Lawyer/avocado

Umberto Eco on how to travel with a salmon.

"An aliquot of gefilte fish every waking hour"

In his last days, Oliver Sacks rediscovered the pleasures of a food of his youth. (Via Becca.) Shades of Lear here: "Men must endure. Their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all."

Also: Jerome Groopman on Sacks' autobiographical writings (with some especially interesting thoughts on what happened when one of Sacks's older mentors plagiarized extensively from his work on migraines after discouraging Sacks from publishing such "trash"):

Sacks attributes Friedman’s bad behavior to a role reversal of the “youthful son-in-science” outshining “the father.” I take a less generous view. Serving on grant review committees, I have observed senior researchers who are fair and well-intentioned, but also those who slam proposals from creative investigators, then steal their ideas. Similar fratricide occurs with submitted manuscripts, with reviewers denigrating competing research so it is not published. There is an ugly side to the scientific hierarchy that comes from unchecked lust for success and fame.

I have been thinking very strongly, over this last week or so, about the fact that while it is easy to descend into a swirling array of plans for self-improvement amidst lashings of self-criticism, I could really boil down my remaining life goals to one thing: to make sure that everything I write from now on aspires to whatever I can muster of the spirit and kind of Sacks's best writings!

Sweetness and light

Paris was amazing partly just because walking around and thinking about past and present and looking at things is so amazing. About the only thing I did my last day there was lunch with a friend and Columbia colleague near the beautiful Reid Hall (conversation included exploring the possibility that I might teach there in some future semester).

I do not have the gift of assiduous museum-going, and really my only goal was to hit this one, which quite lived up to my expectations. I am not a good photographer, but this gives a little bit of a taste of the wares on offer:




Afterwards, a cupcake from Bertie's Cupcakery! (The proprietor is ""The Girl" of DC Rainmaker fame, and also made some custom-designed cookies to celebrate my brother and sister-in-law's acquisition of their first boat, a Nimble Nomad named Gunny.)

No discredit to an excellent cupcake, but the best dessert I had in Paris was with A. at Le Stella (after a dinner that started with a green bean and parmesan salad, then scallops and sole): a vacherin glace of utter deliciousness!

I had another very good dessert that involved a sort of almond and pistachio foam with raspberries in it, and the other thing I ate several times and most enjoyed was the "filets de dorade" (sea bream), in one case with anchovy butter and in another with sauteed fennel....

Catch-up

Unfortunately getting myself out of town has triggered a resurgence of the respiratory ailment I thought I was done with! Sinuses are absurdly full of junk. On the bright side, energy levels are normal and I am also feeling a sense of accomplishment at having got myself here with all arrangements complete and luggage intact: it is enough more complex leaving town for a full month compared to a ten-day trip that there is always a moment in the days before I leave when I wonder whether it will happen at all.

The bicycle has been dropped off at Uncle Bill's for reassembly and we had a lovely dinner last night at Michael's Genuine (I had mahi mahi ceviche, steamed mussels and the delightfully named "cookies, candies and confections" for dessert).

Light reading around the edges and in the air: the enjoyable co-authored Apocalypse: Year Zero; Inger Ash Wolfe, The Calling (preposterous after the fashion of the early Patricia Cornwall - no serial killer in history ever behaved like this! - and full of institutional and psychological implausibilities in the matter of the investigating department, but so well-written that I was more than willing to forgive those trespasses); and a mass-market paperback I received as part of a trade on a huge pile of books expurgated from my apartment from the fellow who sells off a table in front of Milano Market on Broadway, Steve Hamilton's Night Work.

Closing tabs

Lauren Klein's data visualization syllabus.

A very good stargazy pie.

Main task for the day is to knock off as many of the errands on my list as I can. Including some major tidying up at home - I finally got it together yesterday to transport eight or nine boxes of teaching stuff from home office to work (the hotel-style luggage rack I borrowed from my building lobby is not really designed for that kind of load, but I got it there safely and arranged with department administrator to let me in through the secret handicapped-access door...). The accumulation of stuff in life is a great problem, and really I wish I could live in a monastic cell!

"They paid in fish"

Gideon Lewis-Kraus on why the Internet chose cats.  (Via B., who got it here.)

Day of culture!

Lunch with my dad at La Lunchonette (I had sauteed scallops and salade nicoise, he had gravlax and rack of lamb) and then an excellent movie, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, at the IFC Center.  Off shortly to see Cock, whose title gave the NYT some difficulty.

(Apropos of which: "We were allowed seven cunts.")

Also: Zero-gravity design?

"Chine that Salmon"

Elizabethan terminology for carving (via Sarang).

Mescal and sympathy

Oliver Sacks has luxuriant eyelashes. (Courtesy of Dave Lull.)

My favorite bit of the exchange:

How often do you prepare your own meals?

Once or twice — in my lifetime. Usually I subsist on cereal, sardines, and tabouli. Sometimes I have food delivered by Tea & Sympathy, or my local sushi place.

