If you got here after typing "food" and "porn" and "fetish" in Google, you're about to be very disappointed. Best go here instead. Okay? Okay.
I love cooking.
Now, by that I don't mean I like going to the store to buy ingredients, and then at some indeterminate future date remembering to them out of the cupboard, then torturing them with utensils until they yield -- through the magic of food alchemy -- something delicious to eat. And then, god forbid, having to wash the dishes afterward.
No, I love the idea of cooking. I like to watch other people cook... preferably food that will end up in my belly. But if that's not a possibility, I like cooking shows. I like beautiful, glossy, lavishly photographed food magazines and cookbooks. I like the relatively new sub-set of non-cookery books for foodies, which has been labelled food literature but let's be honest: a better term would be food porn.
In other words, picture a person perched on the edge of her chair watching Martha Stewart (oh, Martha, you filthy little kitchen minx, you) uninhibitedly throw whole cream and pounds of fresh creamery butter into her food processor. Then picture that person eating a bowl of cold cereal at the same time that she's watching this orgiastic culinary free-for-all. That's me.
Like all fetishists, I have a small trove of books I like to read under the covers when I'm in the mood:
The latest addition to this collection was sent to me for my birthday by Wing Chun, who, in addition to being witty, brave and having the strength of ten Grinches plus two, always knows exactly what to give.
Hey There, Cupcake! is so my kind of book, it's not even funny. I'm familiar with Clare Crespo's earlier book, The Secret Life of Food, which features beautifully photographed (by the uber-talented Eric Staudenmaier) recipes for freaky fare like the spaghetti and eyeballs shown at the top of this entry (I tried so hard to find a photograph of the mutant chicken, because I desperately wanted to show it to you, but no luck; you'll have to get your hands on the book), so her recipes for tasty little oddities such as crop-circle cupcakes (above) and sushi cupcakes (below) came as a surprise, for sure, but not a shock.
Crespo is a fabulous domestic-arts weirdo, of Amy Sedaris's ilk, as this interview attests. Every new thing I learn about her (such as the fact that she's part of a diorama club) confirms my girl-crush on her. I'm a vegetarian, but for Clare I'd eat mutant chicken.
What's your favourite foodie porn? Let's get nasty in the comments section.
That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx (#27)
I've been a huge Annie Proulx booster since back when she was E. Annie Proulx, but still for some reason I'm usually the last person to know when she has a new book out. Her most recent novel, That Old Ace in the Hole (which was published in 2003), is no exception.
Now, I know Proulx is not everyone's cup of tea. I know people who wanted (and possibly succumbed to their desire) to hurl The Shipping News across the room. (You may be one of them, but humour me for a few minutes.) And since the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Shipping News was by most accounts Proulx's breakout novel -- hence the first one that most people encountered, hence also the last if it struck a wrong chord with them -- it means that a lot of people have missed out on the very fine storytelling that preceded (Postcards, which between you and me I liked more than The Shipping News) and followed (Close Range: Wyoming Stories) it.
I've always loved reading the bio copy on Proulx's book jackets that mentions how she divides her time between Wyoming and Newfoundland. I don't know much about Wyoming, but what I know of all the Newfoundlanders I've met is that there's a rugged streak of quiet, weird humour in them that's easy to miss if you're used to more un-subtle wit. I used to just think people from The Rock were weird. Now I think they're weird and some of the funniest people I know.
All this is by way of saying that there's a strange humour in Proulx's work, but nowhere is this humour so evident and accessible as it is in That Old Ace in the Hole.
In other words, it's a pretty darn funny book.
Bob Dollar is our hero. With a name like that, you're expecting a mealy-mouthed used-car-salesman type, but instead Bob is a bright-but-hapless, quasi-orphaned twenty-five-year-old who, in lieu of a solid Five Year Plan, takes on a job as an undercover site scout for a massive industrial hog farming corporation called Global Pork Rind.
