Archive for August, 2009

Looking for a place to get away from it all yesterday morning, I trudged a few blocks in the rain to the Atomic Bean Cafe, which had opened in the shell of Mojo Records a few months ago.  I knew I could go a few more blocks to Dado Tea for a nice savory scone, but seeing Aranciata in the case reminded me the arancini at St. Anthony’s Feast and so I ordered a ham and cheese croissant and settled in for a spell.

Wifi at Atomic Bean is free, but you have to remember to borrow (and return!) one of the secret password cards near the register.

Atomic Bean is also a gallery of sorts, and they currently feature paintings by Sara Theophall and others.  Wall text and price lists were scant, but the work is well worth a look.  Theophall’s work reminded me a bit of that of Ariel Freiberg, seen at least year’s Somerville Open Studios, where I also first met Tova Speter, whose woodgrain-based work has also graced the walls of Atomic Bean.  Small art world indeed.

What’s better than rice? Risotto.  What’s better than risotto? Fried risotto, that’s what.  Fried balls of rice with cheese, meat and sometimes other stuffings are called arancini (“little oranges”) in Italy, and I was lucky enough to stumble upon some at St. Anthony’s Feast in Boston’s North End this weekend.  It’s like a Brigadoon where old immigrant Italian-America comes back to life for a few nights.

I enjoyed a baseball-sized arancino with spinach and some tomato sauce, and some wonderfully light fried calamari.  Besides arancini and calamari, there was an array of pizza, pasta, sausage and pepper sandwiches, and gelato, plus a healthy (well, probably not that healthy) dose of not-so-Italian dishes like fried dough and cherrystone clams.

Saint Anthony, or Santo Antonio di Padova della Montefalcone as the local Boston version has him, was paraded through the street first in banner form and then as a larger than life-sized statue garlanded with banners of money and watches.  I think the watches are symbolic of St. Anthony’s job as the patron of finding lost things and people.

The grand procession started with a prayer in Italian and English, then at a signal, a confetti canon was fired and St. Anthony was on the move.

Boston’s North End is home to a series of feasts and festivals all summer long, and there are just a couple more, but St Anthony’s Feast is often cited as the largest Italian religious festival in the US.  St. Lucy is up next on Monday – don’t miss her if you’re having trouble seeing.

I ventured to South Boston today to meet up with Fashion Blogger A.  I was waiting in a cafe near the Broadway T and noticed a tragic typeo writeo error:

Here’s the deal:  Arugula is lettuce.  Italians call it rucola.  Rugelach are delicious pastry of Ashkenazic origin. If you’re not sure how to pronounce the final “-ch” just ask a Scot, it’s like the ending of “loch.”

We’ve been reminded that Yiddish words ending in -ach are plural, [although there are also those like wikipedia who say rugelach is a diminutive form] which suggests as that with knleidlach and kreplach,  you can’t eat just one rugel.

I’ll have to return and sample them once the sign is updated.

I’m a big proponent of the rights of authors to profit from the sale of their work, but I’m also a fan of the first-sale doctrine that lets me give away, lend or sell my copy of that work once I legally acquire it.  So, while I am mindful that when I buy a used book (or borrow one) I’m not contributing to author royalties, I support used bookstores for several reasons:

• they make more books available to more people who are price-sensitive
• they are the only way to get books that are out of print
• sometimes, you find something interesting in a used book that you would never find in a new one: an inscription or notes, or a bookmark or some other ephemera

That last one, by the way, is something that future generations of digital book buyers will probably never know they’re missing.  See my recent posts on Kindle-related stuff for more on ebooks and intellectual property.  But it’s also worth noting that Google books, by scanning books, sometimes preserves this old stuff.  Check out page 8 of Google’s scan of a 1905 edition of Wuthering Heights for a taste.

Anyway… I popped in to my local used book emporium, Rodney’s Bookstore, this week seeking a copy of Wuthering Heights for book club. (My desire to contribute to author royalties and publisher revenues diminishes with the deadness of the author.)  I found three paperback copies in totally different editions and varying conditions, priced from $1.90 to $4.80.

One was a standard-issue trade paperback, part of some classic series.  It was in very good condition and the most expensive of the lot.

Next up, a Kaplan SAT Score-Raising Classic edition, billed on the Harlequin Romance inspired cover as “The Classic Novel with 763 SAT Vocabulary Words Identified and Defined!” The definitions were on the facing page to the text, swelling this edition to over 600 pages.  The bold SAT words might be a little distracting, but this one was well-proportioned and a relative bargain at $3.80.

Finally, the highbrow edition.  A St. Martin’s Press press trade paperback with a heavy paper cover, boasting the 1847 text and essays from “five contemporary critical perspectives” namely, psychoanalytic, feminist, deconstruction, Marxist, and cultural criticism.  Wow.  The downside, marked in pencil on the flyleaf, “$1.90 AS IS ROUGH” It was beat up, but appeared complete and had no highlighting or underlining, which are generally deal-breakers for me when buying a book.

Each edition certainly had its merits, but until I got my purchase home, I didn’t know the extent.  Here’s something you probably won’t ever see in your Kindle.

PS I also bought the Kaplan edition, just for laughs, and just in case I need to look up a word.  What does “Wuthering” mean anyway?

When the weather gets into the 90s I try to stay inside during daylight hours, as much for the shade as the humidity-cutting air conditioning.  So it’s important to have lunch material on hand to avoid having to go out.  What I thought was scraping the bottom of the barrel today turned out to be an excellent combination.

Toasted corn nuts from Whole Foods.  Salty and crunchy.  How can you go wrong?

Tomatoes from J’s garden.  Cosmetically imperfect but tasty beyond measure or need for any seasoning or accompaniment.

Cold leftover Chinese food.  Truly the breakfast of champions, but somehow this batch of buckwheat noodles with housemade tofu and vegetables from East Asia in Powderhouse Square made it through till noon despite a passing resemblance to Japanese summer breakfast fave Zaru Soba.

Two minor digressions here (this time I’m warning you in advance!)

The tofu from East Asia is amazing.  It’s made of sheets like the stuff we had a Mu Lan a while back, but this tofu has a toothsome texture and the sheets hold together in chunks and hold sauce admirably.  The restaurant looks like nothing special, but service was extra friendly.  Let’s have a closer look at this marvelous tofu.

Lunch is what’s on TV. Well, the Lunch video podcast is what’s on RSS at any rate. Check it out.  They’re lunching all over town, and sponsorships are available.