Anemometer

Considering the Snail

2011-02-15T16:35:00.001-08:00

It's been a LONG time since I've posted anything at all. I saw this adorable little guy outside the restroom at the Palo Alto Baylands and had to make a run for my camera. Fortunately, he had not made much progress by the time I returned.

From Scarlet to Powdered Gold

2010-07-30T18:24:00.000-07:00

I spotted this tiny hummingbird at my parents' house in Fredonia. The body was about 4cm, the bill half again as long.

On the Way to Arkwright Falls

2010-07-29T14:59:00.000-07:00

Along Canadaway Creek

Spotted on the Coastal Trail, Marin County

2010-07-26T17:44:00.000-07:00

Hands

2010-05-20T13:13:00.000-07:00

by Robinson Jeffers

Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara
The vault of rock is painted with hands,
A multitude of hands in the twilight, a cloud of men's palms, no more,
No other picture. There's no one to say
Whether the brown shy quiet people who are dead intended
Religion or magic, or made their tracings
In the idleness of art; but over the division of years these careful
Signs-manual are now like a sealed message
Saying: "Look: we also were human; we had hands, not paws. All hail
You people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters
In the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down
And be supplanted; for you also are human."

Nomenclature

2010-04-22T13:45:00.001-07:00

My significant other and I were talking about the use of the term "partner" by gay/straight/etc couples recently when I remarked that I sometimes refer to him as my partner. "Funny," he responded, "Because I refer to you as my assistant."

I Love My New Scrubby

2010-04-18T09:27:00.000-07:00

Monday, the final day of my friend Julie's visit, we spent a few hours at a Korean day spa in Japantown. We originally intended to do the $20 day pass and just enjoy the bath and sauna, but once there, the front desk attendant persuaded us to do the scrub + massage package for $90. Frankly, I'm broke and have absolutely no business spending $90 on such things; indeed, I'm usually downright frugal. This time, however, the voluptuary in me prevailed. And I'm glad it did.

If you've never been to a Japanese or Korean-style public bath, I suggest you get out there and try one. Preferably on a cold day when you just can't seem to get warm. In my admittedly limited experience, the Korean places tend to have more services, but the Japanese are more posh. Both begin with bathing and soaking in a warm, tiled room.

After half an hour using the bath/ sauna/ steam room, we were called upstairs (by a woman shouting our numbers "Three! Forty-three!" with a barely-comprehensible accent) to another tiled room, much like a mezzanine, that overlooked the bathing area. There we were greeted by two large Asian women in matching rust-colored bras and panties. I disrobed and climbed face down onto the freshly-cleaned, plastic-coated massage table as instructed. It was still warm from the cleanse. Then I was scrubbed down with soap and a rough cloth for approximately 30 minutes. Thirty minutes! That may sound excessive, but in fact it was quite pleasant, a lot like being massaged with sand paper. I was periodically doused with buckets of hot water to remove the exfoliated skin. The next forty minutes or so were dedicated to an oil massage. Neither was this your typical spa massage; my Chinese amazon (our masseuses chatted in Manderine) roughed me up properly. Next came the facial. Product was applied and removed. I heard a strange kitchen-y sound, then felt cool, freshly grated cucumber placed on my face. She washed and conditioned my hair, removed the cucumber, rinsed me down, and sent me on my way with an envelope stamped "JENEY".

Several days later, my skin still feels wonderfully soft.

Dinner

2010-04-06T19:02:00.001-07:00

Wednesday

2010-03-03T18:43:00.000-08:00

I've got a temp gig this week working a conference downtown. Unlike the bigger conferences that are typically held at venues like the Mascone Center, we're at the lovely Palace Hotel. The current structure was built a century ago to replace the one destroyed in the great earthquake of 1906. It is a marvel of Beaux Arts design, impressive enough to warrant it's own City Guides tour.

It was raining buckets when I went to work at 6AM this morning, but it cleared up completely before noon. This is the sky that greeted me when I emerged from BART this afternoon on my way home.

The Power of Free

2010-02-18T14:07:00.000-08:00

I received my new (and free!) Sony PRS-300 Pocket eBook Reader today, and as you can see in the photo, it may actually fit in my coat pocket! I've also downloaded the required software and a few free ebooks. The print is indeed easy on the eyes. I'll give a more complete review, I suppose, once I've had more time to play with it. Thank you, Sony and Mrs. Kennedy!
And yes, it is pink.

A View from the Pier

2010-02-16T17:31:00.000-08:00

We've been experiencing a 'false Spring,' as my neighbor called it, and today I rode my bicycle over to Crissy Field for a picnic lunch. After wandering around on foot and taking some photos, I snagged a picnic table with a view. I was soon joined by several small black birds, for whom I left the crumbs of my pb&j sandwich when I departed.

Shortbread + Melted Chocolate =

2010-02-13T11:59:00.001-08:00

Mmmmm...

I won! I won!

2010-02-12T17:52:00.000-08:00

As you might learn from a gander at the Comments on my last post, I WON A SONY POCKET READER. And all I had to do to get it was post a favorite literary quote to the comments at Fussy. I chose the opening lines to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Apart from the fact that I never win anything, I'm very excited because I had been fantasizing about various e-readers, but the actual purchase of such a device seemed a long way off. I read quite a bit, mostly courtesy of the SF Public Library, and I occasionally travel for extended periods of time. The prospect of being able to tote around hundreds of titles, therefore, is very appealing.

I hope mine is navy blue.

Guilt-free Goodies

2010-02-03T14:04:00.000-08:00

I've been trying my hand at vegan baking lately. I'm interested in recipes that are vegan from the get-go, not simply modified traditional recipes that substitute Earth Balance for butter and egg replacer for the real thing. Sunday I made Chocolate Peanut Butter Pillows from the folks at the Post Punk Kitchen.

They were fun to make, and I was fairly pleased with the results. I would have liked the chocolate bit to be more chocolate-y, but I didn't have any black cocoa, and had used regular cocoa powder + extra baking soda in place of the recipe's Dutch processed cocoa. So that is probably my fault. This recipe, btw, is from the book Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar.

Monday I moved on to banana bread from The Eazy Vegan. I modified it somewhat, adding shredded coconut, chocolate chips, and pecans.

I'd been disappointed with previous attempts at vegan banana bread, which seems like it ought to be very vegan-friendly, because the results were too dense. I'm quite pleased with this recipe and will try it again.

A couple of comments on the vegan baking experience. Recipes often call for vegan sugar, which initially sounded strange to me, leading me to investigate. I learned that half of the sugar sold in the US comes from sugar cane, the rest from sugar beets. Products derived from sugar beets are vegan, but when you look at cane sugar, things get murky. Charcoal is used in the final filtering process, and that may come from animal, vegetable or mineral sources. Over half of the cane refineries in the US use bone char-- animal derived charcoal-- in the filtering process. Yuck.

And finally, it's a genuine pleasure to once again being able to lick the spoon/bowl/etc. without fear of salmonella.

Happy

2010-01-24T00:24:00.000-08:00

Friday was my forty-first birthday. Though the weather was a bit sketchy, I had a lovely day. It began with yoga class, included some coffee and book time (Iyer's biography of HH the Dalai Lama, The Open Road), phone calls from my sisters, continued with an early performance of the San Francisco Symphony, dinner at Firefly (a veg/vegan-friendly French restaurant- amazing), and ended with me finishing off the Iyer book. It was a near-perfect day for me. I even managed to get a passable shot of the inside of the symphony hall before the "no photography" announcement was made.

Reading: Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
Listening to: Liz Phair's whip-smart

Disgrace

2009-12-28T22:31:00.000-08:00

I recently finished reading Disgrace, the book that won J.M. Coetzee his then-unprecedented second Booker Prize (Australian Peter Carey later matched it). I wept when I read the last page. It's been a while since a novel has made me cry.

Disgrace is the story of a man who loses everything: his youth, his reputation, his academic career, and ultimately, much more. His downfall begins with an ill advised affair. He gives in to his passion, and later is unable to criticize it (or censure himself) simply because he is past his prime. After he leaves the University, he goes to live with his beloved daughter, who has a farm in the Eastern Cape. There he suffers a worse abasement. He and his relationship with his daughter are forever changed.

It reminded me of another novel I read earlier this year, Philip Roth's The Human Stain. The main characters are aging academics who suffer public humiliation, to which they respond with indignation. There are official inquiries, and early retirement. Other shared themes include race, sex with younger women, and university politics.

Also common to the two novels is the writers' unflagging honesty. There is no shirking, for example, from the banal indignity of physical aging. Coetzee and Roth are master craftsmen at the top of their games.

Thanks, Lore.

Impossible Landscapes

2009-12-07T22:47:00.000-08:00

View from the terrace at Kelebek Cave Hotel, Goreme.

The time I spent in Cappadocia, a region in Central Turkey, was the highlight of my trip last month. I've longed to visit ever since I first saw images of this magical, other-worldly place some dozen years ago.

Admittedly, mid-late November is not the ideal time to visit. Days are short, and the nights are bitter cold. On the other hand, such conditions attract few (other) tourists. Our rambles were blissfully solitary.*

Cappadocia (spelled Kapadokya in Turkish) has been inhabited for millennia. The Hittites lived here BCE. It was an important site of early Christiandom, producing many saints and patriarchs, as is evinced in the many cave churches that survive today. Hundreds of massive underground cities were built to protect early Christian populations from invading hordes, then forgotten and lost for centuries (a common theme in this part of the world). We visited on such site, Kaymakli. While the caves are no longer inhabited, people still live in some of the fairy chimneys, like those seen in the Goreme photo above.

*Not so blissful: getting lost, worrying about finding a road before it got dark and we froze to death.

