Foreign Friday. Rosh Hashanah.

I am fortunate that Rosh Hashanah extends over two days and that I won't have to discuss it today.  Although I had forgotten that this apple dipping honey holiday was so rapidly approaching, I am sure that my ancestors would want me to reflect on my roots and my tradition on this New Year of 5,770.  Happy New Year. 

Foreign Friday is something I attempted to start up last week but failed.  Each Friday i will try to make a meal from a foreign country.

My first “Foreign Friday” was a success.  I made Pad Thai using a recipe from Joy of Cooking.  I used the 75^th Anniversary Edition and as there have been so many reprints of this book I am unsure if Irma or her greedy, as I have heard him been called before, grandson Ethan is to blame, but the instructions were at some points unclear.  The shrimp was only supposed to marinate in a tsp. of cream of tartar and a tsp. of sesame oil.  Right under these instructions it said to add to a bowl: and then it listed ¼ cup lemon juice, soy sauce, etc.  I ended up marinating the shrimp in this concoction – which actually worked out quite well, I just added that to the noodles.  There were a couple other adaptations made to this recipe that you might consider.  I didn’t have any peanut oil and I didn’t feel like buying any so I added peanut butter to canola oil; it actually worked quite well.  If you choose to do this, omit the roasted peanuts.  I forgot bean sprouts and basil leaves.  Make sure to cut the shrimp in half, that way you’ll have twice as many.

Recipe:

            1.  Put six ounces of rice stick noodles in hot water to soak for 20-30 minutes.  Drain and then set aside.

            2.  Add 8 ounces large shrimp (peeled deveined, and split lengthwise in half) into 1tsp. cornstarch and 1tsp. toasted sesame oil.  Marinate for 15-20 minutes.

            3.  Then, separately, stir together 2tbl. Thai fish sauce, 2tbl. Soy sauce, ¼ cup fresh lemon juice or lime juice, 3tbl. Sugar.

            4.  Heat 1tbl peanut oil in a large skillet and swirl the oil around so that it is very hot but not smoking.  Add the shrimp and stir fry 30-45 seconds.  It says to drain the shrimp but I don’t know what you are draining them of.

            5.  Add 2tbl peanut oil and swirl briefly.  Add 3 eggs well beaten and stir vigorously until set.  Remove to a plate.

            6.  2 tbl. Peanut oil.  Swirl and then add:

                        ½ cup 1½ inches pieces scallion (white part only)

                        1-2 small green chiles, seeded and chopped (I recommend one)

                        1 small garlic clove (finely minced)  Cook until garlic browns slightly.

            7.  Add noodles and stir until well coated.  Add fish sauce mixture (its alright if you’ve marinated the shrimp in it) and stir well, then add the shrimp and eggs and stir well.  In the order listed, stir in:

                        ½ cup fresh bean sprouts.

                        1/3 cup roasted peanuts coarsely chopped.

                        ¼ cup basil leaves cut into thin strips.

                        ¼ cup cilantro leaves

                        ½ tsp. crushed red pepper flakes.

David Foster Wallace Part 3:3

Last post on David Foster Wallace.  I suggest that you read the three previous parts prior to reading this post, which will focus mainly on Wallace’s writing and what he tried to accomplish through it.

The ideas behind his third novel, The Pale King, only of which a third he completed before his death, matriculated into his commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005.  He addressed the students on the meaning of true liberty, “[it] means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to construct meaning from experience.  Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” 

The Pale King deals with a group of employees who work at the Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois and how they deal with the monotony of their work.  If Infinite Jest broadcasts our addiction to entertainment, it is his last novel that suggests the antidote.  One character comments, “Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low level way, and which most of us spend nearly all of our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from.”

