This is Making Me Hungry

Today I came across a really great line of writing while perusing back articles of NY Mag’s Grub Street NY Diet. If you aren’t familiar with these and you like reading about food, you should be.

Each week NY Mag commissions a self-defined New Yorker to keep track of what and where he or she eats that week. The diarists range from B-list celebrities, food writers, chefs, and politicians to Martha Stewart. The meals range from extravagant dinners at Le Bernadin to Costo canned chicken.

In any case, the April 20^th issue was written by author David Rakoff. Yes, it is slow at work today. No, I did not know who David Rakoff was before reading his entry; maybe that’s a crime in the literary world, I don’t know. I do know that I will pick up his book of essays, Half Empty, the next chance I get. It seems like a perfect accompaniment to David Sedaris and Sloane Crosley (OMG I would love if she did a NY Diet). And also maybe David Foster Wallace if you want to get intellectual about it.  What is it about Davids and humorous essays?

But I keep digressing. Here’s the good part. Rakoff writes about the food department at Ikea which is so clean that beautiful that it, and I quote, “ led me to buy a pretty bottle of elderberry syrup which is so off-puttingly floral, it’s like drinking someone’s grandmother.”

Right? Great line. First of all, even though at first glance that seems like a very odd and perhaps morbid thing to say, after you let it absorb you know exactly what he means. Of course what he means is that old ladies wear too much really sweet smelling perfume. And that’s the other cool thing about this line. He’s talking about a taste, equating it with a smell, and describing it as an action. He’s got a lot of your senses engaged, which is what makes reading interesting. And it doesn’t take him a long time to create such a vivid idea; the simile is only three words long. Short and simple, and yet not at all.  And now I will stop talking about it because great writing is often diminished by analysis. As an erstwhile English major I am allowed to say that, even if it mostly discredits my whole college career.  And on second thought perhaps this blog as well. Oh well. Read on.