Book Project - Day 6 - Food Porn

I don’t know what to write today. I just want to go to sleep.
But I’m not going to cop out, so my topic for the day is: Food porn.

When I say that I didn’t mean porn involving food. Rather it’s a written description of food or a visual representation of food that evokes feelings of hunger, desire or craving toward that food. Same concept as X-rated porn except the object, in this case, is food instead of people, and the fantasy is of eating instead of shagging.

Fancy hardcover cookbooks make excellent food porn. Have you seen this one? (Ooh, child!!)



I sometimes like to peruse any of the cookbooks in my collection, my recipe folders or take out menus while I eat. But a Carl’s Jr. circular ad from the mailbox fits the bill too. Some may say this distracts me from enjoying my food, but it’s not like that to me. I like to read while I eat anyway. I can explain that to you but I would be straying from my topic.

While thinking of this topic I surprisingly realize that looking at food porn is something I have been doing since I was a kid. And although I can’t trace my memory back to my first instance I do recall clearly a series of books by a particular author that contain numerous descriptions of foods and has always fired up my fantasy for those foods as a kid. They were The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I’m sure most people are at least somewhat familiar with Wilder’s books of life on the early American frontier. What some reader might also have noticed is the abundance of descriptions of the foods her family ate. For example, in Little House in the Big Woods there are descriptions of how her family butchered a pig and the various foods they made from the wondrous animal – how they smoked the meat, how they made head cheese, how they roasted the curly tail as a snack.



But while most of the foods the Ingalls family ate in their various frontier homesteads were fairly humble, the foods her husband’s family ate in Farmer Boy were positively bacchanalian. A prosperous farmer family from New York, the Wilders nearly always end their meals with a pie of some kind. In one chapter of the book, the Wilder parents went away for a week, leaving their 4 children in charge of the house. They spent the week making and eating taffy, cakes & ice cream. Another chapter described the buffet of foods that the ladies had cooked for the annual fair, right down to the way the skin curled away from steaming boiled potatoes.

I know I’m not the only that derives such pleasures from reading Wilder’s books: Saveur, a food & cooking magazine, mentioned the Little House on the Prairie books in one of their Saveur 100 edition (I can’t remember which year) where each year they pick a list of their favorite 100 food related items/person.

I think the Pomona Public Library, which has a Laura Ingalls Wilder Children’s Room, should include a display of the various foods mentioned in Wilder’s book – similar to those plastic representations of the menu at some Japanese restaurant – perhaps as part of a larger diorama depicting different scenes from the books? Kids like food.

Another good one is this, Food of a Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky. As summed up by USA Today in its 2009 article on the book:

“It's based on reports, forgotten for more than 60 years, from the Depression-era Federal Writers Project. Part of the New Deal, it created work for writers, including a few who became famous, such as Welty (The Optimist's Daughter) and Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)...One of its last projects, begun in 1939, was a guidebook to local foods and eating traditions. It was to be called "America Eats," but it was abandoned in 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor, when federal resources shifted from social to military spending.”



The reports were presented as they are, unedited, and they contained a range of topics from “A Los Angeles Sandwich Called a Taco” to “Georgia Possum and Taters.” I didn’t find myself desiring a lot of the foods, but I did end up wanting a taco.

If you have a favorite book you can recommend do let me know. I’m always up for adding another book to my wish list.

Book Project - Day 5 - My Small Collection of Skinhead Books

George Marshall’s Spirit of 69: A Skinhead Bible

Anybody else have this book?

This is probably the most expensive book I have in my collection. I say that because it is currently out of print and any good copies left floating around are listed online for more than $100. Fortunately my copy is well worn, so even if greed should overcome me (which it hasn’t) I probably can’t sell mine for more that $50-$60. I’d much rather have the book anyway. This is one of my favorite, and in testament to that, it has never endured out-of-sight storage but has always kept an enviable spot in my bookcase.

This book was first published by ST Publishing out of Scotland in 1991. The author, George Marshall, is a skinhead whose endeavors in writing and publishing started from his fanzine Zoot, which he later turned into Skinhead Times. He eventually began publishing under ST Publishing. In addition to Spirit of 69 Mr. Marshall also wrote the book’s follow up Skinhead Nation, The Two Tone Story (which Will has) and Total Madness.

