They should just call it "Ed's"

In Buffalo, a famous family hot-dog business splits—now there's a "Theodore's" to compete with "Ted's." (Full story at the Buffalo News.)

That's part of the reason Theo's Fring, a mixed order of French fries and onion rings, is not called Ted's Fring, and why burgers are called the Big T and the Little T, rather than the big and little Ted.

*

In non-hot-dog news, tonight I'm on a panel at the Asian American Writers' Workshop—"How to Get Your Book Published: From Writing a Query Letter to Signing a Contract." (It's at 7 p.m., 110-112 W. 27th St., 6th floor.)

Alphabetical America

When he got sick of the South, Mr. Huang said, he decided to go to Buffalo for a Ph.D. in English literature. He felt, he writes in “Charlie Chan,” “like a bottom-feeding fish, one that cannot see the light of day in the muddy pond of America.”

But why Buffalo? “Buffalo begins with B,” he said, grinning. He worked as a delivery boy there, but happily gave up the restaurant business. “Graduate school is really easy compared to restaurant work,” he pointed out. —Charles McGrath, "Charlie Chan: A Stereotype and a Hero," NYT

Postscript: Nabokov: "I am as American as April in Arizona."

Long-lost cousins

For his part, Jason Breen, 30, a more recent Buffalo transplant, explained: “Every time I meet an expatriate or a Buffalonian on vacation, I feel as though I just had an encounter with a long-lost cousin. There is an understanding, an instant bond and a mutual respect between us.”

—NYT, "Devoted to Buffalo, However Far They Roam"

(From Jane)

Disambiguations™ for March 12, 2010

I. Least promising title of folder on my desktop: "Unfinished semifictional scraps"

II. Great idea for an essay over at The Millions: "On Epigraphs."

(I haven't read it yet...does that matter? I can just post stuff here to read later.)

III. Via The Second Pass, some love for Buffalo and Talking Leaves bookstore, and some thoughts on where the East Coast ends and the Midwest begins:

Upstate New York is tricky. The better I’ve gotten to know the western NY region, the more I think that it really is better thought of as the eastern edge of the Midwest. Buffalo absolutely has many of the attributes (and problems) of the Great Lakes cities I know well, like Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and my own Milwaukee. People “seem” Midwestern in a way that I rarely sense on the east or west coasts (though I occasionally feel the Midwest vibe in Denver, which maybe has some Midwest attributes as well)

As I move east toward Syracuse and the Finger Lakes however, things feel a little less clear. These places are still far from the east coast, yet they don’t read Midwestern in the way Buffalo does. When I’m in Ithaca I feel pretty firmly out of the Midwest.

My east coast colleague, Adena, and I sometimes puzzle over NY state geography. A new store appears in an unfamiliar town. She sells Albany, I go as far east (theoretically anyway) as Binghamton, so we’ll call each other and say “is this yours or mine?” The line in New York and Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh! also Midwest!) is fuzzy.

IV. Levi: "Surely the Germans have come up with a word for lying about your plans to blog?"

Funes the Memorious, Western New York version

Description:
"Typical mid-afternoon commercial fare from WKBW TV in Buffalo, NY. 1. Shield Soap 2. Triaminic Cold Syrup 3. Ty-D-Bol 4. Lee Press On Nails (Active Length) 5. ABC Promo- Ryan's Hope"

[Circa?]

A day without wings

On January 26, will Buffalo pizzerias stop serving wings? Read on!

(Via Arlo.)

A must-read?

Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo...
—NYT

(From Jenny D)

And..."the Baryshnikov of the hockey rink"...meets disco...c. 1979..."two of the most powerful trends of our society..."



And...Dzyd Jessica on NewsRadio.

Jupiter jones — Lush life — Buffalo architecture

Jonathan Lethem's "Walking the Moons" is up at Joyland, that "hub for short fiction."

* * *

In the NYTBR, Graydon Carter kicks off the front-page review with...Powell!

It can reasonably be said that “A Dance to the Music of Time,” Anthony Powell’s monumental 12-part novel about English manners, society, politics and power, still begs for an American counterpart. Lush and majestic, the book traces the years from 1921 to 1974 — pretty much the period we like to romanticize as “the American century.” But if no novel over here quite tracks Powell’s course, the life of George Ames Plimpton, impressively recorded in this glorious new biography, “George, Being George,” offers a potential substitute. Powell, in his novel, described four types of men: the artist, the romantic, the man of will and the cynic. —NYTBR

* * *

The NYT's Nicolai Ouroussoff has a long look at Buffalo's architectural heritage:

At a time when oil prices and oil dependence are forcing us to rethink the wisdom of suburban and exurban living, Buffalo could eventually offer a blueprint for repairing America’s other shrinking postindustrial cities.

