Feeding wolves with rubber stamps

So, ever the worrier, am damn near apoplectic with concerns over the Very Boring Details of moving countries - again. Bank accounts, movers, college administration, luggage, living at home for a month in between . . . it's a lot to think about, or rather, worry blindly about.

And then there's the business. The new business will launch 16 June, before which date I'll need to talk to the business naming people, the tax man, the bank, and oh-so-many more people with rubber stamps before I can get cracking. (On the plus side, I now have my very own rubber stamp of my very lovely logo, thanks in part to My Friend George - see right.) More overwhelming is whether all this effort will succeed in earning me the required crust, though well-meaning friends and colleagues assure me that this is not an issue.

By way of keeping fingers in pies and the wolf from the door, I've started noodging for more reviewing work - which will be good *kill me* networking, too. A Dublin-based magazine might have some, but - as in Real Journalism - the freelancer must pitch the idea. They have some useful and amusingly-written guidelines for pitching. Most are fairly par for the course, but some are very useful points spelled out in plain English.

Cooking with Booze

So, as mentioned, the fine folks at Snow Books have a clever scheme. You want a book to review? You want, sneaky sneaky, a book to review and then, GASP, you want to stick a bow on it and give it to someone for Christmas? Then you just go and have a look at the new books from Snow Books, and they pop the one you'd like in the post.

Why do some small presses always get it right?

I had a look, and sure, there was good fiction, fun fiction, scaaaary fiction, but I thought, 'Cooking with Booze? Yes, please.'



So, before anyone of my vast readership gets on their high, sober horse, this book is clearly not a serious exercise in gastronomic brilliance. It's, em, fun. That said, it is a cookbook, and yes, you can cook real, live boozy recipes and produce a tasty meal.

A gorgeous little gift hardback, it sells for a tenner and says 'give me to your friend, the lager lout, the wine connoisseur, the fresher, the cook who ruins a beautiful dinner by walking through the nineteen-hour process it took to make that beluga caviar filo parcel' in a little mischevious voice. Copious amounts of wine-stains adorn the cover and appear throughout the text, and although I might have been tempted to have fewer of the round ring-marks, the message of this package is 'nothing succeeds like excess'. Red-wine ends on nice paper, too - why do so few books sport lovely ends? Yeahyeah, unit cost. Aaaanyway. The author is George Harvey Bone, the alter-ego of a traveller, foodie and all-round up-for-it type who seems to be one of those arch, silly British types, hugely endearing and a bit over-the-top who do it all with tongue in cheek, a nudge and a wink, and a pint in their hand. Reminds me of our own authors, The Bart & the Bounder. (Actually, there might be two people behind GHB, it's hard to tell.)

Recipes are divided not by course or main ingredient, but, of course, by booze: wine, fortified wines, beer, cider, vodka, whisky, rum, brandy, tequila and other spirits and liquers. Now, no one I know has a liquor cabinet (or a drinks cupboard as I've learned it's called here) because they can't afford it. A wide variety of in-house alcohol is, you'd think, the domain of essentially tee-total relatives and city bankers. So no, you won't be able to make everything here, but, in the spirit of things (ha HAH), let the booze lead you to the food. You'd be surprised how much booze you own, or at least I hope you would be. A quick peek in my own kitchen revealed wine, half a bottle of ruby port, a gift bottle of limoncello, gin, a finger or two of pastis, a baby bottle of champers and a novelty shot's worth of absinthe. Plenty to get started with.

Many are even easy enough to whip up when you get home from the pub.



My favourites include Huîtres au Champagne, Baked Mackerel in Calvados and Hungarian Brandy Beef Goulash, which bears the note, 'don't be afraid to add plenty of paprika for that "I fancy another crack at the Ottomans" feeling'. There are some doozies, most of which, sorry, were born in the mid-west or the southern United States, including Beer Butt Chicken, Tipsy Sweet Potatoes (with marshmallows, Clinton-style), and Beer Brats, which would be tasty, but just make me think about foam cheese hats at football games.

