The Idea Blog

Most of you who know me will recall that when I take a bit of time off, I love to read. Books are much easier to enjoy when you can read large chunks in single sittings over just a few days, and that’s what I’m able to do for a short week this week.

You also know that I love to quote from what I’m reading. I’ll come across a passage, mark it, and if I don’t know quite what to do with it, I’ll paste it into my blog.

Here’s the first from this week’s reading, a wonderful metaphor from Gay Talese’s memoir A Writer’s Life about how “easy” it is to be a writer (in bold below). He’s musing about a desire to write about “the restaurant world,” especially as a frequent diner in places such as Elaine’s in New York. “As a young bachelor in New York, and during my forty-plus years as a married man, I have dined out, on average, four or five times a week. I am alone all day, producing prose with the ease of a patient passing kidney stones, and so at night I prefer to dine out, seeking diversion and usually finding it in any of the half dozen restaurants that I patronize - places where I am able to walk in without a reservation even on heavily booked evenings and receive a smile of recognition and the next available table from the maitre d’ (to whom there is no greater aidememoire than a twenty-dollar bill).”

Just a page or so later, there’s this wonderfully long sentence, which I just had to read aloud to Betty:

“[In a restaurant] I have the option of tuning out, half-listening, drifting about mentally while glancing around at the crowded and noisy dining room, watching almost simultaneously a sporting event being shown on television above the bar, an attractive blonde sitting sideways on a stool, and a fat man sitting at a nearby table with his mouth open, about to devour a piece of fish, a slender slice of flounder; and suddenly I imagine the fish coming to life, jumping off the fork, wiggling along the floor, and being retrieved by a waiter, who carries it in a napkin back to the kitchen, where I have visions of the fish swimming backward in time, a flashback fish floating freely ten days before in the Labrador Sea of northeastern Canada, a fish that is flat-bodied and pancake-size and has two eyes on the same side of its head, a Picasso fish, cruising easily along the muddy bottom of the sea in search of a shrimp until, five minutes before sunrise, it glides into a net, is trapped, is confused, is frightened, but is not alone - hundreds of other Picasso-eyed flounder are ensnared there, swirling around, bumping into one another, angling to flip over to their seeing-eye side, hoping to figure out what’s going on - but then they are squeezed together as the big net soars drippingly out of the sea and scrapes along the side of a ship that is piloted by a bearded, brandy-breathed, scrawny, wife-abusing French-Canadian fisherman, who had been illegally trawling in that area all week, and who now, after grabbing fistfuls of wiggling fish out of the net with his gloved hands, hurls them into an ice-filled hold in the stern of his ship, and then starts up his engine for the six-hour journey to the dockside depot of a seafood distributorship in Newfoundland, from which the fish will be flown a day later in refrigerated aluminum containers to JFK airport to New York, where Mafia-affiliated teamsters will receive them and drive them to the Fulton Street market, then deliver them into the hands of wholesale dealers whose vans on the following morning will be double-parked in front of myriad Manhattan restaurants, including Elaine’s, where the fish will be counted and examined by Elaine’s Neapolitan chef, and will be cleaned by her Spanish-speaking scullions, and will be prepared and offered that night as a fresh fish special - flounder meuniere almondine, twenty-nine dollars - and this is what was ordered by, and brought to, the fat man I saw sitting in front of me with his mouth agape.”

Whew! Wonderful!