oandthegang tries desperately to keep up

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ConversesClub Read 2015

Afegeix-te a LibraryThing per participar.

oandthegang tries desperately to keep up

Aquest tema està marcat com "inactiu": L'últim missatge és de fa més de 90 dies. Podeu revifar-lo enviant una resposta.

1Oandthegang
des. 31, 2014, 10:17 pm

Well, here it is, the new year, and already I'm behind! There are so many posts already up even though it's not long after midnight that t looks like this will be another year in which I'm not going to have time to read all the posts on all the threads.

This Christmas I wasn't able to have a nice pile of seasonal books on the coffee table, not for lack of books, but because in the intervening months the cat has taken possession of the coffee table. My feelings on this are mixed. On the one hand he keeps it well polished, on the other the occasional bad landing/takeoff has left marks on the table top. As the coffee table is quite high he can just step from there onto my lap, pinning me to my seat, gradually cutting off my circulation, and generally getting in the way of my reading. My nice seasonal books have therefore had a somewhat nomadic time of it this Christmas. As there have been new additions I didn't manage to get to the traditional re-reads.

I've not set myself any goals for the year, though reducing the number of books waiting to be read, and then reducing the number of books per se would be good. There is that moment of truth when you ask yourself no matter how much you enjoyed a particular book are you really ever going to reread it, and if it is a book which you might want to reread, would it still be available at a library or bookshop if necessary.

With regard to what I might read, I have no system, but the type of book I read tends to go through cycles, and at the moment I am into cosy reads, although I have just picked up a sociological study of dress and aging. It's years since I last read the sort of book in which the author tells you what they are going to say, when they are going to say it, why they are making a mention of a topic now when they had earlier told you they wouldn't be discussing it until the second half of the book, etc., etc., and all in the specially small print reserved for academic studies. (Is this because they have such a low readership, and therefore correspondingly high cost, that publishers try to save money by making sure they use fewer pages?) When I'm awake I want to shout 'Oh just get on with it' at the author, but for some reason, when reading it, sleep comes very soon..... I'm sure there will be some interesting ideas in there somewhere. Zzzz...

(One goal for this year will be to master the art of inserting pictures in my posts. There are so many lovely pictures in other people's threads.)

2NanaCC
gen. 1, 2015, 1:33 am

Hi, O. I have learned how to add book covers, but have no idea how to add photos. Maybe we can get someone to give us a detailed explanation. :)

3Oandthegang
gen. 1, 2015, 3:31 am

The BBC's opening contribution to literature this year is a ten hour dramatization of War And Peace which will go out in one continuous broadcast today. They will be putting it on catch-up for those of us unable to dedicate a full ten hours at one sitting. Alternatively there is the Simon Callow reading of a John Crace abbreviation, and there are the contributions by listeners - summaries in 140 characters and the option to tweetalong.

4rebeccanyc
gen. 1, 2015, 11:48 am

Looking forward to your reading this year.

5Poquette
gen. 1, 2015, 4:08 pm

Oh to have the Beeb here in the US! I know, one can listen via the Internet, but it's not the same as, for instance, climbing into bed, snuggling under a warm comforter — or whatever — and turning on the radio.

6bragan
gen. 3, 2015, 4:11 pm

>1 Oandthegang: As the coffee table is quite high he can just step from there onto my lap, pinning me to my seat, gradually cutting off my circulation, and generally getting in the way of my reading.

Ha! Mine do that without the aid of the coffee table. Things get particularly interesting when I'm lying on the sofa with the reasonable-sized cat on what would be my lap if I were sitting, and the 30-pound cat decides he wants to lie on top of me too. He tends to just jump right up onto my chest, heedless of any books or mugs of coffee I might be holding. On the good side (sort of), sometimes I end up reading for longer that I would otherwise, because I'm pinned in place by cats.

7VivienneR
gen. 4, 2015, 8:03 pm

>6 bragan: sometimes I end up reading for longer that I would otherwise, because I'm pinned in place by cats

Don't you just love it when that happens!!

8bragan
gen. 5, 2015, 3:49 am

>7 VivienneR: I do, except when it happens in the morning and I haven't had my full quota of coffee yet. Then there's often a terrible conflict between cat-imposed inertia and my desperate need for caffeine.

9RidgewayGirl
gen. 5, 2015, 1:44 pm

>8 bragan: But it's a better fate than when you're covered in cats and have had too much coffee to drink. I'm just saying.

10bragan
gen. 5, 2015, 9:33 pm

>9 RidgewayGirl: Now, that is a very good point!

11arubabookwoman
gen. 16, 2015, 5:28 pm

I've decided to reread War and Peace this year at 50 pages a day, and I'm now at p. 300 and I am totally hooked. Will have to check out the BBC production when I'm done with the book.

12rebeccanyc
gen. 17, 2015, 10:42 am

>11 arubabookwoman: War and Peace is one of my all-time favorite books. In addition to the BBC production, there is a multipart Russian (Soviet) movie of it that is terrific; it used to be available from Netflix but I'm not sure if it still is.

13Helenliz
gen. 17, 2015, 10:44 am

>11 arubabookwoman: good luck with that. I tried reading it once, but it was just far too dense for me. But that was probably 20 years ago, it might be one to think about trying again... one day!

14arubabookwoman
gen. 17, 2015, 5:30 pm

This is my second time reading War and Peace. I was in my teens the first time I read it, and I think I mostly skimmed the war parts. This time I'm loving both parts, and even basically following the battle maneuvering. I look forward to reading it every day.

15rebeccanyc
gen. 17, 2015, 5:40 pm

>14 arubabookwoman: I also first read War and Peace in my teens, and like you I skimmed or skipped the war parts. And like you, I found them fascinating and maybe the best part, when I reread it in my 50s.

16Oandthegang
gen. 18, 2015, 5:09 am

>6 bragan: A 30 pound cat!! I thought I was having a tough time with a 17 pound cat! Are you perhaps keeping a small ocelot?

17Oandthegang
gen. 18, 2015, 5:15 am

> 6 I find the cat a useful measure when dieting. I can think 'I ought to lose half a cat' (or in bad times a whole cat). I can stare at him and imagine him wrapped round my waist. As the cat is currently dieting he could relate his weight loss to the number of mice he needs to lose (happily substantially reduced as he is doing better than I).

18RidgewayGirl
gen. 18, 2015, 5:43 am

Congrats on getting your cat to diet. When I was in college, my roommate and I had a guy who the vet said needed to lose a few pounds. We tried to shut him in the bathroom with his dinner, and feed the other two cats in the kitchen as usual. But he would just try to tunnel out and the other two wouldn't eat if he wasn't there, so we gave up pretty quickly.

19NanaCC
gen. 18, 2015, 9:01 am

I need someone to lock me in a room to keep me on my diet. I've had great intentions since the new year started, but last night we had sushi...you can't have sushi without wine...and then you have a nice glass of port to finish the night. I am hopeless.

20Helenliz
gen. 18, 2015, 9:38 am

Diet? What is this "diet" thing of which you speak?
I like food far too much to be any good at restricting myself. I'm on a "no snacking" kick at the moment, so 3 proper meals a day, but nothing in between. Sort of works, especially if I don't buy a packet of biscuits. I'm fine until they're opened, then they vanish, as if by magic.
That is why I run, to be able to eat my way through anything and everything. It's not pretty, and it's not fast, but when I eat cake it is all well worth it. >;-)

21fannyprice
gen. 18, 2015, 10:29 pm

I love this cat conversation. As a new homeowner, I've gotten really obsessed with all of these design blogs, many of which post about "staging" a coffee table with various knick-knacks, flowers, and breakables. It's lovely, and in theory, I want it. But in reality, all I can think is, none of these people has a cat. My cat has managed to take out 50-pound books; you think I'm putting delicate tchotchkes within his reach?

22Oandthegang
Editat: gen. 19, 2015, 9:15 am

>21 fannyprice: I'm fascinated by the idea that your cat has in the past "taken out" fifty pound books. Were these attacks intending termination with extreme prejudice, or just the psychokinesis by which cats push sleeping adults out of bed? I know some cats who are capable of weaving their way around delicate ornaments and vases of flowers, but I wouldn't trust mine.

Some people manage books on coffee tables very well, but they must be very tidy people and/or have alternative surfaces on which to put the things for which coffee tables were originally designed, i.e. coffee cups, a coffee pot, and some biscuits, and possibly a book or magazine put down while the reader is pouring coffee or picking through the biscuits. Books are great colonisers, and where one goes others tend to follow, making them particularly unsuitable for any surface which they are might be expected to share. Hospitality became difficult when my Christmas book display, arranged to inspire me, took over the coffee table, and there were awkward moments as I tried to find corners for people to put their cups and plates.

On the other hand there are the "coffee table books", which have gotten out of hand. I have Charley Harper's Animal Kingdom which is a lovely book and needs to be a certain size to enable one to appreciate the work, but it took up nearly my entire coffee table (so of course the cat took to sleeping on it) and I haven't got anywhere in the house where it fits. Consequently it gets shifted around the seats of spare chairs. Also, because it is so wide one has to think carefully about where one is going to spend any time with it open. I think it is the most awkwardly shaped of my books, but the Taschen reissue of The Curse of Lono is pretty big, closely followed by Raymond Briggs' The Bear. Books which are tall, such as Lono and The Bear, can at least be put on their sides with the spine facing outwards, but books which are wide in proportion to their height, such as the Harper, would just be anonymously edge on and their pages would yellow. If one had sufficient wide short books one could have special shelves built for them. I have some old bookcases which have long shallow drawers down at bottom, possibly specifically for large books, but having books specifically designed to be looked at tucked away in drawers which I need to get on my knees to open seems perverse.

How do others deal with awkwardly shaped books?

23fannyprice
gen. 19, 2015, 9:34 am

>22 Oandthegang:, Oh indeed, these were premeditated, intentional, goal-seeking, what have you. Said cat is quite demanding when hungry and expresses his need for food by knocking things over, generally in escalating value/annoyance factor. First, magazines or random papers (bills, academic articles, etc.); second, books (either normal-sized or true coffee table books, whatever is at paw will do and he's a strong, tenacious little dude); third, phones, iPads, laptops. Other times, he will just start right out by swatting a cup of coffee or tea, which short circuits the entire process and guarantees he will be fed as soon as the mess is cleaned. Fortunately, none of the other cats have adopted this method of making requests.

Incidentally, I also struggle with a couple of very large, unwieldy books - in particular - National Geographic Atlas of the World, Ninth Edition - which is 12.7 x 1.5 x 19 inches. I very much want to keep it at hand, so I can actually look at it, but there is basically no place for it to live. I need an English Lord's manor library with display stands or something.

24SassyLassy
gen. 19, 2015, 7:07 pm

I'm all for coffee table free zones. I have never had one in my adult life. No dirty coffee mugs, tea cups, rumpled newspapers, rings in the wood to worry about, shins will never be bashed. I'm not sure why I don't have one. I suspect I dread all the above that they seem to attract.

>22 Oandthegang: For the wonderful Charley Harper's Animal Kingdom display, how about a sort of plate shelf, where the book can go full frontal?

>23 fannyprice: I love the idea of display stands. A friend of mine has one like a lectern as well as a wonderful collection of huge garden books. Every time I go there, there is a new garden to contemplate. The Times Atlas and OED are below it. Sounds insufferably pretentious, but all are used regularly so it's perfectly okay and I love the look of it between two large windows.

I have a Times Atlas, but like o's Curse of Lono, it is on a shelf spine out.

25bragan
gen. 20, 2015, 3:59 am

>16 Oandthegang: Admittedly, I was rounding up. I think the 30 pound cat topped out at about 28 pounds, if you want to be more precise about it. He may have managed to lose a pound or two since then, though. (You'd think a steady intake of the super-expensive prescription-only diet cat food would help him reduce quickly. You would be wrong. He's been eating that stuff for years. But I should get out the scale and check if he's made any progress lately.)

And here I can remember when he was a newborn and I could hold him in the palm of my hand... He was an orphan, abandoned by his mother in my driveway as soon as he was born, and my theory is that because he didn't get much nutrition in the very first hours of his life, his body went into emergency calorie-conservation mode and stayed there forever.

>23 fannyprice: I had a cat once who, when she really, really wanted me to get out of bed and I wasn't cooperating, would finally give up on the meowing and the batting at my face and the scratching at the bed, and start clawing up books on the shelves in the bedroom. She knew, damn her, that that was something I'd have to get up and put a stop to.

(My most amusing story of cats, books, and destruction involves the time I went to Australia for two weeks and left the cats alone (with a neighbor looking in on them). Needless to say, they did not like this. And when I got home, I found one of them had pulled my copy of Cats for Dummies partially out of the middle of a shelf and chewed on it. None of the other books on either side were touched. It was almost too hilarious to be angry at.)

26Oandthegang
gen. 20, 2015, 9:09 am

>24 SassyLassy: I used to know someone who kept a Mirriam Webster dictionary open on a sort of lectern. The dictionary was a fat well thumbed beast which suffered no harm from this treatment. Its owner was one of those people who love discovering new words, so the open book was a frequent stopping off point on the way to something less interesting. Your friend's garden display and reference area sounds lovely. I do fantasize about buying the complete OED, as it is never going to be reprinted, and it would look lovely on a big deep shelf between high Georgian windows, but the required space, never mind the price, means I am unlikely ever to do so.

I can't decide about the coffee table. Mine is actually a small chest which is about the right height and had just had its place usurped by something else, so while it was homeless in the middle of the living room it occurred to me that it could be used as a coffee table. The room would actually look better without it, but until I think of something better.....

>23 fannyprice:, >25 bragan: How do cats do that? While mine is not up to selecting particular books for punishment he does have - apparently in common with other cats - that uncanny ability to work out an escalating scale of noise when he wants me to get up in the morning, starting with gentle rustling of paper, moving on to tapping the side of the wastepaper basket, knocking it over, etc. I know that giving in to this reinforces the behaviour but (a) I admire his cleverness in working out the sequence and (b) on a couple of occasions when I have resolutely ignored him he has sent the bedside lamp crashing down on my head. I have never been patted, or stood on, but there has been the odd claw like a heat seeking missile to the naked sole. Even that is better than the threat of flying computers and pools of coffee!

27RidgewayGirl
gen. 20, 2015, 10:41 am

Has your cat mastered the cry of a dying beast? Mine does that when we aren't letting him out because he's not allowed to be out after dark. A previous cat did that when the bottom of his food bowl became visible. It starts off strong and insistent and then gradually becomes quieter and more drawn out as the cat loses his will to live due to your poor care.

I have a chest as our coffee table, too. In this case, it was once my SO's grandmother's hope chest and so is ill-suited to the piles of books, coffee mugs and feet with which it is assaulted.

28Oandthegang
gen. 21, 2015, 6:55 pm

> No. The dying beast is a new one on me. i get the odd strangled gasp, as though he has laryngitis.

By now any dog lovers reading this thread will be wondering why we keep cats!

