A tale of crime and cooking

A glance around most bookshops would suggest what Elizabeth Farrelly's publishing friend says more bluntly: not much sells besides cookery and crime.

This had me wondering what lies behind the appeal of both, and if there's a connection between them. If there is, I think it might have something to do with the satisfaction of appetites. An appetite, on the one hand, for adventure, justice, revelation, restoration, above all, perhaps, for story; and on the other, not simply for food, but for creativity, community, husbandry, bounty. Perhaps they offer simpler satisfactions than the more intellectually challenging works that languish on the shelves, but the appetites they satisfy are not in themselves unhealthy or untoward.

Yet if these appetites are perennial, why do they drive the book market now in a way they haven't before? Perhaps because we live in an age of satisfaction. If the Rolling Stones couldn't get none, we can get plenty, usually at the swipe of a card or the click of a button. And if the Stones' idea of satisfaction was too lofty (which seems doubtful), ours is simple enough. In an age where our wealth lets us gratify our wishes more readily than ever, our wishes are more than ever commensurate to what money can buy.

That's the cynical view I suppose. We like crime novels and cookbooks because they meet most simply our simplest needs. The other view might be that our simplest needs tell us more about ourselves than our more complex needs. That if the alternative to crime and cooking is smudgy, plotless literary fiction that matters terribly in some way we don't quite understand, or literary non-fiction that rambles over wide terrain without arriving anywhere, then maybe crime and cooking offer more genuine assistance with our project of human being.

To support such a view, Toni Morrison might be summoned. “For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sorts of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.”

On the couch of anguish

I've been ill this week so haven't done much except read and sleep and listen to podcasts. One's marriage vows come in handy when one is languishing on a couch of illness and can't muster the wherewithall to make oneself a cup of tea. Moved though I would have been to have this sung song over me, I think (if I were Chloris) I'd rather Robbie had rallied round with the teapot than composed affecting poems on my parlous state. Nice to know he cared, I suppose.

Long, long the night,
Heavy comes the morrow,
While my soul's delight
Is on her bed of sorrow.

Can I cease to care,
Can I cease to languish,
While my darling Fair
Is on the couch of anguish.

Long, long the night,
Heavy comes the morrow,
While my soul's delight
Is on her bed of sorrow.

Every hope is fled;
Every fear is terror;
Slumber even I dread,
Every dream is horror.

Long, long the night,
Heavy comes the morrow,
While my soul's delight
Is on her bed of sorrow.

Hear me, Powers Divine!
Oh, in pity, hear me!
Take aught else of mine,
But my Chloris spare me!

Long, long the night,
Heavy comes the morrow,
While my soul's delight
Is on her bed of sorrow.

Saying what needs to be said

Robert Frost said a liberal is a man too broad minded to take his own side in a quarrel. Last Thursday night President Obama (finally) took his own side and gave the speech many have been waiting to hear. Still bending toward compromise, it was punchy, simple, and stirring. He stood up for ordinary America against the interests of the rich and influential, and argued (finally) from America's history against the anti-government feeling that has only swelled since the mid-terms. Simplifying pro-government reasoning, he argued that while individualism has its strengths, there are some things we can only do together. It was a breath of air for anyone who's been watching the GOP suck the oxygen out of US politics.

Unavoidably, the speech participates in the very politics it was trying to circumvent, and doubtless the pundits of both sides will have their way with it. One of the criticisms already levelled, by Maureen Dowd, is that talking doesn't solve anything. She wrote in the NY Times that Obama is suffering from the “speech illusion”: the idea that he can come down from the mountaintop, read the teleprompter, cast his magic spell, and ascend the mountain while everyone scurries to do his bidding. I think in the case of Obama, coming down from the mountaintop to deliver a fiery speech is exactly what he can do, exactly what he should do.

While generally all talk and no action is political failure, sometimes there is virtue in simply saying what needs to be said. Saying what those who have no voice have been saying unheard, and saying it loud. Obama's jobs bill has yet to go through, but his words mattered. Words can restore dignity, sometimes via indignation. They can break rhetorical cycles, gauge or change the public mood, set people on a fresh course. Obama has a unique capacity to do just that. Kevin Rudd (an infinitely less gifted speaker) was blistered by those who thought his apology to the stolen generations was a meaningless gesture, adrift from action. Watching the faces of the Indigenous people massed outside Parliament House that day, I couldn't believe the words weren't important in themselves. Words that acknowledged the past, made a space for grief to be aired, made real the sufferings that had for so long lain unsung. Words reify experience; they set it down indelibly in the long records of human life. As Shakespeare knew, and Obama trusts, words can make and unmake worlds.

This afternoon was the colour of water

For Sunday's anniversary, this poem by America's Amy Lowell: “September, 1918.”

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;

The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;

The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,

And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.

Under a tree in the park,

Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,

Were carefully gathering red berries

To put in a pasteboard box.

Some day there will be no war,

Then I shall take out this afternoon

And turn it in my fingers,

And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,

And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.

To-day I can only gather it

And put it into my lunch-box,

For I have time for nothing

But the endeavour to balance myself

Upon a broken world.

The end/s of fiction

In the same interview I cited some posts back, Tobias Wolff scoffs at the idea, sometimes advanced in writing classes, that there are only seven stories, some of which have already been “used up.” There are as many stories, he says, as there are ways to imagine them; these, by implication, being pretty close to infinite.

Ned Beauman at The Millions is not convinced.  He suggests new writers can be paralysed not only by old stories, but also by used up ways to tell them. “There’s a remark somewhere by (I think) Martin Amis about how all young writers have to confront the fact that there just aren’t many new ways left to describe an autumn sky or a pretty girl. It’s like peak oil for lyricism.”

I have to disagree with Beauman, and possibly with Amis (if it was him). There are infinite ways to describe an autumn sky or a pretty girl. There will be no peak oil for lyricism because lyricism is another word for poetry and poetry is another word for making. How can there be an end to making? A limit to the number of things made?  Lyrics are a resource not external but endemic to the human mind. You might as well say there can be no new inventions, no developments in medicine or physics or genetics. Lyricism springs eternal in the human breast.

In fact what I love most about prose fiction is not the story, whether it's old or new, but the texture and detail of the prose, the ingenuities of language that describe the world in ways I couldn't have. Even a bad book turns up some new phrase, some new way of seeing or being, crystallised in two or three words. The best books do this on every page. It's why, though we know the story back to front, we go back to them.