Touring Buffalo’s monuments is about as close as you can get to experiencing firsthand the earliest struggles to define what an American architecture would look like.

Meet the Mets (in Buffalo)

The New York Mets are a horrorshow right now, blowing late-game leads with the precision of a Swiss-made timepiece (a Tag Heuer, perhaps?). Jayson Stark of ESPN relays an astonishing statistic from Bill James: that if their games were ended after 6 innings, the Mets would have an 11 1/2 game lead over the Phillies, and if they were ended after 8 innings, the lead would be 6 1/2. Currently, they are trailing by 1.5 games. Incredible.

Which is why I shift my thoughts to more soothing things, like my (and the Dizzies') hometown Buffalo Bisons announcing the Mets as their new parent club. Now, the Mets' farm system can charitably be described as "bare", while the former daddy Cleveland Indians have consistently produced outstanding talent from within (i.e. Grady Sizemore, C.C. Sabathia), so this doesn't bode well for on the field success. But the Mets are my team (a rebellion against my Dad's Yankee-ness), so if on my visits home I can see the exploits of the few gems in the system (Fernando Martinez, Wilmer Flores), then all the better.

Part of the reason the Bisons are so attractive to major league teams (they beat out Syracuse to nab the Mets) is their top notch facilities. It's mind boggling to think of it now, but Pilot Field (now the poetically named Dunn Tire Park) is such a nice ballpark because Buffalo held out hope to land a major league team, and was one of five finalists in 1993 for an expansion team, which eventually went to Florida and Colorado. What would Buffalo be like now if it had a Major League franchise?

As Wikipedia helpfully points out, the stadium was one of the first "retro" style baseball-only stadiums built by the architectural firm HOK Sport, four years before they also built Baltimore's Camden Yards, initiating the template for all new parks, up to and including the new Mets stadium, CitiField, which will open next year along with their new Bisons affiliation. It's fate!

And...let me point out that the undefeated Buffalo Bills are now in first place in the AFC East for the first time since week 2 of 2003. I'm only stating facts, not setting myself up for inevitable disappointment.

Stock footage

Buffalo's Talking Leaves bookstore gets a nice salute from Three Percent, for stocking the new Dubravka Ugresic...and from The Dizzies, for stocking Personal Days! (Buffalonians, why not stock up on both?)

In other PD news (wait, was that last thing "news"?)—PD has been shortlisted for the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize! (Here's the Galleycat post, and here's something else, with more on the prize.)

UPDATE: In further PD news—and yes, that last thing was news—though the jury's still out on item #1!—GET TO THE POINT, PARK—I'll be reading at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, 9/14 at 5 p.m. on the Mainstage. (Website here; click "2008 events.") Once again I join Chuck Klosterman (whose debut novel, Downtown Owl, is coming out soon)...also reading: Charles Bock! I need to change my name so that it is "Charles" based? Maybe that is a joke I can tell before I start reading......hmmm.....

Modern, primitive, theatrical

Fascinating piece in the...Antiques section!

[Charles] Rohlfs, a Brooklyn native, had studied engineering at Cooper Union around 1870 and then started designing stove parts for a living while acting part time, mostly in Shakespearean tragedies. (Theater critics called his performances “painful to witness” and “screamingly funny instead of sad.”) His fortunes turned in 1884: he married Anna Katharine Green, a best-selling detective novelist seven years his senior. Despite occasional paralyzing bouts of depression, she published a career total of some 40 books.

“People had a voracious appetite for her work,” Mr. Cunningham said. “The writing sounds stilted now, but it was very modern for the time, and her enormous royalties freed her husband to do whatever he wanted.”

In 1887 the couple moved to Buffalo, where Rohlfs worked briefly for a stove manufacturer and then set up a workshop with a few freelance carvers. He channeled his theatrical tendencies into design. He suspended wall cabinets from thick chains like medieval moat crossings and sliced table bases with so much filigree that they seem deceptively unstable.

