Chinese farmer Hao Xianzhang has perfected the process of growing pears inside Buddha shaped plastic molds. They are sold at 50 yuan (about $7.32 USD) in the village of Hexia, China and are thought to bring good luck.

Here’s how it’s done. Info here.

Someone should try these out with different kinds of mold and different kinds of fruit. Speaking of food, my birthday is coming up and I am going to Duck and Bunny with a bunch of my friends. Pictures to follow… hopefully. If they won’t be up here, they will be up on my Foodspotting account.

Dear Sharon,

I feel as though most things I’m reading this semester is about the death of the American dream, or some loss of identity and struggle to find identity in some way. Last week we read Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of essays, many of which snarkily dealt with a kind of implosion of the American dream. (I didn’t write a letter because of the concerto competition.) Then there was Momaday’s House of Dawn, which was also about Abel’s struggle to make sense of himself and his life (in the most general of terms). Even Lydia Davis, who has a mix of stuff in her short stories, presents a kind of immobility and paralysis – the desire to do something but the inability to do so – in many of her characters.

This week, we read the first section American Pastoral by Philip Roth: “Paradise Remembered.” It’s a kind of retelling of that same implosion of the American dream. One guy, Seymour “Swede” Levov, has got it made for him. He was athletic, handsome, married Miss New Jersey, had a daughter and a nice house and a nice business, but then everything falls apart when his teenaged daughter, caught up in the politics of the Vietnam War, blows up a bank and murders a bystander. I had trouble getting into it for some reason, which made me feel bad because a lot of other people seemed to like it. Even more frustrating to me was the fact that I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why I couldn’t get into it.

I think part of it is the narrator. The novel is narrated by a fictional novelist named Nathan Zuckerman. To him, Swede Levov is the symbol of the American pastoral – the guy whose life is so absolutely perfect that he’s just got to wonder whether there is something underneath. I felt as though in trying to figure out where something went wrong in the Swede’s life, he’s also trying to figure out what went wrong with the American paradise. At one point, the Swede approaches him about writing a biography about his father’s life. Zuckerman meets with him in the hopes of digging below the surface, but soon finds out that “all that rose to the surface was more surface.”

Well, Zuckerman’s attempts to get below the “surface” frustrated and annoyed me. He comes up with elaborate imagining about the Swede’s life, and where things might have gone wrong. He takes something as “small” as the Swede’s daughter’s stutter and attempts to make it one of the main reasons why things fell apart. These little scenes of the Swede’s family life are imagined with such a degree of detail that one sometimes forgets that these are all happening inside Zuckerman’s head. Even the very way the paragraphs are constructed reflects this search. It’s as though he feels that underneath all the blandness there needs to be something wild and crazy to balance things out. Some of these statements were very definitive and dramatic. For instance, “Stoically he suppresses his horror. He learns to live behind a mask. A lifetime experiment in endurance. A performance over a ruin. Swede Levov lives a double life.”

Reading this, I was struck by the grandiosity of these short sentences. At times these and other passages felt so dramatic as to be exaggerated. As it progresses, it gets worse, from mere suppression to wearing the mask to the extent of a lifetime’s endurance to the putting up a play over utter brokenness. I was struck by the power of these words while contrasting these to the blankness that is the Swede’s personality, and part of me wondered why he was going to the lengths to find the right words to emphasize the drama of the situation.

I also wondered for what reason he was so interested in this man’s life, and why he was taking the time to break apart everything, coming to possible inaccurate conclusions. Part of me wondered whether he was doing it because he was attracted by the sensationalism of the Swede’s life, or because the Swede was such a symbol for him that so long that the fact that his life broke apart in such a dramatic way signified something wrong with the world in a larger sense. In short, why did it matter so much whether he could not “decide if that blankness of his was like snow covering something or snow covering nothing”? But then I don’t think it’s merely a personal thing for Zuckerman. The fact that Zuckerman is attempting to illuminate it for us through his own ruminations reveals that he believes that it has some sort of national import.

Maybe part of it was my own current frustration at trying to get at the meaning of books and words and poems and ledger lines to come to a meaning that may or may not be true and which at times seems mostly wrong. It’ll pass. I think.

Here are my favorites:

Pyke:

Dragonstone (probably my favorite):

My favorite ones are the ocean ones, basically. These scenes are beautiful even if one can’t tell the association with Game of Thrones. I wouldn’t mind Dragonstone on my wall.

See the rest here!

From “Burnt Norton”:

… Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

Here is the frustration of a man who sees words under a great “burden” in the attempt to articulate something.

In this section from “East Coker”, the poet seems to be writing, or “musing out loud” about the preceding passage, much as someone would look at something they’d done and judge the measure of it.

That was a way of putting it–not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.

“I suppose that was not very good.” He leaves it where it is. And again from the same poem:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years–
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

“And how should I begin?”

