blog #2

I had a lot of trouble blogging about this week's reading. I kept trying to relate Elbow's cooking to actual cooking, because I like to actually cook a lot. But it just kept sounding really silly. Unfortunately, I could not relate my homemade zucchini bread to Elbow's writing process. The cooking Elbow is refering to, of course, is thinking. When he talks about writing down everything on papers, he's talking about putting our thoughts onto the page, and then putting more of our thoughts onto a page until we get some concrete ideas. My metaphor for actual cooking compared to Elbow's cooking wasn't working at first, because I was trying to explain how my cooking was like my writing process. It's really not since the oven does most of the work. I start with the ingredients. There's a recipe I use, or even a picture of what the final product is supposed to look like. Writing is not this way.
By desperation writing, if I must keep going back to an actual cooking metaphor, Elbow is refering to when the oven is broken and all of your recipe books have suddenly combusted. First, you take stock of everything you have and you put it all on the counter. Second, you separate the good ingredients from the bad ones. Then, you try combining them. You invite your friends over and have them try out your new concoctions. Eventually, you come up with a masterpiece, or at least something edible.
If the food in my kitchen is like the thoughts in my head, Elbow's suggestions almost sounds like a really fancy way of describing the need to constantly organize. Without this, its time to bring in the ladies from the television show "Hoarders", showcase all of the muck, and start pitching until the house shines again.