Extreme dorkiness reigns in places, as well it should, cf. Mushrooms à le Carré, so named 'because they make me all Smiley'. I would love to share with Our Fearless Leader, who is both the good author's editor and a foodie, but I don't think I could bear to speak the words.

Some of the recipies make you wonder what the drink was for in the first place. A fine example is Advocaat. Have you ever, EVER seen ANYONE drink a glass of this yellow, egg-related Dutch abomination? Does one even drink it in a glass? Who knows. Bone gives us Advocaat Ice Cream. I see cream, sugar, alcohol and eggs. Sounds like a great dessert. Another would be the Harvey Wallbanger Cake and similar sentiments about Galliano, though why anyone allowed a cake mix to enter these pages I don't know. Make a sponge cake, people, it's not rocket science.

I see Mojito Cupcakes in my future.

Have a look at the Cooking with Booze blog here. Hey, Snowies, how about Cooking for a Hangover edition next? Think of the promos! The Amazon hook-ups! But you're probably way ahead of me . . .

Cooking with Wine. George Harvey Bone.
Snow Books. 978-1-905005-65-9. £9.99.

It’s a hard knocks life: the longest short piece ever published

Me, I’ll write just about anything, on any schedule for anyone willing to pay me and print it, preferably with a by-line, but shit, let’s be honest… I don’t even care about that.

So far, this tactic has served me well.

The problem with this, and with being junior in these things in general, is that it is extremely difficult to know when exactly to say ‘no’, and when to say ‘wait, wait. You want that when??’. Or alternately, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about Futurist German fiction / physics / the state of Vanuatu today’.

This was my situation when given Foolish Mortals by Jennifer Johnston. You see, I’ve only read one of her other sixteen novels, and that was insufficient for the task at hand. So I did some research, read some lit crit, read past reviews (bad form, I know, but I wanted the critic’s perspective), I hit up the family expert on these things for information, the lot. As you would. As you would, particularly when stuck for time. I then squeezed it into the original 800-word limit – big mistake. This is not the kind of review I usually write (it’s relatively more important than my standard tiny thing that no-one reads), so why I thought that this was going to work, I don’t know.

It didn’t.

Rewrite number one: with the suggestions of Bogglingly Kind Editor, worked in all manner of detail on characters, places, specifics, and as full a critique as I could manage of how this novel sits within her oeuvre to date. Can I do this? Can I, Hell. I can’t remember the last time I wrote 1,000 words on anything, except here of course, but that hardly has to be coherent. It was an ungodly mess.

Rewrite number two: also probably a mistake. Sent Rewrite 1 off to the family expert, presently situated on the east coast of the U.S. That, folks, means a time difference, and resulting lateness to submit on my end. I have never, ever, ever been late to submit any written work to anyone. It also entailed her having to edit extremely quickly, which is unfair, which created a contagious panic. What’s more, the family expert is (obviously) much more able for this than I am, and could do this standing on her head.



Submitted, now at 1,200 words…






…aaaaannd returned.

Rewrite number three: now cut back down to close on the original 800 words. Picture added, Herself in the glasses, no doubt, though just a grey rectangle in my pdf at the moment. Also, text is now ‘lopsided’ as the Bogglingly Kind Editor kindly put it, from the cut. I’ll be rewriting it this weekend, which is not what I wanted to do atall, though I am now more terrified than ever to get it wrong.

More to the point, despite kindness, I am quite sure that the BKE will now never give me anything of this length / placement ever again, which is extremely depressing.

Bespectacled Chinaphile, are you reading? Brace yourself for your début!

Moonwalking in Chinatown

So, funny as, yours truly has reviewed two whole plays for a paper. Oh, yes, P. Bench, theatre reviewer extraordinaire. I've been going long enough, and I know what I like... and I know a bad play when I see one, but does this qualify me? Probably not.

At any rate, the more recent of the two was Moonwalking in Chinatown put on by the Soho Theatre on Dean St.

Basically, it's textbook (oh, yes, I read one) promenade theatre, toodling as it does through the real, live streets of Chinatown with no less than four separate audiences, mobile crew and rotating actors in an hour-long show. The beginning needs work! HOT, people, it was hot. The wait was long. We stood on a landing looking at goldfish-like officeworkers who had no choice in the matter. There was no water, or air, and there were old people... ugh. And there's a bar, a NICE bar downstairs. Sort it out. Otherwise, on with the show, make a long story short, we were handed colour-coded tiles and led out under coordinating lanterns.

