A Momentary Taste of Being

In a word, not to keep you in suspense, charming.  A memoir cum travelogue cum cookbook, Ms. Flinn tells the story of leaving corporate America and pursuing her dream of a degree from one of the most prestigious cooking schools in the world. Ms. Flinn tells her adventures while attending all three courses at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris--basic, intermediate, and superior.  Along the way we learn about the Chefs, their moods, their modes, their recipes, their haunts.  We also learn a bit about Paris, a good deal about the school, and a great deal about Ms. Flinn, who sounds like a wonderful person--one both interesting and entertaining to be with. Living in Paris Ms. Flinn plays host to any number of visitors--from one young man who bursts into her apartment to find the bathroom and spend much of the rest of his stay with her recovering from food poisoning picked up in London, to the visitation of two extremely trying young women who allow Kathleen and her husband to ...

I've modified my plans (re West with the Night)   a bit from yesterday because what I wanted to include was so lengthy, that I think it better to advise you to look up the book and read the chapter.  However, to whet your appetite, I thought I might include one of the striking images that Beryl Markham conjures. from West with the Night Beryl Markham The sound of Paddy's roar in my ears will only be duplicated, I think, when the doors of hell slip their wobbly hinges one day, an give voice and authenticity to the whole panorama of Dante's poetic nightmares. It was an immense roar that encompassed the world and dissolved me in it. I can see what so impressed Hemingway in the writing.  It is vividly imagined and vividly rendered.  One can almost see Ms. Markham at her desk recalling the Elkington Lion and the incident that she recounts in so engrossing a fashion.

I pull out the following passage for its odd cultural resonance. from West with the Night Beryl Markham It wasn't a big farm as farms went in Africa before the First World War, but it had a very nice house with a large veranda on which my father, Jim Elkington, Mrs. Elkington, and one or two other settlers sat and talked with what to my mind was always unreasonable solemnity. Two things--one very minor, but of interest to my point about memoir.  Obviously, the book was written after the commencement (at least) of World War II.  It just struck me as a matter of interest. Ah, but then there is the matter of the complete vanishing of Mrs. Elkington.  I can see Beryl's father, Jim Elkington, and even the shadowy figures of the other people on the veranda.  But Mrs. Elkington has no substance, her very essence is absorbed into her identity as "mate of Elkington."  And it is this sort of thinking and this sort of view of women that remains a challenge today....

from West with the Night Beryl Markham You cannot hunt an animal with such a weapon [a spear] unless you know the way of his life. You must know the things he love, the things he fears, the paths he will follow. You must be sure of the quality of his speed and the measure of his courage. He will know as much about you, and at times make better use of it. . . . That day my eyes were filled with clouds, but they were young enough eyes an they soon cleared. There were other days and other dik-dik. There were so many things. There were dik-dik and leopard, kongoni and warthog, buffalo, lion, and the 'hare that jumps.; There were many thousands of the hare that jumps. And there were wildebeest and antelope. There was the snake that crawls and the snake that climbs. There were birds, and young men like whips of leather, like rainshafts in the sun, like spear before a singiri. Of her work, Hemingway had this to say: from a Letter from Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins Did ...