The centre will not hold

William Butler Yeats, in 1932

This might be a long walk but please, walk with me.

Lately, everything’s been a bit much, hasn't it? Just everything. The growing environmental crisis leading to devastating wildfires, floods, landslides and droughts which the oil and gas sector and their minions in government who depend on their economic clout, choose to ignore. The ongoing attacks on Ukraine by Russia. The devastating, disproportionate and disgusting onslaught of Gaza by a west-backed non-democratic Israeli government which we accept because doing something might lead to something worse (though how that could be is beyond me). Continual economic strife caused by an American administration too daft to know what it is doing. That same administration’s quick step into trying to rid the US of all migrants and refugees through autocratic means using questionable arrests and deportations. The same administration is trying to rewrite several decades of advancement of women’s rights and LCBTQ+ acceptance. The same administration’s attempt to ban books and artistic expression which they deem anti-American. Lastly, I suppose, because to give any more examples would be overkill, is the bald-faced corruption of that same administration using their government platform to enrich themselves and their friends (either through cryptocurrency schemes or accepting large gifts from foreign governments). We don’t actually have to look that far. The Ford government in Ontario has made it their policy to dole out money to their friends and patrons who might benefit from any of their unnecessary schemes under the guise of infrastructure. I will also note that none of these governments causing such havoc are lefties. They are hard-right conservatives (from the MAGAites, to Putin, to Netanyahu). They are only growing in number from being elected in Italy, Hungary, and Poland to rising in the polls in Germany and France. Against their namesake, they aren’t conserving anything, especially not norms, which they are dismantling with glee.

It’s hard to put into words or even to know how to react. Then I heard this from Ezra Klein’s podcast:

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Time After Time

Patek Philippe: Begin your own tradition, price on request.

In the 19th century, an entomologist discovered that the oak beams of Oxford's New College dining hall were infested with beetles. As the dining hall was founded in 1329 there were concerns that such large beams, up to 45 feet in length, were no longer able to be sourced, until a junior fellow suggested consulting the college forester. The forester confirmed that Oxford did, in fact, own property with trees that included some oaks planted 400 years before. Though it's apocryphal that these trees were planted for this very purpose, it was common that 14th-century foresters planted oaks, hazels and ash for construction purposes, and would harvest the hazel and ash about every 25 years while the oaks were allowed to continue growing. The presence of these trees shows the long-term thinking we used to have, thinking that today only survives in the minds of commuters left waiting for the Eglington Crosstown LRT to open.

Somewhat similarly, consider the luxury watch brand Patek Philippe and their advertising campaign, "You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation." Often in their ads, an adult is seen engaging with a child in some meaningful activity like playing chess, solving a puzzle or laughing in a carefree manner. Isn't life grand? What they are trying to sell you is a watch worth more than most cars with the idea that this device will outlive you and you can pass it along to the next generation. Again, someone is out there thinking of the world continuing beyond their lifetime.

Now picture keeping a smartphone or a smartwatch for 50 years and passing it down to some poor kid.

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St. Sammy Peeps 

Samuel Pepys, Portrait by John Hayls, 1666

At this year’s TCAF (the Toronto Comic Arts Festival), I saw a talk given by Rosena Fung about her book “Age 16”, which is a work of fiction that borrows from her own life. It wasn’t an autobiography or memoir but clearly her personal experiences helped imbue her characters with a certain truth. In talking about her work she mentioned how she created a lot of “self documentation”.

Of course, I could empathize. For over twenty years, I’ve maintained a blog. For 17 years I’ve taken entries from that blog and published an annual compendium. Since I’ve owned a smartphone I have taken random photos that I have kept that not only record an image, but the exact time, date and usually a geographic location (my iCloud album goes back 22 years). For the last 9 years I’ve kept sketch books, which started as a daily way to keep up my sketching and use up empty sketchbooks. I now have 14 of them. Since 2010, I’ve kept my work notebooks (this is surely something that I could give up). I have letters and other sketchbooks that go back to the 1990s. After maintaining a blog for over twenty years and a comic book journal for almost ten, my remarkably dull and inoffensive journaling is more like a public "notes to self" than a really honest and insightful diary. I've also started logging my workouts, keeping track of what I eat, allowing Google Maps know my location and I've started using Apple's Journal app (and may occasionally use the Kennedy app which does pretty much the same thing). While none of these are revealing any deeply held secrets or worrying psychosis, they certainly are a record of self-documentation, perhaps of the dullest kind.

