He fully understood all this, but, like a man unable to resist arguing with a hallucination, even though he knows perfectly well that the entire masquerade is staged in his own brain, Cincinnatus tried in vain to out-wrangle his fear, despite his understanding that he ought actually to rejoice at the awakening whose proximity was presaged by barely noticeable phenomena, by the peculiar effects on everyday implements, by a certain general instability, by a certain flaw in all visible matter - but the sun was still realistic, the world still held together, objects still observed an outward propriety.
-Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

E, J & J: what is this doing in My Documents? You haven't received copies because the printer's down, and the Word on the other computer is unregistered and acting petulant lately.

20, May, 2002

Amuse-bouche: Black olives, self-stuffed with pinenuts & basil

Camembert, undergone heat treatment, will last until next year, it doesn’t even look as if it will last another hour. Camembert with crispbread, fig and ginger, not all that crisp, these don’t last either?

It is evanescent; will exit your colon within a day. But it will persist in your memory.

You can’t write standing up, on a flat keyboard. It’s just too hard, really. I’m not kidding. It is. All these things you should know.

Something just came to mind... keep it coming out of the bronze spouts. It’s even harder to write now, now that I can’t see the keyboard, and Buddha is here to look at what I’m writing, looking over my shoulder, now he’s chuckling, and breathing on my neck, and failing to start, and the candle flame on my left and he’s tapping my shoulder, and the lamp too bright on my right. Stroked by Buddha’s hand! Hope it gives me good luck in mahjongg.

Spaghetti aglio olio with shallots, olives and pine-nuts.

I have vanquished blandness. It is a simple matter. Salt the pasta-cooking water with a solemn deportment, as if you were scattering the ashes of a venerable relation into the Aegean Sea. Do not be stingy. Let yourself go. All those myths of hypertension and heart disease are merely scare-tactics, propagated by ascetic nutritionists in order to deflect you from the full enjoyment of your food.

The same with the oil. Olive oil is a wondrous essence, divinity liquefied. Decant a generous amount into the water to prevent the troublesome coherence of floury surfaces, which will be the ruin of your dish. Glug, glug, glug. The best olive oils have a virile and aggressive sunned scent. They should be robust enough to retain their prominence when mingled with other flavours, all of which are competing for the diner's limited palatention.

As for the shallots, see that they do not scorch. Startle them with a fierce flame, and they will soon shrivel to death. Pine-nuts tan easily, especially when you are not looking. On no account should you allow a single immoderately-browned kernel to remain in the mix. Olives are resilient materials and will survive most manhandlings.

What exactly is "al dente"? Standards differ considerably; some desire the contumacy of old sea-coconut, others the pliancy of boiled worms. It is up to you. Drain noodles and combine with oiled ingredients. Then, more oil and more salt. You are allowed this recklessness because you have denied yourself the more extravagant garnishes. Toss through, insouciantly, and serve.

Deserving Passengers. By Amanda Perkins. Harper-Collins; 457 pages; $19.95.

Ms Perkins' second effort, after her religio-political parable debut Maximum Height Clearance, is a spellbindingly inspirational work which should be made mandatory reading in schools. In the honoured tradition of Paulo Coelho, she soothes the soul with tranquil tales of self-discovery, spiritual nourishment and comfort. Written in a no-nonsense, straightforward style overflowing with a touching sincerity, Passengers is aflower with precious nuggets of homely wisdom, golden tenets for our cynical age. This is the sort of honest anodyne we so desperately need to counteract the degenerate and abstruse ramblings of "high art"; something readily assimilated, meaningful and life-enhancing.

Amanda Perkins is a writer of that most contemptible variety: a parochial, pseudo-spiritual guru, a market-square mountebank, who peddles shabby self-help charms and tarnished talismans promising instant faith and mystic direction. The usual vehicle is the picaresque parable, populated by:
1. Sagacious personages who send the protagonist on perilous errands, during which said hero embarks on a parallel voyage of inner discovery;
2. "Chance" encounters with cripples and mendicants spouting cryptic advice;
3. An element of adversity (fearsome monsters, bandits swathed in flowing cloths, large-breasted temptresses, spectre of protagonist's past);
4. The insinuating, allusive presence of God (Julian Barnes in Flaubert's Parrot: "the bearded head gardener who is always tending the apple tree; the wise old sea-captain who never rushes to judgment; the character you're not quite introduced to, but who is giving you a creepy feeling by Chapter Four").
I wish Ms Perkins all future success. Doubtless she will continue to attract legions of adoring fans and credulous fools who will be profoundly touched by her visionary work.

No, I don't like this one at all. There is no gratuitous sex or violence, none whatsoever. It's just far too dull. Perhaps a few swashbuckling scenes of monster-slaying or some riveting political intrigue might save it. All the characters seem too implausibly well-behaved. We need something with broader market appeal, but still artistically interesting. Diaries of rape victims, for instance, or a lesbian romance.

Disenchanted Repartee

A: May I sit on your head?
B: No, I do not like grapefruit.
A: I enjoy hunting moose in Nova Scotia.
B: Only if the villagers are wearing breeches.
A: But isn't it closed on Thursdays?
B: Am I not larger than a poodle?
A: Depending on my liver condition.
B: I'm afraid we have run out of sealing-wax.
A: Someone has broken into my nettle-plantation!
B: My nephew has returned from exile in Odessa!
A: It snowed yesterday.
B: You are an imposter!
A: Do you have this in magenta?
B: Please use the coasters.

