On Cooking
Yesterday, I used my brand new pasta machine for the first time. It’s a beautiful device, and a simple one, a shiny hand-cranked metal thing. Making pasta is time-consuming, but it’s not difficult: that is, there aren’t that many ways that you can screw it up. At the end of all that labor, you are probably going to have delicious pasta. You start with eggs and flour. You put most of the flour into a big mound, with a hole in the middle for the eggs to go into.
Tools I Use to Write
I’m writing a novel, and I have a nerdy setup. I use Emacs, a text editor that was first released in 1976, making it almost as old as I am. This post is not a how-to. It is a description of and an apologia for my workflow. If there is interest, I will write a how-to. “Why do you use that thing?” A few weeks ago, my 15-year-old daughter saw me using Emacs to write on my laptop, and asked me, “Why do you use that thing?
"Substanceless Blue Pour"
For a few weeks now, I’ve had the first three lines of Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel” stuck in my head: Stasis in darkness. Then the substanceless blue Pour of tor and distances. The first thing one might notice about these lines is the rhythm and the internal rhyme. It begins with a matched pair, broken over the first two lines: “Stasis in” almost rhymes with “darkness. / Then,” as “substanceless” almost rhymes with “distances” and “Pour” rhymes with “tor.