Rich Mintz  

I read a lot of nonfiction, especially history and cultural studies, which won’t surprise anyone who knows me; I’ve been teased (accurately) as one of the few people who’d buy pay actual money for a book about the history of the Postal Service. But for any of you who think I read only nonfiction (are you listening, Boon Companion?) — well, it’s just not true. About every fifth book or so, I need to dig into a really meaty novel and not let go until I’ve eaten the whole thing.

The last meaty novel I read, back in the spring, was Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War, really six novels, comprising her Balkan Trilogy and her Levant Trilogy. Spanning the years from just before the Second World War through roughly the end of it, these books are the thinly fictionalized account of what she and her husband lived through as British citizens in Romania, Athens, and Egypt as the war coursed through the region. But the war came to an end, and so did the books, and I went back to my regular diet.

I tried a couple of novels in the intervening months, but nothing seemed to stick.

But last week in Providence, at Myopic Books in Wayland Square — along with a biography of Alexander the Great and a book on Southern culture — I picked up a copy of Martin Amis’s London Fields, which I’ve been meaning to read for the better part of a decade. I started it and quickly got drawn in, and am finding myself carving out a little extra reading time every day. Now I’m 200 pages in, and well immersed.

The experience of a long-form novel is something you don’t get on the Internet (although, of course, you do get other things from the Internet), and it’s only in the most immersive nonfiction (like Piers Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, which I loved) that you get anything that approaches it. You build around you a personal perspective on the venues and trajectories in the novel, come to inhabit the characters’ motivations and to see them from all sides, to anticipate and fear their interactions. You live for a time in someone else’s world. And if (as I did with Manning’s six novels) you come to be comfortable there, it’s a moment of great sadness when you come to the end, especially if you’re reading a dead author who’s not going to be producing any more.

Until I finish, I won’t say any more about London Fields itself, except to say that it takes place in London and it’s more substantive than I expected from the playful Amis (son of Kingsley Amis, whom I can’t endure).

My English friend Matthew and I found ourselves in Boston at the same time last week (he visiting from London, I from New York) and made plans for dinner, and Matthew (for his own reasons, as a lover of all things American) suggested the Cheesecake Factory, an experience he’d never had before. (Obligatory Wikipedia link here, in case any Martian archaeologists are reading this; surely nobody alive in America in 2010 will need to click it.)

As a devotee of The Big Bang Theory, Matthew was curious about the Cheesecake Factory. As someone who’s game for anything, I agreed, and (bracing ourselves for the ridicule of our mutual friends, which did indeed forthwith rain down upon us), we met in front of the Prudential Center branch of America’s favorite sitdown gorgefest about 8:30 the other night.

The last time I set foot in a Cheesecake Factory was about 7 years ago for lunch at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, and the last time I ate in one for dinner was, what, 20 years ago? I hail from that suburban-escapee American social stratum in which the people over 60 (and a few of the younger set who never quite grew up and broke away) enjoy the Factory non-ironically, and the people under 60 sneer at it ceaselessly and set foot in it only when invited by an elderly relative. But I might have to change my tune.

Commercialized? Sure. My cocktail was watery. The menu was too long, covered in advertising, and a bit pretentious for what they’re serving (which you might call “large-portioned high-middlebrow American festival cuisine”). But I’m afraid that with those, I’ve now exhausted my complaints.

I ordered corn fritters, and a chicken cutlet dish with a fake Italian name that came with a football of mashed potatoes and a garden’s worth of asparagus. Matthew had the hibachi steak — which came with a like portion of potatoes — and a ten-pound vegtable salad. And I must say that everything was delicious. The portions were gargantuan, with enough chicken and potatoes on my plate to feed three hungry adults. The corn fritters were absolutely perfectly done, light and fluffy — the sort of dish I’d try and fail to duplicate at home. The chicken cutlets were pan-fried light and floated on an unimpressive but inoffensive sauce. In fact, there was nothing served to either of us that I wouldn’t consider ordering again, which is actually pretty rare when you think about it. In fact, typing this right now, I’m getting hungry.

Incidentally, we skipped the cheesecake, having each consumed about 2,000 calories by the time the dessert menus came. So I guess I’ll have to go back.

Even on this sad little blog with hardly any readers, I get dozens of spam comments a day, which get autofiltered out or trapped in a moderation queue. This must work, or people wouldn’t bother, but it’s such garbage for the most part. And then there’s something like this. For “gooblegobble,” substitute a two-word phrase referring to an increase in size of the male member, which I’ve suppressed so that this post doesn’t get caught in anyone’s spam filter. And the arms race goes on…

HELP! I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia xyzrxyz [url=.....]gooblegobble[/url] xyzrxyz and being forced to post spam comments on blogs and forum! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. xyzrxyz [url=.....]gooblegobble[/url] xyzrxyz They’re coming back now. xyzrxyz [url=.....]gooblegobble[/url] xyzrxyz Please send help!

I actually didn’t wake up that late, but I got up, went out into the steambath of a day to get the Times, came back in, made coffee and read the whole thing, then decided I’d play a few turns of Civilization IV. Four hours later (!), here I am, sitting on the couch being licked by a cat, eating toast made from yesterday’s bread, catching up on a little blogging as I listen to Kathy Griffin talking about her vaginal makeover.

