VOX

This is another short novel I've read recently, by Nicholson Baker. Ok, what to say about this book. Hmm. I liked it. I did like it. The writing is good. It's all dialogue, so I should say the dialogue is good. Witty. Accessible. The characters...well there are only two of them. Um. It's one long phone sex conversation. The entire thing. Phone sex.

This is a good book.

I've never read any erotica before, and this definitely counts as erotic. Literary erotica. Erotic literature. It may not be your thing. But I do recommend this book because of the way Baker's characters develop a real connection and intimacy during, and in spite of, something as superficial and smutty as phone sex.

Happy Bloomsday

All of the action in James Joyce's Ulysses takes place on June 16th, 1904. Fans of the book celebrate the date as Bloomsday, named after the main character Leopold Bloom. It's basically another Irish holiday excuse to drink. Here's a refresher on Ulysses--a comix adaptation of the novel. Looks like it's not completed, though.

By Night In Chile

I'm gonna start going back and writing at least a few sentences about the books I've read lately. Hopefully I'll warm up and start doing some full-blown reviews in the future.


By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano contains two paragraphs. The first paragraph takes up just about the entire 152 pages of the book. The second paragraph is one line. The whole thing is an all night rambling monologue by this old Chilean priest. He basically tells his life story, which intertwines with the literary history of his country over a good chunk of the 20th century.

At this point, after reading The Savage Detectives and 2666, I find it hard to be objective about Bolano. This is how it is with me. I read two or more brilliant books by an author, or watch two or more brilliant movies by a director, and I'm convinced they are geniuses. And can do no wrong.

By Night In Chile doesn't disappoint. The style is similar to Savage and 2666, in that he's able to jump from one story to another without losing you, without losing momentum, and his typical themes and motifs are there, buggery and all. Except maybe grotesque violence. I don't remember grotesque violence being in there. Then again, maybe it was, but I'm just so numbed by 2666 that it paled in comparison.

If there's a weakness to this book...no, no I don't think there is one. I tried.

Leaven Life

For about 10 years now I've been baking bread. Some years have seen more loaves than others. A professor of mine at Huntington College was the first person to show me how it's done. He taught me how to make dough and knead it by hand, and that's the way I've been doing it ever since.

I'd like to really get back into baking, so I thought I should do some regular posts on the subject. Fresh bread is one of my favorite foods. The smell fills the whole house, the rustic loaves look like a frickin still life by Chardin, and the taste makes you want to smack your mother.

Here's the loaf I've been making for about a year now. It's a whole wheat boule made with a brotform. This is the loaf I'll be writing about in the next few Leaven Life posts, and I'll get into brotforms and yeast and kneading and all that in the future. Right now I'll just list the ingredients (some of the amounts aren't included because there are two ways I make this--with bakers yeast and with wild yeast):

yeast

whole milk

1/2c oats

1tsp salt

1/8c oil

1/8c brown sugar

1 egg

1/4c wheat germ

wheat flour

bread flour

Oh, and as a p s, I'm not writing this as a master baker or anything. Please point out if I'm doing something stupid or if you have a tip that'll help me out or if I've done a sucky job of explaining something.

What's up now

Recently I was feeling guilty about how many books I buy, and then BAM! I read this. The more books you have in your house, the smarter your kids'll be. And thank goodness I know now that correlation is causation, so there's no doubt these studies are solid. This is my license to buy. Check it out:

"The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is 'as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.'"

500 books! So like 1000 books would be twice the advantage of having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and four times the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father, right?! I need to get more bookshelves. For the sake of my not-so-distant-future children.

Smoked Chicken

This past weekend I smoked a chicken for the first time. Well, I cooked a chicken with smoke. Actually, I don’t have a smoker, I just put some soaked mesquite wood chips on charcoals. Turns out, it doesn’t work out that well if you put wet wood directly on the coals, ‘cause it kind of dampens the heat. And you need heat for an hour to cook a frying chicken on a charcoal grill.

So I had to finish it in the conventional type oven, but man was it tasty. I soaked the chicken in brine for an hour beforehand, and rubbed the following spices on its tender body: curry, cumin, chili powder, black pepper, cinnamon. Come to think of it, those are just about the exact spices I used for my chicken curry. Anyway, et vas juicy. And smoky. I ended up simmering the carcass with some carrots and celery to make chicken broth, which has quite the mesquite flavor.

Also made some fresh salsa with black beans. I’ve been trying to make stuff with fresh beans. And by fresh I mean soaking dried beans overnight and boiling them for an hour. I know you can get real fresh beans at farmers markets, or so I’ve read. Never seen them at the grocery, though I don’t know if I’ve looked. I just want to stay away from canned stuff, if possible.

More lists

Classics I want to read:

Histories (Herodotus)
Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)
Decameron (Boccaccio)
Discourses On Livy (Machiavelli)
Essays (Montaigne)
Faust (Goethe)
Demons; Notes from the Underground (Dostoevsky)
Middlemarch (Eliot)

Anything by Balzac
....               Stendhal
....               Swift

20th Century fiction I want to read:

Love in the Time of Cholera (Garcia Marquez)
The Tin Drum (Grass)
Hunger; Growth of the Soil (Hamsun)
Finish Proust (already read volume 1 of Remembrance of Things Past)
Blindness (Saramago)
To the Lighthouse (Woolf)
Catch-22 (Heller)
Nostromo (Conrad)
On The Road (Kerouac)
The Bell Jar (Plath)
The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov)
More Murakami (already read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)
Anything by Coetzee
....               Alice Munroe

21st century fiction I want to read:

Netherland (O'Neill)
Oblivion (Wallace)
Cloud Atlas (Mitchell--currently reading)
Middlesex (Eugenides)
Austerlitz (Sebald)
Nazi Literature in the Americas; Amulet; The Skating Rink; Antwerp (Bolano)
The Known World (Jones)
Anything by Coetzee
....               Alice Munroe
....               Zadie Smith