Lost in Translation

2009-11-30T20:44:00.000-08:00

When I left for Turkey, I was 2/3 of the way into Murakami's running book, which I had borrowed from the library. I didn't fancy lugging it around for two weeks, so rather than renewing it and letting it sit at home unused, I returned it. Today I went to the library, found a copy of the English translation, and sat down to finish it off.

The translation was awful: the narrative voice is off and the prose is poor. (It read like something I might produce.) There is a manner of vagueness (for lack of a better expression) that is perfectly acceptable in Japanese, but which, when rendered artlessly into English, is perfectly abominable. This was extensively detailed in Goeff Dyer's review in the NY Times:

On Page 25 he tells us that the “kind of” jazz club he used to run was “pretty rare” and served “pretty decent food” and that he was “pretty naïve.” Moving on, we learn that he was “pretty surprised” when his first novel was “fairly well received,” that his Cambridge apartment was “pretty noisy,” that his new running shoes have been “pretty well” broken in, that he is “pretty easygoing” and had “a pretty good feeling for the pace” he would need to maintain in the New York marathon.

Ugh. Dyer dryly remarks that Murakami's is "the type of prose I would call sort of pretty poor." He goes on to say that "Either he’s the kind of writer who’s a pretty poor editor of his own stuff or this kind of lazy repetition is deliberate." I don't recall getting that impression while reading the original (Japanese) version, but it's possible that I'm less discerning when reading in my second language.

Antalya

2009-11-22T08:23:00.000-08:00

I'm wrıtıng from Turkey, where I have hıtherto been unable to connect to Blogger. Tomorrow we leave the warm, sunny Medıterranean for chılly Istanbul. Weather reports vary sıgnıfıcantly, the Turkısh sıtes beıng more optımıstıc (17-18 degrees C) than others (13-14, chance of showers). I'm goıng to belıeve the locals untıl they're proved wrong.

Steepest Street

2009-11-12T08:43:00.001-08:00

I found this piece on the steepest blocks in San Francisco over at Streetsblog SF. I spent the last six weeks of 2008 at the top of the Church & 22nd Street block mentioned in the post and some of the comments. It is not uncommon to hear "Oh, shit!" from unknowing automobile drivers cresting the hill. Predictably popular with boot camp sergeants putting their grunts through morning drills, this block is, sadly, also the site of not a few scooter accidents.

I have many photos taken from atop the hill, but none of the hill itself, so I'm attaching a random shot I found on the web.

New Landscapes

2009-11-11T19:15:00.000-08:00

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. (Proust)

A friend of mine is reading "How Proust Can Change Your Life," and he posted the above quote with a comment about how he needs to remember this since he tends to crave new landscapes. And so it is with me. When I'm traveling, a steady stream of words flows from my head to my hand, but finding inspiration in the quotidian, that is a challenge.

In What I Talk About... (previously mentioned here), Murakami writes about the characteristics one needs to become a novelist. The most basic requirement is a certain amount of native talent. After that, one should possess a strong power of concentration, and the discipline to sit down at a desk for hours at a time to write. Fortunately, the latter can be developed. (I need to work on that.)

Two weeks ago, I pledged to blog daily for the month of November. Now it turns out that I will not be able to fulfill that commitment. Tomorrow afternoon I'm flying to Istanbul (not Constantinople), Turkey. If all goes well, I will soon regale you with curious tales of new landscapes.

Park Life

2009-11-10T23:22:00.000-08:00

Last week when I was in Sunnyvale, Izumi took me to a park. We saw mallard ducks, coots, a sun-bathing turtle, and (I think) one very tame white heron.

Linguistically Speaking

2009-11-09T18:49:00.001-08:00

I've been spending a lot of time in the kitchen lately, cooking this and baking that, and while I do, I've been listening to History of the English Language. It's a lecture series by John McWhorter, an American linguist currently at Columbia University. The series title is a bit of a misnomer as it is in fact more of a broad survey of language and linguistics. McWhorter is an engaging speaker, the topic one of interest to me. I'm currently listening to lecture #21 of 36, which is about language mixing, specifically grammar, and draws from examples like the impact of Dravidian sentence structure (subject-object-verb) of South India on the Indo-European languages of the North, and Media Lengua of Equador, which combines Spanish vocabulary with a Quechua grammatical system.

McWhorter is not a prescriptive grammarian, rather he sees language as a living, breathing, evolving thing, and he is emphatic in distinguishing between the spoken and written forms. Most of the several thousand languages around today still exist only orally. The written versions are a different, fairly recent phenomenon altogether.

Last week's NY Times Book Review has an essay on recent changes to the Japanese language brought on by the ubiquity of cellphones, blogging, email, etc. Some changes include the classically vertical language becoming horizontal and people losing the ability to hand-write complex characters (think spellcheck). And of course there is the relentless infiltration of Engrish words (often creatively used) into the vocabulary.

The impact of cell phones goes way beyond texting (of which young Japanese were surely early adopters,) with something called keitai shousetsu 携帯小説, or cell phone novels. These are actual novels and short stories meant to be read on mobile phones. Earlier this year I read Miura Shion's Mukashi no Hanashi むかしのはなし, in which it is revealed, at the end of the first in a series of interlinked stories, that the narrator has typed this story on his cell phone. At the time, I found that absurd, but according to this essay, five of the top ten best-selling books in Japan in 2007 were written on cell phones. Huh?

BICYCLES!

2009-11-09T16:20:00.000-08:00

I love the fuzzy red pipe cleaners.

Sunday Run-ins

2009-11-08T15:27:00.001-08:00

Another splendid day in the City by the Bay, so this morning V and I rode our bikes out to the Embarcadero for another waterfront run (this time on the East side). We parked near Townsend Street, not far from AT&T Park (home of the SF Giants) then ran along the water, under the Bay Bridge, beyond the Ferry Building, past Pier this and that, then turned around and came back.

Here I'd like to note that I ran into three acquaintances this morning. First I saw neighbors, a couple, from my apartment-sitting gig in Noe Valley last year. They were right around the corner from where I live, visiting friends in the neighborhood. Then I passed another friend-of-friend on The Embarcadero itself as I was finishing up my run. Since I probably know about a couple dozen people in the city all told, that's rather remarkable.

Crissy

2009-11-07T16:14:00.000-08:00

Though it is rather foreboding when it's cold and windy, nothing beats Crissy Field on a warm, sunny day like today. So when V suggested we head there for a run early this afternoon, I was all for it. Just this week I returned to a regular running schedule after having broken my toe way back at the end of July. (The toe still stubbornly refuses to heal completely, but I've decided to just ignore it for the time being.)

Though we live only about 3-1/2 miles from Crissy Field, there is no quick and easy way to get there from here. Road work on Divisadero made the drive over extra long, over half an hour. I could run faster than that!

But it was worth the drive. And many, many other people seemed to think so as well. Always popular with runners, cyclists and dog companions, today it was especially crowded. We parked at the end of Divisadero and ran the 2+ miles out along the bay to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge (touching the hopper hands) and back.

Along the way, there's a plaque on one of the bridges that reads "This is dedicated to those who find this place a beautiful place to dream."

(Note: not my photos)

Valencia at Hill

2009-11-06T19:06:00.000-08:00

The Real Forbidden Fruit (Or, The Mighty Quince)

2009-11-05T17:05:00.000-08:00

This afternoon I made compote from a few of the quince given to me by my friend Izumi when I visited her on Tuesday. Her Sunnyvale house has a tree in the yard. The fruit looks a bit like the guava. It smells delightful. Most varieties are too tough and sour to eat raw, but they make lovely jam. A syrup made from the fruit is said to be good for the throat. The Japanese for quince is karin 花梨, written with the characters for flower and pear, and indeed it is a relative of apples and pears.

It's said that the fruit described in the creation story, the one that got Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden, was in fact a quince. Elsewhere, the fruit makes an appearance in "The Owl and the Pussycat," where it is eaten, famously, with a runcible spoon.

Running With Murakami

2009-11-04T18:30:00.000-08:00

Way back in January, I mentioned that I was waiting for Murakami Haruki's 2007 book 走ることについて語る時に僕の語ること (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running) to be published in paperback. While the English version appeared back in August of this year, and another novel (1Q84; it has something to do with Orwell's 1984, 25 years on) has appeared in Japanese, Bungei Shunju (the publisher) seems to be dragging its feet on this one.

But wait! there's a light at the end of this tunnel. The Western Addition Branch of San Francisco Public Library has a large collection of Japanese language books, and thanks to their excellent web service, I'm able to request books and have them delivered to my very own Mission Branch. So a sunny day last week I walked to 24th Street and picked up my very first SFPL loan.

Murakami started running in 1982, when he was 33 years old. He'd recently completed his third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, his first work as a full-time writer*. By the time he'd completed the book, he found himself overweight and smoking 3 packs of cigarettes a day. He knew that he had to make a change. To put it briefly, he began running, quit smoking and began eating a more healthy diet. The secondary changes, rather than conscious decisions, seemed to follow naturally from the daily habit of running. He wanted to be able to run longer distances, so he had to quit smoking. And so on.

I found a couple of the ideas he raises in the second chapter to be interesting. First, often when people hear that he runs nearly every day, they applaud him on his strong will and commitment. But that's not how he sees it. Murakami says that he runs because it suits him. No matter how strong your resolution, nobody is going to continue doing something like that for over 20 years without enjoying it. I've been running regularly (except when I'm abroad!) since 2000, and I couldn't agree more.

The second theme has to do with the habit of running. Murakami describes his constitution as such that he puts on weight easily if he's not active. His wife, on the other hand, is naturally thin and doesn't have to think about what she eats. This doesn't seem fair, that some people have to work to maintain a level of fitness while for others it comes naturally. But in the long run, he's glad that he has had to work to stay in shape. If he didn't, he would not have developed the generally healthy habits and lifestyle that he currently has. How many people do you know who never seemed to have to do any work to stay thin when they're young, only to end up struggling with their weight after reaching middle age?