His desks are riddled with secret compartments and have finials shaped like leaping flames. Cell-like honeycombs are stretched taut across the backs of his chairs...

A few wealthy patrons...commissioned custom pieces. Rohlfs exhibited at some international fairs, including the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, and he wangled a distribution contract from Marshall Field & Company in Chicago. It advertised his designs as “so primitive yet so new and modern that they excite wonder.” But they did not catch on.

“The work was so radical it defied categorization,” Mr. Cunningham said. “People must have thought it was positively freakish.”

Much more at NYT.

1936 obit here: Is Credited With Having Originated Mission Furniture, BEGAN CAREER ON STAGE Starred in Mystery Drama Taken From Novel by Wife, Anna Katharine Green

Wife's obit here: 'The Leavenworth Case' in '78 Followed by 36 Other Books — Wife of Charles Rohlfs, WANTED TO WRITE POETRY Wrote Detective Stories to Draw Attention to Her Verse — Changed Mystery Fiction.

(I like this bit, Green saying: "The plot should be so clear and concise that if it were given in the curt language of a telegram it should be interesting.")

Paging Paul Collins!

Buffalo beckons?

So they traded their one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment in Sunset Park—the one they describe as “disgusting and so small and just awful,” and for which they paid $1,300 a month plus an extra hundred for a storage space because the landlady wouldn’t let them use their own basement—for a three-bedroom apartment on a tree-lined street with a living room, a dining room, a basement, a front and back porch, stained-glass windows, and a separate office for Herbeck. All that goes for $795 a month, a price that, Herbeck points out somewhat sheepishly, as though she’s revealing a guilty indulgence, is at the top end of the rental market in Buffalo. —New York

(Via Dzyd JMcB)

Beans and ancestors

[Typed out this morning to Levi Stahl, after finishing Richard Stark's partly-Buffalo-set The Outfit, luxuriously reading late into the night]

Just woke up from a dream in which a letter from Roberto Bolaño (to one of his translators) mentions Buffalo....The letter appears in the latest Triple Canopy.* The translator's letter mentions Buffalo and Niagara Falls, saying, "Of course, since you had only been in the country two days, I can't expect you to have visited either of these places," and mentions how nice it was to have him over for dinner. [He had apparently been in the U.S. recently, for the first time.]

Bolaño's letter is a marvel. He begins by saying, "Believe it or not, I had to travel to Buffalo as soon as I arrived, and had the opportunity to visit the famous Falls," and mentions a few local details that make it clear he did make the trip. Then he digresses on the wonderful dinner salad she prepared, writing that, curiously enough, every ingredient in the salad had some connection to a place in his life. The beans were from Venezuela, as were some of his ancestors; he lived for a time in Mexico, where the cheese was from, etc.




_______
*I must have been thinking of this.

Monday grab-bag, or My new sweet style

...what if I wrote my next novel like this?...Actually the followup to Personal Days has been written, by the inimitable Deb Olin Unferth. It's called Vacation....If I were a saxophonist who played on the street for money, I'd learn "Careless Whisper"...The place name "Multnomah County" gives me the heebie-jeebies...Heffernan: "In his vertiginous free time, he crash-diets, cheats at kickboxing and persuades people to give him money"...Finally finished watching a movie—My Blueberry Nights—is it just me or does some of it feel quite Blockian? Some of the dialogue (esp. between Jude Law and Norah Jones)? And the AA stuff...I'm on the fence about it over all, well, no, let's say I liked it...why not...I used to be a film critic!...The soundtrack should've had Prefab Sprout's "Blueberry Pies"—the lyrics are even almost appropriate: "So if I come begging with take me back eyes/All you have to tell me/All you have to tell me are blueberry, blueberry pies"....WHATEVER!!!......Speaking of food: Korean food....Also in the NYT, a Q&A with American Teen director Nanette Burstein, talking about "her own intense high school experience two decades ago in Buffalo"...ummm....yes...she and yr correspondent were classmates!...Did someone say Buffalo? Yes: The Stubblemeister did, with a tip for Dizzyheads....

Syllabary

I love this juxtaposition of quotes over at the Ouroboric Erasing:

Borges, talking to the Paris Review, 1967:

You know, English is a beautiful language, but the older languages are even more beautiful: they had vowels. Vowels in modern English have lost their value, their color. My hope for English — for the English language — is America. Americans speak clearly. When I go to the movies now, I can’t see much, but in the American movies, I understand every word.