29Oandthegang
Editat: gen. 22, 2015, 1:59 am

The Morville Hours by Katie Swift

In August 1988 Katie Swift and her husband moved in to The Dower House, Morville. They arrived with two removal vans of books, three cats, and two car loads of plants. Up until that time Katie was Keeper of Early Printed Books in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. Her husband had a bookshop in Oxford, and Swift was commuting back to Oxford at weekends. "Morville was his plan to get (her) home." Although closer than Dublin, Morville is in Shropshire, up against the Welsh border.

From the garden of the Dower House one can see the church clock tower, and hear the bells as they strike the quarters and the hours, and ring for the rituals of the church. The church had been built in the early twelfth century by monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Shrewsbury, and then in 1138 permission was granted to build a priory there. The priory is long gone, a casualty of the Reformation, and it is no longer known exactly where the buildings stood. A Roman road passes nearby, and there is evidence of much older habitation. Digging the ground in her new garden Swift would find traces of previous occupants of the land: flints, pipes, glass and pottery. Among her neighbours were people who remembered the old village families and the agrarian practices now on the edge of extinction.

Swift set out to research the history of Morville, back to the creation of the landscape, the reasons for the variation in soil and rock, forward through the lives of various people who would have had a material influence on the estate. She then created a series of gardens together making a coherent whole, but individually planted especially for some previous inhabitant, with plants and planting style appropriate to the style, period, and interests of the selected people.

Books of Hours were produced for the laity throughout the Middle Ages, an abbreviated, portable version of the Hours of The Divine Office which, though pre-dating him, were codified by St Benedict in his rule, a practical guide to monastic life. The prayers, psalms, hymns and readings appropriate to the monastic hours change through the year, and thus books of hours also operate like calendars, with their illustrations showing the activities appropriate to the month; both the day and the year are measured and divided. There are seven Day Hours, plus Vigils, the Night Office, also, confusingly, known as Matins. The length of the 'Hours' would change with the seasons.

Swift's book follows the same division, with the chapters being named for the Hours, moving forward from Vigils, celebrated at 2 a.m., the vigil before dawn, Te deum laudamus, when one would consider the day ahead, - January, the begining of the year and of the garden, the inquiry into the oldest inhabitaants, through to Compline, celebrated at 9pm, the word derived from the Old French meaning 'complete', a time of facing the dark at the end of the day before retiring to bed. Nunc dimittis - now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. December, the present. As the hours construct the day so the hours of Swift's book track the creation of her garden, the seasons of the year, the history of the previous owners, the history of the plants or planting styles they would have used. Along the way she discusses calendars, time, celestial bodies, classical mythology, changes in farming methods and gardening styles over the years and our relationship with nature. Every once and a while fragments of her own family history.

I had resisted this book for a long time, fearing I was just succumbing to the clever cover design, but it was a fascinating and inspiring read. It is lifted above the dry by Swift's extraordinary passion for her subject and her lyrical imaginative descriptions. She has an unashamedly childlike enthusiasm for her plants. The windows and door of the house are frequently thrown wide open all year round so that she can smell the garden. She gets down on her hands and knees to snuffle at low lying scented flowers. Towards the end of the book I began to wish that Swift's descriptions would occasionally be less imaginative, but I think that was just because I read so slowly the richness of the language was becoming occasionally too much. Definitely one to keep.

30NanaCC
gen. 21, 2015, 9:03 pm

>29 Oandthegang: The Morville Hours sounds interesting. Nice review.

31dchaikin
Editat: gen. 21, 2015, 9:34 pm

i got a bit carried away while reading your comments on The Morville Hours. Great review.

32baswood
gen. 22, 2015, 10:47 am

Lovely review of The Morville Hours Interesting to relate the history to the divisions of the day in A Book of Hours.

33Poquette
gen. 22, 2015, 2:20 pm

The Morville Hours sounds very interesting indeed. I have several reproductions of Books of Hours and have for a long time been fascinated by them, their history and production. Emulating the structure of the Hours is a clever approach.

34SassyLassy
gen. 22, 2015, 3:25 pm

>29 Oandthegang: You know I'll read that one!

35Oandthegang
Editat: gen. 24, 2015, 4:07 pm

I feel the need to share Cooking For Your Cat: Healthy Recipes Seasoned With Affection.

It was prominently displayed in the window of a pet charity shop. The cover picture is a photomontage of a petulant cat sitting in a ladder back chair pawing a slice of something looking not a bit like cat food. I was amused but walked past, then, curiosity getting the better of me I went back and asked to inspect it. And Reader, I bought it (well it was very very cheap and money was for charity). Not because I had any intention of making use of the recipes, but simply because the whole thing was so strange. The inside page with all the copyright notices etc does have lots of warnings about these being special occasion recipes, not to replace the cat's normal balanced diet, together with warnings about alcohol, chocolate , avocados etc, but it appears this really is a cookbook for cats - as consumers.

I can quite understand if people want to cook particular food for their pets so that they know what's in the food - poached chicken or whatever, but these recipes don't produce anything most people (and cats) would recognize as cat food. For instance Lulu's Chicken and Tuna Salad involves tinned tuna, cooked chicken, mixed salad leaves, beetroot, vegetable oil, natural yogurt, water, and chopped flat leaf parsley. Yes, this is a raw vegetable salad with bits of meat and a dressing 'drizzled on top'. If I served that up to my cat he'd think I'd lost my mind! He'd move out. The final recipe in the book is for Poultry Hearts. Not as you'd imagine, cooked chicken hearts, but heart-shaped biscuits made from a pastry consisting of flour, oat bran, Parmesan cheese, egg yolk, and pureed cooked poultry, glazed with egg yolk and single cream. The cat is not going to notice that the biscuits are heart shaped. Cats have no concept of heart shapes or semiology.

There are things like chicken soup and lamb hot pot. Although this book appears to be perfectly serious about feeding cats, some of the recipes would be perfectly acceptable 'cooking for one' recipes for people.

All very odd. I see that it was originally a German publication.

36baswood
gen. 25, 2015, 10:21 am

My experience of keeping cats is that once they get something they really like they hold out until they get it again, so don't cook them something really expensive.

37Oandthegang
feb. 12, 2015, 4:42 pm

radical approach to the To Be Read piles. Rearranging the heaps I'd unearth books and think 'Ah, ...', or 'Mmm . . .', or occasionally '???'. Every once in a while, 'Wow!'. Life is too short for anything less than 'Wow!', So anything which I've bought myself in the past couple of years that isn't a 'Wow!' and has no other justification is going. Apart from all those WW1 books - they have four years' grace. Wonderfully liberating, and also a good prod to get on with reading. The Diana Mosley biography was on its way out but I thought I'd give it a skim before it went and now having a good read. Will Diana Cooper be equally interesting? It would tie in with the remarkable The Secret Rooms. But I have a couple of Wow books waiting. Diana Cooper - should she stay or should she go?

38SassyLassy
feb. 12, 2015, 6:47 pm

How very odd; the book page for Diana Cooper has a completely different book reviewed on it, but I would keep a Phillip Ziegler book, especially with its tie-in. I've also been looking at the Diana Mosley biography under its more racy title and it does look like a good one.

Only "Wow" is a truly radical approach indeed. Admirable. I need to prune in much smaller increments to convince myself I haven't done anything too drastic. That may come from having had books pruned for me by natural disasters and other events. In those cases it was always the favourites that suffered.

Back at 35, maybe you could cook some of the "perfectly acceptable" recipes for the household and any left overs go to the cat. My experience with cats would indicate that while they may have no concept of a biscuit shaped like a heart actually representing a heart, they will know if you change the shape.

39Oandthegang
feb. 13, 2015, 1:37 am

Good heavens, what a busy person Phillip Zeigler has been! I hadn't come across him before but after your comment I had a look at his LT listing. Interesting range of periods he covers. Diana Cooper had better stay for now, then.

I did think that the cat cook book would make good small helping meals - particularly if I find substitutes for the offal - but I doubt I'll ever get round to the chicken flavoured heart shaped biscuits.

(Very curious about that Australian novel reviewed on the Diana Cooper page.)

40ipsoivan
feb. 15, 2015, 10:15 am

>37 Oandthegang: I did the same thing just before the New Year. What a great feeling, to get rid of the ???? or other flatliners.

Unfortunately, I seem to be interested in what everyone else is reading right now, so I'm not reading my own Wows.

41Oandthegang
Editat: març 1, 2015, 10:18 am

No Great Mischief Alistair MacLeod

(It's a short novel, you may find it quicker just to read it)

On a sunny golden September Saturday Alexander MacDonald sets off to drive to Toronto. Rather than take the fast Highway 3, which runs flat and straight from the border with the States to the border of Quebec, he prefers to take the leisurely old roads that meander through the opulent farmland of southern Ontario. For him "there is something almost comforting in passing houses where the dogs still run down to the roadside to bark at the wheels of passing cars - as if, for them, it were a real event". It is the time of harvest, and the roadside is lined with baskets of produce and 'Pick Your Own' signs. The Pick Your Own fields are dotted with local families trying to make a day of it despite mounting opposition from their children, but the commercial fields contain other families, - West Indians, Mexicans, French Canadians - people who have left their homes for the duration of the harvest to work long hours for low wages. Such is the richness of the land that food is wasted as it grows. Alexander's grandmother wept to see rejected and overripe tomatoes being plowed under. Each tomato that she had grown in the rocky soil of Cape Breton had been carefully tended, green ones placed on window ledges and turned daily in the hope they would ripen, and all produce carefully bottled for the long winter ahead.

Alexander is driving to town to see his brother, Calum, a wasted alcoholic living in gloomy rundown accommodation catering for the desperately poor and broken.

But Alexander is not really 'Alexander', though that is his christened name, he is 'ille bhig ruaidh - the little red (haired) boy- and a member of clann Chalum Ruaidh, the family of Red Calum, and together with his black haired twin sister, the youngest of his immediate family.

When I finally settled down to read 'No Great Mischief' I was appalled to discover how long I had put off reading it; I had rushed to buy the hardback as soon as it came out in 2000, and it had sat on my shelf ever since. I had even bought an additional copy in paperback so that the hardback wouldn't be damaged on journeys to work. Why the delay? you ask. Well, I had read, and loved, MacLeod's short story collection The Lost Salt Gift Of Blood, stories which are exquisitely written, but filled with sorrow, with dead and broken men and their animals - the fishermen lost at sea, a beloved horse lost through lack of money. The images are still with me twenty years later, and I needed to square myself before adding more. MacLeod was not by any means a miserablist, but he wrote of what mattered to him, of his people, for he himself was descended from the gaelic speaking Scots of Cape Breton, whose ancestors' only hope had been to leave Scotland for Canada, "leaving a land of too few trees for a land of, perhaps, too many", and if their life in Scotland had been hard, life in Cape Breton was not much easier. The title of the book comes from a comment by General Wolfe, who sent the Highlanders in first against the French at the Battle of Quebec, saying it would be no great mischief if they were lost. (It was not many years before that Wolfe had been fighting the Scots on their own land.) Wolfe's comment makes a considerable difference to the perception of the place of the Highlanders in that battle.

'No Great Mischief', although a modern first person narrative, has many elements of the mythic, particularly in the recurrence of ages and seasons, and of twos and threes. Things and people repeat or are the complements of one another.

The founder of clann Chalum Ruaidh was Calum MacDonald. By his first wife MacDonald had six children, three boys and three girls, and by his second, her sister, he had a further three boys and three girls. In 1779, aged fifty-five, he left Scotland with his twelve children, his wife, and the husband of his eldest daughter. They had left their brown dog with neighbours, but she broke away and threw herself into the sea, swimming after the boat despite being ordered back until, seeing she would drown rather than be left behind, Calum pulled her in, promising not to forsake her. During the crossing Calum's second wife died and was buried at sea, and his eldest daughter gave birth. On arriving in Pictou Calum wept for two days, and then after two weeks the family moved up to Cape Breton to join other gaelic speaking Scots. When told this tale as a small boy Alexander, appalled by the idea of a grown man crying, and conditioned to the idea that everyone was glad when they arrived in the New World, exclaimed to his grandfather 'What in the world would he cry for?' His grandfather, tempering his anger at the boy's lack of comprehension, replied "He was crying for his history. He had left his country and lost his wife and spoke a foreign language. He had left as a husband and arrived as a widower and a grandfather, and he was responsible for those who clustered around him. He was like the goose who points the V, and he temporarily wavered and lost his courage."

Calum lived another fifty-five years in Cape Breton, his life in the New World being as long as his life in the old. At one point the narrator muses that, if he lives, he will himself be fifty-five at the turn of the century.

Red Calum passed on a strong genetic legacy - a high frequency of twins, more often than not fraternal, and a distinctive colouring: fair skin with either jet black or bright red hair, frequently with eyes so dark brown as to be almost black. Their colouring is so distinctive as to make their identity immediately recognizable. When the narrator's sister visits Scotland she is immediately spotted and taken in by gaelic speaking Scots who remember the tale of Red Calum's departure, and who keep dogs related to his. With no portrait of their ancestor, the members of clann Chalum Ruaidh look at one another to try to deduce his image.

The dog also founded a dynasty, passing on the tendency "to care too much and to try too hard", faithful to the clann Chalum Ruaidh. Glencoe, where members of clan Donald were famously murdered in their homes by the soldiers to whom they had given hospitality, is said to derive its name from the gaelic Glen cu, meaning dogs' glen, a reference to the mythological hounds that once ran there.

Although the present day narrative begins in September and ends six months later in March, the third month of the year, it is the personal and almost mythological history of the family which gives it meaning. The narrator and his sister have prosperous lives, he is an orthodondist living in southern Ontario, she became an actress and is married to a well to do engineer. She, and by implication he, lives in expensive, tastefully minimalist surroundings, far removed in so many senses from their roots. Although they would be regarded as successful they seem dislocated, spending their time together thinking of the past, looking for their history. They are isolated, beached, while their relations carry on the old hard llfe together, keeping with tradition.

Reading about the gangs of men, generally without name, frequently in conflict and with scores to settle, undifferentiated masses of maleness living in isolation undertaking hard dangerous work, I occasionally wondered how Cormac MacCarthy might have approached the same material. I haven't read all, or even the majority, of MacCarthy's work, but generalizing from what I have read MacCarthy's characters are usually without family, where there is family it is harmful. His characters are disconnected from land, nature, and each other.

MacLeod's characters have a strong sense of personal and cultural history, and with it obligation. "Always look after your own blood". They also have a visceral love of their land, and they have a love and respect for other life. Even as adults they worry about their possible responsibility in childhood for the beaching of a whale to whom they had been singing.

I don't know why some people love the land and the life that surrounds them and others don't. Perhaps it is just, as 'ille bhig ruaigh's grandmother says, "All of us are better when we're loved". And MacLeod loved his people.

The one weakness I found was the conversations between Alexander and his sister. Although she is his fraternal twin, she really only appears in his adult life, and then only as an extension of himself. There may be some justification for this in that she is his twin, but she is not after all his identical twin, and so is really only another sibling. She was the only character who seemed lifeless, just a device to add additional material. This seemed strange as all the other characters, even those with quite formal delivery, seemed entirely human.