I'm still only about a third of the way into the book, so expect more on it later!

*Until then he had managed a cafe/jazz bar in Tokyo called Peter Cat. Great name.

VVG

2009-11-03T22:48:00.001-08:00

“Let’s not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.” ~Vincent Van Gogh

Auto!

2009-11-02T22:35:00.000-08:00

I recently came across this genuine Bajaj auto rickshaw in the Portrero neighborhood of SF. The sighting put a smile on my face. I can not for the life of me imagine how it came to be there.

Typically black and yellow, occasionally green and yellow, this sturdy little three-wheeled taxi (with a fantastic turning radius) is found in most parts of India. The driver (and possibly his close friend) of course mans the front, with room for three average size adult passengers (or a dozen school children) to sit comfortably. In Madhurai, I was once one of six (desperate) adult female passengers: one shared the front seat with our driver, three sat across the back, another sat on their laps, and I sat on a bar at the side window with my back side hanging out. We were a motley bunch: three Americans, one Irishwoman, my friend from Japan, and one Indian from another state.

See also tuk-tuk, the Thai version.

The Bad Beginning

2009-11-01T17:32:00.000-08:00

Today is the first day of NaBloPoMo (wherein I vow to post every day for a month), it's 5:30PM local time, and I only just now remembered that I ought to post something. Which calls to mind the title of Lemony Snicket's first book, which also happens to be the title of this post.

I got to see Lemony in person once. I was living in Menlo Park, CA, home to the great Keppler's book store. Keppler's hosts a lot of author readings, and when I discovered that Snicket (AKA Daniel Handler, author of the slightly more grown-up targeted books The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth) I was very pleased. Maybe even excited. Snicket at the time was about four or five books into the wildly successful A Series of Unfortunate Events. I loved the books for their bleak pessimism, ernest absurdity, anachronism-filled settings and delightful use of vocabulary.

Knowing Handler/Snicket's popularity, I showed up quite early for the reading. An employee later told me that it was the biggest turnout they'd ever had for an author. As the store filled with parents and children, I noticed that I appeared to be the only adult without a child escort. Did that make me creepy? I wondered.

The target age for the books, I suppose, is about 9-12, but there were many much younger children in attendance. I sat in a folding chair at the end of the fourth or fifth row, next to a man with a boy of about five. When Handler showed up, wearing an absurd trench coat and speaking the audio equivalent of his over-dramatic, over-blown prose, he announced that he was sorry, but Mr. Snicket was unable to attend the reading because he'd run into trouble at a picnic. From the start it was clear that this was not going to be your typical adult-author event. Handler did a great job of getting the children to participate, encouraging them tell him the sort of trouble one might have at a picnic, and so on. I'm not sure if it was the content or simply the tone of Handler's voice, but the child next to me was in tears within the first 10 minutes.

I don't want to leave you in tears, dear reader, but do check out the Gothic Archies' The World is a Very Scary Place. Too late for Halloween, but I think Lemony Snicket would approve.

It's That Time of Year Again

2009-10-30T10:49:00.000-07:00

As I did last year, I've decided to participate in November's National Blog Posting Month (not to be confused with National Novel Writing- or the copycat National Blog Writing Month). I'm motivated largely by a recent (though by no means unusual) lack of motivation. (If anyone actually reads this, they'll have noticed the paucity of updates lately.)

Here's an unadulterated photo of Sutro Tower that I took from my bedroom window.

Five Things I Miss About Mountain View, CA

2009-10-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

1. The sun and its warmth
2. Dana Street Roasting Company
3. Well-paved roads

Hmmm... That's only three, right?

And then...

2009-10-09T16:46:00.000-07:00

After I finished up my little tour of the local bibliothèque municipale, I stopped by Ritual for a cup of joe. I reached there in time to catch the tail end of the weekly Public Cupping. Led by Head Roaster Steve Ford, it's much like a wine tasting. Complete with cups to spit in. I made it to the third selection before the ambient noise made it entirely impossible to hear Mr. Ford speak and I gave up. So I queued for a cup of the Los Chacones from Costa Rica and a slice of the vegan nectarine bread. The cafe was jumping, so I had to share a table. The seat I chose just happened to be next to a couple of guys, one ABCD* who looked and sounded familiar. Did I know this guy? Then I overheard some snatches of conversation. The desi guy was talking about some of the bits he was planning to do and in what order. Then it hit me: this was comedian Hari Kondabolu, whom I had seen perform on late night tv. He's performing at the Punch Line tonight.

*American Born Confused Desi (Indian)

The Cathedral of Books

2009-10-09T15:23:00.000-07:00

When I arrived at the Mission branch of the San Francisco Public Library this afternoon, I was surprised to find myself just one of more than twenty people awaiting the 1pm opening. Once inside, I applied for a card.

The friendly woman who granted me my first SFPL card asked if this was my first visit. It was. The children's books are on the ground floor, the adults' upstairs, she informed me. Then she recommend that I check out the upstairs. "I call it the Cathedral of Books." It does have some nice architectural features.

Iconic

2009-10-07T18:52:00.000-07:00

From Alamo Square. Note the fog in the distance. If you look closely, you can see the dome of City Hall between the fourth and fifth houses.

If You're Still Eating Meat

2009-10-04T09:21:00.000-07:00

Better to think twice about that hamburger. And educate yourself on where your meat comes from.

(Inspired by this article in the NY Times.)

The Newest Addition

2009-10-02T23:22:00.000-07:00

Who's the Vegetarian Here Anyhow?

2009-09-28T09:21:00.000-07:00

When V bought his flat in San Francisco, his real estate agent gifted him a bottle of champagne and gift certificates for various shops and restaurants in the neighborhood. Saturday night we had dinner at one of the restaurants, a pricey place that was new to us. We ordered a bottle of wine, an appetizer to share, and a couple of entrees. Things began well. The restaurant was cozy and intimately-lit, the waiter friendly. The heirloom tomato salad was lovely. Our mains arrived. On the surface, V's halibut paled in comparison to my smoked tofu. We began to eat. So far, so good. Then I noticed something strange on the cucumber garnish. Something black. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a fried insect. A male earwig, from the look of it.

V was shocked, appalled. I was inclined to move it to the corner of my plate and forget about it. But we brought it to the attention of a waiter, who acted likewise appalled (and apologetic). He mentioned that the produce was organic and thus more inclined to be buggy than conventional. Then he pointed to the restaurant's perfect rating from the SF Health Department. He said he'd return shortly with a new dish. In the meantime, V went on and on about the outrage we'd suffered. I've worked in my fair share of restaurants and understand that insects will find their way into a kitchen via produce. Even after I'd received my new plate, V just wouldn't let the matter drop. So I told him a story.

Two monks were walking along when they came to a stream. A young woman was waiting at the bank to cross, and the old monk had her climb on his back and carried her across. The monks continued on their journey. About an hour later, the young monk said, "I can't believe you carried that woman across the stream back there! We're not even supposed to touch women." To which the old monk replied, "I left the woman back at the stream. Why are you still carrying her?" You, I told V, are like that young monk. To which a delighted V replied, Yes! And you are that old monk.

The Ice Cream Revolution

2009-09-23T14:00:00.000-07:00

My new neighborhood, the Mission, is blessed with an array of interesting ice cream options. This may have begun with Mitchell's, which opened way back in 1953 and makes its own flavors like Jackfruit, Lychee, and Sweet and Salty Peanut. The current trend seems to be toward complex, adult flavors. Among this crowded field, two stand out for their creativity: Bi-Rite (The Creamery) and Humphrey Slocombe.

Bi-Rite Creamery is located adjacent to Dolores Park (and a very short walk from me), and on sunny days when the park is full, a line of customers snakes out and up 18th Street. Like nearby Bi-Rite market, the Creamery prides itself on using organic, locally grown products and operating in a sustainable manner. Signature flavors include the Salted Caramel, Balsamic Strawberry, and Honey Lavender. Their sorbets are vegan.

There are twelve flavors on hand at Humphrey Slocombe Ice Cream (Harrison at 24th) at any given time. Yesterday, when I visited for the first time, flavors included Salt & Peppa, Secret Breakfast (Bourbon and Corn Flakes), and Bluebottle Viennese Coffee. A local restaurant asked if they could create a flavor that tasted like smoking, and HS came up with Fume (with an accent aigu on the e), flavored with Lapsang Souchong, the distinctly smoky tea from China's Fujian province. I asked if the sorbets, Honeydew and Hibiscus Beet, were vegan, but learned that they use an animal-based stabilizer. They are, apparently, looking to remedy that.

I opted for a scoop each of the Peanut Butter Curry and Milk Chocolate Passion Fruit. The PB Curry was delicious and tasted just like Indonesia: a complex curry flavor with bits of real peanut butter mixed in. They don't seem to use a generic curry powder either; I distinctly tasted brown mustard seeds in the mix. As for the Milk Chocolate Passion Fruit, it was tasty but I was less impressed. Passion fruit has a very strong taste, and here it threatened to overwhelm the milk chocolate. I think that dark chocolate would be a better match for that fruit's intensity.

Fortunately, Fetal Kitten is not a flavor, but rather the artist's joke.

Wild- and Not-so-wild Life I Saw in Wyoming:

2009-09-11T18:52:00.000-07:00

2 herds of bison
2 moose (cow + calf)
2 mule deer
1 coyote
1 herd pronghorn antelope

And lots of chipmunks, horses and cattle. No sign of bears. (Should I count the dead mouse?)

