World’s Greatest Wizards

 

We are continuing with our Harry Potter binge, so thinking about wizards and especially Dumbledore.

A Snowy Owl

 

Harry Potter with his owl Hedgwig

We have started watching the Harry Potter sequence from the start. I don’t know if we’ll finish.

A snowy owl once strayed from its Arctic habitat and spent some time in our part of Michigan.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Watching an Old Movie with New Connections

A Creepy Sensation

Sunday afternoon we watched “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” — which of course we have watched before. It’s one of several prequels to the Harry Potter story as you no doubt are aware. Its author, J.K.Rowling, has an uncanny ability to make me think of current events. As I watched, I had a creepy feeling that the eerie evil character Grindelwald was very familiar right now. 

Yes, I placed Grindelwald’s face: he looks like British right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos who was taken into custody by ICE and deported last Friday from the US to the United Kingdom. The reason for his expulsion was that he had overstayed his visa while engaging in very visible right-wing political activities. He was a writer for the far-right Breitbart website, and was proud of using language that was racist and that denigrated women, Muslims, and transgender people. Good riddance!

Left: Grindelwald. Right: Yiannopoulos.

UPDATE: Tuesday Sept 1 — We have now watched the entire series of Fantastic Beasts. Last night we watched two of them.

Stories for Our Time: Repost from 2024

A purely evil political leader appeals to the masses through his dramatic speeches. The large crowds of his followers go wild, howling with adoration and loyalty. He convinces them that they are superior beings, and that they should show no tolerance for those who differ from them. He promises that once empowered, he will expel or even exterminate their inferiors. His overwhelming appeal almost enables him to become the supreme ruler of the Wizard World. Luckily, a few brave opponents, especially Newt Scamander and Albus Dumbledore, prevent the deceptive and charismatic Grindlewald from achieving his evil plan. 

As we binge-watched the three recent Fantastic Beasts films (prequel to the Harry Potter story) I was overcome with dread because of the parallel to recent real life. Unfortunately, no one stopped the onslaught of our new dictator, and as he rapidly announces his coming regime, I fear that no one will stand up to his evil plan.

Not only are we without a magical hero to save us, we don’t even have adorable magical pets to cheer us up. However, these films are a good escape if you don’t take their political situation too seriously. Here are Newt Scamander’s two adorable pets:

A Niffler

A Bowtruckle

Blog post © 2024,2026 mae sander

At Home This Week

Weekend Google Doodle

I loved learning about the history of kayaks on a trip to Greenland, so this Google Doodle celebrating the kayak was pleasing to see. The reason for this Doodle: 

“In honor of Native American Heritage Month, today's Doodle celebrates the kayak, a narrow watercraft originally created by Arctic tribes 5,000 years ago.” 

About the artist: 

“This Doodle was illustrated by Inuit Nunangat guest artist, Natashia Allakariallak.”   

We have enjoyed our own inflatable kayak as well as opportunities to go kayaking in several places. Kayaks of the more stable and recreational variety are offered on many of the National Geographic trips we have done, so we’ve seen lots of beautiful sights from a kayak. For the last few years, we have also owned an inflatable kayak, which gets us out on the very tame local lakes and rivers — nothing to compare to the incredibly dangerous conditions in which the Inuit kayakers hunted for large marine mammals in unbelievably cold Arctic seas!

On our trip to Alaska in 2013, we watched a bear fishing while we were in a kayak.

Watching a kayak demo in Greenland in 2022. The Inuit of Greenland contributed much to the development of kayaking.

A “Psychological Thriller”

None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell portrays a pathological woman who deceives everyone. Her victims may become suspicious, but she manipulates them to an uncanny extent, and the reader also doesn’t know where her fabrications begin and where the truth ends. A friend of mine recommended this book as a “psychological thriller.” The book definitely embodies a lot of tension, suspicion of coming bad things, cruelty, and growing horror at the layered revelations.

Actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything like this book, and it’s not my usual type of reading. While I wouldn’t call it a supreme work of literary genius (it’s not), I think it’s unusual and very suspenseful.

Question: What is Consciousness?

Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith explores two main topics: the working of our human minds and of the minds of the octopus and closely related species (the cephalopods). The author reviews the evolution that created both humans and cephalopods. He says:

“Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” (p. 9)

In attempting to compare the minds of these divers creatures, he probes the question of consciousness, a question that’s often asked and never really answered. He describes the early steps taken by these animals:

“Later … an integrated perspective on the world arises and a more definite sense of self. We then reach something closer to consciousness. I don’t see that as a single definite step. Instead, I see “consciousness” as a mixed-up and overused but useful term for forms of subjective experience that are unified and coherent in various ways. Here, too, it is likely that experience of this kind arose several times on different evolutionary paths: from white noise, through old and simple forms of experience, to consciousness.” (p. 97)

I reviewed this book in some detail in 2018 in a post titled Invertebrate Intelligence and decided to reread it during the past week. 

Stories for Our Time

A purely evil political leader appeals to the masses through his dramatic speeches. The large crowds of his followers go wild, howling with adoration and loyalty. He convinces them that they are superior beings, and that they should show no tolerance for those who differ from them. He promises that once empowered, he will expel or even exterminate their inferiors. His overwhelming appeal almost enables him to become the supreme ruler of the Wizard World. Luckily, a few brave opponents, especially Newt Scamander and Albus Dumbledore, prevent the deceptive and charismatic Grindlewald from achieving his evil plan. 

As we binge-watched the three recent Fantastic Beasts films (prequel to the Harry Potter story) I was overcome with dread because of the parallel to recent real life. Unfortunately, no one stopped the onslaught of our new dictator, and as he rapidly announces his coming regime, I fear that no one will stand up to his evil plan.

Not only are we without a magical hero to save us, we don’t even have adorable magical pets to cheer us up. However, these films are a good escape if you don’t take their political situation too seriously. Here are Newt Scamander’s two adorable pets:

A Niffler

A Bowtruckle

Blog post and original photos © 2013, 2022, 2024 mae sander. 

Movie images from Warner Brothers

Recent Reading

 Some Short Genre Fiction

A nice short story by Silvia Moreno Garcia.
Although I usually am not a fan of this genre, I enjoy her work.
As suggested by the cover, there’s a wolf in the story.

First sentence of this book: “She’d always known her lover would come from beyond the forest. It was foretold when she cast a divination spell. It was a game she played with the other village girls—quaint superstitions passed from one generation to the next.”

I’m always vowing to read Sci-Fi, but I never really like it.

The last sentence of the book: “ We go forth to find this city’s singer, and hopefully to hear the greatness of its birthing song.” — From N. K. Jemisin "The City Born Great"

And One VERY Long Detective Story

The Running Grave

Writing as Robert Galbraith, author J.K.Rowling has produced another massive suspenseful detective story. Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacot, partners in a private detective agency, are working on several commissions, most dramatically the case of a purely evil cult involving a self-proclaimed prophet (nearly a deity to his followers) and numerous offensive and manipulative activities. The abuses of the brain-washed, imprisoned followers are revealed as Robin bravely endangers herself by embedding in the headquarters of the cult somewhere in the wilds of the English countryside. 

The Perils of Robin in cult captivity are almost (but not quite) overdone in the style of an old movie serial, or maybe like the classic perils of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (published 1740 as Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, and considered to be the first ever example of the modern novel). I couldn’t stop reading!

The strength of this long book is that as Robin subjects herself to the horrors of this cult, the depths of evil that a single person can do are laid bare. I remembered, as I read about the cult leader and his willing victims, about Voldemort and the Death Eaters. All right, I still admire the Harry Potter books. I also admire the extremely pointed and well-observed criticism of cults and their exploitation of weak human beings expressed in this novel. 

