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Brooklyn Book Festival 2011

September 19, 2011

Take a beautiful day, throngs of book lovers, approximately 100 panels highlighting the work of more than 260 writers, plunk it into the center of literary America and you have the Brooklyn Book Festival.

There was a lot to choose from, and that doesn’t include the nearly 150 vendors, including my favorite NYRB Classics and BookCourt. Others present included literary magazines, small presses, and local university presses, including NYU Press and the New School.

This correspondent attended two panels, and I learned something useful: I should have done more homework when I picked my panels. I attended the panel titled “Extreme Weather, Scarce Resources, and Climate Change” and heard a clever but perhaps not entirely helpful reframing analysis asserting that global warming, combined with the end of the Cold War and what one writer called a “neoliberal economic restructuring” is creating chaos in the tropical zones. Already tense hotspots such as the Horn of Africa are seeing increasing conflict. All three writers (Christian Parenti, Mark Hertsgaard, and Anna Lappe,) and the moderator are from The Nation, and while the Nation is a great magazine, it might have been more interesting to hear a more nuanced discussion of the political issues involved in facing climate change in the US.

Later on I went to the “Politically Incorrect Parenting” panel, which included Adam Mansbach, author of “Go the F**k to Sleep” as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Alice Bradley, and enjoyed that a lot more. The St. Francis screening room was full, and the audience ranged from infants to grandparents. The panel concluded that men are increasingly able to express their ambivalence about the joys of parenting. There was an interesting discussion about talking with kids about issues such as race and class. I can’t say I came away with any useful parenting tips, but it was very healthy to hear as a response to the question “What parenting mistakes have you made?” the answer of, approximately, well, I can’t really think of any – I take each day as it comes. My first response was to think, of course you’ve made mistakes, but kids are resilient, they’ll get over them. On further thought, though, this attitude seems about right for parenting each day: here’s where we are, how we got here doesn’t matter, it’s what we do from here that counts.

So what’s to complain about if a discussion makes you think? Altogether it was a very satisfactory Festival.

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Events, Food

Flavor, Fun and Food at the Brooklyn Local

September 17, 2011

If you haven’t already been there, head down to the Tobacco Warehouse in Brooklyn Bridge Park for the Brooklyn Local. A fundraiser for City Harvest, it’s a festival celebrating local foods: chocolate, pickles, mustards, cookies, beef, seafood, and pies and more pies.
“Everything is so delicious and I want to try it all because it’s going to such a good cause!” said Marcia Ely of Park Slope.

Vendors include: One Girl Cookies, Ditch Plains Drop In (with tiny lobster rolls), City ‘Lasses, Sour Puss Pickles, the Pie Corps, Four & Twenty Blackbirds as well as local stalwarts Damascus Bakery, Sahadi’s, Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pies and Jacques Torres Chocolates. A full list of participating purveyors is here.

“We use my great-grandmother’s recipe,” said Bob McClure of McClure’s Pickles, which is in Detroit as well as Brooklyn (his brother runs the Detroit branch.) “I wanted to come today because I’m part of a growing food community, and I’ve known the organizers since we began the business five years ago. I can get our products out to people who’ve never tried them. And I meet new vendors here.”

Many vendors are regularly at the Brooklyn Flea, the New Amsterdam Market, or the Brooklyn Foodshed Market. But not all those locations are walkable from downtown Brooklyn, so it’s a good chance to try some new vendors. I especially liked the apple cider syrup I got from Morris Kitchen, and McClure’s garlic dill pickles. In addition to the food stands, there are cookbook signings, a children’s room and, for $60, a tasting tent. The Brooklyn Local will go on until 4:00 pm today.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Tolstoy and the Purple Chair” by Nina Sankovitch

September 15, 2011

Grief is universal, but we each respond to a death in our own way. Nina Sankovitch’s response to the harrowing death of her older sister, Anne-Marie, from cancer at the age of 46, was to run.

Sankovitch describes herself as sundered in two after Anne-Marie’s death. Part of her couldn’t wait to leave the room with her sister’s deathbed, rushing their mother out the door. And part of her carried the moment of learning of her sister’s death everywhere, so that the news was always fresh, the grief always sharp. She filled her days with activities, not too hard to do with four young sons, until she realized that she couldn’t run away from the sorrow.

