The Raw and The Cooked

I've made a commitment to read and learn as much as I can about food writing. I get excited about writing and food, and it seems to me to marry the two passions would be a smart move for me. I need to learn what constitutes good food writing, so I'm going to try and read anthologies and works by the recognized leaders in the genre, as well as food writing by great authors who gained their fame through other genres. Tonight I picked up a book by Jim Harrison, an author who fits in the last category.

I've read about 20 pages, and so far I'm really enjoying the book. To read a book with the eye of a hopeful writer, looking at a text through a lense that asks, "could I ever write as well as this?" is intimidating, frustrating and exhilirating all at the same time. Harrison is a great writer, and so much further up the ladder than I am that we're not even in the same plane. He's in the New York Phil, and I'm in high school band, still trying to learn my harmonic minor scales. But man, it's inspiring to read such great writing. And it's so obviously good writing, which makes it so much more compelling to me. I think I have to compare it to music--there's a lot of music being written these days for movies and TV, that fills the ears and bludgeons the necessary emotion of a given scene into us, that gets the job done that needs getting done in a journeyman fashion. Most of it is passable but pedestrian, and completely forgettable. But then one hears Beethoven's Ninth, and it so surpasses all of the schlock that we usually hear that even a layman recognizes it as great art. Harrison is jumping out at me tonight like that--I am recognizing it as great writing, and it inspires me to try harder and to become better. That's the kind of writing I'm going to be pursuing, and I'm going to try and read the best, and to read it with the mind of deconstructing what makes it great.

I wonder how much he recrafts things. I'm getting the sense that he's obsessed with perfection. Check out this quote from him: "I recently combed a five-hundred-page galley proof of a novel in terror that I may have used a specific adjective twice." That's commitment to your art, and I can respect that. I find as I type away on this blog here and there, I'm beginning to see patterns of writing, and phrases that I use repeatedly. For example, I like to talk about "marrying" ideas, or things, (something I did in the first paragraph of this entry) and I use the words "simply" and "just" far too frequently. And I fear I over use the comma, and I don't believe I always use it correctly. But it's fun to write, and to strive to become better, and to learn as much as I can about the craft of writing and the English language.

Practice, practice, practice.

I leave you with the first paragraph of the introduction from The Raw and The Cooked:

"I would like to avoid here the merest suggestion that there is anything wrong with my food and wine obsession. How easily we forget that the life overexamined is also not worth living. Rather than descend into the sump of neuroticisms that makes many of us what we are I'd like to think that my eating and drinking comprise a strenuous search for the genuine, that I am a voyager, an explorer, and adventurer in the ordinary activity of what we do every day: eat and drink. Once I jokingly suggested in a column that my sole motif was "eat or die," falsely ascribing it to the Russion author Lermontov to give it greater sonority and authority, but "eat or die" is also a veiled koan suggesting that eating well, however simply, is part of a life fully lived."

Amen, brother.