I was able to hang out with Patricia, Arnold, and Phoebe at their place in Irvine and enjoyed eating barbecue together in the SoCal sun.  Phoebe just gets more animated and verbal each time I see her.  They were kind enough to take me to the Pinkberry at Fashion Island, enabling my first Pinkberry experience.  It did not disappoint; I had an original with lychee--the original yogurt is pretty comparable to Red Mango's.  California has a huge edge on Chicago in terms of getting the novel Asian stuff; we'd be lucky to get a Pinkberry within the next year.  Leaving to go back to the Windy City today, and I'm a bit wistful.  I'll miss everyone.   

Pinkberry

Did y'all see the Beijing opening ceremony and did it kick ass or what?  Zhang Yimou did an amazing job directing the program--I'm a believer. 

Books I've read recently:

Unaccustomed Earth

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri.  Her third book is a collection of longish short stories with a three-story cycle called "Hema and Kaushik" at the end.  I think her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, is still her best work.  I liked a couple of the stories a lot.  Lahiri has a Ph.D. in English Renaissance literature and hence slaved many years for her doctorate like myself, and I especially appreciate her depiction of English grad students, such as the socially awkward male student in one of the stories who studies all the time and has no social life but somehow becomes embroiled in his roommate's complicated romantic life.  There's another poignant story about two Indian-American siblings and the complexity of the sister's relationship with her alcoholic brother.  Hema in "Hema and Kaushik" is an academic, and a little like the character of Moushoumi in The Namesake who I was intrigued by, but the ending of the cycle is just too melodramatic and coincidental for me.  Still--elegant, classic and classy prose from Lahiri here.

The Revolt of the Cockroach People

Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People by Oscar Zeta Acosta.  Part of my reading up on Latino/a literature this summer...  Sheer nuttiness.  Autobiography is that, Acosta's autobiography, and is his first book, filled with the manic ramblings of a 30-something Chicano lawyer via night school degree who works in the slums of Oakland but then takes off from his job and life and goes on a very 1960s On the Road Beat-ish road trip in an attempt to "find himself."  We get loosely associated stories about his past and upbringing in Riverbank (not Riverside) CA.  Too rambling of a book for me to enjoy very much, but it does help give a background to the sequel of Revolt, which, for all Autobiography's rambling and slowness, moves quickly with dramatic excitement and events after his road trip, when he decides to go to East LA and join the Chicano movement in the late 1960s.  I see the problems with cultural nationalism, but man, he was in the thick of law cases defending Chicano militants, the Garfield High school walkouts, sharing a bill and hanging with Angela Davis although getting booed by white hippie UCLA students... Sheer nuttiness, in a good way.  Oh yeah, although Acosta's book may not be that widely read these days (there was only 1 copy in the entire suburban Chicago library system), he is perhaps better known as Dr. Gonzo, the "300 pound Samoan lawyer" in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Benicio del Toro plays him in the movie version with Johnny Depp).  Thompson wrote the Intros for the books.   

We Should Never Meet: Stories

We Should Never Meet by Aimee Phan.  Phan grew up in Little Saigon in Orange County, just up the road from where I grew up.  Her novel alternates between Vietnam and Orange County, dealing with Operation Babylift, which brought orphans from Vietnam to the US after the US pulled out of Vietnam, many of whom were biracial, the children of white and black US soldiers and Vietnamese women.  I enjoyed most her depictions of Little Saigon and Orange County--the disillusioned young Vietnamese American men and women and images of life in the ubiquitous OC box-like 1960s apartment complexes. 

 And finally, one the best books I've read this summer. . .

A Long Stay in a Distant Land (Audiofy Digital Audiobook Chips)

A Long Stay in a Distant Land by Chieh Chieng.  Chieng received his MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine, and I recognize his face from the book jacket, but I didn't know him when I was at Irvine.  The novel is set in Orange County also, and again, I loved his representations of the ennui, absurdity, and pleasure of living there.  He writes with a deadpan, witty tone--a reviewer compared the book to a Jim Jarmusch movie--and I was laughing out loud throughout, which is definitely my idea of a good time.  The book is about several generations of the Lum family, many of whom died off in bizarre and premature ways.  The protagonist, Louis Lum, lives in fear of what promises to be a strange and sudden death, but meanwhile has to deal with his father insisting he educate himself about the golden age of rap music, playing him Public Enemy and Sugarhill Gang, and a grandmother who sings the praises of an uncle who invented Benadryl.  Good times.     

Wilson, a neighbor, and I did some gardening in the flower box in front of our condo building.  We trimmed back the hearty lavender/white hosta plants and planted some yellow daylilies and red and yellow stonecrop (a low flowering plant).  It's really not a lot of gardening, but it's the most I've ever done; I've never planted flowers before.  So I'll be eagerly waiting to see if the plants really grow and bloom.  Since we're doing it for the whole condo building and not just for ourselves, I'm a little more nervous than if it were just my own garden to mess up.  Well, it's a fun thing to do in late summer to watch the garden grow.  Here are some pics of what we planted below from the web; hope our plants will look like this soon!

Daylily single

Stonecrop red

Sedum_kamtschaticum_var._ellacombianum_1

So, since going to fancy fro-yo places such as Red Mango, Starfruit, and Berry Chill take up considerable time (far away) and money, we've discovered you can buy nonfat, with less sugar, Greek Yogurt at the supermarket and Whole Foods.  Greek yogurt has many active live cultures, is thick and creamy, and comes in lovely flavors like honey and fig.  One good thing about the "authentic" fro-yo craze is that it encourages eating less sugar, and Greek yogurt is less sweet than the typical Yoplait but has plenty of flavor. 