I’ve since learned from David Owen’s New Yorker piece, How To Live Forever, that this self-recording is known as solipsism. “Solipsism (from solus 'alone', and ipse 'self') is the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist. As a position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.”
- Wikipedia

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Reading Lists 

This farmer isn't outstanding in his field, he's sitting and reading.

Why do we love lists? Apple recently listed the "best 100 Albums" and while I didn't expect many of my personal favourites to appear, it was shocking that the only two albums from the Beatles were. Revolver (sure, why not?) and Abbey Road. Excuse me whilst I take a swig of water to spit-take at my computer screen. There, done. Abbey Road isn't even one of the Beatles' top albums, never mind being on an all time top album list. Where is the White Album, or Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band? I'm not even that big of a Beatles fan but come on! The outrage!

These lists are ephemeral, incomplete and wrong, which is sort of the point. Someone compiles them to start an argument, that hopefully leads to a conversation. Though, I think it's fair to say, "conversations" on the Internet ended sometime in 2006 several hours after the launch of Twitter. Also, art as competition is always a waste of time - I present the Eurovision Song Contest thingy or American Idol to the jury as examples. These lists are mostly arbitrary and subjective. Yet, what these lists do is give you some barometer between your own tastes and some establishment's assessment. They are also a great way to give you some recommendations for what you might want to listen to, view or read next.

While giving a once over to the Guardian's list of top 100 books, I couldn't help but count the ones I've read. Out of 100, I'd read 15. That's 15% (I did the math so you don't have to). I generally consider myself "well-read" but I'm not sure 15% would qualify me for that. On a list of graphic novel recommendations also from the Guardian (about 25 mentioned), I'd read over half, but if I'm being honest, it was a bit of a crap list that even the author acknowledged as they were trying to give readers a very wide and introductory selection to chose from. I think at work or in a professional setting, we'd call this "Subject Matter Expertise Fatigue" or SMEF because creating acronyms is most of the job - when you know a subject well enough that you basically have a well-informed opinion about everybody else's opinion. On this one subject, I could easily list 100 or more, high quality and influential, graphic novels just from North America or English language sources. It would be impossible to limit yourself to 100, if you listed Japanese, French or Belgian comics too. If I asked some friends to chime in, I'd have another 100. That wouldn't even include fringe, alternative, self-published or hard to find comics. The fact there wasn't a single Moebius… OK, OK, I'm not going to go there. That is a topic for another time.
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The Thirty Year Read 

The false thumb of a pandas is actually a wrist bone. Image via PNAS.org

I can’t recall the exact date or year but it was probably 1986, the year that my brother Chris and I were both attending Memorial University. That was actually a very unique year. For at least one semester, three of four Rogers brothers were all attending the same scholastic institution. I was doing what was then known as General Studies, Chris was completing a Bachelors of Science and Dave was studying Commerce. Not since Chris, Mike and Dave had all been in grade school at St. George’s in a one room school house, (yes, such a thing existed even in my lifetime) had three of us been studying in one place. Unfortunately, as university schedules can range from 8:30 AM to 8:30 PM lectures, and Chris was busy with unscheduled lab work, this situation led to a complicated and varied commute. Most mornings we went in together in one car, but because university days could go longer than planned or required extracirricualr group study sessions et cetera, our return home was more mixed. None of us, that I recall, were what you would call “Morning People” so the morning commute was usually more mute than communicative. Yet the ride home could be far more animated. As science was a common topic for Chris and myself the conversations ranged from the offshore fishery to the statistical likelihood of contracting an illness from a university toilet and how that likelihood increased with proximity to the student centre. At some point I complained that I probably wouldn’t get much from reading Darwin without any real background in biology (somehow I managed to skip it in high school) but Chris suggested Stephen J. Gould as an alternative.
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Words I've Learned Recently 

Apricate

To bask in the sun
Blunderbuss
A short, muzzle-loading shoulder weapon, usually a flintlock, with a wide smooth bore flared at the muzzle to a maximum width of about 4 inches (10 centimetres).

Ardency

adj. 1. Expressing or characterized by warmth of feeling; passionate: an ardent lover. 2. Displaying or characterized by strong enthusiasm or devotion; fervent: "an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art".

Begum

A Muslim woman of high rank.
(Begum) the title of a married Muslim woman, equivalent to Mrs.

Faffing

Spending time in ineffectual activity: we can’t faff around forever. Noun: an unusual amount of ineffectual activity: There was the usual faff getting back onboard the plane.

