How Legos are Made

In case you've ever wondered how Legos are made. Warning: Flash Player required.

MFK Fisher, An Alphabet for Gourments and The Gastronomical Me

The first thing I wanted to do when I finished these books was to read them again. Of course, I had already begun to bake bread before I finished them. Fisher writes less conclusively than many essayists: she gives the story, but not the moral. It frustrates at times – why won't she get to the point? – but it forces you to read more carefully, to form your own opinions.

Which should not imply that Fisher has no opinions of her own. She does. For instance: that the most perfect meals are those eaten alone on a couch or a hillside, or by a couple in love and in a restaurant, or by six in a home; that timidity can ruin any meal; that waiters are nicer than people; that fruit should never serve as an appetizer. But most of all, she believes in the sacredness and power of food. Eating is for all of us a necessity; for Fisher it is a rite. It shields her when she is alone, enchanting the cooks and stewards who protect and respect her, and serve her unadvertised delights. It is a means to challenge the habits and prejudices of others. It is the foundation for remembrance and nostalgia, a reminder of family and friends.

Fisher has known meals and restaurants of envious quantity and quality. She has eaten foods I've never heard of, and some I can only dream of. What inspiration her words are to that basest and subtlest of needs! What a hunger they inspire!

What is your generic term for a sweetened carbonated beverage?

Some researchers at Harvard surveyed the country to find out where the folks who don't call it “pop” live. See the results. Also, note that Chicago is, indeed, the second city.

Thanks to Jason for his link to the survey.

John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

Another book read in a day. This one reminded me, as I'm sure it reminds other, of Nabokov – as one reviewer put it, “John Lanchester, reading reviews of his book, is going to get mighty sick of the adjective ‘Nabokovian.’” It's all there: labrinyth sentences, purposeful interjections – (Dentistry, the compact disk) – (picnic, lightning) – mushroom hunting, even midges. A wonderful book for anyone who's already read all of Nabokov's (though I haven't come close). It combines the obsessions, refinements, and deviousness of Humbert Humbert, the careening ramblings of Charles Kimbote, and the nostalgia of Nabokov himself in Speak, Memory. Besides, it's built upon a foundation of food, including a selection of menus, recipes, and long discussions of such regional specialities as fish soup. I'm not sure whether to be pleased or frightened at recognizing some of Lanchester's culinary references – such as the succesful treatment of an English couple (and their baby) who had accidentally consumed a cache Death Cap mushrooms. Lanchester's allusions, while sharing Nabokov's eclecticism, are neither as obscure nor as hidden. Here, in any case, is a particularly Nabokovian selection from the end of the first chapter:

In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomitting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays.

Thanks to my brother for the unknowing loan of this delight.

Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up

I bought Hooking Up Saturday morning and finished it that day. A few years ago, my Pulitzer-winning journalism professor spent several of our three-hour, once-a-week classes doing nothing but reading from this book. What more of a recommendation do you need?

Wolfe discusses a great variety of subjects – microprocessors, Darwinism, John Updike, Dissenting Protestantism – often in the same story, and yet he weaves a number of common themes throughout the book. His favorites are the increasing irrelevance and anemia of American literature, the profusion of intellectuals and artists lacking in skill and hard work, and the theories of neuroscientists, Darwinists, and digifuturists that promise to revolutionize society but often ignore the truth. And, of course, it's all written in Wolfe's unique style, capable of setting any pace, any tone, and catching you up in his words, even when they're not being read aloud by B.D. Colen.