Department of Spell Check

Another very surprising omission from the MS Word spell-check dictionary: scry. I thought at first I had  misspelled the word, so I typed it out again.  Still misspelled.  I typed it out again. Still misspelled.  Then I had a moment of paralyzing doubt:  maybe this word doesn't exist.  I think it does.  But maybe since it's late, my mind is playing tricks on me.   I had to cut-and-past from my document into the dictionary to ascertain that I was not, in fact, losing my marbles.  Besides, I've been scrying in my crystal ball.  I won't loose my marbles for at least another three months.

a meditation on bread

I love the smell of baker's yeast.  There is something so comforting, so welcoming about it; not to mention the fact that it's a harbinger of good eats to come soon.  When I used to have a bit more time on my hands, my Sunday morning ritual was to bake a challah, and while the dough was rising, I would leisurely do various chores about the house, basking in the delicious scent that comes with that type of bread.  Times change, of course, and though I know in my heart that I can squeeze the time in to bake a loaf or two every once in a while, I haven't for such a long time.  I'm too busy, to tired, to stressed, it's too late.... The excuses come so easily, and my willpower slips away even easier.  Now, my chores are done at a breakneck pace, twenty minutes every day, with more substantial time spent on saturday mornings, in between putting laundry into the machine and rushing off to do my weekly grocery trip as soon as the Trader Joe's opens, in order to beat the weekend crowds.  Sure, I get more done when I'm not kneading dough, or endlessly peeking at my work in progress, wondering if it's time to punch it down, if it's time to put it in the oven, if it's going to burn on top, and perhaps should I put some foil on it....  I tell myself that if I wanted a loaf of bread, I am lucky to have quite a good bakery in town, where the loafs--made fresh every morning by an elderly Frenchman-- are much better than my own.  No matter how good the bread is, however, it doesn't give my apartment that wonderful smell that can only come with lots of yeast, doing what it does best.

Tonight, I came home from a long day at the library, shaking my head at the fact that I am really quite lucky in having the opportunity to do what I do, and yet wondering if I was wasting my life by spending my Friday nights alone with my books.  And I was exhausted; both physically and mentally drained.  From what?  I sat at a desk, putting together a reading list for one of my generals fields.  I agonized over it: over what books to include, and what books to leave off.  I agonized at the thought of having to meet with a professor later that day, wondering how I could presume to do this field, when I knew next to nothing about it.  I met with the professor, and agonized at my attempts to make semi-intelligent conversation about this field, agonized over the obvious books I didn't know to include, and agonized at the thought of all the work that needed to be done before the semester ended.  Then I went back to the library, and tracked down all of the books I needed for the field.  A few trips down into the bowels of the building, weaving in and out of the stacks, and trotting up and down the stairs with my load of books.  And then I read.  And I read. And I read.  And by the time night had properly fallen and I decided to call it a night, I was bone tired. Tired, when the most strenuous thing I did today was agonize. It's like my life is a Woody Allen movie, but it's not any of the good ones.

When I got home, all I wanted to do was loose myself in the comfort of the kneading, kneading, kneading that comes with making bread, but alas, it was too late to start on a loaf.  And tomorrow-- well, there is laundry to be done, and the oil to be changed in the car, and taxes to be figured out, and groceries to be bought, and books to read, and papers to be written, and languages to be learned.

But I did start a loaf of no-knead bread. It's not nearly the same as a proper challah, but a pale echo of the real thing is better than nothing.  And there will be bread tomorrow.

Department of Spell-Check

Another day, another set of reading notes, and another word not found in the MS Word dictionary: plagiarization.  As in, a good number of pamphlets on everything from astrological prognostication to the best way to grow cabbages were simply plagiarizations** and cut-and-pastings of other, earlier works.  The OED has quotations for this noun form starting only in the rather late nineteenth century, with the latest quotation taken from the Economic Times from 2003, to wit: "Plagiarisation has become a habit with today's music directors and it probably existed before I was born. There's nothing wrong in it." Well, it certainly has existed for quite a while, in all aspects of creative life, but as to the fact that there is nothing wrong with it, well....

