A Frolic of My Own

Jazz, Books, Food, and the Writing Life

Blogging from New Orleans, La

29 September 2003

Words Without Borders, an on-line project hosted by Bard College and funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and other benefactors, hopes to expose English speakers to cultures around the world by translating their literature. It’s a laudable project.

I’m amused, though, by the site’s option to search for works by environment. I suppose this grows out of “environmental criticism,” a critical approach I don’t understand since it never took hold in my speciality, 17th century Spanish literature. (How was the environment in 17th century Madrid? The air was so putrid that it would mummify animal carcasses tossed into the streets.) Isn’t there something a little patronizing, though, about the idea the rest of the world’s literature can be classified by the landscape where it was created? That proximity to a mountain is a category as important as language? [via Bookslut]

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28 September 2003

When did waiters decide that the phrase “Does everything taste all right?” was an appropriate way to follow-up after they delivered the meal. What’s wrong with a simple, “How is everything?” This trend started at the chains, I think, but seems to have spread to more upscale establishments.

Just asking the question makes me momentarily imagine a bad taste in my mouth. Why would they want me start my meal with a mental imagine of how it could have gone terribly wrong?

This new question also sets the bar pretty low. No concern with the presence of utensils, any desired sauces or condiments, the comfort of the diner, or whether the dishes delivered were the ones actually ordered. Just a question about whether the kitchen had their act together. I suspect this is probably the reason why waiters have adopted the phrase. Once you define the inquiry that narrowly, it’s hard for diners to broach other subjects and make additional demands.

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26 September 2003

George Plimpton, writer and editor of the Paris Review, has died.

Without a well-bred editor to shake down wealthy patrons, will the magazine survive?

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24 September 2003

Several writers from the Baffler made an appearance this evening at Politics and Prose to celebrate their new anthology, Boob Jubilee: The Cultural Politics of the New Economy. The Baffler was relatively unknown to me until recently, since I spent the last six years thinking about seventeenth-century Spain and reading and writing for journals like the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies and the Revista Candiense de Estudios Hispánicos. The more I became a scholar of the past, the more detached I became from contemporary culture. This is one of the many reasons I have left the academy. Discovering some of the writers engaged with the present has been invigorating.

Chris Lehman, reading from “The Eyes of Spiro Are Upon You,” traced the myth of the “liberal media elite” to Spiro Agnew’s attempts to disguise the fact that the real elite were the people who owned the media. I am sympathetic to the idea that the media is only as liberal as their corporate owners allow them to be, but at the same time it seems hard to deny that an elitist group produces the content. Paul Maliszewski next read from a series of fake articles he published in a Syracuse newspaper where he worked as a business reporter, and implicitly confirmed the idea that an elitist establishment controls the media. Paul became bored as a business reporter in upstate New York and started penning outlandish articles under false names. While recent writers who have duped the New Republic and the New York Times has been greeted with infamy, according to his bio Paul has recently published in Harper’s and the Paris Review. Is the only difference that Paul committed his fraud at a backwater newspaper?

Personally, I would be happy to know that an educated, liberal elite controlled the media. I just wish they were a little more liberal and a little less elitist sometimes. I hate to sound like a humorless scold, because I found Paul’s stories to be incredibly funny. At the same time, though, it’s hard to see how a group of writers can hope to create a broader political change if their allegiance and concerns are limited to a small groups of insiders.

On a lighter note, I sat behind the Antic Muse, one of my favorite bloggers.

Posted by Todd at 11:55 pm | No Comments

22 September 2003

Life in Washington has largely returned to normal after the hurricane. That is, unless you own a car. With traffic lights still out across the city and most potential detours blocked by fallen trees, getting home using anything but mass transit is a slow process.

As a faithful Metro rider myself, watching the cars creep along the streets and honking at the intersections would normally give me some satisfaction. Unfortunately, I had an information interview with Georgetown’s director of corporate and foundation fundraising this afternoon. With no metro in the Goergetown area, I had to rely on Andrea picking me up in the car. We then had to fight our way home with the other commuters.

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21 September 2003

Housekeeping note: I’ve added Upcoming.org to the Washington links. It’s a new collaborative, world-wide events calendar. Its not that useful at the moment, but it just went online Friday and only a handful of people are collaborating. Join up and contribute an event.

Update: I think I originally misunderstood the concept. Upcoming.com is not supposed to be an exhaustive list of area events, but a way for people attending similar events to make connections and discuss. Still a very cool concept. Still very much in the starting phase. Join up and make it happen.

