Tales of a Postdoc Nothing

Postdoc No More

2009-09-06T22:12:00.001-04:00

This is my last blog post.

I've agonized about this for some time, wondering if I could keep up the pace of once- or twice-a-week postings now that I'm fully employed - preparing for classes, teaching those classes, grading papers, commuting an hour each way, trying to work on my own research and writing, all while getting to know a new city, meet new people, eat new pie.

On the one hand, there's certainly a lot to tell you about. There's the food, of course, which is both delicious and ridiculous, thereby meeting my two main criteria for inclusion in this blog. There's the whole adjusting-to-southern-culture thing, which would undoubtedly provide countless humorous material for me (and, once it went viral, could even become the basis of a heartwarming but culturally sensitive movie starring, say, Amy Adams or Renee Zellweger). Or I could take the teaching-in-a-state-university angle, offering up humorous or poignant anecdotes about my students and the important life lessons we all eventually come to share, despite our very different backgrounds and capabilities (this film would also star Amy Adams or Renee Zellweger, and maybe Michael Cera). For that matter, I could probably devote an entire blog to our pain-in-the-ass landlord and the countless awkward-but-hilarious situations in which he places us. I could even start a (gasp!) professional-type blog in which I actually write about the things I'm working on (that'd be communal violence in the British Empire) and current events related to the things I'm working on (that'd be communal violence in places that were once part of the British Empire). Yes, there's certainly no shortage of material here.

On the other hand, well, I'm quite busy now, and it would be awfully nice not to spend my free time writing blog posts. "Big deal," you say, "Just post shorter, less-frequent entries. Don't spend so much time fretting about outdated, pre-internet concepts like sentence structure, argument, grammar, or coherence. And when you're stuck, just do what everybody else does and post funny YouTube videos." Oh, gentle reader, if only that were possible! If I were the sort of person who could gleefully spew out slop all day long I'd already have a publishing record to rival that of Doris Kearns Goodwin. No, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it right. And since I don't have the time or intellectual energy to do it right, I won't do it.

That's part of the reason, anyway. The other part is that the title of this blog is no longer accurate, and I just can't think of a new one. I suppose I'll technically always be "post-doctoral," but the "postdoc" stage is now over - I'm now an assistant professor, and I'll probably be something along those lines for quite some time to come. I've tried to devise with a new blog name, but it's proving well nigh impossible to come up with something that's as witty as the one I'm leaving behind. And if I can't go big, I don't wanna go at all. I've toyed with various Nashville-based plays-on-words, but none of them are too satisfying, and most are already in use somewhere else. (You can blame the demise of this blog, in part, on the existence of a cafe here called Noshville, which name, had it been available, would have been ideal for the sort of food-based blog I might well have written.)

Besides all that, I feel like I'm starting a new stage in my life, and it's going to take some time to figure out how to broadcast it, if at all. My old life - a largely solitary, itinerant affair that was eminently bloggable - has given way to something that's a bit more stable and a lot less solitary. Last year in the Valley, when I started this blog, I was feeling detached from the world and the people I knew in it, and this seemed like a good way to connect. I'm still far removed from many people I love - further, indeed, than I ever was in the Valley - but I don't think we really need blogs to stay connected, not if we're really friends. As for me, I'm now part of the world once again, and I'm feeling less detached. I have a job again, a real job that requires real work from me, and it brings with it lots of students, colleagues, and obligations that'll make me an active and engaged citizen once more. And when I'm not doing that, I'm sharing my home and my life with a wonderful lady and her (usually) wonderful cat, and this is also alleviating the need I felt, all those months ago, to have someone to share my experiences with. You hear that, Kate? You're what I have now instead of a blog!

And so it's with a heavy heart that I write these last few lines. We've had some grand times, you and I. We've learned all about London and Calvin Coolidge and underwear. We have tusseled with ninjas, cavorted with Morris Dancers, stalked J Mascis, and cruised our way through historian parties and campus visits. We have seen sock-wearing ducks, atheist buses, inaugurations, flies, and submarines. We have eaten pies and pancakes and much, much french toast. We will always have these memories, you and I, and if we ever need to refresh them they'll always be just a few clicks away - and soon, no doubt, downloadable directly to our cerebellums.

As a last thought, I'd like to leave you with a song that I learned at a very young age, a song that has seen me through rougher times than this, a song that still, all these years later, fills me with hope. It's from a little television show called "Growing Pains." Perhaps you've heard of it. It starred Alan Thicke.

Sing along with me, won't you?

As long as we got each other
We got the world
Sitting right in our hands.
Baby rain or shine;
All the time.
We got each other
Sharing the laughter and love.

[One more time, with feeling:]

Sharing the laughter and looooove.

This Orientation Brought to You By Starbucks

2009-08-26T09:41:00.000-04:00

Okay, sorry about the recent outburst. Last week was something of a low point, but I've turned the corner, seen the light, and come to Jesus. Kate got in on Sunday and, designated with the task of making everything better immediately, proceeded to do just that. Among other things (most of which, frankly, aren't any of your business), she found my coffee maker, which some fool had shoved in a drawer in my nightstand. Once I find out who packed all this junk, there's gonna be hell to pay.

I also now have home internet service, which is currently enabling this very blog post and will make the rest of my life much, much easier. Although it does mean no more trips to Panera, ever. Which is a bit of a drag, actually, as I was growing quite fond of their pumpkin muffies. More to the point, it turns out one of the Jonas Brothers was spotted Monday night at my Panera, the very one where I've been spending countless hours doing tedious textbook work and munching on muffies. Oh, to have been within spitball distance of such tousle-haired greatness would have sent me, quite literally, over the edge. And onto the floor. Into a pool of muffie crumbs.

(Actually, it's one of my persistent fears here in Nashville that I'll be eating dinner or drinking coffee right next to a bona-fide popular/country music celebrity and not have the slightest clue about it, so detached have I become from these things. The corollary of this is that I often assume that everyone I see is a popular/country music celebrity, a tendency that's facilitated by the large number of people around here who dress like they could be celebrities but are probably just starving singer-songwriters who spend all their disposable income on celebrityish clothes and accessories).

I have also been spending some time this week getting to know my new school. It's a much different place than I'm used to - a large, cash-strapped state school serving a regional studentship who are frequently the first in their families to attend college, and are doing so while working part-time, living at home, etc. There are good and bad things about this. The good mostly involves the greater impact I think I'll have by teaching students who are really working to be there, instead of affluent kids with a sense of entitlement for whom a college education was always a given (note that I'm generalizing grossly, in both directions). The bad mostly involves the lack of money. It sounds like things are pretty tight here even at the best of economic times, which these most certainly are not, and so many of the things I'm accustomed to having or would like to have - fully wired classrooms, attractive facilities, a living wage - are either entirely missing or in very short supply. Still, they make due pretty well with what they've got: the library looks great and has lots of online doohickeys for me to play with, I've got a small travel budget, and there are pretty good state-sponsored benefits, for instance.

At times, however, the school's desperate need for cash manifests itself in a sort of crass commercialism that is deeply obnoxious to my sophisticated, blue-state sensibilities. The fast food outlets in the dining hall are one thing - I encountered these at Tulane, too, a school which was by no means poverty-stricken - but the corporate-sponsored new-faculty orientation is quite another. I have to be careful here since, as I learned from my recent posting about Comcast, some corporations employ people to search through blogs looking for references to their companies - let's call them the brand police - and it would therefore be fairly easy for this particular corporation to track me down and kill me if I named them here. So I'll just say that, after three hours of power-point presentations about things like "the student culture" and "research and graduate students" - three hours in which countless administrators told us all about their giddy, almost unnatural love for the school, most of them working hard to outdo one another by bragging about how long they'd been there (one of them practically boasted that she'd been conceived right there on campus) - after three hours of this, we were marched over to the athletic stadium for lunch, where we were ambushed by representatives of a large regional bank

As we arranged ourselves around our tables we were told that we should leave one seat open for a banker - I repressed an involuntary quip that that's precisely what the entire country had been doing for some time now - and then we were all given personalized folders telling us what this wonderful regional bank could do for us. Then, as we tucked into something that looked like lasagna or maybe chicken parmesan, we listened as each of the bankers introduced themselves and urged us - pleaded with us, really - to come by their office and chat about anything at all, bank-related or not, anytime of the day or night. And then we had to listen while one or two administrators praised the bank, and the school's "relationship" with the bank, with an intensity that bordered on the unseemly. And then, after the speechifying was over, we all trotted over to collect our "goodie bags" full of candy, local maps, and a plastic device that looks like what would happen if a chip clip got into a menage-a-trois with a tablespoon and a fridge magnet.

At least I can say that the map, at any rate, is the largest item of its kind I've ever seen:

As another example of this sort of crassness - or, to be charitable, let's call it a collective tin ear for how such things appear to ubersophisticated newcomers like myself - I'll just point out that the one book every incoming freshman is being required to read is not, as it was at BC some years back, Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains, about a doctor's humanitarian work in Haiti, nor is it any of the thousands of other books that can impart important life lessons in a thoughtful and provocative way. No, the one book all incoming freshman are required to read is How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill, who will be speaking at this year's Convocation. Now this is a book that I haven't read, so I might be way off the mark here, but from all the reviews I've read, the book - which tells the story of how a wealthy man, Gill, loses his fancy corporate job but finds redemption slumming with the lower orders while working at a local Starbucks - is essentially a love letter to the Starbucks corporation. Right there on Amazon's homepage there's a review from Booklist that says, "Other corporate giants can only envy the sheer goodwill that this memoir will inevitably generate for Starbucks," while Publishers Weekly says, "The book reads too much like an employee handbook, as Gill details his duties or explains how the company chooses its coffee. Gill's devotion to the superchain has obviously changed his life for the better, but that same devotion makes for a repetitive, unsatisfying read."

So this is the book they went with? Of all the millions of books that could have imparted essentially the same message - hard work, not wealth, creates happiness (never mind the dubiousness of that assertion) - they chose a poorly written paean to a multinational coffee company? Maybe he was the only Convocation speaker they could get. Or maybe they're getting a bit of consideration from the Starbucks corporation itself, which, incidentally, does have an outlet on campus.

In any case, I can see that I have my work cut out for me.

Addendum to Previous Post

2009-08-19T23:58:00.003-04:00

Guess I'm not quite done:

11) I have no electricity. After making my inaugural Trader Joe's run this evening, I returned home with a bucketful of frozen lasagnas and burritos to find the electricity in my neighborhood had gone missing. Initially I thought it was just me, but it turns out a power line pole down the road somehow snapped itself in half, and there are about 700 of us without lights, air conditioning, etc. The power went off about 4pm. It's now 11, and it's still not on, so I'm staying the night with friends. My frozen TJ's items, meanwhile, are sitting in my nonfunctioning freezer and have, by now, melted into lukewarm puddles of sauce and gluten. I don't even want to think about what's happened at the popsicle shop a few doors down.

Blurg.

I Hate Nashville and I Want to Come Home

2009-08-19T15:56:00.001-04:00

The following things are currently wrong:

1) Our apartment, while 92% done, is not 100% done. Almost three weeks after we were initially assured it would be. Things still needed include

a. smoke detector(s)

b. bathroom fan

c. the removal of massive gobs of paint from the outside of the windows

d. blinds or shades or something to keep the light out

e. a new front door

f. two interior doors

g. a washer/dryer.

This last is our responsibility, and if something doesn't happen soon I'm gonna have to go buy new clothes.

2) The apartment is too small for all of our stuff, and, despite initial assurances that we'd have storage in the basement, we will not, in fact, have storage in the basement. This is because the landlord is turning the basement into another apartment. This is part of a larger problem wherein the landlord is kind of a pain in the ass. There is therefore no room for our bikes, for instance. I may have to build a shack out back.

3) My cellphone doesn't work in the apartment.

4) There's no internet in the apartment. This very serious, and has led me to get on the phone (in the park across the street, where I can get a signal) and call Comcast, AT&T, etc. An initial flirtation with Comcast proved fruitless when the Comcast guy failed to show up yesterday between 1pm and 4pm, as promised (while waiting alone in the apartment, of course, I had no internet to distract me). AT&T has been more helpful, but they're unable to get a guy out to install a jack before Aug. 31. In the meantime, I have a bazillion things to do that require internet access. The solution I've hit upon is to spend the greater part of every day in coffee shops. This is something I tend to do anyway, but not to this extent. It's starting to get quite expensive, and I always feel uncomfortable taking up space somewhere for hours on end. As a partial solution to this problem, I've headed to a Panera at the mall. Not only is there more seating here, but I also don't feel at all bad about mooching Panera's wireless as I do at more local establishments. This plan has two drawbacks, however:

a. I have to spend money at Panera.

b. I have to spend time at Panera.

5) I have a bazillion things to do. In addition to the normal teaching prep, which would be time-consuming enough, I also have an article to write for a conference in Paris that I was hoping to finish before school starts. That's not gonna happen, however, because I've recently been saddled with 80+ hours of freelance textbook work. I'd agreed to do these projects earlier in the summer, when I had time, but they didn't get them to me until last week. Under normal conditions I'd tell them to shove their projects in their pie holes, but it's paying outrageously well and will, in fact, finance my trip to Paris to present the article that I haven't written. And then some.

6) It's hot.

7) It's muggy.

8) People here talk funny and drive very large vehicles.

9) All my stuff is in boxes still and I can't find anything. I currently need to know the locations of the following:

a. Sponges

b. Assorted spray bottles

c. Dish towels

d. My favorite mug.

e. A certain Charlie Daniels bobblehead.

10) I'm all alone and I miss Kate.

There, I'm done griping. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. Everything will be better shortly, I know - it's always this way when moving to a new place, as I know all too well. Combine that with the transition from not-busy to holy-shit-am-I-busy-and-oh-yeah-all-my-stuff-is-in-boxes, and a person would have to be made of stone not to feel at least a little disheartened.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to spend the next three hours working on a spreadsheet. If Panera's musak doesn't drive me away sooner.

18 Things I've Learned Since Leaving the Valley

2009-08-11T08:50:00.001-04:00

It's been over a week since I left the Valley, and I'm already starting to feel a bit bucolic-deficient: I haven't seen a tobacco barn or a creamery or a sugar shack in ages, haven't had a cider donut in eons, and haven't picked-my-own anythings in forever (excepting, perhaps, my nose). Still, I'm bearing up quite well under the circumstances, largely because I'm managing to keep my mind active. It remains to be seen just how active it will remain once I've settled into the languorous rhythms of the South - I've accepted the possibility that my brain muscles, pummelled by the politics and made turgid by the climate, might not retain their accustomed vigor for long - but for now my intellect is still in fighting form. As evidence of which, I hereby present eighteen things I've learned in the past week-and-a-half:

1) Mentor, OH, is the birthplace of James A. Garfield, and for this reason it can be a very difficult place to find a motel room at 11pm on a summer weekend.

2) Red Roof Inns are, despite their charming names, complete dumps. For evidence of this, I advise you to stay at the Red Roof Inn in Mentor, OH, where the rooms have more beds than towels.

3) People in the South drive very rapidly and don't like to use turn signals. I'm unsure why this is, but for now I'm blaming NASCAR.

4) Christ is the answer.

5) Jesus died for me.

6) I may call it abortion, but God calls it murder.

7) It is more expensive to move from Massachusetts to Tennessee via U-Haul than to do so by hiring movers.

8) Some landlords have very primitive understandings of how long it takes to renovate apartments. They also have somewhat underdeveloped notions of just how much communication is necessary or desirable between themselves and tenants expecting to move into said apartments.

9) Relatedly, Tuesday is not Saturday, and Saturday is not Thursday.

10) A tenant's annoyance with a delinquent landlord may be mitigated slightly upon being informed that the reason the landlord is always going "out of town" is that he is a member of a funk band whose members conceal their identities with costumes. Upon acquiring this information, a tenant may be inclined to view the landlord's apparent unscrupulousness as mere flakiness.

11) In the South, macaroni and cheese is a vegetable, and most everything else, including green beans and turnip greens and black-eyed-peas, is not suitable for vegetarians.

12) Ben Folds lives in our neighborhood.

13) The dude who runs two of the coffee shops in which I'll be spending much of my time is dating the chick who runs the popsicle stand at which I'll be spending much of my money.

14) In order to get a parking space for my 8am class, I'll need to arrive on campus by 7am. In order to do that, I'll need to leave home by 6am. And in order to do that, I'll need to be awake by 5:55am.

15) Children in Tennessee have to ride in car seats until they are eight years old.

16) Stacked, all-in-one-unit washer/dryer combos are more expensive than stackable, separate-unit, front-loading washers and dryers.

17) A significant Civil War event happened approximately every twenty feet in the South, and these events are stirringly described by signs more numerous than hairs on a monkey.

18) Custard pie is one of life's great pleasures.

Okay, that's all the larnin' you're gettin' for today. Now get back to work.

Hotel Lives

2009-08-05T20:04:00.003-04:00

Not so very long ago, it was a common thing for people to live in hotels. I've always found the idea romantic, probably because I watch too many black and white movies. There's the friendly bellboy who greets everyone by name, the well-stocked liquor cabinets and linen-draped room-service carts, the mailboxes for long-term guests, the elevator operator who knows everyone's floor, the dapper gentleman on some urgent mission who strolls up to the front desk and asks, "Any messages for me, Sam?" It all seems such a long way from our current world of interchangeable chain motels with names like Motel 6 and Super 8 and Blue 22 (I made that last one up), of "continental breakfasts" comprised of a box of cold, greasy donuts and orange juice in little plastic cups sealed with tinfoil, of televisions that can be used either for express checkout or downloading adult entertainment, in both cases making what was once a transaction between human beings into a solitary endeavor.

The people who used to live in hotels were usually bachelors, young couples, or old folks. I just read a Peter Taylor story about newlyweds who are forced to spend the first night of their honeymoon in the hotel in which the groom used to live, a circumstance that was most embarrassing for the young bride, since everyone was bound to know what they were up to. These days, of course, bachelors live with roommates or parents or rent their own apartments, and young brides don't get embarrassed about much of anything at all. The old folks who used to live in hotels now live in Assisted Living Communities, which is actually very much like living in a hotel, only with more bingo. As for the rest of us, living in a hotel simply isn't a viable option. Who has that kind of money? And where would we put all our stuff?

Nevertheless, the past decade has seen an explosion in the number of so-called extended-stay hotels that charge a reasonably affordable weekly rate for guests who commit to stay long-term. I've yet to figure out who stays at these places, but my hunch is that it's primarily business travelers - a company may rent a couple of rooms in a residence hotel and rotate people through, or individual businesspeople may live in a room for an extended period while they take care of business. This, essentially, is what my grandfather did back in the 1970s when he started traveling from Oklahoma City up to Bartlesville, OK, to work on a case for the oil company based there (he was a lawyer for the company), until it became clear that the case would take years and he and my grandmother might as well just move to Bartlesville.

The other people who stay in extended-stay hotels are probably people who can more easily pay a weekly rate than a monthly one - poor people, intermittently employed people, migrant workers, people forced out of their own homes due to flooding or tornadoes or whatever. These people are likely to live in different hotels than the business travelers. Often it'll be one of those run-down "motor inns" from the 1960s that you and I drive by and shake our heads wondering how such places stay in business. Or it may be one of Motel 6's new line of extended-stay motels (ingeniously named Studio 6) that go for about $140 a week. These people will often sleep several to a room, and they will often not get much in the way of free high-speed internet. It goes without saying, I suppose, that there's not much romance in these arrangements, either for the wealthy or the poor, although you're more likely to find romance in a Four Seasons than in a Studio 6.

For the last four days, I've been somewhere between those extremes, in a Hilton Suites in Brentwood, TN, just a few miles south of Nashville. The apartment Kate and I are moving into isn't quite done yet, a fact that is less surprising now than it would have been a month ago, before I knew our new landlord better. We've been assured it'll be inhabitable by Saturday, so in the meantime I've splurged on a nice hotel in a tony suburb for a few days. Well, okay, I didn't really splurge - I'm actually paying less than half the normal rate, thanks to some mad internetting skills - but it still feels like a bit of an indulgence. I've got a living room, a bedroom, a huge bathroom with a closet in it, a microwave, a little fridge, a nice couch, two sinks, and two televisions (one for express checkout, one for adult entertainment). There's a heated pool, a weight room, a coin-op laundry room, and every morning they bring me a free USA Today, which, since I don't have any birdcages to line or fish to wrap, is perfectly useless - but it's a nice gesture. My principal complaint is that the bed is essentially one giant, squishy pillow covered in hundreds of smaller squishy pillows, and this is making it a bit hard to get a good night's sleep. My principal joy is that the hotel is within walking distance of a barbecue restaurant where last night I managed to have a big meal of pulled pork, green beans, cornbread, and fried corn-on-the-cob*, plus a gigantic bowl of apple cobbler with ice cream, for under $10. It's also near a bakery called the Puffy Muffin, which, now that I think of it, is probably what I should nickname my bed. Pity this'll be my last night on it.

Tomorrow Kate comes in to do some interviews, and we'll be staying with a friend of her mother's for a couple of nights. I'm most grateful for the hospitality, but I'm actually a bit sad to see the end of this little interlude at the Hilton. I didn't get to know any bellboys, I haven't seen any elevator operators, and I haven't received any mail or messages at the front desk, but I think if I were to stay here just a little longer all of those things just - and more - would definitely happen.

---
* Fried corn-on-the-cob is, apparently, a thing here. A very delicious thing, as it happens, and something that I can't believe I'd never imagined before. I am going to get very fat in Nashville.

Operation Mop-Up, Part II

2009-07-29T18:02:00.001-04:00

Oh, hello there! And how are you this fine summer afternoon?

Your timing is excellent - I'm just taking a break from stuffing all of my possessions into boxes (truck-loading commences tomorrow), so I've got a little time to tell you about the rest of my adventures around the Valley over the past week or so. You'll recall that I've been trying to get in a little more sightseeing before I point the wagons southward. Well, I'm happy to say that I've crossed most of the important things off the list, although a few items - the Hadley Farm Museum, the Amherst Historical Society - will have to wait until another day. I'll discuss the recent adventures in ascending order of humorousness.

Historic Northampton
I have walked, biked, or driven by this place about two hundred thousand times, but I never got around to visiting it until last week. No, that's not quite true. Back in early June, Kate, Meagan, and I tried to pop by after breakfast one morning, but they were opening late that day and we didn't manage to fit it into our schedule. And then a few weeks ago Kate and I tried again, but it was closed, for reasons that were - and remain - mysterious.

So I was quite excited when we finally caught the place during opening hours this past week. Something this hard to get into must be spectacular, I thought, like a really exclusive nightclub or a Mormon temple. I'm sorry to report, however, that my excitement was somewhat premature. It was a perfectly nice little museum - a room showing artifacts from Northampton's history, arranged chronologically and in narrative form, with lots and lots of text glued to the cases and walls, plus a small gift shop - but it was distinctly lacking in the interactive bells and whistles I've come to expect from modern museums. C'mon, Historic Northampton! Step into the twenty-first century! Give me an animatronic. pulpit-pounding, firebreathing Jonathan Edwards that I can scare the kids with. Give me a "What Would Sylvester Graham Do?" interactive computer game featuring a series of moral dilemmas and engaging (if slightly lewd) sound effects. Give me a life-size Snuffaluffagus that I can climb on - who cares if Snuffaluffagus wasn't from Northampton? But don't expect me to read. Sheesh. History can be so boring.

The Student Prince
I don't often make it down to Springfield, even though it boasts both the Basketball Hall of Fame and a Dr. Seuss sculpture garden. When I do find myself in this, the regional metropolis, it doesn't take me long to remember why I rarely go there - if you're ever feeling like there just aren't enough scary drug dealers in your life, spend half an hour in the Springfield bus station and tell me if that doesn't solve the problem. A once prosperous city that fell on hard times quite a while ago, Springfield has made some efforts at urban renewal - it's certainly a much more appealing place to spend an afternoon than nearby Holyoke (the birthplace, incidentally, of Volleyball) - but it's clearly got a long way to go before it becomes the next Pittsburgh or Providence.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I wandered into the Student Prince, an old fashioned German restaurant founded in 1935 that I learned about while reading Brock Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers Homes in New England. Just down the street from the prison-like train station, around the corner from the Payday Cash Advance shops, the pawn shops, and the nail salons, the Student Prince can be found serving pot roast, bratwurst, and sauerkraut to the largest crowd of well-dressed old white people you've ever seen. By old, I don't mean spry-retiree, denture-cream-commercial old. I mean nursing-home old, one-foot-in-the-grave old, really-too-old-to-be-eating-bratwurst old. Really, really old. And when I say well-dressed, I mean suits and ties. On a Tuesday. At lunchtime. It was like stepping back in time, to a time when everybody was really old and white and knew everybody who walked through the door, a time when well-dressed old men with mustaches and slick black hair walked from table to table shaking hands with other patrons and asking after their grandkids, a time when everything was decorated in what can only be described as High German Hunting Lodge Kitsch (lamps made of antlers, one of the largest stein collections in the USA, etc.). Outside, it was all dusty urban despair; inside, it was a Bavarian spa town circa 1937.

The food, I must say, was excellent. I had homemade sausages with apple sauce, sauerkraut, and German potato salad. I am a sucker for hearty German fare, after all, to say nothing of hearty German kitsch. So it's probably a good thing that I only discovered how incredibly wonderful the Student Prince is at this late date - otherwise I'd probably have spent much more of my valuable time there, dining on sausage and cabbage at least often enough to get the old folks to start greeting me by name.

The Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum
Now I really have no excuse for not having visited this one earlier, since it's literally right next door to my house. The Forbes Library began collecting Calvin Coolidge's papers in 1920, around the time he was making a name for himself in Massachusetts politics after serving as mayor of Northampton, where he was also a successful lawyer, from 1909-11. The museum isn't open as often as the rest of the library, but it's open often enough - I live right next door - that I really should have peeked in before now. As it happens, I almost missed it entirely. As with Historic Northampton, I had two recent false starts, finding the doors locked during times I expected them to be open, but I did finally manage to visit yesterday afternoon.

And what I learned was nothing short of astonishing. What I learned was this: Calvin Coolidge was the most boring man in American history. Yes, you read that right - not the most boring president, but the most boring man. Think of the dullest person you know. Form a good mental image: what they sound like, what they smell like, what they look like. Got it? Okay, Calvin Coolidge was three times more boring than that person.

It must be a very difficult thing to build a Presidential Library and Museum for the most boring person in American history, and I feel awfully sympathetic for the poor curators and librarians who have the task of looking after this man's legacy. Clearly, they know what they're up against. Here's what it says in one of the early display cases:

How's that for hedging your bets?

Calvin Coolidge was president from 1923 to 1929, taking over after Warren G. Harding's mysterious death in office and proceeding to do absolutely nothing at all while America enjoyed one of the most debauched periods of its history. Here's what I learned about Calvin Coolidge's time in office: he was the first president whose inaugural address was broadcast by radio (big whoop: anybody inaugurated in 1923 would have enjoyed the same honor - it wasn't him, it was the technology); he signed a few treaties, none of them of any lasting importance; his wife wore lots of dresses at White House events; his son John died after getting blood poisoning from an injury sustained on the White House tennis courts; he installed the first White House Christmas tree (yawn); he was, for reasons that are never explained, named chief of the Sioux (the photo below shows how Coolidge could make even an exciting event like this look utterly and completely boring - the Indian behind him to the left is saying, "Oh, god, when will this be over?"); and he presided at the opening of Mt Rushmore. This latter must have been especially humiliating, insofar as the looming faces of those far more important presidents inevitably brought his own boringness into even sharper relief.

Interspersed amongst the images of Coolidge and his wife not doing anything are some excerpts from his autobiography, boringly titled The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge. Here's a representative quote:

When we first went to Washington Mrs. Coolidge and I quite enjoyed the social dinners. As we were always the ranking guests we had the privilege of arriving last and leaving first, so that we were usually home by ten o'clock. It will be seen that this was far from burdensome. We found it a most enjoyable opportunity for getting acquainted and could scarcely comprehend how anyone who had the privilege of sitting at a table surrounded by representatives of the Cabinet, the Congress, the Diplomatic Corps, and the Army and Navy would not find it interesting.

Wow, I almost fell asleep just typing that. And this was the stuff the curators thought was good enough to extract! One can only imagine what the rest of the Autobiography is like.

Despite all this, there is one thing about Coolidge that almost redeems him in my eyes, and that proves nobody can be 100% boring all the time. Sitting under a pair of elephant tusks given to Coolidge by Theodore Roosevelt (a president who lived at the opposite end of the boring meter from Coolidge) there sits a large, black electric horse that Coolidge kept in his White House dressing room. I have no idea why he had it or what he did with it, but I like to imagine him coming home after a long day of ribbon-cuttings before crowds of listless onlookers, kicking off his sensible loafers, donning his ceremonial Sioux headdress, and riding that electric horse with all his might, one hand waving free, whooping silently.

And now I'm going back to pack some more. When next we meet, I'll be in Nashville.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - The Coolidge Park Cafe

2009-07-27T20:14:00.000-04:00

The search is over.

After an intense and, at times, harrowing survey of every single breakfast-serving establishment in the greater NoHo/Amherst area, after eating sixteen(!) different orders of french toast (plus a handful of repeats, in addition to some recreational french toast consumed in Okla. City and Madison, WI), I am prepared to award the title of The Perfect French Toast to...

Ah ah ah - not so fast. First I need to tell you about my visit to the Coolidge Park Cafe, a visit that damn near queered the pitch.

The Coolidge Park Cafe is part of the Hotel Northampton, a massive 1927 building that looms over NoHo like a slumbering beast. I had never been inside the place but had long admired the audacity of it, the way it crawls right up to the edge of King Street and dwarfs the people below, seeming to say, "You are in Northampton, people, and don't forget it!" It's an appropriately grand structure for a town that likes to see itself as much more than a simple New England village, with sturdy brick and a neo-colonial facade that hint at a sort of old-fashioned luxury within. It looks, in short, very expensive.

