Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

I’ve been reading this beautiful, poignant novella for quite some time, and actually stalling on it because I didn’t want to finish it – this is very rare. It chronicles the lives of several Americans of French origin who live in the South. The main protagonist is a woman called Edna who is extremely unhappy about her place in society as mother and wife. She longs for something more and actually breaks from societal confines in order to explore what constitutes personal happiness.

I imagine that the subject matter would have been pretty shocking for its time, whereas now it’s just a very painful reminder of how inflexible the woman’s role in society was a hundred or so years ago. As a closet Marxist, I do have to point out that the book has a distinctly realist setting, that is, we’re talking about Western middle-class society. So, realism does not equal ‘realistic’ depictions or settings of life – if you want that, you need to seek out naturalist works (which I generally much prefer).

This work is very popular in university literature courses, specifically modernist ones for good reason. If you enjoy reading Woolf, you will very likely derive much enjoyment from this work.

You might know that at the moment I have a bit of a periodical addiction, as well as a good food one. Naturally when the two combined, I put my pennies towards a copy.

(image taken from Condiment website)

This one I can’t enter into aNobii’s database so I’ll just have to provide you with a link.

Surprise, surprise, this is the second food periodical I’ve read in one sitting due to insomnia, but unlike Remedy Quarterly which is based in the States, Condiment is local. Yep, it’s Melbourne-based. So I can kiss my dreams of making my own version of Remedy goodbye.

I plan to review this properly, and publish it on eat, drink, stagger rather than here.

If you’ve been reading this blog at all, you probably think I’ve stopped my 75 books for 2010 challenge.

Nothing could be further from the truth. At the moment, I’m trying to catch up on my back issues of The New Yorker. I was given a subscription, and given how frequently they arrive, I am dreadfully behind. I was hoping to at least only be a month behind before resuming non-periodical reading.

I thought it might be fun to go back through the issues I have actually read, and point out some highlights. I’ll link them to the online New Yorker, but some will only be available in abstract form sadly.

Nov 9, 2009

Thomas Mallon on Ayn Rand. Coincides with two recent biographies about Rand being published.

Stephen King’s ‘Premium Harmony’ Wow. I totally thought King was a hack, but this piece is brilliant, and disturbing. The dude’s still got it!

Jonathan Safran Foer writes a non-fiction book, which is reviewed by Elizabeth Kolbert. I’m sure it’ll upset me, but I’m really keen to read it.

Nov 16, 2009

Arthur Krystal on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s time at MGM as a scriptwriter. He had a stint as a scriptwriter, and wasn’t all that successful. Kind of amazing to think that such a loved American novelist can suck at something writerly.

Margaret Talbot on the debilitating nature of bad dreams. As someone who periodically has bad dreams and nightmares, this was pretty insightful.

Ian Parker on the glamorising face of Egyptology. Who knew it had one?

Nov 23, 2009 (the food issue!)

John Colapinto details the the genuinely hard life of a Michelin restaurant guide reviewer. It does genuinely sound terrible, and would take out the passion for eating.

One of my favourite articles ever is by Calvin Trillin on poutine. It also inspired me to try my hand at making it!

Raffi Khatchadourian reports on the science of taste, and the flavour industry. Pretty scary that flavour has its own industry, if you ask me. Eric Schlosser’s excellent book Fast Food Nation also discusses this at great length.

Nov 30, 2009

The award for most boring article thus far goes to Roger Angell for a piece on baseball. I read this when I had insomnia and was praying for it to knock me out. It was insufferably long, too.

Ariel Levy discusses intersex and Olympic runner Caster Semenya. Discusses the issue of what constitutes gender, biologically and on a personal level.

I’ll probably churn out a few more of these posts as I keep reading The New Yorker, but hoping to return to some books too.

You probably think I’ve slowed down with my reading but nothing could be further from the truth! At the moment, I have taken a breather from books to catch up on a large backlog of issues from The New Yorker. I was a ridiculously lucky/spoilt thing and received a gift subscription. It makes for excellent, provocative reading but it’s pretty hard-going!

Tonight, I thought I’d set aside my mags for the graphic novel version of Coraline. I’d seen the stunning film adaptation last year but still hadn’t read the book. I know it might be biased to say so, but Gaiman can’t disappoint.