P.S.:  We tried Berry Chill in River North recently.  The plain flavor is about as good as that of Red Mango, creamy, smooth, and tasty.  The store has the ultra-modern atmosphere like RM and Pinkberry, and the company is going to open up a couple more stores downtown soon.  Sigh, Starfruit is run by a health food company that makes kefir and I like their ethos, but the yogurt is just too icy for me; it's really not as satisfying for a dessert as RM or Berry Chill. 

Oikos-16oz

Wilson and I met up with our friend and Wilson's colleague Fannie at the Chinatown Summer Fair on Sunday.  It was hot and humid in the 90s, but we walked around for a while looking at the food stands; rice hats, parasols, and knockoff handbags for sale; and a martial arts demonstration and Ronald McDonald (saying "nihao"), the "grand marshal" of the parade that was sponsored by McDonald's.  We escaped the heat by going to Lao Szechuan for lunch.  We had some terrific potstickers with homemade doughy, chewy skins, and we introduced Fannie to Tony's special 3-chili chicken's lightly fried, sweet, spicy goodness, which Fannie liked a lot.  Thanks to the nice staff not bothering us, we sat there for a good couple of hours, talking about global studies, Somalian writers, and the Black Arts movement. 

On a warm, humid Chicago evening, Wilson and I took a walk around Logan Square to see the neighborhood, and then headed up Kedzie to Lawrence, where a strip of middle eastern restaurants was rumored to be.  We ate dinner at Al-Khaymeih, a Lebanese restaurant that has its own bakery and grocery store next to it that provides the fresh pita bread that was brought to our table.  We had the Moutabal appetizer, which is kind of like a salsa with eggplant.  I was a bit disappointed, as I was looking for a simmered, minced eggplant/onion dish I still have yet to eat in Chicago (like the one at Orchid in Costa Mesa).  I had a recommended fish dish and Wilson had a juicy chicken kabab with a wonderful yogurt sauce with garlic and lemon.  There are quite a few middle eastern restaurants on that strip, dessert shops too with dozens of kinds of baklava and cookies.  Carthage Cafe is up on Foster and Kedzie; there are numerous hookah shops in the area also.  The next week we had to go back and try another restaurant, this one a Lebanese one called Semiramis.  We rate it lower than Al-Khaymeih.  The atmosphere and decor were somewhat more stylish, but the menu was a lot more basic, with only your typical hummus, falafel, kabab, and kefta dishes; Al-Khaymeih had a lot more variety and also many seafood dishes.  Next up, Noor a Kabab. 

I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

Stephanie Kuehnert

I just finished reading Stephanie Kuehnert's new novel, I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone.  I blogged the book earlier:  Kuehnert lives in the same town as I do, Forest Park, and traces character Emily Black's love of punk rock and rock n' roll and her years growing up in the small town of Carlisle, WI, just north of the Illinois border, to her escape from the corn fields and move to the big city of Chicago and eventually rock n' roll fame as the leader of the band, She Laughs.  Her coming of age story alternates with another parallel and divergent journey that also revolves around music:  Emily's mother left her and her father when she was 3 to "follow punk rock," but in reality criss-crosses the US, moving from city to city, finding flashes of great music here and there but more frequently becoming mired in loneliness, drugs, and dead-end jobs.  Kuehnert catches herself before perpetuating rock n' roll cliches, and the novel shines in characterizing the distance between idealized rock n' roll fantasies and reality, painful nostalgia and the need to move forward.  Forest Park is one of many settings in the novel, as are the music scenes of Chicago and Madison in the Midwest, Olympia, Portland, and Seattle in the Pacific Northwest; and the clubs Jabberjaw, Roxy, and Whisky in LA.  A particularly poignant scene depicts Emily flying over Carlisle and wistfully calling it home from a blurred distance although unsure if it's really below her--a scene that beautifully captures the longing for but difficulties of going "home."  Kuehnert will continue to probe the strangely familiar entity of suburbia in her next novel, slated to be published next summer, Ballads of Suburbia, set in neighboring Oak Park, where she grew up.   

Last night we had dinner in Naperville with our friend Zubair, and afterwards we went to Red Mango.  Aaah, that deliciously creamy, 90 calorie, no fat original-flavored yogurt with mango and pineapple toppings was perfection eating it standing outside on a humid July evening.  One man standing by the counter admiring the toppings with us told us he had already been to the recently opened store four times.  Ummmm, almost worth moving to Naperville for! 

I came across a blog called The Midwest Frozen Yogurt Blog:  a listing of sour frozen yogurt purveryors in the landlocked states.  She has pretty thorough reviews and listings of stores that carry what I've variously heard called sour or tart frozen yogurt from Minnesota to Chicago to Indianapolis (with a guest visit to NYC).  Although the tart frozen yogurt craze seemed to have happened in California a couple of years ago, we're finally getting it in the Midwest.  My theory is that new ideas from around the globe congregate on the coasts of the US as they are the point of entry for many immigrants, who bring their languages, music, TV shows, and, of course, frozen yogurt!

Tonight Wilson and I took a break from "writing" and went to try Starfruit in Wicker Park, Chicago's local kefir answer to Pinkberry and Red Mango.  The store only had the Strawberry Banana flavor, which I had with kiwi and Wilson with blueberries.  I have the usual complaints that it's tart and icy, and I think Red Mango's original flavor is better.  There are some nice stores and restaurants on this stretch of Division and Damen that I'd like to check out sometime.

Starfruit 003

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