Deborah Fallows -- Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin lessons in life, love, and language

Deborah Fallows, wife of the Atlantic magazine columnist James Fallows, moved to China with him about five years ago. They lived in China for three years, during which time Deborah, who has a PhD in linguistics, struggled to learn the Mandarin language and in the process learned much about the Chinese people, their customs and culture, and the struggles and pleasures of life in modern Beijing.

Her book, Dreaming in Chinese, is gracefully written and a charming series of short essays, each featuring an aspect of the Chinese language which she uses to inform her insights. Any of us who has struggled to learn a foreign language will appreciate her frank appraisal of her progress, her teachers, and the Chinese people she meets. Anybody who is interested in language or language learning will find the book fascinating.

I hope she will continue to write. She is gifted and honest and a sensitive observer. I highly recommend this slim book to all.

Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin lessons in life, love, and language. New York, Walker, 2010.

28 October -- Making Posset

It is simple to make and absolutely delicious to eat. As a dessert it is a dramatic dish, uncommon enough to impress the most sophisticated diner. That's because it is an old English recipe (dating from Elizabethan days) which is almost unknown here. We were served Posset in an Asian Fusian restaurant in Gloucester, England and declared it Best. Dessert. Ever.

Naturally, we had to learn to make it at home. Now I have made it three times and I'm beginning to get the hang of it. Here's how it goes:

First, buy a quart of heavy cream. Here in California, every dairy case is filled with non-fat, low-fat or reduced fat milk. It took a lot of looking to find the small collection of cream containers. I wanted to hide it at the bottom of the grocery cart so that I wouldn't get disapproving stares. You could probably buy just a pint of heavy cream, but suppose you want to make it a second time? You don't want to make any more purchases of this aorta-clogging substance than absolutely necessary.

On the same trip, invest in a box of Baker's Sugar. This is a finely granulated sugar typically used in cakes and icings, they tell me.

Also, buy one lemon.

Here's how it all works: Measure out 300 ml of cream. I'm sure it's equivalent to some common measure, but I trust my Pyrex 2-cup measuring cup. Pour the cream into a small saucepan.
Start the cream warming on low heat.

Pour in 1/3 cup of baker's sugar, stirring all the time. Stir, stir, stir. At first you will see something that looks like bubbles, but until the posset is almost boiling, those bubbles are little lumps of undissolved sugar which must be stirred or pressed out. Stir, stir, stir.

Somewhere along the way, squeeze the juice out of your lemon. You'll want about 2 tablespoons of lemon juice. Since there are only three ingredients, it seems like really cheating to use the bottled juice.

While you are stirring, you'll notice that the solution is getting warmer, then hotter. Once it is really bubbling, cook it two minutes longer, continuing to stir. Then remove the pot from the heat, stir in the lemon juice, and pour your posset into four small cups or dishes.

Let it cool slightly, then put the dishes into the refrigerator until it is very cold, or until you are ready to serve it.

We like it with a little spoonful of raspberry jam dropped on top just before serving.

Indexes and indexing

I think Google has permanently spoiled me. How easy it is to type just a few words into its search screen and get -- along with some bad guesses, frequently -- the information I'm seeking. Even the wrong answers can be amusing, and my usual searches of place names or short biographies generally work.

So I forget that indexing is an art as well as a technique. Genealogists have known this for years, of course, and even when they can digitize records they prefer adding human indexers to proof read and give sanity checks to the data. Libraries were pioneers in machine-readable indexes for their card catalogs. I seem to remember that it was Los Angeles County library which issued an index of all of its periodical holdings, except that they forgot to specify that "Los Angeles" (and the other "Los" and "Las" names) were part of the name, and not simply the definite article in Spanish. Consequently anybody wanting, say, the Los Angeles Times had to look under A, for an entry reading "Angeles Times, Los". Kind of embarrassing for them.

So after all these years I expect any index I use to be useful. Imagine my surprise when I opened the big user's guide for my new Android phone (you can get this guide, free, by calling the number they give online). Leafing through the index I didn't find much that was useful until I came to "to" and found entries like this, which occupy most of the index:

To accept an invitation to chat
To access your voice mail from your wireless device
To add a bookmark shortcut to the Home screen
To add a contact to your favorites
etc.

The Spanish language half of the guide perpetuates this silliness, except you have to look for "para".

If I didn't like this phone so much, I'd be upset!

July 2010 -- A bird sighting at Monterey Bay

03 July -- Bob and Laura and I spent the day on the Monterey peninsula enjoying the sun and the sights and the seafood, and trying to name all the authors we knew who had connections here. Naming John Steinbeck reminded us of Ed Rickett's lab on Cannery Row. The city has preserved at least the exteriors of the buildings and the holding tanks that the marine biologist used for many years.

It turned out to be the ideal home for a pair of seagull babies.

