I.
What kind of bug was Gregor Samsa, the guy who wakes up one morning and finds himself turned into...what, exactly?

It depends on how one translates author Franz Kafka’s German. I learned it as either “monstrous insect,” which is vague (Mothra? An angry ladybug?) or “giant cockroach,” which was quaint until I moved to New York City (the Midwest has a low cockroach population).

Vladimir Nabokov, in a talk collected in “Lectures on Literature,” thought Gregor was a beetle that looked like this:

He explains:

A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is anything but flat: he is convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small. He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown.

....

In the original German text, the old charwoman calls him Mistkafer, a “dung beetle.” It is obvious that the good woman is adding the epithet only to be friendly. He is not, technically, a dung beetle. He is merely a big beetle.”

Not everyone agrees with this insect-assessment, Nabokov himself admitted.

II.
In my apartment’s kitchen, I’ve been having a slight issue with cockroaches. I have been committing acts of insecticide with Raid Max roach spray, which comes in a dark blue aerosol can, the subtitle of which is Mata Cucarachas. Once dispensed, it smells sweetly toxic, like lawn fertilizer, and as it settles, it smells of kerosene. I keep my kitchen clean, so it’s a mystery where these bugs are coming from. (Although, as noted above, I do live in New York City.) I seal all shelf-stable food in glass jars, Ziploc bags or plastic containers. I empty my trash and recyclable bins and bags often. I’ve kept the floors swept free of crumbs. I wash my dishes and don’t let them languish in the sink.

At work, in the sixth-floor kitchenette, people leave dishes in the sink even though there’s a small dishwasher right there that the kind folks from Office Services run every evening. Long ago, Office Services taped up a sign above the sink. It reads:

Please be courteous to your coworkers.

Place all dishes to be washed in the dishwasher.

Also, do not take kitchen utensils that don’t belong to you.¹

The sign was ignored. Today, someone taped up a sign, which I suspect was not sanctioned by Office Services, right next to the other sign. I appreciate the grammatical errors and the black-and-white cockroach photos included for illustration and emphasis:

Maybe I will name the cockroaches in my kitchen “Gregor.” Better yet, I will name them “Vladimir.”

III.
There’s a featured section on corn in the September issue of Food & Wine magazine, which I got in the mail yesterday. Most field corn in the U.S.—37 percent of the nearly 86.5 million acres planted (in 2009)—is grown to feed livestock. And the raising of livestock consumes two-thirds of the world’s farmland and generates 20 percent of the greenhouse gases driving global warming, according to this Observer article from last week, which also proposes a solution to the “meat crisis&rdquo—eating insects.

Professor Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at a university in the Netherlands and author of a UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) paper on the subejct, lays out what he sees as the advantages:

“The world population will grow from six billion now to nine billion by 2050 and we know people are consuming more meat. Twenty years ago the average was 20kg, it is now 50kg, and will be 80kg in 20 years. If we continue like this we will need another Earth.”

Van Huis is an enthusiast for eating insects but given his role as a consultant to the FAO, he can’t be dismissed as a crank. “Most of the world already eats insects,” he points out.² “It is only in the western world that we don't. Psychologically we have a problem with it. I don’t know why, as we eat shrimps, which are very comparable.”³

Yes, insects are high in protein, vitamins and minerals, and farming them produces far less greenhouse gas, methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia than livestock. But what red-blooded American would eat insects, except on a dare? We’d sooner eat our dogs.

I thought this especially after I glanced at insect sushi. One of the varieties mentioned in the original Telegraph article notes that the Argentine Cockroach recipe (“Cut open shell, scoop out meat and fry with butter. Replace in shell to serve on top of salad.”) “has no smell at all, but the texture of tender fish.”

Why should eating bugs be any weirder than eating fish, or a cow for that matter? Maybe because bugs are seen mostly as a nuisance, as noted above. (See also: mosquitos, midges, gnats, wasps and hornets, bedbugs, houseflies, lice, ticks, fruit flies, those parasitic worms that enter humans via their eyeball, etc.) I have never heard of a cow infestation, although clearly that’d be equal parts amusing and disgusting. I’m going to forgo eating bugs and stick with eating less meat.

¹ Yes, I work with some assholes. [back]
² Willingly, that is. 80 percent of the world’s nations, even. [back]
³ One of several reasons I don’t eat shrimp anymore. This is one of the others. [back]

These Airequipt slide boxes are from 1959/1960. Each contains one metal tray that holds 36 35mm slides. A friend of mine gave them to me from an estate sale on Long Island. I like the design and typography.

Other maybe than birdsongs in spring, I can't think of an animal sound more tied to a particular season than cicadas in summer. In Ohio as kids, we called them locusts and marveled at the nearly intact dried skins they shed during molting and left clinging to trees, often willows or walnuts .

