Adventures

No more tears

I made a comment on twitter today (yeah, I know, what’s new?) and it flew directly out of my heart into cyber-space.

@ I haven't got any tears left. They are all gone. @
@stellaorbit
Stella Orbit

It caused a ripple of consternation. What do you mean you can’t cry? Did it mean I was happier than I’d ever been, or that I was exhausted? Are tears finite? Like heartbeats are rumoured to be. You have an allocated quota the romantic notion goes, and then you have no more. Your heart stops. Your tears too, could be finite? Read More

There be monsters – in praise of wild things and the darkness of childhood

‘Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!’

Maurice Sendak died this week. As a child, his books were like sacred objects, which to me, is against the spirit of his work completely. Not only did I have to wash my hands before I touched them, I was not allowed to pore over these books without supervision. This is because almost all the copies we had were hardbacks, neatly covered in opaque library plastic, carefully hoarded by my teacher-librarian mother and protected by her from the sticky, dirty, page bending hands of children. They are even now, more than 30 years later, still in pristine condition; withstanding three children and five grandchildren.

As an adult, with my own sticky, dirty, page bending, book chewing child, this makes me incredibly sad. So I let him have them, all of them. And they are all paperbacks, and if we have to have two copies of each to see us through his childhood, then so be it.

Of course, being forbidden, only increased their cachet. More than once, I read them on the quiet, hoping I wouldn’t get sprung. Aside from being well looked after, they were also beautiful and subversive books, featuring imagery and themes, seldom dealt with in children’s literature.

I still remember the mild scandal that erupted about In the Night Kitchen, which features Mickey’s naked bottom, not to mention the rest of him. This was the cause of some consternation among librarians, although it was fair to say not my mother, who had bought it for the school library. In The Night Kitchen deals with falling into the dark, and indeed the bakers all have strangely even, square and short moustaches. The oven imagery is thinly veiled, in my opinion, and Sendak confirmed in interviews, that the references are indeed a comment on the Holocaust. Much more concerning you would think, than a naked bum or the full frontal Mickey.

A baby is snatched away by goblins in Maurice Sendak's Outside Over There. The beloved author and illustrator — who took a darker approach to children's storytelling — died Tuesday at the age of 83.

A baby is snatched away by goblins in Outside Over There. Image: Harper Collins.

Outside Over There, less well-known than Where the Wild Things Are, features incredibly distracted parental figures, who so preoccupied with themselves and their love, leave their eldest daughter in charge of her younger sibling. Young Ida is initially no match for the goblins who kidnap her baby sister while she plays her wonder horn. An allegory for children everywhere, that sometimes you just have to fix it yourself and be courageous and brave. Rescuing your little sister, what higher achievement could you wish? The dark themes of this book have so far washed over my toddler, although he recognises that the baby is in trouble and needs saving. In the middle where the illustrations are of all the crying babies the goblins have kidnapped, he shouts loudly about how sad they are.

I let him have Higglety Pigglety Pop! too. Subtitled There must be more to life, it tells the story of a dog called Jennie who has everything, but is desperately unhappy. It is the story of how having everything handed to you can make you unhappy, and that to be fulfilled, you need to pursue your own dreams – even if that means saving baby from being eaten by the lion and joining ‘The World Mother Goose Theatre’. This book too, features distracted, ill-attentive adults. In Higglety Pigglety Pop, the parents of the baby move house, and forget to take her with them. It is a book for older children, and yet despite the density of the text, the story carries Benedict along, just not in a single sitting, yet.

Sendak understood how frightening childhood could be, how images and ideas, without comprehension of context, could loom large; being considered wild, being naked and having grand plans, could all get you into trouble with adults. Could lead to being sent to bed, which for some children was a blessing, as it meant getting out of eating your dinner, a torture all of its own. The sadness a child feels when she realises that these adults have no idea what they are doing, is a sadness that never leaves a person. What Sendak’s books give you is a sense that it doesn’t matter if the world is a confusing mess, you can work it all out for yourself and that sometimes the monsters are just that little bit closer than you imagine.

Amanda Katz writes in an essay for NPR books, that it is the adults who are scared of Sendak’s books, not the children. She writes:

‘Meanwhile, he [Sendak] reminds adults — even those of us who were once those young and fascinated readers, but who are grown now — to trust our children, who may in the end be less fearful of climbing outside than we are to watch them do it.’

Fortunately, while my mother was over-protective of the precious books, she let us climb out of the windows and be wild things. Sendak reminds us, and we need reminding, that children need to be wild, they need to allowed to express themselves, and tell their stories, even when these stories are too difficult for adults to hear.

