things to do

Michel Butor says that to travel is to write, because to travel is to read. This can be developed further: To write is to travel, to write is to read, to read is to write and to read is to travel. But George Steiner says that to translate is also to read, and to translate is to write, as to write is to translate and to read is to translate. So that we may say: To translate is to travel and to travel is to translate. To translate a travel writing, to read a writing, to write a writing, and to travel. But if because you are translating you read, and because writing translate, because traveling write, because traveling read, and because translating travel; that is if to read is to translate, and to translate is to write, to write to travel, to read to travel, to write to read, to read to write, and to travel to translate; then to write is also to write, and to read is also to read, and even more, because when you read you read, but also travel, and because traveling read, therefore read and read; and when reading also write, therefore read; and reading also translate, therefore read; therefore read, read, read, and read. The same argument may be made for translating, traveling, and writing.

lydia davis*, "to reiterate," almost no memory

[thx mrm]

* i liked her translation** of in search of lost time, but even translated well it is unreadable.
** i hope it's the same lydia davis.

acceptance

Ariel: Hey
    where did you disappear to? Someplace good?
me: ha
    no
    busy and unproductive
Ariel: acceptance of that is the key to happiness
me: 10 points

superordination

We're not big fans of what I consider "vertical" ambition—that is, the usual career-path trajectory, in which a newbie moves up the ladder from associate to manager to vice president over a number of years of service. On the other hand, we revere "horizontal" ambition—in which employees who love what they do are encouraged to dig deeper, expand their knowledge, and become better at it. We always try to hire people who yearn to be master craftspeople, that is, designers who want to be great designers, not managers of designers; developers who want to master the art of programming, not management.

jason fried, 37signals

citrus

things fall apart

the awesome bread device died catastrophically yesterday while baking a 25% rye sourdough. i brought the carcass to judy motzkin and she thinks it may be a result of the firing process evolving a crystalline form of silica that makes the resultant clay more susceptible to thermal shock at the range of temperatures involved in baking tasty bread. she investigates even now. the universe of subjective knowledge expands outward at a speed far exceeding the individual's capacity to understand it.

8-step program

that's not butter.

rye

judy motzkin's cloche slays it again. after various experiments with long-retardation, i began to fool around with rough-milled rye and increasing the amount of starter in the dough (this is a formula from peter reinhardt, by way of wildyeast). this accelerates the first fermentation ("bulk fermentation") of the dough so that you could, if you wanted, have fresh bread in about 6 hours.

rye makes dough sticky beyond belief and appears to become workable by hand only after lots and lots of retardation in a nice cold refrigerator. i followed instructions for time and temperature (which did not include a long cold period), so did not benefit. if you choose to knead a rye-heavy dough by hand, here are some discoveries i have made.

1. dough on fingers dissolves most readily in warm water. hot water, apart from being uncomfortable, also cooks the dough onto you. 
2. answering the phone while kneading is not recommended.
3. wood toothpicks are best for getting dough out of the spaces between cellphone keys.
4. folding the dough is easier and more effective than kneading it. 

as a test, i split the dough into two batches of equal mass, one baked with the cloche and the other on a pizza stone with a steel mixing bowl over the top. the loaf you see below is from the cloche: mildly sour, lots of rye flavour, incredible oven spring, great crisp, caramelised crust, tender crumb with great aeration. 

this competent but much less delightful loaf is from the stone. still decent oven spring, nice-ish crust caramelisation, but the final rise in the oven was not as uniform, and the crumb is not as well aerated (alas, no crumb shot):

leche asada

laphroaig, vanilla ice cream, and a baked custard. eleni roasted a leg of lamb last night, and julieta made this to follow. it suffered a little from the bike ride up from central square.

next acquisition target

in case you are unaware, this is a photo of a real live copy of modernist cuisine. from a 25 minute rapid flipthrough, the book is as promised, maybe more. the typography is oddly 90s in feel: i don't think i've seen optima used as body text since 1998 when it was de rigueur for certificates and other official documents, and the title type is reminiscent of eurostile (but is actually not). the photographic reproduction is killer, though (stochastic screening is part of the reason).

let us not forget that the set weighs 40 pounds and requires special protective packaging inside a dedicated box the size of a cube fridge.

[with thx to corby, for letting me see modernist cuisine in the flesh. so to speak.]

perhaps better in concept than actual deployment

some might say

lever

the blue danube waltz

via youtube.com

Posted via email from flavourcountry

at the taco bell drive-thru

via youtube.com

little honda

the geometry of pasta

from a review of the geometry of pasta:

[Included in this book are recipes detailing] the ingredients needed for over 200 sauce preparations that run the gamut from obscure (Lumace alla Lumache, or Snails with Snails) to the near pedestrian, like Frankfurters and Fontina, a recommended pairing with the wheel shaped Rotelline, "a complex, arguably uninspired shape that was only possible with the advancement of the pasta industries mechanization," an advancement that was apparently "much lauded by the Fascists."

via feasting never stops

a tolerable existence

on which, also see this.

individuals and the species

Men are to be viewed as the organs of their century, which operate mainly unconsciously.

goethe, maxims and reflections #957

what i did this weekend

the people at the environmental studies program at lake forest are real nice. the fragment up there is a piece of the forma urbis romae, a giant marble map of ancient rome. the presentation is here.

chicago, il

portland, me

boston, ma

falsehoods, lies, prevarications

the flavour of tea

ritual, sweet tooth "la orquidea." apparently, a single shot gibraltar at hirise is now known as a vaughn.

when desks are too high

we take a hacksaw to their legs. an hour later, the desk is finally at the correct height for me (25.75"). it feels great.

use

To show how a fact is useful is not to explain how it was created or why it is as it is. The uses it serves presuppose the specific properties characterising it, but do not create them. The need we have of things cannot give them their specific nature, or cause them to come into being. It is to causes of another sort that they owe their existence. The idea we have of their utility may indeed motivate us to put these forces to work and to elicit from them their characteristic effects, but it will not enable us to produce these effects out of nothing. This proposition is evident so long as it is a question only of material, or even psychological, phenomena. It would be equally undisputed in sociology if social facts, because of their extreme intangibility, did not—mistakenly—appear to us without all intrinsic reality.

emile durkheim, the rules of sociological method

twitternet

this, apparently, is my twitter network. [thx tali]

spring may be imminent

the sense of dissonance

Dissonance
(if you are interested)
leads to discovery

william carlos williams, paterson iv

[found in the sense of dissonance, courtesy of the pragmatism reading group]

the sky