42SassyLassy
març 1, 2015, 12:52 pm

You just sent me off to look at No Great Mischief yet again, one of my all time favourites. Unfortunately it is packed in a box of Canadian literature read before the past year.

What I wanted to look at was the last bit, the road story, from the approach to the causeway to home. The culture of the Atlantic Provinces is full of "Going Down the Road" stories and MacLeod is one of the very best at them. This inevitable return, spiritual or physical or both, is at the heart of all of them. There is a 1902 Scottish short story "Beattock for Moffat" by R B Cunninghame-Graham which has the same drive in it.

With regard to the sister, I had somewhat the same problem with her as you did, but decided it was related to her decision to sever her roots by marrying someone from another culture and not really having to participate in the rituals of her own kin and community, so she loses the identity offered her by inclusion.

The Battle of the Plains of Abraham and previous skirmishes led by Wolfe and his ilk, was mentioned in the notes or introduction to the edition of Kidnapped that I read recently. After the banning of Highland dress, someone questioned Wolfe about why the soldiers in Canada were still allowed to wear it while fighting, and wouldn't that make them want to wear it still on their return to Scotland. Wolfe replied that he did not anticipate enough of them returning from the wars to make it a problem.

My wishful hope is that someday an undiscovered work of MacLeod's will emerge and we can all discover a new book of his once more.

43RidgewayGirl
març 1, 2015, 2:02 pm

Lovely review of No Great Mischief. I've owned a copy for years and I think I'll go look for it now.

44Oandthegang
març 1, 2015, 4:11 pm

>42 SassyLassy: Yes, the road story was beautiful - unexpected and again almost mythic. As is so often the case, going back through the book to do the review made me want to read it again properly, but there are so many more books to be getting on with. I had left out of my review, to spare any blushes, Grandpa's claim that he would get an erection whenever he returned to the island - always adding that that was in the days of button up trousers.

I found the relationship between the narrator and the cousin he calls 'the red-haired Alexander MacDonald' interesting. The cousin is THE red-haired Alexander MacDonald, as though the narrator himself were not also a red-haired Alexander MacDonald, but of course, as he says at the outset, until he went to school he did not know that was his own name. Is the red-haired cousin a sort of road not taken, a might have been, a shadow self?

I also liked the complementary grandparents, both to some extent Scottish archetypes, the reserved, careful, bookish Grandfather, single child of a single mother and himself the single father of a single daughter, and the earthy extrovert Grandpa with his wife and brood of children and their house that is always full of people.

The three teenaged boys who went off to live on their own reminded me of Barrie's Lost Boys, bringing themselves up in a rough and tumble way, awkward and embarrassed in the female presence of their little sister. (Again, the breakage in the family, the six divided into the three who lived together, and the other three reduced to the two who would leave.)

I also loved brother Calum's relationship with the horse he trained to haul in the boat and how in mourning he took sugar and bread down to her field, whistled her away from her offspring, and spent the day singing to her, she keeping close and nuzzling him as he lay in the grass.

The dog, the well, the horse, the whale, and of course the shirt. And all the time the sea eating away at the cliff. So much going on in a mere 262 pages.

I read in the obituaries how MacLeod would write a sentence at a time, not moving on to the next until the present one was perfected, and how after years of nagging his publisher had to stalk him to get his hands on the manuscript.

I wonder how long it took to write this small paragraph about Grandpa coming home drunk one Christmas Eve:

"He wobbled to his chair at the end of the kitchen table, where he sat swaying almost regularly, as if sitting on the deck of a departing, pitching boat. 'How is everyone?' he said, waving to us blearily, his hand moving back and forth before his face, as if he were cleaning an imaginary windshield. 'Great day to be alive', he added, and then he sort of crumpled and fell off his chair in a rapid yet amazing sequence. It was like looking at those films that show the destruction of the building which has been cleverly laden with dynamite and then, in a matter of seconds, folds up and seems to vanish soundlessly before your eyes. A few tremors and shocks and then it crumbles."

45Oandthegang
març 1, 2015, 4:12 pm

>42 SassyLassy: P.S. That Wolfe was clearly a Bad Hat.

And what about the king of the herring?

46Oandthegang
març 1, 2015, 4:28 pm

Speaking of Wolfe, I caught the last two episodes of 'Gloomsbury', a little series on BBC Radio about Vera Sackcloth-Vest, her husband Henry, and their friends Ginny and Lionel Fox. In the first (though in fact Episode 5) Ginny and Lionel, incapable of having fun, invite Vera and Henry up to London to show them how. The episode ended with Venus Traduces, dressed in the headdress of an Egyptian god and carrying a wind-up gramophone, encouraging the Foxes to do the Sand Dance in Kensington Gardens while Vera and Henry sloped off home. A wonderful image. The sixth and final episode featured among other things Ginny's attempt to fake a telegram from the Home Office, complete with contemplation of the colour of the waves, observation of a woman standing by the waves, etc., etc. Silly but fun. Written by Sue Limb, cast Miriam Margolyes, Jonathan Coy, Morwenna Banks, Alison Steadman, and Nigel Planer. Doubtless still available, at least in part, on the BBC iPlayer.

47Oandthegang
març 8, 2015, 6:23 am

Cakes And Ale by W Somerset Maugham

The novel opens with the narrator, Willie Ashenden, considering the character and career of Alroy Kear, a man he has known for twenty years. Ashenden and Kear are both novelists, but men of quite different stripe. "Than Roy no one could show a more genuine cordiality to a fellow novelist whose name was on everybody's lips, but no one could more genially turn a cold shoulder on him when idleness, failure, or someone else's success had cast a shadow on his notoriety". Ashenden, not currently being in the public eye, has been out of Kear's notice for some time, and is bemused by finding himself suddenly the recipient of multiple phone messages requesting urgent contact. Ashenden describes Kear as an old friend, but this seems merely to be a reference to a long acquaintance, and perhaps a former closeness. "It sounds a little brutal to say that when he had got all he could get from people he dropped them; but it would take so long to put the matter more delicately, and would need so subtle an adjustments of hints, half-tones, and allusions, playful or tender, that such being at bottom the fact, I think it as well to leave it at that." The description of Kear is a savagely funny skewering of a self serving sycophantic writer grafting his way to prominence despite having only a tablespoon of talent. The savagery goes on for pages, and I began to get the uncomfortable feeling that this was personal, and reading it was rather like being trapped at dinner between rowing hosts who have forgotten one's presence. Turning to the introduction, I found that it was indeed personal, and seems to have come as a bolt from the blue to it object.

Kear is a barely disguised Hugh Walpole, a novelist who had been Maugham's friend for twenty years. Walpole was sent a proof copy of Cakes And Ale to see if it would be suitable for the Book Club. Walpole began reading the book whilst undressing after a night at the theatre. His diary records "Read on with increasing horror. Unmistakable portrait of myself. Never slept." Virginia Woolf, a friend, added "There he sat with only one sock on until 11 the next morning reading it .... in tears".

Walpole was only the first victim. Kear is anxious to meet up with Ashenden because Mrs Driffield has engaged Kear to write a biography of her late husband, Edward Driffield, and Ashenden knew Driffield in the days before he became famous, in the days when he was married to the first Mrs Driffield. Driffield is a stand in for Thomas Hardy, and many of the other characters fall into place from Hardy's or Maugham's circles. Hardy died only two years before Cakes And Ale was published, and the novel was received with headlines such as 'Hitting Below The Shroud' and 'Trampling Upon Hardy's Grave'. For many years Maugham tried to maintain that resemblances to persons living or dead were purely coincidental and not at all intended, despite the manifest evidence to the contrary.

Away from the delicious background information in Nicholas Shakespeare's introduction to this Vintage edition of Cakes And Ale, and the savaging of Walpole/Kear, there is a delightful novel drawing heavily on Maugham's own youth in Whitstable (appearing here as Blackstable), a small town in Kent. Ashenden is a lonely boy living with his aunt and uncle, the later being the local vicar. The boy is isolated by the strict class boundaries of the time, too 'respectable' to socialize with most of the locals, but not high enough in status to have other friends. There is a splendid moment when a local builder, a man of comparative wealth and social prominence, horrifies the vicar's household by calling at their front door. Edward Driffield and his pretty young wife take up temporary residence in Blackstable, causing a degree of consternation among those to whom social boundaries matter. How does one deal with a man once a sailor now a writer married to a former barmaid? As Driffield and his wife are Blackstable born and bred there can be no ignoring their past. None of this seems to affect Driffield and the delightful Rosie, and they befriend the young Ashenden, taking him on picnics with them and teaching him to ride a bike. His friendship with the couple makes for more crossing of class boundaries, as the Vicarage servants knew them well of old, and the Driffields have not the snobbery to cut them. The Driffields come to have a profound effect on Ashenden.

Years later Ashenden is unwillingly obliged to impose on Driffield's hospitality in the company of rich and titled tourists, who visit the grand old man of letters as they would a rare and curious animal at the zoo, to be seen before it dies.

48Oandthegang
Editat: març 8, 2015, 4:56 pm






49baswood
març 9, 2015, 5:49 pm

Excellent review of Cakes and Ale. A novel I read when I was much younger and without the benefit of an introduction. I must have missed so much

50Oandthegang
març 9, 2015, 9:06 pm

>49 baswood: Thank you. I discovered that the introduction is up on the internet.

>42 SassyLassy: Where did you read Beattock For Moffat? I've been trying to track it down, and although there was a published collection of Cunninghame-Graham's short stories which used that title for the title of the book it is out of print. Indeed he seems to be rather generally out of print. I found a rather wonderful site called something like horsetravel books, which specializes in, yes, you guessed it, books about horses in foreign lands, and there are a number of Cunninghame-Graham's books listed there, all of which appear to have handsome covers with fine horses on them. He also gets his own page on the Helensburgh Heritage site. He seems, like Charles Dickens, to have moved about enough to keep the Blue Plaque people happily in business, though rather more widely travelled. I'd never heard of him before, but am now intrigued. If you did come across the story in an anthology currently in print, do let me know.

51SassyLassy
març 10, 2015, 9:42 am

>50 Oandthegang: I found it in a book called The New Penguin Book of Scottish Short Stories edited by Ian Murray. It's not so new anymore, as it was published in 1984, but it does have a good selection. From the Short Stories group thread, here is my synopsis: A dying man is travelling from London, where he has been living, to his old home in Moffatt, Scotland with his Cockney wife and his brother. The only thing keeping him alive is the desire to die at home. The realism of the two Scottish brothers is contrasted with the useless denials of the urban wife.

Back at 47, I read Cakes and Ale back in my teens. My copy is in a book called Cakes and Ale and Twelve Short Stories which used to sit on a desk in the guest room, sort of in keeping with an earlier remark of yours. I wanted to read it again a few months ago following some remarks of edwin's on Maugham, but I see it has now disappeared into those multiplying boxes. There was also a book of Saki's short stories with it.

I will have to look for the "horse travel" books site. It sounds terrific. I wonder if they would consider Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey too lowly a mode of travel?

52Oandthegang
març 10, 2015, 9:47 am

Clearly something went amiss in my youth as it seems that everyone but me was reading Cakes and Ale and those pesky Russians.
>51 SassyLassy: Thanks for the tip. I'll see if I can track that one down. Here's the HorseTravel Books site link. Have fun!
http://www.horsetravelbooks.com/Welcome.htm

53dchaikin
març 15, 2015, 10:40 am

Not sure i would equate Bas and Sassy with everyone, readingwise.

Enjoyed catching up. Great review of Cakes and Ale and inspiring review of Alistair MacLeod, who i had never heard of before.

54Oandthegang
Editat: març 15, 2015, 9:18 pm

>53 dchaikin: Thank you for the reassurance, and I'm glad you enjoyed the reviews.

55edwinbcn
abr. 5, 2015, 9:16 pm

Great review of Cakes and Ale!

56FlorenceArt
abr. 6, 2015, 2:10 am

>47 Oandthegang: Finally read your review of Cakes and Ales. I enjoyed the review, but it confirms that Maugham is just not an author for me. I tried to read Of Human Bondage and abandoned it after a couple of chapters. I really felt like throwing the book at the wall (that was before I read on my iPad!). I suspect I would have a similar reaction to Cakes and Ales.

57Oandthegang
abr. 6, 2015, 9:06 am

>56 FlorenceArt: How do iPad/Kindle readers deal with book rage? One hopes it doesn't happen often, but there are moments when hurling something seems the only appropriate response. I threw a cheap paperback copy of The Turn Of The Screw across a room many years ago (rage at having slogged through the wretched thing only to reach such an unsatisfactory ending). Had I not been able to throw the book I would probably have had to find something to kick.

58FlorenceArt
abr. 6, 2015, 9:20 am

LOL, actually I have always had a great respect for books and would never throw one (not to mention it wouldn't be very nice to my neighbors!). I rarely get that urge, the only other time I remember is The Da Vinci Code, which I might actually have thrown at the wall except that I wanted to send it back to Amazon and never ever set eyes on that trash again.

In fact having an iPad had given me more freedom with books, in that I have started to highlight text and even occasionally write notes. I could never do that on a paper book.

59Oandthegang
abr. 9, 2015, 1:30 am

Since reading Cakes And Ale I have been coming across references to it in various other writing, most recently in a 1931 letter from P G Wodehouse to William Townend: "I re-read Cakes And Ale. What a masterly book it is. Have you read it? Incidentally, if they were going to pick on anyone for being irreverent towards the old Victorian master, why not Hugh Walpole for his Hans Frost?"

60Oandthegang
maig 30, 2015, 7:41 pm

The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain

At nearly two in the morning it was too late to bother her friends or neighbours to tell them she had been mugged and was now without keys or money, and anyway her phone was gone with her handbag, so Laure decided to go to the hotel across the street. They gave her a room for the night; from its window she could see into her own apartment. She waved good night to her cat, cleaned up the cut on her head, and went to bed.

Laurent, going out for his morning coffee, noticed an expensive looking mauve handbag on top of the rubbish bins. Her felt certain it must be stolen rather than put out for disposal, so he took it off to the police station. They were busy and they suggested he come back later. so he took the bag home and went off to work. In the evening he breaks that greatest of taboos: he opens the handbag. He goes through its contents, tests the perfume, looks at the photos, and begins to read the red moleskin notebook full of random thoughts, dreams, and memories. He sets out in search of its owner, but by this time Laure is in a coma.

I bought this book purely on the recommendation of my bookseller. I had realised that the book I was reading was not going to get me home, so I needed something light and short, just to get me home. He suggested this book, saying it was rather in the spirit of the film "Amelie".

It was a good page turner, albeit with a degree of predictability. It's one of those stories which safe on the page is all warm and happy, but in real life would be creepy enough for the police to be called in. A good fluffy read to pass a shortish train journey.

