Vietnamese egg cream

I was surprised and delighted to see “Egg Cream Soda” listed among the drink offerings at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant. But this egg cream is not the New York concoction of chocolate syrup, milk, and seltzer. The menu describes the drink like so: “sweet drink made from egg yolk, sweetened condensed milk & club soda served over ice.” And the menu really calls it an egg cream soda, or soda sua tlot ga. The tlot must be a typo: the Internets identify this drink as soda sua hot ga, or soda sữa hột gà.

Life is better when one is willing to marvel at ordinary things.

Raymond Carver on words and punctuation

Raymond Carver, writing in The New York Times in 1981:

That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer’s own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason — if the words are in any way blurred — the reader’s eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved.

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[1983 or so: I missed hearing Raymond Carver read. It was a late Friday afternoon, it had been a long day, I didn’t want to schlep down to the Northeastern campus. Some other time, I thought. There never was one.]

Satan’s seafood

[Life, June 1, 1959.]

I would have thought that the archfiend made his minions do the seasoning.

In my childhood, all sardines came from Martel. But eaters of a certain age may recall Underwood Sardines. The company’s FAQ page notes that the sardine line “was discontinued years ago.”

Underwood of course is best known for its Deviled Ham. Again, from the Underwood FAQ: “The Underwood Devil logo, which was registered in 1870, is believed to be the oldest registered trademark still in use for a prepackaged food product in the United States.” The Straight Dope has an excellent survey of deviled-food history.

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Recently updated

Another college president plagiarizing? A second Minnesota college president has been accused of plagiarism.

Ralph Ellison stamp

[Click for a much larger view.]

I’m a year late, but my knowledge of stamps is limited to what I see — or in this case what Elaine sees — in our post office. In 2014 the United States Postal Service issued a stamp honoring Ralph Ellison. Art by Kadir Nelson, from a photograph by Gordon Parks. Design by Ethel Kessler. Ninety-one cents = three ounces.

The USPS has a page with three writers’ thoughts about Ellison (who was born 101 years ago yesterday).

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All OCA Ralph Ellison posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

“It’s too bad we can’t go there on Wednesday. The phở is cheaper on Wednesdays.”

“We’ll just have to get phở -price phở.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Remedy that?

In the short conversation preceding this week’s Sunday Puzzle, a contestant confessed to having not seen A Fish Called Wanda. And NPR’s Rachel Martin said, “Remedy that, this weekend.”

I can’t recall ever hearing someone say remedy that. The phrasing seems to have some currency on Twitter; the first results of a Google search for “you should remedy that” are all Twitter-based: “If you’ve never, you should remedy that”; “You should remedy that, the dude was a legend”; “OH MY GOD YOU SHOULD REMEDY THAT IMMEDIATELY.” Searching for “you should remedy that” in Twitter brings up many, many tweets.

Reader, is remedy that, like, a thing? And did you know about it before reading this post? If not, reading this post has remedied that.

Harry Mathews on writing

Harry Mathews, from 20 Lines a Day (Dalkey Archive Press, 1988), a book that developed from a daily writing exercise:

Writing well is so hard — that’s why it’s fun to go for.

New directions in sardines

I opened a can of skinless and boneless sardines for lunch. In olive oil. Sliced a onion. Made a little lump of Dijon mustard. Took out some bread. And then I thought: what about barbecue sauce?

We have a bottle of Memphis-style sauce, nearly empty, in the fridge. Elaine, encouraging, not warning: “Try just a dab.” I did. Many dabs followed. Many, many dabs.

Sardines and barbecue sauce are out of sight: delicious and no longer visible. I am a member of the Clean Plate Club, and I owe it all to sardines and barbecue sauce. As they used to say on television, Try some today.

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[Matt, this could be the recipe you’re looking for.]

What’s relatable

Ira Glass gave teachers of lit an odd little gift with his fleetingly infamous comment that King Lear is “not relatable.” Oh yeah? When I teach the play later this spring, I’ll probably invite my students to bash that piñata argue against that point of view. I will first have to explain who Ira Glass is: This American Life, as I already know, is off my students’ radar.

Looking up Glass’s comment now, I found a terrific response by Rebecca Mead, The Scourge of “Relatability” (The New Yorker). It might be generally useful to teachers who want to resist the idea that a work of lit must somehow meet a reader on the reader’s own terms. An excerpt:

To appreciate King Lear — or even The Catcher in the Rye or The Fault in Our Stars — only to the extent that the work functions as one’s mirror would make for a hopelessly reductive experience. But to reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us in a shape that we can easily recognize — because it does not exempt us from the active exercise of imagination or the effortful summoning of empathy — is our own failure. It’s a failure that has been dispiritingly sanctioned by the rise of “relatable.” In creating a new word and embracing its self-involved implications, we have circumscribed our own critical capacities. That’s what sucks, not Shakespeare.

Amen to that.

[“Later this spring”: as in spring semester. I’ve substituted italics for quotation marks in the excerpt.]