Coraline Jones is a sullen girl with parents who largely ignore her for their work. Not wanting to wallow, she takes it upon herself to keep entertained by exploring her new environs – an old house divided up into flats. She has wonderfully quirky neighbours who insist upon getting her name wrong and who seem to inhabit another plane of existence.

It all starts with a door that is bricked up. Somehow Coraline is able to go through this door and finds creepy alternate reality versions of her parents who seem terrific compared to her actual reality. She soon learns that they are not all that they seem and her parents disappear. Coraline ends up having to rescue them and other lost souls, all with the help of a cheeky but very clever black cat.

This is the kind of book that would scare the shit out of you, but you would not be able to stop reading, as a child. There are great elements of horror, and some of sadness – the phenomenon of parents not having enough time for their children is all too common these days. Just the other day I heard one of my brother’s in-laws telling her four-year-old to go and stop bothering Mummy and play his Nintendo DS.

It’s nice too because it allows us to imagine what escaping our authority figures might be like, and hints that responsibility is actually pretty hard. After all, parents are too busy for good reason, most of the time.

The book isn’t long, and absolutely well worth reading. P. Craig Russell’s illustrations do it justice – evident from small things like the drawing of the black cat in characteristic poses, and smatterings of Poe-like horror (detached hands creeping about the place). My largely grown-up mind did not want it to finish.

I thought these would be Potter’s take on various nursery rhymes but instead, they are portions of nursery rhymes illustrated, interspersed with Potter’s own. I didn’t find them particularly enthralling, and I really like nursery rhymes and the like. These two books really could have been just one, as they are really very short. Was she doing it for the money by this stage, assuming that I read them in their publication order?

Another Potter book about bullying! A cat gets teased by a mouse, so she teases him back. Not really sure how I feel about that. Again, not one of the greatest in the Potter tales – they’re a bit downhill after The Tale of Little Pig Robinson which was really good.

I warn you in advance, I’ve read the last four of the Potter books but I promise I have been doing some ‘real’ reading – I’m finally halfway through The Duchess, the biography upon which the film was based. I really wish I was ploughing through a novel at present, but I’m trying to get through my unfinished books.

Potter’s running out of ideas, it feels. I didn’t quite expect this to be as short as it was: basically a ‘fierce bad rabbit’ bullies a good rabbit but he gets his just deserts! Serves him right.

If you’re expecting more, that’s it. Of course the rabbits are exceedingly cute.

Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy is probably the most intelligently written children’s fiction/fantasy I’ve ever read. I didn’t find the first one The Northern Lights as easy to read as this one – it’s fast-paced and thoroughly interesting.

It can be confusing at times too – Lyra and Will live in alternate Oxfords and somehow end up in each others’ worlds and move between the two. With this, we also have a thinly veiled critique of the Catholic Church and some concepts relating to physics. Pretty heavy stuff. I read on Wikipedia that Pullman weaves Milton’s Paradise Lost through the trilogy. Sadly, I’ve not read Milton, so I can’t quite identify this.

Gobbled up two thirds of it one insomniac-riddled evening, or rather, morning. I honestly don’t know what took me so long to pick this off my shelf. Can’t wait for the third one, though I’ll be really sad when it’s over…will probably buy those other smaller companion books.

It’s also fantastic to read books for children that doesn’t talk down to them and treats them as the beings they are – capable of extreme intuition and intelligence.

This is the longest story out of all the Beatrix Potter tales. It starts off innocently enough – a pig goes to market to run errands for his aunts, as he is a sweet-natured little piglet. Alas, the market is riddled with dangers that a naive pig might not be ready for.

It also makes references to other famous literary works – poor Pig Robinson gets pretty much abducted by sailors and meets a cat that helps him escape – the cat of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ fame. Pig has further adventures on Bong Island, and the reader is told that they should read Robinson Crusoe to find out more.

Anyway, it’s delightful and you should all go out and read it. It proved to be excellent respite from the postmodernist text I’m currently making my way through.

No one likes Ginger and Pickles and they are determined to run their store into the ground, despite their store being cheaper, and letting people buy things on credit.

