Drinking coffee, I found an interesting rendering for the cuff that supports the cup and protects the hand from the heat. In English it is called an "insulating sleeve". In the French one reads about "cette gaine isolante" which back translated refers to a girdle.
Somehow thinking in French makes the cup wide and in English tall and long. And in which language would I be prone to blow upon the beverage to cool it?
And so for day 434
20.02.2008
Came across a creative writing course outline from the early 90s (Transforming Form: Creative Writing from a Gay & Lesbian Perspectives). I proposed that "Through a series of directed readings and structured exercises, participants will integrate an awareness of anticipated reader(s) into critical responses to their own work and that of their peers."
Weeks three, four and five are oddly telling at this distance in time:
Week 3
Travelogue or Mystery (Class Choice)
What differences count? Here and There. Seeing differently? There and Here.
Week 4
Sexually Explicit Writing
Audre Lorde excerpt from Zami
Robin Metcalfe, "The Shirt" Mandate 1983
Killing the cliche; unleashing fantasy; realism and sexual representation.
Week 5
Marking Passages/Testimonials
An examination of obituaries and tributes selected [...]
Week 10
Borders
Joanna Russ The Female Man
Samuel Delany Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Science fiction; utopias; writing for the open audience
Paul Bouissac in "Three Mini-reviews: Focus on the Brain" quotes from Donald Pfaff Brain Arousal and Information Theory: Neural and Genetic Mechanisms
Brains are foretelling devices and their predictive powers emerge from the various rhythms they perpetually generate. At the same time, brain activity can be tuned to become an ideal observer of the environment, due to an organized system of rhythms.
"The prefrontal cortex allows us to mentally time travel. It's an amazing capacity," he [Anderson] explained "but it can have some side effects." The ability to learn from the past and predict the future is useful but it can also cause us to worry about what has already happened or what is yet to come.
A rift on a line from Matthew 7:17-20 and pondering the fate of being consigned to the fire
pan dendron agathon
the parable of every good tree ends
in dry crackle of winter
In the "On Water" chapter of Jennifer Bennett's Our Gardens Ourselves: Reflections on an Ancient Art one finds a lovely meandering sentence that reminds one of a slowly trickling stream or of the tranquil disappearance of evaporation trails.
It is hidden in the air, in the soil and in countless puddles that do not look like puddles but take on fascinating, colourful multitude of unpuddlelike shapes — tree shapes, earthworm shapes, gardener shapes, tomato shapes, whatever — that hold the water, in transit, by means of relatively small amounts of substances other than water.
Anne McCaffrey Crystal Singer embeds an intriguing aphorism in a passage reflecting upon the awakening of the protagonist, Killashandra, to her chosen craft and profession.
That was ever the way of technology: to take the worthless and convert it into wealth.
The two facets of singing crystal were linked: the good and bad, the difficult, the ecstatic.
Signed "James Downey", the introduction to inno'va-tion: Essays by Leading Canadian Researchers contains an apt description of the ingredients of the research process
While researchers may use highly sophisticated machines, they themselves are subject to the same vagaries of chance experience as the rest of us. Their discoveries are often a unique and unpredictable mix of curiosity, circumstance, skill, and personal reflection.
Literature, of course, is an unnatural act committed by two consenting individuals — writer and reader. [...] Each — writer and reader — helps create the world. The pattern is the book. A fantasy novel is more than an adventure or a quest. Rather it is a series of image-repeating glasses, a hall of mirrors that brings past and future into focus and calls it the present. [...] The fantasy novel presents a world of poetry, of dream-making and sometimes of dream-breaking.
Mosquito by Gayl Jones ends with a signature that displays the names of the narrator protagonist: Sojourner Nadine Jane Nzingha Johnson.
The first chapter of The General in His Labyrinth by Gabreil Garcia Marquez translated by Edith Grossman ends with a paragraph that likewise rifts on names:
It was the end. General Simon Jose Antonio de la Santisima Trinidad Bolivar y Palacios was leaving forever.
Any Vanderbilt's Complete Cookbook has a recipe for "Baked Stuffed Onions" in which the tops of cooked onions are sliced off and the centres scooped out. The scooped-out onions are sauted and spooned over the stuffed onions. This reminds me of soubise.
And so I looked up Soubise in Len Deigthon's Où est le garlic? in which soubise is described as the addition of cooked onions to béchamel. Oddly not what I recalled (a mixture of cooked rice and onions pureed).
I checked Escoffier's Ma Cuisine where it is called "Sauce ou purée soubise". No trace of a bechamel base.
All this cross-checking is assisted by good indices. And it generates an appetite. Time to head for the kitchen.
And so for day 426
12.02.2008
Alan Fletcher in The Art of Looking Sideways reproduces Erotic Surrealist Handsigns. One discovers a clever juxtaposition of a chart of the handsigns from the deaf alphabet and associated with each of these letters a word. For example, "U" stands for "urticate", "C" for "cunnilinguate", "D" for "deflower", etc.
Being set in a book of some thousand pages, the reproduction of the found art is itself a bit of a "trouvaille".
And so for day 425
11.02.2008
