The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays by Simon Leys- Finished the sea essays....Leys actually makes subject matter that I don’t ordinarily find very interesting...very interesting...this feeling was really profound after finishing the essays on the sea but was even true about some of the literary criticism (Evelyn Waugh will not make my TBR pile anytime soon!) and the China essays (although I am very interested in Confucius and Leys’ essay on Confucius is really, really good).
But it must be said that, in (Samuel) Johnson’s time— and until not so long ago— life at sea was barbarous indeed. The catalogue of its miseries makes one shudder: stinking discomfort, inhumane crowdedness, permanent humidity, the heat and the cold, rats, vermin, mouldy and rotting food, brackish water, brutishness of the company, sadistic ferocity of the ship’s discipline, constant risk of breaking one’s neck or drowning when falling from a yard in heavy weather, danger of shipwreck, permanent menace of scurvy on long voyages, death after slow, hideous agony...
...and then I think of being locked up and part of The Middle Passage and having those conditions (as a future slave) piled on top of Leys’ description...
I am reading:
Nova by Samuel Delany-
Yes Chef: A Memoir by Marcus Samuelsson with Veronica Chambers— I’ve read from his beginnings in Ethiopia to his entrance into his first kitchen in Sweden.
One thing that I took note of was that Samuelson decided to go into cooking and there was schooling available to him when he was approximately at the high school level. US community colleges (and even arty high schools) should be able to provide this level of training for citizens who wish to take that route...in fact, there are CCs that do but the CC systems in the US are, by and large, impoverished.
There was no running in my grandmother’s house. She’d look at me standing there out of breath and say, “Ah, there you are. Come. I have a job for you.” She would pull out a stool and set me to string rhubarb or shell peas or pluck a chicken. I’m not sure why my sisters never joined us in our Saturday afternoon cooking sessions; and, at the time, I didn’t care. I was only to happy to have Mormor to myself.