Cabbage strudel recipes

I was promised an "irresistible treat for any woman who reads it" but I'm afraid that Nora Ephron's 'I feel bad about my neck' left me feeling a bit meh. It is a collection of essays that have all previously been published in various magazines and newspapers, gathered together here under the vague subtitle of 'thoughts on being a woman'.  It serves to remind me how far I sometimes am from being a real woman.

The first one did make me laugh because I have mused elsewhere on the subject of how your neck is the part of you that gives your age away, and she does tackle the ageing process with a suitable good humour and distain. But it went downhill from there; handbags leave me cold and the long chapter on 'Maintenance' left me merely bemused. I have never blow-dried my hair, let alone dyed it, had a manicure or pedicure, threaded or otherwise removed facial hair or spent money on miraculous anti-ageing creams. I found the diatribe about cooking boring, but was more understanding of her falling in love with her Manhattan apartment. What I did like was how matter of factly the men in her life arrived and departed, and how the stories were about her as a human being, not her job, or her marriages, nor even about her children, though they are all mentioned in passing. I think the one I did like was 'Rapture', about falling in love with books (in fact many of them are about love in its many and various forms) and the importance of a good sofa:

"I did most of my reading as a child on my bed or on a rattan sofa in the sunroom of the house I grew up in. Here's a strange thing: Whenever i read a book I love, I start to remember all the other books that have sent me into rapture, and I can remember where I was living and the couch I was sitting on when I read them. After college, living in Greenwich Village, I sat on my brand-new wide-wale corduroy couch and read The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, the extraordinary novel that changed my life and the lives of so many other young women in the 1960's. I have the paperback copy I read at the time, and it's dog-eared, epiphany after epiphany marked so that I could easily refer back to them. Does anyone read The Golden Notebook nowadays?" (p.183)

and later, after getting carried away by Smiley's People:
"But meanwhile, my purple couch is lost in the divorce and I buy a new couch, a wonderful squishy thing covered in warm, cozy fabric, with arms you can lie back on and cushions you can sink into, depending on whether you want to read sitting up or lying down." (p.185)

Towards the end a brief piece entitled 'What I wish I'd known' gives a variety of both vague and very specific advice for life; never forget "You can order more than one dessert." The book had been sitting on the arm of the sofa and the library requested it back so I confess I skim read most of it this afternoon; probably a quiet afternoon's light entertainment if that is your kind of thing.

My Name is Asher Lev

'My Name is Asher Lev' by Chaim Potok
Apparently (according to wiki) Chaim Potok's book 'The Chosen' sold 3,400,000 copies. I read it many years ago, probably when in the sixth form and it is one of the few books from that period that left an abiding impression on me. I requested this from the library after reading a review recently. This book was quite hard work to read, stylistically it is very straightforward but it demands that you think about the characters quite a lot and that you work to understand their motivations and intentions. It is a book about relationships and principles; the story of Asher's growing up is, to some extent, merely a vehicle to examine the ideas that drive the relationships. 

Told in the first person the story follows Asher through his childhood, a rather lonely one I felt, though he never expresses it as such, when he discovers a passion for drawing, through the deep depression and eventual recovery of his mother, through a rift with his father over his desire to paint and a long uneasy peace when he rejects his father's authority in favour of a mentor, Jacob Kahn. Having recently done a MOOC on social psychology it was interesting to find that the main characters are all suffering from cognitive dissonance; they hold two beliefs that are in conflict with each other. Asher wants to be a good son, he wants to be a good Jew, but he also wants to be an artist, not just 'wants', is driven to be, which is completely at odds with the other wants. His father is a devout orthodox Hasidic Jew who wants to be a good father, who loves his son, but his traditions dictate that certain things are not permitted, one of which is his son's obsession with art and painting. It is the father's inability to reconcile his faith with his love for his son that creates the conflict within the story. Eventually the Rebbe intercedes on Asher's behalf and arranges for him to work with Jacob Kahn, and because of his respect for the Rebbe Asher's father agrees. I found myself liking the Rebbe; he has a position of respect and authority over the community, people defer to him in decisions, even significant ones about their lives. At times I found very strange, but he has the element of being removed and somewhat objective, and he is benevolent and wise and humane and does not abuse the trust placed in him. Part of the conflict is also about the conflict of attitude; whether the individual is more significant than the community, how the needs of the many might outweigh the rights of a person to decide their own destiny. It is a very difficult thing to grasp when your society is based on the cult of the individual and the right to decide the course of your own life, the idea that another person might know better is alien, and yet for this community the Rebbe is considered to know better, to be in a position to make a choice for you: Asher's mother wants to go to university to study and continue the work of her brother, but she will not do so without the agreement of the Rebbe. And so Asher grows up, he tries to study hard at school to keep his father happy, but is often distracted by drawing, spending long hours at the museums and art galleries and making his mother anxious by his absences. He grows, he studies, he paints, he and his father regard each other across a gulf of misunderstanding. Jacob Kahn and his agent provide Asher with a route into the art world but mostly he teaches himself by studying great works of art and drawing, drawing, drawing. His parents go to live and work in Europe and he goes to live with an uncle who allows him the freedom to paint without feeling he is betraying anyone. Nothing much happens for large chunks of the book except there remains this brooding cloud hanging over the father/son relationship. You hope that with success will come reconciliation, and there is a hint of pride, but when Asher paints the pain and suffering of his family the final betrayal is a step too far.

