1Q84 Foods

Cooking was not a chore for Tengo. He always used it as a time to think -- about everyday problems, about math problems, about his writing, or about metaphysical propositions.

***

"Does this mean we’re going pretty far from the city?”
“What were you just doing,” she asked, ignoring his question. 　
“Making dinner.” 　
“Making what.” 　
“Nothing special, just cooking for myself. Grilling a dried mackerel and grating a daikon radish. Making a miso soup with littlenecks and green onions to eat with tofu. Dousing cucumber slices and wakame seaweed with vinegar. Ending up with rice and nappa pickles. That’s all” 　
“Sounds good.” 　
“I wonder. Nothing special. Pretty much what I eat all the time,” Tengo said.

***

Fuka-Eri stared straight at Tengo again for a time. She seemed to be having some kind of thoughts about intercourse. What she was actually thinking about, no one could say. 　
“Hungry?” Tengo asked. 　
Fuka-Eri nodded. “I have hardly eaten anything since this morning"
“I’ll make dinner,” Tengo said. He himself had hardly eaten anything since the morning, and he was feeling hungry. Also, he could not think of anything to do for the moment aside from making dinner. Tengo washed the rice, put it in the cooker, and turned on the switch. He used the time until the rice was ready to make miso soup with wakame seaweed and green onions, grill a sun-dried mackerel, take some tofu out of the refrigerator and flavor it with ginger, grate a chunk of daikon radish, and reheat some leftover boiled vegetables. To go with the rice, he set out some pickled turnip slices and a few pickled plums. With Tengo moving his big body around inside it, the little kitchen looked especially small. It did not bother him, though. He was long used to making do with what he had there. 　
Sorry, but these simple things are all I can make,” Tengo said. 　
Fuka-Eri studied Tengo’s skillful kitchen work in great detail. With apparent fascination, she scrutinized the results of that work neatly arranged on the table and said, “You know how to cook.” 　
“I’ve been living alone for a long time. I prepare my meals alone as quickly as possible and I eat alone as quickly as possible. It’s become a habit.” 　
“Do you always eat alone.” 　
“Pretty much. It’s very unusual for me to sit down to a meal like this with somebody. I used to eat lunch here once a week with the woman we were talking about. But, come to think of it, I haven’t eaten dinner with anybody for a very long time.” 　
“Are you nervous.” 　
Tengo shook his head. “No, not especially. It’s just dinner. It does seem a little strange, though"

***

Either I’m funny or the world’s funny, I don’t know which. The bottle and lid don’t fit. It could be the bottle’s fault or the lid’s fault. In either case, there’s no denying that the fit is bad. Aomame opened her refrigerator and examined its contents. She hadn’t been shopping for some days, so there wasn’t much to see. She took out a ripe papaya, cut it in two, and ate it with a spoon. Next she took out three cucumbers, washed them, and ate them with mayonnaise, taking the time to chew slowly. Then she drank a glass of soy milk. That was her entire dinner. It was a simple meal, but ideal for preventing constipation. Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.

***

Tengo chopped a lot of ginger to a fine consistency. Then he sliced some celery and mushrooms into nice-sized pieces. The Chinese parsley, too, he chopped up finely. He peeled the shrimp and washed them at the sink. Spreading a paper towel, he laid the shrimp out in neat rows, like troops in formation. When the edamame were finished boiling, he drained them in a colander and left them to cool. Next he warmed a large frying pan and dribbled some sesame oil and spread it over the bottom. He slowly fried the chopped ginger over a low flame.
I wish I could meet Aomame right now, Tengo started thinking again. Even if she turned out to be disappointed in him or he was a little disappointed in her, he didn’t care. He wanted to see her in any case. All he wanted was to find out what kind of life she had led since then, what kind of place she was in now, what kinds of things gave her joy, and what kinds of things made her sad.

