I will have to tell the story of Boston and such soon. But tonight, I was in the mood to play with Photoshop.

Voila. New header.

And I’m really loving my newest book purchase - Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading.” I should finish it off tonight since I didn’t have my train commute today to do my reading.

A week or two ago, I heard a short interview with Harold McGee on my local public radio station - WNYC. The audio is available online here. McGee is a food scientist; his book “On Food and Cooking” is sort of the bible of molecular gastronomy and general foodie craziness (it’s been around for 20+ years and was completely revised and updated in 2004). I was fascinated by that short clip (where he spoke with my favorite public radio host, Soterios Johnson) about the chemistry of forcing water into rice and pasta, cooking sous-vide, and the window of time to cook something to perfect doneness.

So I ordered it from Amazon because it seemed right up my alley. It arrived earlier this week and it just makes me feel all powerful flipping through the pages (which, incidentally, feel really nice. Good paper choice, production folks at Scribner/Simon & Schuster!)

I’ve been flipping around and reading the chapters/sections that capture my interest: the milk and dairy section gave me a better understanding of cheeses and the differences between ice cream, custard (ice cream + egg yolk) and gelato (custard with more butterfat). The chapter on eggs opens with the answer to, “What came first? The chicken or the egg?” (appropriate for today, I suppose). His answer: eggs existed long before chickens did—he sides with Samuel Butler who said, “a chicken is just an egg’s way of making another egg.”

Interesting stuff on muscle fibers and how they determine whether meat is light or dark, judging doneness of meat by feel, the chemistry behind the onion’s tear-producing skills (a sulfur compound known as the “lacrimator”—lacrimose means tearful) which is essentially a molecular bomb that hits the nerve endings of our eyes and breaks down into hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid. Yes, the same sulfuric acid that we would add to sugar in high school chemistry class to create a pillar of stinky black carbon in a beaker. It’s also the same stuff that will burst into flames if a 100% pure piece of it comes in contact with air - it reacts violently with water, so the moisture in the air does that. A 98% pure piece of it will burn through paper just by touching it. Fun stuff. And that’s what makes us cry when we’re cutting onions.

I skipped past the fruit chapter for now and am about to start Chapter 8 –”Flavorings from Plants: Herbs and Spices, Tea and Coffee.” Mmm.

Easter breakfast with the family is finished (I made a kick-ass Asparagus and Leek Frittata - except we didn’t have leeks or shiitake mushrooms, so I used scallions, onion and red peppers instead. It worked out OK.) Yay, food!

For the next month, Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods, will be available in its entirety to read online, for free.

This free book would’ve beaten the Oprah/Suze Orman free book to the punch (in terms of availability) had it not been for the fact that readers actually voted to select which of Neil Gaiman’s books Harper should make available online. Democracy in action.

American Gods is a good one. I voted for Neverwhere, but this would’ve been my second choice if that was an option.

Check it out. It’s good stuff. And here’s the post announcing it on his blog with a few words from Mr. Gaiman about the whole idea.

Dear sweet object of lust and desire. How friggin’ AWESOME would this be???

Staircase and bookcase IN ONE!

I want to cry because there is no chance I will ever have anything this cool in my little world

Update: I cheered myself up with this font quiz from mental_floss:

I aimed to spend the better part of this weekend reading. I am in the middle of far too many books right now… and bought three more on Thursday. My bookstore spoils:

I’m almost done with The Book of Lost Things - this was the one my friend Sara recommended to me, so I started reading it in the bookstore while being a patron of their cafe and drinking green tea.

Embarrassingly enough, I’ve never read Foucault’s Pendulum - my Eco reading has covered The Name of the Rose, The Island of the Day Before and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, but not that seminal work.

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil just sounds really interesting. It “summarizes more than 30 years of research on factors that can create a “perfect storm” which leads good people to engage in evil actions.” Fun!

And I’m also in various stages of completion in these four titles. I’m farthest along in The Children’s Hospital because it is (not surprisingly) the quickest reading of the four.

Double-gunning Saramago might not have been the brightest idea since he’s not speedy reading, but he’s good - so it’s OK. And The Brothers Karamazov is just another one on my “classics I should’ve read list” that I finally got around to. Russian literature wasn’t a large part of my high school or college reading. My first exposure to Russian literature was Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in high school. I didn’t like that much at all back then. I should re-read it. My next experience was with Lolita which, while written by a Russian author, was written in English. Does that count as Russian lit?