If you interested in the traditional skinhead culture (not racist boneheads), this book is an enjoyable read and a good resource. There are a few skinhead photo books out there, and in the US there are a number of books on skinheads as a gang, mostly focusing on the violent and racist lots. What sets this book apart is that Mr. Marshall wrote it for his fellow skins, “a view from within” as he called it. He covered everything from the history of the movement from the 60’s, its later development, a good coverage on the music from rock steady to Two Tone to Oi!, and an encyclopedia of skinhead fashion, all illustrated with tons of photos. I especially like the cover photos selection – the back cover shows very a sharp looking girl, and I must say an umbrella had never seemed to me so threatening.

I had bought this book at Rhino Record in Claremont in 1995 or 1996. I had wanted to get Skinhead Nation as well but didn’t have the money, and a subsequent effort to order it by mail from ST Publishing didn’t work out as they said they never received my order. I didn’t feel the urgency to get it then. Now I’m kicking myself because I can’t find it for less than $90. *sigh* One day.

I believe this book is currently regarded as one of the most comprehensive and definitive look at skinhead culture. I don’t know what the general opinion of the skinheads out there may be on this book, but to me this is certainly true. If nothing else because most other skinhead books I have come across either focus more on photographs with considerably less background and cultural information or are about boneheads.

I took this book with me when I went on an exchange program to England in the fall of 1996. My intention was to personally delve deeper into the skinhead culture, which didn’t end up happening as I had dreamed it would (the only skin I met at Cheltenham, where I was, was a racist and was visibly hostile to me). But I did get to read Susie Daniel’s The Paint House which they had at the college library, and I wrote my term paper on the influence of Jamaican culture on the British working class. It was essentially about skinhead, and I don’t think it went over too well. Most people to whom I mentioned my interest on skinheads at the time still brought out the National Front.

Other books on skinhead I own include this one, Nick Knight’s Skin:



And this one, Gavin Watson’s Skins:



Out of those two Gavin Watson’s book is the one I like best. While Nick Knight was a photographer who took some pictures of skinheads, Gavin Watson was a skinhead who took pictures of his mates. Mr. Watson continues to pursue photography, has published another book called Skins & Punks, and I still enjoy looking at his pictures.

If anybody else has any suggestion on other skinhead books, hit me up. My collection needs to grow. Are the Richard Allen books any good?

Book Project - Day 4 - Book vs E-Reader

Lesson learned #2: Don’t write blog entry while under the influence.

This is what happened on the last 2 entries when I pissed away the 2 hot days of the weekend when the temp topped over 100 degrees mostly sitting indoors with all the fans in the house working at full speed & getting baked. Needless to say, I spaced out a lot while writing them.

The topic of today is e-reader – whether it’s Kindle, Nook or what have you. I’m guessing most people who love books & reading have been asked at one point if they are getting an e-reader. I certainly have. My answer is “no.” But my rejection of the e-reader has been tempered quite a bit over the last few months; I have gone from a “Hell no!” to more of a “it’s just not for me” response.

While my allegiance still lies with the cumbersome book, I do recognize some advantages to the e-reader. For example, with the proliferation of public domain books and scanned copies on the internet there are a lot of books out there you can read for free. Some of the websites, like Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page) has a ton of obscure books I’ve never heard of (Best British Sort Stories of 1922, anyone?) which is part of what makes it pretty cool. I found pdf copies online of 2 Ahmad Tohari novels from Indonesia that I had read as a teen. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, since after 8 hours of sitting in front of a computer at work I’m not very likely to hop back on the computer at home to read a book. But that’s one case where an e-reader can be useful.

The exception to that is Kindle. I think the newer Kindle DX can read pdf files while the older Kindle 2 cannot unless it’s converted. I actually do have a few bones to pick with Amazon’s Kindle. I’m not sure if these issues are also present with Barnes & Nobles’ Nook, I haven’t looked into that one much yet, but here is my problem with Kindle:

Kindle books aren’t yours. When you buy a Kindle you are buying the device, and when you buy a Kindle book you are licensed to view that book on your device. If Amazon should decide to terminate their licensing agreement it has with a publisher, you also lose access to your book. An instance that illustrate this point happened not too long ago where a dispute arose between Amazon and the publisher who had agreed to license George Orwell’s “1984” as a Kindle version. Somehow the dispute led to the book being removed from Kindle’s catalog and thus, the book was also removed from the Kindle device of those people who had purchased it.
You also can’t lend your books to others, as your purchased book is only licensed to your particular Kindle. For example, if a friend of yours also has a Kindle you can’t transfer books between the 2 devices so you can read each other’s books. You can let them borrow your Kindle – but that’s like letting someone borrow your laptop for a few days. Why would you, and even if you would, for how long?

