My 7 Links

For a blogger, I'm pretty abysmal when it comes to active participation in the blogging world: I rarely leave comments on other people's blogs and typically rely on a small group of a dozen or so blogs for six-month periods, before hunting down a new dozen blogs in an attempt to catch up with some new views and voices.

I came across Tripbase's 'my 7 links' project when I was looking for a good gnocchi recipe. I found the recipe and also a bit of info about the 7 links project. I haven't been invited to take part by another blogger, but it sounded like a cute idea, so I've hijacked the thread to post up my 7 links anyway. 

It's good fun digging through one's personal and peculiar digital archive. There's a lot of nonsense, hardly surprising given that I've been writing this blog for four years, but there's also some stuff I quite like. So for old and new readers alike, I give you - dan da dah dah da da dum dum!! - my 7 links.

Nominees are meant to nominate five other blogs to take part in the 'my 7 links' posting, so I've selected five blogs by people I don't know very well (in two instances, people I don't know at all!) in the hope that they'll gratify my curiosity and delve into their own archives for a bit of bloggy fun. My nominees are at the end of the post.

My 7 Links*

Your most beautiful post

1. In pictures - Probably my prettiest post: I love Paris. Nothing more than a bunch of photos of Paris and Versailles after a week-long research trip turned into a bit of holiday fun. I love Paris, and I love Versailles even more. One of my favourite places in the world.

2. In words - The first post I ever wrote and the one that started it all was Waking up with Prynne. The post is a poem by J.H. Prynne, still one of my favourite poets. In fact, the name of the blog is taken from the last stanza of 'A New Tax on the Counter-Earth', which I quote in the post. I wish I wrote more posts like this one.

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Your most popular post

I wrote two posts in 2009, after reading Norman Doidge's brilliant book The Brain the Changes Itself and the second of these - The Brain that Changes Itself Part 2 - is still the most popular post on the blog by some distance. It's a fascinating subject so I can see why people find it interesting, but I have no idea why it's such a popular post. Having said that, this post also served as the basis for my entry to the Wellcome Trust Science Prize, so no complaints here.

– 

Your most controversial post

This one's easy. Funnily enough, my most controversial posts have been things I've been commissioned to write for other people: FAD and Spoonfed, but I suppose the most *controversial* was my review of this year's Venice Biennale, Cliché-ridden Claptrap. I wrote the piece for FAD and it certainly got some interesting reactions. People either hated it - mostly galleries, artists, other critics - or loved it and told me how brave I was for speaking my mind. Not exactly the reaction I was expecting...

– 
Your most helpful post

I'm not so sure this is my most helpful post, given that it could be read as rather offensive, but it was written with many a helpful intention in mind: my open letter to Tube-taking Londoners.

– 
A post whose success surprised you

It's impossible to pick just one in this instance, so:

1. The only thing I can think of that might explain the popularity of this post - I Have a Dream - is that English people like to hear Americans bashing other Americans. I was forced to spend the summer of 2008 in exile in Phoenix and I wrote this post after a disasterous trip to the supermarket.

2. This is the third most popular post on my blog of all time. I have absolutely no idea why. Literally. No idea.

–
A post you feel didn’t get the attention it deserved

I spent most of June 2009 reading poems by Luke Kennard. Thereafter pretty much every poem I wrote was Kennardian wannabe wankery. Perhaps that's why they didn't get that much attention. I still like this poem/post though. A lot.

– 
The post that you are most proud of

This was probably the most difficult of all the seven links to choose just one (or even two) post. I'm not sure what that says about me, but if I had to choose just one it would probably be these two:

1. Welfare State: this post that launched my career as an ambassador of the anti-art speak bollocks crusade against meaningless arty nonsense in press releases and artist statements. The crusade continues.

2. The sole occasion - in Whose Fault is it Really - when I managed to unite utility and my personal academic research, bringing together Lucan's Pharsalia and contemporary (as in 21st century, not 1st century AD) political events. I don't really believe that academic research should be held accountable to the high priests of the committee of utility, but it was nice to show - for once - that the study of classical antiquity can occasionally have practical applications.

-

My five nominee blogs are: 

Lobster and Swan

This is Yogic
Neurophilosophy
Hitchcock Blonde
London Muse 

I'm a big fan of all of the above blogs and hope they humour me and post their 7 links soon!

*disclaimer: I cheat. A lot. There are more than 7 links.

Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize

Way back in May I entered The Wellcome Trust’s Science Writing Prize and then mostly forgot about it.

Turns out they liked my piece – a re-researched/rehashed/rewritten version of this blog post on neuroplasticity and pornography I wrote back in April 2009 – and, along with fourteen other lost souls, I’ve been shortlisted for the grand old prize to be announced on 12 October. Needless to say, I'm absolutely delighted.

I write a lot about science on my blog (e.g. on memory and mentors, on perception and the illusion of control, ramblings on neuroplasticity) and apart from endless years of chemistry in high school, followed by a couple of years of organic and biochemistry at university, I haven't a lick of professional science experience - just a deep-seated love for labware and particle physics (mostly thanks to some damn fine science teachers when I was at school. Hear, hear for great teachers!).

I'm an old fashioned humanist, the kind that thinks that Latin is as important as chemistry and philosophy. Being shortlisted for a science writing prize is incredibly gratifying to me because it isn't the field in which I tend to operate professionally. Entering the prize wasn't about taking steps in a "new direction" or "trying my hand" at something different (as so often seems to be the label snidely ascribed to such endeavours when they appear to deviate from a straightforward career path), but a totally natural (to me, at least) expression of one of my many interests. I'm often asked how, if at all, these interests fit together, but I don't see them as a number of diverging subjects, but as complementary topics that feed off each other and allow new ways of thinking to emerge - it's all so much more exciting when one is able to make links across a wide variety of subjects instead of being trapped by knowledge - however vast - of only one subject.

