We are always after some new thing. Which is fine in many ways, but in matters of food often disastrous. We are so busy running after the latest dish, that the good things we have known for centuries are forgotten as quickly as the boring things. -Jane Grigson (English Food) The wise Jane Grigson wrote…
In Saunders' opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage.…
But there is great dignity in allowing oneself to keep clear about what is good, and it is what I think of when I hear the term "good taste." Whether things were ever simpler than they are now, or better if they were, we can't know. We do know that people have always found ways…
I thought famous people were proud, unapproachable, that they despised the crowd, and by their fame and the glory of their name, as it were, revenged themselves on the vulgar herd for putting rank and wealth above everything. But here they cry and fish, play cards, laugh and get cross like everyone else!-Anton Chekhov (The…
What is sometimes called a tongue of flameor an arm extended burning is only the longred and orange branch of a green maplein early September reaching into the greenest fieldout of the green woods at the edge of which the birch trees appear a little tattered tired of sustaining delicacyall through the…
The counselors conferred in low voices out of the king's hearing, speaking of the state of the king's mind and vanity, the innate interest of the task, whetherthe taskmaster would be able to recognize a solution, and finally whether their combined lifetimes would suffice to write the required book. At last they turned to the…
There is a silence where hath been no sound. -Thomas Hood ("Silence") I know I've written about pizza before, but, frankly, when all is said and done, it's something worth revisiting again and again. Pizza is just one of those irresistible comfort foods: you put whatever you're in the mood for on top of a…
"But when we sit together close, we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory."-Virginia Woolf (The Waves)My life is generally all about words these days--finalizing the conference paper, grading assignments and responding to this batch of revised papers. But even though I'm still racing to get…
Sweetest of sweets, I thank you: when displeasureDid through my body wound my mind,You took me thence, and in your house of pleasureA dainty lodging me assigned.-George Herbert ("Church Music")Time is a little of the essence here since I'm a) still in the process of shortening my paper to conference length, b) quite tired since…
Dining with Dostoevsky 