I can appreciate a meaningless football game as much as anyone, especially if the grass is real and the weather is dismal, but bowl games aren’t supposed to be meaningless. The way I understand it, a bowl game is a championship of some sort. For example, the NFL has the Super Bowl. College has a tradition of bowls, which should be scrapped for a playoff, but I can accept a series of games spread out over the holiday season. In fact, it was just that lovely idea that had me preparing to clip the bowl game schedule, so I could post it on the fridge in anticipation of some leisurely tv viewing.
That’s where I found a list of 35 bowl games. Thirty-five! That’s 70 teams, a huge number of which are absolutely mediocre. 32 of the teams playing—almost half of them—have records of 7-5 or worse! That’s unconscionable, pathetic, appalling. I realize that’s where money can be made, and that’s where our power lies. If your team goes 7-5 or 6-6, please don’t fly off to some southern city to support them. Let them earn their way to a bowl game. And if you’re at home with nothing to do, don’t watch the game. What if no one attended these games, and the broadcasts garnered 0.0 Nielsen scores?
One of the pleasures of teaching teenagers is that you get to keep up on current slang, or at least not fall behind as far as you would on your own as an old fart. This year’s two biggest slang terms are sick and awkward. Sick is an adjective that—not surprisingly—mean its opposite. It’s used almost entirely by guys, especially (at this institution) hockey players, in place of awesome or amazing. For example: That was a sick move! Or That was a totally sick move! Or Did you see the end of last night’s game? It was sick!
Awkward is used primarily by girls, which is fitting since it has more to do with social dynamics.
“Why?”
“It would be so awkward. Can you imagine anything more awkward?”
I love to see the way people play with language, and make it fresh. I remember when my first son was born, and consciously not wanting to use the word cool around him too much. It seemed that everyone around me was using it for everything that was good or desirable. I felt like it put too much emphasis on what was cool and what wasn’t, and it also made people sound rather unintelligent when that was the only modifier that came out of their mouths. I wanted him to grow up with a greater range of descriptors at his disposal. In time, sick and awkward will either become passé or clichéd, but for now they feel fresh. Of course, as a middle-aged man I don’t actually use these terms. That would be awkward.
1. White Noise by Don DeLillo. Just as Hemingway was the most influential American prose writer for much of the 20th century, DeLillo has been the most influential novelist of the past two decades (at least among male writers), and by DeLillo I mean the DeLillo of White Noise. I lent this to a girlfriend in my early 20s. Lost it in the breakup. I still think of it as a contemporary novel even though Penguin has put it through nearly half a dozen cover changes since then.
2. The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. One of my favorite works of literary journalism. I will be teaching it next year, so just picked up another copy, which has a pale, much less attractive cover than the rich blue of the advance reading copy of the hardcover edition I owned. Also, the trim size of that was slightly unusual if I remember correctly, and it looks like they’ve trimmed the bottom margins of the current paperback to make it a more orthodox size. Too bad.
3. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. Read this during fall semester of my freshman year in college in a class that was confirming my decision to be an English major. This seems like a book I would really like to re-read. I remember it as a revelation of what a novel could be, and it seems like it would be no less satisfying to read in mid-life.
4. Heft on Wheels: A Field Guide to Doing a 180 by Mike Magnuson. The only book on this list that I’ve read twice, and if I had it on hand I might start in on it again right now. Magnuson’s account of his love affair as a 255-lb., chain-smoking, heavy drinker with bicycling is profane and beautiful. This and Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run are two outstanding books about the compulsions of endurance athletes.
5. Feeding a Yen by Calvin Trillin. The only book on this list I haven’t read in its entirety. I lent it out before I could sit down and read it properly.
Despite what it says on the front of the box—
—Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
—Entertainment Weekly
Last spring when I was in France, I was served a memorable salad before my lunch that was comprised in large part of grapefruit and shrimp. At the time, it seemed to me something that would be worth approximating after I returned home. In addition to being delicious, it appeared that it would be fairly simple to make, and it would undoubtedly make a great impression on my guest(s). Then I mostly forgot about it. Until yesterday morning, when Ms. O said something that reminded me of it. Suddenly I wanted to make it for her.
I couldn’t find anything in my cookbooks, and when I went online, searching for grapefruit and shrimp or grapefruit and shrimp and salad, I came up with some similar things, especially a couple that also included avocado that I may try at some point down the line, but nothing that represented the dish I had enjoyed. I then tried to call my French travel partner, Fast Freddie, hoping she might be able to help me out, but as I was dialing I remembered she isn’t much of a seafood fan. Even though we were served the same dish, she probably hadn’t felt the same way about it that I did. On the other hand, her husband is French—maybe he would know something about it. As it turned out, she wasn’t home. Or wherever her cell phone was. Or taking calls from me at that time. Which is when Ms. O had the breakthrough idea:
“Why don’t you google the words in French?”
As soon as I could remember the word for shrimp in French, I did it (you never forget the word for grapefruit—pamplemousse), and there they were at the very top of the list—variations on this wonderful dish I wanted to make for my girlfriend. And the information that it is a regional dish specific to Bretagne. No wonder it hasn’t made its way to the cookbooks I have on hand or to the enormous compilation of online recipes in English (at least on an initial cursory search).
So, here it is. Three ingredients in its simplest form, and the chance to wow friends with a simple, fresh dish they have probably never seen before.
