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Our Internet World
I’VE JUST LOST AN HOUR CRUISING ON AMAZON. Radio Three ran a talking-heads programme tonight about . . . well, this is it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jhny7 I immediately pricked my ears* at the description of Sturt’s book The Wheelwright’s Shop; one of my favourite things is ye olde tymie life as described by them wot were there.** And the problem with amazon, as I assume all of you know, is that their little robot gizmos glom onto what not merely you’ve ordered, since in fact I mostly try not to order from amazon, but what you’ve merely looked at, as here, and promptly start unrolling screenfuls of Other Things That Might Interest You. They also remember what you looked at the last time you visited. GAAAAAAH. And every item you look at has yet more recommendations down at the bottom. Keep scrolling. . . .
And yeah, I could not look. I’m very good at not reading reviews of my own books, not looking myself up on Google, etc***, so clearly I can not do certain dangerous things. But, you know . . . I kind of like the recommendation system.† Sure, a lot of the recs are rubbish, but so are a lot of the books you pick up idly in a real street-bookshop browse. And it gives you somewhere to start in a World of Publishing that churns out a couple hundred thousand new titles per year.†† It still leaves you wasting hours you should be spending (a) writing novels (b) writing blog entries (c) reading the books you already have.
Which brings me to an article I read today (from a two-day-old hard-copy newspaper. Internet schminternet, some things don’t change): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/29/my-bright-idea-ha-joon-chang The subhead reads: ‘The net isn’t as important as we think: the washing machine changed the world more than the internet, a tool whose benefits we overestimate while ignoring its downsides.’
I thought it was a really interesting article, allowing for the fact that it’s trying to be a provocative snippet to attract you to Ha-Joon Chang’s new book, and I was also disposed to like what he was saying because his point about the washing machine is that it and its labour-saving colleagues essentially doubled the workforce by allowing women to go out to work, and pull their own paychecks.
But here’s the paragraph about me and my life: ‘There’s now so much information out there that you don’t actually have time to digest it . . . the American economist Herbert Simon . . . argued that our problem now is that we have limited decision-making capability rather than too little information. If you try to find something on the internet, it’s a deluge. And in terms of productivity, the internet has its drawbacks—for example it makes it a lot easier to bunk off work.’†††
Hmm. His book looks pretty good too. . . . http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/29/ha-joon-chang-23-things Maybe I’ll look it up on amazon. It’ll make a nice balance with The Wheelwright’s Shop. ‡
* * *
* Mostly I turn talking-heads programmes off with a snarl. I’m usually either working or reading over dinner, and if I wanted talk frelling programmes I’d go to BBC 4 where they belong, and I don’t want them. I want music. Specifically I want classical music, and I want it uninterrupted by a lot of smarm and self-congratulation. I detest Proms season.^ They stop playing Composer of the Week, one of my favourite programmes,^^ at a time I can listen to it, they have all kinds of horrible non-classical music^^^ Proms despite the Proms’ own advertising, and the self-congratulatory smarm level is intolerable.
We won’t discuss the Last Night at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Proms#Last_Night_of_the_Proms ^^^^
^ Thus proving once and for all that I am not English.
^^ Except when I’m disagreeing with the presenter, Donald Macleod. Perhaps he’s let down by his researchers.
^^^ I’m not entirely lost to the world outside Verdi and Benjamin Britten. I love Late Junction because it plays all kinds of stuff I’ve never heard of and wouldn’t ever hear of if I didn’t run into it here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tp52 And just when people like me+ think we can’t stand it any more, they throw us a little Mozart.
+ It’s been a very long time since my last Siouxie and the Banshees concert
^^^^ I said all this last year at this time, didn’t I?
** George Ewart Evans, for example: http://twurl.nl/8n2xco
or William Cobbett: http://twurl.nl/2bsic3
Or the totally fabulous Akenfield, http://twurl.nl/6kvzg1
although I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never read anything else by Blythe. I’ve mentioned Akenfield to you before, haven’t I? Because—ahem—it is notorious among certain circles for having a chapter on method bell ringing and the barking folk who go in for it.
