Here's a gorgeous taste of Mark Crick's Household tips of the great writers: recipes in the style of Virginia Woolf, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Raymond Chandler. The latter is particularly good:
"I sipped on my whiskey sour, ground out my cigarette on the chopping board and watched a bug trying to crawl out of the basin. I needed a table at Maxim's, a hundred bucks and a gorgeous blonde; what I had was a leg of lamb and no clues."
Delicious.
Self-expression is the new entertainment, says Arianna Huffington. I would add that self-expression as entertainment is replacing information as the content most retailed on air and web. Witness the comically misnamed Fox News, which is an expensive but effective way for Rupert Murdoch to express himself. Witness Alan Jones, whose part-ownership of 2GB makes him the equivalent of a self-publishing novelist. Witness, most recently, the regrettable Kyle Sandilands, who seems to take perverse delight in demonstrating that his value as a radio host is in inverse proportion to his contribution as a human being. (The exodus of his sponsors seems to indicate a downgrading of his currency, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t ever, ever go away.)
For these self-expressers, the least charge of misinformation yields the disclaimer ‘opinion,’ which in turn is sustained on the grounds of entertainment. Opinion doesn’t have to be truthful or civil, particularly when neither sells as well as violations of both. In fact to seek these qualities seems to spark wild declamations about freedom of speech. The defenders of offenders like Bolt, Sandilands, Hadley and Jones seem to feel that censorship and tyranny are poised to choke our long-cherished freedom, and only await opportunity to leap from the shadows and silence the chorus of our democracy. Yet those arguing for freedom of speech as an absolute and without limits have radically undervalued the other values by which we manage to live democratically. It seems to me that we are most protective of those goods we are least in danger of losing. We are afraid of silencing diversity when we are most in danger of cacophony. We are afraid of losing our liberty when our more likely loss is liberality. And we are afraid of losing opinion when what’s ebbing away is truth.
This poem has been on my mind since Obama's visit. Three of its lines are among the best known in America, but the rest may be less familiar. Emma Lazarus, a woman of Sephardic Jewish heritage who had worked among Russian Jewish refugees in New York, was commissioned to write the poem in 1883 as part of an arts event to raise funds for a pedestal, on which Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi's statue (a gift from France to America) would be raised. The statue went up in 1886, but the poem wasn't inscribed on it until 1903, twenty years after Lazarus's death. Lazarus called the statue “Mother of Exiles,” and called the poem “The New Colossus.”
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
I'm a sucker for renovation shows - proper ones, I mean, not silly ones fixated on moronic conflict and ludicrous speed. I like the ones about real families creating over periods of months and years spaces they will actually live in. So I'm a fan of Grand Designs, and I've enjoyed the first two episodes of Caroline Quentin's Restoration Home, though it does resemble some of the more irritating British reality shows in being a tad repetitive and inclined to drama. It compensates amply with its attention to history and architecture, and its slightly earnest message about the salvation of Britain's heritage.
I think it's the element of salvation that gives the best renovation shows their zest. There's something richly satisfying about watching someone bring order, beauty and memory out of loss and disrepair; about watching the miraculous reversal of natural decay, and the recovery of something once entombed. It's more impressive than the ex nihilo creations of new build, and often more compelling because of its excavation of human stories and attachments. In the process, some figments of the past are restored to use, while others are laid more decorously to rest. In both, the past inhabits the present as the human family inhabits present and past at once.
Behind these felicities is, I think, the deeper recognition of a divine preference for salvage. The final phase of creation is not destruction but re-creation. In nature as in supernature, death follows birth, but rebirth follows death, and morning follows evening. It's the divine pleasure to re-purpose, to retrieve treasures from dust, to seek and save the lost.