Friday Fave: Cheese Chasers

Cheese has always been a serious matter in my household. My father is in general one of those people unwilling to spend more than absolutely necessary on what he needs; if I’m buying a packet of cocoa powder, or a cut of meat, or a new phone, he has always found it necessary to query why I’m buying this or that particular brand or style, and inform me (usually more than once) that I would have spent less if I’d bought said thing somewhere else, or a different brand’s version. There are, however, a few things he does not compromise on: marmalade, bread, and cheese. Never once has he argued with me over the price of a loaf of bread, and anything labeled as “cheese food” or “spray cheese” is not allowed in the house. We bought Velveeta once to make nachos, but it was pronounced a failure. I do remember a brief period from my childhood when we had Kraft slices at home, possibly because I had begged for them–I have absolutely no memories of taking them to school for lunch, but I think we used them for cheese toast–but when Cabot cheese appeared in our local supermarket, that was the end of individually wrapped, plasticky cheese. I also remember my mother describing how someone had told her that she cooked macaroni and cheese for dinner at least once a week, because it was so tasty and saved her money, and wondering how it could possibly save her money when a block of cheese for the dish cost so much; I’m not sure my mother had ever realized, at least at that point, that a box of macaroni and cheese mix included powdered stuff that resembled cheese sauce when prepared.

As long as there has been high-quality cheese available in our local supermarkets, preferably imported from the UK or France or Italy, there has always been a block of cheddar in our refrigerator. It is often accompanied by a piece of brie or camembert, and more recently, Danish blue. I’d make a great many more trips to the Whole Foods cheese counter if my income allowed. (When I lived in Edinburgh there was J. Mellis Cheesmongers, one of the nicest cheese shops ever. Mellis has six locations in Scotland; I’ve lived within a five-minute walk of three of them, at various times. Of the many, many things I miss about Scotland, this is one of them. If Atlanta has anything comparable, I haven’t found it yet.) Costco has been, if not a life-saver, at least a great boon in this regard.

Image result for cheese slices tv show

One of the perks of frequently housesitting for friends is getting to watch the cable stations that my own provider doesn’t carry. A few years ago I was channel surfing and came across a show called Cheese Slices, or Cheese Chasers. (It seems to have different names depending on where it’s aired.) It’s a half hour program devoted entirely to cheese, and honestly, given how much people love cheese (it’s as addictive as a drug, apparently, did you know?) I don’t know why no one thought of this years ago. Each episode is devoted to a different region of the world known for producing a specific variety of cheese, and the host, Will Studd, goes to different commercial and home-grown businesses that produce the cheese. They discuss each variety’s history, the milk it’s made from–often accompanied by shots of the herds kept to produce said milk–the legal restrictions it’s subject to, and usually a meal or two that features the cheese. I find it fascinating, and endlessly irritating that it’s only available in broken-up segments on YouTube–I’d happily buy the series on dvd if it was available; episodes are available for purchase on his website, but I don’t know what the cost is per show. I suspect it’s more than I’m willing to pay, at least for now. There are clips available on YouTube, if you hunt for them–look for Will Studd, because if you just do a search for “Cheese Chasers” you get a lot of clips of a classic cartoon episode by the same name. If you happen to have a cable service provided that carries the otherwise ridiculous Wealth TV (now labeling itself A Wealth of Entertainment), keep an eye out for it.

Studd himself is an evangelist for unpasteurized milk and dairy products, which I don’t entirely agree with. I do think it’s silly to prohibit the sale of unpasteurized cheeses, because they do have a flavor that can’t be achieved with pasteurized milk, and can be delicious; I don’t know of anywhere that prohibits the making and consumption of sushi, as long as any such sale is accompanied by the obligatory warning about the possibility of becoming sick from eating uncooked fish. On the other hand, the law on the sale of unpasteurized milk exists for a good reason, as grotesquely and effectively illustrated in an early episode of Boardwalk Empire. People can easily see the difference between uncooked and cooked fish, chicken, and meat; pasteurized and unpasteurized milk, and the cheese made therefrom, isn’t similarly distinguishable at a glance.

But back to the cheese. Each episode finishes off with a meal–many of them are simple picnics, pairing the cheeses with local meats and wines, and some require specific pans that I don’t have access to, or techniques I haven’t mastered (I *will* make a proper frittata one day. I will), but there was one recipe that I am going to try just as soon as I find the right sort of cheese. I wish I could link to the original clip, or give credit to the family who seems to have thought of this (unless it’s a traditional local dish that I just haven’t been able to guess the name of, I did try searching by ingredients), and the next time I get a chance to see the episode I will (it’s in episode 6 of season 1, I think), but until then, try this, it looks delicious.

