2.2.2022 – imaginative

imaginative
hilarious ludicrous
daft ridiculous

Sometime somewhere I read that if you like eating, you like reading about food.

Some of my favorite passages in my reading involved the planning, cooking and eating of fabulous dinners.

Small wonder that Jim Harrison, the author of A Really Big Lunch is one of my favorite writers.

Through Mr. Harrison I also read John Thorne’s wonderful essays on eating and cooking.

But it is the scenes in books not about cooking that talking about cooking that I look for.

CS Forester’s food scenes in his Hornblower Series or even the snatched meals on the bridge that Mr. Forester described in “The Good Shephard.”

The Whale Steak scene in Mr. Melville’s Moby Dick.

The King-eats-with-the-poor-people scene in Mr. Twain’s Connecticut Yankee.

The diner scene in Mr. Thurber’s A Couple of Hamburgers.

With this in mind I clicked on the article, Top 10 cooks in fiction.

The article was in a British Newspaper so I guess I should not be surprised that I wasn’t familiar with any of the books.

The description of the last book listed caught me eye.

The writer writes about the book, Cooking With Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson, that “The plot is fast-paced but daft, the characters ludicrous but hilarious, and the recipes imaginative but ridiculous.”

For me, any book that can be described with all those wonderful words in one sentence is worth a look-see.

I got my copy this morning out of archive.org so I will add an update soon.

I offer the first paragraph as a window.

If you will insist on arriving at Pisa airport in the summer you will probably have to fight your way out of the terminal building past incoming sun-reddened Brits, snappish with clinking luggage. They are twenty minutes late for their Ryanair cheapo return to Stansted (“I said carry your sister’s bloody bag, Crispin, not drag it. If we miss this flight your life won’t be worth living… “). Ignoring them and once safely outside, you can retrieve your car in leisurely fashion from the long-term park and hit the northbound motorway following the “Genova” signs. Within a mere twenty minutes you are off again at the Viareggio exit. Don’t panic: you are not destined for the beach which stretches its tottering crop of sun umbrel¬ las like poison-hued mushrooms for miles of unexciting coast¬ line. No. You are heading safely inland through the little town of Camaiore.

So promise I think.

2.1.2022 – sat upon the shore

sat upon the shore
Fishing, Shall at least set
my lands in order?

Part of the series of Haiku inspired by The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot and the article, ‘It takes your hand off the panic button’: TS Eliot’s The Waste Land 100 years on by Andrew Dickson.

Mr. Dickson asks, ‘Is it genuinely one of the greatest works in the language, or – as the poet once claimed – just “a piece of rhythmical grumbling“?’

Readers of this blog may remember that from time to time I struggle with the weight of effort of producing a daily Haiku and any thoughts I may have about the words and time that went in the Haiku that day.

This daily schedule of missing a day can bring on a personal mental paralysis wherein writing these entries becomes impossible.

I learned to deal with this by not dealing with it and let it go.

Then when I look at my register of entries and see blank days with no post, I will grab a topic or book or poem for a source and produce a series of Haiku to fill in those blank dates.

This is one of the great benefits of this effort being my blog and my blog, my rules.

It IS cricket because I say it is.

It is ‘according to Hoyle’ because I say it is.

Thus I have this series based on ‘The Wasteland.’

A thoroughly enjoyable connection of wordplay and source of endless discussion in the search for meaning.

For myself, I like that bit about a piece of rhythmical grumbling by Mr. Eliot so said Mr. Eliot.

I have remembered this story before in these posts, but it reminds me of a story told by the actor Rex Harrison.

Mr. Harrison recounted rehearsing a play by George Bernard-Shaw and that the company was having a difficult time with a certain scene when, wonder of wonder, Bernard-Shaw himself dropped by to watch rehearsal.

Mr. Harrison tells how great this was as they went to the play write and asked how did he see this scene – what was he striving for?

Bernard-Shaw asked for a script and read over the scene, read it over again and a third time, then looked up and said, “This is rather bad isn’t it.”

1.25.2022 – impermanent than

impermanent than
eternal and the simple
rather than ornate

Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:

. . . the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the simple rather than the ornate. The reason owes nothing to climate or genetics . . . but is the result of the actions of writers, painters and theorists, who have actively shaped the sense of beauty of their nation.

According the The New York Review of Books, this book, the The Architecture of Happiness is “A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”

What I find irrestible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.

I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.

Neat trick in writing a book.

If I knew how to do that, I would.

1.22.2022 – recover a sense

recover a sense
of the malleability
behind what is built

Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:

We should recover a sense of the malleability behind what is built. There is no predetermined script guiding the direction of bulldozers or cranes. While mourning the number of missed opportunities, we have no reason to abandon a belief in the ever-present possibility of moulding circumstances for the better.

According the The New York Review of Books, this is “A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”

What I find irrestible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.

I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.

Neat trick in writing a book.

If I knew how to do that, I would.

1.20.2022 – we have no reason

we have no reason
to abandon belief in the
ever-present better

Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:

We should recover a sense of the malleability behind what is built. There is no predetermined script guiding the direction of bulldozers or cranes. While mourning the number of missed opportunities, we have no reason to abandon a belief in the ever-present possibility of moulding circumstances for the better.

I felt this was kind of appropriate for the 1st anniversary of the Biden Administration.

Which isn’t so important for the start of the Biden efforts as much as it is important for the end of the previous administration.

According the The New York Review of Books, this is “A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”

What I find irrestible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.

I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.

Neat trick in writing a book.

If I knew how to do that, I would.