The Foremost Good Fortune

The Foremost Good Fortune by Susan Conley

The foremost good fortune
Laowai
pole position

Anish Kapoor in China.

I am reading running away to home where author Jennifer Wilson with her family goes to her Croatian ancestral village to find her roots. I picked this 'The Foremost Good Fortune' book by Susan so I could compare.

Language is a big impediment in the new country in communicating yourself. Both families get care packages from grandparents back home for the displaced grandkids.



Puer tea

The author dines at local restaurants and involves herself in activities - sweater party, bag purchasing, that get her to interact more with the adopted country. From the people she meets everyday - a maid at house, a chaffeur, gym trainer, yoga teacher she learns much about the Chinese culture. As a family, she travels to different places and learns about the regions.

By making us see how her kids process her having cancer, she shows us a filigree of emotions around the cancer victims and family.

The author is not clueless in China as her husband has been there before and can speak the language. The children assimilate faster into the new culture with their father making it fun for them to learn the language. In distress when a child has to dissuade the maid from catching a pigeon outside their window, he says 'bu yao'.. not wanted.

The author compares her cancer to all situations she cant get a handle on.

Running Away to Home: Our Family's Journey to Croatia in Search of Who We Are, Where We Came From, and What Really Matters 

Rush hour

Tsingtao, this name stuck in my brain from Chris Tucker saying it in the movie. Popular as the movie was a decade ago, I couldnt recall the name while watching it at a restaurant.

French toast
Understand France
Bateau Mouche
Toulouse Lautrec
Boulette D'Avesnes

1996 Fall

Hayden's Ferry Review Tenth anniversary has Laura Lee washburn's poem 'The story of Snow white and Rose Red'.

..
The sisters had no use for other stories..

From Valencia street poem,

..The street is a ribbon
on a gift you've never opened...

Turandot in George Looney's Libretto for an opera about gold and lust. His 'Under the sad weight of the moon' is a labrynth with a horse, moon at the dead ends. I was reminded of 'red chair in a beige room' by Carol smith only for the similarity of repetitive treatment of fixed subjects.

A chapter 11 from Valerie Miner's Range of light novel
D and C

In 'Paper Boy' by Cathrine Ryan Hyde(author of Pay It forward), I guessed part of the story.

From Daughters to Mothers

latilla - poles used in ceiling
Epergne

Reading Winter 2010 issue of The Missouri review, I came across Brian Brodeur's poems and his How a poem happens blog. His poem 'On Suffering' is gut wrenching.
Nancy Cunard
Samuel Beckett's - Whoroscope

I had read about Slum tourism a while ago. So when an Adam Krause story began with Slum Tours, I was very taken to read it even though it was fiction.

Maria Hummel's poem and her work on the myth of changeling

Importance of fluid intake

Yesterday I read this Pregnancy journal from week 23. I was fascinated to learn of the amount of amniotic fluid in the uterus, the time in which it is replaced everyday after few weeks, the 55 pound pressure that is involved during contractions. And who thunk that breastfeeding is a ~500calorie effort.
I should read the first part and know more stuff.

The book of (Even more) Awesome
Authors website

Worst sleep ever?
when I was trying to increase my pile of experiences, I spent the night at a company. I wasnt scared. Its tough sleeping on a desk when there are mosquitoes.
Once my roomate locked me out by latching from inside. I had to spend the night at computing center and wait for it to be 6 in the moring when it was ok to loiter.

One to many

Has your expression ever been misunderstood? If you are like Keats muse, then a blush or sigh of yours has a very little chance of being understood.

Anthologized in She walks in beauty

Book list

Today I wanted to get rid of a post-it which had names of 3 books. You keep compiling these books that you like from reviews and lose track of them. I had the first title wrong. I wrote down the article title instead of the book.
Fire season : Field notes from a wilderness outlook. I wanted to read this book to know more about Gila.
Far from shore - birdwatching
Man with a Pan

I realised that I read Man with a Pan.

The Life of a Deli

My Korean Deli

I remember this book from a review either from NPR or NYTimes. In the beginning while the search is on for a deli, I had doubts if I would finish the book.But once he donned the 'deli owner' role, I was hooked to the book.

It must have been from where he starts to include his WASP history. Another moment was when a peek ino the refrigerator of the otherwise incommercible prospective store changed his mind.

The chapters traverse his dual lives of an editor at Paris Review and a deli owner maintaining a continuity. What it takes to keep a tobacco license, what happens to a deli in the times of power cut? These are the things we learn of and all the mayhem that surrounds these situations.