Plagiarism has indeed had a long and venerable history blah blah blah Adrian Johns' Piracy*** blah blah blah.  Now back to my regularly scheduled readings.


** Though, to be fair, I just google-booked the word inside of the book I just read, and the word doesn't appear there either.  But, the OED says it's a word, so I'm running with it.  I like it better than plagiarism in the context in which I have written it.

*** Really good book, and my 'blah's really don't do it justice.

quotation of the day

One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?
Søren Kierkegaard

I am still reading Cyrano's Voyage to the Moon.  "What is this thing called the world?"  It's a sentiment that would undoubtedly crossed the mind of our fair narrator, and it's certainly one that crosses my mind at least half a dozen times a day.  I told myself that until my generals exams are over, I'm not allowed to read any theater of the absurd-- it's just to demoralizing.  I suppose that goes double for thinking about Kierkegaard.

Cyrano de Bergerac

I am in the process of reading Cyrano de Bergerac's The Comical History of the States and Empires of the World of the Moon in an 1899 Doubleday reprint (on Google Books, thanks Google Books!) of the 1687 translation by A. Lowell (or, as the work says, "Englished" by Lovell).  A few choice quotations from the section about the author:

• “The fortune of his early education made him fall into the hands of a country curate, who was an insufferable pedant (the species seems to have been common at that time), and who had no real scholarship (the two things are by no means contradictory).  Cyrano dubbed his master an “Aristotelic Ass,” and wrote to his father that he preferred Paris.”

• “He lived the Paris student’s life, burning honest tradesmen’s signs and ‘doing other crazy things.’” I feel like such a lame student in comparison.  Why, I haven't burned a single tradesman's sign over in Grad School City.  I haven't even thrown a stone at the townies (though sometimes I am sorely tempted).  Perhaps I should remedy this situation, and take up the life of a 17th century Parisian student.      

• On Cyrano's famed nose: “not ridiculous, but monumental! … It is said that this nose brought death upon more than ten persons…”  Even Cyrano himself had hilarious things to say about his nose though—“This veridic nose arrives everywhere a quarter of an hour before its master.  Ten shoemakers, good round fat ones too, go and sit down to work under it out of the rain."

The section was written by a Curtis Hidden Page, a professor of English literature at the turn of the century (no, not this past one).  His is a name straight out of a Jasper Fforde novel!

Try some salt next time!

After a day of reading, it's Top Chef time!  I'm watching it now, and for the quickfire challenge, the contestants were suposed to peruse Modernist Cuisine (a book I already salivated over when it first came out), in order to create a modernist dish for Nathan Myhrvold, one of the authors. During the commercial*, I went back to Amazon to salivate over the set again, knowing full well that I would never spend $500 on a set of books, no matter how much I wanted to read them,** and went to read some of the reviews that have been posted since I last checked the book out.  For any item, I always read the negative reviews first, since I find criticisms more illuminating than platitudes, but mostly because for most items, there are at least a few negative reviews that are so bad, they are unintentionally hilarious, and make you wonder if the person who wrote them can manage, in real life, to walk and chew gum at the same time.  Except perhaps the person who complained that the measurements were all in grams, and the alarmist who equated the book with a nuclear disaster (to wit: "I love to keep my cooking simple, done by instinct with empirically felt impressions, not in the consultation of an operations manual for a nuclear power plant!"), there was nothing all that illuminating about the book in the comments section.   There was, however, a reviewer who noted that the book was terrible because it tasted awful :)  That was clearly a joke.  I can only hope that one of the comments ("You're not supposed to eat it") was also a joke!

Oh, how I want this set to miraculously be offered used on Amazon for a song!




* I'm not in my lonely, TV-less apartment, and I forget that you can zap past all the commercials when something is Tivo'ed.  This newfangled technology is a far cry from how I usually watch TV, which is all for the best, seeing as how Top Chef isn't (legally) posted online.


** I wonder if I can get the library to get it via ILL.  While I probably could, I feel like I shouldn't, thought that wouldn't be the largest set of books I have ever ordered via ILL.....  I wonder if our public library has an ILL system that has access to this book?