Sriracha Chili Sauce

Okay, I realize I'm obsessed with Sriracha sauce (aka "rooster sauce" or "cock sauce"), but I'm finding it's not that uncommon to be... check this out: the New York Times article about it, "A Chili Sauce to Crow About," is presently the #1 most emailed article. What! To its credit, however, it's a good condiment for practically anything - obviously in pho noodles, but also atop any savory rice dish or mixed into other sauces. And new visitors to our house almost unfailingly comment on how great the stuff is. Sriracha-users seem to be pretty enthusiastic fans!

This school year = complete. One more year for me. Time to start on my summer reads!

And a link for ya'll. Here's a neat YouTube-based collaborate music project called In B Flat. These videos seem to harmonize well no matter what order in which you start playing them. Sounds pretty atmospheric, art-school... it kind of depends on which you choose, though. I can't really figure out what's going on with the Nintendo DS there - is the game console itself making the noise?

My present self reading with past self, who had written for future self.

Just some musing during my re-read of The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien:
High school literature class. Learning the language of archetypes, of parallelism. Listing notes on syntax, emulating the rhetoric, claiming recognition of a "transferred epithet." Scribbling that in the margin a half-page above an unfinished meditation on juxtaposition of -

A re-read is an instance of
notes expounding upon notes,
a book carrying a weight great
with pen-ink and trailing thoughts.

(Also confer Billy Collins's poem, "Marginalia.")

Link: Forbes ranking of the 20 Best Places to Live in the World

Go here to see the slideshow of the 20 best, ranked by Forbes.
This is pretty neat because I am looking to get out of the DC area in the next few years, mostly because I've never lived anywhere else. According to this list, I'd probably have to cross over to western Europe or Canada to achieve the highest quality of life... I don't know. Anyhow, this does not help to quell my wanderlust. I'm gonna have to take a weekend roadtrip ou deux this summer.

Back to paper-writing. I've been just cranking out the pages lately (but of course in a more artful manner than that denotes, I should hope). Oh, and somebody remind me to write sometime about how everything I read seems to converge and allude to each other and music even, music aligns in such concord to the words on the page and the thoughts that seem to emerge everywhere. Almost enough to make one believe there is a configuration natural to living or thought... But I digress; that's a whole 'nother post at least. And, o! I have some fresh thoughts on social networks online and offline to expand upon, too. Possibly also a feature post on the musical genre of "freak folk," in time. There's a lot of writing to be had here.

Quotation for this lovely morning.

From an interview with Harold Bloom on the subject of reading in the modern age: "You cannot even begin to heal the worst aspects of solitude, which are loneliness and potential madness, by visual experience of any kind, particularly the sort of mediated visual experience that you get off a screen of whatever sort."

In honor of tax day having come and gone:

My brother sent me this link - a visual representation of where your Federal tax dollars go. Nicely laid out, especially for those of you who grasp numbers better in spiffy graphical form.

Leaving Tangier, Tahar Ben Jelloun

Likely the most notable aspect of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s newest novel to be translated from French into English, Leaving Tangier (2009), is his unique storytelling through the series of “character sketches.” People of all backgrounds and experiences and relations to Tangier are made real and alive through their speech, reflections, and cultural mannerisms. Most of their tales are quite tragic: stories of prostitution, drug-dealing, and trafficking run rampant in Tangier’s seedy coastline locale. New people are introduced abruptly; their narratives are then weaved together through the highly ambivalent relationship between Azel and Miguel, separately from Morocco and Spain, who together represent the portal city of Tangier. Leaving Tangier shows Tahar Ben Jelloun’s developed understanding of what it feels like to straddle two nations and how difficult it is to completely sever the ties to one’s homeland. His knowledge of expatriation is as vast as his characters are numerous.

In this novel of simultaneous descent and brief bouts of enlightenment, migrants are torn about their past and national identity. Azel, the protagonist, is described at one point as “street trash” by his rich Spanish “lover,” who is all too willing to take the Moroccan man’s body even without receving his heart. Their acts flow parallel to the Strait of Gibraltar, claiming the Moroccan lives that sorely strove to reach new prospects in the glamorous land over the water. Drowning becomes a purgatory move in this sense, cleansing years of raw history.