Flutterings

The immediate impression of the trio [Ottolenghi, NOPI head chef Ramael Scully, and recipe developer Esme Howarth] made was of friendliness -- how well suited to one another they were, and how soft-spoken and solicitous Ottolenghi was.

"Would you like some tea and cookies?" he asked, and without waiting for an answer he went rummaging to retrieve some. I'd been served so much Ottolenghi food by others, and now Ottolenghi himself was serving me cookies. This seemed to be the opposite of Gordon Ramsay. This was the opposite of the matador chefs and their brash opining. In fact, if you could say anything about Yotam Ottolenghi, you might say he contained multitudes: a sweet temperament and fierce intensity, iron discipline and wild creativity.

I have an unofficial contest going with some writer friends, to see who can ask the stupidest question EVER without meaning to, and I think I recently won. I was interviewing the chef Yotam Ottolenghi in London, and at the risk of never being asked to go on assignment again, I'm going to quote my question, verbatim:

So I'm just--butternut! Butternut squash, broccoli polenta, pearled lemon, that idea of, and sometimes this happens at the ridiculous high-end restaurant, the prawn did this, eat the whole flower, or whatever, just get that marrow, or whatever it is, up here, on the plate, all foamy, and this is what you’re doing without having to turn it into some sort of ridiculous cooky thing in these restaurants, like, maybe you could tell me: Why are we doing this!?

Seriously, how can you answer a question like this? And you know you're in trouble when the response is, as it was in Ottolenghi's case, a very long silence, a polite but quizzical expression usually reserved for the platypus tank at the zoo, and then, with pity: I think I know what you're trying to say...

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster. And treat those two impostors just the same pic.twitter.com/brJENv2WpR

— Fatima (@FatimaAsh) July 6, 2014

There was simply too much to express.

''You've only got so much space, and that's the point,'' she said. ''That's the art. In a very short space, you need pertinent details while knowing what to leave out.'' One song she's still revising is called ''Shine.''

''It starts, 'Shine on Vegas and Wall Street/Place your bets,' '' she said. ''You could write a thousand verses. 'Shine on the dazzling darkness that mends us when we sleep/Shine on what we throw away and what we keep.' I have written about 60 different verses and rhyming couplets to this thing, and I've kept 12. Are they the best ones? I don't know. I could write 60 a week. What are the 12 most important things to illuminate? It's overwhelming.''

Writing . . . is a license to be curious. I, for example, am interested in how things work, in how a creative movie deal is structured, how a conglomerate is formed. How a tooth is reconstructed or an aorta patched. How a geologist pinpoints a possible oil strike, how an immunologist isolates a virus. How a fire investigator knows when a fire is an accident and when because of the pattern of smoke stains in the burnt-out shell and the sponginess of the floor it is arson. How a pathologist knows that the prostate is the last male organ and the uterus the last female organ destroyed in a fire, how carbon granules in the bronchial passages indicate the victim was alive when the fire started and fat globules in the lung mean that the victim was attacked before the fire. How Fernando Valenzuela throws a screwball, how the air currents and the speed of the projectile and the angle of the wrist at the point of release conspire to make a pitch man was not intended to throw nor his elbow to endure.

- John Gregory Dunne; quoted in Jonathan Yardley's tribute to him

As I've argued before, you have to make music matter enough for people to decide to invest in it, not expect it to pay. If you want a classical CD, you have to fund it, just as if you want a music lesson, or a nice harp. If you are poor, hopefully a civilised society that cares about the arts has sponsorship opportunities for you, but the need for money remains.

To make people care about any music, recorded or otherwise, you have to communicate - in concert, on disc, in books and magazines, through education and by what you create in the first place. You have to reach out to others. It never ceases to amaze me how many so-called artists think their self-interest self-expression is the only thing that counts, but music (to me) is too widely human, too gloriously infinite. Just as someone who only talks about themselves is a crushing bore, all creative endeavours that are only masturbatory acts of self-love fail. Some initial charisma might carry the artist for a while, but there is no lyricism, no tenderness, no angry drive to make things better for others, no love: only an arid and deluded pride that ultimately burns itself away, for it has no other fuel.

As with anything where you must deeply think and feel, the more you know, the more you know how little you know.

According to Rabbi Levi, Abraham said to God, 'If You seek to have a world, strict justice cannot be exercised; and if You seek strict justice, there will be no world. Do You expect to take hold of the well’s rope at both ends? You desire a world and You also desire justice? You can have only one of the two. If You do not relent a little, the world will not endure' (Genesis Rabbah 39:6)

- from a Jewish Theological Seminary e-newsletter

I remember very early having the sense that there is one poet in the world, and sometimes if you're very lucky and you work very hard, you get to be the poet for a while. The rest of the time, you're trying to earn your way back to being the poet for a moment. Meanwhile, you love poetry itself.

- Franz Wright, from an essay to appear tomorrow on Poetry Daily

A kids' book author I know once worried that he might be on rocky ground with his characterization of a three-legged dog, so asked a group of children about it. "Wow," they squealed, "what about a one-legged dog?"

- David Yezzi