Perhaps I’m just being a grumpy pseudo-Marxist, but what is wrong with these people/animals? Ginger and Pickles work hard and are generous to their customers. Their shop eventually folds and the townspeople are forced to shop at Tabitha Twitchit’s more expensive shop and she does not offer credit! Ginger becomes stout and Pickles becomes a gameskeeper (which immediately made me think of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, another novel about the difference between the various social classes).

Not one of my favourites from the Potter collection.

This is one of the sillier Beatrix Potter tales.

A cat invites a dog over for a party. The dog worries that she will be served mouse pie, and so sneaks her own pie into the cat’s oven to cook. Dog ends up eating cat’s pie, but then worries she has accidentally eaten a metal patty-pan in the process. Cat’s party is thrown into disrepute as she has to call the doctor for the idiotic dog.

I’m sure that this is all just a comedy of manners and very much indicative of the time Potter lived and for this reason, I’m not sure it really works as a story for children. One of the Potter tales I’ve least enjoyed, but then that could be because I was taught to suffer whatever the host(ess) served up.

Excellent revision and introduction on this important facet of Western cultural theory, with great everyday, down-to-earth examples. I already knew Catherine Belsey, its author, as an esteemed critic and am really pleased with how approachable she made everything sound. As a result, I now have passing knowledge on Lacan (less so on Lyotard, but that’s due to lack of exposure on my part).

I’ll be buying up more of these beauties for reading. It’s a great series.

More Beatrix Potter delight! I don’t necessarily know that this was Samuel Whiskers’ tale as it seemed to have lots of cats in it. Notable moment included poor dear Tom Kitten nearly being turned into kitten dumpling to be gobbled up, and also getting ‘smuts’ (chimney ash) all about him. Of course he gets saved, which is the important thing!

I don’t have many of the Potter books to go…I’ll feel a bit lost once I finish them all. I’m really glad that Tom Kitten reappeared. Peter Rabbit appears in other tales too.

I struggled greatly with this book. I’m not sure why I read the first two thirds so quickly, because I did actually find it quite disturbing: nearly all the main protagonists are wicked, miserable people. A lot of their misery is of their own making and for this reason, it’s hard to look upon them in a sympathetic manner. The last third or so I really had to push through.

I don’t get the aura of Byronic hero around Heathcliff. Were it not for Mr Darcy’s social standing, I would that it would be more appropriate for Darcy (of Pride and Prejudice fame). Cathy I find equally unlikable as a supposed heroine.

Interestingly, I think Brontë predates or rather anticipates Ibsenian (and then Zolaesque) naturalism in that the sins, afflictions and pecadilloes of the parents are visited upon their progeny. Yet again another reason why this classic was not overly enjoyable.

Make no mistake though: Brontë is an astute observer and chronicler of human nature – interesting given that she was quite reclusive. Characters like Joseph are so vivid and believable. It’s worth reading, but probably not unless you’re in the mood for it. I think of it as a bleak, wintry read.

I am desperately trying not to start new books, but rather finish the ones I do have in progress. Very hard given that my mind is racing and wanting to fill itself with new ideas at the moment (poststructuralist book, I’m looking at you).

After reading a bit of Wuthering Heights, decided to wind down with another delightful Beatrix Potter tale. This one is an extension of the nursery rhyme ‘To market, to market / to buy a fat pig! / Home again, home again / jiggety-jig!’ and quite enjoyable, though it does make one a little sad at the thought that these adorable piglets could end up as bacon – for example, when the farmer pinches Pigling Bland in the ribs to see if he’s ‘ready’.

Interestingly, Beatrix herself is also present in the story. It is obvious that for all of the stories I’ve read thus far (I’m about halfway through the complete box now), that she is the narrator, but in this one, she is part of the action, so to speak.

I tell you, I’ve never seen anything quite so adorable as pigs being drawn running on their trotters! Very, very cute.

It was a bit of a whim to get this: a gorgeous and far-too-trendy-for-me blog I read did a feature on this and I knew I just had to have a copy. It was quite a while before it became available, and when it did, I snapped up a subscription.
Remedy Quarterly is inspired by a time contemporaneous to my parents’ time – when your mum had daggy but inexplicably alluring collections of recipe index cards and cookbooks accidentally kept from your local library (well, my mother has late 70s-early 80s cookbooks that look like they were from our local English library! oops!). I don’t know what it is about those damned cards that fascinate me so – they looked so exotic (though in hindsight, they aren’t at all), even though they are not necessarily things I would ever make for myself.

