Epic Meal Quest

On Sunday we visited the brand-new High Line Park, walked around Greenwich Village for a couple of hours, then decided to make our way over to Teany for tea. It was by this time 2:30, and none of us had eaten anything since breakfast. We were also trying to catch up with some friends of B & R, and unfortunately had to keep calling them to say "We're not where we just were... we're over here now..."

So, we get to Teany approaching 3:00. It is... closed. They had a fire. Apparently this happened back in mid-June, but I had missed hearing about it until now. And Diana, who goes oftener than I do, hadn't heard either...

We make a new plan. We'll go to Bluestockings and wait for B & R's friends to arrive, and then we'll head up to Cha An and have tea there. So, we do hang out in Bluestockings for a bit, we do meet up with B & R's friends, we are seven people now and Cha An won't have room for us for half an hour. We haven't eaten, we're getting cranky.

We make a new plan. We'll go down to Typhoon and eat a light lunch there, and then just get tea and dessert at Cha An. We get to Typhoon, and... it's closed. They're not open for lunch, or at least not open for lunch on Sunday.

We look across the street. There is a Japanese restaurant. It is a tiny little hole in the wall, no decor to speak of. But they have room for all of us (because no one else is there.) B. has a bad feeling about it. We order appetizers to share.

The agedashi tofu is better than at the specialty tofu restaurant in Nagasaki. The eggplant is the best eggplant I've ever had, broiled with miso. The veg gyoza is with spinach dough -- I'm usually meh on veg gyoza because they just put cabbage in, but it was pretty good.

Just as we're finishing up, Cha An calls and has a table for us. Cha An is a Japanese tea house that does a lot of Japanese-style sweets, and we got a dessert course with sake ice cream, and black sesame creme brulee, and sakura flan, and B. had matcha, and chocolate roll cake with rasperry, and it was SO FANTASTIC. OMG. It was one of those food experiences that is worth paying for. And that is the end of our Epic Meal Quest, but we did go to Kyotofu for dinner and that was also great.

THE END. YAY.

(no subject)

It bothers me when people say, "Oh, well, taste is just subjective" as a way of shutting down discussions about aesthetics, or about the quality of art.

"Oh, well, taste is just subjective" because lots of people like Stephen King, or lots of people like Stephenie Meyer. Does that mean we can't discuss what works and doesn't work in their books? Does that mean that we have to accept something as good because lots of people think so?

I'm not interested in selling a lot of books except to the extent that I'd like to keep writing, and I'd like to keep writing and have enough leisure time, and I'd like to have enough money to finance that. I am interested in working on my craft. And when people say, "Oh, well, taste is just subjective," what they're really saying is: there is no point in working on your craft. There is no such thing as craft. If you try to write better, some people might like your writing more, or some people might not.

And it's not as if there's some Olympic Committee of Art handing out 5.8s and 5.9s so there's some objective measurement of exactly how you stack up compared to the Dan Browns of the world. It's even true that as some authors get closer and closer to what they're trying to achieve, they start to write work that is dense, obscure, alienating. And on the other hand I don't think that accessibility is the highest of virtues; it's delightful and impressive when a writer has built something dense and obscure and absolutely necessary to the story. Even when I read, say, Greer Gilman, and I don't know what the heck is going on and I don't understand it/ love it enough to persevere, I'm not going to say it was done badly just because it doesn't work for me.

Perhaps this discussion is still stuck between the Scylla and Charybdis of populism and elitism. Elitism has been rightly exposed as a force that gets used to reinforce privileges and exclude people. But doing creative work means trusting the art, committing yourself to the art, and you cannot do that and at the same time throw up your hands and say there's no such thing as good and bad.