As usual, there is plenty of personal detail about the two detectives, especially the struggle Cormoran Strike is waging to get his weight under control in order to reduce stress on his missing leg. His unwilling but disciplined choices, such as fish rather than steak, and his strenuous resistance against his craving for hamburgers and chips, as they are called in London, are very painfully familiar — as well as the circumstances where his will-power crumbles and he eats (in Robin’s estimation) 5000 calories worth of McDonald's. An example of his giving in:

“While Robin was in Kensington, Strike was back in the Denmark Street office, eating his second Chinese meal in two weeks, this time a takeaway. He was finding the last stone to go before hitting his target weight very hard to shift, and while he supposed a nutritionist might tell him the reappearance of takeaways and pub food in his diet might have something to do with that, the lure of sweet and sour chicken and fried rice had proved too strong for him this evening.” (p. 767) 

I was amused by one lunch: Strike is treated by a wealthy client at Rules restaurant in Covent Garden, an old restaurant with “comfortable glamour.” In fact, our friends in London, who are super knowledgeable about the city, took us there, and indeed we enjoyed the tradition and glamor of the place. Our visit was the same year as in the novel, 2016. Here are my photos of this experience:

After I found a couple of novels in the Cormoran Strike series to be grotesquely violent, I had decided not to read any more of them. However, a couple of people I trust (including our London friend in the photo!) said this one was better, and they were right. I’m glad I read it.

Reviews © 2023 mae sander

Shared with Eileen’s Saturday Critters and with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz

Babel

 

Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution

“A 'novel of ideas' is different from a novel with ideas. It is a novel whose story expounds and explores a particular philosophical perspective on the world.” (Goodreads)

Babel by R.F.Kuang fits this definition. This very long and complex novel expounds several ideas. These ideas include applied linguistics (or maybe the less-respectable discipline of semantics), colonialism, the effects of slavery, British conquests in the 19th century, the uses and dangers of technology, the opium wars and why opium was bad for China, and the corrosive nature of racism. 

Besides being a novel of ideas, Babel is a fantasy novel set in the 1830s. Historic fantasy novels where magic takes over from history are in a way a genre all their own. Here, an Oxford college of “translation” uses mystic connections among languages to create a web of technology that empowers the British empire. 

The magic substance that enables these miracles is silver, and the magic connections are created by expert native speakers or masters of many languages, especially Chinese, French, and ancient classical languages. Marvels of this technology include much beyond the actual 19th century achievements, such as water and sewage treatment plants, railroad and carriage speed and comfort, very fast ship travel, serving platters that keep food warm on the table, and many other inventions that allow British upper-class people and intellectuals to enjoy a comfortable, happy, and powerful existence

The center of the novel is four young people with different backgrounds adapting to life in the college system of Oxford in the 1830s. There are many parallels to earlier novels, or maybe evidence of too much influence. For example, I constantly thought of several popular novels with similar themes, such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, the Oxford setting and mysticism of Pullman’s Dark Materials or of C.S.Lewis’s fantasy novels, the threatening magical-historic settings of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and more. 

Underlying these parallels is one more: the central character, leader of the four friends, is Robin Swift, who chose his last name because he loved the book Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift — and I think we are meant to consider how Robin’s developing view of the British Empire echoes some of the dark pessimism of Jonathan Swift’s portrayal of the foibles of humanity. At one point, feeling very bad about his role in the creation of enabling technology for empire, Robin says:

“Did you ever read Gulliver’s Travels? I read it all the time, when I lived here – I read it so often I nearly memorized it. And there’s this chapter where Gulliver winds up on a land ruled by horses, who call themselves the Houyhnhnms, and where the humans are savage, idiot slaves called Yahoos. They’re swapped. And Gulliver gets so used to living with his Houyhnhnm master, gets so convinced of Houyhnhnm superiority, that when he gets home, he’s horrified by his fellow humans. He thinks they’re imbeciles. He can’t stand to be around them.” (p. 306)

The novel is long in part because the magic, politics, ideas, and adventures are always described in great detail, including lots of domestic observations like how the students do their laundry, where they sleep if they are in an academic building without beds, relationships with servants, and similar things. More importantly, character development and expanding self-awareness, especially of Robin Swift, is a key feature of the novel, and I would say is its greatest accomplishment. The plot is exciting and suspenseful as well, with excellent reflections of the ideas that I mentioned earlier. However, I don't want to expand on these features — nor reveal any spoilers.

What did they eat?

Obviously, among all the details of life in the novel, it includes food (which I never miss). In the household where Robin lives before going to Oxford, there’s Mrs. Piper, a cozy and loving Scottish housekeeper who introduces British treats and meals to Robin, originally a native of Canton, China. 

