A magical video. You have to take the dive. {via Royal Quiet Deluxe}
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Writing & Books
I scored these two very shiny and pretty cookbooks for a fiver at Oxfam Dalston:
Heston’s Fantastical Feasts by Heston Blumenthal, and Creole by Babette de Rozières. I bought the Blumenthal book mostly because it has instructions on how to make lickable wallpaper, a la Willy Wonka. But I am more excited about the Creole book, described as a “colourful and sumptuous celebration of West Indian Creole cooking”.
Just a bit of a preview before adding the to the towering pile of books next to my bed – aren’t the pictures luscious? Can’t wait to make some of the sweet dishes from the Creole book, like coconut flans with caramel, and try some traditional Guadeloupean ti’punch – a white rum and lime mix.
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I am on a real foodie kick at the moment! I just – belatedly – finished the last few pages of Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (which was very good, my tardiness wasn’t a reflection of the book’s quality at all), and have spent many happy hours leafing through the The Flavour Thesaurus for cooking inspiration. And now Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain.
I’ve been hearing for years that Anthony Bourdain is a bit of a badass, and then a copy of Kitchen Confidential showed up in my Christmas stocking. Funnily enough the parts I’m enjoying thus far, are those moments from a softer time:
My brother and I were reasonably happy here. The beaches were warm, there were lizards to hunt down and exterminate with readily available pétards, firecrackers, which one could buy legally (!) over-the-counter. There was a forest within walking distance where an actual hermit lived, and my brother and I spent hours there, spying on him from the underbrush. By now I could read comic books in French and, of course, I was eating – really eating. Murky brown soupe de poisson, tomato salad, moules marinières, poulet basquaise (we were only a few miles from the Basque country). We made day trips to Cap Ferret, a wild, deserted and breathtakingly magnificent Atlantic beach with big rolling waves, taking along baguettes and saucissons and wheels of cheese, wine and Evian (bottled water was at that time unheard of back home).
A few miles west was Lac Cazeaux, a fresh-water lake where my brother and I could rent pédalo watercraft. We ate gaufres, delicious hot waffles, covered in whipped cream and powdered sugar. The two hot songs of that summer on the Cazeaux jukebox were Whiter Shade Of Pale by Procol Harum and These Boots Were Made For Walkin’ by Nancy Sinatra. The French played those two songs over and over again, the music punctuated by the sonic booms from French air force jets that would swoop over the lake on their way to a nearby bombing range.
There’s something about food & music isn’t there? The two seem inexplicably linked. Laura Vincent of Hungry & Frozen always lovingly lists her current sounds, and Turntable Kitchen matches recipes with records. How does Tame Impala with creamy couscous sound? I think they’ll even post you out a pack of ingredients with a song to match.
Music while dining matters too. I read an interesting article on the sometimes inspired, sometimes insipid music choices of restaurants and pubs and how they shape the experience.
Likewise, last night’s Mexican feast at Thor and Liv’s place probably would have had an entirely different atmosphere if we weren’t stuffing our faces to the sweet tunes of Mariachi El Bronx. (By the way, thinly sliced green apple, dressed with fresh lime and Swedish black salt is incredible. Think of that if you listen to the Mariachi song.)
What do you like to listen to when you’re eating, cooking, or dreaming of food?
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“The most powerful, eloquent moments on screen require no verbal description to create them, no dialogue to act them. They are image, pure and silent.” - Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee.
It may sound odd coming from a book teaching you to write but it’s true. Show not tell. The Piano comes to mind.
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There has been a lot of hoopla around Erin Morgenstern’s début novel – The Night Circus. After seeing many glowing reviews I was keen to read it myself, and even more so after hearing the book started life as a National Novel Writing Month manuscript. NaNoWriMo, as it is lovingly called, and is an annual challenge to write a 50,000 word first draft in the month of November (it’s a fun experiment and as my friend Rebekah said – it’s excellent for turning off the inner critic).
Last night I finished reading The Night Circus, and to my surprise felt very conflicted. I adore the premise – immersive experiences really float my boat. And the book is stuffed with gorgeous imagery – think ice gardens, a living carousel, paper birds and other transcendent illusions. I have no doubt that this story will be translated for the screen.
But when it comes to mechanic like character and plot, it is a rather clunky story. This thorough Amazon review cites a lot of grammatical errors that will make you frown, and the use of first person present tense makes you feel like you’re leafing through a child’s choose-your-own-adventure. While Harry Potter is technically for younger readers, as a 25-year-old I can still read the series and feel satisfied. Likewise with Meg Rosoff’s fantastic How I Live Now. I don’t feel this with The Night Circus.
The plot staggers around the world like a drunk, flipping from dull character to character. And like some drunks, it’s got a bit of a paunch. It just didn’t feel fully polished and the middle of the books sags. Writers, if you’re concerned about your weight, Kat Asharya has written an excellent piece on fictional Flabby Middles and How To Tone Them.
