Morgens an den Schreibtisch gesetzt und ihn bis abends nicht verlassen, mit einer kurzen Mittagspause, um „Saturday Night Live“ zu gucken. Das Fußballspiel in Augsburg gegen Leverkusen lief die ersten Minuten mit Ton nebenbei, nach dem 1:0 schaltete ich auf stumm, weil ich lieber das Textdokument fertigkriegen als Fußball gucken wollte. Ich sah das unrühmliche Ende, wie Augsburg in der vierten Minute der Nachspielzeit noch den Ausgleich kassierte, aber wie F. völlig richtig meinte: Hey, einen Punkt mehr als wir erwartet hatten. Augsburg hat Leverkusen in zehn Bundesligajahren noch kein einziges Mal geschlagen und daher ist ein Punkt natürlich super, aber dann trotzdem doof, egal, kurz getwittert und weiter am Dokument gebastelt.

Abends machte ich aus den ganzen Einzelkapiteln wieder ein langes, auch um die Seitenzahlen ins Inhaltsverzeichnis zu schreiben, die natürlich für die Veröffentlichung egal sein werden, aber für den ersten Eindruck dann doch nicht ganz unwichtig. Ich bin dann jetzt doch wieder bei 315 Seiten, was nur gute 40 weniger sind als bei der Diss-Abgabe. Ich hatte mal 70 rausgeschmissen, wollte aber die ganzen Anregungen aus den Gutachten bzw. der Korrektur meines Doktorvaters einpflegen und jetzt sind wir halt wieder bei 315. Aber immerhin in meinen Augen deutlich besseren 315 als vorher.

Heute husche ich noch einmal pro forma rüber, aber eigentlich nur um zu gucken, ob ich auch wirklich alle Markierungen und Anmerkungen für mich selbst rausgeworfen habe, dann wird ein PDF draus und dann darf Vati nochmal drüberlesen. Währenddessen kümmerere ich mich um Verlagsanfragen, denn nun habe ich ja eine Zeichen- und Abbildungsanzahl, mit der ich nachfragen kann, wieviele tausend Euro denn jemand dafür haben möchte, aus dem PDF ein Buch zu machen, damit ich meine Promotionsurkunde kriege und neue Visitenkarten drucken kann.

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How Ottolenghi’s bright colours and vivid tastes changed the way we eat

Der Gastro-Kritiker Jay Rayner, den ich sehr aus seinen Masterchef-Teilnahmen mag, guckt sich 15 Jahre nach dem Erscheinen noch einmal das erste Ottolenghi-Kochbuch an und klingt dabei sehr sentimental.

„In 2002 the literary agent Felicity Rubinstein found herself drawn to a white-walled deli that had just opened around the corner from her home in London’s Notting Hill. It was called Ottolenghi and its food display was a riot of colour and promise. Eating it looked like it might be a quick route to feeling good about yourself. “I became rather obsessed with it,” she says now. “I reckoned it wasn’t difficult to make this food. I just had to know what was in it.” Soon Ottolenghi opened an outpost in Islington. Sarah Lavelle, then an editor at Ebury Books, lived close by. “I went down one weekend and people were queueing out the door. I thought, ‘Something’s going on here.’” Merope Mills, then editor of the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, also visited. “I was looking for a new vegetarian cooking columnist,” she says. “And I was struck by all these brilliant-looking salads.”

These three people, all in powerful media positions, were drawn to an extraordinary retail display: of rugged vegetable dishes spiked with chilli and lemon, with the green of fresh herbs against the vivid orange of roast squash; to heaps of buxom cakes, honey-slicked pastries and pert, snowy meringues. Each would play a part in launching a publishing phenomenon; one which has so far shifted around 7m copies worldwide. Its cornerstone is the original Ottolenghi, published in 2008; a book which introduced the UK to the then exotic joys of tahini, sumac and za’atar. It’s not yet 15 years old, but to flick through its pages is to glimpse the self when young, before charring broccoli was a thing. To think, there was a time when all we did was boil it.

“Yotam has literally changed what supermarkets stock,” Mills says now of the Israeli chef and writer, who in the 90s gave up studying for a PhD for a life of cooking in London.“

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Roxane Gay on How to Write About Trauma

Monica Lewinsky spricht mit Roxane Gay. Das hat schon gereicht, um mich für das Interview zu interessieren.

„L: Does “writing trauma well” fall under the category of what we would normally say is “good” writing? Or does writing trauma well mean that it’s effective in a different way?

G: That’s a good question, and I think a lot of the time what we mean by writing well is very subjective and there can be a lot of different criteria. For some people, writing about trauma well means that it helps them work through something. But is that going to be writing trauma well for an audience? And which audience? You really do have to think through these questions as you’re writing trauma and decide, what is your end goal? And what are you going to consider a success?

L: I’ve written about my trauma and what ends up feeling meaningful to me is when someone connects with it in a way that helps them. You had an outpouring of that after ‚Hunger‘. Did that mitigate some of the experiences you were having with the press? What was that like?

G: It was surprising, because I did not expect the book to resonate with as many people as it did, and with as many people who were not fat. I just thought, Great, I’m going to reach my fat brethren, yay. But living in a body is hard, no matter what that body looks like, and no matter what that body’s ability is. And so people really had a lot to say, and I really felt I had done it well, because so many people came to me. But also because it created a small measure of change. Now, it’s being taught in many medical schools and it is helping doctors rethink how they interact with their fat patients and how they treat their fat patients and how they understand their fat patients. And that, for me, was when I knew I had done okay. Because, that’s such a real problem, fat phobia in the medical profession. And so many fat people go undiagnosed with issues they have every right to seek treatment for. Being fat is not a crime. And so, if the medical establishment can decriminalize fatness a little bit, I will have considered my life a life well lived. […]

L: Do you feel comfortable talking publicly about the healing modalities that you’ve used or are using?

G: […] We don’t talk a lot about the messiness of recovery, because people like to believe that it is a contained and discrete experience. It happens, it’s over, you heal, you move on. You heal, but sometimes the wound reopens, and it heals again and then reopens and scar tissue develops, and so on. I try to also accommodate that in my writing so that people are clear that I’m not offering you some sort of magical solution. This is not therapy. This is just a memoir. It is an accounting of a life…. So many people with trauma feel like they’re failing because they have a bad day or a bad week or a bad year. And you know what? If you wake up, you’re not failing. If you brush your teeth, you’re not failing. And I think if we just have slightly more realistic goals for ourselves than perfection, we’ll be okay.“

Den Satz, den Lewinsky zitiert, mochte ich sehr:

L: Somebody told me this quote a couple years ago and it came to mind as I was reading your essay. It’s from the French writer André Malraux. “You did not come back from hell with empty hands.”

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Dieses Bild mochte ich gestern.

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Ein Beitrag geteilt von Iris van Herpen Official (@irisvanherpen)