I also like the older stuff, The Paston Letters, say http://twurl.nl/2vdhjp and all those books on What It Was Really Like in the Middle Ages for Ordinary People. I fell under the spell of Frances and Joseph Gies http://twurl.nl/dftsek at a relatively tender age. I think I may have read somewhere since that they’ve been somewhat discredited . . . but if so I don’t want to know. I still say they’re brilliant for us dilettantes.
Oh, and yes, Wheelwright’s Shop is available: http://twurl.nl/mjwk4h
. . . and speaking of invidious net-related time-wasting, it’s a few extra frelling minutes copying, pasting and shortening the frelling amazon links.
*** The fact that I find the idea horrible to the utmost extreme helps with the will power part. My will power is pretty much limp and gooey. I keep it in a large jar with a lid where it can’t hurt itself or embarrass me. Meanwhile, I do revulsion and loathing really well, which will stand in for a lot of things if you angle your approach carefully. Revulsion and loathing of, say, jail, successfully bars me from many otherwise attractive indulgences.
† It’s the only twenty four hours per day that is the major failing of the system, as I and a number of forumites have commented on frequently already.
†† Yes, it depends on whose statistics you look at. But nearer 200,000 than 100,000 in the US and the UK, who top the list. And whose broad overlap next year will include McKinley for the first time in some years.
††† Twitter, I’m looking at you.
‡ Some other day when I haven’t embodied the evils of the internet by wasting an hour cruising amazon, I’ll talk about what I was originally going to talk about, which springboards from another paragraph from this same interview. He says to the reporter: ‘The internet may have significantly changed the working patterns of people like you and me, but we are in a tiny minority. For most people, its effect is more about keeping in touch with friends and looking up things here and there. Economists have found very little evidence that since the internet revolution productivity has grown.’
Well, I don’t know about productivity or grown. But significantly changed? You bet your brand-new netbook/iPhone/iPad/Kindle/plug in the back of your neck. I’m looking forward to the back-up brain technology.
Three Short Books
. . . which have NOTHING to do with each other except that I read them all recently and liked them all.* I liked three books in a row. This doesn’t happen.
Say Yes, by Audrey Couloumbis.
I had read her Getting Near to Baby when it first came out, and liked it a lot. Say Yes is entirely different, barring the kid-getting-on-with-her-life-in-difficult-circumstances aspect, although this is an entirely different kid in entirely different difficult circumstances.
Twelve-year-old Casey lives alone with her stepmother, Sylvia; her dad died two years ago, and they both still miss him. But Sylvia is the sort of person who needs to have other people to hang onto, to cling to. She holds on to Casey, which Casey both likes and doesn’t like, and she hangs onto her boyfriend. The boyfriend doesn’t like Casey, and the feeling is mutual.
One morning Sylvia is particularly affectionate as Casey gets ready to go to school. Casey maybe wonders a little what is up with her—but only a little. Until she gets back from school and Sylvia isn’t there. She doesn’t come home that night at all. And she left some money in an envelope under a magnet on the fridge. Sylvia doesn’t leave money around.
It’s not really till the next day, when Casey notices that the freezer is full of her favourite dinners, and none of Sylvia’s—and that Sylvia’s clothes and stuff are gone—and she tries the boyfriend’s phone number and it’s been disconnected—that she begins to realise how much trouble she’s in. . . .
The Big Bazoohley, by Peter Carey
‘Like most grown-ups, Sam Kellow’s parents never guessed that their son ever thought about money. . . . But in truth Sam knew a lot about how much things cost, and when the family arrived in Toronto in the middle of a blizzard, he knew they were there to sell his mother’s latest painting to the mysterious Mr. Edward St. John de Vere. He also knew they were down to their last fifty-three dollars and twenty cents.’ And the hotel they’re staying at is very grand: ‘He watched his father tip the doorman five dollars and the bell captain two dollars, and when the porter brought their single suitcase to the room, Sam saw how much Earl Kellow gave him and he knew they now had only forty-four dollars and twenty cents left in all the world. . . .