It is ironic then that the character Chris Fogle, a college student, gains his moment of epiphany through television: “There was certainly always reading and studying for finals I could do, but I was being a wastoid…Anyhow, I was sitting there trying to spin the ball on my finger and watching the soap opera…and at the end of ever commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of the planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, “You’re watching ‘As the World Turns,’” until the tone began to seem almost incredulous –“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’” –until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement…It was as if the CBS announcer was speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep –“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns.’”… I didn’t stand for anything.  If I wanted to matter –even just to myself –I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.”  Perhaps, what he found so frustrating was that the realizations he composed for his characters seemed so hard to grasp for himself.  As if he had some kind of intellectual idealization of enlightenment that played out accordingly in his fiction but not in his reality.

Could it be that life is an unraveling of the intertwinement of our greatest gift tangled within our Achilles heal: that the gift of language can be equally destructive?  An emerging field of Psychology, ACT, a branch of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, links language to one of our root causes of our suffering.  The paradox, which the founders are quick to point out is that our survival is deeply indebted to language: that while we are inferior to most other animals in speed, in size, and strength, we are cognitively superior.  Coincidentally, there has been no other known species that has been scientifically proven to commit suicide. 

Wallace, cognitively superior to the cognitively superior, saw language as a means of nourishment.  While he found a comfortable discomfort in irony, he attempted to escape it because although he claimed it could critique it was a voice incapable of nourishing or redeeming and ultimately, impeded him from creating: “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction.”  His language would turn to the use of extensive footnotes and parentheses, which allowed him he wrote, “a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story.”  And in the wake of authors who wrote to flaunt and impress, for recognition and wealth, his attempts were to discover a voice that could convey truth. In an interview with Larry McCaffrey, English Professor at San Diego State, he said, “It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies…in be[ing] willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow.  Even now I’m scared how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this.  And the effort to actually do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don’t seem to have yet.”  “It [fiction], Wallace goes on to say, “should help readers to feel less alone inside.”

        

And as I sit here writing this, two brothers, one obviously out-aged by the other, lead an army (I can’t see anyone else) into a courageous battle hurling grenades (unripened crab apples) at the approaching army (a stagnant shed that contains restrooms and janitorial supplies).  Outnumbered, they retreat (manifested by frequent explosive noises and hands flailing in the air), and they are forced to retreat to their trenches (behind a fence made of two levels of logs laying horizontally against evenly spaced posts).  One has been hit in the leg (I don’t know by what) and crawls toward the trenches. Nonetheless, his valiant brother risks his safety to drag him off the battlefield (the younger brother seems to be struggling to free himself).  The excitement is interrupted by a distant battle cry summoning them for bed and this band of brothers is forced to relinquish its citadel in order to appease their mother.  It’s a question that’s been asked too many times before to circumvent cliche–and I know happy sappy this will look in writing –but is ignorance bliss?

It's not about you...:Part 5/2 of 3.

When there’s a dearth of time, it’s amazing how little the mind will interfere. You’ve probably noticed this when you've attempted the 'grab your balls and approach a girl technique'. Although I'm sure that many girls can attest to the fact that the effects of this sometimes aren’t pretty,  your mind is not to blame.  But when there's an abundance of time, that’s when the rumination begins.  Here's my case: a man on third, one out, tie game. I tap my right foot to my left then kick up some dirt and dig my left cleat, a little aft of my right, into the ground. I pound my glove three times, crouch, lean forward, and wait.

These are not the early signs of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; every player has some kind of routine (although the situation has exacerbated itself with modernity), when I was playing, players would take routines from ball games on TV, which would amount to stepping into the batter’s box and frantically waving their bat to and fro.

Ultimately, a routine is what distracts the mind. But a distraction is just that; in a way it's like trying to drown out the noise of your children (if, like me, you don’t have any children don’t let it ruin the metaphor, just fill it in with siblings, significant other, etc) with a radio.  You now have two sounds blaring simultaneously. Try catching a ball with that on your mind.

I don’t remember what the batter looked like but if how he hit the ball -which I remember very well -is any indication of his size, he would've been between four and five feet. The ball, hit with such a lack of chutzpah, barely overcame the forces of gravity and wind resistance –pathetically lobbing through the air like a dog no higher than your shins viciously barking up at you, groveling for an non-reciprocated and unearned attention.

