This is going to be another spotty week for postings, in all likelihood, as I am travelling to my child’s graduation from college, a very exciting milestone.
I did in fact work with a cookbook over the weekend, Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby’s 1994 book Big Flavors of the Hot Sun, but it didn’t quite seem to warrant a full-fledged Cookbook Survivor treatment. Not the least because there’s no way the cookbook is going to fail—I didn’t even need to open it up. It’s actually a fairly uneven book, to be honest, but the best recipes in it are so good that I’ve long since memorized them, even internalized them. One of them is a recipe that I think you could literally make anywhere on the planet, just about—it’s boneless chicken breasts or thighs that marinate in pureed canned tomato, a lot of lemon juice, chopped garlic, some fresh herbs (just about anything will do), a fair amount of cinnamon, and some chopped fresh chiles (I think you could substitute tabasco or any hot sauce or paste). Then you grill the chicken.
Another of those recipes is grilled sausages (any kind, any mix) with a relish made from grilled onions, grilled sweet bell peppers, fresh herbs (any, but mint and oregano are especially good), a bit of lemon juice and then most crucially Inner Beauty or some other mustard-based hot sauce (I used Melinda’s Habanero Honey Mustard). That’s it, super-simple, but really great.
The conference I went to last week was considerably more interesting than I expected—that expectation reveals a failure of imagination on my part, I fear.
I found myself reminded that I used to show up more often in situations where I didn’t have a prior interest or any plan to cultivate some familiar bit of cultural or social capital towards a preset goal. A long time ago, I challenged a colleague about the way Swarthmore (and many schools like it) approached general education through distribution requirements. Why was it, I asked, that we expected that students could learn across the disciplines and the divisions while we didn’t expect that of ourselves? In stages, I stopped saying that to others and to some extent I stopping saying it to myself. I got boxed in—or boxed myself in—within a tighter intellectual space even when I was ostensibly charged with thinking about institutions as a whole.
Being at this meeting last week felt a bit like waking up: I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed being in a discussion whose terms and direction weren’t well-worn ruts in the cart-paths of my professional life.
Or my online one. In fact, that’s the real thing that struck me. Once upon a time, way back in the mid to late-1990s, I went into online discussions looking for new perspectives, new ideas, a bigger ‘room’ than I could find in a single institution or in my field of specialization or in my discipline. And back then, that’s what I found, and then I found it again in my first five or six years as a blogger. But once we crossed into platform capitalism, into social media as a place that money was made and attention was cultivated, the conversations became in turns conventionalized and threatening. Or at times, uncanny: rather like the priests in The Exorcist, you feel you are talking to some menacing spirit ascending from an unfamiliar hell, a kind of machine-human chimera.
So what a relief to be in a room with people who are real but also shake up thoughts that had grown stale or expected. It’s a reminder to seek out those kinds of experiences more often!
Real nice, very inspiring. Thanks