A ladysfinger

starts from a
yellow flower
with a green cloche

Imaginary Logic

Imaginary logic

The poet being a professor, it not a surprisr that one kind of subjects - fiction, criticism, rhetoric, poetry workshop class in 'The Ante' make a frequent appearance.

..On each pencil the teeth of every child
who ever held it had gnawed deep tracks...in 'The Elementary Principles of Rhetoric'

The poet is at his best with the endings like

..they dont get it - the kind of people
who epxect real smoke from a toy tractor.. in 'Feelings, by ashley Higgins'

'Winning' is a childhood sack race poem.

'The Previous Tenants' poem with its detective angle reminded me of Ted Kooser's 'Abandoned farmhouse'.

Freshet
Infralapsarian

The apple trees at Olema
Olema

I have learnt in geography class, that we cannot use sand dunes in a desert for locating ourselves. In 'Variations on a passage in Edward Abbey', Hass begins

A dune begins with an obstacle.
.... Its thus a dune is formed
Now I know the scientific how-to followed by the dunes and the inevitable movement to another location preventing them from serving as landmarks.

Another how-to, what a body can expect when submitted to the medical examiner is followed up with a reality of the relegated funeral business.

The eucalyptus casts a feathered shadow
in 'Concerning the afterlife, the Indians of central California had only the dimmest notions'.

sokkaram by a lawyer

In songs to survive the summer, the poet calls the dog days, unvaried by accident and in Not going to New York: A letter, the letter rhymes by accident.
Paschal lamb poem
Tall windows poem
duck blind poem with an ending in motion
A story about the body poem
Ceanothus
Puerto Escondido
Cuernavaca
Kathe Kollwitz
Ponge
Athabascan
Mimulus

French food and literature

Balzac's Omelette
Omelette as a work of art reminds me of this Omelette woman painting. Looking at the old lady seated and cooking, it also reminds me of my grandmother and her kitchen. In their days, the stove occupied very little space. In a generation, the cooking space has changed so much. Imagine how different the culinary scene would have been in the times of Balzac. We are talking about 1800s. Balzac was a French Novelist and a playwright.
the author takes us two centuries into the past into the streets of Paris as well as into the books of Balzac, to take a look at the elite parties as well as meagre broth households. She takes us to a time when cheese was poor man's food and Paris saw the rise of restaurants. Lunch wasnt always an important meal(pg 58).Having Russian service from 'blood, Bones and Butter' fresh in my mind, it was insightful to contrast the French service. the author mentions that the art of decorating flowers on dining tables came from Russia.This is the strongest part of the book where the readers are grabbed in easily.
The author shows with all the examples of sketches of characters in Balzac's books, how Balzac was the first to use food in his novels as a window to a character, their class in society. The author also contrasts Balzac's style with writers like Zola, Proust and others to show how the rest treated food differently in their books. The first chapter is about Balzac's relation with food. He went great lengths to find the food he had his mind upon. While most chapters held me in curiosity, 'The misers and the food worshippers' read like a boring compilation of characters and their relationship with food.
There are really some lines about how to make 'Balzac's omelette'.
The last but one line about Proust on 'a fish whose body with its numberless vertebrae, its blue and pink veins, had been constructed by nature, but according to an architectural plan, like a polychrome cathedral of the deep' is a look at how different the world seems to a person who sees with a sense of hunger.



While Adam could have 15 dozen oysters, Balzac too could have over 100 oysters and more after finishig a novel, working at it day and night.
Balzac used restaurants to move his plots forward(pg 66).
French vs Russian service

Laclos
Pantagruelism
Olivet Cheeses
Airport novels
brace of partridge
Comice Pears
embonpoint
Craquelin
Vouvray
regrttiers - traders who buy leftovers.
Trotter
white pudding
Black pudding
Lucien Rubempre
Oysters from Ostend
totted up -sum up
Hundred days
pate from Strasbourg
hams from Mayence

Gray patridge
Blanquette
Fricandeau
a la Pluche
a la Barigoule
a la Robert
Brandade
Jabot
cutlets a la Soubise
Chicken a la Marengo
Machicolation
Poussin's landscape on Sevres ware
collation -light meal permitted on fast days
balzac never saw a great chef at work, there is a notable absence of great culinary artists in his novels(pg 87).
fashion for decorating tables with flowers came from Russia(pg 89).
serviette - napkin

au sucre
Marron glaces
orgeat
Jugged hare
sea pie
specious - having a false look of truth
Grisette

Mother sauce - I heard of it first from Robert Irvine on Restaurant Impossible
making of soy sauce
Foods named after people
Lake Leman
Garret room
Peignoir
Collops