‘I knew terrible things, but I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew … it would scare them.’

Cooking and Love

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10, 000 hour rule. No matter how clever you are, if you really want to be good at something, you have to practice. And practice. And practice. In short, according to Gladwell and others, you need to accumulate 10, 000 hours of time at a task to really master it. 10, 000 hours is over 400 days straight. So by ordinary application, it’s full days for a few years. Or some practice, every day, over several years.

My 10, 000 hours are accumulated in two things. Cooking and writing.

First to the writing. It is the easier to account for. Two degrees one after another, both involving a great deal of writing. One involving a ‘substantial contribution to scholarship’ and a big fat dissertation. Collectively, this took over 12 years of writing every day, almost. There were a few days when I didn’t write, but not many.

The second of my 10, 000 hours, cooking has taken longer to accumulate. I started when I could reach the bench. My first cook book was a large format 1979 Ladybird book called We Can Cook it featured animal character cartoons as illustrations. It had a fruit cake recipe, which I made and foisted on people.

We Can Cook (Board Book)

I wish I still had that book. I cooked often for my whole family and by my early teens could be relied upon to turn out dinner for us all when required. We had a fuel stove, so before you could cook, you had to attend to the fire. This taught me a lot about preparation.

Yesterday, I was reading Charlotte Wood’s food blog How to shuck an oyster and I read two great pieces that I wanted to comment on, but was concerned about essay length blog comments. The first is about a book I really want to read by Julian Barnes and the second, is about Conflict in the Kitchen and power struggles between couples when cooking for other people. These two pieces resonated with me together as much as separately.

Cooking as Conversation is a ‘review’ of sorts of Julian Barnes’ book entitled, Pedant in the Kitchen. Charlotte quotes from the book;

‘The result of all this…is that while I now cook with enthusiasm and pleasure, I do so with little sense of freedom or imagination. I need an exact shopping list and an avuncular cookbook.’

What is interesting to me here, is as Charlotte says, he is expressing his true nature. Barnes is a pedant, a nick picker and a bit not self-sensoring. It struck me right there that this what Robert is like when he cooks. This is how he cooks. Not so much the lacking in imagination, but more the requirement for precise instructions, and everything exactly as it says in the book. Almost always, when he cooks, it looks precisely like the picture. It is delicious and wonderful. But it is not fast, it is not spontaneous and there is always a mountain of washing up.

It is also, the complete opposite of how he does almost everything else. And it’s not like he doesn’t have his 10, 000 hours up. After all, years of working in cafes, sandwich shops and making pancakes for a living, as well as cooking for his family, have easily seen him meet the challenge. Perhaps it is this experience of cooking on a large scale, of the necessity of getting it right to earn money, that lead to his technique and approach.

In fact, in the kitchen, it is like we both are our mirror selves. Robert gets precise, and adheres to a script as if the meal depends on it. Even recipes he has made hundreds of times, he nearly always looks it up. I am completely the opposite. And this is in some way the opposite of myself too.

I make it up. If you open the fridge and want something for dinner, I am your woman. I can pull stuff together out of seemingly thin air. Robert would be off down the shops, with a list in his hand. And in that time I could have made the pasta. Spontaneous, making do, cutting corners to get a more efficient result, adapting recipes as I go to shorten the time taken, to chop out the faffing around.

This brings me to a second piece from How to shuck an oyster, Conflict in the Kitchen. We have, as a couple, had some conflict about who is going to cook when, who cooks the show pieces and who does the work-a-day meals. In our house we have very difference approaches and different skills, most of them complementary. I never have to make pastry again, for to do so would be a total waste of time, so good is Robert’s. But when it comes to the crunch of churning out weekday meals, it is just easier and faster if I do it. I am fond of spending a relaxing few hours on a Sunday making dishes for the week to keep things easy. Robert would just head to the shops every day.

Dinner parties cause conflict, especially in the planning phase. We fight over what to have. We disagree about the menu. We argue about the tried and true versus the opportunity to make something new or different. It would be nice if we could work together, share, make love on the kitchen floor, but our competitive natures won’t let us. Our egos fight it out. We argue. We clutch our favourite books, shouting menu suggestions across the house.

And then Robert trumps me. ‘I’ll get the fish kettle out.’ As soon as he says that, I opt out. I go and find candles and polish glass ware. ‘What am I supposed to make if you are going to poach a whole bloody salmon?’

All of it comes from love. All of it comes from the joy of making something delicious. But make no mistake, it’s a fight to the death. Whose cuisine will reign supreme?

9 February 2008 - Party Salmon photo Robert Gotts

To buy Charlotte’s new book Love and Hunger click here

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Soup’s on – Tuscan bean soup

It’s true, I am blogging another recipe. I am sharing this firstly, because it is totally delicious and you should immediately make it as soon as the weather gets cool, Canberra I am looking at you, and secondly, because nice people asked me to.

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Work together; just add salt.

I just used the last jar of preserved lemon that Robert and I made in 2008. We made maybe 10 size 20 Vacola jars of preserved lemon. We had kilos and kilos of lemons. It was our first large cooking project together. In 2008 I rented a house in Curtin. It had an old garden that was full of treasure. Read More

I find that I am now 39

It was my birthday, last week, and I decided it was about time I had a birthday party. Haven’t had one (well a proper one) since about 1995, so waste not a moment more I thought. A practice go for next year.

It has been the wettest summer in Canberra for years and years. Naturally I planned an outside garden cocktail party. And naturally it started raining at 2-30pm and by 7pm we’d had another 30mm of rain. My minions slaved away with tarps and portable heaters, 4 million helium balloons and candles, while I tried in vain to get the toddler to keep out of the water, eat his dinner, and stop setting fire to things!

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Rain

Toddler and I

Under the same umbrella.

His arms tightly around my neck

His face pressed against my cheek.

Cool water drip down my neck, as the umbrella shifts while he cranes to see a passing dog.

Drinking our tiny little coffees – froth for him, piccolo for me, we watch the passers pass.

 

Puddles

Dear Blog, sorry for ignoring you, Love Me.

Three people asked me about my blog in late December. One of them is a pretty important person in our town and two of them I see often; when I go to work. I talked animatedly to each of them about my blog, what I write about, and how much I love it. I did however feel like a bit of a fraud; as I mentally calculated how long it has been since I actually written a post.

For the whole of November and some of October before that, I was obsessed about NaNoWriMo. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. Every Tuesday, I sat at Lonsdale Street Roasters (coffee heaven, hello everyone) and wrote and drank coffee til my bum went numb on the hard chair. I then went home and wrote some more, on a more comfortable chair.

Racking 'em up!

I ignored most other things. I tried not to get distracted. I still had to work three days a week. I still went to yoga, I went to the shops. But I didn’t watch tv, I didn’t garden much, and I certainly ignored my family more often than normal. My patient and kind Robert, looked after the children. Both the big and the little were restless, filled with end of year angsty tiredness.

Cheers

It quickly moved from celebrating NaNo victory to mad christmas and December rush. We have a lot of December birthdays in our family and immediate circle – a lot. Every spare moment I was buying gifts, wrapping, sending acceptances, thank you notes. We made Christmas cakes, and puddings, and then mince tarts. And ice-cream. After being away last year, and labouring away the year before, it was like we were cramming three years of christmas into one. We had visitors, we went visiting. Frankly, while some of it was very enjoyable and some of it hilarious (especially Christmas eve when the carefully set kettle BBQ went out after half an hour, necessitating a few changes of plan and then later due to extreme drunkenness we forgot to cook the potatoes) it was totally exhausting.

So here we are in early January. I am half-way through a significant milestone. I have enrolled in a yoga intensive for this week. Two classes per day for five days. This is much more important than it looks because of what it represents. For me, this week is about bringing myself back to a position where I can move on. And it is hard. My muscles remember how much work it takes. I know the poses, I know what it feels like to do so many classes. I used to do it all the time. Then I stopped. And I shouldn’t have left it. I should have made myself go, had more courage to overcome the fear of changing schools and leaving my familiar and-well loved teachers from Sydney.

Sydney Yoga Space Intensive 2006

I am back now. Back on the mat. Significantly, my past experience is assisting me. What is so significant about yoga for me, is that it gives me back control of myself. It helps my body become strong and relaxed, it gives me mental and emotional space from my responsibilities and it allows me to feel good about my outer shell, as well as my inner world which it is easier for me to feel good about.

NaNoWriMo Update

Day 20 has just passed. My word count is up over the 30 000 word line. It is starting to look like the downhill slide.

The denouement is creeping closer. I am carefully setting the scene for the fall and resolution.

I have had some pretty huge writing days. At least three days over the month I have written over 5ooo. Another few I have written over 3000. I did not keep my promise to myself to write everyday. The delicious progress bar chart on the NaNo site has little steps in the middle of most weeks where I didn’t progress at all. On my least productive day I wrote 25 words. A long sentence. That was it.

