...more recent posts
June 2nd, 2004
Relatively recently I had the sensation of having been young for too long. It has now passed.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
May 26th, 2005
I'm sitting in bed reading a cookbook and missing Steve Doughton. (I seem to recall Martin Amis citing the reading of cookbooks in bed by wives as a reason to dissolve a marriage). So much of the pleasure of cooking is dependent on the enthusiasm of those who eat the food you have prepared. Steve is a very excited diner and I find myself cooking less, partly because of work, but also because he now lives on another coast. The work thing is very disappointing. You work in a restaurant and you never cook a meal. I cook for the dog, she is a selective diner and I’m still figuring out her preferences, but when I present her with a bowl that she devours it reminds me of feeding Steve. There is pride, delight, and a very fundamental pleasure in nourishing another creature. Christine laughed at me when I told her this, “hah, I used to cook for Guthrie too.” I haven’t been able to locate a piece of mutton (old sheep) in Manhattan. We fed this to our dogs and to ourselves in Ireland, it is good, inexpensive protein that can be rendered delicious with a pressure cooker. Where do all the old sheep go?
Dog is lovely
Doggerel.
Jewel Bako serves Nipponese delights -
The smell of the wooden spoon
Spooning broth of the highest order
To my mouth
Smells unexpectedly of wet dog
and I am removed in a transportation
of missing you
My dog
November 6, 2003
It is so long since I have read a book that the physicality of a book, the sighting of one, particularly in a public place with a body attached to the book and reading it, can cause an odd feverish, almost erotic excitement in me. The last one I read was by a friend, and it is an excellent book. I enjoyed it not only for the pleasure of reading it but also for the feeling of vindication that he had written a wonderful book. But I haven't read anything since. When I look at a page now I seem incapable of reading down the lines of print, from left to right, of making sense of the accumulating sentences, of slipping into someone's intention. I am beginning to wonder if I have late onset ADD. Even magazines and newspapers prove problematic, though the former can delight with their visuals. And this inability to read is unnerving because for me, as I suppose for many of those with writerly pretensions, the act of reading and writing are symbiotic. I passed the window of St. Mark's Books last week and in the window was Lydia Davis' translation of Swann's Way, a book I have never read, but I had heard that this writer that I greatly admire was in the process of translating it and I have long promised myself that when the book became available I would read it. So it sits to the right of my head when I sleep, the last in a pile of unread books. (I still occasionally haunt a bookshop, make a purchase, to satisfy that part of reading that is linked to the physical aspect of books and to that great anticipatory delight that the prospect of an unread book can provide.) The not reading of books, for me, has the quality of what I imagine people view as a sinful act. Yesterday I remembered a younger self escaping some office job to sit in a sun drenched Central Park to read a book I had purchased in the late Books and Co. on Madison Avenue. Perhaps it was youth, the sun, the temporary escape from copy editing foul prose, but I suspect it was simply the act of being closely involved with a book that made me so happy.