‘Vanessa Kellow['s] . . . tiny paintings showed entire cities. Not just the buildings and the streets, but the bakers and butchers, and the stews bubbling in the pots, and the freckles on the faces, and the cat sleeping in the basket, and the fluff under the beds, although you could not see these things without a special magnifying glass, and then you might find a ruby ring in a secret drawer or a jar of blue-and-green striped candy in a cupboard. . . . People would go crazy when they saw his mother’s tiny paintings . . . and if they were rich people, they would pay a lot of money. . . . ’
The mysterious Mr de Vere ‘“ . . . has a mansion which is totally underground. You reach it from a door on the Bloor Street subway platform.”’
Except that when Sam’s mother goes to deliver her painting she discovers that the entrance to the mansion has disappeared.
And their hotel room costs four hundred and fifty-three dollars a night. Plus tax.
But the hotel is also playing host to the Perfecto Kiddo competition. The winner will take home $10,000. Sam is more the grubby, backwards-baseball-cap type than the Perfecto Kiddo type, but emergencies demand drastic action. . . .
Owl in Love, by Patricia Kindl
‘I am in love with Mr. Lindstrom, my science teacher. I found out where he lives and every night I perch on a tree branch outside his bedroom window and watch him sleep. He sleeps in his underwear: Fruit of the Loom, size 34.’
She is not kidding when she says she perches on a tree branch: ‘I am Owl. It is my name as well as my nature. There are birds of prey in my family going back hundreds of years, one every two or three generations . . . by night I seek my living in owl shape . . . By day I am an ordinary girl (more or less) attending the local high school.’ And while it is not unusual for fourteen-year-old girls to develop crushes on their science teachers, there are complications in this case: ‘I am Owl; it is in my nature to give my love once and only once in a lifetime. I shall love him until I die, or he does.’ And Mr Lindstrom is forty years old, and has a wife and a son—a son about Owl’s age—although no one seems to know anything for certain about the son; there is an awful rumour that he is insane, and is kept under restraint in an asylum, and that this is why Mr Lindstrom’s wife left him.
Owls are solitary creatures; Owl has never had a friend aside from her parents. But in science class they are about to have to prick their fingers for blood samples—and Owl’s blood is clearly not human. She needs an ally—an ally who doesn’t mind providing a second blood sample. That ally is Dawn, who has guessed Owl’s passion for Mr Lindstrom, and invites her home to experiment with potentially science-teacher-attracting make-up. Owl, rather bemusedly, agrees. ‘Dawn’s house was nice enough inside, I suppose, if you like all that furniture and that glaring sunlight pouring in at the windows. To my taste it seemed awfully cluttered. . . . You couldn’t walk ten feet in any direction without bumping into a piece of overstuffed furniture. . . . A few rotting branches or some old leaves would have made the place look a lot homier, in my opinion. . . .’ There is a tricky moment when Dawn offers Owl, hungry after another night of keeping watch rather than hunting, her hamster to hold: ‘“Here, pet him . . . he’s really friendly.” . . . I have been carefully raised. Hungry as I was I could not be guilty of such a violation of proper conduct as to eat my hostess’ pet. . . .’
Owl has lately been watching Mr Lindstrom’s house with more purpose than mere longing. There is another shape-shifting owl who has taken up residence in the woods behind Mr Lindstrom’s house. A young one—a young incompetent one. Owl cannot decide if she should run him off what she considers to be her territory, or help him learn to be what he is. For the moment, she decides to keep a wary eye on him: ‘I will try for larger prey to stave off my hunger, and so be free to watch by the window longer. I have sometimes caught fat rabbits hopping in the moonlight around our frozen vegetable garden. . . . .The garden of a were-owl at midnight makes a perilous salad bar.’
They’re all three funny and warm and lovely in their very different ways; each author has a sharp, individual style and something to say. I recommend them all.
* * *
* And were in the same dusty box under the bed only recently discovered. Sigh. I didn’t think there were any more dusty boxes of books under there. In fact I’m sure there weren’t. So I have a new theory. There’s a hole in spacetime under my bed. Boxes of various items come through occasionally. This particular hole does seem to have a predilection for books, but there are worse things. At least I know what to do with books.^ There was a random-selection box not long ago that was pretty challenging.^^
^ Put them in piles. All over the house. Reading is good too. But creating and rearranging the piles is the important thing.
