My ever-expanding to-read list piles up

I think it was Saul Bellow who said that we spend our time reading thinking about the next book to read. Or something like that, anyway. And so it is. I’m halfway through Alone in Berlin, which is excellent, and already I have a mental pile of books to plow through as soon as I’m finished with this. So allow me to make a few notes, with the intention of suggesting these books to you as well.

In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent – Ever wanted to read a whole chapter about Klingon-speakers?

Say Everything by Scott Rosenberg – The past, present and future of the most maddening and addictive pastime…blogging. Can blogs survive the Age of Twitter?

Virgins? What Virgins? by Ibn Warraq – I’ve been curious to read Warraq at some length without diving head first into hardcore Qur’anic exegesis. I still haven’t finished the Qur’an! So this is a collection of his shorter pieces for amateurs like me.

I’m always open to suggestions, so feel free to post them in the comments if you have any.

Kimchi blues

It’s early July and I’m sitting with Alex in a Korean restaurant in Rome’s Esquilino neighborhood. There is no air conditioning, and the place is empty except for a table in the back room occupied by what looks to be a Korean family having a special occasion meal. It is a very plain restaurant, neither clean nor dirty. Alex is a vegetarian, and I’m one tonight for the simple reason that I’m distrustful of the kitchen’s hygiene. Why are we seated there at all, one might be inclined to ask?

Alex and I both grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, and both of us have been flirting with Rome for much of our adult lives. Alex has dual American-German citizenship, and for a while taught at a university in Beyreuth, Germany. He made his way back to Rome eventually. I haven’t left since I moved here in 2003, which is beginning to feel like a long time.

I feel I speak for many Americans abroad when I add that we are hungry for what we call “ethnic food.” So hungry are we that we will sit down in a Korean joint about which we know nothing just to feel like we’re in New York for an hour or two. The fiction works, if you disregard the waiter’s choppy Italian. My eyes keep veering off during conversation to a Korean news station on the TV behind Alex.

Talk revolves around the usual topics: racism, conspiracy theories, literature (Alex is reading Roberto Bolaño) and of course food. I begin telling him about a woman named Layne Mosler who writes a blog called Taxi Gourmet. The idea is that she makes her way into various NYC taxis, asks the driver where the best place to eat is, and pays him — or her — to whisk her off to a great meal. I add that our restaurant is just the kind of place Layne would write about.

What is it about taxi drivers? Do they possess what might be called food wisdom? Mosler began Taxi Gourmet in Buenos Aires, moved to New York City, and last year embarked on a voting campaign among readers for her first European destination. Rome was on the list of possibilities, but Berlin won out and now she’s writing up her summer adventures in the German capital.

It has been suggested to me that I turn this column into a similar venture. Part of me has always wanted to be a food writer. It’s the same part of me that has always wanted to be an astronaut. It’s a vocation I find fascinating. I briefly toyed with the genre when I was in New York, penning a six-line poem — on commission — praising a midtown falafel chef named Muhammad Rahman. It ended up, fortuitously, in the New Yorker. But do I really need to eat that much? Do I really want to look like A.J. Liebling?

And that’s not even to consider funding such a project. Layne Mosler has recently become a cabbie herself, perhaps to earn spending money for her blog exploits. She has also raised money directly from her readers. They, in effect, are sending her to Berlin. Now she is working on a book based on her considerable experience.

In Joseph O’Neill’s recent novel “Netherland,” a minor character is a New York food writer whose job it is to eat in taxi driver-frequented holes in the wall. He is unimpressed. “‘Cab drivers?’ he said. ‘Have you ever heard one of these guys express an opinion that wasn’t complete bullshit?'”

For my part, I once jested in this column that I could cook as well or better than most of the restaurants I’ve eaten at in Rome. Some accused me of hubris, and I understand why. But of course I don’t normally eat at five-star restaurants. I eat at cheap to mid-priced places that should offer better fare than they often do. That was my gripe, and it still is.

Back to Alex and me and our Korean dinner. There isn’t much on the menu for vegetarians. The waiter appears perplexed when I ask for help. He points me to a bean curd soup, which looks benign enough. I hear my wife’s voice in my head, “Don’t order the anaconda!” We had a bad experience in a Chinese restaurant in Portugal on our honeymoon, and she subsequently struck all Far Eastern cuisine from the shrinking list of non-Italian foods she will consider eating. Bean curd it is.

We pick at the kimchi, the marinated cucumbers and shrimp omelet. Alex scarfs his Korean pizza. I raise up my spoon to find a mysterious clamshell in the midst of the tofu mess. It is still burning hot. We pour more Tsingtao into our glasses and discuss Hitler, blogging and the paranormal. When our meal is over we head for the metro, where the train doors close on us in mid-debate.

The next day I write Alex an email: “Next week I choose. Ever tried Ethiopian?”

Published in The American

Alone in Berlin

Last night I caved and bought a copy of Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin (in the US it’s called Every Man Dies Alone), which has been taunting me for a while now. A little research reveals that Hans Fallada was a basket case, a drunk and a morphine addict who did time in a Nazi asylum. He had also killed a friend in a duel (which brings to mind both Pushkin and Caravaggio). He wrote this book in 1947. It’s about everyday resistance to Nazism by ordinary Germans, a theme we hear far too little about.

Now that even Roberto Bolaño’s laundry lists have been published to wild acclaim, it looks like Hans Fallada is the new forgotten master on the block. Read him before your mother has to for her book club.