A Surprising Discovery and a Small Prayer

2009-08-12T06:31:00.001-07:00

I took a tour of Jaffa this morning, and about 10 minutes and three photos into it I found that my 2 Gig SD card was full. I was shocked, but when I reviewed what was on the card, I discovered that it contained a ton of photos from Varanasi and Bodh Gaya. Which means that I haven't used the card since March 2008. I deleted at least 70 of them to make room for the new stuff and prayed that I had them backed up somewhere.

No, I'm Serious

2009-08-07T22:16:00.000-07:00

I rarely travel internationally for shorter than a few months. But a few hours ago I got a ticket, departing tomorrow, for five days in Tel Aviv. With a few days layover in Paris on the way back.

Done

2009-07-27T19:29:00.000-07:00

I began reading Infinite Jest about 5 weeks back on my flight from BUF to SFO, and coincidentally, I've completed it today while flying from BUF to SJC. It's going to take a long time for me to digest even a small portion, but expect more on IJ later.

ICH R.I.P.

2009-07-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

While doing a bit of research this afternoon, I came across the following in Wikipedia:

The 50-year old Indian Coffee House at M. G. Road in Bangalore closed on 5 April 2009, after the Indian Coffee Workers' Cooperative Society Limited lost a legal battle with the owner of the building to continue in the premises. It has however been reopened on Church Street, less than a hundred metres away.

What a blow! The ICH is an Indian institution, and the one on MG Road in Bangalore was a real classic. Entering its blue wooden doors was like stepping back in time. Waiters dressed in Raj-era throw-back uniforms, complete with stiff turban-like hats (which call to mind the typical groom's headdress of North India). The very air was rife with the dust of days-gone-by. As far as I know, you can still get that feeling at the Mavalli Tiffin Room on Lal Bagh and Koshy's on St. Mark's Road.

(Photo not mine)

Just What I Need

2009-07-06T10:53:00.000-07:00

Free Music!

2009-07-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

And not the downloadable kind, the living, breathing, sweating stuff.

My friend Nick tipped me off to some free lunchtime concerts in connection with the St. Lawrence String Quartet's Chamber Music seminar at Stanford this week. I made it to the Friday performance. Not only was it free, the concert was pleasantly informal. The performers were dressed fairly casually, and simple introductions were provided by one of the SLSQ violinists (Nuttall, I think. The blond guy proudly sporting a very tacky shirt).

The show began with SLSQ's friends (and fellow Canadians) The Gryphon Trio- a piano/cello/violin ensemble- performing Haydn's Piano Trio in C Major (Hoboken 15/?). They were wonderful. The cellist was really entertaining to watch, all swaying and exaggerated facial expressions, but it was the violinist who caught my ear. After thundering applause and a couple of rounds of bows, they were quickly replaced onstage by the St. Lawrence String Quartet.

The SLSQ, celebrating its 20th year together, performed Dvorak's Opus 106 (String Quartet No. 13 in G Major). Delightful. The man with the bad shirt introduced the piece with a background story. Dvorak* was the director at the National Conservatory of Music of America from 1892 to '95. By that time he was already very well known in Europe, but he accepted the position in New York because the salary of $15,000 was about ten times that he was earning in Prague. Though fruitful professionally, Dvorak suffered from terrible homesickness while in the US. The first couple of works he completed after his return to Europe (Opus 105/106) were thus emotionally charged with his happiness at being home.

There's something wonderfully intimate about chamber music. Though we arrived just before the performance began and the hall was nearly full, we were able to sit just a few rows from the front, at close to stage level. Near enough to clearly see the fingering, facial expressions, sweat, etc. of the musicians. You can't beat the live music experience.

*Coincidentally, I recently ripped a couple of Dvorak piano trios from among the substantial music collection at my local library.

Infinite Summer II

2009-07-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

In connection with Infinite Summer*, whereby thousands of us have committed to reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest over the course of this summer, I watched an interview DFW did with Charlie Rose back in '97. This was a year after IJ had come out, and DFW was on a publicity tour for his essay collection "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." Charlie is his usual fawning self in the interview, whereas DFW often looks like he's about to crawl out of his skin.

Much has been made of DFW's liberal use of footnotes/end notes, both in IJ and in his essays. In addition to the 981 pages of the main body of text, IJ contains 96 pages of endnotes, numbering 388 total, varying in length from a single line to 17 pages. A few of the end notes have end notes of their own. Some of the folks at A Supposedly Fun Blog find them obnoxious. I enjoy them**. It makes me feel engaged with the text in a specific way. In the interview, Wallace had this to say:

There's a way, it seems to me, that reality is fractured right now. At least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty of writing about... that reality is that text is very linear, it's very unified. And you- I anyhow- are constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren't totally disorienting. I mean... you can take the lines and jumble them up and that's nicely fractured, but nobody is going to read it. Right? So there's got to be some interplay between how difficult you make it for the reader and how seductive it is so the reader is willing to do it. The end notes for me were a useful compromise, although there were a lot more when I delivered the manuscript. And one of the things that the editor did for me was have me pare the end notes down to absolutely the bare essential.

From there Charlie went off in a completely different direction, but I'd have liked to get a better sense of what he meant by the fractured nature of reality.

Later they talk about how Wallace's essays end up being about himself. "A Supposedly Fun Thing..." contains a piece on David Lynch, and Charlie asks him how that is about him. Wallace reminisces about seeing Blue Velvet in the Spring of '86.

Blue Velvet is an entirely new and original kind of surrealism... it no more comes out of a previous tradition or the postmodern thing-- It is completely David Lynch... It was here that I understood that the point of being postmodern or avant garde or whatever wasn't following a certain tradition. That all that stuff was b.s. imposed by critics and camp followers afterward. That what the really great artists do- and it sounds very trite to say that line- but what the truly great artists do is they are entirely themselves... They've got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality***, and if it's authentic and true you will feel it in your nerve endings... Lynch sort of snapped me out of this adolescent delusion that I was having of what avant garde art could be. And it's very odd, because film and books are very different media.

I'm approaching 300 pages in Infinite Jest, the generally-acknowledged Point of No Return. I can't imagine putting the book down now. I'm too invested, too sucked in, and it is a very rewarding reading experience. When I'm not reading the novel, I find myself searching the web for biographical information, essays and interviews. A.O. Scott wrote a lovely piece in the NY Times after Wallace's death in September last year. It was this eulogy that first made me think about tackling IJ.

If you have an idea what he means by fracturing reality, I'd like to hear it.

*Which I mentioned here. For some reason I keep wanting to call this Endless Summer, like the 1966 surfing documentary.
**And I am aware of my own predilection.
***That expression again!

Happy Birthday, Canada!

2009-07-01T19:25:00.000-07:00

And thanks to Colleen, who posted this image long ago.

Update

2009-06-30T10:41:00.000-07:00

I found an interesting (and timely) article in the NY Times about fireflies. Some facts (in case you're not inclined to click and read yourself):

There are over 2000 species worldwide
The larvae glow to warn would-be predators of their bitter taste
Not all adults glow, but for those who do, it is a mating call
Females can carry on as many as 10 simultaneous conversations and are very picky
The Photuris firefly kills other fireflies to harvest the bitter chemicals and make themselves even less attractive to predators

My Fellow American

2009-06-26T10:08:00.001-07:00

It was a big day for JV, who took the Oath of Citizenship this morning. I accompanied him to the Office of Homeland Security in San Jose to provide moral support, take photos, and sate my curiosity.

The crowd was really mixed, comprised of Latin Americans, Europeans, and East and South Asians. Not many Africans. JV remarked that in sharp contrast to all things Green Card- related, the folks you encounter in the citizenship process are generally polite and friendly: surely a special breed of civil servant. That seemed to be the case today.*

The ceremony lasted about thirty minutes, and included, in addition to the Oath, recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance**, a talk about the rights and priveleges of citizenship, a list of famous naturalized citizens, and a short film. The film began with a brief address by President Obama, followed up by a montage of sweeping landscapes and arial shots of Navy sailors on deck, to the dreaded Country song that goes, "I'm Proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free..." At the end, staff members passed out the Certificates of Naturalization, patiently pausing from time to time to pose for photos with their new countrymen. Tears were shed.***

*Of the two government employees who addressed the crowd, one repeatedly referred to the US as "One of the great countries of the world," while the other did not mince words, declaring this "the greatest country in the world." Both were obviously naturalized themselves.

**The woman who administered the Oath asked for a volunteer to lead us in the Pledge. When the volunteer, a middle-aged woman of European descent, got to the last line, "With liberty and justice for all," her voice cracked with emotion.

***Not by JV, of course!

Happy Ending

2009-06-23T16:59:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I picked up a copy of Eat Pray Love for my mother, never considering that I might want to read it myself. I was finally able to give book to her in person when I visited my family in Fredonia recently. After receiving a near blow-by-blow account of the first two sections of the book, I began to reconsider. In case you aren't familiar with this publishing phenomenon, which is currently sitting at #12 and in its 125th week on the NY Times List of Best-selling Paperback Nonfiction, it is "A writer’s yearlong journey in search of self takes her to Italy, India and Indonesia."

I began reading EPL a few days before my departure, and when I headed to the airport early this morning, I still had 30 pages left to read. I wasn't keen to carry a book across country for a mere 30 pages, so I left it there. I figured I'd find a copy at the library, or at the very least read it standing up at my local used book store (which by the way, is fabulous). So imagine my surprise and delight when, on my second flight, I found that the window to my aisle was carrying just that very book. And she kindly loaned it to me long enough for me to finish.

Bioluminescence

2009-06-20T13:31:00.000-07:00

Last night I attended a bonfire out in Arkwright. It was far enough outside of town to be properly dark, something I don't get to enjoy very often in this land of light pollution. Highlights included swordplay, s'mores, and several explosions.

