Kitchen Stadium

BAM! Hello, Midnight's children. It is 11:11pm - while driving home from professor Veder's (oh, how I wish it was pronounced with a long A sound instead of a long E…) class it occurred to me that I had not yet posted my blog! Ye gods! Unfortunately this means that I am frantically racing the clock while I try to dredge up some semblance of meaning from the fragments of memory on the reading. Question: If I am too tired to cook, should I just settle for take-out?

Yes. Food is on the mind. For this reading, we traded George Lucas's archetypal world for Iron Chef Bobby Flay. Brilliant. Or at least it could have been brilliant if the metaphor worked – which for me it did not. Like some others had also mention, I too am a passionate home wannabe chef. For me cooking is about spontaneity, improvisation, and love. When cooking, I don't bounce ideas off of other people. Cooking is a very personal and private process. That is not to say I disagree with Elbow, on the contrary. I am merely making the argument that the metaphor does not work – though I applaud Elbow for heeding his own advice: "Make as many metaphors as you can" (53). When I am cooking omelets, I don't break open as many eggs as I can. I break open as many as I think will be needed.

On page 54, Elbow puts a foot in the waters of interesting tangent, but then ultimately finds the water too cold for a midnight swim. The tangent was on the topic of the pervasive and underlying nature of metaphor and language. I would have enjoyed more dialogue from Elbow on this topic.

Perhaps the cooking metaphor would have worked better if non-cooking was referred to as take-out. But then Elbow loses us again when he stretches the metaphor beyond the breaking point when discussing the difference between cooking and internal cooking.

Look. There is quite a bit I agree with in this section (particularly the part warning us not to get too attached to the words we write p70). Unfortunately, I think his argument loss some of its poignancy in trying to keep a dying metaphor alive much longer than needed.