In Latin, cicada means “buzzer” and they buzz by vibrating membranes on their abdomens, which are mostly hollow and work as amplifiers. They modulate the buzz by angling it off the tree they’re perched on. Each species has its own song.

(image via the New York Public Library Digital Gallery)

“We are,” says novelist Norman Mailer, speaking, with his customary candor, of the ticket upon which he is presently [1969] running for mayor of New York, “incompetent, innocent, and of unsavory reputation.” But, points out his running mate Jimmy Breslin, a New York journalist, “If you think we’re crazy, look at the other candidates. You wanna die.”

I love it when this happens. I want to collect all of the instances. I think I first noticed a writer running for high office when I read about popular novelist Mario Vargas Llosa running for president of Peru in 1990 against Alberto Fujimori, who won and ruled like a crazy person for the next decade.

And then there’s New York crazy. The Mailer-Breslin ticket drank a lot. They were frequently angry. Many of their sound bites were unprintable, on account of the cursing. Their platform? Satehood for the city. In other words, a New York City secession. (It’s actually an old idea.) Here’s a campaign poster illustrating the theoretical 51st state, a groovy place where each neighborhood would wield town-like power. (Click the image for a bigger view.)

Note the “Free Bikes” icon in Lower Manhattan and the “Clean Air” and “No Smog” promises blowing-in from New Jersey. Mailer-Breslin also promoted ideas that since have been adapted and embraced by our current mayor, a big fan of green space, bicycles and busting-up congestion.

Mailer’s “left-conservative” platform called for a monorail, a ban on private cars in Manhattan, a monthly “Sweet Sunday” on which vehicles would be barred from city streets, rails or air space altogether.

Well, in 1969, nuts to those ideas. Mailer got 5 percent of the vote; Breslin got 11 percent. They returned to writing. Incumbent mayor John Lindsay won his second term.

(first quote via “A Literary Ticket for the 51st State” by Richard Woodley, Life, May 30, 1969; second quote via “Podcast: Remembering Mailer for Mayor” by Sam Roberts, November 11, 2007; poster scan via frumination)

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Stephen Hawking, from his book A Brief History of Time (1988)

(postcard scan via Flickr)

Now that New York City has reached 90° with nearly 50% humidity, a young man’s thoughts turn to tropical cocktails such as the Mai Tai. But for those, one requires a proper receptacle, and I’ve found the cheapest place to get Tiki mugs is Bowery Restaurant Supply. Lately, in fact, I buy most of my cheap and sturdy kitchen equipment there, namely utensils, pots, pans, bowls and boards.

I’m not talking about Bowery Kitchen which, despite its name, is located in Chelsea. That place has its draw, too, with deals on certain generics (cookie sheets leap to mind). But it skews toward brand-name equipment and supplies for the typically higher-grade clientèle of Chelsea Market.

Bowery Restaurant Supply, on the other hand, is located just off the Bowery, steps from the J/M subway station and the Bowery Ballroom, as storied as it is grubby.

You can glean at least three facts from this receipt: I planned ahead for my dog days with a Tiki mug-run in snowy February. Stuff is incredibly cheap at Bowery Restaurant by New York standards (and possibly the standards of other locales)—$2.50 each for the mugs! A heavy pint glass (now acting as my primary cocktail shaker) for $2.25! Really cheap plastic squeeze-bottles, perfect for dressings, syrups and condiments!

And they’re super oldschool: they have a cash box, not a register, and a gnarled Asian man handwrites your receipt. I am happy that fame, in the form of Mark Bittman’s prominent ode to them three years back, has not seemed to have affected their thrifty, low-key style.

Sounds delicious.

Purchasing Sloane Closley’s essay collection I Was Told There’d Be Cake at the Strand, the best bookstore in the world, the cashier absent-mindedly handed me the flyer I’ve scanned above, which reports the store’s Financial District offshoot, the Strand Annex, is closing on August 31st. According to a blurb in The Real Deal about a month ago, it’s because “construction in the area has decreased foot traffic around the store, lowering profits,” although the flyer notes it’s because the store lost its lease. Whichever reason, it’s a bummer; I hate to see any bookstore bite it, especially the kin of one of my favorites.

More talk of mixtapes. Here’s a newer one for the Love Is A Mix Tape set (and from the guy who started Found magazine) called Cassette From My Ex. And although they’re not set up for casual browsing, I also like Mixwit (design your own custom cassette-tape graphic!) and Muxtape (mysterious, easy-to-use interface!).

