Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants (Latin: nanos gigantium humeris insidentes) is a Western metaphor meaning "One who develops future intellectual pursuits by understanding the research and works created by notable thinkers of the past"; a contemporary interpretation. However, the metaphor was first recorded in the twelfth century and attributed to Bernard of Chartres. It was famously uttered by seventeenth-century scientist Isaac Newton.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants
I am copying another person's ideas - sort of. I am going to keep a blog (probably not every day) about reading literature and cooking. I am probably going to talk a lot about my friends and their crazy lives. I will definitely give out pseudonyms. I will include recipes and give credit to the places I find them. I will talk about characters and story lines and symbols and metaphors. I will talk about drinks and the dinner parties where there should be music, food, and entertaining discussion about literature and culture. I might ruin a few endings for anyone who hasn't read the book under discussion.
About me: I love to cook. Not for money, but for my friends. To me, the best part about cooking is when I am in the kitchen and I can hear my friends in my apartment eating appetizers, drinking, and talking about who-cares-what. I also like to read. I read all the time, and I read just about anything I can get my hands on. This lead me to purchase a Kindle 2, which in turn lead me to the second part of the inspiration for this blog. You see, lots of Kindle books are free. War and Peace is free. War and Peace is a book that I have never read, but have always intended to read. Seeing that it was free, I downloaded it onto my Kindle 2 about 2 months ago. I read a lot of other, shorter novels and one memoir since then. That memoir was Julie and Julia.
That's when I got this idea, as a joke, to read War and Peace, and teach myself how to cook Russian food. Friends were actually encouraging about the idea, even more so when I started telling everyone that the first recipe I found was for Chocolate Vodka.
Ashley: Can you make that this weekend?
Then I thought, why limit myself to just one cuisine and one novel (albeit a very long one). Why not read some Murakami and learn to make sushi? So, this is where I have landed myself.
If I were to write a disclaimer to Julie Powell for stealing her ideas, it might look something like this:
Dear Julie Powell,
Thanks.
Love,
k
This is a FAN-DAM-TASTIC idea. Isn't imitation the highest for of flattery? I can't wait to see where this goes!
ReplyDeleteyou should make a dedicated section for ideas that people have. or maybe you could just let them put their ideas in the comments section. just a thought.
ReplyDeleteMuch fun. I wish that I were closer to join in. Alas, I will have to live vicariously through the blog. Post photos of the food!
ReplyDeleteLove it, Karen! And I expect to be invited to many of these events. Hey-- is it all going to be fiction, or does it also include cookbooks? My literary cook is James Beard-- how bout some of his food essays?
ReplyDeleteYou have to make Potato Blintzes and serve with sour cream.
ReplyDeleteI'll ask my Siberian daughter-in-law if she has a better recipe than I.
Eric, would love the recipe and any others you may recommend!
ReplyDeleteJulie, any book is fair game, though admittedly, this one will take a while for even me to get through (Ashley, the little minx, has more than lapped me and made it up to chapter 7)