As I press on for the last 10 days (eek!) as I pass 35 000 and then 45 000, I have to keep reminding myself that not every page will be great but that it exists at all is great. I look forward to the race to the finish line. Not least of all because they maybe, just maybe be champagne waiting when I cross it.

I am learning an enormous amount about the writing craft during this challenge.  Here is a sample of the lessons. (Any seasoned writers reading this, please turn the page now, before I fall in your esteem.)

1. Dialogue is hard to write. Actually, good dialogue is hard to write.

2. You need an infinite variety of synonyms for ‘quietly’ or ‘softly’ if your characters are whispering to each other a lot. (Mine are)

3. My characters spend a lot of time with their faces pressed up against the glass looking out – at the view, at the skyline, at the planes. They are always doing it! Is this normal?

4. If you write with action in both hemispheres at once, map out what season it is at any point first. So confusing. I am sure that these sections will need editing, a lot of editing.

5. You need to keep checking your character’s motivations, clarifying point of view. Would she really say that? Is she just not going to answer the phone?

6. Some word, that you don’t often have to type are really hard to spell and look all wrong when you type them; meringue for example.

7. Sometimes the writing is easy, it comes out and flows well. Sometimes it is torture to sit at the desk for one more minute writing what you know is essential description but so boring that you’d rather stick a pencil in your eye that write one more word about the departure lounge at Heathrow. (For the record I just stopped; the plane took off, scene finished, job done.)

The Versatile Blogger

Too long has passed since I was honoured by lovely Jennifer Smart over at A Sampler with a Versatile Blogger Award.

Acceptance of this award comes with the following conditions; one, I am to tell you seven interesting facts about myself, and two, I share with you fifteen blogs that I have discovered. Without any further delay then, here are some facts and some great blogs you should check out.

 

Seven interesting facts about me

1. I hold a PhD in philosophy.

2. I like stripey things – especially clothes.

3. I love red lipstick and I have many of them; all of them are blue based red.

4. Once I played the piano in a competition in the Cremone Hayden Orpheum.

5. I love rosé. It will never be unfashionable to me.

6. I have read Ulysses. Every single word.

7. Occasionally, I select book purely on their thickness.

 

15 newly (and some not so newly) discovered blogs that I enjoy – in no particular order

Karen Charlton – http://therhythmmethod.wordpress.com/

Twitchy Corner – http://www.twitchycorner.com/

Trish Smith –  http://eatshootblog.com/

Lisa Lintern – http://lisalinternblog.blogspot.com/

Ruth Bruten – http://gourmetgirl-friend.blogspot.com/

K.J. – http://ourbigexpatadventure.wordpress.com

Nicole McLachlan – http://www.ironingandapostrophes.com/

Michelle Higgins – http://4kids1dogblog.blogspot.com/

Tina – http://tinkertines.blogspot.com/

Cat – http://beloverly.blogspot.com/

Very Bored in Catalunya – http://www.veryboredincatalunya.com/

Heather – http://www.notefromlapland.com/

Gill – http://www.inkpaperpen.blogspot.com/

Michelle – http://www.booktothefuture.com.au/

Benison – http://benisonanneoreilly.com/blog

 

Life has a bow wave

Time. Marching on.

There is a kind of truism about the doctor who won’t see a doctor, a hairdresser who can’t get a haircut and accountants who don’t do their tax. Some of it is professional fatigue. After seeing sick people all day, or cutting hair or doing tax, why on earth would you want to do MORE of it? To me, it is also a professional snobbery. If you are good at your profession, it is hard to find someone else who meets your own professional standard.

What about a more esoteric example. What about a philosopher who is struggling to come to grips with time? Someone who has spent a long time thinking about the central questions of philosophy and who has read a large number of books on the subject by other preeminent philosophers? What about her? Read More

Sometimes life is just annoying

It is true that sometimes, I resemble Zorg from the film Fifth Element. Not the evil, world domination parts, but they part that likes control of the domain he occupies, the clean, tidy desk he rests his feet on. As he tells Cornelius ‘Life, which you so nobly serve, come from destruction, disorder and chaos.’ He has clearly never heard of the ‘broken window fallacy’ but I digress.

I like it neat. I like it organised, smooth, well ordered. I like to be on time. I like things to just work. For plans to come together. I have been writing a post about this, but it is taking too long. It is full of huge concepts that I am trying to unpack. Read More