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Personal blog of Jessica Zafra, author of The Collected Stories and the Twisted series
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Archive for November, 2012

Poetry, paintings, pens

November 23, 2012 By: jessicazafra Category: Art, Books 3 Comments →


Here, 27 poems by Wislawa Szymborska, in the original Polish with English translations by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak. (NBS, Php605)


The Milkmaid by Vermeer. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.


Vermeer by Wislawa Szymborska (We wrote it out with a Pilot disposable fountain pen)

An earlier poem by Szymborska: Brueghel’s Two Monkeys.


Two Chained Monkeys by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.


Brueghel’s Two Monkeys by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Cavanagh and Baranczak. (Disposable fountain pen)

Cracking open a new notebook

November 22, 2012 By: jessicazafra Category: Notebooks 4 Comments →


Moleskine pocket notebook, unlined, Php1100 at NBS.

Two retro technologies we cling to: writing by hand on notebooks made of paper, and audiocassettes.

Details engraved on the cover.

Plus stickers for customizing. Couldn’t resist cracking it open for a quick scribble.

P.S. Our Wu-Tang name is Sarkastik Ambassador. The Wu-Tang Name Generator knows all!

Biblio-mat: a vending machine for books

November 22, 2012 By: jessicazafra Category: Books, Music, Places 2 Comments →

The BIBLIO-MAT from Craig Small on Vimeo.

The Biblio-Mat is a random book dispenser built by Craig Small for The Monkey’s Paw, an idiosyncratic antiquarian bookshop in Toronto. Biblio-Mat books, which vary widely in size and subject matter, cost two dollars. The machine was conceived as an artful alternative to the ubiquitous and often ignored discount sidewalk bin. When a customer puts coins into it, the Biblio-Mat dramatically whirrs and vibrates as the machine is set in motion. The ring of an old telephone bell enhances the thrill when the customer’s mystery book is delivered with a satisfying clunk into the receptacle below. via NPR

The Biblio-mat is dispensing books to the tune of Step Right Up by Tom Waits.

Xmas in a bag

November 22, 2012 By: jessicazafra Category: Announcements, Clothing No Comments →


The Fairfax bag, in ketchup.

Kipling, the Belgian bag brand, and World Vision have launched “A Brighter Christmas for A Brighter Tomorrow,” a program to raise funds for the education of children under the care of the advocacy group.

For every bag or piece of luggage purchased at Kipling stores in the Philippines from December 1 to 31, 2012, Kipling will donate Php500 to World Vision. (Up to 22 percent of the cost of the item, which is pretty generous.)


The Shopper Combo, in green

Kipling’s “Basic Elevated” holiday collection is now available at its stores.

Our favorite delicious bad review

November 21, 2012 By: jessicazafra Category: Food, Places 4 Comments →

Allegory of Taste by Jan Brueghel the Elder. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Our favorite lines from As Not Seen On TV, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells’s now-famous review of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar: all of them, but especially these. (In blue, like the watermelon margarita that tastes like radiator fluid and formaldehyde.)

Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?

What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?

Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret — a lunch-only sandwich of chopped soy-glazed pork with coleslaw and cucumbers — called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?

And when we hear the words Donkey Sauce, which part of the donkey are we supposed to think about?

Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?

Mostly we’re gnawing our liver with envy because a negative review of a restaurant would not appear in our major dailies. Virulent attacks on political figures: Sure! Ad hominem attacks on show business personalities: Go ahead. Hypercritical movie reviews: Fine. Hypercritical book reviews: Umm, we review each other. But bad restaurant reviews: No no no no or we could never eat there again (As if we’d want to eat there again).

Have we mentioned that we got our Today column because of a bad restaurant review? We had total freedom. True, we had no ads because we published negative reviews (and that eventually killed us), but we could write whatever we wanted. Those were good times.

More: Restaurant critics review Pete Wells’s review

Weingarten’s new laws of writing

November 21, 2012 By: jessicazafra Category: Language 3 Comments →

(1) The Law of Conservation of Adjectives. In the old days, writers needed to burden themselves with an arsenal of modifiers adjectives that deliver subtly different connotation and emphasis. No more. Today, one only needs the adverb really, and the degree of emphasis is indicated by how many times it is used. Really, really happy would formerly have been elated. Really, really, really, really happy would formerly have been orgasmic. The really phenomenon is so strong that its limits cannot be plumbed even by the mighty Google search engine, which restricts inquiries to no more than 32 words. I can, however, report that people have used at least 32 reallys very often. How often? Really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really often. Thirty-two reallys, in quotes, returns more than 3 million hits. Here, some of the words following 32 or more reallys: like girls, hot guy, old, cool and want this (its a shirt). A quick anecdotal sampling suggests the most common word following 32 reallys is bored.

Read Prose and Cons. Good news: More people are writing. Bad news: More people are writing.