Awooooooo!

I meant to post about this a couple weeks ago.

"Howl" is one of Allen Ginsberg's most famous poems. You may have heard the opening lines of part I in one form or another:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,      starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking      for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly      connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night

Ages ago I found that someone was sharing a recording of part I via my university network. Turns out this is a fairly famous recording, one of the earliest of Ginsberg reading "Howl". In fact, for awhile, it was considered the earliest known recording of said poem.

But recently a literary researcher uncovered a recording that was older still, "at the library of a private college here [in Oregon]". Which private college in Oregon, you ask? What else?

Reed College.

You can listen to the new oldest recording along with poems from the same reading here.

A Question of Geekiness

Look at this.

It’s a link to a short list of eight things that “happen when geeks have children.” However, only half of the photos, to my mind, actually qualify as examples of geekiness applied to (inflicted upon?) children--and in some cases they qualify only barely. Shall we run through them?

1. The D&D baby. Giving your child character stats for the granddaddy of all roleplaying games, which are still the hallmark of geeks and nerds everywhere. Sheer geekiness. Our winner.


2. iPood. Baby-based parody of a popular mainstream electronic device. No geekery at all.


3. Cthulhu baby. Dressing your child up as one of the chief alien gods from a series of cult horror stories penned by an obscure (nowadays semi-obscure) New England writer at the turn of the 20th century. Definite geekiness.


4. Robot child. WTF? Making a robot costume for your child out of boxes and foil? Robots aren’t geeky. My halloween costume at that age—a walking personal computer, complete with 5.25” floppy disk and disk drive, was geeky. A Robby the Robot costume would have been geeky. But a mere generic robot? Cute, sure. But not geeky.


5. Mario and Luigi. Cute, admittedly. And the detail is pretty neat. But the Mario Bros. have been popular video game icons since the late 1980s, starring in millions of sequels and spinoffs. Putting your kids in costume as them hardly squeaks off the ground. But we’ll give points for effort. Inching toward geekiness.


6. Ninja baby. I know ninjas are all the rage now, and the ninja vs. pirate meme that got passed around among certain crowds several years ago was definitely geeky—but ninjas and other eastern martial artists have held our collective fascination since before Bruce Lee—through movies, TV shows, stories, etc. Dressing your child up as a ninja for halloween is as mundane as serving cereal for breakfast (in American culture). Just ask my parents about taking me to a martial arts supply store when I was in 1st grade to buy a genuine ninjitsu outfit for the end of October. Not geeky.


7. iPod baby. Okay, the baby’s expression is cutely disturbing. And actually clothing your baby as an iPod is a little bit on the geeky side. But it’s still a popular mainstream electronic device, and I would bet that this baby jumper can be bought easily and by many online—and was tailored for exactly that. So: borderline geeky.


8. Princess Leia. Fine, fine, you win on this one. Star Wars fanatics (old-school ones, especially, and not young kids these days) rank as high as Trekkies on the geekometer. So this one counts. But every time Lucas clones a sequel (excuse me, prequel) or a spinoff, it gets less geeky.

To Be or Not To Be: Determining the Fate of a Final Work

I'm a little late to the literary news table with this one, but that's okay.

Dmitri Nabokov, son of the late Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita, Pale Fire, and many others), is facing a dilemma: respect his father's wishes and destroy the literary genius's unpublished final manuscript, or fulfill the desires of the international literary community and publish it.

Honestly, I don't know what I'd do in such a situation myself. A part of me hankers to see this last work (and knows, too, that other greats made similar requests that went unheeded, much to our literary benefit), and another part of me understands the need to honor our dead loved ones and follow their final requests. Yet a third part of me has little idea why one would make such a request in the first place--unless maybe one felt that the unpublished work was crap. On the other hand, if I knew I wasn't long for this world and I still had unfinished works, would it really matter to me if people saw them after I shuffled off?

Bubble Tea Chez Nous

V and I recently discovered we can make one of my favorite drinks at home (fortunate because there seems to be only one store in Paris that sells it). Tapioca pearls, however, are difficult to cook right, and we've found very little good advice online about it.

That said, through trial, error, and "painstaking" research, we've found a method that seems to work well:

1. Bring lots of water (anywhere from 4 to 8 times the volume of tapioca pearls you wish to cook) to a boil in a saucepan.


2. Pour in tapioca pearls. Cover and turn heat to low.


3. Simmer for 1.5 hours, adding hot or boiling water periodically to keep the tapioca well-saturated.


4. Check tapioca pearls: they should be full and round, and if you used uncolored pearls, they should have turned clear and there should be next to no white powder visible at the center. A few pearls with white centers are okay. More than a few and you should continue cooking a bit.


5. Turn off the heat but leave the tapioca pearls covered and on the stove. Let them sit in the warm water for another half hour.


6. Drain liquid from the pearls and rinse them in cold water. Serve, or for short-term storage, cover them in a sugar syrup made of 1 part each brown and white sugars and 2 parts water brought to a boil and then cooled. (This is also used to sweeten the tea for the drink.) I hear also that tapioca pearls freewe well, but we haven't tried it.