The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Alain De Botton

Hamish Hamilton 2009

The flat is quiet and guilty. Nothing here moved while, on the banks of the Thames, the accountant was meeting with IT and striving to keep his temper with an intern. He notices the bath towel thrown hastily over the sofa after the morning shower. The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorsefully tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear motional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life. p266

We walked for three hours in the rain until the line took us to the edge of the town of Sittingbourne, where we decided to stop in the hope of finding something sweet to eat. It was a place where, as often and inexplicably happens in small communities, everyone had chosen to enter the same profession - in this case, hairdressing - as a result of which most enterprises appeared to be close to bankruptcy. Luckily, we found a teashop advertising homemade cakes and what was termed an Old World atmosphere, and took our seats at the back. How cheerful one would have needed to be in such a place in order not to regret existence. A woman wearing a historically styled bonnet arrived with a opt of tea. 'I'll let one of you be mum,' she declared - which for a time prevented either Ian or me from taking the initiative. p208

I was told there'd be cake

Essays by Sloane Crosley. 2008. Riverhead Books

Another reading while turning pancakes book. Just right for my current short attention span. Sloane writes about her evil bully of a boss, her level of vegetarianism weakened by sashimi, origins of her name, being cornered into bridesmaid duties by a forgotten high school friend, a collection of toy ponies she wheedles out of her boyfriends then feels pathetic about, being a slack volunteer at the butterfly exhibit of the Museum. Her humour is dry and the range of references is very young-lady-in-New York.

The subplot of modern marriage assumes that a wedding is the crown jewel of any best friendship, a time when otherwise rational women are legally permitted to misplace their minds, and treat their friend like heel-skin-shaving employees. This is something we tolerate of our closest pals, but I had barely spoken to this woman in a decade....It's a wedding, not an episode of This Is Your Life. p146

It's not my fault they print them

Catherine Deveny. 2007. Black Inc

What do you read when you want to read but need to flip pancakes. I read collections of magazine style articles. An endless weekend paper. Catherine does a fine job of building up an argument or a joke to a good stew. And reading about TV is in my opinion so much finer than actually watching it. Righteous, funny, proud of her opinions on all the key topics: births, hitting children, marriages, changing names, and the Brownlow. And it's all such a relief.

Most kids don't give a rat's about the improvised music workshops, organic gardens and interpretive dance classes they do at school. But the parents, eyes blazing, face alight, will bore you senseless about them in an attempt to convince you of their coolness. All it actually does is convince us that they are Wannabe Creatives; insecure dags who had friends in bands but were never in bands themselves. Too much exposure to organised creativity immunises children against creativity. p62

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.

Eating Between the Lines. Food and Equality in Australia.

Rebecca Huntley. 2008 Black Inc

Essays about the politics behind the way we eat. Like a series of magazine articles; many illustrated in interviews with representatives of the common person.

From a chapter called “Lebs make the best Lamb”:

…”my mother, born and bred here and having shed her Italian name through marriage, still feels some of the stigma. I tried to explain to her once that all things Italian were now cool. We were acceptable. We now live in a suburb awash with lattes and Pelegrino, where clothes proudly display their Italian origins and Italian food is popular with gourmands and the hoi polloi alike. It means little to her. ‘Sure they like our food now. Why wouldn’t they? It’s a lot better than what they were eating before we came. But it doesn’t mean they accept us.’ P 133

Hobart blue and yellow

Hobart