The Pedant in the Kitchen

Julian Barnes 2003 Atlantic Books , London

Julian is the pedant making fun of his cooking mishaps in a book of short stories. Funny, witty, relate able. I'm now a happy owner of a pressure cooker. Will no doubt have many of my own tales to tell.

(8) Never replace your tatty old Jane Grigson or Elizabeth David with a new version containing exactly the same text, even if it does now have picture (see 1). You will never use it and will go back to the original tatty paperback because it has your marginal notes and you rightly feel comfortable about it.p29

30 Days in Sydney. A Wildly Distorted Account

Peter Carey. 2001. Bloomsbury

Poetic writing and cities, if that was a genre, it would be one of my favourites. Society seen in the structure and symbolism of the city.

And then, in my dream, I peered down from the top arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and had the insight which would never leave me, not even in my waking hours. Asleep in my bed in Wollahra I saw the Central Business District as if for the first time. I saw how it held itself back fro the edge of the beloved harbour as if it understood how vile and crooked it had always been. In a society which values the view above all else, here was the heart of the city, a blind place with no vistas, a dense knot of development and politics and business and law. This was Macartur's monument. A physical expression of two centuries of Sydney's own brand of capitalism, the concrete symbol of an unhealthy anti-democratic alliance between business and those authorities which should have controlled it. p.92

Some of the slurry half-dream-half-drunk macho posturing got on my nerves; not enough to put me off the book.

Growing, An autobiography of the years 1904 - 1911

Leonard Woolf. The Hogath Press. London. 1967

Leonard (husband of Virginia) tells of his time in the civil service in Sri Lanka. A time about a century ago is cleanly described; pearl fishing, jungle elephants and leopards, solitude, mad dogs and Englishmen.

" ...I would  never put golf very high in the hierarchy of good games; it is too slowly long drawn out and therefore the anger against one's opponent, which in tennis and rackets, for instance, merely adds an occasional, momentary spur to one's efforts or exhaustion, in golf is apt to smoulder unpleasantly and sadistically."p119

Singled Out

Virginia Nicholson. How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War. Viking 2007

I really enjoy how Virginia writes, and loved her earlier book - 'Amongst the Bohemians'.  

"...the surplus two million had much to wing their hands over, but if such women...had weakly submitted to being unjustly marginalised, we might still be living in a patriarchy...women might still lack the professional, political and social status that they have today...for them being denied marriage was a liberation and a launching pad." p235

Great to able to see the positives instead of concentrating on what is missing. Filled with personal stories of unusual and rich lives. Ladies with causes and drive. 

Among the Bohemians

Experiments in Living 1900 - 1939. Virginia Nicholson. (2002) Viking.

Free thinking artists and the development of a bohemia, based on gypsy travels and colourful dress, garlic, freer love lives, unorthodox relationships, naked wild children, and experimental parenting bordering on neglect. What's not to like? Fabulous book with themed chapters about manners, love, children, money, travel; all the good things. Gender relations I found particularly revealing. Great inequality continued.

"Today we can conduct relationships with people from any class without fear of ostracism, while deploring oppressive , stratified societies. Our choice of friendships and love affairs are our own. The idea of chaperonage makes us laugh; women are independent. We recognise that children have potential that must not be squashed...We re hatless, relaxed and on first-name terms with people we barely know. Red paint, ratatouille and yellow corduroy brighten our lives...We live in a society which most people's great grandparents would hardly recognise..."p279

"the Bohemians... resolved to bring their children up as happy, carefree, creative individuals, and they were determined to spare them the boring, punishing childhoods that so many of them had been forced to endure. It was Rousseau versus repression." p97

Some children did not learn to read until 12 and it seemed not to do any harm to their future lives and careers. Some felt the need for strict order, one son of the John brood for example joined the navy.

"Many parents saw the provision of liberty for their children as a prior condition of creativity, both their own and their children's. But at times one feels that this neglect was as much expedient as ideological. Bringing up children is very hard work. For parents with not much money, teams of nursemaids boiling nappies, starching frills and enforcing table manners were beyond their reach. Leaving children to get on with their lives was a great deal simpler and cheaper than keeping them up to the mark....You could maintain cleanliness and order, or spend the time on creative activities - but not both."p 76

Wrong About Japan

A father's journey with his son. Peter Carey 2004 Vintage

Peter Carey develops an interest in Japanese manga books and movies via his 12 year old son. 

