January 6, 2010

Avocado mishaps and literary avocados

A mishaps during Sunday’s trip to the grocery store led to me bringing home ten avocados when I really only meant to buy one, and so it’s avocado city here these days, as we seek to use them up before they get riper than ripe (read: rotten). Which is sort of easy, because we have a baby, and avocados are nature’s baby food, but even she doesn’t need that much avocado, so we’ve also been indulging in avocado milkshakes, avocado pizza, avocado scones, and my new favourite discovery– avocado bread, which might just be the best thing in the universe. I’ve adapted the recipe as per the reviewer’s comment to add a bit more sugar, and then I forget about the sugar and pretend that this is a healthy treat, because avocado is the good fat, after all.

So the point is that I’m totally obsessed with avocados, and have been thinking about bookish ones. I remembered this piece from the London Review of Books about Californian agriculture and avocado orchards: “Avocados have always been the icon of San Diego’s countryside (which produces much of the US harvest) and if the remaining growers are forced to sell out, the past will become as inaccessible as the future will be combustible.”

In terms of books, there is Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado (which I once wrote about here). The famously dirty Wetlands that had an avocado on its cover. We have a picture book called Avocado Baby by John Burningham. I wrote a poem about avocados during my Poetic April back in 2008. Googling, I found this ode to the avocado by Richard Wireck in a literary journal called r.kv.r.y. “O Avocado Avocado”, in which the author asked to be slathered, buried “in God’s sweet, gold pudding, the very butter of paradise.” And YA author called Daniel Pinkwater wrote a book called The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. A further web search brings me to Avocado: Botany, Production and Uses, which sounds a bit boring, and Sex and the Avocado, which sounds less so, until you realize it’s written by the author of 105-Plus Guacamole Dip Recipes.

Which is nowhere near enough. What other literary avocados am I missing? Forgive me for not coming up with more on my own, but I’ve got another loaf to bake.

December 31, 2009

As you do

Behold, the weirdest thing I’ve read all day: “Carey tells of [William Golding’s] drunken assault on a Bob Dylan puppet belonging to the writer Andrew Sinclair and kept in his house, in a bedroom used by the Goldings. Waking in the night, Golding mistook the puppet for Satan, attacked it and buried it in the garden.”– from “Theopany“, Frank Kermode’s review of William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies

December 29, 2009

Adolescent Poetry

“I don’t know why Jung made such a big deal about dreams. The important ones are obvious. They are the adolescent poetry of the subconscious.” –Karen Connelly, Burmese Lessons

December 17, 2009

Our Menagerie

This morning at the library, I was excited to find a book called Animals in My House. “Finally,” I thought, “a book that Harriet will be able to relate to.” How disappointed was I then, when I discovered the book was about domestic animals, exclusively pets? And does anybody know a book we can use to help explain to our daughter the mice under the floors, the squirrel in the wall, spiders on the bathroom ceiling and that family of raccoons outside the door? Or is this just a board book begging to be written?

November 26, 2009

Remarkable

That my library owns a DVD copy of the movie It’s Pat is quite remarkable, but what’s even more so is that sometimes the movie is signed out.

November 22, 2009

The only proper way to breastfeed

It’s strange, I think, that while breastfeeding is so ridiculously revered in our society to the point where bottle-feeding can raise eyebrows, the image of breastfeeding itself might raise those brows even higher. Mostly because we never see it, in real life or in the media, which perpetuates breastfeeding imagery as taboo, and so it goes. So I’ve been eagerly keeping track of breastfeeding imagery during this last while, on television (Being Erica) and in children’s books (lately, Busy Pandas).

But I especially like this picture, from Susan Meyer’s Everywhere Babies (which acknowledges breastfeeding as being just one of many ways that babies everywhere are fed).

While we don’t see enough breastfeeding imagery, even rarer is imagery of the only proper way to breastfeed– with a book in hand.

It is telling, however, that the mother has fallen asleep. Some days are just too much for multi-tasking.

November 16, 2009

On Hilary Mantel and Fludd etc.

I’m currently reading Fludd by Hilary Mantel, as an experiment in reading books by Hilary Mantel I have no desire to read. Fludd, at 186 pages, you see, is much less an investment than Wolf Hall‘s terrifying 650. I still have no desire to read Wolf Hall either, but for various reasons have been possessed to buy it. And now I’m enjoying Fludd so immensely, that I feel enjoying Wolf Hall could be less unlikely than I previously thought.

All this leading to two points.

1) Hilary Mantel is absolutely scathing in this book. And I’m reminded of a writing teacher who once criticized a story of mine for lack of sympathy toward the idiots within it, and so I rewrote these idiots with a more human touch. With hearts in their depths. But now I kind of wish I hadn’t. Though Hilary Mantel is a far better writer than I could ever hope to be, I think that some meanness is delicious, and not all fictional characters need hearts in their depths. I just need to learn to be mean more intelligently.

2) Her range! Fludd is more like Beyond Black than any of her others I’ve read (and I’d term these “supernatural realism). Could these possibly be by the same writer who wrote historical epics Wolf Hall and A Place of Greater Safety? The brutally black comedy Every Day is Mother’s Day? The more conventional (but no less brilliant) novels Eight Months of Ghazzah Street, A Change of Climate and An Experiment in Love? I am becoming more and more unafraid to read Wolf Hall, because I’ve never met a Hilary Mantel novel that wasn’t amazing.

Which makes me think of Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing too– writers who’ve branched out in unimaginable ways. Challenging their readers’ sensibilities, exploring the limits of genre, breaking the mold again and again. Seems like these are writers to whom “the novel” is a brand new blank white page, every time they sit down to write one.

November 13, 2009

Horizontal Parenting

I am very excited about the Parenting Method I have devised, and subsequent book I am going to self-publish about my Parenting Method (via lulu.com). My method is called Horizontal Parenting, and I’ve been practicing it for about six months now. Its core tenets are the five Ls– 1) Lie down to breastfeed, 2) Lie down to soothe your crying babe by gently rocking your hips, 3) Lie down to have your baby sleep on your chest (contrary to everything the Back to Sleep people will tell you), 4) Lie down to play with your baby– a popular game is lying on one’s back and throwing a soft ball up to the ceiling again and again. The fun never stops. 5) Take time every day for yoga practice– but only the savasana pose. (This last tenet doesn’t start with L, but that’s because it’s the exception that proves the rule.)

The jury’s still out on the advantages of horizontal parenting on child development, but my child seems to be developing fairly normally (save for her new, disturbing penchant for pinching the fat on my upper arms). For me, however, the advantages are multifold– I never have a sore back, I get to sleep at night (albeit sometimes uncomfortably on my side), I get to lie on the couch and read or nap frequently throughout the day, and I get many opportunities to breathe in the sweet smell of my baby daughter’s head.

As soon as I figure out how to cook dinner from a hammock, then I will really claim to have it all figured out.

November 5, 2009

Exploring the Other Side

I gave up hating newspaper columnists ages ago, and I don’t want Margaret Wente to be fired. But her recent essay on her new book only made clear to me the fundamental problem with her approach. People call her on being deliberately provocative, to which she thumbs her nose: “Would it be better if I deliberately set out to be inoffensive?” As though there were only the two extremes, and perhaps Wente is satisfied with making people angry, with provoking that response, but I can’t help think a great writer can do better than that. If conventional wisdom is really so off base, if “exploring the other side” is so important, shouldn’t she do it more carefully? Shouldn’t she actually “explore” instead of committing columnly acts of mischief? Has a Margaret Wente column ever changed anyone’s mind?

Provocation doesn’t make people think, rather, it puts up walls. Which is one reason I’m not as frightened as I should be by American right-wing media (but that might just be because I don’t have cable).

October 26, 2009

Simon Le Bon blogs books.

Well, it’s no secret that I love Duran Duran, but I just don’t talk about it very often. Mostly because I don’t like to brag about my mean acoustic version of “Rio”, in which I wail about her making me feel alive, alive, alive. But I’m pleased that Melanie at The Indextrious Reader has unearthed this gem of a link, which is nearly as good as Art Garfunkel’s books list: Simon Le Bon blogs books on the band’s website. To check out his picks, go here, click on “writing”, and then “Simon’s Reader”. Really, what we’ve all been waiting for.