Don't Fling Stones At This Joint

first published in The Malay Mail Online, 27 May 2015


♪ Flingstones, eat at Flingstones, Subang Jaya's modern hip café
Right in SS15, loads of porky goodness done their way... ♫

...Sorry.

I'd heard about this place that offers, among other things, an aglio olio-style pasta with bacon and crispy bits of fried pork lard ("NOOOOO", shrieked my liver). But makan kaki Melody was in another state, celebrating a new career milestone, and I had no excuse to go there on my own.

One evening, outside Flingstones Café

Then I received an invitation to lunch at Flingstones from Mel's buddies, Wendy and Sam.

Located along Jalan SS 15/8, on the same row as Starbucks and situated across Taylor's College, the café doesn't quite stand out (it was something else when Google Street View passed by). But once you step inside...

...not much stands out, either.

Well, perhaps for the names of some of their offerings, which say nothing about what's in them at all. Have fun figuring out why "Snow White is a Nutcase", whether you want "One Night with Cendolman", and ... why is a Michael Jackson song and an English rock band on the menu?

Just a small sample of Flingstones' brand of whimsy

I admit, it made us curious.

None of us wanted crispy pork lard, so we settled for the Oink-Oink Ribs, while Sam had "One Night with Cendolman" and a Gula Melaka Latté, followed by a BLT sandwich.

"Cendolman" turned out to be a cake with layers of pandan sponge, gula melaka-infused sago pearls and coconut cream, topped with gula melaka jelly, that evokes memories of the cooling traditional streetside treat.

"One Night with Cendolman", a slice of Malaysia in a cake

Sam didn't fancy her beverage, though. Coffee and gula melaka both have this smoky, earthy thing going on and she couldn't get used to tasting both in the same cup. Plus, she thought it was too sweet. I had a sip and found it okay, but I'm partial to weird coffee drinks.

The ribs, tender and coated with a sweet and slightly sour plum sauce, were bone-sucking good. Perhaps too good, to the point where I injured my mouth trying to get at every last bit of sauce, after tearing off the tasty bits caveman style.

Not Flintstone-sized, but the sight, smell and taste of the Oink-Oink Ribs
will rouse the caveman in you

Sam also loved the battered and fried orange and purple sweet potatoes that came with the ribs - a welcome change from the sticky sweet-sour sauce on the ribs. However, we saw little difference between a half rack (which was more of a three-quarter rack) and a full rack. Was the chef in a good mood?

When I saw that Flingstones had the "Dirty", I knew what it was, having seen something similar offered elsewhere. Here, in a glass where the rim was powdered with cocoa, was a layer of espresso that would slowly meld with the cold milk it was sitting on, like a painting in progress. What wasn't welcome was the swirl of whipped cream on top. At least the coffee was good.

Partners in crime: the "Dirty" (left) and the "Smooth Criminal" (photo by
Wendy Lok). So, Annie, are they OK, are they OK, Annie? "I don't know, I'll
have to try them."

Time passed and we had a ball shooting the breeze, but I felt the need for another beverage or something. "Hit me with a 'Smooth Criminal'," I told the cashier.

What came was an egg-sized scoop of vanilla ice cream in a glass, perched on a bed of grass jelly, and a tiny flask filled with espresso. Like the "Cendolman," the jelly provided that added texture to what would've been a run-of-the-mill affogato.

Chu yau char angel hair pasta: sinful as heck

Wendy loved everything. She's not picky. She said she'll return for the ribs.

Which she did one Saturday evening, and this time Melody was around for the ride.

As expected, the bacon and pork-lard angel hair pasta was great, but only if your thirst is the kind that only pig fat can slake.

Hidden inside the strands of well-lubricated pasta was one or two pieces of cili padi, so be careful.

In the end, all that's left on the plate was about a teaspoonful of pork-lard crisps, in spite of fears of growing waistlines and fat-smothered livers.

But it'll be a while before we'd miss this dish again.

Until then, we're eating clean. And fitness buff Sam gave me some kilo-shedding tips.