You will need a bowl at least 3 inches or so deep and a saucepan large enough to fit the bowl easily inside. A steamer insert would also be handy, but isn’t necessary. Fill the saucepan an inch deep with water and bring the boil. While the water is heating, crumble or shred a few slices of Lancashire cheese and sprinkle them in a ring around the edge of the bowl. Crack an egg into the center of the cheese ring. (Amounts of cheese and egg can be increased according to how many people are sharing the dish.) Cut a fresh Roma or other small tomato or two into thin slices and arrange them over the cheese in a ring. Set the bowl carefully into the pan of boiling water–use an oven glove or a dishtowel to avoid burning yourself. (This is where the steamer basket is a handy thing, if you have one.) Cover the saucepan with its lid and allow to steam for five minutes–more time may be necessary if you’ve got more than one egg. Remove the bowl carefully from the pan, again being careful not to burn yourself. Serve with a loaf of crusty bread, toasted or fresh. Spoon the melted cheese and poached egg onto the bread as you eat. Comfort food at its finest, and great for a cool autumn or winter morning.

Friday Fave: Christine and the Queens

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Pop music that isn’t sung in English rarely gets much of a listen among U.S. audiences. once in a while a song, usually associated with an insanely popular film, that includes a verse–or a phrase or two–in a second language will be really popular, but for the most part it’s English all the way. I wonder at times if French pop is met with particularly studied rejection after the brief rage for Jordy’s “Dur Dur D’Etre Bebe” back in 1992 (apologies to all who had successfully blocked that memory. I think I remember buying the single when it came out, but mostly I remember a few instances of singing the lyrics along with a few classmates to torture our French teacher, who was remarkably patient and good-natured but hated the song. It does grate on the nerves after about 10 seconds.)

Dur Dur D’Etre Bebe (and the somewhat alarming image of family life portrayed in its video) aside, the general distaste for foreign pop and rock music is a pity on many scores. I’ve always found it particularly odd when a singer or a group makes the charts in several other countries, or all over the world, and remains virtually unknown in the U.S. As with so many things–particularly football/soccer–this feels like a sort of willful denial on our part, and a bit immature. As though we are covering our ears, scrunching up our faces and muttering “unh-uh” while a the rest of the world holds out a glass of good champagne and a plate of chocolate truffles to us, insisting that we’ll like it if we only give it a chance.

I stopped paying attention to music television and radio when I was finishing high school, save for a brief spell in 2001 when my otherwise tight-fisted landlord gave us free cable television for six months (so he could hike the rent on the next tenants) and there were a couple of music stations that still played music videos. Since then, I’ve relied on reviews, word of mouth, and television shows to hear new stuff. The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert have proved particularly useful in this regard–they don’t have musical guests on all that often, but those they do have are usually acts I find worth listening to. Or, in case of The National, find myself a week later trying to buy up their complete back catalogue.

The only other act from TDS I’ve really fallen for is Christine and the Queens, otherwise known as Héloïse Letissier offstage. She was one of Trevor Noah’s first few musical guests, if not the first, and I think I enjoyed Noah’s complete loss for words at how to respond to her performance as I did the music itself. She and her dancers/band are one of the few rock/pop acts that make live music an actual performance, not by adding a lightshow and other special effects, but by making dance and a number of cultural references an integral part of the show along with the singing. She also uses every song she sings to question and break down gender and sexual normativity, which a lot of people still find threatening; as I watched Trevor Noah’s brief interview with her, I wondered if he had bothered to listen to any of her music before the show.

I didn’t rush to iTunes for the album immediately, but when I did get to it a few weeks later I wished I had. I played it pretty much non-stop for a month, and it was one of the things that got me through last December without losing my mind. She has a lovely voice, and does 80s-style synth-pop better than they did in the 80s. (Granted, she probably has better equipment than was available 25-30 years ago.) She does sing in French, but she re-recorded the album for international release with some of the lyrics translated into English. It sounds like an odd proposition, and I’m sure in some cases it would produced questionable results, but she makes it work beautifully.

She seems to be making waves everywhere but here, which is a pity; we’re missing out. Of course the language barrier isn’t the only obstacle to her popularity over here–we may be making strides in terms of breaking down prejudice against the cishet status quo, but there’s a ways to go yet. Letissier just isn’t interested in waiting, or diluting her style to make it more palatable for the general population: she does what makes her happy. I’m sure it would make a great many more people here happy too, if they had a listen.