Sankovitch had to stop to confront it, and she did that by sitting really still, reading a complete book every single day for a year (and writing about each). She read mysteries, young adult books, literary works, short story collections, novellas. All of it was fiction. At the end of the year, during which she experienced extravagant highs, other griefs, and some sheer escape through what she had read, she found herself at peace.

Sankovitch provides vivid descriptions of her family life and the purple chair itself moves beyond prop into metaphor. Sankovitch is even better at describing the searing emotions she experienced during the illness and at the death of her sister. Each chapter has an epigraph from one of the books as a signal of the chapter’s topic; each chapter circles back to Sankovitch’s main theme, that books have provided her with a path out of an all-encompassing grief.

Sankovitch is still reading (fiction and non-fiction) and blogging; you can find out about her recent favorites here. Which books saved you in moments of trauma and grief? Please share your favorites in the comments.

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Food

Restaurants and recipes from Cheryl Tan, author of A Tiger in the Kitchen

September 14, 2011

Cheryl Tan’s book, “ A Tiger in the Kitchen,” a Brooklyn Bugle Book Club selection discussed here, describes many Singaporean dishes and includes a few recipes. But Tan doesn’t include recipes for all the dishes she describes, and I had some restaurant questions. Tan agreed to answer some questions by email.

AB: Do you have a favorite Singapore or Singapore-style restaurant in NYC?

CLT: There are very few good places — Nyonya in Chinatown has some good dishes. I would highly recommend the beef rendang, which is an amazing curried beef dish packed with lemongrass, coriander, cumin, ginger and a whole host of other spices, as well as the kangkong belacan, which is water spinach fried with belacan, a spicy shrimp paste.

The Singapore consulate in New York uses Taste Good in Queens to cater some of its events — I take that as pretty big endorsement. Many dishes here are great and very authentic — popiah, the Singaporean summer roll I mention in A Tiger in the Kitchen, as well as chili crab, Singapore’s national dish. I also like some Singaporean dishes at Cafe Asean, a pan-Asian restaurant in the West Village

AB: One of the dishes you mention but don’t provide a recipe for is laksa. Is there a good place to get it in New York?

CLT: I actually don’t have a recipe of my own for laksa — it’s not something my family makes. Taste Good does fantastic versions — regular laksa as well as assam laksa, which is a slightly sour version of laksa as it is flavored with “assam,” which is Malay for tamarind.

AB: The recipes mention msg and other canned and processed foods – how do you feel about using them in cooking in general?

CLT: I don’t personally use MSG when I cook — in the recipes in my book, I’ve mentioned that they’re optional. Generally, I try to use fresh ingredients as much as I can but with some items — tomato pastes and sauces, for example — it would simply be too time-consuming to do everything from scratch.

AB: You describe a process of molding bak-zhang in bamboo leaves – do you fold the bamboo leaves to mold the bak-zhang?

CLT: The dish is amazing! I love the flavor of the filling so much — and if you’re lazy to wrap bak-zhang, you can always just make a big pot of that filling and eat it with rice. It’s so tasty. Here is how you wrap bak-zhang.

Cheryl Tan will be appearing at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 18, as part of the panel “Food From All Sides” to be held at 12 noon on the North Stage. Here’s the description from the Festival’s website: Three panelists use the lens of food to write about family, poverty and war—Annia Ciezadlo (Day of Honey) looks at food and politics in the Middle East, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan (A Tiger In the Kitchen) follows a Chinese-American woman back to Singapore in search of her family’s culinary history, and Tracie McMillan (forthcoming The American Way of Eating: Undercover on the Front Lines of Our Nation’s Meals) deals with poverty and food issues. Moderated by food writer Christy Harrison.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “A Tiger in the Kitchen” by Brooklyn Heights Resident Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

September 9, 2011

by Alexandra Bowie

According to birth order theorists, oldest children tend to be cautious; their younger siblings are the creative risk-takers in the family (surround that statement with a lot of caveats, of course). There are some exceptions, one of them being the oldest daughters of two-daughter families. Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, the author of the engrossing memoir “The Tiger in the Kitchen” is one of this special group.

