Chopping and Tossing

Mollie Katzen. The Enchanted Broccoli Forest "Improvisation Notes"

Cooking is a very personal statement, whether you follow a recipe, vary it, or invent your own altogether. The same recipe made by different people on different days and in different kitchens can taste new each time. There always seems to be an personal touch — a special elusive quality — from each individual cook.

The first step toward improvisation is to find some cookbooks that appeal to you and just read them without necessarily cooking any of the recipes. This will help you to understand basic procedures and principles of cooking.

Then make a commitment to really notice and taste good food, to ask questions of other cooks, and to become deeply familiar with your own preferences. Your comfort and "vocabulary" will quickly grow, and you will find yourself more and more able to vary recipes, or even to cook without them at all.

Similar advice applies to writing.

The foraged ingredients from J.W. Hackett Haiku Poetry Volume One:

That old empty house,
   now overgrown with years,
      is the only real one here.

Adapted to the Berneval kitchen:

That empty old house,
overgrown now with years,
is here the only real one.

Interesting parallels between sensitivity to syntax and to cooking times.

And so for day 1557
19.03.2011

Treading

Catherine Bateson. Composing a Life.

It is time now to explore the creative potential of interrupted and conflicted lives, where energies are not narrowly focused or permanently pointed toward a single ambition. Theses are not lives without commitment, but rather lives in which commitments are continually refocused and redefined. [...] what are the possible transfers of learning when life is a collage of different tasks? How does creativity flourish on distraction? what insights arise from the experience of multiplicity and ambiguity? And at what point does desperate improvisation become significant achievement?

These are important questions in a world in which we are all increasingly strange sojourners.

And so for day 612
16.08.2008

Notes on Improvisation

Entry from a 1996 notebook recording a conversation with Craig Squires.

Risks of Improvisation

know people well    danger of falling into old habits

when you don't know the people well     you can't "hear" because you don't know their vocabulary

for people you know well    touch those buttons you "can't" touch

Aleatory aspects more present with people you don't know well

but with people you know the aleatory is mapped onto the emergence of novelty in the relationship

control of adequate redundancy in communication situations

with performance with people you know the third. is there, a sensing of other participants sensing ...

— without risk improv doesn't work.

the punctuation is odd and so is the spacing - familiar and yet disjunctive


And so for day 542
07.06.2008