Fen

A low and marshy or frequently flooded area of land: a native species of fens and damp meadows

Naphtha

A flammable oil containing various hydrocarbons, obtained by the dry distillation of organic substances such as coal, shale, or petroleum.

Quiddities

The inherent nature or essence of someone or something; a distinctive feature, peculiarities: his quirks and quiddities.

Thrum

A continuous rhythmic humming sound: the steady thrum of rain on the windows.

Tor

A hill or rocky peak

Zarf

a holder, usually of ornamental metal, for a coffee cup without a handle.

It's About the Journey (or Journal) 

"Gramps" Memory Books

A few years ago, after moving into my new place I discovered a box of sketchbooks. Empty sketchbooks. I realized I'd moved with them at least twice. They were roughly A5 format, some were stitch bound, others were wire coil bound, some were 80 pages, some were almost 200 pages but all of them were blank, open white pages. I determined I should either use them or give them away. Giving away some were easy, but I couldn't give up others and I didn't know why. I decided I would have to start using them. For whatever reason it made natural sense to use them as they were intended, as journals. It seemed just as natural to use the comic book format - either four boxes or six or more to simply fill in what was going on during any given day. Plus, I felt I wanted to teach myself how to tell stories in that format. When I began I almost obsessively drew everyday. At some point that seemed too much and there was about a four month gap when I only drew three or four times. Since then I usually do two or three a week and they capture the most ridiculously mundane details of my life. Dentist visits, biking in the rain, baking bread, going for a run, or reading on the couch. I'm not sure you'd really learn anything about me from them other than I have terrible penmanship and the quality of the drawing has remained woefully poor, but I will say, occasionally, a page of wordless images are some of the best things I've ever done.

Seeing this short film on The Atlantic and hearing the narrator's father talk about his father's journals and how sometimes he would just grab a journal from the bookshelf and relive moments from the past resonated with me. I do the same thing even though I only have been doing it since 2015 and only have eight sketchbooks. Still, I can recall the week around Mom's heart surgery, or a summer trip or a weekend when something odd happened.

Curiously verbose. Absurdly quotidian.

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A post shared by Peter Rogers (@peterrogersesq) on Apr 8, 2019 at 11:01am PDT

Page from one of my own journals

Seen in… January 

Harold Lloyd doing what he does best - creating an iconic movie moment. Image via The Movie DB.

Britain's darkest hour may have been in the spring of 1940 but for Canadians it is deep in the heart of winter. Winter can be a wonderful and magical time of year – if you are between the ages of five to ten years old. Unfortunately the rest of us have to shovel and plow our way to work and back. You wake in the bleak darkness and arrive at your place of work with what can be best described as a brightening greyness. In Toronto, winter is a time when the sky is an even and unbreakable grey. It's time to go home when you glance at the window only to see your own face staring back from the blackened glass. You wake and go home in the same unforgiving dark. It's a surprise I left the house at all, but between volunteer engagements, meetings and advocacy bike rides I did manage to get to the theatre and see a few films at home.


Gary Oldman poisoning himself.Image via The Movie DB.

Darkest Hour

This film is about the dark days of May 1940 when Nazi forces had advanced so quickly through Europe they simply shocked their foes and the majority of Britain’s army were trapped on a beach in France without any way out. Within the British government Winston Churchill had just been appointed prime minister and was being pressured to negotiate with Hitler via Italy. Churchill sees no way of winning as he rightly argues you can’t “negotiate with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.” When the near miraculous evacuation of Dunkirk offers a spark of hope Churchill delivers his famously rousing speech in the House of Commons: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender” which led one parliamentarian to quip that Churchill had weaponized the English language. The speech led to support of Churchill and a turning point that led to the Battle of Britain. The thing about this film is, that not for one second do you think, “Wow Gary Oldman is really a lot like Winston Churchill”. You simply forget there is a Gary Oldman at all as he so completely inhabits the makeup and mannerisms of someone so iconic and renders him full of doubts, resolve and humanity. If this performance doesn’t win Oldman the Academy Award then nothing will. The film is surprisingly gripping despite being a war movie set almost entirely in smoky rooms of government offices and war rooms. Having seen Christopher Nolan’s taut rendition of the Dunkirk evacuation only heightened the urgency playing out behind large dark oak doors of the British establishment.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency Season 2

Despite bingeing through this series like a starving man at an all you can eat Mandarin buffet, it really wasn’t as profoundly quirky or holistic as season one. In a strange way it seemed almost too fantastical. I think this series works best when Dirk and the gang fall into the weird little coincidences that are too weird to be just a coincidence but at the same time might just be the only way to explain what’s going on.