Kindle books can only be read on Kindle devices. If you have a collection of Kindle books and your reader take a shit, you will need to get another Kindle; you can’t switch to a different reader. If you decide not to then you just lost all those books you bought for it.

Here is my favorite rejection of the Kindle, courtesy of Patrick the Bookish Pinoy. Patrick clearly loves book and I enjoy reading his blogs.
http://www.syaoran.net/thebookishpinoy/2009/08/11-reasons-why-i-dont-like-the-amazon-kindle/

Aside from the above, I think there are valid reasons for getting an e-reader. As I mentioned above, plenty of books area available online for free. Also, books can create a lot of clutter, and this is something I am intimately familiar with. Some people don’t like to see their books take over their living space with joyful abandon. I do – but I also have an attack goose, so clearly my opinion on good housekeeping is worthless.

Which reminds me of a testimonial for the Kindle that I read on Amazon: this woman said she loves her Kindle because she can be assured of its sanitary quality, She said she doesn’t like used or library books because she doesn’t know where they have been.

Really? I guess that’s the opposite spectrum of the housekeeping issue. She probably wipes the bus bench with Purell before sitting down. Actually she probably doesn’t ride the bus anyway.

In the end, I don’t wish to demonize e-readers – although I think it looks douche-y.

Here are just some of the reasons why my loyalty still belongs to the printed book:

1) E-readers are electronic – Meaning it’s not cheap. Meaning it needs power or batteries to work. Meaning I must remember to keep it charged in case I get a sudden urge to read. Meaning it has delicate parts and can break. Meaning for a person like myself who likes books exactly for their easy portability, an e-reader just isn’t very practical. I can’t carry a reader around casually tucked into my pants or on a long bus trip, nor can I throw it at somebody should I get mad at them.

2) I can’t stack e-readers to form a night stand for myself or a fortress for my cat.

3) A book is so much more to me than the story it contains. It is an object, and to those who love it there is no limit to the elements of the object that maybe fixated upon. Just like some people who love cars may note things most others ignore, bibliophiles may note paper quality, binding, smell, etc. To me, in addition to being mental fodder books also provide tactile pleasure – the feel of the binding, the texture of paper. Flipping the pages of a new acquisition or examining the book before diving in evokes in me an expectant, restrained joy – like the week before a vacation trip. Or like foreplay. And some books have gotten stuck in my mind for tactile reason: the best smelling book I have ever read was a somewhat ratty paperback edition of “Madame Bovary” borrowed from the Moreno Valley Public Library. It smelled faintly sweet, almost like rosewater.

4) Books are still cheaper. Not when you’re one of those people who only buy new copies of the latest bestsellers, but if you’re a book freak (as Will called them) you have your spots and your hustle. Second hand stores (selling in person or on the internet), library sales, book-swapping sites – the only reason I pay full book price anymore is when somebody gives me a gift certificate to somewhere. Kindle books are still in the $8-$9 range, and there is no buying used Kindle books. The same titles can likely be found in used copies for much less.

5) Seriously – this is the simplest form of mass media. You don’t need power, you don’t need a screen, you don’t need to navigate through it. All you need are eyes that work. Just pick it up and read it. Why make it complicated?

6) Did I mention you can throw books at somebody when you get mad? With a little practice books make excellent projectiles and can inflict gratifying damage. Even paperbacks. Youtube tutorial to follow later.

7) Book’s obsolescence isn’t coming yet. Oh ye of little faith! You think since everything now exists in electronic form it means we have no more need for books? Think they’re tearing down the Library of Congress pretty soon? Not likely. The only reason we have electronic form of everything is because somewhere, somehow, a hard copy exist. And while no one will likely lament the day when not a single copy of “Bridges of Madison County” remains to exist, books will continue to exist and libraries will continue to exist even if only to serve as storage for our accumulation of printed knowledge and memory.
Your Kindle, on the other hand, will be nothing more than a joint-rolling surface in 5 years. Make it three.

8) Books already make good joint-rolling surfaces anyway. Especially those wide, heavy coffee table ones with lots of pretty pictures in them.

9) Coloring books. Hello? Do they have an e-coloring book yet?

10) Books, like people, have history. This obviously doesn’t apply to people who shun used books because they don’t know where they have been. But I personally love used books exactly because they have a history (which usually makes them cheaper, but not always). I love seeing signatures or book plates in a recently acquired book, finding notes or photos or a receipt or anything else that had been used as a quick bookmark between the pages. I don’t feel that I can reject a book for it having had another owner anymore than I can expect a new lover to have had no partner before me. Unless the book is completely trashed or the new lover comes with a previously contracted VD.