Bob hones in on Woolybucket, a dead-end town in the Texas panhandle. In the months that follow, he rents a cabin and gets to know the locals, trying to sniff out desperate landowners who would be willing to sell out for a pittance. All the while, he maintains his cover, primarily for his own protection as the subject of factory hog farming inspires virulent rage in a number of residents.
Throughout this main narrative through-line, Proulx uses wildly ingenious -- yet never forced or overwrought -- devices to seed the story with fascinating nuggets of local history, as well as with back-stories for various characters that could warrant novels in their own right. All these narratives come together in an ending that's probably about as zany as I've seen Proulx get. And it isn't until the final pages of the book that the title even makes sense. (It turns out to be an awful play on words that manages to be pretty funny in its deadpan punny unfunniness.)
Zaniness aside, I have huge respect for Proulx for being able to (effortlessly, it seems) avoid falling into a couple of traps set by this kind of story and setting. First, in creating a cast of eccentric rural characters that recognizes and acknowledges all the usual stereotypes, and then neatly sidesteps them. And second, in taking an anti-corporate, pro-ecology stance without (a) being preachy, or (b) letting that message override the story.
Proulx's travel-writing chops are evident throughout this novel (she used to write for Outside way back when it was a fabulous adventure mag, before turning into a glossy gear catalogue)... so much so that now I'm pining to visit the Texas panhandle. Now that's what I call good writing.
From the continuing education program that just arrived in the mail:
Da Vinci's Code (NEW!)
Are you interested in finding out more about the Divine Proportion, the Golden Mean, Fibonacci numbers, Vitruvian Man, (all mentioned in the book)? You will learn how to draw a golden rectangle, & how the golden mean is used in music, art, poetry, architecture, body parts & even nature. Please bring pencil, paper, ruler, eraser, & a geometry compass. Please bring a lunch. ($49)
Okay, I haven't read the book (because I'm contrary that way), but I'm torn between thinking this either sounds kind of cool or really, really lame.
But at the end of the day, I can't get behind a book-related course with such egregiously bad punctuation in the course description (because I'm snobby that way). Right now I'm leaning more toward "Dealing with Anger for Women." Well, that or "Contact Your Spirit Guides."
As you were.
The current CBC lockout makes me really glad I'm on maternity leave. (In case you didn't know, I work for the Ceeb.)
I'm away from the action, so I don't have much to say about it. But this guy does.
Just popping in to post this, because it's way too fucking funny to keep to myself. Well, funny if you're a nerd. Which I am. But only by marriage.
Okay. I'm out of here. Pretend you didn't see me.
...I want to be a Jewish porn star.
And I want this to be my screen name.
If your shelves are anything like mine, they house a quadrillion of those Penguin paperbacks with the orange spine.* I love them (see my earlier post about the difficulty in finding good one-handed reading material), but they get kind of beat up alongside the hardcovers and bigger, meaner paperbacks.
Finally (sort of), these humble little books have a home of their own:
The Penguin Donkey bookcase was designed in 1939 specifically to hold Penguin books -- up to 80 of them, to be precise -- and has been resurrected by design house twentytwentyone. If you're a vintage nut like me, you're already trying to rationalize the £451.00 price tag. Ouch!
[Thanks to design*sponge for the link.]
*Speaking of Penguin, BoingBoing recently posted that Amazon is selling the complete Penguin Classics Library (1,082 titles in total) for just under eight grand. That's some serious dimp. But now the link from BoingBoing to the specific info on Amazon doesn't work. Does anyone know anything about this? Not that I have that kind of coin, but I like to keep my facts straight.
ETA: Here is the correct Amazon link. Thanks, Ms Molly!
Salon's Rebecca Traister has written one of the best reviews of Lord of the Flies that I've read.
Ralph barely manages to evolve from a real jerk into someone capable of acknowledging that there might be some humanity in the fat kid. Here is Ralph, "adjusting his values:" "Piggy, for all his ludicrous body, had brains. Ralph was a specialist in thought now, and could recognize thought in another." Well congratu-fucking-lations, Ralph, you're a real mensch.
