Books Catch-up: After the Quake, An Unquiet Mind, The Yellow Wallpaper, All the Pretty Horses

After the Quakeby Haruki Murakami Rating: four out of five stars

Prior to this book, I’d only ever read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle –which is, as I've mentioned before, a strange, strange book that mixes mystery, relationships, WWII, mysticism … basically the kitchen sink and a bunch of cats. So, I knew that there is something to love about Murakami. His short stories are a treat, because for the most part, they keep to one story line and allow you to appreciate his sparse writing style. A master story-teller, Murakami is inventive. I particularly enjoyed “Landscape with Flat Iron” followed by “Honey Pie” and “All God’s Children Can Dance.”

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An Unquiet  Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison Rating: three out of five stars

An Unquiet Mind is an inside look at manic depressive disorder – how difficult it is, even for a doctor  to recognize in herself, acknowledge, treat, and live with it. I found the book a lot less sensational than I anticipated, and for this I am grateful. Not only is it a brave work of someone going through something I cannot quite understand, but it also provides an historical perspective of the illness and its treatments. This book is brave on both a personal and professional level, as Jamison risked her professional career to be so honest about an illness that comes with so much stigma and misunderstanding.

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Rating: three out of five stars

This is a re-read, of course, and a reliable one. These stories are simple but still enjoyable. It’s nice to read a short story with a straight-forward (for the most part) moral and lesson. More current short stories are often so complicated that, as a reader, I cannot remember what took place or what point the author was trying to make, just a few weeks after I close the book covers. But these stories stick with me. Yes, they are dated, but still thoughtful.

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All the Pretty Horses (Border Trilogy, Vol 1) by Cormac McCarthy Rating: four out of five stars

This book did it for me. McCarthy is a master. He uses spare language – he doesn’t spoon feed readers the story. Rather, the reader is expected to make connections, to make themselves comfortable with the fact that they don’t know all the information upfront and that they will learn more by...wait for it...reading. All the Pretty Horses has everything I want in a book: love, courage, heartbreak, redemption, injustice, and sentences that can stand alone as poems – oh yes, and horses. I’ve ordered the other two books of this border trilogy.

Couscous and Lentils of the Israeli and French Variety

The latest cooking endeavor was adapted from this MooseWood cookbook, which is slowly becoming my go-to for vegetarian recipes.

Couscous and Lentils Salad

Add ½ cup of French lentils to water with ½ teaspoon of salt.  Bring to a boil then simmer for about 20 minutes (until soft.) Drain and set aside.

It’s important to use these little green guys because they are firmer than other lentil varieties, although I don’t think they carry as much taste.

Bring about 8 cups of water to a boil then add 1½ cups of Israeli couscous, a cinnamon stick, and a teaspoon of salt.  Cook in the rapidly boiling water for about 10 minutes to al dente.  Drain, rinse with cold water a few times, remove the cinnamon stick. 

This gets your home smelling lovely.

In a serving bowl, toss the couscous and lentils with:

• 2 tablespoons of olive oil
• 2 teaspoons of freshly grated lemon peel
• Juice from 1½ lemons
• ½ cup of diced red bell peppers
• ¼ cup of diced pitted dates
• 3 tablespoons of minced fresh mint

Add a good amount of black pepper and salt to taste.  Cover and set aside in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes to allow the flavors to settle and deepen.  Top with toasted pine nuts and serve.

The toasted pine nuts are KEY.  Make sure to take this last step.

The Play's the Thing

I don’t go to many plays.  I’ve mentioned my wish that this weren’t so, along with my concern that it is a dying art form, particularly in my fair city.  That was a tad sensationalist.  So, it was with great anticipation that I went to see Company One’s Boston theater premier of Haruki Murakami’s short story collection After the Quake – as adapted by Frank Galati. Prior to this week, I’d only ever read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle – a strange, strange book that mixes mystery, relationships, WWII, mysticism … you name it.  It meanders around a storyline (or a dozen storylines) and you lose your place and then can’t seem to forget it.

So, a play adaptation of Murakami – with his constant interweaving of reality and its counterparts – sounded interesting.  BCA Plaza Theatre is a nice little place in the South End with about 140 seats.  (Right next door you can get really delicious fries and drinks at the Beehive.)  The play mixed two stories from the After the Quake collection: “Honey Pie” and “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.”  One a little more grounded in reality than the other, so I thought they were a good combination.

Murakami wrote this collection of short stories after the earthquake that hit Kobe, Japan in 1995.  The “Kobe Earthquake” was at a 6.9 magnitude and killed approximately 5,500 and injured 36,896 people.  In writing the stories, Murakami set some guidelines: All had to be related to the earthquake but none could take place in Kobe or during the actual event.  They also had to be written in the third person.  Now, this last bit clears up something about the play.  Yes, there was a narrator for both stories, but every once in a while the characters themselves would deliver a self- descriptive monologue in the third person.  It felt odd, but it was Galati sticking within Murakami’s guidelines.

The two musicians on stage throughout the 90 minutes were fantastic.  A violin and a bass clarinet.  Five actors total (including a little girl), switched characters as the play jumped between stories, including the role of narrator.  The set was spare and seemed to catch an appropriate Murakami mood.  The actors were decent, but I was distracted by some of the delivery.

