First, let’s get the wee thing out of the way.

You have to learn to love it, that grassy, glucosey, honey-sulphur stench that surprises you every time. Think, like Proust, of the verdant alchemy that “transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume”, and consider it a delightful disruption of your mindless bog-going; a private second chance to remember what it tasted like going in at the other end.

An asparagal meditation trigger, if you will.

The thing is, you have to learn to relish any opportunity to get more, more, more – even if it is through the medium of your own methanethiol-laced piss – because the English asparagus season is so tragically short. The seasonality is partly what makes those stalks so special, scarcity breeding desire; in an instantly gratifying world, there is a rare thrill in channelling our greed into two months of sweet-pee’d gluttony.

You can’t cheat. The overpackaged trays of biro-skinny spears proffered in December, or the taxidermic bottles of fat pale pickled fingers lining continental supermarket shelves, have nothing to do with the splendidly stubby, phallic bundles that appear in farm shops from May to June. And it has to be thick and green; purple, white, thin or tips just can’t compete with the summer lushness of a plump and waxy shaft bursting with chlorophyll.

When it comes to eating, I’ll have none of your mayonnaise or hollandaise, smothering freshness with tooth-coating goop; nor parmesan or parma ham, slipping an unwelcome salty barrier between my mouth and yielding flesh. I was once served asparagus cold, with vinaigrette, and promptly reminded of clammily decomposed digits fresh from the embalming jar. No, the perfect pikes are most definitely gobbled lightly steamed, with a jug of melted butter and a crunchy snowfall of sea salt. And cutlery takes up too much time. Go for fingers, slippery and rapacious; duck your head to catch the nodding tip, and gnash down to the woody base, grasping for the next before someone else robs the pile.

Oh, alright. If you really must be ornery, there is one permissible alternative. On disappointing days when ash has trashed your holiday and your thighs loom tuber-like and tanless in your too-mini denim mini shorts, you may reach for spears doused in mirin and speckled with sesame seeds. The burst of damp, warm salt and sugar results in the ideal vegetal comfort food.

Hey. It’s already mid-May, people. Stop reading, and dig in.

-Molly Flatt runs the Hitchcock Blonde website.

Tags: asparagus, Proust

This entry was posted on Friday, May 21st, 2010 at 4:54 pm and is filed under The Perfectionist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

When you look, it literally stops your breath.

It is a little dam in the relentless gush of being; a tiny raised stitch hitching up the fabric of time; a minute crampon allowing us to cling to the slippery slopes of meaning; yet this delicate, broken curb is also inherently porous, allowing sense to flow forwards even as it catches it momentarily, swinging open like the flippers in a pinball machine to propel sense and sentiment on.

Yes. The semi-colon.

Most of us have a moment, usually around twelve, a tremulous, game-changing moment when we realise that we are simply and irrevocably different from the other kids; mine occurred when I discovered that no-one else had a favourite punctuation mark.

It has become something of an obsession. I have to stop myself from forming every sentence I write around the semi-colon’s broken curve. It is no coincidence that it has become the international symbol for the knowing, winking smile; this mark is a professional tease, separating phrases yet indicating their interdependence as it does so. It is both curtailer and coupler; a Pandarus of punctuation that gently holds concepts a hairs-breadth apart to make their collision all the sweeter.

No wonder it was invented by an Italian. I like to imagine Aldus Manutius, squinting over his fifteenth-century woodblocks, his aquiline nose radiant in a mullion-patterned shaft of Venetian light as he levitates a full stop, slips a comma beneath, and grins wolfishly at the perfection of his elegant new hybrid.

There; there, he thinks.

You may assume that all punctuation is perfect, each economic symbol doing its essential bit to disambiguate our language. You are wrong. The full stop is basically death, absolute and eternal; demanding total respect but difficult to love. The comma is too common to adore; a promiscuous, breathy slip of a thing that races ahead with laboradorian gusto. The question mark is tainted with aggressive egocentricity, obliterating subtlety with its lollipop-headed LA twang. And worst of all is the exclamation ‘point’ – as F. Scott Fitzgerald memorably put it, “like laughing at your own jokes.”

Start noticing semi-colons. See how they manipulate you so easily, so quietly, so prettily. Give their complex hiatuses the fully loaded micro-pauses they deserve.

Then go out and play with the other children, dear.

-Molly Flatt runs the Hitchcock Blonde website.

Tags: Aldus Manutius, punctuation, semi-colon

This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 5:46 pm and is filed under The Perfectionist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.