Books and Movies: A Week Indoors

Avatar 2: A Lot of Blue People

I started watching this very predictable blockbuster with Len. I was so bored that I wasn't very focused on the first half, after which we stopped watching to eat dinner. Then we watched the rest: at least I tried to watch, but I fell asleep. Even the spectacular CGI effects get boring after a while. Nature’s sea creatures interest me much more than exaggerated artificial versions of them.

"Small Fires" -- Big Ego

Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson is an appalling mash-up of bad jargon from academia, overdone feminism from the 1970s, and psychobabble. It's unbearably pretentious, and doesn't have anything new to offer anyone who has read feminist or academic or psycho stuff in the last 50 years or so. One of the two blurbs on the cover uses the word "witty." I can't think of any less applicable word for this author's prosaic and pedantic narrative.

What this book most definitely is not: EPIC! What this book is, mercifully, is short.

Here are a few quotes about the deep meaning of a recipe for tomato sauce:

“The recipe is a method for responding to things. Things have agency in many directions. Like words, they have histories and contexts, but when I perform the recipe, things become other things in a messier transformation than words in a sentence. They spatter my shirt red” (p. 51)

“When I cook the recipe, I experience the difference between the knowledge promised by language, and the unboundedness of embodiment, which is both richer and more dangerous that the text can convey.” (p. 73) 

“My ‘reception’ of the recipe – my intervention into the tradition of recipe reception – is to translate text into food. Each time I cook the recipe I produce a new translation of the text. I translate the recipe from the medium of language into the spattering physicality of the ingredients. Like different translations of the Odyssey, my translations of the recipe vary in accordance with the historical moment.” (p. 81)

“When people ask about my work an assumption hangs in the air that I am writing a lovely book of lovely recipes that will be beautifully photographed. … ‘Lovely’ is an acutely gendered adjective that brings my body into the discussion of my writing. It defines my writing through my body… ‘Lovely’ defines and excludes the non-lovely and works to legitimize violence against those who differ from the ideal of an obedient, quiet, thin, clean, happy, grateful, rich, white woman.” (p 98)

In Small Fires, Johnson may be the most extreme name-dropper whose works I’ve ever read. She really wants us to know what a great intellectual literary contemporary reader she is! She mentions writers and creators, briefly alludes to and quotes them, and then moves on to prove how much more she knows! A few of them include: Homer the ancient poet (she has a lot to say about the Odyssey), D.W. Winnicott, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mrs Beeton, Sam Sifton, Claudia Roden, Natalia Ginzburg, Sigmund Freud, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Mingus, Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, Simone Weil, Jessye Norman, and many others. Aren’t we impressed? A typical sentence “I look up Jean Laplanche and read a little about his work – he is a psychoanalyst and winemaker who appears in Agnès Varda’s film Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse.” (p. 166)

The New York Times Review lured me into buying this newly-published book. It said:

"Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen ... aims to upend not only the way we cook but the way we think about cooking. The book regards recipes as sites of dynamic, creative engagement across generations — and notes that most bragging about not following a recipe is simply a defensive response to anxiety about originality. Small Fires, … is brave enough to hurt feelings, and delicious enough for no one to care."

I read all of this little book, and I mostly found it annoying. I will admit that there are a few good passages among all the posturing and long words and blustering and self-promotion, and I understand her point, that making a recipe for tomato sauce (particularly Marcella Hazan’s recipe) is a metaphor for life in general or for the plight of women in society. She isn’t the first one to discover this. I suspect that this book will be popular with other pseudo-intellectuals and aspirants to intellectual giganticness.

My Whole Week Felt Kind of Eerie

Although I read one very good book this week (The Great Influenza by John M. Barry) I was mostly feeling very claustrophobic because from Wednesday morning onward, the smoke from the Canadian fires means it has been too terrible to breathe much outdoors. I can’t take my usual walks, sit in the garden, or otherwise enjoy the cool summer weather. It's depressing and overwhelming, because we know what it means:

“Climate scientists have been saying for decades that global warming would lead to a proliferation of wildfires. Last year a U.N. report warned of a ‘global wildfire crisis’ as many forested areas become hotter and drier. The smoke-filled skies outside my window are, in effect, a validation of mainstream climate science: The experts didn’t predict this particular disaster for this particular week, but this is exactly the kind of thing they’ve been warning us would happen.” (Paul Krugman in the New York Times)

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

Blog post © 2023 mae sander.