Breakfast:
1 egg. 1 glass wine.
Lunch:
2 eggs. 2 glasses wine.
Dinner:
1 steak. The rest of the bottle.
Seriously. I'm only doing this for a few days, in case you're worried about my getting scurvy. Although, as I recently learned, only 1/2 ounce of lemon juice a day is enough to prevent scurvy! That's right: you heard it here first: one whiskey sour a day, and you never have to eat fruit again! And it's the excuse you've been wanting to have whiskey for breakfast.
June 9, 2009
An essay on how reading leads to drinking and drinking leads to reading.
I personally am unable to read even the most indirect reference to Dorothy Parker without craving a martini.
This is how addictions begin, subtly and then suddenly. Soon I found myself devouring every hard-boiled word of Chandler’s. And then I read them again. I started talking in similes and metaphors. One day I told a dear friend that he had a face like a collapsed lung. I couldn’t help myself. A progression took hold. Chandler led me to Hammett and from Hammett I staggered to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald led me to Hemingway.
I personally am unable to read even the most indirect reference to Dorothy Parker without craving a martini.
June 8, 2009
Matching wine with Eastern food
"Let them drink beer!" So said my wine connoisseur friend when I outlined my dilemma. My boss and his wife were coming over for dinner, and we had decided to prepare an Indian feast (a big mistake, as it turned out, but more on that in another column). Hence the question: What wine to serve with Indian food?
I'm so glad someone addressed this problem! The article is on Slate: with Indian food Gewürztraminer or pinot blanc apparently works. For Japanese food, dry French whites are recommended. I prefer red wine, but I haven't found any that really match with spicy vegetarian food.
May 29, 2009
Why I can't enjoy film
Reading in our world has a sort of old, sedate, peaceful, slow image, while TV and movies are perceived as fast, exciting and youthful. Many people think that TV is shortening our attention spans! The truth is precisely the contrary: my attention span is too short to do anything but read. With 98% of movies, I get bored after about 20 minutes and start to multitask. Even with the few really good movies, I prefer to watch in 30-minute installments.
Think about it: how many words do you take in per second? Quickly testing it with a fairly easy nonfiction text, I found I read 7-10 words per second. That means that, several times per second, something is happening. In nonfiction, an argument is being presented or an example given. In fiction, even if nothing is happening in the plot, there’s a description, a philosophical aside, or a thought-provoking word choice to focus on.
(N.B.: This assumes you are reading an actually good book. If you are one of those people who read books for their plot, you might as well just switch to TV. I will not miss you.)
If I think the book is going too slowly, I can just read faster. Alternatively, I can skip forward, reading a few sentences every few pages, and see if anything more interesting promises to come.
With film, skipping forward is impossible. Watching TV or a movie in a theatre, there is no way you can figure out what’s going to happen--you have to make an absolute yes-or-no decision about whether to stay and watch. With a DVD, you can of course skip scenes; but that never gives you as much information as skimming through a book. You can skip to the beginning of the next scene, but that might not be the most interesting part. In order to see if it is, you have to watch the whole scene! It’s slavery! You can fast-forward, but all you’ll see will be vague moving shapes; you might be fast-forwarding past the best dialogue in the film, without knowing it.
Moreover, everything moves more slowly in filmed media. Things happen in the superficial sense, but anything interesting takes forever! A ton of any movie or TV show--even the good ones--will be taken up with shots intended to establish the setting or the time period--with shots showing you the characters’ clothes 0r houses or bodies or faces--with shots of their movements or observations--with fistfights and sex. Even in scenes containing dialogue, the actors speak incredibly slowly, compared to the speed at which you would read their words. If you’re familiar with the written text, it’s painful to watch the words dragging and halting by (compare reading “The Importance of Being Earnest” to watching the, nevertheless good, movie!).
I admit that there are certain respects in which the visual image can be more effective; but these are all relatively shallow areas of experience. The sex scene which might arouse male viewers--the sight of an emotional face which appeals to the sentimental--the skeleton jumping out unexpectedly which makes me jump. Anything deeper than these effects which a movie wishes to convey could probably be done as well or better in print.
The exception is comedy, which is actually easier to do in film. With a good episode of “Seinfeld”, for instance, something funny or at least attention-catching is happening every few seconds. (“Seinfeld” also illustrates the fact that in a comedy of whatever kind, all or most emotion must be leached out in order to maintain the comic mood and keep an audience’s interest.) Animated comedies are especially easy for me to appreciate, since their creators usually realize we aren’t interested in lengthy shots of clothes, faces or emotions belonging to animated figures.
I do think, however, that an authentically funny creation is a rare, virtuoso performance, which even the masters can’t keep alive for more than, say, 30 pages or twenty minutes. I honestly can’t remember any non-animated full-length film which I’ve enjoyed for the comedy!
There are other, vaguely personal reasons why I can't enjoy film--but, basically, if I refuse to watch a movie with you; it's not you, it's the entire cinematic tradition.
Think about it: how many words do you take in per second? Quickly testing it with a fairly easy nonfiction text, I found I read 7-10 words per second. That means that, several times per second, something is happening. In nonfiction, an argument is being presented or an example given. In fiction, even if nothing is happening in the plot, there’s a description, a philosophical aside, or a thought-provoking word choice to focus on.
(N.B.: This assumes you are reading an actually good book. If you are one of those people who read books for their plot, you might as well just switch to TV. I will not miss you.)
If I think the book is going too slowly, I can just read faster. Alternatively, I can skip forward, reading a few sentences every few pages, and see if anything more interesting promises to come.