If you want to have breakfast at the Coolidge Park Cafe at the Hotel Northampton, you should get there early. The first time Kate and I tried to go, about 10:15 on a Friday morning, they had already stopped serving breakfast at 10:00. So we went back the next morning (time is short: I'm leaving town this Friday, so I really don't have time to monkey around) and tried again. The hotel lobby was traditional but tasteful - there was the black-framed portrait above the fireplace, here were the striped, upholstered chairs - and the cafe was largely empty. I had the impression that the cafe doesn't cater much to people who aren't staying at the hotel - more locals may go to the Wiggins Tavern, a reconstructed 18th-century tavern annexed to the back of the hotel, but it wasn't open during our visit - and I deduced that the current recession must have severely cut down on the number of tourists willing to shell out the however-much it costs to stay there, but I may be wrong about that.

In any event, the lack of people meant we got a good seat - facing a window facing down King Street, even if this also had us facing into the (pre-10am) sun - although it didn't ensure terribly prompt service. When we got the chance to order I asked for the "Texas Size French Toast," despite not having an entirely positive experience of similarly-designated french toasts elsewhere. Sure enough, when the toast arrived it was neither "Texas Size" nor made of "texas toast," the latter being an especially delicious, butter-and-garlic delicacy found in places in and around Texas that would, nevertheless, probably not be very good in french form. Instead, it looked like regular old triangle-cut bread with a sprinking of powdered sugar and a bit of fruit garnish.

But my god was it good. The bread was crisp on the outside and grainy and hearty on the inside. The maple syrup was real and delightful. And the whole thing was overpoweringly, almost scandalously, cinnamony. Reader, if you love cinnamon, I suggest you drop what you're doing right now and get thee to the Hotel Northampton immediately (just be sure to arrive between the hours of 7am and 10am, Eastern Time). If it wasn't nearly 8pm here, I think I'd go back right now.

This french toast was so good, in fact, that it put me in a bit of a pickle. See, I was hoping that it'd be terrible or at least bland or even merely good, so that I could declare a clear winner - that'd be the Lone Wolf - and get on with my life. But it'd been so long since I'd had the Lone Wolf's french toast that I found myself in a state of deep uncertainty. Was the Lone Wolf's french toast as tender and tasty as this one? Had I overestimated the Lone Wolf's french toast because it came after a string of substandard varieties? Was I looking back at the Lone Wolf through rose-colored glasses?

There was only one way to answer these questions: a Toast-Off.

Well, okay, so it wasn't exactly a Toast-Off. I simply decided that I needed to go back to the Lone Wolf and settle things once and for all. And so, early this morning, Kate and I made the long drive over to Amherst - a drive that's actually not that long but that seems endless when you haven't had breakfast yet (as was the case for Kate) or have only had one breakfast and really need a second one (as was the case with me).

When the toast arrived, it was just as I remembered it. Pretty triangles of thickly sliced challah bread artistically arranged in a circular pattern around the plate, dusted with powdered sugar and lightly browned. Actually, it was a bit more lightly browned than my last serving, but one has to allow for the occasional inconsistency when dealing with something as mercurial as french toast. Eating it was like visiting an old friend: all the old elements of enjoyment were still there, and this encouraged lingering and savoring. As before, I found the inside of the toast refreshingly free of mush (even the Coolidge Park's french toast had been a tad mushy, though not, it must be noted, eggy). As before, it held the syrup well and was even a bit chewy. And, as before, it was almost more than I could eat - this is the only french toast of the sixteen that has been almost more than I could eat - but I still managed to power through to the end.

And the verdict? I'm very pleased, after a hard-fought, last-minute battle, to award the title of The Perfect French Toast to the challah french toast at the Lone Wolf in Amherst, MA. Ding ding ding ding!

Coming in at a very close second place: The Coolidge Park Cafe

Third place goes to: Cafe Esselon.

Honorable mentions: The Green Street Cafe, Amanouz Cafe, and the Haymarket.

In the category of Best Diner French Toast: Look Restaurant.

And coming in dead last, in a category all by itself, a french toast that is almost sublime in its awfulness: Kathy's Diner.

Thank you for accompanying me on this journey. It's been fun for me and, I hope, educational for you. And in case you're wondering - yes, I never want to have french toast again.

Oink Oink

2009-07-26T08:54:00.000-04:00

I must have finally recovered from the butter burgers and fried cheese curds, because this sounds really, really good. A reason for me to hightail it to Nashville ASAP:

Read the description at the Nashville Scene's food blog, and you'll understand. (If you don't understand, I'm afraid we can't be friends.)

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Sylvester's

2009-07-21T10:45:00.000-04:00

Of all the Valley's famous residents, Sylvester Graham is probably the least-remembered and the most intriguing. Most people know at least a little bit about Calvin Coolidge, Sojourner Truth, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson, but very few people know about old Sylvester - or, if they do, they don't know that they do. This is because the graham cracker was named after him. There is some dispute as to whether Sylvester actually invented the graham cracker or if it was simply given his name because it was originally made using the "graham flour" that he helped to popularize in the nineteenth century, but in either case his is a significant contribution to the annals of American food culture for that reason alone.

But that's not why he's intriguing. He's intriguing because he was the first American dietary guru, and because he was among the first to adopt that oh-so-American habit of equating dietary choices with moral choices (anyone who has ever heard a dessert described as "decadent" or "sinful" has Graham to thank). For Graham, good health depended on curbing appetites, whether digestive or sexual, and adhering to a strict, ascetic lifestyle. Meat, he felt, inflamed the stomach as well as the carnal passions, and thus should be avoided entirely (late in life he helped found one of the country's earliest vegetarian societies). For the same reasons condiments were to be shunned, as were tight corsets, feather beds, enriched flour (hence his development of unenriched "graham flour"), and, of course, masturbation (the ill effects of the latter could clearly be seen in outbreaks of acne among adolescents). Many of his prescriptions were, in fact, quite healthful, though often not for the reasons he thought. He promoted regular exercise, for instance, believing that it would prevent nocturnal emissions, and many a modern-day nutritionist would endorse his advocacy of a meat-free diet rich in whole grains, even if they might be a bit more lenient when it came to feather beds.

Graham emerged during a period of intense reforming zeal in American history, preaching his food gospel (he was, fittingly, a Presbyterian minister) during the 1820s and 1830s, during the so-called Second Great Awakening. Just to the west of here, in the "burned-over district" of upstate New York, Joseph Smith was founding the Latter Day Saints after being visited by the angel Moroni, who showed him golden plates detailing Christ's visits to the ancient Israelite inhabitants of the Americas. Also among Graham's neighbors were the Shakers, who first started getting the shakes around this time; the Fox sisters, whose seances became national sensations; and John Noyes, who founded the utopian commune at Oneida, NY, where residents simultaneously practiced group marriage and discouraged male ejaculation - no mean feat, that, but one of which Graham must surely have approved.

Graham's legacy, apart from the eponymous cracker, is primarily felt today in the breakfast cereal aisle of your local grocery store. James Caleb Jackson, a Graham disciple, developed the first breakfast cereal, called Granula, from his teacher's whole-grain principles. John Harvey Kellogg, brother of W. K. Kellogg (whose signature, found on millions of cereal boxes worldwide, is second only to John Hancock's as the most famous in America), was another Graham follower, and his famous sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan (the setting of T.C. Boyle's book The Road to Wellville and the film of the same name) updated and popularized Graham's teaching in the late 19th century. Kellogg developed his own cereal (the first of which he named Granola, after a court battle deprived him of the name Granula), and he and his brother went on to build a breakfast cereal empire that, over time, came to have only a tenuous connection to Graham's original principles.

It's fitting, therefore, that Graham's Northampton home, where he died in 1851, should now be one of the Valley's most popular brunch destinations. Until very recently the servers' t-shirts said, on the back, "Rain or Shine, There's Always a Line," and it's true, especially on weekends - if you're trying to get into Sylvester's on a sunny Sunday morning, you'd better bring a book and prepare to wait a while. In many ways, however, Graham would be thoroughly appalled by what's become of his former home. Not only does the restaurant serve bread baked with enriched flour (Graham famously clashed with Boston bakers in 1837 over his opposition to their industrially manufactured bread), it also serves coffee and tea (Graham was opposed to all stimulants), as well as meat of every kind. The place might as well be filled with masturbating teenagers in corsets.

Still, it's a pretty good brunch spot, although one sometimes gets the feeling that they're coasting on their reputation. The food is good, but it's not outstanding, and the menu is seldom innovative like it is at, say, the Green Bean or the Lone Wolf. They do, however, offer a range of french toasts - in addition to the usual choice of white or wheat, there is also banana bread, cinnamon raisin, and apple. On a recent visit, in the spirit of Sylvester Graham, I opted for the most whole-grain french toast I could find - the kind made with Oatmeal Sunflower Seed Bread. My expectations were high, given the popularity of the restaurant and the karmic appropriateness of eating this specific variety of french toast in Graham's own house, but I'm afraid it wasn't the transcendent experience I was expecting. Mind you, it was perfectly serviceable french toast - nicely crisp on the outside, a little cinnamony, the scattered sunflower seeds enlivening the task of masticating - but it was eggy and mushy inside, and it lacked powdered sugar. It certainly didn't inflame my passions - which, I suppose, would have suited the original Sylvester just fine.

Operation Mop-Up

2009-07-17T08:39:00.001-04:00

The countdown has begun. In exactly two weeks I'll be hitting the road with all my stuff in a big truck (a truck so big, in fact, that it may not fit through the narrow passage into my driveway, which would make loading it more than a little difficult), bidding a fond TTFN to the Valley, and directing my gaze with hawk-like intensity toward the future - a future of fightin', cheatin', and drinkin', if the old country songs are anything to go by (and they are). This means that there's lots to do in the next couple of weeks. I'm not talking about boring stuff like packing, closing my bank account, contacting the electric company (hey you guys!!), submitting a change of address form to the post office, or any of that. These things will more or less take care of themselves. No, I'm talking about running through the list of things I still need to see and do before leaving the Valley - a project I'm calling Operation Mop-Up.

What, you're wondering, could I possibly be talking about? Well let me give you a for instance, as some of my less grammatically astute high school teachers would say.

I happen to live within a very short distance of the Yankee Candle Company. No, not one of those tiny, intensely pungent shopping mall stores - this is the factory, where they actually churn out all those multicolored wax cylinders that get shoved, each holiday season, into the gift bags of great-aunts everywhere. The factory, unfortunately, is not open to the public - which is probably a good thing, considering the severe olfactory (no pun intended) assault any visitors to the place would undergo - but the factory store absolutely is open to the public. Nay, more: it sprawls at the side of Route 5 and screams at the public to come inside. And so the other day, after months of procrastination, come inside I did.

Having been trained by the YCC's mall stores to expect a ruthless nasal pummeling as soon as I stepped across the threshold of this self-proclaimed Scenter of the Universe, I was pleasantly surprised to find the place smelling only slightly of chemical foodstuffs and summer breezes. Instead, I found a vast compound full of toys, home accents, cheap New England souvenirs, a fudge shop, a bakery, a medieval castle, and, of course, an extensive Christmas village, complete with model trains, spinning trees, and fake snow falling from the ceiling every four minutes. This last was quite a hit amongst the schoolbusload of teenage girls who had arrived before me. There was also a make-your-own-candle station that included a display on the science of scent-mixing as well as a person-sized candle named King Candle, though which king it was named for is a mystery to me.

There were also, of course, lots and lots of candles spread throughout the place, but the ambient odors were diluted in the vast space of the building. I was, therefore, obliged to pop the lids off of more than a few and give them a good sniff. And as I made my way through candles with names like Egg Nog, Frosted Pumpkin, Vanilla Lime, Juicy Peach, and Candied Apple, I became profoundly, uncomfortably hungry. Just as I was about to take a bite out of Almond Cookie, I snapped out of it and beat a hasty retreat for the door, vowing never to return (on an empty stomach, at least).

Another item I've managed to cross off the Operation Mop-Up list is a visit to UMass Stonehenge. What's UMass Stonehenge? Well, from the road it looks like a diminutive neolithic site that somehow survived the construction of the adjacent UMass football stadium. It's always intrigued me - ever since Spinal Tap, miniature Stonehenges have been cool - so I stopped by the other day while out riding my bike. It was a bit disappointing. Turns out UMass Stonehenge is actually a "sunwheel" used by the Astronomy Department to teach about sun and moon cycles. It's the site of solstice gatherings, when the sun aligns with several of the larger rocks, and it's also used for moon tracking. So, in short, it's about science. Bah. I took a photo, but I wasn't happy about it.

Also crossed off the list: a climb up Mt. Sugarloaf, about which I'll say nothing except that I think maybe I saw John Hodgman up on the summit. And I took a witty photograph up there (not of John Hodgman).

So stay tuned for more highlights from Operation Mop-Up and, of course, for the last two french toast posts. Just two more toasts to go! Whee!

Some Superlatives from a Visit to the Upper Midwest

2009-07-14T16:29:00.006-04:00

I've just returned from a 10-day ramble through Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois, during which I was accompanied, at various times, by my brother, his girlfriend, my girlfriend, and several bouts of indigestion. I've broken the elements of the trip down into several helpful categories in order to convey the experience to you.

Largest Ball of Twine Seen:

Francis A. Johnson's famous twine ball in Darwin, MN. At one time the largest twine ball in the world, Johnson's ball, constructed between 1950 and 1979, has since been surpassed by several others, but it remains the largest twine ball ever rolled by one man. It is also, as yet, the only twine ball about which Weird Al Yankovic has written a song.

Largest Orange Moose Seen:

The gigantic fiberglass moose in Black River Falls, WI. I have no idea why this was here.

Largest Spoon Seen:

"Spoonbridge and Cherry," a sculpture in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden created by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen.

Largest Cherry Seen:
See above.

Largest American Gothic Homage Seen:

J. Seward Johnson's "God Bless America" statue on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

Largest Frozen Custard Serving Consumed:

A single scoop of regular old vanilla custard at Kopp's, in Milwaukee.

Largest Carousel in the World:

The carousel at the House on the Rock in Milwaukee.

Minimum Number of Outlandishly Large Objects Seen:
Eight.

Happiest Barn in which Apple-Pie-Baked-In-a-Paper-Sack Was Purchased:

The Elegant Farmer, outside Milwaukee.

Stinkiest Sausage Bought and Consumed:
Landjaeger from the Elegant Farmer.

Maximum Number of Enclosed Spaces Rendered Almost Completely Unusable by the Landjaeger:
Three.

Drunkest Tour Guide:
The guy giving the Lakefront Brewery tour in Milwaukee.

Tour Guide Most Clearly Infatuated by a Deceased Brewery Proprietor:
The lady who showed us around the Pabst Mansion in Milwaukee.

Most Dangerous Chandelier Seen:

Captain Pabst's antler chandelier in Milwaukee.

Deadliest Hamburger Consumed:

The butter burger at Solly's in Milwaukee.

Most Dangerous Burger Consumed:

The Jucy Lucy at Matt's Bar in Minneapolis. This burger consists of two patties of meat surrounding molten cheese - servers warn customers to wait a few minutes for the cheese to cool before biting into it. This makes the Jucy Lucy more dangerous than Solly's butter burger, but it remains considerably less deadly.

Deadliest Item(s) Consumed:

Fried cheese curds at the Old Fashioned in Madison. (This was a closely contested category, but the inclusion of a side of garlic mayonnaise for dipping put the cheese curds over the top).

Most Rapidly Devoured Pie:

The caramel-apple pie at Solly's.

Most Calories Consumed at One Sitting:

Hopple Popple at Benji's Deli in Milwaukee.

Most Ridiculous Item Consumed:

Pie Shakes at Betty's Pies in Minneapolis.

Prettiest Sunset:

Over the lake at the Union Terrace at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Biggest Surprise:

Minneapolis. Turns out it's gorgeous! And exciting! There are lakes and parkways everywhere, wonderful restaurants, lots of bookshops, friendly people... and it has easy access to the Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota! I wonder if it's sunny and warm like that all year long.

Gayest Thai Food Consumed:
Dinner at Pingpong in Boystown, Chicago.

Gayest Everything Else:
Everything in Boystown, Chicago.

Creepiest House in America:

The House on the Rock in Spring Green, WI. I don't even know how to describe this place. You'll just have to look at the photos.

Most Active Photographer:
Me. Here.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Look Restaurant

2009-07-02T07:51:00.001-04:00

I know, I know. You thought I'd forgotten about this little quest, right? Indeed, you were probably hoping I'd forgotten about it, huh? (I'm looking at you, Dr C.) Well I hate to ruin your morning, but it's just not my way to leave a task undone. Especially when that task involves bread and syrup and eggs and sometimes powdered sugar and cinnamon.

Am I getting tired of french toast? You bet your life I am. But am I going to let that deter me from fighting this fight through to the final round? No, I am not.

The good news for all of you haters out there is that we are, indeed, quickly reaching said final round. According to my calculations, there are only three establishments within the vague geographic range that I've set for myself that I've yet to talk about - one of which I'll dispose of presently, and quite succinctly at that. The other two are Valley institutions that I've been needing to talk about anyway, and then we'll be done. And, as God is my witness, I'll never have to eat french toast again.

The Look Restaurant is itself something of a Valley institution. It's located just north of the entrance to Look Park, named after Frank Newhall Look, whose wife, Fannie, donated the land to the city of Northampton in his honor. Frank was the chief executive of the Prophylactic Brush Company from 1877 to 1911, and, before you all start tittering, you should know that the Prophylactic Brush Company was one of the first (if not the first) mass producers of plastic toothbrushes in the nation. They also made hair brushes and other brushy things. The company was bought by the Lambert Company in 1930, the same year Fannie donated the land for the park to honor her husband, and subsequently became a division of Standard Oil, as most things did at that time. The park itself is one of the loveliest around - there are walking and biking paths, a serene pond surrounded by groves of tall evergreens, a miniature train, and even a small zoo, though if you go there expecting giraffes and elephants you're going to be sorely disappointed (as I was). Similarly, if you go to Look Park without first obtaining a permit for your picnic, you're likely to be chucked into the pond. Ah well - we live in a society, after all, and societies have their rules. More pleasantly, the park also has an amphitheater and a summer concert series, whose performers this year have included Gordon Lightfoot, Joan Baez, and Tom Jones. It's not unusual, if you'll pardon my saying so, to wish you'd actually made it to see Tom Jones.

This is what the Look Park looks (excuse the pun) like:

The best thing about the Look Restaurant, which you spot as you drive along Route 9 past the park, is that, as you pass it, you can say, "Look! Restaurant!" In fact, you can say this every time you pass it, in the same exact way, to the same exact person, and it will always be funny. Trust me.

The least good thing about the Look Restaurant is that the interior looks like a hospital commissary. The pastel colors and fluorescent lights give the place a sickly, washed-out look, and this effect is only slightly overcome by the several pleasant pieces of art that hang on the walls, including one large, framed photograph of a serving of french toast.

"Aha!" I thought, as I spied this piece of vernacular art. "Any place that has a large, framed photograph of french toast hanging on its walls must have good french toast!"

On examining the photograph further, I noted that the toast in the picture appeared to be coated in lacquer. It was probably supposed to be butter, but this toast was far to glistening to be covered in actual butter, which, as we all know, seeps into french toast fairly quickly and doesn't exactly shimmer in the light of a flashbulb. Or maybe it was laminated. Whatever it was, it was very shiny, and I began to have my doubts.

I was also surprised to find that the Look Restaurant, despite its name, is, in fact, a diner. There's a long counter with stools, behind which the cooks do their thing amidst their cooking equipment, and there were some benches along the walls. The customers were of the sort typically found in the area's diners - elderly folks, families, casually dressed businessmen, the sorts of people Tracy Kidder, in Home Town, describes as natives, and whom I've been less charitably referring to as townies. Indeed, the Look Restaurant plays a considerable role in Kidder's book as the favorite dining establishment of Tommy, the cop who's the principal subject of the book.

That's how I know the Look Restaurant is a Valley institution.

In any case, the folks at the Look were certainly friendly. I had a brief conversation with an older gentleman sitting beside me about the economy (he wasn't optimistic), flipped through the morning's Daily Hampshire Gazette, which someone had kindly left on the counter for me, and noted that most of the folks in there clearly came by quite a bit - they knew the servers, and they knew one another. Indeed, so locals-down-at-the-diner was the place that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a presidential candidate, with entourage, sweep into the place and start shaking hands and taking pictures. If we had been in New Hampshire, I'm pretty sure that would have happened.

As for the french toast, it was not bad. It certainly could have been a lot worse - at least it wasn't coated in poisonous chemicals, like the one on the wall. They offered a choice of white, wheat, cinnamon raisin, or banana bread, as well as real maple syrup for an extra $1.50. I went with the wheat, with the real maple syrup. The slices were nice and thick, cooked just right with a thin, crisp crust on both sides, and the syrup gave it plenty of sweetness to make up for the absence of powdered sugar. In all, it was probably the best diner french toast I've had in the area.

Which isn't saying much, but it is saying something.

Look! French toast!

Love and Popsicles

2009-06-29T08:15:00.000-04:00

Apartment hunting is a lot like online dating. You start with essentially two lists: necessary attributes and ideal attributes. On the first list you put things you can't live without - two bedrooms and a dishwasher, say, or a college degree and blond hair. On the second list you put things that will help you decide among those that pass your initial screening process - does it get plenty of light? is it close to a park? will my friends like it? does it laugh at my jokes? As you sift through the choices online, you flag the ones that look interesting and send a brief email expressing interest and asking to arrange a meeting. Maybe you include a little about yourself in the email, a little joke maybe, to make yourself stand out from the crowd, or maybe you make do with a simple, flirtatious wink.

Then you wait, impatiently, for a response. You check your email obsessively to see who's gotten back to you - some of the ones that sound promising never respond at all, while some of the less promising ones reply immediately and want to make an appointment for this afternoon. You diligently mark down all the appointments in your calendar, being sure to note a few pieces of relevant information about each. And then you're off, scrambling all over the city from appointment to appointment, introducing yourself, trying to sound charming and desirable, asking all the right questions. You tell the same stories over and over, crack the same jokes. Before long, all the people and places you will start to blur together, and if you don't start taking notes soon you'll get them mixed up later - was this the one with the weird crack in the bathroom? was this the one with the brother in Minneapolis?

If you're the type who makes quick judgments, if you're comfortable going with your gut, then you'll quickly decide to commit to just one apartment/person as soon as it feels right, maybe even before you've visited all the ones on your list. Sometimes this will lead to great happiness, but often your enthusiasm will fade quite quickly, as soon as it becomes clear that the drawbacks - the things you hadn't considered or had willfully overlooked in the first rush of excitement - are, in fact, quite severe. Sure, it's really cute, but it's also really, really noisy. Yeah, the view is astounding, but it's a bit cramped in here, and what's with all the mirrors? But by then you're committed, and you can't wriggle out of your predicament without a lot of pain and heartache on both sides, and possibly a lawsuit.

It's far better, to my mind, to take your time with these things, to make as many appointments as possible with as wide a variety of places/people as you can find. Get an idea of what's out there by going after something that's obviously out of your league. Dip into the bottom of the barrel and see if you come up with a gem. Don't stick too closely to your lists of necessary and ideal attributes - you might be surprised at what you're willing to do without (a dishwasher, a nodding acquaintance with the nonfiction works of David Foster Wallace) when all the other stars align just perfectly.

The problem with this second approach, of course, is that it's not entirely in your hands. In both apartment hunting and dating, you have not only to worry about whether the object of your desire will desire you in return - maybe your credit's not good enough, maybe you're not tall enough, maybe you have a history of breaking windows and shoving beer bottles into walls - but you also have a very ill-defined set of time constraints to deal with. Some of the people you meet are looking to have their needs filled immediately, some are, like you, meeting a number of different people and then making their own decisions about whom to offer themselves to among the pool of applicants/suitors, some are looking to move much quicker than you are (often because they know they can't compete with the others on the market), and some are possessed of a serene confidence that if you don't want them, someone else will. This dance can be a tricky, even maddening one, especially if you're someone who likes to take your time and explore all your options before making a commitment - by the time you convince yourself that this one is the one, someone else might have snatched it up. It pays to be deliberate, but try not to be too deliberative.

Last week Kate and I went to Nashville to undertake the apartment-hunting equivalent of speed dating. We had roughly 40 hours in town and 10 appointments, all of which were made by me in the days immediately preceding our trip. We ended up seeing 14 different apartments, almost all of which would have been suitable, but only one of which was perfect. One was in a high-rise condo building with a breathtaking view all the way to Arkansas and a swimming pool on the roof, but the apartment was much too small. One was incredibly, stupidly cheap - virtually free, really - but it was pretty shabby and in a boring area. Several were perfectly fine - good area, plenty of room, all the necessary amenities - but we just weren't feeling a spark. And then, on our last appointment, with a guy who'd already shown us three other properties he owned and had decided to show us one last one that he was currently renovated, we fell in love.

The apartment was completely gutted - no floor, no kitchen, no bathroom - but we knew it'd be perfect. We just knew. It was in an old house, a tri-plex, in the 12 South neighborhood of Nashville, within walking distance of the corridor of stores and bars and coffee shops that line 12th Avenue and not far from the buzzing student areas near Vanderbilt and Belmont, across the street from a beautiful park (beyond which is a community garden), and mere steps away from a gourmet popsicle stand. That's what I said: a gourmet popsicle stand. Which we subsequently visited - I tried the blueberry chocolate chip and Kate had the cucumber chile - and declared to be just as amazing as we expected it to be, and maybe a little bit more. The house itself met all of our essential criteria. The rent is good, pets are allowed, there's plenty of parking, plenty of light, plenty of space, a basement for storage, and all the rest of it. There's also a fireplace, high ceilings, funky angles, and a great, weird front door. (I wish we'd taken pictures, but we didn't.)

So we signed a lease, we paid a deposit, and we have been assured that the renovations will be done by the first of August, or at least a few days into August. I'm optimistic that everything will be as promised, but I still feel a slight twinge of apprehension, given the current state of the place. We are, after all, putting a great deal of trust in someone we've only just met to fulfill the promises he's made to us, and we've already got a lot invested - both monetarily and emotionally - in a successful outcome.

Which also makes this a lot like dating, but with significantly higher stakes. I'm thinking, of course, of all the popsicles in my future if this thing goes all the way.

Cape Crusaders

2009-06-22T07:48:00.000-04:00

Hello. Last week I went to Cape Cod with Kate and her parents, and the following things happened.

1) John Waters, director of Hairspray and Cecil B. DeMented and Pink Flamingos and many other strange movies that I haven't actually ever seen, bicycled past me in a navy blue suit and sneakers. This was in Provincetown, at the very tip of the Cape, which is famous for its artists and writers and large gay population (the three groups being by no means mutually exclusive). There was a film festival going on, and this is probably why John Waters was riding his bike through town. At least I assume it was his bike.

2) If it was his bike, he may well have purchased it from an old friend of mine who runs a few bike shops on the Cape and whom we visited one afternoon in the rain. This is Peter, whom some of you remember from our grad school days. He left the program about six years ago, and, judging from the current economic climate, this was a very wise move indeed. He now owns three bike shops, a house, a wife, and a baby named Jebediah. He was happy and warm and he gave us t-shirts. I love Peter.

3) If John Waters were to ride his bike (or someone else's bike) south out of Provincetown to North Truro, he would pass - or, if he's smart, stop by - the Susan Baker Memorial Museum. Susan Baker is an old friend of Kate's parents, and she lives in her memorial museum with her husband, Keith, and a one-eyed basset hound who sometimes wets the floors. She makes papier mache sculptures of dogs and ticks and other animals, chapbooks and book-books about dogs and ticks and childbirth and things, and paintings of European cities and Cape Cod and other places. They're really quite remarkable, the paintings, and you can see what appear to be watercolor interpretations of them here. I should also point out that Susan and Keith's son, Ellery, is currently biking with a friend from Vladivostok, Russia, to Porto, Portugal - a distance of about 10,000 miles (I'd like to see John Waters do that!). They've become quite the media sensation in Russia and are hoping to meet Vladimir Putin. You can follow their adventures here. I forgot to ask Peter if he's the one who sold them their bikes, but I think he probably is.

4) Have you ever been to a tea dance? Well I have. A tea dance, according to the bouncer standing outside the club advertising the tea dance, is a take-off on the British high tea, but instead of finger food they have, um, something else. He offered us a free peek inside - this was mid-afternoon, and the club was thumping out some glittery techno tunes into the placid P'town air - and we took him up on his offer. It was a bit disappointing, actually: no tea, no dancing, just a few clusters of people standing around on the deck overlooking the harbor. But it was a pleasant enough deck, and I'll happily go to another tea dance there if I'm ever invited.

5) There were custard rolls and sweet-potato pastries and Portuguese sweet breads and maybe one or two servings of french toast. Oh, and cinnamon rolls - one buttermilk, one regular.

6) There were also gallery openings (Kate's parents, having lived in P'town back in the 1970s, are friends with many of the artists in the area - including one woman who once shared gallery space with Norman Mailer's fourth wife!) and lovely meals and picnics on the beach and a B&B proprietor who was very, very proud of his extensive VHS (VHS!) video collection and was thrilled to have a librarian (that'd be Kate) to whom he could explain his cataloguing procedure, which relied heavily on multicolored circular stickers. Said proprietor also had a marked fondness for Abraham Lincoln, elephants, and things with ruffles.

7) Photographs were taken.

