I week or so ago I had a dream that I was “writing a delicious bowl of pancita de res.” It took me half a day to realize that pancita is tripe. Oh snap, said my subconscious, and oh ouch, said my contused conscious; though after a while the latter got to work reminding me that I currently love the Saturday specials of pancita de res at Santa Clarita and that must mean something. (Like what?) Although the wait staff has been pretty steady for the last few years, the cooks have changed a few times. They are always decent, but the most recent person in charge has mad skillz as Ashley and Chad, the mad assimilated preteen kids of patrons, are wont to say to one another. (My god, teenagers and kids of that age are starting to break my heart these days. They are so self-conscious and earnest and awful and awkward I can hardly bear the urge to Take Care of Them or squeeze their dignified little cheeks.) The most recent bowl was burning red, the meat chewy and tender and faintly stinky in that good way. Just delicious. And speaking of uncivilized cuts of meat, a piece of the translation of Iturriaga’s Las Cocinas de Mexico I’m working on:

As we know, the chicharron is the skin of the pig. Once the animal is shaved with boiling water, it is flayed and the skin freed from the body. It can then be either fried with the carnitas to result in smooth little cueritos, or follow a separate long process to convert it to chicharron. Not everyone knows how to make chicharron.

The raw skin of the pig is salted and sweated during the first day. The second, cut into large rectangular slices, and sancocha-ed, to use the customary term. That is to say, it is fried over a slow flame in lard and the resulting hard sheets, practically inedible, are let rest. The third day, the pieces are popped one by one; this last step consists of frying them a few seconds at a high temperature which inflates, wrinkles, and crackles each rigid sheet. Some ten or fifteen seconds suffices. The puffed chicharron is removed, still flexible, and as it cools, hardens to the delicious point we know well.

Chicharron is delightful, but translating is really hard for me. Everything I write feels really clunky and awkward, (though a couple of native speakers have implied that the original language here is sometimes a bit odd). Beside not knowing Spanish well enough to always be able to distinguish everyday usages from the formal or anomalous, I just don’t think I have the right sort of brain for it. I always respected translation as an art, but though it might be something I could do if I worked hard enough. Now it seems almost as remote as composing music. (People can hear music in their heads? What!) I read recently some reference to what’s observable of the process on an MRI (Five Dials?) and as I remember it, translation appears to deactivate parts of the brain associated with other semantic tasks (presumably preventing me from remembering how to express an idea with any fluidity). I wonder if the brains of professional translators look any different. I found an abstract of a study of quadri-lingual subjects which notes that “the number of activated voxels correlated with proficiency, so that the activated volume increased for languages in which a subject had poorer proficiency.” No wonder my head hurts. My poor monolingual brain must be lit up like Christmas tree. Now that Aure has begun, however infrequently, to conjugate his verbs, I am again the worst Spanish speaker in the house. When I speak everything takes place in a hazy but certain present tense. The past means nothing to me, and the conditional I use so frequently in English that it feels as defining as my height or eye color, is all but impossible for me in Spanish. Sometimes V translates for me, but I am usually frustrated by how peremptory he makes me sound.

~

An old but always pertinent video of Ira Glass talking about storytelling and creative work in general. It’s downright Emersonian.

A Times article by Joyce Wadler on Amy Stewart, author of Wicked Plants, which includes instructions for avenging a variety of offenses.

Charlie White’s beautiful Teen and Transgender Comparative Study.

Melville’s limited correspondence to Hawthorne. I’m still trying to construct a satisfactory picture of Melville, for some reason.

Quimby the Mouse.

Iraqi intelligence in suing The Guardian and (at least some from) the interior ministry are suing The Times. Hmm. (via Salam Pax, though the hmm is mine.)

Food fonts at Typophile. Love the baked beans. It strikes me that these would nicely double as captcha fonts in the current Man vs Machine battle. The human user could devour the font when he’s done with it… Although that’s not to say that machines can’t metabolize food. (The best part about Cloaca is that the poo emerges in a nice vacuum sealed package.)

