roflmao.
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Author: Harry
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barbecue stuff
Flatbreads cooked on the barbecue worked OK, though it might be easier to just do them in a frying pan or under the grill. A simple sauce for fish: juice of one lemon and a little olive oil blended with a bunch of tarragon.
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Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman doesn’t appear to differentiate between ‘UK’ and ‘England’. Still, he’s an American, so perhaps it would be too much to expect.
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Jonathan Mayhew on ‘middlebrow’
Jonathan has been commenting on the middlebrow. But his blog doesn’t allow anonymous comments and I don’t have a blogger account.
I found Starbucks and the designer teapot peculiar examples (not that I know the teapot or teapot shop in question). For me, low/middle/highbrow implies a specifically intellectual judgement. The relationship between your taste in coffee and your taste in literature seems strained to me – it makes it more into a judgement of someone’s social class. Or urbanity. Perhaps the word he’s looking for is ‘sophisticated’ rather than ‘highbrow’.
That’s not the same thing as saying that we are all differently-browed in different areas. I have low-to-middlebrow taste in films, but fairly highbrow taste in literature, and it seems reasonable to make the comparison. My taste in coffee seems a quite different subject.
I also think his description of the middlebrow as ‘addressed to a wider audience that wants to “improve itself”‘ is patronising and misguided. My sense is that the middlebrow audience just enjoys art at a particular level of accessibility and intellectual content. The idea that people watch Pride and Prejudice on the telly because they want to ‘improve themselves’ seems ridiculous to me. Rather, they’ve found the level at which they find art to be enjoyable. Two disclaimers: I don’t think that level is determined by intellectual capacity but by their priorities and tastes. And I don’t think that high-brow art is always better than middle-brow or low-brow art.
[publishers apparently have a category called ‘faux-brow’. Like The Girl in the Pearl Earring, which is romantic fiction, but with a historical, arty theme and a more expensive cover.]
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played two, lost two.
No wonder we thrashed Australia in the Twenty20 game if they can’t even beat Somerset. Come on Australia – don’t stop now, lose to Bangladesh as well.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, as Herrick once said to Viv Richards.
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the chirping of sparrows
The chirping of sparrows is a key human noise, a key human experience.
the essential noise of humanity (humanness)
most human of noises
the sparrow is the human soul. (id?)
throwing croissant crumbs/bits of chip/whatever to the sparrows. Chirping among the roof-tiles. dust-bathing.
I’ve been very conscious of sparrows since they disappeared from this part of London a few years ago. There were lots at the hotel in Egypt – the noise is so cheerful, and so deep-down familiar. People think of ‘chirping’ as a generic bird-noise, but actually it’s not, it’s very specific to sparrows.
Sparrows are only found in association with people – their original habitat is unknown.
From a US website: “Perhaps the most citified of birds, this import’s incessant chattering, quarrelsome disposition, and abundance about human habitations distinguish it from our native sparrows. Actually, it is not a sparrow at all, but a weaver finch.” Surely it would be more true to say that American sparrows are not sparrows at all.
Catullus. Some haiku? Who killed cock robin.
There’s a poem in there somewhere.