Heh.
Yes, you. You do. You rock harder than a room full of grandmas on speed. I'll tell you why:
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett (#26)
Waaaaaaay back when I wrote about being disappointed with Christopher Moore's Fluke (after being somewhat entertained by Lamb), I lamented the fact that there are so few funny, smart fiction writers out there.
A bunch of you suggested that, if I like Douglas Adams, I should read Terry Pratchett, particularly his novel Good Omens, co-written with Neil Gaiman. So I tracked down a copy (which was way harder than it should have been, for some reason) and ploughed through it in just a couple of nights. And it was perfect.
Not only was it effortlessly funny (my biggest criticism of Moore is that he tries too hard, and it shows), it was also intelligent and unafraid to drop some semi-obscure biblical references on me. The plot hung together throughout the story (Fluke kind of fell apart about two-thirds of the way through, and even Douglas Adams's storylines had a tendency to meander off-course and never return, though he had some good excuses for this), and... AND... most important, my edition of Good Omens was a deliciously, eminently holdable trade paperback, meaning I could read it in bed with one hand while cradling young Master Sam in the other arm.
Like I said, the perfect book.
So thank you, thank you, thank you for recommending such a thoroughly satisfying novel.*
And please, please, please... if you can suggest any other authors -- and specific titles -- in this vein, please do. I'm trying to read The Kite Runner, but I have to take a break every 50 pages or so because -- I'll be honest here -- it's a bit of a downer. I need some intermittent yuks to keep me going.
*ETA: Uh, it seems I've neglected to say what Good Omens is actually about. How about I just use Clive Barker's review quote from the cover: "The Apocalypse has never been funnier!"
- button-fly jeans?
- velcro sneakers?
- sockettes with pompoms?
- Booberry cereal?
- that TV show Chico the Rainmaker?
I mean, most of the flotsam and jetsom of the '70s and '80s has been recycled by now -- even Smurfs, for sweet Jesus' sake -- but not these things. Why not?
Did I miss the media circus surrounding the infamous Levi's lawsuit of '89, wherein the frat boys of America filed a class-action lawsuit against the denim retailer after one too many emasculating buttonhole injuries? Were Frankenberry and Count Chocula so threatened by the unassuming, yet vastly superior, tastiness of Booberry that they had him disposed of and all memory of him erased? And does anyone but me even remember Chico the Rainmaker? Because I'm starting to get that "Am I on crazy pills?" feeling when I meet the blank stares.
I'm sure there are more examples of things that somehow, miraculously, resisted being appropriated by vintage-loving urban hipsters, but I can't think of them. Those urban hipsters sure are thorough.
So we're getting ready to go out today, and I'm in the shower thinking about how little reading I'm doing these days, and I remembered Wordsworth's "The Tables Turned":
Up! up! my friend, and quit your books,
Or surely you'll grow double.
Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble. . . .
Books! 'tis a dull and endless trifle:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it. . . .
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things--
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art,
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
Well, actually, I only remembered "Up! up! my friend, and quit your books." I had to look up the rest. But I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for coming up with an excuse -- in rhyme, no less! -- for my laziness. And then I remembered that I don't like Wordsworth, so am I still entitled to tout him when I'm in the midst of a merry bout of self-justification?
There! Did you catch that?
That was the exact moment I realized what a pretentious git I am.
I'm so pretentious I'm not even embarrassed to use the expression "pretentious git". Next thing you know, I'm going to be saying stuff like "shite" and referring to Hunter S. Thompson as "Dr. Thompson". THAT'S how pretentious I am.
Okay, not quite. But still. Wordsworth. Keee-rist.
Don't get me wrong. I don't have a problem with pretentious people, per se. I'm down with the poseurs, trust me. I just wish I were smart enough to be one and pull it off. Do you know hard it is to be both pretentious AND dumb?