Further reading and listening:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/07/christine-and-the-queens-soho-drag-club-to-french-superstardom-heloise-letissier

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/christine-and-the-queens_us_5765a79ce4b0853f8bf11ee8

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Christine+and+the+QUeens&&view=detail&mid=E8E9A1DF1C08D4CE4F7AE8E9A1DF1C08D4CE4F7A&FORM=VRDGAR

 

Friday Fave: Halt and Catch Fire

When Halt and Catch Fire started three years ago, my sole reason for watching it was Lee Pace, who is all kinds of awesome and I couldn’t understand why his shows kept getting cancelled. (If you haven’t seen Wonderfalls or Pushing Daisies, go hunt them up on Netflix or YouTube or wherever, stat. You have been missing out for years. Also, boo, Fox and ABC respectively, boo.) I was mildly interested that it was filmed in Atlanta, but mostly it was to watch Lee Pace. Beyond that, I didn’t know what to expect–I think I had an idea that it would be a bit like Mad Men, but set in Silicon Valley. Not knocking Mad Men, which was great, but I was getting a bit bored with the white-male-mid-life crisis angst and tragedy. It has been the primary focus of quite a bit of truly brilliant television in recent years–Breaking Bad being another example–and said television has featured some women and even (rarely) central characters who aren’t white, but brilliant television always inspired dozens of not-as-great imitations, usually with less imagination and even less effort at representation.

Mad Men this is not. Corporate culture certainly has a presence in the story, but this time it holds no allure or glamour; it is a world that is stifling, threatening, something that three of the four, if not all, of the main characters are fighting to overthrow, not to conquer. They are not a part of of it and they have no wish to be. Neither is this a male-dominated show, which has been glossed over or gotten lost in some of the advertising. It is about two men, two women, and the rise of the home computer industry. The acting is excellent.

Underneath that, of course, it is about so much more. It is about two couples: one pair who constantly have to negotiate their way between a desire for the stereotypical suburban home and 2.5 children and making the most of their considerable talent for engineering and mathematics, and the other whose relationship is pretty much just a hot mess. It is about two women who decide that they don’t want to be relegated to support roles in the lives of the men they work for and live with, and how they struggle with suddenly being seen as a threat by those same men, consciously and otherwise. It is a close comparison of the intersections between work and home life change when you have a family and all that that entails.

It isn’t a perfect television series–some episodes are better than others, and some of the subplots are at times more compelling than the central story. It could do better in terms of representation, although it’s doing better than some shows in this regard. I’m also finding that the effort to cover all the major leaps in the evolution of the computing world are feeling a bit strained. I know just enough about coding and hacking to have found that aspect of The Honourable Woman a constant irritation in watching the last few episodes of show, but not enough to be distracted by any errors present in this one. What does bother me is that, in the world of the story, these four people seem to responsible for most, if not all of the major innovations that we now take for granted–the initial Apple vs. Microsoft fight was substantial enough, but some six years later they’ve also created the seeds of e-bay, online multi-player games, and it looks like someone might be about to invent a thinly-disguised Sirius radio. With the sheer number of people who were and are drawn to this industry–something that is reflected in the show, whenever a scene takes place in public or business setting–it feels disingenuous to present this quartet of characters as the only really imaginative innovators in the field, and placing so much of the burden of that innovation on those four characters takes away from the parts of the story that make the show compelling.

The thing I love best about the show is that it has two fully developed female leads who work and live in what is still a male-dominated industry, but beyond that I love that the writers decided to maintain their focus on these four characters, and the development of the story constantly realigns their alliances and allegiances enough to keep their interactions interesting but not so much that all four come off as sociopaths who have no real grasp of what fidelity is. (Joe is a sociopath, but he’s written that way; the other three are sane, if damaged to varying degrees.) I also really like that the show’s title is an integral metaphor for the shared tendency of the characters to self-sabotage their emotional and professional relationships; titles are important when it comes to stories, but televisions shows are usually just named for their character or a setting. It’s unusual to have such an apt title continue to reflect an important aspect of the story, and I think a lot of the reviewers who dismissed the show in its first two seasons didn’t make that connection–I’ve only ever seen it mentioned in order to explain the term’s meaning as a coding command.

I don’t tend to read a lot of reviews for any one show, and the few I’ve read over the past three years for this one have always made me feel like the decision to renew it must be balanced on a knife-edge; it has always been highly rated by calculators such as Rotten Tomatoes, but it seemed to suffer from a lack of interest rather than negative opinion. Renewals for the second and third season were thus pleasant surprises. (Most of those reviews I have read have complained about the show’s lack of substance, to the point that I wonder if they actually watched the thing. It has substance in plenty; it is just that you can only take the drama of literally creating code and machinery so far. After that the human elements of egotism and jealousy and fecklessness and just plain wanting something from another person have to take over, otherwise you have no story.)

Season three seems to be attracting more attention, and more positive reviews, than the first two, so I’m finally allowing myself to hope for season four. Season three is currently airing Tuesday nights on AMC in the U.S.; in the UK it is available on Amazon Prime.