"Mrs Piper and her kitchen had enjoyed a glorious reunion. The dining room table, which seemed ridiculously large for just the two of them, was piled with pitchers of milk, white rolls of bread, roast carrots and potatoes, gravy, something still simmering in a silver-gilded tureen, and what looked like an entire glazed chicken." (p. 23). 

"From Mrs Piper, he learned more than he’d imagined possible about English food and England. Adjusting to this new palate took some time. He had never thought much about food when he lived in Canton – the porridge, steamed buns, dumplings, and vegetable dishes that comprised his daily meals had seemed unremarkable to him. They were the staples of a poor family’s diet, a far cry from high Chinese cuisine. Now he was astonished by how much he missed them. The English made regular use of only two flavours – salty and not salty – and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as ‘seasoned’, let alone ‘spicy.’"  (p. 34).

"One night Mrs Piper brought out a round, flat circle: some kind of baked dough that had been cut into triangular wedges. Robin took one and tentatively bit at the corner. It was very thick and floury, much denser than the fluffy white rolls his mother used to steam every week. It was not unpleasant, just surprisingly heavy. He took a large gulp of water to guide the bolus down, then asked, ‘What’s this?’ ‘That’s a bannock, dear,’ said Mrs Piper. ‘Scone,’ corrected Professor Lovell." (p. 35). 

The food they are served in the college dining hall is terrible -- virtually inedible, dry, and flavorless compared to Mrs. Piper's many-flavored scones or to the cuisines of the multi-cultural members of the translation institute such as Ramy, a student from India, who told Robin and his two other friends that "they were all cowards – in Calcutta, he claimed, infants could eat ghost peppers without batting an eye." (p. 130).  

The only good food at the college was afternoon tea:

"All the hot food was gone, but afternoon tea and its trappings were on offer until supper. They loaded trays with teacups, teapots, sugar bowls, milk jugs, and scones, then navigated the long wooden tables in hall until they found an unoccupied one in the corner." (p. 84). 

From The Guardian

“This is a grim and harrowing novel; many of the characters have poisonous opinions about race, and Swift becomes increasingly embittered. The antagonists are closer to demons than humans, with no nuance, and they do sickening things. Often the allure of fantasy is escape from the real world, but there’s no escape here; Kuang’s use of the genre does not soften real history but sharpens it. Babel asks what people from colonised countries are supposed to do when they reach positions of power – while being set in a time and place where reaching those positions would, in the real world, have been impossible. It is a fantastically made work, moving and enraging by turns, with an ending to blow down walls “ (source)

Blog post © 2022 mae sander 

Halloween Classics

From the Food Network: A Black Light Cocktail (source)

My neighbors have started decorating their houses and lawns for Halloween, and everywhere I shop has Halloween candy. It’s time to think about the holiday, so I’ve been trying to make a list of classic literature for Halloween reading. Here are my favorites. I’ve read them all, mostly more than once, and enjoyed them, though some of them frightened me!

• Dracula — Bram Stoker, 1897
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow— Washington Irving, 1820
• “The Raven” — Edgar Allan Poe, 1845
• Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus — Mary Shelley, 1818
• Macbeth— Shakespeare, 1606
• All the Harry Potter books —- J.K.Rowling, 1997 - 2011
• Halloween Party — Agatha Christie, 1969
• The Graveyard Book — Neil Gaiman, 2008
• Mexican Gothic — Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2020 (reviewed here: Cthulhu Comes to Mexico)
• Anything by H.P.Lovecraft (lived 1890-1937) — If his creepy characters don’t scare you, his racism will.

I’m concentrating here on literary works. I know there are many others that I am less familiar with, notably Stephen King. Of course, tons of movies and TV specials also have Halloween or otherwise supernatural and spooky themes! And most of the classics that I named have been made into films, sometimes over and over again. Like there seem to be at least 60 versions of Dracula.

Blog post © 2022 mae sander. Images as credited.

