsuo
The Terminator 2
This Island Earth
Three’s Company
J.R.R. Tolkien
Tomoko
Tribe
Tripods
Twilight Zone
U2
Ultraman
Adrian Veidt
Veritech Fighter
Virus
The Watcher
Watchman
Watership Down
Margaret Weis
H.G. Wells
What If
What’s Happening
Wonder Woman
X-Men
Zardoz

Hey folks! I’m interviewed over at Minnesota Reads, a great local reader resource, by Jodi, who also blogs at I Will Dare. It’s six short questions, and I had fun answering them; click over to see which fictional characters and author I have crushes on.

The usual disclaimer about how I obviously can’t stop shopping for books. From Half Price Books, St. Louis Park MN, 25 October 2008:

Rise Against Siren Song of the Counter Culture CD (for 5yo Drake)

Persuasion and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
(all for me. I buy multiple copies to get different introductions and footnotes, since many of my current copies are footnote-free.)
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl (for G. Grod. I don’t remember liking this one.)

The Yellow Admiral, The Wine-Dark Sea and The Truelove by Patrick O’Brian (all for G. Grod, who is working his way through the series)

Happy Halloween, Curious George!
(for Drake and Guppy, of course.)
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom (nod to Mental Multivitamin for finally “talking” me into Harold Bloom) (me)

Oblivion. RIP David Foster Wallace (G. Grod)

Bonus points to anyone who can correctly identify which item(s) are for which member of the family, Me, husband G. Grod, 5yo Drake and 2yo Guppy. Edited to add links. Edited to add answers.

I recently saw Mamma Mia! in the theater, and enjoyed it very much. Afterward, I had the nagging sensation that it reminded me of something from Jane Austen. I began to make a list, and this is what I ended up with:

Did I miss any? As always, if you’re in the mood for more Austen goodness, visit the erudite and entertaining Austenblog.

Thanks to Weirleader, whose html might have worked but I couldn’t make it do so, and my tech support G. Grod, who turned this into a readable table. Let me know if it’s not readable enough.