Not the most amazing thing I’ve experienced, but I’m glad I went.  Theater helps you look at a storyline from a different view.  For example, when reading “Honey Pie” I did not pay much attention to the story of the bears and consider what that story within meant to the overall story.  But the play got me thinking…

“I'll have grounds/ More relative than this – the play's the thing/ Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.”

I would recommend this play for lovers of the novelist – or rather, I’d recommend reading the short stories and then going to the play, because it is impossible not to appreciate Murakami.

Nothing Like a Good Kick to the Head

Yoga is a funny thing.  It actually makes people nicer.  It brings awareness to one's self and in turn makes you more aware of and more compassionate to those around you. Watching people place their mats down before class is always interesting.  The studio is going to get completely full so the mats will end up close to one another no matter what, and the goal is to stagger them so you can spread your arms wide without hitting thy neighbor.  But newbies don’t have the experience to know this yet – and often shy away from being too close to another person during practice.  They become territorial about their space and might pretend to be asleep or deep in a warm-up pose when someone looks to fit in next to them.  The tactic rarely works, but hey, they are new.

Yoga has a lot to do with being humble.  And the funny thing about being humble is that it comes and goes.  We are proud creatures.  And yoga is another way to practice the line between humility and confidence.  Difficult but possible.

Yesterday, I got to the studio a little bit early so I had my pick of spots to lay my mat.  I watched people file in and make room for others and I watched people guard their space.  The guy to the left of me did not stagger his mat even though he had plenty of room to do so.

While surveying the scene, I realized that there was a part of me that was in judgment.   It was a basics class and so I practice more than many of the people there.  I knew where to place my mat and knew where others should place there’s.  Of course, sometimes it’s best to just let things play out.  The newbies in the class would, over time, come to realize that they are better off with staggered mats.

Suddenly, I am cognizant that I'm up against something new.  Yoga is not about being “the best.”  And if we start striving for that label, we lose something in the effort.  Sure, it would be great to be able to do the most perfect Ardha Chandrasana, but that’s not what it’s about.  Waiting for class to start, I realized that by striving to be perfect, my humility was walking out the door.

And so, I spent yesterday’s class focused on being humble.  If I couldn’t go deep into a particular pose, that was fine.  I backed out a little bit.  I accepted that my practice is constantly evolving just like everyone else’s in the room.  That we have this in common.

This is another thing that I love about yoga.  It shows me things about myself that I can bring out of the studio and into my daily life.  It allows me to practice compassion and humility towards myself and others and helps me be mindful of both outside the studio.

And then, as a more tangible reminder to remain humble – and to ensure I was not getting too proud of my new awareness – the man in front of me came out of a back bend version of Tri Pada Adho Mukha Svanasana and nailed me with his foot right on the top of the head.  BAM.  I saw a stars.  I was seriously stunned.

Apparently, the yoga gods needed to make sure I understood the day’s lesson.

The Climate is Changing and Humans Are the Cause

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu was at the Kennedy School this week to discuss global warming and various solutions. Chu won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for his research in cooling and trapping atoms with laser light.  I can’t pretend to imagine what this entails, but it is with relief that he seems to have the common sense needed to serve as our 12^th Energy Secretary.  He said to the overflowing audience last Thursday: “it’s going to become more and more obvious that the climate is changing and that humans are the cause of it.” I still don’t understand why some people won’t admit to climate change.  Apparently, neither does Chu, because he went on, “We have a policy in the Energy Department that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.”

With the adverse risks of climate change, we in the northeast can expect a few things:  A 67 percent increase in rain (this June was a taste), meaning downpours in Winter and Spring with droughts in summer… this does not sound like very good growing conditions for my vegetables.  In Boston specifically, the number of summer days going over the 100 F mark will increase from one a year to 24 days a year -that’s practically a full month.

And then there is outside the northeast, for example, the thawing of the tundra, which is particularly frightening.  Chu made the analogy of taking a bunch of food out of your freezer.  It lasts just fine frozen, but once you take it out of the freezer it goes bad within a matter of days.  Well, the tundra is melting, and as it thaws at a faster rate than it should it is going bad quickly, emitting more carbon monoxide than we can handle.  In fact, it is believed that the tundra holds about 2x as much carbon monoxide than is already in our air.

“We need an industrial revolution,” said Chu.  Yes, yes we do.  Stop using so much energy, for one.  Paint roofs white and roads and sidewalks any color other than black. Invest in wind technology and solar module technology.  Develop clean coal technologies if we must keep coal around at all.  American consumers: put your money towards home energy efficiency rather than a new granite counter-top.

Chu was introduced by Massachusetts Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Malden). I didn’t know much about Markey before this week, but he is your typical MA politician and therefore I love him.   Judge me as you will.  Markey has been a leader in environment and energy issues for many moons (he’s been a congressman for 33 years) and among other things, chairs the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, established by Nancy Pelosi in 2007 to address America's oil dependence and the threat of global warming.  He is co-author of the Markey-Waxman Bill (with California’s Henry Waxman), also known as the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.”

I don’t mind when politicians are politicians, particularly when they are politicizing about something I can get behind.  Add this view to my love of hearing a good sound bite in action, and it’s with a warm giggle that I received Markey’s statement about the fact that he is hopeful that as Americans we can put our mind to the environmental issues at hand, we can progress and “turn to China and India and say that we are no longer teaching temperance from a bar stool.”  It’s true!