WWOZ’s Shrove Tuesday

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Woke up this morning and for a few moments thought it was Thursday. Went downstairs (my commute), fired up the laptop (odd phrasing, when you think about it) and soon realized it was Wednesday. Fridays are still the best workdays, naturally, but Thursdays aren’t bad either. You still have Friday to look forward to. So I must have wanted it to be Thursday.

Still, that’s odd, since I was fully aware of it being Shrove Tuesday the day before. As time allowed during the day, I listened online to WWOZ, nonprofit radio out of New Orleans that broadcasts New Orleans and Louisiana music. I’m sure it’s a local treasure. It should be a national treasure. It was one of the first online radio stations I ever encountered, by happy chance back in the early 2000s, when maintaining a connection consistently was no sure thing, especially if you used an iMac. I don’t listen to it enough.

But I did on Tuesday, for obvious reasons, and the celebration was on all day. The guys behind the mike got especially giddy as the evening wore on, maybe even rowdy, though I didn’t hear anything breaking. Just the kind of happy DJs – and those with some personality on display – that radio consolidation and rote programming have mostly banished from the airwaves.

Except maybe for morons in the morning? You know, drivetime voices, often a man and a woman, who yuk it up between songs and commercials and news snips, without regard to good sense or good taste. Is that still a thing? My commute, as you’d think, doesn’t involve radio.

Such duos were so much a part of radio programming 20 years ago that another of first radio stations I heard online, one from Sydney, as in Australia, was being hosted by a man and a woman – who yukked it up without regard to sense or taste. But with such fun Australian accents that I didn’t mind listening a while.

Now I seem to have further evidence that the algorithms are getting better. Better at drawing conclusions from their spying. Today those opaque entities suggested a version of “St. James Infirmary Blues” that I didn’t know.

Wow, that’s good. Tom Jones and the talented Rhiannon Giddens, once of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

The song is associated with New Orleans jazzmen, of course, especially Louie Armstrong, and I spent a lot of yesterday with Carnival in the background. So was that the connection the machine made? Or is it that I’ve listened to many other versions of the song, or a clip from the same show, or all that other jazz (and I mean that literally and figuratively)? The bots ain’t telling.

Mallard Lake on a Mild February Sunday

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An unusual run of warmish days for February so far, and by that I mean above freezing every day and a completely melted snow cover. Local plants aren’t fooled, keeping their earth colors for now.

The scene Sunday at Mallard Lake. A few other people were around, walking the trail around the lake. Not everyone was at a pregame gathering.Mallard Lake Mallard Lake Mallard Lake

There are islands in Lake Mallard, and where there are islands, there are bridges.Mallard Lake Mallard Lake

The stroll was a touch melancholic, since we couldn’t bring the dog, who is too frail for this kind of walk any more. Just a touch, since she’s still with us, just slow moving.

V.S. Pritchett ’83 (Part 2)

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The VU class that V.S. Pritchett taught in 1983 was fiction writing, which makes sense, since he was a fiction writer of renown and, presumably, Vanderbilt’s attenuated reputation for literature was still important to the English Department at the time. It’s hard to recollect much about the class, though. It’s been 40+ years, of course, but it’s more than that. To undergraduates, professors seemed to ply their trade from the perch of an advanced age, one that was hard to imagine. That didn’t always interfere with a student’s ability to absorb the material, however, provided the professor had some skill as a teacher.

Pritchett was 82. That was more than advanced; that was positively antediluvian, in my youthful estimation. I still feel that way a bit, though I know that advanced age doesn’t necessarily — or even that often — cut into ability in the intellectual arts. Regardless, aged or not, he wasn’t one of the great teachers that one encounters along the way. I’m not even sure he was that good. He seemed to like to listen to students read each other’s stories out loud – we wrote stories for the class, and read them, but not our own. I think. Then we talked about the stories in a meandering sort of way. He made comments, but for a writer of stories, didn’t seem to tell that many in class.

