Welcome to the second installment of Brain/Food! This month’s contributor is Fathima Cader, Renaissance woman. She is a writer, world traveler, lawyer, web designer, and photographer. She is also one of the funniest and most original thinkers I’ve ever met. Fathima was a student in the very first university course I taught. It was a…
Month: February 2013
Mid-Farch blues
Friends, we’re just about halfway through the affliction of Farch, but if you think this means there’s any relief in sight, I laugh at your insane and misguided optimism. Yesterday, it was sunny and hovering just above the freezing mark; it was lovely, in other words. That was Farch getting our hopes up so that…
In memorium: soy and a soup pot
I lost two of my most favourite things recently, one under mysterious circumstances, the other because of a stove top mishap for which I take complete responsibility. My guilt and irresponsibility first: Once upon a time, I got married. My husband and I decided against all the frills and floomph and icing that often characterizes…
Reading Soseki: A memoir
A few weeks ago, I read Soseki’s Natsume’s Grass on the Wayside; I needed a reboot on the space Soseki’s fiction was occupying in my brain after that Francis Mathy translation debacle. Given what Soseki has been to me, I couldn’t let that horrid memory of literary neglect and abuse linger too long; it wouldn’t…
The worst thing about not being an academic, or, I just read a very minor Anthony Trollope novel and it made me incredibly happy
As some of you know, I hold a PhD but use it only for activities such as washing the car or trying to get a free upgrade on international flights. It would be a lie to say I’ve never regretted my decision not to pursue an academic career, but for the most part my regrets…
Garlic: a love story
Once upon a time, I was 23 years old. I was about to begin a Master’s degree at an excellent university, but at a university located in the town in which I’d grown up. A town which hadn’t acted upon my psyche to make me extremely adventurous or open-minded or charming. This is important to…
The shifting and confused gusts of memory
In my previous post about Swann’s Way, I discussed it as a novel about humans being defined almost solely by unhealthy obsessions. This is a rather grim view of things tempered only, perhaps, by the fact that this hasn’t been my experience of life after 21-ish. I suppose I should also talk about remembrance, memory,…
Jam and Idleness 
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