Posting this link seems a little futile, since readers of this blog are few and far between. But if you’re reading this, please take the time to follow this link
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/09/margaret-atwood-birds-review
and read the article by Margaret Atwood.
It’s very important.
P.S. so important, I’m actually posting this while I’m at work…
Work In Progress
Who knows when this will be done. I haven’t worked on it in awhile, and then this weekend I can’t stop. Starting to delete a lot of elements to work out a lot of compositional problems.
Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris
Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris is filled with food. I’ve never read (gasp!) Chocolat (yet!), but I imagine that it was also filled with food, although of the sweeter kind. Five Quarters starts out sweet, then almost half way, gets dark and then darker and then a little mysterious. It’s about pleasure and repression. About family feuds past and present, innocence and experience, guilt, lies, and bold, fiesty hearts.
The writing is the best part. It’s simple but sumptuous and very real. And goes deliciously well with a stack of home made chocolate chip walnut cookies.
Chocolate Chip Walnut Cookies (not to be eaten with lemons)
French Taste by Laura Calder
Steph got this for me for Christmas, and I am just now finally able to sit down with a cup of tea, toast (with lots of butter) and a soft boiled egg, ready to run my hands through its soft, elegant pages and take in the smell of the press (a favourite past-time).
At this time of the year, a lot of us are contemplating what we’ll do different this time around; what we can improve, attempt to define what we want, and configure the necessary steps to get there.
Over the last 5 or 6 months or so, once a week I do two hours of Yoga. Among the many things I have learned in the practice, one of them is “paying attention”. Stop. Breath. Listen to the quiet. Feel the heart thrumping. And in this, I have found the importance, or the value in, taking pleasure.
It may be cliché to go on about pleasure, but I do feel it is the secret to living well. (And I say this fully aware that pursuing it is more easily said than done.) At its most basic, the natural human pursuit of pleasure is what makes the body prefer a ripe fruit over a rotten one (a very practical feat of genetic engineering, that). At a higher level of evolution, it’s what makes a person bother to stop, sit down at a table, and enjoy a sandwich off a plate with some dignity, rather than rip at one like a bloodhound while simultaneously driving a car through a deluge and phoning the cleaners about the overcoat dropped off last Wednesday. (We all have our desparate moments, fair enough, but you’d have to be a masochist to make a habit of them.)
French Taste: Elegant Everyday Eating Laura Calder
How To Eat, French Taste by Laura Calder
So my resolution for this year: take pleasure in everything. But wait. I don’t mean to say that I will quit my job, eat roast every night while polishing off a bottle of wine, and then partake in lusty entertainment. A Taurus like me, must take heed to avoid the fall into pure hedonism – it is no laughing matter.
Rather, when I have my breakfast, I will not gobble and think about my day ahead of me and all the bloody things I have to do, and give myself a stomach ache to boot. I will sit down, and savor the thick, creamy, silky ball of yolk. I will warm my hands on my favorite coffee mug and experience what the good, brown liquid does to me; comfort, warmth, relaxation, nostalgia, home.
Par example: today I have a great deal of sanding, plastering and painting to do. I HATE it. I cannot tell you how much I hate doing it. It is ironic that I, who loves to make paintings, am the worst house painter in the world. I have no patience for it. But rather than do the job in frustration which will most probably guarantee a shitty outcome, I’ll get into my grubby painting clothes, put on some tunes and a happy face, and take pleasure in it.
