Reading etc.

We went to see this last week.  I think that much more of this culture stuff could kill me.  Mr. Waffle maintains that I remained stony faced because of the Cork accents (not bad at all) but I would suggest it was because of the deeply disturbing themes explored in the play.  OK, it may have had its comic moments also.  Not for me but clever.  Remained resolutely seated as the rest of the audience rose to their feet; regretted that we had seats in the front row, though.

For most of my time in recent months, I have been recovering from the move.  I have therefore been rereading as this is all I felt strong enough for – Georgette Heyer, Father Brown, Myles na gCopaleen and Saki.  However, recently, I have begun to recover (hurrah) and have tried the selection below.  I am curious – what do you reread when life is becoming slightly overwhelming?

“When will there be Good News?” by Kate Atkinson

I think that Kate Atkinson is a wonderful writer.  I have read all her books and I have yet to be disappointed.  She has great plots, interesting characters and she writes so beautifully and insightfully that I sometimes sigh wistfully at her brilliance.  When will there be another new Kate Atkinson book?

“Ni d’Adam, ni d’Eve” by Amelie Nothomb

This is the third Amelie Nothomb book I have read and it is far less enjoyable than the other two.  It has its moments, I must concede and it can by quite funny but not funny enough to offset her vague musings on Japan.  She is, incidentally, quite clearly, nutty as a fruit cake.  This both adds to her work (funny) and detracts from it (no, no, too mad).  Still she is very Belgian and that must be worth something.

“This Year it Will be Different” by Maeve Binchy

A collection of short stories, some of them quite ancient.  All about Christmas and all about men having affairs.  Reading them all one after another does make me wonder a little about Maeve’s personal life.  Perhaps she only married late because her heart was broken by a philandering bastard.

“Heat” by Bill Buford

Mr. Waffle recommended this.  It’s about a man’s attempt to master (and I do mean master) Italian cooking while his very patient wife supports him.  It has its moments.  He comments that “seafood with butter – or any other dairy ingredient – verges on culinary blasphemy”.  I know this to be true because once, in a not at all fancy restaurant in Italy, I asked for parmesan to go on seafood pasta and there was some whispering in the back and then not one but two waiters came up to tell me that I just couldn’t have parmesan with seafood.

“Où on va papa?” by Jean-Louis Fournier

This is a book written by a man who had two handicapped children.  I found it very disturbing, very good and entirely compelling.  In public discourse, parents don’t seem to be allowed to say that having a handicapped child is very, very hard and a huge disappointment.  This man has no such hesitations.  This book is, I think, supposed to be funny and there is a certain amount of black humour but overwhelmingly, it is sad.  There is an aching sense of loss, of what might have been, of what his boys’ lives would have been like had they not been “different”.  It is a brilliant book.

“Mothering” by Rudolph Schaffer

I picked this up in my mother-in-law the psychologist’s house.  It dates from the 1970s so all the information may not be entirely up to date. I nearly gave up early on when we had two pages on the infant’s sucking reflex followed by another couple on sleep patterns.

However, I quite enjoyed this bit later on:

“With increasing occupational and social outlets for women a wife need no longer disappear into the confines of the home on marriage, with nothing to do except have and care for children…Having children should be only for those who want children and will actively enjoy children”.

I’m not sure that actively enjoying necessarily follows from wanting, however, I am touched by his vision of the brave new world that the proper use of contraception will entail.

I was lured into reading the book by seeing the author’s description of the Ik tribe in Northern Uganda but this is something of a sensationalist moment compared to the remainder of the text.  He says:
“The Ik had formerly been a nomadic tribe of hunters and gatherers….[but] confined to a limited barren area…[on the brink of starvation]…[there] came a virtual disintegration of their social organization: the family as an institution almost ceased to exist, and in the wake of the struggle to remain alive there followed an utterly selfish attitude to life that displace all positive emotions like love, affection and tenderness….Children were regarded as useless appendages who were turned out of the parents’ hut when they reached the age of three years, compelled from then on to make their own way without help or guidance from any adult and certainly without any parental love or affection.  Consequently one rarely saw a parent with a child except accidentally or incidentally; when a child hurt himself by falling into the fire the only reaction was amusement; if a predator came and carried off a baby the mother was merely gald at no longer having to care for it.  One never saw a parent feed a child over the age of three – on the contrary, such children were regarded as competitors from whom food had to be hidden; if consequently one died of starvation that merely meant one mouth the fewer.”
Not only is it sensationalist but it may not even be true.  Wikipedia has some serious reservation about Mr. Turnbull’s research on the Ik, on which the paragraph above is based.

Oh well, I see Mr. Schaffer had a new edition out in 1984 so doubtless he fixed it up then.

This has been sitting unposted in my drafts since May.  I felt it needed more work.  But it’s Nablopomo. I’m desperate.  Wait until you see what I end up posting tomorrow.