---

Flingstones Café

Jalan SS15/8
47500 Subang Jaya
Selangor

CLOSED FOR GOOD

Book Marks: To Write Good Books, China Censors And Genre Snobbery

Working in publishing doesn't mean you'll learn how to write and publish a good book, as Patricia Park learns. Things were different when the shoe's on the other foot:

Part of the difficulty with writing is that it's an unruly, inefficient process. I'd create painstaking outlines, only to off-road the narrative. I wrote longhand in spiral notebooks—for every ten words I put down, I'd cut nine. Then I'd type up my work, print it out, and edit again by pen.

...In a misguided moment (among the many), I took the passing advice of a writing instructor who found my protagonist "distant" and rewrote half a year's work from the first-person voice to the third—only to return eventually to the first-person. It's a process that generates a lot of waste. Years' worth of work ended up on the cutting room floor.

---

Two things in Hong Kong: China's control over the sale of sensitive books in the island territories (which has been around for some time) and the decision to close City University's MFA programme might have something to do with Occupy Central.

Madeleine Thien, a Canadian novelist and tutor at the University, seems to think the closure could be political, and fears for her students and the youth of Hong Kong.

Recently, one of my students wrote to me: "Freedom of speech is dying in Hong Kong." In its abrupt closure of a small programme, City University has chosen to make the act of writing a political battle. For five years, we occupied a small and unique place: a learning environment in which there were no hard and fast dicta, but in which we cultivated the awareness that language is thinking. Language can diminish and language can enlarge. For our young people, to read and to be read matters.

With regards to book censorship, this report on how Chinese censors are changing the content in imported works without the authors' knowledge is ... well ... perturbing.

US novelist Paul Auster told PEN he did not discover the changes made to the translated version of his book Sunset Park until after publication in China last November. He said he felt his book was mutilated. The plight of dissident and Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo is a minor plot in the book. The publisher cut several pages, and in other places replaced the dissident's name with "L."

Oh, China. What else can I say?

---

Over at Salon, Rachel Kramer Bussel has problems with somebody's "cultural snobbery masquerading as concern for the impending downfall of society".

Everyone is entitled to read, watch and listen to whatever they want. Personally, I'd rather see people reading something than reading nothing. ...if you're so concerned with society being dumbed down, why not try to tackle the problem of illiteracy or education or library funding?

---

Life doesn't come with trigger warnings, says Lori Horvitz in The Guardian, so why should books have them? "Do we, as citizens of this uncomfortable and unpredictable world, have the luxury and privilege of receiving 'trigger warnings' before being exposed to disturbing material about subjects like the Holocaust, lynching, murder and rape?"

Horvitz is, according to her Guardian profile, a "Professor of Literature and Language at University of North Carolina at Asheville, where she teaches courses in creative writing, literature, and directs their Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program."

---

Find out how Terry Pratchett's Night Watch cured Sam Jordison's post-election blues.

There is some wonderful, inspiring material in this novel about the rule of law and the benefits of simple decency. There's fiery rage at the injustice of society – and yet also gentle delight in the way things keep on moving in spite of that injustice, and a determination that people can do the right thing. At a time when I've felt pretty bleak about human nature, it's been a ray of light. Come the next election, one of the first things I'll want to know from my candidate is how much Terry Pratchett he or she has read.

I think Jordison's not a fan of the Conservative Party.

---

"Is this the forgotten book that inspired Douglas Adams?" asks Scott Pack, who found similarities between Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Richard Cowper's Worlds Apart.

Though he doesn't feel his analysis is conclusive, he's "willing to bet that Douglas Adams was aware of this book and may well have read it before writing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Worlds Apart was published in 1974, Hitchhiker was first broadcast in 1978. Cowper, the pen name of John Middleton Murry Jr, was a popular SF writer throughout the 1970s. Never a huge bestseller, he was nonetheless well known in SF circles and I find it unlikely that Adams would not have heard of him.

Book Marks: Extreme Openness, Neverending Drama

A forum in Universiti Malaya to discuss new phenomena in the local book publishing industry was cancelled supposedly because of a ban on Faisal Tehrani's books. The forum was originally scheduled to be held at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, but was shifted to UM - probably for the same reason.

