Can you smell what the Bookpusher is cooking?

Growing up, my mom was an amazing cook. Her mom, my grandmother, once owned and operated a small diner and specialized in Southern cooking. I did not think I inhereted their passion or talent for cooking until just recently.

I ate some amazing food growing up – the sort of Chicken-Fried-Everything, bad-for-you-but-oh-so-good kinds of food, but our selections were usually quite limited. Not much by way of variety, essentially the same sorts of things over and over. I didn’t mind much – food was food, and it was some damn good food at that – and growing up that way I really never knew much better.

Then I got married. My wife loves nothing more than variety and being adventurous with foods, so I started eating all sorts of things I never got at home – vegetarian, Greek, Thai, sushi, you name it. The only thing my wife dislikes is the same thing over and over, which was exactly what I was used to. Once I got over this little bit of culture shock, I grew to love it and embraced foods and cooking in a way I never did before.

Not that I’m any sort of experienced foodie, by any mean. I consider myself strictly an amtaeur who likes to try new things. There is one catch, however – I absolutely, positively, need a recipe. There are people out there – my grandmother, my mom, and my wife among them – who see cooking as alchemy. A dash of this, a dash of that, hey what’s that over there, who cares, we’ll add it, boom, it’ll taste good. I can’t operate that way. I need structure. I need to follow the recipe, exactly, every time. I measure out 1/4 teaspoon instead of grabbing a pinch and throwing it in the pot. I look up cooking terms – what is blanching, anyway? – to see how they do it properly.

Cooking is one of the few parts of my life where I’m a J instead of a P. If you’re familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality test, you’ll know that part of the classification divides those who are Ps, who procrastinate, dither, and do things when the mood strikes them, from Js, who are listmakers and organizers. I trend P while my wife is a J. (Or son, Gavin, is a hardcore J. If my socks or my bookbag is on the floor where it shouldn’t be, he’ll let me know about it. Loudly.)

 

Call me Eight-Finger Bookpusher.

Tomorrow will be the 4th of July. A great, time-honored Kansas City tradition is to light things on fire and blow stuff up. I got over the “blowing stuff up is cool” phase when I was about eighteen, but I completely understand the appeal and wish all those little teenage arsonists well, as long as they stay away from my house and my material possessions. My comic book collection may not be worth much, but I don’t want it and my house to go up in flames because  some kid decided to see if the roof shingles on my house were fire-resistant.

I have no funny stories about the Fourth, except for the innocent ritual of my parents driving me to the big tent on the street corner to by fireworks.  I was able to browse the aisles and buy what I wished – within reason – while my dad would always chat up the guy behind the makeshift counter, trying to get him to show us the “really good stuff” he presumed they hid in a trailer out back somewhere. My dad was more excited about blowing stuff up than I was, and the bigger and more obnoxious the explosion the fireworks produced, the better.

I was naturally a bit less adventurous – not only did my mom breed in me a healthy fear of dying by misadventure, but the one time I did try to live on the edge, I immediately screwed it up. My friends and I one year were lighting firecrackers, and instead of the traditional method of setting them down, lighting them, and running away, somebody was bold enough to light them in their hand and throw them, greatly impressing the rest of the group. I tried this a few times and started to get more confident with it until I got one with a short fuse that exploded a few inches from my hand. I can still remember the pain I felt, and I think about it whenever I see the local police using illegal fireworks to blow up department-store mannequins during their annual scared-straight bits on local tv year after year.

 

Book recommendation: Michael Connelly – The Scarecrow

I’ll go ahead and state right right off the bat that I’m a huge fan. I own more books by Connelly – thirteen, with eight of them in hardcover – than by any other single author. His novels are the wonderful and rare matchup of being well-written along with having widespread popularity. When I’m doing Reader’s Advisory with a patron and they mention they would like to read a good mystery or thriller, his books are always one of the first ones I reach for.