So to summarise, this is neither topical nor quite what I wanted to say.  With that enticing introduction, I am sure that you are keen to read on.

There’s been a lot on the radio about 1968.  The other day I was in the car and there was a woman on the Belgian radio saying how, although she was 35 in 1968, it had changed her life.  She was pregnant with her third child and in the spirit of the times she had changed the school they planned to send the child to and she was looking forward to a bright, new, future.  She wasn’t too pleased with the way it turned out.

Meanwhile, British Radio 4, when I switched over, was doing a somewhat heavy piece about the philosophers of ’68 and their thinking.

I’m not quite sure what I’m trying to get at here.  In the French piece you could really sense that they were trying to change the world and imagine what it was like to be there then (I perhaps haven’t done it justice). The English piece was just a bit dull.

Remember, I said that I distrusted the influence of the British media in the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty?

Sarah Carey had an opinion piece in the Irish Times during the week on this very topic.  Since the Irish Times is still getting to grips with new media and this piece may disappear off into paid subscriber only material, let me give you a few quotes:

“For anyone relying on the Sunday Times for information on its continuing coverage of the Lisbon Treaty, they would do well to ask themselves [who is behind this and what is his or her agenda].

For over three years, I worked for the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, which, like other British newspapers the Sun, News of the World and the Times, plus Sky television, is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International. During my three years with the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, I was only vaguely aware that it was a distant outpost of Murdoch’s empire.

We seemed to be like the hobbits in Lord of the Rings. The Eye of the evil Lord Sauron was rarely fixed on our petty domestic issues and we got on with the business of political and social opinion without any comment from Wapping. Except for Lisbon.

Some months before the date for the referendum was announced, I told Irish editor, Frank Fitzgibbon, that I was eager to write a piece in favour of Lisbon. At the time, we seemed to be in agreement on the political imperative that the treaty be passed, though it’s possible I misunderstood his views. We also discussed the fact that Murdoch’s well known pro-US-hawkish views would obviously be the opposite, but we shrugged our shoulders.

Time passed, the date was set and I staked my claim to the pro-treaty column. But something had changed. Fitzgibbon told me that not only would I not be writing a pro-treaty column, but no other writer anywhere in the paper would either. This was not a matter for Sarah’s precious little ego, but a cover-to-cover ban on any pro-treaty comment. Apparently since our first conversation, Fitzgibbon had looked into his heart and discovered the democratic deficit. From seemingly being in favour of Lisbon, he was now cheerfully banning all opinion favourable to Lisbon from the paper.

He argued that only broadcasters were legally required to present balanced coverage, and that as a privately-owned newspaper the Sunday Times was under no legal obligation to offer opposing views. I countered that while this was legally correct, he was under an ethical obligation to provide an alternative view, especially when that view tallied with the extraordinary political consensus that Lisbon was good for Ireland. He claimed he was under no such obligation – and that was that.

I should have written the column anyway and resigned if he refused to print it. But I was in no financial position to go around resigning on a point of principle, and I backed off. So no kudos to me. Part of me accepted that Fitzgibbon had a point: everyone is entitled to their agenda. The problem only arises – which it did in this case – when it’s not really your agenda at all. […]

In whose interests did the Sunday Times campaign against the Lisbon Treaty to the exclusion of all favourable comment? Was it because they really believed that Ireland is best served by wrecking the treaty or because Eurosceptic views were imported, or worse, imposed, from Britain? [….]

If our entire political establishment was dismayed because Lisbon was defeated and the cheers from Wapping were ringing in our ears, doesn’t that make anyone wonder whether No was the right answer to the question?”

Case closed, wouldn’t you agree?

A couple of years ago, I read an interview with a photographer wherein he said that the desire for celebrity photographs is entirely driven by women.  I stopped reading all the trashy gossip magazines.  In-flight fodder became slightly more worthy. I still look at the headlines in the shops but I do not buy.

It is distressing.  The way Brittney Spears had a nervous breakdown in public was horrific.  Kerry Katona’s widely publicised problems shouldn’t be widely publicised.  I don’t care whether these women courted the press at any stage in their careers.  They shouldn’t be hounded.  I can see no public interest in it and a great deal that is disturbing.   And, loath though I am to admit it, the photographer was right.  The phenomenon is driven by women, women like me.

I read a very cool review of the work of Annie Leibovitz in one of the Sunday papers. Her work had no humanity.  But what is wrong with a little glamour?  Surely this is what we pay film stars for.  Why are we so obsessed with their feet of clay?

I never buy gossip magazines any more and, you know, you shouldn’t either.

This preaching thing? I should warn you, I may get worse before I get better, it’s hard to stop once you start.

OK, tomorrow, definitely tomorrow, my next house.