VU prof Walter Sullivan (d. 2006, curiously at 82), whose fiction writing class I’d taken in the fall of 1982, read student stories himself, ones he’d picked to illustrate some point, and then led the discussion. Not with an iron hand precisely, but the firmness of the former Marine that he was.

One student wrote a story about (again, I think) about a little girl and the death of a baby bird, or some such. Dr. Sullivan read it, and then thundered: “Don’t write stories about animals! Or little children! Short stories should be about grown men and women.”

Sullivan was, as I recall, the better teacher. Still, we liked Pritchett. But being in his class was something of a squandered opportunity. We were dense youth, so we didn’t really ask him many good questions. No followup about Orwell, as I’ve mentioned, even though Pritchett did tell us a snippet or two about him.

But here was a man who, for instance, remembered World War I as a youth (though not in the fighting) and who went to Paris in the 1920s as a young man, and who took a ramble through Spain and Ireland during that same decade. I wish I’d thought to ask about those things. Or what about the other writers that he knew? Or his opinions on such luminaries as Chekhov – he must have been thinking about him when he taught us, since he published Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free in 1989. Ah, well. At this remote time, all I can do is shrug.

This is the second part of my interview, published February 11, 1983.

Television was killing the printed word in those days; had been since Howdy Doody started shilling for Wonder Bread. Seems almost like a quaint notion now, its dumbing down role famously usurped by social media, though I’d say that TV is still in the game.

I have a collection of Pritchett’s short stories somewhere or other, and I dimly remember reading some of them. I also have a book of his literary criticism, Myth Makers (1981). I know where that one is. That’s pretty close to the time I interacted with him.

“Essays on major European and Latin-American writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by the distinguished English man of letters, include lucid, sensitive interpretations of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Flaubert, Stendhal, Kafka, Borges, and others,” notes the Amazon squib. I ought to get around to reading it.

V.S. Pritchett ’83 (Part 1)

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I’m not one to drop names. One reason is I don’t have many to drop. There was that time I was pretty sure I saw Neil Young having lunch at the International Market in Nashville, ca. 1985, or at least someone who was a dead ringer for the musician. I let the man eat his food in peace.

And of course there was the other time (spring 1980) two friends and I saw Gregg Allman and his entourage enter the same Nashville restaurant we were having lunch, making a bee line back to a private room. If one of my friends hadn’t pointed them out, I wouldn’t have known.

The same with Larry David. A colleague and I were passing through the lobby of the Boca Raton Resort & Club in 2004 and he (my colleague) made a startled announcement: “That’s Larry David,” referring to a fellow we’d just passed whom I’d scarcely noticed in the crowd. That was the first I’d ever heard of him. Later I discovered that his brand of humor isn’t really for me.

Which brings me to Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett (1900-97), a British writer best known for his short stories. V.S. Pritchett, his byline is usually styled. I expect many (many) more people, Americans anyway, have heard of the other notables I’ve mentioned than him.

Still, I not only saw Pritchett, I met him, since I took a class he taught as a visiting professor at Vanderbilt in the spring of ’83. I’ve mentioned him precisely once in 21 years, so I can’t call knowing him earth-shaking or otherwise consequential to the course of my life. Even so, I’m dropping his name now.

Besides sorting postcards, I’m opening up old files – physical files, of which there are many – with a mind toward sorting them as well. One I opened this week was labeled “Clips Before 1984.” Most of them are items I wrote for The Vanderbilt Hustler, the VU student newspaper. I was its news editor in the spring of ’83, and one of the items I did was a longish interview with V.S. Pritchett.

I’d completely forgotten about it. But there it was in black and white, to use the cliché. A front-page interview, but below the fold.

The first part ran on February 8, 1983. 

The second part was published on February 11. Not a bad interview for a college kid. But why – why – why didn’t I ask him about George Orwell? He knew Orwell. At least I know my degree of separation from Orwell is exactly two, a thought that pleases me for some reason.