On a slightly related note: I found an interesting old video clip on YouTube: an Edisi 7 segment in 2013 talking about Lejen Press dan "Isu Keterbukaan Melampau Buku Alternatif" (the issue of extreme openness in alternative books).

I guess in some quarters, this is still an issue.

---

After Borders threatened JAWI with legal action if Nik Raina's case not dropped, this happened. But the joy was shortlived when JAWI denied withdrawing the appeal, which is now likely to be heard in the Federal Court this August.

Cukuplah, wei.

---

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in a lecture that closed the recent PEN World Voices festival, warned against "codes of silence" in American life (but she could be speaking of similar things in other places as well.

Using the contrast between Nigerian and American hospitals as an example, Adichie pointed out that Americans like to be "comfortable". And she worried that the comfort has brought "dangerous silencing" into American public conversation. "The fear of causing offence, the fear of ruffling the careful layers of comfort, becomes a fetish," Adichie said. As such, the goal of many public conversations in the United States "is not truth ... [it] is comfort".

"To choose to write is to reject silence," Adichie also said.


Let's move on:

• On page 20 in the 13 May edition of The Sun, Adifitri Ahmad speaks about his graphic novel Taubat Si Tanggang, published by Maple (pronounced "Ma-PLUH", apparently) Comics. The story and concept are interesting, and I heard that if it's well received, there will be another volume.
• The Perak Academy launched four books by local writers at Sekeping Kong Heng in Ipoh. Star Metro has a bit more about one of the books that were launched.
• RIP William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well.
• Wandering food journalist Robyn Eckhardt shares the story of "A Day in the Life of a Singapore Hawker". It's a tough life, and reminiscent of what our hawkers face.
• Writers Margaret Atwood, JG Ballard, AS Byatt, et al. share their early reads.
• "A history of pigs is a history of humanity". A Q&A with Mark Essig, author of Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig, at Salon, which also features an excerpt from the book.
• No idea how "sea lion" became a verb until I looked it up. This tweet made me.
• Sh*t book nerds do, according to Book Riot. Whoa, really?

In The Company of Good Food

first published in The Malay Mail Online, 18 May 2015


Famished after a day at work, I drifted past the different restos in Jaya Shopping Centre, finding nothing that caught my fancy.

Then I remembered a place on the fifth floor.

Good Food and Co. at Jaya Shopping Centre

Good Food and Co. was an unremarkable two-level café with and open kitchen and several desserts displayed on top of a chiller. A food blog waxed lyrical over the egg dishes, and I'd begun turning to eggs for a pick-me-up.

That was way back when. Several dishes the food blog mentioned were no longer available. One of the first things I tried was the shakshouka, an egg poached in an earthenware dish of spicy tomato-based vegetable stew. This was served with slices of crusty bread that's baked on the premises.

The shakshouka, Good Food and Co's go-to, must-try staple

Even without the optional merguez sausage, the shakshouka, said to be of either Middle Eastern or North African origin, made a hearty and healthy meal. Serious vegetarians can probably ask the chefs to omit the egg. Don't worry - the owners, head chef Jonathan and his wife Lydia, are nice and approachable.

So, on this fine day, I went up to Good Food and Co., who had just introduced a laksa pesto pasta with chicken. Since then, I've had it three times, and each tasted a little different as they tweaked the dish.

Laksa pesto chicken pasta - Malaysia on a plate, kind of

What hit me were the flavours, which tasted like they came from a Malay grandma's rural backyard garden. I imagined (you don't ask, okay?) laksa leaves, chilli, a bit of lemongrass, maybe torch ginger flower and peanuts, tossed with some fettuccine and well-marinated chicken. You also get lime wedges.

I had an ulam spaghetti somewhere a long while ago, and in hindsight, a pesto made out of herbs and condiments in laksa or nasi kerabu isn't all that far-fetched. But to actually come up with it...

Three times. Maybe there was a fourth. I stopped counting since the brain went over the laksa pesto cliff. Seems unfair to some of the other items on the menu that also look interesting.

Possibly among the best brownies you'll ever have in the Klang Valley

Since then, I introduced another makan kaki to this place while Melody was out of town. Irene's roast chicken, sitting on a puree of pumpkin with salad on the side was well made, as was my beef salami pasta with soft-boiled egg. A quirky touch was nesting the egg, still in the shell with the top taken off, upright in a bed of pasta.