Enough of this. I'm off to the Aquarium. They've got a new dolphin!
Given how many hours I spend online every day, you'd think I regularly visit Metafilter. I don't. But I couldn't get there fast enough when Rusty Iron, knowing my fondness for all things tentacled, told me about this video of a giant octopus taking on a three-foot shark.
As enjoyable as the video was, I was even more delighted by Metafilter's link to Jonathan Lethem's site, specifically the glove compartment, which contains all sorts of Lethem's unpublished treasures. (My favourite? So far it's a toss-up between Top 5 Depressed Superheroes and The Loneliest Book I've Read, which brilliantly and simply summed up some inchoate thoughts about reading that I've never put into words.)
I'm a bit late to dinner on this one, but it's been slightly haunting me for a few weeks now. The current issue of Harper's published a recently unearthed letter sent by John Steinbeck to Jack Valenti, special assistant to Lyndon B. Johnson. Valenti forwarded the memo to Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara on January 14, 1966.
From time to time, John Steinbeck, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, writes me. He's a fascinating man, with a kind of imaginative flair for war and its weaponry. I excerpt from his letter, for it bears on your business. It presents three different suggestions:
[The first suggestion is to use the element of surprise and make random "colossal strikes" in Vietnam, rather than regular daily attacks. The second is to exchange rifles for 12-gauge single-shot pistols, for greater accuracy.]
My [Steinbeck's] third idea has been bugging me for some time. I think the most terrifying modern weapon is the napalm bomb. People who will charge rifle fire won't go through flame. The hand grenade is pretty good, but the necessary weight of metal for fragmenting makes it hard to throw and limits the range. Did you ever throw one with a bent arm? It will put your shoulder out for a week.
What I suggest is a napalm grenade, packed in a heavy plastic sphere almost the exact size and weight of a baseball. The detonator should be of very low power -- just enough to break the plastic shell and ignite the inflammable. If the napalm is packed under pressure, it will spread itself when the case breaks. The detonator (a contact cap) should be carried separately and inserted or screwed in just before throwing. This would allow a man to carry a sack full of balls without danger to himself. Now, we probably have developed some fine riflemen, sharpshooters, etc., but there isn't an American boy over thirteen who can't peg a baseball from infield to home plate with accuracy. And a grown man with sandlot experience can do much better. It is the natural weapon for Americans. Six good men could ring an area with either napalm or white phosphorus faster than you could throw a magazine into an automatic or a machine gun. And an enemy with a bit of flame on his clothes or even in front of him is out of combat. The weapon would also be valuable for cleaning out tunnels and foxholes. Mounted as a rifle grenade, the Steinbeck super ball would also be valuable for burning off cover of extra ambush country or of tree-borne sniper fire.
"The Steinbeck super ball"? I did not see that one coming.
Before I leapt to judgment on this, I asked Rusty Iron how tight Steinbeck's science was. (For some reason that I'm not going to pry into, Rusty has a preternatural understanding of the wartime sciences.)
Rusty gave me a long, complicated answer that, to be quite frank, I didn't entirely understand, but part of what I did get is that Steinbeck is way off. Apparently, baseball-sized quantities of napalm -- even if packed under pressure -- wouldn't be sufficient to do significant damage. Not having any napalm on hand with which to experiment (not to mention consenting human targets), I had to take his word for it.
Okay, I'm being disingenious, and you know why? Because this letter kind of freaked me out. Faulty tactical reasoning notwithstanding, Steinbeck's tone -- which somehow manages to be both folksy and detached -- in delivering his suggestions for better ways to hurt people is distressing, to say the least. It reminded me of the way my brother used to torture live frogs, which taught me early on that you can justify pretty much anything if you adopt a scientific manner about it.
In other words, Steinbeck sounds like a bright, imaginative schoolboy, which superficially seems innocent as all get-out. But if Lord of the Flies taught us nothing else, didn't it teach us to watch our backs when bright, imaginative schoolboys are afoot?