This book is about their travel in Japan; interviewing directors, fans, and sword makers. Evocative of the blurriness and misunderstandings involved in travel, between cultures and generations. I liked the descriptions of the contained anti social boredom of the teenager and the failed need to interpret and understand of the father.

This is reading in a daydream of my own of somewhat far off travel plans, perhaps once Joy is out of the pram. 

Crisply written, like an extended weekend magazine article.

Australian Parrots

second (revised) edition by Joseph M. Forshaw Illustrated by William T. Cooper. Lansdowne Editions, Melbourne 1981.

or Tea and crochet

A winter cold has us at home browsing through picture books  - this one of Australian parrots with full page illustrations and more technical information than Joy and I require quite at the moment. 

To go with the red capped and indigo capped parrots I have started a crochet hat for me. Lacy and patterned crochet at the edge of my abilities. In dark lilac wool with a navy edge and a navy flower.

Is housework a good thing?

Mary Lutyens, 'To be Young' Corgi edition 1989. First published 1959

Agatha Christie: an Autobiography'. Berkley Books 1996. First published 1977

Catherine Gildiner, 'Too Close To the Falls, A Memoir' Flamingo 2003

Elaine Dundy, 'The Dud Avocado'. New York Review Books, New York 2007. First published 1958

Winifred Watson, 'Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day' Persephone Books, London 2008. First published in 1938

Penelope Mortimer, 'About Time, An Aspect of Autobiography'. Penguin Books Ltd 1979

Have had a feast of biographies. The tamed chaos of life in hindsight is so endearing.

In this bunch the childhood memories of parents and the experience of motherhood; with nurses, governesses and boarding schools of particular interest. So different to the current divide of working/non working.

To know the poor education that women had and survived in the past, helps to put into perspective the school quest and waiting lists. Agatha Christie had almost no formal schooling and was considered slow witted in her family. Very funny description of her Steiner school by Penelope:

I wore my own clothes for a few days, while they diagnosed my temperament. The prognosis was red, for choleric. So I wore red smocks in the summer, and red jersies in the winter.. (p72)

Stranger still was the childhood of Mary Lutyens, the daughter of the famous architect father and a fervent theosophic mother; a childhood of pilgrimages, and waiting and practicing to be enlightened.

Domesticity- another area of interest.  Agatha, Sally Jay (Dud Avocado), Penelope and Delysia (Miss Pettigrew) avoid it and gain so much time. In the Dud Avocado, Sally Jay is outraged in being expected to cook/entertain: 

I tried to remember  one minute that whole weekend when Marion and I weren't either feeding people, or clearing up from doing it, or preparing to do it again. And presumably she never stopped doing it. But I could not see why just because she did, I should. I mean, here was I practically fresh out of the egg, everything was so new to me, and here was everybody telling me to stop drifting, and start living in this world; telling me to start cooking, and sewing, and cleaning, and I don't know what. Taking care of my grandchildren. (p144) 

Agatha can only cook souffles, Penelope can only cook toast and learns to make scrambled eggs.

The light reading - Dud Avocado and Miss Pettigrew was entertaining. Happy endings in both. I'm not giving anything away. Such different social norms before and after WW2. 

Penelope Mortimer's autobiography is so quickly readable, such grace in descriptions, toughness in opinions and a very steady gaze at her life. I'm reading the second part of the autobiography now and am loving the 6 children of 4 fathers, and 2 husbands. Like in all good sagas a family tree in included to help the reader along.

A long biography, like Agatha's, is interesting because of the knowledge she has about herself and what makes her happy. It's not fancy.

I was never good at  games; I am not and never shall be a good conversationalist; I am so easily suggestible that I have to get away by myself before I know what I really think or need to do. I can't draw; I can't paint; I can't model or do any kind of sculpture; I can't hurry without getting rattled; I can't say what I mean easily - I can write it better. I can stand fast on a matter of principle, but not on anything else. (p472)

Few Eggs and No Oranges

Vere Hodgson, (1976) London: Dennis Dobson: 'A diary showing how unimportant people lived in London and Birmingham lived through the war years 1940 - 1945 written in the Notting Hill area of London'. (has been recently published by Persephone publishers)

Phew, what a long title.

Diary format, (just like a blog). Small pleasures and daily life during the blitz in London. Very captivating.