We were one with the actors, confused them for us, for passersby, for lunatics, whatever. The stage was shopwindows, supermarkets, smelly back alleys and beatific courtyards (yes, they can be) in the middle of high-priced real estate. It was a silly story, really, but they did a slam-bang job of it and we all learned a bit about things Moon Festival and Chinese.

But I'll tell you what we didn't come away with: a MOON CAKE, people. Come on. Is stellou the only one to provide?? Or am I going to have to haul my white, ill-informed beeehind down to Chinatown to sort the lotus seed paste from the cured ham? Because I can tell you, it won't be pretty. And how will I avoid the damn duck eggs? Where is that clever, bespectacled chinaphile? You know who you are. And I bet you know the real word for a chinaphile. So I went cakeless. Really, it would have been the perfect end to a fun night, but hey.

I commend the fine folks at Soho Theatre for putting it all together, t'ain'tabeen easy. Likewise, I'm impressed by the web gear for this show: a ‘moonblog’ which is cute, but could be a little rougher around the edges, along with mp3s of interviews, and some of the cast even announced their availability on facebook for chats after the show (soho bananaboy and duriangirl among others). This is exactly the sort of thing that theatres should be taking on: make it different, make it lively, and for Chrissake stop flogging half-dead donkeys up and down the West End.

Shortie of the Week

It's been a while, but in the interim, American author Grace Paley passed away. I must admit that I never read loads of her work, but then, what I don't know would fill a room... for although A.M. Homes is not my favourite, Dan Schneider seems a bit harsh on the Laura Hird site. Homes did at least a twofer on Paley, here in 1998 and in the Guardian yesterday.

But we're democratic here at Parkbench, so go on and look her up yourself for your short fiction reading this week. Her greatest hits include 'Goodbye and Good Luck' (a popular title for her obit in lots of papers) and ‘A Conversation With My Father’. Really, she seems to have been a sweet, introspective, thoughtful type of woman, as suggested by this charming interview - somewhere in there the suggestion that we should have known more of her and her writing, though I suspect that at 26 I may be exactly the wrong age to have been introduced to her work in American highschool.

But most wonderfully, do please go and listen in to the writer herself through the links to past interviews and discussions on NPR in the States - nothing does it like audio.


Alternately, read the single most astonishing collection of short fiction of recent years - Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan. I was thrilled to have met her last Christmas, and she gives off those eerie waves of genius. That's all there is to it. I hope someone lets me review it, and I will do so here soon.

Fishies

Like most mere mortals with bad salaries and high rents, I live in Paperback Land. This means that I read all books (other than those I work on) a year after they come out, when they're cheaper, more colourful and more plentiful. If you have somehow, like myself until recently, managed to miss Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, you should know that it is indeed a book to be judged by its cover – and title. OK, so that's not the Yemen, but throw a girl a bone. Anyway, the book really does do what it says on the tin… of salmon. Schnar. A serious-minded fisheries scientist thinks that he might have to walk away from his career rather than get involved with a daft government-backed scheme to beat them all: taking Atlantic salmon to the wadis of the Yemen to please a rich Caledoniaphile (oh, yes) Sheik and provide a good photo-op in the Middle East for the PM. There’s a nice narrative sideline regards the bigger political machinations of the scheme involving a send-up of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell that’s more Yes, Minister than West Wing, though it does get a bit bogged-down halfway through. Eventually, the good scientist, trapped in a loveless marriage he never realised was miserable, finds that his life lacks meaning and adventure. Soon, he is flying around the world to learn about holding tanks, cooling systems and how to trick fish into adapting to desert life, while dodging his increasingly enraged wife, a sycophant spin-doctor and a backstabbing boss. It’s charming and funny and really just a straightforward middle-aged picaresque. Highly recommended for some fun, easy reading. And of course you already knew all that, but Hell, no one reads this anyway!