What I loved about the story: the relationship between Asher and Reb Krinsky, a man who arrives in their community from Russia and who befriends Asher. The relationship between Asher and Jacob Kahn, a true meeting of talents, and he gives help and support unstintingly, without jealousy, recognising what they share in their passion for art rather than begrudging his youth and prodigy status. I loved Asher because he accept the conflict he is living with, accepts the talent that drives him to paint but does not reject his faith or his traditions, he somehow finds a way to accommodate them.  
What I did not love about the story: the character of Asher's mother. It seems almost clichéd that this kind of male writer writes women like this. She is frail and delicate, and beautiful, idolised by her son and a representative of what are proper feminine qualities. While her husband works and acts because he believes it is the right thing to do for his faith and his community she works and acts in response to his work and actions, to support him, not as an agent in her own right. She stands between her husband and her son trying not to take sides in their conflict, suffering for each of them while they deal with their anger and resentment. She is a there as a foil for her husband and son; the image, repeated throughout the book, of her waiting at the window for either of them to come home is somehow symbolic of the story. The 'Brooklyn Crucifixion' that Asher paints, based on his mother at the window, sums up the story in one image. Potok says that Asher is the character he most identifies with and was himself a painter as well as a writer, and he created for real a painting of how he imagined the crucifixion painting might have looked. 

(picture credit Chaim Potok website)

Getting Lost

'A Field Guide to Getting Lost' by Rebecca Solnit was a most peculiar book, another one I think from the stable of Brainpickings. It said lots of interesting things, I have a whole list of quotes to give you, and yet it didn't say very much at all as a conclusion, I am just left feeling 'what the hell was that supposed to be about'. It is, as it says in the title, about lostness and belonging, and how pervasive the one is and how elusive the other. Maybe if I launch into the quotes it will come back to me why I persisted with reading.

On walking at the Great Salt Lake when the water level dropped:

"I walked across ground that was sometimes ribbed sand, sometimes smooth, that sometimes caved in underfoot, as though there were pockets of air underneath, that sometimes squelched so that my footprints were surrounded by paler sand where the water had been pressed away by my weight. With that long line of footprints unfurling behind me, I couldn't get literally lost but I lost track of time, becoming lost in that other way that isn't about dislocation but about the immersion where everything else falls away." (p.35-6)

This links tenuously to the next:
"the word 'track' in Tibetan: shul, a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by - a footprint, for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. All of these are shul: the impression of something that used to be there. A path is a shul because it is an impression in the ground left by the regular tread of feet, which has kept it clear of obstructions and maintained it for the use of others. As a shul, emptiness can be compared to impression of something that used to be there. In this case, such an impression is formed by the indentations, hollows, marks and scars left by the turbulence of selfish cravings." (p.50-51)

Interesting snippets and family stories meander, seemingly aimlessly, through chapters, interspersed with her own travels and vague philosophical musings. Here she visits an aunt shortly before her death:
"The river we had been flowing flowed into the sea, becoming broad and tranquil at its mouth, and the afternoon light lit it to silver, the same silver of the sea. I looked and two things that had been stories seemed fact at that moment: the belief of many coastal tribes that the souls of the dead go west over the sea, and the description of death as the point at which the river enters the sea. I had driven my aunt to her death, or as it seemed in that luminousness, still like the moment after a peal of thunder, both of us to meet death. The forest we had come from seemed darker in this cool blaze of water and light, and we had entered the colourless, radiant landscape of death. charged with something as vital as life, too majestic to be terrifying, transfigured into another world." (p.61)

Occasionally she seems to capture for me something subtle about the human condition and just drop it randomly into the book:
"Even in the everyday world of the present, an anxiety to survive manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged occasions than those at hand, as though to express some sense of the toughness of things and of readiness to face them. But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next." 
And this, about the nature of adulthood:
"I had been on my own since I turned seventeen, and that early independence made me old: I was never sure anyone would pick up the pieces if I fell apart, and I thought of consequences. The young live absolutely in the present, but a present of drama and recklessness, of acting on urges and running with the pack. They bring the fearlessness of children to acts with adult consequences, and when something goes wrong they experience the shame or the pain as an eternal present too. Adulthood is made up of a prudent anticipation and a philosophical memory that makes you navigate more slowly and steadily." (p.108-9)

But really it was the lovely almost poetic turns of phrase that made the book so readable:
"Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert. It wan't particular things but the space between them, that abundance of absence, that is the desert's invitation. There the geology that underlies lusher landscapes is exposed to the eye, and this gives it a skeletal elegance, just as it's harsh conditions - the vast distances between water, the many dangers, the extremes of heat and cold - keep you in mind of your mortality.
...
With other men you get to know their families, with this unhurried man who seemed like a desert hermit, animals seemed to fill that place, and they were always around his home. Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn't an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or many not turn over." (p.129-131)

Sorry if the review is a bit vague, it is not easy to pin down the essence of the book. In an era that seems obsessed with 'finding yourself' it is quite refreshing to encounter someone relishing the notion of 'lost', not fighting but embracing. Solnit trawls through cultures and history to find for the reader stories about lostness and intermingles them very effectively with her own stories, thoroughly engaging and thought provoking. 

