On reading as procrastination
Sometimes I find myself begging the universe for more work: down to the last $30 in my bank account; heartily sick of beans on toast; scanning Seek for the eighth time this week. What then happens is I get some more work, feel briefly grateful, realise I deeply hate academic editing/thankless admin/my computer, begin rationalising impecunity as character-building, and spend nine days only leaving my desk to get more tea.
What I’m trying to say is, I wrote this newsletter too quickly during a busy week, unable to give it any actual thought, but hoping not to break the habit. In an attempt not to write words flimsier than usual, I’ve focused on other people’s. My week has been full of theirs: here are some things you might like to read too.
Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies by Alexandra Harris
Did you know that the word umbrella is bastardised Italian for “little shadow”? (In Italy, of course, it’s a sunshade, not a rain-guard.) Or that while the English sun appears in almost no poetry from the Anglo-Saxon period, the Anglo-Saxons had a highly developed winter vocabulary including a single word to express seasonal woe (wintercearig, “the cares of winter”)? In 1683, it was so cold the Thames froze and Londoners set up a frost fair on the ice: booths sold warm spiced beer, delicate glassware, rides in a boat spun round a pole. And in October 1666, a Puritan minister recorded “a softly rain” in his diary — the gentlest expression I’ve read in months.
This book surveys a topic surely too huge for a single volume: how the weather has featured in English art and literature since records began. Somehow, it manages not to feel squeezed, proffering ample fascinating tidbits all the way.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
God, this is a funny book. It’s an elfin thing, just over 100 pages, and not much happens: it’s the story of a charismatic teacher and the set of schoolgirls devoted to her, set in 1930s Edinburgh. There are ill-matched love affairs and abhorrent British meals. There’s a bit of Fascism thrown in for good measure. The language is crisp and wry, perfectly suited to piercing observations. But mostly this novel is hilarious, full of lines like “‘Whatever possessed you?’ said Miss Brodie in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke” and “everyone likes to visit a nun, it provides a spiritual sensation, a catharsis to go home with, especially if the nun clutches the bars of the grille”.
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross
Like almost every classical music lover I know, I’m guilty of listening to very little twentieth-century classical music: I must have listened to Bach’s French Suites two hundred times, but I’ve never managed the whole of The Rite of Spring; I couldn’t name five John Adams compositions; I don’t care for Boulez. I think I might change my tune (sorry) after finishing this book, which is peppered with details that outshine the main story: to my fascination, I’ve learned that modern formal concert etiquette didn’t exist until it was imposed by silence-loving Mahler in the early 1900s, and that even in 1910s Vienna, concert programmes were dominated by an historical canon near-identical to today’s (Bach, Mozart, Brahms) and not contemporary works. The best bit of all, though, is Ross’s writing: he’s the sort of person who describes an early Schoenberg work as beginning with “a great steam bath of E-flat major”.
A Half-Baked Idea: How Grief, Love and Cake Took Me from the Courtroom to Le Cordon Bleu by Olivia Potts
I didn’t really enjoy this book, the memoir of a young woman who leaves the Bar to pursue a Diplôme de Pâtisserie after her mother’s sudden death. But I took from it a recipe for something so delicious it seemed worth the whole read: milk chocolate praline cornflake crunch. You toast cornflakes with butter, sugar, milk powder. You make a praline (caramel poured over toasted hazelnuts, left to set, then blitzed to powder in a food processor or a snaplock bag hit with an enthusiastic rolling pin), fold it into melted milk chocolate, toss everything together and leave it to set into something highly midnight-snackable. God it’s good.
Mansfield and Me: A Graphic Memoir by Sarah Laing
When you’re about 15, if you grow up in New Zealand, your English teacher will make you read a short story called “The Doll’s House”. At that age, you’ll only half-understand it, cough up the required essay about it, and then get on with being 15. But if you love to write, you’ll almost certainly come back to Katherine Mansfield, especially if you leave New Zealand, as Mansfield did permanently from the age of 20. No different for Sarah Laing, who here intertwines her own love/sex/travel/ambition story with Mansfield’s much sadder one, in limpid watercolours.
Some things I am still thinking about, a week later: that for the last five years of her life (aged 29-34), when she wrote some of the most extraordinary short stories in the English language, Mansfield’s consumption made her too weak to walk without a cane. That she miscarried entirely alone in a foreign hotel at the age of 20. And this journal entry from 1916: a Bible lecturer “asked any young lady in the room to hold up her hand if she had been chased by a wild bull, and as nobody else did I held up mine (though of course I hadn’t). ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid you do not count. You are a little savage from New Zealand’”.