How to use this Page

Nope - not chocolate chip cookies, even though I love them.  Not brownies or cupcakes. 



My oven is loaded with hardtack!

Hardtack, also called ship's bread, is a very hard, dry cracker or biscuit that was a staple of the Revolutionary War sailor's diet.  Made with just flour, water, and sometimes salt, it's incredibly cheap, and it lasts forever as long as it doesn't get wet. 

I have two school visits coming up next week, and I always like to let kids taste some of the food that the characters eat in my historical novel Spitfire.  Most students take a tiny piece of hardtack, bite down on it, discover it's like eating petrified wood, and grimace.  A few always end up liking it, though - hanging around for extra samples when the presentation is over.  These kids, I figure, probably would have made the best sailors.  They probably like sleeping on the floor, too.

Many sailors and soldiers got into the habit of tapping their hardtack before they bit into it.  This was to knock the weevils out of it because the bread often became infested with bugs.  Other men preferred to soak the bread in their soup or coffee and then pick the bugs out with a spoon.   But wait!  Kids in South Burlington and Brandon... I don't want you to worry if you're reading this. Even though my hardtack can't compete with chocolate chip cookies, I guarantee it will be insect-free.

Inspired by our nationwide heatwave, Papercuts blogger Dwight Garner points to a beautiful passage of Paul Theroux’s in The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Building Blocks:

I have a quite romantic notion of when I was very young. I saw the movie “Picnic” with William Holden. Whenever I think of “Picnic,” I think of hot summers, the picnics, small towns, something dramatic happening. To me, the quintessential American experience is a summer picnic. It’s hot; it’s kind of steamy. It’s very sensual to me. The way the people are dressed, what they say, darkness falling, the crickets, all of that stuff. And I suppose the film was part of it. That moment in middle America when the corn is ripe. Maybe it’s purely fantasy because I’ve never lived in the Midwest, but that is the sense I have. Sometimes you get it in Wright Morris or Willa Cather. I think of the Midwest and then, of course, for New England I think of Robert Frost. So I think a great deal of writing which is purely American literature arouses a lot of emotions in me.

To read the rest of the post and the comments that followed, click here.

An article in Salon.com, “Let Us Now Praise Editors” by Gary Kumiya, compares editors to Mr. Wolf in Pulp Fiction (the kind of people who are called in to clean up the mess).

The first half of Kumiya’s article discusses exactly what editors do: “Editors are craftsmen, ghosts, psychiatrists, bullies, sparring partners, experts, enablers, ignoramuses, translators, writers, goalies, friends, foremen, wimps, ditch diggers, mind readers, coaches, bomb throwers, muses and spittoons — sometimes all while working on the same piece.”

The second half of the article discusses the importance of editors in light of self-publishing and blogging trends: “If learning how to be edited is a form of growing up, much of the blogosphere still seems to be in adolescence, loudly affirming its identity and raging against authority. But teenagers eventually realize that authority is not as tyrannical and unhip as they once thought. It’s edited prose, with its points sharpened by another, that will ultimately stand the test of time.”

A UK publisher, Tank, is releasing a series of literary classics packaged like cigarettes. You flip the top, tear off the cellophane, and let the tales “take your breath away.” … Apparently inspired by the recent UK ban on smoking in public places.