Tan grew up in Singapore, a descendant of emigrant Chinese. She worked hard at school, consciously avoiding learning domestic skills as she studied. She went to the US for college and didn’t look back for 15 years. After graduation, Tan forged a career as a reporter, first at the Baltimore Sun, later at the Wall Street Journal, covering fashion and the related business. She married an American, and settled in Brooklyn. But at some point she realized she was missing something – the food. A couple of years ago a lay-off gave her an opportunity, and Tan took it: over the course of a year she made several long visits to her family in Singapore and, eventually, to the village her great-grandfather had left behind in China.

Tan spent most of her visits with her divorced mother and extended family on both her father’s and mother’s sides, learning her culture through its cooking. Tan describes one signal clash of cultures that was evident immediately: the only plausible explanation she could give her Singapore relatives for her extended visits away from her husband was that she was learning to cook so she could make him “good Singaporean dinners.” Tan brought the same skills she needed as a reporter to her cooking quest, and immediately found another place her several cultures refused to mesh in the approach to details. Having trained herself to be a successful free-lancer, Tan was interested in the minutiae: when? How much? Could her aunties and granny let her measure an ingredient before they added it to a pot? They laughed at her, saying “Agak-agak,” which Tan translates as “just guess.” As Tan let go of her need to know the details, she slowly learned to cook.

More important, as she ably demonstrates, over the course of the year Tan grew up. Tan writes her own brand of UK-inflected American English, and speaks her mind. She describes her mistakes, including a delightful story about second-guessing her forgetful grandmother. The comparison of the final products proved, that, contrary to Tan’s assumption, her granny had not omitted some important instructions. Tan also describes her cooking failures, most memorably a ciabatta that filled her apartment with smoke. Tan is braver than I am: she describes serving many of what she considers failures to her friends and family. As Tan learns through the course of the year, it’s not always a choice between career and cooking. Some lucky people combine them, as Tan now has – in addition to the book, her blog is a great source of recipes and food information. Her lengthy visits home taught her something fundamental. Over the course of that year, she more than came to terms with herself; in the words of one of her relatives, she learned to cook with her heart.

Cheryl Tan will be appearing at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 18, as part of the panel “Food From All Sides” to be held at 12 noon on the North Stage. Here’s the description from the Festival’s website: Three panelists use the lens of food to write about family, poverty and war—Annia Ciezadlo (Day of Honey) looks at food and politics in the Middle East, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan (A Tiger In the Kitchen) follows a Chinese-American woman back to Singapore in search of her family’s culinary history, and Tracie McMillan (forthcoming The American Way of Eating: Undercover on the Front Lines of Our Nation’s Meals) deals with poverty and food issues. Moderated by food writer Christy Harrison.

Who taught you to cook? What’s your favorite family meal memory? Join the discussion in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club – Cleopatra, by Stacy Schiff, out in paperback

September 6, 2011

Who is Cleo? What is she? Any number of different things, including Elizabeth Taylor, depending on who you ask. (And Angeline Jolie in the new movie version – Ed.)

Stacy Schiff’s terrific biography of Cleopatra has just been released in paperback, and the publisher has released this video to mark (ok, to market) it. The book was a bestseller in hardcover and e-book versions – if you haven’t yet read it I suggest popping over to BookCourt for the paperback. You can follow Stacy Schiff’s Twitter feed here.

There’s a school of thought in this household that the most likely place to find Cleo today would be the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Who is Cleopatra to you? Where do you think she would turn up if she were around today? Discuss in the comments.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Bossypants” by Tina Fey

September 2, 2011

OK, I didn’t really read Bossypants, Tina Fey’s recent memoir, except for the excerpts in The New Yorker (available, behind a paywall, here. One of the local teenagers downloaded the audio version from audible.com, and we listened to it as a family during a long car ride.

While reading the excerpts I thought that Fey’s writerly voice was a little, well, bossy is the word that comes to mind, but her tone while I was listening (Fey reads the work herself) is masterly. This is as it should be; Fey was trained as an actor. The book is hilarious and appealed to our entire family, which includes two college-aged kids. The I’m-an-awkward-girl-growing-up scenes felt all too familiar yet made both my daughter and me laugh out loud (though there was some squirming from squeamish male family members). Fey’s descriptions of her friendships with gay men and her college-age efforts to connect with unavailable men ranged from charming to a “that’s so familiar” cringe-inducing honesty. Her descriptions of tortured Christmas-time drives across Pennsylvania with a toddler in a car seat hit a little too close to home, even though our kids have reached driving age.

