cooking with stein, flo & benaud

for michael farrell

opening out onto a floured bench is
the dough, barely kneaded, just held
together with the blunt cuts of a butter
knife – the palms face-up but still
making slender butter. Flo Bjelke-Petersen’s

voice starchy and tea-towelly. the golden
rule of scone-making is to add the milk
gently – “milk me sugar” – “do not be
afraid” to add more if the mixture is dry:
the imperative voice, “soft not sticky”.

given the heat no one is expected to
exist near an oven and not sweat. it is
a simple causal relationship and
generally people are gentle about its
being true, or at least, being evident. when

a scone is brushed with milk – two fingers
miming, more or less effectively, a pastry
brush – it glosses up nicely. spread apart
they rise into each other, the extent can be
micromanaged with simple, kitchen-focused
mathematics:

algorithms hell-bent on decoding the
unknowable curvatures of a cricket ball –
“nice cherry” – and the ecology of baking
scone-nuts, clustered or spaced: “the
difference is spreading.”

and & and

an equation’s unusual beauty
borderline tropes and borders
and lines and the curvature and
hooks of glyphs, xs and ys and
the pivots of ‘of’ and ‘and’ or
the equals and equivalences:
a deep feeling for the way we
measure, or don’t measure, and
measure.

algebra with whitehead & stein

one, the invariableness of the basic terms of interconnection
— the connectives — (or manage or arrange or value)
two, the invariableness of the unspecified entities indicated
by the symbols for ‘real variables’ (or relieve or better like)
three, the meaningfulness of the patterns of real variables
thus connected (or not at all as nearly once compared)
four, the irrelevance to the argument of the completion of
meaning infused into the basic connectives by the unspecified
real variables thus connected (or made it to be gained).
namely, the meaning as in assumption one is not in fact
invariable but the variation is irrelevant (or finally as lost).