September 2012
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'Fifty Shades of Grey' Makeover Given to 'Pride... →
A new publishing imprint, Clandestine Classics, has decided that the classics need a little spicing up:
“The old-fashioned pleasantries and timidity have all been stripped away, quite literally. You didn’t really think that these much-loved characters only held hands and pecked cheeks, did you? Come with us as we embark on a breathtaking experience — behind the closed bedroom doors...
August 2012
4 posts
“You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true...”
– Winston Churchill
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The Many Stages Of Publishing a Book, Told in...
Whenever someone asks me what it feels like to write a book, I am just going to send them to this brilliant blog post, The Publishing Process in GIF Form.
I also like to imagine the exact procrastination-happy state of mind that inspired the author to make this instead of writing their book. Happens to the best of us.
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I'm terrible at updating this blog. Read my stuff... →
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May 2012
1 post
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When Life Gets Stressful, I Get Baking
It starts when I start to fantasize about cookies. Cookies studded with chunks of melted chocolate, cobbled with hunks of walnut, heavy with raisins. Then I move onto pies. Crisp, buttery crusts, velvety lemon custard, rustic chunks of apple. I can tell I’m having a very bad day when I start in on cakes. Layer cakes, each painstakingly spread with raspberry preserves and buttercream. Whipped...
April 2012
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My Own Advice for Future Food Writers
Amanda Hesser has a pretty bleak blog post up at Food52 today, Advice for Future Food Writers, in which she bemoans the decline of the 9-to-5 staff food writing job:
I can no longer responsibly recommend that you drop everything to try to become a food writer … Just 10 years ago, food writers with staff jobs were able to earn $80,000 to $150,000 a year, and freelancers were regularly paid $2...
March 2012
1 post
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February 2012
3 posts
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Daily Mail: How supermarkets invent farms to trick... →
Some brands use entirely invented places to evoke a sense of homeliness and wholesomeness, while others use ambiguous, meaningless language such as ‘hearty’ and ‘rich’ designed to baffle.
Man. Isn’t that like the most cynical thing you’ve ever heard?
Champis, the shepherding rabbit →
Happy Saturday! (You’re welcome.)
January 2012
2 posts
The Laziest Day Ever
I did nothing yesterday. Well, almost nothing: I read all day long, first in bed until the sun started going down, then on the couch because it seemed too shameful to stay in bed. I also made coffee, and walked down to the corner store to buy some beer. And that was my Saturday.
A shame, because I had such a lofty To Do list that included:
Go to yoga
Clean my appallingly messy apartment
Write...
“It seems wrong and unfair that Christmas, with its stressful and unmanageable...”
– Bridget Jones’s Diary
October 2011
3 posts
2 tags
Stalking Geoff Dyer
Meeting one’s literary idols is a disorienting experience. They’re always so disappointingly normal. Novelists don’t have the sheen of movie stars; you are reminded that these are people who spend the majority of time alone at their desk, struggling with sentences.
Today I went to brunch in Greenpoint with girls I’ve been friends with for nearly 15 years—a...
September 2011
3 posts
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Eat Your Way Through Game of Thrones →
My god, two obsessions in one blog — these ladies are recreating all the recipes in the Game of Thrones books (reading those books always made me hungry). I only wish I’d thought of it first.
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“Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled...”
– Mark Bittman, Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?
July 2011
2 posts
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This Passage Haunts Me In Weak Moments
from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s miraculous essay “The Crack-Up”:
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There...
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Required Reading for Food Nerds
You don’t have to be a food history geek like me to appreciate the Lapham’s Quarterly summer issue on food, though if you are it’s pretty much the Holy Grail. The magazine’s MO is to exhaustively explore a single theme each issue (previous topics include sports, the city and celebrity), through more than 200 pages of excerpts, interviews, infographics and essays culled from...
June 2011
7 posts
Duke Ellington Knew Road Food →
Adam Gopnik: What I Learned When I Learned to Draw →
I hope you subscribe to the New Yorker, because it’s a great essay. As usual.