^^ Especially the intelligent squid who had lost her navigational widget and taken a wrong turn.
Friday the 13th or, YA* is not a dirty word
Or, it’s actually been a pretty good day** and not only is time hurtling by like a hellhound*** but stuff I really want to point and shout at is stacking up and in another day or two I’ll forget which is my best trick of all, unfortunately, and I figure there’s all this Friday the 13th energy washing around, waiting to turn you into a tadpole or make you win the lottery even if you didn’t buy a ticket, so I might as well ride a little of it.
Emoon [@emoontx] saw it first, and tweeted the link to ‘The Kids’ Books Are All Right’, printed in the NYTimes, no less, about—brace yourselves, this is going to come as a shock—adults are reading books for young adults. YAAAAAAH. I retweeted somewhat ungraciously, adding ‘I am a 30+ year survivor of “when are you going to write a real book?”’—and I’m not impressed. I ‘follow’ the Huffington Post Books section, and they retweeted, so I retweeted again as follows:
Oh do stick yr hushed amazement in yr ear RT @HuffPostBooks: Why it’s okay 4 adults 2 love YA books as much as teens http://huff.to/dAxuSS
I thought about blogging about it myself, but as the above pithily indicates, I was going to have some trouble being professionally polite. And then, lo, Jodi sent me this link:
http://www.gayleforman.com/blog/2010/08/10/sandbox/
Way to go Gayle. Yes, flaming frell it. Yes.
Which will also serve as a much-delayed lead-in to telling you that if you haven’t read Forman’s book IF I STAY, you have a big, sobbing, heart-wrenching, glorious treat waiting for you. Jodi† blogged about it a while ago†† http://jmeadows.livejournal.com/760957.html
. . . but I never quite got around to it, partly because Pollyanna and I kept arguing about terms. See, there was no way I was going to like this book. My editor sent it to me—it’s published in another part of the Penguin forest from me—and I took one long disbelieving look at it and laid it down again for several months.††† It ticks all my instant-death boxes: It’s written in present tense. The heroine is a Sensitive Teen. I hate Sensitive Teens. They give me a rash. She’s not only sensitive, but fabulously talented, and already has her great musical gift to organise her life around. I hate sensitive teens who already know who they are and what they’re good at. She also has a Perfect Boyfriend who not only has his own clear, mature aims and goals but gets hers. Also, he’s cute. He could at least be geeky and spotty. But nooooo. He’s cute. I probably hate Perfect Boyfriends the most of all.
SPOILER ALERT HERE. Jodi was very good when she blogged about the book—she didn’t give anything away. My own feeling is that you’re allowed to blow the set up, the first (say) twenty pages—I’m very literal-minded in my little dragons-and-pegasi way and I find it too difficult to get behind a read this book without mentioning at least a few specifics. So, if you’re willing to take Jodi’s and my word for it, and you like sitting down to a book that you know absolutely nothing about but that the odds are good you’ll like it (which in fact I do, so I will perfectly understand), STOP READING NOW.
But for the rest of you: Mia, our heroine, and her much-loved parents and little brother, are on their way to see friends. School’s been called off because of snow; but the snow stopped almost as soon as the announcement was made, so the roads aren’t even slippery. Slippery enough however: There’s an accident. ‘The car is eviscerated. The impact of a four-ton pick-up truck going sixty miles an hour had the force of an atom bomb.’ Mia’s parents are both killed instantly; she and her little brother are dangerously injured. Mia tells the story as a disassociated spirit, as her damaged and unconscious body lies in a hospital bed connected to various drips and tubes and life-support machinery. The point at which the book really grabbed me for the first time happens when Mia first ‘wakes’ outside her body immediately after the accident, and sees the wreckage around her: ‘You wouldn’t expect the radio to work afterward. But it does.’ She sees what has happened and can’t bear it. ‘Wake up! I scream. Wake up! Wakeupwakeupwakeup! But I can’t. I don’t. . . . Then I hear something. It’s the music. I can still hear the music. So I concentrate on that. I finger the notes of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata no. 3 . . . as I often do when I listen to pieces I am working on. . . . I play, just focusing on that, until the last bit of life in the car dies, and the music goes with it.
