caravia/writing

An excellent searchable archive of the Arab images, both historic and modern. 75000 images online, impressing.

My new book, come out from the printers this Friday, very exciting! Sadly, only in Swedish so far :( !
Someone asked me about the book and I can only say the book is a documentary but also a fiction about the years I spent in jail in Uruguay when I was very young. It's 36 years today of the very day I become a political prisoner for four years.
At that time the US hold a crusade against the commmunism, very similar the crusade the US drive against Islam today. The coups d'etat in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay were sanctioned by the US. I wish Henry Kissinger, ironically a peace Nobel prize, nightmares. It was he who approved the deaths and tortures of hundreds of thousands and the prision of several generations, including my own.

Wonderful writing about food!

"If you imagine the Pacific as a giant plate (which, geologically speaking, it is), the jewel-like Hawaiian Islands are placed right in the center, like the precious compositions of nouvelle cuisine. It was there, in Hawaii, that chef Roy Yamaguchi created Pacific Rim cuisine. Yamaguchi grew up in Japan, the son of Japanese and American parents, and was trained in classical French technique at the Culinary Institute of America. Perhaps it's not accurate to say that he "created" Pacific Rim cuisine -- the idea was clearly in the air at the time -- but he was uniquely qualified for the role, and he made the most of it. Yamaguchi soon had restaurants in Beijing, California, Cebu, Guam, Hawaii, Hong Kong, Japan, and New York.

Pacific Rim cuisine, like its predecessor nouvelle cuisine, is, at heart, French cooking tempered by Japanese sensibilities. When Japan was opened to the West a century earlier, the French immediately recognized a kindred spirit. The style à la japonaise influenced literature, music, and art -- especially Monet. But as a culinary term, it referred only to dishes incorporating Japanese or Chinese artichokes -- the crisp, starchy tubers of Stachys affinis -- or to a dessert containing tea-flavored mousse. Not until the birth of nouvelle cuisine on the banks of the Rhône did the French truly adapt the Japanese style to French kitchens. And not until the appearance of Pacific Rim cuisine in Hawaii were the ingredients and sensibilities of the East fully absorbed into classical Western cooking."

Free University courses online, excelelent resource.