The field across the road from my friend's place and the one surrounding the fire were full of fireflies. I haven't seen that many fireflies since... ever. Though green and not blue, the flashing lights reminded me of the phosphorescence of certain marine invertebrates that I first saw in the ocean of Southern Thailand many years ago. Magical.

Thanks, Carmen!

2009-06-18T15:22:00.000-07:00

She even let me help with the caramel sauce :) Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm

FOH

2009-06-15T13:07:00.000-07:00

Last week, Fredonia celebrated its 14th annual Baroque music festival, Bach & Beyond. It began Tuesday to Thursday with musical matinees at local restaurants called "Bach's lunches". Weekend performances were held at the Opera House in the village hall. I attended the Saturday evening performance. Highlights (for me) were Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and a selection from Handel's Water Music. The musicians were superb.

The 1891 Fredonia Opera House was restored in the late 80's with a combination of grants, fundraisers and volunteer contributions. Look at that stage! It's a local treasure.

Found

2009-06-14T18:08:00.001-07:00

On the driveway outside my parents' Fredonia house. Cause of death unknown.

Another Food-related Post

2009-06-05T15:05:00.000-07:00

This place hardly needs a plug-- it's already been featured on the Food Network's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives-- and yet... I can't help it, I love it.

According to the Coptic friend-of-a-friend, the word falafel comes from the Coptic for fava bean. Unlike the falafel you find most places, those dry pucks made from chick peas, the falafel here are soft and green inside. And delicious. Cheap. Made from fava beans? I suspect so. If you find yourself hungry in San Jose, try it.

(Note the apostrophe there in the name: it's Falafel's drive-in.)

In Praise of an Underappreciated Spice (Or, Another Instance in which the Leadin is Longer than the Main Attraction)

2009-06-03T15:17:00.000-07:00

Being a reasonably strict lacto-ovo vegetarian in Japan is no easy feat. While not the hardcore red meat consumers Americans are, it still isn't a very veg-friendly food culture. Most Japanese dishes, even one as seemingly innocuous as miso soup, are seasoned with 本だし hondashi, a stock made from boiled 鰹節katsuobushi (smoked bonito) and 昆布 kombu (a type of kelp). When I lived in Tokyo in the 90's, my constant companion was a guide to vegetarian, organic and health food restaurants in the city. Through this portable lifesaver I discovered 香林坊 Korinbo, a veggie hole-in-the-wall run by the gracious Taiwanese Reian-san and located upstairs at the back of the bizarre Nakano Sun Plaza*. Another favorite was ぐ Gu (and not just for the name), an organic/ brown rice joint in Shimokitazawa.

And yet from time to time I still found myself adrift in the megalopolis, in need of a quick meal, with nary a health food restaurant in sight. My options then, if I was lucky, were Italian or Indian. So I ended up eating a fair amount of decent Italian and mediocre Indian food (the latter mostly from chains).

I did stumble upon the occasional gem. In a second floor room above the shops lining the road to Inokashira Park in Kichijyoji was a tiny, cluttered Indian restaurant called かるだもーん Cardamom. It was run by a genuine Indian man (cook) and his Japanese wife (server). Going there was a bit like eating at a friend's place, a feeling no doubt enhanced by the constant presence of the couple's 3 year old son and infant daughter. Now that I've had a lot more experience with Indian food, I'm not quite sure how the food at Cardamom would stack up. But to my less experienced tongue, it was nothing short of a revelation. Japanese food is indeed lovely, but there's very little spice involved. Most of the seasoning comes from dashi, mirin (sweet cooking sake) and soy sauce. Sometimes I craved something... more. Unlike the insipid dishes server by restaurant chains like Samrat, they pulled no punches at Cardamom. No concession was made to the delicate Japanese palate. Rather, the flavors were complex, rich. Spicy. When I first began to eat there, my ignorance was such that I did not even know what cardamom was. Now it is perhaps my favorite spice.

Cardamom A member of the ginger family, there are, apparently, two varieties. Here I'll stick to Elettaria, the green variety I am familiar with. Elaichi in Hindi, this fragrant spice is commonly used in traditional Indian sweets like kir (rice pudding). My favorite masala chai is made by adding crushed cardamom pods and ginger to black tea leaves, water and milk. Boil. Add sugar to taste. Scandinavians are also fond of cardamom in their sweets, particularly sweet breads and cookies. Try replacing 1/2 or all of the cinnamon in your cookie or coffee cake recipe with cardamom. In the Middle East, the pods are ground along with coffee beans and mixed with boiling water to produce the wonderfully silty brew usually called Turkish coffee. You may try something similar by adding a few pods** to your coffee grinder for your own morning ritual. I did this today in my moka pot, with wonderful results. Cardamom also figures prominently in savory dishes like the Indian palak paneer (spinach and cottage cheese curry) and meat dishes (think lamb) in Middle Eastern cuisine.

Cardamom powder is made by grinding the small black seeds inside the green pods. Unfortunately, once ground it loses its flavor quickly, so purchase in small quantities or grind your own. It's a tedious process, liberating the seeds from the pods, but you will be rewarded.

*Which no doubt deserves its own post.
**It's not necessary to separate the seeds from the pods when flavoring tea or coffee.

2009-05-28T22:09:00.000-07:00

Shortbread

2009-05-26T19:06:00.000-07:00

I decided not to purchase eggs anymore*, and the chemistry of baking requires that I become more creative. I'm not interested in commercial egg replacements, and I've had mixed results with other means of substitute (ground flax seeds and water, plain yogurt**, bananas, etc).

There are, fortunately, some recipes that are naturally egg-free and do not require tinkering. Shortbread (and its many variations) is one of the easiest and most delicious cookies out there. There are few basic ingredients-- flour, butter, and sugar, roughly in a ratio of 4:2:1-- so it's important that they are of good quality. You will probably want to add a pinch of salt, possibly vanilla extract. For variety, throw in some chocolate bits, orange peal, etc. It's an extremely flexible dough in every sense of the word. Roll it out and cut into shapes, form into a round, or just press it into the bottom of a pan to be cut after baking. Scoring is optional, but fork pricks are not. You generally cook it slowly at a low heat, around 300-325 degrees, until it's a pleasant golden color.

I tried adding corn starch to this batch, and 2/3 of a dark Belgian chocolate bar. The corn starch, which some recipes substitute for 1/4 of the flour while others just call for adding it in equal portion to the butter, is supposed to give it a more delicate flavor and melt-in-your-mouth texture. If you use good butter, it's difficult to screw up shortbread. And it goes very well with black tea.

*I also tried using I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, but you you know what? it's pretty easy to believe.

** I recently made really lovely, moist chocolate chip cookies by substituting yogurt for eggs in the standard Tollhouse recipe.

Infinite Summer

2009-05-25T17:37:00.000-07:00

"You've been meaning to do it for over a decade."

Two weeks ago I picked up Infinite Jest from the Hold shelf at the library. The book became available earlier than I expected, at which time I was regrettably entangled in another book. Then I began Cryptonomicon... In the meantime I picked up a few old Philip Roth paperbacks that I have sworn to read in the near future. So it's looking unlikely that I'll be reading IJ any time soon.

But wait, there is hope (albeit in the form of a website, Facebook group, etc.). Infinite Summer challenges endurance bibliophiles to read DFW's magnum opus over the course of the Summer of 2009. Since the book clocks in at 1000+ pages, that works out to roughly 75 pages per week. Which sounds reasonable. Anyone game?

योग

2009-05-22T19:14:00.000-07:00

Today marks nine years since I began practicing yoga. This followed a move to Palo Alto (from Marin County) and a return to running. When I took my first class, I'd been running regularly for several months (ran my first B2B a couple of weeks earlier) and was reasonably fit, so imagine my surprise when said class kicked my butt.

Until I began my yoga practice, I wasn't very in tune with my body. It seemed to work well enough, but I rarely demanded much of it. All that stretching and twisting reveals all sorts of surprises, so I've gotten to know it pretty well in the meantime. I've practiced an eclectic array of styles, embracing what I found to be useful and eschewing the dogmatic. I love the flow of Ashtanga vinyasa, the precision of Iyengar and Atma Vikasa. It was yoga that took me to India the first time, and for that I will be forever grateful.

Cryptonomicon

2009-05-21T18:00:00.000-07:00

The NY Times compared it favorably to similarly-massive postmodern tomes Mason & Dixon (Pynchon), Underworld (DeLillo) and Infinite Jest (Wallace). Though I've just begun to dig into its meaty 900+ pages, I'm already hooked.

First there was the obviously Pynchonesque* prologue, complete with haiku-composing narrator and absurdist Second World War Shanghai setting. Note the curious symbol on the cover, reminiscent of the muted horn in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which appears at the head of each (un-numbered) chapter. But it was a dialogue on mathematics that really drew me in. I recently completed The Music of the Primes, Marcus du Sautoy's history of Prime Number Theory, specifically the Riemann Hypothesis; Alan Turing and the Riemann Zeta Function make an appearance on page 9 (! trade paperback edition) of Cryptonomicon.

This mixing of fiction with of historical facts and figures** is hardly new, but add to that an intricate plot (or rather multiple interconnected plots), heaps of richly detailed characters, multiple time settings, the fascinating game of crypto, and vocabulary that has me occasionally reaching for a dictionary (not at the level of, say, Umberto Eco, but not bad,) well, this is a recipe I can hardly resist.

A decade has passed since its initial publication, causing me to wonder, What took me so long?

* The further I read, the more I'm reminded of Gravity's Rainbow. Twenty-some years and several re-readings later, it still ranks among my all-time favorite novels.