I was not keen on dessert, but Irene sort of insisted. Her choice of a brownie with ice cream piqued my interest in the carrot cake, which I saw being iced with butter cream behind the counter by lady boss Lydia.

Homely home-baked carrot cake

Then again, the desserts, including the salted caramel cake and blueberry muffins, look so inviting, even with the uneven surfaces on the cakes and icing. Like the breads, some were baked within the premises.

Both were delightful, especially the brownie, which Irene said she would return for. Not a light endorsement from someone who surgically removes every bit of chopped green herb from her main courses before digging in.

Good Food and Co's fare is simple, unpretentious yet tasty. Just a few good ingredients, some technique and a lot of care, served in a homely setting.

Even their current weekday special: a rice-and-chicken dish with a sunny-side-up egg, is so well done, with moist and tender chicken.

And as the last mouthful finally, reluctantly, slides down your gullet, you can't help but wonder: what will they come up with next?

---

Good Food and Co.

Lot 5.02, Level 5, Jaya Shopping Centre
Jalan Semangat, Seksyen 14
46100 Petaling Jaya
Selangor

Pork-free

Mon-Sat: 11:30am-9pm
Sun: 12pm-9pm

+603 7931 5156

Web site | Facebook page

Book Marks: Fixi Is Popular, GerakBudaya Raid, And Minor Updates

The Popular-The Star Readers' Choice Awards is back. Looks like the fiction category is dominated by Fixi. Specifically, the English-language Fixi Novo imprint.

I swear I could hear Fixi boss Amir Muhammad laughing as I read it.

However, I have a problem with this paragraph:

To vote, you can fill up voting forms, available on this page on the right, as well as at all Popular and Harris bookstores nationwide. Or you can vote online at either popular.com.my, facebook.com/popularmalaysia, bookfestmalaysia.com or facebook.com/bookfestmalaysia.

I actually looked around for "this page on the right", wondering what was going on. Guess they weren't paying attention when shifting the text online.

Another Fixi Novo book, a compilation of creepy, mind-messing short stories titled Here Be Nightmares by Julya Oui was longlisted for the Frank O' Connor International Short Story Award. Oui has come a long way since her first published compilation. Let's wish her all the best.

---

The Home Ministry raided the GerakBudaya booth during the KL International Book Fair last week and seized copies of several books, including the controversial Money Logging.

The ministry has also banned four books by Faisal Tehrani, including the flagged Sebongkah Batu di Kuala Berang, which, according to that Malaysian Insider report, "were found to have contained Shia elements".


Plus:

• My job would be a lot simpler if the writers followed these rules (which I tend to break myself, unfortunately). But isn't it inconvenient, to have metaphorical rulebooks or style guides hovering over your head, especially when you're struggling to get a first draft out?
• Yesterday, 5 May, was the 151st anniversary of the birth of Elizabeth Jane Cochran, otherwise known as Nellie Bly, the American journalist who pioneered a "new kind of investigative journalism" (I find the term "muckraking" derogatory). Slate ran a piece on her, which includes a link to some of her work, archived by NYU Libraries (in PDFs, and some of the files can be huge).
• RIP Joshua Ozersky, food writer and food editor for Esquire. Damn, dude was only 47.
• This review of a restaurant by Jay Rayner sparked a flurry of legal letters. Considering it's Rayner, it's probably not the first (or last) time.
• Sunili Govinnage read books by only minority authors for a year and learnt how white the reading world is.
• Somebody's Kickstarting an emoji translation project. In light of news that Malaysians are among the world's heavy emoji users and the On the Fastrack strips highlighting icon-based communication, I wonder if we will end up not being able to read or write.
• An interview with Dr. Gary Weitzman, co-author (with Aline Alexander Newman) of the National Geographic book, How to Speak Cat.

Also, I'm not blogging about the company's books anymore. The company has set up another Facebook page, which they are updating regularly; go there for updates or to comment, commend or raise hell.

And the revived MPH Writers' Circle has a Facebook Group (login required) for aspiring authors, illustrators, photographers, ghostwriters or editors.

Something Off-page

I was ill for a long while, between mid-March to almost mid-April. I feel fine now, but the sense of dread over getting sick again remains.

Every year, when I visit my grandparents' shared grave, I always pray for one thing: health. But with me getting sick due to bad eating habits, lack of sleep and exercise and an overall unhealthy lifestyle, I've come to wonder...

What do I need to be healthy for, apart from work?

My relationship is in pieces. My social life has shrivelled. I'm not motivated enough to write or try new things. Even book-related events no longer interest me.

At the KL Alternative Bookfest, my mood was ruined by the roadblocks and lingering illness that I didn't enjoy the atmosphere. Poor Ted Mahsun, he bore the brunt of it.

"What?" he asked, rooting me on the spot as I turned to leave, perplexed that all I did was give him a 'hi'. "I only get a 'hi'?"

"Everybody gets a 'hi'," I said reflexively. At that point, it was true. Physically I felt like shit and I couldn't stay there any longer. And I couldn't forget what happened several years ago when I wrote a certain article. I wasn't ready to reconnect.

On top of it all (among other things), I'm still grappling with what I've learnt something about myself early this year that pretty much explains:

Why I'm such a socially inept introvert. And why my responses in a social setting feel ... pre-programmed? Like I picked it up from a book.

Why I can eat, do and enjoy the same things over and over and over again - until boredom finally sets in.

Why I don't mind or prefer to be alone most of the time.

Why I tend to get thrown off by unexpected changes in my daily routines.

Why I generally find animals more appealing than people - and why I hate crowds.

Why I communicate better in writing than oral on-the-fly presentations (where I trip over my ideas and words).

Why I can go on and on about certain topics in a lecturing tone, ignoring the level of interest of other people, making me look like an arrogant schmuck with zero EQ (so I'm told).

Why I can tunnel deep into a topic or subject and soak up whatever I can about it (Javascript, HTML, CSS, prongramming languages) - and totally ignore stuff I'm not interested in (like math and RPG programming).

(Probably) why I am such a Chinese New Year hamper of neuroses: fear of heights, fear of dirt, and so on.

And I spent over RM200 and waited three weeks for two books that would enlighten me on this to arrive. Think I only needed one. But the books can wait.

Right now, I'm in the middle of fixing some of those bad habits that keep making me sick, so I've put a lot of recreational reading and writing on hold. I don't even see the point of writing all this down.

Maybe I'm just good at forgetting what pains me.

But perhaps I shouldn't forget.

Maybe it's because I keep forgetting that the same hurt keeps recurring, like my throat and sinus infections.

To keep all of that at bay, some things will need to change.

Book Marks: Amir's Spine, Rahnaward Zaryab's Memories

The authors and their stories that will be appearing in the upcoming Fixi Novo Cyberpunk anthology have been announced. I believe the release date is around June 2015. Cor, several of the titles sound borderline Fifty Shades.

Speaking of Fixi, here's what the founder wrote for the 2015 London Book Fair. He doesn't hold back, right from the beginning:

I was mooching around Instagram recently and found that the hashtag for my company #BukuFixi was used on more than 14,000 posts. I was shocked–shocked!–to find this was just 4,000 fewer than #PenguinBooks and certainly more than, say #RandomHouse, which had 10,000. But we’re a small Malaysian company without even an office.

And here he is, providing an overview of the Malay fiction market, which...

...is dominated by the romance genre and 50,000 in sales is considered a bestseller. Among the blockbusters of the past decade are My Husband Is a Religious Teacher, My Husband Is Mr Perfect 10, My Husband Is the Sweetest and My Husband Is a Limited Edition.

Notice that he changed a few things for the benefit of a non-Malay-speaking audience. So humble, so helpful.

---

RIP Tsuen-hsuin "T.H." Tsien, considered the most influential Chinese librarian in America.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Mr. Tsien, former curator of the Far Eastern Library of the University of Chicago, is also credited with training generations of students for East Asian libraries around the nation. Former students of his went on to head the East Asian libraries at Harvard and Princeton, as well as become senior members of the Library of Congress.

