So Much to Learn!

 Books!

My longtime favorite little library. Around a mile from our house.
(Yes, they still keep going.)
I seem to read everything on ebooks.

Our Garden

Serious Book

Quotes from The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger

“Electricity is a wily force. It itself is not alive, but it is very often the best sign of life. It’s a proxy for aliveness.”

“Already, scientists have found compelling evidence that language is not entirely confined to the human realm; prairie dogs appear to use adjectives, specific repeated sounds they use to describe the size, shape, color, and speed of predators. Japanese great tits have syntax; they use distinct strings of chirps to instruct their comrades to scan for danger, or tell them to move closer. We’ve heard about songbirds using backchannels for alarm calls, and risk-averse chipmunks screaming at the slightest spook. Perhaps it would be small-minded of us to foreclose on the possibility of a sound-based plant language emerging too.”

“If plants can’t do something for themselves, they find other things that can do it for them. But when those other things are living creatures with their own agendas, that might take a little bribing—or manipulation. Legumes, for example, form associations with bacteria in their roots to lock in a steady supply of nitrogen fertilizer.”

“Agency is an organism’s capacity to assess the conditions it finds itself in, and change itself to suit them. Yes, we do this all the time. So do plants.”

“Intelligence is a loaded word, perhaps overly connected to our ideas of academic achievement. It’s been weaponized against fellow humans for millennia, used to divide people into hierarchies of worth and power. I wouldn’t want to apply that schema to a whole additional category of life. Yet it is, by its very definition, still a word that contains the germ of what we mean by alert, awake to the world, spontaneous, responsive, decision-making. From the Latin interlegere: to discern, to choose between. So science may or may not ever deign to use it for plants, for exactly the reasons of the social implications; humans have contaminated the word with their humanness. But words are merely symbols. They draw a perimeter around a feeling for which there is no language. In that sense, intelligent might be the tightest word-perimeter we’ve got to describe what we are seeing plants do.”

Not-so-Serious Book

The Kamogawa Food Detectives is a light-hearted book, but unfortunately it’s quite repetitive. Each chapter begins in the secretive restaurant of the Kamogawa family, the father, Nagare, and the daughter, Koishi. In each case, a person comes into the restaurant with a request to the “detectives” to identify a blurry food memory, usually from their early childhood. 

Before hearing about this request, Koishi and Nagare serve him or her a remarkable, delicious, and ultra-traditional Japanese meal. The descriptions of these over-the-top Japanese meals really seem to be the main motivation for the novel. Here’s an example:

“‘From top left,’ began Nagare, tucking the tray under his arm, ‘Miyajima oysters, simmered Kurama-style, miso-glazed baked butterburs with millet cake, bracken and bamboo shoot stew, chargrilled moroko, breast of Kyoto-reared chicken with a wasabi dressing, and vinegared Wakasa mackerel wrapped in pickled Shogoin turnip. In the bottom right you have a hamaguri clam broth thickened with kudzu starch. Tonight’s customer asked me to create something that evoked both the lingering winter and the onset of spring, which led to the dishes you see here.’”

After the client eats and describes the food memory they wish to recapture, Nagare travels to somewhere in Japan where the seeker lived as a child. This consistently requires two weeks, after which he will prepare the dish that haunted their client. In contrast to the lavish meal served two weeks before, these nostalgic dishes are usually very simple — in one case, it’s a simple dish of spaghetti with hot dogs, served in a special way; usually it’s a simple food typical of Japanese childhood, but also slightly unusual in some way. 

Each chapter is so much like the others that I quickly got tired of reading. There’s even a cat that makes an appearance at the same point in each story. Note, however, that I did finish all 201 pages of the book.

UPDATE: A recent New York Times cooking article described the Japanese “Spaghetti Napolitan” that featured in the story I mentioned. It’s spaghetti fried with seasoned ketchup — based on Italian cuisine, but invented in Japan, and a definite favorite of kids there. (NYT Article Here)

Alice in Amsterdam

Alice sent me some photos of her visit. I love this street art!

At the Reijksmuseum

Wonderful dollhouses. I try to see them whenever I am there.

“The Nightwatch” is being cleaned. A previous time it was cleaned was in 1976, and we
(Len, Evelyn, and I) saw it then, in a workshop. So it’s funny that Alice is seeing the same thing.

I’m sharing this weekend post with Eileen’s critters, Sami’s murals (The Nightwatch is DEFINITELY a mural!) and with Deb’s Sunday Salon. © 2025 mae sander.