I don’t feel at home in this world anymore

I watched this Netflix original about a woman who takes vigilante justice to the next level after her home was robbed, mostly because Elijah Wood appeared to be playing the same lost loner as he plays in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. He was so similar that I briefly thought this movie was a cross-over with the other show, also a Netflix original. Melanie Lynskey is Ruth who reaches a type of tepid simmer and tired of being knocked about by life sets out to take back a single iota of control. Her neighbour, Tony, played by Wood is so purposeless that he jumps at the opportunity to do anything at all. What seems at first to be perhaps a quirky mystery or buddy movie morphs into something less funny and more dangerous which is what makes the movie interesting. Beneath the humour is a menace and yet the fact that the people who are so menacing are also so pedestrian is what makes it all the more creepy. So this movie is quirky, funny and creepy… if that helps at all.
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The Hibernator's Handbook 

This is exactly the kind of thing I want to avoid

2017 didn’t end well for me. In fact, I began the holiday season looking up from my belly and ended the year looking down at it. Less than a week before Christmas, I was riding hard, standing on the pedals, when one of my bike’s crank arms gave way beneath me. Luckily, my ribs broke my fall. I spent the entirety of Christmas trying not to move, but now more than anything I have to try to move which is a tricky business when I’ve decided under no circumstances should I go outside.

Having no bike to ride as transport and with the temperatures well in the crispy -20 to -30s I began to feel a hibernation coming on. If bears and other beasties can do it, why can’t I? I’m old enough to not be drawn out by any kind “cold shaming” that accuses you of not being Canadian if you can’t face the cold. I have nothing to prove. I recently rode a bike 30 minutes across town in -23°C just to go skating for another 30 minutes then ride another 30 minutes back again. Did I mention the temperature? Did I mention the blistering wind as violent as any shark attack? Did I mention the difficulty tying my skates after all my fingers had frozen then broken off? I ride throughout the winter devising stratagems and tactics such as doubling of socks and gloves while employing a variety of balaclavas, scarves and hats in such a combination that not even I know where my face begins or ends. No, I have nothing to prove and it now seems appropriate to withdraw from the world and enter a prolonged state of torpor.
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Creativity Killjoy 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge probably thinking about opium, image via The Times

Kubla Khan
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! … [knock on door]

that deep romantic… [knock on door, harder now]

chasm that flowed, crap, no… Chasm which [more knocking on door]

Oh for FU… “HANG ON!”

There is a story, most likely apocryphal, that Samuel Coleridge had many more stanzas of his famous poem in mind but was disturbed from his reverie by an insurance salesman knocking on the door. It’s probably more likely that Coleridge’s opium high dissipated, thus ending a soaring stanza-generating drug fuelled high. Downer, man.
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The 2016 Absurdly Quotidian Omnibus 

It's been sent to the printers. The first batch is in the post. At 281 pages, the tenth annual Omnibus (previously The Almanac of General Knowledge) may be one of the longest ever. Here is a preview: warts, grammatical errors, mistypings and misgivings for all to see.

Most years, this tome of timely nothings, takes a leisurely two weeks to assemble (three weekends, with the two weeks in-between). Each time I do it feels more like the end. For some reason I always finish with the Film section and usually have the TV on in the background (which may explain the typos) and a bowl of roasted chestnuts, or some chocolate or a peeled clementine or two beside me. It feels like closing up a shop for the season. A way of revisiting the year and remembering all that has happened. It was a hell of a year and it's not done yet – but I think we can all agree, we're all done with it.

No promises but I may make this available as either a downloadable PDF or ePub in the near future. If I do, I'll make a real effort to fix all the weird typos and grammatical errors that are driving me nuts!

Landscapes and Escapes 

New Bedford Harbour, Rockwell Kent. Plattsburgh State Art Museum

This year, for the first time in many years, I made a resolution. I set a goal for myself to read more. For years, I made this resolution with little or no effect. This year however, I set a reasonable goal. Twelve books. A book a month. This, in all honesty is about how long it takes me to read a book. To have something to read over the Christmas break, I queued up a couple of books I’d been meaning to read for ages. The Big Why by Michael Winter and The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. I didn’t really even know the title of Michael Winter’s book, I just knew someone had written a fictionalized account of the American artist, Rockwell Kent, and the year or so he lived in Newfoundland (in high school I was fascinated by Kent’s woodcuts and only later discovered he had lived in Newfoundland briefly). I’d read an excerpt of The Art of Travel in a magazine and it piqued my interest, especially as I was confounded by my own desire to travel mixed with my complete laziness to do so. Another book on my longtime list of things I should get to was the story of Longitude about how the development of accurate time keeping lead to more accurate mapping of the seas.

