1.30.2010















from The 39 Steps

"I got the wild style / always been a foul child"


















"Boyle’s story lines are inventive, but his characters often feel implausible and feeble, drained of vitality by the surgeries necessary to fit them into procrustean plot contraptions." -- Wells Tower on T.C. Boyle

1.29.2010

Honor Society Nominations Now Open

Order of the Golden Fleece: Nominees must possess exemplary character and include juniors, seniors and graduate students who have made a significant, lasting contribution to the University, and others who have made a significant contribution to undergraduate student life.

Order of the Grail-Valkyries: Recognizes students of outstanding character who have made significant contributions to our university's academic climate through excellence in scholarship, dynamic leadership, and innovative service.

Order of the Old Well: Recognizes students and faculty members of high character who have demonstrated outstanding humanitarian service and whose service has gone uncompensated and unrewarded.

1.24.2010

Naming

She smiled for the first time and gently shook her head from side to side. "I believe that what you need is money. Does money have a name?"
I shook my head as she was doing. Money had no name, of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangability.

from Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

1.23.2010

This is a...

"Table. Apple. Piece of wax. Finger. Table. Good morning Theaetetus."

adapted from Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Name That Song

"This is a story about a girl named Renee.
I don't discriminate.
Call me Evil.
I've never been tooken out."

Thoughts, or Artists (of the Bronze Age), or Founders of the State

"They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext; they appear as lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too different even to be hated."

Nietzsche, from The Genealogy of Morals
http://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogy2.htm

1.12.2010

"And then I realized, all this time, I've been stuttering in the wrong language."

1.06.2010

Fail Log: Cookie




Ever since I had my first Levain Bakery cookie in 2007, I've periodically been trying to replicate it. A quarter-pounder of a cookie, it is crispy crunchy on the outside, and richly soft and textured on the inside. In my quest, there was a point in 2008 when I would try to make 2-3 batches of big cookies per week. They were all failures. It is simply impossible for a cookie to stay that big and tall in a oven (they're almost an inch thick). The butter in cookies tends to push them out, or down, into silver dollar pancakes or tennis raquet heads, depending on the size. I tried everything in my attempt to copy their mojo, steam in the oven, baking soda changes, butter creaming techniques, virtually eggless doughs, bake time changes, you name it, I tried it. In failing over and over again, I think I understand cookies inside out now. But I always get mortified anew somehow. Recently, at the bakery I work for, I think I finally baked a pretty close cousin of the Levain mother cookie. We shall see.