Posted by Todd at 4:13 pm | No Comments

20 September 2003

Mark your calendars and start drafting your message to the world. From December 9th to the 12th, the Helloworld project will be accepting text messages and projecting them onto buildings, mountains, and water spouts in South Africa, Brazil, and Geneva. The project was first tried in Switzerland, where messages were projected onto the slopes above Davos for the benefit of world leaders attending the annual conference. [via Dublog]

Posted by Todd at 9:25 pm | No Comments

18 September 2003

Is this all Isabel is going to give us? It’s almost midnight, and Washington hasn’t been hit with anything more than a little rain. I can’t believed they closed the Metro and made me miss a day of work. That’s eight hours of pay I will never see.

Posted by Todd at 10:38 pm | No Comments

The winds have picked up slightly, but it’s nothing stronger than a good thunderstorm at the moment. I spoke to Andrea in Charlottesville and she lost her power a few minutes ago. The news says that almost one million people are without power in Virginia.

Posted by Todd at 4:42 pm | No Comments

The rain has started, but the winds are still calm. I’ve loaded up on beer and batteries for the short-wave radio. If the worst happens, I can sit in the hallway, listen to the BBC World Service, and drink.

Posted by Todd at 1:43 pm | No Comments

I suppose the government has to take dumb citizens seriously, since they pay taxes. In fact, evidence suggests that they vote in greater numbers as well.

In an effort to serve the needs of the lower-IQ set, NOAA patiently and thoughtfully responds to the frequently asked question of “why don’t we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them.”

As Crooked Timber said, “There are no stupid questions. Well, as a matter of fact, there are.”

Posted by Todd at 12:15 pm | No Comments

The winds have picked up a little, the temperature dropped, and the stores were packed with people buying can goods. Still no rain in the Washington area, but that should be arriving soon. I saw Isabel hit North Carolina on the news this morning. Having never lived through a hurricane before, I don’t know what to expect. I weathered plenty of tornadoes, though.

My main fear is that the power will go out, and our fine DC government won’t get it restored for several days.

Posted by Todd at 10:59 am | No Comments

17 September 2003

When Diana Kennedy published The Cuisines of Mexico in 1972, she made it clear that her book presented the real cuisine of Mexico and not the Americanized “Tex-Mex” peddled throughout Texas. Jorge Cortez, whose father had founded the restaurant Mi Tierra Café in 1941, was surprised to learn that the food his family served in San Antonio’s El Mercado and the food he grew up eating was not Mexican. It was hard for him to argue with Kennedy’s knowledge of Mexican cuisine, but he refused to accept her opinion that the food in San Antonio was inferior to what the restaurants in Mexico City served.

Tex-Mex was shaped by both the people who settled Texas and the U.S. food industry. Chili powder was introduced by a German immigrant familiar with the production of paprika and tired of driving to Mexico to buy his annual supply of ancho chilies. The heavy use of cumin may be a contribution of a group of Berber colonists in one of the early Spanish missions. The substitution of flour tortillas for corn tortillas was a natural adaptation to the grain available in the area. And the now ubiquitous fajita could only appear in the 1980s when flank steaks become supple with the shift from free-range cattle to beef fattened at a feed lot.

In the past, I have been guilty of believing Tex-Mex to be an anglicized version of Mexican cuisine. Jorge Cortez, along with fellow restaurateurs and food writers participating in a panel discussion this weekend at the National Museum of American History, convinced me that it’s not a watered down import. Rather, Tex-Mex is a legitimate product of Tejano culture and the oldest regional cuisine in the United States.

Posted by Todd at 11:46 pm | No Comments

My parents called last night and urged me to prepare for hurricane Isabel. I thought they were just being alarmist.

When I stepped off the metro today, though, I found that the grates and gutters had been sandbagged during the day. At my apartment, the management greeted me with a dire warning to buy water and prepare for blackouts. Maybe this is serious.

Posted by Todd at 12:02 pm | No Comments

16 September 2003

I normally avoid politics on Frolic, since the last thing the world needs is another blogger publishing uniformed opinions. I’m breaking that rule to point you towards CalPundit’s interview with Paul Krugman, the New York Times Columnist and Princeton economist, since it may not appear in more mainstream venues. Krugman, an expert on macroeconomics disasters, believes that America may be headed for an Argentine-style meltdown. This may sound improbably and alarmist. Krugman says, however, “I think we have to take seriously the possibility that things won’t work out this time.”

Posted by Todd at 11:50 pm | No Comments

14 September 2003

To Do List:

  1. See Sofia Coppola’s new film Lost in Translation.

  2. Hear honky tonker Dale Watson play “That’s Country My Ass” and other tunes Monday at the Iota.

  3. Join an artist-led tour of D.C. galleries Thursday night. The free tour convenes at 6:30 in the Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes (812 Seventh St., NW).
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