61Oandthegang
Editat: juny 5, 2015, 2:27 pm

A God In Ruins by Kate Atkinson

Readers of A God In Ruins will fall into one of two camps - those who have read Life After Life and those who haven't. I am one of the former.

In Life After Life Ursula Todd dies at birth, but then time goes back and she is born again, at the same moment as before, to the same mother, but lives, for a while. Again she is born, and this time lives a while longer. Implicit in the idea that there are infinite variations to the life she might have is that there are infinite variations to everyone else's lives. What is different about Ursula is her awareness of these variations, breakthrough memories of being in the same situation in other versions, often trivial, but sometimes enabling her to alter the course of events in her present life. Through this endlessly branching maze are certain constants, one of them being her strong love for her younger brother, Teddy, and the lengths she goes to to keep him safe as again and again the Second World War breaks out.

A God In Ruins is about Teddy.

This is an interesting choice. The novel has to stand alone, but at the same time fit with the previous one. They are related but independent. A God In Ruins as a sort of pendant to Life After Life. For me the difficulty was the shadow of the first book. All the way through I was thinking of fierce brave Ursula fighting for her younger brother, the charming, handsome boy whom everybody loved. All that - for this??

Like the first novel, A God In Ruins moves back and forth in time. It opens in an aerodrome in Naseby on 30 March 1944, but ranges between 1925 and 2012, as Teddy passes from childhood to care home. As a young man he is popular and admired, yet seemed to me curiously lacking in character. I could see nothing in him to attract notice or particular affection, but had to accept these as given. I was frustrated by his apparent passivity and lack of imagination. He marries his 'childhood sweetheart' possibly because it was what everyone, including him, expected. Before marrying Nancy and Teddy give each other the opportunity to walk away. Neither does, but to have one's fiancé enquire whether one really wants to marry inevitably creates doubt about the fiance's desire to do so. On the other hand they are both people who would marry so as not to let anyone down. Once married, Teddy seems to shut down, bobbing along in his wife's wake. They can't discuss their war experiences, his as a pilot in Bomber Command, hers as a code breaker. She is sworn to secrecy about life at Bletchley, and in revenge he shuts her out. He has no idea that the war destroyed her chance of a brilliant career in mathematics. She seems brittle and somewhat disengaged from Teddy, but always working at some scheme for betterment. They have a single child, the headstrong and horrible Viola, who grows up hating him. In time she produces a son, Sunny, and a daughter, Bertie. Viola and Sunny are each scarred by witnessing the violent death of a parent, deaths whose circumstances are misunderstood.

As with its predecessor, this novel has a strong afterlife. Although I found it a dull as I read it, I am spending a lot of time thinking about it.

Teddy is an everyman, typical of his generation, ordinary people who suddenly had extraordinary lives and then were dumped back in a world trying to be ordinary again and left to get on with it. Teddy promised -himself? God? - that if he survived the war he would lead a quiet life and would always be kind. Does he chafe at his life, simply keeping his promise, or is it what he would have done anyway? Viola, a particularly unpleasant caricature of a self-obsessed baby-boomer, nags him about his boring life, his lack of adventure, not thinking that surviving a war might be more than enough adventure for one lifetime.

Teddy seems to have no friends of his own, he is carried along by the strong women who surround him. He allows his grandson to be put at risk because he does not stand in his daughter's way. Time and time again opportunities for connection are missed because people are incapable of crossing the gulf which expectation puts between them. The elderly Teddy asks his grandson to drive him to Stonewall, a Commonwealth war grave. Teddy talks about the crewmen - over eight thousand of them - who died on training flights, on crash landing on return from mission, or in Harrogate hospital from wounds. Crews who died together were buried together. More than twenty thousand bomber crew without a grave are commemorated at Runnymede. Had Sunny been alive then he might have been one of them. Although Teddy thinks that Sunny has drifted away through boredom in fact he has turned his back because he is moved to tears. Coming back he stands, scuffing the toe of his paratrooper-like boot against one of the gravestones and asks "So did you see, like, really bad things?", clarifying that by 'bad things' he means anything grisly/awful/ghoulish. Teddy remembers the grisly/awful/ghoulish things he's seen but can't mention them. In subsequent chapters we learn that Sunny has seen such things himself.

I was surprised by the strength of my feeling that Ursula's efforts had been wasted, that they should have resulted in a better life, a better man. Would it have been better to spare him this life of quiet desperation? Does he feel desperate? Is his life really any more boring and pointless than anyone else's? Why should I expect him to be special just because Ursula loved him? Why do I think his life should have been different just because she loved him and saved him? Is that the fault of fiction? Surely we must believe that one need not be special to be loved, to be saved.

As anyone who has not read Life After Life will not be aware of Ursula's struggles they will read the book without all this extra baggage. It's hard to imagine how I would have felt about the book if I had read it first. I found the first part somewhat dull, and Viola is so grotesque as to be barely credible. If one sticks with it, however, the novel picks up in the descriptions of Teddy's war and the experiences of the flight crew, and the respective family lives become more vivid, although towards the end the narrative moves at a frenetic pace, briefly becoming almost incoherent, before becoming slower, almost hesitant.. Having got to the end the crafting of the book becomes more apparent, and there is a temptation to start again just to see the structure at work, the hints dropped, the recurring themes and images.

The reader is encouraged to look again at that generation so derided by their children for their humdrum lives and their limited horizons, their make-do-and-mend and their buttoned up emotions, a generation being more widely re-evaluated just as it disappears. Is there a sort of nobility in just putting up with the lives they had and the emotional isolation in which they lived them? To me perhaps the saddest thing about 'Brief Encounter' is the idea that she will go to her grave without anyone else knowing about this love which was so important, and the gentle signal from her husband that he may not have been so unaware as she assumed, though it will never again be mentioned.

In her Author's Note, Atkinson says that the novel is about fiction and the Fall, war being the greatest fall of all. The pair of books are about on the one hand life during the Blitz (Life After Life), and on the other the strategic bombing campaign against Germany (A God In Ruins). So there you go, perhaps I missed the point.

(edited to correct touchstone)

62NanaCC
maig 31, 2015, 8:48 am

I've been curious to see what others think of the book. I loved A God in Ruins, and thought that Atkinson's use of the flitting memories was done very well. I can see where it would be a book to love or hate. I don't always need to like a character to enjoy them, and Viola was hateful, but a great character. Teddy was like a crotchety old man after the war, but as the book progresses, you can see why. I enjoyed your review. I'll be curious to see what others think. Life After Life is still my favorite of the two books - I gave it 5 stars, 4.5 for A God in Ruins

63RidgewayGirl
maig 31, 2015, 11:27 am

I'm only a third of the way through, and I do understand that Viola isn't altogether likable, but I certainly feel like I understand her and care about her even as she behaves with an utter inability to imagine herself in the place of other people.

64SassyLassy
juny 2, 2015, 12:38 pm

>61 Oandthegang: A thoughtful review, which may actually convince me to read both books, which I had been avoiding for unknown reasons. You could post it for others who may be of the same mindset. Currently your touchstone is set to a Leon Uris novel of the same name.

>57 Oandthegang: Hurling books? I would be overwhelmed with remorse in an instant and would feel compelled to rush out and buy a pristine copy of the awful book to replace the copy I had just destroyed and would now be stuck with something I would never read again and the original.

65VivienneR
juny 2, 2015, 2:53 pm

Excellent review of A God in Ruins. As a fan of Kate Atkinson I'm looking forward to reading it. I'm sure I will refer to your review again.

66dchaikin
juny 4, 2015, 11:22 am

Enjoyed your thoughts on A God in Ruins.

67japaul22
juny 4, 2015, 12:11 pm

I've just finished A God in Ruins and very much enjoyed your review. I actually liked A God in Ruins a bit better than Life After Life. I felt that in Life After Life Atkinson relied a little too heavily on her idea about Ursula's many lives and some of the characterizations suffered. In A God in Ruins, I loved seeing the real Teddy instead of Ursula's version of the "perfect brother", which could never really be true.

In her Author's Note, Atkinson says that the novel is about fiction and the Fall, war being the greatest fall of all. The pair of books are about on the one hand life during the Blitz (Life After Life), and on the other the strategic bombing campaign against Germany (A God In Ruins). So there you go, perhaps I missed the point.

I also thought that if Atkinson was really aiming for historical fiction focusing on the war, neither of these books really hit the mark in that way for me. Though the war was an important background and certainly impacted the lives of all the characters, it seemed more of an event to play off of than the central topic. I've also read Behind the Scenes at the Museum and in all three of these books, I saw death, afterlife, and how can we live the life we have to the fullest being the most pervasive themes.

68Oandthegang
juny 4, 2015, 9:06 pm

>67 japaul22: I really enjoyed Life After Life although it took me several goes to get in to it.I love the idea of the parallel lives. I have a friend who now lives half way round the world but we lived in the same place while we were at university. We are in touch very infrequently, but when we are we often find that we have independently but simultaneously been engaged in something to do with that place. Since reading Life After Life I like to imagine that this happens because in another life we are still living there. Atkinson has this happen in reverse with her characters - the man and woman who meet on a bridge, marry, and have children, but in a parallel version she is not on the bridge, they never meet. The man as he crosses the bridge feels an obscure disappointment, a sense that he has missed something, that something has been lost, but he has no idea why.

69Oandthegang
juny 5, 2015, 3:16 pm

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass - Lewis Carroll

This is just a quick post in praise of the 2011 Collector's Colour Library edition of these two works.

I am a fan of the Collector's Library editions generally, however I selected this book from a table display of different editions and books based on the original works for its quality. All the Collector's Library books are small enough to fit in the pocket (one might need a biggish pocket for this one as it is nearly an inch thick), have marker ribbons, nice paper, and shiny gold edging to the pages on all exposed edges. Their classics are frequently illustrated.

This edition has the original Tenniel illustrations, however they have all been specially hand coloured by Barbara Frith. I'm not normally a fan of interfering with original work, particularly applying colour to things which were created in black and white. The original artist/director/designer will have made something in a particular way knowing how the eye would see it in monochrome. Adding colour changes the emphasis and makes something the original creator did not intend, often to the detriment of the original (particularly in the case of film). Frith's work is sensitively done, with something of a period look, and has brought out little details I hadn't previously noticed - the oddity of the Dodo having little hands projecting out from under his wings, the slippers worn by the lobster grooming for the Lobster Quadrille and the bootjack by his feet. Curiously there is a change in palette between the two stories. The Wonderland colours are bright and clear but the Looking-Glass ones are dull and muddy. One of the most interesting changes is in the red. The red in Wonderland is just the right sort of colour for hearts and playing cards but the red in Through The Looking Glass is more sinister, heading towards either russet or black, giving a particularly nightmarish look to the Red Queen. Somewhere I have the single volume edition of these works that I had as a child, which had the Tenniel illustrations, and I think some of them may have been coloured, so it may be (I haven't looked it up but doubtless some knowledgable Thingers will know) that Tenniel did colour some of the original illustrations in which case Frith has presumably worked to his palette.

Anyway, a nice edition to give - or to add to one's own collection.

I gave up trying to sort through the Touchstones on this but if anyone is interested the ISBN is 978-1-907360-36-7.

70rebeccanyc
juny 5, 2015, 4:10 pm

I loved loved loved Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when I was a child. We had an older edition with the Tenniel illustrations, and I searched high and low for it when I cleaned out my parents' apartment, to no avail, alas.

71japaul22
juny 5, 2015, 7:43 pm

I love the Collector's Library editions (I have a whole shelf!) but I haven't seen these colour editions. I've also never read Alice in Wonderland, something I need to remedy.

72Oandthegang
juny 9, 2015, 6:19 pm

Brush Up Your German Linguaphone edition 1931

I love old language teaching texts. They are a window on another world. I have to remind myself that no-one I know ever has need of the sort of conversations in modern language tutorials, but the world of the 1931 traveller does seem extraordinary.

The Linguaphone edition of Brush Up Your German ("A series of up-to-date German Conversations describing the adventures of Herr and Frau Meyer during a visit to their native Germany.") appears from the introduction to be a shortened version of another work, possibly of the same name, published by J M Dent & Sons.

Herr Meyer and his wife live in London. He is a solicitor in his early forties, his wife Ilse is in her early thirties. He is from Berlin, she from Munich. On the accompanying recordings, which, alas, I don't have, they are impersonated by Dr Deissmann and Fau Walz. According to the introduction "you will find them the ideal couple to help you, and on the Linguaphone Records you will hear them saying exactly what you ought to say."

Selected highlights of useful things one ought to be saying:-

"Why is the boat heeling over so much? Is it overloaded?" (explanation - no, it's just that the cranes are loading one half of the hold first)

"You can't possibly run along the platform at Aix-la-Chapelle in your pyjamas."

Life gets more bizarre. Appropriate behaviour when stopped by the police for exceeding the speed limit:

The P: Do you know you were going over twenty-five miles an hour?

Frau M (with the charming smile of childlike innocence) Yes, but the salesman told me I could drive as fast as I wanted after the first three hundred miles.

The P (somewhat taken aback) Well, that may be. But through the town, certainly not; it is a punishable offence.

Frau M (still smiling) Surely you can wink at it once in a while, officer? I assure you it's my very first crime that I'm committing to-day!

The P (also smiling) Well, all right then. Drive on!

Conversation at the Tobacconists:-

Herr M: I don't care for any but English tobacco - besides, I still have some which I smuggled through the Customs.

The T: Yes, you are right, our so-called "Navy Cut" isn't a patch on the English. Do you require anything else? Cigarette holders?

Herr M: Yes, I have just broken my amber holder. This time I would rather try ivory.

The book is full of useful information about buying woollen bathing costumes, flowers ("roses and carnations are always suitable, but they are pretty hackneyed"), etc., as well as every day expressions such as "Ripping I call it!" (when commenting on a particularly nice vase of lilacs) and "Do you want something recherché?" when selecting a restaurant.

73AlisonY
juny 10, 2015, 5:20 am

Aw - if only I'd had this when we went to Bavaria on holiday last year. I'm sure I could have managed to somehow apply "You can't possibly run across the platform at x in your pyjamas" ;)

What a fun review - hilarious!

74baswood
juny 10, 2015, 5:57 pm

But did you learn any German?

75Oandthegang
juny 11, 2015, 7:16 pm

>74 baswood: I haven't got very far with that, but I'm sure I will soon have expressions such as 'Vieleicht kann ich jezt eine Funkdespesche abschicken' ('Perhaps I can send a radiogram now') tripping off my tongue. I hasten to reassure people that in this context a radiogram is something in the spirit of a telegram rather than a large piece of furniture.

I remember being giggled at by the assistants in a small shop in the south of France. My accent may have had something to do with it, but I gather it was most likely amusement at my bizarrely formal and outdated French. I look forward to having Germans on their knees weeping with laughter.

Bernard Levin had a good story about visiting Italy thinking that as an opera lover he would be fine with the language, but finding his vocabulary quite redundant for modern purposes. Interesting to contemplate how far Rheingold would get me.