Update to previous post: Republican flies and vanishing bears

2009-06-17T12:38:00.000-04:00

OH MY GOD. One of my flies has escaped and tried to eat President Obama! I'm so sorry, Mr. President. I should never have gone back into that utility room. I should just have left my bike and my laundry and my trash where it was. Please don't order unmanned drone strikes on my little home, President Obama. I traveled all the way to Philadelphia to vote for you! I went all the way to London for your inauguration! I'm even a vice president in your vice president's fan club! Oh god! How did this happen?

But it's not entirely my fault, see, there's this elderly couple that comes by and bickers in my basement every now and then...

---

Also, another development since last I posted: one of the bears I photographed over in Easthampton the other day has been kidnapped!

The chrome bear in front of the Eastworks building named (I'm not making this up) "Bearly There" was stolen overnight on Saturday following the unveiling of several dozen public-art bears for Easthampton's "Bearfest 2009."

If anyone has seen this bear, perhaps sticking her little chrome paw into a pot of honey or lying in wait to snatch somebody's pickinic basket, please contact the Eastampton police immediately. The alternative is simply too unbearable to contemplate. (get it?)

Here's the full story:

Lord of the Flies

2009-06-15T20:35:00.000-04:00

Every so often, an elderly couple comes to my basement and begins bickering. Well, they're not exactly elderly - early sixties, I'd guess - and it's not exactly a basement - it's the utility room adjacent to mine that merely looks like a basement, all cobwebby and dank, although it's actually on ground level - but these are mere technicalities, and the bickering certainly is bickering.

The couple, whom I'll call Earl and Madge, are charged with removing the trash from my unit (known half-affectionately by me as The Submarine) and the three other units in my building. They back their old maroon sedan up to the building, stomp around to the back door (frequently startling me at my computer as they pass my ground-level windows or, worse, catching me at my morning exercises, mid-twirl and half-naked), and proceed to argue and accuse their way through the plastic bags of trash and recyclables that accumulate just inside the back door.

What happens to the trash after this is anyone's guess. It almost certainly gets piled into the trunk of Earl and Madge's sedan, but where they dump it, and what happens to it between the collecting and the dumping, is a mystery. If only the Valley had a Trash Museum, like the good folks of the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority have in Hartford, CT, I would have a much clearer picture of what happens to all those donut boxes, pie tins, watermelon husks, and empty bottles of Dan Akroyd wine that I carelessly toss into the appropriate receptacles.

If the Valley does build a Trash Museum, it should, like the Hartford Trash Museum, be located at a recycling plant where I could become entranced by the sight of quick-moving conveyor belts carrying plastic containers past lines of gloved and goggled men who knock things off the belt with great force and what seems like great arbitrariness. I could stare in wonder at the guy who pre-sorts the recyclables and thus has the enviable job of removing all the weird, unrecyclable items that somehow found their way into the plant - dresses, lamps, and god knows what else. When I tired of that, I could wander downstairs and take part in a low-stakes scavenger hunt in and around something called the Temple of Trash, or get one of the museum ladies to open up the compost boxes and show me a few red wigglers, little worms who are, in my experience, much more red than they are wiggly, and who really love corn cobs.

If the Valley did have a Trash Museum, it might even look something like this, but only through the lens of a low-resolution BlackBerry camera:

And then we would all go out for burritos and pie.

Sadly, however, there is no such educational facility in the immediate NoHo area, and so I am left to speculate with woeful imprecision as to what happens to my refuse after Earl and Madge have had their way with it.

Even this uncertainty would be a tolerable state of affairs compared to what has happened recently, however. For recently, within the last two weeks or so, Earl and Madge have disappeared.

I don't want to alarm anyone. This has happened at least once before, and after about three weeks and a couple of phone calls to the property management company, during which I hinted darkly at the appeal of uncollected, rotting trash for certain species of furry vermin, Earl and Madge returned, more dispirited than ever at the heaps of rubbish they had to pile into their sedan, but efficient in its removal. I remain hopeful, therefore, that their current absence will likewise prove to be temporary, but I dread what may happen in the meantime.

I got a most unwelcome glimpse of what an Earl-and-Madgeless future might look like on Saturday, which was a nice, sunny day of the kind we haven't seen in the Valley recently. Thrilled by this rare glimpse of sunshine, I raced into the utility room to retrieve my bicycle, which had only seen service twice this spring. As I swung the door open, I a thousand angry flies swarmed onto me like bees on a honeybear. Reader, I yelped. Then I lurched back, slammed the door, and made a quick scan of the immediate area to see if any stray flies had found their way into my apartment. It all looked clear.

Regrouping, I vowed that I wouldn't let a bunch of flies - no matter how numerous or demonic - deprive me of my bike ride. Sealing my lips and squinting by eyes, I swung back into the utility room, slammed the door, grabbed the bike, and swung back through the door as quickly as possible, trying to minimize the number of flies who would inevitably leak into The Submarine. I then went on a soul-soothing ride through Easthampton and took pictures of bears.

On my return, I found that at least two dozen flies had swept into my apartment with me and my bicycle, and I spent the rest of the weekend swatting flies like a maniac. No sooner would I track down one and squish it against the window than two more would begin buzzing in my light fixtures. A pleasant evening reading on the couch with Kate became a frenzied battle against a dozen buzzing flies along the entire length of the living room. I even briefly considered turning out all the lights and sitting quietly in the dark, just so I wouldn't have to hear them bumping and humming against the lamps.

I can now state with reasonable certainty that, as of this writing, the living room flies have been entirely annihilated. It hasn't been pretty, this war of extermination, and there have been times when I've done things of which I am not proud. But war is hell, my friends, and even the best among us cannot know how he will act until he finds himself right there, face-to-face with his own mortality, in the shape of two dozen tiny, crazed insects determined to nibble him to death, bite by excruciating bite.

With the return of clouds and gloomy weather today the fly problem appears to have eased. I've been able to take the trash out and do a load of laundry without inviting another swarm into my living room, but I know this is only a temporary respite. Until the cavalry arrives - in the form of two foul-tempered retirees in a maroon sedan - I will remain under siege - and I will be afraid, I will be very afraid.

Preemptive Nostalgia

2009-06-10T19:39:00.001-04:00

Right now my head is in two places.

One of those places is Nashville, with respect to which moving plans are slowly falling into place. Kate and I are headed there in a couple of weeks to apartment hunt, and we've been getting the skinny on the best neighborhoods, etc, from my future colleagues. We're talking about what we want in an apartment, what sorts of friends we might have, where - if anywhere - we'll be able to find gay people, and whether I should contemplate doing with pie what I've been doing with french toast. We've been doing research into Nashville and Tennessee writers we might like to read; I recently bought a collection of short stories by Peter Taylor and am currently accepting further recommendations. Meanwhile, I've also been trying to figure out how to teach five hundred years of world history in one semester to a seventy-student class (the answer: teach it by focusing on seven cities whose histories encapsulate broader themes in modern history, specifically Berlin, Nanking, Luanda, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Delhi, and Mexico City), and Kate's been trying to find some sort of library-based employment (tips kindly accepted). And, of course, we've been getting ourselves all excited by watching Robert Altman's Nashville and vowing that we, too, will wear rhinestones and bouffant hairdos when we get to town, just like the folks in the movie.

But the thing about moving is that you have to leave somewhere behind before you get somewhere new. So the other place my head is is the Valley, with respect to which I'm feeling mighty nostalgic - never mind that I haven't left it yet. I always knew that my stay here would be brief, and I've done a pretty good job getting to know the place, but that's just making it all the harder to leave. Some things you just can't do anywhere else, or not just anywhere else - last Sunday's trip, with two of my favorite people, down Route 47 for some strawberry picking, followed by a visit to the Montague Bookmill (about which I've spoken before) and ice cream and cow-petting at a nearby creamery is a good example. The sun was shining, the pollen was flying, and nothing was stolen from my car during the whole time we were parked at the Bookmill, a fact unremarkable in itself except that I had accidentally left my door wide open for the almost two hours we were there (whoops). Will any of those things be possible in Nashville? Sadly, I don't think they will be.

And now I've just started reading Home Town by Tracy Kidder*, and it's making things worse. This is because it's a book about Northampton - about the people, the politics, the streets, the history, and the buildings that make up the fabric of the community, centering on the (true) story of a morally conflicted local cop named Tommy O'Connor. It's a bit dated now (most of it is set in the mid-1990s), but it captures the look of the place precisely. Observe:

Men and women, women and women, strolled arm in arm past the street musicians. Now and then Tommy would see a cellist seated on a chair outside a coffee shop, or a troupe of Bolivian panpipers on the sidewalk by the Unitarian church. ... People with that drifty academic look headed for the readings at the bookstores, and people of the avant-garde, in collarless shirts, the occasional beret, headed for the old bank building that had been recycled into an art gallery. Tommy would glance, and glance again, at the little knots of costumed youth loitering in Pulaski Park and by the Information Booth - skateboarders with their baseball caps turned backward, homeboys with baggy pants and gold chains, Goths in torn black clothes, adorned with spikey jewelry. Often, out in front of the Haymarket coffee shop, a group of Gothically attired youths sat in a circle on the sidewalk - some of Northampton's vegetarian anarchists, talking revolution and for now impeding only food traffic.

And:

No one seems in a great hurry, but many seem serious. No one dresses to say, "I'm rich." If anything, most say with their costumes, "I'm smart." Many could be blue-collar workers or perpetual graduate students, or both. Or financiers. Guessing professions on Main Street is tricky.

Reading this, I think, "Gosh, I miss Northampton!" And I realize that, even as I go about my day among the very people and streets Kidder's describing, I'm already consigning these last few weeks in Northampton to the realm of memory. It's a bit like watching something on the DVR at a slight delay - the Saturday Night Live episode you're recording is 45 minutes along, but you're still on minute 37 - or like watching a movie where the soundtrack is a split second behind the image.

Am I being a bit dramatic? Yes indeedy. But I'm being honest, too. Moving is both sad and exciting - I know this because I've done it an awful lot lately. And the weirdest time is the time just before the move, when you can see the end but can't quite get there yet. And trying to look ahead feels a bit like trying to run underwater. But what else are you gonna do?

---
* Kidder is probably best known for Mountains beyond Mountains, his biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, and The Soul of a New Machine, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the fledgling computer industry.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Sully's

2009-06-05T07:43:00.005-04:00

This quest is really starting to take its toll.

It seemed like a harmless idea several months ago, maybe even a fun idea - to scour the Valley for great french toast and report back to you, the great big world, about what I found. Along the way I'd learn something not only about french toast (with respect to which, I may modestly assert, I'm becoming quite discerning), but also about the place I was living. It would be an excuse to peer into the many nooks and crannies into which the great, diverse masses wander in search of breakfast and coffee and conversation, a way to touch the Valley's soul. I have, it's true, been amply rewarded for my troubles. I have learned much, I have traveled widely, and I have eaten some very good french toast.

But I have also seen shit that would turn you white.

First there was my diner juggernaut, which culminated in that traumatizing visit to Kathy's. Several weeks later, I still wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming about the sickly, crusty slime that I ate there. Lately, I'm even finding myself unable to take pleasure in pure, simple things - a child's laughter, a kitten drinking from a bowl of milk, a baby clinging to her mother's shoulder - without a sudden vision of Kathy's french toast flashing before my eyes (and nostrils) and reminding me of the evil of which this world is capable.

Now there's Sully's, a place I had long been dying to visit, enticed as I was by the sign on Route 9 that advertises the place as "The Home of Polish Music." "Polish music!" I thought, "This place must have great french toast! Ooh, I wonder if it's Polish french toast! Whoopee!"

Oh, gentle reader, how wrong I was.

The first thing that strikes you on entering Sully's is the distinct lack of Polish music, or, indeed, of anything that might indicate that Polish music ever has, or ever will be, performed there, much less would make its home there. The menus - blue rectangles of unlaminated construction paper dappled with stains from long-ago meals, stains so severe that they render whole sections of the menu utterly unreadable - contain not a whiff even of Polish food, other than a side of kielbasa that you can order with your meal, if you dare. There is, it's true, a photograph of a local band hanging on one wall, though there is nothing about this photograph to suggest either a) that the band is even remotely Polish, or b) that it has ever played at Sully's.

The next thing that strikes you about Sully's is how old everything is. Not good-old - like, say, Istanbul's Galata neighborhood - but bad-old, like what happened to the cheese you inadvertantly left out on the counter before you went off to Istanbul for a week. Along one wall there hang large, faded yellow banners celebrating the sporting triumphs of the Hopkins Academy soccer and softball teams between the years 1979 and 1983 (said academy, incidentally, has recently been spotted with a "For Sale" sign posted on their roadside marquee). Above the counter there hang photographs of children who are probably nearing retirement age by now. The floor is covered in ratty carpet abundantly splattered with dark stains and covered with large crumbs, some of them approaching crouton size. The menus, as already noted, are in dire need of a good disinfecting. The decor, such as it is, is a hodgepodge of knicknacks of the sort that you usually find in the "free" box after a yard sale, the centerpiece being a large bass - the fish, not the musical instrument - mounted on a plank hanging on the wall and looking for all the world like it's going to escape out the back door.

The setting, then, was less than auspicious, but still we (Kate, the poor dear, was with me) decided to make a go of it. Intrigued by a faded handwritten sign advertising potato pancakes, we ordered some, thinking that this might add a bit of Polish flavor to our breakfast. In the same spirit, I also ordered my french toast with a side of sausage, thinking that it might, in fact, be Polish sausage. Not a bit of it. The sausage was two black hockey pucks of standard breakfast sausage, and the "potato pancakes" were, in fact, hash browns molded halfheartedly into three flat, uneven discs.

And the french toast? It was certainly a notch or two above Kathy's, but that is faint praise indeed. There was no powdered sugar, the syrup was corn syrup, and overall there was little of what might be described as flavor. But that's not necessarily a bad thing - if the ambiance was anything to go by, the less flavor one encounters at Sully's, the better. It could easily have been much, much worse.

And so the search for The Perfect French Toast beats on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into my belly.

If Nashville's anything like Istanbul, we're gonna be just fine.

2009-06-02T09:07:00.001-04:00

If you've seen the pictures, you'll know that Istanbul was gorgeous and peaceful, full of mosques and pudding shops, romantic (in the heart-going-pitter-patter sense) and Romantic (in the melancholy-ruins-of-a-lost-empire sense). If you haven't seen the pictures, I'd urge you to do so now.

When I move to Istanbul, I think I'll move to the Galata neighborhood, in the heart of what's called the New District. It's "new" in relation to the Old Town area across the bridge, where the buildings - such as the Aya Sofya (or Hagia Sofia in Greek), an Orthodox-church-turned-mosque - date back to the sixth century, the heyday of old Constantinople. The Old Town is where the big-ticket attractions are - in addition to the Aya Sofya, there's also the Ottomans' enormous Blue Mosque, the dank Byzantine underground cistern, the labyrinthine (and heavily Disneyfied) Grand Bazaar and Spice Bazaar, the sprawling Topkapı Palace, and the 16th-century Suleymaniye Mosque (largely shuttered for renovations) - and it's where most of the non-Turkish people in the city congregate, most of them, in our experience, Germans. In addition to Germans, the Old Town is full of hawkers trying to entice you into their shops and restaurants with calls of "Hello, my friend!" and "Where are from?" and "Hello yes please!" It's where old men selling fruit from rolling carts will go to great lengths to ensure that you buy 5 lira (about $3.25) worth of fruit, no matter what it is you actually ask for - ask for two bananas, and they'll throw together a bundle of five bananas, four apricots, and a handful of tasteless little green plum things to bring the total price to five lira, and before you know what happened you've bought the whole batch and a little more besides. It's where cheesy restaurants encourage you to dress up like an Ottoman (fez, silly vest, pointy shoes), puff on a water pipe, recline on a bed of decadent pillows, and watch a group of bored belly dancers. It's where you can while away an afternoon haggling theatrically with aggressively mustached men selling mass-produced jewelry and backgammon boards.

Aya Sofya

Crowds at Topkapı Palace

Ottoman kitsch in the Old Town

Five-lira fruit seller

The Old Town is where people go to find a Turkey that probably never existed. All of these things are worth experiencing, and some - such as the Aya Sofya - are simply unmissable, but one quickly discovers that the real Istanbul is to be found elsewhere.

Mind you, the New District, where Galata is, can be pretty touristy as well (more so, certainly, than the Asian side of the city, across the Bosphorus, which remained largely unexplored by us apart from an evening jaunt to a fabulous restaurant called Çiya, where we had an assortment of dishes that were stunningly delicious but whose principal ingredients were, and remain, a complete mystery). Galata is dominated by the 14th-century Galata tower, built by the Genoese when this part of Constantinople was controlled by Italian merchants. It's a decidedly Western-facing piece of architecture, one that's crawling with tourists by day but ghostly and forlorn at night.

Galata Tower

The same is true of many of the smaller buildings in the neighborhood as well, which crowd together along narrow, cobblestoned lanes that twist their way up and down the steep hill on which the tower perches. By day there are music shops and sidewalk cafes and street vendors here. Not too far away is the once-grubby-now-trendy district of Beyoğlu, with its swanky nightclubs and cafes, and the crowded Istiklal Street, which resembles a European high street with its retail chains and street performers (think Grafton Street in Dublin, Monckebergstrasse in Hamburg, or Oxford Street in London).

Istiklal Street

But at night - ah, at night Galata is deserted and still, apart from some scurrying stray cats and perhaps the odd gaggle of wandering stray Germans. The dogs, also strays, nap at the foot of the tower, where a cellist might serenade a few lonely diners. The taxis that careen through the twisty lanes have disappeared, allowing you to wander the murky streets freely, like a phantom.

Galata at night

This, then, is where I'll live when I move to Istanbul. This was actually a subject of some considerable discussion between Kate and myself, when, on a Friday ferry cruise up the Bosphorus, we spotted many lovely seaside hamlets that would also be ideal places to relocate. We concluded, however, that these would be better for suited for retirement, after it becomes difficult to navigate the hills and cobbles (and dog poop) of Galata. So: Galata now, seaside hamlet later.

The Seaside Hamlet of Rumeli Kavaği

The thing is, I'm probably not going to be moving to Istanbul soon. See, first I have to move to Nashville and put in a few years doing this professor thing, during which time I'll be able to save up enough to relocate to Galata. I figure it'll take about 2-3 years, max.

In the meantime, I expect I'll survive in Nashville just fine, provided it has the following things that Istanbul also has:

1. Pudding shops. The kind that sell real pudding, mind you. Not the meat-and-innards kind they sell in Britain, but chocolate and vanilla and something called Noah's Ark, which has nuts and raisins and orange peels and stuff. We had pudding almost every day in Istanbul, and it was the most fun I've ever had. (Though I really wish I could write that sentence without the "almost.")

2. Cheap fish sandwiches underneath the bridge where the fish is caught. Under the Galata Bridge, which connects the Old and New districts, there are restaurants grilling and selling fish, in sandwich form, that has been caught by the men crowded atop the bridge with fishing poles and empty yogurt buckets. This tradition also needs to be present in Nashville.

3. Cheap ferry journeys (ca. $1) to Asia. This one is self explanatory.

4. Whirling Dervishes. I'd be content with whirling Pentecostals in Nashville, but they need to be wearing white flowing robes. Oversized WWJD sweatshirts are not acceptable substitutes.

5. Friendly men named Mustafa who will serve you tea and tell you the story of his family's shop while he overcharges you for an antique teapot.

6. Full-service intercity buses in which an attendant comes around with coffee, tea, juice, water, and snacks, and concludes (and/or begins) the journey by dumping handfuls of dripping, lemony hand santizer into your cupped hands, so that it overflows onto your trousers.

7. At least one mosque designed by the great Ottoman architect Sinan.

8. Coffee that is somewhere between liquid and solid and tastes a bit like waking up with a hangover.

9. Shops selling and displaying baklava and Turkish Delight of every color in the rainbow.

10. Ubiquitous portraits of the founder of the republic. This person should appear not only on every single denomination of the local currency, but also on gigantic flags draped over buildings and in framed portraits in the shops and cafes. He should also look a little like a 1930s movie star.

11. A cheerful, curious, enthusiastic, sensitive, patient, and gorgeous lady to explore the city with. She should also exhibit great enthusiasm for pudding.

If Nashville has just five or six of these things, it's going to be a lovely place to live. I already know it'll have at least one. Now to do get to work researching the rest.

Turkey Days

2009-05-27T17:43:00.002-04:00

I'm back from Istanbul and it was fabulous.

There was pudding and mosques and cisterns and Germans and pudding and dervishes and coffee and hand sanitizer and bananas and pudding and a strange alien-looking corporate mascot and baklava and mustaches and Ataturk and tiny green plums and fruit-shaped soap and castles and water pipes and fish sandwiches and pudding and rooftop terraces and dreamy sunsets over the Bosphorus and Turkish Delight and things that look like bagels but aren't and Jewish museums and pudding.

I'm still thinking about how I'll treat all this in a full, proper post, but here are some photos to tide you over in the meantime.

Did I mention there was pudding?

Caught by the Turks

2009-05-15T07:59:00.000-04:00

Which do you prefer to do?

When traveling someplace new, do you prefer to learn everything you can about a place beforehand - I'm talking not only guide books, but also novels, movies, memoirs, journalism, phrase books, food blogs, think-tank research papers, etc. - so that you can appreciate what you see when you see it, or do you prefer to approach a place with few preconceptions, to do a bit of practical research and then let yourself be surprised by the rest?

I used to do the latter quite frequently - when Jon and I took our rail tour of Europe back in college we were armed with little more than a large "Europe 1997" guide book and a vague notion of what the German word for "thanks" is - but in recent years I've been moving more toward the former. Partly this is because I have more time, disposable income, and access to information (the internet has grown substantially since 1997) than I did when I first started traveling, but I also suspect that I'm slightly less death-defying than I was in my youth, slightly more cautious. I like to know what I'm getting into before I head somewhere unknown. But I also don't want to miss anything, especially if I'm going somewhere that I may never visit again, and I trust others to tell me what to see and think and feel more than I trust myself. This may or may not be a good thing.

So, for instance: Kate and I are going to Istanbul soon. On, like, Monday. We found a cheap flight (traveling is so cheap right now - if you have a little time and still have a job, go play around on Kayak and see for yourself) and we'd never been there before, so that was reason enough. Pretty spontaneous, huh? Maybe even impulsive?

Not so fast: since we got the tickets about a month ago we've been burying ourselves in all things Turkey - and when I say "we" I really mean "I", since, although Kate's been doing her share of research and preparation, she's been exercising a level of restraint that has been completely inaccessible to your humble blogger. This is because, as she says, she doesn't want her experience to be too heavily mediated by others and would like to approach the city on her own terms, but it's also (probably) because she actually has a job, and therefore has other things to keep her occupied. As much as I admire her reasoning, however, I appear to be operating under no such constraints. And it's becoming a bit of a problem.

Here's a sampling of what I've read, in whole or in part, in preparation for this trip:

Guide Books
Rick Steves' Istanbul - this is a bit chatty and hand-holdy, the target audience (apparently) being the sorts of loud, obnoxious American tourists who need to be reminded every few pages to be more respectful and culturally sensitive than they are likely to be. We bought it because it has lengthy descriptions of major tourist attractions whose signage is unlikely to be in English.

Fodors Turkey - a standard guidebook with lots of information about places outside of Istanbul, in case we decide to escape the city.

Lonely Planet Istanbul (tiny edition) - Lonely Planets are best for their food/drink/shopping recommendations, less-good for their info on cultural/historical/sightseeing matters, and this one appears to be no exception. Which is perfectly fine.

Lonely Planet Turkish Phrasebook - Kate's been looking through this one more than I. Turkish is hard! And they've got lots of dots and squiggles on their letters! This I expect will be most confusing for me.

Non-Guide Books (already read)
Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book - a novel by Turkey's most famous modern novelist that evokes a dreamlike Istanbul heavy with snow and melancholy, a novel (and a city) not for the faint of heart or the short of attention span.

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul - a memoir by Turkey's most famous modern novelist that evokes a dreamlike Istanbul heavy with snow and melancholy, etc.

Scott Malcolmson, Borderlands - a work of journalism by an American traveling through Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Uzbekistan immediately after the fall of communism, just as new (or long-dormant) ethnic nationalisms are beginning to arise.

Non-Guide Books (not-yet read)
Mary Lee Settle, Turkish Reflections: A Biography of a Place - terrible title, but I found it used, and it looks like a potentially interesting description of Turkey by an outsider who's spent a lot of time in the country.

Francis Yeats-Brown, Caught by the Turks - great title, by a soldier who was captured by the Ottomans during WWI. Came across this one while doing research about India - Yeats-Brown also spent lots of time in the Indian army and wrote about his experiences, most famously, in Lives of a Bengal Lancer.

Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul - a novel examining, I think, the legacy of the Armenian genocide for a couple of Turkish families. Kate read it, but I haven't.

Films
"Across the Bridge" - a documentary about contemporary music in Istanbul, hosted by a very unintentionally comic German musician.

"Takva: A Man's Fear of God" - about a simple, holy man who is forced to confront the modern world and doesn't handle it too well.

"Head-On" - (haven't-yet-watched) about Turkish immigrants in Germany.

"The Edge of Heaven" - ditto

Websites
Too many to list, but here's a sampling:

James Fallows on whirling dervishes, in The Atlantic (from Joey).

The NYT's Frugal Traveler goes to Turkey.

Ottoman Empire T-Shirts (we are so going here!)

Istanbul Eats (food blog)

Cafe Fernando (another food blog)

Hurriyet, one of Turkey's major newspapers (in English!).

Analysis and reporting on contemporary Turkish politics at Opendemocracy.net.

Turkey's Dark Side, a paper by the European Security Initiative on the underside of Turkish democracy.

And so on...

By this point, I've read/seen so much about the place that I kind of feel like I don't even need to go there. But I will, and it'll be great, and I predict that there will still be one or two things that'll surprise me. I may not have gotten the balance between ignorance and preparation completely right this time, but that's okay. A new city is a new city, and if you don't know somebody there who's local and can show you around, you've got to rely on your own wits and instincts - and there's nothing wrong with honing those wits and instincts with lots and lots (and lots) of research.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Green Street Cafe

2009-05-11T21:08:00.001-04:00

Sunday was Mother's Day, and Mother's Day means brunch. And brunch, in my world, means french toast. So it was pretty much a given that I would spend the morning of Mother's Day munching on pan-grilled bread drizzled with syrup. Never mind that my mother is several thousand miles away - I'm sure that if she had been here, she would have wanted to be taken to brunch, and, had that been the case, I would probably have taken her to the Green Street Cafe, which stands about a block from my apartment, just across the street from Smith College.

So it was in honor of both of our absent mothers that Kate and I ventured out yesterday morning, timing our visit to coincide with the opening of the cafe at 10am, reasoning, not without reason, that the place would quickly fill up with people who had made the same Mother's Day plans as we did, albeit accompanied by their actual mothers.

Sure enough, when we walked through the door the jolly, white-haired, ponytailed man that greeted us said to Kate, "Well you don't look old enough to be a mother!" Which is not strictly true - a woman in her late 20s, no matter how youthful looking, could certainly be a mother (indeed, back home it's practically required) - but I suppose he may have meant that she didn't look old enough to be my mother, which is certainly true. Though I'd humbly submit that my actual mother doesn't look old enough to be mother, either. But that's neither here nor there.

As it happened, the cafe wasn't very busy, although a steady stream of families did file in while we dined. This gave us an opportunity to contemplate the most striking feature of the Green Street Cafe, a vibrant mural that takes up an entire wall along the cafe's west side. The mural, called "Last Staff Supper at Green Street Cafe," is modeled on Da Vinci's "Last Supper" and depicts a group of people - cafe employees and owners - gathered around a Christ-ish figure holding a blueprint. Here are some photos I took; better ones are here.

The artist, Jeff Mack, painted it to raise awareness of the long-festering dispute between the cafe and its landlady, Smith College. It's a classic town-gown quarrel: the college, which owns the cafe as well as most of the surrounding neighborhood, is building a new engineering building that's disrupting business and threatens eventually to obliterate the block of buildings in which the cafe sits. The cafe's parking lot has been closed for nearly two years due to the construction, as has its outdoor patio, and this, say the owners, has cost the cafe some 75% of its business. The mural was painted almost three years ago, when the dispute began, but things are only now starting to get settled - in March the cafe owners filed a lawsuit, and in April a judge found in favor of the college. Smith promises to look after the interests of the neighborhood, but the cafe's lease runs out in 2012, after which the Green Street Cafe could well cease to exist.

Which would be a shame, because it's a very friendly place that serves some very wonderful food. They grow a lot of their food in their own gardens and buy most of the rest locally - the menu said that they have a "Locavore Rating" of 4 out of 5, which sounded pretty good to us ("locavore," I believe, is Spanish for "crazy eater") - and the menu changes often to reflect whatever food is in season.

And the french toast, I'm happy to report, was wonderful. It may just be that, after my recent diner experiences, anything that didn't taste like mushy-egg-burp would inevitably taste magically delicious, but I'm pretty sure most objective observers would agree with me. The bread was a sort of chewy sourdough, light and crispy and (for the most part) not too gooey, the syrup was not only real but also warm, which is an innovation of which I heartily approve, and the overall taste was sweet and flavorful. My principal complaint is that there wasn't enough of it, and, for that reason, the Lone Wolf retains the lead. But the Green Street Cafe easily takes it place among the runners-up, sharing a spot with the Esselon Cafe and Haymarket as a purveyor of Almost-Perfect French Toast.

This prompts me to suggest to the owners of the cafe what seems, to me, a fairly obvious solution to their dispute with Smith: drop the lawsuits and instead invite the college administration over for some free french toast. Call it the "We Love Smith College French Toast Gala," get someone like Rachel Maddow or Judith Butler to come give a keynote address, and they'll be all, "Wrecking ball? What wrecking ball? Here's a lease until 2062!"

