addy, packing for her riyadh trip, turned up a book she had bought for me in paris several years ago (and had blithely forgotten about,) which book, this time, was hurriedly conveyed to me. it was a gorgeous little handstitched pamphlet, green exterior, watermelon red pages, and quite right too, because it was la pastèque - dix façons de la préparer by william chan tat chuen, who, it would appear, is a french-chinese food writer and editor.

i am not going to attempt anything within.

but i would love to produce a little book like this. i wish i knew anything about the publishing trade, perhaps i should go edit cookbooks for a bit on the side, or help people put out their monographs. i've rather got a taste for editing these days, having worked on that bilingual text project for a bit. i like being able to get to the rewriting bit without ever having to go through the work of the first writing.

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i like gerald c. potter for saying "productivity on this scale soon puts the roses back in a writer's life." i wish some productivity will come into my writing life, and them roses attendant on that development, but that is not a thing to hope for, i suppose.

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come to think of it i rather like him for saying (in a tentative way) to his wife, following one of her hysterical fits: "are you hinged now?"

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