 
But comparing a measly hit baseball to a minuscule dog is a bit of a balk: although a dog might call attention to you in public it is a walk in the park compared with having a ball hit at you. When a ball is hit toward you, well actually it was hit to both the short stop and I -which worsened my predicament -you can't look away with disinterest because your mind creates a state of hypervigilance. It forbodes what will happen if you drop the ball, the shame that will ensue, and as you wait for the ball the mind with alacrity reminds you at every moment the possible consequences: it’s a survival mechanism that doesn’t have a safety and more often than not, shoots you in the foot. Its very similar to the fight or flight response, except you can’t runaway (there would be even worse repercussions) and fighting a ball might land you a dinner seat next to Wiley in the mental institution.

And because there was a man on third, one out, bottom of the sixth (we only played six), and the game was tied -it all made the consequences quite large. In my backyard, catching that ball would’ve been as routine as kicking my right foot with my left, but this ball lingered in the air longer, almost like that stagnation of time that yuppie moms dissect while discussing Eckhart Tolle over brunch. But the power of now can sometimes be too powerful, the slowness of the ball an inadequate anchor to the moment because the imagination of it being dropped is too dire to ignore.

Perhaps it was a reflux but I called off the shortstop and waited. And waited. And then I couldn’t wait. I closed my glove and the ball hit the outer edge. In a frenzy, I scrambled to it, hurled it at the first baseman and the batter was out at first. But outs only count in horseshoes or when there’s two of them. That was it, game over, the man on third scored. My play, or lack there of, combined with the universal feeling of empathy experienced by mothers everywhere, a gift bestowed upon them with the birth of their first born, caused these side spectators, these daughter's of Eve, to exhibit the external behavior of wincing because the pain of their hearts dropping needed to be expressed. The dad’s (and the moms with the tendency to bawl at the umpire), unsure of the identity of that boy under that oversized, “fit’s all” cap, but just to be safe -in case it was their own, sacrificed the strain on their necks to bring their heads parallel with the ground. Mighty Casey (I really wasn't that mighty at all) dropped the ball.

Are some of us predisposed to making fools of ourselves, to perfectly positioning our bodies for a belly flop when attempting a flip, to having that awkward silence with a girl linger just a little longer (but making it exponentially more awkward)? Is it nature or nurture? Or neither? Was it the traumatic experience that cracked the shell of self-consciousness or the self-consciousness that birthed the traumatic experience? It must’ve been the birth of tragedy that came first.

Which reminds me of one of the all time great New Yorker Cartoons.

"I'm nothing, and yet I'm all I can think about."

I have wasted this whole post talking about me. My apologies.  David Foster Wallace continued tomorrow.


WOD - Fluvial:

1. of or pertaining to a river: a meandering fluvial contour.

2. produced by or found in a river: fluvial plants. Contextually speaking: "Another fluvial piece -"Tight-Assed River" -was checked by Josh Hersh in 2004." Not a very good context, I know. Taken from New Yorker on article "Checkpoints".

WOD: Anomie

1. Social instability caused by erosion of standards and values.
2. Alienation and purposelessness experienced by a person or a class as a result of a lack of standards, values, or ideals.
   

In Context (taken from New Yorker article on DFW): Wallace's voice was different.  It projected, in Howard's words, "the sheer joy of a talent realizing itself."  There was optimism in its despair, elation in its anomie.

Part Three to come tomorrow.

I had a question but I forgot it...If only I had twitter.

David Foster Wallace

Part Two of Three (strongly recommended that you go in sequential order. It has been years since my parents forced me to sit in front of the Tele and watch The Sound of Music but the traumatic experience still lingers on in my temporal lobe: the reverberations of Maria Von Trapp bellowing out "start at the very beginning, its a very good place to start)."



Facebook Five Hundred Challenge Update:
175 Friends. 3 days left. 325 friends needed. How are my chances looking? Not so good. Who knows, sometimes the dark horse is the one with the kick.

WOD Miasma:

1. Nonoxious exhalations from putrescent organic matter; poisonous effluvia or germs polluting the atmosphere.
 


2. a dangerous, foreboding, or deathlike influence or atmosphere.

