The Tears of Things

This Blog Is Changing Again

by Jerome du Bois

I have noted with unsurprised disappointment the sitemeter plunge now that our undeserved public shaming has run its course.

How quickly the sadistic sponge up your tears, idn't it? Not just the tears, but the blood and sweat as well. Savor it, vampires, it's your last from us.

It is depressing to note that so many readers simply wanted to follow the drama and ignore every other real issue we cover here. We had to witness. Whoever understands that, good for you. As for the rest --pfui! Beyond that:

First, Catherine will no longer post anything except photographs.

Second, we will no longer cover art, especially local art, artists, the art scene, arts organizations, museums . . . got it? We tried, now you can all breathe easier and get back to your incestuous wallowing.

Third, more alerts about Islamicist infiltration into America. I'll start with my next post, which features Theo van Gogh as host, as he highlights overlooked tragedies such as the murder of French DJ Sebastien Selam, and the Egyptian Coptic Christian Armanious family ritual murder in New Jersey.

Murderous personal jihad --bloody ritual slaughter with knives-- has leapt the Atlantic and the Meditteranean, and is now in the United States. And not many in the MSM have reported it. Which leads to my next point.

Fourth, this excerpt from Hugh Hewitt's book Blog keeps buzzing in my mind:

. . . We can only wonder if a fair and balanced MSM [Mainstream Media] had been attentive to the reality of Saddam from 1979 forward, or before him Khomeni, or before him the communists from Southeast Asia or the machinations of Stalin or the early years of Hitler, how many lives would have been saved and conflicts and humanitarian disasters avoided. Media's power is in alerting free peoples to dangers, and in each case mentioned, the MSM did nothing of the sort. (p.98)

I have this blog, this medium, and I'm going to shout the facts from its screen no matter what the MSM does, because, come Judgment Day, it won't be said about me that I didn't raise my voice.

It won't all be Islamoslamming. I'll be Cubaslamming too. I'm dusting off La Pionera and The New Mango, which we set aside to pursue what turned out to be chimeras. (Such a waste of time, but there's nothing for it but the lesson, Never Again.) I've only told half the story so far, and the best scenes are yet to come, as four smart Cuban teenagers stymie the authorities with stealthy little pieces of paper, and create a ruckus across Havana with their strategic interventions. This espio-epistolary novella is meant as a tonic to the continuing sad news coming out of that dolorous island.

I'll be posting recipes, too, of what I will call "comfort cuisine." If, as Raymond Carver wrote, eating is a small, good thing in a time of death, so is cooking, which I do well. I adapt recipes from the major magazines, and I'm also using the new Gourmet Cookbook, with its 1000 recipes. I've been reading Harold McGee's revised On Food and Cooking, a wonderful book, encyclopedic and lucid. I'll be quoting from it liberally.

And I just picked up Gray Lunz and Peter Kaminsky's The Elements of Taste, a kind of reverse-engineered cookbook: "Chefs don't create from recipes. Chefs create from tastes." And they identify fourteen: tastes that push (salty, picante, sweet); tastes that pull (tangy, vinted, bulby, spiced aromatic, foral herbal, funky); tastes that punctuate (sharp/bitter); and taste platforms (garden, meaty, oceanic, starchy). So I'll be grazing through that one, too, for ideas.

I'm hungry already.

What else? The Tears of Things will be more bloggy, meaning more linking --once I have greatly revised and extended my blogroll-- and more short posts pointing to outrages.

Book reviews. Some music reviews. And anything else that catches my attention.

In other words, I might become a real blogger.

It seems appropriate, somehow, to close with the lyrics to one of my favorite songs, "Strange Boat," by Mike Scott and the Waterboys, 1988:

We're sailing in a strange boat,
Heading for a strange shore;
We're sailing in a strange boat,
Heading for a strange shore;
Carrying the strangest cargo that was ever hauled aboard.

We're sailing on a strange sea,
Blown by a strange wind;
We're sailing on a strange sea,
Blown by a strange wind;
Carrying the strangest crew that was ever seen.

We're riding in a strange car--
We're following a strange star--
We're climbing on the strangest ladder
That was ever there to climb . . .

We're living in a strange time,
Working for a strange goal;
We're living in a strange time,
Working for a strange goal:

We're turning flesh and body . . . into soul.

Thanks for reading. Back later. And long live a free and democratic Iraq!

[Update: Another change: comments are open. Now, let's be civil, people.]

Posted by Jerome at January 30, 2005 09:36 AM | TrackBack