“It was the best thing I had ever drawn, and I realized that I hadn’t drawn it as I had imagined, God’s hand finally resting on mine to steal a true contour from the world. No, I had made it up out of small, stale parts and constant reapplications of energy and observation, back and...
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Watch“Look at this weird fork. Yelping.”
“It smells like food in here. Yelped.”
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Signing Books at Costco
When I was a kid, a trip to Costco was a Special Event. My parents kept a list on the back of an envelope on the fridge, and I’d impatiently watch it grow as the family’s need for paper towels, olive oil, frozen chicken nuggets, peanut butter, cereal and laundry detergent mounted. Finally, the day would arrive. To my sisters and me, a trip to Costco meant samples.
Samples were...
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“One gradually developed a protective hardness against both praise and blame. Too...”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Early Success”
Nerdy brilliance: Food search data charted →
It’s awesome — HuffPo uses Google Correlate to track food search data over the years and throughout the country. A few not-so-surprising revelations: Acai peaked in 2009, people in Maine heart pie like no one else.
Speaking of acai, who read that New Yorker article charting the Brazilian fruit’s “Miley Cyrus-like trajectory from obscurity to hype, critical backlash, and...
April 2011
1 post
5 Favorite Memories of Kim Ricketts
Sometimes you come across people who believe in you. Against all odds and expectations, they see a glimmer of something in you that you’ve always seen in yourself but maybe never told anyone about, and they make it their mission to help you draw it out. They come in the form of mentors, patrons, close friends—but they share the simple fact that at one point they believed in you more...
February 2011
6 posts
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David Lebovitz on food blogs →
Long, but worth reading.
Three-day weekend
Mostly I slept, obscene amounts, 12 or 15 hours a night and naps in between. When I wasn’t sleeping, I was lying on the couch and watching television I don’t remember (the Real Housewives? An entire season of Sex and the City?), or lying in bed reading contemporary fiction, because it was easier to read than the New Yorker or real literature.
One day I walked to the Farmers Market and...
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Bill Buford on Why Lyon is the Food Capital of the... →
Food/travel writing doesn’t get much better than this.
“Lyon is unusual and seems to be exceptionally incompetent at publicising itself. In fact, it doesn’t want visitors. It fears discovery. The Lyonnais: they like their food, they eat it, they talk about it all day long. They don’t care what you think about it. They don’t care if you like it, if you eat it, if...
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“Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night...”
– Jack Kerouac
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NYT: Japanese Coffeemaking Methods Embraced... →
Mostly thanks to Blue Bottle Coffee in San Francisco. The West Coast is awesome in its willingness to try new methods in pursuit of the best.
January 2011
2 posts
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Adam Gopnik dissects the modern dessert →
“Without surrendering sugar, dessert had surrendered all its familiar forms—the cake, the soufflé, the pudding—as the avant-garde novel had surrendered narrative, character, and moral. Losing our faith in art is, in a secular culture, what losing our faith in God was to a religious one; God only knows what losing our faith in desserts must be.”
It’s a brilliant...
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On College Admissions Essays →
Interesting piece in NYT today questioning the expectations placed on college students about personal essays.
What if, like most 17-year-olds, a high school senior sounds wooden or pretentious or thunderously trite when trying to express himself in the first person? Prose in which an author’s voice emerges through layers of perfectly correct sentences is the hardest kind of writing there...
December 2010
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A Great Way to Begin a Story →
Lovely nostalgic essay in the New York Times today about being a young, aspiring writer, and those moments when you know you’ve Made It. (Whatever that means.)
November 2010
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“For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can...”
– James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Great Men
October 2010
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"It is always the card handwritten by you that... →
The title quote’s taken from the Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette, first published in 1952. The importance of handwritten notes appears on 37 pages. (http://bit.ly/bpgsnX). In my lifetime, it’s become a lost art.