Back in business

So… here we are. February.

It’s been a busy few months, and I return with my tail between my legs. I think I’ll do a few separate entries, rather than one big behemoth job.

I last wrote in November, when I faced harsh truths about working part-time:
1. You can’t live on a part-time publishing salary in London, no matter how much freelance reviewing you manage to land.

2. If you do work part-time, and your company has use-it-or-lose-it holidays, you have plenty of time, no money, and holidays you must, well, use or lose.

3. Holiday days carry more weight when you’re part-time. If you work a three-day week, nine days of holiday means three weeks off.

I could have just handed them over to The Man, but I was having a lousy time and determined to sit around in my bathrobe and eat discount bonbons in Norf London if it came to it. A girl’s gotta do…

But that would have been grim- my own sugar-laden company can only amuse for so long. Instead, I spent a week toddling around London, seeing the sights, meeting the mates, reading through the stack.

Then, I thought about where else I could go. I had to have accommodation supplied, under the circumstances, so I considered the options, and found myself back in the town of my birth. Very odd to be back, and odder still as I it was the first Thanksgiving in eight years I had in the States.

My cut-price where’s-the-catch? trip took me from Gatwick to Detroit to National Airport. Not Reagan. National. Got it?

At any rate, I spent most of it inhaling a copy of I Served the King of England by Brohumil Hrabal (Vintage, 2005). A slim volume with a decadent, mouldy brown cover sporting a dusty 1920s scene in a plush hotel, waiters, flappers and wealthy gentleman sunk into velvet banquettes, hiding in snugs and dark wood panelling. Hrabal’s was not a name I knew, but Milan Kundera called him the greatest writer in their country. If it’s good enough for Kundera, it’s enough to knock the rest of us sideways. It is essentially a picaresque, but not of the sunny, blond-haired, rosy-cheeked, dirty fingernails variety. The book opens with a young, poor man helping his resourceful grandmother with her rather unusual work: she profits from the profits of others, as visiting salesmen up on their luck toss their old, worn shirts, socks and jocks out the window into a stream. There sit the young man and his grandmother, who wait, heron-like, ready to lift them out, wash, mend and resell them down the ladder of working men. Soon, the boy seeks to come up in the world, and gains employment as a waiter in one of Prague’s old hotels in a day when waitering was a career, and only the observant, the skilled and the discreet could get ahead.

From this unremarkable start opens the most charming, exquisitely-written tale I have read in years. Though it never leaves Prague and surrounds, the boy has an education beyond his wildest dreams, as lush, exotic and glittering as the most colourful travel lit. Hrabal writes sensually, not sexually, about the boy’s first encounters with the garish women who frequent the hotels, as he ‘covers their laps with flowers’. He captures awe surrounding the prime minister’s misleading dinner for three, as the staff twigging with varying speeds to the non-existence of third diner as man and mistress tumble, sweetly into a pergola in the gardens.

There is an air of magic to this book, and though I know that the term ‘magic realism’ can turn people clean off, there is nothing here as blatant as Garcìa Marquez or Angela Carter. It is as if the magic has just left the stage, leaving just a twinkle in its wake. Here, the King of Ethiopa arrives with his full entourage, and a banquet is created the likes of which Bohemia has never seen. The near-orgiastic scene that erupts as the camel stuffed with x, stuffed with y and flavoured with all the spices of the Orient is cut and consumed is loud, sparkling, funny and mesmerising. There are more such scenes, but I won’t spoil it for you. (If you’re interested, another blogger, waggish, has run through it comprehensively)
What’s more, I was so astonished by it, that I threw my copy across the living room in Washington at my father, and left it there, demanding that he read it. Oi, you people who don’t read modern and contemporary fiction – get to it.

As to my time in Washington, it was lovely, filling and all those good things. Met up with the Best Friend, and thinking of happy nights in Addis in King's Cross, introduced her to some first-rate Ethiopian in Addams Morgan, and sampled some fabulous but pricey mojitos. She is muchly missed, but there we are. Also, did some wandering in the Old Country of the outback of North West DC and relearned my driving skills all over again. Relaxing. Not London. Good.

