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.