A Fabulous Piece Of Writing That Sickens Me With Jealousy
You know when you read something that you immediately recognize as fantastic, but can’t fully enjoy it because at the back of your mind–and not so far back, at that–you are thinking, goddamnit, why did I not articulate the whirling thoughts I’ve had in the vicinity of this topic in just this way myself?
Reading the recent blockbuster novel Gone Girl was a bit like that, in a self-deluding sort of way; reading this post, “Some notes on the grammar of curry,” was exactly that. Rishidev Chaudhuri writes about the “grammar” of Indian restaurants in the U.S. both in a straightforward sense, i.e. the linguistic conventions of their menus, and in the broader, conceptual sense that the rules of a cuisine themselves amount to a sort of grammar.
This is such an incisive way of looking at things. If you tweak the particulars of Chaudhuri’s argument, it could just as easily be applied to my own special preoccupation, Chinese restaurants in America.