Friday Fave: Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

This is one of those albums for which I’ve started avoiding looking at the year it was released, because it makes me feel old. (It turns 22 this year. Probably gets played on those oldies stations that I also avoid listening to because a friend told me a few years ago that Blind Melon’s “No Rain” is officially an oldie now and how can that be &*%^$ possible?)

I discovered the single “Possession” on a flight from Atlanta to Miami when I was 15: It was on a list of maybe eight tracks the airline had compiled of rock and pop music on the in-flight “radio” station. I listened to that channel for the entire flight, sitting through the other entirely forgettable songs just to hear “Possession” maybe three times. I got the album as soon as it came out, and I have never stopped listening.

I still listen to a lot of the music I loved when I was a teenager, but most of it is still dear to me out of a sense of nostalgia: I am not the person I was when I fell in love with those songs, and in a lot of cases my taste has changed to the extent that some of it now sounds shallow and hackneyed–the lyrics capture a glimmer of how I felt at the time, but the songs aren’t strikingly inventive in any way. Fumbling towards Ecstasy is one of the exceptions. Every song on it is still as compelling to me as they were the day I brought the album home, particularly “Possession,” “Ice,” and the titular “Fumbling toward Ecstasy.”

While there’s plenty to be said about originality and inventiveness in popular music, a large part of what I’ve always valued in rock and other short-form songs is the use of lyrics–without the imagery and expression, the greater part of the artistry in rock stems from using existing melodies and rhythms in new ways. She captures something of Romanticism in its original literary sense, and a lot of the imagery she uses in her songs subverts and questions the representations of women ingrained in our culture, particularly those of Christian iconography. Most of the songs on her first four albums aren’t about love at all, and those that are are not about winning the guy but about struggling to keep one’s sense of personal identity from being subsumed by obsession, about questioning whether love and passion are the same thing, about whether overwhelming physical passion is ever a truly healthy thing.

A lot of television and film reviews these days discuss the idea of the male gaze, and how more and more directors are creating love scenes and other interactions on screen to present such exchanges from the woman’s perspective, and to appeal to the tastes of female viewers. This is something that McLachlan does in her music that few other musicians were doing at the time–she uses the female perspective in ways that weren’t often heard on popular radio stations back in 1994. Most pop love songs sung from the woman’s perspective even now are limited to celebrating a particular ideal man, questioning what a man wants from a woman, or occasionally rejecting that in favour of another man (or preferring being alone). Before Sarah McLachlan and her support of women artists via the Lilith Fair, there wasn’t a lot of pop music making it onto the charts that asked not just was this man or that man worth it, would he treat you well, but what do you really want in a lover and a partner? (Regardless of that partner’s gender.) She also cast the woman in a relationship in the role of the protector and the provider–and, in “Possession”, as the stalker. (Everyone always brings up “Every Breath You Take” as the quintessential example of a really creepy song being misunderstood as a glorious love song, but when you look at the lyrics of “Possession”, which were in fact inspired by things that two stalkers wrote to McLachlan in the early years of her career. It isn’t as airily romantic as her voice implies; the words are more evocative of paranoid delusion than they are of sane, if melodramatic, love.)

She wasn’t alone–there was Aimee Mann, the Indigo Girls, P. J. Harvey, Melissa Etheridge, Salt n’ Pepa, and a few others active at the same time–but she was a rarity, and she has used her fame to promote other women in music and music education in general. This album is still the best of McLachlan’s work and, together with its bookends Solace and Surfacing, still sounds vital and a little different from anything else around.

 

Friday Fave: Allie Brosh and Hyperbole and a Half

I discovered the blog Hyperbole and a Half quite by chance about three years ago when someone I was once in contact with on Facebook at the time happened to post a comment that Allie Brosh had updated her site for the first time in a long time. I was curious, so I clicked on the link.

I think I spent the next two hours laughing until I cried and my stomach hurt.

Brosh’s blog is like many other blogs, mostly about herself and her relatively uneventful, non-celebrity life with her boyfriend and her two dogs, but she has a genius for relating the most trivial–and sometimes the most awful–experiences in a way that is both honest and incredibly funny. (Dooce’s writing has a similar quality, but lacks the fantastic illustrations.) Brosh captures this tone even in explaining and confronting her struggle with depression, which I return to every so often, particularly when I’m having a difficult week myself. The episode I find the funniest, however, is This Is Why I’ll Never Be An Adult.  If you read nothing else on the site, read that episode. Cleaning *all the things* in a single go is an ambition I continue to nurse–I used to be able to manage it when I lived in a flat in Edinburgh, but the house in Atlanta is proving a different beast. (How do closets and cabinets get so dirty? They stay closed 95% of the time. It isn’t fair.)