T. C. Boyle -- The Women

Awhile back -- in 1998, to be exact -- I was quite angry with T. C. Boyle. He had written a story which was published in the New Yorker, which depicted his version of the life of Baldasare Forestiere, one of my favorite eccentrics. Forestiere, a Sicilian immigrant, arrived in Fresno, California, in 1905, dreaming of farming his own land. Sold a patch of hardpan, Forestiere eventually tamed it, tunneling deep enough to find good fertile soil, building a home and planting an orchard in which trees lived underground and grew up through holes in the surface soil. I thought Boyle's story was disparaging and condescending, and was an unhealthy cross between fiction and biography.

Now I must change my opinion, or, rather, decide that this one story was uncharacteristically meanspirited. Boyle, is seems, has written a number of novels centered on American eccentrics, and most of them are very good. I have just finished The Women, a fictional retelling of the wife and mistresses of Frank Lloyd Wright. It's prime Boyle, filled with events and passions and Wright's living-on-the-edge flamboyant style. He failed to pay his bills, he built houses in which the roofs leaked and the fireplaces failed to warm the rooms, but his successes were dramatic and the customers who were happy were ecstatically happy. The women, now, that's another story. Even Boyle's skills fail to convince me that they are more than spoiled, needy and selfish.

The story is told by a fictional narrator, a Japanese apprentice who spends much of his young adulthood at Taliesin. His own story gives additional depth to Wright's biography.

I began reading this book with great misgivings, not only because of my memory of Forestiere but because E. L. Doctorow did such a misleading job of fictional biography in his story of the Collier Brothers. Boyle is an accomplished story-teller and a wise man, and I hope he's busy writing his new novel, whatever it is, right now.

Sam Lipsyte -- The Ask

Occasionally I get the feeling that the book I have requested, because of its glowing reviews, is not the book I am reading. It's not that I got the wrong item: nothing as easy as that! My confusion is due to the fact that other people, people who should know better, like critics for major papers or awards committees, maintain that this is a humorous and important, book. And I, struggling through to the end, find it neither.

This happened to me this week with The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte. This novel is the tale of Milo, a nobody, a would-be artist soldiering away on a college campus (Mediocre U, he calls it) in the Development Department. That is, he looks for people to give money for new buildings or endowed professorships or the like. Due to a series of unfortunate events, mostly having to do with his lack of tact, he is thrown out until an old college friend, Purdy, arranges to have him work on a donation which Purdy may make to the college.

The story then veers off into the relationship between Purdy and his son, born of an affair and not recognized until after the boy has returned from Iraq as a double amputee.

Do you notice anything humorous so far? Me neither.

It was only my determination not to let the book get the better of me that made me read through to the end, not caring whether Milo will save his marriage, or rescue his too-adorable and precocious three-year-old from the absent-minded non-care of the babysitter, or even get a permanent job.

The satirical targets are too broad (e.g., yuppified experimental pre-schools, over-age hippies). I can't recall one attractive character, and I think that even if all else fails, at least one character in which one can believe is necessary for an emotional connection to a novel.

James McManus -- Cowboys full: the story of poker

Let's hear it for the new historians, who take a subject -- an idea, an artifact, a slogan, a style of dress, a game -- and study it carefully, using the same analytic tools their colleagues use while studying the "big" topics like war. To understand our culture, it's sometimes more useful to view it from ground level rather than from the broader academic lens.

Cowboys Full, written by a journalist who himself was a participant in a World Series of Poker, is an entertaining and educational trip through western history, starting before the 1400s and continuing to the present. In fifteenth century Italy, decks of cards had coins, cups, scimitars and polo sticks. Stiff cardboard, too stiff to shuffle, was used later, and just about any group of people -- especially wanderers, warriors, professional gamblers and prospectors -- made decks of cards from whatever material was easiest to come by.

One of McManus' favorite topics is the connection between poker and politics. He includes the well-known stories, such as Nixon's financing his first political campaign with his poker winnings, but he also tells stories of other presidents and important people, illustrating the importance of discipline: the poker face.

Closer to the present, he covers the beginning and growth of the World Series of Poker, which all of us have seen at least on television. Since its inception, the admission fee has been $10,000. McManus says:

...For perspective, it's what Robert Ford was paid to kill Jesse James in 1882, and what John Backus cheats the cheaters out of with a double cold deck during the voyage to San Francisco in Twain's "The Professor's Yarn." ...

...Ten thousand dollars had been roughly the median family income when the World Series began in 1970, and despite inflation the sum will still buy a year's tuition at an excellent state university, a used VW Beetle in pretty good shape, or a family vacation to Hawaii. It's also the amount won by the high-stakes pro Howard Lederer, a vegetarian, from his fellow pro David Grey, who had bet him that he wouldn't eat a cheeseburger...

This book is stimulating, a fun read that will send you off in many direction as you decide you want to know more about the people, places, and events relating to poker. A born story-teller, McManus delights.