76ursula
juny 12, 2015, 1:06 am

I love the idea of actually using those lessons in Germany. :) I found current Italian lessons hilarious enough. I was sharing them with my Facebook friends with headings like "Italian for Amnesiacs" and "Italian for Stalkers."

77RidgewayGirl
juny 12, 2015, 2:00 am

Rick Steves has a similar love of language guides. He thought the chapter in one on medical issues was particularly useless - instead of explaining in a complete sentence that your leg is broken, surely pointing and screaming is more appropriate.

And German is less formal now than it was even ten years ago. Which is a relief - I was always using the formal address when the familiar address was more appropriate, and vice versa.

78Oandthegang
Editat: juny 13, 2015, 3:20 am

My school German lessons were odd to say the least. We started off learning the script abolished the 1930s, (where on earth did the school find an adequate supply of text books??) and then - unlike other schools which started with Emil And The Detectives and went straight to Goethe - we had a reader about a family of rats, whose family name translated at Greytail. The son, Fritz, was always in trouble, and the only sentence I remember is Fritz exclaiming 'O weh! Mein Ei ist in der Fluss gefallen!' (Oh dear! My egg has fallen into the river!), a sentence unlikely to be useful unless one has been carelessly tossing one's picnic egg in the air whilst in proximity to a large natural flow of water travelling along a channel to the sea. I suspect Fritz grew into just the sort of chap who would run along train platforms in his pyjamas.

The following year we had a very dull modern 'workbook' with pictures of clean cut teenagers discussing their homework and how to get from A to B.

>77 RidgewayGirl: Rick Steves sounds like my kind of guy!

Does the new informality mean that if I go I should be 'du'-ing everyone, except perhaps the elderly?

I gather there is some sort of nuance in the use of GrussGott (sp?) rather than Gutten Tag or Gutten Abend. Is that just a regional thing? Or perhaps everyone just says Hi! in all circumstances?

(edited to correct spelling)

79Helenliz
juny 13, 2015, 2:39 am

Sounds like a very useful set of phrases. You're just not likely to be in the situations they'd be useful. About as useful as the limited German that's stuck in my brain all these years. In the oral exam we had to talk about a number of likely topics, our house, family, pets etc. so instead of the usual cat or dog, I invented a budgerigar. Ich have einen Wellensittich. And that's just about all that's stayed with me... Maybe not the most terribly helpful phrase!

80Oandthegang
Editat: juny 13, 2015, 3:45 am

>79 Helenliz: A rather Kate Atkinson sort of thought. The phrases are right but not for this life. And what have those small colourful birds done to deserve being landed with such unwieldy names as budgerigar and Wellensittich?

81Oandthegang
juny 28, 2015, 10:13 pm

Alexander McQueen : Savage Beauty

The Alexander McQueen exhibition at the V&A is perhaps the most beautiful exhibition I have ever seen. I'd not previously been a fan of his work but there were things here of such skill and elegance as to move one to tears. The exhibition (on at the V&A until early August 2015 - do go if you possibly can) is initially somewhat daunting. The first room has a loud sound collage and behind a row of mannequins dressed in McQueen outfits the entire wall is a video of almost monochrome footage from his shows. Round the corner the sound diminishes and there is a wonderful display of jackets - for want of a better word - worn by figures closer to tailor's dummies than to conventional mannequins. The absence of any body below the hip line enables one to see more clearly the cut and drape, the lining and other details. In another room exquisitely worked black dresses are worn by mannequins whose heads are enclosed in black leather bondage hoods. McQueen had a great understanding of historical dress, as well as a grounding in classic British military tailoring, but he was also interested in dress from other cultures, taking inspiration from Africa and Japan. There are echoes of Poiret and of the Regency, but there are also fantastic clothes engulfing the body in hair, feathers, or, in one case, razor clam shells. One can get close to the outfits, but one could peer endlessly without being able to perceive how they are constructed. There was a dress of a coarse woven fabric (hessian?) with large floral embroidery on the skirt, the overall impression being reminiscent of those straw baskets with raffia embroidery so popular in the 50s and early 60s. The effect was of something thrown together, but the fabric of the bodice was moulded to the breasts not by darts, but by pulling and stretching the fabric itself so that between the breasts the weave was close, pulled on the diagonal, but over the breasts it was more open.

Naturally at the end of the exhibition there is the shop. Which book to buy? The V&A has an exhibition book, but at a quick flick it seemed substantially higher on text than on images, and what I wanted was to take away images not only as an aide memoir, but also so that I could study the construction and detail of the clothes. There were many books, but there were also many people, so I did not check all the books, but on leafing through this one it seemed that many of the clothes which had interested me were in it. It was definitely higher on image than text, and, for a book of this type not too expensive.

I got home and removed the cellophane wrapping. Here was the first problem. Affixed to the outside of the front cover is a large plastic sheet containing a pair of black and white superimposed images, the sort of thing where as you tilt the picture one image turns into the other. All well and good, all very clever, but unless one wears gloves there is no sensible way to read the book without getting fingerprints on the stylish black image. Already I have given up polishing them away.

I discovered that this book comes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition of McQueen's work in 2011. I don't know whether the exhibition I saw at the V&A is identical to the Met's but the style of presentation in the photographs is quite different. Whereas the V&A uses dummy-like mannequins in a manner which is austere but accentuates the opulence of the clothes, the photos in this book are very 'fashion', the headless mannequins being more like store mannequins. Many are set in action poses like a magazine photo shoot, and all are smeared with dull red like dried blood. The jackets which the V&A showed on half mannequins are here shown on full mannequins naked below the waist. Thus in a photo of the back of a cropped jacket the eye is inevitably struck more by the naked bottom than the stitching of the garment, an effect intensified by the mannequin's stance - elbows out, hands on hips. While this may be very McQueen in spirit it does detract from what I would expect from a book such as this, i.e. attention to the detail of the clothes themselves. I concede that there are some garments for which the action shot works best, those with bits that would drape and float but be lost in a static photo are here shown well, presumably through the use of a strong fan. (In the exhibition there is a video of a woman wearing a very long heavy cloak which billows out behind her. Her movement is peculiar, almost disoriented, but consistent with someone trying to walk towards a powerful wind machine.)

Most disappointing, however, is the quality of the photographs, or perhaps the way in which they have been reproduced. Many of McQueen's garments are black, but there are also delicate off whites and sumptuous regal reds. All the mannequins have been photographed against a medium grey background under what appears to have been a low light. Despite the opulence of the fabrics which McQueen used, frequently with beaded embroidery, the clothes appear matt and flat. In many of the images it is impossible to tell what is going on in the cut and design of the clothes. This is especially the case with the black clothes. In some cases where the arm is next to the torso it is not possible to tell where one stops and the other begins. The powerful reds which dominate the room at the V&A exhibition are here matted down and blackly shaded, the only hints of the rich colour being where light catches the fabric on shoulders. There is a skirt which in the show is the colour of mid to blonde wood which in the book appears to be black and red. Everything looks dull and grubby.

Looking at the book again for this review, the day after visiting the exhibition, the book appears somewhat better than I at first thought, but I trust my first sense of disappointment.


The book I would really like to have would be a book done by the V&A photographed to the quality that they use in their "..... In Detail" series. In these books a photograph of a detail of an item of clothing is accompanied by a diagram showing the garment itself. The photographs are good enough to frame.

In the meantime, for as long as they are available, I recommend anyone who is interested but wouldn't be able to go to the exhibition to have a look at the V&A website, which has a number of articles and short videos about this and the BBC iPlayer, which has an exclusive guide to the show by Tinie Tempah. I don't know to what extent either of these may be geo-blocked.

82baswood
juny 29, 2015, 5:15 pm

Thoroughly enjoyed your review of the Alexander McQueen exhibition and the accompanying catalogue/exhibition book. It is disappointing when you realise that the photographs in the book were not the actual ones that you saw, because the mind craves for an accurate record.

83lilisin
juny 29, 2015, 9:18 pm

>81 Oandthegang:

McQueen is a designer I really adore and wish I could own so many of his pieces but unfortunately the price range is way over my budget. It's good to see though people appreciating the technique and labor that goes into his work as so many people are so quick to dismiss fashion.

A pity about the book though. As baswood mentions, it's frustrating when a book can't capture what you see in a museum but one has to remember that that is actually the norm, and books that do capture the feel are the rare books. I was sad this Christmas when I went to a Hokusai exhibit and bought the book only to see that my favorite pieces from the exhibit never made it into the book. Unfortunate!

84NanaCC
juny 30, 2015, 7:06 am

My daughter and her family just returned from a wonderful trip to Rome with a few days in London at the end of their trip. I am on vacation right now with my kids and seven grandchildren. While we were at dinner on Saturday night, my daughter's two children, ages 9 and 6, were telling us their favorite things about their trip. We were discussing art, and 9 year old, Catherine, told us that her favorite painting was "The Last Judgement" by Michelangelo - told with the complete story behind it. Then we asked, 6 year old Michael what his favorite artwork was. No hesitation, ""Sacred Beauty" by Alexander McQueen".

85Oandthegang
jul. 1, 2015, 4:41 pm

>84 NanaCC: I'd keep an eye on that six-year-old. With precocious taste like that who knows where he'll end up!

86Oandthegang
jul. 1, 2015, 6:01 pm

> Yes I love the couture world precisely for the preservation of extraordinary skills and the imaginative use of materials. I discovered at this exhibition that there is a profession dedicated to working with feathers - makes sense when you think about it, but why would you? I wish more people realized what it is possible to do with fabric, but in a culture in which irrespective of ability to pay almost everyone is out for the cheapest here-today-gone-tomorrow goods that's unlikely. A designer friend showed me a lovely pair of trousers he'd made as a sample for one of the better high street chains. When I said I hadn't seen those trousers on sale he described the modifications to fabric and cut the retailer made to save money when they went into production, which seemed to me to render the original model pointless (except that he gave me the original, so not entirely pointless).

I had been put off McQueen by photos of his shows and a lot of his clothes which seemed to concentrate on the ugly and the unwearable. The Armadillo shoes made more sense in the context of the Atlantis show, but they're still grotesque and probably painful to wear. Many of the beautiful clothes would probably render normal movement impossible and a bit of my mind that I couldn't turn off kept wondering about health and safety and insurance claims and hoping that the models got danger money. There was an extraordinary video of a model, possibly Naomi Campbell, wearing high shoes and a black short outfit, the details of which I never noticed because she was also wearing a piece of metal tubing which formed the outline of a square. Her knees were encircled by fixed loops attached to the lower corners and her elbows were similarly attached to the upper corners. As the sides of the square were only around eighteen inches to two foot in length she was forced to crouch with her knees apart and could only move in a squatting, crab-like manner. Nonetheless she smiled and made elaborate movements with her hands and lower arms as she crept down a flight of stairs into a pool of water.

Fashion, eh?

87lilisin
jul. 1, 2015, 10:34 pm

Well, when it comes to the second paragraph, you have to think of those shows and that clothing as performance art: art you go to see and appreciate the show and the message, but that isn't made to sit on your mantle or hang off your wall. Those armadillo shoes were never put into production and were only used for shows (and that one time Lady Gaga wore them). So basically the shows are meant to be attention-grabbers and boy, do they work. However, the layman then tends to think that is actual fashion because they don't understand the industry and media likes to make the layman think that the couture shows are clothes actually meant for production.

88Oandthegang
oct. 9, 2015, 2:28 am

Good Heavens!

I am in the midst of a magazine cull, a time when my magazines are perhaps more closely read than when they are purchased, and came across an article in the Country Mouse column of Country Life 18 March (yes culls are very intermittent). The column discussed the blackthorn winter (new to me too) and the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, quoting Robert Macfarlane from The Guardian:

"A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-past, MP3 player and voicemail."

Surely children nowadays are born knowing the meaning of words like blog, celebrity, and voicemail. If they are no longer encountering acorns, dandelions, and kingfishers surely there is more of a need for them to be explained to children encountering these words when reading. Perhaps the Oxford University Press has decided that children no longer encounter these words at all. Goodbye A. A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, Gerald Durrell, Gavin Maxwell, et al? And what about encouraging the naturalists of the future?

The movement to rewild children has a very big mountain to climb.



89RidgewayGirl
Editat: oct. 9, 2015, 6:17 am

>78 Oandthegang: Back to the German -- Grüss Gott is a regional term, used in Bavaria, and isn't in use farther north. There are a whole slew of terms that are different depending on where in Germany you are. For example, the German version of a jelly doughnut is ein Berliner in most of Germany, but ein Krapfen in Bavaria. Likewise, eine Brotchen (a bread roll) is called ein Semmel in the south. It's fun to try and remember all of this and so use the proper term in the proper location.

Of course, Germans are generally so fluent in English that it's sometimes a challenge to keep them speaking German, rather than switching to English. We have it very easy, us native English speakers.

And excellent review of the McQueen show. The V&A does such a wonderful job with their fashion and costume exhibits. I'm going to an exhibition of Jean-Paul Gautier next week and I'm looking forward to it.

90baswood
oct. 9, 2015, 7:03 am

91NanaCC
oct. 9, 2015, 7:41 am

>88 Oandthegang: Good Heavens! Is right....as I sit here listening to the acorns that are landing on my deck. Thank goodness my grandchildren have been exposed to the living equivalent of most of those words to be deleted. Why can't they just add, if they find it necessary, rather than delete?

92ursula
oct. 9, 2015, 11:22 am

>89 RidgewayGirl: Oh, thank you! Now I know exactly what the guy at our bar has been saying a particular pastry is. He told me it was a German word, and it sounded like "grafen" to me. These have cream in them, not jelly, but the shape is the same.

93.Monkey.
oct. 9, 2015, 12:08 pm

Ftr, Berliners are awesome. :D

94SassyLassy
oct. 9, 2015, 12:19 pm

Good to "see" you back.

So the OUP is now contributing to nature deficit disorder. Random thoughts:
- it's hard to fight the emerald ash borer when you don't know what it is that is being attacked
- doesn't Harry Potter have any newts?
- since dandelions seem determined to take over the world now that herbicides are limited in so many municipalities, it might be a good thing to be able to name those yellow flowers (and perhaps distinguish them from buttercups)

In the rural area where I live, children would know most of these words, especially pasture and conker. Conkers are zealously collected each fall as small boys and some girls arm themselves to do battle.

Bluebell is a problematic word, but the chances of it being replaced by the botanical name of any of the plants it is used to describe are remote. Hyacinthoides, Mertensia, and Campanula are all called bluebells by someone or another, depending on where you are. Around here, it is used for all three, although the Hyacinthoides are more usually called squills.

Perhaps if OUP had published Last Child in the Woods it might not be so ruthless. All this begs the real question though; is "dictionary" an obsolete term for children?

>89 RidgewayGirl: I read reviews of the Gaultier exhibition. It sounds wonderful

95Oandthegang
oct. 9, 2015, 5:28 pm

Have just seen pictures of the fifty lane highway in China ground to a halt in mega traffic jam. Fifty lanes???!!!

96NanaCC
oct. 9, 2015, 5:57 pm

>95 Oandthegang: I saw that, and I think I heard that it merges down to twenty lanes. No wonder it is jammed

97twogerbils
oct. 10, 2015, 11:52 am

>72 Oandthegang: This probably goes months back, but reading your post about Brush Up Your German made me smile. I also try to keep up my German through reading, and it made me laugh what phrases found their way into the text (so useful ;) ). Also reminded me of when I used to teach English abroad - made me wonder sometimes, plus the texts were British English and I'm an Ami.

98Oandthegang
oct. 10, 2015, 7:26 pm

More old news from the old magazines.

There is still time to do some anniversary reading.

From 300 years ago there are various Jacobite rising dates, including the Battle of Sheriffmuir called The Battle of Sherramuir by Robert Burns on 13 November (new calendar).

October 25 is the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, and 28 December 950 years since the consecration of Westminster Abby.

99Oandthegang
Editat: oct. 17, 2015, 4:52 am

On the whole I detest poetry, however Auden has interested me for some time, so I have purchased Selected Poems (revised edition edited by Edward Mendelson Faber and Faber 2009). In the morning I read one poem while waiting for the porridge to boil, and then re-read the others while waiting for it to cool. Then sometimes after I've eaten I read the new poem aloud, and perhaps have another go at one of the earlier ones. I am only up to March 1928 but I see that when I hit September 1929 I am going to have to devise a new routine or a way to heat porridge extremely slowly. A pity as I am enjoying my Auden mornings.

(Yes porridge makers, in the interest of reading I have been neglecting to stir the porridge before it boils.)

100SassyLassy
oct. 17, 2015, 6:57 pm

(Yes porridge makers, in the interest of reading I have been neglecting to stir the porridge before it boils.)

Glad you added that bit. My first horrified thought was "boiled porridge?!"

101baswood
oct. 18, 2015, 7:19 am

Great way to read a poem while waiting for something to happen, even if it is only boiling porridge. Tell us more about those Auden poems.

102dchaikin
oct. 19, 2015, 3:52 pm

>99 Oandthegang: whatever works. I don't even know what porridge is, but love your method and reading and rereading.

103SassyLassy
oct. 19, 2015, 4:59 pm

>102 dchaikin: Done properly, one of the best things in the world. Unfortunately, people tend to tart it up with brown sugar, raisins, and other travesties.

104edwinbcn
oct. 20, 2015, 11:50 am

The fifty lanes highway news item is a good example of urban myth creation in progress.

There are no highways of fifty lanes in China. What you see in the picture are cars lining up before a toll gate. To facilitate cueing and make sure the waiting cars do not clog the high way over too great a length a bay area is created. After the toll gate, the highway funnels back into a 4-lane highway.

This toll gate is on the Jing-Gang-Ao (Beijing-Hongkong/Macau) highway, located about 30 km to the southeast of the metropolitan area of Beijing. I pass this road and toll gate four times a week.

105edwinbcn
oct. 20, 2015, 12:00 pm

I enjoyed your post about the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

Personally, I also regret such omissions. However, I am sure the lexicographers at the editorial board will have some very sensible arguments. Our sentiment is probably very WASP-ish, and they probably consider the needs of the majority of children, not just children in the UK. OUP is a global publisher that tries to sell its books in global markets.

Actually, as is already very noticeable in EFL textbooks, such publication are so bland and so deliberately international, that they are not motivating to any learner in particular.

I would prefer more localized, regional textbooks and dictionaries (e.g. per continents or region) accounting for local differences.

106Oandthegang
oct. 24, 2015, 6:22 am

>104 edwinbcn: Thank you for clarifying that. Are people directed into lanes like queuing for a car ferry?

>105 edwinbcn: Interesting point to debate.

I use dictionaries in two ways, firstly to check that I am using a word correctly - normally for correspondence at work where meaning must be very exact without room for ambiguity or misinterpretation, and secondly to learn new words. As words in the first category tend to be descriptive or to imply judgement or value, and those in the second are usually about things i know nothing about, and often while looking them up I discover words for things I did not know anyone had named, it could be argued that I don't need a dictionary for words about things that I know, and therefore a dictionary which was targeted at things within my experience would be to some extent redundant.

As my neighbour and I do not know the same things, what is redundant for one is not redundant for the other. Is an editor to decide that my experience is that of a minority and therefore to delete words seen as only relevant to me? The dictionary should satisfy us both so needs to cover all bases.

I can see that a child growing up in Australia will have different vocabulary from a child growing up in England, as indeed will a child growing up in Scotland, though the things the Scots and the English encounter will probably have an overall greater similarity to each other than to the Australian, so if there are to be abbreviated, tailored dictionaries for children the different nationalities will need different words, but that's where the question of reading material and other cultural artefacts comes in. Just because something is not part of the child's everyday experience might they still not need a word for it? How much of one country's vocabulary is a child in another country likely to need? (I was about to say that British children know what koalas are, but as it is alleged that some urban children are hazy about cows I mustn't be too hasty.) A decision that children need only know words relevant to 21st Century urban life seems limiting. When I was a child I read books set in places I had never been, and generally in times other than my own, so full of reference to objects and practices I had never encountered. I don't remember ever looking anything up in a dictionary, but it would have been a shame if I had and it hadn't been there. Among other things I would have come to believe that dictionaries were not to be relied upon as a source of knowledge.

Tricky.

I would have a copy of the The Shorter Oxford Dictionary (or equivalent) in every household kept within easy reach for homework and idle moments, but that isn't going to happen. As I work through this I begin to wonder (shockingly for a book lover such as I) what the point of a junior dictionary is anyway.

(Here follows a long tangential rant about footnotes, with particular reference to the Penguin Barchester Towers)

As an aside, but possibly arising from a similar editorial mindset, I frequently feel insulted by editorial notes in various books. I cannot believe that whoever is responsible thinks that the majority of readers will not know whatever has been explained in the note, which is often simply a definition. The Penguin Classic edition of Barchester Towers, for instance, has notes to explain 'bon vivant', 'basilisk', 'par venu', 'Carrara', 'Marsala', 'Sophocles', etc. etc. I know that these words may not be in everyone's vocabulary, and that probably most people are a bit uncertain about exactly what distinguishes a braugham from a fly, but I would prefer the book's editors not to make assumptions and to leave it to the individual reader to reach for a dictionary if s/he chooses. If they are going to do notes about the braugham and fly, I would have thought it more helpful if the notes indicated the social status or other connotations associated with each form of transport. I find it odd that they should put in all these definitions and then for a phrase have a note saying simply 'See Henry IV, Part Two, I,i,70-72'. The reader has no recourse to a dictionary but can easily look up Shakespeare's plays?? (It is taken for granted that reader knows what Henry IV Part Two is and has easy access to it in order to read the phrase in its original context).

I am also puzzled by the decisions made about what will need a note. If I come across something I don't understand or on which my knowledge is hazy I can pass over it, deduce its general meaning/relevance from the context, or go away and look it up. My knowledge of the Corn Laws has faded over the years, but if I cared or felt it particularly necessary for the understanding of the plot I would go and learn about them properly, probably after I finished the book.

Rant over. Time to get on with life.

107Oandthegang
oct. 24, 2015, 6:25 am

>89 RidgewayGirl: So when JFK famously declared himself to be a jam doughnut was the problem that he included the indefinite article? (assuming the whole incident is not a myth anyway)

108.Monkey.
oct. 24, 2015, 6:26 am

I am also puzzled by the decisions made about what will need a note.

This is something I am always puzzled by. There will be plenty of more obscure things, for the current time/location, that get no mention, and then there will be multiple totally everyday words that they take the time to put the definition and I just sit there going WHAT?!

109RidgewayGirl
oct. 24, 2015, 6:46 am

>107 Oandthegang: I know a guy who was a young man living in Berlin when Kennedy visited and he was at that speech. He told me that it was such a meaningful moment to Berliners, people who were largely cut off from the rest of West Germany and the world, that they never thought it was a humorous mistake; the importance of his message and presence were too meaningful.

110FlorenceArt
oct. 24, 2015, 7:49 am

>106 Oandthegang: I have also often been baffled and frustrated by the choices editors make when writing notes. I always feel that most of them are useless, and when I really want to understand something in the text that baffles me, there is no note to explain it.

111rebeccanyc
oct. 24, 2015, 12:42 pm

>106 Oandthegang: >110 FlorenceArt: That's how I feel too, Florence.

112Oandthegang
oct. 25, 2015, 4:38 am

>109 RidgewayGirl: I am moved just thinking about what it must have been like to be there at such an important moment.

113Oandthegang
oct. 25, 2015, 4:41 am

Today is St Crispin's Day.

114SassyLassy
oct. 27, 2015, 2:30 pm

>106 Oandthegang: I do enjoy a good rant.

Notes on the Corn Laws always make me think of the Penguin editions of George Eliot's books.

I must admit I am one of those who love foot notes. If I am buying a pre 20th century novel, or even a more current novel in translation, I always look for an edition with notes. This has probably helped OUP and Penguin to some modest degree. Now there is also broadview editions to add to the list. I also appreciate maps, glossaries and appendices. Some books such as the OUP editions of Walter Scott even incorporate the author's notes as well as the editor's notes. All this means it may take a while to read a book, as it is sometimes read almost twice, once going through the chapter with the notes and once after that for fun. I also really appreciate a good introduction, but only to be read after the book, as they often have spoilers. Spoilers seem to be creeping in elsewhere too; I have even noticed a few in notes lately.

It's worth the risk to me of having the scope of my vocabulary insulted by one note to quickly find out what the Fronde was in another. I do prefer the notes to be at the bottom of the page though, so you can quickly see whether it is of relevance or not.

Perhaps some of the needless notes you are finding are the result of OUP, Penguin and other publishers catering in part to literature courses. One of the other difficulties may be that they are read throughout the English speaking world, and going back to your discussion of vocabulary, it is different in different parts of the world. I reread Little Women last year and found many of the footnotes just did not work, for example "sweet cakes" for "muffins", or "scones" for "hot biscuits", or "jam" for "jelly".

Vantage and other publishers have nineteenth century novels without notes .

>110 FlorenceArt: That is so frustrating to find something not covered in the notes, especially when you discover it has a fair degree of significance for the plot.

115Oandthegang
Editat: oct. 29, 2015, 6:25 pm

>114 SassyLassy: I agree about spoilers, so I too usually ignore introductions etc until after I've read the book. I did deviate slightly from this in my Auden reading, as it had started off well with me not understanding everything but happy to get a feeling of what he was on about, but a few poems in I thought 'I'm really not getting this', so sneaked a peak at Edward Mendelson's introduction, which I tried to skim with half closed eyes to avoid learning too much, and was relieved to read "These first of his adult poems have the manner of gnomic fragments. They seem to be episodes of a private mythology whose details never quite resolve themselves into a unified story ... these early poems keep their distance from their reader; they not only refuse to give up any cohesive meanings, but adopt a tone of foreboding and threat." It seems that critics "inferred from the poems' elusive privacy the existence of a coterie who shared the meanings and got the jokes" but Auden's friends didn't know what he was on about either. Whew! Not just me then. I will accept that "The poems' elusiveness is part of their meaning" and carry on. I have decided that the new Auden slot shall be while waiting for the bath to fill*. Unfortunately this makes Auden reading an evening activity. Were it summer still I could perhaps make time after breakfast to sit in the garden for the day's poem, but the chances for that are likely to be few now.

With regard to footnotes about details such as what people were eating (by way of example), I don't think I've ever really wondered about those sorts of details. On reading your comment, and taking the Little Women footnotes as examples of the sorts of things that editors think might need to be explained I imagined myself reading a book set in some country about whose food I knew virtually nothing, and decided that I would read through the scene taking it that they were eating and drinking but not worrying about what was being consumed. You, on the other hand, would want to know, and might even look the things up if no helpful editor had told you. You will therefore know about more things than I, which I admire. It may be simply that I am inherently less curious/questing than you; it may also be that because I have never been able to retain detail at some subconscious level I decide not to divert myself by looking up something I'm going to forget anyway.

I did read the various notes etc when I was slogging through Crime And Punishment. They did give some useful information, though again I felt it often superfluous - not because I necessarily knew the stuff, but because it didn't feel necessary to know it. I probably enjoyed the notes more than the book.

*(The bath probably takes about as long to fill as porridge takes to cook, but one doesn't need to immediately get into a bath. Note for strangers to porridge: one doesn't need to get into porridge at all, though there are those who say it is good for the skin.)


116Oandthegang
oct. 29, 2015, 6:31 pm

A catalogue has come through my door which includes an offer of £5 off on a decorative Santa Claus. Disputes about aesthetics aside, this qualification implies a need to make a distinction between their merchandise and the real thing. Interesting. I don't think anyone looking at the merchandise could be in doubt.

117janemarieprice
oct. 29, 2015, 10:46 pm

On notes, introductions, etc - I always hold introductions until after I've read the book both to avoid spoilers but also if I don't like the book I'll skip it and if I do it's such a treat to get to stay with it for a little while after I've finished. Notes I sometimes like and sometimes not. I prefer foot to end but then when it's just minutia references to other works I don't find them useful (though understand they are necessary for scholars). It's a hard balance to strike though and I almost feel like essays on the work are more useful.

*sidebar - what is porridge?

118Oandthegang
Editat: oct. 30, 2015, 4:55 am

>117 janemarieprice: Porridge is a very simple food which arouses strong passions.

Although I believe it might be used in other contexts proper porridge consists of oats, water, and salt and Nothing Else. The Nothing Else is very important. I commit sacrilege by sprinkling dark brown sugar on it before eating, but I recoil in horror before the bizarre permutations which are offered in England, and probably elsewhere, nowadays. Such is the lack of understanding of the dish that I have been obliged to have it sent back to the kitchen with proper instructions for the chef when staying in hotels.

If one has the time I gather it is best made with pin oats (I'm moving into dangerous territory here) which should be soaked overnight. If like me you're not organised for that or you don't have access to good pin oats it can be made with rolled oats. Depending on my mood I then add either two or three parts water to one part oats and then throw in a pinch of salt. I then slowly bring it to the boil stirring it with a spurtle (a lovely carved wooden stick specially made for stirring porridge), the slower it is heated the better. The heat should not exceed simmer. When the mixture is properly thick, and definitely if it starts to boil, take it off the heat and immediately pour into bowl(s) to allow it to set. If left alone at this point for a period of time it will form a skin on top and probably shrink back a little from the sides of the bowl. It thickens more as it cools. The controversy about eating becomes truly fraught at this point. Once it has set most people pour milk into the bowl. This is generally regarded as acceptable. I read that in the old way a bowl of milk/cream would be placed on the table for communal use and each person would dip each spoonful of his/her porridge in the communal bowl before eating. I have also read that once cooled it would be sliced and taken by labourers to their work in the fields. I know that if the remains of porridge are not washed up reasonably soon it can require a degree of elbow grease to clean it off, but as porridge is normally a wobbly semi-solid like milk pudding or jelly I don't understand how people got it to the fields in slices. Pails yes, slices no.