There’s actually not a great deal I can say that wouldn’t be better captured by just going and reading the blog itself, so have at it. I know some of you reading this will already be familiar with it, but like Black Books, I find it bears many, many repeated viewings. It is safe for work in the sense of no nudity or much swearing, as far as I recall, but laughing may be a problem. She has one book out, containing the best of the blog and some new material; a second book, Solutions and Other Problems, is due out sometime soon, in which we are promised much new material. If the publisher can just settle on a release date.

The Friday Fave: Writing Letters

Letters

I am an only child, and when I was growing up there were only a couple of other kids my age in my neighbourhood, so I spent a great deal of time playing on my own. One of my odder games was to sit down with one of my mother’s old fountain pens and pretend I was writing letters, immensely long sermons of letters in copperplate, the way I saw people doing in the costume dramas my parents watched on Sunday nights. The only problem was I couldn’t write in cursive at that point, let alone copperplate, so I mostly just scrawled loose lines of spikes and loops over good printer paper that I probably hadn’t bothered asking permission to use. I’d like to say I was three or four years old during these escapades but I was probably old enough to know better.

When I was in second grade my teachers announced that my class would be doing a pen-pal project with another second-grade class in Burkina Faso. I was captivated. Not only would I finally get to write a real letter–not just a Christmas card to a family member–I loved the idea that something I was going to write would be sent to someone on the other side of the globe, whom I’d never met. (I had it in my head that we would each be paired off with one other student in the other class–it didn’t occur to me that the other class full of students was likely much bigger than ours, and whatever we wrote and received would be shared by all the students.) When the planned exchange fell through due to political events, I was terribly disappointed–I’d been practicing my penmanship and studying Africa on the globe for weeks. I still wanted a penpal.

I got one eventually, later the following summer, although we only managed one letter each. I remember that her name was Chrissy, but not much else–I have entirely forgotten how I made contact with her, what state she lived in, and who found her address for me, but I still have her letter.

After that, letters were the part of summer I most looked forward to. I gave up attempting to make my handwriting look like copperplate, at least for the time being, but I wrote as much as I could. One stretch of two or three weeks was spent writing tortuously long recaps of All My Children episodes to one friend spending the summer in New York, because I was certain she wasn’t able to watch it where she was. I don’t know where I got this idea. Another summer was the year of a postman in Florida assuming that I was my best friend’s “little boyfriend” because I had taken to plastering stickers all over the back of the envelopes.

I started collecting volumes of letters by my favourite writers and artists. One Christmas my mother gave me the Oxford Book of Letters, still a favourite possession, to which I started adding hand copies of letters from other volumes when I found that it didn’t include Sullivan Ballou’s last letter to his wife. I was about sixteen, and took this as an almost personal affront, being convinced that it was the loveliest letter ever written.

I met Margaret by chance at my senior prom, and we hit it off instantly. I was due to leave for Scotland in a few months: transatlantic phone calls being both impractical and prohibitively expensive, and email being a thing but Internet access being unpredictable, letters were our only reasonable means of keeping in touch and getting to know one another better. So I started writing more letters. Lots and lots of letters.

Letter box
Some of Margaret’s letters to me

I don’t imagine they were particularly good, my imaginative life at this point being dominated by equal parts Shakespeare, Emily Bronte, Matchbox 20, and Sarah McLachlan. There were tearful letters and homesick letters and plenty of angst about boys, in between being breathlessly enchanted by living in such close proximity to the North Sea and plenty of Mediaeval ruins. There were also, later, drunken letters, which must have been dreadful to read. Sometimes I still want to go back and read these; the rest of the time I think it’s much better for my present and future state of mind that I never do. I’d probably die of embarrassment.

I lost a great part of my will to write at the end of 2001, so addled by anemia that I usually lacked the energy to concentrate. I started relying on email and phone calls more, and lost the discipline to make it to the post office when I did manage to finish a real letter. I made sporadic attempts and recovering my old drive to write letters over the next several years, but it didn’t come back properly, not like it was.

Writing Desk 1

After my mother died I lost most of my interest in writing any sort of personal document at all; whatever inspiration I had went into fiction, where I didn’t have to think about my actual situation and surroundings. I still haven’t resumed my journal, but a couple of months ago my itch write letters came back with a vengeance. I took possession of my parents’ old escritoire–it had been used for storing excess stationery and dried-up pens for most of my life–and all the good writing paper my mother collected but never used, and returned it to the purpose it was designed for. The hutch is still home to some of my mother’s favourite china, but the desk is all mine now, one place to keep my pens, journals, and letter paper and nothing else. It is the nicest place I’ve ever had dedicated solely to writing, and has done a great deal to re-ignite the joy I once found in focusing on what to say to another person.

We are in danger of losing letters as an art form, but I don’t think the rise of email and social media is the culprit. It started to decline at the same time that reading challenging novels and poetry for enjoyment did, which occurred long before we all got access to the Internet. Letters are so much more than a means of transmitting information; for the writer, they can be exercises in introspection, a means of illuminating how we feel about an event or another person, for ourselves as much as for our correspondent; for the reader, they capture something of the writer’s spirit that can’t be communicated over the telephone.

They are also invaluable documents of the past, both in the sense of our shared cultural and national histories and our own personal and family histories. Even the most trivial of comments shed light on the personalities that wrote them. In going through my family’s collection of photos and letters, I found a postcard that my grandfather wrote to his mother when he was away on a scouting trip, aged perhaps 13 or 14, about a century ago now. I never got the chance to know my grandfather well, and fragments like this are invaluable to me.

There’s a great trend these days for devoting all one’s disposable income and time to experiences rather than things, but it bothers me that along with the laudable impulse to be less materialistic we’re forgetting all sense of permanence. One tenet of the anti-immigration argument is that a high number of immigrants inexorably and irretrievably changes our culture (as though time and innovations in technology don’t alter anything). We inexorably and irretrievably lose our culture and our past because we don’t read enough of it, not just recent commentary on previous centuries but the letters and records that have survived. One of the Internet’s greatest blessings is how easy it has made it for us to rediscover and access those documents. Letters are one of our richest resources for learning about where we came for and growing as individuals, and I still continue to hope that it never quite goes out of style. So write a letter. Write to your family the next time you go out of town, in addition to the necessary emails that you’re alive and well. Write to loved ones who live out of state or across the country. If you are so moved, you can take part in awesome projects like this and write to random strangers. Also, there’s nothing quite like finding a handwritten letter in the post, amongst all the sales catalogues and bills.

 

The Friday Fave

I had a different Friday Fave planned for this week, but recent events have kind of derailed me. I’ll have my breath back next week. In the meantime, this is one of the two poems that stays in my mind every time we have to endure such events as the several that occurred over the last week.

September 1, 1939

W. H. Auden, 19071973

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return. 

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire 
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

The Friday Fave: Hamilton!

As a few of my friends already know, I have Hamilaria. (I don’t randomly break into song, I promise. I do find the tunes popping up in my mind at inopportune moments.)

I was late to the party when it came to discovering Hamilton. I tend to resist anything that feels over-hyped, usually certain that it will turn out to be at best shallow and at worst–unintentionally or not–deeply offensive to one or more segments of society. Or just awful and inexplicably popular. (Still mystified why anyone bothered to read Fifty Shades of Grey. If you’re into pornographic novels, surely there are better-written examples lining the shelves of the Romance section–ones that don’t glorify manipulative, abusive, and controlling relationships. Surely.) Occasionally, however, I have come to regret this tendency. It was about four years into the show’s run before I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer out of boredom, mostly because I remembered Sarah Michelle Gellar from Swan’s Crossing and All My Children and I was convinced she couldn’t possibly have become a good actor. (I was being a snob. This was stupid of me.) The same happened with the Harry Potter novels, which I regret a bit more, because the first editions of those first few novels must be worth quite a bit now.

Hamilton cast
Image © Mark Seliger

When mentions of Hamilton suddenly started popping up on just about every media platform I read and watch, I didn’t pay much attention, because a) I haven’t really enjoyed many musicals written after the 1980s, and b) the idea of adapting the life of Alexander Hamilton and the American Revolution struck me as excessively odd. I thought the multi-racial cast was an awesome idea and was interested by the use rap in the music, but I just couldn’t get my head around the idea of writing a musical about the American Revolution. The outcome was a great thing, but living through it must have been a harrowing experience for most of those involved. It’s not a subject that lends itself to comedy, and the notions of comedy and musical theatre are inextricably linked in my mind. I really ought to have known better–Miss Saigon was my favourite musical prior to this, and it isn’t as though there’s anything saccharine about Rent or Gypsy.

Oh me of little faith. There are some moments of humor, to be sure–many provided by Jonathan Groff’s deliciously camp King George III–but Hamilton is decidedly a drama, not a comic opera. I finally decided to give it a listen when I heard Leslie Odom Jr. sang the part of Burr–I’d been waiting for his reappearance since Smash was cancelled. One afternoon when I finished work early I pulled up some of the songs on YouTube (most, although not all, of the soundtrack is available here).