‘It isn’t long after that the sirens come.’
For my money, one of the reasons the book is so absorbing is the groundedness of it. You hear, graphically and specifically, about the accident, about what happens to Mia—about how they go about trying to save her life—about her prospects—which are not at all good. The entire book takes place in the hospital, while the doctors and what remains of her family and friends wait to see if she will live or die. And this is intercut with the story of her life so far: the music—shortly before the book begins she’d had her audition at Juilliard—the Perfect Boyfriend (who is a rock star, but he’s okay really, he wears Converse All Stars), the best girlfriend. And the family. The family that she is a part of in a deep, genuine way that she knows she is lucky to have. The family who has been destroyed by a little bit of wet road.
It’s also a thriller. Forman does a brilliant job of wracking you silly over the latest section of the hospital vigil . . . and then whoops you back to Mia’s life before, with her music and Adam, the boyfriend, and Kim, the girlfriend, and her parents, and Teddy, her brother, and her dad’s parents, her school, and the ramshackle old house she and her parents and brother live in, and which is something of a refuge for everyone they love. And as you keep anxiously, lump-in-throat-ishly turning the pages you realise that it’s a real question, about whether Mia chooses to stay. To live. Or not. And the present tense narration? This may be the only book I’ve ever read where it’s absolutely right; where the moment-by-moment of Mia’s fragile existence after the accident is perfectly reflected in all those present-tense verbs.
Read it. But have a big box of tissues handy.
* * *
* Pronounced YAH. Or possibly YAAAAAH.
** So far. There’s a few minutes of it left. Things could always change. But Oisin and I spent a big fat chunk of this afternoon drinking tea and engaging in parallel play with our new toys^—he has a brand-new-this-week iPhone4 too. It’s pathetic. Here we are, respected career professionals in glamorous if ill-paid creative callings, both of us a lot nearer sixty than fifty, and behaving like fifteen-year-olds over a couple of pieces of shiny new kit. Well, I’m still badly mired in the Ooooh! Shiny! stage. Oisin is a bit more blasé, having had earlier versions of the iPhone for several years^^, but he’s the one who explained how you can not only take terrible pictures of the person sitting on the other side of the teapot from you but you can then load one of those terrible photos next to the person’s info on your contact page and then assign them their own ringtone.^^^ So the moment your phone begins ringing you know who’s calling. Supposing you can remember if you assigned the theme from JAWS to your dentist or your accountant. Oh, well, it doesn’t matter that much really. You know you don’t want to answer it.
And then at bell practise tonight . . . I genuinely am beginning to stagger through touches of Grandsire Triples on an inside bell. ‘Beginning’ and ‘stagger’ still being the operative words. But given that it was only a fortnight or so ago that I remained clueless on the touches of Grandsire Triples front, this is excellent. I am going to learn this. I am.
^ Piano lesson? Remind me what that would be—? Although he did remember my empty threat last week about bringing something to sing. Well, he’s the one cancelled at the last minute—not me. And this week is—this week. Not last. Besides, I’m hoarse from screaming.
^^ And in fact bears some responsibility for enmeshing me in this whole iPhone thing in the first place. That and Cathy’s Fingerzilla.
^^^ This is getting as appalling as the existence of a cheat app—of several cheat apps—for Angry Birds.
*** Only twenty four hours left to get a recipe in for the sticky-baked-goods drawing for a shiny gold SIGNED copy of SUNSHINE! http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2010/08/07/sunshine-contest-%e2%80%93-round-2-guest-post-by-ajlr/
† Jodi is everywhere. Don’t do anything you don’t want her to see.
†† Right after we’d been talking about how good it was. Jodi, however, wrote about it. I dithered.
††† I finally picked it up again because Hannah and her daughters really liked it.