And then there were the descriptions of Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock. Fey includes the script of her first appearance as Sarah Palin (the one where Amy Poehler is Hillary Clinton) in the hard copy of the book (I went over to a local bookstore and looked), but the performance is included in the audio book, a distinct advantage. Everyone in the car enjoyed that – I’ve provided a link to a youtube clip. Beyond SNL, Fey is generous to her 30 Rock writers and co-stars without giving too much away about the show, and I admit I’ll be looking up a few more episodes to watch what she called the best jokes.

The audio book comes with a pdf download of the hard copy book’s photos (and you get to avoid that weird cover photo.) In general the audiobook feels like a rare improvement over the actual book. What do you think of audio books in general? This one in particular? Tina Fey? Comment away!

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “To The End of the Land” by David Grossman

August 25, 2011

A parent’s work is never done, the saying goes, and there’s a reason for that. Several, in fact, but the existential one is the subtext for David Grossman’s fascinating book To the End of the Land. The work of organizing a home, and feeding nurturing and caring for its inhabitants always falls to someone, and in that work – cooking and eating and dishes and laundry – a lot of living gets done. This appears to be true regardless of culture. Grossman is an Israeli and Israel, with its three years of compulsory army service, asks much more of its parents than we do.

In the novel Ora, separated from her husband of 20 years, Ilan, and estranged from her older son, has left her home to go on a hike the length of the country, to pass the time while her second son, Ofer, extends his military service by a month. More importantly, she wants to be out of reach of the messengers she is desperately afraid will come to tell her of her son’s death in action. On the way to her starting point, she has an irremediable fight with her long-time Arab-Israeli driver, and plucks her old friend Avram out of his drab existence to accompany her. Avram has a tragic history of his own, slowly revealed through the course of the novel, that is inextricably intertwined with Ora’s and Ilan’s.

Ora spends the walk describing her family’s life to Avram. “A family is a perpetual occurrence,” she says at one point. She is still simultaneously avoiding and puzzling out the cause of its sundering. Avram, it is not giving away too much to reveal, is Ofer’s father. In the course of their walk, with Ora relating the story of Ofer’s 21 years, Avram becomes his parent. They walk from signpost to signpost but also from memorial to memorial, for soldiers, almost all aged 21. Regarding one, Ora says, “There’s no more room for all the dead.” Meanwhile, in a subplot I found to be not completely credible, Ora witnesses Avram slowly return to life, until, in a more realistic twist, she realizes that he has managed a life without her and Ilan despite their guilt.

The ending of the novel is ambiguous, though readers of The New Yorker who read George Packer’s 2010 profile of Grossman (available behind a paywall here) will remember that Grossman’s son Uri was killed during the time he wrote the book. It’s not an autobiographical novel; Grossman says in an endnote, “What changed, above all, was the echo of the reality in which the final draft was written.”

Endless conflict has a pernicious effect on the soul, and that’s what, in the end, this novel is about. What happens when living a good life, and teaching your child to be good, isn’t enough to protect your child? From circumstances? From the consequences of the choices he has had to make? Recently the New York Times ran a story about Israeli women picking up Palestinian women and children from the West Bank and taking them to the beach for the day. Is that enough? The morality may be particularly ambiguous in Israel. The universal truth, vividly exposed here, is that all the choices are bad and the compromises we have to make are ugly indeed.

Have you read this beautiful and troubling book? Does Ofer survive his extra month? What do you think will happened in the end to these characters? Use the comments and talk back!

 

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Air We Breathe” by Andrea Barrett

August 18, 2011

I recently finished reading Andrea Barrett’s 2007 novel The Air We Breathe. It’s set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the fictional Adirondack town of Tamarack Lake during 1915-1917, while the Great War was under way but before the US had entered it.