Have been very busy this week. Insane amounts to get done in next 10 days or so. That said, have found time for minor extracurriculars: an odd play at the Flea (weirdly chronologically unanchored play about nuns and priests leaving their orders, with disconcerting moment in which a cellphone appears & thoroughly disrupts peculiarly timeless ambience - why weren't they talking about the molestation scandals and the difficulty of recruiting high-quality young nuns if it really is set in the present day as opposed to the 1960s?), a fun show by Titus Andronicus courtesy of my good friend and triathlon training partner Lauren whose sister Amy is in the band and was kind enough to put us on the guest list. Tomorrow I am going to see Nico's thing at St. Ann's Warehouse. New York life: very stimulating, very tiring....

A culinary digression

I was captivated by the name when I saw the tin at the supermarket the other day, and I just had it for lunch - cullen skink! I am not sure I have ever had it before, but my Scottish grandfather used to make Finnan haddie for breakfast, and it was delicious (I think it was just the fish poached in milk, perhaps with a small knob of butter and some pepper, maybe potatoes as well?) - this perhaps not quite as good, but only in the way that something out of the tin is not as good as homemade...

"Blue light on their underside"

At the FT, curator James Maclaine contemplates five favorite species of unusual deep sea fish (site registration required): the stoplight loosejaw, the pelican eel, the black seadevil, the football fish and the Sloane's viperfish...

Stained-glass language

At the LRB, Richard Hamblyn offers a delightful account of Richard Shelton's book on the Atlantic salmon:

‘Smolt’, ‘grilse’: as Richard Shelton observes, salmon are spoken of in a ‘stained-glass language’ of their own, their life stages marked by an ichthyological lexicon unchanged since Chaucer’s time. Born in a ‘redd’, a shallow, gravel-covered depression dug by the female in the days before spawning, newly hatched salmon begin life as ‘alevins’, tiny, buoyant creatures with their yolk sacs still attached. Once the yolk has been absorbed, the fast-growing fish, now known as ‘fry’, are able to feed for themselves, turning instinctively to face the current in order to graze on drifting insect larvae. Some months later, the juvenile salmon, now known as ‘parr’, move downstream to deeper water, where their markings grow darker and their shapes more distinctively salmonoid. By the following spring, most parr have begun the first of the transformations that will enable them to cross the hydrological boundary from the river to the sea: once their kidneys have been primed to reverse their usual function of taking in salts and excreting dilute river water, their skin colour brightens to reflective silver through a microscopic coating of guanine crystals, and their body shapes fill out in anticipation of the long voyage ahead. It is then that the ‘smolts’, as the fish are now known, are ready to head downriver to the sea.

Triffid-like co-tenants

At the Guardian Review, Iain Sinclair on J. G. Ballard.

Out late tonight for a pair of literary things: first of all, a tour by the curators of the quite amazing Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan Library. Then I met up with G. to see the Pearl Theatre Company's adaptation of Hard Times. It is not at all bad, acting and adaptation both quite good (it is far from being my favorite Dickens novel, it is overly schematic), only the whole thing feels undermotivated - especially in comparison with the really imaginative and fresh integration of third-person narration and dialogue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, which is still very much in my mind. Even with a 7:30 curtain time, it wasn't over till 11 - my stomach was terribly rumbling!

We then had a truly lavish meal at Milos. Our initial order was kindly but summarily rejected by the waiter ("Of course, the money is not an issue - but if one person orders the whole fish by the pound, it will cost $70, $80 for a single portion - you must order the prix fixe!"), and so we both signed on for the prix fixe dinner: I had grilled octopus, tomato salad, grilled loup de mer and a very nice dessert of walnut cake with lavender-vanilla ice-cream. Delicious...

Cockles and mussels

Archeologists sift through remains to determine Elizabethan theatergoers' snack preferences:

The preferred snacks for Tudor theatre-goers appear to have been oysters, crabs, cockles, mussels, periwinkles and whelks, as well as walnuts, hazelnuts, raisins, plums, cherries, dried figs and peaches.

Some clues even suggest that 16th-century fans of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe also ploughed through vast quantities of elderberry and blackberry pie – and some may even have snacked on sturgeon steaks.

Bonus link: a nice WNYC piece about Tino's Guggenheim exhibit - I did a shift this afternoon, it was quite tiring but also very enjoyable...

Bloater paste

At the Guardian, Tim Hayward on the perils of nostalgia for childhood foods:

Meat and fish pastes are still around. They exist in a weird little timewarp of forgotten but much-loved Victorian prepared foods along with corned beef, custard powder and tinned meat pies. We should be thinking fondly of them, potted ox-cheek, brown shrimp, rabbit and haddock pepper the menus of every Mod Brit restaurant in the country - achingly fashionable statements of thrift and authenticity. We should even doff our hats at the cooking method. Pastes are actually cooked inside those little pop-top jars - the same way as the foie gras or rillettes we disloyally rush to buy on trips to French supermarkets. Should you doubt me, read Sue Shepard's masterful work on the subject; 'Pickled, Potted and Canned' which isn't subtitled 'How meat paste created the British Empire' but should have been.

World records

Extra-large ancestors!

Also: the highest price ever paid at a charitable auction for a hand-cut jigsaw puzzle. . .

"Like Sophia Loren, and equally difficult to catch"

The mysterious death of a giant carp (courtesy of Julia).

Surf and turf

"One may not doubt that, somehow, Good / Shall come of Water and of Mud. . . ."

(Robert Hudson's first novel The Kilburn Social Club will be published later this summer.)

The silver darlings

Oliver Sacks, herring-lover.