On the Write Track

So today I had a moment I rarely seem to have lately. Lately I'm all ideas, ideas, ideas, and nothing but notes to show for it.

I was cooking up lunch (fresh merquez sausages with last night's shallot vinegar green beans with crispy mushrooms and the tasty remains of smashed roasted sweet potatoes with parmesan and chive cream sauce) when I had an idea to write a short story.

1,186 words later I've got a first draft of this story and I really like something about it. Maybe the tone of voice or the perspective. It's written in the first person from the perspective of a young girl who after an accident suffers severe vision loss.





After a printer mishap, I've printed two copies and made my first edits. It's clever, or at least I think it is. I'm looking forward to ripping it apart and fixing the little mistakes that I know are there.

This is what I live for. I live for this moment where I've got a story by the tail and I feel for those blessed albeit too short moments that I'm on the right path. It's cheesey and corny and cliché, but two paths diverged in my wood and I took the path less traveled by. It's in these rare moments when I begin to truly believe it will make all the difference.

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Ojingo Bokkum, Pan Fried Squid in Spicy Sauce 오징어볶음

I tend to cook a lot of Korean food not simply because Korean cuisine is my heritage, but because I love the beautiful simplicity of a well-prepared Korean meal.

Last night I served ojingo bokkum (오징어볶음) (sauteed squid) with sukju namul muchim (숙주-나물)(green bean sprout salad), with marinated radish, mat kimchee, and seaweed.




Ojingo Bokkum

Korean cuisine is a complicated thing. How many side dishes (called banchan) to serve, how many different dishes, soups, etc. Then once the food is made there are rules about place settings, where the hot foods are placed, where the cold foods are placed, who eats when, and even where you're supposed to place the kimchee!

Don't think of Korean cooking as it is in restaurants or else you will torture yourself. When I cook Korean at home for just myself and a few people, I rarely ever make what is known as "haejeongsikk", or a full course meal. When I cook for less than 6 people I usually make one banchan or side dish for each person and unless I'm serving BBQ (bulgogi, daegi gogi, kalbi, sam gyeop sal) I try to make one main dish for two people.





Hanjeongsik - I count 17 side dishes, 1 main dish, 1 soup, rice, and 3 sauces!

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My favorite vintage shop in Paris?

In Paris there is a great possibility to find amazing vintage pieces - especially from French brands or designers like Chanel, Hermes, YSL, Azzedine Alaia, Herve Leger, Balmain, Givenchy, and Ungaro.

But the best vintage for the price is found at Vintage Clothing Paris located at 10, rue de Crussol in the 11eme.

It has odd hours (Thursday,Friday 12h - 18h30; Saturday 14h - 18h), and it won't help if you need a Monday (or Tuesday) fix - but definitely save your money until it opens because the owner has an amazing collection of affordable designer pret-a-porter and even a few pieces of couture. The owner is a former stall owner at "Les Puces" and brought her flea market sensibilities to a part of Paris that was desperately in need of high quality vintage with reasonable prices.

I've scored YSL suits here for less than 300,00 euros. A friend of mine bought a vintage Herve Leger dress from the 80's for less than 200,00 euros and almost bought an immaculate Azzedine Alaia skirt suit for 300,00.

What I like about this shop is the owner isn't trying to show off. It's not a "collection" where you get the feeling she's unwilling to sell. Instead you get the feeling she's got all this great stuff and she's just been waiting for you to pop round and buy it all up.

The only drawback I can think of is that the store isn't full of accessories, but for the real clothing nuts (those of us who buy clothes more often than accessories understand what I mean) it's a cave of wonders.

Don't forget about the weird hours and if you do score a major find at Vintage Clothing Paris, feel free to email photos of your scores and I'll post them up!

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Dutch Pancakes with Crispy Bacon

Last year when I was in Amsterdam, passing yet another morning at Pancakes!Amsterdam, I decided I would recreate them chez moi for a fabulous brunch.





I absolutely love this little place. The pancakes are delicious and rather modestly priced. I also love the outdoor seating on one of my favorite streets in all of Amsterdam. Berenstraat is the name of the street between the Keizersgracht (east) and Prisengracht (west) canals. If you follow the Herengracht canal northward for example, you'll want to take a left at Wolvenstraat and will have to cross the Keizersgracht, where the street changes to Berenstraat.

Also located near Pancakes!Amsterdam along Wolvenstraat-Berenstraat are some of the best vintage and second-hand clothing shops in Amsterdam; Episode, Lady Day, and Second Line.






Dutch Pancakes
Serves 2  (8 pancakes using 1/4 cup of batter each)
Difficulty: Easy!!!

Equipment:

1 large mixing bowl
fork
dry measuring cups
measuring spoons
liquid measuring cup
spatula
soup ladle
non-stick crepe pan or frying pan


Ingredients: For people residing in Europe, I've included the metric conversions


1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour / 190 grams
3 1/2 tsp. baking powder / 10 grams
1 tsp. salt / 6 grams
1 tsp. sugar /  6 grams
1 1/4 cups milk / 295 milliliters*
1 egg
3 T. melted butter / 45 grams *
2 cups chopped bacon / 200 grams "lardons"

* Use liquid measuring cup regardless of which version of the recipe you are using.

1. Sift flour, baking powder, salt and sugar.

If available use flour that guarantees no "lumps" or "grummeaux" in French. In France I use Francine brand for all my baking. I've tried the lesser priced Casino, Monoprix, and Franprix brands, but for the minimal savings the quality is not as good.

Baking powder can be extremely expensive in France. I buy mine for 1 euro at the Indian shops on rue Louis Blanc (Metro Line 2, Station La Chappelle).

2. Make a well in the dry mixture.

3. If using all-purpose flour, add half the milk and butter and mix until you get a thick batter that is smooth without signs of lumps. Then add the rest of the milk and butter.

If using a specialty baking flour, as mentioned in Step 1, you can simply add all the milk and butter and mix until smooth.

4. Add the egg, and using a fork tilted at an angle, beat the egg into the mixture making sure to "add air". Do not overmix. Overmixing will give you heavy pancakes.

5. You can slightly oil your crepe/frying pan/griddle, but I find it's usually not neccessary and can give the pancakes a non-uniform look.

6. Heat pan and test for temperature using a drop of batter.

7. For pancakes that are uniform in size, I find the best thing to use is a soup ladle or a measuring cup. Exactly measure the batter (about 1/4 cup or 59 ml) and pour on to hot pan in one steady pour to help keep the circular shape. If you mess up, don't worry just let the pancake cook and eat it while you perfect your technique!

8. Cook on one side until there are visible bubbles in the batter. After the first bubbles, you will notice the pancake will look smooth again but that the batter is still moist. Wait until a second series of bubbles form and carefully flip the pancake over. It may stick to the pan, so carefully lift it and don't be afraid to use your fingers - just make sure to check the temperature of the pancake first.

9. Once the pancake is flipped over, wait for it to "rise". Once the pancake has risen uniformly, the pancake is entirely cooked and no longer still "wet" in the middle. Move to pan and garnish with a few slabs of unmelted butter.

10. Continue until all the batter is used and stack four of the pancakes one on top of the other on 2 plates. Set plates into a warm oven (usually to keep the oven warm for this sort of thing I preheat it to about 200 degrees (C) / 400 degrees (F) and then turn the oven off and wait about 10-15 minutes to let everything shut off).

11. On the same pan, add 1 cup of chopped bacon (100 grams) and fry until crispy.  Set aside fried bacon in a bowl and fry the remaining half. Make sure to conserve any grease.

In France you can use "lardons", which are already chopped up bacon. For the same type of texture, in the US you would have to buy the bacon uncut in a chunk of 1/4 lbs. and then either slightly freeze it to making chopping it up easier, or slightly freeze it and chop it up in a food processor.

12. Divide the bacon mixture and the grease and pour over pancakes and on to the plate.  Add maple syrup for garnish.

Maple syrup can be attrociously expensive in France. The best for the price is either found at some Franprix's or found at Casino. The price is usually less than 5 euros for a bottle of 250ml. For better quality maple syrup you can try the various American/English epiceries, but it will be much more expensive (10-12 euros for 250ml) or the "Bio" stores, which is definitely more expensive with 500ml costing around 16-20 euros.

Serve this with chilled clementine or orange juice and with fresh red berries, yogurt, and cream for dessert.

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More Book Buying Abroad

So I went to the US for a short trip of gambling, stocking up on American consumer goodness, and book buying. I visited a few fantastic bookshops but the best of all was Calico Cat Books in Ventura, California. Here I snapped up a rare edition of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the 1956 edition of Proust's In Search of Lost Time in 7 volumes, and a very nice copy of Journey to the West. At Starlight Books in Flagstaff Arizona I bought an odd book edited by Italo Calvino of Italian Fairytales, W. Somerset Maugham's book on Kipling, and a first edition of Knut Hamsun's Pan. This was an exciting purchase as it is an extremely rare printing by Knopf from 1921 after Hamsun won the Nobel.

Needless to say I came home with so many books that I had to rush to Walmart with my best friend THL at 3 in the morning to buy another suitcase and repack (after we drove back to Vegas for our flight back to Paris along Route 66) as we were a bit over the max weight limit per suitcase.

One thing I find amusing is that bookstores here in Paris are always trying to be more American and bookstores in the US are always trying to be more European. Europeans read a lot. But don't lose faith America - aside from the Les Pleiades, printed by Gallimard (which are for French people the ultimate editions and rightly so, they're AMAZING and cause me to drool whenever I see them) - American books are much better printed in general.

The real score of my American book buying was finding a first edition Charlotte's Web by EB White for $4.00!!!! No seriously. It even had a printing flaw, where the last chapter's start page had to be written in by hand...would be interested hearing from any collector's if this means anything? I'm adding this on my shelf beside my 1st American Edition of The Trumpet of the Swan, which is my favorite EB White Book.

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A Good Ol' Vent

I've been keeping this blog rather sporadically. But in the month or so that I've been away, I've actually been very busy with lots of stuff other than blogging...

1. The book buying continues, as if I could stop it. I'm currently reading a lot of fairy tales and Colette. Freud would love to get me on the sofa over that I'm sure. But even today I went to two place that sell books and passed by the closed WH Smith with regret. I need a 12 step program and Jesus.

2. I went to the book launch for the letters of Samuel Beckett at the Irish Cultural Center in Paris. The two editors who put the book together, Daniel Gunn and George Craig read some of his letters and Daniel kept mentioning that Beckett struggled with being a writer. I waited until after to ask him if he ever became more confident about it and Mr. Gunn said he struggled his whole life. Take this as you will. For me it simply meant no matter what you might accomplish as a writer, you'll always be uncertain. But he also said Beckett knew he had to write and that he knew he wasn't fit for anything else. Inspiring thought.

3. I bought a bike and have been riding all over Paris. It is by far the best way to see the city. I think it's the best thing I've bought since I've come to Paris. I see the city through new eyes and plus it helps burn off all the pastries.

So expect more from me, but in snippets. I'm getting ready to begin my book. I can feel it...or maybe it's just gas?

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Helpful Links & Inspiration

"We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your devine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity."
~Rejection slip from a Chinese economic journal
(from Sophy Burnham's collection of inspiring thoughts for writers, "For Writers Only," Ballantine Books, 1994)

Character Trait Chart


Essay on Writing from Kurt Vonnegut

Be Brutal

Online library of scanned book covers

From bard-de-boulogne

“In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.”

Look for L'Age d'Or


Blog Full of Interesting Facts

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Top 25 Things to Do Instead of Writing

1. Cut off my split ends with cuticle scissors.

2. Browse through books written by better writers than me.

3. Fantasize about Morrissey serenading me from six stories down as I stand on the balcony.

4. Fantasize he's not singing "You're the One for Me Fatty", even though I'm doing a lot of late night binge eating.

5. Late night binge eating.

6. Light entire packs of cigarettes on fire, while unfortunately inhaling the smoke.

7. Put on lipstick and admire my reflection in my computer screen.

8. Download interviews from the Paris Review website before they take them down just to make you buy the back issue.

9. Look for random weird things on ebay.

10. Randomly get up and drop my ghetto booty.

11. Write love notes to my boyfriend I don't give him.

12. Look at style.com.

13. Criticize myself after looking at style.com because I can't fit into the clothes I like.

14. Replan my existing wardrobe.

15. Think of all the cool things I'd make if I had a glue gun.

16. Plan vacations

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Tenderize the Night

She is sleeping on a bed as soft as an overcooked steak. The lumpy mashed potato pillows and the afghan with its unraveling bit of string bean yarn frame her body, as still and old as a two day old roll.

