Good teeth

Lucy Kellaway lunches with Jonathan Franzen for the FT. I am laughing, I have been a Franzen defender in my time (his books are better than 95% at least of those with a reasonable claim to be worth reading, why trash him?), but he does have a nearly unprecedented ability to say things that make him sound utterly insufferable!

I bogged down halfway through Purity (might finish it this weekend) - the East German scenes seem to me embarrassingly bad, and the limited range of characters and emotions (especially female characters and female emotions) struck me more here than with his last couple books, but it is certainly well above the bar of basic readability...

"Three hot pancakes lavishly coated in Grand Marnier syrup and orange peel"

The FT lunches with Marian Goodman, site registration required. (I am not at all in that world except because of having done that show of Tino Sehgal's called This Situation at MG's gallery - she hosted a big dinner for us all at a restaurant before the show opened, and my sense of her corresponds quite closely to what is presented in this article.)

Pang of missing my father, who would have been interested to see this one as he followed TS's career closely - and a terrible pang earlier today as B. and I watched the (hugely enjoyable) movie The Martian. The scene where the lead character's fix-it MacGyverism involves using hexadecimal code to program the camera to communicate through 360-degree swiveling was so much what he would have found enjoyably preposterous that I found myself looking to my side to see what he thought!

Against the 1%

Some funny food details in this FT lunch with Thomas Piketty, who seems to have been making a point by choosing a really mediocre lunch venue (I do understand the preference for quiet research time over lunch!): "the now tepid bolognese," "ripe and soothing" cubes of pineapple, "a rubbery crêpe au sucre"....

Pangs

I have had several bad pangs of missing my father this week. One came when I realized that the restaurant I hoped to have a quiet memorial dinner at with B. next weekend in Philadelphia (we are there for my stepfather's memorial) has since closed! Another came just now when I saw this lunch with the FT piece (interviewee is Richard Desmond), which included a refrain I know he would have hugely appreciated (Desmond has ordered a 580-pound bottle of wine):

I carve into a courgette tart. Desmond heaps English mustard to the left of his tuna. The cuff of his right sleeve rubs into the pesto. The wine is delicious, especially now that I have stopped seeing the reflection of the FT expenses department in my glass.

Lanchesteriana

Strong feelings of similarity-with-difference as I read these two fun interviews with John Lanchester! I have had a version of that conversation about eating octopus a number of times now - it's the only thing I don't eat on vaguely ethical grounds (in days of yore I found it extremely delicious, and grilled octopus really is my favorite food that I won't eat!) - it's not so much that it has a brain as that the brain is in the part that you eat....

(I also completely agree about the sublimity of Blood on the Tracks!)

The FT lunches with John Lanchester.

Lanchester's cultural highlights.

(My favorite song from that album.)

Closing tabs

Jay Winter on Paul Fussell.

Susanna Rustin interviews Adam Phillips for the Guardian.

The FT has a very good lunch with George R. R. Martin (site registration required).

"It was as if a light had been Nookd" (courtesy of Anjuli and Alice).

I've been trying to stay off the computer due to what is probably a slightly pulled back muscle, but it's somewhat better this morning.  It is fishy that my back is sore enough to prevent me writing my overdue Austen essay but still permits a couple of hours of exercise every day!  Really I was just working too hard from January through May and am now having the traditional post-semester willpower collapse - having now slightly bored myself by watching the first two seasons of House as if under a compulsion, it is now preferable to write the essay, which I am hoping I might finish by the end of the day tomorrow so that I can get back to The Magic Circle for one more round of revision.

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?

"The menus were not printed until 2003"

Site registration definitely worthwhile: a history of the Lunch with the FT feature!  (It must be said that on my very short list of things that would make me feel like I had 'arrived' in the world, being asked to lunch with the FT would be pretty high up: though I truly love this feature most for its stylistic range and variety, along the lines of Toni Schlesinger's brilliant variations on a theme in Five Flights Up.)

Closing tabs

Slightly outside my usual bailiwick, but I enjoyed Gideon Rachmann's piece about lunching with Kenneth Rogoff for the FT (site registration required).  The discussion of chess addiction is compelling, there's good advice about eating before a meal during which one will be expected to talk a lot and I like the small drama of the food-ordering as it plays out on this particular occasion (one always feels a pang for the interviewer deprived of dessert!).

Jace Clayton's amazing alternate Kindle screensavers!

Robin McKinley on starting a novel and revising it.

Reacher-like

John Gapper lunches with Lee Child for the FT (site registration required; link courtesy of Julia).

"Somehow old-fashioned, gladatorial"

Tom Robbins lunched last week with cyclist David Millar for the FT (site registration required). The material is extremely interesting (I am eager to read Racing Through the Dark, but alas, there is no Kindle edition available), and they had a fantastically delicious-sounding and decadent lunch!

Firbankiana and mash

Alan Hollinghurst is not a forthcoming interviewee (FT site registration required), but I am extremely eager to read his new novel....

Surplus footmen

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney lunches (expensively) with Roger Waters for the FT (site registration required).

