Re: at the street canal

marika <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I get a lot of posts on my Facebook TL about how food in other countries is
> made.
> They’re always “large batch” type operations of how food is prepped
> (usually manually) in exotic places like Taiwan, India, Mexico… all are for
> individual sales to the public, by street vendors. Most look really
> delicious, actually.
> Yesterday was a guy making a giant cauldron of an Asian noodles dish.
> “Authentic”. Somewhere in Malaysia or somewhere like that.
> While admittedly the final product looked really good, here is what he did.
> 
> Massive metal bowl, couple times the size of satellite dish.
> Boiling water and LOTS of raw eggs. Heat, stir.
> Add lots of spinach leaves. Continue heat and stir.
> Now here’s the best part: open DOZENS of individual packets of dry Ramen
> Pride noodles. Continue heat and stir.
> Open every single tiny little spice and soy packet, dozens of them, heat
> and stir.
> Add lots more raw eggs. Heat and stir.
> SERVE.
> 
> The “authentic” exotic local noodle dish was freakin Ramen Pride!
> 
> 
> 

“Her fourth novel was Geek Love. Published in 1989, it smashed the
best-seller list, and made Dunn into a bona fide countercultural goddess.
Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a family of itinerant carny
freaks. Over thirty years after its publication, it is a totem for
outcasts—born and made—the world over. It is the novel most likely to be
referenced in a tattoo, an illegal mural, a strip club dressing room, or
the smokers’ parking lot outside a home for troubled girls. In my own
misspent youth, I memorized Geek Love the way British schoolboys memorized
The Odyssey. I also wanted to find my fictional forebears. The Binewski
parents, Al and Crystal Lil, produced each of their children with love,
hallucinogens, and radioactive waste, and taught them to hold themselves
haughtily apart from the straight world. I too held myself haughtily apart
from the good blond children who liked to throw Coke bottles at my head.
For weird kids like me, Geek Love was both a respite and a weapon.
For all the freaks that Al and Crystal Lil created, they had their
failures—the six dead babies who floated in jars in a[…]”

Excerpt From
Toad
Katherine Dunn
By Molly Crabapple, foreword