"The dog marriage season"

Suzanne Sternthal on Moscow's stray dog population (FT site registration required).

Devastation

Images of destruction and recovery from the students of Haiti's Ciné Institute.

Pistachio

These truly look like the most delicious things on earth. (Link courtesy of Wendy.)

"Aamon, Abigor, Abracace, Adramelech"

At Bookforum, Albert Mobilio on Umberto Eco's Infinity of Lists (site registration required).

Bloater paste

At the Guardian, Tim Hayward on the perils of nostalgia for childhood foods:

Meat and fish pastes are still around. They exist in a weird little timewarp of forgotten but much-loved Victorian prepared foods along with corned beef, custard powder and tinned meat pies. We should be thinking fondly of them, potted ox-cheek, brown shrimp, rabbit and haddock pepper the menus of every Mod Brit restaurant in the country - achingly fashionable statements of thrift and authenticity. We should even doff our hats at the cooking method. Pastes are actually cooked inside those little pop-top jars - the same way as the foie gras or rillettes we disloyally rush to buy on trips to French supermarkets. Should you doubt me, read Sue Shepard's masterful work on the subject; 'Pickled, Potted and Canned' which isn't subtitled 'How meat paste created the British Empire' but should have been.

The world's first sex robot?

"Sex only goes so far - then you want to be able to talk to the person."

Convergences

A lovely review of Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century at the website of the British Society for Literature and Science.

On the road

I've been traveling a bit - Florida is freezingly cold, but I was Keeper for a Day at Busch Gardens, threw fish into a pelican's beak, tipped 'chunk meat' into troughs for various birds to feed on, laid out 'flakes' of hay for giraffes and various other exotic hoofstock, saw baby kangaroos and wallabies bottle-fed and held a two-toed sloth in my arms - it was amazing feeling it sort of hook itself onto me and suspend itself in a supremely lazy and incredibly efficient fashion! (Here is a picture, not mine, of the sloth in question.)

Light reading catch-up:

The four novels by Octavia Butler collected in Seed to Harvest are really extraordinary - very unusual, very good, very much what I really enjoy reading. There is something about her writing that reminds me, though on the face of it they are entirely different, of the stories of Edward P. Jones - both have developed quite unusual techniques in order to capture something of the sheer duration of slavery and the way it has affected human lives. I've read three or four of Butler's other books, but it seems to me it would be worth really going back to everything and reading through in order - I wouldn't mind writing a short thing about her one of these days.

Hit the Waldenbooks in the Tampa shopping mall yesterday for some emergency light reading, I had brought a novel by Stendhal with me but found I was not in the mood! Plucked a few crime novels from the bargain shelves - Robert Crais's The Two-Minute Rule (very good, because everything he writes is very good, but perhaps not my absolute favorite of his) and P. D. James's The Lighthouse. There is one scene late in the book (it involves rock-climbing) that I thought was electrifyingly well-written; the rest of the book was a bit blah. I read her more recent one a few weeks ago, too, that is to say The Private Patient: for the first four or five chapters, I was thinking to myself something like "Why am I always speaking so disparagingly of P.D. James and how much I hate her recent novels? This isn't half bad!" But I grew increasingly weary of the way she 'follows' different characters - they all seem to have exactly the same texture of thought, and it is an essentially falsifying way of representing human subjectivity and human life, it irks me! Also, of course, my main source of irk (other than the slight pretentiousness and dominant upper-middle-class certainty of the writing - I can't read Ian McEwan these days either...) is the tiresome Adam Dalgliesh - faced with the conundrum of whether to age him into retirement or arrest his development even as time moved forward, James chose the latter option, but it has left her with a completely implausible creation, a time-traveler from another generation who simply could not exist in the present day in his present incarnation without seeming a much more peculiar and anomalous figure than he was initially meant to be.

(And I saw the Sherlock Holmes movie yesterday - very enjoyable - and Avatar last week - first hour and a half much more transporting than the absurd political developments of the last forty-five minutes, and certainly the texture of the film is much superior to the storytelling itself - but it is good to unwind a bit from the stresses of last semester, though I guess I still have a ways further to go!)

Small worlds

Lovely miniature worlds crafted from ordinary materials and objects and photographed by Matthew Albanese (via The Rumpus).

Caption: "Paprika Mars. Made out of 12 pounds paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, chili powder and charcoal"

Iced buns

From the Guardian slideshow based on "A Visual History of Cookery":

Caption:

A coloured engraving of various cakes, from Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. The picture shows 1. Eclairs 2. Assorted fancy pastry 3. Sponge Savoy cake 4. Gâteau St. Honoré 5. Simnel Cake 6. Pancakes

Light reading catch-up

I haven't read much recently, but should be coming into a nice stretch of reading and blogging a bit more prolifically.

I happened to be passing my local public library just after Xmas and saw it was open, popped in to see what I could glean from the shelves - mostly a load of RUBBISH, it turned out.

I enjoyed James Lee Burke's The Tin Roof Blowdown (incredibly depressing to think about Katrina and its aftermath), Mercedes Lackey's Foundation (generic and not particularly well-written, but I like this kind of book - I think Lackey is somewhat inferior to Anne McCaffrey and Marion Zimmer Bradley, but I usually find her books worth reading in any case as they are so much the sort of thing I enjoy), Jennifer Weiner's Best Friends Forever (highly readable, but not so much my kind of thing - alas, the jokey mystery is not a favorite of mine - I am not a Susan Isaacs fan, either).

The other books in the pile were so drivelly that I could not finish any of 'em, it made me wonder how people can stand to either read or write such simple-minded things (I just about skimmed my way to the end of this, but I had to put this aside without finishing it - surely the early books in the series were far better?!? - and I found this nigh unreadable.)

