Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Curiosity
Perhaps the answer to the question in the previous post is that we are obsessed with food in an arm-chair way - books, celebrity chefs and the like - because we have a sneaking feeling that out relationship with our food is not what it used to be. I have long suspected the heavy emphasis on cuddly kids, family values and whathaveyou in Hollywood films results from a comparable issue.
Beef turned out OK though. At 7.75 pounds plus 200 grams = (let us say) 8.25 pounds - our weights going nicely up to 8 pounds but no further - and the powers of two arising from having 16 ounces in the pound - giving one an elegantly stacking 4 pound, 2 pound, 1 pound, half pound, quarter pound, eighth pound, sixteenth pound and thirty second of a pound sequence of weights not available to lovers of things metric - so we cook the thing for 2.5 hours at 180C and it was done to a T as they say. Must find someone who knows where the T comes from. For a change served with very small (although not very new) potatoes boiled in their skins and Cesar salad. This worked well, not least because one was not messing around with fragile boiled vegetables just before the off. Followed by a cooked cheesecake - something which seems to be more or less unobtainable to those without BHs of a culinary persuasion.
Prompted by the TLS been taking another look at Lord Jim. The prompt in the TLS was a slightly irritating article on the occasion of some centenary or other. Said article occupied 36 column inches (one wonders whether some arcane literary custom means that review articles are supplied in whole yards) of which 8 and one half inches were occupied, in a prominent position, by a slightly relevant anecdote about Turgeniev. I guess the main point - rather like things in this 'ere blog - was to advertise the reviewer's knowledge of such matters. He then spent the rest of the article arguing for what was to me a rather perverse reading: the book, it seems, is all about, what it means to be 'one of us'. Some of this argument hung on the book's framing Marlovian narrative. There is perhaps a point. The hero was a disgraced mariner, and Marlow is a respectable one. He was also a white man in the Far East at the end of the 19th century surrounded by not so white men and Portuguese. On re-reading, I thought there was a definate racist tinge to the thing - in the same way as there is when John Buchan writes about undesirables and villains who just happen to be Jews. At least, what we would call racist now. But this was not, I think, what the reviewer was on about. On re-reading also, I was struck by a comment from one Captain Brierley (a sturdy and successful mariner who commits suicide for reasons unknown some little time later), to the effect that most people got through a career in the merchant navy without being called to do anything special - anything calling for nerve, courage or pluck. The trick was to be up to the mark when the call came; the problem was knowing whether one would be.
Pleased that I have taken a look. One forgets how many very good books there are knocking about.
Beef turned out OK though. At 7.75 pounds plus 200 grams = (let us say) 8.25 pounds - our weights going nicely up to 8 pounds but no further - and the powers of two arising from having 16 ounces in the pound - giving one an elegantly stacking 4 pound, 2 pound, 1 pound, half pound, quarter pound, eighth pound, sixteenth pound and thirty second of a pound sequence of weights not available to lovers of things metric - so we cook the thing for 2.5 hours at 180C and it was done to a T as they say. Must find someone who knows where the T comes from. For a change served with very small (although not very new) potatoes boiled in their skins and Cesar salad. This worked well, not least because one was not messing around with fragile boiled vegetables just before the off. Followed by a cooked cheesecake - something which seems to be more or less unobtainable to those without BHs of a culinary persuasion.
Prompted by the TLS been taking another look at Lord Jim. The prompt in the TLS was a slightly irritating article on the occasion of some centenary or other. Said article occupied 36 column inches (one wonders whether some arcane literary custom means that review articles are supplied in whole yards) of which 8 and one half inches were occupied, in a prominent position, by a slightly relevant anecdote about Turgeniev. I guess the main point - rather like things in this 'ere blog - was to advertise the reviewer's knowledge of such matters. He then spent the rest of the article arguing for what was to me a rather perverse reading: the book, it seems, is all about, what it means to be 'one of us'. Some of this argument hung on the book's framing Marlovian narrative. There is perhaps a point. The hero was a disgraced mariner, and Marlow is a respectable one. He was also a white man in the Far East at the end of the 19th century surrounded by not so white men and Portuguese. On re-reading, I thought there was a definate racist tinge to the thing - in the same way as there is when John Buchan writes about undesirables and villains who just happen to be Jews. At least, what we would call racist now. But this was not, I think, what the reviewer was on about. On re-reading also, I was struck by a comment from one Captain Brierley (a sturdy and successful mariner who commits suicide for reasons unknown some little time later), to the effect that most people got through a career in the merchant navy without being called to do anything special - anything calling for nerve, courage or pluck. The trick was to be up to the mark when the call came; the problem was knowing whether one would be.
Pleased that I have taken a look. One forgets how many very good books there are knocking about.
# posted by Jim @ 10:36 AM 