With film, skipping forward is impossible. Watching TV or a movie in a theatre, there is no way you can figure out what’s going to happen--you have to make an absolute yes-or-no decision about whether to stay and watch. With a DVD, you can of course skip scenes; but that never gives you as much information as skimming through a book. You can skip to the beginning of the next scene, but that might not be the most interesting part. In order to see if it is, you have to watch the whole scene! It’s slavery! You can fast-forward, but all you’ll see will be vague moving shapes; you might be fast-forwarding past the best dialogue in the film, without knowing it.
Moreover, everything moves more slowly in filmed media. Things happen in the superficial sense, but anything interesting takes forever! A ton of any movie or TV show--even the good ones--will be taken up with shots intended to establish the setting or the time period--with shots showing you the characters’ clothes 0r houses or bodies or faces--with shots of their movements or observations--with fistfights and sex. Even in scenes containing dialogue, the actors speak incredibly slowly, compared to the speed at which you would read their words. If you’re familiar with the written text, it’s painful to watch the words dragging and halting by (compare reading “The Importance of Being Earnest” to watching the, nevertheless good, movie!).
I admit that there are certain respects in which the visual image can be more effective; but these are all relatively shallow areas of experience. The sex scene which might arouse male viewers--the sight of an emotional face which appeals to the sentimental--the skeleton jumping out unexpectedly which makes me jump. Anything deeper than these effects which a movie wishes to convey could probably be done as well or better in print.
The exception is comedy, which is actually easier to do in film. With a good episode of “Seinfeld”, for instance, something funny or at least attention-catching is happening every few seconds. (“Seinfeld” also illustrates the fact that in a comedy of whatever kind, all or most emotion must be leached out in order to maintain the comic mood and keep an audience’s interest.) Animated comedies are especially easy for me to appreciate, since their creators usually realize we aren’t interested in lengthy shots of clothes, faces or emotions belonging to animated figures.
I do think, however, that an authentically funny creation is a rare, virtuoso performance, which even the masters can’t keep alive for more than, say, 30 pages or twenty minutes. I honestly can’t remember any non-animated full-length film which I’ve enjoyed for the comedy!
There are other, vaguely personal reasons why I can't enjoy film--but, basically, if I refuse to watch a movie with you; it's not you, it's the entire cinematic tradition.
May 20, 2009
Blanched spinach: a miracle food
Pretty much every time I cook, about halfway through the process it suddenly occurs to me that, hey, I could blanche some spinach and throw it in here. It works for almost any dish: omelet, casserole, soup, chili, curry, pasta, or tortilla dish. Blanching is easy and spinach is one of the most nutritious foods ever. You can reduce several handfuls of spinach:
to a tiny quantity of cooked spinach:
so that you can incorporate extra nutrients into almost any meal with very little effect on its color, texture or taste.
Also, if you fail to eat spinach fast enough and it gets crushed and starts to rot, you don't have to throw it away; just blanche it and mix it in, and it retains its palatibility.
to a tiny quantity of cooked spinach:
so that you can incorporate extra nutrients into almost any meal with very little effect on its color, texture or taste.
Also, if you fail to eat spinach fast enough and it gets crushed and starts to rot, you don't have to throw it away; just blanche it and mix it in, and it retains its palatibility.
May 18, 2009
The universality of literature
This article on women's writing is surprisingly unobjectionable--until I got to this! Near the end we find a single isolated sentence: "Great Literary American Novel Syndrome is a surprisingly persistent condition, despite the increasingly obvious likelihood that no work of art can sum up a nation as heterogeneous as ours without neglecting somebody."
Note the implied idea that a great writer can never speak for someone who is different than him. What the hell. This is Chinua Achebe's obscenely obtuse critique of "Heart of Darkness" all over again. Am I only to read heterosexual female Polish/Scottish 22-year-old authors? If I can find part of myself--not my Eastern European features or my sex, but the most important part of myself reflected in, say, a middle-aged gay French man, then other people should be able to do the same. If they can't, it's their own damn fault.
For a great author--no, even a good one--doesn't just write about the superficial. His characters have hair colors and ages and nationalities, but they have other, more important, characteristics--their personalities are what we identify with--or even more deeply human characteristics.
This said, I do admit that the superficial qualities of characters and authors can make it easier or harder for us to appreciate them. It was, for instance, a strikingly bad idea to make my sophomore language class (a class of mostly female 20-year-olds) spend all year studying old men (Lear and Oedipus). Some of us may be able to reach past the different superficialites--just like some women can reach past the annoyance of an author who assumes all his readers are male. But the fact that there are women and non-white people who write makes it easier for a lot of us to find literature from which to learn.
Note the implied idea that a great writer can never speak for someone who is different than him. What the hell. This is Chinua Achebe's obscenely obtuse critique of "Heart of Darkness" all over again. Am I only to read heterosexual female Polish/Scottish 22-year-old authors? If I can find part of myself--not my Eastern European features or my sex, but the most important part of myself reflected in, say, a middle-aged gay French man, then other people should be able to do the same. If they can't, it's their own damn fault.
For a great author--no, even a good one--doesn't just write about the superficial. His characters have hair colors and ages and nationalities, but they have other, more important, characteristics--their personalities are what we identify with--or even more deeply human characteristics.
This said, I do admit that the superficial qualities of characters and authors can make it easier or harder for us to appreciate them. It was, for instance, a strikingly bad idea to make my sophomore language class (a class of mostly female 20-year-olds) spend all year studying old men (Lear and Oedipus). Some of us may be able to reach past the different superficialites--just like some women can reach past the annoyance of an author who assumes all his readers are male. But the fact that there are women and non-white people who write makes it easier for a lot of us to find literature from which to learn.
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