I found José N. Iturriaga de la Fuente‘s Las Cocinas de Mexico I and II online six or seven years ago and started translating parts, both as an exercise and because they are fascinating. I’m still working on them now and then. (I have a idea for a book that includes parts of the translations in combination with stories and recipes from people who live here now.) Besides the tender detail of the documentation, I love how the personality of the author emerges in the hastily described but painstakingly accurate text. There’s an elocutionary quality to the writing that I find endearing. He has an almost imperious voice that, just as it seems about to veer into pedantry, meanders instead off on a whimsical aside; for example, mocking the delicate souls who refuse to pronounce culantro because it contains the word culo (ass), or inserting some snide aside at the expense of anyone too classy to eat good old fashioned street food. He is a brilliant generalist with a background in economics and history, who was appointed to the Mexican National Council of Culture and Arts in the nineties. There he organized a gigantic effort to discover and document traditional Mexican cuisine, from street food to long lost texts and secret family recipes. He rallied an astonishingly large research staff to whom he emphasized quantity and completion over fine tuning and perfection. I have a note in an old journal (the only direct quote from an excellent biographical article by Corby Kummer, which doesn’t seem to be online any longer) that reads,

“The worst enemy of good things,” Iturriaga kept telling Marcelli and his other collaborators, “is perfect things.”

This is from the man responsible for some fifty four volumes of gastronomy documentation, including the Colección de Recetarios Antiguos. (I wonder if he teaches at the University of Gastronomic Sciences?) I cannot hear this message too many times. Artificial deadlines and their papery definition of completion are the best way to stay practiced and the surest way to inch in the direction to the perfect and complete… And speaking of writing online, a very funny tableau at the Freakonomics blog at the Times. Note the list of pointless, meandering, or downright inflammatory comments with sly and unhyperlinked links!-links!-links! beneath the entry on how bloggers are rewarded for reciprocity within their networks. (Read: only bloggers read blogs, which I suppose it more true in some circles than others.)

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Strange Maps, an hugely energetic collection of maps with notes, research, and all sorts of speculation. (via Neil Wehrle. Hi Neil!)

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From Hawthorne’s American Notebooks:

Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one’s genius.

What were the contents of the burden of Christian in the “Pilgrim’s Progress”? He must have been taken for a pedler travelling with his pack.

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An article on designing for MS Surface which barely gets at the interesting part, i.e. multi-user interactions, and all the social and athletic possibilities there. The table part with the coffee cups and place settings and high chair and chandelier is just silly. It must have something to do with this dishonorable instinct many humans have to turn anything into a lamp or stick a browser on the front of the fridge. It doesn’t do, fellas.

There were apparently four arrests during Public Ad Campaign‘s New York Street Advertising Takeover. More images at cronicasbarbaras.com (via Wooster Collective), as well as a video and lots of pics on Flickr. No more crazy outdoor shenanigans for me. I can just see myself sitting in central booking for forty hours with a baby on my back.

Photographer Sandy Carson’s images of Galveston in God’s Love on This Island 1 and 2. I lived in Galveston eighteen years ago, near the cluster of cemeteries at 61St toward the seawall. Perhaps because I was a high school student intent on rocketing out of there at the first possible opportunity, the entire city and it’s venerable history always felt oddly temporary to me, like a stage set. I used to give tours of the Bishop’s Palace and think, as I heard myself talking about Tiffany lamps and Victorian craft, this is not my life, I’ll barely remember this place some day.

Here’s the thing: if I read everything the instant it comes out, I end up having to slog through a lot of crap. If I wait awhile, some of the mediocre stuff flakes off the top of my reading list and I don’t have to waste the time or money or shelf space on it, and meanwhile there’s no dearth of classics and classics and noire to read and reread. And when I get done with Balzac and Hawthorne, there’s my reading list, all shiny and exfoliated and all I have to do is pick it up and say now I will read The Savage Detectives or something. The only problem is that I theoretically could have been reading The Savage Detectives a couple of years ago when it came out in English and that kills me.⁰¹ (V. just began to read it in Spanish, but there is no way I am doing more than flipping through. If the translation is any indication, and I think it is, that thing is co-lo-qui-al. The translation is genius as well, by the way. Natasha Wimmer has a really sensitive feeling for when to translate and when to render things directly. I get frustrated when translators make everything so idiomatic that the specificity of the setting is lost.) Does it kill me dead enough to make me want to read all sorts of inoffensive volumes with bees and gerunds in the titles? Well, no. However I admit that by being a couple of years behind, I will inevitably die without reading something wonderful that was published right under my nose.

And another thing: The Savage Detectives made me want to make poetry and it didn’t help me one bit with my resolution to use parenthesis only outside of sentences (oh well). Roberto Bolaño could parenthesize! Every time I saw another parenthesis coming, I would get excited, as if the parentheses contained all the chewiest parts.

An interview with Francis Alys, who is responsible for moving a mountain. But not entirely by faith.

From the introduction to Ordinary Mysteries, the Common Journals of Nathaniel and Sofia Hawthorne:

…the relation between allegory and mundane realism in Hawthorne undergoes a change in the notebooks that he and Sophia produced collaboratively. There, for the first time, the allegorical and the mundane occupy the same space, revealing themselves to be continuous with one another in the manner of a Mobius strip… the common journals inaugurate a form of self-allegorization that is evidently a function of their address to someone other than the author.

This actually includes images of the original notebook with it’s tidy illegible lines of script beside the transcription. Unfortunately the scroll bar is missing on the mobile interface which renders the rest of it pretty much useless. It’s not so pleasant to sit in front of the computer to read. Do you hear me, Google Books? I am bothered.

Wired has a story in which AI is used to place the organization of the Indus Script squarely within the range of spoken language while IBM announces a sort of a Deep Blue for playing Jeopardy. The best thing about that article is the seven meanings of I never said she stole my money. That kept my household busy for hours and got me poking through a curious article on Artificial Intelligence and Metaphors of Mind.

I am enjoying The Manual of Detection. It has an calm, atmospheric quality that I think may make it a candidate for the bedtime/detection reread pile, though I wish I hadn’t read somewhere that it feels a little like Paul Auster on a good day. It’s full of twins, doppels, and clocks, and I half imagine I’m missing a lot of referential play as I read at a normal, sleepy pace. I’m only half way through. Will report back.

Russell Davies’ notes on Notes From Walnut Tree Farm (via Magical Nihilism) and then from there on to Daytum, which is not quite as silly as it is spelled. The best entries are for things like Hates, Guilts, and Thankfulnessess. This seems like a sort of brilliant way to plow through a moment of ennui, to document oneself inside out until the documentation begins to sketch the outline of some other person whom you can step outside of and ta-da! suddenly find yourself someone/somewhere else. I’m sure someone is hard at work cataloguing the range of species of procrastination.

Okay, I think you’re right. Who knows where to start on Etsy, since browsing is a nightmare. Here are some pretty, girly things: a creamy handbag, a simple grey dress, a woven wool table runner, and a set of envelopes made from an atlas. Also, I once bought my tiny nephew a nice felt mustache which proved popular.

Cody Trepte’s binary cross-stitch: Alan Turing once knit himself a pair of gloves.

And a little more Merce Cunningham, this time in a very beautiful collaboration with artist Daniel Arsham, who gouged away layers of the set. You can see the curls of scrap on the floor behind the dancers.