Consolations, when there have been too many of Those Days
Consolation #1: Daylily going for it. 
This is probably her* best year yet, and last year I swore I was going to ‘lift’ (as the ridiculous euphemism for ‘dig yourself an amazing crop of blisters and a back that will no longer straighten’ is) and divide her because she’s jammed into that pot by now and is due to stop flowering in despair. Ahem. All she’s had is a couple of biggish handfuls of flower food. And I really really am going to hack her out of the pot THIS winter, and split her up into several eager little world-devouring blobs. I love a good daylily.
Consolation #2: This is the final paragraph of an email from a reader that arrived today.
Anyway, although my experience has at no point involved bees I just wanted to say that I haven’t read another book that has more realistically described the experience of being suddenly responsible, of not even knowing the words for the things that you have to do, of finding out suddenly that there was something important that you should have known but no one told you because you were supposed to already know it, of finding that people who were your friends now see you as someone that they have/ought to have respect for and of feeling like a fraud and knowing that everyone can see through you and of being terrified that you will damage this already damaged structure further.
Thank you. As I keep saying, the story is the story, but some stories find you when you’re ready to tell them**, and some stories you realise only after it’s too late are being informed more directly by your own experience than you wanted or planned. CHALICE, as I’ve told this blog before, is saturated, not to say soggy, with my experience of trying to learn to use homeopathy. Homeopathy works—I don’t care how many ‘quackbusters’ you’ve read to the contrary—which means that when it doesn’t work, you’ve done something wrong. And it’s a gigantic subject, and there are no sure ways through the thickets or around the bottomless chasms. And meanwhile people are asking you for help. . . .
Consolation # 3: Other people’s books.
I am such a wash-out as a book reviewer. Sigh. A lot of it, as I’ve told you before, is that since books matter, and I’m only going to tell you about the ones that I think are good, I get all seized up about doing it well enough, and I haven’t got time to get all seized up about writing blog posts. So I keep putting off writing about other people’s books.
There is also the late-to-the-party aspect. Writing about old favourites or the unjustly obscure is one thing. Writing about something that has been on the best seller list for the last x years and everybody has already read but you is something else.
So let me just mention in passing two series that have (recently) given me a lot of lying-in-the-bath-till-the-water-gets-cold, must-keep-turning-pages pleasure***, and you can chuckle condescendingly since you’ve read them both several times all the way through. The first are Melissa Marr’s WICKED LOVELY books. How can you resist a centuries-long faery feud that produces a conversation like this one:
‘She wiped her cheeks, trying not to flinch as she saw that the tears were golden. . . . . “I don’t know how to rule anyone.”
‘He shrugged . . . “So you learn. I’ll be there. I do know how to rule. But today we don’t think about all that. . . . There are balls to have and dancing to be done. If we rejoice, our court will too. It is as much a duty as waking the earth.”
“Right, sounds like an easy job. Wake the earth, rule the unruly, repair the broken stuff and party.”’
Also there are cool tattoos. And a boa constrictor.
The second series is Cassandra Clare’s MORTAL INSTRUMENTS. There was no way I was going to read these books.† Aside from who likes them †† they are too long. Romantic YA urban fantasy trilogy that runs 1500 small-print pages or so? Ewww. But . . . wrong. I kept running into references to these books and finally said oh all right and found an excerpt to read.††† Oh. Okay. Ordering now. And not only is the story pretty much an adventure per page, it’s funny. ‡
‘Jocelyn even had a graceful way of walking that made people turn their heads to watch her go by. Clary, by contrast, was always tripping over her feet. The only time people turned to watch her go by was when she hurtled past them as she fell downstairs.’
. . . ‘“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Simon said, blinking. “Demon slayers take the subway?”
“It’s faster than driving.”’
. . . ‘“There are demons in the White House?”
“I was kidding . . . I think.” He shrugged philosophically. “I’m sure someone would have mentioned it.”’
Consolation # 4: Peter’s mayonnaise.
It’s right up there with chocolate and champagne.
