gobble gobble

On "carving foul:"
"If the bird is to be carved at table, be sure the
heated serving platter is large enough, and garnish it lightly with parsley or watercress. There is a subtle art to carving...."
-- p. 421 of Joy of Cooking, 1975
edition



My mother's copy of Joy of Cooking is an utter mystery to me; I have a difficult time picturing an earlier version of my mother who doesn't know how to cook. I can't imagine this mom flipping pages and flirting with the idea of making "sour cream apple cake souffle cockaigne" or "fresh cod a la Portugaise."



In my world, my mother already knows her ingredients. And they definitely do not include squirrel: "Gray squirrels are the preferred ones; red squirrels are small and quite gamy in flavor.... Stuff and roast squirrels as for pigeons...." (p. 515)



How fascinatingly preposterous, right?



So yes, I am spending part of my Thanksgiving weekend flipping through very old cookbooks. And wondering if I could ever style myself after Julie Powell. (Answer: No. It's been done, a movie's been made, the jig is up. Plus I don't have a husband to feed and one woman cannot ingest the amount of butter Joy of Cooking circa 1975 suggests.)



I am also spending much time contemplating the past, and wondering about the future. Blame Audrey Niffenegger, perhaps, and the fact that my second reading of The Time Traveler's Wife ended with me sobbing at 3 a.m. (Poor Clare! Always, always waiting for Henry! What is Niffenegger trying to say? That even in love, we are alone? Always?)



In the meantime, my unabashed begging for pointers to books that won't make me cry did not go unanswered -- if you flip to this blog's previous post, you'll find thoughtful suggestions from both TSS and Erin (my unofficial co-bloggers/generally awesome Edmontonians). However, before they weighed in, I made a therapeutic shopping trip to a local bookstore. And decided it was time to get to know Dan Savage a little better.





So, I've got The Commitment on my nightstand, waiting for me to finish The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews.


Yes, I realize neither of these books are guaranteed to make me laugh. Neither are as vapid as Fame (which I enjoyed, because there's lots of singing and dancing and very little character development or plot).


No matter how well written, Savage's book ties in with the ongoing battle in the United States to legalize gay marriage. And so by definition can't really be a laugh riot. And The F'ing Troutmans (as the title reads on the outside of the hardcover copy) begins with a psychotic mother left all but comatose by her illness. Her sister, the main character, is left with the shambles of piecing together family life. Parts are freaking hilarious because Toews understands children so well and puts them on the page in this utterly believable, uniquely beautiful way. But there's a sad, longing undertone to the whole thing.


Yikes.


I worry I just can't stop being serious.


Ok, folks -- back to the books, and other weekend adventures. Happy Canadian (and therefore awesome and understated) Thanksgiving.

reserved countdown

Ok, I have been waiting years for this movie. Which, we can all agree, is always a bad thing. For example, last year I couldn't wait to see Sex and the City and.... a year later, I'm still not over how bad it was, what they did to Carrie, what they did to Big, and the fact they'd even consider a sequel.

Last week, I couldn't wait to see Year One. Which, less surprisingly, was not awesome. (But who doesn't love love love Michael Cera? Seriously.)

And movies based on books? Sigh. Especially movies based on books starring Eric Bana -- I still haven't forgiven him, Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman for that whole Other Boleyn Girl ordeal. (Sidenote irony: I always pictured Henry, the time traveler at the centre of The Time Traveler's Wife, as Jonathan Rhys Meyers.) It seems like the general rule is, if you've read the book first, you will be disappointed. Unless the folks behind the movie redirect its purpose and retool the storyline to make it more of a movie....

Anyway, The Time Traveler's Wife -- the movie -- has some promise. One: Rachel McAdams. Two: Audrey Niffenegger's book was absolutely fabulous, and written in this colourful style of story-telling that may very well lend itself to a great movie. Three: From the preview, at least, it looks like the film itself is shot through with colour and light, which will be key given, well, what could be considered a rather depressing premise....

Biggest drawback? I've never met a woman who's read the book who didn't love it. Like, want all her friends to read it love it. Like, no drawbacks, unabashed love it-love it.

Which may very well lead to disappointment for all....

yet another book club

http://www.cjob.com/station/blog_adler_bookclub.aspx

Thanks to a friend for pointing out this link.... Now we can all take a moment to wonder at the effects of celebrity on private radio broadcasters listened to mostly by people who drive trucks. (At least it's not Rutherford? Whose first book, I assume, would be The Prince, and whose follow-ups might include the latest Harper biography?)