Seriously, y'all. Try it. Just try not to drizzle syrup on that lease.

Why I Love the ODNB

2009-05-08T09:05:00.002-04:00

Occasionally I take a break from eating french toast to actually do a bit of work. This is, after all, what I'm getting paid for. Sort of. I'm a pretty self-motivating kind of fellow, but without deadlines or time pressure or even much of a regular schedule that would force me to squeeze in a specific amount of research-work per week, it's difficult to make much headway. And then what headway I make is very hazy and ill-defined: one of the drawbacks of being an academic is that, apart from the teaching (and frequently even then), we don't produce much in the way of deliverables. Which is to say that we very rarely see tangible, quantifiable products arise from our labor in the way that, say, a newspaper editor might, or an assembly-line worker. It took me about eight years to produce my first book (which still hasn't been published, though I'm assured it will appear soon), and that was with something like three years in which I was technically doing nothing, or nearly nothing, other than working on it. Heaven knows how long it'll take to produce the next one, what with all the teaching and committee work I'll be doing, to say nothing of the country band Kate and I will be starting once we arrive in Nashville.

But that's not really what I want to talk about this morning.

My current project involves, in part, investigating the lives and careers of the men who ran the British Empire. The overall project is a sort of comparative thingy looking at how the British state understood and responded to communal violence in Ireland and South Asia (that's how I put it in my fellowship proposals, anyway). This means looking at who was governing a particular spot where rioting was taking place, what their prior experiences would have been before they arrived there, and, crucially, whether any of the administrators in India had any experience in Ireland (or vice versa). Knowing this would help me understand what sort of ideological baggage these guys brought to their duties, whether they were trying to apply any supposed "lessons" from one part of the empire to another part, and, more broadly, how the different parts of the empire interacted with one another. The idea is to see the British Empire - and, by extension, imperialism generally - not as a top-down system in which the center imposes its will upon the periphery, but rather as a decentralized, improvised, and slightly unstable system with a whole bunch of (occasionally interlocking, occasionally colliding) moving parts. Sort of like a sixth-grade band recital.

This need to understand the lives of Britain's imperial administrators has brought me into close communion with one of the great towering achievements (alongside Jaffa Cakes and Monty Python's Life of Brian) of British civilization: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Haven't read the ODNB yet? Don't feel bad: it contains biographical sketches of over 56,000 figures from British history (or, as they put it, "Remarkable people in any walk of life who were connected with the British Isles"), from the ancient Romans all the way up to people who died in 2005.* You can access it online, but you have to have a subscription, or the library you're using has to have a subscription, which almost all UK public libraries and most good American university libraries will. You can also buy it as a 60-volume set for $6,500 (Amazon also has a used set for a mere $2099.97), but honestly, who has the space? There's also a free podcast (one life every two weeks), an RSS feed, a life-a-day email, and a few freebies on the website as well, all of which you should probably try out before you commit to buying the whole thing.

I love the ODNB for many reasons, perhaps the most important (and least interesting) of which is that it's a wonderful, quick reference for me as I do my research. All I have to do, when I come across an unfamiliar name, is type it into the search engine and see if there's anything on the dude (and, for what I'm doing, it's almost always a dude) I'm curious about. If there is, I've suddenly got a lot of insight that I didn't previously have into what went on at a very remote place in a very remote time. If there's not, I shrug and move on. The articles also contain lots of information about the archives in which a person's papers are held, the most significant secondary sources that discuss the person's life and career, and (somewhat perplexingly) the person's wealth at time of death.

But the real fun starts when I let myself get distracted by the contents of the articles. Usually I just skim them for salient career information, family history, attitudes toward specific political issues, etc., but I often come across a sentence like the following, from Anthony Clayton's biography of Lord Francis George Montagu Douglas Scott (1879-1952), and then I'm hooked: "From 1905 to 1910 Scott served as aide-de-camp to the viceroy of India, the earl of Minto, combining his duties with his two principal sporting interests, cricket and pig-sticking." Pig-sticking! Genius.

Or maybe something like the following, from David Matless's biography of Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (1863-1942): "His marriage lacked emotional depth: Helen Younghusband led a quiet and melancholy home life (from 1921 to 1937 at Westerham, Kent), while her husband ranged around the country and the globe. In 1939 he met Madeline Lees, thirty-two years his junior and mother of seven children, with whom he conducted a passionately mystical affair until his death." How can I not go back and read the whole article after something like that?

So here's the thing about the ODNB, and the reason I love it so: it's a hybrid publication, an essentially Victorian enterprise with a modern veneer. Way back in the 1880s George Smith and Leslie Stephen, with typical Victorian grandiosity, conceived a comprehensive series of biographies of every important Briton who had ever lived. With considerable expense and massive scholarly energy, the two men - one as publisher, the other as editor - began churning out biographical sketches, in alphabetical order, every three months from 1885 to 1900. Eventually the sketches comprised 63 volumes and represented the work of over 600 contributors. The press revised the volumes for a few years and then, from 1912 to 1996, they stopped producing new editions, although additional volumes on the recently deceased appeared regularly.

In the 1990s the OUP decided to publish a new edition, bringing in modern experts to revise the musty old articles with modern historiographical techniques and perspectives, as well as adding new entries on people who may have been overlooked in the original edition (women, for example). This was also a massive and expensive undertaking, and it's still ongoing. Most of the major historical figures from the first edition have been considerably reevaluated, the new contributors bringing in the most recent scholarship and asking all the right, politically correct questions about their subjects. These are usually quite insightful and engaging, and a whole lot easier to digest than the sort of 600-page, day-by-day biographies that seem to be all the rage these days.

But I love this new ODNB primarily for the lives that have fallen through the cracks, the ones that have not been revised (or at least not very heavily), the ones where the original Victorian prose still survives in all its unselfconscious, mauve-tinted glory. Most of the men I'm looking up were pretty minor figures, and so apparently haven't merited much attention from the ODNB's modern contributors. Men like Lord Elgin, a not-especially-successful Viceroy of India from 1894-99, whose letters I came across at the British Library in January and who, it seems, conducted a fairly tense correspondence with Queen Victoria on the topic of the government's relations with Muslims. Or Sir Antony MacDonnell, an Irish Catholic who served as a provincial governor in India in the 1890s before returning to Ireland to serve as Undersecretary at Dublin Castle from 1901-8. These were reasonably important men in their time but almost wholly forgotten these days, and, while the ODNB gives me a good outline of their lives, it also gives me a glimpse into how these people were regarded by their contemporaries, for it is by them that the articles about them were originally written, and many of these assessments have been left intact by the modern contributors. Much of what they say fleshes out the personalities of these men, their priorities and their culture, much better than a bare-bones encyclopedia entry could ever do.

So, for instance, we have Sir William Duke (1863-1924), an administrator in Bengal, as described by P. G. Robb: “Duke thoroughly enjoyed Indian life, especially in its outdoor aspects, was a fair shot, and acquired a good field knowledge of the fauna and flora of Bengal. An indefatigable walker, he liked to explore his districts and to get to know the villagers, by whom he was called ‘the sahib who does all his daks (journeys) on foot’.”

Then there's George Robert Canning (Lord) Harris (1851-1932), Governor of Bombay from 1890-5, described by Katherine Prior as an avid cricketer who "always regarded his official work as a distraction from cricket, albeit a necessary one..." Prior goes on to say, "after outbreaks of sectarian rioting in 1893 and 1894, Harris saw himself as an umpire in India, deploying the rules of fair play to balance the competing interests of Hindus, Muslims, and Parsis." Communal riot as cricket match, with the state as umpire? That's absolutely brilliant, is what that is, and it gives me insight into the whole phenomenon that I hadn't ever considered - a way of looking at the person and period that I, from my 21st-century, non-cricket-playing perch, would never have imagined. Plus it's also kind of amusing, and also maybe a little bit depressing.

I could give you similar examples all day, but I'll restrain myself.

The wonderful thing about ODNB, then, is not only that it's amusing (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not), but also that - in many instances - it illuminates its subjects from two very different vantage points. It gives you the modern, sophisticated, well-researched version of a person's life, the sort of thing that is both fairly objective but also somewhat distant, far-removed from the era in which he (or, occasionally, she) lived, and therefore a perspective that's slightly out of sympathy with these people. But it also gives you - in the lives of the relatively minor figures - traces of an older way of doing history, a more subjective point of view that, in the case of the Victorian imperial administrators who were actually alive during the ODNB's first publication run, is much closer to the lives it describes. At its best, it can give you the impression of sitting around a fireplace listening to people tell stories about someone they knew, rather than sitting in a lecture hall while some slick young professor reads you her latest peer-reviewed journal article.

As for me, I'm now considering a chapter on pig-sticking.

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*One of the principles for inclusion in the ODNB is that you have to be dead - so, for instance, John Lennon and George Harrison have entries but Paul and Ringo do not.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Diner Roundup

2009-05-04T20:56:00.001-04:00

Good golly but I'm getting tired of diners. I've told you before about how I once romanticized diners as remnants of a vanishing America only to slowly realize that, whatever their charms, their food is usually pretty bad. Well, over the past couple of weeks, as I've visited a few more diners in the Valley, I've come to a further realization: although they may seem quirky and authentic compared to the soul-sucking sameness of the national franchises, diners can be quite boring and predictable when compared to each other.

Imagine a world without fast-food restaurants and casual dining chains. Are you imagining it? No? Maybe this will help: imagine a world before fast-food restaurants and casual dining chains. Okay? What year is it? Like, 1948 or something, right? Now imagine you're driving across the country, or maybe it's your lunch hour at your construction job and you want a cheap, quick meal. Where are you gonna go? What's that? Yup - you're gonna go to a diner. But which diner? That's right - the closest one. And do you know why you're gonna go to the closest one? Because it doesn't friggin matter which diner you go to! They're all the same: same atmosphere (a counter with some stools, a lot of chrome, maybe a larger dining room off to the side), same food (competently produced breakfast items, greasy burgers, some baked goods, watery coffee), same service (surly waitresses who look like they were born there), same customers. Okay, maybe there'll be a bit of variation - a daily special here, an exceptionally good peanut butter pie there - but it's 1948, how much uniformity do you expect?

My point? Diners aren't antidotes to the crushing conformity of the contemporary American dining scene, they're the cause of it. They are the grandparents of all the McDonaldses and Applebeeses and Joe's Crabshackses that are currently ruining our landscape, poisoning our groundwater, and perverting our children. They were the ones who first gave us a taste for the cheap, filling meal and the no-frills, no-surprises menu. They taught us - or they taught our grandparents, who then taught our parents, who then taught us - to treat food like a car treats gasoline, as something that's necessary to keep the engine from knocking and the wheels turning, but not something to be enjoyed. "Food is fuel," says the roadside diner, "perch on a stool, fill 'er up, and head off to where it was you were going." This, of course, is a lie, but we believed it - or our grandparents did - and now look what we're stuck with.

That said, a lie told by a crusty old-timer is always more interesting than a lie told by a youthful, corporate fast-talker, so diners remain superior to their progeny. But they're liars all the same, and we would all do well to bear that in mind.

I'm going to run quickly through the three diners I've hit over the past few weeks in the search for The Perfect French Toast. I was never expecting to find TPFT in these places, and I wasn't really expecting any of these meals to be that memorable - turns out, I was right about the french toast, but only partly right about the memorable bit. This, as you will see, is not a good thing. In what follows I'll be focusing on the differences between these diners, but these are pretty minor variations within the overall uniformity of the diner experience.

Here they are, in ascending order of disgustingness:

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The Route 9 Diner

I always forget about this place, probably because it blends in so well with the parking-lot sea that surrounds it. It's a new building masquerading as an old one, but not very convincingly, and all the exterior chrome (or chrome-like plastic) isn't exactly inviting, nor, to my eye, is the stars-and-stripes motif that dominates the place. When I popped in this morning the place was empty except for several groups of hungover college students boasting about last night's kegger. The waitresses were abrupt and sullen, there was neon track lighting running around the dining room (where I was seated, though not by choice), lots of air conditioning, a rotating pie case, and individual jukeboxes at some of the tables.

I was surprised, however, to see a variety of french-toast options. Theirs is a challah french toast, a phenomenon to which I'm becoming quite accustomed, and it was offered with all sorts of bells and whistles, if I wanted them: walnuts, bananas, strawberries, etc. I refrained, of course, and ordered it straight, no chaser. I noted that my waitress, who hardly looked at me, didn't offer me real maple syrup, as another waitress did at a table nearby, and when my plate arrived I was depressed to find two plastic containers of restaurant-supply maple-flavored corn syrup, alongside plastic containers of butter. The bread itself was crisp on the outside and not too mushy on the inside, a passable effort at gourmet french toast in a decidedly non-gourmet establishment, and I left feeling well-fed but considerably beaten down by the neon shininess, the serving-staff sullenness, and the fratboy gossipiness. I won't be back.

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The Bluebonnet Diner

The first time I tried to eat here, way back in the fall, it was Sunday and they were closed. The second time I tried, it was also Sunday and they were closed. Beginning to detect a pattern, but utterly failing to understand why a diner would close on Sundays, I tried again during a weekday, and they were open. Whatever I had at the time was fine, but completely uninteresting.

The Bluebonnet is certainly a much more attractive place than the Route 9. It's an old-style dining-car diner, and on the outside it advertises "Broasted Chicken" - which is a way of preparing chicken about which I must confess complete ignorance. Instead of looking into the matter further, however, I've simply been pretending that the sign says "Breasted Chicken" and having myself a good, juvenile chuckle whenever I drive past.

Inside, the place looks like any old diner, although it is worth noting that the dining room off to the side does sport a miniature toy train that chugs along below the ceiling. The customers are mostly old, mostly overweight, and mostly in sweatshirts. The waitresses are surly but not sullen, which suits me fine. They also have individual jukeboxes at the tables, a "Donut & Pastry" case on the counter full of shrinkwrapped donuts and muffins, and a clock on the wall that says "Worcester Diners." (Well, what it really says is "tick-tock, tick-tock.")

When I ordered the "thick-style" french toast listed on the menu, the waitress said, "They put some powdered sugar on the french toast, if that's okay," giving me the impression that other customers had complained about this wild culinary innovation (although looking around me, I couldn't imagine that this could be so). I told her that of course it was okay. Sure enough, when the toast came out it was dusted with powdered sugar, and it even came with real maple syrup, but the fun stopped there. The bread was cold and chewy, flavorless apart from the syrup and sugar, and much the same could be said of the side of bacon I got with it.

"Bleck," I said, and got up to pay my bill.

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Kathy's Diner

I really want to like Kathy's. According to the info on the back of the menu, a diner has been on this spot since 1923, although I'd guess the current building dates to the 1930s. It's been known by many different names - the Amos Diner, Mac's Diner, Jim's Diner, the Miss Northampton Diner, the White Castle Diner, the Red Lion Diner - and the current owner, Kathy, has been working there since she was a teenager. Kathy can still be seen behind the counter most days, presiding over the sizzling grill with the assistance of a larger, younger fellow whom I can only assume is her son or grandson. They're both friendly, know their regulars, love the Red Sox, and usually run the place all by themselves, with no additional waiting or cooking staff. It's also cheap - really cheap, like $3-for-french-toast-cheap.

Unfortunately, that's about $3 too many.

Part of the problem is that, while charming from the outside, Kathy's is kind of disgusting on the inside. The counter and tables are frequently crummy and greasy, several windows are broken and taped over with plastic, and the whole space behind the counter really needs a good dusting. But most of the problem has to do with the food, which is - not to put too fine a point on it - gross. Really gross. Almost inedibly gross. Almost vomiting-on-my-shoes gross.

Really, really gross.

The french toast I got, which was served alongside a plastic bottle of Vermont Maid corn syrup (no effort being made to hide its humble origins), appeared to have been made from a standard loaf of white Wonder Bread. It was thin as a communion wafer, but it still managed to do something that I've never experienced before, nor would have thought possible. The outside of the bread was crispy, like toast should be, but once I bit into it the two sides slid apart to reveal a slimy, eggy interior that had the consistency of custard. It was a bit like eating cow tongue, which is similarly rough on the outside and slimy on the inside, but at least with cow tongue you know why it's gross. And remember: thin as a communion wafer. This was, and remains, a complete mystery to me, defying all the laws of chemistry and physics of which I'm aware (which, I'll admit, don't add up to very many).

But this was nothing compared to what happened when I bit into the last slice. The other slices may have been wretched, but at least they were still recognizable as french toast. This last slice, though, had clearly gotten too much egg batter on it - I don't even want to think about how this worked - and so was almost more egg than bread, which made it a bit like eating a fried egg that had attached itself, parasite-like, onto a soggy piece of Wonder Bread. This might have been okay, or at least slightly less gag-inducing, if I'd been expecting a meal of eggs-on-toast, but I wasn't, and, what's more, it didn't taste like eggs-on-toast so much as it tasted like what might happen if someone next to you was eating eggs-on-toast and then burped in your direction. And you simultaneously had your mouth full of slimey mush.

When I started this quest, I had no idea that I was endangering my life. Now I know better, and will proceed with all due caution in the future.

Also in the future: much as I'll continue to wish her well, I do believe I will not be returning to Kathy's Diner.

Last Call for Pancakes

2009-04-27T20:11:00.000-04:00

I'm not a native New Englander, so I don't know much about maple sugaring. I do know that the sugaring industry has been struggling recently, as seasons grow shorter and shorter and the sap line* inches ever northward. Something about the earth getting warmer, I think. Apart from that, I'm a rank amateur in all things maple-sugary. It was just this year, for instance, that I learned that not all maple syrup is real maple syrup - I first cottoned on to what is, apparently, a fairly widespread conspiracy when I noticed brunch places in the Valley charging extra for "real maple syrup." What, you mean Aunt Jemima's isn't real? I thought. Then what the hell is it? Corn syrup, it turns out. I can sense all you natives out there smiling at my naivete, but I assure you I had never even considered the possibility that the syrup I'd been consuming for most of my life was anything other than real until I noticed this. And then I felt betrayed. Used and betrayed.

Well, so what? We can't all know everything about everything, right? I know quite a bit about a whole lot of other things, so what's the harm in not knowing a lot about the maple sugar industry? Well I'll tell you what the harm is, Mr./Mrs. Smartypants. I'll tell you right here in this very blog. Listen carefully.

The most significant other thing that I didn't know about maple sugaring until very recently is that the sugaring season usually begins around late February and comes to an end around early to mid-April. Or at least it did this year. This is significant in itself, of course, but its significance for me lies in a further fact. This is that during this very short period, dozens of little sugar shacks all over New England open their doors to visitors. They sell these visitors freshly bottled syrup, maple-related trinkets and doodads and gewgaws, and breakfast. That's what I said: breakfast. Here I've been, wandering all over the Valley in search of The Perfect French Toast, eating in greasy diners and getting all crunchy-organic with the Suburu-driving bourgeoisie, when I could have been eating french toast in rustic little sugar shacks, surrounded by boiling drums of syrup, taking in the sounds and smells of one of the only truly local regional economic activities we have left in this country. Bah! Humbug!

You will have gathered that I only learned about this phenomenon after all the area sugar shacks had closed for the season. Well, almost all.

Yesterday Kate and I set off for the far northwestern corner of Massachusetts. Our mission, for once, was not specifically french-toast or even breakfast-related - it was to meet up with Dr. and Mrs. D. (and toddler D.), have a picnic in the sunshine, run around chasing rubber balls and frisbees, and check out the Henri Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, which was coming to an end yesterday (the exhibit was coming to an end, not Williamstown). We were also looking forward to driving down Route 2, also called the Mohawk Trail, a ridiculously scenic road named for the Indians who once traded and raided along it and not for the hair styles of the many bikers who prowl along it when the weather's fine (although one could certainly be forgiven for believing the latter).

And we did all that. The Mohawk Trail, one of the earliest designated scenic routes in the country (it was so designated in 1914), has lost none of its scenicness, although some of the route's roadside attractions have clearly seen better days. I'd always wanted to dawdle along the trail, poke around in its souvenir shops, peek in the windows of the little red schoolhouse that dates to 1828, get within touching distance of the eponymous "Big Indian" that towers above the Big Indian Shop and the bronze elk statue that guards the optimistically named town of Florida, and so this was my chance. I took a few photos, some of which are below, and most of which are here.

We also had our picnic in the sunshine, did a bit of running around, enjoyed catching up with the D.'s, went to the museum (the Clark is, I believe, one of the best small art museums in the country) and contemplated the sexual abandon of fin de siecle Paris, and generally made the most of what was a very beautiful day.

But before all that happened, we stopped in what is probably the last sugar shack still open in all of New England: Gould's Sugar House. In fact, this was the last day that Gould's itself would be open until next season, as we learned after some careful eavesdropping. The Gould's story is a long and proud one - at least I'm assuming it is, since a book promising to tell us the Gould's story was on sale in the gift shop for $15. I didn't buy the book, so I don't really know the Gould's story, but I did learn that this was their 50th season of operation, which means they got started right around what was probably the peak of the Mohawk Trail's early glory - if the postwar, car-culture roadside kitsch of the other establishments along the trail is anything to go by. We were also able to learn that Gould's smells very strongly of bacon and maple (which is not at all a bad thing); that the elderly Mrs. Gould, though getting a little dotty, is still quite spry as she welcomes diners at the hostess stand; that Gould's does not serve french toast, but that they do serve several other things, including blueberry pancakes and something called Sugar-on-Snow; and that on this particular morning they were all out of snow, and so there was no Sugar-on-Snow to be had. This last fact made me quite sad.

Though somewhat confused by my inability to order french toast, I eventually settled on the blueberry pankcakes, as did my charming companion. And golly but they were good! They weren't all cakey like so many pancakes are, and the blueberries were real, whole blueberries (not the blueberry-flavored corn syrup mush you'll find elsewhere) that performed a vital thermodynamic function for the pancakes as a whole: they kept them hot. If you've ever microwaved a jelly donut, you know that the jelly inside will stay nice and piping long after the encasing dough has cooled - well, something like that was happening with the blueberries and the pancakes, and this made them wonderfully warm and melty. The syrup was pretty good, too.

Here's what the place looked like:

So have I become a pancake convert? Will I abandon the search for The Perfect French Toast in order to locate The Perfect Pancake (it's got a slightly better ring to it, you have to admit)? No, no, patient reader, worry not. Although this unexpected detour was indeed quite delicious, I'll remain steadfast in my original quest. For one thing, I don't like to leave things unfinished and I suck at multitasking. And for another, I already know where The Perfect Pancake can be found - and it's nowhere near the Mohawk Trail, NoHo, or the Valley. It's in Nashville - where I, too, will shortly be. As will Kate.

Yippee-Kai-Ay!

___
*I just made that term up, but I think it conveys my meaning nicely.

Pardon Me While I Briefly Shift Tone

2009-04-24T08:24:00.001-04:00

Many of you are going to hate me for saying this, but I just can't help myself: apart from two more lunches next month and a dinner gathering that may or may not happen, my academic duties are officially over until August. Yesterday I gave my last (of two) presentations to the other fellows and faculty, and it was a nice, informal discussion that actually got me pretty energized to finish this article I've been mulling over about when and why British troops/policemen shot at rioters in Victorian Ireland and India. Heady stuff, I know, but if rioting is my bread-and-butter (and it is), then excessive state violence is my raspberry preserves, and the flavor combination really gets my mouth watering. Even if it means I spend the next half-hour picking seeds out of my teeth.

Which is probably why I've been following the recent flood of torture revelations with such keen interest. I've long been aware of, and troubled by, what the Bushies did to detainees in all those secret prisons, black sites, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, etc., but I hadn't become thoroughly sickened until I read the first of Mark Danner's two articles in the New York Review of Books about a classified Red Cross report of interviews with prisoners held by the CIA at Guantanamo. It's a long article that makes for harrowing reading - details of prisoners forced to stand for extended periods with their hands shackled to the ceiling; prisoners stripped naked, kept in cold rooms, and periodically sprayed with cold water; prisoners kept in small boxes in which they could neither crouch nor stand for days and weeks on end; prisoners with towels wrapped around their necks and beaten repeatedly against walls; the infamous waterboarding - but I'd highly recommend reading it, and, if you've got time, read the second one, too.

Since Danner's articles came out, of course, there's been a flood of information coming from the Justice Department and the Senate, and lots of great reporting and analysis from the NY Times, etc., and I'm not sure how much I have to say on the topic that hasn't been said earlier and better by others. I will say, however, that I'm overjoyed that we're finally having this discussion in this country. For the last few days it's even pushed the economic news into second place, however briefly. Maybe it's asking too much of the American public, but if we could perhaps get up in arms about this issue in the same way that some folks recently got up in arms about the prospect of a 6% tax hike, then I'd say we had, indeed, turned a corner. I'll confess that I'm not just terribly optimistic about that, but it's nice to hope.

As Danner points out, the principal argument now - and Dick Cheney has been making this case quite loudly - will revolve around whether these tactics actually worked. Torture may be unseemly, runs the argument, but if it helps prevent Americans from another terrorist attack, then it's worth it. Cheney's been insisting that the CIA release all the "actionable intelligence" that was garnered from these harsh interrogations, and many Americans, weaned on the terror-porn of shows like 24, will undoubtedly be willing to believe any scrap of evidence showing that something a tortured prisoner said may have prevented some future attack. Never mind that study after study (as well as this guy, formerly of the FBI) has shown that torture doesn't work - or that common sense alone will tell you that a tortured prisoner will likely say anything to make the pain stop, and his/her information will therefore be highly suspect, at best. And never mind that what went on at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and the black sites did more to foster anti-American sentiment worldwide, and thereby to make future attacks more likely, than almost anything else we could have done. For some Americans, the ticking-time-bomb scenario, in which the interrogator knows that the prisoner knows where the bomb is, and has no choice but to keep turning the screws until he tells the truth, is just too appealing. It's also a handy way of avoiding looking ourselves in the mirror, of preserving the good-guy / bad-guy story that we like to tell ourselves about war, law enforcement, and our national character. If we torture, it's for some greater good, like preventing the deaths of thousands of people. If our enemies torture, it's because they're depraved and sadistic. The idea that we might be just as morally compromised as the people we're torturing (and I won't deny that many of the detainees were quite nasty guys) is one that most Americans will only accept with reluctance, if at all.

And so I expect the debate will continue along these lines, with one side upholding abstract principles of justice and morality and the other insisting on a brutal pragmatism along the lines of the Marines' fabled motto, "Kill 'Em All and Let God Sort 'Em Out." The rule of law vs. the utilitarian, the sheriff vs. the outlaw, the rule-bound police commissioner vs. Dirty Harry: thus has it ever been in this country, and thus will it continue to be.

What's happening now is that something we all knew (the fact that the US tortured prisoners isn't exactly news) but preferred not to think about is suddenly being hauled out into the light of day. Torture, apparently, is okay as long as we don't have to see it happening, but once we're forced to confront it in all its ugliness, will we still want our government to do it? I'm afraid that over time the answer will turn out to be yes. After all, we've been through all this before: it was five years ago that the Abu Ghraib story broke, and, despite an initial flurry of handwringing, things eventually settled down, the folks who did the torturing were effectively defined as "bad apples" and duly punished, and their superiors kept their jobs. Now most of those officials are no longer in power, a new administration is reluctantly but effectively coming to grips with our past misdeeds, and the national mood (if there even is such a thing) has shifted. We're not as fearful as we used to be of a terrorist attack - thank you, media, for helping to redirect our fears toward the stock market instead! - and we're not as likely to give the Bush administration a free pass as we once were. But I'm still not optimistic.

In my ideal world, the whole lot of them - Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Tenet, Rice, the lawyers who gave the torturers legal cover, the CIA agents who did the torturing (even if they were reluctantly "just following orders") - would be thrown in jail. It would be a very comfortable jail with lots of televisions and cushy chairs and vegetarian options. There would be ping-pong tables, pilates lessons, picnic tables, and a puppy room. And once a week, for only an hour or so, they would be forced, not to feel like they themselves were drowning, to but to watch a videotape of someone being made to feel like he is drowning. Then they would be sent back to the puppy room to think about what they've done. The bastards.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Esselon Cafe

2009-04-21T20:15:00.000-04:00

I knew this would happen eventually.

It's been about a month and a half since I initiated my search for The Perfect French Toast, during which time I've had eight different french toasts (nine, if you count the Memphis French Toast in Oklahoma City) and reported the experiences to you as diligently and entertainingly as I could. And now the inevitable has begun to happen: I'm running out of ways to write about french toast. This is not at all the same as saying that I'm growing tired of french toast - quite the contrary! - but it is to say that there are only so many adjectives you can use to describe french toast, only so many variables you can isolate in how it's prepared and presented, only so many hyperbolic superlatives you can employ before your readers start to grow testy and suspicious.

It is also becoming clear to me that I'm using this french toast quest as a narrative crutch. (I just did a quick Google search and confirmed that I am the only person on the internet ever to have written those words.) That's a roundabout way of saying that it's making me lazy. Back before this whole thing started, I'd spend many of my waking hours on the alert for something to blog about - several times a week I'd come across something and think, "Ooh! I must blog about that!" and then proceed either to do just that, or to forget about it as soon as I got home. Lately, though, I've been retracting my antennae, blithely and inattentively moving through life in the smug assurance that the next blog post would probably be about french toast, as would the one after that, and the one after that. Sure, I've interspersed some non-toast posts in amongst the others, but just think of all the fantastic, earth-shattering things I've experienced and decided not to blog about, or, worse, failed to experience altogether, so wrapped up have I been in this french toast thing. The mind boggles! (bloggles?)