I had no idea how connected thematically these books would be. Read more »

Absurdly Quotidian 

“Making the ephemeral ephemera,”

This year's almanac is at the printers as I write this and only days away from shipping, but I thought I'd post a preview here. One thing you may notice is the re-christening of the Almanac of General Knowledge as the Absurdly Quotidian Omnibus. To be accurate the full title is Roget's Almanac of General Knowledge Presents the 2013 Absurdly Quotidian Omnibus, if you're not into the whole brevity thing. Or the 'bus for short, if, you know, you are into the brevity thing. Why the change? Boredom I suppose, but also it's a truer reflection of what the book is. An omnibus. A collection of previously published works, both by me and from the public domain — if you describe the Internet as a domain in the public and if you consider “copy/paste” part of fair use copyright laws (laws, schmaws… am I right?)

You can download a PDF of the 'bus from Issuu.com but there is a limit of only 25 downloads available so act now! Okay, the directive that you should act now may in fact be hyperbole. For those so inclined, I do intend to make an ePub version available once I have the time. So follow me on Twitter @rowdyman for further announcements. I'm kidding of course. I know exactly 3, maybe 4 people out of 6.5 billion who may actually want a digital version and even then they are just being polite.

It's funny I should bother doing that because it's so backward. I mean, this Web site is the digital version of the Omnibus. The whole idea of making a book in the first place was to explore the idea of the printed Web. Well, the real reason behind the Almanac was one year I noticed mother had left me out of the Christmas newsletter and this is my revenge. I like the idea of curating pieces of writing and projects that are born in the digital ether of the Internet and turning them into something so three dimensional as a book. Making the ephemeral ephemera, you might say. What once was only server space shall now be shelf space, and for that I truly am sorry.

Closed Circuit 

Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton, image via leanneshapton.com

What's that thing our brain does instinctively, when we obsessively seek to identify patterns? Thinking? Is that it? Associative intelligence? "…the ability to think in non-sequential associations – similarities, differences, resonances, meanings, relationships, etc. –and to create (and appreciate) totally new patterns and meanings out of old ones." Whatever it is, it haunts me.

Last night I had a moment when all these coincidences coalesced around a single theme: swimming.
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Roget's Almanac, 2011 Edition 

Open publication - Free publishing - More almanac

At 231 pages this year's almanac is the thickest ever. Despite the occasional typo or formatting error I was genuinely surprised to get the thing finished and printed in time for the holidays. For those of you less inclined to print and more inclined to read digital editions, you can read it here or download the PDF version from here.

I hope you find something of interest.

Footnotes from Innis Hall

image via Comic Book Resources

Joe Sacco spoke at length to an audience of over 200 at Innis Hall on U of T's campus Thursday night as part of a speaking series on the arts. His journalistic comic books focus on conflicts in places such as Gaza and Sarajevo. They tell of the impact of war on regular civilians. He brings an evocative eye to both the horrible conditions and everyday life of refugee camps such as Rafah. You hear a term like refugee camp and you're picturing some wind swept collection of tents, not a muddy city of thousands that's been there for 60 years. It's this unique blend of journalistic storytelling and comic book arts that set Sacco apart. While others have created autobiographical works of a more personal nature no one else really reports the way Sacco does.¹ Especially when you see his work together you can really see the importance of it.

It was a pleasure to hear him talk about how he works with reference photographs, recorded interviews and first hand experience. After his talk he took a lot of questions and it's a little unexpected just how congenial a guy Sacco is. I mean he takes in a lot of dire stories in some awful settings and situations. He did admit that his latest book about Gaza which took about 7 years to create was probably the last one he'll do about Palestine or Israel for awhile. Fair enough.

FN1: I sort of forgot that probably the only other person creating this kind of reportage comic is Guy Delisle, a Quebec cartoonist and animator who has written about his travels to Pyongyang, North Korea and Burma (aka Myanmar). Again, though, you'd probably categorize Delisle's work as a travelogue or autobiographical comic essay rather than journalistic like Sacco's. They probably would prefer not to be compared to each other anyway with each artist's work standing on its own merits. You can see a sample of from Pyongyang below.

