January 2007
10 posts
3 tags
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave,...
I am certainly an amateur in the kitchen. I have learned to become much more comfortable in the kitchen and have come to quite enjoy cooking. Every once and a while mr twoumbrellas and I like to try something a bit fancy: homemade cassoulet or pasta sauce. Crepes were fun; mustard was not. I need to follow a recipe. I don’t have a chef’s intuition about food combinations, tastes, or...
December 2006
10 posts
3 tags
Ninth Letter
A few months ago I went to a reading presented by Hobart magazine. It was a good time and the readings were good. As an added bonus, they gave away door prizes and mine happened to be a one year’s subscription to Ninth Letter, a literary magazine that is published by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The print version is large, bulky and very hard to handle. I would never take...
1 tag
"The Eggy Stone"
The Guardian has a new story by Tessa Hadley. It’s only a few short paragraphs but she is always able to pack a lot of sensuality and sound into a sentence:
We crunched in socks and sandals across a rim of crisped black seaweed and bone and sea-washed plastic: the tide was in, the long grey line of the waves curled and sucked at the cramped remainder of the beach, a narrow strip of...
2 tags
Restaurant Week in Philadelphia
As in many cities around the country, Philadelphia will be having their Winter Restaurant Week from January 28-February 2, 2007. mr twoumbrellas and I will be dining at Django.
At only $30 per person for a three course meal, it’s a great way to sample the more expensive treats at a reasonable cost. As I find myself becoming a bit of an amateur foodie, I am very excited.
3 tags
The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway
The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway is a short but dense novel that infuses writing and identity on many levels. The writing is hard and desperate - at only 247 pages, it took me almost two weeks to get through it. When I read most of Hemingway (with probably the only exception being the Nick Adams stories), I am left feeling weighted and heavy, burdened with emotion as if I had been able to...
2 tags
The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas
I recently read this post at the Guardian and was intrigued by the question as I had been recently ill and taken to many long days lying around reading. I had just finished Madame Bovary and decided that I needed something that I thought might rely a little more on plot. I picked up The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas. I was pleasantly surprised when I got much more than I bargained for:...
3 tags
"I'm not trying to be him"
The Guardian profiles Philip Gourevitch, the new editor of The Paris Review:
I love what the Paris Review was, its traditions, what it stands for; but I didn’t feel that I was being hired to act as the curator of a museum piece. Rather, that I should treat it as a living thing, with its own new form. It’s a sign of my respect for Plimpton that I’m not trying to be...
2 tags
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
What can I say about Madame Bovary that hasn’t already been said? Probably not much other than that I should have been forced to read this book many years ago and shouldn’t have waited so long to force myself. Although (it seems as of late) I have a penchant for reading tales of adultery, I read this book because of Milan Kundera’s essay in The New Yorker. I am always open to...
2 tags
It's that time of the year...
when newspapers gather what they have read over the past year and make wonderful lists of this year’s best:
The Independent
The Times (UK)
The Guardian
Boston Globe
LA Times fiction and nonfiction
Washington Post
SF Chronicle (Updated)
NY Times This list is probably the worst I have seen from the Times. I am losing great respect for the book section with its grandiose self...
4 tags
Barrel Fever by David Sedaris
Barrel Fever by David Sedaris is an early collection of both short stories and essays. I was unaware that Sedaris wrote stories and I was only familiar with a few of his essays in The New Yorker, so one could say that I was a Sedaris virgin. I felt a little out of the loop (as usual), not having read any of his collections. This collection, being one of his earlier ones, was probably not the best...