And in an attempt to FOIL Wordpress’ villainy with photo placement, we’re going to have the footnotes FIRST, and Consolation #5 at the end.
* * *
* Apparently all daylilies are girls, like all roses are, even General Kleber and Benjamin Britten, to mention two that are on this year’s ACQUIRE list.^
^ And Peter Beales is introducing a new pale-pink rose named Beatrix Potter. Just in case anyone else would like to know.
** Sometimes they don’t care if you’re frelling ready to tell them or not. Write me or die, they say.
*** And in fact still are, because I haven’t finished either of them yet, okay? So don’t tell me anything.^ I’m a slow reader. And I’m still struggling with Music Theory for Dummies and YOUNG ROMANTICS by Daisy Hay. And I’ve just ordered CLARA SCHUMANN by Nancy B. Reich. And I’m always behind on homeopathy journals.
^ I followed Cassandra Clare on Twitter for a while, but I had to stop. She spent a lot of time answering fan questions, and these were full of spoilers.
† Remember my one official exception to Pollyanna? There’s a big fat plug from her splashed across the covers. I totally understand why they’re using it, and I’m sure there was champagne all round at the publishers’ the day the quote came in. But it totally put me off, because I am an Evil Cow.
†† Ahem
††† I love on line book excerpts. They’re one of the absolute best things about the internet. Never mind blogs and Twitter and Google. Excerpts.
‡ I am, let me say, a sucker for funny. Everything is better with a few good lines.^
^ I know. I should like Shakespeare. I don’t.
Consolation # 5: The unbearable cuteness of hellhounds.
And if you’re thinking that looks like a rec ground with lanes drawn for runners . . . it is. Occasionally I am an irresponsible fool and let them off lead in town. Baaaaaaad hellgoddess. I don’t do it very often.
The I Hate to Cookbook, revisited
Years and years and years and half a lifetime ago when I had only just started this blog*, I brought up the subject of Peg Bracken’s classic of the culinary art, The I Hate to Cookbook,** as a result of having just read her obituary***. Now I started teaching myself to cook at the relatively tender age of thirteen, and discovered I liked it, but I still have pretty much always agreed that ‘life’s too short to stuff a mushroom’†. And when I was thirteen life was serious and the idea of having a family to feed every day—and in the midsixties girls were growing up with the idea that that was their future: this may be what we rebelled against, but that’s precisely because it was what was in our way—was pretty overwhelming.†† Peg Bracken was hot in those days, her recipes worked, and furthermore she was funny.††† Hey! It’s not all June Cleaver!‡ Pass it on!
And, thinking back to those days, the paragraph that caught my attention in the obituary, and which I probably quoted the last time‡‡, was this: ‘Bracken received short shrift from the first half-dozen editors, all men, whom she approached. They neither sympathised with [her cookbook’s] subversion nor thought American women unhappy with their lot. Similarly, when she showed the manuscript to her second husband, the writer Roderick Lull, he remarked: “It stinks.”‡‡‡ Its value was not appreciated until she found a woman editor [boldface mine] at Harcourt Brace.’ Um-hmm. And it sold over 3 million copies.
My original mid-60s paperback disappeared or disintegrated long ago. It probably went with one of my early purist purges. But the obituary reminded me what a hoot she was, and while my diet these days is so holy it hurts§, I started trying to track down a copy of the then-out-of-print cookbook. And found one: yaay. Which happened to be a reprint of the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, with an Introduction to the Introduction which begins: ‘When they informed me that twenty-five years have elapsed since The I Hate to Cook Book appeared, I was astonished. Only think! Twenty-five long years, some longer than others. Well, some of them shorter than others too, come to think of it. But anyway, twenty-five of them, all kinds, and it just goes to show what can happen when you’re not paying attention.’