The author of several books and more than 100 articles, he retired in 1978 and was the curator emeritus of the East Asian Collection of the Joseph Regenstein Library and professor emeritus of Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations (now East Asian Languages and Civilizations) at the University of Chicago.

---

An Afghan novelist "locks himself up for weeks at a time, lost in bottles of smuggled vodka and old memories of Kabul, a capital city long transformed by war and money."

Because...

...after he became the standard-bearer for Afghan literature, Mr. [Rahnaward] Zaryab was forced to watch as Kabul, the muse he idealized as a city of music and chivalry in most of his 17 books, fell into rubble and chaos.

...Little of a readership culture remains these days, even in Kabul. Bookshops are saturated with bootleg copies of Iranian books. Local authors make no money from publishing their work. In return for a manuscript, Mr. Zaryab gets a number of copies from the publisher to distribute to friends.

---

The estate of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels is suing publisher (Penguin?) Random House...

...over the book Goebbels, by Peter Longerich, professor of modern German history at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Longerich, an authority on the Holocaust and Nazi era Germany, drew extensively on Goebbels' diaries in his biography, which was published in Germany in 2010.

...Rainer Dresen, general counsel of Random House Germany, told the Guardian that an important principle was at stake. "We are convinced that no money should go to a war criminal," he said.

---

Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl On The Train, talks about the book and her new-found fame.

Well, obviously my name is known now, but I don’t think people generally tend to recognize authors very much. People like J.K. Rowling maybe, Gillian Flynn might be recognized, but I reckon she could walk by me on the street and I wouldn't know who she was. So I'm not sure it’s that kind of fame. I suppose when I realized it was doing really well in the States, that was terrifying because of the number of people you’re talking about because it's such a big place, you’re suddenly talking millions. That's probably the moment when I thought, "Oh God, this is sort of scary now."

The Gillian Flynn mention is interesting, since Hawkins's book has been called "the new Gone Girl".

---

Never knew there were several levels in how one reads a book. That blog post also cited American philosopher, educator and author Mortimer Adler and his book, How to Read a Book (of course), which identified four levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, analytical and syntopical.

If you're reading for entertainment or information, you're going to read a lot differently (and likely different material) than reading to increase understanding. While many people are proficient in reading for information and entertainment, few improve their ability to read for knowledge.

Before we can improve our reading skills, we need to understand the differences in the reading levels. They are thought of as levels because you can’t move to a higher level without a firm understanding of the previous one — they are cumulative.

Good to know, but can be hard to apply.

---

Philip Gwyn Jones says there's a "civil war" going on in the book industry for readers' attention.

Economically it will be the reader who is the prize, the territory to be captured, the Alsace-Lorraine or the Poland of the civil war. Winning the reader’s attention – and the natural monopolies of Google and Facebook will be far better at this than the publishers – then chopping that attention into tiny little morsels for never-ending re-sale and re-cycling seems, in a way that might even be beyond the imaginings of a Borges or a Ballard, likely to be the humming machinery at the heart of the 21-century book business.

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Publishers are at risk of becoming culturally irrelevant, a study claims. Meanwhile, in the US, it's said that there's a war (that word again) on diversity in reading material.

---

The Arab Spring's best legacy: Egyptians are now reading once-banned books.

But the really controversial titles have come from the country's crop of small, independent publishers. Freed from the shackles of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak's rule when he was ousted in 2011, the Sefsafa publishing house rushed out a host of daring material, including Basma Abdel Aziz's The Temptation of Absolute Power, whose critique of the system might have landed her in jail some years before.

Another publisher, Madarat Research and Publication, seized upon the power vacuum following Mubarak's toppling to print and distributed a nuanced take on the political theory of Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Even the conservative Dar al-Shorouk, Egypt's largest privately owned publisher, produced a few critical takes on the previously untouchable former president, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

---

Marketing tools and strategies for indie writers were being pitched in the London Book Fair. Meanwhile, Gen-X authors in India talk about the trials of telling and selling their tales in the age of social media (try not to get distracted by the "Don't Miss" sidebar).

I've stopped following and commenting on the whole indie or self-publishing phenomenon, mainly because other people are, and I think independent and self-publishers have proven their point. The business model works - but only if you work at it.