1. Journal-
Description practice. Describe an object that is important to you without saying what it is or what it's for.
2. Description discussion... DFW based. What are some of your favorite passages?
Be apprised, though, that the Main Eating Tent’s suppers come in
Styrofoam trays, and the soft drinks are iceless and flat, and the
coffee is convenience-store coffee in yet more Styrofoam, and the
utensils are plastic (there are none of the special long skinny forks
for pushing out the tail meat, though a few savvy diners bring their
own). Nor do they give you near enough napkins, considering how messy
lobster is to eat, especially when you’re squeezed onto benches
alongside children of various ages and vastly different levels of
fine-motor development—not to mention the people who’ve somehow smuggled
in their own beer in enormous aisle-blocking coolers, or who all of a
sudden produce their own plastic tablecloths and try to spread them over
large portions of tables to try to reserve them (the tables) for their
little groups. And so on. Any one example is no more than a petty
inconvenience, of course, but the MLF turns out to be full of irksome
little downers like this—see for instance the Main Stage’s headliner
shows, where it turns out that you have to pay $20 extra for a folding
chair if you want to sit down; or the North Tent’s mad scramble for the
NyQuil-cup-size samples of finalists’ entries handed out after the
Cooking Competition; or the much-touted Maine Sea Goddess pageant
finals, which turn out to be excruciatingly long and to consist mainly
of endless thanks and tributes to local sponsors. What the Maine Lobster
Festival really is is a midlevel county fair with a culinary hook, and
in this respect it’s not unlike Tidewater crab festivals, Midwest corn
festivals, Texas chili festivals, etc., and shares with these venues the
core paradox of all teeming commercial demotic events: It’s not for
everyone.6 Nothing against the
aforementioned euphoric Senior Editor, but I’d be surprised if she’d
spent much time here in Harbor Park, watching people slap canal-zone
mosquitoes as they eat deep-fried Twinkies and watch Professor
Paddywhack, on six-foot stilts in a raincoat with plastic lobsters
protruding from all directions on springs, terrify their children.
Most of us have been in supermarkets or restaurants that feature tanks
of live lobster, from which you can pick out your supper while it
watches you point.
If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the
lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to
hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from
going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully
immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually
hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it
off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it
thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you
or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the
obvious exception of screaming).15 A blunter
way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain,
causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of
those little lightweight plastic oven timers with them into another room
and wait until the whole process is over.
3. Description tips, notes, tricks?
4. Quick shop....
5. HW- This is it. Let's bring our final draft, or at least our next one, to class on Thursday for presentation or one more workshop, if you'd rather.
6. HW- What should our next assignment be? My ideas....
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