Vere is a spinster in her 30s. She used to be a governess for Mussolini's daughter in Florence. During the war, she works for a charity doing good works and keeps a diary writing a few paragraphs every couple days. This is a long book. 

Lots of discussion of bombs: the sounds, the fires, the blackout, the discomfort of sleeping in bomb shelters and feeling 'second rate' and sleep deprived, and the deaths. Many passages of Vere hurrying home with a torch in with 'barking' machine fire and whooshing bombs, checking for fires from the roof and practising putting out fires. She is passionately involved in the war and feels personally uplifted by Churchill's speeches.

The main title - Few Eggs and No Oranges - captures the shortage of food, one of the main themes in the book. The thrill of fresh fruit, kippers and even potatoes.

Sometime in the middle of the war Vere moves into a flatlet (with a sink and a cooker!) and I loved reading about her revelling in a sense of home.

Vere is also involved in metaphysics and the diary is peppered with peculiar predictions about the war by fortune tellers.

Come, Tell Me How You Live

- Agatha Christie

first published 1946, Harper Collins Publishers 1999

Am enjoying the non-fiction diary format at the moment. This is a travel book about camping in the desert in the late 30s and early 40s. Interesting to read the personal voice of Agatha Christie, who writes very funny anecdotes, similar in observation to Bill Bryson.

This book had me laughing at the misunderstandings between cultures. Agatha Christie goes to Syria and Lebanon with her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan and a crew of local workmen, a sheik, chefs and drivers. Also there is a Mac, a supremely sedate and quiet architect, with whom Agatha has trouble making any conversation. They are looking for pre-Roman treasures, those dating from from before AD. 

A 'tell' is also the name of a dig site; a 'bump' in the desert that contains an old city. 

Judith Levine (2006) Not Buying It. My Year without Shopping.

Free Press. New York

A quick read from the non-fiction section. As a ‘professional organic’ I could identify with the quest for self-fulfilment with a conscience. For a year, Judith and partner Paul eschewed buying all luxuries. This ban excludes good food.

The year seemed to pass by without too many temptations: movies, restaurant meals and clothes. Judith was tempted outside the pledge a couple of times; clothes both times. She came away with a refreshed palette for worldly goods and an understanding of her vulnerabilities. She had a lot of free fun in the process. Street art, demonstrations, libraries. I liked how she an atheist Jew and Paul a lapsed Catholic find themselves uplifted at a marginally pagan-like church service during the holiday season.

Judith and Paul live half the year in Brooklyn and the other in Vermont. Shying away from the hard line of evils of consumer culture Judith kept a diary of her feelings and justifications, these ranged from anxiety, frustration, boredom and contentment. Leaving off on a note of quietened appetite and a more nuanced palette.

Judith picked at the threads of fulfilment, identity and the joys of fine-tuning your identity through the filthy lucre of shopping. Judith acknowledges that her desires run the way of bohemia rather than mainstream, nevertheless the urges are the same. Giving money to a friend’s poetry reading is recognised as discretionary spending, so is desiring the latest released books.

During the year she engages with a number of groups and individuals who are going about to challenge the consumer culture. These include a group who meet to discuss voluntary simplicity. Mainly turning to be about tailoring spending to fit with reduced wages due to unemployment. Clutter is much mentioned. Also Judith describes the life of Richard Czaplinski. Richard lives the on $5,000 and seems virtuous and productive doing it. Does not miss much. Is highly self-sufficient and leaves a very small ecological footprint.

In the writing, one gets a sense of her sense of frustration and irritability with herself and the consumer pickle.

Through this book there runs the thread of left leaning liberal (or in the US setting the Democrat) concerns with human rights. The argument is for working a little less and enjoying wealth a little more sensitively. Frivolity is not dismissed. Judith battles with herself about some desirable lime green stiletto heels, she resists but does not dismiss these as unworthy. Thoreau’s idea of the noble savage is tried on and discarded as not being a good fit or a realistic goal for the urban population.

Gift giving is much discussed and analysed. One of my favourite minor plot dramas was the need for graduation present when a table full of origami animals just does not cut it.

So battle through your own ‘needs’… Is wine a necessity? What about cotton buds? Bring your own lunch, go for a walk and a picnic, rally for your rights, participate in democracy, and pay off your credit card, start home brewing, if you must, join the library and trust in the kindness of friends. Most of all experience a greater mindfulness about your life and what it requires. Rather than fixing it all with shopping: feel your vulnerability and revel in it.