My pal Amy found this book on a remainder table at Borders & bought me a copy. The Complete Vietnamese Cookbook appears to be out of print, but I’d recommend it. Even though my tastes run to northern cuisine & this cookbook focuses on the south, I’ve already found its extensive & well-illustrated discussion of basic ingredients useful. I also like that it includes several Cambodian recipes — in the countryside of the Mekong Delta the culture of Vietnam blends into that of Cambodia as you go east & this cookbook recognizes that. In fact, I tried a Cambodian dish last night. Amy came over with her friend & colleague Peter, a sculptor like Amy, & I made a Vietnamese diner: 1) Summer rolls (somehow seemed appropriate in the middle of January) with carrot, shallot, basil, coriander, & lettuce wrapped in an uncooked wrapper; 2) Fried Cambodian sweet potato balls rolled in sesame seeds; & 3) My old standby Thit ga koh gung, chicken with ginger. I also put a couple of dipping sauces on the table — nuoc cham, the standard lime & fish sauce concoction, & a spicy peanut sauce I hadn’t made before. When Amy came in she saw the cookbook on the table, open to the sweet potato balls, and said, “I’m glad you like the book! — did you see these sweet potato balls?” And I was able to answer, “Yeah, I’m making them right now.” First we ate the summer rolls, which were great in both sauces, then the sweet potato balls, which loved the hot peanut sauce & have an almost custard-like texture, then my Saigon chicken with some rice to which we added the peanut sauce & some squirts of Sriracha. We had Amy’s cherry pie for desert! Peter brought his dog Jackson & Amy brought her dog Penny so we had six dogs in the house for the evening. Everyone was quite well-behaved. Even the humans. It’s wonderful to have a good kitchen after all these years — it was the last thing we remodeled in this our house — because I can cook for friends. And what wonderful friends.
Monthly Archives: January 2008
Collage No. 2
This is a collage I’ve made over the last few days consisting of a two-page spread in the book I sewed together last week (with Carole’s help). The first page was not built up very much, but in these I did more layering. I’m still trying to work quickly without much premeditation using whatever material is easily at hand. In a strange way, I think this project may teach me something about the sequencing of the poems in a long manuscript of a long sequence I’ve been working on for a long time. How to you hook things together formally & thematically without making the connections either too obvious or too obscure?
Project Challenge Week 2; or: Three Hours with Eleven Teenagers
Warm-up: Write anything you want but keep writing. Try not to lift your pen or pencil from the page except between words. Let whatever is in your mind out (you won’t have to share any of this unless you want to). Try following the rhythm of the music if you want to, or describe it. . Grammar for poets: Last week at the end of class we focused on concrete nouns. Go back through what you have just written and circle or underline the concrete nouns, then do the same for active verbs. What do you notice about the sentences in which these words appear? I want you to keep looking for concrete nouns as well as active verbs. These are the main elements of good imaginative writing.
|
Nouns |
Verbs |
||
|
Concrete |
Abstract |
Active |
Abstract |
| table | love | touch | is |
| kiss | courage | kiss | was |
| kneecap | happiness | choose | are |
| sky | beauty | push | be |
| moon | sadness | reach | being |
| bone | niceness | fly | am |
| coffee | bravery | drive | were |
Notice for the moment that abstract nouns easily get turned into adjectives: lovely, courageous, happy, beautiful, sad, nice, brave; and also into adverbs: happily, beautifully, sadly, nicely, bravely. All these words are useful to the creative writer, of course, but some should function as the centers of our sentences, some as occasional add-on parts, as if for decoration. Some writers like more decoration, some less.
2. Quick exercise: Create a collection of at least ten sentences using concrete and active language. The first five will be in the form of similes, the second five in the form of metaphors. A simile is a sentence that says one thing is like another; a metaphor is a sentence that says one thing is another (very different) thing. Simile: The moon is like a woman’s face. Metaphor: The moon is a woman’s face. Note that in both cases the comparison is between unlike things, so that to say, for example, The moon is a satellite is not a metaphor, but a literal description. There is plenty of room for literal description in poetry and fiction, but non-literal comparisons play a larger role than they do in everyday uses of language. Examples: Fill the blanks in the sentences with concrete nouns or noun phrases. (Notice that is a place where we use abstract verbs.)
Similes: The __________ is like a _____________ .
_____________s are like ____________s.
Metaphors: The __________ is a _______________ .
_____________s are ______________ .
If you have extra time: Can you make similes and metaphors with verbs as well as nouns?
3. Lies: Write a poem of at least ten lines in which every statement is a lie. I will ask for volunteers to read these poems aloud when we are finished.
4. Cool-down: If we have time, we’ll spend the final part of the class writing to music again. You can write anything in any form.
5. Continuations: If you feel like working on the material from today’s class on your own, here are a couple of things you might try:
- Collect nouns and noun phrases in your notebook, the weirder the better. Listen to people talk, note things you find in books or hear on the radio or TV.