Pumpkins

Every October our neighborhood is filled with pumpkins, ghosts, haunted houses, covens of witches, pretend grave-stones, giant inflatable spiders, and many more Halloween-themed gardens and elaborately garnished houses. I’ve posted photos of these wonderful and imaginative decorations before, and many of the neighbors reuse and expand the same tableaux every year. Next door to us, there’s a new, simple and delightful yard scene:

I’m thinking a lot about pumpkins, thanks to all the nearby displays, but I’m thinking about pumpkins as food! My own favorite pumpkin dishes are pumpkin soup, pumpkin stew, and pumpkin sautés, all with savory spices and usually lots of onion and peppers. I posted my pumpkin lasagne recipe a few years ago:

 https://maefood.blogspot.com/2010/11/pumpkin-lasagna-recipe-by-request.html

My choice is always for fresh pumpkin with some of the crisp texture preserved: never canned purée! Sweetened pumpkin dishes flavored with the traditional “pumpkin pie spice,” such as pumpkin pie, turnovers, muffins, and cheesecake don’t appeal to me as much. Least of all do I like sweet pumpkin beverages. The less said about Starbucks, the better.

Pumpkin Juice

I do want to mention Harry Potter, though, and the amusing beverage pumpkin juice that was served at Hogwarts. Another clever twist in these most-imaginative books. Obviously, witches want pumpkin. (Obviously? Well, yes.)

The Hogwarts Dining Hall.

Did pumpkin juice even exist before Hogwarts? Surely not very much. I find the idea quite unpalatable, though the many recipes on offer web-wise add lots of sweeteners like brown sugar, other fruit flavors, and a hefty dose of  “the spice” to balance out the actual pumpkin taste. I suspect the young witches were drinking straight pumpkin juice: they are different from you and especially me.

Boozy Pumpkins?

“11 Pumpkin Cocktails to Try Right Now” by Naren Young”—  https://www.liquor.com/articles/pumpkin-cocktails/  — recently appeared on a website about all things liquor. I’m not much of a cocktail drinker (I have had one cocktail in approximately the last two years) but I find this to be a very entertaining article. It mentions a Sazerac, a Flip, a Buck, a Toddy, a Nog, a Margarita, a Ramos Gin Fizz, a Piña Colada, a Whiskey Sour, a Gimlet, and an Old Fashioned made with pumpkin, as well as a few others. I do like cocktail names!

Naren Young’s  Pumpkin Punch, served in little pumpkins.
Contents: "bourbon and ginger liqueur with apple,
lemon and pineapple juices, pumpkin puree and a fall spice syrup."
Maybe this is what the house elves concocted for the Hogwarts’ faculty.

Whatever you drink for Halloween, I hope you will have a great holiday! I still haven’t decided if I will invite the trick-or-treaters this year. It’s still a little risky, I think, though I’d love to see the costumes.

Blog post © 2021 mae sander, photos as credited.

What is an English Breakfast?

What I'm reading: a definitive treatise on the English Breakfast.

The English Breakfast today is a popular choice for discriminating lovers of all things British. In London and other English destinations there are B&Bs, country inns, urban hotels, pretentious and unpretentious dining establishments, Harry Potter theme park restaurants (representing the Hogwarts dining room), and probably a few surviving country houses that still offer a menu that fits the description of this classic meal. You can even get an English Breakfast at some places in New York; cruise ship menus often have English Breakfast options, as do trains and car ferry restaurants -- providing they aren't stopped by pandemic closures 

If you order an English Breakfast, the expectation is that you will find a set choice of foods. The usual offerings would be tea or coffee, toast drowned in butter, two kinds of bacon, variously cooked eggs, a grilled tomato, a few mushrooms, several types of English-style sausage such as chipolatas; a dish of kedgeree; fish such as bloaters, smoked salmon, haddock, or kippers; black or white pudding, Heinz baked beans, marmalade, and possibly something or other in a white sauce. 

If you find a croissant, a blueberry muffin, or a Danish pastry in an "English Breakfast" your host has probably overstepped the traditional definition of this very English meal. An egg-white omelet would also be suspect. The English Breakfast flavors are traditionally mostly savory not sweet, and the choices are mostly fattening, not abstemious. 

Two items that were blamed for the demise of the English Breakfast in the 1920s were grapefruit and packaged cold cereal, which were more convenient and faster, and less dependent on domestic servants. The Americans were held responsible for these innovations, but that's not fair. After all, it was the American Heinz corporation that developed the canned baked beans that became a luxury item for country house breakfasts  before canned food was a cheap and easy choice and a required item on the English Breakfast list. In any case, the English Breakfast did not die, but was resurrected after the World War II rationing almost brought it to extinction.