~

I remember thinking I needed to research Silas Weir Mitchell and his sinister rest cure long ago, but I only got around to it when Jane mentioned his work with amputees and malingerers during the Civil war. He apparently pioneered the use of anesthesia to diagnose malingering in the Union army (Science!), though he appears to have understood (male) pain in a way unusual for his time. According to Edwin A. Weinstein in a fascinating work on War Psychiatry (see chapter 15),  women still had a monopoly on the diagnosis of hysteria at the time (with the exception of “men weakened by sex, alcohol, or tobacco” and, I would be willing to bet, foreigners), so the male psychological casualties of the first modern war were diagnosed instead with a variety of maladies including nostalgia, soldier’s heart, and garden variety insanity… Despite The Yellow Wallpaper (Mitchell was actually Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s doctor!), I used to be fascinated with the idea of the rest cure. I imagined a sort of Victorian spa where everyone was wheeled about in bath chairs, drinking milk under shade trees, free of cares, probably looking thin, pale and interesting. In Fat and Blood Mitchell describes women who “fail in flesh” and are “cases desirable to fatten and redden.” I would not have qualified as I am positively puffy when depressed. Even if I lose my appetite entirely, no romantic wasting takes place. Sometimes I get an itchy rash, but no one could call that romantic. However, in my imagination, all of us taking the rest cure were excessively slender with haunted eyes beneath masses of chestnut, flaxen, raven, or auburn hair (see those large untidy nests on the heads of Edwardian ladies fortunate enough not to be roosted on by a bunch of flowers and avian taxidermy by way of a hat) that may or may not eventually need to be cut off for incomprehensible reasons probably associated with consumption or being dosed with Calomel—no, that was earlier and for teething or something. Maybe. Regardless, recovering from a nervous breakdown in a peaceful place sounded like an unassailable excuse to stay in bed. I think this was the late teenage, early adulthood corollary of my childhood fantasy of the Apocalypse on the days book reports were due. Obviously I didn’t think it through very well because, like the Apocalypse, there probably wouldn’t have been anything to read when I got there.

I decided to include bitter melon in the cucumber salad in case the oddly assorted guests ran out of things to say to one another. I recommend this. People who might otherwise have nothing in common agreed enthusiastically that bitter melon is not fit for human consumption. Don’t you think the sweet, lingering aftertaste is worth the suffering of a bite, I asked. They did not and said so at length.

~

Edward Fitzgerald, who wanted to see a single miracle to prove “God damned us all because a woman ate an apple.” A conversation in the car, in which we agree that water into wine might be a nice miracle, especially if it were dependable, i.e. if there’s water, there’s always wine. We think we could get over the damnation thing for such a convenience and wonder if Fitzgerald would have. He probably didn’t drink though.

William Langland, of whose name we’re not even certain.

Kafka’s Letter to His Father.

I was wondering if anyone has looked at Chris Ware and Georges Perec together. Here’s a reference to Perec (and also a good starting point for other reading), but not much else comes up in a quick search.

Hawthorne’s notebooks are full of ideas for children’s stories, like gnomes living in teeth. Did he ever write any? Yes, he did.

I had to go back and read The Second Awakening from the start. As a result, I’ve been thinking about the author all weekend, as if she’s someone I know. Worrying and wondering about her.

Apparently spruce beer is mostly what it sounds like: beer made with spruce tips and a lot of ginger. Admittedly I couldn’t have divined the ginger part.

Finally—Eucalyptus is available in the app store! It’s the future! It’s beautifully formatted. Every free book I’ve downloaded has a lovely table of contents and elegant formatting. Bite, me Kindle… And speaking of apps, I am really getting a lot of use out of Notebooks, made by Alfons Schmid.

~

Walking quickly toward the train, we caught up with a straggling group of teenage boys going in the same direction. There were six or seven, one in front, limping slightly, clutching his pant leg in one hand and keeping his companion at arm’s length with the other. From the corner of my eye, I imagined glossy red bubble on the side of his shin, but when I turned my head I saw that there was red bone sticking out, a great tear in the flesh. There were a few thin lines of bright blood on his leg, and his shoe was spotted. He kept walking firmly, his face relaxed, shaking his head side to side as his bewildered friends called to him to stop. You’re buggin out somebody said. Yeah, you’re buggin out, they repeated helplessly, as if in relief to have lighted upon the right words.

Later, I passed two women were walking toward me, talking animatedly. One, all curls, gold jewelry and a stretchy aqua halter top, pounded her fist for emphasis. She had a line of inflamed and scabbed piercings tracing a sharp line along her abdominal muscles on one side of her hollow stomach. The other gestured back, her enormous body appearing to move by parts, madras encased hips rolling, great breasts surging forward in an orange shirt with silver print the read, HOTTER THAN YOUR GIRLFRIEND.

As I rounded the corner walking fast, a guy in a white tank top stepped out in front of me, proffering an empty pack of Sudafed and half open straw. When I stepped around him, he frowned and shook them at me, as though to chastise me for neglecting a duty.

Sometimes it seems as though the whole world is under a spell of somnolence or is drifting along in a dimension ordered by an unfathomable logic. I watch through sound proof glass, certain there must be a running broadcast on the other side, issuing orders and providing careful explanations. From my own dimension, everyone appears to accept the most improbable or degrading circumstances without question.