What you need:
1 grapefruit
100 grams of already cooked shrimp (roughly a ¼ pound—essentially equal parts grapefruit and shrimp)
2 dollops of mayonnaise
What you do:
Halve the grapefruit. Remove the fruit, and chop it up. Scrape out the bowl of the rind, and dispose of the membranes. Chop up the shrimp into similar size pieces. Stir together the shrimp, grapefruit, and mayonnaise. Place the combined ingredients back in the grapefruit-rind bowls, and serve. Voila!
1. "The Great Pretender" by The Platters
2. "Duke of Earl" by Gene Chandler
3. "Under the Boardwalk" by The Drifters
4. "Blue Moon" by The Marcels
5. "In the Still of the Night" by The Five Satins
6. "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers
7. "The Book of Love" by The Monotones
8. "Come Go with Me" by The Del Vikings
9. "Runaround Sue" by Dion
10. "A Teenager in Love" by Dion and the Belmonts
It’s Friday afternoon, time to roll out a few pet peeves to brighten your weekend:
• Drivers not using their blinkers. It’s lazy, inconsiderate, and dangerous. Just use ‘em.
• The fact that you always hear annoying Dire Straits songs on the radio, like the unbearable “Money for Nothing” (hated it then, hate it now—from the stereotyping of the blue-collar narrator to Sting’s guest appearance) and “The Walk of Life,” but never the ones you want to hear, like “Sultans of Swing,” “Skateaway,” or “Romeo & Juliet.”
• The rampant use of the term “perfect storm.” Sebastian Junger wrote a fantastic book with that title about the deaths at sea of six commercial fisherman, and now any time multiple circumstances come together, it’s “a perfect storm.” If you even semi-regularly read newspapers and general interest magazines, or listen to public radio, you will find this phrase popping up all over the place. It’s become a common cliché in a very short time.
Without putting too melodramatic a point on it, the printed word is endangered. There have been conversations about the death of the novel, the end of the book, and the miniscule audience for poetry for decades, but it turns out the more fragile species are newspapers and magazines. As these publications fight for their life, slim down, and disappear, one of the first things to go are book reviews and book review sections.
The critic’s craft is an underappreciated one, and its role is diminishing as well. Long ago Rolling Stone drew readers away from the music reviewer’s analysis and reflection by posting bold stars at the beginning of the piece. There was no need to read the text; you could just count the stars. You could probably fit ten current Rolling Stone reviews into one of the reviews during their heyday. Likewise, as Siskel & Ebert’s show gained in popularity, the final decision—a robust “two thumbs up” or a resounding “two thumbs down”—overshadowed the content of their discussion.
Though far more books are still published per year than any human can read, sources for learning and thinking about them are drying up. And among those that remain, few of them are going to give you more than 500 words on a book. I remember interviewing for a freelance reviewing gig with piddling pay for a shortlived tabloid almost two decades ago, and the editor said anybody could review a movie or play, seeming to suggest that most democratic of possibilities: everybody’s perspective is equally valuable.
We now live in an world based primarily on two ideas that the quality of the arts can be mathematically tabulated (if you go to the website Rotten Tomatoes, a movie review website, you will see a score, not unlike a song got on American Bandstand or a wine gets from Robert Parker) or that everyone is a reviewer (say on Amazon.com). What’s missing is the thoughtful analysis of someone who knows the field better than you do, the possibility of learning more about the topic at hand rather than just getting someone’s take on whether something is good or bad.
Well, last night I read a print review of a print book that reminded me of how good a review can be, of how if you give the right reviewer enough space, he or she can reflect, and give you context, and quote at length, and in the end come up with a compelling, thoughtful piece of writing that entertains while informing. I finished reading Wyatt Mason’s piece, “The Untamed: Joshua Ferris’s restless-novel syndrome,” in the February 2010 issue of Harper’s, wanting to know more about this young novelist I’d never heard of, and grateful for Mason’s acute commentary.
Mason is ostensibly reviewing Ferris’s latest, The Unnamed, but he spends the first half of the essay, nearly five full-page columns, discussing his debut, Then We Came to the End. He is in no way entirely laudatory of this earlier work, and he takes other critics to task for the lazy, shorthanded way that they praised it, but in his discussion of it, he brings to the surface qualities that make me want to know more, that in the end make me want to read the novel.
One thing Mason does is quote at length. In the first half of the review, he quotes four separate paragraphs from the novel, and the language in those passages tells me, as much as anything Mason says, that Ferris is a writer I want to spend time with, that he is going to help me see my familiar world in a new and vivid way, something like when I first came upon DeLillo (Ferris’s title is taken from the first sentence of DeLillo’s first novel—important information Mason gives us in the first paragraph of his review).
In the end—or more precisely in the second half of the review—Mason makes it clear that Ferris has fallen prey to the dreaded sophomore slump with The Unnamed, but fortunately, he himself never succumbs to such clichéd shorthand. He quotes from the novel at length again, and explains its unusual premise, comparing it to works by Saramago and Kafka, which gives credence to Ferris even as he comes up short. When he critiques the novel, he does so by quoting shorter passages, and then pointing out clearly and effectively how the prose in those passages lets the storyteller down. You still feel that Mason respects Ferris’s abilities, but that he doesn’t see him executing them as skillfully here as he did in his first book. You also get the idea he will be reading Ferris’s next effort with a hopeful yet critical eye.
As for myself, I will be seeking out Joshua Ferris’s first book Then We Came to the End because of the way Wyatt Mason negatively reviewed his current novel. I encourage you to seek out that review.
Unlike the New York Times Book Review and other such publications’ year-end lists, which are so stodgy—including only books published in the most recent calendar year—my list is comprised of the best books I read in 2009 regardless of when they were published.
Honorable Mention: There Is No One What Will Take Care Of You by The Palace Brothers (1993)
