Well, can’t argue with a simple French approach: Franey’s book retains its appeal.
It took well under 60 minutes to make, including every part of the prep.
It also accomplished the considerable feat of making me like zucchini, which I normally view as “sure, fine, that’s ok”. I don’t hate it, I don’t love it. There’s often something sort of watery and bland about the texture and mouthfeel of it. This prep was excellent, however.
Makes me think I need to pull the book off the shelves more often, especially on those nights where we really are up against it. I don’t love most of the prepared food/take-out options right here, it’s one aspect of suburban living that has consistently sucked for pretty much the entire lifespan of the suburbs. There’s a half-way decent pizza available now from 320 Market in Swarthmore after thirty years of really horrible pizza all around, but a lot of tired nights I’d still rather assemble something home-cooked, leftovers or otherwise.
If you look for my writing on Notes over the weekend, you’ll see me mostly saying “Oh man, here we go around the same loops once again”. I think Sam Kriss said it better by observing: 1) if you design something that looks like Twitter, you get Twitter’s culture flooding into it. (Sort of like a exorcised spirit looking for a body to possess.) and 2) shut the fuck up everybody and cultivate silence.
I am not the guy who can follow the second suggestion very much, not the least because I really do enjoy saying “I told you so”. Substack would be better off just saying honestly, “We’re not paying to create real editors for this publication platform, Notes or otherwise, because it’s not the Silicon Valley way, it’s not like custom Italian marble kitchens in third homes pay for themselves, after all.” But I would suggest that they are gonna have to tweak the interface to relink Notes conversations to newsletters and raise the force fields up again between some discursive clusters. Writers and readers did not know who all was in this space with them until the Glorious First Notes Weekend of 2023 and now they do. I just hope Substack’s owners aren’t part of the peculiarly stupid self-satisfied strata of American public culture who sincerely think gosh it’s just great when you put everybody of every different imaginable perspective and ideology together in dialogue. We are forty years into knowing quite concretely that no, no, that’s not great.