"Adler nation." ".... truly privileged in being part of something new and very special." (Because no one has ever come up with this broadcast-book concept before. Not some lady in Chicago and certainly not a national public broadcaster.) ".... one of the planet's top publishers."

Sigh. Okay, I'll stop picking now. Turns out yesterday was Grouch Day. But today I have no excuse.

(Top 5 books I would list should I ever become a radio personality/minor celebrity in charge of a book club and somehow bettering the nation's literacy:

1. Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood -- hah, you thought I'd pick Handmaid's Tale, eh? Too obvious. This tome is a better think piece on femininity.
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen -- super obvious. After asking people to read Persuasion last autumn, I'm afraid of further ruining Austen for anyone who's never read her.
3. The Stone Carvers, Jane Urquhart -- a romantic, startling reflection of First World War-era Canada.
4. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle -- an excellent children's novel, possibly my all-time favourite. Publishers turned down the novel several times, making L'Engle re-write it and re-write it, honing it to perfection.
5. A new entry, and, I think, a starting- or end-point for a paper on the Jewish-American woman's experience in literature. I'm not sure if it's the start or end because, frankly, I'm not overwhelmingly familiar with how much Jewish-American women's literature there is out there. The Guy Not Taken, Jennifer Weiner.

Okay, that's enough for today. Surely all my choices will change tomorrow, or within the hour. Like, immediately I want to switch Urquhart for David Bergen's The Time in Between. Or Richard B. Wright's Clara Callan. And maybe L'Engle should be replaced by The Time Traveller's Wife? And do I really want to end the list off with a group of short stories by Weiner? Even if I did think "Swim" was absolutely gorgeous, does Weiner belong on the same bookshelf as Austen? Even if I was impressed by her notes at the end of the book, which explained how she came to write each piece, and in what year?)

the cool table

Thank goodness I'm not afraid of being late to the cool table. Or missing it altogether.

By this, I mean that I often am the last one to know what is cool. For example, every Christmas my brother and his partner have to introduce me to new and cool music.

(Side note, last week my sort-of sister-in-law introduced me to a local band. In Edmonton. She and my brother live in Ottawa. This is really but a window to my uncoolness.)

For example, I was years behind everyone else in getting to A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews and The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger -- two novels that changed the way I want to read books, two narratives that struck me by how gently one can and should handle the characteristics of love and childhood.

Another example: despite my love for Atwood's stories, The Blind Assassin still sits, unread, on my bookshelf, seven years after I purchased it in hardcover. Alongside it is Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which incidentally has been very popular over the last, say, century and a quarter.

And I still don't know why the caged bird sings. Even though, again, my brother and his partner have tried to show me.

All this does come around to a point -- something else that is new for me but likely old to everyone else. A blog about London's Tube. I know it must be old to everyone else because it's included in blogspot.com's list of must-reads. But I only just discovered it -- and it's very cool.

on my mind, time

I am sure there are people with lots of focus and drive in their lives who manage to do all sorts of things on the days that they work nights.

I am not one of them. My days somehow end up filled with sleeping, cooking and watching soap operas. It's as if, for five business days, I transit time entirely and become a particularly lazy 1960s housewife. Sans hair curlers and smoke rings. Then at night, I am busy working before going out for drinks with other people who spent the night working. They always work at night, though, so they're far better adjusted than I.

On the subject of time transit, however (oy, bad bad bad segue, I know), I offer you this essay, written by Audrey Niffenegger about writing.

I love Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. It may, in fact, be the only book I've ever read that is loved as much by me as it is by every single woman I know. It weaves time and space, love and ego, lust and blood.

On reading it, I couldn't help but wonder whether the woman would have loved her husband had he not trained her to do so; in turn, would the man have loved his wife had she not trained him?

And so, is love just repetition? Conditioning? Environment? Excellent timing?

I know, not a terribly romantic thought the week before Valentine's Day. But I'm not much for the day of chocolate and red roses, anyway.

Niffenegger's novel is scheduled to become a movie next year -- because modern directors and screenwriters don't write original films anymore -- and I wonder how it will go. I wonder if it will be as beautiful as the book? Casting Canadian actress Rachel McAdams as the female lead is hopeful.... perhaps they'll get Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the male lead?

I do know I wouldn't want to see the film unless I had read Niffenegger's prose for myself first. Because the story is not remotely linear; it can't be. I am not sure that will translate well to film.

Hm. The early morning hours are creeping up on me, and I think I stopped making sense several graphs back.

Goodnight.