BBC: “An adopted brick-layer who traced back his family history discovered his brother is the internationally celebrated author Ian McEwan.”
Month / January 2007
But No Calvino?
The Abbott and Costello Routine You Didn’t Know About
There is a place in Austria called Fucking. More here. (via The Millions)
Politics and the Culinary Language
New York Times: “And according to [food service industry research firm principal] Tom Miner, ‘The food has to be fast, it has to be handheld, and No. 1 across the board is egg and cheese on a bread carrier.'”
I don’t know if I find the phrase “bread carrier” as appealing as Jenny D, in large part because I think it’s silly to put “bread” and “carrier” in the same noun phrase. I can get behind “bread bowl” because the bread has been constructed as such. But to me, “bread carrier” sounds like a Samsonite innovation gone terribly wrong. It also suggests a strange cowardice on the part of Tom Miner. Why not just say bagel like the rest of us? Or did Miner, forced into the position of advocating food at large, feel the need to be non-exclusionary about bread in general? Did he fear an array of phone calls and emails from those restaurants and wholesalers using English muffins? Who knew that bread could be so political?
The Myths Behind Slow Writing
Justine Larbalestier: “I keep coming across two assumptions about writers who publish a lot of books per year. The first is that if a book takes less than a year to write then it can’t be any good. So if a writer can produce two or more books a year they are total hacks. It ain’t necessarily so. People write at different paces and in different circumstances. Some so-called slow writers are slow because they also have a full or part-time job, because they have a family, because they’re running the household, and their writing is snatched in the time between waking and going to work. Or before the kids come home from school. Or on their lunch hours.”