"Oh! The horror!"

Warm weather has arrived, blue skies and sun, but I was sick so I didn't go out. Instead, Christina came over and we talked about books. I guess you could say we were two chicks talking Lit though I hate the term "Chick Lit" just as much as I hate the term "Chick Flicks" (though I've been guilty of sneaking off to a few).

I guess Jane Austen re-makes count as "chick flicks" though Bob will actually watch those. Poor Jane Austen.  All those romanticized remakes. Then murder mysteries appeared with Austen as the detective and now her books have morphed into horror stories. I see their ghastly covers in bookstores everywhere: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Die, Die, My Darcy and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.  It's a travesty.

I looked up the definition of "travesty" to see if I was using the word correctly and found out, to my surprise, that the term in its most literal sense perfectly describes the books:

1. An exaggerated or grotesque imitation, such as the parody of a literary work.

Though I intended another meaning:

2. a distorted or debased version of something, a travesty of justice

for these travesties do a great injustice to poor Miss Austen's literary oeuvre. (Though I confess I do like some of the remakes. Colin Firth as Darcy brings out the werewolf in me, that is to say, my inner Flick Chick.)

Fish Fries

I very rarely get a response from my readers though I know you're out there, all five or six of you! But I actually got two responses to my sardine post. Apparently, sardines stir up something in people. My friend from the East Coast wrote:

I have not eaten a sardine, either. That can of oily slippery silvery fish just does not appeal to any of my senses, though the attached key has always fascinated me.  However, I have eaten freshly caught deep fried smelt, head & tail attached, bones included, like a weird Icelandic version of a French fry.  I spent many weeks  of my early 30's  crewing on "The Gray", our British friends' Dominick and Cecilia's 130' Baltic trader.  One summer evening Dominick rowed us away from the ship into Long Island Sound and we set up seining nets between the ship & dingy.  He said that the smelt were running and they surely were.  We followed his commands and eventually hauled in a squirming mass of smelt.  Cecilia then floured & fried them up and I ate mine with ketchup.  And I even liked them, though I was a bit squeamish at the thought of eating eyeballs and intestines, and fins.  The sea gives a person a unique appetite!

Sardines

I love cookbooks. It's too bad that I don't like to cook. Yes, I'm a voyeur in the world of cookery. Occasionally, I do make something, but the activity doesn't come naturally. I'd rather read about cooking than do it. 

I bought a panini cookbook at Walden Pond Books. "God," said the guy behind the counter. "Looking at the cover makes me hungry. But then I haven't had lunch yet."

I looked at my watch. "It's four thirty. How can you go so long without eating?"

"Coffee and more coffee."

"If I could only skip lunch, I'd be thin," I said, enviously.

"Well, I'm not thin, as you can see. That's because I do all my eating at night, which is unhealthy."

"I don't know about unhealthy. Look at the French. They eat fattening foods, but they keep their weight off."

"Yes." He brightened up. "Half my family lives in Spain and they don't eat dinner there until ten at night."

"How do they do it? I couldn't go that long."

"Oh, they eat all day  They're constantly eating little snacks. Sardines on toast and stuff like that. Tapas."

"Sardines?" I wrinkled my nose.  "I've never had one. They sound disgusting."

"They're not. They're like tuna, only stronger. You should try some." 

"OK, I will."  But I haven't screwed up the courage yet.

Pho Anh Dao

We ventured outside for a mini-outing -- just a trip to 18th Street to Pho Anh Dao for lunch. It had actually stopped raining, but we could hardly believe our eyes. We were like dogs afraid to come out of their cage, sniffing warily at the edges of freedom, but ready to be beaten back at any time. OK, I exaggerate. But we were timid.

We often eat at Pho Anh Dao, especially when we can't think of anywhere else to go. It's not the best Vietnamese restaurant in town, but it's the closest to our house and it's cheap. Besides, I like the atmosphere.  The premises are large, dark, and rather shabby. There's the requisite fish tank in the back with cloudy water and semi-conscious marine creatures, things you don't want to examine too closely. There are the worn-out plastic tables with their jars of hot sauces, their metal containers jammed with paper napkins and their plastic chopsticks lined in a grimy row where the table meets the wall. There is the odd mixture of artwork on the wall and the occasional roach crawling down its wooden panels. The only new-looking objects in the place are the wide-screen TVs, angled down from the ceiling.  They play soundless sports footage, in this case basketball.