And then I moved into the world of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy with Notes from the Underground and Anna Karenina, respectively. But that was years ago… so it seemed time.

And since I’ve liked “Bros K” thus far, I picked up Crime and Punishment while I was at it - the version by the same translators. I haven’t cracked that open yet. Same thing with Walden; I read excerpts in high school and college. In high school, it was during our “transcendentalism” unit, and in college, it was while I was reading “Leaves of Grass” in a modern poetry course. The professor wanted us to get a sense of prose transcendentalism as we read the verse, so we had bits of Thoreau and Emerson on our syllabus… but I like to have the bigger picture in place.

So you might say I have a bit of a book problem. But I guess as far as addictions and compulsions go, it could be far, far worse.

LibraryThing has this funky “view all your covers” feature.

So I fired that up and then did a little screengrab of the complete page. The books that don’t have covers (out of print or foreign books) don’t get included, but still - you can see the covers of something close to 900 books in one image. It’s pretty sweet.

Check out an image of the covers.

(You’ll have to click to enlarge to full screen size, btw.)

I want this. I also want to buy it for two people I know. I like giving people books.

Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch

In this “unexpected delight,” filmmaker David Lynch describes his personal methods of capturing and working with ideas, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation.

Now in a beautiful paperback edition, David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish provides a rare window into the internationally acclaimed filmmaker’s methods as an artist, his personal working style, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation.

Catching the Big Fish comes as a revelation to the legion of fans who have longed to better understand Lynch’s personal vision. And it is equally compelling to those who wonder how they can nurture their own creativity.

I also like the cover. That font is gorgeous.

You’re Catch-22!

by Joseph Heller

Incredibly witty and funny, you have a taste for irony in all that you see. It seems that life has put you in perpetually untenable situations, and your sense of humor is all that gets you through them. These experiences have also made you an ardent pacifist, though you present your message with tongue sewn into cheek. You could coin a phrase that replaces the word “paradox” for millions of people.

Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Since my personal library holdings recently crossed the 1,000 book threshold, I decided that it might be time to slow down the acquisition of new books and re-read some of the good ones that I haven’t touched in a while.*

I decided to start this re-reading with Paul Auster’s Moon Palace. I vividly remembered the beginning and had (as it turns out) a good grasp on the general story, though I’d forgotten some of the finer details. On the basis of this very positive recollection (and my enjoyment of Paul Auster’s work as a whole) I got it for a friend for Christmas since I thought he’d really enjoy it, too.

And having re-read it, two good things have happened. One, I enjoyed it tremendously this time around as well and, two, I’ll have it fresh in my mind if there is book discussion to be had. I even have Post-it® note flags marking certain sections of the book, two of which I will share here, with some set-up but not too much exposition.

The main character has found employment with a cranky, blind, paraplegic man; he works as his companion, reading to him, pushing his wheelchair around the Upper West Side of Manhattan, etc. One of his tasks is to describe their surroundings as accurately as possible while they walk. At this point in the story, he’s realized how difficult this task is:

Instead of doing it merely to discharge an obligation, I began to consider it as a spiritual exercise, a process of training myself to look at the world as if I were discovering it for the first time. What do you see? And if you see, how do you put it into words? The world enters us through our eyes, but we cannot make sense of it until it descends into our mouths. I began to appreciate how great that distance was, to understand how far a thing must travel in order to get from the one place to the other. In actual terms, it was no more than two or three inches, but considering how many accidents and losses could occur along the way, it might just as well have been a journey from the earth to the moon.

Then there’s a sort of story within a story - a narrative that the protagonist hears from another character. He’s just mentioned that the circumstances of their respective stories are similar, and that he understands the other man better than he perhaps thought he could/would:

… my situation had been far less desperate than his. When a man feels he has come to the end of his rope, it is perfectly natural that he should want to scream. The air bunches in his lungs, and he cannot breathe unless he pushes it out of him, unless he howls it forth with all his strength. Otherwise, he will choke on his own breath, the very sky will smother him.

It’s always gratifying to me to come across words or thoughts in a book that I can truly understand. Both of these bits fit the bill. I have struggled with the inadequacy of words for describing certain things and thought about how our individual perceptions of objects or feelings can never be accurately communicated to another person; we’re only ever talking in approximations since your vision of “robin’s egg blue” is going to be different from what I see in my mind’s eye. Even if we’re both looking at the same exact color swatch, there’s no way to tell that we’re perceiving that color the same way. The same goes for getting the description back out to someone.

