DON'T YOU LOVE CODE?

Kumbayah, residents of Little Macondo, Malaysia and Poitou-Charentes! Following the advice of empowerment gurus, I identified my passions--Lior Ashkenazi, Orlando Figes, Simon Sebag, chocolate,Yevgenia's wild mushroom borstch, among others--I felt that it was time to build my knowledge of Blogger Analytics. Vhat catastrophe, vhat hoomiliashawn! Nowhere could I find forward slash body thingie after which one must paste Analytic's asynchronous tracking code. The Infanta rescued me and I am ready to offer an informal tutorial,
Copy the asynchronous tracking code from the Google Analytics page.
Open your blog page.
Click on Layout.
Click on Edit HTML

Paste code into blog template immediately before
Replace characters beginning with UA- with your web ID, which you can find in your Analytics account.
Save.
Et voila, you have Analytics tracking. You have predefined filter capability, mwahahaha. Simple, no? Very simple once you understand that the place the Analytics code is in your template. Now, why didn't Google geeks explain this more clearly? Shouldn't code be about clarity? BTW, it is most annoying that the new Blogger editor consistently eat the icon one must have in order to post graphics. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, blast it.
Anyhoo, I see you are still in your jammies. I prescribe two doppio espressos and a brisk walk. As for me, I will start reading my next for-review book, Lori Gottlieb's MARRY HIM while I wait to hear from author Robert Hicks. My review of his novel, A SEPARATE COUNTRY, will appear shortly in my book blog www.richtexts.blogspot.com.

THE ART OF HUNGER

Lemon bread for my best beloved.

"L'amour physique est un besoin semblable a la faim..." Honore de Balzac


"It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it...and then it is all one." MFK Fisher


Being an inept cook is hardly a prerequisite for greatness. Nevertheless, there are those  who believe that  cooking and a high achievements are  incompatible . Sad to say, the anti-cooking faction seems to be an American phenomenon. Perhaps in the Americas, where  ancestral memories of slavery  and indentured remain fresh, it is easy to equate manual labor of any sort with powerlessness.  After all, powerful people can choose not to engage in menial labor . Rather than toiling in the kitchen, they can split the atom, redefine the time-space continuum and make  the string theory intelligible to pre-schoolers. 
Tainted by its association with the servile job of cooking, food writing commands little respect in the Americas. I ought to know. As a freelance writer, I did my share of food writing in my day. The subject fascinated me and up to the advent of the internet,  some national publications made  food pages more accessible to freelancers than, say, the arts section.  Freelancers are generalists and I am no exception. I wrote about painting, the ballet, the theater, literature, politics, science and the history of food among other things. Yet  in  Little Macondo, this lusty  microcosm of the Americas, some saw me as a recipe writer--a profession that has as much cachet as garbage collection.  Hard news reporters in the provincial newspaper where I worked for to many years,  called food writers  "kitchen table writers." That was fine. The kitchen table writers thought hard news guys were one-note Johnnies whose collective IQ equaled that of a flea.  
All this is water over bridge.  GOURMET magazine where peerless food writing alternated with some of the best travel pieces in biz, folded. The Washington Post's food writing is a joke.   Food writers in the print media  have to compete for attention with  gazillions of bloggers and the ubiquitous television minions of Martha Stewart. Though Hollywood elevated  Julia Child's to that of a national treasure, real food  writers such as MFK Fisher, whose sparkling prosed once added glamour to the pages of The New Yorker,  are nearly forgotten. That is a pity. Real writers--dust off your Balzac, Dickens, Nabokov, Chekhov, Jason Goodwin-- inevitably write about food. Why not? It is honorable work. So is recipe writing, which was first published in ancient Rome. Would that all non-cooks would leave behind a legacy as valuable as DE RE COQINARIA

BEEGNIGN NEGLECT

BENIGN NEGLECT

Alas, for the garden. I spend my time sending interview requests to writers I admire. My interview with Canadian author Louise Penny is up at http://www.richtexts.blogspot.com/I love her crime fiction books. They are richly layered, dense with yummy tidbits and surprises as the most delicious cake. Plus, she is a woman of elegant manners and wit. I feel lucky to have had the chance to communicate with her. Next, I will be talking with author Sujata Massey whose Rei Shimura novels are vastly entertaining and delightfully fresh.

The news from the garden is that the round Italian zucchini from Thompson and Morgan has actually gone into production. Bambi must be slipping. In the flower garden, a glorious cobalt blue delphinium is in bloom along with deliciously cotton candy pink roses. Daylilies, black eyed susans, perovskia, catmint and lavender put forth an abundance of blossoms. The paintbox geraniums that looked so umpromising when I bought them have caught up with the double petunias and verbena. Annual baby's breath I grew from seed has finally come into its own.

Tomorrow I will be unpacking an enormous order of miniature roses and mowing the lawn carefully to preserve the clover blossoms that have attracted three honeybees to the the garden.