"The English Breakfast is the national dish of a mythic and indivisible England, a repast that, despite differences in execution, binds its people together as one." (The English Breakfast, Kaori O'Connor, p 46). There are Welsh, Irish, and Scottish versions but there is one English Breakfast to rule them all.

The English Breakfast as many people imagine it now may take inspiration from literary versions of the meal. A century ago, detective fiction by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, A.A.Milne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others often set their imagined murders in a country house. The resident servants got up early to produce a lavish buffet with every item on this list and maybe more, to be consumed by hosts, guests, and possibly murderers and detectives. Versions of the English Breakfast still show up in current detective fiction by authors like Tana French, sometimes called a fry-up or a Full English. Such a breakfast in more recent detective fiction is rarely presented by a staff of servants in a serious country house, but still -- it survives in fiction as it does in real life.

While twentieth and twenty-first century versions are more familiar, the origin of the English Breakfast was actually during the Victorian era, when gentry living in country houses were a model of English propriety — and culinary correctness. The increasing wealth of the non-gentry created a new class: one that aspired to act genteel, but that had not been born into gentility nor inherited an estate. A real gentleman's estate would ideally stretch as far as the eye could see from the manor house. From these lands would come all the food served in the dining rooms and breakfast rooms of the stately home at the center of the property. The dishes that showed up on the table were the products of "one's own soil, rivers, forests and moorlands. The upper class fondness for venison, game and salmon springs from the fact that these are all specific products of country estates, once largely available only to those who possessed them." (p. 23)

For aspiring non-aristocrats, the Victorian era produced a large literature on how to act genteel even if you weren't born to it. Some of the challenges included training your domestic staff to cook and serve as they should, and setting tables worthy of the class to which you wanted to belong. O'Connor's book includes facsimile versions of three Victorian manuals on the ideal high-class breakfast -- that is, instructions on how to emulate the gentry in their country houses no matter how humble were your actual circumstances. To serve a proper breakfast required proper recipes for the foods, but also demanded the use of damask tablecloths, china place settings and serving dishes, silver tableware, utensils like a purpose-made scissors for cutting the top off a boiled egg, various types of toast racks, or coffee and tea sets with ewers, creamers, and so on. You needed a special diagram to know how to arrange all this on the table. Not to mention a big table. It wasn't easy!

From O’Connor’s book: an illustration of how to set a breakfast buffet for twelve.

In a future post I'll describe more of the fascinating story of the English Breakfast as told in O'Connor's wonderfully detailed book.

Review © 2021 mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.

"The Man in the Red Coat"

The Man in the Red Coat
(published November, 2019)

Julian Barnes's recent book The Man in the Red Coat is very puzzling. When I bought it, I thought it was a historical novel. As I began reading I quickly found that it's nothing like that, but I have finished reading the book, and I still don't know what, exactly, it is. Social history? Intellectual history? Personality sketches of a bunch of people who lived in France and England at the end of the 19th century? A bunch of muddled thoughts of a wonderful present-day writer, free associating while looking at very old photos and portraits by famous artists of that day? An attempt to write a biography of Dr. Samuel Pozzi (1846-1918) -- but one that was derailed by too much focus on a whole lot of other people? A successful biography that I just didn't appreciate? Something else that I didn't appreciate? And I wish I had been a more successful reader, as I've liked many of Barnes's other books.

The Man in the Red Coat presents many details about the life of Dr. Pozzi,  who was a famous gynecologist and made the profession much more effective and respectable, as well as being a member of high society in France. Barnes includes details about Pozzi's accomplishments innovating new surgical procedures and new anti-infection techniques, as well as his leadership in the practice of medicine in France and worldwide. As an administrator, for example, his taste in art was reflected when he commissioned art works for the hospital where he worked, such as “Health Restored to the Sick” -- a very large mural (4.4 by 2.75 meters) by Georges Clairin.

