Naku!

I have received from Jukka-Pekka Kervinen a pdf file of The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, which I edited with Mark Young. Very happy to see it in its almost-final shape, and excited to see it come into print this Fall! Even better, it's great to see that poets like Lorna Dee Cervantes, Ernesto Priego, Tom Beckett, Crag Hill and many others are continuing to work in the hay(na)ku form.

CHEESEY

With all this hoopla about wine and crusty bread and tomatoes, I just want to put in a good word for cheese. I don't know how the term, "cheesey" got adapted for negative purposes. Because cheese is just fine with me. In fact, my cheese of the day is Sini Fulvi's Cacio de Roma, a goat cheese, which I just ate with two pears off of my lovely pear tree.

You are What You Edit (?)

And the fact is, I have gained some weight. Is it because of all this interest in food? Somebody please send me an exercise book to edit.

Peel a Tomato, Peel a Grape

Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. Tomatoes are sexy. Tomatoes are luscious.

Here are some tomato recipes from my friend, Joan, of the Book Blog.

I have had the privilege of tasting the tomato chutney, and it was excellent. I have tried the tomato bread soup from the Bowl Food recipe (get this wonderful, compact, but perfect cookbook!), but I'm really intrigued by the version presented by Joan. At some point, I will try it.

I am thinking about food a lot, lately, because I will soon be editing a book on Wine and Poetics. That's right, wine and poetics. And a nice loaf of crusty bread!

More Comfort Food

I'm still in the comfort book/food mode. So how about this:

Ginger Pear Oatmeal

Make up a small pot of oatmeal
Using either the 5-minute or the slow
cooking kind of oatmeal, or even
better: Irish steel-cut oats.

BEFORE the oats come to a boil, add

a smallish piece of ginger
handful of raisins or currants
1 fresh pear, cut-up
cinnamon and/or nutmeg
dash of salt

Cook according to instructions
on your box

EAT (preferably with a bit of half & half
rather than milk)

YUM

I got this idea from the ginger-pear muffins
that are sold at the French Bakery around
the corner...The pear came off my tree in
the back yard.

This is Slow Food ...

I was looking for a "Slow Food Philippines," but sadly, found only this:

Slow Death of a Farm Sector, by Walden Bello.

What India is Reading

Because I'm editing a book on Indian philosophy (and a few other things), I was interested in Curry Man's post on The Atlantic's list of the top ten books Indians are reading. "Cheesiness" aside, I'm not sure what to make of such an eclectic list, except that perhaps, Indians are really feeling it lately -- life in the fast lane...!

Comfort Books

When I was a kid, I remember going through a period when, for me, reading was all about food. It was a gustatory experience. And it wasn't some fine novel that started it. I seem to remember that it had to do with two books. The first, I can't remember very well, and can't remember the title -- only that it was a children's historical novel about settlers who arrived in North America on the Mayflower. And it included a brief mention of a menu, which included ham, potatoes, some vegetable, and (I think) some kind of corn gruel. For someone used to Filipino food -- rice and chicken adobo and vinegary fish stews -- the Mayflower menu seemed exotic. The description made me hungry. I asked my mother to cook that meal for me, and I ate it while reading the book.

The second book wasn't even the novel itself, but a Reader's Digest condensation of Rumer Godden's An Episode of Sparrows. I read this condensation of the novel over and over again, during a period when I was sickly and asthmatic, and couldn't sleep until exhausted. It was a strangely comforting book about an orphaned little girl living in London with her aunt and uncle, right after World War II, in an area full of craters blasted out by bombs. Trying to make something beautiful in her blighted neighborhood, the girl creates a "forbidden" garden (forbidden by the local garden committee) out of found plants, stolen dirt, bits of crockery and broken statuary. In the meantime, her uncle starts a French restaurant on a shoestring, and together, he and his niece obsess fondly over his beloved menu, sitting on the stoop while practicing the French words, speculating about the wonderful possibilities for entrees, wines and desserts, and the availability of local ingredients.

I also loved the sexual tension between the girl, Lovejoy, and the raffish teenaged boy who befriends her, and helps her steal things to put into her garden.

Why am I writing this? I don't know. Nostalgia, maybe. Or hunger.

The Eros of Punctuation

I have been spending more and more of my time focusing on the little details of editing, namely all the rules and "styles," (fashion) and precedents, in short all those little things that hold content together with little snap fasteners; all those things that seem to make editors grumpy and testy, and for good reason. Now, Eileen Tabios comes along, mails us all a postcard revealing (well, not quite all, not quite yet) the Secret Lives of Punctuations. This is, of course, just prepping us for the book. Thank you, Eileen. I knew there was more to all this than the Copyeditor's Handbook, or worse, the Chicago Manual of Style. Eileen (also known as the Chatelaine) is, among other things, the writer of Behind the Blue Canvas, a collection of erotic prose poems set in the NYC art scene, and the light behind Meritage Press.

What Difference Does One Letter Make?

Saraswati, or Sarasvati?

Wal-Mart Thought Police

Wal-Mart edits too. Via Dialogic.

Grumpiness & Love

OK, so, some changes around here. Have been peeking at editing blogs and the first thing I notice (mostly on the copyediting sites) a certain...grumpiness. No doubt it's at least partly the effect of the vocation itself. And perhaps also in the nature of people who copyedit. Then after some browsing, I realized that there's an almost archetypal feel to this. Saturnine, curmudgeonly, testy. The copyeditor, as last-bastion of textual defense before proofreading, then -- it's off to the galleys!

The latter remark is prompted by a short story I taught a couple semesters ago, "Caps and Lower Case," by the Filipino writer, Manuel Arguilla. Quite a depressing tale about the miserable life of a proletarian copyeditor, a "galley slave" as his boss called him, for a large Manila Newspaper. The story ends unhappily. Surprisingly, my students seemed to like the story a lot, and upon deeper examination of what I thought a simple proletarian story, we discovered many layers.

Well, the opposite of saturnine, to my mind, is love and sensuality. Love of logos, love of books, love of the texture and turns of language and ideas. That's the other side of copyediting and developmental editing, I think: just the sheer abundance of language, when you dig down into it -- all its eccentricities, its trickiness and subversion, its sexiness.

(Of course there's also its sheer boredom and verbosity, its pompousness, blandness, and opacity, its capacity for delusion...)

testing this thing