Does all this mean I'm abandoning the search for TPFT before it's reached its natural end? Absolutely not! Does it mean I've accepted that the best french toast I've had so far - the challah french toast at the Lone Wolf - is, indeed, the perfect french toast? Not on your life! Does it mean I simply don't have a lot to say about my most recent french toast excursion and have decided to pad this post with some verbose, slightly tongue-in-cheek introspection? You might be onto something there.

The Esselon Cafe sits out on my favorite, love-to-hate-it highway: Route 9, between NoHo and Amherst. It's in a standalone building on the Hadley Common, a pleasant ribbon of land that cuts perpendicularly across the highway and is lined with modest but stately old homes whose leafy trees look stunning in autumn and will probably look quite pretty in the spring, if spring ever arrives. The cafe itself is a family-friendly place that looks like an antique, slightly overgrown Starbucks (you order at the counter, the servers are hemmed in on all sides by hulking and hopelessly complex coffee-making contraptions, the color palate is all muted, soothing earth tones). They've got a covered porch with tables and chairs, an uncovered porch with a few picnic tables and a hammock out on the lawn, and a carved (or possibly cast-iron) ceiling that reminds me of the ornate ceiling at the Crown Liquor Saloon in Belfast, a gorgeous early-Victorian pub that's owned by the National Trust and whose west-facing windows have the misfortune of facing the Europa Hotel, at one time the most-bombed hotel in Europe. I didn't have my great big camera with me, so I was forced to use my BlackBerry instead - these pictures aren't great, but you'll get the idea:

Esselon's french toast, like that at the Lone Wolf and the Green Bean, is made with challah bread, and it can be ordered with fruit or without. Kate was with me and, as we had done at Amanouz, she ordered the fruit while I did my Gandhi imitation and went for the bare-bones version. It came out all covered in powdered sugar and served with real maple syrup - hers with strawberries and blueberries on top, mine with a single red strawberry and a green mint leaf. Both of them were tasty and sweet, and, though the bread was just the slightest bit chewy, they easily entered the top ranks of french toast in the Valley, if not quite coming up to the level of near-perfection achieved by the Lone Wolf.

And that, as they say, is that.

The Tale of a Vacation, in Six Meals

2009-04-15T20:04:00.006-04:00

I swear I'm not turning this into a food blog, but I just can't help myself. I've tried to think of a pithy way to tell you about my recent road trip out to Toronto and back without organizing my post around the meals I ate along the way, and I've concluded that it's simply impossible. If it's any consolation, in what follows I don't mention french toast once. I was on vacation, after all, so I was determined to leave my work at the office, as it were.

(Photos of the excursion are here.)

1) Day One - The Moosewood Restaurant, Ithaca, NY.

Have you ever heard of the Moosewood? If you're a vegetarian, or if you've ever spent much time browsing the cookbook aisle at Borders, you probably have. The Moosewood Cookbook is to vegetarian cooking what What to Expect When You're Expecting is to childbirth - a sort of holy text that simultaneously informs and soothes. "It's not so bad," it says, "Here's how we're gonna get through this." Well, it turns out the Moosewood Restaurant is in Ithaca, which is kind of on the way to Toronto. And Kate, my road-trip companion (the Neal Cassady to my Jack Kerouac, if you will), is a vegetarian. And Camille, one of my former fellow Fellows from Philly (a former Philly Fellow, a Philly former fellow Fellow) lives in Ithaca. So... we went there! And we ate vegetarian food! And it was great, if a bit like eating something someone had prepared for you from The Moosewood Cookbook. And then Camille took us around Ithaca to see the gorges, which get quite dark at night, so I'm pretty sure we saw gorges, but I can't be positive.

2) Day Two - Niagara Falls Snack Bar. Buffalo, NY, has given the world one great culinary item and kept another one for itself. To the world it has given the Buffalo Wing, and we all know what the world has done with that. For itself it has kept a sandwich called the beef on weck, a roast beef sandwich that is dipped - bun and all - into a thin, salty juice that turns it into one of the tastiest and grossest sandwiches in the history of sandwiches. I had one a few months ago and it changed my life (while also nearly ending it), but I figured on this trip I would defer to the vegetarian sensibilities of my companion and try to find somewhere in Buffalo that might serve a vegetable or two. It was a fool's errand. After touring some of the most profound urban blight I've ever seen, trembling in horror before the Buffalo City Hall, getting lost on something called the Skyway, and spotting an okay-looking Brewpub just as we drove onto an interstate ramp that took us flying past it, we decided to pass on Buffalo and head up to Niagara Falls instead, where we were bound to find a quick sandwich or something. We did not. Turns out April is still the off-season at Niagara Falls. And by off-season I mean the spray from the falls is still frozen on parts of the park, nobody is there but a handful of dazed-looking South Asians, and there are no - and I mean no - places outside the park to buy lunch apart from a shabby Punjabi restaurant advertising "The Best Indian Food in America." Enticing as that was, we decided to take our chances on the grounds of the park, and what we ended up with was a $6 PB&J sandwich and chips (for her) and a $7 shrinkwrapped ham-and-cheese sandwich (for him), which, when you add in a bottle of apple juice and tax, cost us something like $17. We ate them outside in the windy cold, and it was all Kate could do to keep me from hurling myself over the ledge and into the falls.

3) Day Two - Byzantium. Things got much better once we crossed into Canada. Toronto, you must know, is the "gayest city in Canada," as a free newspaper I picked up put it, and it has a wealth of gay bars, clubs, and cafes - so many, in fact, that "Queer as Folk" (which, I believe, is a television program about gay people) was actually filmed there, although it was supposedly set in Pittsburgh (which is not a very gay city at all). With our Valley-sharpened gaydars in prime working order, we zeroed in on the principal gay district without much trouble that evening and landed in a place called Byzantium. And that's where I had one of the best meals of my life. Kate, working from the assumption that ostriches are vegetables, ordered the ostrich steak (I'm being glib here - she's okay eating meat, so long as she knows where it came from, and so long as where it came from isn't a horrible factory farm) and I ordered the rabbit stew. Have you ever had rabbit? It's a cliche to say that it tastes like chicken, but cliches are cliches for a reason, and in this case that reason is this: rabbit tastes like chicken. But the sauce - oh, the sauce! And the vegetables - oh, the vegetables! And the ostrich - oh, the ostrich (I maybe helped Kate out a little)! They made me very, very glad that I hadn't hurled myself into Niagara Falls earlier in the day. Terribly, terribly glad.

4) Day Three - Fran's Diner.

Of course I couldn't resist going to at least one diner on this trip, and, in fact, I actually went to two diners, though they were the same diner. What I mean is this: Fran's, a Toronto institution whose original location is rumored to have never locked its doors since it opened in 1940, actually has a few locations around the city. After eating here on our first morning in town - a decent-but-not-fabulous meal of poached eggs and english muffins for me - we accidentally stumbled into another Fran's on our last day in town. That second meal was equally shrugworthy, but the setting was pleasant retro-dinery and the service was impeccable.

5) Day Three - Kensington Market.

Kensington Market isn't a market but a neighborhood (oh, excuse me, neighbourhood), and after our cute gay waiter at Byzantium recommended we check it out while we were in town, and after we realized that Good Friday is a public holiday in Canada, and after we further realized that this meant that all of the museums (musea?) we'd planned to visit that day were closed, we decided to spend most of the day exploring this area. If you've ever been to London, it's a bit like the Spitalfields/Brick Lane district on a Saturday. If you've ever been to Philadelphia, it's kinda like the Italian Market on a weekend. Lots of funky shops spilling out onto the streets, many lovely places to buy all sorts of food of varying qualities, lots of graffiti, and at least one bona-fide cannabis cafe. We bought some bread and cheese and apples (but no cannabis), stole two plastic knives from a coffee shop, and had a picnic in the park. Well, it was more of a sand pit with some dope dealers lounging on benches and sullen children playing on a swingset, but it looked like it may once have been a park. In any event, we then went to my new favorite place, a pie shop called Wanda's Pie in the Sky, which had just relocated to Kensington Market from Bloor Street, up near the university. I had sour cherry pie and Kate had ambrosia pie, and it was all I could do not to walk out of there with several more pies tucked under each arm, a few hot cross buns stuffed under my chin, and as many frosted cookies crammed into my mouth as I could manage without dislocating my jaw. Oh, Wanda's Pie in the Sky - if you were a woman instead of a shop I'd try really hard to get you to marry me.

6) Day Three - The Sultan's Tent. That evening it was down to the old part of town for some Moroccan food at the Sultan's Tent. The food was very good - I had sesame-crusted salmon - but the place was memorable principally for the bangles that all of the hostesses were wearing around their waists and the belly-dancing that was going on in the back dining room, which we were nevertheless unable to watch because we didn't want to pay for it. Oh, and then when we ordered some mint tea after dinner our waiter, who I'm pretty sure didn't like us, poured the tea out of a fancy Moroccan teapot by holding the tray of glasses waaaaay down low in one hand and raising the pouring teapot waaaaaay up over his head, so that by the end he looked like some sort of fancy tea-pouring fountain. It would have been better if he'd looked like he was enjoying himself, but he didn't.

7) And The Rest. Okay, this post is getting a little out of hand, and there are still several days to go. I think I'm going to wrap things up here, since the above meals really were the most interesting ones we had, and they give you a pretty good taste (ha!) of what we did during the trip. There were also donuts (Tim Horton's! Maple Cream!); Italian food in Chinatown (that's right); breakfast in a diner that looked like a doctor's office waiting room in Rochester, NY; delicious hot dogs (veggie and meatie) at a hot-dog place called Dogtown, also in Rochester, where all of the different varieties are named after dog breeds (I had the Bernese Mountain Dog - mushrooms and swiss); delicious sandwiches and a strawberry brownie in Albany; zucchini pancakes in a neighborhood of Toronto whose name I could never pronounce, but which starts with an R; a strange but tasty Ukrainian frozen treat on Bloor Street West; German easter chocolates; and lots and lots of grapes.

Now, sadly, vacation time is over, and it's back to the rat race, the nine-to-five, the daily grind - the search for the perfect french toast.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Miss Flo Diner

2009-04-07T17:11:00.005-04:00

Florence, as you know, is a city in Italy. Michelangelo and Dante lived there and did some of their best work there. The Medicis had a palace and lots of shiny things there. The skyline is dominated by a gigantic domed cathedral, the streets buzz with hundreds of motor scooters, and the cafes serve some of the best ice cream and sandwiches (but not, to my knowledge, ice-cream sandwiches) in the world. If you go there, however, be prepared to share the city's quite compressed spaces with thousands of other tourists who've come looking for the same Renaissancey magic that you have. Because of the overwhelming presence of these tourists, you will have a hard time locating said magic.

For those of you looking for something off the beaten path, might I recommend another destination? It doesn't have a cathedral, no famous poets or artists call it home, and there's a distinct lack - perhaps even a total absence - of buzzing motor scooters, but it does have a pizza parlor, where you can enjoy authentic Italian cuisine; a coffee shop, that (surely) serves Italian-style espresso and lattes; an ice cream (aka, American gelato) shop called Friendly's (motto: "Where Ice Cream Makes the Meal"); and a vegan cafe called Cafe Evolution, two words which are the same, more or less, in Italian and English.

I'm speaking, of course, of Florence, Massachuessts, a village of Northampton (don't ask me how these screwy municipal boundaries work - I don't make the rules, I just abide by them) that also happens to be home of one of the most striking diners in all of New England: the Miss Florence Diner, known colloquially as the Miss Flo.

Good luck finding something like that in Italy.

Now, I'll not repeat myself on the general topic of diners. Suffice it to say that what I like about the Miss Flo has more to do with the ambience than the food. If any of my Boston readers are familiar with the Rosebud Diner in Somerville, you've got a pretty good idea of what the Miss Flo looks like, on the inside at least, as I'm pretty sure they were made by the same people. It's a dining-car style diner, which means that before it was tied to the earth with bricks and mortar it was, in principle, portable. Eating inside of it - even after the considerable remodeling that's gone on since the place was established in 1941 - one is reminded of what once made diners so revolutionary, the vaulted ceilings and streamlined chromework evoking an era in which mobility, speed, and cheapness in dining were all quite novel and, consequently, exciting.

When I visited the other day, most of my fellow patrons were old enough to remember when the Miss Flo was, indeed, at the forefront of dining technology. Which is to say, they were really old. Cracking open the menu, I noticed that the type of french toast served at the Miss Flo is called Texas French Toast. This confirmed my slowly building suspicion that french toast, like pizza and hot dogs, is subject to regional variations - never mind that I have never seen Texas French Toast in Texas itself, nor, for that matter, have I ever had Memphis French Toast in Memphis. Have you ever had plain old (i.e., non-French) Texas Toast? It's served quite often in Oklahoma and is a sort of garlic-and-butter extravaganza of lightly toasted white bread cut very, very thick but somehow also managing to be light as air. I couldn't wait to see what this might be like once it had been frenchified by the Miss Flo's chefs. I was also delighted to see that whoever had typed up the menu was clearly so excited by this particular item that he/she got a little carried away with the "p" key. Here's what it said, verbatim:

A true delicacy! Three one-inch thick slices of bread hand-dipped, toppped with cinnampn and sugar and grilled to golden perfection.

This was promising indeed, as was the motto I spotted emblazoned across the back of my server's t-shirt: "Ain't No Finer Diner." While Tammy Wynette sang "Stand By Your Man" on the radio and elderly couples filed in from church, I ordered my Texas French Toast in full confidence that this would be a memorable experience.

That confidence, I am sorry to report, was somewhat misplaced. The toast was indeed cinnampny and sugary, there were indeed three slices of bread, each sliced once again for presentation's sake (making for a total of six slices, if my math is correct), and there may well have been some sugar involved, but the meal as a whole was pretty uninteresting. It was, I suppose, pretty much your standard french toast: not too mushy, not too fancy, perfectly serviceable on the whole, but very, very far from perfect. And it was very far from what I know actual Texas Toast to be. Take a look and you'll see what I mean:

Yeah, that's what I said.

T-shirt mottoes notwithstanding, then, it's a reasonable certainty that there are, in fact, finer diners than the Miss Flo, at least when it comes to french toast. Nevertheless, I'll bet it's a good sight better than what you'd find at any comparable diner in the other Florence. The Italians are great at lots of things, but they really don't know squat about french toast.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - The Green Bean

2009-04-03T19:25:00.005-04:00

Before I tell you about my latest french toast (mis)adventure, I've got a couple of items that I need to mention. First, it has come to my attention that sometime in the late 1970s a British band called Streetband recorded what may be the only, and is certainly the best, song about toast. It is not specifically about french toast, and, indeed, some of the song's percussion would have been completely impossible if it had been about french toast, but it still deserves a mention here.

Watch this and you'll see why. You'll also grin, giggle, and wonder how you've made it this long without this song in your life. That's a promise.

You're welcome.

The other thing I need to tell you also pertains to toast, naturally, and to french toast, specifically. Earlier this week I was in Oklahoma, and while there I went with my father to a restaurant called the Classen Grill. The Classen Grill is an OKC staple, one of the city's few non-chain restaurants that manages both to draw a loyal clientele and to produce some pretty tasty food. I'd been there several times before, usually to try one of their southwestern-inflected brunch items, but this time my french-toast antennae, in prime toast-finding condition, called my attention to a menu item called "Memphis French Toast." As someone who's about to move to Tennessee and who, moreover, hadn't yet considered the possibility that there might be regional variations in the manner french toast is prepared, I was intrigued. What if I were to go to Memphis soon and unexpectedly find myself forced to eat french toast? Would I be prepared? I already knew that I'd fare well if ever I got myself into a similar predicament in the Mediterranean, but in Memphis? I simply had no idea.

So of course I ordered it.

It's a good thing that I've been limiting my search for The Perfect French Toast to the restaurants in and around the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, because otherwise the Classen Grill's Memphis French Toast would have presented me with quite a dilemma. This is not because it is, in fact, TPFT - it's very good, but it's not perfect. What it is, rather, is The World's Most Ridiculous French Toast. Or at least I'm pretty sure it is. If I'd discovered it in Massachusetts I might have been forced to open up an entirely new category and scour the Valley for other potentially ridiculous french toasts. As it is, I'm under no such obligation, and thank god for that.

Unfortunately, I failed to take a photograph of this meal, so you'll just have to trust me. Memphis French Toast, apparently, is this: two large slices of thick white bread, dipped in a cinnamon batter and grilled. One of the slices is topped with banana slices, honey, and peanut butter, then the other slice is placed on top of it - like a french toast sandwich. The whole is then sprinkled with powdered sugar and served with maple syrup, butter, and a compulsory side of bacon.

It was deadly.

No, I'm serious. It was deadly.

It was also enough to get me excited about moving to Tennessee again (I've been afflicted with a bad case of ambivalence lately), assuming, of course, that they really do eat their french toast like this in Memphis. It's only like two hours from Nashville, which means this question can be pretty easily answered, once I've recovered sufficiently.

But anyway, on to the main object of this post, about which I actually plan to say very little.

The Green Bean

The Green Bean is a relatively new establishment that has quickly become one of the most popular brunch spots in NoHo. They serve locally grown, organic food in creative ways to ethically-minded diners, most of whom live on the gown side of the town-gown divide. I've been there quite a few times - it's one of the places I've spotted Dinosaur Jr frontman J Mascis - and always had a pleasant experience. The servers are friendly, the food is yummy, and they let you get your own coffee by choosing from an array of second-hand porcelain mugs that hang from an iron tree above the coffee pots. On this visit, I chose a souvenir mug from Gene and Jen's wedding, and event that took place in January of 2008 and which, presumably, was long enough ago for at least one of their guests to decide he/she could safely donate their souvenir mug to the Green Bean. The mug made me wonder how things were going with Gene and Jen, people whom I've never met but who have adorable taste in animals, and whom I therefore liked immediately. I hope they're doing well.

Unfortunately, the mug was about as good as it got on this visit. I'd had the Green Bean's 8-Grain French Toast before - in fact, it was one of the things that inspired me to go on this quest - but I'd never had their Challah French Toast, which I was intent to try after my transcendent experience of the same item over at the Lone Wolf. Kate joined me in ordering the Challah French Toast that morning at the Green Bean, and when it came out it looked promising enough - a little floppy, perhaps, and not nearly as glamorous as what the Lone Wolf was serving, but it was thick and it had powdered sugar and I was pretty sure everything was going to be fine.

It was not. The bread wasn't just floppy, it was soggy. Eggy and mushy and lacking in flavor, it was like the Lone Wolf's evil twin. Kate agreed, and we beat a hasty retreat just as soon as we'd eaten all we could (just because french toast is bad doesn't mean it shouldn't be thoroughly eaten).

If I, Streetband-like, should ever feel moved to write a song about the Green Bean's french toast, I'm pretty sure it would be a dirge.

Atheists Among Us

2009-03-30T10:34:00.002-04:00

One of the best newspaper front pages I've ever seen appeared in the Daily Oklahoman a few years ago. A full-color photograph above the fold showed a pretty, smiling young woman with glasses and blond hair above the portentous headline, "The Face of Atheism in Oklahoma." The story, written in the style of a exposé, described an atheist club that this smiling heathen had founded at one of the local universities, and it went on to incredulously examine the murky world of unbelief that she and her minions inhabited. It was as if the reporter had uncovered a hidden race of aliens living among us, aliens who adopted our language and manners and even our appearance, but who decidedly are not humans and are just waiting for an opportunity to take over the planet.

I was reminded of that story a few weeks ago when I heard that state representative Todd Thomsen, a former University of Oklahoma (OU) football player, had introduced a resolution calling on the House to oppose a scheduled appearance by Richard Dawkins at OU. Dawkins, of course, is one of the more prominent of the current worldwide crop of God deniers and was a guiding force behind the atheist bus campaign in the UK that I discussed some time back. The resolution reads, in part:

WHEREAS, the University of Oklahoma is a publicly funded institution which should be open to all ideas and should train students in all disciplines of study and research and to use independent thinking and free inquiry; and
WHEREAS, the University of Oklahoma has planned a year-long celebration of the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of Darwin's theory of evolution, called the "Darwin 2009 Project", which includes a series of lectures, public speakers, and a course on the history of evolution; and
WHEREAS, the University of Oklahoma, as a part of the Darwin 2009 Project, has invited as a public speaker on campus, Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published opinions, as represented in his 2006 book "The God Delusion", and public statements on the theory of evolution demonstrate an intolerance for cultural diversity and diversity of thinking and are views that are not shared and are not representative of the thinking of a majority of the citizens of Oklahoma; and
WHEREAS, the invitation for Richard Dawkins to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma on Friday, March 6, 2009, will only serve to present a biased philosophy on the theory of evolution to the exclusion of all other divergent considerations rather than teaching a scientific concept.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE 1ST SESSION OF THE 52ND OKLAHOMA LEGISLATURE:
THAT the Oklahoma House of Representative strongly opposes the invitation to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma to Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published statements on the theory of evolution and opinion about those who do not believe in the theory are contrary and offensive to the views and opinions of most citizens of Oklahoma.
THAT the Oklahoma House of Representatives encourages the University of Oklahoma to engage in an open, dignified, and fair discussion of the Darwinian theory of evolution and all other scientific theories which is the approach that a public institution should be engaged in and which represents the desire and interest of the citizens of Oklahoma.

Regardless of your feelings about the whole God thing, the above cannot be otherwise than chilling to anyone with even a passing respect for the principles of democracy and free speech. Denying somebody the chance to speak because his views "are contrary and offensive to the views and opinions of most citizens of Oklahoma"? I don't know what they're teaching OU football players in their civics courses, but clearly Rep. Thomsen has an underdeveloped sense of what liberal democracies are supposed to be doing: you know, things like protecting the views of minorities, not permitting governments to interfere with people's religious practices or beliefs, and other little things that help to ensure the free interchange of ideas. Perhaps the university isn't the ideal forum for such a free interchange of ideas but - oh wait - yes it is.

It's easy to poke fun at small-minded knuckledraggers like Thomsen, and plenty of people have already done so. It's also easy to get angry on learning that after Dawkins did, indeed, give his speech at OU, the OK legislature launched an investigation into the speech and the circumstances surrounding it. It's also easy to shake your head and go tut-tut when I tell you that I've been in OK for several days now and have heard almost no public outrage or even discussion of the issue - it's mostly bloggers outside the state who have dogpiled on Thomsen, while everyone around here seems either oblivious or indifferent to the (to me) rather grave matter of a state government attempting to regulate religious discussion.

But my purpose today is rather different. I recognize that I'm sometimes a little harsh on my home state, and I haven't exactly been doing all I could to challenge certain stereotypes about the bible-humping hicks amongst whom I grew up. In the interests of being a better cultural ambassador, therefore, I'd like to draw your attention to two things. The first is that, just before Thomsen began trying to legislate away religious freedom, the OK Senate narrowly defeated a bill that would have allowed (but not mandated) the teaching of alternative theories of creation/evolution - that is, a bill that would have allowed state schoolteachers to teach Genesis in their science classes. This seems to me rather significant. The second thing I'd like to do is to show you this video of Dawkins' speech at OU, with the purpose not so much of letting you hear Dawkins himself (though his response to his persecutors is quite amusing) but rather of letting you witness the rapturous reception he received in the packed auditorium.

This state may be ruled by a bunch of petty ayatollahs, but I hope it's clear here that there are still plenty of folks around here who refuse to conform to the reigning idiocy. Both of my parents report feeling a lot more embattled, relative freethinkers that they are, in recent years by the forces of willful ignorance that dominate this place, and there's definitely a new shrillness creeping into the conservative ethos of the state that wasn't really there when I was growing up. But as long as some atheists continue to walk amongst us, and as long as they're able to listen to one another and talk to one another and form clubs (even at the risk of legislative and media harassment), all is not quite lost.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - The Lone Wolf

2009-03-25T21:43:00.001-04:00

I think I may have found it.

The Lone Wolf in Amherst is what you might call an incongruous restaurant. Or, better, a restaurant at war with itself. In many ways it's a typical Valley crunchy-brunchy cafe. They do the tofu thing, the vegan thing, and the locavore thing, and they make a point of fancying up traditional dishes with all sorts of creative ingredients, many of them deriving from root vegetables. But the ambience is strikingly at odds with the menu. For one thing, and for reasons that I can't begin to fathom, the decor tends toward the Southwestern-kitschy end of the decor spectrum. I overheard one lady on my recent visit remark that it reminded her of Arizona. Maybe so, if by Arizona she meant a gift shop in the Tucson airport. It's not that I object to the introduction of a bit of Southwestern color to this lily-white bastion of old New England, but there's nothing distinctly Southwestern about the menu. And that seems odd to me.

The other odd thing is that the place is almost always packed with large groups of sweatpantsed college students, instead of the expected Subaru-station-wagon-driving, New-Yorker-subscribing, NPR-contributing, beard-sporting, pipe-smoking, left-wing, middle-aged, middle-class diners that normally flock to places like this. The waitstaff, too, consists largely of sullen college students who are more interested in flirting with one another than with bringing you (and by you I mean me) a timely coffee refill. This shouldn't be too surprising, given that Amherst - home not only to Amherst College but also to the gigantic UMass campus - is stuffed to the gills with students for nine months of the year, and their presence is much more marked than it is in NoHo - with its tiny population of Smithies - which has become my frame of reference for these things. But still, it seems a bit strange.

All that aside, I have never had a meal at the Lone Wolf that wasn't outstanding, or at least very, very close to outstanding. So I was expecting to be impressed by their challah french toast (the only french toast on the menu), but I wasn't expecting what happened to happen. What happened was this:

Do you know challah bread? You don't? Well, you should. Go get some right now - I'll wait.

No, hold on, don't go. I've got a better idea: stop reading this immediately and go book a flight or hop a train or start the car, wherever you are, and meet me at the Lone Wolf by the time it opens tomorrow morning so we can have their challah french toast together. According to the menu, the bread - large and chunky but very, very light and spongy - is dipped in a cinnamon-vanilla sauce before cooking, and, while I didn't taste much obvious cinnamon or vanilla in it, I suspect that these ingredients exert some subliminal influence on the wonderfulness that unfolds when you bite into it. While cooking, the the bread develops a crisp outer skin that cracks, like the thinnest of creme-brulee crusts, under your teeth. And overall, it maintains its spongy consistency throughout, gleefully welcoming the (what I'm pretty sure is real) maple syrup and melty butter like long lost friends, sitting them down, making them comfortable, getting them a cup of tea. And the best part? The part that made me weep with joy right there at the table, while my waiter tried to impress one of the waitresses with his knowledge of Japanese cinema and a nearby table frat boys started hurling spitwads at a hand-painted kokopelli figurine? It was dusted with powdered sugar. Yes, for only the second time since I started this search (the other one being at Amanouz a few days earlier) I encountered french toast in its natural, bespeckled state, and it was glorious.

My only complaint - and this was entirely unexpected, I assure you - is that it was almost too much for me to eat. I soldiered through to the end, mind you, but I don't mind admitting that it nearly got the best of me, and I was forced to take a few breaks before completing it entirely. Which meant that the last piece was pretty cold, which was a shame.

I intend to keep searching, of course - to stop now would be a disservice to all of you who've traveled with me this far. But I would advise you to take a good, long look at the photograph above, for it may very well be The Perfect French Toast.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Amanouz Cafe

2009-03-23T21:40:00.001-04:00

Have you ever heard of Mediterranean french toast? Yeah, I hadn't either - until I spotted it on the menu at Amanouz Cafe a while back. Amanouz is a lovely little Moroccan place in NoHo notable for its wonderful selection of soups, sandwiches, and omelets (yes, omelets). I was there buying some I-don't-remember-what (something falafely, probably) the other week when I noticed that they served this thing called Mediterranean french toast, which, according to the chalkboard menu, is served with cinnamon and honey and is also available with strawberries or blueberries. I took note of this intriguing item and waited for an opportunity to investigate further.

That opportunity arose this weekend when Kate and I found ourselves up and about before anybody else in town had begun to shake of their Saturday sleepies. We hightailed it to Amanouz, anxious to get a seat before the deluge began - weekend brunch is always a busy time in the Valley - and were pleased to find plenty of open tables in the tiny cafe. Giddy with anticipation, we strolled right up to the counter and ordered some french toast. And I mean we ordered the hell out of it. I managed to stick to my (gradually wavering) determination to avoid unfair french-toast extravagance by getting mine sans fruit, and Kate ordered hers with strawberries, thereby ensuring that I could still get a glimpse of extravagance, if only to know what I was missing. It's no exaggeration when I tell you that at this moment I felt a little like Gandhi, who reputedly made a point of sleeping beside multiple naked young women, well into his old age, as a way of testing and affirming his chastity. That morning, as I refused the temptation of fresh fruit in the name of scientific inquiry, I was the Gandhi of french toast.

And so, orders placed, we took a seat and looked around.

When the food arrived Kate could hardly contain her excitement, though I remained cool as a Mahatma.

Now, I can't say with certainty that what I'm about to tell you is true of all Mediterranean french toast, or if it's only true of the type served at Amanouz, but here's what I learned that day about this unusual culinary item:

1) Unlike almost every other french toast I've had in New England so far, it's served with a sprinkling of powdered sugar. This, of course, is the way french toast is supposed to be served, so score one for the Mediterraneans for getting this one right.

2) It's served with honey instead of maple syrup. Let me repeat: no syrup, only honey. On reflection, this makes sense, since there aren't that many maple trees along the Mediterranean - at least not along the Mediterranean coast of France, which is the area to which I'm assuming this french toast is indigenous.

3) It's really frigging good. The bread is a sort of sourdough, similar to that used by the Haymarket, which is strong enough to withstand the battering and grilling and honey-drizzling, but substantial enough to temper the overwhelming sweetness of the honey and powdered sugar. That said, it's still very sweet. Imagine a Pop Tart. Now imagine a whole wheat bagel. The difference between those two? That's the difference between Mediterranean french toast and regular old french toast, especially the boring sort that you'll find at places like Stables.

