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.”
Kids brag that they work at Starbucks, not at Wal-Mart. Maybe it is the literary name taken from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (could not Wal-Mart be renamed Gandalf’s, Sherlock’s, or Lancelot’s?)?
I went, “I know what you’re going to say: I’m a biped mammal, I’m not a serpent with tiny claws or legs. I don’t have a tail, I can’t breathe fire or fly, and the rest of the things that aren’t dragonlike about me. But I do think in my imagination I’ve got something which might at least push the WETA animation into a direction.”
When we die, we do so not in the random billiard-ball-matrix but in the inescapable-life-matrix.
Sixty percent of all lice are now “super lice,” meaning they are resistant to the chemicals that are traditionally used to treat them. That percentage is rapidly growing.
Moon rabbits seem to be used as capable soldiers in the Moon’s war effort, and can communicate telepathically between each other across extremely long distances (like from the Moon to the Earth).
The image on the front cover is of a cowed, misshapen human, who looks to be under attack from doves or miniature angels.
As Rosengarten explains it, “The [Second] World War had been a very important factor on our sensibility; people you knew were going off and getting killed, and there was a possibility that we would lose the war and the Nazis would take over America or Canada. But the other thing was that, while this was going on, the word was that if we did win the war, because of the great sacrifice everybody had made, the would was going to become this wonderful utopian place, with all this collective energy that had been dissipated in the war directed toward its creation. I think for us it was somewhat disillusioning that, at the end of the war, the first thing they did was kind of repudiate the collective aspect of the society and maintain this idea that it was really good for business to produce things instead, and sell people products as a substitute for this collective spirit. And the enormous number of women who worked and did things during the war that were considered unfit for women were packed up after the war and sent back to the kitchen. Leonard and I, these were things we were shockingly aware of.” That sense of a lost Eden, of something beautiful that did not work out or could not last, would be detectable in a good deal of Leonard’s work.
(Sylvie Simmons, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen)
Tinkie was still alive at this time; he would expire during his sixteenth year after wandering off alone in a snowstorm.
But we got to the Joanna Newsom concert, between sneezes. That was great! My brother-in-law asked what she’s like, because he hadn’t heard of her. I said she’s a cross between Bob Dylan and Glinda, the Good Witch of the North.