Wuthering Heights and all that

October is nearly over, the Read-a-thon has come and gone, the Literature Festival has come and gone, and NaNoWriMo is nearly upon us. I went to a lot of interesting events during the literature festival but Catherine O'Flynn's event at Waterstones on Saturday was my favourite; I reviewed her first novel 'What Was Lost' back in 2009 and treated myself to a signed copy of her new book 'Mr Lynch's Holiday'. She was a lovely unassuming woman who made you feel that ordinary people are capable of good writing and you don't have to be some kind of driven 'creative' type to make a living at it.

I didn't strictly finish 'Wuthering Heights' during the read-a-thon, I read the last few pages after I got back from an afternoon festival event. I am not sure what to write about a book that has no doubt been analysed to death. It was not what I expected, though I don't know what I did expect. It was gripping in the way that only really nasty characters can make a book; it was following a litany of people who's only pleasure in life was the manipulation and control of others. I did like the way that the tale is related by a servant, so you get a very particular view of the characters, because of course she was close and intimate with their lives in some ways and yet kept at a remove in others. Because of course it is partly about social boundaries, like the one that divided Cathy and Heathcliff, although I felt it was less a commentary on the position of women than Austen manages. I liked it much better than Jane Austen because the emotions are more real and there is less of the tedious formal politeness that blights the lives in Pride and Prejudice. I pulled out this one quote, just because it encapsulated for me the whole thing about their relationship. I definitely did not find Heathcliff very loveable or romantic but it helps you appreciate what he meant to Cathy:

"I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I have watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary." (p.81)

I have been doing various bits and pieces. This is a pattern called Corinna which I have been working on for a while out of some lambswool/silk from Kingcraig fabrics. It is sort of a replacement for my lovely yellow cable jumper that I managed to shrink just very slightly, enough to make it less of a pleasure to wear ... such is life.

And here is the cowl I knitted with some homespun yarn for my sister Claire's birthday, knit to this nice simple pattern. I was a bit iffy about the whole idea of a cowl but I really liked it once I had made it so might very well do another for myself; all the benefits of a scarf but none of the bother of the dangly bits getting in the way.

 

When we were at HESFES I bought this quilted jacket. The peachy colour did not really appeal so I transformed it with a dark red dye:

And finally just a quickie of Creature's birthday cake; she didn't want to be photographed with it as usual, but Tish and I were quite proud of our efforts here.

Shark bait

It is nearly 4am and we have both had a brief nap to ward off the droopy eyelids. We have been watched over by Bruce, Tish's remote control shark, who lurks in the dark corners of the living room, stalking unsuspecting visitors.

I am up to my fourth cup of tea:

Having taken a break from  'Wuthering Heights' I am up to page 134 of Eleanor Catton's 'The Rehearsal' and Creature has nearly finished 'Hitchhiker's Guide' and is about to discover the meaning of life.

Starburst balancing for beginners

The October Read-a-thon started at 1pm and it is gone 10pm and we don't really feel like we have read very much. It has been a long day and both Creaure and I had a little doze in the first hour of reading and then had to pop to the shop for snacks as we had not been very organised in advance, so all in all it's been a slow start. I have read 123 pages of 'Wuthering Heights' and Creature is on page 107 of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', plus a few chapters of 'The Hobbit' while making the lemon cake.

I had never noticed but Starburst wrappers have silly suggestions printed on them, one of which is 'balance a starburst on each of your fingers' ... it's surprisingly difficult:-)

Other books in our TBR pile for this evening:

The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk
Runaway by Alice Munro
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

Hoping everyone else is having a great reading day.

'tis Read-a-thon time

OK, How I Live Now was a bit of a mixed bag as a film, if you're precious about the story you may find it irritating. We were more annoyed by the personality changes than any messing with the story line. Oh well. 

This Saturday we are doing that crazy thing again that is the Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-thon. Back in April Creature and I tried and failed to stay up all night but we still got a lot of reading done. I have decided to read Wuthering Heights, I feel slightly ashamed to have never read it, but we are also planning to read aloud some of The Hobbit that I started ages ago. This time we will be starting the 24 hours a little later because we are going down to Tish's open day at work; she started this term as a teacher of Animal Management at the Northenden Campus of Manchester College. Good luck and happy reading to all the participants.

It is the twins birthday today so there will be cake for tea.

This is the famous 'Hedgehog Cake' (which is the only thing I know how to say in sign language), that I have been making since the children were very small. He is made by baking the cake mixture in a pyrex mixing bowl and then covering the entire thing in butter cream icing and chopped up chocolate buttons.