June 8, 2008

Barbeque Pizza

At our house, one of the very best developments of late has been the advent of barbeque pizza. We adore homemade pizza, but as the weather gets hot, turning on the oven becomes deeply undesirable, but then the desire for pizza still remains, so whatever to do? The following recipe (and grilling instructions) are based on those from our favourite cookbook Vegetarian Classics by Jeanne Lemlin.

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon dried basil
• 4 tablespoons chilled margarine
• 1/2 cup of milk or soy milk
• 1/2 cup water
• Olive oil

1) Mix first four ingredients in a large bowl. Add the margarine, and then rub it into the dry ingredients with your fingers until the mixture is coarse. Blend milk and water, and slowly add to the flour mix, stirring until the dough is evenly moistened.
2) Place the dough on a floured surface, and knead two or three times (“until pliable”). Divide into four balls.
3) Press the four balls flat, not so large that all four will not fit on your bbq grill. Brush both sides of each pizza with olive oil.
4) By this time the bbq should be lit and hot. Place oiled dough on the grill for three minutes, and then flip and cook on the other side for three more minutes. Remove from the grill.
5) Add pizza toppings.
6) Return pizzas to the grill and cook for about three more minutes, until the cheese is melted.
7) Cut into quarters, and serve

June 6, 2008

Boyish book binge (which is different from a bookish boy binge)

I’m on a short boyish book binge. Now reading Victory by Joseph Conrad, for reasons I’ve already mentioned. It’s really wonderful, actually, thoroughly enjoyable. My last memory of reading Conrad was loathing Lord Jim and never actually finishing it (which was actually part of the reason it took me so long to get around the Lucky Jim [no relation]), so I am pleasantly surprised. I suspect my dislike for Lord Jim, however, had something to do with nautical themes and me being twenty. I’ll be rereading Heart of Darkness this summer, and so I’m pleased that my Conrad context will be just a bit wider. Anyway, Victory. All day I’ve been struck by the line, “For the use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears.”

Next book on my list is Engleby by Sabastian Faulks, because Emily Perkins mentioned it in my interview with her. I am looking forward to that, and an author entirely new to me (and a buzzy one, because of James Bond).

So yes, two novels by men. As the last twenty-one novels I’ve read have been by women, this intervention was probably necessary. I do try to read men’s fiction once in a while, just to keep vaguely abreast of things. They’re not really for me, of course, but I do it for the sake of fairness. You’d be surprised how much good stuff there really is, actually, particularly once you move away from the more peculiar fixations (dogs, and cigars, and warfare). Some of it I can even identify with, though I’m not sure I’d call it literature exactly. There’s just never enough linoleum for it to qualify as that.

June 4, 2008

Springing

“April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can’t keep, all passion is really a setup, and we’re doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally. I’m a soul on ice flung out on a rock in the sun, where the needles that pierced me begin to melt all as one.” –Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Vegetable Miracle

A table full of wonderful things, brought back from our first trip to the new Bloor Borden Farmer’s Market.

June 4, 2008

What I Need

I’m currently reading Carol Shields, whose work has always struck me as particularly subversive, and her letters and interviews make clear that this was consciously so. The anger in her final novel (and finest, in my opinion) Unless is palpable, directed, but appropriately complicated by the world we live in, and Shields’ understanding of it. But not loud, no, and not destructive. “I am trying to put forward my objection gently,” her narrator writes. “I’m not screaming as you may think. I’m not even whining, and certainly not stamping my lady-sized foot. Whispering is more like it.”

Of course, I don’t think that novels have to be subversive. I think that the miracle of novels is that they do such mulitudinous things, provide us with infinite horizons to discover, and I’m always a bowled over by those who claim to have these complex organisms wrapped up in a tiny box. Michael Bryson writes in The Danforth Review, “We need our inherited tropes to be broken down, deconstructed, challenged to the core, overturned,” but the thing is, I don’t. And it’s not because I’m stupid, or because I’m “middlebrow”, however much I might be both. It’s just that what I need is different.

I need work that takes our inherited tropes and builds upon them, expanding their infinite possibilities. I need construction. Challenge to the core, but bloody well make something of that challenge. Not necessarily to have things overturned, but at the very least surmounted. Make something. I need means to lead to ends, and I want to like where I have landed. I want to acknowledge where I started. I want power in whispers, so that I can really listen. No foot stomping, no sir.

June 3, 2008

Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith

The Myths series has a bit of the gimmick about it. These “contemporary take[s] on our most enduring myths”, with their promises to “shed new light”. The books so lovely and slim, they could almost slip inside a pocket, so there is certainly no physical evidence of their substance. Look at the drawing on the cover of Girl Meets Boy, for example, all delicate lines and flowers. Positively precious.

But what would you say if I told you the drawing was called “Self Portrait as a Small Bird” and the self being portraited was Tracey Emin. Wouldn’t you agree then, that this is a book with tricks up its proverbial sleeve? And so it is, being a book by Ali Smith, whose The Accidental was one trick after another. But now the trick is on me, and it may be on you, because there’s nothing of the gimmick about Smith’s latest novel at all.

“Smith’s latest novel” I say, for this is exactly right. It is a powerful novel and it can stand alone. A slim book, yes, and part of a series, but then there is actually very little uniform about The Myths. Featuring a wide range of writers from various backgrounds who select their own myths and approach these stories in any way they choose. In Girl Meets Boy, Smith working with the myth of Iphis, from Ovid’s Metamorpheses. As she writes in her afterward, “It is one of the cheeriest metamorpheses in the whole, one of the most happily resolved of its stories about the desire for and the ramifications of change.”

And like any novel, this one has its very own story. Beginning, “Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.” Quickly establishing a world of unfixed parametres, of shape-shifting, as young sisters Anthea and Imogen absorb their grandfather’s stories. TV game show Blind Date playing in the background, with host Cilla Black between the panel of boys and the panel of girls. Anthea wondering, “But which is Cilla Black, then, boy or girl? She doesn’t seem to be either… She can go between the two sides of things like a magician or a joke.”

In the future, however, which is the present day, all the magic has been put aside. The girls’ grandparents have long ago been lost at sea, and life is weighty with its disappointments. Anthea has come back home to Inverness to live with her sister, who has been able to secure her a job as a “Creative” for the multinational conglomerate Pure. And Anthea finds herself easily distracted one day during a “Creative” brainstorm session by one certain vandal in a kilt.

In Girl Meets Boy, Ali Smith presents metamorphosis as possibility. Anthea joining forces with the vandal, spreading slogans: “ALL ACROSS THE WORLD, WHERE WOMEN ARE DOING EXACTLY THE SAME WORK AS MEN, THEY’RE BEING PAID BETWEEN THIRTY TO FORTY PERCENT LESS. THAT’S NOT FAIR. THIS MUST CHANGE.” Anthea also falling in love for the first time in her life, with this vandal, who is a woman. Much to her sister’s horror (“My sister would be banned in schools if she was a book.”)

So here is an old story inside inside this new story, which is a love story, and actually no less than two. For such a slim book, this is something, and that the stories sit comfortably amidst so much stuff of ages– from the ancient Greeks to our poppest of culture, allusions, winks, nods and odes. There are lines and lines and lines between these lines.

But Smith’s language, of course, is always her most marvelous trick. Amidst all the stuff, rendering her thesis quite simple: that in a world where things are changeable, things can change. Innumerable doors swinging open upon this promise, that progress is a way forward after all. “And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with.” A most refreshing triumph.

June 1, 2008

Stumbled In

Stumbled into a used bookshop today, and stumbled out after with an arm-full. Some controversial: Birthday by Alan Sillitoe, the sequel to my beloved Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Forty-years on, it is could be one thing or another. I also picked up Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, for I’ve hardly read her at all. And then I got The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for Carnival by Carol Shields, and though I’ll read one shortly, I’ll not read the other for years and years, for these are the last two I have left to read, and I don’t want to live in a world without more Carol Shields to discover.

Now reading Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith. Just finished Deborah Eisenberg’s majestic Twilight of the Superheroes.

June 1, 2008

Histories

A tiny post today over at the Descant blog, about “Encounters with Books: And the Histories Inside Them”.