It doesn't really seem kosher to post my entry here until the winner has been announced, but never fear, I'll be sure to whack it up as soon as the hangover has cleared from the awards festivities.

Blanch & Shock => Roganic

The Blanch & Shock Lido Cafe Takeover The Second was almost a month ago (eeeeeek), but I wanted to write it up, particularly in light of the fact that a) they're awesome, b) they're bound to be doing something awesome soon that you might want to go to if you haven't been to a B&S event before, and c) my wonderful fiancé (wow, how weird is that!) treated me dinner at Roganic last week and I spent most of the time thinking that the food was a lot like what Blanch and Shock's food would be like if they had their own restaurant, an army of people working for them and a few more years to perfect their technique.

This was the menu for the B & S Lido Dinner:

Kick off with a little treat of plums with homemade marscapone

High Easter Sourdough Bread and Homemade Goat's Cream Butter 


English Tomatoes - Green Almonds, Quail's Egg, and Homegrown Garlic

Pig Cheeks - English Peas and their shoots, Summer Savory Vinegar


American Signal Crayfish - Brined, and as a broth, with Wild Fennel and Meadowsweet


Woodpigeon - New Season's Cherries, Toasted Wheat and Wood Sorrel


Roasted Hay Cream - White Currants, Blackcurrant Sauce and Charcoal Tuile

Coffee + Snacks

I didn't take any photos of the snacks (or pudding) because, luckily, I have a self-ordained special status which means as soon as the coffee + snacks are being prepared I run into the kitchen to chat and gobble up all the leftovers in sight. I do clearly remember that there was a brown butter milkshake, and a delicious sweetcorn soup (that wasn't a snack - Mike set himself the challenge of making something delicious out of one of his least favourite ingredients. How cool is that?).

The food was summery and delicious - the tomatoes were divine. One really should not underestimate the difficulty in sourcing good tomatoes in this country. Though, having said that, at the last Blanch & Shock dinner I met a lady who works at Wild Harvest, a food supplier to a lot of London's swanky restaurants and she told me that you don't have to be a swanky restaurant to order tomatoes - or anything else - from them, so order I shall!

So, Roganic. Simon Rogan's lovely London-based outpost of his Lake District L'Enclume has a two-year lease on a little place on Blandford Street over in Marylebone (just across the street from Purl). Roganic shares a similar foodie ethos with Blanch and Shock: sourcing local ingredients, which often means strange English herbs and plants long since forgotten by the likes of high-street supermarkets; foraging; seasonality; and really good homemade bread and butter.

Service was fantastic and everyone front of house very, very friendly - almost like having dinner in a friend's house. In fact, bar the absolute dickhead sat next to us (who ranted for a good 45 minutes about the sommelier trying to pull the wool over his eyes by serving him a too warmed red), it was one of the most mouth-wateringly delicious, perfectly cooked, well-thought menus I've had the pleasure to eat in a London restaurant in some time.&

There are only two options at Roganic: the 6 course menu or the 10 course menu. Of course, we cheated a bit because we really wanted to try the shredded ox tongue, which was on the 10 course menu, but we asked and they obliged.

Here's what we ate (as illustrated by some terrible photographs!).

Millet Pudding with grains, burnt pear, and Stichelton


Seawater cured Kentish mackerel, orache, broccoli and warm elderflower honey


Vintage potatoes in onion ashes, lovage and wood sorrel


Shredded ox tongue, pickles and sourdough paper


Skate belly, charred leek, carmelised cauliflower, Queenie scallop


Cumbrian hogget, artichokes and chenopodiums (hogget + artichockes = unprecedented levels of deliciousness)


Sweet ciceley with strawberry, buttermilk and verbena - didn't snap a pic of this! below is a douglas fir pine milkshake. Yummy!

Visual Inspiration: Matt Duffin

Matt Duffin is an American artist. I didn't even need to look it up to know it when I first saw his works. There's no way he could have been anything but, which has made me think twice about the qualms I had with nationalism as a way of classifying and identifying art as per the Venice Biennale. Duffin's primary medium is encaustic painting, and unless you're an experimental artist or an art history buff, you probably won't have come across the technique before.
Encaustic is painting with hot wax, typically beeswax, which is then mixed with pigments and spread on wood or canvas before being shaped with heated metal tools or heat guns. It's laborious and difficult, but produces sensational effects with the right lighting. The most famous practitioner of encaustic painting is Jasper Johns, who used the technique to great effect in his flag and target paintings.


Jasper Johns's 'Flag', Encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, 42 x 61 in., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1954-55. Art (C) Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Duffin has moved on from Johns's impasto encaustic to a lighter, glazed effect which is what gives his images such a luminous quality even though he works primarily in shades of black, grey, and white. The other clear American influence is one of illustration (also, Duffin originally trained as an architect, which clearly shows in the spatial nature of his images). Many writers have commented that Duffin's works have an illustratory quality about them, but even more specifically, Duffin's works borrow from the visual language of illustrator Chris van Allsburg. Allsburg is a wonderful illustrator, one who can tell a story without any text; whose images have a grainy, textured quality -- as do Duffin's -- and who depicts objects from a childlike point of view, but with a rather unsettling, disturbing perspective.

Chris van Allsburg, illustrations from Jumanji; (C) Houghton Mifflin Company













All other images (c) Matt Duffin