Oh, and porridge is Scottish. Very very Scottish. Oats grew well in Scotland and even the agrarian poor could afford them. Robert Burns mentions porridge. Purists view any deviation from the basic recipe with contempt. I'm no purist but my blood pressure rises when I see microwave/boil-in-the-bag 'porridge' packets or 'porridge' made with yoghurt, blueberries, etc., etc. Cooked oats with blueberries it may be, but porridge it isn't.

As an indication of how seriously people treat the matter, here is a link to the Golden Spurtle awards.

http://www.goldenspurtle.com

I look forward to sassy and others adding to the LT understanding of porridge.

Oh, and just to confuse matters for non-UK people, because porridge is so cheap and is associated with gruel 'doing porridge' is a slang term for doing time in prison, hence the old BBC television comedy series called 'Porridge' starring Ronnie Barker.

119Oandthegang
oct. 30, 2015, 4:52 am

>117 janemarieprice: P.S. Running hot water through oats softens the water and application of oatmeal is generally regarded as good for the skin. A nice cheap way to have softened bath water is to hold a muslin bag or a fine sieve filled with rolled oats under the hot tap while running the bath. The oats will expand and soften and the fine dust will mix with and cloud the water. But for the addition of salt the bath is then on its way to becoming extremely diluted porridge.

120Helenliz
oct. 30, 2015, 4:58 am

>118 Oandthegang: as a southern softie, I do all sorts of unbearable things to my porridge. Half milk, half water, make it in the microwave and add honey. I realise I will shortly be asked to leave the thread. However it is one of the things the really signals autumn is here, when I start fancying a bowl of porridge for breakfast.

I like reading books with extensive notes, but I sometimes wonder who decides what needs noting. Somethings I'm thinking "and?" while other items have no notes and make no sense (well, make no sense to me, at any rate). Those books I usually read with 2 bookmarks, one to mark where I am reading, one to indicate how far through the endnotes I've got. Makes it easy to find the next note.

121NanaCC
oct. 30, 2015, 7:34 am

>118 Oandthegang:. It sounds a bit like my McCann's Oatmeal. Although I don't add milk, I may add some fresh fruit in season. But I like it piping hot. I can't imagine eating it cold.

122SassyLassy
Editat: oct. 30, 2015, 3:01 pm

Love this porridge discussion. For those in North America, pin oats are known as steel cut oats. They are more expensive than rolled oats and grittier, sort of like kasha. Rolled oats are sometimes called old fashioned oats. They work very well. You definitely cannot use quick oats or even worse, instant oatmeal, to get porridge.

My grandfather in Scotland put the oats, water and salt on the stove each night before he went to bed. In the morning the porridge was just the right consistency. Absolutely no additions were allowed except for the above mentioned milk (whole milk) or cream, added at the table.

In Canada, our porridge was made with rolled oats, as I don't believe the steel cut were available then. That, or because they are also called Irish oats, they just may not have been used. Now they appear to be a high end specialty item. Porridge was made the slow way described above. I still use the spurtle from home with a burn mark down one side where my mother left it on the stove to attend to some minor emergency or other. I also have a more decorative spurtle for use with willing guests. In the bad old days, spurtles could also serve a disciplinary function for little hands too close to the stove. As >118 Oandthegang: says, nothing was added except milk or cream, but for some bizarre reason in our strict home, my sister was allowed to add brown sugar.

Porridge has given rise to many expressions, my favourite of which is "Save your breath for your porridge", which usually makes small children crack up.

>121 NanaCC: I actually like cold porridge. It is really thick by that time.

>120 Helenliz: Too funny!
I also use that double book mark system, so will merely look away as you eat your morning meal which we won't call porridge.

>119 Oandthegang: You can also put an oats and water mixture on your face (honey may be allowed here) and as it contracts, it acts as a masque.

I wonder if porridge arouses such passions because there was little else to eat.

_________________
edited thanks to Lola for pointing out error

123LolaWalser
oct. 30, 2015, 12:07 pm

steel rolled oats

Steel-cut oats, I think? The rolled oats are flattened seed, the "pin" would be integral or cut.

I used to be a porridge purist, but I drifted... But only in terms of additions (usually a few raisins, some wheat germ and almond milk), not cooking. As oandthegang beautifully describes, the process takes what it takes--time and willingness to stir, stir, stir. Which is why I usually have it only on weekends now.

124rebeccanyc
oct. 30, 2015, 12:31 pm

I'm going to "steal" the introduction/footnote/endnote conversation for a Question for the Avid Reader!

125SassyLassy
oct. 30, 2015, 3:00 pm

>123 LolaWalser: Thanks for picking that up. My mind was going more quickly than my fingers. It should indeed be steel cut and I have amended it.

126AnnieMod
oct. 30, 2015, 3:33 pm

So what is the difference between oatmeal (not the instant but the properly cooked one) and porridge then? Now I am confused (and I had just started to understand the whole steel-cut oats business)...

127Oandthegang
oct. 30, 2015, 6:47 pm

I would think of oatmeal as the ingredient. The OED defines meal as the edible part of a grain, so oatmeal would be the edible part of oats. So porridge would be made of oatmeal. There are, after all, oatmeal cookies (yum!).

128.Monkey.
oct. 31, 2015, 3:39 am

>127 Oandthegang: Yes but oats are the ingredient, oatmeal is a food people make with oats. ;)

>126 AnnieMod: Porridge can be made with oats, or with various other meals/flours, my husband makes porridge a lot. So oatmeal, as used in the US, is one type of porridge. :)

129janemarieprice
oct. 31, 2015, 10:11 am

Yeah I was going to say it sounds like maybe a slower cooking, no added ingredient version of what we in the US call oatmeal. Being from the south though, I barely know what that is either...we have grits.

We did do oatmeal bath though - it's traditionally used for chicken pox. We spent every night we were sick in the oatmeal bath.

130Oandthegang
oct. 31, 2015, 3:17 pm

>129 janemarieprice: I've always been mystified by 'grits'. From the association with the word 'gritty' it doesn't sound promising, but when I hear/read people referring to grits it always sounds comforting, perhaps because I usually encounter it in conjunction with the word 'hominy', which has a sound suggestive of both 'honey' and 'homely', but I don't really understand what it is.

Oatmeal bath for chickenpox sounds like a really interesting idea though. Did it relieve the itching?

131Oandthegang
Editat: oct. 31, 2015, 9:22 pm

To return to the footnote etc discussion, I must eat humble pie (oh look - the food link hasn't been lost!!).

I have recently begun reading C J Sansom's Lamentation. At the front of the book are two maps and a family tree for Catherine Parr, as well as a two page author's note, and a list of the Principal Dramatis Personae, at the back are twenty-six pages of historical notes, But I Want More!!!! And this despite Sansom managing to incorporate quite a lot of historical information in the narrative, sometimes to my taste a little clumsily, but at others to good dramatic effect. I am not yet far enough in to review the book, but a nice drop-in of information is a scene in which Catherine Parr (the last wife, and ultimately the widow, of Henry VIII) remarks that she cannot forget the fates of previous wives, as she wears their jewels and even their clothes. The garments were so rich, especially those made with gold or silver thread, that they were returned to the Department of The Queen's Wardrobe, and passed down from queen to queen. Makes total sense.

But in terms of the More: the two maps aren't enough, I want a map which covers a wider area so that I can see how the two areas shown relate to each other and to the area around them and the extent to which these relate to modern day London. As I've mentioned before, I am a bit of a map anorak, and while the old Palace of Whitehall is long gone its location, and of course the City of London, are still with us, so when the narrator describes a journey, for instance from his home in Lincoln's Inn to the Palace of Whitehall, in my mind I am trying to track him and place him in the streets I know, and that's when I want to reach for the map. Clothes are described. I've forgotten what a farthingale looks like (don't horses also wear farthingales?), and with such careful descriptions of the clothes I begin to wish colour plates of contemporary portraits had been included. A group portrait of the Royal Family is described; I know I've seen that picture but I want to see it again as soon as I read about it.

On the other hand I wonder if I might have found the inclusion of these additional maps and pictures distracting. I can look up maps, historical costume, and royal portraits. The novel as it stands thus becomes a potential starting point for a lot of other reading which had the novel been weighted down with all the additional material I crave I would not do. So I guess for me this book has just the right amount of additional information. It's there if I want it, but it's not getting in my way, and I know that for my own particular interests I can look elsewhere.

(quick note about the book for anyone passing through and wondering what the book is about:-

Sansom has written a series of historical detective fiction novels set in Tudor time. His detective is Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer. Lamentation is quite far in to the series and is set in 1546, a time of religious and political uncertainty, heightened by the courtiers' awareness that King Henry will die very soon, leaving a young motherless male heir who will need an adult to guide him. Heretics as well as political opponents are being tortured and burnt and Catharine Parr is at risk. Those are the headlines. More when I've finished the book.)

132Oandthegang
oct. 31, 2015, 4:16 pm

Perhaps horses wear martingales (can't remember what they are either)

133NanaCC
oct. 31, 2015, 5:11 pm

Have you read the earlier books in the Shardlake series? I listened to all of them, so didn't have the benefit of maps. I used the Internet quite a bit.

I know that martingales are associated with horses, and I am amused at the thought of a horse with a big hoop cage to hold up its skirt. Although, I guess there could be another definition. :)

134janemarieprice
oct. 31, 2015, 8:29 pm

130 - Grits are wonderful and highly recommend everyone have some if they can. Not really sure how to describe them but maybe somewhere in between oatmeal and polenta? It's a little more al dente maybe than polenta but similar flavors. Definitely savory as opposed to oatmeal which is usually more sweet (though I've seen some interesting sounding savory recipes).

135Oandthegang
oct. 31, 2015, 9:39 pm

>133 NanaCC: No I haven't read the earlier books. Someone in a book store recommended them to me ages ago and so I bought one (now buried somewhere in TBR?). I wouldn't normally blunder in to a series late like this, but it's a book club read. After a hesitant start I'm beginning to enjoy it but doubtful I will be able to get through its 706 pages of plot in time as I am quite a slow reader. It must take hours and hours to read these books aloud. Do you ever get irritated by the reader's delivery? I often find when listening to a radio reading or watching a stage play (particularly Shakespeare) I get irritated by curious emphasis or cadence.

I will now definitely have to look up farthingales and martingales.

>134 janemarieprice: Sounds nice. Don't know if grits make it this far north, but I will keep an eye out for them.

136FlorenceArt
nov. 2, 2015, 9:52 am

>131 Oandthegang: I've had a similar wish for illustrations while reading Zweig's Marie-Antoinette where he describes her clothes and hairstyles at some length but not in enough detail for me to picture them (this is something I never do anyway, I have no visual imagination and visual descriptions are wasted on me). The Net and Wikipedia especially proved very useful for this.

In fact, if I can't find the meaning of a specific word mentioned it's no longer as big a frustration as it used to be. Since I read on my iPad, I can look it up immediately (well unless I'm on the underground train, in which case I have to wait till I get home or at work). Which doesn't mean that notes have become worthless, just that if they don't suffice, I have other options.

137Oandthegang
nov. 10, 2015, 7:28 am

London City Of Disappearances - Iain Sinclair

I found this book somewhat frustrating on a number of fronts, not least because I felt that for someone it would be a wonderful book but that someone is not me. Iain Sinclair has a very particular style and approach in all his work, and this book is very Sinclair. I wanted to like it. It sounded fascinating in the introduction, but I soon became frustrated by the very layout of the book. The names of the fifty-nine 'contributors' (I'm not sure that Thomas De Quincy could properly be regarded as a contributor) appear in a block at the beginning of the book. The names run into one another with no gaps between names or initials, the only indication of the end of one person's name and the beginning of the next being that surnames appear in capital letters. The book is divided into twelve segments each of which is made up of a number of pieces by different writers but although each piece has a title the index does not list them. There are notes on contributors towards the back of the book (De Quincy is omitted - disappeared?) and finally a list of contributors appears in conventional form at the end of the book, with page numbers for their contributions. Where the contributions appear within the segments the piece starts with a title, but no author attribution until it ends. In fairness probably many anthologies are laid out like this without causing any difficulty, but in this book I wanted to know whose voice I was hearing, so for each piece I would have to go rummaging through the book to find its end and the author's name. I think it mattered to me for this book because it was set up that it would include fact and fiction, and what people remembered as fact, though others approached might remember it differently. Sometimes someone mentioned in one piece is the author of the next. It seems to me that one should know that in advance.

I gave up on the book partway through the first section, West End Final. It's a big book, over six hundred pages, and though I feel certain that I have missed some interesting stuff the commitment of time required was too great for something I was really only reading as a curiosity when I have a large stack of books that I really want to read. Of what I did read, the editing is clever as one piece leads into the next, but the book would be best read by someone with a substantial knowledge of the London fringe/underground culture of the mid twentieth century, as many of its places and people feature here. There are the Fulcrum Press poets, Better Books, Indica, the Raymond Revue Bar, the whole strange but not uncommon mix of art and criminality round the fringes. Many of the names and places were familiar to me, many were not. I think the book could be read as it stands but to be properly appreciated one would really need to know the people involved. This is reinforced by the feeling that all the contributors are chums of Sinclair's, or at very least all known to each other and within a particular literary milieu.

I see that later sections of the book include fiction, poetry, and archive news reports, but with regret I am passing them up and passing the book back to the charity shop from whence it came.

138RidgewayGirl
nov. 10, 2015, 10:31 am

>135 Oandthegang: Regarding grits -- please don't try them unless you are in the South or are having them prepared for you by a southerner who knows what they are doing. If they aren't made well, you will never want to try them again. Ideally, a warm evening spent on the patio of a restaurant in Charleston, with a serving of shrimp and grits.

139lesmel
Editat: nov. 10, 2015, 11:32 am

>134 janemarieprice:, >135 Oandthegang:, >138 RidgewayGirl: I'm from South Texas. Grits are served with butter and sugar where I'm from. Just because I prefer them that way doesn't mean I don't like shrimp and grits -- who wouldn't love anything loaded with cheese? There's not just one "right" style for grits. Does anyone follow Southern Foodways Alliance (https://www.southernfoodways.org)? I'm almost always intrigued by food as culture and cultural cuisines.

ETA: https://www.southernfoodways.org/eating-with-miss-donna
"This was my first foray into (bad) Southern food, and for most of my early childhood it impacted how I ate.
That is, until I had grits done right by a sweet mama who was dedicated to showing me just how good Southern food could be."

Isn't that how it is for most food? If done badly, we never want to try it again. Heh.

140SassyLassy
nov. 10, 2015, 11:46 am

How disappointing an outcome from a promising title.

Your review kind of confirms my Sinclair experiences. The first was Downriver, now languishing lost in some purgatorial pile of abandoned books. I might add that it is very odd for me to not finish a book, no matter how unresponsive I may be to it. The second is Rodinsky's Room with Rachel Lichtenstein, also languishing somewhere. It started off in a far more promising fashion, but has wandered off somewhere. I'm pretty sure I will finish it once I find it though.