I don’t know why I shouldn’t have days like this — and weather like today’s, nasty and oppressive and miserable, is the perfect day to stay indoors in the A/C and have one — but I feel vaguely guilty about it, as though there’s something More Important I should be doing. But there isn’t; it’s Sunday, so why not? Besides, this is life, as much as the stuff we do weekdays from 9 to 6 is. Right?

Bonus photos: current game of Civ IV. I’m playing green.

According to today’s Times, Allegra Goodman has a new novel, The Cookbook Collector — which I’ve now ordered. (Disclosure: Allegra Goodman and I were in college together, and we know people in common, although I haven’t spoken to her in 20 years.)

I’ve enjoyed every published word of Goodman’s, from her stories in the New Yorker to the most recent Intuition — she is one on that short list of authors whose books I’ll order in hardcover the moment I hear about them. If I had to pick one novel to take to a desert island, it might well be Goodman’s Paradise Park, the raucously funny yet serious and thoughtful story of a young woman hungry for spiritual meaning. I liked that one so much I gave it as a gift to a dozen people that year. Aside from the stories themselves, I always learn about something new from Allegra’s books — about the Jewish communities in Hawaii and Brooklyn and the Catskills and Miami, for example. (This is something Goodman has in common with Philip Roth, an author you wouldn’t otherwise associate her with — I learned more about the glove industry in Newark, New Jersey from reading Roth than probably everyone who will ever read this blog post put together has ever known about it.) So go buy her new book right now!

Here’s this week’s bread:

It got a six-hour rising, and consequently is soft and crumby despite being heavier on the whole wheat (proportions roughly 2 cups King Arthur whole wheat flour, 1/2 cup cornmeal, 1/2 cup toasted buckwheat groats [kasha], 3 cups King Arthur white bread flour). I wasn’t sure what the kasha would do — in the dough, it was a little lumpy, and I was afraid it would interfere with the rise — but it’s fine; it gives the bread a nutty overtone without hurting it at all.

The Boon Companion (who is the one who deserves the credit for “groaty to the max”) said “this bread tastes really… er… healthy… and that’s sort of a compliment” — but I’m happy with it. And if I do this 50 more weeks in a row, I’ll be a master of flavors and textures.

“A light-hearted documentary exploring the birth and popularity of cheese dip in central Arkansas.” That’s what it says. It’s a nineteen-minute documentary, courtesy of Kerri Case.

This comment made me laugh: “I have often said that if we are what we eat, then I may very well be 70% cheese dip.”

Watch and enjoy.

“In Queso Fever: A Movie About Cheese Dip” from Nick Rogers on Vimeo.

Sensationalistic, of course. If you actually read the story, what they blame is radio, which is the opposite of social media.

Other comments:

(1) They use the orderly crowd at the Old 97s concert on July 4th weekend as evidence that the new crowd control measures are working. Hello — the Old 97s were a college band, what, 17 years ago? (Evidence: I own their albums. And paid money for them. On physical media. And listen to them on my old-fashioned crank-activated gramophone.) If there is a riot at an Old 97s concert, something has gone Horribly Wrong.

(2) What is a “Canadian rapper”? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

I’ve been in Penn Station, what, a hundred times by now? Two hundred? And yet when the train from Boston pulled in tonight, and I hustled onto the platform and up the nearest stairway, I ended up in some subterranean hole I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. It constantly amazes me how Byzantine everything in New York is. (Even after more than eight months living right on top of it, I still sometimes get disoriented inside of Fulton Street station.)

So I walked down a short corridor filled with Long Islanders and their Long Island ways, followed a cryptic sign reading “C-E Downtown Street” up an unpromising-looking back stairway, and there I was standing in front of a subway turnstile as the downtown-bound E pulled in. What luck! Not only that, I’m at the front of the train, at the closest exit to my house.

I’m guessing I was on some mid-level north-south cross-corridor on the Eighth Avenue side, somewhere near the 31st Street corner. But God knows I’ll never find it again. Maybe next time, it won’t even be there anymore.

I’m curious about why the I-95 viaduct through downtown Bridgeport (seen here) is so high. It’s high enough that you could pass a pretty tall ship through the western channel, which is spanned by part of it — despite the fact that the river(s) doesn’t/don’t appear, from the map, to be navigable very far upstream. Note also that the railroad bridge, which is only a little ways upstream, isn’t nearly as tall, so it’s not like your pirate ship or whatever could get past that (although there may be a drawbridge on that one — it’s hard to tell from the satellite photo, and there’s certainly one on the Congress Street bridge just upstream from there — it’s open in the photo).

Aside from being the birthplace of (allegedly) the Frisbee, and of Subway, and a major brassiere manufacturing hub, I learned nothing much about the industrial history of Bridgeport from Wikipedia, except that there was a lot of it for a long time and now there isn’t so much. Nothing mentioned about a shipyard. So presumably once upon a time, maybe even 15 or 20 years ago, there was just a lot of supply and trade shipping going on along that west channel (which appears to be the mouth of the Pequonnock River, although it’s hard to be sure).

But there isn’t now. So what gives? That elevated highway must have cost a fortune, and doesn’t look that old, so there must have been a reason…

Update: It’s not old; the project didn’t even start until 1996. Here’s lots of detail from Construction Equipment Guide (yes, that’s a thing).