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“Fernet’s defining bitterness is layered with complications, like a well-lived life”

At one point during the tour, Branca, an impeccably polite gentleman with enviable hair, opened the door to a dim, cavernous room and beckoned me in.

Here were acres of burlap sacks piled atop pallets and containing the 40 or so barks, roots, fungi, herbs, and spices that go into Fernet Branca. These include myrrh, gentian root, cinchona bark, orris root, zedoary, and saffron. To walk through the room is to reconnoiter a peculiar olfactory geography, crossing from the republic of one aroma into another, with the borderlands between the two sometimes under détente, but often not.

I ordered a Fernet Branca the other night. I ordered it because I liked the idea of drinking something that sounds like a Swiss mathematician. But it turns out that among the things I don’t particularly like are drinks that taste like iodine. In fact, drinking Fernet is a bit like tongue-kissing a First World War infirmary.

Having said that, I’m willing to give it another chance. This 2008 Atlantic article serves as a decent Fernet primer.

“George is hoarding biospheres”

An example of the kind of thing where I think Twitter has the edge over Google+ or Facebook: it gives rise to demented brilliance like #FutureSeinfeld. Some great work from @spikelynch, @facelikethunder, @timsterne and @monkeytypist among many others.

“Buy the atoms, get the bits free”

I’ve seen a lot of people link to Nicholas Carr’s call for publishers to bundle free, electronic versions of books with purchases of the physical artifact (in the way that music labels often bundle audio files with vinyl purchases), but it chimes so much with my own feelings that I felt I needed to link to it here too.

Keywords: what, the, shit

“Yes! That stock photo of squirrels having sex on top of a photocopier is just what we need for the cover of the next Rogering Rodents Quarterly!”

“No one can give more than one hundred percent. By definition that is the most anyone can give.”

Erik Malinowski takes a fascinating look at the making of ‘Homer at the Bat’ from season three of The Simpsons. This was the first Simpsons episode to make heavy use of multiple guest stars — and as Malinowski explains, the writing staff were forced to give one hundred and ten percent to pull the episode off. (“That’s impossible…” etc)

Which other guest stars have demanded changes over the show’s twenty-plus year history, I wonder?

Martial (f)arts

Can’t help but feel that Japanese cinema has been missing a trick here. (Via @cityoftongues, via io9)

“Like the food machine, you mean”

susan-TARDIS-food-machine.gif

Humankind moves one step closer to artificial food. (Image via the arrangement of nerves in a leaf)

“In [Words with Friends], it’s extremely advantageous to have the J — to the tune of 6 final score points”

Interesting article describing how Words with Friends creators Zynga reshaped the [Scrabble] board, added four tiles, and changed the values and distribution of the letters in the process of developing their blockbuster smartphone game.

‘One of the goals we had in designing our letter distribution was to give players letters that would allow them to form words much more easily than in other word games,’ [designer and engineer Kevin] Holme said via e-mail. ‘In [Words with Friends], we put four Hs into the bag and set their value to 3 — a big difference from Scrabble, which uses two Hs worth 4 points.’

In other words, he amplified the number of… ‘explosive moments.’

My micro life: 9:55am, 15 January 2012

It’s hard to believe that George Lucas’s inspiration for the Mos Eisley Cantina sequence did not come from Dandenong Railway Station.

“One of the reasons I always liked the idea of being a writer was that it meant I would never have reason to speak in public”

Further to the link I posted last week about the psychic division between the writer as author and the writer as human being, here’s author Chris Womersley writing for the Untitled Books website about the delicate splitting of the self that comes with producing a work of fiction:

The fellow who does the dishes, forgets people’s names, ferociously bites his nails and eats porridge for breakfast — the everyday me, in other words — and the one who performs the slightly dreamy act of writing are, subtly, different. The everyday me doesn’t actually narrate my works of fiction. Instead it is the writerly version of myself — the one with access to the (hopefully) best possible word, who can spend months revisiting sentences to ensure they are just right, who can see the structure of the story being told, who understands his characters; the one who rearranges.

“We ratted my parents to the SS and hit the road again”

“The Hitler Youth LP”. (For context, see this tweet from @spikelynch.)

“For the sheet of paper bore only a drawing, of a single, giant, yellow, staring EYE”

‘Good God, man, what do you mean?!’ cried Sergeant Major General. ‘Do you mean some unimaginable alien being came through a hole in the fabric of space-time and sucked this man’s living heart from his body as part of some kind of plot to take over our planet?’

Inspired the acquisition of a number of books all named The Eye of the Tiger, Pinknantucket Press is making its own splendid contribution to the canon of works endowed with this most excellent designation.

Keep a look-out for the forthcoming Eye of the Tiger Omnibus.

“Books can open up emotional, imaginative and historical landscapes that equal and extend the corridors of the web”

Psychologists from Washington University used brain scans to see what happens inside our heads when we read stories. They found that ‘readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative’. The brain weaves these situations together with experiences from its own life to create a new mental synthesis. Reading a book leaves us with new neural pathways.

Gail Rebuck in the Guardian on the role of written narrative in developing empathy and a sense of self. She adds that (as) publishers, we need to use every new piece of technology to embed long-form reading within our culture. We should concentrate on the message, not agonise over the medium. We should be agnostic on the platform, but evangelical about the content.

“When they use social media, authors have as many personae to choose from as they do in their other writings”

Every writer is two people (at least). There’s the one that does the writing, and the one that has an egg for breakfast. I’m the other one.

Margaret Atwood on the psychic division between the writer as author and the writer as human being, quoted in the New York Times in the context of authors extending their private selves into the world via social media.

“You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment”

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble; it is why no one can ever write this book.

From a galvanising 1989 piece by Annie Dillard for the New York Times. A vivid, powerful expression of the art of writing if ever I’ve read one.

The original article is behind the NYT paywall, but Google has a cached version.

(Thanks to T.B. McKenzie for the link.)

Things I’ve been reading (1 October to 31 December 2011)

Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes

Life Kills by Miles Vertigan

The Radleys by Matt Haig

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

Spurious by Lars Iyer

Poor kettle manoeuvres in the dark

Trying to make a coffee in a small house at 5am without waking anyone is like trying to make a series of loud clattering noises in a small house at 5am without waking anyone.

Horse joke #4

A horse walks into a bar and gets terribly drunk the night before an important racing carnival. The next day the horse is judged unfit to race and is executed. The barman is found guilty of serving alcohol to a visibly intoxicated horse, and is executed.

Horse joke #3

A horse walks into a bar. The barman says “Why the long face?”. (He’s never seen a horse before and doesn’t realise that horses, distinctively, have long faces.)

Horse joke #2

A horse walks into a bar. The barman calls the local agency responsible for the collection and temporary protection of lost livestock.

Several days later the barman hears that the horse has been returned to the property from which it had wandered.

Fancy that, though — a horse walking into a bar!