** Ronald Reagan! Albert Einstein! Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto!

B2B

2009-05-18T10:39:00.000-07:00

I'm nursing a bad foot, so I wasn't able to run Bay to Breakers this year. I didn't even make it over to the Panhandle until 10AM (two hours after the 12K race began), and still I was able to watch the parade of merriment for an hour and a half with no end in sight.

The weather was stunning, though too warm for many of the costumes. I took so many photos that I actually filled up my camera's memory card. I haven't had time to sort through them yet, but the colors of this one caught my eye.

And While We're on the Subject of Names...

2009-05-15T17:26:00.000-07:00

According to this site, there are two people in the US with my first and last name combo. Considering that I know the other one, that's rather comforting.

Queit, Please

2009-05-14T23:43:00.001-07:00

Nomenclature

2009-05-14T23:04:00.000-07:00

A recent thread on MeFi about baby names got me thinking.* Both of my grandmothers were born early in the last century and had typically old-fashioned names: Matilda and Genevieve. Coincidentally (?), both were commonly called boys' names, Matty and Johnny. As a child, I could hardly bear to hear my maternal grandmother and her sisters' names. They sounded like a coven of particularly ugly witches. What a difference a century makes. What are the chances today of coming across a group of little girls named Matilda, Beatrice and Gladys?

* I also learned a new word. Onomastics, the study of naming.

It's in the Air, Like Pollen

2009-04-28T00:13:00.000-07:00

I just did a quick bed-time tour of my usual blogs, and found that no one except for my sister has updated lately. So perhaps it's not just me, but rather a general malaise... what happened to Spring Fever?*

* I only use this term because it was a recent crossword answer and so on my mind. Clue: Restlessness of a sort.

Ada

2009-04-21T23:26:00.000-07:00

I walk, run or ride my bicycle up Ada Avenue nearly every day. The street is a mixture of characterless new housing developments-- townhouses, condos and the like-- and, at the southern end, some older single family homes. Though I noticed long ago that there are a lot of Japanese names on mail boxes at that far end, I've never paid much attention to the houses themselves. It's the flora that gets my attention, and the occasional cat or duck. It was only on my walk today that I noticed first a stone lantern and some bamboo. Then looking up I discovered, right there in my neighborhood, an entire modern Japanese style house. Imagine that.

So, Yeah

2009-03-13T17:24:00.001-07:00

I really dig the macro setting on my Canon.

I Know

2009-03-11T12:55:00.001-07:00

I need to move on from flowers.

For Lack of Anything More Coherent to Write...

2009-03-05T15:08:00.000-08:00

I am so completely boring lately. Not bored, exactly, I'm keeping busy with books and films and hulu, etc, but I am feeling spectacularly unengaged with the world. And I'm struggling even more than usual with the creative process. It's almost as though I'm encased in a transparent bubble that keeps me an extra step removed from what's going on around me. The only thing I'm into at the moment is running. I'm having a blast with that.

That's me at the Dana Street Roasting Company. They're roasting the Espresso blend right now, which explains the crooked smile.

February Flowers

2009-02-23T22:22:00.000-08:00

I posted some photos on Facebook. Take a look.

Sakura 桜

2009-02-04T17:15:00.000-08:00

February 4, and the cherry blossoms are already blooming in sunny California.

読むことについて語る時に私の語ること

2009-01-31T21:47:00.000-08:00

Apparently I can post in Japanese.

The above title (translation: What I Talk About When I Talk about Reading) is a play on the title of Murakami's most recent book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running 走ることについて語るときに僕の語ること, which is itself a play on Raymond Carver’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Love. Note that we use different characters for "I". He uses one that's typical of men and especially boys, 僕, and I use the standard, 私.

For decades Murakami has been a committed long-distance runner, having run marathons all over the world. Released in October 2007, I'm waiting for the paperback (Japanese) version of this to come out.

2008 Reading List, 10-13

2009-01-31T21:41:00.000-08:00

10 Corelli's Mandolin- Louis De Bernieres
When the film version of this came out (with Nicolas Cage in the lead), it was summarily panned by critics. Another example of a rich, complex, much-loved novel being ruined by Hollywood. I was never all that keen on reading the book, but I eventually saw so many copies of it in used book stores and it came so highly recommended that I didn't feel I had much choice.
It turned out to be just my cup of tea. History, love, totalitarianism, the brutality and futility of war-- great themes, and complex, well-drawn characters. The story revolves around actual historical events, the Italian occupation of the Greek island of Cephallonia and subsequent massacre of Italian forces by the German.

11 Until I Find You- John Irving
I've read quite a few Irving novels over the years, starting with The Hotel New Hampshire back in high school. Upon review, I see that this is the fifth (or possibly sixth) I've read in the past 25 years. There are many recurring themes in Irving's work, notably wrestling, prostitution, deadly accidents, Vienna, bears, New England, etc. All of these, with the exception of bears, appear in this novel. Another common element of Irving's fiction is fairly heavy sexual content and variation. I found this aspect of UIFY to be quite disturbing. The main character is sexualized at a frightfully young age, and as a child he becomes the victim of abuse at the hands of women and older girls.
But discomfort aside, Irving knows his craft. The book is divided into two parts, childhood and adulthood. In the childhood section, the main character, Jack, is raised by his tattoo artist mother. He never meets his father, though his mother drags him around Europe for several months (ostensibly) in pursuit of the man. As an adult, Jack slowly discovers that much of what he learned about his absent father as a child was false. At 848 pages, it's too long. I don't think I'd recommend this book.

12 A Long Way Down- Nick Hornby
Like numbers eleven and thirteen, I found this book at my guest house in Chiang Mai. I've read most of Hornby's books, and recall the buzz (radio/print) surrounding the 2005 release of this novel. (I should note, as I did with the 2007 List, that Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree was the inspiration behind my decision to keep track of the books I read.)
I liked this book. It's about a disparate group of people that fate brings together on a rooftop on New Year's Eve. Each intends to commit suicide, but after running into all the other would-be suiciders, none are able to go through with it. They share their stories, and even afterward continue to meet. One thing I liked about the book was that a set-up like this could easily lead to a story about overcoming adversity and personal growth wherein, when faced with the problems of others, each of the characters is somehow inspired and learns to value the positive aspects of their own lives. At the end of the book the characters are, for the most part, somewhat better off than they were at the start. But there's no major transformation, and it's not at all inspirational.

13 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance- Robert M. Persig
A surprisingly dull re-read. The last time I delved into this book, I was still in my teens. At that time, I found the ideas it explored to be genuinely interesting. Twenty years later, I found the philosophy less stimulating and the narrator to be a bore.
I do recall an embarrassing anecdote connected with my first reading of this book. I was about half-way through it when I was hanging out with my pal EVR and the guys from Bomb. The bass player (I think) was talking about riding a motor cycle, and I said that while I hadn't spent much time on a bike, I liked the idea of experiencing the passing world without the windshield or framing of the windows of a car. To which he said, you mean like he says in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? I was so busted.

I Heard it Through the Grape Vine

2009-01-22T11:21:00.000-08:00

by Marvin Gaye was the number one song in the US on this date in 1969. In the UK it was Marmalade's Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da (?).

At Last I Can Remove that Canadian Flag from my Backpack

2009-01-20T09:06:00.000-08:00

My earliest memories of presidential events are probably of Watergate. I was five and a half and getting ready to enter the first grade when when Nixon finally resigned, so I suppose that's not too surprising. I have much clearer memories of the '76 presidential campaign, particularly the big, toothy grin caricatures of Jimmy Carter. Then there was John Anderson. The Eighties were a dark time for my father. For various reasons, he found it difficult living in a world where Reagan was elected president. Twice. I was reminded of this after GWB became my president.

Killing in the Name

2009-01-17T23:07:00.000-08:00

Tonight on the ride back from San Francisco I heard Rage Against the Machine's* Killing in the Name. The song always reminds me of an incident that happened while I was living in Tokyo in the mid-nineties. I'd gone out with my housemate, Miwa, and beau, Evil Dave, and we'd ended up at the notorious Gas Panic. Located in Roppongi district, it was a particular sort of meat market. This was my first and only visit, and looking around, I felt oddly out of place. The crowd was composed entirely of white men (by the look of them, mostly American military) and Japanese women. While my companions broadly fit into these catagories, I did not.

The place was already pretty lively, but when Killing in the Name came on, the guys went wild, fist pumping, waving their drinks, and singing along. Watching a bunch of military guys shouting lyrics like:

Killing in the name of!

And now you do what they told ya, now you're under control
And now you do what they told ya!

Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! (15x?)
Motherfucker!

well, it was precious. The irony of this seems to have been lost on all but me and my friends. (Full lyrics here. Or better still, watch this video.)

*While not a big fan of the music, I've had a certain fondness for RATM since I heard the band interview Noam Chomsky on the radio years ago.

2008 Reading List, 6-9

2009-01-14T20:36:00.000-08:00

6 Out- Natsuo Kirino
Kirino is an award-winning crime/mystery writer from Japan, and I suppose it was her nationality that initially attracted me to this book. Once I'd started, however, I was quickly pulled into the world of the four women who narrate the story in turn. It begins with one woman impulsively strangling her no-good husband. The other three women are her co-workers on the night shift at a factory that makes boxed lunches. They each have problems of their own, and the grim depiction of the women's struggles is worlds away from the comfortable middle class folks who populate the Japanese novels I usually read. Colleagues turn accomplices, helping to dispose of the body in a rather grizzly fashion. The description of the dismembering is quite graphic, so much that I had to skim over some passages. I have come close to fainting twice in the past while reading similar things: the scene where a man is methodically skinned alive in Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicles, and the bloody description of a man struggling to saw through a human torso in Ian McEwan's The Innocent.