- Same thing for verbs. Try to be startled by the language around you. Take notes.
- Write your own poems however you want, but try to use the things we’ve been doing in class.
Cold
About 10° below last night. The river is frozen over except for the channel along the far bank where it runs the fastest. Low pearl-colored sky. Only a few chickadees at the bird feeder. Lucky for me, I don’t have to go farther than the post office today & not until afternoon. Friday is my rest & recovery day this semester & I typically don’t do much in the morning, then putter around the house & finally sit down & bring my teaching notes & grade book current. For the next month, as I mentioned before, I’m teaching a writing workshop to high school students on Saturday mornings. The first session, in which we sewed journals, went extremely well, but then Carole did all the work. Tomorrow I’m going to have to fill the whole three hours myself. My plan is to structure all the remaining sessions by beginning & ending with free writing while listening to music, with the time between filled with exercises and workshop / discussion. (Just picked the music for tomorrow: Count Basie, Moondog, Bach, John Coltrane — no words, very rhythmic.) Tomorrow, too, I’ll pick up on the first quick exercise I did on concrete language, particularly nouns, with a discussion of active verbs. Without talking about grammar as such, I want to have students work with moving the parts of a sentence around. I’m going to get them to do this by making metaphors & similes out of concrete nouns & then changing out the terms. Finally, I’m going to take a page right out of Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams & ask students to write a ten line poem in which every line is a lie. Next week, more freewriting to music, but then I’m going to teach them how write blues & ballad stanzas. Hope I can find some blues that are not too profane for fifteen-year-olds (though I realize that, by themselves, many of them are more profane than me — & I’m pretty profane).
Later: Four fat starlings on the fence around the dog run. A flock of goldfinches at the feeder.
So How Long Are We Expected to Keep Voting for These Clowns?
Via Talking Points Memo:
The handwriting has been on the wall for some time, but it now seems certain that Senate Democrats will pass a new FISA bill that contains retroactive immunity for telecoms, shielding them from lawsuits over their cooperation with the Bush Administration in its far-reaching warrantless wiretapping program.
Meanwhile, House Democrats have decided to postpone any vote on holding Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers in contempt for their refusal to testify to Congress about the White House role in the U.S. attorney purge.
And more from Digby quoting Glenn Greenwald:
So here’s Greenwald with the latest on the FISA kabuki, and this time it’s so clunky and obvious it’s more like a bunch of drunk college kids singing karaoke on platform shoes:
Harry Reid — who has (a) done more than any other individual to ensure that Bush’s demands for telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping powers will be met in full and (b) allowed the Republicans all year to block virtually every bill without having to bother to actually filibuster — went to the Senate floor yesterday and, with the scripted assistance of Mitch McConnell and Pat Leahy, warned Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold and others that they would be selfishly wreaking havoc on the schedules of their fellow Senators (making them work over the weekend, ruining their planned “retreat,” and even preventing them from going to Davos!) if they bothered everyone with their annoying, pointless little filibuster.
To do so, Reid announced that, unlike for the multiple filibusters from Republican colleagues, he would actually force Dodd and company to engage in a real filibuster. This is what Reid said:
[I]f people think they are going to talk this to death, we are going to be in here all night. This is not something we are going to have a silent filibuster on. If someone wants to filibuster this bill, they are going to do it in the openness of the Senate.
That is what Democrats have been urging Reid to do to the filibustering Republicans all year — in order to dramatize their obstructionism — but he has refused to make them actually filibuster anything, generously agreeing instead that every bill requires 60 votes. Instead, he reserves such punishment only for the members of his own caucus trying to take a stand for the rule of law and the Constitution, those who are trying finally to bring some accountability to this administration.
Read all of Glenn’s post. He features the patronizing and demeaning little script that Reid, his counterpart the unctuous drip Mitch McConnell and Pat Leahy (!) came up with to announce their bipartisan agreement to force Democrat Chris Dodd to do what Republicans only have to pretend to do.
The next president of the United States is very likely to be one of two sitting senators who are, at the moment, the two most powerful people in the Democratic Party. Either one of them could bring their star power and future institutional clout to bear on this debate if they wanted to. Will they? I don’t know. Maybe all you supporters out there should stop arguing amongst yourselves about trivia for a couple of minutes and ask them. You can go here to send a message. (And if you happen to be at a town hall meeting or a speech somewhere, how about holding up a sign or asking your guy or gal about this?) [Emphasis & links in original posts. --jd]
I don’t usually quote big chunks of political text like this — I leave it to the political bloggers — but I have been struck forcefully of late by the infantile — I was going to say junior high, but that’s giving them too much credit — behavior & remarks of Obama & Clinton supporters online & to a lesser extent in the MSM. The Democratic primaries have devolved into a popularity contest while the Radical Right in the person of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell, and their Democratic Party enablers sell out the basic principles of accountability & democracy. The triumph of the politics of distractions & irrelevance is virtually complete.