Maybe we find what we look for, but I’m seeing a lot of new things made by combining older things—and the synthesis (sometimes) seems better than the sum of its parts. Is this blending behind much of pop culture right now? If so, it’s good to be aware. Reading about pop culture after the fact can be fun in a nostalgic way—but “you had to be there” or it doesn’t make for good historical reading.

So, I offer here some mixed-up observations about what is going on around San Miguel and beyond, so that after a fashion you could read about this time and these trends and remember them in a sweet, melancholic, nostalgic way.

Fusion food

The history of the world’s cuisines is in large part the story of fusion food, but the word “fusion” was first appended to “food” by US cooks when they began to add untraditional ingredients from other cuisines to regional dishes. After global travel for the masses and a decade’s worth of internet information sharing, there is no stopping what innovative cooks will try. Have you added chiles to your sushi in San Miguel? What about just a dash of hot peppers in your grandmother’s traditional chicken soup? Even my dog has developed a taste for chiles. I tried sprinkling dried, crushed chiles on plants and the wooden arms of a chair I own to deter my dog from chewing them, but instead she has developed a taste for the hot and spicy.

I really don’t like the anything-goes “wraps” you can find in US restaurants now—do you? But I do have some favorite, odd snack combos: I like to follow a Cheeto (Cheetoe? Is there a singular form? Can you eat just one?) with a bite of bread-and-butter pickle. The juicy, sweet/sour green thing is the perfect complement to the dessicated, salty orange thing.

Popular now in Munich clubs is a mix of Indian spices and German sausage called Curry-Wurst. The refrigerated package comes with a sliced pork sausage in tomato sauce, a packet of curry, and toothpicks to poke holes in the package prior to microwaving.

I’ve known of the Irish/Mexican cuisine restaurant combination for a long time—there is a chain called “Carlos O’Kelly’s.” A friend here just told me about the “Chinese/Canadian” restaurants she spotted on her last trip to Toronto.

Music mash-ups

A mash-up is a remix of music that involves combining parts of two different songs to create a new, third song. Often the resulting track features the instrumentals of one song with the vocals of the other. Ideally, the songs are of different genres and written at least 15 years apart. There have been occasional novelty songs of this type since the fifties, but creating mash-ups has become de rigeur among underground hip-hop DJs since January 2004, when DJ Danger Mouse released the celebrated mash-up album called The Grey Album. He combined The Beatles’s classic White Album with rapper Jay-Z’s Black Album. It became an internet hit, by word of blog, and DJ Danger Mouse received a prompt cease and desist order from EMI, the music label that owns the rights to the Beatles’s sound recordings. Mash-ups became commercially available this year with the release—for sale on iTunes—of Beck’s “Frontin on Debra.”

By the way, hip-hop remains the global, youth pop-culture phenomenon extraordinaire. Some think the genuine, “keep it real” hip-hop as an expression of alienation, lack of opportunities, and oppression is by now played out in the US, as the culture is fully commercialized and in the hands of the big corporations: the music labels, the Nike and Hilfiger brand managers. There are pockets around the world where hip-hop is evolving to incorporate the voices, issues and trends of the young locals. You can find young nonconformists seeking community within a hip-hop attitude of polemic and yearning, especially in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo. (See Where You’re At: Notes from the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet, by Patrick Neate, in the Biblioteca.)

Fashion fractures

Fashion Week just finished up in New York, with this outlook: The trendsetter’s latest fad of wearing dresses over pants will give way this fall and winter to tunics over leggings. Leggings are good for not shaving your legs; otherwise I don’t like them at all. But there is no ignoring that the dress-over-pants is a sort of fashion mash-up and visible in San Miguel, but you’d better look fast or it will be gone. One value of fashion is to remind us that there is always progress, or at least change.

Kakuro and sudoku puzzles

How about a crossword puzzle that uses numbers? Kakuro puzzles are also called “cross sums.” It is a variation of a crossword puzzle in which the clues for the ACROSS and DOWN numbers is the sum of digits in that number (only the digits 1–9 can be used; you cannot use a digit twice in the same number). The kakuro was invented in the US, became popular in Japan, and is now booming around the globe.

In the US, sudoku puzzles are all the rage. A sudoku puzzle is a grid that includes 9 rows and 9 columns and 9, 3 × 3 blocks. You use logic, and the process of elimination, to complete the grid—already partly filled with numbers. To solve a sudoku is to place all numbers from 1 to 9 in the 9 × 9 grid. Each row, column, and 3 × 3 block must contain only one instance of each number.

These puzzles are anathema to me, language-obsessed as I am.

Fun with Photoshop™

Photoshop™ is 16 years old, and it is still really fun to put your friends’ faces on the bodies of other people, animals and the Sphinx. You can “play God” and make some of these weirdly evolved creations and then name them. Collage demonstrates a staying power as an art form, with globalization of goods, adventure tourism and the internet providing ever more opportunities and inspirations for visual, cultural mash-ups.

The new Mexican loteria cards

I think we can simply deem this a good example of a new coinage I’ve learned: “glocalization.” I don’t like it that Tweety Bird, Hello Kitty, and Daffy Duck are illustrating the new decks (what I think of as my personal Spanish vocabulary flashcards). I asked one kid, 10-year-old Nahui, her opinion on the cards: “cool, funny and stupid all at the same time.” Well put.

Poetry potpourri

Speaking of language, there is a certain kind of poetry with mash-up characteristics: the cento. A cento is a collage-poem composed exclusively of lines from other sources. The word “cento” means “patchwork” in Latin—so that the lines stitched together create a whole new poem. John Ashbery did one called “To a Waterfowl” in 1961, and it includes this couplet: “Calm was the day and through the trembling air,/Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.” The first line is by Edmund Spenser, the second by Wallace Stevens. Writing a cento is kind of like reading and writing at the same time, and perhaps it is making a comeback. David Lehman just published one on the back page of the April 2 edition of the New York Times Book Review. Here are two lines from Lehman’s “The Oxford Cento”: “Give all to love,/a burnt match skating in a urinal.” The first line is from Emerson’s “Give All to Love,” the second from Hart Crane’s “The Tunnel.”

San Miguel especiales

Selective dog breeding has brought all the lovely dog breeds into existence, conforming as specified to the AKC big book. But there is nothing quite as special as a mutt. There is even a literary magazine that favors the mixed breed: Bark, out of Berkeley. You can see their website at www.thebark.com.

Reading combos

The books popular in our time are also a reflection of the popular culture. Take a look at the current New York Times bestseller lists and you’ll see people are still interested in diets (The Fat Smash Diet: The Last Diet You’ll Ever Need), self-help, dogs (there’s a book by “the dog whisperer”), crime thrillers, Danielle Steel, and the US and its enemies. Are there any mash-up trends here? Hmm. In recent weeks I’ve written about some genre-bending books: autopathologies, fictional biographies, invented memoirs. There are also “true novels,” of which Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song are two classic examples. Thomas Wolf and Hunter S Thompson were also pioneers of the form. Today’s Sebastian Junger—with his books A Death in Belmont, The Perfect Storm, and Fire—seems their heir apparent. I’ve read that since 9/11/01, people turned away from novels and in bookstores showed a preference for stories that are purportedly true. Life itself was drama enough.

Since I don’t see any mash-up trends in the content of newly published books—there are no self-help diets based on whispering with dogs about crime, romance, politics—let me suggest a way to read some books that reflects the mash-up sensibility. You can read books in pairs: related books, separated in time, one of a contemporary writer and one by that writer’s literary influence. Reading in this way hints at the unique pleasure of a third thing derived from two other things. What is that reading bonus? You’ll gain greater understanding of each of the books and their subject matter, an appreciation for styles of writing and that themes in life and literature are universal, and that writers can and do revere one another across generations.

You can discover such novel combinations by reading interviews with authors in which they answer that question about their literary influences. For example, Zadie Smith rhapsodizes about E.M. Forster. If you read her newest novel, On Beauty, you’ll see elements of Howards End. It is best to read the modern work first. The classic has already stood the test of time, so you can expect it to hold up well under the scrutiny it will receive as you compare it to its descendent.

A few other good combinations: Alex Garland’s The Tesseract, followed by any of J. G. Ballard’s apocalyptic novels. Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, followed by Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser. John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, followed by Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, followed by Virginia Woolfe’s Mrs. Dalloway. Tama Janowitz’s A Certain Age, followed by Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.

I don’t recommend that you read the two paired books one right after the other, but close enough in time so that you can recall the first book and appreciate its relationship to the older novel. You will enjoy two books and also create a third story in your own head that reveals something of the continuance of themes in the human drama and presents a view on some writing as an homage to a classic or favorite writer.