Three interests meme, rhubarb, rhubarb
Via
jesse_the_k:
1. Comment on this entry saying Rhubarb!, and I'll pick three things from your profile interests or tags.
2.Write about the words/phrases I picked in your journal and link back here. Spread the love.
Which I offer up to dr rdrs who might be interested to do this.
Or indeed, if anyone would like to pick three others of my interests for expatiation, have at it.
And she has given me:
Laurie Colwin
I first encountered her work when some women's magazine that I then read regularly had a feature in which well-known women talked about their favourite books and extracts were published, and one day, in the late 70s/early 80s, it was Colwin's novel Happy All The Time. Which I then got out of one or other of the local libraries I then patronised and liked a lot, and eventually acquired my very own copy. However, she was a writer who didn't, I think, get routinely UK-published, and I picked up her other works, including the cookery books, during the trips I made to US from the late 80s on for research, conferences, etc. Happy All The Time remains my favourite of her works, followed I think by Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, which gave me some favourite philosophy of the kitchen: No one ever says: 'Cornbread and prosciutto. I wonder what that will taste like.' Instead, they say the words every cook longs to hear: 'This is wonderful. May I please have some more?'
Which can apply to more than food. Also: '[W]hen the chips are down, the spirit is exhausted and the body hungry, the same old thing is a great consolation'. And her wonderfully laidback and reassuring approach to bread-making: And then I read this liberating sentence: 'It's really a question of arranging matters so that the dough suits your timetable rather than the other way around.' Why, you could have knocked me over with a pastry brush! This meant that I could mix up the bread in the morning, leave it to rise, and actually go away! I could come home when I wanted, punch the dough down and let it rise all afternoon if I needed to.... The idea that bread baking was something that would accommodate itself to me was downright thrilling.
Footnotes
I rather regret that these days, the excoriating if exquisitely polite rejoinder to one's academic rivals in a neatly turned footnote is out of style, and publishers, if, indeed, they allow notes at all, tend to do endnotes, and say, 'citations only', which cuts out some of the amusingly discursive things one finds in works of an older school. But I am still very much there for the citing of the sources, in such a way that the curious may find them again.
Apostrophe
'[T]he semicolon is one of the neglected children in the family... the apostrophe is the abused victim': The Apostrophe's Plaint: I'm misused and abused, oh please care for me:
For I am a miserable apostrophe.
Always in the wrong place, never where I should be;
I'm such a miserable apostrophe.
There was alarm and despondence last year when the 96 year old chairman of the Apostrophe Protection Society, announced that he was closing it down, but others are still, pro tem, maintaining the website and posting pictures of egregiously abused apostrophe's.
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3170474.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.