Tuesday, January 13, 2009

When I am the queen, which is a forever thing, I will offer you a satchel full of lentils. You are not good at soup but should be. I have spent years and years about the soup--trying to show you soup is an all day event. For it to be good. The lentils are only the base. You must, I will say, it is essential that you... provide other materials. These can come from any type of life. Aristocrats have sharp-nosed pigs to scavenge truffles from under molding bark in black-earth forests. Commoners use hunks of stale bread, bones from other meals. The key to a soup is time, not an herb, but the system with which we measure movement. Take a pot of water, bring it to a rolling boil. Watch to see how very long that takes. Walk away and it takes no time, you boil away half the pot and need to add more, boil again. The key to soup is understanding time. It is a lifelong assignment. I am not such a queen I would ask you to undertake the task isolate. No, together we should begin our study. Here are our lentils.

2 comments:

Sian Griffiths said...

I so thoroughly enjoyed this that I had to pass it along to some of my students, who dubbed me the Queen last semester. (Full title: The Queen of Lurk, because I am always lurking.)

My love may stem not merely from egoism but also from the sideways quotation of Gross Pointe Blank (one of the best movies ever). Joan Cusack: NO. The [random ingredient] is just the BASE of the soup!)

kirsten said...

Gross Pointe Blanke is clearly one of the top ten movies of ALL TIME... thank you for getting the ref... I am off now though--to the last 40 pages of a mesmerizing tome I'm reading--hmm.