I never remember fiddling much with mixtapes, either giving or receiving. I got one in college from a girl with nothing but Smiths songs on side A and nothing buy Morrissey solo-carreer songs on side B which was personally responsible for “The Last of the Famous International Playboys” being my favorite Moz song. I made one in college that I’m pretty sure had a Toad the Wet Sprocket song on it; better that one stay lost. In fact, rooting through my boxes of junk, I was only able to find one. The song selections prove its 1997 vintage. I got this one from my friend/then-coworker who was also named Jason and who at the time worked part-time in the neighborhood used record store. He used a found "passport" from the ’30s as the booklet art and hand-typed the tracklist. I’m unfortunately missing the cassette itself but regardless no longer have anything to play it on. Oh, technology.

You’ll be pleased to see that your own computer area at home is not as depressing as you may have suspected.

I found this Polaroid today in the street near the intersection of Seventh Avenue and West 17th Street.

An ATM receipt, strangely lacking, from a bodega on Prince Street near Mulberry.

I found this handwritten flashcard on the floor of the A train last night. There’s not an answer on the back and the suspense is killing me: anyone know which valve has the lowest transvalvular velocity?

As I foretold, Allison staged the first installment tonight of the Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner series, BKLYN #1, a potluck with a “local/sustainable/seasonal” theme. It went down at the Clinton Hill/Bed-Stuy apartment of her and her boyfriend, Jovito. I love this part: the building used to be a Tootsie Roll factory.

The dinner party included Allison and Jovito, my friend Beth and I, Allison’s friend Angela, and her sister Laura. Also present were the resident tabby, Ra, who warily shares space with the resident shelter-mutt, Manute. He’s a blend of black Lab, Great Dane and black German Shepherd named after Manute Bol because both are long-legged shot-blockers who like having their bellies scratched.

We started with three New York state sheep’s milk cheeses, Berkshire pork prosciutto and membrillo (quince paste), purple grapes and candied walnuts. For "local" drinks, we drank rye-stiffened Brooklyns throughout the evening, inspired by a recipe Allison procured in an entertaining fashion. On Tuesday, she and Jovito attended a reading featuring Brooklyn-based cocktail authority David Wondrich, whom I’ve written about before. As he signed her copy of Imbibe!, she mentioned the upcoming dinner and her consideration of serving locally invented cocktails, namely Manhattans and Jack Roses, the latter a classic New Jersey drink in honor of Jovito’s home state.

Wondrich concurred then rattled off the ingredients for a Brooklyn, a cocktail curiously absent from his book. Realizing the recipe would be a tall order to remember, he removed a piece of paper from his pocket and scribbled it down. Meanwhile, Allison told him I’d wanted to attend the reading but couldn’t, then blurted that I had a man-crush on him, so after laughing nervously, he autographed the recipe as a sort-of-wish-you-were-here keepsake.

The man-crush thing is true. What human wouldn’t lovingly admire another who can mingle alcohols to their tastiest and most potent permutations? Although I had to tell Allison that men will not often admit a man-crush to one another. Regardless, it netted me a scrap of cocktail ephemera that I’ll treasure always until I spill bitters on it. Here’s a scan of it. You’ll notice Wondrich spelled liqueur wrong, unless liquer is an archaic cocktail-maven spelling.

After the first round, shaken with ice and served in old-school coupes, Allison deviated from the handwritten version of the recipe to the one I’ve reproduced below. I must say that rye in its 100-proof form is excellent for clouding one’s mind in the best way possible.

Ah, and for the food. Beth made butternut squash soup with a plain-yogurt and cilantro topping. Laura made a shredded carrot and toasted almond salad. Angela made a Sicilian-style potato gratin with capers and Parmesan. Allison made tender, braised short ribs with chocolate and rosemary. We also had baguettes with Brooklyn-made butter. The dessert course brought out ice cream sandwiches made from oatmeal toffee-chip cookies and almond/English-toffee ice cream from the Adirondacks. I supplied my Gâteau Aux Pommes apple cake, made with apples and eggs from upstate New York. In short, great good, great drinks, great music, and great company.

Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner

• Meal 12 of 52: a heap of delicious food, home-cooked by friends.

I found this note recently on the sidewalk on my way to the 190th Street station of the A train.

I don’t know the correlation between strange doodles and real estate conferences, but like at least twice before, I happened upon another odd scribbling at a real estate conference today in Orlando. It resembles a demented Homer Simpson.

This flyer, posted on my A train home from work tonight, reminds me that the world needs more tract-style advertisements.

Reminiscent of another strange sketch I found earlier this year is this “snappy” doodle I found on a table after a real estate conference here in New York today.

