Bad cooking!

I've just read 'My Life in France' by Julia Child, which is a wonderful book. 

Julia and her husband Paul, in one of the best pictures of all time!

 She's so frank and full of humility. She details her many failings on the way to success, and in fact she describes them repeatedly as being part of the process. Here's one of my favourite sections:

      In spite of my good notices, I remained a long way from being a maître de cuisine. This was made plain the day I invited my friend Winnie for lunch, and managed to serve her the most vile eggs Florentine one could imagine outside of England. I suppose I had gotten a little too self-confident for my own good: rather than measure out the flour, I had guessed at the proportions, and the result was a goopy sauce Mornay. Unable to find spinach at the market, I'd bought chicory instead; it, too, was horrid. We at the lunch with painful politeness and avoided discussing its taste. I made sure not to apologize for it. This was a rule of mine.

      I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make. When one's hostess starts in with self-deprecations such as "Oh, I don't know how to cook..." or "Poor little me..." or "This may taste awful..." it is so dreadful to have to reassure her that everything is delicious and fine, whether it is or not. Besides, such admissions only draw attention to one's shortcomings (or self-perceived shortcomings), and make the other person think, "Yes, you're right, this really is an awful meal!" Maybe the cat has fallen into the stew, or the lettuce has frozen, or the cake has collapsed - eh bien, tant pis!

Usually one's cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is truly vile, as my ersatz eggs Florentine surely were, then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile -  and learn from her mistakes.

Spontaneous Generation

Imagine for a moment that you live in a world without microscopes. You can only see things with your naked eye.

You see a piece of meat rotting, and out of it crawls maggots. The meat is changing as it rots: its colour, smell, texture, dampness, etc. are all going through changes. The creation of maggots is just another part of that change, it would seem.

(This is a maggot by the way. Don't they look cute and weird up close!)

If you see this over and over again, in all sorts of contexts, it will seem to you to be true. This is the basis of Aristotelian 'Natural Philosophy', which is the origin of modern science. Repeated observations are key to understanding the world. In fact, in this context, you would have to be quite strange to see anything other than maggots being 'born' from the rotting meat.

It was also Aristotle who brought together the classical theories on spontaneous generation:

"...some [animals] spring from parent animals according to their kind, whilst others grow spontaneously and not from kindred stock; and of these instances of spontaneous generation some come from putrefying earth or vegetable matter, as is the case with a number of insects, while others are spontaneously generated in the inside of animals out of the secretions of their several organs."
Aristotle, History of Animals, Book V, Part 1 

Aristotle had seen many examples of 'spontaneous generation' with his own eyes, and he described the 'vital heat' which must exist in some things and lead to life arising there. Hundreds of years later, with the invention of microscopes, and the stronger emphasis on experimentation over observation in science, people began to get another idea.

If you're interested in the history of the microscope and its use to understand the generation of life, there's an interesting blog post that goes into lots of detail: Invisible World. (There's also a shorter, but still quite comprehensive article here.) The summary of it is that though the microscope was invented in around 1610, the matter of spontaneous generation was not entirely settled until Pasteur's experiments in 1859. In those 250 years, there was plenty of back and forth, and attempts at experiements to prove one side or the other to be correct.

The best thing by far to have arisen from the debate is this recipe for how to make a mouse by Jan Baptista van Helmont:

(Wheat + sweaty rags + 21 days = fully grown mice)

It's such a great idea that it's even the kicking off point for a short story by Jon Franklin: To Make a Mouse.

Overall, it seems that it's very hard to let go of something that you can see to be true with your own eyes. Understandably so.

I'm fairly certain that if future discoveries turn our understanding about reproduction on its head, it would probably take another quarter of a century for us to get on board.

So Here's the Point

I often sit with my pen in my hand and a piece of paper in front of me. I can sit there for hours sometimes without writing a word. Perhaps you've experienced this too.

Or, if you're a programmer, you've stared at an empty screen. Or, if you're a scientist, you've looked blankly at a rack of samples. Or, if you're in advertising, you've watched your product just sit on the desk and not inspire you at all. Or....well, you get the picture.

We're often paralysed in the act of creating something because we already know ahead of time that what we create will be awful. So why bother? Better to live with at least the sliver of hope that you might have talent, than to smash that hope to pieces by proving to yourself that you don't. Right?

Maybe not.

For a long time, I had a printout of this story above my bed. It's called Slight Rebellion Off Madison, and it was published by The New Yorker in 1946. It was written by J D Salinger, and was later edited into chapter 17 of Catcher in the Rye.



The story is not very long, and compared to Catcher, it's not very good. I kept it tacked really high up on the wall, and I've only read it a couple of times. I didn't stick it over my bed so that I could read it. It was there for inspiration.

I kept it on my wall to remind myself that the first version is not the version. It's just a starting point.

Somehow, since I've moved out of that bedroom, I've often forgotten this fact. I've avoided even picking up my pen or sitting down in front of any paper because I just hated to stare at the emptiness that could only be marred by my own imperfection.

So, I've started this blog. I want to remind myself, and perhaps a few others, that perfection is not a starting point.

I want to gather together examples of bad first drafts, and downright awful ideas, from all walks of life, and all avenues of creation. Not to mock them, but to celebrate them as the first step on the road to something great!