4) As good as it is sans fruit, it's even better with fresh strawberries, of the sort Kate (mostly) had on hers. I know this because I maybe had a bite or two. I know, I know: some french toast Gandhi I turned out to be. But don't judge me too harshly - surely the old man didn't keep his hands to himself all the time.

Looking at People Looking at Art

2009-03-22T04:43:00.008-04:00

Kate and I went to New York this weekend to visit some friends/family and to look at some art. I wanted to see the new Br ücke exhibit at the Neue Galerie - I love me some Expressionists, and I'd never been to that museum - and we both wanted to see the new Walker Evans postcard exhibit at the Met (a museum I'd also never visited).

(I've been to New York like a thousand times but somehow I never make it to anything cultural or touristy, always finding myself face-down in some dive instead, or recovering from having spent the previous evening face-down in some dive. Last December was the first time I made it to an actual NYC museum, the Guggenheim, and then largely because I was with my mother and grandmother, whose interest in putting their faces down in some dive is rather less than mine.)

Anyway, I'll not describe these exhibits - or the ancillary activities we engaged in, such as searching for whoopie pies in the Village, buying books we didn't need at the Strand, filling our luggage with remarkably stinky bagels in Brooklyn, chatting with cousins, dining with an old friend on the Upper East Side - except to note that they're well worth your time and money, if time and money you have, and especially if you have a thing for paintings with great big vibrant planes of color and/or hand-colored old postcards and vernacular photography.

What I'd like to share with you, instead, are some of my own photos from the Met. I love art and I love looking at art, but I also love looking at people looking at art. So, too, do I love taking photos of perfect strangers looking at art. I didn't quite realize I was developing this theme until I got home and was going through my photos this afternoon, but the results are fairly amusing, and I hope you like them.

(Note 1: One of these people is not, in fact, a perfect stranger - see if you can determine which one.)

(Note 2: Another one of these people bears a striking resemblance to Tony Roberts, Woody Allen's friend ("Max") in Annie Hall - hint: this person may be made of marble.)

(Note 3: In one of these photos the looking-at-art is implied, rather than visually demonstrated - it's something that's already happened, and we're just witnessing the aftermath.)

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - The Whately Diner

2009-03-17T20:52:00.002-04:00

Until last year I had quite the thing for diners. I never saw any growing up - Oklahoma was never really diner country, even in the heyday of diners, and anything of that sort had been obliterated by fast-food franchises and multi-lane expressways by the time I achieved sentience - so when I moved east I was surprised to find quite a number of them still going strong. I loved them for their authenticity, or what I imagined to be their authenticity. I was charmed by the old-fashioned design of the things, especially the dining-car diners, with their hand-lettered signs and sleek lines and all that chrome. I romanticized the patrons as true, salt-of-the-earth Americans who came to a diner as much for fellowship as for food, persisting in a type of neighborliness that had disappeared from the rest of the country around the time we stopped walking and began sealing ourselves up in steel-and-glass boxes instead. More than anything, I admired the modesty of diners, their defiant corniness in the face of so much fluorescent, national-chain bombast.

And then I moved to Philadelphia.

Now New Jersey, as anyone knows who's spent any time there, is the epicenter of diner culture. The three biggest dining-car manufacturers were once based there, and what new diner construction still goes on these days is almost exclusively carried on there. Philly, of course, is not in New Jersey, but in many ways it's a sort of cultural annex of the Garden State, which sprawls there just across the river, and the city has many, many diners both within its limits and in the surrounding counties. I spent a lot of time in these diners - many of them, it must be said, not of the quaint dining-car variety, but of the glitzy, mega-diner variety (what I called, without much regard to accuracy, "Las Vegas diners") - and as the romantic gauze began to slip from my eyes, I began to realize something as profound as it was troubling: diner food sucks. This may be because diners tend to have vast menus, offering everything from spaghetti-and-meatballs to waffles, and the quality of the food declines as the expertise of the chefs becomes correspondingly diluted. It may be because the patrons - those salt-of-the-earth embodiments of a vanishing America - are the very same people who, on other days, can be found stuffing their corpulent faces at all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets or filling up on Saltburgers at the local Cracker Barrel. It may be any combination of things, but the fact is that I have almost never had a memorable diner meal - or at least not one that was memorable for the food.

It took some time for me to come to this realization, but once I had it I began, if not exactly avoiding diners, then at least ratcheting down my expectations considerably. So this morning when I went to the Whately Diner (known officially, if unappetizingly, as the Fillin' Station Diner, but no one here calls it by that name - Whately is the name of the town), I did so more for the sake of crossing another breakfast place off my list than with any great tummy-rumbling excitement. I had been there before, though not for the french toast, and remembered it principally for its unattractive location beside a gas station (hence its official name) and a parking lot filled with eighteen-wheelers fresh off I-91. And sure enough, when I walked in the door the few customers I saw munching away at the counter bore the distinct odor of diesel fuel. A glance at their copious beards and bellies confirmed that these were indeed brethren of the sacred order of the big rig.

I settled into a booth in the corner, ordered my coffee, and waited to order the only type of french toast on the menu: "french toast with bacon or sausage." I decided on sausage. And then I waited. And waited. The two middle-aged waitresses were chatting away about some acquaintance's heart condition, and then about some other piece of local gossip, and, when I finally strolled up to the counter to ask if I could order, they looked genuinely alarmed. And then, when they saw that I simply wanted to place my order and wasn't going to cause them any physical harm, they apologized. Profusely.

"I'm so sorry! I thought you got him!" (looking sternly at her counterpart)

"I thought I had, too! I was up here at the register and completely forgot!" (looking sternly toward heaven)

"We both apologize!"

"It's okay, really, it's fine," I said. "Really, really, it's okay."

While I waited I flipped through the mini-jukebox with which my booth, like all the others, was equipped. Alan Jackson. Charlie Daniels. Lynard Skynard. Eagles Greatest Hits. NOW That's What I Call Music! vol. 19. Grammy Nominees 2003.

Fortunately, my food arrived before I managed to dig out the 50 cents required to play a song (they'd clearly expedited my order to make up for the earlier lapse), and, famished by now, I tucked in with abandon. And maybe this was just my grateful tummy telling me so, but it was really tasty. The butter came in little plastic-and-aluminum cubes, the syrup had to be squeezed from a plastic bottle like ketchup, and the bread was just plain - if rather thick - white bread, but it all worked deliciously. The bread was nice and spongy, the syrup (plastic bottle or not) was nice and sweet, and the sausage tasted like breakfast sausage should - that is, like no other sort of sausage you'll ever have in any other context.

When I went to the register to pay, the waitresses were engaged in a heated discussion about food coloring.

"What makes green? Blue and yellow?"

"Yeah, but just use a little bit of blue, otherwise it'll look too dark."

Oh yeah. Today was St Patrick's Day.

"Are you trying to find something you can turn green?" I said, as I handed over my check.

"Yeah."

"Green eggs and ham?" I suggested.

"We tried that a few years ago. It doesn't look too appealing. Maybe we could do mash potatoes. We did that a while back. HEY GEORGE! Can we do green mash potatoes? What? Why not? What about for just some customers? Aw, c'mon!"

"Thanks," I said, and stepped out to the car.

And then I began getting excited about diners again, if only a little.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Haymarket Cafe

2009-03-15T14:48:00.001-04:00

The Haymarket Cafe is the beating heart of NoHo, but, if you're not looking for it, you're very likely to walk right past it without noticing. Sandwiched between a couple of other businesses in a downtown block dating to 1868, the Haymarket's storefront is barely wide enough to accommodate its door and a tall window. Blink and you've already strolled by it. Instead of blinking, though, you're much more likely to be distracted by the hippies and buskers who congregate around the benches along this stretch of Main Street, singing Jewel songs and stroking their pet ducks. If, that is, your eyes aren't stinging from the smoke of clove cigarettes that assails them as you mosey by.

Should you manage to find your way inside, however, you will immediately see that you've stumbled upon something special. For one thing, the place will be much larger than you expected - not exactly capacious, but certainly cavernous, even commodious, especially when you spot the stairs leading to a lower level. In this way it will remind you of certain pubs and restaurants you've encountered in Europe, the sorts of places that look teensy from the sidewalk but that open up into grand palaces once you're inside, much of the space having clearly been gobbled up from adjacent establishments in some earlier age. Another thing you'll quickly notice is that the walls are painted with bright, just-shy-of-whimsical designs and adorned with antique prints, lithographs, and mirrors whose relationship to one another is purely circumstantial. Which is to say they don't match, but that doesn't really matter. Scoot further inside and you'll spot two display cases offering pastries both hearty and decadent. If it's still morning you might opt for an oatcake - though I'd recommend one of the moist, soft fruit-and-nut bars instead, if they've got them - and if it's afternoon you'll probably spring for a cupcake or two. You'll also notice that, in addition to the usual range of coffee products, the Haymarket is an honest-to-goodness juice bar with all sorts of ways to satisfy your juice jones.

If this is a normal day, by which I mean a day in which you didn't come to the Haymarket for french toast, you'll get your coffee/juice and oatcake/cupcake and grab a seat upstairs, if you can find one. You'll settle into your seat and look around. And then you'll notice that the the Haymarket is a buzzing microcosm of NoHo life, the patrons and staff a virtual cross-section of the local citizenry. There are the burly, friendly lesbians behind the counter, with their tattooes and flannels; there the placid lesbian couple with their Asian baby. There's the guy with the long, permed hair who looks like he used to be in the J Geils Band and whom you're pretty sure is a professor at Smith; here, indeed, is a table full of his probable students, chattery young Smithies wearing Uggs. There's the young, punky guy with three (three!) eyebrow-rings and close-cropped hair knitting (knitting!) some sort of pink baby sweater; there's the group of sweatshirted grad students you always see pecking away at their laptops. Here's someone doing some sort of complex graphic design and taking a phone call a little to loudly. There's a bearded guy who just stumbled in with a beat-up guitar case looking for the bathroom. Behind you you hear a conversation about academic politics or, possibly, plain old politics politics. Here comes a handful of blinking tourists. Oh! And there's the guy you privately call The Highlander, the one you see stomping around town in his green kilt and multicolored knitted cap with earflaps and strings that sway to and fro above his shoulders as he barrels past you. Man, that is one fascinating dude.

As you can probably tell, I spend a lot of time at the Haymarket. It's one of my standard coffee-shop haunts, the place I go on those mornings when I manage to get out of my pajamas before noon (after noon it gets much harder to find a seat there, and I usually end up at the less-popular Yellow Sofa instead). I've even had quite a few meals there - downstairs they serve delicious soups, sandwiches, and salads - but until recently I was completely unaware that they serve french toast as well. Well they do, and it's among the best in the Valley that I've had so far.

To get it I had to take a seat downstairs (under a black-and-white poster of Emiliano Zapata proclaiming "Tierra Y Libertad," at a table sporting some faux-naive-arts-&-crafts-movement stenciling) and let myself be served by what I can only call a waitress - table service is unusual in coffee shops of any kind, and the Haymarket provides it in the morning only, downstairs only. Unlike the menu at Stables, which offered a dizzying array of french toasts that put me in a bit of a moral noose, the Haymarket offers only one variety of the dish, the "bourbon french toast," and so I was free to indulge my growing desire for the fanciest, schmanciest french toast I could find - and to hell with science. So order it I did. It looked like this:

Served with real maple syrup, a handful of fresh fruit, and some creme fraiche dotted with candied pecans, the toast itself could have been bland as butter and the meal still would have been delicious. Fortunately, the toast was also quite good. I didn't taste much bourbon, but with the syrup and creme and pecans more flavor would have probably left me feeling overwhelmed and confused. The bread itself appeared to be a kind of sourdough, the sort of bread that would be crusty (on the outside) and rubbery (on the inside) if eaten dry, but, having been dipped in egg stuff, fried, and slathered in sugar and cream, it acquitted itself quite well, retaining remarkable structural integrity when many lesser breads would have disintegrated into porridge (I'm looking at you, Stables). That said, a heartier bread - something whole-grain, maybe, with lots of oats - would have been even better, and it's this slight reservation that's preventing me from declaring this the early, odds-on favorite to win the title of TPFT. Right now, though, it's the one to beat.

The ante has just been upped.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Stables

2009-03-09T20:08:00.005-04:00

I've complained several times in this blog about Route 9, the main artery that connects NoHo to Amherst. It's the part of the Valley that looks like it could be anywhere in America. Apart from a few farm stands and the occasional glimpse of distant hills across tidy farmland (oh, and a bison ranch), it's all big box stores, strip malls, prefab motels, gas stations, and chain restaurants. I spend a lot of time driving up and down this road and sometimes run a few errands along it - a visit to Trader Joe's for some reduced-fat brie, a peek inside Marshall's in search of cheap jeans - but I rarely think of Route 9 as somewhere to go in search of a pleasing dining experience. This is probably grossly unfair to Route 9, for nestled in amongst the Chilises and Applebeeses are some genuinely interesting-looking local establishments, but it rarely occurs to me, when food is on the agenda, to brave the traffic in search of them.

Stables is one such establishment. I'd often noticed it squatting there, a bit too far back from the road, behind a rutting parking lot, looking like an old red barn. It was the kind of place that, had I spotted it on a road trip, would immediately have caught my eye as a place where I might see some of the natives in their natural habitat, if not exactly as a place likely to serve memorable food. I pictured lots and lots of country-style crafts adorning the interior. You know the sort of thing: cute signs with homey sayings stencilled onto them, cross-stitched scenes of cows and windmills, hand-painted wooded chickens, lace curtains. The food would be serviceable and salty, the servers boisterous and friendly and maybe a little salty themselves, and the clientele would be well-rounded (in a purely physical sense) and well-aged (in a life-span sense). Had I encountered Stables on a road trip I would have looked around a little for something a bit more exciting before circling back to it. Which is probably why I didn't get around to trying it out until last weekend, and then largely at Kate's suggestion.

On entering, I was pleased to see that my (hasty, ill-informed, potentially unfair) assumptions about the place had been more or less accurate. There were the cute country crafts, there were the salty waitresses, there was the menu promising food that was certain to make you full but unlikely to change your life. The only large point on which I was in error had to do with the patrons - rather than being a gathering spot for elderly townies, Stables appears, at least on weekend mornings, to cater primarily to college students and their parents. The place was packed with them - so packed, in fact, that it enabled us to play a rousing game of "guess the college," in which players attempt to determine, based solely on the (hasty, ill-informed, potentially unfair) stereotypes attached to each of the area colleges, which school a given group of students attends. This is one of my favorite games to play in this college-stuffed valley, and on this occasion we were able to determine without much fear of contradiction that most of the students were from UMass, dressed and groomed, as they were, like conventional frat boys and girls (ball caps, fleeces, absence of facial hair, pajama bottoms). There was one group of dredlocked white kids who were definitely, definitely from Hampshire (the undisputed hippie college of the area), but on the whole this was a UMass crowd - there, no doubt, for the copious amounts of food that could be had for a relative pittance. But then, aren't all pittances relative?

Settling onto our stools at the counter, Kate and I were surprised - and I somewhat alarmed - to encounter a surfeit of french toast options. As I said in the last post, I'm trying, in the interests of science, to be scrupulously fair in my search for TPFT, to ensure that I am comparing dishes that are, in fact, comparable. Imagine my distress, then, when I encountered a vast variety of french toasts from which to choose. There was normal french toast, french toast made with homemade bread, corn bread french toast, zucchini bread french toast, and more. Reader, I tell you I was in a quandary. I wanted nothing more than to gaze upon and then devour a steaming plate of zucchini-stuffed french toast. But then what of my search? How could I compare what would undoubtedly be the heavenly taste of zucchini mingled with eggs and syrup and sugar to the regular, plane-jane french toast I'd had at Jake's and would undoubtedly have again?

But then a tiny, evil voice inside me said, "Oh, quit being such a stickler! If Stables offers zucchini french toast and Jake's doesn't, whose fault is that? Doesn't Stables deserve extra consideration simply because it had the foresight to include zucchini french toast on the specials board, while Jake's didn't?"

"But what about science?" said the larger, better voice within me.

"Science, schmience," said the tiny, evil voice.

"You make a good point," said the larger, better voice.

"Yes," said the tiny, evil voice.

"..." said the larger, better voice.

And then I recalled that I wasn't alone on this particular morning. Kate was here! Would she save me? The solution seemed obvious.

"What will you have, madame?" I said in my normal voice.

To my surprise and delight, she said, "I do believe I'll have the corn bread french toast, my good man."

It wasn't zucchini bread, but it was good enough. Thus assured that I would at least be able to taste one of the gourmet french toasts on offer, I submitted to the larger, better voice and ordered the french toast with homemade bread (if I were a stronger person I would have ordered the plain old french toast, but even scientists have to allow themselves to be human sometimes). I was thrown briefly off-balance when the waitress asked me if I wanted the homemade cinnamon swirl, chocolate chip, banana, or white bread, but I regained my composure quickly and ordered the white bread, thus ensuring that the playing field would remain more-or-less level.

When our orders came out they looked absolutely delicious. I took a picture, and the waitress expressed surprise.

"You're taking a picture of your food?" she said.

"Yes," I said. "It looks really good."

"That's nice," she said. "That's real nice."

Here's the picture:

Then it was crunch time. Or, um, brunch time. We doused our bread with real maple syrup (at least I'm pretty sure it was real) and started in, munching on brunch. Kate's corn bread french toast tasted like corn bread covered in syrup. We determined that it had been cooked in some sort of egg mixture, but the influence of that mixture was more evident in the crisp shell surrounding the toast than in the taste. And my homemade bread, while nice and thick, was bland. Bland and mushy. The middle of the toast was more like pudding than toast, and even with the addition of copious amounts of real maple syrup and butter it tasted like nothing at all. Or like a slightly sweet air pudding. Yes, that's it precisely.

I was disappointed, but I can't say I was surprised.

I'm glad to have gone to Stables and will happily go back, but when I do, I believe I'll have something other than french toast. The prices were good, the service was friendly if not wholly competent, and they get points for adding a bit of flair to an otherwise pretty basic breakfast menu. And maybe, once the search for TPFT is over and the winner has been announced, I'll be able to relax a bit and finally give that zucchini bread a crack.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Jake's

2009-03-06T00:49:00.002-05:00

There is, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, a vast proliferation of brunch spots here in the Valley. In addition to the expected handful of chrome-and-linoleum, dining-car diners (this is New England, after all), there are trendy cafes serving locally grown, organic food; sugar shacks where you can drizzle your food with made-right-there maple syrup; artsy-studenty coffee shops; and any number of kountry kitchens of the sort you'll find in small towns all over America, the kinds of places that presidential candidates like to pop into for photo-ops with real Americans, most of whom, in places like this, will be found wearing feed-lot ballcaps and hearing aids. I'm not sure how to account for this abundance of brunch options - maybe it has something to do with all the students, or all the parents visiting all the students, or the combination of lots of students and lots of old people gathered together in one place - but I'm happy to take advantage of it. Indeed, since I moved here at least half of the meals I've eaten outside the house have been of the breakfast/brunch variety. This is traceable to a number of causes, but the primary one, I believe, has to do with my tendency to get up quite early in the morning, and therefore to eat breakfast quite early. By the time 10:30 or 11:00 rolls around, breakfast is like four hours in the past, and I'm ready to eat again. And what does one eat at that time of day? You guessed it.

So by now I've been to quite a few of these places, but by no means have I exhausted the available options. I'm quite a thorough person, and I don't like to visit a place (or live in a place) without having explored its every corner, at least every corner in which something interesting or tasty might be going on. I also work well within a clearly defined set of parameters - set me free in a large grocery store and tell me to buy something, anything, to eat, and I'll wander around helpless for hours in the face of so many options, but tell me to find something for lunch that's yellow, starts with the letter m, and can be found anywhere between aisles 4 and 9, and I'll provide you with the most memorable meal you've ever had - so it helps me to have an organizing principle for my exploring. To that end, I've decided to scour all the brunch places in the Valley for The Perfect French Toast (TPFT). Why french toast? You mean, besides the fact that, when done right, it can be the most delicious breakfast food imaginable? Well, here are two more reasons.

1) It's hard to get right. Most breakfast foods are pretty much the same wherever you go. Scrambled eggs are, with very few exceptions, scrambled eggs. Ditto bacon, sausage links, even waffles and pancakes (with some caveats - see #2 below). With french toast, however, there are a number of variables - involving quality and quantity of ingredients, timing, and so forth - that make it both more difficult to execute properly and more rewarding when done right. How a restaurant does its french toast is usually a pretty good measure of the care and skill with which it executes the rest of its menu.

2) French toast is less susceptible to culinary variations or innovations. Unlike pancakes, say, into which cooks will stuff all sorts of things, from apples to pumpkin to granola, or waffles, which can come in all sorts of different fruity flavors, french toast usually appears in a consistent style from restaurant to restaurant. This makes it easier to compare different restaurants. If I were to order the potato pancakes at one place and the pumpkin pancakes at another, I would have insufficient data with which to form a solid judgment of the two restaurants' pancakes. It would be like comparing apples to oranges, or, in this case, potatoes to pumpkins. Mind you, there are a few substantial variations that I expect to encounter in my search for TPFT - most of which will have to do with the type of bread used - but these variations will be minimal, and I'll do my best to ensure that the search is conducted on a level playing field. That includes refusing to garnish my french toast with different sorts of fruit, an option many places include, for, as much as it kills me to do so, fruit is the sort of variable that could skew the whole project. Syrup variation, on the other hand, I regard as a legitimate point of comparison.

So with these notions in mind, I set out this morning to begin the search. I went to Jake's.

Jake's prides itself on its "no frills" dining ethos, and to a certain extent I agree with their self-assessment. The food is cheap, standard fare - no tofu sausage or spinach wraps here, just eggs and breakfast meat, waffles and pancakes, french toast (with or without meat, eggs, or fruit), and an occasional modest flourish like huevos rancheros or their daily specials. The servers are black-aproned and all female, the cooks, whom you can glimpse over a partition behind the cash register, are tattooed, surly looking, and male, like cooks are supposed to be. The coffee is served from diner-style coffee pots and it tastes like diner coffee - weak, but most amenable to plenty of milk or cream - and is refilled frequently, provided the servers are paying attention to you. There's a counter with stools for solo diners and scarred wooden tables for larger parties, dark wood-panelled walls, and to get to the bathroom you have to go down a dank set of stairs while trying not to hit your head on overhead beams and pipes. That said, there are at least a few frills to be found at Jake's, most notably the black-and-white portrait of Calvin Coolidge hanging above the counter, as well as a hand-painted portrait of the Quaker from the front of the Quaker Oats cartons. These are frills by pretty much anyone's definition.

The nice thing about Jake's is that you can almost always get a seat there without waiting. Other, trendier spots in town often have large crowds gathered outside their doors, especially on weekends, and at least one of them (Sylvester's) actually prides itself on its notoriously long waits, much as Jake's prides itself on its lack of frills. This morning was a typically mellow scene at Jake's, the only real excitement coming from a group of four local businessmen and politicians who'd gathered to gossip about real estate and the perilous state of the corporate franchises in the area. Home Depot in West Springfield, I gather, is not doing nearly as well as it was when it opened, while the strip mall that houses Old Navy and a now-defunct Linens 'N Things is in pretty dire straits. Things, it was agreed, will probably get worse before they get better.

Anyway - the french toast. I decided to inaugurate this search for TPFT at Jake's because, way back in September, I'd had an order of french toast there that completely blew me away. It was crisp, hearty yet flavorful, unlike any french toast I'd ever had. In the several times I've been there since, however, the french toast has never come close to that initial taste of heaven - it's been soggy, under- and unevenly cooked, and fell apart easily under the weight of the syrup. It was quite depressing, actually, and illustrative of my earlier point that french toast can be transplendent when done right, but very difficult actually to get right.

This time the french toast was... pretty good. It was evenly cooked on both sides, with a nicely browned shell that gave a tiny snap when I bit into it. The bread - which, I suspect, was simply store-bought white bread - held the butter and syrup well, without getting soggy or mushy in the middle (the soggy, mushy middle is the most common lapse one encounters while eating french toast). The butter was light and whipped, but the syrup wasn't "pure" maple syrup - for that you had to pay extra, and I didn't want to pay extra - but simply supermarket "maple-flavored" syrup, and so less than memorable. It was, in short, a solid but by no means exciting french toast experience, a good baseline, perhaps, for future excursions. It looked like this:

SnoHo

2009-03-03T18:33:00.004-05:00

It snowed here yesterday, and this made me pretty happy. Before you get all "What!? How can you be happy about snow at this time of year, it's frigging March!" on me, let me 'splain. The snow was welcome because a) I had a thing to do on campus yesterday - a forum on violence involving me, my fellow fellows, and however many students our faculty sponsors could bludgeon into attending - that I wasn't really feeling up for (headachey, snoozey), and the snow initiated a chain of events that culminated in the postponement of the forum until next week; and b) the Valley's gotten really, really ugly lately - like monster-from-Pan's-Labyrinth ugly - and the fresh snow did a wonderful job of covering up (however briefly) all the crusty, gritty piles of ice and gravel that have accumulated on the lawns and parking lots like so many hideous tumors on an otherwise beautful face. Tumors that get all runny and melty in the sunshine, and that you have to walk through in your boots and end up tracking all over your entryway. Blech.

So it snowed, and the Valley looks pretty once again, and I don't have anything pressing to do until next week. And that means that I was able to go out today during my usual coffee-shop-and-grocery rounds and snap a few photos. They're here. It also means that I had one last (at least I hope it's the last) opportunity to wear my longjohns and my Dick Cheney coat, which meant that I was really quite warm out there while everyone else was freezing, which meant, in turn, that I was able to feel just the tiniest bit superior to all those suckers who weren't as well-layered as I was. And that made me feel even warmer inside. Self-righteousness, I find, is a wonderful cure for the winter blues.

What's a Dick Cheney coat, you ask? It's a big, green, puffy coat that looks like the one our former VP wore to a 2005 ceremony at Auschwitz. This was a fashion faux pas for which he was mercilessly, if briefly, ridiculed, since he looked completely ridiculous alongside the somber, black-clad dignitaries who also gathered for the occasion. As someone pointed out at the time, while everyone else looked (appropriately) like they were going to a funeral, Cheney looked like a guy who was going out to shovel his driveway. It's the one and only time, to my knowledge, that Dick Cheney has ever looked ridiculous in his life, and it fills me with great joy just to think about it. Like I said, self-righteousness is a wonderful cure for the winter blues.

But first, a little music...

2009-02-26T19:26:00.007-05:00

Okay, so I haven't exactly gone out and done much exploring yet. I did go to Atkins Market and buy some cider donuts, and I'd like to tell you about Atkins - which I think of as the Wal-Mart of farm stands (but in a good way) - at some point, but not right now. First it needs to not be winter anymore so that they can get some produce that doesn't come from Central America and I can tell you how wonderful it is. I can tell you that the cider donuts are deadly (also in a good way), but I don't want to give too much away just yet.

In the meantime, then, I'd like to share with you one of my favorite finds of recent months. This is La Blogotheque. Do you know La Blogotheque? Don't feel bad: neither did I. It's a YouTube channel from France that has many, many videos of many, many great bands doing unusual live performances, most often in the streets and courtyards of Paris. It is, I gather, the most-subscribed YouTube channel in France, but most of the artists they feature are American or at least English-speaking, so there's no reason we can't join the fun as well. We did, after all, save their asses in WWII.

So when I say great bands doing unusual live performances, here's what I mean: Fleet Foxes (and their beards) doing acapella harmonies sitting in a park, Man Man (go Philly!) banging on railings and trash cans and the bicycle helmets of passersby, the boys from Beirut doing their thing on a street corner, Will Sheff of Okkervil River with his guitar in another park. Sufjan Stevens sings a song on a rooftop in Cincinatti, which isn't exactly France, but he is coaxed into it by a very persistent French videographer. Andrew Bird, Grizzly Bear, Arcade Fire, Architecture in Helsinki, Au Revoir Simone, I'm From Barcelona, Jose Gonzalez, Yeasayer, The Shins, Menomena... I could spend days here. And I probably will (it's so much easier than what I'm supposed to be doing).

My favorite videos so far, the ones I have deemed worthy of inclusion in the ToaPN Hall of Fame, if I ever get one built, are the following:

1. Bon Iver's stunning version of "Skinny Love" before a small, transfixed gathering in what appears to be a basement. The song is, as you know, one of the best songs written in this or any other century, and this performance nearly made me cry.

2. Herman Dune (which, I believe, is a band rather than a guy), armed only with a guitar and a strange plastic toy instrument thingy, singing "123 Apple Tree" in a laundromat (while people are trying to get their laundry done) before taking it to the streets with another song in the best-ever category, "I Wish that I Could See You Soon." The best part, as you will no doubt notice, is the bear costume that the principal Dune is wearing throughout the performance.

Among many other things, these videos have given me serious Parislust. When I was in grad school I threatened many times to drop out and move there (I have some dear Parisian friends whose willingness to provide me with shelter and food was a crucial presumption underlying the whole scheme), but clearly that didn't happen, and I haven't been back in years. I have, however, just written a paper proposal for a conference on colonial policing that's taking place at the Sorbonne in November, so maybe I'll find myself there again before long. And when I do, I plan to track down Mr Blogotheque and give him a big wet French kiss.