Book Project - Day 3 - What Do You Do With Your Books?

My books are starting to form piles around the house again. This means it's time for a clean up, and shuffling. Some of them will be relegated to the obscurity of the piles and boxes under my bed. Some get to stay on either of my 2 shelves

In a perfect world I would have a library, with lots of windows and a big couch I can nap on. Although not having one hasn't stopped me from getting more books. Most of them indeed occupy the space under my bed. I don't really mind except it's a hassle to look for a particular book when I don't know exactly where they are. Other than that I have the 2 shelves I had mentioned previously, I have some books in my closet and a couple of boxes of books I had lent to my mom at my parents' house.

That sounds excessive. And maybe it is. That will be a good topic of discussion for later. My question of the day is on the matter of storage that also facilitates easy access. So boxes in the basement would not fit the bill; shelves will. But what else can you do other than turn every wall in your house into a wall of books?



Although this one looks intriguing.



Actually I have a bookcase that I bought from the Habitat for Humanity store. I just need to repaint it. Then I can set to work rearranging my collection.

I love when people share pictures of their book arrangements online. I also love looking at bookshelf designs. A lot of them are clever rather than economic (in terms of how many books it can hold), still, I enjoy looking.

Book Project - Day 2 - New Acquisitions

Lesson learned #1: don't pick a broad subject when I don't have a lot of time.

That's what happened to yesterday's post. So today I will keep it brief. Today's post is about my visit to Borders this afternoon, to finally use the $25 gift certificate I received from a co-worker on my birthday. Will went with me, because the temperature topped 100 again and we figured we can milk a couple of hours of air-conditioning out of it. Which didn't happen, by the way. If I was on my own I could have milked 2 hours of the visit, easy. But Will isn't so enamored with book stores as I do, so I refrained from perusing every shelves of every aisles and back again.

My first intention was to look for a guidebook for Melbourne, for our upcoming trip in October. I didn't end up being too impressed with any of the ones on the shelves, although I still walked out with 3 books. So here are my most recent purchase:



"Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink" - David Remnick, ed.

I've always liked the combination of articles and cartoons in The New Yorker. I'm rather indifferent to some of the articles that focused on local happenings (because I can't relate), but some of my favorite articles/stories/cartoons (and one poem I had committed to memory-although I had long since forgotten the author) have come from The New Yorker, and I have a collection of clipped illustrations & articles I had ripped out. This looks like a nice little collection of food and dining articles; I look forward to reading it. I hope this will prove to be much-needed consolation prize after my last acquisition yielded already 3 duds that I could not even endure to finish. This somehow feels less like a sin now than it did when I was younger, when I finished every book I picked-up out of a sense of duty. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Anyway. My second acquisition:



"The Clash" aka The Searing-Pink Clash Book

I had been aware of this book for a while, put it on my Amazon wish list but haven't been in a hurry to get it. Recently 2 friends mentioned that they had found it somewhere for 5 bucks. One of them said Borders. So Will wanted to check and sure enough, Borders had the books there for $5.99. It's written by the remaining members of The Clash and, I read, contains previously unseen materials. I haven't dived into it yet. The choice of color is a bit surprising.

My third acquisition:



"Weird California" - Greg Bishop, et al.

I have "Weird U.S." of the same series. An entertaining enough collection of local legends and curiosities , although sometimes the entries seem redundant. But for the purpose of casual reading it serves well.

This was the last copy on the shelf and the paperback cover was completely detached from the book. Will suggested inquiring about some discount. I did and they gave me 15% off. Not much considering the condition of the book, but better than nothing. I could have put it back but I thought I still got a good deal.

That's my book adventure for the day.

Book Project - Day 1 - Tales from Djakarta

I need some kind of a project.

Mind you, I have lots of project ideas. But they all require time, to plan and to execute. I want something I can do between dinner and bedtime, something I can do at work for a few minutes while things are slow. Researching trip destinations is usually a fun one, and we are heading to Melbourne in October. But I don't want to kill Melbourne yet.

So my idea is to do a 30 consecutive days of blog entry on books - books I've read, books I want, book sales, my experience with book, etc. We'll see if I actually keep it up for 30 days (since I have a nasty habit of not finishing what I started), but that's part of the reason I want to do this.

Hence, my first entry: "Tales from Djakarta" by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (PAT). I am currently re-reading this collection of short stories, set in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, in the 1950s.