Once you’ve spewed your dreams on paper and have that shitty first draft down, it’s time to re-vision the work. It’s important to edit, edit, edit and when you’ think you’re done, put it away for a month before editing some more. Various writing tutors I’ve met over the years always say hard work is where the magic lies. I really wanted to love The Night Circus. To echo countless parents around the globe – I’m not angry, just disappointed.
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I went on a book buying binge yesterday afternoon from the comfort of my kitchen table. Here are the books I now have lined up on my Kindle to read. It’s an odd mix… a little bit like October.
Life by Keith Richards
Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
London Fields by Martin Amis
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf (it’s free for Kindle!)
When we left the restaurant, the sky was a brilliant splash of colours. The kind of air that felt like if you breathed it in, your lungs would be dyed the same shade of blue. Tiny stars began to twinkle. Barely able to wait for the long summer day to be over, the locals were out for an after-dinner stroll around the harbour. Families, couples, groups of friends. The gentle scent of the tide at the end of the day enveloped the streets.
Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami (rereading this – one of my favourites)
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No one ever gets talker’s block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.
Why then, is writer’s block endemic?
The reason we don’t get talker’s block is that we’re in the habit of talking without a lot of concern for whether or not our inane blather will come back to haunt us. Talk is cheap. Talk is ephemeral. Talk can be easily denied.
We talk poorly and then, eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk. We see what works and what doesn’t, and if we’re insightful, do more of what works. How can one get talker’s block after all this practice?
Writer’s block isn’t hard to cure.
Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.
- the marvelous Seth Godin, writing about the myth of writer’s block .
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[via Louniverse]
I am really looking forward to my first autumnal September. I remember visiting New York in October, and suddenly Halloween made sense; the end of harvest and darkening of days, not strawberries and 8pm sunsets. I’ve spent a long time in topsy-turvy land… It’s now time for scarves, crisp mornings and falling leaves.
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Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I’m reading it right now – so far, so good! It’s set in a not too distant time, and I love this musing on the ‘evolution’ of language:
Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words – ‘friend’ and ‘real’ and ‘story’ and ‘change’ – words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like ‘identity’, ‘search’, and ‘cloud’, had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had ‘American’ become an ironic term? How had ‘democracy’ come to be used in an arch, mocking way?
(Don’t worry, the rest of novel is not all as earnest as this – it’s a bit more sardonic.)
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Holy moly, I am so looking forward to this. The Rum Diary was one of Book Club For Drunk’s best reads ever - daiquiris ahoy. I really recommend you read the book first if you haven’t already. It was (supposedly) written when Hunter S. Thompson was only 22!
The typography is rather smashing too, don’t you think?
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When you sit down to write, is that what you do? Just say, “Okay, I’m starting a book” and then sit down and keep writing until it’s done? Do you take breaks? Do you ever get writer’s block?
No. No writer’s block. Never had it. Don’t believe in it. Doesn’t exist. I don’t buy that one.
Ernest Hemingway said it… If you’ve got writer’s block, write one sentence. And if you can write one, you can write two. If you can write two, you can write three. If you’ve written three, you have a paragraph. There’s just no such thing as writer’s block.
I work all the time. I write all the time. No days off, not for any reason. I get up in the morning and I start at it, get into the afternoon, I work out. I work at it at night. I work on it until I go to bed at eleven. I keep a notebook by my table and I write in the middle of the night sometimes. Sometimes I’ll write from maybe 4AM to 6AM and go back to bed, but I write all the time. And I always have. That’s the way I’ve always done it.
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From George Orwell’s (1948) book Nineteen Eighty-Four - I hope nothing else becomes the norm.
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I’m working on a new all singing, all dancing, online home for the The Book Club For Drunks. As part of this, I commissioned the marvelous Erin Forsyth to make an illustration encapsulating all club’s activities… drinking & reading, ahem. Here’s a tiny preview:
I LOVE IT. From the big brash party skull, right down to the lipstick smeared martini glass and the blank book spines waiting to be filled in. Can’t wait to have the website up and running. Stay tuned!
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I love good writing about food, and Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
“I wanted a place with a Velvet Underground CD that made you nod your head and feel warm with recognition. I wanted the lettuce and the eggs at room temperature … I wanted the tarnished silverware and chipped wedding china from a paladar in Havana, and the canned sardines I ate in that little apartment on Twenty-Ninth Street. The marrow bones my mother made us eat as kids that I grew to crave as an adult. We would have brown butcher paper on the tables, not linen tablecloths, and when you finished your meal, the server would just pull the pen from behind her ear and scribble the bill directly on the paper like [the waitresses in France] had done. We would use jelly jars for wine glasses. There would be no foam and no ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food; just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry.”
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