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.”

1.29.2022 – vivid picture to

vivid picture to
the imagination and was
worth thinking about

According to what I read and watch, a BOMB CYCLONE is heading for the East Coast of the United States.

Sounds awful.

Whenever bad weather is predicted I think of two things.

The first is that I am glad to be out of it.

That simple sentence, for me, has two meanings.

Living in the Low Country of South Carolina and yet to experience a hurricane, the weather here for the most part is what you might call salubrious (a wonderful word and I put it to you that if you can work it into your conversation today you will feel better) or favorable to or promoting health or well-being.

The proximity to an ocean that won’t go below 50 degrees helps keep most of any weather away that might include the word, “freezing.”

For the most part its warm or at least warmer here than where I grew in West Michigan.

Somewhere in my mind is a passage in a book of all old rich man, sitting in the kitchen of his mansion saying something like, “182 rooms and all I want is the warmest one.”

The other meaning to “glad to be out of it” for me, is that for 20 years I was in the news business and in the news business there is no business like the bad weather business.

After I was on the job about 6 months, creating and managing a website for a local TV station, I got a call that I needed to come up with a way to a list any school closings online.

This list also needed to be able to be updated by the schools themselves.

And if I could somehow figure out how to send out an email with the list of school closings to anyone who wanted it, that would be even better.

“When?”, was my response.

“Tomorrow”, was the answer.

Understand that just a little more than 20 years ago, none of this information was online.

There was no online.

The most fun of my job and creating an online news environment was that I never would say that something couldn’t be done because nothing HAD been done and we did not know what couldn’t be done so we did everything.

And somehow the next morning we had school closings online.

More recently I was involved with the online video streaming of news.

As EB White wrote on the News and weather, “radio [News] people, Nature is an oddity tinged with malevolence and worthy of note only in her more violent moments. The radio [News] either lets Nature alone or gives her the full treatment.

The full news treatment for News Online involved me a lot.

Weekends, after hours, all hours, I was up and online and making sure that the weather got the full treatment.

Now, I am glad to be out of it.

The other thing I think about is an essay, again by EB White.

In fact, it is the essay where that the earlier quote about Nature being an oddity tinged with malevolence comes from.

It is an essay of Mr. White’s that appeared in The New Yorker magazine on September 25, 1954 and is included in the book, The Essays of E.B. White, that you can read online at archive.org.

The title of the essay is, “The Eye of Edna” and it tells the story of Mr. White following Hurricane Edna as it came up the Atlantic Coast.

In 1954, hour by hour radio coverage of a hurricane was something new for Mr. White and the world at large.

I cannot read this essay without comparing the news coverage of 1954 with the news coverage of 2022.

What I think when I make such a comparison is that there is nothing new to the news here.

Mr. White tells how a reporter on the scene of the storm was asked about road conditions.

The hurricane rains and ocean storm surges had been predicted to wipe out local roads.

“They were wet” reported the reporter, who, according to Mr. White, “seemed to be in a sulk.”

In the essay, Mr. White recounts his own efforts to prepare his home for the coming storm.

In the essay, there is this sentence, “The croquet set was brought in. (I was extremely skeptical about the chance of croquet balls coming in through the window, but it presented a vivid picture to the imagination and was worth thinking about.).

The oft-quoted-by-me writer Alain de Botton, used the phrase, I began word-painting.

Starting with the thought a hurricane and wind tossed trees and such.

Then add a croquet set.

Throw in windows, car windshields and maybe someone’s forehead.

Then thinking about how to paint scene this with words, I don’t think anyone could do better than “I was extremely skeptical about the chance of croquet balls coming in through the window, but it presented a vivid picture to the imagination and was worth thinking about.”

29 words and I can see it all in my mind’s eye.

I can see it in my mind and it never happened.

A vivid picture to the imagination.

Something worth thinking about.