A large vitreous vessel in which artichokes fester, thereby acquiring all sorts of gripping flavours: ditchwater, sweaty socks, acrylic. A treacherous tongue-slaying pearl-onion, loaded with vinegar and possibly vitriol. An archaeological treasure: dairy-granite, crumbling corpse of milk. A Cubist Caprese. Straggly salame thickly woven with fat (hog with halitosis, snouting down my throat). Placid Prosciutto, with a sweeter and more diffident odour, deftly carved, to be paired with: parched pulp of eggplant, a mouthful of loamy loveliness.

One of those "delicious do-nothing" afternoons. I am poring over past correspondence (admiring chance cadences, the spirited loops and writhing strokes of unretouched handwriting), the chaotic scrawl of writing drafts (furiously and densely annotated; a stray beautiful thought being framed and shaped, fugitive impressions rescued and preserved). But also performance programmes, tickets, receipts...compulsively hoarding the accumulated detritus of my life, objets retrouvés, reclaimed beached treasures, shell necklaces, bottled ships, "the refuse of my profession" (Updike).

I need a fresh idiom, wafting forth exoticism and otherness. But not the bad-translation sort. Who should I attempt to imitate next?

On Charm in Music

“Life is ridiculous; and that cannot be borne.” That, I vaguely recall, came either from Ibsen or one of his characters. Our time, frilled with vain frippery, plastic pop iconography, stupid notions of facile glamour, would have been simply insufferable from the outset, but for the unfortunate (and some would say ineluctable) fact that the number of persons paying subscription to the package is rather inordinate (but perhaps unsurprisingly so); and the dwindling demographic of sound-minded people, seeing no terribly excitable motivation to incite themselves into becoming valiant proselytisers, have reduced all their potential opposition to lackadaisical, faintly pejorative phrases: “vulgar”, “crass”, “maudlin”, “schmaltzy”. Absurdity has become a monstrous fashion, an insidousness artfully wrapped in the latest brand of glitter and passed off as irony, burlesque and quirkdom. The revulsion we ought to feel and do not has become an alien reaction. Decorum, propriety, rectitude – archaisms which most would have only a fading recollection of from some Jane Austen drawing-room drama, popularly regarded as the queer and pitiable result of Victorian repression. We have lost our capacity to be scandalised; consequently, it is an accordingly difficult effort for us to become animated by the impulsions of passion, or stirred by the tenacity of conviction. Disaffection is the new heroic mode.

Half-delirious, I finally locate a copy of Zhang Daqian's dual-language treatise on Chinese brush painting at Kinokuniya. The English half has that elliptical, overwrought and awkward charm which blooms only rarely, in what would strictly be considered inept translations. The rendering into an alien tongue of an allusive texture, a linguistic quiddity, an idiom weighted with folklore, a metaphor attuned to a native music, is almost never accomplished with both grace and fidelity, especially with two languages as temperamentally and semantically opposed as English and Chinese...but I revel secretly in the translator's gaffes. Of fish ZDQ writes (or is rendered as having written):

The secret of painting fish lies in the painter's ability to express the fishy gladness and freedom of motion in water. If the fish should appear to be out of water, so to speak, that would be tantamount to divorcing it from its natural instinct. The test of the painter's finesse is in the art of showing aquatic presence in the feeling and attitude of the fish, without having to delineate water.

Elsewhere the translator tries for grandiloquence and unwittingly ends up with burlesque:

Blessed with majestic elegance and splendour, the peony is hailed as the queen of all flowers, the reigning beauty of celestial fragrance. Hence, in the elaborate style of painting, it may be regarded as the representative of the floral kingdom.

What is that magical modulation? A clumsy tumble; a cadence which often shrieks but sometimes sings, resounding above the humdrum vernacular we have become dulled to.

Shunning the well-trodden standard-issue freebies which grace the tables of Chinese restaurants (braised groundnuts, Sichuan kiam chye, artless attempts at achar), Silk Road proffers a dish of alien apostasy and faerie-delicacie; a finely-brined and nicely-diced mirepoix of tantalisingly toothy vegetables, steeped in a secret, seductive potion; cavorting coyly with the tastebuds, a temptress feisty and forthright, voluptuous and vitalising.

XLB plump and meaty, strong on the ginger, beautifully clammy-skinned, but on the whole still lacking the incendiary succulence of CJLMXLB's rendition (although, on occasion, one wishes that the latter were a little less floppy, poodle-eared, Persistence-Of-Memory Daliquescent). But the divinest dumpling was definitely the "Snowflake" Jiaozi, briefly browned, lewdly lubricated, stuffed with pork, jiu3 cai4 and an inspired whiff of aniseed/liquorice/Pernod. And on top of them rested an ethereal popiah-skin-"snowflake", tenuous and tremulous: a virginal veil of pre-nuptial modesty, or naughty edible lingerie to encourage gastronomic foreplay? Never were the "pleasures of the table" so archly ceremonious...

I've run dry (well, not really. But I can't possibly publish every last piece of doggerel I have, can I? Certainly not for free, anyway). I am sick of this blog. I have been reduced to going ice-skating in order to amuse myself.

It is downright dispiriting to have to write in the wake of giant predecessors. Borges: "The certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all." If every aspiring writer were told that he must compete directly with the literary personages of the past, we should not have half so many complacent mediocrities clamouring for our attention and approval with trivial topicalities.

Was reading the Strong Opinions of Nabokov at Borders. That was a flagrant paraphrase.

Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote it and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando