January 31st, 2010
There possibly isn’t a woman in this country who does not have a difficult relationship with food. Flick through the women’s mags and you can see a dozen conflicting messages about women, their bodies, their role as mothers and provider of meals, their sex appeal, their health and their role as consumers. After spending serious hairdresser time with these mags I stagger out into the light looking groomed, but my mind is reeling. Of all the evils women must be on alert for at all times the number one is carbohydrates. This may change next decade, but for the moment carbs are as unwelcome as an ancient, incontinent dog on the carpet.
But Italy, Bella Italia, the vessel holding our holiday dreams and desires, is the land of carbohydrate – pasta, bread, gelati, and wine just to name a few. I don’t know the stats on this but from observation visiting Italy, (in villages and non tourist areas), you don’t see many fat people. The descendents of the twentieth century Italian Diaspora living here in Australia and eleswhere are far more likely to be carrying too much flesh. Partly because it was mostly famine plagued Southern Italians who migrated. And for them food had become not only important to live but was invested with huge symbolic significances that were hard to leave behind.
In many Italian communities visiting relatives is the main social occupation, there are protocols to this pastime and if you don’t know them it can become tricky. One is to eat everything you are given if you are a guest – it’s the host’s way of saying ‘you are a valued visitor and I am well off enough to stuff you to the eyeballs’. And if you are the host you must have on hand, at all times, enough food to show you are doing well and can participate in this social exchange. It’s a status thing and all cultures have a variation on the theme. Food is no longer in short supply in Italy, although some areas are still marked by struggle, nor in the US or Australia, but the customs continue, and if you take it all seriously, and wish to maintain a link to the homeland, you feed – and you eat everything offered to you.
So this is one reason for the extra heft, the others are best left to the health planners, but I would offer another reason. One is the size of the serves. Italians in Italy eat small amounts of good food, like the French. In the south they eat masses of vegetables and grains, and pasta is reserved for Sunday or for a small first course before the meat or fish and vegetable course. And by small I mean maybe one and a half cups or less of cooked pasta. They drink wine with the meal – not before and not after. The younger ones might use other mind-altering substances but binge drinking is mainly the preserve of Northern European cultures and their once colonial outposts.
Having a strong culturally determined relationship with food means the forces of modern marketing and industrial food companies have found it hard to get a foothold in Italy. They will inevitably get in there and upsize everything, but the modest amounts eaten at meal times means that a gelati can be eaten and enjoyed in the heat for the evening without lashing ones self with a birch twig and drinking only sprout juice the next day
I like pasta, bread and wine, but my favourite carbohydrate of all is gelati. I don’t like ice cream, it tastes greasy and rich. But gelati, which is milk or fruit based, is lighter and more refreshing. If it’s made with cream it’s not gelati – don’t be fooled. In Italy you can have a dollop of cream on your gelati but why you would do this I’m not sure. And in some cities you can have your gelati between two thick slabs of sweetened bread. This has to be eaten quickly I imagine and I’ve only ever seen young men eating this combination. These blokes are probably perpetually hungry, no matter how much they eat.
A famous American ice cream brand has recently opened its first shop on a beachfront in Sydney. I queued with a friend to taste this new and exotic substance but was sadly disappointed. It was just ice cream with a funky name, huge serves and a big advertising budget. It wasn’t one of those rare moments when you taste something and you know you’ll remember that moment forever. My first taste of the Fiore de Latte flavoured gelati from a small gelataria in the back lanes of Rome was one of those moments. And all ice cream and gelato subsequently will be found wanting – the price you pay for cavorting in carbohydrate Eden.
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January 29th, 2010
The Royal Museum at Naples,
BEING
SOME ACCOUNT OF
THE EROTIC PAINTINGS, BRONZES, AND STATUES
CONTAINED IN THAT FAMOUS
“CABINET SECRET”
BY
COLONEL FANIN.
(Stanislas Marie César Famin, b. 1799 d. 1853)
London
[1871]
Here is the link to the site www.sacred-texts.com where the background and history of what is known as the Royal Museum at Naples Index can be found and the images perused. The ancient Romans were at ease with sex and sexuality and the pictures in the Index are of an ‘adult’ nature, (and thus unable to appear on this chaste and pure website). The copy of the index that appeared in Lily’s shop is, of course, an invention.
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January 26th, 2010
In my past life in the visual arts world I noted – along with thousands of others – that any overtly female artwork, not feminist, but dealing with the business of being of the female gender, was neatly sidelined as ‘women’s art’. Some female students scrambled valiantly to get away from this label because it was the kiss of marginalisation and obscurity. But some embraced it with an enthusiasm and passion usually reserved for the beheading of aristocrats in revolutions.
Sculpture departments in art schools are full of traditional masculine technologies such as woodworking, metalwork, steel, clay and so on. During my time as a student in a sculpture department all the permanent staff were in their men in their forties, (the part timers were female). At the end of each term students would display whatever it was they were working on and the staff, and other students, would gather around for what was termed a critique.
When a female student exhibited a ‘female’ piece of work the tension became unbearable, because criticising these artworks was impossible. The male teaching staff - poor bastards - were being asked to walk through a minefield. Bristling female students held their breath as they anticipated a bloody explosion, but the male students wandered off – it didn’t concern them, it was a chick thing. And anyway, it was ‘women’s art’ – made them a bit squeamish, a bit guilty and a lot bored.
So what’s the point of this little story, I hear you ask. The point is, despite being fifty one per cent of the world’s population, representation of women and their lives is still considered a minority interest, and of lower status than the dominant masculinised culture. New York Times film critic, Manhola Dargis, talks about this problem in regards to Hollywood filmmaking. (Jezebel.com, December 14)
“There’s a reason that women go to movies like Mamma Mia. It’s a terrible movie… but women are starved for representation of themselves. … It’s a vicious cycle. We’re (women) not going to movies because there aren’t movies for us. Therefore we’re not seen as a loyal movie going audience. My point is that if there are stories about women, women will come out for that…
That’s why [women] go to a movie like The Devil Wears Prada and make huge hits. They want to see women in movies. People in the trade press constantly frame that as a surprise. This, gee whiz, Sex and the City’s a hit, Twilight, hmm, wonder what’s going on here. Maybe they should not be so surprised. In the trade press, women audiences are considered a niche. How is that even possible? We’re 51 percent of the audience.”
To generalise, women are interested in stories about relationships between people. In popular culture romance and women’s fiction are invariably focussed on relationships both within the family and beyond, how woman negotiate these relationships and how individual women find a place in our society. These books represent us to ourselves – larger than life, sure, but with a core of truth that we recognise. However these books are marginalised, and in the case of romance, trivialised and stigmatised.
A relative of mine can’t get his head around the fact that I’ve chosen to write romantic comedy. The word ‘romantic’ sticks in his throat. He just can’t understand why an overeducated, intelligent western woman would be writing such things.
And I’ll tell you why – Australian author and academic Bronwyn Parry describes romantic fiction as having four main characteristics – a concern with relationships, with the emotional arc or journey of the characters, affirming the power of love and with an optimistic ending. I’m interested in relationships, I’m interested in exploring emotions, I know happy endings don’t mirror reality but people like to be uplifted occasionally. And I do believe in the transformational power of love – not in some queasy pink Hallmark way, but as a human who has had lovers, children, partners, friends and parents, and seen love at work. Everybody is, or has been, on a journey toward intimacy with another human being – it’s not a minority experience.
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January 20th, 2010
Ennui and schadenfreude are what linguists would call loan words. We English speakers pinched them from the French and the Germans respectively because they are just too good not to use.
Tolstoy described ennui as a ‘desire for desires’. As a word it carries much more glamour than the approximate word in English – bored. The woman was too bored to do anything, versus the woman on the couch was filled with ennui. The latter sentence has a story somewhere, a touch of decadence, a hint of wistfulness and a jaded, over sophisticated glamour to it. The former sentence speaks of one who lacks motivation, imagination and perhaps has uncouth personal habits.
And schadenfreude – pleasure in others misfortune. Another word stuffed with shades and nuance. The Wikipedia article on schadenfreude mentions the Latin equivalent – delectatio morosa or in English, ‘morose delectation’. As a phrase it doesn’t quite have the same flavour, although it’s quite delightful in itself. Apparently it was a sin in the medieval church to ‘dwell with delectation on evil thoughts,’ but I imagine that didn’t stop people.
As they say, so much is lost in translation. Nothing is more irritating than watching a French or German film using subtitles with a companion who is a fluent speaker of either language – they sit next to you, snorting and tittering, then lean over and tell you the subtitles are only rudimentary and the subtleties cannot be conveyed without knowing the language.
I’ve been dwelling on thoughts of translation at the moment. I’m reading a book by a French writer and although I don’t know for sure, I think much has been skewed by the translation. It doesn’t read well in areas and I can only assume that the translation is at fault. But the translator, as noted on the book, is an academic and prize winning translator. So what is going wrong? Either I’m being too picky, or too generous to the writer. Some of the scenes involve the characters using dialect, colloquialisms and slang. The translator appears to have used American and sometimes British colloquial speech to stand for French and it just doesn’t work – for me anyway.
The book is not literature and I doubt learned scholars will debate the author’s meaning for years at a time. In today’s publishing climate I’d imagine the publishing house that bought the rights would offer the translation job to various experts and the result accepted as good enough. Or would another editor go over the translation - one who spoke both English and French and suggest alternatives? It could become lengthy and expensive if that were the case.
I recently listened to a radio program about two translators, an older couple - husband and wife - one French, one Russian, who live in Paris and are currently working on a new translation of War and Peace. The woman noted it was not uncommon for them to debate the meaning of a word all afternoon. How glorious. I could hear the slow tick of a wooden clock, see old couches and a sun dappled floor, the busy streets of Paris outside, the cacophony of mobile phones echoing everywhere, and these two, with perhaps coffee and a small glass of cognac beside them, deep in thought and conversation about a word. Now this is the sort of treatment War and Peace deserves. French thrillers probably get translators with serious work habits, less poetic natures and a liking for instant coffee.
Random House in Germany has bought the Book of Love’s translation rights. What they come up with will no doubt be a good translation. But I wouldn’t be able to tell, because I don’t speak German. I’m not too worried about it, I’ll simply assume that the translator gets it right and the book, with my name on it, makes sense to the readers.
This year, for various reasons and simply for the challenge, I am attempting to learn French, with the aim, eventually, of being able to read French novels. The idea of such an effort of mind being put toward a seemingly trivial pursuit appeals to me enormously.
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“The great novel of the Napoleon excursion into Russia is brought to all its glory by the veteran translators who have been methodically slashing their way through the Russian classics. Their deft work with both Russian and French (Russian nobility spoke primarily French) is a remarkable feat. When I asked my editor, the worldly wonderful Beena Kamlani at Penguin, whether I should read this, she replied, “It will make you glad to have been alive in order to be able to read this.”
Robb Spillman, TinHouse Publishing Blog
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January 17th, 2010
I’m hard at work on finishing my current writing project and have very little space in my mind left for other activities. Anti social? Yes, but that’s the way it is for writers – and indeed for anyone who works for themselves. So instead of posting new pieces this month I’m going to have a sort of ‘best of’ from the early days of this blog.
This first piece – ‘Choosing the Right Word’ was selected by Harper Collins Fifth Estate website for re-blogging in June 2009.
I am busy engaging in the old must-sharpen-pencils-before-I-can-write strategy. Procrastination, as it is commonly known. But as I write on a laptop, I don’t need the pencils. Perhaps I could check my email – there might be something interesting or urgent waiting for me. Or I could look slightly to the left and stare out the window. Or I could look up the meaning of ‘procrastinate’. May as well know the exact meaning of my current state of mind.
I am, according to the Dictionary.com site, deferring action, and delaying until an opportunity is lost. My 1911 copy of the Oxford English dictionary goes one step further and accuses me of being dilatory. I dilated even further when I dug up my trusty 1952 copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, and I discovered that to engage in procrastination could also be described as engaging in Fabian Tactics.
Fabian Tactics? This could lead to some excellent procrastination.
I nipped over to Wikipedia, despite having an ancient set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. To get out of my chair and walk into the living room, pull down the index and find the entry on the Fabian Society, replace the index and find the relevant volume is just too much like hard work, and possibly against the spirit of Fabian Tactics.
The Fabian Society, according to Wikipedia is ‘a British intellectual socialist movement whose purpose is to advance the principles of Social Democracy via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary means’.
So where does the procrastination come in? To be reformist is not deferring action. I was missing something. On reading further I discovered the Fabians to be named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, nicknamed, (beware transposing those letters…) ‘Cunctator,’ meaning The Delayer, whose battle strategy consisted of the guerrilla tactics of harassment rather than direct confrontation on the battlefield.
It is true that I am not approaching my writing task in a confrontational way, but nor am I conducting guerrilla warfare with it. The term Fabian Tactics proved not be the definition I was after and I returned to Thesaurus where I discovered I was, by procrastinating, indulging in ‘masterly inactivity’, ‘fribbling’ or – thank you Quintus Fabius, ‘cunctating.’
The opportunity to procrastinate is one to savour. But I went one step further back to the old word ‘leisure,’ yesterday and went to bed for the afternoon with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Be not alarmed, jaded reader, I speak of the newly released Penguin edition in the recognisable orange black and white cover. The covers hark back, (clever Penguin marketing people), to a slower time, a time when choosing a book was not an act decided by a visceral attraction to the cover image.
To pry myself away from the screen and re educate myself in reading has become a compelling obsession for me lately. The screen brings anxiety, brings demands, brings urgency. The book allows me to escape.
I am also about to re engage in an old technology – writing a letter with pen and paper. A novel and charming idea. Imagine the freedom, to squiggle and draw, to scrawl when I want and to do perfect modified cursive if I want. To sketch a little picture next to my words and to not have to master thirty computer programs in order to do so. One drawback. Once written, it can’t be changed. No going back and editing, no cut and paste, no second chances. Get it right first time or not at all.
My father spent the second half of his working life in a position that required him to write long, detailed legal decisions. Despite his assistants and staff all using computers, he would write his decisions in longhand. When asked by me, completely bemused by how he did it without Word, he replied, that he thought about each sentence before he wrote it.
I raised my eyebrows and nodded slowly. Simple question, simple answer.
To write and get it right first time is a challenging concept. My father used an A4 notepad and ballpoint pen and worked on a desk free of clutter. He never used correcting fluid and prided himself on the evenness of his handwriting. (You can imagine what our family dinners were like.)
My handwriting lurches from hastily scrawled printing to illegible and all variations in between. And it deteriorates the more I use a keyboard. When I write handwritten notes my hand grips the pen in an unsteady way, like an accident victim learning to walk again.
I have read, where I don’t know, that writers working on computers tend to become more ‘wordy.’ One would expect from that observation that handwriting a book favoured an economy of style, and yet to read a nineteenth century novel is to experience ‘wordy’ sometimes to exasperating excess.
Did Anthony Trollope cunctate when faced with writing Barchester Towers at 200,372 words? To produce a manuscript of 85, 000 words I have written perhaps 200,000. I whittle away, replace, add a bit, cut, cut more, cut another chunk, until I am satisfied, and it is a long process despite the ease computers lend to writing. Whereas Trollope might have had to get it right first time - by gaslight with pen, nib and notebook. And yet I, with all my modern tools, am still dilating and cunctating. But Trollope’s readers had the leisure for his lengthy books, and my readers, like me, can only steal fragments of leisure in between answering phones, emails, social networking messages, twittering, exhaustion and those gorgeous moments where they allow themselves to cunctate.
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January 14th, 2010
Striped image via Style Bubble
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January 13th, 2010
Melbourne Writers Festival
I’ve been told that there is not a lot that I can personally do to sell my book. Yes, there will be a launches, some magazine interviews and maybe radio and other things to do, but basically the story will, or will not, sell itself.
As a debut author I’m not that interesting, and I’m glad this is so. If this was my tenth book, maybe, if I was a celebrity, definitely, if my book were non-fiction, possibly. You see, you will get hours of entertainment from my book, but not from me. I’d start to yawn, or wander off, or pick up a magazine or want to talk all about the mysteries of poultry keeping. And my private life is about as interesting as anybody else’s – which means not very, except to friends and family.
At lunch the other day a friend asked me, ‘Why are writers so boring when you meet them?’ I choked and spluttered on my glass of wine and then laughed. Does Bruce Willis go around punching people? Is Jerry Seinfeld a barrel of laughs all the time? No to both questions - so why should we writers be as interesting as our books?
What does make a person interesting? For me, usually it’s not what they’ve done but how they frame it themselves, the connections they make, the choices they’ve made and the obstacles they’ve overcome. But not everybody is forthcoming with these introspections, and many don’t have the language or the temperament for such analysis anyway. And I have no right to their inner life. If they choose to share, that’s different. But you can’t access a writer’s inner life at a cocktail party, writers festival or indeed, ever. And why should they let you anyway?
I have always disliked writer’s festivals because I don’t want to see the writers, I don’t want to hear them read from their book – I can do that myself. What does interest me is the creative journeys they were on – how and why they wrote what they did. That can be fascinating. But it’s rarely spoken of. I find artist’s notebooks more interesting than the finished piece sometimes, and I know actors have to criss cross the world promoting their films – but occasionally I’d like to hear the film designer, or the costumes mistress and hear about how they solved the creative problems they came across. I’d love to have access to manuscript edits on my favourite books to see where things were changed and why – far more interesting than the personage of the writer.
The thing is though, is that in this world our lives are increasingly public, particularly because of the Internet. Information about the individual is easier to get. Unless the aim of this is nefarious, I can’t really see the point. But I know there are certain obligations that come with putting a piece of work in the public space; one has to accept that and then draw the line.
So if someone enjoys my book and wants to know how it came about, I’m happy to talk, but only about that. Me personally? Boring and off limits. Me socially? Good for a laugh, a few drinks, then I’m off. My book? Funny, full of suspense, great characters and good value at twice the price.
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January 10th, 2010
Hanging Dresses image via Pony and Pink blogspot
Teacup and Rose image by Annalisa Feleppa
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Ice Cream Imposters
for a good feed ...