Some background

In the debate over Paul Berman’s Flight, it might be helpful to have the background on the debate, most of which goes back to 2007. Berman’s book is an extension of this debate between European intellectuals (this is a very European debate, by the way) in the English-language German website signandsight.

You can read all the major articles here, beginning with this fiery assertion by Pascal Bruckner:

“Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it is true, does elude current stereotypes of political correctness. As a Somali, she proclaims the superiority of Europe over Africa. As a woman, she is neither wife nor mother. As a Muslim, she openly denounces the backwardness of the Koran. So many flouted cliches make her a true rebel, unlike the sham insurgents our societies produce by the dozen.”

Ouch.

10 books which will poison your mind

That’s just a provocative way of introducing a few summer reading suggestions for the open-minded (but not so open that your brains fall out, we often hear these days). As I’m constantly reading books, and not just blogs, I feel it’s somehow my duty to share these with the outside world. What is more exciting than reading a good book? It’s not unlike falling in love, though you don’t have to fret over fidelity. Read as many as you like; they will never get jealous.

Here are ten books chosen, in no particular fashion, from books I have recently read or dipped into with more than a passing glance.

1. Occidentalism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit

2. 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists ed. Russell Blackford & Udo Schuklenk

3. Summer for the Gods by Edward J. Larson

4. Past Continuous by Yaakov Shabtai

5. Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History by David Aaronovitch

6. Exuberant Skepticism by Paul Kurtz

7. Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh

8. Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

9. Liberty in the Age of Terror by A.C. Grayling

10. The Flight of the Intellectuals by Paul Berman

Granted, there’s not much fiction on this list. I realize most people instinctively reach for a novel when summer hits. So I’ll add an appendix of some fiction I recommend, recently read or not, from among my perennial favorites.

1. American Pastoral by Philip Roth

2. The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

3. Barney’s Version by Mordechai Richler

4. Fanny Hill by John Cleland

5. Tevye the Dairyman by Sholem Aleichem

Happy reading!

No disagreement here: Garton Ash vs. Hirsi Ali

Another long, eight-part debate, this time between Timothy Garton Ash and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Garton Ash is a master of backpeddling and the “veiled compliment” (you’ll have to watch the whole thing for Hirsi Ali’s rejoinder and Garton Ash’s embarrassing comeback quip). He insists they agree 100% on everything – except what they disagree on. Also, around the end of part six – assuming anyone reading this is as interested as I am in watching the whole thing – Hirsi Ali says something I can’t make out, which is followed by a long bleep-out of Garton Ash’s reply. At the end of part eight, it is explained that this had nothing to do with the debate and was omitted at Garton Ash’s request. Does anyone know what was actually said? If so, please share this tidbit of information in the comments section below.

Tom Bissell on not blogging

Tom Bissell has a post about why he doesn’t blog at Powell’s Books Blog. Tom and I are the same age (both born in 1974), though he is way more successful in his writing career than I have been so far. But he’s not sitting on a magnum opus, I suspect, that will blow the field of modern poetry wide open once it’s published. So, optimistically, by the time we are fifty we should be in the same anthology of “hot middle-aged talent.”

I’m thirty-six, which plants me along a rather odd cultural seam. I’m old enough to remember a world without the Internet (I didn’t send an email until I was in college, and didn’t have a personal email account until I was 27), but young enough not to have known how important it was to pay close attention to the landscape as it changed around me, or how dearly it would affect me. In the late 1990s, when I began publishing, the only writers who had websites or blogs were either tech-savvy or unusually forward thinking. Because I grew up reading magazines and regarded the mere act of publication as promotional effort enough, I simply didn’t understand that the world as it was could be meaningfully altered — much less that it would be. By the time I woke up to this, I worried that a blog or website would seem like a late-to-the-party desperation move. (Yes, at one point in my life, I actually believed that someone other than my mom tracked my machinations that closely.)

My bigger worry, though, was that a blog or website would give me another thing with which to piddle away my time, which I already managed to do quite well by staring at walls. Plus, there was the whole mortifying possibility that I’d start a blog, work hard to fill it up with interesting material, and in effect be forced to attend a daily version of my own funeral in which no one came, no one commented, and no one cared.

(He’s right about that funeral stuff.) Nice work, Tom.

YIVO Encyclopedia online

I just want to mention that the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe is now completely accessible online. This is a landmark project. (Via Normblog.)

The rise of the radical agnostics

Ron Rosenbaum has been getting his share of verbal spanking for the past week from the secret atheist police. They are always out to silence the opposition, even if the opposition is pretty much on their side. Atheists, the new Radical Agnostics say, will settle for nothing less than absolute unbelief. Anything veering from the path of the Truth (there is no God) is suspect and therefore mincemeat for the Atheist Inquisition, especially if you’re guzzling Templeton gelt. It’s only a matter of time before they set up the gallows in your hometown.

What is this radical agnosticism Rosenbaum has proposed, anyway? It is the assertion that WE DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING. It paints science as the pretension to a TOE – or Theory of Everything – and atheists as the henchmen of its church. Agnostics, feeling left out of the NYT bestseller list in the past seven years, want their share now, too.  But how can you be radically undecided? This reminds me of one of those hollow political slogans you see at election time in Italy, Estremo Centro. Get it? Extreme Center. Enough fighting! We have the answer. We’re all just a bunch of ignoramuses. Scientists are no better than theologians. Life is a mystery. We’re all hypocrites. Even me. Even you.

What ever happened to the ancient, respectable art of making an argument and backing it up? Or is that just too fundamentalist for these troubled times?