A Momentary Taste of Being

In a word, not to keep you in suspense, charming.  A memoir cum travelogue cum cookbook, Ms. Flinn tells the story of leaving corporate America and pursuing her dream of a degree from one of the most prestigious cooking schools in the world. Ms. Flinn tells her adventures while attending all three courses at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris--basic, intermediate, and superior.  Along the way we learn about the Chefs, their moods, their modes, their recipes, their haunts.  We also learn a bit about Paris, a good deal about the school, and a great deal about Ms. Flinn, who sounds like a wonderful person--one both interesting and entertaining to be with. Living in Paris Ms. Flinn plays host to any number of visitors--from one young man who bursts into her apartment to find the bathroom and spend much of the rest of his stay with her recovering from food poisoning picked up in London, to the visitation of two extremely trying young women who allow Kathleen and her husband to ...

I've read the previous memoir, Wishful Drinking and. . . well. . . I suppose enjoyed is not quite the right word for my experience with it--although my recollection of it was enough to make me pick this up when in the library. This continues the story begun in Wishful Drinking and the title refers directly to Carrie Fisher's treatment for near suicidal depression and related psychiatric problems.  While the book does talk about and illuminate this aspect of her life, it doesn't stop there and dwell on things.  Indeed, the most substantial part of this book is a loving and in many ways compassionate memoir of her later life with her famous father Eddie Fisher. I don't follow celebrity news or entanglements, so it came as something of a revelation to me (not of the fireworks and sudden dawn variety) that Elizabeth Taylor was, for some small part of Ms. Taylor's life, the step-mother of Carrie Fisher.  And you all say, "Well, duh!"  Told you I wasn'...

from When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me? Saul Frampton      Around this time a fog descended over northern Europe. It covered the Rhine, merging with the reed beds and sea mists. It cloistered the churchyards of France. It slipped inside books, it tarnished sword blades.  It scaled the high walls of Oxford and surrounded Aristotle. It seems to enter flesh itself, and confuse the identities of thins and the very boundaries of mater. And then it settled in men's minds. . . .      Scepticism arrived as a new and intoxicating intellectual force in the sixteenth century.

Foster and Ellis together again not for the last time I truly wish I could get through Foster's longer works.  I've managed two short stories--but I am so put off by post-modern games in literature that I find it impossible to read.  On the other hand Ellis created a sort of sick tour de force in Less than Zero and has not since equaled that early work. Of the two, I would like to like Foster and find Ellis unreadable, but for me, it is exactly the reverse.  And because Ellis is readable but had nothing of interest to say--I find that I cannot read either. By the way, the blogpost referenced above is an elegant consideration of the two writers well worth your attention if you are interested in either of them.

Prof. Myers posts an interesting note about misreading Victor Frankl. Prof. Myers's point is quite different from my own.  The book is often presented as the story of the triumph over the inhumanity of death camps--but I failed to find any real triumph here.  Frankl was as oppressed and impressed by the camps as any other survivor.  His triumph was a triumph of numbers and accident--not a triumph of will--or at least not exclusively.  This doesn't detract from either Frankl or what he came to understand from the experience, but it records an instance of "reading into."  There is no triumph here--there is no meaning that one can paste over the experience of the holocaust.  There is no ultimate conclusion from it except that some, for reasons of grace, will, or completely opaque causes, survive and others do not.  When the "how" of existence becomes merely mechanistic there can be no triumph.  I have not yet found the triumph in Frankl's book an...

"Interstate"

As I Lay Dying reviewed So accessible, indeed that a good many students in high school read it.  I did.  I didn't get much out of it at that time except a life-long abiding love for Faulkner.  I didn't attempt much more at that time, but have dipped in from time to time, returning within the past three or four years to discover a deep an wide treasure-trove of story-telling and technique.  For those with fear of Faulkner, As I Lay Dying is a very good place to start--accessible, but still deep within the Faulknerian technique and sensibility.

"Bernice Bobs Her Hair"  a discussion.

Bi Feiyu, author of the luminous The Moon Opera, has won for Three Sisters. This book should be coming to me soon.  I can't wait to read it.

Allegra Goodman v. Jonathan Franzen Even from the brief description, it appears that I would need to look into the book by Ms. Goodman.  It sounds too good to be missed. When people have sex in Freedom, heads bang on walls. In The Cookbook Collector it's a finger on the chest and then fade out. There are great flights of imagination in The Cookbook Collector – like the scene where George stumbles upon a collection of 17th-century manuscripts in the cabinets and ovens of a musty kitchen: "For a moment, he thought she was searching for the iodine, and then he saw them. Leather-bound, cloth-bound, quartos and folios, books of every size."  I'll spare you the rest of that paragraph.  In all, it sounds to me like Goodman wins hands down.  So why so little acclaim--read the article to find out.

The Fifth Queen --Ford Madox Ford Perhaps a palliative for those who succumb to frothing at the mouth over Wolf Hall (either succumbing to the critical approval or railing against the language and historicity).  The review makes this sound like a book worth taking up.

Franzen and Houellebecq considered

"Storm Fear"

The Fourth Bear --Jasper Fforde

Franzen's Freedom , another view

Robert Frost and the post-modernists An article that considers at length Frost's stand on authorship--who is the author?

Connected reviewed

A Tour of James Bonds's London via Books Inq.

Diamond Hill by Chi-shun Feng reviewed

Haslett on Fish on Strunk and White