A Short List of Likes for Late January

Cottage Loaf (Photo credit: mer de glace)

This is a link to a blog that couples writers and food. I was so happy to see this recipe from Virginia Woolf. The writer says this about herself on her About page:

Part historical discussion, part food and recipe blog, part literary fangirl-ing, Paper and Salt attempts to recreate and reinterpret the dishes that iconic authors discuss in their letters, diaries, essays, and fiction.

Nicole is a voracious consumer of both food and literature. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, she currently cooks in a very small kitchen in New York City, and currently reads almost everywhere.

I say rush on over and check out her work!

More things I am happy about:

Abi Maxwell’s debut novel, Lake People. It is incandescent in its plain-spoken lyricism. So much paradox in that description, I know, but read the book!

I recently discovered the meaning of “paradigm.” A student in a class used it, and I had to go look it up.

Little flurries of snow falling now.

How Joyce describes his potatoes as “floury”

Scandinavian crime drama, in Danish. It was brought on by my interest in MI-5. Then The Eagle. Now, The Protectors. Let my subdue my guilt by pointing out The New Yorker had a recent article by Lauren Collins in the January 7 issue under “Letter from Copenhagen”on the same.

The quietness of this morning.

University of Sussex buys Woolf’s pocket diaries (bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com)
Virginia Woolf on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary (brainpickings.org)
The Read Balloon: Virginia Woolf for Little Wolves (householdwords.wordpress.com)

When it snows in winter

2 Replies

Indira Ganesan, Almost a Bridge, 2013

I am as happy as a child waking up to snow-covered landscape as I did this morning. No need to think of work, driving, black ice. Instead, I went out to snap a few photos, of which the one above is the Ansel Adams enhancement.

We had an inch and a half or so of snow, in a year that is different from last year’s mildness. The cold has made it last and I wonder how the horses are faring in the field.

I have begun a new job, with a long commute. For part of the journey I need to drive and be mindful of weather; the other part is where I am passenger, recipient to daydream and reading, the necessary components of composition. As a child, I loved to gaze out the car windows as the Midwestern cornfields swept past, regally bowing. I was not an “I” but part of a symphony of my own imagination. What is transport and season but movement?