Because of the nation’s absurd copyright laws, I suppose the article technically still belongs to Vanderbilt Student Communications, but I doubt they’d begrudge me posting it nonprofessionally after more than 40 years. If they do object, I’ll take it down. Until then, it represents an interview with Pritchett that probably isn’t posted anywhere else, a thought that also pleases me, though it surely doesn’t add or change anything about the record of his life.

RIP, Sir Victor.

Valentine’s Day Helium

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A slice of late March slipped into early February today, not quite warm but certainly not cold, windy and a scattering of rain. The atmosphere was charged enough to set of the waaah-waaah lightning warning gizmo installed in the park within sight of my back yard. Hadn’t heard its bleat in months. Didn’t see any actual lightning.

Went to a local chain grocery store this evening after work, a place I go maybe once a month, though it’s only about a five-minute drive. The local grocery market is saturated. Whatever the opposite of a food desert is, the northwestern suburbs are that.

The store isn’t really local, having been owned by Big Grocery for some years now. But it keeps its legacy name, known to Chicagoans far and wide. The aisles are, of course, fully ready for the next occasion on the North American calendar.Valentines candy Valentines balloons

Wait – isn’t there a helium shortage? That’s one of those things I’ve half heard about, but never looked into much. Yes and no is the answer, at least according to an article, restricted to about four paragraphs for us non-subscribers of Gas World, about the prospects for the far-flung international helium market in 2024.

“Intelligas’ assessment of the worldwide supply of helium is about 5.9 billion cubic feet (Bcf) for 2023, up from about 5.7 Bcf in 2022 – back where we were in 2021.

“We forecast that worldwide supply will be short of demand until late 2024 if the large new sources of helium come onstream. The shortage that began in early 2022 when Amur suffered explosions at its first two LNG trains is still having an impact. And history has taught those of us in the helium business that large plants typically incur delays due to unexpected technical issues. Plenty of uncertainty remains.”

Amur explosions?

Again from Gas World, about two years ago: “New information about the explosion and fire that took place at Gazprom’s Amur natural gas processing facility on 5th January [2022] indicates that helium production will remain offline for at least the next six months.”

Maybe I heard about that at the time, but other news from Russia soon eclipsed anything as pedestrian as an industrial accident.

Good ol’ Gazprom. Its name, I believe, goes back to the late Soviet era. Say what you want about the commies, they came up with some boss names sometimes.

Joong Boo

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When Toys R Us went under, I remember fans came out of the woodwork to tell the world how wonderful the chain was, and how it would live forever in a nostalgic corner of their hearts. Maybe you had to be a former child visitor to the stores to feel that way. Big places seem even bigger at that age, and big places stuffed with toys – what could be better?

The toy stores of my youth were standalones or in-line shops – small presences on long streets or in large malls. The closest I remember to a warehouse toy store was chain of mall toy stores whose name I’ve long forgotten, but which seemed to stack its merchandise floor to ceiling. Occasionally I bought model airplanes there. Forward 30 years and a Toys R Us location might hold 10 of those mall stores I remember from childhood. So I can see they might have been wowsers to the crop of children that came of age when Toys R Us was open.

First encountering Toys R Us as a parent of young children is another matter. When I wasn’t myself marveling at the profusion of entertainment options for small fry, because the stock was always an impressive array, I understood that visiting was a contest to hold spending to some reasonable level. Hold the line on spending like you might hold a squirming animal. A greased pig, maybe. It wasn’t easy.

So I didn’t mourn Toys R Us particularly. The location we visited closed with all the rest and the building stood vacant for a good many years afterward, which was unusual on this busy main thoroughfare in the northwest suburbs. Last year, a sign appeared in front of the former toy store explaining that a grocery store was coming soon.

Here it is.

Not just any grocery store, but Joong Boo, a Korean store. We visited last Friday, during the store’s first week of operation. The fourth location of a Chicago-based chain, it’s clearly a rising competitor to the larger Korean chain, H-Mart, which not long ago expanded its store within a mile or so of the new Joong Boo. So new that the location isn’t, as of today, listed on the Joong Boo web site.

