When author Ann Everett scheduled Augustine Sam for her Food, Fiction, and Foolishness feature, she didn’t know he’d submit a spaghetti recipe, which she said was fancier than the one she posted weeks earlier. To help her American fans understand the recipe, she offered a link to the gourmet sleuth website for conversion to U.S. measurements and said she loved that the author used a photo of himself in the foolishness section. Oh, she loved the funny quote too!
Pecorino - about 50g (Italian sheep’s milk cheese)
Preparation:
1) Cook the spaghetti in boiling water with little salt. The pasta should not be too soft or overdone, it should, instead, be cooked to be firm to the bite (“al dente” in Italian).
2) In the meantime, cut the bacon or pork cheek into cubes, letting it dissolve in a pan with little oil.
3) When the bacon or cheek lard fat partially melts, add a little water and cook over moderate heat for about ten minutes.
4) Beat the egg yolks in a salad bowl, as if to make an omelet, add the Pecorino cheese and a pinch of black pepper.
5) Mix the ingredients: Pour the bacon or cheek lard over the spaghetti cooked “al dente”, and add the beaten egg yolks prepared with the cheese, mixing them until they are firm, then serve your Spaghetti alla Carbonara hot.
FICTION
The saga of a compelling backward journey through a broken mind
Paige Lyman, an accomplished psychiatrist, is on the verge of madness but she doesn’t know it yet. The madness begins when she gets it into her head to write her memoirs. As her brilliant mind assembles bits and pieces of her life for the book, ugly skeletons, long forgotten in the closet, begin to rear their heads.
It had all begun with a simple act of love. And love, for her, was a blond-haired Irish boy named Bill, so when Bill abandoned her for priesthood the world around her collapsed. Now seized by a different passion—vengeance—she seeks her proverbial pound of flesh in the beds of various priests.
But that’s before she meets Stern W. And now, she’s transformed from a psychiatrist to a patient, and saddled with dark memories she must decipher in order to be free…
FOOLISHNESS
Funny Book quote:
“Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” - P.J. O’Rourke
Washington Irving says “Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune, but great minds rise above them.”
Put differently, “The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.” - Eric Hoffer
And as John Ruskin puts it, “The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it?”
In relation to creative endeavors according to Aristotle, it must be remembered that “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
“The hardest part of writing is not the conception of a story but the presentation of the story to readers. While it isn’t effortless to conceive an idea—though writers are generally blessed with a fertile imagination, which, in a way, is what distinguishes a creative mind from a non-creative one—presenting a story to readers in a way that makes sense to them as it does in your head, in terms of characterization, style, and plot is not easy at all.”
“Illusion,” Voltaire says, “is the first of all pleasures.” But that’s not all. “It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.”
Herbert Read, of course, agrees with that. “The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol,” he says.
“To send light into the darkness of men’s heart - such is the duty of the artist,” Robert Schumann adds.
Henri Matisse acknowledges, however, that “Creativity takes courage.”
“If you try, you risk failure. If you don’t, you ensure it,” chimes in an anonymous voice.
Elizabeth Bowen explains that it’s important because “Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.”
“The purpose of a writer,” after all, “is to keep civilization from destroying itself,” says Albert Camus.
Which might explain why Buddha says that “Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.”
But what about books? Can reading books, by any chance, be considered living wisely? Cassandra Clare seems to have a unique take on books.“One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”
And sometimes, so do critics. But...
“You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one,” John Wooden warns.
“The pleasure of criticizing takes away from us the pleasure of being moved by some very fine things.” - Jean de La Bruyère.
Remember the words of Friedrich Nietzsche: “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
Also, remember...
“Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” - Aristotle.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
“A great artist is always before his time or behind it.”