Connelly began his career as a journalist, and it comes through in his style of writing – he writes procedurals with a heavy dose of old-school Los Angeles noir. He’s mostly known for his novels featuring detective Harry Bosch, but will occasionally do a stand-alone or branch off with other characters, such as lawyer Mickey Haller, which I particularly like. The Scarecrow features one of Connelly’s regulars, reporter Jack McEvoy. McEvoy’s just been given fourteen days’ notice at his job at the L.A. Times in the latest round of layoffs and wants to write that One Last Great Story before his career is done. What seems to be a routine gangland killing quickly is revealed to be the work of a serial killer, and McEvoy pulls in another Connelly regular, FBI profiler Rachel Walling, to track him (or them) down.

It’s all excellent stuff, reads like gangbusters, and perfect for a beach or poolside read. However, The Scarecrow didn’t push all my buttons that way Connelly’s stuff usually does. The problem for me was the main character – Jack McEvoy is the least interesting of Connelly’s heroes, probably because he’s what Connelly himself once was – a journalist. McEvoy is, to be quite honest, a bit dull. Working at the tail end of a mid-level career, with an ex-wife and a half-finished novel gathering dust in the drawer – none of the noir pathos sings to me like it should, or like it does in his other novels.

Also, Connelly has a point to make here, contrasting McEvoy’s old-school shoe-leather journalism versus the serial killer, who stalks his victims over the net and is a hacker extraordinaire. It’s a bit obvious and Connelly, the old-school journo himself, can’t resist making it.

If it sounds like I’m trashing the novel, I’m not. For one of my favorite novelists to come out with a B minus book when most of his stuff is at the top of the class – well, I might be a bit disappointed, but I’m still a fan and absolutely locked in on his next novel.

(Which is a Harry Bosch one, by the way. Just sayin’.)

 

Scenes from the Playground: Neediness.

Gavin and I still haven’t found a playgroup to roll with, so we spend a good chunk of our time during the day finding stuff to do outside, away from the house. We’re lucky to have access to an indoor pool right up the street, plus there’s Goose Poop Park within easy wagon distance. But the same thing gets stale after a while, so we have a rotation of parks and playgrounds and the like we visit.

We always meet kids at those places. That isn’t unsusal. What is unusual is that many of those kids will seem to be by themselves, or with an uninterested grandparent or babysitter sitting on a bench nearby. They will see me with Gav and will come up to me and ask if I would push them on the swing, or watch them as they do a cartwheel, or play catch with them, hungry for any sort of adult attention. This isn’t routine playground interaction with strangers – they aggressively ask for it, sometimes boxing Gavin out of their way. The neediness of these kids radiates off of them in almost visible waves as they ask me to do daddy-type of things for them. I assume the adults they’re with aren’t interested in them, or they don’t have a dad at home, or whatever, but I always wonder if parks and playgrounds are just places for parents to dump their children – to get them off their hands for an hour or two – for them to run around and expend energy. Expending your child’s energy isn’t the point of parenthood, but for some it might just be. Lord knows I sometimes need a break from my child (there are some days where I look forward to my afternoon-coffee-and-Facebook-update breaks like a prisoner looks forward to their parole hearings) but this need for adult interaction that I get from these kids hints at something more.

If the situation wasn’t so heartbreaking, I wonder if I shouldn’t open a Rent-A-Dad service where adults pay a fee and I would meet their kids at the park and do dad-like things, giving them dad-like attention,  for a fixed period of time. Of course, I have my own kiddo who needs my full attention.

 

31 days, 31 posts.

I’ve been in the doldrums recently.

I stopped blogging around the first of the year because of the oncoming crush of my last semester of grad school. I felt I needed to clear the decks and focus on school exclusively. Once I graduated, I then felt I needed a break from everything to refresh myself and recharge some batteries. Now, over a month after that, I’ve come to the realization that I really didn’t need any of that in the first place and it was pretty much all laziness to begin with.

I looked at the calendar this morning and realized that the first day of the month is tomorrow. So: there are 31 days in July, therefore to force myself to get back in the habit of blogging I will post once a day, every day of the month, regardless of whether I can find an excuse not to. Think of it as an internet exercise program that I’m accountable to all of you for. Nothing but unbridled, unrestrained content, coming your way, every day in July. Even if it’s a two-line Twitter/Facebook-style update. Because, dammit, I need to.