Monday grumbling

I rouse myself from illness and lethargy to share a lovely little bit from WWD (!) about a power luncheon at La Grenouille in support of the International AIDS Vaccine Initative, sent to me by Dave Lull because he knows of my interest in Oliver Sacks:

To raise funds to secure more L-dopa, the mild-mannered Sacks said lightly, “I did what I never did before in my life. I went to a luncheon.” Though he’s likely been to several such gatherings since, Sacks’ tie let on that he’s never going to be the conventional party-goer. It was blue with yellow banana slugs on it, a tribute to UC Santa Cruz, where Sacks once taught. “I have a thing for mollusks,” he explained

My enjoyment of Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy was not augmented by the shared highlighted comments that the Kindle showed me, which invariably hinged upon the most banal and aphoristic pronouncements, so I have now turned that function off. The books themselves are grippingly readable, in spite of an occasional lack of subtlety in the psychology (individual and political) and flatness in the prose - I ordered books 2 and 3 for instant delivery as soon as I had read the first few chapters of the first one, and really I read them straight through pretty much without putting them down except when absolutely necessary.

I had lunch with my agent today (I felt so sick I almost canceled, but I knew it would be a great disappointment to me if I missed seeing her while I am in New York). She had wise advice, and once I'm back in Cayman I'll buckle down to do a good rewrite on the style book (a number of the editors who passed this time will look at a 'next' version, and it really will depend on where the revisions take me whether it will be better suited to be a university press or a trade book) and also to try something (is this top secret, should I be embargoing it?!?) that seemed to me a very interesting suggestion: to combine the manuscripts of The Explosionist and Invisible Things into one long novel so that she can pursue some possible European interest. That is definitely a long book, but it is truly one continuous story; I was very careful to make the second book self-sufficient, it should work well for readers who didn't read the first one, so some of those explanations may need to be taken out again, but I will be interested to see how it looks.

I would love it if the books could have a single-volume afterlife - really I wish Tor would publish the story as a fat mass-market paperback with a lurid fantasy cover!

"Too much drink and too few vegetables"

Trevor Butterworth lunches with Loren Stein for the FT (site registration required).

Lydia Davis in Flaubert-time

Emily Stokes lunches with Lydia Davis for the FT (site registration required).

Difficult prawns

Amanda Mitchison lunches with Philip Pullman for the FT.

"Lurid pastries and curled sandwiches"

I have been working too hard to blog - it is almost unprecedented, and I hope that the situation shortly returns to normal!

(Shooting right now for e-mailing the novel out around 11:30 tomorrow morning - if I can't get it out by then, it's probably all over till the next morning...)

But I will indulge myself in a brief blog post, courtesy of my father. The "Lunch with the FT" feature always appeals to me most when there is also some sort of drama concerning the food! Gideon Rachman had a very good one this week with Abhisit Vejjajiva, Prime Minister of Thailand in a "jollied-up" basement room at the Davos resort where the World Economic Forum is held:

Abhisit, immaculately dressed in a grey suit and waistcoat, with a pale blue shirt and black tie with white stripes, looks slightly doubtful at the array of lurid pastries and curled sandwiches placed before him. I explain that our conversation is meant to take place against a background of eating and drinking. “OK. I will comply,” he says. But he makes no movement towards the food.

(Hmmm, I would eat a lurid apricot Danish pastry if someone gave me one right now!)

The tally:

The Congress Centre
Davos, Switzerland

Apricot Danish pastry (untouched)
Apple tart (neglected)
Ham sandwich (forgotten)
Cheese sandwich (half-eaten)
Coffee x2

Free of charge

Love's blind spots

At the TLS, Angus Trumble on Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez's Perfumes (a book I have dipped into with considerable enjoyment - thanks, Gautam!).

Also, this piece is not really within my central field of interest but includes several coinages I must have for the labels!

Three sandwiches

From Abraham Pais's contribution to Paul Dirac: The Man and His Work:

Throughout his life, Dirac maintained a minimal, sparse (not terse), precise, and apoetically elegant style of speech and writing. Sample: his comment on the novel Crime and Punishment: 'It is nice, but in one of the chapters the author made a mistake. He describes the sun as rising twice on the same day.' Once when Oppenheimer offered Dirac some books to read, he politely refused, saying that reading books interfered with thought.
...
... [At the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton] we would often have lunch together. It was on one of those occasions that I had my first exposure to the Dirac style of exhaustive inquiry. Because of a large appetite and a Dutch background, I would regularly eat three sandwiches at that time. One day, Dirac queried me. (Between each answer and the next question there was a half minute's pause.) D. Do you always eat three sandwiches for lunch? P. Yes. D. Do you always eat the same three sandwiches for lunch? P. No, it depends on my taste of the day. D. Do you eat your sandwiches in some fixed order? P. No. Some months later, when a young man named Salam visited me at the Institute, he said: I have regards for you from Professor Dirac in Cambridge. He wants to know if you still eat three sandwiches for lunch. Dirac and I often lunched together when he came back to the Institute for the academic year 1947-8. On an early occasion, Dirac looked at my plate and noted, triumphantly: 'Now you only eat two sandwiches for lunch.'