How can anyone take on such interesting ventures and then turn them into such turgid works?

Your second paragraph seems to indicate that the book, minus the disappearing de Quincy, is mostly about twentieth century London, which is too bad in some ways, however useful as a source book in others, possibly when reading Linda Grant for instance. Does the index give place names so that it could be used for reference?

141Oandthegang
nov. 10, 2015, 5:38 pm

>140 SassyLassy: I always wanted to read Rodinsky's Room from everything I'd heard about it, but whenever I saw the book itself I was never sure that it could really be the book that I'd heard about.

No, nothing so handy as an index to places, however there are notes to some of the pieces, which include details of source material. I don't think the book is just about twentieth century London, though the bits I read were. According to the book's cover: "Inside you'll encounter the destroyed portrait by German Expressionist Ludwig Meidner... Raymond's Revuebar in its afterlife ... the antiquarian manuscript that reveals an astonishing tale of abduction and rape ... the London resurrectionists.. Kafka's hairbrush in Whitechapel ... a previously unrecorded book by Samuel Pepys in a Tilbury pub, and other stories both factual and those yet to grow into myth" It claims to be "a book of phantoms whose fabulous identities are freed from the chains of mundane reality; lost lives are reclaimed and reinstated; and the city moves towards and away from recognition." Rereading this guff I don't know why I ever brought the book home in the first place. Perhaps I was expecting something more along the lines of Hawkesmoor or The House Of Doctor Dee.

>51 SassyLassy: I have ordered the wrong book. I have just collected The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories instead of the Penguin collection which you had. I know the current Penguin collection has a different editor from your version, but I thought there was a chance that the selections overlapped. Instead I have the Oxford collection. Wretchedly small print closely spaced, it might just as well be a Bible. As the weather is very grey here, although with some of the highest temperatures for the time of year on record, I succumbed to the seasonal books out on display, mostly detective fiction, but I am trying not to read any of them until December.

142janemarieprice
Editat: nov. 19, 2015, 10:11 pm

138 - Yes Ridgewaygirl, good southern grits are definitely a requirement though I eat them more as breakfast (particularly good for camping as it coats your belly well for a long day of hiking). Growing up shrimp and grits were considered 'fancy' food. :)

139 - lesmel, I LOVE Southern Foodways Alliance. They have so many great projects. I found them through a documentary they did on the cochon de lait festival which is in the next town over from where my mom grew up. It's beautiful (though must come with the disclaimer that it does include the full scope of butchery so be warned). But such, such beautiful Cajun French in the intro.

143Oandthegang
nov. 21, 2015, 11:37 am

The year has hiked itself up to the top of that terrifying slide down towards Christmas and the New Year and I am hopelessly behind in my reading and reviews. I need to slough off some of the guilty unfinished business of unwritten reviews of books I really wanted to tell people about, and at the same time to make some headway in my good resolutions about book culling (it's so humbling to go back over one's early posts and see the good intentions unfulfilled) so I will be doing some random and perhaps somewhat vague reviews just to get something done.

I have been further held up by recent difficulties with my hands which have made typing difficult, and are in turn aggravated by typing so it will be reviews in fits and starts.

144Oandthegang
Editat: nov. 21, 2015, 1:31 pm

George Simenon - various Maigret novels

In November 2013 Penguin began an admirable programme of re-issuing the Inspector Maigret novels, in chronological order, at the rate of one per month. I had never read any Maigret, nor, I think, any Simenon, and my idea of Maigret was probably drawn from some vague memory of old French black and white movies, a sort of French Humphrey Bogart.

The real thing therefore came as a considerable shock. I now think of Maigret as rather like the large silent creature sitting beside the little girl in the film Spirited Away.

Unfortunately I have mislaid the first volume, Pietr the Latvian (Touchstone doesn't seem to pick up the right book) and if I go looking for it I will never get this done, so these are the things I remember. Maigret is coarsely built, a large man, whose body strains his clothes, his working class (peasant?) background clearly visible. In The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (Touchstone is really hating these titles) the third Maigret novel, Detective Chief Inspector Maigret is quickly established as someone that people don't really notice. "People paid less attention to a traveller sitting at the neighbouring table, a tall, heavy fellow, broad in the shoulders. He wore a thick black overcoat with a velvet collar and a celluloid protector cradled the knot of his necktie." He is "calmly, almost implacably, puffing on his pipe" as he watches a fellow passenger in a third class train compartment. He has a "fleshy face, which seemed to have been punched out of dense clay by strong thumbs". The man is almost literally lumpen. (He also wears a bowler hat!)

There were several things I found interesting about Maigret which made him very different from the American and British (effectively English) detectives of similar vintage I had read. First, the fact that he was a policeman and, as far as I can tell from the first few novels that I read (there are seventy-five Maigret novels and twenty-eight short stories), did not have any difficulty with his colleagues or superiors, his complaints being restricted to lack of heat in his office and food. There are details which immediately strike one with how different everyday life in France during the nineteen thirties are from today, but also how different from that represented in English or American fiction of the time. Pietr The Latvian opens with Maigret receiving a written warning that a dangerous man is heading for Paris. Maigret checks the time and sees that it is too late to intercept him at the French border, the train will have already crossed and now be speeding towards Paris at sixty miles per hour. So that he can recognise the criminal, Maigert is supplied with a description of the man's ear, as everyone's ears are, apparently, unique.

Maigret does not own a car, and as his cases take him to various places outside the city he spends a lot of time on trains, on foot, and even on bicycles. (It is hard to imagine Sam Spade bicycling anywhere.) He also spends a lot of time observing, often standing silently keeping watch in pouring rain. On one occasion he goes to collect a widow and has to walk each way between the station and her house in sweltering heat. There is no police car, no taxi.

Maigret moves between invisibility and a dominant, if silent, presence. In one of the novels he takes up a post in a hotel lobby, as welcome and inconspicuous as a wet St Bernard. Within this boulder-like man is a very sharp mind. He observes, he thinks, he knows human nature. Despite being a policeman he bends the rules where a more natural justice or a more benign outcome can be achieved. Suicides and escapes are permitted.

He is happily married and at the end of the day returns to what seems to be a surprisingly feminine environment, with good food, eiderdowns, and rose patterned walls, leaving all the greyness of his work behind.

I did not continue with the Maigrets, though I might someday sit down to an omnibus, but I did think how interesting it would be to do an analysis along the lines of Margaret Atwood's Survival. I remember particularly in Survival Atwood's comments on the different treatment of animals in the literatures of Britain, the USA, and Canada. She comments that British animal stories are about "social relations", American ones about people killing animals, and Canadian ones about animals being killed "as felt emotionally from inside the fur and feathers". To some extent the 'golden age' British and American detective stories seem to follow a similar pattern. I've not made a serious study, and I must admit that having just discovered Freeman Wills Crofts's Inspector French I realise my case is far from watertight, but it is interesting the frequency with which British crime classics of the twenties and thirties featured a seemingly dim and/or insignificant member of the aristocracy, who Pimpernell-like is more than he looks, always has an assistant - frequently his man servant - and works collaboratively with other people to solve the crime. Miss Marple, though no aristocrat, continues the harmless dim mask tradition. Also interesting is the frequency with which women are involved in the solution, perhaps because the particular detective novels were written by women. These people are not part of the law enforcement system. They are amateurs, though frequently with a good friend who is in the police force. There is brain work and seldom much violence.

The American classics seem to feature loners, hard drinkers, hard hitters, fast talkers, deeply cynical and with an uneasy relationship with the police, a style which now seems to have become fairly international, even when the featured detective is a police officer (thank you Mr Camilleri for keeping Inspector Montalbano clear of this).

Maigret's position seems so different, I wonder what, if anything, he tells us about the France he inhabited. It would also be interesting to chart how, if at all, he changed over the years.

145baswood
nov. 21, 2015, 1:57 pm

>144 Oandthegang: Very interesting. I enjoyed reading your thoughts on the Maigret novels and how he fitted into his world. More innocent perhaps?

146SassyLassy
nov. 21, 2015, 2:26 pm

For some reason, our high school French teacher had us reading Maigret in French. This somewhat clouds my remembrance of him and perhaps I should now read him again, these many years later, when I can focus on the novels and not the language. I do know that my memories are of him being somewhat like an early Inspector Clouseau, and for that reason I remember him with a certain fondness as a sort of hapless sort who manages to muddle through. I may discover that is totally off centre though when I read him again.

147dchaikin
nov. 24, 2015, 10:31 am

Fun stuff on Maigret. I'd never heard of his series.

148Oandthegang
nov. 25, 2015, 1:17 pm

>145 baswood: Does Maigret still have a place in French culture, or has he been left behind? (I realise that it is of course entirely possible that you do not spend time with your French friends discussing old detective novels!)

149rebeccanyc
nov. 25, 2015, 2:28 pm

>148 Oandthegang: Wasn't Simenon Belgian?

150RidgewayGirl
nov. 25, 2015, 2:33 pm

>149 rebeccanyc: Yes, but Maigret, his most famous character, was a French policeman.

151rebeccanyc
nov. 25, 2015, 2:46 pm

Thanks, Kay. Clearly, I've never read any Maigrets!

152RidgewayGirl
nov. 25, 2015, 3:58 pm

>151 rebeccanyc: French class. Le Chien Jaune. I remember it vividly. But it was a better selection that some of the other books chosen. Les Lettres Persanes, I am looking at you.

153Oandthegang
Editat: nov. 25, 2015, 7:06 pm

Maigret has his own entry in Wikipedia, complete with picture of a statute unveiled by Simenon himself. and a listing of the various actors who have played him round the world, including Russian and Japan. According to Wikipedia Simenon's favourite was an English actor, Rupert Davies, who played him in a BBC series, but I don't believe I've seen any of them.

154rebeccanyc
nov. 26, 2015, 10:59 am

>152 RidgewayGirl: If I were to read the Maigret novels, would it be important to read them in order, or should I start with a favorite like The Yellow Dog?

155Oandthegang
nov. 29, 2015, 8:07 pm

Murder Of A Lady: A Scottish Mystery by Anthony Wynne (note incorrect and irrelevant touchstones in this review)

'Mr. Leod McLeod, Procurator Fiscal of Mid-Argyll, was known throughout that country as "the Monarch of the Glen". He deserved the title, if only because of the shape and set of his head and the distinction of his features. A Highlander, full length, in oils, dignified as a mountain, touchy as a squall, inscrutable, comic in the Greek sense. When at ten o'clock at night he came striding in, past the butler, to the smoking-room at Darroch Mor, even Dr. Eustace Hailey gasped, giving, by that, joy to his host, Colonel John MacCallien.

"I must apologize, gentlemen, for disturbing you at this unseasonable hour."

Mr. McLeod bowed as he spoke, like a sapling in a hurricane.'

Mr. McLeod has come to announce that Miss Mary Gregor has been murdered. The Colonel exclaims that it can't be possible - "Mary Gregor hadn't an enemy in the world. Even tramps and tinkers turned to bless her as she passed them.."

It being the Sabbath, (and the book having been published in 1931) Mr McLeod does not believe the police will be able to get to Loch Fyne until the following day, and therefore, having heard that Dr Hailey was staying with MacCallien, has come to require him to apply his skills to the matter, for Dr Hailey has a reputation as an amateur sleuth. He requests Hailey to accompany him to Castle Duchlan to view the the scene of the crime. There they are greeted by Mary's brother, Major Hamish Gregor, kilted and surrounded by ancient furniture and decaying hunting trophies.

As the Procurator Fiscal seems to be named Loud McCloud, though doubtless this pronunciation is incorrect, I speculated on the possible pronunciations of Duchlan, which could approximate somewhere between ducklin' and darlin'. The fun of this is that Mary Gregor's brother, being the laird, is referred to as Duchlan.

Miss Gregor was found dead in her room, the door and windows of which had been locked from inside, and although there is a deep wound in her shoulder the weapon is nowhere to be found.

It soon becomes clear that Miss Gregor was a piece of work, a manipulative enforcer of a stern and righteous Christianity utterly lacking in true charity, and that she had inculcated in her brother an unhealthy concern with family pride and tradition. Illustrating the goodness of her nature, Duchlan describes how Miss Gregor had insisted that the piper play during dinner as was their tradition, even though she had a headache. "I knew that she was suffering greatly, but she welcomed Angus, my piper, with perfect grace, and, when his playing finished, rose and handed him the loving cup. I'm sure he knew and appreciated her courage."

Hailey and the Glasgow detectives work separately and come to different conclusions. A series of cases are made and knocked down for the guilt or innocence of various members of the household, with motive and character being weighed against each other. There is an implicit case against capital punishment as the subtlety, or lack thereof, in a jury's understanding of character and moral codes is considered as potentially the sole determinant of whether a suspect will live or hang.

The novel plays off the antipathy between Highland and Lowland Scots. While the Highlanders are represented to some extent as bizarre and superstitious people caught in an anachronistic way of life the police who come up from Glasgow are hampered by their own prejudices and narrowness of thought. Dr Hailey, though clearly familiar with Scots of both strains, is English. The Irish are seen as emotionally healthy role models, albeit a tad volatile - if only the Highlanders could be a bit more like the Irish they'd all be happier. Some modern readers might bulk at the choices made by various characters, but 1931 is a long time ago. Think how different from now is the world of Brief Encounter, made in 1945.

I was intrigued by the placing of Castle Duchlan on the shores of Loch Fyne, a curious parallel with Inveraray Castle, the seat of the Duke of Argyll. I believe the tenth Duke kept a piper, much to the annoyance of his house guests. Duchlan is described as Major Hamish Gregor, late of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The Duke was, according to Wikipedia, an honorary colonel in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders until 1929. Again according to Wikipedia, the tenth Duke was known for his eccentricity, and was so worried about passing on hereditary mental instability that he never married.

The introduction to Murder Of A Lady describes it as "an excellent example of the "impossible crime" mystery, written by a long forgotten master of this ingenious form of detective puzzle". It goes on to quote Robert Adey's study Locked Room Mysteries: Wynne "established himself as the champion of a form of impossible crime: death by invisible agent." The detective is confronted with "situations in which the victim was killed, quite on his own, in plain view of witnesses who were unable to explain how a close-quarters blow could have been struck".

Anthony Wynne was the pseudonym of Robert McNair Wilson (1882-1963), a physician born in Glasgow, who in addition to his detective novels (the Dr Hailey novels appeared from the mid twenties until 1950) also wrote on medical, scientific, historical, and economic matters.

The pleasant image on the cover of this British Library Crime Classic edition is part of a Caledonian Railway poster for the Tarbet Hotel on Loch Lomond with a paddle steamer full of day trippers sailing past.

156RidgewayGirl
nov. 30, 2015, 2:50 am

>154 rebeccanyc: Any order is fine.
En/na oandthegang tries desperately to keep up ha continuat aquest tema.