::Blink.:: Why does this feel so familiar? So, I’ve spent the last two and a half years thinking ‘I should blog about this again. Because I have found a formative influence. When I started the blog, was I thinking, Anais Nin? §§ Virginia Woolf?§§§ May Sarton?# No. Clearly I aspired to the dizzyingly high standards of frittery and piffle of Peg Bracken. And here’s the clincher: she uses footnotes. Yes! Footnotes! I admit she doesn’t use as many as I do## but she uses them in a stimulating manner. ###
So imagine my pleasure and delight when this appeared on my Twitter feed yesterday:
PublishersWkly The “I Hate to Cook Book” turns 50 with a new anniversary edition http://bit.ly/bGPTEG
Will I buy it? Probably. I hope they kept the Hilary Knight illustrations. Of their time? Sure. But so is Bracken. Not all of it will translate—and I wouldn’t miss it, for example, if they edit out the peanut butter and ketchup canapé spread~—but I feel that a paragraph like this is timeless: ‘Some people, so they tell me, can’t make good pastry. I see no reason to doubt them. Some people can’t keep their eyes open under water, either. We all have our mental blocks to play with.’~~
* * *
* That would be September 2007. A very long time ago. I wasn’t even ringing Stedman yet. Well, at least not successfully.
** I did blog about it. I did. But lj’s search is refusing to find it for me, and I don’t feel like wrestling with its extremely uncooperative calendar. Thanks, lj! I so don’t miss you!
*** Gods, I looove the internet when it works. Here’s the link to the one I read: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/dec/10/guardianobituaries.mainsection
† http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/lifes-too-short.html Also quoted in the Bracken obituary. I don’t know if Shirley Conran read Peg Bracken, but I would like to think they’d have got on like a house on fire. Or like two women who knew they had better things to do than stuff mushrooms.^
^ Although, yes. I have. I have gone through occasional phases of (pretty strictly culinary only) domestic goddesshood in which I not only read but applied chapters of cookbooks that during more stringent eras I wouldn’t have gone near. The crucial word in that sentence however is through. There are all kinds of things you might want to try once or twice for the experience+ even if you aren’t going to make a habit of them. I haven’t stuffed any mushrooms since I started bell ringing, say. And really if I’m going to be silly in the kitchen I’d rather be silly with icing and cookie cutters.
+ Driving 1000 miles in three days on a 350cc two stroke motorcycle with no windscreen, for example. Not sleeping (or breathing, much) for seven days while waiting to see if that English bloke was going to figure out that I was his future or not. And stuffing mushrooms.
†† Did you ever see Audrey Hepburn in a kitchen? Okay, there are a couple of passing references to cordon bleu omelettes in Sabrina, but did she ever make one?
††† Sample chapter titles: The Leftover, or Every Family Needs a Dog^; Potluck Suppers, or How to Bring the Water for the Lemonade; Stealing from Knowledgeable People, or I Seen Her When She Done It But I Never Let On.
^ Not a hellhound, clearly
‡ Or Miss Moneypenny! Or Nurse Chapel! Or any other subservient, hero-fixated girlie! You can cook and have kids or YOU CAN BE PATHETIC AND UNFULFILLED! Having a profession DOES NOT COUNT! Grrrrrrr.
‡‡ But that was a long time ago, so you won’t mind.
‡‡‡ I’m glad she divorced him.
§ Except for the tea, the chocolate and the champagne. Thank you, gods, for this loophole in my undesired and unenjoyed salubriousness.
§§ NO.
§§§ NOOO.
# NOOOOOO.
## She wasn’t writing a daily blog, okay? I’m sure she would have if she had been.
### This one, for example: ‘The recipe calls for “good mayonnaise,” a term that always makes me feel truculent as well as defensive. What kind do they think you buy? . . .’ This reminds me of one of my favourite cookbook comments, which is nailed in my memory to Bracken, except I can’t imagine her ever telling you how to make yeast bread, protesting the standard yeast-bread instruction to cover your rising sponge ‘with a clean towel’. You’re going to cover it with a dirty towel? Indeed.
~ Yeccch. Even if it did appear in a footnote.
~~ Or this paragraph, plus footnotes, which appears at the end: ‘Like a love affair, a cookbook is probably easier to get into than out of. At the end of both, sins of commission and omission loom large. . . . Is the chocolate sauce really that good?^ . . . Shouldn’t there have been some mention of brunches? ^^ . . .’
^ Yes.
^^ No.