Thus began Tengo’s days at the cat town beside the sea. He would get up early, take a walk along the shore, watch the fishing boats go in and out of the harbor, then return to the inn for breakfast. Breakfast was exactly the same every day -- dried horse mackerel and fried eggs, a quartered tomato, seasoned dried seaweed, miso soup with shijimi clams, and rice -- but for some reason it tasted wonderful every morning. After breakfast he would sit at a small desk and write. He hadn’t written in some time and found the act of writing with his fountain pen enjoyable.

--Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Jazz Opinion

As I say, I’d listened to a bit of jazz here and there—not a great deal. I think I used to like the early Stan Kenton records and things like that. And one day a friend of mine played me a record of Garner playing The Way You Look Tonight. I was just bowled off my feet by it—I’d never heard anything like it before. There’s something so complete and rounded in his playing that it struck me immediately I heard it. In fact, he is, and will probably continue to be, one of the most complete of all pianists. And ever after that I chased Garner records all over the place, and spent hours and hours trying to play like him— copying his style quite slavishly, because I just feel, as I felt then, that his sense of time is so unique and so extraordinary that it was a very good basis to start from. It’s more extraordinary than, say, somebody like Fats Waller, or even Art Tatum. Somehow, Garner has a special time conception that is all his own.

--Dudley Moore

When Miles Davis died, Rolling Stone put out a big article looking back at his work, and I kept dodging them - I told them, 'I don't like Miles Davis. I don't think you want to ask me questions'. And the guy was like, 'No, I think we should. That's even better'. So I said if it's going to be smooth I'd rather listen to Chet Baker, if it's going to be funky I'd rather listen to Sly Stone. He does a bunch of things all of which I think are done better by somebody else. They printed it, and people wanted me dead.

--James Murphy of LCD Sound System

Vanity Fair

The defects in the book according to the taste of to-day are obvious enough. Artist as he is in details Thackeray lacks the power or the will to make his novel as a whole a work of art. We do not like to have the author poke his head out from the pages every little while and moralize over his characters; we grow tired of the frequent comparisons of life to a pantomime; we find the characters Pitt Crawley, George, Amelia, Dobbin exaggerated, out of drawing, distorted. Thackeray does not hold a mirror up to life; he holds up a warped and twisted reflector that gives the life it reflects a half comic, half satirical aspect. Thackeray's admirers are many and devoted, but for most readers he is too much occupied with the superficial relations of life, with social distinctions, with the envy and vulgarity of those below and the snobbishness and vulgarity of those above. Greater men, such as Shakespeare or Tolstoi, do not find their attention drawn to such matters, they find their interest in experiences, emotions, passions, of a kind more deeply human, they delineate men and women as more occupied with the larger matters of life, love, work, discipline, excellence and so forth, and less concerned with the meaner failings of ill-adjusted social classes.

And yet despite these defects ‘Vanity Fair’ is a novel that represents some manifestations of human society, with remarkable truth...

-Henry Dwight Sedgwick III on Vanity Fair, The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)

Bad Dream <=> News Story

Man faints at sight of blood, dies

A federal agency is investigating the death of a worker at a Savannah recycling plant, who died after a chain of events that begin with a cut to his hand.

Authorities say the worker died Tuesday after a Sunday accident at Southern Metals Recycling's plant on Tremont Road. Michael Day, owner of the temporary staffing firm StaffCo, tells The Savannah Morning News that 26-year-old Fernando Aburto cut his hand while stripping insulation from wire at the plant. Day said the worker then fainted at the sight of the blood, hit his head on concrete and was taken to a hospital.

Day said StaffCo provides workers for Southern Metals Recycling. The recycling company referred questions about the matter to StaffCo.

