BREATHNAIGH
Pronounced bra-nug.
A tumblr from same dude as breathnaigh.org.
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Chip Kidd’s TED talk on book design. Piped blazer is a bold move.
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Because the internet has terrible short-term memory, I wanted to remind everyone of Danzig’s book collection.
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A Girl and Her Pig: Emma Allan on April Bloomfield’s new book in the New Yorker.
…This transcontinental décor is fitting for Bloomfield, a thoroughly British chef who grew up in the industrial city of Birmingham and proved her gastronomic grit with Rose Gray (to whom the cookbook is dedicated) and Ruth Rogers, at London’s River Café. Then Jamie Oliver convinced Mario Batali to snag her for the Pig gig. “I’d never eaten a slice of New York pizza or seen the Brooklyn Bridge,” Bloomfield writes in her cookbook. But since the Spotted Pig opened, in 2004—with New York’s anthem-singer Jay-Z as an investor—she’s become one of Manhattan’s culinary darlings, even as she continues to promote such British dishes as “bubble and squeak,” a.k.a. patties made from refried leftovers.
The cookbook, which Bloomfield collaborated on with the food writer J. J. Goode, enthusiastically advocates for the oft-derided British cuisine, championing hearty, rustic dishes. Alongside recipes inspired by Marcella Hazan and England’s Mediterranean neighbors (gnudi, mussels stuffed with mortadella, carta da musica with bottarga), appear Anglo-Saxon classics like potato bread, beef-and-blue-cheese pie, trifle, liver and onions, “faggots” (baby-fist-size packets of pork cheeks), and Eton mess. These creations are the meticulous offspring of the hulking “pork with all manner of veg, much of it copiously buttered” prepared by her gin-toting Nan and her grandfather, who never travelled without a cooler full of kidneys. Bloomfield even includes directions for the “perfect cuppa” (tea).
As with all of her concoctions, there is a single-minded perfectionism that goes into the cuppa’s preparation. You must use PG Tips English Breakfast, in an eight-inch mug—“not a wide mug, please, or the tea will cool too quickly.” And there’s something in that “please”: it’s both the decorous mannerism of a cookbook writer loath to impose on your culinary explorations and the entreaty of a master chef who doesn’t want you to mess up the dishes that she’s perfected…
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I have always had a problem with the shoeshine business, and even on the rare occasions when I wished to have my scuffed shoes cleaned, some egalitarian spirit kept me from doing so; it felt ridiculous to mount the elevated chairs in the shops and have someone kneel before me. It wasn’t, as I often said to myself, the kind of relationship I wanted to have with another person.
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…swinging back up into the cab of the truck in my Levis and lumberjacket and moccasins (which out on the highway no longer seem the costume that they do in the halls of the high school)—plus the sun just beginning to shine over the hilly farmlands of New Jersey, my state!—I am reborn!
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
(Note: note a representative quotation)
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Entire aesthetic categories failed to translate. The idea, for instance, of bourgeois people wearing work clothes as a class-status antisignifier, of hipsters in work boots and utility pants, was inexpressibly alien. Even workingmen didn’t wear work clothes. Waist-deep in a pit, a pick-wielding laborer might wear slacks and a sweater and a floppy knit hat with earflaps.Tom Scocca in Beijing Welcomes You
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When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. The vast presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on “Ulysses,” with a little help from “Dubliners.” You could jettison Kafka’s three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of “Paradise Lost.” Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all mortal limitations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to reread the comedies (“As You Like It” is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with “King John” or “Henry VI, Part III”?
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Levi’s we didn’t wash at all. They shrank too much, and it weakened the threads. So we wore them and wore them until they were shiny with mud, manure, tallow, cattle slobber, bacon fat, axle grease, and hoof oil—and then we wore them some more. Eventually, the Levi’s reached a point of grime saturation where they couldn’t get any dirtier, where they had the feel of oilskin and had become not just waterproof but briar-proof, and that was when you knew you had really broken them in. When Levi’s reached that degree of conditioning, they were sort of like smoke-cured ham or aged bourbon, and you couldn’t pay a cowboy to let you wash his.Jeanette Walls, Half-Broke Horses
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