In the summer, Pho Anh Dao's cavernous gloom gives it a bit of coolness, at least compared to the harsh sun beating down on the sidewalk outside. In the winter, it's a warm hide-out, somewhere where human bears like us can definitely hibernate in comfort, huddled over our bowls of steaming pho. (I'm into animal metaphors to-night.)

Actually, we didn't eat pho this time. Instead, we devoured bowls of cold vermicelli topped with bits of meat, carrot and cucumber plus shredded lettuce, peanuts and bean sprouts. There was also the usual saucer of fish sauce to pour over the concoction, which we did.

The restaurant is usually fairly empty, but today it was filled with tables of animated young people. They were runners from Oakland's second annual marathon. They wore running gear and baseball hats and laughed and giggled and joked around, high-spirited over their bowls of pho. And they were all Asian. It was cheery to have them there with us in the restaurant, slurping up their noodles.

A Confession

Bob accuses me of mostly reading mysteries. That's true. I did most of my "great literature" reading when I was young. I prefer mysteries to literature for a lot of reasons, but I have to admit that one of them is that they're easy to read. And they don't require much thought. I especially like the ones that are amusing and quick-paced.  Either I've become a lazy reader through an excessive combination of mystery and magazine reading plus Internet scanning or I always was a lazy reader so naturally, I gravitated to those forms. I also like memoirs, essays and poems, but it's ironic that novels are usually my last choice since I've always wanted to be a novelist.

I did read In The Eye of the Sun by the Anglo-Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif, but that was only because my friend Christina lent it to me. And I re-read Herself Surprised by Joyce Cary because I was word-starved in the dead of night and there it was on the shelf. Joyce Cary wrote two sets of trilogies, which he referred to as "triptychs." Herself Surprised is the first volume of his first trilogy. To Be A Pilgrim is the second volume and The Horse's Mouth the third. That one was made into the 1958 film starring Alec Guinness about a crazed but brilliant artist. The Horse's Mouth is the only one of the trilogy that I didn't own so the following day I had to have it. I hunted down a tattered copy in our neighborhood bookstore and started to read.

Chapter 1 begins:

I was walking by the Thames. Half-past morning on an autumn day. Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried fish shop. All bright below. Low tide, dusty water and a crooked bar of straw, chicken-boxes, dirt and oil from mud to mud. Like a viper swimming in skim milk. The old serpent, symbol of nature and love.

How could you not like that as an opening?  I'd forgotten how good the story is, but it does need to be read slowly -- not raced through like a suspense novel -- and this I found hard to do. I skimmed through the pages, reading non-sequentially. It's true, Cary's writing is a bit dated and tedious at times, but my impatience does him a disservice. I haven't the will to go back and read it properly, though.  Maybe I'll dip in and out of the rich comic prose until I've constructed some sort of story, collage-like, out of its random pieces.

Circle of Protection

There are the days that nothing much happens and then there are the days that too much happens. That was yesterday. Too much happened and not much of it was good. Most of the bad stuff wasn't happening to me or Bob, but to people we love. I don't want to write about their private troubles on a public forum, but I do want to offer -- What, is it, exactly, that I want to offer? Grace, compassion, and a circle of protection to keep them from harm. So it's a good time to call on Green Tara, the goddess of compassion. What the hell. I might as well invoke her protective powers for the people of Japan, too. May they stay safe from the harmful effects of radiation. And may she protect the citizens of Libya, Syria, and Bahrain from the perils of warfare and oppression. OK, the whole world.

Buddha Nature

Bob's Buddha sits serenely in the center of our mantle, as he has for over a decade, enlightened in his lotus position. I don't know if he's our god or our altar. Through the years, his lap has held rose petals, pennies and pebbles; his head has been crowned with vines, flowers, Santa Claus caps and bunny ears, his neck draped with beads, feathers, and twigs, and his face disguised in sunglasses and Halloween masks. He's endured all these alterations calmly, as a good Buddha should.

Right now he's wearing a sort of woven toga, which is really a piece of shredded tree bark that we found on the path by Lake Merritt. Bob has draped a bough from our monster parsley bush over his head: Buddha as a Roman consul on his triumphal march into the city of Spring? I hope he prevails. So far Spring has not been conquered. Today it rained even harder than before. It was daunting.

Bob ran out in the yard in the cold and wet, returning with the parsley branch grasped in his fist as he laughed maniacally: his gesture of triumph against the forces of evil (those being boredom and frustration at the never-ending rain.) I, too, struck a small blow against the rain by taking my Winter collage down from the wall and replacing it with Spring.

We pray that our domestic rituals may subdue the wet wild weather: rain dances in reverse.