Context as used by John Updike in article on John Cheever - New Yorker style: "On the other hand, all this biographer's zeal makes a heavy, dispiriting read, to the point that even I, a reader often enraptured by Cheever's prose and an acquaintance who generally enjoyed his lively company, wanted the narrative, pursued in methodical chapters that tick past year after year, to hurry through the menacing miasma of a life which, for all the sparkle of its creative moments, brought so little happiness to its possessor and to those around him."

The concept of the perpetual chase after self-gratification is the premise to his best selling novel, Infinite Jest. Or so I have been told. The book is not easy to digest and the finish line being over one thousand pages away, makes it even more ominous. I read the first one hundred pages and then it sat around for a couple weeks before I took the initiative to take it back to the library (the library was closed and it was too large for the drop box).

I don't feel right recommending something I haven't read -at least only one tenth of it (Note: this is a tangent. Feel free to skip to the end of the parentheses and continue on. In no way will this information impact your overall comprehension of this post. Your going to read it anyway, aren't you? As soon as you tell someone they don't have to do something, they suddenly want to. Why do you think that is? Voice your thoughts in the comment section. The story: I used to work in a bookstore where employees would talk to the customers -recommending books as if they had read them. They actually did it quite well. 



One day we got a book order and I opened a box to find a book called How to Talk about Books you haven't Read. It looked like a book that could attract some attention, so I decided to put it on the display case at the checkout -not that I had any authority to do this. A couple days later, I was working with a fellow employee, a teenage boy of 17. We were in a conversation and a man walked up and set a New York Times on the glass and made eyes with my book. He picked it up, turned it around, and looked at the back where it gave a short summation of the novels (most upwards of six hundred pages) that would be covered: Moby Dick, Ulysses, War and Peace, etc

As I had planned, it instigated a conversation about how people BS books. The ultimate irony was that when the man asked about the book, my fellow employee, who had not yet read the book (I am unsure even if he had any intentions of doing so) took it upon himself to give the man an executive summary. Also, if you don't like tangents, write that in the comments as well or if you think I'm bad at telling stories). So in short, I try not to recommend books I haven't read. I do recommend reading his compilation of his journalistic works, Consider the Lobster and his creative New York Times article on the tennis champion, Roger Federer.



Although Wallace loved the game of tennis, playing it was anything but a refuge. Instead, it was only volleying the ball into another court of self-consciousness. One can feel his discomfort as Terry aggrandizes his junior tennis career referring to him as a 'tennis champion', he quickly interlocutes, "I was not - I deny steadfastly that I was a champion, I played competitive tennis on a regional junior level, I was not a champion, I don't want anyone from my hometown to hear me profess the word champion." Humble yes, but an undertow of something more was being swirled to the surface; it was almost a fear of being called something he wasn't. Was he reverting back to the ordinary? Was he leaving me to solo the journey as the sole patient diagnosed with this unordinary fear? Gross rephrases her compliment, "okay, you were a darned good tennis play," and then gives a good humored laugh as if to suggest with certainty that by rephrasing it, the case has been closed. It hasn't. Her serve will be returned. The interviewee not even content with 'darned good' debases himself once again, correcting her: "I was decent by competitive standards."



Instead of tennis being an asylum, he brought tennis into the game of life.Although it isn't mentioned in the abridged version of the interview (I think he might talk about it in the complete 1997 recording), he explains how he uses the accouterment of tennis to circumvent any explanation he would have to provide for the beads of sweat coagulating on his forehead. The diversion worked but his panic attacks remained. All at the expense of having to harbor the habiliments of a tennis racket and gym towel: the tennis racket gave him an excuse for the sweat exuding into his shirt, and the towel, solidifying his wardrobe while also serving a more utilitarian purpose.