On the plane down to Cayman, I read another of Morag Joss's books, Funeral Music; well-written, but somewhat preposterous in the plotting and I am also not crazy about the mildly satirical orientation towards the characters.

I also started rereading (and finished over the next day or so) Mary Renault's pair of novels about Alexander the Great. I really love Renault's novels, I grew up reading them (along with Robert Graves of course) - I picked these two up from my mother's house over Xmas after my friend and former student Julia Hoban mentioned one of them and reminded me how much I liked them when I was younger.

Fire from Heaven seems to me much less good than I remembered - it is written in the third person, unusually for Renault, and it is a voice that works much less well for her than the first. Rosemary Sutcliffe did this sort of thing much better in half-a-dozen of her books. But The Persian Boy is wonderful!

I read an amazingly good novel the other day, I would give it a very strong recommendation indeed and was surprised I had not heard more about it when it came out (but perhaps I just wasn't paying attention, 2009 was a year of having my mind on other things than literary fiction!). It is Michelle Huneven's Blame, and I truly loved it - beautifully written, both the characters and the setting are really wonderfully well-rendered and the book itself (it is the vein of Kate Christensen and Sigrid Nunez) is actually quite spectacularly good in an understated way.

Another good one (on a totally different note - I was combing the piles of unread books in my apartment the night before I left for Cayman and trying to find appealing things to take with me to read!): Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood. A one-joke book, but it is a very good joke, and beautifully well-executed. Also, one of the best cover designs I've seen in ages!

Rogue sociology

Just finished a really wonderful book, Loïc Wacquant's Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. I cannot now remember where I heard about this book (presumably it was cited in something else I must have been reading to do with sport, re: my obsession with swimming and techniques of the body), but it was excellent indeed. How can I never have read Bourdieu's "Program for a Sociology of Sport"? Hmmm, if I weren't so obsessed with language, I would have to be a sociologist instead of a literary critic, this particular kind of sociology is almost the most interesting thing I can think of...

(Swimming and boxing have a good deal in common - and one of the wonders of the modern world is that although I am sitting in a lounge at the Owen Roberts International Airport in Grand Cayman I have just pulled up an interesting reference from Wacquant, Daniel F. Chambliss's "The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on STratification and Olympic Swimmers"...)

Anyway, here is my favorite bit, the meat of the book:

[S]parring is not only a physical exercise; it is also the means and support of a particularly intense form of "emotion work." Because "few lapses of self-control are punished as immediately and severely as loss of temper during a boxing bout" [ED. That is Konrad Lorenz], it is vital that one dominate at all times the impulses of one's affect. In the squared circle, one must be capable of managing one's emotions and know, according to the circumstances, how to contain or repress them or, on the contrary, how to stir and swell them; how to muzzle certain feelings (of anger, restiveness, frustration) so as to resist the blows, provocations, and verbal abuse dished out by one's opponent, as well as the "rough tactics" he may resort to (hitting below the belt or with his elbows, head-butting, rubbing his gloves into your eyes or over a facial cut in order to open it further, etc.); and how to call forth and amplify others (of aggressiveness or "controlled fury," for instance) at will while not letting them get out of hand.

...

To learn how to box is to imperceptibly modify one's bodily schema, one's relation to one's body and to the uses one usually puts it to, so as to internalize a set of dispositions that are inseparably mental and physical and that, in the long run, turn the body into a virtual punching machine, but an intelligent and creative machine capable of self-regulation while innovating within a fixed and relatively restricted panoply of moves as an instantaneous function of the actions of the opponent in time. The mutual imbrication of corporeal dispositions and mental dispositions reaches such a degree that even willpower, morale, determination, concentration, and the control of one's emotions change into so many reflexes inscribed within the organism. In the accomplished boxer, the mental becomes part of the physical and vice versa; body and mind function in total symbiosis.

"We're really circumspect"

My favorite thing about the "Lunch with the FT" feature is seeing how each particular interviewer integrates discussion of the food with interviewee profiling, and I would say that William Leith does a very good and funny job interviewing Susie Orbach (FT site registration required):

“Take Rankin. He’s a fantastic photographer. He’s shot women of different sizes, and they look spectacular. They have glamour, they have pizzazz, they have that sense of, ‘Oh, that’s me!’ He’s taken pictures of people who were paraplegic who were very very stylish. So art directors are geniuses. And something happens in the visual cortex. What these art directors do affects us, and goes into us.”

Something is happening in my visual cortex. It is the waiter. We need to order, and quickly. Time is rushing by. Orbach orders a soup of Jerusalem artichokes to start – and another starter, a plate of scallops. No main course. She also orders a green salad. I go for Dorset crab, followed by halibut on a bed of vegetables, and a side order of dauphinoise potatoes.

Bagatelles pour un massacre

At the NYRB, Wyatt Mason considers Céline's anti-Semitism:

The language is, indeed, alive. In French particularly one registers the profound technical gift Céline possessed, his ability to sew vernacular into his syntactically exacting prose, prose Simon de Beauvoir called "a new instrument: writing as alive as speech." But the theme played on that instrument—"The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death"—one repeated in book after book, is shallow and simpleminded. To read any single novel by Céline is to receive, in a bracing style, a hysterical primer on the abjection of being. To read them all is to register a unique species of racism: a hatred not of particular elements of humanity but of the human race as a whole. Thus Jean Giono said of Céline's writing, "If Céline had truly believed what he wrote, he would have killed himself."

The 2000s

At the Guardian, a celebration of some writers who died in the last decade: lots there of interest, including Geoff Dyer on W. G. Sebald and Ian Rankin on Muriel Spark.

When I find time to look back through the year's archives, I'll probably post a "favorites of 2009" list, though I don't think I read much this past year - 2010 should be a good year for reading, though...