What I See

2009-02-23T20:09:00.003-05:00

I've been reading a collection of stories by Joseph Roth in a book called What I Saw. Roth was an Austrian journalist and novelist living in Berlin in the 1920s - he moved to Paris in 1925 and stopped coming to Berlin in 1933, reasoning, correctly, that the life of a left-wing Jewish intellectual wouldn't be worth much under the new Nazi regime - and he wrote prolifically, churning out at least 19 books and innumerable newspaper pieces during a career that barely lasted two decades. The stories in What I Saw aren't really stories but rather vignettes (or feuilletons, as his translator calls them), short pieces describing tiny little corners of Berlin life: a seedy bar, a visit to a barbershop, a stroll through the Jewish quarter. At his best Roth uses these settings to sketch a tantalizing picture of the rough edges of Weimar-era Berlin - the outcasts and the dispossessed, barflies, call-girls, street sweepers, the same people who would later populate Joseph Mitchell stories and Tom Waits songs - and at his worst he comes across as a surly old curmudgeon, griping about the newfangled elevators in the department stores or the glowing fluorescent lights in a diner.

I had never heard of Roth until my brother and I stumbled into the Joseph Roth Cafe in Berlin last summer. Okay, we didn't exactly stumble into it - we collapsed into it after a long and very tiring search for a decent dinner spot near Potsdamer Platz, a search that only ended after we found the Joseph Roth in our guidebook and, giving up on Potsdamer Platz, hiked across town on aching legs in search of it. It was, under the circumstances, the best possible solution to our problem - a ragged, homey, divey sort of place with Roth quotes on the walls, a collection of his books, and the coldest beer and warmest Schnitzel I've ever tasted. It made for Roth, deservedly or not, a permanent warm spot in my heart, and it looked like this:

I bring up Roth because his Berlin vignettes are inspiring me to return to my original goal for this blog, or at least one of my original goals, which was to provide a glimpse of what life here in the Happy Valley looks and feels like. I'm aware that I've strayed from this goal a bit - I got a little distracted by the whole London thing, and then I keep finding fun stuff on the internet that I want to share, and now there's all this grody February weather, which has me a bit down and makes me not want to go outside or to take much interest in the things I encounter when I'm out there. But February's about to end, the gritty 3-month-old snow is about to melt, and, though the next several weeks will still be slushy and cold, the world will slowly begin to look alive again. And as it does, there are many, many things that I'm going to need to tell you about, from Calvin Coolidge and Sylvester Graham to butterfly gardens and french toast.

It's gonna be great. Like, obscure-Austrian-writer-who-died-alone-and-alcoholic-in-Paris- in-1939 great.

In the meantime, in this season of renewal, please allow your spirit to be transported by the following rendition of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy":

Notes from a Conference

2009-02-21T12:57:00.003-05:00

I just came back from a two-day conference here in the Valley on violence. It was one of my fellowship duties to attend the conference and to provide a formal response to one of the papers presented, which I happily did. Unlike most other academic conferences I've attended, this was a small affair - about 15 people attended - and instead of standing at a podium reading papers to an audience, the presenters were asked to circulate their papers several weeks in advance and then to give short, informal overviews of their papers while sitting around a large conference table. To my way of thinking, this format is far preferable to the usual way of doing things, insofar as it not only provides everyone with a common textual foundation from which to start a discussion, but it also allows for a more intimate and unstructured exchange of ideas. I enjoyed all this very much, and the narrow thematic focus - we were all people who study violence in one form or another, albeit from different disciplinary perspectives - made it all the more engaging.

That said, there's one thing that perplexed me about the conference - the same thing, in fact, that has perplexed me about the many other conferences I've attended. This is the question of why I bother taking notes at these things. By this point in my career I've amassed a sizable pile of scribblings on all sorts of media - legal pads, post-its, napkins, the backs of printouts - created during conferences, seminars, and the like. Sometimes these represent ideas or themes that occur to me while listening to a speaker and that I may use during the ensuing discussion as prompts for a question I'd like to raise or an observation I'd like to make. More often, though, they're a collection of phrases or ideas that seemed worth jotting down at the time but whose coherence, even five minutes after the conference has ended, has completely vanished. I don't know why I keep these notes - it's not as though I'm ever going to look at them - but, more to the point, I don't know why I take them in the first place.

I suspect it has something to do with the note-taking training we receive in college - not only the notion that we're supposed to take notes when we're undertaking some sort of serious intellectual endeavor, but, perhaps more powerfully, the notion that we should be seen to be taking notes in order to look fully engaged or knowledgeable. Every college student will be familiar with the experience of sitting in class, daydreaming away, when suddenly the room erupts in a flurry of notetaking prompted by something the professor has said, something that the collective wisdom of the room has determined to be important or, at the very least, likely to appear on the exam. What do you do in such a situation? Of course you begin taking notes as well, even if you don't really know what's been said, so as not to look like you don't know what's going on. Notetaking becomes more about performance than about obtaining or retaining knowledge. It becomes a social activity rather than an intellectual one.

The tangible results of this activity are, as I say, completely worthless from an intellectual perspective, but I nevertheless believe that these strange, incomprehensible jottings do have some value. That value is, I believe, aesthetic. These notes are quite poetic, in their way, and they evoke all sorts of associations and images that often have nothing to do with whatever matter was actually being discussed at the time of their creation, but that seem to exist in their own dreamlike world. By way of illustrating this idea, I herewith present to you, gentle reader, a transcript of the notes I took during six hours of presentations and discussions:

- perlocutionary speech produces an effect - persuasive speech
- elocutionary - speech that's an effect in itself - apologizing, etc.
- focus of paper - this is the violent speech act
- simultaneity of physical & linguistic activity explodes agency
- anonymous speech - attempt to deny your own agency

- Frame the everyday w/i the global

- how does violence become normal?
- innocents & guilty
- complicity in acceptance of wall as normal
- Bergeson

- radical right is central component of "mainstream" conservatism
- Alice in Wonderland

- how to read the body? How to tell who's a Muslim by visible signs
- Absence of standing languages
- aesthetic vs. political representation -
aesthetic assumes tacit consent by Muslims
- in colonial period, punishment for traitors is to deny religious rites on death
- doesn't want to stablize given Muslim subject
- consent & assimilation
- Brian Masumi on fear - post 9/11 - thru color coded system gvt invades bodies
- loss of words
- tendency to conflate perpetrators of violence w/ causes of violence
- in writing about violence, how much do we say? We know bad things happen, don't have to say everything
- Violence = essentially unstable object
- don't know how to connect external expression & inner life
- everything they're saying about violence could also be said about love*

- Abu Ghraib photos reinforce hierarchy

- Read Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song

Now I'm going to take these notes and put them in a folder somewhere, so that I'll always have them when I need them.

---
*This is my favorite note of the series. At a certain point I began imagining that every time someone said "violence" they were really saying "love", and it all fit perfectly - love is fundamentally unstable, unrepresentable, ultimately unknowable, we can't define it but we know it when we see it, etc. I thought about bringing this up, but decided against it.

Breathin Red White and Blue

2009-02-15T14:07:00.008-05:00

I made two very big mistakes yesterday. The first was going to see Clint Eastwood's new movie, Gran Torino, about which I had read a pretty glowing review by Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. This is not the first time ol' Manohla has led me astray, but I have vowed that it will be the last - she now joins the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris and former LA Times critic Kevin Thomas on my small but growing list of Movie Critics Not To Trust. Not that all the blame is hers: I confess to being a bit too easily swayed by reviews, not just of movies, but also of albums, restaurants, and any other item of consumption that I take the time to research before experiencing myself. And I confess to a very strong tendency to frontload many of my activities with lots and lots of research, often to the point of excess, as one or two ex-girlfriends and travel companions will tell you. It's not that I'm incapable of forming my own opinions of these things once I experience them - again, often to the point of excess - but rather that in making the initial decision to commit time and resources to undertaking an activity, I tend to rely on the advice of others, and too often these others are reviewers, either professional or amateur, whose judgment and/or taste is simply unsound. It's quite a problem.

I won't say much about the movie itself, except to note that there were several scenes that were so poorly acted, or so toe-curlingly cloying, or so larded with ham-fisted symbolism (if I may be permitted to mix two meat-based metaphors), that, had I not been hemmed in on both sides by my fellow moviegoers, I would have fled the theater. Do you know the story of the movie? Clint Eastwood is a Korean War vet and retired auto worker who's just lost his wife, is estranged from his sons, and is steeped in a racist rage at the steady infiltration of his Detroit neighborhood by Asian immigrants, specifically people of the Hmong culture. After a series of misunderstandings between Clint and his new neighbors, which usually involve Clint sticking a gun in somebody's face, or growling racist epithets, or both, the two cultures gradually come to understand one another, primarily through Clint's relationship with the teenage boy next door, for whom he becomes a sort of surrogate father. I won't give away the ending, the symbolism of which is not only lardy and ham-fisty but postively carcinogenic, but accept it as a measure of the movie's overall badness when I say that its highlights, comedic and otherwise, consist entirely of the scenes when Clint is pointing guns and growling racist epithets. Partly, I suppose, to compensate for my inability to escape, I found myself chuckling and enjoying these scenes immensely, presented, as they were, with a knowing wink to the hard-bitten vigilante characters that he inhabited in the Dirty Harry and Spaghetti Western flicks. At least I hope the wink was knowing.

My second mistake yesterday was arriving at the movie theater about five minutes early. I hadn't been to this theater before - it's the big multiplex in the area, in the mall out on Route 9 - and I'd forgotten that when going to movies at multiplexes one has to expect to have one's senses assaulted for about 5-10 minutes with loud, long, heavily-produced commercials that begin playing before the trailers, and sometimes well before the advertised showtime. This is how I encountered the new Kid Rock / Dale Earnhardt Jr. ad for the National Guard. Now don't get me wrong, I love militarism, and NASCAR, and cock-rock, any of which can enhance the moviegoing experience just as much as a big carton of Junior Mints and a bucket of popcorn. But I can't take all three of them together, particularly when they're deployed in the following manner:

Now, if you're wondering what driving fast cars around in circles has to do with the National Guard, then clearly you're not paying enough attention to what the US military has been up to over the last few years. Amidst all the talk about spreading democracy, destroying the enemies of freedom, and defending civilization from the barbarians, one aspect of our foreign policy that has received relatively little attention in the liberal media is our construction, in association with the Big Three automakers, of world-class NASCAR arenas all over the Middle East and central Asia. Hey, the British Empire introduced cricket to all sorts of places, from Trinidad to Malaysia - why shouldn't we use our imperial might to spread our own, much less faggoty sports around the globe? Especially if it helps out the troubled domestic auto industry? What?

My favorite part of the video, though, is when the little brown kid with the big Aryan eyes and feminine locks runs in front of the tank to retrieve an errant ball and, though initially trembling before the big, virile American soldier, smiles appreciatively when he gets his ball back. The message? Don't worry, world, we may look scary, but we're only here to give you back your balls.

The strange thing about all this is that it happened in the Valley, where I've grown accustomed to being insulated from the sort of nationalist propaganda embodied in the National Guard ad, if not from the sentimental multiculturalism of the Clint Eastwood film. Indeed, I'd be surprised if the multiplex isn't bombarded with angry letters from offended Valleyites as a consequence of this ad. Or maybe they're only showing it before mainstream films like Gran Torino, which are unlikely to draw the same sort of crowd as, say, Milk or W. In any case, nobody in my theater raised so much as a murmur after viewing the ad, and, what's more, everybody seemed to enjoy the movie as well (I assume all the crying I witnessed after the closing credits was induced by sorrow at the movie's downbeat ending, rather than at the horrifying travesty of filmmaking that we'd all just witnessed). Oh Valley, Valley, Valley... I'm very disappointed in you.

This is What Happens When You Call Your Store "Target"

2009-02-11T18:38:00.008-05:00

I woke up this morning to news that a rare Februrary tornado had touched down in northwest Oklahoma City yesterday, about two miles east of my father's house and two miles west of my mother's. It struck the busiest thoroughfare in that part of the city, the misleadingly named Northwest Expressway, a six-lane behemoth that cuts a gash across the otherwise orderly grid of OKC's secondary roads. Anyone who has heard me describe OKC as one giant Wal-Mart parking lot stitched together by a bunch of fast-food parking lots will have a pretty good idea of what this "expressway" looks like.

Here's a video showing the damage. Dig the slightly inappropriate horror-movie soundtrack that shows up about halfway through:

Luckily, no one appears to have been injured by this tornado. My family's fine - they didn't even lose power - and I believe we can credit the city's ridiculously low population density for creating a situation in which a tornado could touch down near a very busy intersection and only damage a few signs, buildings, and cars. Urban sprawl saves the day!

The same, however, cannot be said about the tornado that tore through the small town of Lone Grove, about 100 miles south of OKC, where some 8 people were killed. And there's nothing funny about that, so I'll move on.

Now, I know this part of OKC very, very well - what might look to you like a bland collection of prefabricated buildings surrounded by a sea of parking lots is, to me, a repository of many of my strongest childhood memories. The Chuck E. Cheese that was damaged used to be a ShowBiz Pizza, and I attended many, many birthday parties with my little friends there. I can still picture the large animatronic gorilla who sat in front and played the piano (what was his name? anyone?), the surfing polar bear (ditto), and the guy with the puppet whose specialty was singing happy birthday songs (ditto ditto). When I visited ShowBiz with my older cousins, the birthday guy would invariably find himself singing happy birthday songs to me whether it was my birthday or not - my cousins having amused themselves by telling the staff that it was my birthday and that, moreover, my name was Eugene.

My principal memory of the El Chico Mexican restaurant next door to Chuck E. Cheese is that it was the first place that I realized there was a difference between chain-restaurant Mexican and real Mexican. El Chico is an example of the former.

Across the street and down a little bit, the Target was also damaged by the tornado - this Target was once an ill-fated Wal-Mart knockoff called Venture, where my friend Maggie worked for a few months in high school. This was during the period when Maggie was making the rounds of all the establishments along Northwest Expressway - the McDonald's, the Buy For Less, Burger King - and seemingly unable to hold down a job at any of them for more than a month. Venture itself was kind of a dump, but that wasn't really Maggie's fault.

Also damaged was the Chick-fil-A, which I haven't ever visited but which stands on the site of the late lamented Village Inn pancake house, which burned down a few years ago. The Village Inn was one of the all-night breakfast places where I and my now not-so-little friends hung out once we were old enough to drive, but before we were old enough to buy cigarettes. Not that that stopped us. It was here that a waiter was once heard - mistakenly, as it turned out - to say "The answer is, Dutch Apple Pie," (I think what he really said was, "The dessert is Dutch Apple Pie"). This prompted us guessing what the question might be, and the phrase became a running inside joke for the rest of high school and beyond. To this day, when I hear somebody ask, "What's the answer?" my first impulse is to respond, "Dutch Apple Pie." And sometimes that's just what I do.

While I was thinking about all this it dawned on me that at least two of the places targeted by the tornado were explicitly Christian franchises. Chick-fil-A is run by a fellow with the improbable name of S. Truett Cathy, a former Baptist minister who has sought to infuse his operation with Christian principles by, among other things, closing the stores on Sundays and sending employees to seminars on how to maintain healthy marriages. The company's statement of purpose is: "That we might glorify God by being a faithful steward in all that is entrusted to our care, and that we might have a positive influence on all the people that we might come in contact with." According to Cathy, "miraculous" things began happening to his chicken restaurants shortly after the fateful 1982 meeting at which the board adopted this statement of purpose, and he hasn't looked back since.

The other Christian business in the area is Hobby Lobby, an OKC-based hobby store whose NW Expressway location happens to be in a former Wal-Mart (the rampant repurposing of these prefab buildings is an urban-studies dissertation waiting to happen). Hobby Lobby is also closed on Sundays and it has a more exhaustively righteous statement of purpose. It is as follows:

In order to effectively serve our owners, employees, and customers the Board of Directors is committed to:

Honoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with Biblical principles.

Offering our customers an exceptional selection and value.

Serving our employees and their families by establishing a work environment and company policies that build character, strengthen individuals, and nurture families.

Providing a return on the owners' investment, sharing the Lord's blessings with our employees, and investing in our community.

We believe that it is by God's grace and provision that Hobby Lobby has endured. He has been faithful in the past, we trust Him for our future.

Both Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby, then, attribute their success to God's divine assistance. And who's to say they're not right? If God's spending all His time ensuring shoppers experience "exceptional selection and value" in their quests for dried flowers and multicolored yarn, then that explains an awful lot about the mess the rest of the world finds itself in. Maybe, just maybe, this tornado means He's finally turning His attention to more pressing matters.

All snarkiness aside, however, here's hoping the folks back home pick up the pieces and get back to work soon. Now is not the time to find oneself out of a job, even if that job is scraping crusty cheese off the festive Pier One plates at El Chico.

Sunday Timewasters

2009-02-08T14:30:00.006-05:00

I have recently been bombarded with all sorts of wonderful things from all four corners of the internet, and, in the interests of helping you have a happy and relaxing Sunday, I want to share them with you.

The first comes from my old pal Harvey Pew, who shared this stunning (and stunningly expensive) artifact of the security state: the Playmobile Security Checkpoint. Be the first on your block to train your children to comply with authority and to disregard the integrity of their persons for the sake of enabling the state to create and perpetuate an illusion of efficacy against allegedly omnipresent threats! Also be sure to check out the customer reviews.

Next comes an item from my rival and sometime friend-with-benefits Dr D, who forwards this little gem from the Captain Planet series. If ever you've wondered about the roots of the Catholic-Protestant divide in Northern Ireland, and the relatively simple steps that can be taken to rectify it, then wonder no more. I was completely ignorant of this program until a few days ago, so you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that my own role in mediating the conflict had not only been dramatized in this way, but also that I had myself been rendered into cartoon form. That laser-ring sure did come in handy, too.

Dr D is also to be credited for bringing to my attention the existence of a bus-ad generator based on those London atheist bus ads I've been obsessing over. Make your own and post them in my comments section! Here's mine:

Chris Jordan is a photographer obsessed with documenting the scale of American consumption. In a series called "Intolerable Beauty," he created stunning photographs from junkyards, recycling centers, etc, that show the detritus of consumer society in all its mind-boggling volume: thousands of cell-phone chargers twisted around each other like snakes, towering mountains of sawdust, shimmering strips of steel from shredded automobiles. Lately, he's been messing around with statistics and Photoshop, taking pictures of prison uniforms, say, or plastic bags, and copying and pasting them hundreds and thousands of times to create massive, sometimes beautiful images that attempt to give concrete, visual form to abstract statistics. So, for instance, in "Cans Seurat", he reinterprets Georges Seurat's famous "Sunday Afternoon..." using 106,000 soda cans, the amount consumed by Americans every 30 seconds, in place of Seurat's pointilist dots. It looks like this:

Here's an 18-minute video of Jordan showing and explaining his work.

Finally, I'd like to call your attention to my new favorite t-shirt. Just the other day I was complaining to Kate that, for all the Obama merchandise out there in the world right now, it's nearly impossible to find anything celebrating vice-presidential cutie-pie Joe Biden. There are Obama bobbleheads, action figures, sandwiches, buttons, ice cream flavors, and hot sauces, but poor Joe hardly merits so much as a toothpaste. Now, however, the balance is beginning to be righted, thanks to the enterprising folks over at (the Happy Valley's own) Diesel Sweeties, who have begun selling Joe Biden Fan Club t-shirts. I saw one the other day being worn by one of the baristas over at the Haymarket, and was so excited I almost spilled my fair-trade organic Columbia roast all over the cafe. They look like this, and are available in a variety of sizes:

Get yours today!

Apres Moi, Le Deluge

2009-02-05T09:21:00.002-05:00

[cheers, Dr D]

As expected, London appears to have completely fallen apart in my absence. You've no doubt heard about the snowstorm that paralyzed the city earlier this week. Something like 5-8 inches fell on Sunday and Monday, forcing schools and businesses to close, shutting down service on all but one of the Tube lines, and playing havoc with Heathrow Airport (an airport which, I might add, tends to teeter on the brink of havoc even on good days). As I stare at the several feet of snow piled up outside my Massachusetts apartment, it's difficult not to feel a little amused by the complete inability of the British to handle a snowstorm that would hardly even merit the name in this part of the world. But, as Anne Applebaum points out, it's all about what you're used to. It makes no sense to own a snow shovel in London if it only snows like this once every 18 years.

If you ask me, this snowstorm is God's punishment for all those atheist buses that have been rumbling through London's streets lately. I'm happy to report, however, that the balance is soon to be righted. The Guardian reports today that several Christian groups have begun running counter-adverts refuting the atheists' arguments. With ads claiming "There definitely is a God. So join the Christian Party and enjoy your life," "There IS a God, BELIEVE. Don't worry and enjoy your life," and "The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God," these groups are also buying up real estate on the sides of London buses and elsewhere around the city. And I say good for them. It's been a long, long time since Britain has been the scene of any serious religious disputes. In the good old days these disputes were between people convinced that theirs was the one true faith and that their opponents were a bunch of anti-Christian, superstitious savages. They'd hold forth in public parks and streets denouncing the pope or the king or what have you, revelling in lurid, slightly pornographic tales about what supposedly went on in the Catholic confessional or in convents, thrilling their audiences with horror-show tales of the inquisition or the Counterreformation. Sometimes, in the really really old days, they'd even fight wars about these things. A king would get it into his head that he would decide whom he could sleep with and not some fat old fart over in Rome, and that'd provoke a series of crises that would culimnate in the execution of another king some hundred years later. Monasteries would be looted and burned. The Irish would get involved and start throwing bricks and burning Protestants in barns. Angry, hairy Highlanders would come down from the hills and sack villages. France or Holland or Spain would try to invade. Crazy radical fundamentalists would flee the country in rickety boats and sail west until they hit a green patch and make friends with Indians and eat turkey with cranberry sauce while wearing buckles on their shoes.

These religious disputes, in short, were productive of a great many things, and I'm glad to see them reemerging - albeit in a slightly modified form - in this new century. No longer is the argument "My God is better than your God, No he's not, Yes he is, No he's not," but rather "There is no God, Yes there is, No there isn't, Yes there is, No there isn't," but it's heartening all the same. It confirms my calculation, made several years ago, that religious conflict was and would remain a growth industry, and that if I was going to succeed financially and professionally I'd do well to hop on that bus.

Of course, there is one other religious fault line in contemporary Britain. I'm speaking, of course, of the nation's large and growing number of Muslims and the alienation that has grown up between some of them and "mainstream" British society. I wonder what they think about this whole atheist bus fracas. For that matter, I wonder what they think about all the snow.

The Shadow Knows

2009-02-02T07:36:00.011-05:00

I don't know about you, but Groundhog Day always sneaks up on me. This is probably because it has the misfortune of falling in early February, which is objectively the worst month of the year, and so I spend most of the end of January making plans not to leave the house (I'm convinced that when I die it will be in February, and I reason that I'm more likely to survive the month if I stay at home. This may or may not be sound reasoning.) and completely forget that this most deplorable month actually begins with a fabulously ridiculous (and therefore simply fabulous) celebration of the predictive powers of furry rodents.

I'm not going to dwell on the ridiculousness of Groundhog Day - Timothy Noah, in a 2004 article for Slate, covered that ground quite thoroughly - nor do I feel much need to explain its background in pagan nature cults, its association with German immigrants to Pennsylvania, or the clearly absurd premise - that is, the idea that we have any way of knowing whether the groundhog sees his shadow or not - on which it's based. I do want to give a brief nod to Bill Murray for immortalizing the holiday in one of his finest pre-Lost-In-Translation performances, but only a brief nod. Instead, I'd like to take this opportunity to celebrate Groundhog Day as a glimmering example of Great American Kitsch.

I've never been to Punxsutawney, PA, on Groundhog Day, but I have been to Punxsutawney, PA. Last spring I went on a driving tour of Pennsylvania and, after playing around in Amish country and eating some nearly lethal sandwiches in Pittsburgh (Go Steelers!, BTW), I popped up to Punxsutawney for an afternoon. It was April, I believe, but it was cold and snowy, making the signs proclaiming Punxsutawney to be "The Weather Capital of the World" seem, on this day at least, only slightly hyperbolic. The town was nearly deserted - not only were there very few people on the streets, but many of the storefronts were empty or boarded up - and it soon became clear that Groundhog Day was pretty much the only game in town. It seemed a shame that the regional economy should be tied to something that only happens once a year, but you ride the star you're hitched to, I suppose.

You've no doubt seen the Cow Parade statues, or some variation of them, that have appeared in different cities over the last few years. These are large fiberglass statues that are posted in different spots around the city, each in different colors, often boasting unique outfits or designs created by local children or corporate sponsors. Boston had fish several years ago, Oklahoma City had buffaloes, etc. Well, Punxsutaney has groundhogs - human-size, waving and friendly groundhogs. They were, apart from the McDonald's downtown, the only splashes of color on a very grey day.

On the main square in town you'll find the Groundhog Zoo, which is actually a window on the outside of the town library, on the other side of which resides Phil, the meteorological groundhog, on the days when he's not being hauled out into the cold by some tophatted buffoon. At least that's what they say - when I was there Phil was sleeping somewhere offstage, so I had to be content with his humongous fiberglass cousins.

By far the best - and warmest - part of my visit was the time I spent in Phil's Official Souvenir Shop. In addition to the expected t-shirts, keyrings, beanie babies, and Groundhog Day DVDs, the shop had a dizzying array of commonplace items made less commonplace by the presence of a smiling groundhog. These included: pens, ashtrays, paper napkins, paper plates, water bottles, and (I'm pretty sure) toothbrushes. Indeed, if one were so inclined one could equip a small apartment entirely with items purchased at Phil's Official Souvenir Shop, assuming one wanted an apartment full of smiling groundhog faces. My arms were full of these things - in fact, I was rapidly checking off the names on my Christmas list - when I had a last-minute change of heart and put them all back. All, that is, except for a "Weather Capital of the World" water bottle, which today enjoys a prominent spot in the water-bottle-holder on my bicycle (although I am a little worried that it might get stolen some day). Do I regret not having bought more groundhog kitsch when I had the chance? I do, sometimes. I do.

My purchase made, I bid a fond adieu to Punxsutawney, but not before passing by the Groundhog Car Wash and the Groundhog Plaza strip mall. And I thought to myself: wow, if I lived here, I would be so goddamn sick of goddamn groundhogs.

Last Post from London

2009-01-27T15:47:00.007-05:00

Like many visitors to London, I've been finding myself endlessly intrigued and amused by the names of the stops on the London Underground (known to a handful of London insiders as the "Tube"). Most stops, such as Westminster or Gloucester Road, have an obvious relationship with their locations and are simply terribly English-sounding without being especially amusing. But some manage to be both impeccably English and amusing. On the District Line alone (which is the one I've been taking most often to get in and out of Kew) there are the delightfully named Hornchurch, Upney, Upminster, Dagenham Heathway, Bromley-By-Bow, West Ham, and Barking stops. Over on the Northern Line there's the ever-popular Elephant and Castle, along with Balham, Tooting Bec, and Tooting Broadway, all clustered in there together like three slightly childish punchlines to three slightly childish jokes. If asked to name a favorite, most teenage boys would probably choose Cockfosters on the Piccadilly Line, or perhaps (among the more imaginative) Shepherd's Bush, which can be found both on the Central and the Hammersmith & City Lines.

I also must confess to taking a certain puerile pleasure in these unintentionally lewd names, a widespread British phenomenon which, as the New York Times recently reported, is by no means restricted to London (thanks, Ely!). But if I had to choose only one station name to take home with me, I believe it'd have to be Turnham Green, just a few stops away from Kew Gardens on the District Line. This is because a) it kind of looks like Turnip Green, and b) when you say it aloud (and if you're the automated voice on the trains, you do this quite often) it sounds like Turn 'Em Green. And that invariably makes me smile.

The newest Underground line is the Jubilee Line, which opened in 1979 and was substantially expanded in 1999. As far as I know, there are no plans to open a new one anytime soon, but if a new line ever is constructed, I believe it should be called the Buffet Line and should include the following stops (at a minimum): Steakfries, Chutney Common, Lambshanks, Chewingham, Burgerloo, Bluebury, Spooning, Curdsenwhey, Mustardly, and Ham-On-Rye. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.

---

I was in Berlin this past weekend visiting friends and eating currywursts. This is the second time I've been to Berlin in the last year, and it's very quickly become one of my favorite cities. This despite the fact that (much like London) it was grey and damp and muddy and bleak this time around (less so last June). But even in the sunshine Berlin is a fairly unattractive city, with lots of bland modern buildings, windswept plazas, lots and lots of graffiti, and, in the east, block after block of concrete GDR-era abominations that still manage to oppress the senses nearly 20 years after the Wall fell. Berlin also has no identifiable city center - the Potsdamer Platz is more like a vast, traffic-snarled black hole than a proper urban focal point - and it has serious social and economic problems. But still I love it, and believe I need to spend more time in it. Unlike flashier cities like, say, Florence, Berlin's charms are elusive. It takes a lot of exploring - best done one neighborhood at a time, as my brother and I learned this summer - to find its essence. It's also a city with many different layers of history poking out all over the place: remnants of the Cold War and the Third Reich are, of course, inescapable, but there are also fragments from the nineteenth century and beyond, if you know where to look. Like New Orleans, life in Berlin feels a little tentative, a little improvised, and this gives rise to all sorts of strange and wonderful clashes and convergences.

For example: I went out walking with my friends Verena and Thomas, their new baby, and a couple of their friends one drizzly afternoon after brunch. We passed a spooky old abandoned (or apparently abandoned) circus that looked like this:

Unexpectedly, we then took a left turn past the circus and through a deserted grove of skeletal trees and emerged amidst a bunch of graffitied ruins. They looked like this:

Even more unexpectedly, we then saw flocks of Berliners out sunning themselves (the sun had come out briefly, though it was still quite cold) amidst the ruins. They looked like this:

And then we saw joggers. And children riding bikes. Old women with dogs. It was like they were in the Public Garden in Boston or Central Park in New York, but instead they were in some grubby, boggy park in Kreuzberg. And nobody thought it was at all strange.

(More Berlin pictures are here.)