7 The Night Watch- Sarah Waters
Another wonderful Waters novel, this one set around the Second World War. Divided in three parts, it opens a couple of years after the war has ended, with the characters still struggling to piece together their lives. Subsequent sections travel backward to 1944 and 1941, revealing details that shed light on events of previous (though chronologically later) sections. This unfolding and discovery (which peaks in the brief but perfect final section) is one of the pleasures of reading this book. Another of course is the characters themselves, whose rich emotional lives are the heart of the narrative. Two of the novel's four main characters are lesbians, as is Waters herself, but to categorize her work as Lesbian Lit would be sadly reductionist.
Again Waters has done her research brilliantly, creating a strong sense of time and place. Whether it's the post-war period of rations or London of the Blitz, one feels transported.

8 Vernon God Little- DBC Pierre
Another disappointing recipient of the Man Booker Prize. It's possible that the hyper-absurd characters/storyline and Tex-Mex setting was amusing to the British judges, but the story failed to draw me in. I simply never grew to care for any of the characters, not even the eponymous main character.

9 Japanese novel (?)
In March, I spent some time at the Tree House on Ko Chang's Lost Beach. Lost beach is fairly isolated, with only one van daily to drop off new blood and return others to civilization. After finishing the disappointing VGL, I found a hard cover Japanese book laying around. It took only a few days for me to plow through this impossibly stupid story of a girl who falls for her high school teacher. I never bothered to write down the author/title, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

Guess Who Came to Dinner?

2009-01-05T13:17:00.000-08:00

My closest sibling was five years my senior, and off at school all day from the time I can remember. As I believe is fairly common of only children, I had several imaginary friends. I can still remember the three most popular: Doc Osmond, who wore a white smock and one of those reflective headbands in his afro; Johnny Kingee, who was cool and always wore denim; and Goo Goo, a white dog who walked upright and looked a bit like the professor from that old cartoon.

I was speaking about my old friends with my mother a few years ago, and I when I described them to her, she was shocked. "Goo Goo was a dog?? But we used to set a place for him at the dinner table!"

2008 Reading List

2009-01-04T17:23:00.000-08:00

Last year around this time, I began posting my 2007 Reading List. This was my attempt to briefly document the forty-some books I'd read in 2007, in groups of five. I never made it past #15. As is often the case, I found it difficult to keep it brief. Or I spent too much time struggling to write on books I no longer cared about.

This year I've decided to try again. I read fewer books in 2008, so I should be able to compete this in six or seven posts.

1 Alice in Wonderland- Lewis Carroll
Though I've never read this before, nearly every scene was so familiar to me (the tale having so permeated popular culture) that I felt as though I were re-reading a well-loved book from childhood. Reading it in Japanese was quite fun, particularly in recognizing the more quotable lines. It has been pointed out to me that Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson- whew,) was a logician. He must have had great fun writing the Wonderland characters' twisted logic that so infuriates Alice.

2 The New Life- Orhan Pamuk
Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, which of course peaks ones curiosity. A blurb on the back of this book mentioned The Usual Suspects, and I found the post-modern-ness of the description intriguing. It's the story of a young man, a university student in Istanbul, who reads a book that changes his life.
TNL was an enormous success in Turkey. The opening line is "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed." It's not at all clear initially why the book is able to have such a profound impact on him. The details of the novel-within-the-novel are revealed very slowly, interwoven with our hero's own story. Ultimately, we discover that what makes the book so powerful is that it is, in a sense, our hero's story. The ending is therefore deliberately predictable.
I don't know if the translation was poor or if Pamuk's prose is awkward as well, but I had a hard time getting into this novel. Though told in the first person, I felt distanced from the main character. Plot-wise, it takes a long, meandering time to get to the interesting bits. That said, I would consider reading one of Pamuk's later novels.

3 Fingersmith- Sarah Waters
I came across a reference to Waters' celebrated debut, Tipping the Velvet, some years ago, and have been looking forward to reading something by her ever since. I can't say why it took me so long, but when I finally got around to it, I was not disappointed.
Waters writes period novels, and Fingersmith is set in Victorian England. The story revolves around two girls, both orphans, whose fates are linked from birth. Sue is raised among thieves by her adopted mother, Mrs. Sucksby, while Maud grows up with her uncle in decidedly more affluent circumstances. Of course, all is not as it seems.
This novel has got it all: an intricately woven plot with delicious twists, and a brilliantly detailed Nineteenth Century English setting populated by unforgettable, Dickensesque characters. Indeed, if you have exhausted your library's collection of Dickens and (Wilkie) Collins, by all means check this out.

4 Black Dogs- Ian McEwan
I'm pleased to write that I haven't been disappointed by a McEwan novel since Amsterdam.
Black Dogs is about a man's preoccupation with his in-laws, a couple whose wildly divergent paths in the search for meaning (he in the public sphere, she in personal spirituality. The classic reason/emotion dichotomy) led to decades of estrangement. I suppose there is a certain heavy-handedness in McEwan's exposition of this theme, but he is so masterful that his prose is nevertheless a pleasure to read.
The title refers to an encounter the mother-in-law had with two feral beast years ago. For her it was a successful encounter with evil that subsequently came to define her life.

5 Black Swan Green- David Mitchell
I've read Mitchell's three earlier novels, fascinating books with wildly diverse characters, geographies, time periods. Each employs a creative method of storytelling. In comparison, BSG is much more conventional, more personal. It follows Jason Taylor from the time he turns thirteen in January, 1982 until the following January. Each chapter is a scene from one calendar month. The narrative voice is spot-on, as is the often squirm-inducing depiction of what it is like to be thirteen years old: the awkwardness, the casual cruelty, the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of girls.
Mitchell was born the same month as me, and though his British childhood was an ocean away from my American one, the common time period (references to Thatcher, the Falklands War, popular music) drew me in along with the more universal themes.

What to Do with that Unexpected Windfall

2008-12-31T08:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I did what has come to be my favorite run: starting at Anand's place in Noe Valley, passing through the Mission, up and around Bernal Hill, then zig-zagging back to Noe. On the return trip, I found a $10 bill lying at the side of the road. No one was around. I stuffed it into the tiny pocket of my running shorts.

I imagined buying a lottery ticket as my mother would surely suggest, but by the time I got back I'd forgotten about the cash altogether. It was only later in the evening, when I was eating dinner, that I remembered the money and fished it out of my shorts' pocket. It is now on the table beside me, again pondering that lottery ticket. Or just a $4.25 cup of coffee from the Clover machine at Ritual.

The Other Bridge

2008-12-25T21:37:00.000-08:00

I had Christmas dinner at Dave and Kirsten's in the East Bay. To get there, I had to cross the Bay Bridge. Some people I know actually prefer the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate. In the interest of fairness, I'm posting a photo. That's Treasure Island at the far side (of the photo, not the bridge. The bridge continues on beyond TI to Oakland.)

Church & 18th

2008-12-17T17:09:00.001-08:00

And Back Again

2008-12-17T17:08:00.000-08:00

The climb up was just right: steep but not too steep, long but not too long. I parked my bike at the highest point of paved road, just below Hawk Hill, and gazed at the City across the bridge. The sky was clouding up, and a brown-grey haze lingered over the city. Despite being a weekday afternoon, there were a fair number of cyclists roaming the hills. I stopped frequently on the way down, again soaking up the spectacular views. For the return trip, I decided to go around the city. Sticking to the paths and sidewalks along the water, I was able to avoid Van Ness, traffic and the worst of the hills. Using VN on the way there, I'd made it to the Marina in about half an hour. It took me well over an hour to return. I walked the bicycle briefly while passing through the heavy pedestrian traffic of Fisherman's Warf. By the time I reached the Mission, street traffic was heavy and the sun was approaching the horizon. I struggled a bit going up the final hill to Noe. It was dusk when I reached home.

There

2008-12-12T11:25:00.000-08:00

The weather yesterday looked promising, reasonably clear and warm, so after lunch I got into my cycling gear and hit the road. I wanted to ride over the Golden Gate Bridge and up into the Marin Headlands. On a clear day, the view of the city from there is spectacular. It turned out to be somewhat cloudy, and the pollution was visible, but that didn't stop me from taking about 180 photographs.

Unsure of the best route and hoping to avoid the really killer hills, I took Van Ness across town to Lombard, and from there out to the Marina, Fort Mason and Crissy Field. Once you hit Crissy Field, there's a series of bike/ pedestrian paths and bike lanes that take you all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. Van Ness, however, sucked. The road itself was more pot-hole than pavement, and the traffic-- even at mid-day-- was heavy. I decided I'd try an alternative route on my return.

I made good time crossing the city (despite the mess of VN), but once I hit Crissy Field I found myself stopping repeatedly, mesmerized by the ever-changing views of the Bay, the Bridge, and the Marin Headlands. I vowed several times that this would be the last stop until I reached the Headlands, but each time I found myself deciding that my appreciation of this lovely place was more important than time. Besides, I had plenty of time. (TBC)

Candor

2008-12-08T17:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon while browsing at a bookstore in the Castro, I pointed out a Philip Roth novel in the bargain section. V read and loved The Human Stain. He remarked, "You know what makes Philip Roth's work so amazing? Its brutal honesty."

That reminded me of something that came up in my memoir writing workshop back in Fredonia. I've never been able to really write with complete openness. I censor my blog because of who may be reading it. And I even hold back in my journal writing, leery that someday someone might read that. To some degree I attribute this to an early childhood memory of my mother reading my elder sister's diary. I mentioned this to someone, and they were aghast: how dare my mother do such a thing?! I, however, know exactly how. My teenage sister was completely out of control, and my mother desperately wanted to do something about that. Of course violating her daughter's privacy was not a good way to go about it, but my mother was doing the best she could. It's possible to appreciate that in retrospect.

