Where do you want to be

New Orleans is sinking. Will sink.

I remember the first time: I was in an internet cafe in Laos. It was 2005, the days of weekly emails home and transferring photos onto CDs – and I pulled up the NY Times and I saw these pictures…
It didn’t make sense.
It was the first time, perhaps, when something happened that I could not conceive of people allowing to happen. (Not the last.)

And I was in New Orleans, before that, the first time the world ended: December 31, 1999. The night the planes would fall from the sky because computers didn’t know tomorrow wasn’t 1900.
I don’t remember sleeping on that trip, except at the very beginning. We missed our flight (Jason’s fault; not mine) and couldn’t reach anyone when we arrived (after several quarters in the payphone at the back of the local dive), so we ended up sleeping on Eric’s porch until he got home from work. We’d brought sleeping bags because although he and his roommate, Feyde (not her real name; goth girls didn’t use their real names in those days), were renting an entire house, they had no furniture.
After that – the next day, or the next – it was New Year’s Eve, and we spent the night in Jackson Square and Pirate’s Alley, and were still awake the next morning when the fire department came and hosed the streets down at 6am.
(I don’t remember eating anything either, aside from pear cider and sugar cubes, both from Pirate’s Alley. I was only 19 but Eric and Jason were both 22. I assume the sugar cubes were for absinthe; it being New Orleans; there were bowls of them on the bar, like peanuts.)

Recipe: Pasta Puttanesca, in honor of the Baudelaire orphans, and because it's tasty.

An argument for watching the movie first

I've just read Rowan Matilda. Months after she saw the musical in the West End. Years after she saw the film (musical) version. She loved it. I loved it.

I cannot think of any way in which having watched it first had a negative impact on our reading experience.

We noted a few differences: Matilda is younger, in the book; she has a brother (different than the film, but not the stage version); there is no escapologist nonsense. Okay. So what?

People come into the shop all the time for whatever The Hot Thing is -- Dune, Wuthering Heights, Project Hail Mary -- saying, Well of course I've got to read it first. It shocks them when I suggest that maybe, just maybe, they don't.

How did this idea take hold? And take such hold that it is accepted gospel, really, for those who read? ...I think therein lies the answer. It is important that the book get read; that we're all not just watching the movie and being satisfied. Yes. But it got taken too far.

Consider: If you read the book first, you go to the movie holding this entire world in your head. You'll compare every plot point, measure the actors against your imagination, be annoyed when the entire thing wasn't there. But if you watch the movie first: you'll enjoy a good movie. And then you'll pick up the book and find that there is so, so much more.

Obviously this only works for a good movie. But that's fine; we're not seeing the bad ones. I say: Watch the movie first. Just make sure you do read the book after.

Recipe: Katharine Hepburn's brownies. Becuase sometimes you're in someone else's house and they do not have 5kg of chocolate lying around but they do have cocoa powder. (They didn't even have nuts; I chopped up some cocoa hazelnut protein bars no one really wanted and used those for texture instead.)