Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Bookish: Tess of the Baskervilles
I’ve been reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles outloud to Brian this summer (his cataracts make it impossible to read in the sunlight) as it happened to be on my “classics to read before I die list”. We’re getting pretty close to the end of what has been a great read-aloud book – what with the melodrama and all – and I happened to mention to Brian that when I was a kid I thought that Tess was a book about a woman who was attacked by mad dogs. I had no idea why, figured it was my own quirky thing…..
Except that Brian had the same childhood confusion over the book! So we puzzled that one out until he figured out that the confusion had come from another classic book The Hounds of the Baskervilles – Baskerville seeming close enough to D’Urberville for a six-year-old to confuse the two. Made sense to me, and I “remembered” that this was probably where I had also gotten mixed up.
In any case, we’ve decided in the tradition of Pride, Prejudice and Zombies (a totally worthwhile read, btw) that Tess needs to be rewritten along these lines, since surely Brian and I weren’t the only kids who got Urberville and Baskerville mixed up – right? It seem that after the rape of Tess in the first bit of the book, rather than continuing along the path of bad treatment by men, Tess should adopt some magical power that attracts rabid dogs to her side. Not to attack her, mind you, but to snarlingly go after those sexist scoundrels of Victorian society. The dastardly Alec, the priggish Clare, the nasty landowner from Trantridge who works her near death – why should Tess suffer any of these abuses? Nothing a foaming pack of hounds wouldn’t fix eh? She’s a fair morbid character at the best of times throughout (wishing her own death from the very beginning of the book), it really does seem fitting that rather than living up to some ideal of purity she give herself over to the gothic darkside of revenge and bloodlust. Ah yes, I can see it now – our childhood confusions brought to life in modern satirical literature!
So if there’s any aspiring writer out there looking for a new take on Victoria literature – look no further – but make sure to give us credit if you write the book. We’d love to see such a thing in print!
Bookish: The Lazarus Project
Before I went on holidays I finished this Aleksander Hemon novel and was charged to discover that this novel (released last year) lives up to the promise of Hemon’s short fiction. Unlike Nowhere Man, his first “novel”, The Lazarus Project holds throughout with a double narrative, strong characters and an intact storyline that carry the reader through the travels and struggles of two immigrants to America one hundred years apart.
The Lazarus Project is both the story of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish Immigrant shot dead Chicago’s police chief in 1908 and of Vladamir Brik, a Bosnian-American writer who becomes interested in Lazarus, following his path in reverse through the novel from Chicago to the Ukraine, Molodova, Romania and Bosnia with the aid of his fantastical friend and photographer Ahmed Rora. The two stories, though taking separate chapters in the beginning of the book, begin to bleed through into each other by the end, provoking comparisons between the two main figures despite their divergent lives. Averbuch, a man chased by pogroms to America works on his English, goes to political meetings and sketches out ideas for a novel. Brik, having left his home country on a writing gig and been blocked from re-entry due to war, works as an immigrant columnist while living principally on his surgeon wife’s income. Two men no longer able to live in their country of birth, searching for something to dignify them in the great land of freedom. And of course, that’s not so easy (many would say impossible) to discover.
The story of Averbuch is very much true, the mystery of what happened to him on police chief Shippy’s doorstep that March morning has never been solved, though the racial tensions caused by the shooting were well documented in newspapers of the time. Hemon does a thorough job of imagining the conversations, smells, thoughts, and conditions that Averbuch lives in, as much as he is able to bring life to the journey of Brik and Rora through Eastern Europe to their devastating conclusion. Each story informing the other, layering on much thought and beauty in the process. A pleasure to read, The Lazarus Project gets a place on my shelf and a definite recommendation.
Just saying….
I am really having a difficult time understanding why some Americans are so rabidly, hysterically opposed to health care reform in the US. I mean, have you seen those people at the town hall meetings? And it’s not because of the weak suggestion of a public option (that’s what I’d be up in arms about – there *has* to be a public option!)…. it’s because of…. well you know, Obama wants to kill children and old people. Or something to that effect.
In response the US government vehemently denies that they would consider bringing in a system like Canada or Britain have – socialized medicine being the bugaboo that it is south of the border. Heaven forbid! A seamless system under which a single insurer manages payments to any number of services that might be required by a patient without any fuss to said patient? I’m not saying the system here is perfect by a long shot, but I do appreciate that I can go to the Doctor, the lab, an ultrasound clinic and a specialist never once having to figure out if that company or individual is covered by my insurance plan. They all are! And there isn’t another plan to get it confused with! (Not only that but I pay less than half of what the average HMO charges for medical insurance for what is considered some of the best medical care in the world).
Yeah, that’s totally something to scream about, or to backpedal away from. I can see why people are bringing handguns to townhall meetings to confront their local representatives…. Because public health care is too scary, all those good God-fearing Americans need to defend themselves from it and Obama. Damn.
Canning madness.
Last week we had planned on a 3-4 day kayaking trip with friends in Victoria which didn’t happen (for us) because I wasn’t up to kayaking in the steady rain that greeted us Monday morning. Instead, Brian and I got back on the ferry and headed inland to Manning Park which we used as a base for a road trip/fruit-buying expedition to Keremeos as well as some hiking and canoeing. Arriving home on Thursday, we’ve spent a part of each of the last few days canning our haul which has (finally) come to its end and is ready for storing against the winter ahead. We’ve processed 40 pounds of tomatoes, 30 pounds of peaches and ten pounds of cherries – not to mention a pound of strawberries, 3 pounds of self-picked blackberries and a bunch of rhubarb from the backyard into the following:
- 6 jars of blackberry-rhubarb pie filling
- 4 jars of strawberry-rhubarb pie filling
- 22 500 ml jars of stewed tomatoes
- 4 large jars of tomato broth
- 2 jars of tomato sauce (frozen)
- 19 500 ml jars of sliced peaches (canned with sage, thyme or cinnamon)
- 3 250 ml jars of peach-rum sauce
- 7 250 ml jars of peach salsa
- 6 500 ml jars of cherries
- 6 250 ml jars of “spirited cherries” (with rum and vanilla vodka)
Which is somewhat insane given that I’ve still got fall apples to do (applesauce, apple chutney, apricot chutney)… we’re going to end up with a lot of food in the cupboards when its all done. I’m quite pleased about it really, Brian’s enthusiasm for learning to can (not to mention his willingness to do half the work) spurred me on to greater quantities and more diverse recipes than ever this year.
I’ll post a couple of recipes in the next few days, including my favourite apple chutney, for those of you so inclined to try. Canning really is very simple, and once you get the gear it’s a super cheap way to create yummy food for the whole year.
Red Cedar 