I found this handcrafted advertisement on the sidewalk near my apartment building after work tonight. You can click the scan above to view an extra-large version in a separate pop-up window. Here’s a transcription of the text:

Scarlett Peña          7/18/06

Class 205 will have a
cup cake sail. At the in door
gym. Come to my cup
cake sail.

[drawing of a cupcake?]

At 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Itis so good because itis a
chocoleat cup cake. For ¢50

So if I’m understanding the marketing message here correctly, these cupcakes are superior because they are inexpensive, they feature chocolate icing topped with sprinkles, and they have a miniature rainbow baked inside. Well, I’m sold.

My mom mailed me some brittle pages from the Sunday Magazine of the Toledo Blade dated August 18, 1974 that she found in a dresser drawer. Check out these Holly Hill summer fashions in Easy-Care Polyester available at Lion, a local department store chain. For only $16 apiece, you could sashay among Ohio society in the Skimmer with self-flip-tie on the left or the “Fit and Flare” princess dress on the right.

Here’s a doodle I found at a real estate conference in Philadelphia today.

A girl I know who lives in Jersey near the Passaic Falls had never heard of William Carlos Williams’ poetic ode to the city they’re in, Paterson, so I offered to lend her my copy. Tonight, while paging through it, I found this bookmark.

What an awesome bookstore that was. It was located in my college town of Bowling Green, Ohio, on Main Street, sandwiched between a bar frequented by underclassmen and the 24-hour diner they’d stumble to afterhours for alcohol-absorbing hamburgers. As a creative writing and journalism major at BGSU in the early-’90s, and because the Wood County Public Library was located conveniently just across the street, I spent entirely too much time at Pauper’s. I was surprised to learn years later that the place was still whisperingly referred to as an anarchist shop. I’ve been in anarchist bookstores before; they need an anarchist name (“Viva la Books!”), prints of Che hanging all over the place, and a battered card table in the back where subversives can meet, drink too much coffee and write manifestos. Now maybe Pauper’s sold a few rabble-rousing rags, but it had no additional anarchic features other than a sense of organization. We’re talking literally piles of books. That “drive you simply nuts” slogan on the Pauper’s bookmark isn’t only a cheesy clipart pun. Far in the back of the store, there was stack upon toppling stack of boxes and those flat boxes grapes are wholesold in, filled with books and reaching the ceiling.

You can get a small sense of this disarray looking at these photos I took during a trip back to Bowling Green in September 2002, although they don’t represent the store as packed as it once was. That day, as you can see from a sign in one of the photos, the merchandise was 50% off. The store was struggling to stay open then and was to close for good a year later.

For a journalism class assignment, I had to write a business-related article and I chose to interview Pauper’s owner, Leo Schifferli, a skinny, gray-bearded fellow with Le Corbusier-like spectacles. He spoke slowly and with care and seemed to know everything about any book. I wasn’t surprised when he told me he didn’t have an inventory management system for his thousands of books. Not only that, he had only recently upgraded to the computerized version of Books in Print from microfilm, although I frequently saw his 386 on but unused and him still squinting at projected pieces of film that he shifted expertly under glass. But he didn’t need an inventory management system. He remembered where everything was in the store and he was willing to go the extra yard to seal a deal. When I asked him for that copy of Paterson he knew there wasn’t one in the store but offered to bring in the spare copy from his home collection, a handsome New Directions paperback edition from 1963.

He’s the one who told me about Amazons, the infamous faux-memoir Don DeLillo wrote pretending to be the first female NHL player. He offered to sell me a hardcover copy for a reasonable sum and I wish now I would have bought it, if not only because it’s been wholly out of print since its original run in 1980 and is considered one of the great contemporary books written under a pseudonym—in fact, Keith Gessen wrote an article about it in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, “In Search of the Great American Hockey Novel.” Leo was a well-read gentleman who could make recommendations of new writers or classics books based solely on the last few books you had read. Learning what I liked, he introduced me to Richard Yates, selling me Eleven Kinds of Loneliness for $4.75. It remains one of my favorite short story collections.

My college roommate Scott and I were surprised to find Leo at the door of our apartment late one night, moonlighting as a deliveryman for our favorite pizza parlor, Pisanello’s. He was wearing the same gray knit watchman’s cap he always wore in his unheated store and was making his way across town for his deliveries on his beat-up 10-speed. Was he delivering pizzas because his store wasn’t making enough money or because he wanted to get out and about more? With Leo, it was probably a bit of both; he had a weird, absent-minded sense of humor. He’s the one who told me, “Pocket Books are called that for a reason” and would sometimes have fire-sales of moldy pulp-fiction paperbacks from a tall metal spinner rack he’d put out on the sidewalk on sunny days. He was kind of hoping people entranced by the cool retro covers would steal them and he wouldn’t have to regret throwing them in the trash.