The story involves a quadrilateral romance. Miles Fairchild, a wealthy industrialist patient staying at a private boarding house in Tamarack Lake loves Naomi, his landlady’s daughter. She in turn loves Leo Marbury, an impoverished German-Jewish émigré confined to the public sanatorium. He loves Eudora, a nurse’s aide there, who is also Naomi’s best friend. Part of the plot turns on Eudora figuring out whether she loves Leo back. They all get to know each other after Miles organizes a series of discussions in which the various patients lecture their fellows on something they know from the outside world.

And the plot also turns on those discussion groups, because during one of them there’s a suspicious fire. Miles, who has become a leader in a homeland security vigilante group, undertakes the investigation and, partly because he is jealous of him, throws suspicion on to Leo. Circumstantial evidence supports his theory.

Tamarack Lake is not an otherworldly place like Hans Castorp’s magic mountain. The novel considers issues of class and origin, and Leo is suspected partly because he is German. (An irony, of course, is that had he stayed in Germany, and lived long enough, he would have been a victim there because his mother was Jewish.) The Great War does not stay out of patient’s lives—one measure of the repression they experience is their changing access to information from the outside.

Ever since I read “Ship Fever” I’ve thought of Barrett as a writer who lets the bones of her stories show, but here the bones are covered with muscle and skin, and clothed in flowing silk that shifts and uncovers, now the curve of a breast, later a glimpse of inner thigh. (To extend the metaphor, there is no fat in this narrative.) This impression is strengthened by an unusual narrative device: the rest of the patients take over the narration occasionally, becoming a shared unconscious, demonstrating how quickly an unsupported rumor can spread among a community and take on the aura of truth. Read one way, the story is an allegory of our present-day mistrust of immigrants, particularly Muslims. Read another, it’s a story of class in American life.

I keep thinking about this book, and every time I do, I come up with a new possible interpretation. Have you read it? Do you agree or disagree? Which of Barrett’s other books would you recommend? Use the comments to discuss and make your recommendations.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: NYRB Books

July 29, 2011

Over the past few years I’ve noticed how many of the great books that have come into the house have been classics reissued by New York Review Books (NYRB Classics). They cover an amazing range, and our household has enjoyed a lot of them, including:

All of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travel books – A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water are the best known. In them Patrick Leigh Fermor describes a walking trip across Europe in 1933-35 — he was 18 when he started —  from Rotterdam to Istanbul. The books, especially the second, are lovely; they are also elegiac, because they PLF wrote them years later, with full knowledge of the horrors World War II brought. PLF describes his trip through Romania and Hungary like a long, golden summer afternoon. (Sadly, Leigh Fermore died earlier this year without having completed his description of the final leg of the trip.) But he did publish other travel books. Mani, about the Southern tip of Greece, where Leigh Fermor lived, is also interesting. I just picked up his book about the Caribbean, The Traveller’s Tree.

Names on the Land, by George R. Stewart – A whimsical and fun to read but academically rigorous study of American place names from 1492 (and earlier where possible).

The Snows of Yesteryear and Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, by Gregor von Rezzori. The former a memoir, the latter a novel, of growing up in Central Europe, before and during the Second World War. I hesitate to make the Nabokov comparison, but Nabokov did keep springing to mind, particularly Speak, Memory.

Stoner, by John Williams – If it were written now, the title would mean something else. But it’s just name of the main character, a Midwestern academic in a misalliance worthy of Edith Wharton, if she had written about another part of the country. It’s a memorable book.

The Long Ships, by Frans G. Bengtsson – A tale of Vikings from around the first millenium. Characters travel as far as Constantinople, are enslaved in Spain, convert to Christianity, go on Viking raids, and defend their own farm. Perfect for the beach or a long plane ride.

The Education of a Gardener, by Russell Page – Basic knowledge for gardeners and landscape architects, this one is perhaps not a page-turner, but it will make you look at the gardens around you in a new and thoughtful way. And it’s beautifully illustrated.

I could go on. NYRB always has a booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival, to be held this year on September 15-18, and I always like seeing what they’ve brought. And Court Street Books has a full bookshelf devoted to the press, it’s worth checking out.

Have you read any of these books? Did you like them? Which NYRB books are your favorites? Discuss in the comments.

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