Lorrie Moore, mercilessly, in her short story “How to Become a Writer”:

Insist you are not very interested in any one subject at all, that you are interested in the music of language, that you are interested in — in — syllables, because they are the atoms of poetry, the cells of the mind, the breath of the soul. Begin to feel woozy. Stare into your plastic wine cup.

“Syllables?” you will hear someone ask, voice trailing off, as they glide slowly toward the reassuring white of the dip.

Can I add two from my personal stash?

Clem came from Buffalo and spoke in the neutral American accent that sends dictionary makers there. His pronunciation was clear and colorless.
—John Updike, "I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying"

Could mortal lip divine
The undeveloped Freight
Of a delivered syllable
'Twould crumble with the weight.
—Emily Dickinson

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for March 25, 2008

I. Two quotes—

Ultimately I was removed from Buffalo, but the stages of my breakdown have a montage-like quality to them, and by now they’re mixed up with what I have dreamed.
—Charles Baxter, The Soul Thief

Anthony Powell wouldn't do, while Michael Moorcock became a friend....
—Karl Miller, "Duty and the Drink," review of J.G. Ballard's Miracles of Life, TLS

II. Lots of action on the Personal Days blog! I deliberately chose the most antiseptic-looking Blogger template, but what does it mean that I find it very warm now? (Thanks to Dizzyhead Jen for co-blogging there with me.)

III. Janet Maslin on Jodi Picoult:

What if a bad man murdered a nice woman’s husband? What if he killed her daughter too? What if she had another daughter? What if 11 years later, as the date for the bad man’s execution approached, the second daughter needed a new heart?

What if the bad man wanted to make amends with an organ transplant? What if he wanted to give his bad heart to the innocent child? As Ms. Picoult puts it, in the bold, high-concept idiom of movie ads: “Would you want your dreams to come true if it meant granting your enemy’s dying wish?”

Let’s put it another way: If you were that mother, would it take you 447 pages to make up your mind?

I kind of wish the whole piece was composed of questions—didn't Lester Bangs have a piece in which every sentence ended in an exclamation point? (Via Light Reading)

IV. I love this Paul Collins piece on How to Do Nothing With Nobody All Alone By Yourself, in the latest Tin House:

A step-by-step guide to grinding oyster shells against the front stoop for no damn reason, to turning buttons and string into buzzsaws that won't cut anything, and to making paper boomerangs that don't come back, Nothing is about what you do when you're nine years old and have neither money nor anyone paying much attention to you, and where your one guiding principle is that you avoid grown-ups and don't ask for help....

V. And finally—it wouldn't be a "Table-Talk" without your daily Ouroboros. This one's from Dizzyhead Khong, who helpfully IDs the critter as an "armadillo lizard"; according to this site, "They bite on their tail and roll themselves into a ball when threatened."

The first picture show

Over at Termite Art, Dizzies Team Member Rob points to a Buffalo News article about the Ellicott Building. "If one was looking for a cosmopolitan night on the town, you could enter the Edisonia Phonograph Parlor, head downstairs, and walk into Vitagraph Hall—one of the earliest, and possibly THE earliest, movie theater in the U.S., having opened in October, 1896," Rob writes.

(Here's the original article.)

My rebuttal!

Still thinking about this previous post, excerpt from the article on Buffalo's decline.

1. Isn't it unfair to compare Buffalo's college-degree-holder percentage with...Manhattan's (surely the highest in the country)? Better to compare it to the national average?
2. "Buffalo wasn't a university town like Boston"—no, but is any town a university town like Boston?
3. The "Scandinavian passion" strikes me as weird and unproveable?

Wide right

This has come to me from various Dizzyheads: "Can Buffalo Ever Come Back," an article in the latest City Journal.

Buffalo wasn’t a particularly skilled city in 1970, and it isn’t one now. Fewer than 19 percent of the city’s adults boast a college degree; the number in Manhattan is 57.5 percent. Whereas New York always had some industries, such as finance, that required brainpower, Buffalo’s industries were invariably brawn-based. Buffalo wasn’t a university town like Boston, and it didn’t have Minneapolis’s Scandinavian passion for good lower education. It had the right skill mix for making steel or flour, not for flourishing in the information age.

Olaf Fub sez

Dizzyhead Sarah sends us this sentence:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

A sentence? Yes! More here.