THE FULL TITLE IS UNDERSTANDING Comics: The Invisible Art, and it will change the way you think about (as the author, Scott McCloud, concisely defines it) “sequential art.” McCloud takes us inside the art form to explain how and why…
Tag: books
My first best friends.
First Graf: Ulysses
THERE’S NOT MUCH ELSE TO say about James Joyce’s magnum opus (although some would apply that descriptor to Finnegans Wake) that hasn’t been said, and by greater and more erudite scholars than this reporter: takes place over 24 hours in…
First Graf: Fringes of Reason
REMEMBER THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOGS? Mostly subtitled “Access to Tools,” they were popular mainstays of the late 1960s-1970s’ DIY culture, spanning a variety of subjects from computers to home gardens. One of them, 1989’s Fringes of Reason: A Field Guide…
Why I Love: Torah Study
IT’S THE ENDLESS INTELLECTUAL PUZZLE. It’s that Hebrew writing closely resembles Klingonese (well, it does; come to think of it, so does some of the sentiment). It’s belonging to the 3,000-year-old Permanent Floating Book Club. It’s the spectra, vagaries and…
First Graf: An Everlasting Meal
THIS IS THE BOOK THAT inspired me to cook for myself. It demystified for me the cooking process, shored up my nascent resolve, and gave me the mental tools I needed to commit the revolutionary act of not settling for…
Sailing the Sea of Talmud (And Related Waters)
IF YOU STUDY ANYTHING, AS the salesman sang in the opening scene of “The Music Man,” “You’ve got to know the territory.” Case in point: Every Wednesday morning for the past few years, I have conducted an hour-long living-room learning…
First Graf: The Gourmet’s Lexicon
SITTING ON MY BOOKSHELF IS a slim purple volume from 1982 called The Gourmet’s Lexicon, an encyclopedic and indispensable listing of cuisines, dishes, and cooking techniques and styles. What Webster was to words, author Norman Kolpas is to food. Often…
Cooking as Transformational Gestalt
COOKING FOR MYSELF ALL STARTED with Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace, during and after reading which I said to myself, “I can.” It also started after seeing Michael Pollan’s Netflix documentary, “Cooked,” during and after…
First Graf: The Jewish Catalog
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THE COUNTER-CULTURAL agents of the 1960s (re)discovered their Yiddishkeit (Jewishness)? A trio of them (and many others) produced the now-classic The Jewish Catalog: a do-it-yourself kit. As the subtitle implies, the book is chock-full of homemade ways…
Brillat-Savarin’s Hot Chocolate
AS AUTUMN TURNS COLDER THE nights and days, a young (or old) cook’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of hot chocolate. And what better hot chocolate can there be than that featured on page 88 of the Leete’s Island Books…
First Graf(s): The Book of the SubGenius
THIS BOOK SAVED MY LIFE. Well, not the book per se — although that definitely helped — but one of the guys who wrote it. The Book of the SubGenius told me that there were Others Out There who felt…
First Graf: The Illuminati Papers
THE LATE ROBERT ANTON WILSON is perhaps the greatest influence on my life and thought since even before Rabbi Akiva. His spirit is sprinkled here and there throughout this blog like raisins in a cake. A prolific author, RAW (as…