Besides, I’ve read about two dozen books or so and need to tell you all about them.

 

Scenes from a Playground: Part One

There’s a nice public park not too far away form where I live. I call it Goose Poop Park becuase there’s a nice sized-lake there that’s infested with Canadian geese, which leave their droppings over everything to the point I fear bacterial apocalypse whenever my 17-month-old bends down to pick up a nice-looking rock or a stick, which will usually end up in the neighborhood of his mouth.

Anyway, I was at Goose Poop Park last week, watching Gav totter around on the playground equipment, making sure he didn’t fall. An older boy, probably around eight, came over to where we were and asked if he could play with Gav.

I responded, “well, he really isn’t old enough to play tag or anything, but you can hang out with him if you want to.”

“Okay.” He stood there for a moment and watched Gav climb up the steps to the slide. ” I came over here because Hayley was being mean to me. She told me I shouldn’t chase the ducks and that I would get in trouble and they could bite me.”

I nodded, not wanting to get into an in-depth conversation with a strange kid on a public playground, and also not bothering to point out that the ducks he was referring to were really geese. He fooled around on the swings for a little bit. After a while, another little girl, a few years older (and presumably Hayley) tromped over to talk to the boy, hands on her hips. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to talk to strangers?”

The boy responded, “I wasn’t talking to strangers. Just old people.”

I was the only person he talked to. I’m 36.

 

Comedy at the Edge – Richard Zoglin

I first discovered stand-up comedy in the early 1980s, when my parents were hosting a party and George Carlin’s “Carlin at Carnegie Hall” was playing on HBO in the living room. I wasn’t allowed in, of course, being about eleven years old at the time, but after a while I wandered in under everyone’s radar and stood leaning against the wall, watching, transfixed. I was thrilled with the exposure to naughty words – being Carlin, there were plenty of them – and I could only understand about half of his routine, but he talked about silly, nonsense stuff, too, like dogs . And I loved it.

Terminally shy, with wit that only came to me after the bullies left, I understood immediately there was power in the ability of making people laugh. One guy standing in front of a brick wall with a microphone, no soundtrack, no band, no partner, no nothing, convincing complete strangers to like and accept them, just by making them laugh. I knew I didn’t have the confidence in doing this myself – thus derailing a surefire comedy and sitcom career into librarianship – but I did spend a large part of my teens buying comedy tapes, playing them endlessly, memorizing routines and repeating them to my friends. George Carlin quickly led to a host of others, and I developed my personal Stand-Up Album Pantheon. Along with “Carlin at Carnegie”, there were Bill Cosby’s “Himself”, Stephen Wright’s “I Have a Pony”, Robin Williams’ “Night at the Met”, Sam Kinison’s “Louder than Hell”, and Richard Pryor’s “Wanted: Live in Concert”. Oh, and Eddie Murphy’s “Delirious”, too. These were, in many ways, the soundtrack of my teens.

All this was my background going into Richard Zoglin’s “Comedy at the Edge”, a study of the emergence of the stand-up scene during the late sixtes and early seventies, starting with the legacy of Lenny Bruce and moving through Carlin, Richard Pryor, Robert Klein, Andy Kaufmann, Albert Brooks, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, and a truckload of others. Ground Zero of the stand-up explosion were the scenes in New York and LA, with comedians working out their inner demons on stage or angling to get a shot at sitting on the couch with Johnny Carson. Zoglin knows his stuff, spending years honing his skills as a feature writer for Time magazine. His extensive interviews gives depth to the performers, placing them in a social context. The book comes off almost as a verbal history, similar to Shales and Miller’s “Live From New York” about the early years of Saturday Night Live. Essential reading for anyone who loves pop-culture history or stand-up comedy.

 

Anatomy of a bail: The Emperor of Scent – Chandler Burr

I’m about a third of the way in and I’ve been struggling with it for a while, and I’m afraid I’m going to just have to cut bait. It took me longer than it usually does to make this decision, since I really really really wanted to like this one. The book would at first blush seem right up my alley: a true story about a charmingly rogue scientist who stretches across different scientific disciplines and creates an entire new theory of how we recognize smells, but his research is sabotaged by the scientific community because he’s a rulebreaker and doesn’t kiss enough ass.

