What's in a caffé latte? There's enough in the remains of this morning's one you half-see above for me to celebrate it with a photo. It is Monday 10th March and I haven't made one - usually a Saturday or Sunday morning treat - since about 21st December. What makes it a caffé latte rather than a milky coffee? It is the little Italian coffee-maker, made, it so happens in China, and how the words link each one - each milky coffee I've ever made - to the first such, made in Italy in the apartment of Andrea's parents above the pharmacy on the main street of Santa Margherita Ligure in, I think it was, August 1980.
So pleasurable is the preparing and partaking of a caffé latte that I have, it seems, to already be in a pleasure zone, have to already have enough pleasure in my life, for it - the idea of making one - to form. It is clearly not enough to see one of the parts of the machine for a latte to come into my head: in my tiny kitchen, I must have seen them dozens of times over all the mornings between 21st December and 10th March.
That I made one this morning - it was good - is a sign that my mood is finally improving, following disimprovement on the 22nd December connected to an unpleasant meeting to do with this.
And the geek in the corner? That's Siegfried Kracauer, the German writer, philosopher and theorist of photography and film. My own theory about him - of which, some other time - is that his ugliness played a defining role in the development of his thinking. Harry Graf Kessler writes in his Diaries, in the one fleeting reference to Kracauer, of his "monstrous ugliness I can't get used to"1.
And the photo?
(To be continued)
Notes
1. Harry Graf Kessler, Tagebücher, Ed. Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli, Insel Taschenbuch, Frankfurt, 1996, p. 763.
