When Langdon Cook’s book came across my desk, I immediately wondered why James and I hadn’t written this book. But now that Langdon beat us to it, I’m happy to simply tell you that Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager is a fascinating look at how foraging for your food can be shocking to your friends but also deeply satisfying.
Langdon Cook was a senior book editor at Amazon.com until 2004 when he fled corporate life and shacked up in a little cabin in the woods. Fat of the Land is about how he lived off the grid and foraged for food.
Free-diving in icy Puget Sound in hopes of spearing a snaggletooth lingcod.
Picking mushrooms.
Fly-fishing for sea-run trout.
Collect stinging nettles.
The prose is a mix of literary humour and travel writing. The chapters are divided up by the seasons and each features some type of foraging for wild edibles and ends with a recipe. The first chapter I read was on crab catching.
James and I regularly go crab catching. And by crab catching, I do not mean with a trap, I mean with a wet suit and cooler. James is the catcher and I’m the keeper. He swims out and dives down for the crabs. When he has more than he can hold in his hands, we meet in the shallow water. I wade out with the cooler, he puts the crabs in, and I snuggle them in ice and then wait for the next two.
In BC, you can keep 4 crabs per license and they have to be 6.5 inches across the carapace (don’t quote me on that, get the ruler) and male.
Various friends have come with us to participate in the catching. They enjoy the eating and, if they are fast learners and get the hang of spotting the crabs in the sand, then they also enjoy the catching. It’s tricky. I can spot the crabs but I can’t hold my breath or dive down in a controlled way. I float like a cork.
After we have our limit, there are two options. Cook them on the beach. Or take them home and cook them on the stove. Either is acceptable.
New Think for Old Publishers panel at SXSW drew a lot of frustration from the crowd of book lovers and supporters.
The official description of the session was:
This is not a discussion of whether ebooks are killing treebooks, or whether it’s possible to get cozy with an Amazon Kindle. It’s about how participatory culture and the online world interact with good olde book publishing.Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, Deborah Schultz, and fellow panelists will share with the audience a variety of perspectives on what’s going right and what’s going wrong in publishing, assess success of recent forays into marketing digitally, digital publishing, and what books and blogs have to gain from one another. Penguin Group (USA), which houses some 40 plus imprints and publishes an extremely broad variety of physical and digital products everything from William Gibson’s first ebook in the 90’s to Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food to Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels (the source for HBO’s True Blood) is deeply involved in exploring ways that old and new media might better collaborate. Audience members are invited to speak up about what they think book publishers could/should be doing to better provide relevant information and content to blogs, websites, and online communities. Come tell old media what you want and how you want it.
Clay Shirky ITP
John Fagan Mktg Dir, Penguin Group (USA)
Deborah Schultz Founder/Chief Catalyst, deborahschultz.com
Peter Miller Dir of Publicity, Bloomsbury USA
Ivan Held Pres GP Putnam’s Sons, Penguin Group (USA)
They certainly told publishers what they think. The summation was “you suck at this is the biggest way possible.”
I think it’s unfair to attack the folks on that panel but as representatives of the industry they do have to go back to their houses and understand that they need to convey, not that bloggers are an unruly bunch, but that publishers need to get off their asses and get involved with social media. Enough is enough.
BookSquare says
If you’re going to hold a session called “New Think for Old Publishers”, you gotta come with some new thinking. Either that or tell the audience that it’s a research session…and the audience is supposed to bring the new thinking. Good idea, needed better execution. Nobody read the panel description to mean “we want the audience to tell us what we’re doing wrong and how we can fix it”.
...
The publishing people on stage said, essentially, tell us what we’re doing wrong and how we can fix it. You have 300 people who give up an hour of their lives to hear the cool things the traditional publishing business is doing…and you can ask them to consult on your business?
Monique’s summary
What went wrong is this:
* Publishers have not listened to the crowd for a long time.
* The crowd is restless.
* Publishers wring their hands about the web.
* The crowd offers options publishers don’t like.
* Publishers weep into their hands.
* The crowd wants to help and offers other suggestions.
* Publishers act like deer in headlights.
* The crowd plows down publishers and reinvents the industry without them.
What this panel really came down to is that the wisdom of the crowds is not being tapped. The crowd is now sick and tired of trying to help people who won’t help themselves.
Hold me to this: I’m going to organize a panel in Vancouver. We’re going to create a model for publishing and marketing books. We’re going to move forward as an industry. Leaders will be identified. Roles will be assigned. If you’re not open to totally change everything you’re doing, then you are not ready for this revolution. Don’t come.
Who’s in?
UPDATES
Peter Miller Glibness. “Do As I Say, Not As I Do: Tips from a panelist who barely survived” in Publishers Weekly. Read the article.
Michael Tamblyn of BookNet Canada on 6 Things That Revolutionize Publishing
Apparently the bangers and mash really hit the fan in Christopher Moore’s new novel Fool.
Published by Harper Canada
Travis introduced me to Christopher Moore a while ago. I read his copy of Fluke. If I had more than 2 minutes to myself in the next month, I’d be getting my hands on a copy.
