A magical video. You have to take the dive. {via Royal Quiet Deluxe}
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books
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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All going well, I will be moving into a new house soon (xx, those are my fingers; twisted, knotted and wishing). Starting with blank walls, and empty rooms. Some decor inspiration:
It turns out my decorating wish list is quite simple; a Chesterfield sofa with a velveteen blanket, a big solid work table, and lots of bookshelves. How is it, that despite arriving in England with one book, I have acquired a few dozen more in just 4 months? Oops!
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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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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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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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I am a bookish girl, and nothing pleases me more than libraries, notes in margins and the smell of binding glue. But recently I was given the super lovely gift of a Kindle
{My Kindle, snug in its blue case – the device itself powers a light in the case!}
Why I love my Kindle:
- All the hits, for free. I HEART HEART HEART that most of the classics are available for free. Doing some top-level math, the cost of a kindle would be covered by just a tiny stack of Penguin Classics. So far I’ve read Pride & Prejudice, Little Women and Anna Karenina, without trotting down to the library.
- Simply buying digital saves you money. Book prices are at least a few dollars cheaper, and you save on shipping. (Although of course if you buy at Book Depository there is free worldwide shipping.)
- Space (and back) saving. It lets me cut down on the space required to store my belongings. Currently most of my possessions is books… and moving house is painful. Books are heavy! With the Kindle I can store hundreds in my satchel.
- DIY magazines. You can push long articles from the web to your Kindle to read later as a separate ”book”. A Chrome extension gives you this ability with just a click. I am looking forward to making my own awesome magazines to read on flights and more.
- Freedom to connect. I got the 3G model, which seems superfluous in the age of wi-fi. But should I ever make it to the backwaters of Borneo again, I’ll never spend hours searching for an internet café. A 3G Kindle will let me check email and the web (albeit slowly) from anywhere on the planet.
Books I have lined up to read:
- Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by Kate Fox. I did a few anthropology papers at university and loved them, so I ordered this book for a bit of nostalgia. Social anthropology starts at home for Fox; rather than trot off to the Amazon, she looked at her own tribe.
- Here She Comes Now (3 short stories) by Chad Taylor. ‘Here She Comes Now’ is a collection short stories about modern relationships and family tensions, with a focus on dialogue. The author’s 2004 novel, Electric is one of my favourite New Zealand books.
- Do the Work
by Steven Pressfield. A productivity guide aimed at writers, based around the Art Of War. How could I resist?
- Just Kids
by Patti Smith. Just Kids chronicles Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe’s time in New York before they found fame. I’m sure many of you have read this already and you’ll agree, it’s captivating. I am half way through it already and I don’t want it to end.
- The Wasp Factory: A Novel by Iain Banks. I have read some of the science fiction, and rather like his 2003 novel Dead Air. A friend recommend this book to me as “life changing”, and I can’t think of higher praise than that.
I think at this stage the Kindle and I are entering into a long-term relationship, but if I fall in love with a book, or appreciate its design aesthetic, I’ll probably buy a hard copy. Or should I happen to drift into a second-hand bookstore, I’m sure I’ll emerge with a bag full of new-to-me books.
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Please allow me to introduce myself , I’m a man of wealth and taste… Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones is one of my favourite songs. A personal top 10 ranking, definitely. Various sources state it was inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which I have just finished reading. Also – how smooth and wonderful does the video look? It’s the joy of real film.
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Anna Karenina. This is going to sound ridiculous, but I always got the plot of this book mixed up with the life of one Anna Karina.
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