Posts tagged as:

pretty pictures

Dante and the Lobster

September 17, 2009

 
Eating a perfectly cooked lobster, like this one here, beautifully prepared by chef David LeFevre of downtown’s seafood palace The Water Grill, (a wedge of lemon, drawn butter in a porcelain bowl like the hull of a docking ship) is a pleasure in its own right. Even more so when an impossibly polite server pins [...]

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How Atlantis Disappeared

August 16, 2009

HOW ATLANTIS DISAPPEARED

Under Socrates’ quiet direction
they took down the street signs and the house numbers.
One by one
the city councilmen dissolved

the ink on all the deeds and licenses,
while the mayor personally
destroyed the negatives
of every picture of the town.

Then, citizens, dutifully checking off a list,
erased the floor plan
of every house on every block.
In a single day

the city [...]

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Salmon curing in Japan

May 17, 2009

Cool fish, eh?  These are curing salmon, strung from a snowy porch in the coastal town of Murakami, in Niigata Prefecture, Japan.  Click here to find out more about the process: warning, it’s in Japanese.  Here’s how my sister, who has lived in Japan for close to 2o years and who took the pictures, translates:
◆鮭の内臓とエラを取り除いて洗い、良くヌメリをとります。
Remove [...]

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Rhubarb tarts on a doily, or not

April 15, 2009

When you’re testing recipes for a cookbook, you generate a lot of food.  For the last weeks and months, the assembly line of breads and cookies and pies and muffins coming out of my kitchen has been astonishing, like an unlicensed bakery that sporadically opens to manic over-production.  So this past weekend, after I pulled [...]

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Citrus on a drying rack

April 14, 2009

Making marmalade is extremely fun, albeit rather time-consuming.  With blood oranges and Meyer lemons coming to the ends of their respective seasons, Kim and I are making 3 citrus marmalade, with bloods, Meyers and Valencia oranges.  (Because there were Valencias at the farmers market, so that’s what I got.)  Since marmalade is made with the [...]

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The Kite Flying Upper Atmosphere Station #12

April 14, 2009

THE KITE FLYING UPPER ATMOSPHERE STATION #12
For three years Wittgenstein studied aeronautics at the University of Manchester.  It was before the war.  He studied kites.  How they moved outside the world’s prisons.  It was, he came to think, about games.  How the kites played.  With the barbarians and with the clocks and with the systems [...]

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Peter Schaner’s Easter eggs

April 11, 2009

Decorating eggs for Easter is a long tradition (pagan origins, Christian symbol of rebirth), which in my house historically involves buying those flimsy egg-dying kits from the grocery store with their haphazard array of paper bits and dye tablets that usually don’t work out right.  We’ve experimented with wax crayons, food coloring, different vinegars, vegetable [...]

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Ariadne at the end of the line

April 5, 2009

 

 
ARIADNE AT THE END OF THE LINE
She starts out from the west and starts
rolling: the string she winds around her hands
a deepening maze of cuts, each one
a thread that binds her back to the center
of the labyrinth she remembers.  Only bread and milk
and the way her mother cried [...]

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