I’ve just finished reading Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters. A Parsi friend from college had suggested it in an email exchange a while back, and I’d immediately ordered it and started reading it. She said that I had “to read it with [my] knowledge of parsi eccentricities and oddities etc. [I would] love it. [It] also talks about india and hindu fanaticism with the shiv sena ruling bombay etc.” It is an amazing book. It conjures up a Bombay which the reader can reach out and touch or simply sit back and observe. Though most of the narrative covers a short period set in the 1990s, the story ranges over three generations of a Parsi family. The eternal cycle of youthful disparaging of religious strictures and the breaking of tabus before inevitable return to a rigid piety in their old age crosses cultures. One of my favorite parts is when Vikram Kapur, the owner of the Bombay Sporting Goods (or Gods after a neon oh blows out), a displaced Hindu from the Punjab, dresses up as Santa Claus during December. He sends one of his employees, a Muslim, out on the street to bring in children to meet Santa and get a sweet. (Meanwhile, a couple of Shivsainiks arrive to warn him to change the Bombay in his store’s name to Mumbai.) It kept reminding me of a clock in my friend Krishnan’s oldest brother’s flat, where I stayed in Srirangam (near Tiruchirappalli), that played an out-of-tune Santa Claus Is Coming To Town every hour on the hour. That and the humidity and the near-by temple somehow sums up what India means to me. Oh, and Sanskrit, too.
What a busy week. On Thursday, I finally caught up with my friend Chris Golde who’s been back in the Bay Area now from the University of Wisconsin Madison, for more than a year and working at the Carnegie Foundation. We met up in Mountain View for dinner at Café Yulong, an excellent Chinese restaurant, though we did bump into each other at Book Buyers first, since we both showed up terminally unhiply early. Upon entering the restaurant, Chris was greated like a long lost relative by owner Miya Pei, and two complementary glasses of wine arrived shortly after the Tsingtaos we ordered. We had some delicious Shanghai steamed dumplings, some great housemade noodles, and a nice prawn dish. The conversation swerved all over the place, and we took turns expounding so the other could scarf. An interesting and tasty dessert arrived without our ordering it, another gift from the Pei family. It was a kind of pancake made of sticky rice and apples in a sweetish syrup. We could just barely finish it, and when conversation ground to a halt, we paid and left.
Well, the blogging lacks or lags. It’s been a busy week or so since the last entries. Met up with two cyberpals, one Kalleh from the Wordcraft discussion board and the other fellow blogger MrBaliHai from the Eye of the Goof. Kalleh was in San Francisco for a conference, and we spent a pleasant Sunday at the SFMOMA enjoying art, trying a couple of cask-conditioned ales at two pubs out in the Haight (Toronado and Magnolia Pub & Brewery), and eating dinner at a grand Catalan Bistro, B44, in the Euro-chic Belden Place (where two other fabulous restaurants, Cafe Bastille and Tiramisu, co-exist). MrBaliHai was in the Bay Area teaching an IT class down in Mountain View near where I’m currently finishing up a contract (in Menlo Park), and yesterday evening we headed on over to La Bodeguita del Medio in Palo Alto for some mojitos and Cuban food.
Meanwhile, Melville’s Le Cercle rouge languishes at home next to the DVD player awaiting its consumption.
Years ago when we first bought our house, we decided to convert an odd little workroom off of the garage and the laundry room into a wine cellar. We’d sheetrocked it and put some nice tiles down on the floor, but at some point back when the economy was going strong and there wasn’t a batch of unbaked hooligans in charge of the country, work on the wine cellar slowed and it quickly accumulated a bunch of boxed odds and ends. Well, we’ve decided to clean it out and put in the wine racks and finish installing the lights, &c. So, with the temperature crossing on over into the hundreds, I started to move boxes of books out. I found a bunch of LPs and some 5.25 inch diskettes, along with some ancient Broderbund software. No black widow spiders, yet.
Last night we watched a documentary called Derrida. It was an enjoyable 90 minutes, but revealed precious little about the philosophy or the man behind it. Now I know that his wife calls him Jackie, and that he butters a crumpet quite methodically. His brother, René, has a funny moment staring into the camera and musing on just where does his brother come up with all that thinking he puts in his books. The director, Amy Ziering Kofman, displays one of the worst American accents that I’ve heard since high school French class when asking her purposefully banal questions. I liked her voiced over excerpts from his texts and think the film would have worked without the questions. At one point, it does promise to cross over into the surreal when a British interviewer asks Derrida about Seinfeld. He stares at her unblinkingly. “Deconstruction, as I understand it, does not produce any sitcoms,” he says. "Do your homework and read.” Later in his library cum study, the film crew comes across some Ann Rice paperbacks. “Somebody gave them to me when I was researching vampirism. No, I've never read them.” As the camera pans away from him putting the books back up on the shelf, the audience sees some toys, Pampers disposable diapers, and a little temporary bed. Derrida’s granddaughter has been to visit.
Not much to report these days. Same old cycle of work-home-rinse-repeat. Been watching more DVDs thanks to Netflix. So far we’re watching our money’s worth, but we still stop in to the mom & pop video store nearby for spur of the moment, just-released Hollywood trash. Finally caught the first two seasons of Black Adder. Liked this character better than Mr Bean. Saw von Trier’s Dogville and enjoyed it in an annoyed sort of way. I think that Kafka did a better job of describing an America he never visited. Not sure what to make of von Trier’s well-publicized fear of flying. And he seems to be off his Dogme 95 oath of purity. Not that he did much besides sign the manifesto. These publicity stunts, cf. Ebert-Gallo hissing-spitting match at Cannes, are beginning to exhaust me. (Though, they did kiss and make nice.)