It’s frustrating but wonderful at the same time; it’s a bit of semiotics. We’d like to think we understand one another or the people with whom we “click” or consider to be close to us, but on the most fundamental level, we never truly can because words are only signs—broad representations of ideas and thoughts. We can only ever approximate. I think the effort, though, is what forges relationships - how much time and energy we are willing to put into the attempt to bridge that gap.

And the screaming thing? I get it. For me, if often comes down to the choice between a scream or hysterical crying. I usually opt for the latter (suburbia is not hot on primal scream therapy), but the sensation is the same. Yes, the air bunches in my lungs and I feel like I’ll choke on my own breath if I don’t get it the hell out of me.

So. A good book. I might officially be on a Paul Auster kick after this because I can re-read “Book of Illusions”, “Mr. Vertigo” or “The New York Trilogy.” Yippee!

_________________________________

* Mind you, that didn’t stop me from ordering a used copy of “Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon”. The book’s premise is that “television heroine Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, has been an unlikely source of language change. In his book [the author] tells how this unconventional teen challenged linguistic taboos and introduced new words and phrases in nearly every show.” Furthemore, on PBS’s “Do You Speak American?” website, they featured the following excerpt:

Buffy has introduced new slang terms and phrases in nearly every episode, many of them formed in the usual ways, some of them at the crest of new formative tendencies… Besides contributing items to the slang lexicon, slayer slang intensifies current formative practices in slang: it glories in them, certainly, but it also constitutes, by exaggerating them, a critique of those practices. For instance, the writers acknowledge that slang increasingly trades on references to popular culture by shifting proper names into other parts of speech, both verbs and adjectives. Thus Xander asks in Puppet Show (5 May 1997), “Does anyone feel like we’ve been Keyser Sozed?” after the character in The Usual Suspects when he means ‘tricked, manipulated’. Afraid that Halloween will get out of hand, Xander remarks in Halloween (27 October 1997), “Halloween quiet? I figured it would have been a big ole vamp Scareapolooza,” from the alternative rock festival Lollapalooza; similarly he argues in The Wish (8 December 1998), “Look, you wanna do Guiltapalooza, fine, but I’m done with that.”

I’m up early. Much earlier than I like to be on a weekend. But I have a 10:15 appointment with the eye doctor to see how my eyes are doing with the new contact lenses; they have to have been in my eyes for a minimum of three hours. However, had I not been up this early, I might not have seen these fun things until later:

• On his blog, author Neil Gaiman has posted a link to a few seconds of footage from the movie adaptation of his book “Coraline.” It’s really only a few seconds, and the movie is a) a year away and b) going to be in 3D so we don’t get the “full effect,” but I’m excited. I love that book. Creepy creepy kids’ book.

• In the metro NYC area (and in Manhattan proper, esp.) it’s a fact that things are more expensive*. When people visit from “out of town” they marvel at the cost of boxed cereal and Starbucks’ coffee. But if you’re tenacious, you can get yourself the most expensive coffee at Starbucks : A 13 shot venti soy hazelnut vanilla cinnamon white mocha with extra white mocha and caramel.

It would have cost the (brilliant? ridiculous?) guy who took on this challenge $13.76 were it not for the fact he had a “Free drink” coupon for Starbucks which he unveiled after ordering the drink. And yay for the barista who helped him figure out how to make the most expensive drink possible. I don’t drink coffee, but this sounds like fun and I wish my coffee-drinking friends and I had thought of it.

• And I took this “How Much of a Sci-Fi Geek Are You?” quiz (via Neatorama). I suppose I should be embarrassed to post the results (it said something like, “You’re an extreme geek. You’re probably wearing your own homemade Tron helmet right now!” While I’ve never actually watched “Tron,” I am familiar with the visuals), but I posted about Jane Austen not too long ago. My interests are simply well-rounded. And I do not attend conventions, so I’m still in the “socially functional” category.

	I received 85 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Guess the Sci-Fi Movie Sounds here

*Though in NJ, the fact that we have the lowest gasoline tax in the nation keeps gas prices low and people marvel at that, too. The state of NJ hasn’t increased its gas tax in 19 years. I guess it’s some small compensation for the fact that NY and NJ have the highest property taxes in the United States - easily 2 or 2.5 times as much as other areas within throwing/inconvenient driving distance, like Connecticut and Pennsylvania. (Oh, and that’s part of your answer right there.)

Edit: Here’s the Coraline video: