Everyday Boy

A Remedy For Insomnia

Every April (National Poetry month) I have signed up for Knopf Poetry's a poem-a-day.  April 9th's poem this past year was a beauty, and I look forward to picking up this collection of poetry:

A Remedy For Insomnia

Not sheep coming down the hills,
not cracks on the ceiling—
count the ones you loved,
the former tenants of dreams
who would keep you awake,
once meant the world to you,
rocked you in their arms,
those who loved you...
You will fall asleep, by dawn, in tears.

Vera Pavlova, If There Is Something To Desire
Translated by Steven Seymour

The Mystery Of Venice

... the German poet, Rilke, said on a visit to the city in 1920, "as with mirrors one grasps nothing but is only drawn into the secret of its elusiveness.  One is filled with images all day long, but could not substantiate a single one of them.  Venice is a matter of faith."

(8)

... the reality of Venice bears no relation to any of the published guides and maps.  The shortest distant between two points is never a straight line.  So the network of Venice induces mystery.  It can arouse infantile feelings of lay and game, wonder and terror.  It is easy to believe that you are being followed.  Your footsteps echo down the stone labyrinth.  The sudden vista of an alley or a courtyard takes you by surprise; you may glimpse a shadow or a silhouette, or see someone standing in a doorway.  Walking in Venice often seems as unreal as a dream or, rather, the reality is of a different order.  There are times when the life of the past seems very close - almost as if it might be around the next corner.  The closeness of the past is embodied in the closeness of the walls and ways all around you.  Here you can sense the organic growth of the city, stone by stone.  You can sense the historical process of the city unfolding before you.  There is a phrase, in T.S. Eliot's Gerontion, to the effect that history has many cunning passage-ways.  These are the passages of Venice.

(87)

- Peter Ackroyd, Venice: Pure City

During The Days Of Lent

During Lent, the monks are to go on working but to increase their reading time.  In this period, they are to be assigned a book to read straight through.  In Lent they are to put themselves on a regimen and study what they are told to study in a serious and ordered way.  Nevertheless, the work continues.  Benedictines were to earn their bread by the labor of their hands, and no devotion was to take the place of the demands of life.  These were working monastics who depended on God to provide the means of getting food but who did not, as the ancients said, depend on God to put it in the nest.

At the same time, work is not what defines the Benedictine.  It is the single-minded search for God that defines the Benedictine spirituality.  That is what the monastic pursues behind every other pursuit.  That is what gives the monastic life meaning.  This is what frees the monastic heart.  The monastic does not exist for work.  Creative and productive work are simply meant to enhance the Garden and sustain us while we grow into God.

In today's culture in which people are identified more by what they do than what they are, this is a lesson of profound importance.  Once the retirement dinner is over and the company watch is engraved, there has to be something left in life that makes us human and makes us happy or life may well have been in vain.  That something, Benedictine spirituality indicates, is a mind and a heart full of a sense of meaning and an instinct for God.

(124)

Joan Chittister
The Rule of Benedict: Insight For the Ages

Books, Books, Books

The book is a uniquely durable object, one that can be fully enjoyed without being damaged. A book doesn't require fuel, food, or service; it isn't very messy and rarely makes noise. A book can be read over and over, then passed on to friends, or resold at a garage sale. A book will not crash or freeze and will still work when filled with sand. Even if it falls into the bath, it can be dried out, ironed if necessary, and then finished. Should the spine of a book crack so badly the pages fall out, one simply has to gather them before the wind blows them away and wrap with a rubber band.

- Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

(From Red Clover)

Always read stuff that will make you look good
if you die in the middle of it.

- P. J. O'Rourke

From the Hedge Society:
The New York Times: The Book Club With Just One Member

January Flickr blog entry: Lost In The Shelves

Spaghetti Con Gameretti E Rucola

This is a tasty and quick pasta dish I like to cook up, courtesy Jamie Oliver.  It is a pasta dish which I have many good memories of, sharing around a kitchen table with friends.  As many of you know I am a big Jamie Oliver fan, and have learned a lot about cooking following many of his recipes from almost all of his cookbooks - cookbooks generously given to my by friends and family.  I must especially thank Alison for having one of his cookbooks sitting on a kitchen shelf for me to discover; for buying me his Italian cookbook, which has been used religiously to this day; and for this lovely fish-shaped serving dish pictured above.

I am a bit better these days not having to follow recipe's to the letter, thanks in large part to my friend Karen, so I've found that you can adapt it to be a simple vegetarian dish by removing the shrimp, and that the dish works just as well with spinach if there is no arugula to be found. Tammy won a bid at a fundraiser for 30 bottles of white wine last Fall, so this is also a good way to use up a bit of that wine, along with Jamie Oliver's various risotto dishes.

Spaghetti With Shrimp & Arugula
Serves 4

1 pound dried spaghetti
sea salt and freshly ground pepper
extra virgin olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely chopped
1 - 2 dried red chilies, crumbled
1 pound peeled raw large shrimp
1 small wineglass of white wine
2 heaping tablespoons sun-dried tomato puree, or 6 sun-dried tomatoes blitzed in a blender
zest and juice of 1 lemon
2 handfuls of arugula, roughly chopped

Cook your spaghetti in a large pot of salted boiling water according to the package instructions. Meanwhile, heat 3 good glugs of extra virgin olive oil in a large frying pan and toss in the garlic and chili. As the garlic begins to color, add the shrimp and saute them for a minute. Add the white wine and tomato puree and simmer for a couple of minutes. When the pasta is ready, drain it in a colander, reserving a little of the cooking water. Toss the spaghetti with the sauce, squeeze in the lemon juice, and add half the chopped arugula, using a little of the reserved cooking water if you want to loosen the sauce a bit, and correct the seasoning. Divide between four plates and sprinkle with the grated lemon zest and the rest of the arugula leaves.

(116)

Jamie's Italy

This Book Will Change Your Life

 

I picked up a copy of This Book Will Change Your Life: The Best of This Diary Will Change Your Life: a compilation of the annual This Diary Will Change Your Life books. It's a fun daily read, that helps keep me on the lighter side of the road.

Yesterday's entry was self-portrait day:

Everyone can emulate Rembrandt tese days and produce a self-portrait that reveals their inner self. How do you see yourself? Today, take the best portrait of yourself you can manage. Take as many shots as you need to, and post the most reavealing one... for the world to discover you. (Day 8)

So I'm cheating a bit and posting a picture that Tammy took of me instead (you can view what's on top of my head here):

 

Ideas For The New Year

My friend Maija passed along a link to Seth Godin's free e-book, What Matters Now, a collection of "70 big thinkers, each sharing an idea for you to think about as we head into the New Year."  Here is one of those ideas, highlighting the project benefiting from the book's proceeds:

Education has a ripple effect.  One drop can initiate a cascade of possibility, each concentric circle gaining in size and traveling further.  If you get education right, you get many things right:  escape from poverty, better family health, and improved status of women.

Educate a girl, and you educate her children and generations to follow.

Yet for hundreds of millions of kids in the developing world, the ripple never begins.  Instead, there’s a seemingly inescapable whirlpool of poverty.  In the words of a headmaster I once met in Nepal:  “We are too poor to afford education.  But until we have education, we will always be poor.”

That’s why there are 300 million children in the developing world who woke up this morning and did not go to school.  And why there are over 750 million people unable to read and write, nearly 2/3 of whom are girls and women.  I dream of a world in which we’ve changed that.  A world with thousands of new schools.  Tens of thousands of new libraries.  Each with equal access for all children.  

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.

The second best time is now.

- John Wood is Founder & Executive Chairman, Room to Read, which has built over 850 schools and opened over 7,500 libraries serving 3 million children.  He is the author of Leaving Microsoft to Change the World.

An Illustrated Life

A quote for you full-time and part-time sketchers, journal makers and painters.  I found it in a book I got for Christmas this year (An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration From the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators & Designers by Danny Gregory).

Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here.  I was hungry.  I was defeated.  I was happy.  I was sad.  I was in love.  I was afraid.  I was hopeful.  I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art.

- Felix Gonzales Torres
From Christine Castro Hughes' journal.

(93)

Eat, Memory

I discovered the local public library up the hill from us a few weeks ago, and am looking at stemming my appetite for books, music and movies there, instead of haunting local book, music, and video stores.  I figure it will be easier on my wallet, as well as our limited and burgeoning storage space.

I picked up a collection of essays from the New York Times called Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table featuring food inspired recollections by some of America's leading writers: playwrights, screenwriters, novelists, poets and journalists.  Not just stories but recipes too.  It reminds me of an idea a friend's mother made about writing memorable meals in the margins of our cookbooks so as not to forget them.

Editor, Amada Hesser writes: "Writers know that if you want to portray a person succinctly, tellingly, you describe the way he (she) eats.  Food is the royal road to the unconscious." (11)  Which has me thinking about the way I eat, as well as the desire to cultivate good eating habits - slow food as opposed to fast food.

I found a package of gnocchi to cook up this week at the neighborhood grocery store, and decided to cook up a simple Alfredo sauce to go with it.  I found a recipe in Mark Bittman's dictionary-like recipe book How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipe's for Great Food (which I have barely scratched the surface of).  I would like to try and master simple recipes like this:

Maybe overkill, but good nevertheless:  Reduce the butter to 2 tablespoons and melt it gently.  While the pasta cooks, combine two eggs, 1 1/2 cup heavy cream (I substituted skim milk and some corn starch), and 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese in a warmed bowl; beat briefly.  Sprinkle with pepper.  When the past is cooked, toss it with the cheese mixture, adding a little of the cooking water if necessary to keep the mixture moist.  Drizzle with the butter, toss well, and serve immediately. (447)

Not That New York City Has No Humanity

She reads:

In a place of no humanity, strive to be human.
Pirkei Avot: Ethics of The Fathers

That's my motto for living in New York.

(244)

From The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs

Encountered on a walk around Harlem, October 2008.