DESCENDING this week on the culinary scene like a meteor, “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” is the self-published six-volume masterwork from a team led by Nathan Myhrvold, the multimillionaire tech visionary who, as a friend of mine said, “decided to play Renaissance doge with food.”

I was left wondering how a book could be mind-crushingly boring, eye-bulgingly riveting, edifying, infuriating, frustrating, fascinating, all in the same moment. Every time I tore myself away from these stunning pages to emerge for air, I had to shake my head so hard my cheeks made Looney Tunes noises.

GPC - Cloned guinea pig receptor.

Anthrozoologist John Bradshaw insists that cats really aren’t terribly domesticated and think that humans are the same species as them, but oddly “non-hostile.”

Aomame, fantasizing about Tengo, lingers on his “big, strong genitals,” and her bodyguard, Tamaru, bizarrely observes, “When it comes to being gay, I’m in the big leagues.”

The pages also are replete, says Moon, with “puns and silly jokes – the things that most adults edit out of their writing and out of their very being.”

Had trouble again with twine. Mad enough to wish I was a bad tornado. Swore at God.

(Henry Darger, Journals, April 16, 1968).

As I usually run away after readings I didn’t stop to hear anyone’s opinion of my barking except for my brother who loved it and my son who was kind of horrified. I barked at Dartmouth just last week though and no one seemed to mind.

“Nobody is going to buy a book on the cover of which is a female body with my face for tits,” Leonard wrote in September 1964 in a long, heated letter to McClelland.

Theorist Michael Moon further articulates this flowing Cornellian eros as an “oralia” characterizing his profuse artistic practices and lifestyle as an “inexhaustible urge to eat sweets and to produce language through speaking and writing.”