I admit it, RQ is trendy, but it’s also gorgeous. There are heartwarming stories and recipes. All of the recipes published have a personal history attached to them. Don’t think I’ll be making curry turkey anytime soon (too hard for me!) but am so going to try corned beef pie, and the chilli. Mmm.

I know the publication is US-centric, and for that reason, some of the ingredients I found confusing. What I’d give to have a Melbourne-centric issue as a special!

My favourite piece was about the Barbados-born crossing guard. He sounds like such a warm man, chatting to the locals, and giving one of the contributors some ingredients for old-school remedies. It’s also a wonderful reminder that community spirit is not dead, at least not in some parts of the world.

Ravenously read through this fantastic first issue, and look forward to the next three issues of my subscription. I do feel spoilt.

It has inspired me to ask my mother if she has those gloriously outdated recipe cards. They seem appealing to me, all of a sudden. I’ll post some pictures if I unearth them, pretty sure they made the trip from England to here.

This isn’t the most recent issue but I’m carefully working through a backlog of (excellent) Australian periodicals and Heat 19 was one on my nightstand.

It begins with some sad reading – Judith Beveridge recalls her close friend Dorothy Porter, who sadly passed away due to complications with breast cancer last year. Porter is one of Australia’s best known female contemporary poets, and sought bring attention to the verse novel form. She’s probably best known in the non-poetry public for The Monkey’s Mask, which was adapted for film.

The anthology stands at 200+ pages but I devoured it greedily, over half of it last night. There is a subtle thematic undercurrent that links all the contributions. If I had to pick my favourite, it would Jasmine Chan’s poem ‘Tyrant’. Honorable mention to Tim Thorne’s ‘Easy Sushi in 7′ for making me crave Japanese something chronic!

So yes, if I had the money, I’d be subscribing to Heat, and definitely recommend it. It’s a beautiful publication.

I hadn’t heard of Fanny Hill till I saw it at a bookshop and read the blurb – it sounded pretty raunchy, so I bought it. It’s actually listed in Boxall’s book of 1001 books to read before you die.

It’s almost a guilty pleasure reading it – it is so entertaining and I just gobbled it up. Normally books on revered lists are a bit of a chore to read, I admit it. This one, not so. A country lass comes to the city and finds that she must support herself. She is initially taken in by a lady who basically tells her she has to put out, or get out. Knowing nothing of sexual delights, an older, more experienced girl shows her…

Thus begins Fanny’s memoirs: lots of physical love, lots of perving, a bit of spanking, a dash of homosexual love, and there’s even time for a happy ending when Fanny isn’t telling us about the encounters she has with ‘ivory maypoles’. Giggle.

Yeah, of course I loved it.

I got this for my partner for Christmas and I figure if he’s not going to read it, then I’m perfectly happy to dip into it every now and then.

T. S. Eliot, while being one of the most famous exponents of Anglo-American modernist literature, is ripping good fun in this small volume of poems about cats. When I read these poems, I feel like Eliot just gets cats. I chuckle with all the wonder of a child at rereading them.

This version which seemed to be new is illustrated by Axel Scheffler. If you’ve never read Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, then definitely seek out an illustrated edition. These poems also form the basis of the musical Cats. Again, this is another book that seems meant for children, but is equally fabulous for grown-ups.

More Neil Gaiman, more Dave McKean. It took me a while to fully embrace the grim world of a boy remembering his childhood spent in Portsmouth – at first it seemed slow-paced, and the art is schizophrenic, and very, very creepy.

What I like best about The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch is that it focusses on what must seem to be an innate fear we all have – what on earth is it about fairgrounds and carnivals that we all find so sinister? I actually spent my summers in Portsmouth when my family still lived in England, and I was terrified of the carousel. I was scared of the actual ride, it being so high and so fast, and also of getting lost and being separated from my parents. I didn’t often have separational anxiety, so even today this strikes me as odd.

In any case, McKean and Gaiman do a fab job of tapping into this almost primal fear. One cannot help but wonder how much of Gaiman’s childhood is in Mr Punch.