Daily Notes

I’m Jewish and I Don’t Want to Leave Again

… that an American Jew felt the need to write this post is itself disturbing…

When to leave? That’s the question every Jew has embedded in our DNA. When did people know to leave Germany? Russia? Where do you go? What do you take? What do you leave behind? How will you live, if you live?

We are waiting for the midterms and then we will decide. 

They say antisemitism is the oldest hatred. But it is hard to know who is historically more hated: Jews, women, or homosexuals. There is the problem of human nature and the question: Why do things never really change? But having those three giant targets on my back, the time might be now.

… i worry about the midterms too…

The Art World Reacts to Ye’s Hateful Comments

… what the fuck is Ye up to?… a black man hating jews, selling “White Lives Matter” t-shirts, purchasing Parler and just being an all round shit?…

It’s been a long October in the realm of Ye’s erratic, attention-seeking behavior. In the last three weeks, Ye has had his “White Lives Matter” t-shirts delivered to Los Angeles’s homeless population in Skid Row, made moves to purchase the conservative social media app Parler, and made a series of antisemitic comments and theories publicized on social media (on now blocked accounts), and the Drink Champs podcast interview that has since been deleted. Several companies affiliated with Ye and his projects have woken up from their daze and severed ties with the disgruntled artist at last.

… i am just as baffled with black people becoming 45 supporters and election conspiracy hawks… do they understand that any Christian Nationalist government is not going to hold them in high esteem?… already doesn’t hold them in high esteem…

“I’d Read Her Grocery Lists.” On Cooking with Sylvia Plath

We know, from the dates on her entries, that she made lemon pudding cake on the day she wrote “Lady Lazarus”—in which she grapples with her own repeated, unsuccessful suicide attempts. “Dying / Is an art, like everything else / I do it exceptionally well” she wrote, while beaten egg whites stiffened in the oven. In the process of drafting “Death & Co”—a poem as cutting and nihilistic as its title suggests—she prepped tomato soup cake, blood red and bittersweet. A signature recipe of hers, it requires, among other things, two cups of butter and one can of condensed tomato soup.

… tomato soup cake?… i wonder if i can find a recipe for that… and there is…

The kitchen was the axis on which her whole world spun. It was where she wrote, stood, boiled, diced, longed, mourned, revised.

… i think of my own kitchen existence… right along side the photography work and my writing…

It’s not lost on me that looking for cooking inspiration from a woman whose last great baking project was, well, her final act, is a questionable project (whether or not we can joke about the matter is another complicated question). But for Plath, the stovetop was an altar of a kind, the kitchen, a chapel—the whole room wreaked of guilt, shame, wickedness, tomato soup—as restrictive as it was holy.

… i seem to be on a food binge this morning… on making a map of Toronto identifying all the various places one can get dumplings…

Versatile, Universal, and Delicious: Karon Liu on the Magic of Dumplings

Toronto is the perfect city to create such a map: a metropolis that has evolved to be one of the most diverse culinary destinations in the world, thanks to waves of migration resulting in cuisines from disparate parts of the world commingling with each other. This place is a mix of cooks practicing centuries-old techniques learned from previous generations, innovators sharing new creations in the age of TikTok, and cooks embracing their third-culture cooking—combining what they learned from their parents with the new flavors and methods that come from living in a city where a roti spot, a sushi restaurant, and a souvlaki joint can all be found in a single plaza.