That description has it all: a new scientific principle concerning something we deal with every day, a fun and engaging scientist who’s struggling against the establishment, and a peek inside the multi-multi-million dollar prefume industry. The problem with the book is that there’s too much sdamn cience involved. You see, I consider myself a fairly well-read person and for the most part I enjoy science writing. However, I am an English major and need scientific principles explained to me as one would explain them to a hyperactive fifth-grader. Burr starts off reasonably enough, talking about the chemical bonds between molecules, but soon plunges headlong into electron tunneling and making diodes out of proteins and pretty soon I’m completely over my head. When Burr switches back to the narrative, I’m fully locked in, but within a few pages I’m drowning in the science again, and I start to slog.

So yeah: I’ve got to bail. For those more patient than me, and who are able to follow the science, this is a completely engaging book. A good buddy of mine who can bring the science, the Rambling Rover, would probably love it. But it’s not for me.

 

Shelling out the ducats.

Working at a library, I’m used to not paying for books. Whenever I want something I just go to the shelves and get it or else put it on hold and wait a bit. It makes me wonder why I even bothered paying for all those books when I worked for bookstores all those years ago. (Probably because they gave employees a house account so we had to keep working there in order to pay it off: a modern-day version of indentured servitude. But I digress.)

There’s a very short list of authors I will plunk down my money for. Everything else I’ll happily wait on the hold list like everyone else. Those authors are: 

Michael Connelly. George Pelecanos. Robert Crais just misses this list, but not by much. Lee Child used to be on the list until his latest release sucked; he is exiled until further notice. Don Winslow. Charlie Huston. (I’m currently tearing through Huston’s latest – not as good as Shotgun Rule thus far, but then I’m only halfway through.) Daniel Silva was off the list but is working his way back on – he needs another solid release to get back into my good graces. Bill Simmons.

And, finally, Megan Abbott. If you haven’t read Queenpin, get yourself to your library and snag it immediately, as it’s a sexy, smooth, brilliant, and nasty piece of noir as you’re ever going to read. On the strength of that book alone, Abbott has guaranteed my undying patronage. (By “undying”, I mean at least a three-book grace period.) Having not heard from her lately, I buzzed over to her site and was greeted by a blurb regarding her latest release, due in July, entitled Bury Me Deep, which sent me into spasms of anticipation. Talented writer? Check. My favorite genre? Check. Lurid-as-hell title and cover? Check and mate. Cannot. Freaking. WAIT. For this one.

 

Bruuuuuuuce!

I wish we could all just wait a few weeks to let the Super Bowl get a bit cold in our minds before we start throwing around terms like “Best Super Bowl Ever.” That always annoys me: some idiot sportscaster is always throwing around “best”, “all-time”, and “greatest” in every game, to the point where it loses all meaning. There’s nothing wrong with “pretty good”, people, and that was a pretty good game last night. Certainly belongs in the conversation of Best Ever. But let’s wait a few weeks, huh?

And the halftime show. Sure, Springsteen did a nice set – he shoved his crank in the camera with that badly-timed power slide of his, which was far, far more offensive that anything Janet Jackson could have dreamed up. But even though I was in high school when Born in the USA came out and his “Dancing in the Dark” video with Courtney Cox was all MTV could show, I’ve never been a Bruce guy. Never owned any of his albums, don’t have any of his songs on my MP3 player. His entire Jersey working-class schtick never resonated with me – I grew up in working-class Raytown, Missouri, so any romance or poetry about the situation was pretty much lost on me at an early point.

And to all the baby-boomer producers of the Super Bowl, a 60-year-old Bruce Springteen is about as hip and current as they’re willing to provide after Janet ruined it for everyone. The kids aren’t going to be allowed to sit at the big table for a while – we won’t have Kanye or Spoon or the Ting Tings until they’re 60 years of age.