Rambling grumbling on a sultry Wednesday...

I absolutely hate talking about the weather, but I woke up and for the nth straight day feeling the humidity sitting on my forehead like a big, big....what sits on your forehead? Nothing I can think of. I feel oppressed. Probably the weather and the red wine I drank last night with a friend I will call The Tango Dancer who has had way, way too much loss in her life lately. And in typical male fashion, I tried to fix it instead of listening. Sometimes it's better to shut up. The Ragazzo had a friend over the other day who was telling us how little luck she has had finding a job since moving to a new city and for about twenty minutes he and I were both saying "have you tried this...?" "have you tried this...?" And then suddenly The Ragazzo said - "You're with two men. We're going to try to fix it." Ain't it the truth? Or ain't it the cliche anyway. Someone should do a study to find out if it's really true.

Today I am going to be a subject in a friend's neurophysiology experiment, which means I'm going to have a stretchy cap put on my head with 128 electrodes and then sit in a dark room
look at checkerboard patterns. It's something like four hours long and evidently very boring. I hope I don't fall asleep.

In case you haven't noticed, I haven't read enough in The Informers to say anything new of interest. At least I don't think I have, let me turn to one of my recent sticky markers... Well, this is a nice description of a perfectly hateful character:

Hans Bethke's perfectly shaven face, his little spectacles, everything about him said: I'll smile at you, but turn round and I'll stab you in the back. He had curly, blond, slicked-down hair, and it formed little spirals at his temples. His whole head was a whirl, like sharing a table with one of Van Gogh's trees. And the tree talked. It talked a mile a minute. He used the little he'd done in his life to put down anyone else. Before we'd finished our drinks in the living room, we already knew that Bethke had travelled to Germany when he was twenty, for a short stay, sent by his family to get to know that land of his ancestors, and he'd returned to Colombia more German than the Kaiser.

The writing is largely very strong, but I'm in a rather slow section of the book where Gabriel Santoro, the character whose story we're reading, is learning about the past from his friend Sara. There is something about a second narrator narrating to the first that I'm finding confusing. I keep losing track of what is happening to whom. I hope it picks up soon and tells me how this fits in. I'm getting impatient and feel like either starting something new or making food.




Butter Bean Salad

2 cans of butter beans
1 - 2 baskets of grape tomatoes
about a cup 1/2 of pitted olives (your choice, I use a combo of green and greek black)
1/2 - 3/4 pound of feta (preferably the creamier sheeps milk kind, not the crumbly)
1 shallot
2 large bunches of flat-leaf parsley
a bunch of baby spinach and/or arugula/and/or dill/
good olive oil
lemon
marjoram
black pepper

Halve the tomatoes and squash them gently as you put them in the bowl with the beans and the olives. Cut the feta into squares (very messy). Chop the shallot finely. Mix all this together, adding some dried marjoram if you like. Chop or tear the parsley roughly (leave the leaves in big pieces), toss them into the salad in small bunches otherwise the cheese clumps it all together. Add the juice of a lemon and a few glugs of good olive oil. Mix it all together and stick it in the fridge for several hours or even make it the day before, this will wilt the parsley a bit. When you're going to eat it, roughly chop some baby spinach or arugula and some fresh dill. Mix it in and adjust the olive oil/lemon balance if you need to. Grind on some black pepper and eat it. I know the picture has cucumbers - not in my version, but you're welcome to add them.

That's what we're having tonight for dinner.

Mark is trying to read all of Roth - craaaaazy, better you than me, Mark.

Jonah has resorted to linking neuroscience and Sesame Street songs, in which I was surprised to learn that Elmo is not a bad dancer.

Sheila has a brand new cat.

And my brain has no room for any new neuroscientific facts - marginal or seminal.

Sunday hodgepodge

I don't know what possessed me, but I decided to make salmon last night, actually I do know - it was Jake's plea for recipes for graduate and medical school students. He had numerous responders, including myself, offering their supposedly inexpensive and quick recipes that are nutritious and produce lots of leftovers. When considering last night's dinner, I had started with the idea of chicken and asparagus but after looking through my cookbooks The Ragazzo and I settled on prosciutto wrapped salmon, which sounds fancy but it could not be easier. It was accompanied by lentils with chopped spinach and herbs with yogurt dribbled on top. It even looked good on the plate! It was one of Jamie Oliver's recipes which I find are almost alway easy to make and really tasty. I first discovered the Naked Chef - while sick w/ a flu in a hotel in London and stuck in front of the television. Here's the recipe my only variations - I had pretty hefty fillets and cooked them for 20 minutes not 10. They were perfect. I also cheated and used canned lentils. I have Jamie's The Naked Chef Takes Off which has quite a few recipes I go to again and again. He also has a new book Cook with Jamie that I paged through while waiting for someone at Williams Sonoma that looks like a really good cooking primer. I'm a fan.


On a stomach happily filled with salmon and lentils I finished Russell Banks The Reserve. My enthusiasm for the solidity of his writing and my criticism for the plotting of this novel stand. My suspicions for how the novel would end were mostly confirmed. Banks may not have wished me to be surprised though. In the italicized passages that are flash forwards interspersed with the plot-proper set in 1936, at least one character dies. I won't say who or how, but what that did for the remainder of the 1936 events was cast a completely different light on them. It is like getting terribly caught up in one of life's daily drama's at work or at home - something that feels terribly important - and then suddenly hurricane Katrina strikes or a childhood friend gets a terrible illness and you're left thinking - what was I making all that fuss about? There is a sudden switch in the focus of the novel from a 1930s film intrigue and romance to questions of ethics - of right and wrong. They come a little late if you ask me, but I appreciated them coming at all. They gave me a respect for one of the characters that I hadn't previously felt.

If any of you care to recommend to me the Russell Banks I should read - I'd be intrigued to hear. I've had one vote for Cloudsplitter. He is the New York State Novelist after all, so I would like to read some more of his work.

I'm choosing between David Lodge's Thinks..., Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, and Stefan Zweig's Chess Story for my next book, but now, despite the fact that you think it may be Sunday, I have to head off to the lab and work.