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....

Dept. of desirable but wrong things

Tweet an Oreo....

Cookie-tickets

The cats are one of the few bright points in Inside Llewyn Davis, which I saw last night with G. It is a watchable but bleak film, minor in its ambitions. I liked Luc Sante's account (that's the movie I saw, unless I'd been reviewing it for Cat Fancy or similar!); here's another interesting related link.

Closing tabs:

Indestructible but non-delicious gingerbread houses; the great Finnish gingerbread ticket fiasco of 2013.

I need to do a proper light reading end-of-year roundup, but that entails reading back through the year's blog posts, and I am not sure I have the vim to do it this evening. Currently having very enjoyable Susan Howatch reread - I reread the three St. Benet's books and now am on the second of the Starbridge novels. Appealingly both like and unlike Trollope.

Loaves Conference Room, Layer Cake Area

Genius piece by Leon Neyfakh at Slate on visiting the Pepperidge Farm Cookie Factory!

(I have a mild obsession with that brand dating back to childhood, when my father worked for a spell at a company located near to the Pepperidge Farm outlet store. This was in the days before outlet stores were common, and the bags of stuff he brought home now and again from Pepperidge Farm were truly otherworldly - we had homemade treats at home, but as you know if you grew up on delicious homemade treats, nothing is as exciting as store-bought! Layer cakes with one corner slightly mangled, deficient crescent rolls, one-gallon cartons of goldfish; I always give a longing look to the Pepperidge Farm cakes in the freezer section at the supermarket, though I do not think my adult self would find them so delicious, and I still get a bag of Gingermen or Bordeaux cookies now and again.)

[ED. Alice has reminded me that it was the Pepperidge farm "thrift store"! Nomenclature is important.]

Closing tabs

What Whit Stillman reads.

Wayne Koestenbaum on a prince of parataxis. (Via.)

Jane Smiley rereads a beloved book of my childhood, Enid Bagnold's National Velvet.

Plants vs. Zombies eats up a full "Anna Karenina" of Sam Anderson's leisure time.

V. S. Naipaul in Buenos Aires.

Finally, on a non-literary note, check out these amazing nautical cookies  I was lucky enough to be able to commission to celebrate my brother and sister-in-law's acquisition of their first boat!  (Not sure whether or not this picture is accessible, but this is the actual vessel....)

Pantone cookies

These are among the most alluring sweets I have ever seen...

I wish I had thought of this!

Judith Klausner has made a series of Oreo cameos.

(Via BoingBoing.)

(The cereal sampler is also particularly effective...)

Closing tabs

My eyes are almost completely better (those drops are a miracle cure!), but my lung ailment is lasting forever - it's making me very worried about whether I'll be better in time for my race on the 26th. All I can do, though, is lounge around and try and mend and hope for the best...

(Also I dug the little humidifier out of the closet and plugged it in, and purchased some new high-powered extra-strength Mucinex.)

Sat down with the Bacchae on Morningside Heights manuscript this morning and made a good start on editing; I am excited!

(I decided to switch the planned order and revise this one first and the style book second. This is the more interesting and ambitious revision - i.e. I guess much more work remains to be done - and I decided to give in to the impulse to treat myself with the interesting one first...)

I think it will take me three or four days to go through and do a decent copy-edit on the whole thing; in the meantime I'm making a list of places where new scenes need to be inserted to do more work of plot and character development. I want it to have more of a real thriller structure, so that's the main project; but first I'll clean up the prose that I have, type up corrections and then work with a clean version as I start in on the new writing.

Meanwhile, closing some tabs:

Synesthesia and swimming! (Courtesy of Brent, as is the next link also.)

Ways British usage tends to be misunderstood.

""You wouldn't think to read the pack because it looks so much like cookies"!

Good ones all over, but I especially enjoyed this obituary of Patrick Leigh Fermor by Artemis Cooper for the Independent.

Things organized neatly

The milk bottle grosses me out (don't mind milk in things, but can't stomach it straight), but the cookie arrangement is exquisite!

Had a needlessly emotionally tumultuous day, but did get dug back in on my long-overdue theater and the novel essay and spent some very nice hours in the evening with old friends, also beneficial. Lungs seem sufficiently stabilized that I think I may be able to make a stab at actual exercise tomorrow, which would also be good for the morale.

Light reading: William Ryan, The Holy Thief (interesting milieu and appealing main character, surprisingly vague plotting); Adrian McGinty, Fifty Grand (some underlying and fairly entrenched implausibilities about character and voice, but really wonderfully gripping in every important respect - this would make a great movie!).