This letter doesn't, it seems to me, jibe with Steinbeck's beautiful acceptance speech when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature four years earlier, in 1962:
...the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love.
Can you be a humanitarian -- an advocate for "compassion and love" -- and an inventor of weaponry? It strikes me that you can't, but maybe I'm missing something.*
Or maybe I've previously overly idealized Steinbeck's humanity. Or maybe this is a case where a reader has projected too much of her own values on a favourite author. Or maybe Steinbeck kind of went nuts in his old age.
I really don't know what to think. All I know is that I feel sad and disillusioned.
*ETA: It's difficult to read this excerpt without context (i.e. Steinbeck's assessment of the situation in Vietnam) and in hindsight (because "of course" everyone knows now that the U.S.'s presence in Vietnam was unnecessary). You might wonder why someone would naively, idealistically think that humanitarianism and pacifism are synonymous. Hey, the world needs a few of us unapologetically naive idealists to keep all you dirty realists honest. (Er, that was a joke.)
Canned Clams Toilet Burp White Trasherati Atomic Bong Parade of Flatulence 10,000 Stan March Avon Calling Hellalujah! Blogger? I don't even know her. Rants in My Pants* The Paul Martin Experience
Albinos Have Stories, Too
*ETA: Daaaaang. Evidently, this one already exists.
It's a funny thing. My older brother, by his own count, has read exactly two (2) books in his adult life. If you're anything like me (and I suspect you are), it's hard for you to fathom this. Yet my brother is a smart, together kind of guy. Reading just isn't a part of his world.
But get this: my bro remembers all the characters' names, all the plot points, everything about those two books. I, on the other hand, have read thousands of books, and I remember... almost nothing. That's my sad confession.
If you're wondering how that tallies up in terms of wasted hours, here's the math:
Let's say I read for an hour a day on average. Multiply that by 365 days, then multiply THAT by 35 years. If you don't have a calculator handy, the grand total is over 12,000 hours.
Twelve thousand hours.
TWELVE THOUSAND HOURS.
In other words, that's over 500 days. In yet another bunch of words, that's about a year and a third. And that's a conservative estimate. Jesus.
All this is by way of telling you that, while I've read a bunch of books in the past three months, my memories of these books are spotty at best. So before this entry disappears in a solipsistic puff, here's what I remember without revisiting the book jackets:
Some Great Thing by Colin McAdam (#21)
I believe this was nominated for a Governor General's Award, and if memory serves, it probably deserved the nomination. It's about a guy... no, make that two guys... wait... actually, it's about two guys and a woman and another younger woman (and to a lesser degree her mother) and the first guy's son. The first guy is married to the first woman. Oh, and the novel is set in Ottawa, which -- while it may have the distinction of having been my teenage stomping grounds -- is not usually the backdrop for exciting stories.
There are two parallel -- and occasionally overlapping -- storylines, one involving the man/woman/kid and the second dealing with the rest of this batch of characters. The first narrative is your classic Duddy Kravitz-esque "obnoxious-but-compelling working stiff builds an empire by busting his (and everyone else's) balls" story. The second narrative involves a poncey public servant and his pursuit of a younger woman. Uh, and I don't remember how these storylines end.
Okay, all facetiousness aside, I really don't remember much in the way of hard-and-fast details, which is seriously sad. But I do recall being impressed by McAdam's ability to create characters who are almost wholly unlikeable, yet who still, against my will, spark tiny twinges of pity. Try it. It's not easy.
Would I recommend this novel? Sure, why the hell not. It's McAdam's first book, and I find the raggediness of most first novels is part of what makes them compelling.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (#22)
Okay, was I the only one who was slightly underwhelmed by Cloud Atlas? What with the Booker nom and all the critical praise, maybe my expectations were too high. But I've had high expectations of books before, and somehow they didn't spoil the books for me.