Pramoedya is likely Indonesia's most well-known writer, partly (I think) due to his long and unjustified detention & exile at Buru Island, where he conceived his most famous opus: the 4 novels of the Buru Quartet. Originally narrated orally to his fellow prisoners because he was forbidden to write and did not have access to writing supplies, the novels only saw the light of day only after Pram's fellow prisoners began surreptitiously procuring papers for him, and later they smuggled his written works out. This true story of creation and perseverance in the face of total oppression lent Pram a kind of a mythical hero persona, something which drew many people, myself included.

Many of PAT's works are not uplifting. The stories in this collection, subtitled "Caricatures of Circumstances and Their Human Beings," are a bouquet of heartbreaks, dire circumstances, slow death and poverty. The stories were written at a time when Indonesia was experiencing a painful shift from the fiery hopes and idealism of the revolution for independence. People like PAT, who were fervent supporters of the Republic, were frustrated and disappointed with the corruption and backbiting that quickly took hold among the new Indonesian governing bodies and political landscape. After fiercely fighting to throw off the yoke of occupation to reclaim the country for their own people, they proved to be no better at governing and no less corrupt than their oppressors. The people in these stories are no better off under the rule of their fellow Indonesian than they were under the Dutch or the Japanese. Ignorance, illiteracy and poverty plague were their lot as they had been the lot of many other before them, and will likely continue to be the lot of plenty other in the future.


For more on Pramoedya Ananta Toer, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pramoedya_Ananta_Toer


Here's an interesting thesis paper by Stephen Miller on PAT's role in Indonesian Politics:
http://www.une.edu.au/lcl/asianlang/indonesian/pdf/pram_pol.pdf

6 Months Later...

It's May, and Brody is still missing from my life. Despite my efforts I haven't been able to find her. Despite my prayers, my flyer distribution, my consultations with several animal communicators.....

The last 3 animal communicators I spoke to all told me she has found a home with someone: an older man, not too close from where we are but also not very far, in a brown-colored house. I have tried dropping fliers at every brown house around here. But perhaps my radius of MO was not large enough. I have an ad in the Pennysaver that I run every week, just hoping that one day the person who has her would see it and call us.

They told me that he is very fond of her. How could he not be? She's an awesome friend to have - affectionate, well-mannered, always so happy to just be with you - which is the very reason I want her back. But perhaps that's also a reason why that person would be reluctant to return her.

Sometimes I think of the day I would find her, imagine the scenario that would go down, how I would be driving around one day and just see a man with a little dog, and it would be her. I would pull over & jump out of the car all sick, run to her. She would perk up her ears and run to me ( oh God, does she even still remember me? I hope she does). We collide in an embrace of explosive joy - endless happy licks from her, a flood of tears from me. Then I would explain to the man who I am, how precious she is to me and how I lost her. He would be reluctant at first but eventually he would concede that she does, by virtue of my love and our friendship, rightfully belong to us (instead of him). I would thank him, offer him the reward we had offered in the flyer ($100, because that's all we could spare). I would apologize for taking his friend away from him, and tell him that if he should wish to adopt another friend from the shelter I would gladly pay the adoption fee for him. He would accept. I would tell him he can visit Brody whenever he liked. Then Brody and I would walk him home. I would let her bid him good bye and thank him for taking care of my baby all this time. Then she and I would go home, to this house where I have lived longer without her than with her, and the universe will be right once again.

I am still waiting. I am still holding out hope. Still stubborn in my mind that the powers that be would return us to each other because that's how things should be, because I have done nothing wrong, because to take this love away from me is cruel, because it's not fair when my neighbor chains her dog to a tree in the backyard and yet others give their friends away when it's no longer convenient to keep them. In my rational mind I know all those are moot. Life is not known for its fairness, and we are powerless against the twists and turns it dishes out. What I am hoping for is that I will prove to be special in getting my wish. As unlikely as that may be I still cannot bring myself to give up.

Lincoln Park - I cannot drive these streets now without shedding tears. It's painfully ironic to me that while we got our wish of buying our own house, shortly after passing that marker in our lives, we lost a friend. Sometimes I wonder if it had been some kind of cosmic exchange, if losing her had been a price. I'm trying to grasp at any flimsy filament of reasoning, any tenuous web that would suggest any kind of pattern of cause-and-effect because I cannot accept the unfairness of it all, because the thought of her pains me still. And it pains me more because there are people, including those close to me, who do not understand, who think my insistent love for something not human is unnecessary, who advise me to forget.
I cannot.