But her dreams are sweet. The dull flat, with its dirty tile floor and weathered facade are replaced with walls made of graham crackers. The lifeless posters and cracked plaster are in this sugar spun temperaneous world smell of peppermint and the jewel tone gum drops twinkle. The dining table is bare of good china or her grandmother's heirloom silver. She takes a bite. It's made of chocolate and its joint meet one another in nougat.

She slumbers on. The maid sleeps transformed. The sun bleached uniform is pink and the once sagging skirt twirls in mid-air, dancing with the silk ballet slippers.

In this dream she dresses; not with haste and reluctance, but with expectation. When she looks in the mirror there is a smile there, as if it had been waiting for her face to simply show up and complete the happy reflection.

There is a hint of doom. Behind her she seems the glare of the evil witch's red eyes. Next, she hears the horrible cackle of the witch's laugh. She flees. She tries to fend off the monsters with her licorice whip.

A white hand lashes out from under the overboiled green beans, slapping the top of the alarm clock like a mosquito.

She crawls down the stairs that groan profanities at her, and places her coffee mug on the well worn table. By the time she adds the sugar, the sweetness of her other life is already forgotten.

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On pain...

"I've got this little thing I've learned to do just lately...When it's so hard I think I shan't go on, I try to make it worse. I make myself think about Berkeley. Our camp on the river. How good it was. When I'm certain I won't stand it, I go a moment more. Then I know I can bear anything."

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Books and Bindings

There are books that are like a wind through your life. They can send a shiver down your spine or offer up a refreshing breeze. They are random. If you had read them perhaps at another moment instead of that moment, perhaps they would have had no effect at all.



Then there are those other books. The books that you keep beneath your pillow, beside your bed, and in your heart.

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Recent Acquisitions

Letters from Africa - Isak Dinesen
Heaven and Hell - Emanuel Swedenborg
The Roots of Coincidence - Arthur Koestler
The Betrothed - Alessandro Manzoni
The Sailor Who Fell from the Sea - Yukio Mishima
Bored of the Rings - The Harvard Lampoon
The Counterfeiters - Andre Gide
The Unvanquished - William Faulkner
The Rainbow - D.H. Lawrence
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Innocent Libertine - Colette
The Farewell Party - Milan Kundera
Deception - Philip Roth
Fathers and Sons - Alexander Roth
Youth and the Bright Medusa - Willa Cather
The Other Woman - Colette
The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
Cosmicomics - Italo Calvino
Demain - Herman Hesse
Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Seven Gothic Tales - Isek Dinesen
The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid - Octavio Paz
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Waves - Virginia Woolf
The Book of the Five Rings - Musashi
D.H. Lawrence - Anais Nin
Children of the Albatross - Anais Nin
A Spy in the House of Love - Anais Nin
Seduction of the Minotaur - Anais Nin
Orlando - Virginia Woolf
The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiessen
No Name - Wilkie Collins
Anatomical Drawings - Leonardo da Vinci
Les Belles Images - Simone de Beauvoir
Gravity - George Gamow
A House is Not a Home - Polly Adler
Chanel - Edmonde Charles- Roux
Letters Summer 1926 - Pasternak, Rilke, Tsvetayeva
A Beside Nature, Genius and Eccentricity in Science 1869 - 1953 (foreword by Stephen Jay Gould)
Memories of Childhood - Marcel Pagnol
The Flounder - Gunter Grass
Losing Battles - Eudora Welty
Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs
The Green House - Maria Vargas Llosa
Group Portrait with Lady - Henrich Boll
The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
The Mystic Masseur - V.S. Naipul
Leafstorm and Other Stories - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Delta Wedding - Eudora Welty
Creatures Great and Small - Colette
Tutankh-Amen and His Tomb - G. Elliot Smith
The Age of Fable - Thomas Bullfinch
Call It Sleep - Henry Roth
Travels with Charley - John Steinbeck
Anti-Memoirs - Andre Malraux
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and six more - Roald Dahl
Nijinsky - Nijinsky
The Search for Modern China - Jonathan D. Spence
The Best Cartoons from Punch
Histoire de Paris et des Parisiens
French Gourmet Cooking Volume I & II - Julia Child
Infinity and the Mind - Rudy Rucker
Lectures on Literature - Nabokov
Marquis de Sade - Simone de Beauvoir
Apocalypse - D.H. Lawrence
Psychology and Alchemy - C.G. Jung
Corydon - Andre Gide
Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges - Richard Burgin
The Captive Mind - Czeslaw Milosz
We - Eugene Zamiatin
American Power and the New Mandarins
Everything that Rises Must Converge - Flannery O'Connor
Invitation to a Beheading - Nabokov
The Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino
Conversations about the End of Time - Eco, Gould, etc
The Intuitionist - Colson Whitehead
The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico - Bernal Diaz del Castillo
The Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Complete Poems - D.H. Lawrence
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Memoirs - Pablo Neruda
Closing the Gap - Chandler Brossard

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Writing Tip #1

Always put clarity before cleverness. Your reader will love you for it.

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Children's Writing, The HP Phenomenon

Deciding to write a children's novel in the post-Harry Potter era is a daunting task.

Since I rarely read literary criticism as I prefer to judge a book (and its cover) for myself, I never knew that the HP received any criticism, given that the series has sold 400 million copies and be made into video games and put to film.

So in the need to encourage myself further, I allowed myself to be sucked into yet another Wikipedia Wormhole and discovered that a critic/author I much admire, A.S. Byatt in an article published in the New York Times, said that HP is a, "secondary world, made up of patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children's literature ... written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip".

Now don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the HP series. I had a system where I would buy the recent HP book, read a chapter and hand the book to a random child on the subway. So I personally think I contributed greatly to the 400 million copies that were sold.

But I did so because as a child reading was my absolute favorite way to pass the time, and the idea that parents were expected to shell out 30 bucks for a hard cover book for children simply baffled me. While Rowling has been charitable, given her position she should have insisted that a less expensive format be available alongside the hard back release; something should I ever enjoy the success Rowling has I would definitely fight for.

Still, A.S. Byatt's criticisms about aspects of the book that I found a bit too simple are not unfounded. For example Rowling took a lot of the components from mythology, such as the 3 headed dog that guards the Philospher's Stone and many other of the creatures are based on myths.

Rowling herself has stated that Paul Gallico was a huge inspiration for her. A simple search lists countless sites that accuse Rowling of everything including full out plagarism of the Harry Potter name, the idea that Harry Potter was a wizard, and even his scar.

The sad part might be that because children moved away from reading, very few children might pick up and find the references that are so obvious to others.

Last night I completed the first sketch for my book. Every author draws from the books they have read, it's unavoidable. But for my part, I do honestly feel that my story will something new, if only because I have read a considerable amount and believe in the power of my imagination in a way not much different than when I was seven, the age my main heroine is when the story begins.

Line for line I do not think Rowling compares to C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Alice in Wonderland, E.B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan (which I prefer over Charlotte's Web); and cannot compare to the literature that was once considered the domain of children written by Dickens, Hugo, or Dumas (Senior).

But as of last night, the idea of my heroine became more than an idea. She took form in my mind. Like me she has raven hair and big dark eyes. Like me she has a kind heart, a tendency to be naughty, is inventive, precocious, and determined. I believe in her. I believe in the quest I will set her out upon, though it has not yet begun.

A.S. Byatt gave me hope that people do still expect more from children's literature. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, despite its faults gave me even more hope that children want to read intelligent and thoughtful stories and that those stories are still sellable.

But I'm not just writing this story to sell books. I'm writing this story to entertain children, to pay hommage to those writers whose stories kept a lonely little girl company, and ultimately so that one day I might be able to do something good with whatever proceeds I might make.

And plus, now that my little seven year old heroine has come to life, she is every bit a child and not content to sit still in my mind. She wants out and fast. She knows there is a whole world waiting for her and a fantastic journey that is meant for her alone.

I am glad that I will be the first to make this journey with her and hope I will not be the last.

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The Old Television Set

From Blog Photos

The television had been there for thirty years. You got the sense that if you turned it on, a thirty year old television show would play.

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