If you've read Cloud Atlas, you know that its structure is a big part of what all the fooferaw is about. There are multiple narratives -- from 18th century sea voyager to futuristic neo-neanderthal -- that seem disparate at first, but slowly and subtly the relationships between all these perspectives emerge.
It's clever, yes. And tightly crafted. And post-modern as all get-out. But clever po-mo shenanigans aside, to me this book had no heart. And at the end of the day, that's what a book needs in order to be great.
It's interesting: Cloud Atlas had the smooth construction that Some Great Thing lacked, and Some Great Thing had the heart that Cloud Atlas was missing. If you could put them together, they'd be a great book.
Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (#23)
I've written about my love of P.G. Wodehouse elsewhere in this site. In fact, after I wrote this entry, I felt this huge compulsion to read more Wodehouse... or more specifically, to re-read more Wodehouse.
Right Ho, Jeeves isn't my favourite (that would be The Code of the Woosters, if you're wondering), but it's pretty damn good. If you're familiar with the Wodehouse pantheon, it features Bertie and Jeeves, natch, as well as Aunt Dahlia, Anatole, Tuppy Glossop, cousin Angela, and the memorable first coupling of Madeline Basset and Gussie Fink-Nottle. Good times!
Microserfs by Douglas Coupland (#24)
This was another re-read, spurred by learning that Coupland's coming out with a sequel (which I will definitely be reading).
I don't care what all the literary reactionaries think: not everything Coupland wrote can be just unilaterally written off. I read Generation X well before the hype and, untainted by popular opinion, I thought it was an excellent book, and probably the first book about my generation that felt even remotely believable.
His subsequent books may have been a mixed bag of hits (Shampoo Planet, All Families Are Psychotic) and misses (Miss Wyoming, Life After God), but even Coupland's weaker efforts can't be summarily dismissed. The dude has a gift for cultural observation and snappy dialogue that deserves respect.
The wild thing about Microserfs is that it's coming up on its ten-year anniversary. (Ten years! I'm freaking out! I'M SO OLD!) Re-reading it was kind of like looking through your parents' old MAD magazines from the '60s: mildly anthropological, full of vicariously embarrassing slang (I-way! Infobahn! Egad!), but still cutely quaint.
Chicken Soup for the Mother's Soul 2 (#25)
I bet you didn't see this one coming. No, I'm not normally one of those people with an appetite for Chicken Soup (did you know there are over 90 of these bad boys on the market, including Chicken Soup for the Baseball Player's Soul, Chicken Soup for the Canadian's Soul, and TWO volumes of Chicken Soup for the Golfer's Soul?).
But I was staying at my mother-in-law's house a month ago, running out of reading material, and hunting for the copy of The Stone Diaries that I loaned her TEN YEARS AGO, and I found this.
First off... there's a sequel?
Second, the cover was an example of some of the most egregiously awful cover art I've seen in some time.
Third, the full title of this book is Chicken Soup for the Mother's Soul 2: More Stories to Open the Hearts and Rekindle the Spirits of Mothers. Now, maybe it's just me, but I get a little ornery at a publisher who's presumptuous enough to tell me exactly how I'm supposed to feel when I read a book (notwithstanding A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which earns a get out of jail free card because at least it was being ironic). I'LL decide if my heart's open and my spirit's rekindled, thank you very much.
Fourth, and in the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you that some of the stories in this book made me cry. So maybe my spirit was a little rekindled. I mean, this collection is no Dropped Threads, (and I could go on and on comparing these two books and what they say about mainstream literary tastes in Canada versus America), but it still manages to give you a little kick or two to the heart area.
So, how many shameful things have I admitted in just this one entry?
- I can't remember storylines to almost every book I've ever read.
- I like Douglas Coupland.
- I also like Dave Eggers.
- I didn't think much of the much-hyped Cloud Atlas.
- And I read one of the Chicken Soup books.
What? You don't have any literary skeletons in your closet?