I was hooked after about three songs, and overwhelmed when I was finally able to listen to the whole album all the way through. This is not just a good musical, and a useful hook to get high school students to pay attention in history classes: it’s one of the most impressive and important cultural works of the decade. There is so much more going on in the songs alone than just well-rhymed lyrics and excellent delivery. There are references to other significant works of musical theatre, and direct quotation of the historical figures embodied in the characters. There is also a constant theme throughout the story that while avarice and arrogance usually bring ruin, intelligence is the most valuable of a person’s assets, something to celebrate rather than quash. The musical presents us with a new view of the American Revolution: familiar topics such as Washington’s genius as a commander and Jefferson’s libido are addressed, but so are the seeds of the movements and arguments that we are still living with today–the continuations of the Civil Rights and women’s rights struggles, and the question of what it means to be American. Are you born one, or is it something you choose to become? This is something I think about a great deal, being a first-generation American whose right to be here has never been questioned because I happen to be Caucasian and able to alter my accent if I choose. I witnessed perhaps a handful of occasions where people were rude to my mother because she was so thoroughly not from the U.S., but for the most part those who noticed that she was English were either indifferent or interested in that fact–we were never told that we should go home if we couldn’t adapt and become “real” Americans. This has always highlighted for me that the bitter fight over immigration to this country is about race and ethnicity–I am accepted as part of the status quo, while people whose forebears arrived here decades and centuries before mine are still told to “go back to” Africa / Mexico / wherever. This is why it matters so much that well-known historical figures are performed by people of colour in this production–aside from the unprecedented audience engagement this has spurred, it creates a layer of meaning that would not be present were the performers all white. (If that bothers you, blame Shakespeare and Ben Jonson–they started it when they began to question the limits of gender in plays such as “As You Like It” and “Epicoene”.)

I am thrilled to bits that Miranda, Thomas Kail, and the magnificent cast are winning *all* the awards for their work, and are getting so much exposure for their other creative work. I cherished a hope for about half an hour that I’d be able to see the play with the original line-up at some point this year, until I saw the prices that tickets were going for and that most of the performances until the end of next year were pretty much sold out last February. Now I’m just holding out hope that there’s a full taping of an early stage performance somewhere and they’re just sitting on it until the national tour ends.

I was going to write about Miranda himself as well, but if I do this post may never end, so I’ll save it for a later post. (He is awesome in all kinds of ways, and I can’t think of any other public figure to have spent so much time engaging with his audience on a personal level just being nice. Check out his twitter feed some time.) The Tony awards are on this Sunday and will feature a live performance of a song from the show, for all the fans like me who are desperate to see as well as hear the real thing.

 

Friday Fave: Dark Hour of Noon

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This is the first novel that changed my life, that shaped a part of who I am. I was nine years old, wandering through my school’s library, looking for longer books with appealing covers because I was still at an age where I liked illustrations–it would be another couple of years before I started to dislike them because I found my imaginings of the characters to be so much more interesting. (This book is also the root of my dislike of the idiom that you can’t judge a book by its cover–I’ve discovered a number of excellent novels because I

was attracted by their covers. I do realize that’s irrelevant to the meaning of the saying, but it still irritates me.)

I knew about World War II–my father was a child in London during the Blitz, and my mother remembers the German POWs who worked for her father and other neighbours when she was very small. Our bookshelves at home are still lined with biographies of Churchill and dozens of histories of the military aspect of the conflict. I was always more interested in the social side of history, though, and beyond watching Hope and Glory every time it came on TV, I didn’t know much about that side of things at that point. I picked the book up because I was intrigued by the illustration, and I loved the title; there was no synopsis on the back of the book, and most of the excerpt on the inside of the front cover is a discussion between two characters about the mythological heroes of Poland. I may have thought it was in part a fantasy story–I’d already discovered fantasy at that age, and was enchanted by all things mythology-related.

Fantasy is is decidedly not, although it is nightmarish in many parts. It follows Trina, seven years old in 1939, as her world is torn up by the Nazi occupation of Poland. She watches what her friends and loved ones endure at the hands of the invading soldiers, and soon decides to fight back in whatever way she can. The novel chronicles Trina’s life during the war, and the ways that she and several like-minded children mounted what resistance they could to the occupation.

It is still my favourite novel about WWII, and my favourite YA novel. I don’t remember how many times I read in the three years between my discovering it and graduating the school whose library owned the only copy I could find. I looked for it in every bookshop I went into, every garage sale. Everyone always thought I was talking about Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. A few years later I found another copy in the library of the elementary school attached to my high school and seriously considered how to steal it, leaving money in its place, but I never had the chance–it was not a room I routinely had access to, and I could hardly have come and gone unnoticed, as the librarians knew all the children they worked with. Then came the age of online book stores, just after I’d finished university, and Margaret found a pristine first edition for me one Christmas–one of the many reasons she’s an amazing friend. I shrieked like my nine-year-old self when I unwrapped it, much to my parents’ consternation. I spent that Christmas day re-reading the book, and have done so again many times since. It isn’t one of the books I carry around with me from country to country, because I’ve done my best to keep it from damage, but it is always on my favourites shelf.