Now that I'm on the topic, I recall another incident. A decade ago I went through a rather long and messy (thanks to me) break up, and my long-distance, soon-to-be-ex- boyfriend logged in and read the messages in my email account. Though I was surprised and appalled, I could not really blame him. At a distance and in absence of any real meaningful communication from me, it was the only avenue left open to him.

Sweet

2008-12-04T18:34:00.000-08:00

Today I needed to make a visit to Mountain View, so I got on my road bike to ride over to the 22nd Street Caltrain station. It looked easy on the map, and even looking down 22nd Street from the living room window, it looked like a nice ride. But I was in for a real surprise when I actually hit the road. The hills were punishing. I lost my way. At one point, I actually had to get off and walk the bike. I reached Caltrain with three minutes to spare, only to find that all trains were running late, and all day it was FREE TO RIDE.

Loveless

2008-12-02T18:39:00.000-08:00

Last night I dropped by to see John as I was in his (my old) neighborhood. While there, we spoke briefly of Chris, someone he knew well and I only slightly. Neither of us has been in touch with him for years. When I got home later that evening and went online, I found a friend request from Chris on Facebook.

This morning while I was getting ready to go out, I listened to My Bloody Valentine's 1991 shoegazer masterpiece, Loveless. It put me in the right mood to walk through the Mission and over to Sports Basement. Pausing at the light at 18th and Mission, I heard someone call my name. It was John, who just happened to be driving by.

After accomplishing my mission at Sports Basement, I headed back toward Noe Valley, stopping for a while to drink a cup of joe at Ritual Cafe. After a few cups of amazing coffee there last week, the past couple have been disappointing. Today's coffee tasted muddy.

I took out my Miura Shion book (the one I picked up last week in Japantown) to read. The collection is titled "Mukashi no Hanashi," A Long Long Time Ago, and is billed as modern fairy tales. The first story is about a man who works as a gigolo. It's written as an email. The message begins by saying that his grandfather died at the age of 27 and that his father did as well. And he himself turned 27 the previous month. His mother often told him that his father's family was cursed. But our narrator was both afraid and distanced from the prospect of turning 27. Imagine that NASA announced that tomorrow a giant meteor was going to strike the earth. You'd be scared, but there'd be no escape. You wouldn't want to believe it, but you'd be wondering what was going to happen, and you'd be anxious. That's the way he felt about turning 27. The meter image appears again later:

"Do you believe in fate?" If you think about it, this is as embarrassing a question to ask as "Do you believe in love?". I don't want to believe. Neither in fate nor in love. Because I've never seen either. Or rather, when you're thinking "that was it," you're looking back and its too late. That's the same as not existing. It's like a meteor striking the earth. When it hits, everything is finished anyhow. (translation mine)

We learn that our narrator is writing the email on his mobile phone while trying to hide from a group of hitmen. He got one of his clients pregnant, and she turned out to be the girlfriend of a yakuza boss.

I finished off the coffee and the story at about the same time. Looking at the title, I smiled to see that it was ラブレス, Loveless.

Reunited

2008-11-30T20:12:00.000-08:00

This afternoon I visited my friend Mary at her place in Bernal Heights. I hadn't seen her in over a year and a half, and was looking forward to meeting five month old daughter, Audrey. When I arrived, husband Adam was working on my bicycle in the garage, filling the tires, dusting it off. I'd left my bike with Mary hoping that she would get some use out of it while I was abroad. She got pregnant instead, but took very good care of my bicycle.

After getting acquainted at home, Mary, Audrey and I took a walk around Bernal Hill. The views were amazing. Note to self: return with camera. It was warm, the walk pleasant. Audrey was delightful company.

I rode the bike back to Anand's place. What a ride! It was dark, so I stuck to the sidewalks.

North

2008-11-29T23:14:00.000-08:00

Done to death on calendars, t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc., the Golden Gate is a truly iconic image. And the real thing is genuinely lovely.

After picking up a few things at the Noe Valley Farmer's Market, V and I crossed the bridge late in the morning, stopping briefly at the Vista Point on the North side of the bridge to admire the view. Another beautiful day in the Bay Area.

We continued on to Mill Valley for lunch. I lived in Mill Valley for six months nearly a decade ago, and still have fond feelings for the place. This is particularly true for Avatar's Panjabi Burrito's. An Indian take on the Mexican classic, the basic panjabi burrito is basmati rice, chick pea curry, carrot pickle, fruit and mint chutneys, and tamarind sauce wrapped in a paratha. Today I added sweet potato curry to the mix.

We'd headed North with plans of walking among the redwoods, but we took several detours along the way. By the time we reached Armstrong Redwoods State Reserve, we had little more than an hour of sunlight remaining. The walk was neither long nor strenuous, but just being among those ancient trees and breathing the fragrant air was highly pleasurable.

O Tannenbaum

2008-11-28T23:55:00.000-08:00

This evening I went downtown, and as you might imagine, there were a lot of people around. I wandered a few stores, not really shopping but rather enjoying the festive atmosphere. As I approached Union Square, the crowds on the street were unbelievable. It was like being in Shibuya on a Saturday night. The streets around the Square were closed to traffic, and there was a distinct police presence. Two recent news stories flashed through my mind: the Mumbai terrorist attacks and the Walmart employee who was trampled to death by an insane crowd of consumers. I tried to imagine what might have drawn all these people to this area, but at first I was stumped. I saw a few people carrying anti-gay signs, but they seemed marginal: this was your typical crowd of holiday shoppers. People were even clustered around the windows of surrounding hotels, staring down at the Square. Then I wondered if it might have something to do with the Christmas tree. Sure enough, a few minutes later people started counting down and then the gigantic Christmas tree in the Square was illuminated.

The crowd dispersed much more quickly than I'd have thought possible. For the record, these photos were taken with an iPhone.

Thanks

2008-11-27T20:08:00.000-08:00

To Satomi and Shirish, for inviting me over for Thanksgiving dinner. I had no plans, figured I'd just hang out in the city with the other family- and friend-less. The food and company were well appreciated.

Nihonmachi

2008-11-26T23:02:00.000-08:00

This afternoon I went in search of something to read. I'm currently reading two books*, but they're both short and I could easily finish them off with a couple of hours of concentrated reading. There are many books I'd like to read right here at the apartment where I'm staying. But today I was looking for a Japanese book, and for that I had to go to Kinokuniya in Japantown.

San Francisco is home to the largest- and oldest- Japanese enclave in the United States. At the heart is the Japantown Center, which covers two full city blocks and contains the above-mentioned Kinokuniya, many restaurants, bakeries, and shops selling Japanese goods. Besides the wonderful book store (lots of great books in both Japanese and English), I recommend Hashi no Ue, On the Bridge, a real Japanese-style kisaten or cafe. It crowded, with a counter and just a few tables, and has Japanese newspapers and a good collection comic books. The menu consists of kisaten favorites like Japanese-style curry and rice, gratin and doria, and a great selection of wafu (Japanese style) spaghettis: kimchi, mentaiko, sansai (mountain vegetables)...

Nowadays there's a strong Korean presence in Nihonmachi, particularly at the Eastern end. Elsewhere there's a Denny's with an Asian menu. Soko Hardware sells a broad range of Japanese household goods and is always fun to browse. For low ticket items, from snacks like the ever-popular Pocky and cute lunch boxes to plain old cleaning implements, try Ichibankan. And if you've tired of eating and shopping, there is a place for Japanese language study and a branch temple of the Nichiren school of Buddhism.

I departed Japantown with Miura Shion's Mukashi no Hanashi and a Chococat fob for my new mobile phone.

*Don't think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff, and Twenty Days on Route 20 by Michael Czarnecki.

Books

2008-11-25T22:47:00.000-08:00

I took public transport today, the J Church to Civic Center and the San Francisco Public Library. Though it was completed a couple of years before I ever even lived in the city, this was my first time inside the Main Library. How is this possible? A bibliophile like me?! I usually love libraries, and this was no exception. It's open and airy with lots of natural light. Good places to sit. Even mid-day during the week it was doing a brisk business. The computer terminals were full, and a steady stream of people passed through the check out area.

The library, however, is not without its critics. Despite being more than twice the size of the building it replaced, the collection was actually reduced after the move. The amount of shelf space is limited due to the very large and airy atrium at the center of the building.

Simplicity

2008-11-24T22:52:00.000-08:00

My dinner this evening consisted of 1/2 of a baked acorn squash and a bowl of yoghurt with raisins, pistachios, and honey. Sometimes it's nice to eat alone.

2008-11-23T16:53:00.000-08:00

Today I added a photo to yesterday's post. In case it wasn't clear, that's the t-shirt I got in the Haight yesterday. I was with my burrito-loving friend, V, at the time. Which reminded me of a story I once told him. V didn't grow up in the US, so I was telling him about a t-shirt that was popular when I was a kid. It said "I'm With Stupid", and had a finger or arrow pointing to one side. I said that while I never had such a t-shirt, a lot of my friends seemed to. Yes, sometimes my sense of humour is rather puerile.

City Life

2008-11-22T23:53:00.000-08:00

It was a very San Francisco sort of day. Walked down to 24th Street to discover that Noe Valley has a Farmer's Market. Drank some decent coffee. Wandered the Haight and got a new T-shirt. Went for a run out at Crissy Field, turning around at the Golden Gate. Dinner at a new Belgian restaurant on Valencia. Arrived early enough at the Red Poppy Art House to secure one of the window seats for the Black Olive Babes concert ("an eclectic mix of Balkan, Romani, Sephardic and American Roots music"). Most of the seats at the Red Poppy are absurdly uncomfortable. Later met friends at a sidewalk cafe in the Mission for a nightcap.