It turns out it must have been a Bengal tiger, not a tepesquintle (“regarded by some authorities as the tastiest of all rodents”) I ate a few years ago. The restaurant where I et it descries any mention of the incident as foul slander (but I forgive them for their chicharron.) I remember the conversation perfectly. They used to be endangered but suddenly they (whomever they were) learned how to breed them in captivity and the country was frothing with indigent tespesquintle queuing up at soup kitchens to be eaten. I did my duty to rodentkind, ate and did not question the source of this revelation, an amiable bullshitter famous for believing his own yarns. Oops. In the future I will be more cautious of things magically delicious.

~

From The Princess and Curdie (I have been revisiting my childhood reading. Perfect for insomnia.)

…Curdie grew, he grew at this time faster in body than in mind—with the usual consequence, that he was getting rather stupid—one of the chief signs of which was that he believed less and less in things he had never seen. At the same time I do not think he was ever so stupid as to imagine that this was a sign of superior faculty and strength of mind. Still, he was becoming more and more a miner, and less and less a man of the upper world where the wind blew. On his way to and from the mine he took less and less notice of bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds. He was gradually changing into a commonplace man.

~

A note while reading In Defense of Food (very good, though no revelation for anyone who has been pondering food and nutrition science for a while): Maybe we don’t understand the sensual—the literal use of our senses, because we no longer have a food or physical culture much connected to the—empirical, to a tangible reality. (Is that the right way to put it?). This is why things like psychoanalysis, meditation, or fertility seem magical, mystical to us. They are so at odds with our rootless versions of sex and eating, which are decreasingly tethered to our own senses, which in turn are decreasingly tethered to the natural world. So many aspects of our culture encourage us to doubt our senses or outright deceive them with calculated fakes that satisfy enough to make us fat and sleepy as we float farther and farther from the earth; out of visual, auditory, or tactile range.

~

Pink Tentacle highlights some monsters from Yōkai Jiten.

Fishing in the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico.

Overcoming Creative Block (via SwissMiss). I’d add that in my experience, creative energy comes in waves and when it retreats the only thing to do is wait quietly. I find I have to switch back and forth between the stimulating and the soothing to not burn out.

Luke Jerram’s Acoustic Wind Pavilian.

5-d geometries. (See the video animations.)

~

I am back in NYC now and besides feeling more energetic than I have in some time, everything that happened in the last month feels far away as I try to make notes on the farms and tangle of gardens we visited. I am still nibbling the last of the crumbly chocolate we bought in Puerto Viejo, where the best chocolate is cacao paste and grated tapa dulce and nothing else. It doesn’t stay fresh long so there’s no point in saving it for my hope chest or something. I have a bit of that astonishing honey left, a bag of nutmeg, lots of cacao beans, some banana vinegar, achiote paste, a tub of cacao butter, and a lot of different tropical fruit jams. We arrived home around 3am. All three of us were wide awake, enervated but alert. It was twenty degrees outside and the sky was brilliantly clear. New York looked cold and sharply beautiful from the window of the cab.

After I read that article by Alfie Kohn everyone kept telling me about, I decided to read his book, Unconditional Parenting. I remembered his other article in the Times (Magazine?) in which he described how crippling it is for kids to hear that they’re smart, in particular a study comparing test scores of kids told they were either hardworking or smart. Hardworking smacked down smart. That article, like the more recent, brought me vividly back to childhood. Most of what he’s saying sounds so obvious to me and so in line with my experiences as a child, that I was surprised to read a page of uncomprehending comments beneath. I bought the book primarily in an attempt to figure out why what he’s saying (or what I’d read so far) seemed so evident to me. Or maybe that’s not quite right, I felt like it was a way of organizing a bunch of ideas that to me feel almost odd and a little exciting to extract and view as externally as theory. (Also, I don’t think I have some great insight lacking from the vast pool of commenters at the Times and I was puzzled by all the indignation until I realized that most adults don’t seem to remember what it was like to be a child. In addition, V reminds me of the difference between readers and indignant commenters. Oh, yes, of course.) The first part of the book nails it. He ties a fixation on discipline and rewards to a deep discomfort with the idea that any individual has a right to something he hasn’t earned. In other words, humanity is inherently corrupt, so every human matter on earth is, at bottom, an economic transaction. The baldness of that makes me recoil as I bet it does a lot of people who are uneasy about the colorful array of boxed parenting options, Froot Loop style Smart Choices®, but it explains everything. I think Kohn is saying not to be frightened of your child, to learn to know him in a way that will make a lot of disembodied childrearing advice beside the point. This should be familiar to anyone who has ever enjoyed the company of another human being. Then, of course, he has to go on to provide a lot of disembodied advice because how else could he fill up the second half of the book without scripts for over-explaining stuff to tantruming toddlers? (This reminds me a little of those volumes of tips for creating a compelling resume or land a man. Totally unconsidered is the possibility that you may not want to work for/shack up with someone who doesn’t find your sincerity valuable. I suspect that this is another instance in which you either get it or your don’t. You can’t fake a relationship.) I found the discussion of the various studies he includes to be pretty interesting, mainly because I love to visualize studies involving hordes of toddlers and their tutting mothers (on the THX 1137 set), but the appendix in which he discusses race and culture was really excellent. He politely dismantles the galling conclusions of the Physical Discipline among African American and European American Mothers study. Okay, I haven’t read the whole study, but I’d like to suggest to the authors that maybe physical discipline doesn’t bother African American kids because, as history teaches us, they probably only experience 3/5ths of the pain white kids do from being walluped. Just like African American children didn’t suffer from autism for a very long time and low income kids certainly still don’t have the imaginary allergies affluent kids with healthy diets and helicopter moms suffer from. (Interestingly, oppositional defiant disorder appears to often cause the same swollen eyelids, snot face, and crankiness as do imaginary food allergies in rich kids. So much creativity!)… That silence was me clicking away—reading, while everyone else is asleep. This is a bit of researching the rest cure a few months ago. Drapetomania! Dysaethesia Aethiopica! Science!