Nice redesign inside, not a hint of its former use. Artful light bars overhead. Hope they’re energy efficient.

The place was crowded. In its first week anyway, it’s a hit.

One thing that H-Mart taught me is about the endless variety (I exaggerate: the impressive variety) of fresh seafood offered by a Korean supermarket, at least here in North America. Three samples from a much larger selection:

Something I didn’t expect.

I bought one. Not because I’m going to eat it soon, though I might sometime, but to help keep the Spam Museum open (which, I see, is in a newish location). Yuriko bought more healthful items to prepare for our table. For her, the store represents economy: many of the same or similar items than at the local Japanese supermarket, but at a better price. That doesn’t keep her away from the Japanese store completely – it is, after all, the Japanese store — just sometimes.

Another reason to wander a Korean grocery store – or any store, really – is to be on the lookout for brands that aren’t creatures of the U.S. food industry, but maybe some other country’s food conglomerates. Or just third-string or otherwise unusual brands, such as Argentine frosted flakes.

A South Korean beer, Terra.

That counts as the creature of the South Korean food industry, since it’s an export made by Hite Brewery Co., the largest beer maker in that country. Look at the bottle and you learn it’s a Czech-style Korean lager using Australian malt.

Speaking of creatures.

He seems to be the mascot of Jinro, which, as a unit of Hite since 2006, is the world’s largest maker of soju. In English, anyway, he’s referred to as a toad, and man, you can get a lot of Jinro merch.

Frozen K-Food

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We’ve all heard of K-Pop, even if we pay it no mind. Go to a Korean grocery store here in the northwest suburbs, and you’ll be aware of K-Food. Frozen K-Food, too.

Convenient and delicious for any occasion, it seems. I didn’t do a comprehensive look-see at the Frozen K-Food aisles, but did notice a few things. Such as a version of K-corn dogs: mozzarella and fish cake on a stick.k-food

The marvels of globalization never cease. People worry that globalization = homogenization, but I don’t think so.

Korean breakfast links, or anytime sausage? The taste you always wanted? In any case, true to the tradition of cartoon mascots gleeful about the human consumption of their own kind.

This is diversity.

But maybe not quite as much as at first glance, since the maker of Red Baron, Schwan’s, was acquired by South Korean food conglomerate CJ CheilJedang a few years ago. So there you have it: a popular North American convenience food named for a German flying ace owned by a South Korean operation. All there in a frozen food bin.

Durians and jackfruit!

Once only available in Southeast Asia, now in your frozen food aisle. Must be popular in Korea these days, too. Why not? For me, jackfruit brings back fond memories of Thailand. As for durian, that is a fond memory from Malaysia.

Not long after I wandered away from the frozen food, I encountered fresh jackfruit. jackfruit 2024
jackfruit 2024

A Hindenburg-class fruit, it is. More than 20 lbs. of jackfruit for less than $20. I’ll assume that’s a good deal.

Robot on Aisle 7

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When I took Ann back to Normal yesterday, I didn’t stop anywhere else in that town. But the last time I was there, we went to a grocery store just off I-55. And who should we meet in one of the aisles? I’d say it was strolling around, but I don’t think inventory robots stroll. Wheel along, maybe. It was puttering along.

That’s Tally, which isn’t precisely new tech, considering that you can easily find an article about the machine from 2016. Then again, maybe the one we saw is a more advanced version or, for all I know, it’s an older one still perfectly fine for its job. Never mind what the tech industry says, tech still has value as long as you find it useful.

“[Tally] can traverse a shop’s aisles for eight to 12 hours on a single charge, counting and checking up to 20,000 individual stock keeping units (SKUs) with greater than 96 percent accuracy,” the PC magazine article reported then.

A robot replacing a human. A human going up and down the aisles for hours holding a electronic wand of some kind. That sounds like the kind of really boring job that robots were going to take in the future, as it was once more optimistically imagined. Were supposed to take.

On the other hand, I asked the check-out clerk about the robot. How long had the store had the robot? She didn’t know, a while. We hate it anyway, she said, but didn’t elaborate.