-The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 24

Literary criticism in translation

["The Story of Ying Ying"] is about the deep and melancholic personal bonds between a man and a woman. Their sublime passion, though deep, has no beginning and no end, as a single burst of love and affection creates endless despair and infinite sorrow. The romance emphasizes Scholar Zhang’s faithful character and irregular constancy; underscoring in every part how his captivation with Ying Ying is different from the ordinary philandering of a lecher. Ying Ying is able to turn Zhang upside down, which highlights how Ying Ying is different from other beauties. Ying Ying is an intelligent unflappable young lady. She loves Zhang’s talent and is moved by Zhang’s foolish passion (chiqing). That she arranged the private rendezvous with Zhang in the western chamber, yet scolded him once there, is perhaps a matter of changing her mind at the last minute, or perhaps she really only wanted to see him and speak with him. In any case her “speaking of principle sharply and defensively” (yan ze min bian) is believable.…If Yuan Zhen’s “The Story of Yingying” was really about Yuan’s own feelings, then Scholar Zhang’s restraint answers not only to the personality (gexing) of the character (renwu), but also the needs of the story. The old matron, knowing the boat has sailed, is not obstructing the marriage, so Zhang and Ying Ying can enjoy what they desire and don’t need to remain mired in melancholy. It is Zhang who restrains himself before the marriage can be completed. Zhang’s restraint is not what Yuan Zhen wants, but only a rule of the story, an internal requirement of it.…Neither Ying Ying’s meandering soliloquy, her sorrowful qin playing, nor her plaintive-without-complaining (yuan er bu nu) love letters can make Zhang bring his passion to a head. And even though she breaks up with Zhang in a poetic letter, still there is a lingering passion left unsevered (yu qing wei duan), a cavity of the heart filled with a deep depression that manages to win the reader’s empathy. Yuan Zhen’s “love ’em and leave ‘em” （shiluan zhongqi) story is clearly not meant to promote some grand moral involving “restraint,” but rather to write out a kind of infinite melancholia. This is not just a matter of failure between Zhang and Yingying, but also a statement about how common failure is in this world; moreover, it makes manifest the conflict between intellect (lizhi) and passion (qinggan). Knowledge from the intellect is a defect that can’t be patched; passion, though, is unwilling to submit, can never rest, and yet is also no guarantee of success. These feelings (qinggan) are the universal human experience (rensheng pubian de jingyan). It really proves a statement from western literary theory: “A particular fiction can lead towards a general truth.” That’s why this little story is so moving, and later generations never stopped praising it, and in Record of the Western Chamber, even gave it a happy ending.

--Yang Jiang, "Shishi, gushi, zhenshi" 实事、故事、真是 (Fact, Story, Reality)

Islam, 0.5

Notes on a guest speaker from Twin Ports Islamic Center in my class

The root s-l-m, from which the word Islam is derived, means "safe and unharmed, unimpaired." Its derivatives include words meaning both "peace" and "surrender."...It is the latter meaning that is uppermust in the use of the term Islam, meaning "to surrender oneself, to commit or resign oneself to the will of God." Islam is the state or act of submission; Muslim is the one who submits. It is in this sense, of total surrender to the will of God, that the terms Islam and Muslim have always been understood in the Islamic lands and communities.

--Barnard Lewis and Buntzie Ellis Churchill, Islam: the Religion and the People (Pearson, 2009)

Struggles of the Writer, 1

"I never mean to be slow," Joseph Conrad wrote to David Meldurm of the Blackwood publishing house in 1899, but "The stuff comes out at its own rate [and] too often -- alas! -- I've to wait for the sentence -- for the word." The process of writing involved long hours of incapacitating doubt that left him caught like a ship in a calm, an unrestful paralysis in which his mind remained "extremely active," producing "descriptions, dialogue, reflexion -- everything -- everything but the belief, the conviction, the only thing neeeded to make me put pen to paper." Days would pass without his writing a line, and Conrad would take to his bed, sick of a labor so great that it should have given "birth to masterpieces" instead of what he termed the "ridiculous mouse" his struggles would sometimes produce. ...Conrad also had a history of nervous collapse at the end of most of his major books. Under Western Eyes (1911) in particular, a novel that involved a prolonged psychic immersion in the Russia he both hated and feared. Few of his letters are without some plaintive or even desperate note. "My brain reduced to the size of a pea seems to rattle about in my head," he wrote to R. B. Cunninghame Graham in 1900, and if it wasn't the fight with words then it was his worries about money or housing, the illnesses of his wife and children, or the crippling attacks of gout with which his working life was spiked.

--The Portable Conrad, introduction by Michael Gorra