Category: Notes

I picked up the book soon after I finally purchased Robert Frank’s The Americans and Walker Evan’s American Photographs. Amazon’s algorithm saw a trend and kept placing this book in front of me until I caved.

Fortunately, the algorithm did right. I fully enjoyed this snapshot of America in the early 90’s.

Kubota is the most sincere photographer I’ve read. He keeps a respectful distance from his subject, presents them without comment, avoids personal flourishes, and maintains the fourth wall between the photograph and the reader.

I was intrigued by his ability to seem so anonymous within his work. Like the dog who didn’t bark, it takes a while before you notice the fact he worked so carefully to stay out of the frame. His only stylistic device is a tendency to go high, whether a step ladder or on a blimp. Even then, this was noticed largely because he admits to it in the introduction.

At a contextual level, it was also interesting to note how many of these three decade old photos would be considered subpar in today’s world. The aerial night shots of Vegas are completely blurred, something you’d expect of a frame capture from a youtube video. Such aerial shots were possibly magnificent in their time, but such technical and logistical feats have lost their punch in an era where my contractor is producing a weekly high definition drone video of my construction site.

Even so, Kubota’s photographs still hold up on the ground and in the crowd. Maybe the reason they’ve stayed fresh because my nostalgia of these years when America was on the ascendency after the fall of the Soviets.

However, I’d like to think they hold up artistically because he scrupulously avoided forcing a stylistic signature in his work. Asian Americans are often frustrated by our invisibility within larger society. In this case, Kubota used it to his great advantage.

This assessment might be an idiosyncratic preference – Kubota’s out of print books are not overpriced in the secondary market. Even so, I can think of no higher compliment than to mention that I’ve purchased two more of his books, China and Out of the East, this time without the insistent prompting of the algorithm.

You are what you eat. Not a novel assertion, but this book was enjoyable because of the many ways that Versfeld explored this concept.

He advocates for a simple and earthy enjoyment of food via a refined book liberally seasoned with references and allusions from all throughout literate history. My intimate understanding of the Bible, a working familiarity with Greek and Roman mythology, generic feel for the contours of Western philosophy, and recent forays into ancient Chinese thought, all turned out to be surprisingly useful for enjoying this book.

As I grow older (and disillusioned with the gift of the internet) I find myself becoming more curmudgeonly concerning my information consumption. I have always been skeptical about fads that valorize a classical “great-books” education, but I have to admit that such a rarified syllabus is obviously better fare than a constant barrage of opinion pieces (such as this post) that are indiscriminately published on the web.

In these days of easy edutainment, it is difficult to slow down and read a book. A book is a journey that takes time and mental effort to inhabit. It is much harder to develop understanding than to collect trophies. Unfortunately, social media is all about collecting trophies to satisfy our basest emotional instincts. The quick hit of a hot take is a fleeting pleasure that have been weaponized by our favorite tech companies. The only way I’ve been able to sidestep this dilemma has to cut social media out my life.

I’ve uninstalled all the apps and am logged out on my browsers. I haven’t deleted my accounts, because I will occasionally reference old posts and keep contacts alive in private messages. I’m not perfect, so I’ll sometimes slip into surfing these feeds, but the more I stay away from the addiction, the easier it’s been to avoid mindlessly returning to these infinite pages.

In reading about habits, you will come across the trope of “never skip two days”. It’s bad enough to miss one day, but you’re in real danger if you miss two in a row. My advice for cutting out social media is the inverse. The hardest step in avoiding a site is the second day. Once you get past that point, it is relatively easy to avoid such sites for multiple weeks.

Breaking the social media habit was most among my greatest accomplishments over the past year, along with losing weight, and getting myself back on a regular schedule of posting self-righteous puffery on this little platform of my own.

In all, I quite enjoyed the book. I don’t think it will be in the regular rotation, but I think this will be a book that I will happily rediscover on my shelves every few years. Kind of like finding an old friend on Facebook.

What struck me was the foreignness of it all.

Is the jungle in Madagascar truly more exotic than a dump in England? What is stranger: the birds who fly the seas eating any scrap of edible looking trash or the people who obsessively chase them?

I have no interest in bird watching, but this book was a compelling read.

Any endeavor fully pursued begins to weave together the entire world. A singular focus on one subject becomes a window on the universe. Though they come from the sea and the air, these gulls are now intertwined with our human world, inhabiting our cities and farms. The landfill is a record of our activities, a living testament of who we were yesterday. The categorizations of these birds highlight our scientific era’s obsession with creating ever finer distinctions of specificity.

Tim Dee’s anecdotes in the field and interviews with experts transforms this niche subject into a exploration of humanity. The book is an example of how a deftly managed lens becomes a mirror that reveals our other selves.

The world is rich, we just need to truly look.

This is an ambitious endeavor, covering fermentation in all its forms, all over the world.

After getting into sourdough baking, I developed a preference for “scientific” cookbooks, using weight measurements (metric) with page layouts that are clearly formatted for ease of visual discrimination as one skims the the work. However, all these books invariably ended up being messy and touchy feely when describing how to develop a starter.

Fermentation is the art of a collecting things, shoving them into a favorable environment, and letting time do its thing.

As modern humans, we are given an illusion of control. However, choosing to ferment is a leap of faith, especially at the idiosyncratic home-brew level and especially in one’s first attempts.

But one should start simply, with the a basic sauerkraut. The first batch I made was with some almost-wilted purple cabbage that had been abandoned in the fridge. I chopped it up, squeezed the leaves as I added salt, shoved it all into a jar. A couple days later I had the best sauerkraut I’ve ever tasted in my life.

Absolute magic.

My sourdough starter is also magical, but it took two long weeks of feeding and discarding before she came to life. It then took another three weeks before I figured out how to bake properly to draw out her full capabilities.

In contrast, sauerkraut was so simple. Just two ingredients shoved into a jar for a couple days. Fermentation happens, and this book is a lovely mix of folksy wisdom, extensive experience, and authoritative research that wrestles with this unruly topic.

This book is an encyclopedic and magisterial work. I wonder what it’s like to work on such a project. Writing is a lonely task and any ambitious project is fraught with insecurity. With this grand title, it’s clear that Sandor Katz knew this was going to be his magnum opus. I also wonder how it feels when such a project achieves the author’s dreams of grandeur, winning a James Beard award and being generally regarded as a in instant classic in the field.

This book is victorious, but whatever brilliance earned from the previous project is fleeting. There’s always the next project. Life (and fermentation) marches on, and I look forward to reading Sandor’s newest book, Fermentation as Metaphor.

Postscript
I really like the following quote, but I couldn’t fit them into the post above.

Professor Kosikowski won over Kindstedt and his fellow graduate students. “He understood that traditional cheesemaking was not simply about food, or even gastronomic delight, but rather carried with it the weight of the culture and local identity that are so essential for providing context and meaning to our lives.” Indeed, all food exists in a broad context, and centralized mass produced food diminishes that context.

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