Going the Wicklow Way

Having left at the crack of dawn (why am I always, always leaving at the crack of dawn despite my best efforts?!?!),

I'm back again after a gloriously lazy weekend in Wicklow with a houseful of friends, food, wine and sea views.

Fierce therapeutic, of course, and nice to make the place feel like home. Pleasing to be with other people who appreciate the small pleasures, and cracked up to see international types endearing themselves/bewildering locals to take pictures of gingerbread men and the like. Barely resisted the urge to avail of the five-finger discount in one of the town's amazing boutiques, well beyond my price range, of course. Lots of stomping, all the cobwebs blown out and returned clearheaded and sure as ever that London is not the place for me, but I think that's just going to be the way it is.

Did almost no reading while I was there, having just finished the fantastic The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa, a truly daft Dante-as-detective effort, and *gak* Mother Missing by Joyce Carol bloody Oates. Why I'm constantly subjected to Women's Writing (as opposed to writing by women) simply because I'm young and female is beyond me: as if you would feed a black freelancer almost exclusively Black Writing, mais bon. Silliness and entirely not my cup of tea, with women characters so objectionable, so catty, manipulative and stereotypically female that it was hard to drag myself past the opening scene. The Dante effort was fine but not worth discussing further, but the Agualusa! Fantastic. Absolutely gorgeous, gentle writing, unusual characters well developed, and several openly discussed and well-integrated themes. Based in Angola, it oozes light and heat, and has a lovely, rounded story about a 'seller of pasts' and how he falls in love. Absolutely superlative in its simplicity, and really rekindling an interest in contemporary African writing for me.

Now have a week off (use it or lose it holidays) and not enough to read! I might have to (gasp) read for pleasure! Shockin'.

Freelance aspirations

So in a recent e-ponder at my understandably none-too-impressed mother, I wondered exactly how much freelance reviewing and writing one would have to get before giving up the day job. This is, of course, a very naive train of thought, but Hell, that's what blogs are for.

I have found that freelancers spend so much time having to promote themselves and their abilities that they become unreliable narrators of how they spend their time, or alternately, they've been doing it for so long that they started in a time when things were very different. I would love to know more about the harsh realities of freelance features journalism and how one makes the leap. If you've already got a national broadsheet and a few major literary outlets under your belt, what's next? How do you up the ante from £40 or £60 pieces without ending up making coffee in a newsroom somewhere? Need it necessarily be a one-way ticket to the poorhouse and 60-hour weeks alone on your laptop? Will you always be faced with people asking if you never wanted a 'real career'? Will you cease to care? Ponder ponder.

Submitting to Peer Pressure

So, despite a groaning piles of Books I Should Be Reading Because I'm Paid to Do So, I went into the singularly unfriendly Camden Waterstone's to remind myself why indies are best and to buy Colm Toibin's Mothers and Sons. *will master accents and italics shortly, joy* Have a look at the master's own website, a bit cutesy but impressive nonetheless.

It's just breathtaking. The book that is, not his website. The short story is, as they say, your only man.

Much to my immense annoyance, I missed the William Trevor reading at the short story festival this weekend through a truly lame combination of fatigue, lack of funds and the lure of the Brick Lane Beigel Shop. That, and fear of meeting work folk I don't know well enough yet, but should.

So on a completely unrelated note, I'm compiling a Christmas list, one which includes precious few books (see above) but rather a list of passwords to the likes of the LRB, the New Yorker and a few other tools of the trade I would really rather like but, unsurprisingly, find that I cannot afford. I should probably do something bright like do alternate weeks of different mags with a £5 budget. That's a thought.

Greetings, Blogland

Being a thoroughly 21st-century gal these days, I thought that the time had come to start a blog. It will be, and hopefully remain, a fairly anonymous effort. My aim is to meet and greet some of the likeminded books bloggers, writers and critics whose work I've come across in the last year.

I make no promises to be regular in my posts, sociable in my nature, nor positive in my outlook, but I will try to keep it interesting and topical and include some photos of mine and others I like. Stealing images and words isn't nice, so try to avoid it, and I'll plan to do the same.