(Untitled)

[flowery_twat]

The OED word of the day almost always cracks me up. The word today is whelk. Already kind of funny, right? I mean it's hard to think of a situation where you'd really need to be able to talk about whelks. But then I scroll down to the various adjunct entries (obsolete uses, compounds and the like) and find: to be unable to run a whelk stall: an

Comments

[snarkhunter]

Food writing! I don't care for it myself, really, not being all that into food, but I just got an e-mail from my former roommate, Keebler, which included a brief discussion of food books. I can ask her for recs, if you'd like.

Here's *my* rec: Aphrodite, by Isabel Allende. It's a book about aphrodisiacs, and it's completely brilliant. It's witty, clever, and completely engrossing.

K. is reading The Man Who Ate Everything, and she gave to bear a book about lobsters...I can't remember what it's called, but Bear can tell you.

In terms of funny, fluffy, fun fiction (ph34r my alliterative ski11z!), if you want any of that, I highly recommend Meg Cabot's chick lit novels (Every Boy's Got One enraptured bear so much that she couldn't put it down) and Donna Andrews's Murder With Peacocks, which isn't much of a challenge as mystery novels go, but is completely hilarious and delightful.

Also? There should be more discussion of whelks. Whelks are very important. T someone. Somewhere.

[flowery_twat]

not being all that into food

??? i don't even know how to begin to parse that phrase! :-)

That's two Allende recs, so I shall definitely give that a shot. Sounds excellent. Thanks. The lobsters one sound awesome too.

I have to say I pretty much loathe chick lit. 'Bridget's Jones Diary' made me want to wallop both Bridget and Helen Fielding, repeatedly, with a large carp. I've never found an example of the genre in which the characters weren't stupid, whingy bints. Oddly, I have no problem with chick flicks, which are just as inane. Which surely goes to show something, but don't ask me what.

[snarkhunter]

I completely agree with you on most chick lit, actually...even though I still read it. I have no idea why these books, which are supposed to, like, reflect the empowered, capable, capable modern woman, feature so many total idiots and escaped lunatics.

I mean, really. Are we supposed to identify with Bridget's helplessness and delusions? Are we meant to find her relentless quest for a man charming? Are we really supposed to emulate the utter incompetence of these adult women? I recently read Confessions of a Shopaholic, and I was utterly appalled by the whole damn book. It actually made me feel physically ill at some points. In what world is this a GOOD thing?

This is why I liked MC's book. The main character was a successful woman who knew what she wanted and what she liked. She was happy with herself. She wasn't the one who needed to be Taught A Lesson. Sure, she's quirky, but not in the Bridget-Jones-why-is-she-exhibiting-signs-of-psychosis way. :)

not being all that into foodHee. Food is a tool. It helps me keep going, and

[flowery_twat]

OK, I will totally give the MC book a try. You've sold me.

Food wise, see, I too have a very fast metabolism and become a total loony monster without food, but I don't resent this in the slightest. I don't just love cooking and eating (both of which I approach as a combo of science experiment and art project), but I also love thinking about food - what we eat, with whom we eat, how we eat, how all those things have changed over time, the immense economic impact of food choices, the neurobiology of hunger and taste, etc. Food, sleep & death - the three constants for all biological organisms. Understand how a species or culture or person deals with those three things and you come pretty close to understanding everything. There's a reason Eve was given an apple, not a comfy chair, or a beautiful necklace, or what ever other 'tempting' thing one can imagine.

*waffles on until your ears fall off*

[snarkhunter]

Ooh, I like the tie there between sin and consumption. One of the ways that food does interest me is in the question of consumption, and, in particular, how food gets tied to knowledge.

As you said, Eve got an apple, which lead to knowledge. And I heard somewhere once of a study where they claimed that one of the reasons libraries have so much trouble keeping food out is that people tie eating with reading--two different, but related, forms of consumption. (I'm positive someone's made the same tie between movies/tv and food. I mean, I always feel a bit odd when I'm at the movie theatre and I'm not eating *something*.)

But my real interest is not in food itself, but in overlap between the ways we think about food and the ways we think about absorbing knowledge. I wonder, actually...to what extent does gluttony get tied to scholarship/learning? I'm also positive this isn't an original thought, and I haven't actually read all of Faust, nor have I read Dr. Faustus, but it seems to me that his life of excess following his Teufelspakt

[flowery_twat]

I *knew* it! I knew you were interested in food in some fashion or other. I can accept that not everyone wants to know the history of the tomato (although it's bloody fascintating) or how taste buds work, or get into a discussion of whether Julia Child was actually a good cook or not, but I *knew* you had to be interested in some aspect of food. Hah!

Food & knowledge - hmmm. The first thought that springs to mind is the scholar and theologian as aesetic - deny the flesh to feed the mind or whatever. I don't think I can think of any representation of a scholar who isn't thin. And yet in real life, Johnson was grossly overweight.

*happily interferes with other peoples dissertations now that I never have to deal with my own ever again*

[snarkhunter]

My first thought is the ascetic, too, but I wonder if there's not some overlap, somewhere, between, like, "wrong" knowledge and overeating. (I'm now using your journal as a forum to think out loud.) Or...if not overeating, voluptuousness? I can't think of a connection to food. It always comes back to lust--Abelard & Heloise, for example. Paolo & Francesca. But considering the ways in which the Seven Deadly Sins overlap in other ways...there might be something there.

Fortunately, I am not a medievalist, and this is mostly like to be a medieval or Renaissance thing, so I can happily return to my Victorians.

(Ohhh. The Aesthetics. Now *they* might have something. Or the Pre-Raphs...)

Damn it.