I don't mean to give the impression that all of Berlin is like this. There are plenty of posh areas, touristy areas, beautiful palaces, and neighborhoods that would look right at home in some Mediterranean seaside town (I had some amazing Brazilian tomato soup in one of the latter, Prinzlauerburg, yesterday). But it's the sort of city that, I believe, repays repeated visits - indeed, the sort of city that is probably better to live in than to travel to - and if I could figure out how, I think I'd do just that.

PS. I found this map of the Tube with all of the station names translated into German. If you sprechen the Deutsch and know the Tube, take a look - it's pretty great.

I'm In London Still

2009-01-22T02:40:00.001-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen, the Waifs.

Obauguration, London Style

2009-01-20T16:45:00.002-05:00

A few nights ago I found myself having dinner in a pub near Notting Hill. A young American girl was tending bar and talking excitedly about inauguration day. "Yeah," she said, "I don't have to work, so I'm planning to drink champagne all day long!" She was excited, she said, because someone she'd helped to elect (she'd voted for Obama and donated to his campaign) had actually been elected - only she was a little bummed that the election didn't really affect her life, now that she wasn't living in the States anymore.

I and the other patrons - primarily a staggering handful of local drunks - held our tongues, but I'm pretty sure we all knew better.

Because of course Obama's election will affect her life, as it will those of people all over the world, not just those living in America. That's why I believe everyone who is not an American citizen should get precisely one-half vote in our presidential elections. It's only fair - it might not matter to me who the prime minister of Iceland is, but it really does matter to most people in the world who the president of the US is. And most people out here in the rest of the world know it. The London papers have been all over this thing - not only giving the inauguration itself wall-to-wall coverage with a level of detail and insight that you wouldn't find even in most American newspapers (in fact, I rather wonder if the Daily Oklahoman is covering the inauguration at all), but also running multi-part inserts on things like "The Lives of the Presidents" and so forth. The same is true of the TV stations which, when not showing some snooker tournament, have been running special after special examining Obama, the American presidency, and American politics from every conceivable angle.

There were, as you might expect, many Obama happenings around London today. Krispy Kreme Donuts offered a free americano coffee to anyone who came up to the counter and said "yes we can!" The irony being, of course, that there's nothing remotely American about the americano, which is just espresso and hot water - it's what British cafes serve when they don't have actual drip coffee makers, and it's usually a very poor approximation. Madame Tussauds, to celebrate the unveiling of their new Obama statue, kicked it up a notch by offering free admission to anyone with an American passport (that's a savings of 25 pounds, folks). TGI Fridays, which has a distressingly large presence here, advertised "The World's Largest Inauguration Party," which would include a simultaneous toast of Jack-and-Coke at 9pm and free Friday's buttons for everybody. And, perhaps most intriguing of all, the Hard Rock Cafe promised that an "Obama lookalike" would appear during their screening of the event. One can only imagine what that might have turned out to be.

I, being a good research monkey, attended none of these events - though believe me, gentle reader, I was sorely tempted to do so, that I might then be able to report to you what I saw and felt. I did, however, allow myself to knock off an hour early and watch the inauguration in a nearby pub - a pub several blocks away that I'd scouted out the day before, after learning that the pub closest to the British Library (the Euston Flyer) was only planning to show the inauguration if there wasn't any football on. By which, I believe, they meant soccer.

And I'm afraid there's not much more to report. The pub was full of American college students, everyone clapped in all the right places, was silent in all the right places, and began losing interest around the time the poet laureate came on. The BBC announcers may have misidentified the song Aretha Franklin sang as the "national anthem," and they may also have dwelled a little too long on how high the risk was that Obama would be assassinated, but otherwise it all went fairly smoothly.

I guess there was one thing. For the first time that I can remember in all the time I've spent abroad, I didn't feel ashamed to be an American. No, that's not quite right: I actually felt proud. Not only of the guy standing behind the podium on TV, but of all the clapping, laughing, drinking Americans sitting happily around me. Firmly, unmistakably proud.

But I'll concede that I may not have felt that way if I'd spent the day at TGI Fridays.

Oh yeah? Then how do you explain Pop Tarts?

2009-01-18T16:32:00.004-05:00

There's an ad campaign that's causing quite a stir over here in the ol' U of K. It seems a group of godless heathens calling themselves the British Humanists Association, with the assistance of some crank named Richard Dawkins, have taken out ads on British buses informing people that there is, in all likelihood, no God. In fact, what the ads say is, "There's Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life."

I've seen these ads on a few buses and have even tried to take some photos for you, but those buggers move too damn fast. So here's a photo from the web:

Now I know what you're all thinking: dang, atheists are cute! Oh, and also, isn't Europe already like 98.7% atheist? Why bother shelling out money for an ad campaign that tells people what they already know?

I'm afraid I'm not really able to answer that question, but I can tell you this: there are some folks around here who are taking considerable exception to the ads. In the (strangely named) town of Southampton, a Christian bus driver has refused to drive any bus bearing the ad, although whether he has taken similar exception to driving buses with ads for violent or exploitative movies and/or video games is unclear. Predictably, some of the most vocal opposition has come from Northern Ireland, where hard-line Protestant politicians have been working themselves into a right ol' tizzy over the prospect of any similar ads showing up in their fair land. If Dawkins & Co. know what's good for them, they'll steer well clear of that hornet's nest.

As for me, I've been on London buses, and I can tell you that being told that there is no God just before boarding one of those lurching behemoths is the very opposite of comforting. It's downright terrifying. The same goes for trying to navigate the streets on foot with those monsters careening all over the place. There is no God? Fine - but don't expect me suddenly to stop worrying and start blissfully skipping down the lane. If there is no God then that means human beings are in charge, and that is a troubling notion not only with respect to public transport in London, but to a whole bunch of other things as well.

Save the Last Silly British Stick Dance for Me

2009-01-16T16:57:00.007-05:00

There is (I hear) grave concern in some corners of this sceptred isle that the great British tradition of Morris Dancing is dying a rapid death, and there's even talk among its practitioners that in 20 years there'll be no one left in Britain who is capable of carrying on this glorious and not at all ridiculous piece of Britain's cultural heritage. To combat this problem, advocates of Morris Dancing are visiting schools and malls to try to encourage young people to take it up.

Apparently, they're having some difficulty convincing the little turds to give Morris Dancing a go. See if you can guess why.

As part of my ongoing effort to save Britain from itself, therefore, I hereby resolve that, should I ever move to London, the second thing I'll do, right after joining the P. G. Wodehouse Society (UK), is strap on a pair of knee-bells, grab the nearest stick, and join up with a group of Morris Dancers. Perhaps these guys. They look like fun.

Standing In the Kew - er, Queue

2009-01-15T16:58:00.012-05:00

There's a wonderful old play by Israel Horovitz (who happens to be the father of Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, AKA Adrock) called Line that I saw some time ago in Philadelphia. One by one, five characters appear on a blank stage and begin to form a line. They're not sure what they're waiting for, but before long they're scheming and lying and cheating and manipulating one another to get to the front of the line. It's a satire of America's win-at-all-costs culture, and it was quite amusing.

I thought of this play the other morning when I showed up early at the British Library to begin the day's research. I knew the reading room didn't open until 9:30, but I thought I might be able to get into the main part of the library and/or the cafe and grab a cup of coffee beforehand, so I arrived about 9:07. When I walked up I noticed three men standing by the door, which indicated to me that they hadn't yet opened. So I stood there for a few minutes considering my next move, thinking they may still open the door a little before 9:30, but after about 10 minutes I decided that wasn't going to happen and I should probably go for a walk or at least go sit on a bench. When I turned to go, however, I saw that a massive line - sorry, queue - had formed behind me. I mean massive, snaking all the way across the plaza and almost onto the street. So I decided to stay put - damned if I was gonna lose my place in line! And then I remembered how one of the things you always hear about the English is that they'll queue up for anything. And then I remembered how I love it when people live up to their national stereotypes, and I smiled.

Maybe if this were an American line there would, indeed, be shoving and conniving and trickery to get to the front, but I can tell you this: if this were in, say, Spain, or maybe Italy, there wouldn't be a queue at all, just a great throng of people pressed up against the windows, gesticulating wildly. Not that the people running the library in Spain or Italy would be quite the sticklers for punctuality that the folks at the British Library are - for at 9:30 on the dot, not a second earlier or later, the doors slid open and the queue passed slowly inside. It was all very civilized.

The next morning, having learned my lesson, I showed up only 3 minutes early. And sure enough, there was the queue. This time I was ready with the camera:

See?

Mind Your Peas and Kews

2009-01-13T14:58:00.008-05:00

Call me a romantic or a fuddy duddy or both, but I love it when places are the way they're supposed to be. I'm all for embracing change and all that crap, mind you, but I also like it when, say, I come across a rude French waiter or a Texan who says "yee-haw" unironically and spouts homey aphorisms like Dr Phil. I guess you could say that I enjoy it when people live up to their stereotypes - I dunno, I guess I find it reassuring.

With that prejudice in mind, I've been collecting things that I have overheard or come across here in London that seem to me to be quintessentially English things to say - things that you will almost never hear anywhere else, unless you're somewhere else with a bunch of English people. Some things are too ubiquitous to even be worth noting - e.g., "mind the gap" for "don't fall in the hole" or "ta" for "thanks" (the latter drives me a little bit bonkers, actually, but never mind) - and some things are so cartoonish that you'll never actually hear any English person saying them, e.g., "Oh, I say, jolly good, old boy!" or "Fetch the car, Jeeves." Although I should most dearly love to hear one or the other in real life before I die.

Thus far, my collection amounts to the following:

1) "Wank! Wank! Wankers!! Wank! Wank! Wankers!!" - shouted by a crazy man walking through Piccadilly Circus.

2) "Are you being a cheeky monkey?" - said by a father to his misbehaving child in Kew Gardens.

3) "He's a lean and hungry snooker machine!" - uttered by an announcer during a snooker tournament on TV (I quite like the Shakespeare reference here).

4) "I'll have the mushy peas, please." - overheard at the table next to me while eating fish and chips.

5) And this, which appears in the back of a paperback copy of Carry On, Jeeves, by P. G. Wodehouse, that I bought this evening:

The P. G. Wodehouse Society (UK)

The P. G. Wodehouse Society (UK) was formed in 1997 to promote the enjoyment of the writings of the twentieth century's greatest humorist [sic]. The Society publishes a quarterly magazine, Wooster Sauce, which includes articles, features, reviews, and current Society news. Occasional special papers are also published. Society events include regular meetings in central London, cricket matches and a formal biennial dinner, along with other activities. The Society actively supports the preservation of the Berkshire pig, a rare breed, in honour of the incomparable Empress of Blandings.

[There follows information on how to join the Society]

If I moved to London, I believe the first thing I would do, even before finding an apartment, would be to join the P. G. Wodehouse Society (UK). I expect you all to hold me to that.

---

Instead of a traditional "work ethic," I believe I have what is best described as a crushing sense of guilt that kicks in anytime I'm not doing something academicky. There's always another book I need to be reading, another paper I need to be grading, a lecture I need to be working on, an article that needs revising. My fellow academics will know what I'm talking about - and they will also know that this academic guilt doesn't necessarily mean that I spend all my time working, it just means that I'm unable to goof off without a nagging feeling that I really need to be doing something more important. Well, the nice thing about travelling somewhere specifically to do archival research is that your working hours are more-or-less dictated by the opening hours of the libraries you're working in, and, if you happen to be working in the UK or Ireland, that means that most days you're only able to work from about 9am to 5-6pm, with maybe a late night on Thursdays, and nothing at all on Sunday. You can always do stuff outside the library, of course, but the early closing hours give you an alibi, enabling you to feel slightly less degenerate if you take evenings and Sundays off.

So that's what I've been doing. Last Sunday I went to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (just down the road from where I'm staying) and was delighted to find that, even though it's the middle of winter, there wwere still plenty of beautiful things to look at, especially in the glass houses. I am, however, less into botany than I am into colonialism, and so I was doubly excited to learn just how central Kew had been to the colonial economy that developed in the 18th and 19th centuries. For instance, did you know that the gardeners at Kew were responsible for transplanting rubber cultivation from South America to places like Malaysia and Sri Lanka? No, I bet you did not. To stroll through Kew is to stroll through a living museum of the British Empire - like the artifacts on display at the British Museum or the colonial subjects whose "traditional" societies were recreated at all those old imperial exhibitions, the plants at Kew show British imperialism at its giddy, acquisitive best. In fact, once it was opened to the public in the 1840s it became one of the most popular ways through which ordinary people could experience and appreciate the fruits of empire - pun intended.

Anyways, I took me some photos of the purty plants. They're here.

The other thing I've been doing in my off hours is going to a new neighborhood every night for dinner, with a bit of London rambling built into the agenda. Luckily, I've already seen a whole lot of London during the daytime, so it's kind of exciting to see these places in their eveningwear. I've also taken a few photos on these excursions. They're here.

The nighttime photos will probably be updated several times over the next two weeks, so check back often! (I'd hate for y'all to miss anything.)

Of Underwear and Silver Linings

2009-01-11T16:43:00.009-05:00

There's a store in the UK called Primark. In Ireland it's called Penney's, but it's really the same thing. They sell clothes and other household items of reasonable quality and questionable style for virtually nothing. And when I say "virtually nothing," I don't mean "cheap for the UK but would be outrageously overpriced in any normal country" - I mean really, virtually nothing. When I was living hand-to-mouth in Ireland/Northern Ireland five years ago, I bought any clothes that I happened to need at Penney's/Primark because it was by far the cheapest way to clothe myself short of growing my own cotton and weaving and spinning and sewing it myself, and, let's face it, the overhead on that sort of operation would have been prohibitive. Several of the items - a pair of cargo pants, some shorts - wore out pretty quickly, but several of them I still own and wear. I'm thinking particularly of the half-dozen black and grey boxer briefs that have become central to my wardrobe and that had, until the past few months, held up remarkably well for the amount of use and abuse they get week in, week out.

So when my suitcase failed to arrive by Friday evening and I had given up hope of ever seeing it again (I left for London on Tuesday), I vowed that I would not wear the same socks, t-shirt, and underwear for a fifth day, and my thoughts turned immediately to Primark. A quick web search (incidentally, I heard today that the carbon footprint of doing one Google search is the equivalent of running an electric kettle - can that be right?) revealed that there is a Primark just down the District Line from here in Hammersmith, and so I hopped on over. After a brief, and entirely unnecessary, perambulation around the entire circumference of the Hammersmith Underground Station, I found the Primark, grabbed a handful of 1.67-pound t-shirts (that's sterling, not lbs), 10 socks at 5-for-2-pounds, and bunches and bunches of my favorite underwear. I've learned that Primark is best for buying things that very few people will ever actually see you wearing, so I steered clear of the shirts and jeans, checked out, and handed over my 20 pounds with a smile and a gleam in my eye.

You know what's coming, right? Well, after a nice moonlight walk along the Thames and a small meal at a small pub with a small crowd of mostly old people, I hopped back onto the Tube, opened the door to Yaya's house, and there was my suitcase, big as life, standing in the hallway. The bastards had come while I was out shopping, and now I had a backpack full of mostly extraneous clothing that I can't actually fit in my luggage. The solution, however, is obvious: I'll wear my old tattered socks and underwear and t-shirts one more time over the coming week - give them a sort of valedictory circuit - and then chuck them in the bin, replacing them with my brand-new, virtually-free items from Primark. I've never been this excited about underwear in my life. Well, almost never.

---

Okay, so the baggage thing has been less than ideal, but let me share with you something that I bet you didn't know, and which, upon learning it myself, briefly made me forget my suitcase woes. This is that steak & kidney pudding is not really pudding. I know! But wait, here's the cool part: it's still really, really good. At least it is at this place called Porter's near Covent Garden. Porter's is a little on the touristy side (the only other people in there on Thursday night were an older American couple), but it's also one of the only "traditional" English restaurants left in London - at least one of the few that doesn't also serve items from the Tikka Masala family - and its slightly Epcot Centerish atmosphere is mitigated by the Tina Turner and George Michael hits that blare, tinnily, from the overhead speakers. Porter's also has lots of pies - Shepherd's Pie, Leek-and-Potato Pie, Lamb-and-Apricot Pie - and you all know how I love pie, so I may just go back there before I leave. Anyway, here's what the steak & kidney pudding looked like:

For dessert, I considered ordering the spotted dick, but they sell that at Marks & Spencer's, so I demured.

Dispatch from Yaya's Room

2009-01-08T17:49:00.002-05:00

I'm sitting in the bedroom of a girl whom I'll call Yaya. Yaya is, I believe, a teenage girl, and, although I've never met her, I know several important things about her, such as: she likes cats; she reads Philip Pullman books (though what she thinks of them I don't know); and she enjoys wearing large, chunky jewellry.

How do I know these things about Yaya? Well, you might say I'm living in her room.

See, I've come to London - Kew, to be precise, on the southwestern edge of town - to do a bit of research at the National Archives here and (though this is further into the city) at the British Library. I'm beginning a new project and hoping to cram as much research into the next three weeks as I can before I have to get back to The Valley to renew those Thursday lunches - and my fellowship comes with a research stipend, so it's pretty much a cost-free trip for me, which is kind of fabulous.

Now, as many of you know, London can be a very expensive place to stay. It's become much less expensive now that the exchange rate is a little less insane - about $1.44 to the pound instead of $2.00 - but it's stil quite pricey, especially when it comes to accommodations. Enter Yaya. Or, more precisely, Yaya's parents, who live in Kew and rent out several rooms in their home on a weekly basis. It's probably the cheapest lodging in London, steps away from the archives and the Tube, and it's a lovely little house. The only thing is that, well, I'm living in their daughter's bedroom.

It's one of the strangest places I've ever been.

When I arrived yesterday, I was greeted by a tiny, elderly Vietnamese housekeeper whom I'd been warned spoke only French. I don't know about her French, but I can verify that English is not a language with which she is conversant. She was expecting me, however, and kindly showed me upstairs to my room. I was briefly taken aback by the sign proclaiming the room to belong to Yaya, and further informing me that behind the bedroom door lay a "dungeon." My uncertainty intensified when, on entering the room, I noticed that the room was full of stuff - teenage girl stuff - and I had the strange feeling that I was trespassing or, worse, that Yaya might return home any minute. Had the housekeeper been able to understand me I would have somehow sought to confirm that I was, in fact, in the right place, but that wasn't really an option and, besides, she seemed completely nonplussed - indeed, slightly bored - by my presence, so I stepped inside and looked around. Sure enough, there were the promised mini-fridge and microwave, along with a toaster, an electric kettle, and a handful of plates and mugs and pieces of silverware. Clearly, I was not the first lodger to sleep in Yaya's room.

I was jetlagged and so I took a nap in Yaya's bed. I should point out here that my suitcase had gone missing somewhere during my layover in Halifax (as of this writing it's still yet to arrive), and so, lacking any pajamas, I took my pants off before getting in bed. A little while later, after I'd dozed off, the door opened and in walked another lady, who - thankfully - was not Yaya but Yaya's mother, the proprietess of the house, who'd come in to retrieve the keys the housekeeper had given me and replace them with another set. I was groggy and embarassed, unable to get out of bed because I was pantless, and fell back asleep after muttering a few things for her and, I believe, frightening her slightly.

When I woke up again it was mid-afternoon and time to pop down to the archives to get my reader's ticket and get my bearings, which I did, and then when I came back I ran into Yaya's mother again and had a slightly more lucid conversation in which I learned: a) there are at least 3 other lodgers in the house (although I've yet to meet any of them); b) Yaya is off at college, so there's very little chance of her popping in unannounced; and c) there's a Marks & Spencer just down the road where I can get some cheap ready-meals to keep in my mini fridge and heat up in my microwave. Armed with this new information, I popped down to the M&S and did just that.

I've got much more to say - about the archives, living in the same socks for 3 days, steak & kidney pudding, etc - but it's late and I'm tired. Before I go, though, I want to impress upon you just how strange this place is. Imagine the home you grew up in. It's got a dining room, a living room, a nice kitchen, a study, a place to watch TV, a driveway and an entryway, carpet, stairs, and so on. Now imagine that most of the bedrooms are inhabited by perfect strangers who pay you to live there. They don't spend any time in the kitchen or living room or dining room - they just pop into the entryway (where they take off their shoes), and scramble upstairs to their rooms while you go about living your life in the rest of the house. This is what life is like for Yaya's parents (there's a father, too - I know because I've briefly glimpsed him around a corner). Now imagine that you're one of the strangers living in this family's house. That's me.

So You Think You Want to Be a Historian – The Historian Party

2009-01-06T21:57:00.002-05:00

Every winter, thousands of historians migrate to a major US city for what’s known officially as the American Historical Association’s Annual Meeting, and unofficially (which is to say, by me) as the Historian Party. If you are a historian or are intending to become one, this annual migration will become an important part of your year, and its characteristics are therefore worth examining in some detail.

If you travel to the Historian Party, which you will do only if you have a paper to present or a job for which to interview – and for no other conceivable reason whatsoever – you will immediately notice that historians look an awful lot like historians. Indeed, a Martian visitor alighting from his or her flying saucer in the midst of the Historian Party would, without much trouble at all, quickly surmise that he or she (or it) was in the midst of a gathering of historians. This Martian would not for one minute, for instance, imagine that he or she (or it) had happened upon a Shriners convention, or a gastroenterologists conference, or even (though this may surprise you) a Philosopher Party, so much do historians look like historians. They are, on the whole, a beardy, scarfy, cardigany lot (I’m talking here about historians, not Martians), although their cardigans and scarves (if not their beards) are often draped in long black woolen coats. This is because the gathering always happens in early January, usually in cities where the only way to remain warm is to wear a long black woolen coat. Indeed, any bright colors you may spot during the Historian Party are almost certain to belong not to historians but to interlopers such as book reps, spouses, or the janitorial staff.

The uniformity of the historians’ uniforms can make it difficult for the uninitiated to differentiate amongst them, but a practiced observer can easily spot subtle differences. The following guidelines may help you identify some of the more common types of historians you are likely to encounter:

1) A historian wearing a bowtie is almost certainly a diplomatic or military historian, and his (it will always be a him) area of expertise will be 20th-century America.

2) Many, many historians will have freshly-shaved, shiny bald heads, and they will be wearing thick-rimmed glasses. These will almost always be male, and, though you may initially assume that they are gay, they are not. They will, however, specialize in intellectual history and/or gender history, with a particular interest in the history of the family.

3) There will also be women at the Historian Party, of course, whom you will be able to spot by their longish hair and distinctive lack of necktie. In fact, many of these women will be stylish, charming, and coolly self-possessed, although they will look slightly bewildered by the beardy commotion around them. All of these women specialize in the women’s suffrage movement in Britain and America.

4) You will encounter many youngish people (late 20s, early 30s) who are dressed in 3-piece suits and resemble funeral parlor directors. They will probably be fidgety and sweaty, and they will invariably be talking to themselves. These are job candidates, and you would be wise to steer clear of them.

5) Finally, you will encounter a very, very small number of historians who appear to be of a race other than Caucasian. Do not be alarmed – these historians study minor, out-of-the-way places that you don’t know or care about, like Asia, Africa, and South America, and you will never have any reason to talk with them about anything.

Once you know what to expect, a fun game you can play even before you arrive at the Historian Party – at the train station, say, or at the airport – is “Spot the Historian,” which is exactly what it sounds like. In addition to their distinctive uniforms, you can spot historians by the volume of their voices (historians usually talk quite loudly), their tendency to speak in full paragraphs (any historian who began talking when you started reading this post, for example, would only now be wrapping up his/her thesis statement), and their slightly bewildered look, as if they weren’t expecting the world outside to be quite this brightly lit.

On arriving at the Historian Party be sure to obtain your $170 name tag and program, and then think about how you’re going to apportion your time. You may be tempted to join one of the many historic walking tours promoted by the Local Arrangements Committee, but you will quickly learn that all of the available spots have already been claimed, and so you will just have to learn about “Tenement Life in 1870s New York” or “Lincoln’s Washington, DC” in some other way. Glancing through your program, you will notice many, many “panels” taking place throughout the four days of the conference. Most of these “panels” will be devoted to topics that are clearly of pressing concern to someone, but probably not to you. They will have titles like: “The Influence of the Levellers’ Social Radicalism on John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government” or “A Long Decline?: the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century.” Those “panels” not devoted to specific historical topics will be concerned with professional navel-gazing (note: these may also misleadingly be called “roundtables”), and they will have titles like: “Are There Too Few Minorities in the Historical Profession?” (answer: yes) or “Teaching European History in a Global Age.” You will note that many of these “panels” and “roundtables” are scheduled to take place simultaneously, and so you will, unfortunately, be unable to attend them all. You will have to choose, so choose wisely. And note that the only three “panels” that really interest you will invariably be scheduled to take place at the same time as one another. Try to avoid the temptation to kick something.

Let’s say you’ve decided to attend a “panel” on your first afternoon at the Historian Party. What can you expect to see? You will see a small hotel conference room with 3-4 people seated at the front of the room behind a long table, and 3-4 people seated in the audience in chairs facing the table. The speakers will be introduced by someone who clearly just met them all a few moments before, and then one by one they will stand at a podium and read a 10-12 page paper to you. Let me repeat: they will read a paper to you. One after the other, 20 minutes at a time, with minimal ad-libbing or improvising. If you’re lucky, they’ll look up from the podium from time to time. After an hour of this the room will be open to questions, during which bearded men in cardigans will ask questions of the panelists that, though masquerading as questions about the panelists’ papers, are actually questions about the questioners’ own research. A sample question: “Yes, um, I was really interested in what you said about the chaotic nature of the Third Reich’s administrative regime, and I was wondering if you’d thought about doing some sort of comparison with the Spanish Empire’s administration in 16th-century Mexico, which, as I pointed out in my latest book, was similarly chaotic but without, perhaps, the added pressure of waging a global war…” Once the questioner pauses to take a breath, you’ll have an opportunity to sneak quietly out of the room. You should probably do that.

Unless you’re actually presenting a paper at the Historian Party, however, you are most likely there because you are interviewing for a job, for this is the place where the historical profession normally conducts its initial interviews before inviting finalists for on-campus interviews. These interviews are conducted either in hotel rooms reserved individually by the interviewing schools, or in a massive, partitioned ballroom known colloquially as the “bullpen.” If your interview is in a hotel room, you can expect to spend half an hour sitting on a chair in the middle of the room (or, if the room is especially small, sitting on the bed) while 3-5 faculty members seated in a semicircle pepper you with questions, many of which they will have written on yellow legal pads sitting on their knee. As unpleasant as this sounds, it is infinitely preferable to the alternative. Should you have an interview in the “bullpen,” you can expect first to sit in a sort of waiting room, or holding pen, while you wait for one of your interviewers to come out of the larger room and call your name. While sitting in the holding pen, you will notice that you’re surrounded by all those job candidates you’ve been avoiding throughout the Party, and you will further notice that this place at this time is perhaps the worst place on earth that you could possibly be. Your companions will be shaking, sweating, red-faced, pale-faced, staring into space, making awkward conversation with one another, doing breathing exercises, talking to themselves, fidgeting, flipping through printouts, and jumping up at any sound that could vaguely be their name being called out by an interviewer. Many will be doing all of these things at once. Some will be glancing at the large television on which are scrolling the names and locations of the various schools that are interviewing. Some will be weeping openly.

On being called back into the “bullpen,” you will find yourself seated in a small, curtained-off rectangle about half the size of a standard cubicle, sitting across the table from 2-4 faculty members who will spend half an hour peppering you with questions, most of which will be written on yellow legal pads. While you’re talking, your interviewers may glance around the room and wave at people they know who happen to be walking by; you may become conscious of other interviews going on a few inches away, and you may become distracted by them; you may wish you had thought to bring a bottle of water; you may wish you had gotten some sleep the night before; and you may have a very strong and sudden urge to run away screaming. If none of these things happen, you are probably in the wrong room.

Your interview over, you are now free to enjoy the highlight of the Historian Party: the book exhibit. This room can only be accessed by flashing your $170 name tag, which will momentarily make you feel like the expense was justified, although you will quickly come to your senses. Inside, you will see booths belonging to publishers, mostly academic but some trade, who will try to entice you to buy their books and, more excitingly, to “adopt” one of their books for a course you’re teaching. The people manning these booths are bloodsucking hucksters and you musn’t make eye contact with them or they will pounce on you like a hound on a fox. Instead of wandering slowly from booth to booth, you would do best to scan the room for brightly colored signs announcing “50% Conference Discounts!” or “$3 Books This Table Only!” Pay full price for nothing, but do your best to get as many cheap-to-free books as you can find, and there will be many. But I repeat: do not look the book reps in the eye. Maybe bring some pepper spray, just to be safe.

Now that you’ve attended a panel or two, survived your interview, and loaded your luggage down with cheap books, you’re ready to get down to the real business of the Historian Party: finding a bar with your historian friends and getting well and truly annihilated. As mentioned above, the Historian Party is held in a different city each year, and the nice thing about cities is that even the crappiest ones (Atlanta, say) have bars, and even if the only bar near the hotel is a slightly offensive tiki bar that serves hot buttered rum in skull-shaped plastic mugs (Atlanta again), you will find a way to have a good time. Having a good time may require murdering Elvis’s “In The Ghetto” by turning it into a duet in a karaoke bar in Washington, DC, before collapsing into a nearby hookah bar. It may require sipping $19 glasses of red wine at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City and justifying the expense by stealing the pen that the waiter brings you to sign your credit card receipt. It may even require chugging that hot buttered rum and following it up with a scorpion bowl shared amongst four other inebriated historians. But a good time will be had, and when you wake up the next day – if you wake up the next day – you will be mighty glad that you came to the Historian Party this year. And you will vow never, ever to go back.