So What Now? poetry by Kerry R. Rock

So what now, that the day becomes
red under the weight of its watch -
do we wait and watch the sun deflate
or light a flame and continue the debauch?

Discovered while I was perusing son Kerry's poetry website, linked to his blog, Kerinth's Edda.

Lots of little lovelies in there. Important for me not to forget those older repositories, poems and ideas set to 'paper' before the collective Sewers of Babel emerged.

the curious incident of the dog in the night-time

This book: A trip to read.
Get in the head of a 12? year old with Asperger's, or high-functioning autism.
I love the logic trees, the visuals. Temple Grandin's life in a novel.

This blue cover that of the U.K. edition, the original. See the publisher's website for more, starting with a reading by someone sounding just like Christopher, the narrator, the boy the book is all about. And the review in the English newspaper, The Guardian.


And the cover for the American edition, the one I have.

And two reviews from this side of the big pond.

The New York Times

Salon.com

14th century chef's chicanerie

This from Sunday, April 30th's "The Way We Eat" in the New York Times Magazine: Olde School: The thoroughly modern chef Heston Blumenthal gets a Tudor tutorial.

"I had came (sic) across a manuscript of Le Viander de Taillevent. He was the chef to the Palais Royal in Paris. I think it was the 14th century.. . .And in there was this wonderful — wonderful? fascinating as opposed to wonderful; it's not the right word — recipe for how to roast a chicken. You take the chicken, and you pluck the chicken while it's still alive, and you baste the skin with a mixture of soya, wheat germ and dripping, I think it was. And apparently this makes it look like the skin's been roasted. You then put the head of this live chicken under its tummy and rock it to sleep. Then you get two other chickens and you roast them. And you bring these three chickens out on a tray to the table. You start carving one of the roasted chickens. And. . .the one that is still alive but sleeping goes sort of 'Wha!' — head pops up — and it runs off down the table."

Oh, my God.

"And that's Part 1. Then you take this poor chicken, and you kill it, and you stuff its neck with a mixture of quicksilver, which is mercury, and sulfur, and then stitch it up. And apparently — obviously I haven't tried this at home, or at work — the expanding air in the neck cavity as you roast causes the mercury and the sulfur to react and somehow creates a clucking noise."

Oh, my God.

"And then you bring this clucking chicken back to the table. So you've taken a live chicken and made it appear dead, and then you've brought it back to life again."

Oh, my God.

"And so it's completely extreme, but it represents for me a point of creativity in cooking — not that I'd ever do anything like that."

Right.