What goes better together than wine and cheese? Authors and cheese. The Airship paired ten gourmet cheeses with famous writers. Virginia Woolf goes well with a Bayley Hazen Blue. “This Stilton-like blue is a mix of narratives – the Mrs. Dalloway of cheeses, if you will.”
East of Edam
Language, the Savior
At The Guardian, Jhumpa Lahiri recounts the path that led her to write her latest book in Italian, one of the most anticipated books of 2016. As she puts it, “A week after arriving [in Rome], I open my diary to describe our misadventures and I do something strange, unexpected. I write my diary in Italian. I do it almost automatically, spontaneously. I do it because when I take the pen in my hand I no longer hear English in my brain. During this period when everything confuses me, everything unsettles me, I change the language I write in.”
The Illustrated Road
Recommended Viewing: Paul Rogers illustrated every page of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
Writers and Their Snacks
Franz Kafka liked to drink milk as he wrote. Walt Whitman liked a breakfast of cold meat and oysters. Marcel Proust was an espresso addict. This info graphic from The New York Times raises the question: what do you snack on as you write? You might also want to snack as you read that article, so check out our own Lydia Kiesling's piece from last April.
●
●
Perfectly Inexplicable
Last week, I wrote about Kathryn Schulz’s innovative interview with David Mitchell, which took place on a walk along the Irish coastline. Now, in a nice complement to our own review from today, Pico Iyer reviews the author’s latest. Sample quote: “A perfectly matter-of-fact, unvarnished evocation of how regular folks speak, married to a take-no-prisoners fascination with all that we can’t explain.” Our review of The Bone Clocks was published today.
●
●
2 comments:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Lost and Found in Translation
"The Google Translate results feel less and less lucky as the sentence progresses, and with each new roll of the search engine dice." Over the six years that Esther Allen was translating Argentine novelist Antonio Di Benedetto's classic, Zama, she would occasionally run lines through Google translate as an experiment in the ersatz. Pair with translator Alison Anderson on "Ferrante Fever" and what a great translation adds to the original work.
Raising Hell
“When you read these books—I suggest perusing them, martini in hand, while your children (or better your friends’ children, for whom you are babysitting) run around shrieking—you’ll see every parenting stance you’ve ever adopted, every parent-story trope you’ve ever told or heard, expressed more perfectly than you ever could have.” Dan Kois on Shirley Jackson’s two memoirs on parenting.
Not quite on point, and includes TV characters, but what about:
a.) Rumpole of the Bailey and Brie (just so he can shout “Bringgg Me My Brie!”) to She Who Must Be Obeyed.
b.) Edith Pargeter’s Brother Cadfael and a nice Shropshire Blue on a bed of medicinal herbs.
c.) Agatha Christie’s Poirot and a suspicious Limburger on black bread.
Moe Murph
Just tweeted H. James as gorgonzola. I live in Cornwall, where yarg is made: soft & creamy, wrapped in luscious green nettle leaves – DH Lawrence lived for a time near Zennor, was arrested as a spy with Frieda on suspicion of signalling to WWI German subs because they had mismatched curtains in their cottage; his writing is lyrically poetic at heart, but with an acerbic outer edge…So, Lawrence as yarg.