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Friday, May 9th, 2008
 How exciting! Sylvia and I are going to Brooklyn tomorrow, to see the Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. (Sylvia already saw it with Ellen a couple of weeks ago, and wants to go back; I have not seen it yet except in photos.) And! We will be meeting Bill at the museum, whom I have not seen in a year or so; and then having dinner with Dan, whom I have not seen in a lot longer time, I'm thinking about 8 years.
posted evening of May 9th, 2008: Respond
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Tonight we watched Crash. It's funny -- it reminded me in certain key ways of Lush Life, which I just finished reading; and my reaction to it was similar to my reaction to that book: it's a pretty gripping, entertaining story as long as you avoid thinking about the deficiencies in the plot and characterizations. If you just watch, don't think: a good movie. (In the end, not nearly as well-done a story as Lush Life, which despite having some similar defects is much more coherent.)
 A.O. Scott's review is absolutely spot-on. Here is a nice line: "Metaphor hangs in the California air like smog."
posted evening of May 9th, 2008: Respond
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You want to know what is a really excellent pasta? Foglio d'Autunno, is what. I bought a bag this evening to go with the dinner I was making for Ellen, and man -- I don't know if I have ever tasted a more pleasant pasta. It's really surprising, since noodles are usually made in regular shapes; these are like little irregular lumps of pasta in different colors. I recommend it. This recipe was inspired by A White Bear's Cauliflower Pasta Sauce. (For reasons too complicated to explain in this short context, you can log in to AWB's recipe site using as a password, the initial letters of the phrase "Why Must You Be Such A Little Bitch?") I was scanning through the wiki this afternoon looking for a dinner recipe; my eyes kept coming back to that one. Thanks AWB for reminding me of the existence of asiago cheese, which I had somehow forgotten about. Modified Cauliflower Pasta Sauce- one red onion
- garlic
- one head of cauliflower
- a bit of spinach
- grated cheese, asiago or romano
Sauté the onion, garlic and cauliflower in olive oil for a good long time, about half an hour. It's ready when the the cauliflower gets tender and pleasant to bite into. At this point you should put pasta into the water that you have been bringing to a boil.Add a few handfuls of cheese and the spinach leaves to the pan. As the cheese starts to burn, pour some liquid over it and stir well. (AWB used broth, I used white wine.) Turn the heat down to a simmer. When the noodles are ready, toss everything together in a bowl and serve.
It's a good dinner, and pretty easy to put together. I was worried when the cheese started burning, that I had done something wrong; but it turns into a really nice brown sauce in the wine.
posted evening of May 9th, 2008: Respond
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Question about timeouts on select(): if anyone has ideas about this, please let me know in comments. Obviously select() is not a real-time operation; if you pass in a 1-second timeout, you cannot assume that you will get to run again in one second, since the operating system is allotting time to all the processes on the machine: in an extremely busy environment, it could be several seconds before you get the processor back. But I'm wondering whether the timeout is 1 second of real time, or 1 second of execution time -- in the very busy environment where your process does not get another time slice for more than a second, would select() continue to wait on the files you passed in until it had waited for a second? Or would it return immediately? (select() as it is used in this post should be read to mean "select() and poll()," since I'm assuming both API's behave the same in this regard. Who knows, maybe they don't! But that seems unlikely to me.)
posted afternoon of May 9th, 2008: 2 responses
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Thursday, May 8th, 2008
Ellen came up with a very tasty recipe this evening: One Pot Wonder: Baked Monkfish and Italian Sausage
adapted from Real Simple. Serves 3.
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 3 sausages, cut into small chunks
- 1 lb. Yukon gold potatoes, sliced thin
- 1 leek, white and light green parts only, halved lengthwise, rinsed, and thinly sliced into half-moons
 - ½ cup low-salt chicken broth
- pinch of crumbled saffron threads
- kosher salt
- black pepper
- ¾ lb. monkfish fillet
- chopped parsley for garnish
Heat oven to 400° F.
Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large cast iron skillet over medium-high heat. Add the sausage and brown on both sides. Add the potatoes and cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes. Add the leeks, broth, saffron, pinch of salt, a couple of grinds of pepper. Bring to a boil.