Wilson 

Daniel Clowes' latest book, Wilson. Image via Drawn and Quarterly

I got this book for my birthday but just read it recently. I wouldn't call it classic Clowes as surprisingly it's his first complete "graphic novel", but more of an expansion of his Ouevre that he's been exploring for years. Despite his other books being compilations of individually printed comics, those books seemed to have a more clear narrative than this one which feels more like a serial comic that's been compiled. I assume that was in part due to the formal story structure Clowes has chosen. What Clowes does with these one-pagers is tell a very complete story with remarkably little. I suppose it's like a great piece of music where the spaces mean as much as the notes. Typical of a Clowes' character, Wilson is a deluded loser but his tale of woe (mostly brought upon himself) is not only sad but incredibly and wickedly funny. Dan Clowes' humour has always been present in his work but I don't know if I had ever laughed out loud as often as I did with this book. Even though there is a repeated form to every page and a formulaic construction of every joke, the last panel was always the dagger that drew laughter (and a little blood). Of course, the writing uses explicit language and humour so it's not exactly a Sunday School Special but fans of Clowes will appreciate both his writing, and seeing his full range and knowledge of the medium as he manipulates comic book clichés and styles in creating Wilson's story.

Yeesh, this post is written like a bad weekend review hacked together to meet a Friday night deadline. My most sincere apologies.

Best of the Best 

Music, Films & Books



It's funny but I sort of forgot about the whole decade ending in January 2009 not 2010 despite reading all of those "Best of the Decade" lists. I guess I just forgot 'em. Those lists that make you tear your hair out until you realize you have precious little hair to be tearing out, mate, so wise up and leave it be.

To remind myself, here are some top lists for the year & decade of music, films and books.
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Who says "print" is dead?*

Is it just me or does Portland remind you of Seattle?

*Okay, technically, "Boing Boing" is a blog not print and just to go all nerd on your Pacific Northwestern ass here is the list of publications (not counting sky writing, sand writing or phone books) mentioned:
The New Yorker
McSweeney's
Mother Jones
Spin
Paste
Dwell
New York Times
New York Observer
Washington Post
Wall Street Journal
Boing Boing
The Portland Mercury
The Seattle Stranger
SF Weekly
The Harvard Lampoon
Mad Magazine
Cathy
Family Circus
Calvin and Hobbes
The Boston Globe
The Washington Blade
The Bible
The Portland Monthly

The only ones I hadn't heard of were Paste and The Washington Blade but my question is, "What, no Village Voice? No Utne Reader? No Harpers? No The Atlantic Monthly? No Lapham's Quarterly?"

Other than that it's practically like a dinner party at my lunch table.

Let Me Eat Bread 

I've been making my own bread for about 3 years. It's pretty much the most basic recipe.

combine:
3 cups flour
½ tsp yeast
1-½ tsp salt
add
1-½ cups of water

After mixing it all up, simply cover the dough and let sit over night. Do not knead.

Preheat the oven then bake in a covered dish for 30 minutes at 510°F.

Almost fool proof. I mix it up sometimes with half white flour, half whole grain (more whole grain than that and the thing never rises), or I'll add flax seeds, sesame seeds or something. One time I added olives and sun-dried tomatoes. Come to think of it, I should try that one again. Inevitably, the bread turns out great.

Yet it is not fluffy, crusty French bread for which there seems to be no shortcut. I tried the shortcuts. They do not work. I tried one this weekend. 20 minutes of kneading and eight hours of rising yielding the same bland results as eight hours of rising and 20 minutes of kneading. Okay, I know when I put it like that it makes no sense whatsoever, but believe me when I say that there was actually a difference there.

I just keep thinking it can't be that hard but the idea that it probably is keeps me from trying — especially when I have a recipe that works great? I mean, really why would I kill myself trying to make fantastic bread when I make pretty damn good bread. I will tell you the best bread is fresh bread. It's not like I'm obsessed with bread and am willing to travel to France to uncover the secrets of French bread.

I leave that kind of obsession to Chad Robertson, co-owner of Tartine Bakery with his wife Elisabeth Prueitt. Watch this "book trailer" for the cook book, Tartine Bread.

Tartine Bread from 4SP Films on Vimeo.

When did this sort of mini-featurette become a "book trailer"? Was the word "advertisement" taken? Whatever. I think it's a good idea. I've always thought stage plays should have "trailers". Live concerts get ads. Sport events get ads. Even monster truck rallies get ads. Why not stage plays and books?