Freckles & Doubt (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
freckles_and_doubt) wrote2007-07-12 09:51 am
freckles_and_doubt) wrote2007-07-12 09:51 am
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wok!
I have a new wok. This makes me happy, but confused: why should it be that stir-fry cooked in a wok, although containing precisely the same ingredients I always use, tastes much better than stir-fry cooked in any other form of pan? (And by "much better", of course I mean "closer to the Platonic ideal that is stir-fry cooked by stv.")
(Somewhere in the mists of time is an extended joke that was wandering around a select portion of my social circle, entailing a punchline about happy herds of wok, grazing the grass. I am totally unable to remember either the origin or the context, although I associate it vaguely with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bumpycat.)
Woks aside, yesterday I read Iain Banks's Dead Air, in an enormous extended gollup while not actually moving from the couch. (a) It's, as usual, very good, and (b) my butt hurts. The book has a fascinating protagonist: a flawed, hyperactive, exhibitionist and occasionally weak and nasty person who's also an idealist of extreme political integrity. The writing style, which is about two thirds fragmented dialogue, works brilliantly to convey the multiplicity and frequent fast-moving confusion of the contemporary world. There was also pleasing serendipity in reading it on the same day as Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which if you squint a bit turns out to have a curiously similar theme. Autism is not only a perfectly logical development in response to a world whose complexities are so extreme as to defy anything but the most superficial and momentary assimilation, it's a perfect metaphor for such a world.
(Somewhere in the mists of time is an extended joke that was wandering around a select portion of my social circle, entailing a punchline about happy herds of wok, grazing the grass. I am totally unable to remember either the origin or the context, although I associate it vaguely with
bumpycat.)Woks aside, yesterday I read Iain Banks's Dead Air, in an enormous extended gollup while not actually moving from the couch. (a) It's, as usual, very good, and (b) my butt hurts. The book has a fascinating protagonist: a flawed, hyperactive, exhibitionist and occasionally weak and nasty person who's also an idealist of extreme political integrity. The writing style, which is about two thirds fragmented dialogue, works brilliantly to convey the multiplicity and frequent fast-moving confusion of the contemporary world. There was also pleasing serendipity in reading it on the same day as Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which if you squint a bit turns out to have a curiously similar theme. Autism is not only a perfectly logical development in response to a world whose complexities are so extreme as to defy anything but the most superficial and momentary assimilation, it's a perfect metaphor for such a world.