Rinse the monkfish, pat dry, season with salt and pepper. Place on top of potatoes and drizzle with 1 tablespoon olive oil. Transfer pan to oven and bake until the fish is cooked through, about 15-20 minutes. If potatoes are not ready, take out fish and wrap in foil, until the rest is done. Serve with parsley on top.
The parsley (along with a little bit of oregano) was the first use our new herb garden has seen.
posted evening of May 8th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
I have been following the discussion at The Edge of the American West about using fiction in history curricula with great interest. So it was on my mind this evening as I read Pamuk's essay "Mario Vargas Llosa and Third World Literature" (from Other Colors).
Is there such a thing as Third World literature? Is it possible to establish -- without falling prey to vulgarity or parochialism -- the fundamental virtues of the literatures of the countries that make up what we call the Third World? In its most nuanced articulation -- in Edward Said, for example -- the notion of a Third World literature serves to highlight the richness and the range of the literatures on the margins and their relation to non-Western identity and nationalism. But when someone like Fredric Jameson asserts that "Third World literatures serve as national allegories" he is simply expressing a polite indifference to the wealth and complexity of literatures from the marginalized world. Borges wrote his short stories and essays in the 1930s in Argentina -- a Third World country in the classic sense of the term -- but his place at the very center of literature is undisputed.
The essay follows a pattern I have noticed in Pamuk's literary essays: he lays out a great deal of history in a very small space, leaving it to the reader to fill in the elisions. The history here is that of  Llosa's relationship with the Existentialists (specifically Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus) and his break with Marxism. Of all this I know nothing besides a very general notion of Llosa as the Peruvian writer who was a radical youth but became quite conservative in his adulthood. (All I have read by the man is The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, and that when I was very young.) But Pamuk sketches the story so well, he gives me a feeling of familiarity with the actors. He makes me wish very strongly to read Death in the Andes:
This novel takes place in the abandoned and disintegrating small towns of the remote Andes -- in empty valleys, mineral beds, mountain roads, and one field that is anything but deserted -- and follows an investigation into a series of disappearances that may be murders.... Though Death in the Andes skirts tired modernist hypotheses about the Third World, it is still not a postmodern novel in the manner of, say, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. ...[I]t would be wrong to dismiss it as a coarse statement about inscrutable cultures, for it is a playful and mostly witty realist text about everyday life in Peru: in short, a trustworthy history.
Which last bit I guess is what made me think about Dr. Rauchway's post linked above and the comments thereto.
posted evening of May 7th, 2008: Respond
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My brother got tenure! Congratulations, Gabe. Check out his class blog for quality commentary on popular music.
posted afternoon of May 7th, 2008: Respond
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 One time I left my wallet in the back of a taxi; I was very upset, and hugely relieved when the person who found it called me up and arranged to give it back to me. Imagine if it had been a priceless violin!
posted morning of May 7th, 2008: Respond
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So last night I was maintaining code for a program which loaded a helper program for handling data files. Before it executed the helper program it would check the sum of the binary, I think because certain instances of the helper needed special handling; if the sum was not on a list of recognized values, the program would log an error and exit. Unfortunately the helper program was not stable and was being recompiled frequently; every time this happened I needed to edit the list of recognized sums, which was hard-coded into the main program, and recompile the main program. I was embarrassed about such a stupid bit of code being in the program so I was editing, compiling, and distributing the main program without mentioning it to anybody. What a stressful dream that was! (Sort of ties everything together in a way, that I woke up humming Bessie Smith's "Gimme Pigfoot", which was in Gertrude Sturdley's post this week and which I was working on a fiddle version of last night.)
posted morning of May 7th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
 So last week, Captain Sturdley posted this song that I just loved, "Deep Henderson" by the Savannah Syncopators (aka King Oliver and his Dixie Syncopators) -- this follows on her posting a few weeks ago, another jazz tune that I just loved, Mel Powell's "Blue Skies". And this week, she has some Bessie Smith tunes! Excellent.
[redacted: a bunch of fumbling around about whether I understand jazz or not. Unworthwhile.]
posted evening of May 6th, 2008: Respond
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