I am reading The Moon and Sixpence after pretty recently reading Cakes and Ale and despite having a taste for Maugham’s writing at the moment, I’m starting to get annoyed. Cakes and Ale was fine enough, and the first few chapters pretty funny, but after a while he seems so intent on skewering whomever (Walpole and Hardy?) in a lot of boring specificity that he begins to repeat himself, and then the ending threw all my assumptions about the book into disarray. Rosie turns out to have a tragic secret! Only the heartrending death of a child could explain her naughty behavior! So much for being frank and unconventional. It turns out she’s just a muse. Empty and highly reflective with a “body made for the act of love.” (Hahaha! Oh no, really?)  Also, I assumed the narrator was supposed to be a bitchy pedant, but nothing really happened to confirm it was intentional; and now I find the same narrator in The Moon and Sixpence droning on about women in a fantastically pompous voice that barely hides his squeamishness. Yikes, was that Somerset Maugham? I s’pose it partly is, given the actual Vicar-uncle of Something-stable and his history as a medical student. Poor guy. For your enjoyment, a digested version of The Moon and Sixpence:

I have a recollection of large, unbending women with great noses and rapacious eyes. “Why do nice women marry dull men?” “Because intelligent men won’t marry nice women.” I did not know then how great a part is played in women’s life by the opinion of others. It throws a shadow of insincerity over their most deeply felt emotions. I have always been a little disconcerted by the passion women have for behaving beautifully at the death-bed of those they love. “Who makes fame? Critics, writers, stockbrokers, women.” “You mustn’t take very seriously what women say when they’re in a passion” What I had taken for love was no more than the feminine response to caresses and comfort which in the minds of most women passes for it. It is an emotion made up of the satisfaction in security, pride of property, the pleasure of being desired, the gratification of a household, and it is only by an amiable vanity that women ascribe to it spiritual value. Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed. It’s generally a gesture to arouse pity or terror in their lover. Because women can do nothing except love, they’ve given it a ridiculous importance. “Women are the instruments of my pleasure.” As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times. “Women are strange little beasts,” he said to Dr. Coutras. “You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.”

Nevertheless, I am actually enjoying it and spending a good amount of time speculating about how much of it was really Gauguin. Could anyone have been so opaque to their own family? That cranky that much of the time? And I guess leprosy is more literary than syphilis. More of a clear judgement from on high with no room for a jolly elbow to the ribs. It’s a good enough book to take the taste of The Magician out of my mouth– bleh, dilute Le Fanu with a lot of scholarly references thrown in for effect. (Though I’d happily take a list of said scholarly references. I was reading in Eucalyptus, which presumptuously does not allow bookmarks. I have a weakness for alchemists, guys. All I want to do is fold down the corner of the page.) The best parts were descriptions of how Susie was dressed: a green silk gown with ancient lace and “a chain which had once adorned that of a madonna in an Andalusian church.” At first I thought we’d have gotten along, but then she fell in selflessly in love… The other night I read Of Human Bondage for the first time since high school. I had a headache that wouldn’t budge. In fact, I have it still. It’s been more than a week and either someone is trying to poison me for my vast fortune (I read a lot of Agatha Christie during my formative years.) or someone else is feeling unwell and getting up six or more times in the night to be comforted. Tangentially, the latter someone has been begging me to swaddle him and walk around with him, which is what we did from six to ten pm every night of the first three or four months of his tortured little life. In those days, he cried the whole time, but despite that, it must have been comforting because the last few nights he’s requested we wrap his arms (tight!) and walk the same stumbling loop around the dark bedroom. Anyhow, the headache—it’s different from the usual. A tight band with painful swollen spots at the base of my skull that are impervious to heat. I thought I couldn’t handle it any more so I took some Excedrin migraine. I don’t normally take pain killers for headaches since they have a rebound effect on me, but I was stupidly desperate. Afterward I was so wired (and still headache-y) I didn’t even feel drowsy until seven am. Instead I intermittently walked the baby and read Of Human Bondage. It was odd to recall my own emotional responses to the story but not the details of the story itself. I think the dreary repetitive realism frightened me a bit at the time. (Too soon after Agatha Christie, perhaps?) Now I’m drunk with exhaustion and still more headache, but fine enough to look up soap bubbles and the Marangoni Effect.