Aside from that I’m reading Pride & Prejudice & Zombies (distributed by Raincoast Books).
Cooking For Two: Perfect Meals For Pairs by Strand, Jessica (Chronicle Books).
The kind folks at Raincoast Books sent over a delicious little book called Cooking for Two. Since James is the chef in our house, cookbooks for me are more like menus. “I’d like this please.”
That said, when James is busy, I’m on my own. The kitchen is a scary place with me in it so this book is perfect. Lovely photos that allow me to see how horribly wrong my version is, and simple recipes that suggest I should do better.
Not in the cookbook, but a complementary dish, is James’ prosciutto-wrapped pork loin.
Since I’m responsible for appetizers, dessert and beverage service, my suggested pairing is Marc Tempe’s Pinot Gris Zellenberg Vielle Vignes 2005. As Anthony at Farmstead Wines says: “Drinks like a wine of twice the price. Bottled in August 2007 without filtration. Stonefruit, spice, vanilla, & integrated wood notes with great minerality in an amazingly rich wine.” That means it tastes really fricking good with this meal.
My birthday usually lasts the full month. This behaviour wasn’t instituted by me. It came about because as a teen I lived in one place with lots of lovely friends and had lots of other lovely friends in another city. It meant that I got used to stretching out a birthday in order to make myself and others feel good about not being able to celebrate together on my actual birthday. The practice that started due to geography soon became habit so even now I love stretching out the celebrations.
This year was a truncated celebration. I was away in Jordan during the lead-up to my birthday, in a perfume workshop the weekend of my birthday, and have been bustling away with work since my birthday. The birthday celebration was Sunday night (Nov. 16) and there’s only been a quiet smattering of birthday wishes since. Not my usual full-blown agenda so I was very excited to get a bunch of cool mail this week.
Not in the mail, but stumbled up via Flickr, here’s the photo of my birthday party filling a full theatre row. (Thanks Travis.)
Thursday Andrew Zuckerman’s Creature arrived in the mail. Lovely, beautiful photographs from an amazing photographer. Andrew Zuckerman’s Wisdom is another worthwhile book (watch the video on his site). But Creature is eye-candy for the animal lover. It is about souls beyond human souls.
Friday afternoon my perfume oils from Eden Botanicals arrived. I’m looking forward to playing with the Black Currant.
Saturday morning the doorbell brought this tasty selection of treats from the Sherrett household. Thank you Linda!
The BC Achievement Foundation’s 2008 Award for Early Literacy went to author Bill Richardson and illustrator Cynthia Nugent for The Aunts Come Marching (Raincoast Books), a singalong story about a procession of musical aunts who drop in on a family for an unexpected visit. This is a very fun book and I even had the pleasure of listening to Bill read/sing it.
The Time to Read Award is a national book award honouring the author and the illustrator of a children’s book suitable for kindergarten students. The winning book is distributed to all kindergarten children in British Columbia by the Ministry of Education.
Thank you to John MacKenzie and Selina Rajani—John for saying go ahead and Selina for packaging it up so nicely.
The Idea of Beauty is one of my most favourite poems (and it’s featured in Sledgehammer, published by Polestar). I heard John read this in the hallway at Raincoast Books and it has stuck with me.
The Idea of Beauty (Spoke Itself) by John MacKenzie
I have been waiting here for you since
the stars first leapt into the sky
since before there was water sprung from fresh rock
(its first & longest music a metronome—
beat after unvaried beat falling like hammers of zombied blacksmiths)
I have been waiting here where
there were no flowers & the rocks were sharp
the soil odorless & dense,
no air pockets, no tunnels of worms winding
under roots of grass
I have waited here as minerals & salts turned to algae & coral
in the factory din of water & wind
as the assembly-line sun flung super-cooled windsurfing dimetrodons
among giant treeferns & monochrome blossoms,
as prototype blood shifted towards red & DNA began its fall
from beautiful flux into fixity and self-replication
I have waited here glacially for you
as the whispery respiration of trees built air
while whole forests fell into peat bogs, became stones
while the beaded sweat of ancient lives accreted into diamonds
& the idea of beauty spoke itself in the lush green syllables of your eyes
This public surface, reserved for Taker, could be a scene in John Burn’ new novel Runnerland
Runnerland is about Peter, aka Runner. He’s an amateur artist. A kid living on the streets. And he’s running from life.
In particular he’s running from his former life, that of typical teenager whose living the middle-class lifestyle. The thing that drives Peter away from home is his father’s death and the discovery that he’s adopted. These two life altering moments result in a bus trip across Canada, the initiation into a street group (kind of a gang but that’s never explicit).
The thing that I like about Peter’s story was that it was believable. Believable enough for someone who doesn’t live on the street and who’s never run away. I like that he doesn’t follow the path of drugs. But he gets messed up in his own way. I feel that Peter is lost, but I also feel like he’s smart enough to survive.
Runnerland is about Peter, aka Runner. He’s an amateur artist. A kid living on the streets. And he’s running from life.