I still write most things by hand: First drafts, journals, letters, meeting notes. I need the immediacy and intimacy of pen-on-paper to capture what I’m...
February 2010
1 post
Why I Love Tintin →
“This sense of being outside of time, which Hergé worked so hard to create, is one of the deep springs of Tintin’s popularity. Children, who have a similar sense of existing outside of normal adult time, identify with it. For them, as for Tintin, what matters are the attachments and attractions that surround them here and now. And though I no longer think like that, Hergé’s work is so...
October 2009
1 post
Archie's Getting Married
Archie Andrews is married. The New York Times posted the unfortunate news today. And I feel more betrayed than if my little sister, my high school boyfriend, anyone ever important to me in real life had gotten hitched without my knowledge. Archie Andrews’ transition from bachelorhood hits me where it hurts.
I’ve spent the past hour to figure out why. Surely, Archie is allowed to grow up like...
September 2009
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The One Charm of the Past
I was cleaning out a drawer tonight and found my old reporter tape recorder. This giant, bulky thing with a cassette still inside. I haven’t listened to it. I don’t particularly want to. That tape is a snapshot from my life before, my life a year ago, my life when I was a married freelance food journalist living in Seattle.
Two things strike me. The first is that even a year ago, while packing up...
August 2009
2 posts
Sick Day, By the Numbers
Nature documentaries: 2
Ocean’s 11 movies: 1.2
Heath Ledger movies: .8
Episodes of Beverly Hills 90210, original: .6
gchat conversations: 7
Surprisingly productive gchat conversations: 4
Facebook chats: 2
Minutes on phone with mom: 47
Pints of matzo ball soup: 1
Mugs of tea: 3
Hot toddies: 1
Twitter updates: 5
Magazine articles read: 4
Magazine articles skimmed: 9
Items in magazine...
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Museum of Jurassic Technology
Museums are supposed to make sense.
Like a textbook, I approach a museum with a set of expectations: That it will follow an organizational logic. That it will be easy to interpret. That it will teach me something. That it will tell me the truth.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City does none of these things. It’s intentionally confusing, incoherent, opaque. And it’s one of the most...
July 2009
2 posts
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(500) Days of Summer
So have you seen (500) Days of Summer yet? If not, you absolutely should. (Though I understand your hesitation. Is this a smart indie rom-com, in the vein of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Or are we looking at another “quirky” disaster like Garden State? Can’t risk it in the theater. Better Netflix it.)
Anyway, you can set your fears to rest. The movie’s exactly what it should be, and can...
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Winning Friends With Salad
I have recently discovered a troubling bias against me and my salad-loving brethren.
It started at Westside Tavern, the stylish, wood-paneled new gastropub in Westside Pavilion, and what proved to be the best Cobb salad of my young life. We were there for dinner before The Hangover at The Landmark. It was the Friday night after a long week, and we were both in need of serious indulgence.
...
June 2009
2 posts
Michael Jackson: A Tribute in Posterboards
We’ve been living with the Michael Jackson situation for a few days now, and most everything has already been said. Major thinkers have weighed in against the fans,questioned the media’s editorial judgment, gotten all hot and bothered about cultural currency of twitter and facebook, and will probably continue to provide running commentary for as long as we can stand it (and as long as there are...
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A Night to Remember
“It does not wish to be part of the city, but rather its equivalent and its replacement or substitute,” Frederic Jameson wrote about the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in his 1988 essay,Postmodernism and Consumer Society. “The glass skin repels the city outside … it’s not even an exterior, inasmuch as when you seek to look at the hotel’s outer walls you cannot see the hotel itself, but only the...
May 2009
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Complaining About Hipsters is Such a Cliche
So I live in Santa Monica. There are no hipsters. There are some pseudohipsters in Venice, but Venice is too expensive for real hipsters; those are more like people who shop at the boutique equivalent of Urban Outfitters and decorate their homes with very expensive midcentury furniture.
Living here has kind of thrown off my game for a while, because I’ve always had this vague idea, growing up in...