Ann at 21

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Turns out it wasn’t Dry February after all. On Saturday night, I had a shot glass of Soon Hari brand flavored soju, which is the Korean equivalent of nihonshu (sake). Ann came up for the weekend, on the (near) occasion of her birthday. We went to the same Korean barbecue place we’ve taken her to twice before for her birthday dinner, only this time she ordered alcohol. Mostly this was a matter of form, since she had turned 21 a few days earlier.

The flavor was grape. It was sweet and 12% alcohol by volume, so it could sneak up on you. She had enough to make her pink in the face (“Asian glow,” she calls it) and a little tipsy.

Later we had birthday pie at home.

Twenty-one: obligatory note here about the wingéd passage of time.

Pretty Sure It Will Be Dry February As Well

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Not only are we rid of January today, it was the most pleasant weather I can ever remember on a February 1 in northern Illinois: sun out sometimes, temps touching about 50 F.

YouTube algorithms are getting better at their game. Or so it seems. Today they suggested a Mexican ska band, Mexican Nutty Stompers, who have just released an album. The song, “Souvenir.” I was the 83rd listener.

Never mind the delight in finding Mexican ska when you didn’t such a thing existed, whoever the lead singer is, she’s got some voice. I might look into finding out her name, but for now the voice is more than enough.

A snippet from a press release that came a few weeks ago:

Embrace the spirit of Dry January with Hotel ZaZa Memorial City. Dine in at Hotel ZAZA’s Tipping Point Restaurant and Terrace and indulge in exclusive mocktail specials, crafted to make your taste buds dance without the spirits. Throughout the month of January, enjoy a selection of zero-proof concoctions, each priced at just $8.

Closer to my wheelhouse, but not quite in it. Still, I learned a couple of things from the release. One, Hotel ZaZa Memorial City is in Houston. Zaza is a collection of boutique hotels in Texas, in fact, with locations in Austin and Dallas too. I wasn’t familiar with the brand, but it looks posh all right. Also, this is the essence of the luxury hotel business: serving drinks at what would be a very reasonable price, if they contained any alcohol.

Dry January. I had to look around for more information on that, and it turned out to be a thing. Not sure if it’s just a thing of the chattering classes, or has stronger purchase on the steep slopes of American culture, but anyway you can find mainstream articles about it. Never heard of any of that. I’m late to the party, as usual. Or the non-party, considering no alcohol is served. As we all know, alcohol is essential to any fun party. That’s true in song and story.

The concept is simple enough to be a thing: Dry January just means not drinking alcohol during January, presumably timed to come after personal bacchanals in December. The hotel is using the concept to sell mocktails, but people do seem to use the idea to improve their lives. Good for them. I found it a little hard to imagine, though. Every January is Dry January for me.

I did order, and drink, an Old Fashioned at the bar of the Nashville Italian restaurant where we had dinner on the last full night with my friends in November. We were waiting for a table, so we all sat at the bar, enjoying some lively conversation with each other.

We also spent a few minutes watching the bartender, a nattily dressed slip of an African-American young man, maybe 30, who seemed to be everywhere behind the bar doing everything all the time, but mostly assembling the various liquors for his cocktail creations. With an economy and grace to his movements that spoke of years of practice. He was an artist.

So I wanted to order something from him. But what? As I later explained to my friends, a little part of every man wants to be Don Draper, so the drink in front of me was my homage to the character, and a vehicle to provide a nice tip for the bartender.

A little more than 12 years before ordering the Old Fashioned in Nashville, I ordered one in Appleton, Wisconsin on a press trip because I recently heard of the drink on Mad Men and was curious.

But mixed drinks haven’t been how I’ve usually spent my money over the years. All those years later in Nashville, I nursed my Old Fashioned a while – I’m not a hard-drinking TV character, after all – and concluded that I hadn’t had a bar cocktail between those two times, only occasional beer and wine, most of which wasn’t at bars anyway. What’s the term for that? Not teetotaler. Quasi-totaler?