And it is this self-consciousness that kept him from attaining the self-proclaimed ranks of 'champion' and instead, being merely a good and decent one. It was his high school teacher that broke the news to him, "you got-a bad head kid." He knew his coach was right, he just didn't know how to fix it. He acknowledges to Terry that he could've gone further if not for his crippling self-consciousness. But even after his early retirement, he still uses the instrument that precluded him from his potential to contemplate its place in sports: "Look, one of the great mysteries about athletes and why I think they appear dumb to some of us -they seem to have this ability to turn it off, I don't know how many of your listeners have this part in their brain, but ah.. what if I double vault on this point... what if I miss this free throw..." (say nothing more, I know it all too well) Its a part in my brain that played a prominent position in my fledgling years as a little leaguer -Wallace and I have yet another matching point: deuce: deuce.

It is this debilitating self-consciousness that probably occurs more often than not. Or maybe not. Maybe him and I are the only ones to have ever experienced it. For me it started as I was spawning into the prepubescent age; conveniently, just as I was matriculating into the Majors. As I climbed up through the ranks it remained at my side, like a glove to a hand. But my fascination with the mind didn't start until I got some space from it (which is now...maybe). I remember one day so vividly: I made four jaw dropping catches (by anyone's standards) -two that were grounders, one hit just left of the first baseman and the other in the gap near second base. The two fly balls were hit into the shallows of the outfield and despite the sun ingesting the wavering ball -the red stitches barely audible, my back bending, my body contorting and then sensing the seams being coughed up at the last moment, like a man from the Matrix, I leaned back far enough that my extending arms could arch beneath the ball.  Willie Mays didn't even have a name for this one. This is the day I remember. But if you were to ask any of my fellow sunflower seed spitting teammates, they would tell you a different story from a different game. This story will have to wait until tomorrow...

Lastly, please do comment. I am trying to figure out how to show everyone's comments (well, right now there is only one) so that it can become more of a discussion, a conversation so to speak.
Nice... 

If anyone has any ideas on how to do this, I have already tried clicking on embedding comments in post but this hasn't worked and I have also tried tweaking some things in the template. Also to no avail.

Good night moon,

Jimmy

David Foster Wallace

This is part one of three:

Until I started flipping through an old New Yorker (those are the hand me downs that the library is willing to part with (for which I thank them)) two days ago, I didn't realize the approaching anniversary of the death of David Foster Wallace, laudable author and recipient of the prestigious MacArthur genius award. One year ago marks the day when he marched out to his backyard patio and hanged himself.

I first came across David Foster Wallace not through his prose but through an interview between he and Terry Gross; it aired eight years ago but was brought back to life the day after Wallace was found dead. Any pursuer of vocal pedagogy would've winced at the abundance of verbal faux pas and extracurricular fillers: the 'um,' the 'ah,' and his inclination to header the majority of responses with a disclaimer -at face value the small phrases are not unlike those employed by our president; however, the denotations differ greatly -'well, look' or simply 'look': a tactical approach that precludes him from seeming cliche -a feat of ventriloquism that distances himself from the question at hand, not unlike a former president of ours, only Wallace does it in a much more articulate and graceful manner.

But his perseverance to circumvent his own convictions and tiptoe around his own beliefs and opinions on these issues -be it as it may spawning from a fear of sounding trite -attracted me to the writer. At base level, I could relate to his intense desire to avoid sounding ordinary. As some are diseased with a fear of failure; others even with a fear of success; the author and myself share the same clinical diagnoses of a fear of being -or at least coming off as such -ordinary. And underneath it all: the endless quest for that idealized individuality.


But even after his attempts to eradicate himself (or his sense of self) from his answers while simultaneously sifting through anything that has the potential to be platitudinous, his finer particles of sincerity and honesty still filter through. One feels as though, even if it has been said before -reiterated many times before by many people, it hasn't been stripped to quite the same flavor of simplicity and watchful hesitance -like a shy child afraid to come out from behind the swing set yet not content with being alone. And Wallace's writing attempts to anatomize and reconcile the ideas of meaning and true value with "being raised in an era when really the ultimate value seems to be...I mean a successful life is, let's see -you make a lot of money... and you have a really attractive spouse. Or you get infamous or famous in some way so that its a life where you experience as much pleasure as possible which ends up being sort of empty and low calorie."


I'm too lazy to do WOD today.