It had, after all, been twenty years since the Waste Land. The difference in theme between that poem’s quest to this reflects Eliot’s own spiritual journey, from the Waste Land‘s struggle to articulate the absence of moral or spiritual foundation in the world, to the Four Quartet‘s struggle to articulate a quest’s discovery. Each poem is a different “attempt” or “beginning” at using words to express the un-expressable, a “raid on the inarticulate.” Maybe the struggle to begin evokes (maybe unintentionally) “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 30 years prior, with Prufrock’s inability to articulate his feelings. “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” This act of beginning is tantamount to the impossible, rather like biting off the overwhelming question with a smile, or squeezing the universe into a ball. It can’t be done. However, years later, Eliot has come to the realization that he can make a beginning, and “in my beginning is my end.”

And finally, from “Little Gidding”, Eliot writes as someone who sees that though words may be inadequate, they still have a usefulness. For the poet there is a certain beauty in the struggle to construct, much like a dance.

… And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.

How cool is that? It’s only the product of photoshop, but it looks impressive.

I’d be a little afraid of falling, though.

1. Study.
2. Write.
3. Read.
4. Eat.
5. Travel.
6. Be less outwardly snarky to people I don’t like.

1, 2, 3, and 4 are inevitable (except for unforeseen circumstances). 5 is a bit hazy at this point. I’m still hopeful.

6 will be a bit difficult.

“Little Gidding”

A new vending machine has been released which can print any book within minutes.

The Espresso Book Machine has access to 500,000 different books – the same as 23.6 miles of shelf space – and can even churn out a fresh copy of Crime and Punishment in just nine minutes.

Pages are printed at a rate of over 100 per minute and are then pressed, glued and cut to produce a pristine book.

Users simply pick the book they would like on a screen and wait for it to be printed … it certainly is a novel way of getting a new book.

It seems too easy to be true! Apparently it IS real, though. It’s a machine that takes a PDF file of a book and churns out the copy, all nice and bound, within minutes. Part of me seems like it’s a strange thing to do, considering worries that physical books might be on their way out in favor of E-readers and other such things. Even out-of-print books can be obtained quickly, providing one has the digital file (which makes me hope that if this machine endures, digital files will be more readily accessible). At the New York Public Library, people have been able to get free copies of books which are no longer covered by copyright, which makes me wonder that they’re not charging money for the cost of paper or ink. What it might mean is that books may be more readily accessible, considering that one no longer has to pay for shipping or anything of the sort.

I have a secret dream of being a food reviewer. The past few days, I’ve been obsessed with a food photography/review website called Foodspotter. Basically, people can make profiles, take pictures of the food they eat at various restaurants, and upload them to the site. One can then write what type of food it is (seafood ramen), the restaurant at which they ate it (including address), and the category of food it belongs to (noodles, Japanese food, etc). Under that, the photographer can leave comments about their impressions. Was the seafood ramen too salty? Was it undercooked or over-dry? A lot of people opt not to do that, but a lot do. It’s a cool way for people to find good eats, and an even cooler way to celebrate food.

It wasn’t hard for me to set up a profile and upload halfway-decent pictures, as my friends and I have a list of must-eat restaurants around Rhode Island and Massachusetts that we are plowing through one by one throughout the school year. I had amassed a collection of pictures from reputable restaurants around Boston and Providence. I’d also like to think that through eating out I sort of cultivated my taste buds a little more for subtleties — less greasy, less salty, less sweet.

(Here’s my profile. Follow me!)

In addition, I have a food tumblr, wherein I simply reblog pictures of all kinds of food. Sadly, most of it isn’t my own photography, but most of the photography there is very nice, and it’s as much a homage to food photographers as it is to good food. Sometimes I reblog recipes, or restaurant recommendations, but not so much.

I feel as my current food goals all involve asian food. I seem to be craving a lot of asian food lately.

Things to do:

• Find the best gyoza
• Find the best chinese food near Providence
• Eat lots of scallion pancakes/egg rolls
• Return to Taiwan and eat lots of beef noodle soup/random chinese food
• Find egg gummies and BUY THEM
• Go to that restaurant in Taiwan which serves food in little dishes that look like toilet bowls

Speaking of food, I went to Harvard Square today. Next time I go there, I might try the Shabu-Ya restaurant that was right next to the Wagamama’s, though on Google it seems to have only 3.5 stars. There’s also a cupcake shop which has a very good reputation. And also a local frozen yogurt place called Berryline which has lots of good reviews. Clearly I need to visit this place in the summer.

II. Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier

In a brown field stood a tree
And the tree was crookt and dry.
In a black sky, from a green cloud
Natural forces shriek’d aloud,
Screamed, rattled, muttered endlessly.
Little dog was safe and warm
Under a cretonne eiderdown,
Yet the field was cracked and brown
And the tree was cramped and dry.
Pollicle dogs and cats all must
Jellicle catts and dogs all must
Like undertakers, come to dust.
Here a little dog I pause
Heaving up my prior paws,
Pause, and sleep endlessly.

The word choice is superb. “Pollicle” and “jellicle”? The use of such “ridiculous” language belies the troubling images of the “crookt” tree and the black sky.

Or what about Eliot’s “porpentine” (prickly?) cat and his “wopsical” hat as he pokes fun at himself?

V. Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With a bobtail cur
In a coat of fur
And a porpentine cat
And a wopsical hat:
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
(Whether his mouth be open or shut).

Read the rest here.