It grieves me every time I see a list of books for children and teens about the Holocaust and this is not on it. At times I wonder if this is because too many parents and teachers found it too grim–it is grim subject matter, and unsparing in its depictions of the violence committed by the Nazi army and by those who resisted them–but most of the time I’m inclined to think it’s just because it wasn’t advertised successfully. Since the recent success of Elizabeth Wein’s excellent Codename: Verity and Rose Under Fire, as well as other YA novels such as A Northern Light, I keep hoping that it will be republished and get more attention. I’ve seen it mentioned in a few scholarly works on the representation of war in children’s fiction, but it doesn’t have the readership it deserves. I continue to hope it will be rediscovered, and that this will change.

 

Friday Fave: Angels in America

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I’m sure many of my friends are sick of familiar with hearing me go on about just how amazing so much of the television produced in the last fifteen years has been, how shows like the The Wire, Peaky Blinders, and Borgen have made screenplays not simply an offshoot of stage drama but something like a hybrid of plays and the serial novel from the days of Dickens and Wilkie Collins. It isn’t as though I didn’t like television to begin with, but there is a depth to these recent series–albeit not always in every season of some long-running ones–that rivals many of the films considered to be more serious art, which I think is a great pity. Six Feet Under was the first such series that I saw, back in 2002; it was like nothing I had ever seen, and I loved it. About a year and a half later the HBO production of Angels in America aired, and I was transfixed.

It was a play to begin with, of course, so adapting it for the screen was presumably less of a challenge than stories written as novels or other prose, but the freedom afforded by filming with regard to locations, sets, and special effects gave the scenes a dimension that just couldn’t be achieved on a stage. (My experience of drama is admittedly limited, but to my mind there are some plays that will always be better on stage than on screen; I do not think this is one of them.) I had heard of it when I was growing up and considered buying the script when I was in high school, but resisted because I wanted to see it on stage first. (I still haven’t had the chance, but I live in hope.)

From the opening scenes I thought the production was as close to perfect as could be; the ensuing years and numerous viewings have not altered my opinion. The casting was spot-on, particularly Mary-Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright, and Al Pacino as the vile Roy Cohn. There are so many luminous moments in the six hours that I don’t have a favourite scene, although I do have a favourite line–Belize looking Cohn straight in the eye and saying “I am the antithesis of you.” Prior’s line about taking anti-depressants “in wee fistfuls” in his first dream-sequence meeting with Harper, and Harper’s vague query about why Mormons are thus named are close seconds. If there is a flaw at any point in the film, it is Emma Thompson getting too strident and manic as the Angel in her scenes with Hannah Pitt–for me a couple of those moments veered from the intense into the absurd.

The play is valuable for so many reasons. It’s an insight into the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and the discrimination faced by the LBGTQ community, which much of our society still has so much trouble understanding. It’s a particularly haunting account of personal struggles with physical and mental illness, and of how fear can lead us to hurt those we love most. It’s also an insight into how the idea that the straight white Caucasian male is superior to all other genders, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations can damage just about anyone, even those who believe most strongly in the idea–even when they are among those disadvantaged by such a position, such as Hannah Pitt and Roy Cohn.

Beyond–or underlying–all this is the fact that it’s a beautiful work of literature, and that the television production is a gorgeous example of what can be done on a screen. Aside from the fact that I am a staunch feminist and I believe strongly that the rights of the African-American community, people of colour, and the LGBTQ community continue to be suppressed and infringed upon in this country, I get frustrated with commentary on works such as Angels in America, Between the World and Me, and Hamilton that dismiss them out of hand because they “advance a liberal agenda.” Dismissing these and other such works because they portray a worldview you have no experience of or familiarity with is to miss the point of what good art is, and what it can achieve. It is possible to be able to appreciate a work while still disagreeing with its central premise, or actively disliking the person who created it (*cough cough* Woody Allen, Roman Polanski). Refusing to listen to / read / watch something because you do not share the perspective of the creator or protagonist(s) is as absurd as saying that a woman shouldn’t read Tom Jones and can’t enjoy its humor because she’s not a randy and yet hopelessly romantic young man, or that only men with military experience should watch Band of Brothers–another near-perfect example of filmmaking–because it fails the Bechdel and DuVernay tests. Badly. Such refusals are as dismissive of our cultural inheritance as the proverbial reduction of the Western Canon to a single-semester course in “dead white men”, because they deny that we still have art that is vital and creative and new, and that all of the techniques and facets of language those same dead white men used, and in some cases created or perfected, are still present and alive in these new works. (If characters being portrayed by people of different races and genders bothers you, blame Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Sarah Bernhardt; Lin-Manuel Miranda was not the first to hit on the idea.)

Margaret wrote an excellent review of Between the World and Me a few weeks ago, in case you didn’t read it the first time. I will have more to say on Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton, and its amazing cast at some point in the (hopefully near) future. If you haven’t seen Angels in America, or haven’t seen it in a long time, give it a try. It’s held up well in the years since its filming.