Dr. Pozzi was well-connected among the intellectual classes, the artists and stage performers, the aristocrats, and the bourgeois high society of Paris in his day. Consequently much (in fact, too much) of the narrative is occupied with the lives of a number of people who were in some way associated with Dr. Pozzi, some close, some not-so-close. We especially learn a lot about the famous people such as Oscar Wild, John Singer Sargent, Marcel Proust, and Sarah Bernhardt (whose face appeared in Clairin's allegorical mural). I'll spare you a list of the dozens of people who were less-well-known who get a lot of space in the book. Barnes manages to provide a huge amount of detail about Pozzi, his wife and children, and all his many friends, his colleagues, his acquaintances, and of the acquaintances of all of these people.

Dr. Pozzi at Home by John Singer Sargent (1881)

As you can tell, I am a frustrated reader. All these free ranging sketches of numerous people and their relationships to each other as well as to Pozzi simply didn't seem coherent to me. I couldn't follow the choice of all these riffs on portraits by artists of the time, such as the one that gives the book its title.

Occasionally Barnes does offer a hint about what he was doing:

"I was drawn to Dr. Pozzi by the Sargent portrait, became curious about his life and work, wrote this book, and still find the picture a true and dashing likeness." Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat, Kindle Locations 2644-2645).

Throughout the book, Barnes comes back to his interpretation of this portrait, and to the interpretation of many other portraits by Sargent and others, as well as speculation and history of the lives -- especially the sex lives -- of the subjects.

Finally "Things We Cannot Know" is the title of a long section towards the end of the book, where Barnes summarizes all the half-known biographical details and intriguing hints he found in researching the doctor's life and the lives -- especially the sex lives --  of his friends and acquaintances. And he ends this long passage: "All these matters could, of course, be solved in a novel." (Kindle Locations 3188 and 3257).

The book is full of small photographs of all the famous people of the era, as well as of their portraits by famous painters. At times I felt as if this collection of photos and portraits was a driving force in Barnes's choice of subject matter. He explains these photos:

"If, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, you bought a chocolate bar from the grocers Félix Potin, there was an outside chance that you might find in it a small photograph of Dr. Pozzi, the size and shape of a cigarette card. Between 1898 and 1922 Félix Potin produced three series of Célébrités Contemporaines— with around five hundred in each batch— and also sold albums into which you could stick your cards. Pozzi featured in the second series, and was available in two different poses. I have both cards on my desk. Full-bearded and wavy-haired, with a marked widow’s peak, he wears a dark jacket: in one, arms folded, he gazes off to our right; in the other, he stares straight back at us. Both poses exude dynamism and self-confidence; 'Pozzi, Médecin' each of them proclaims." (Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat, Kindle Locations 1184-1189). 

Wait! They are just like the Famous Witch and Wizard cards included in each purchase of chocolate frogs -- the cards that Harry Potter learns about on his first trip on the Hogwarts Express! Never mind. This insight is of no more use to me than any other.

To you, my readers, I apologize for writing such a confused review, but it's all mine and copyright © 2020 by me, mae sander, for maefood dot blog spot dot com, and if you are finding it elsewhere, it's a pirate version!

"The Fifth Season" by N.K.Jemisin

“I read everything. The No 1 thing I tell my students...is read diversely. And I’m not talking about demographics, though that’s part of it. Aesthetic diversity, genre diversity. It matters because it just makes us better informed, and it protects us from our worst instincts.”

So said Roxane Gay in a recent interview with Aida Edemariam titled: Roxane Gay: ‘Public discourse rarely allows for nuance. And see where that’s gotten us.’  According to this article, Gay "reserves a particular ire for those who read only literary fiction;" she particularly likes spy thrillers and romance novels, according to the interview.

I agree with Roxane Gay that a diet of all literary fiction is really tedious, and I really know it because I just read five or six works of literary fiction in a row. Some of them were set in other cultures or in American subcultures, but they were pretty typical of literary fiction.

Would Roxane Gay say to me what she said in the article: "Anybody who tells me, ‘I only read literary fiction,’ I’m just like, ‘Well, you’re an asshole. What are we going to talk about?’" Whatever Roxane Gay thinks, I felt like it was time to read something different, so I read The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin's Hugo Winner.

Unfortunately The Fifth Season didn't satisfy my taste in this type of literature. I prefer sci-fi and fantasy that has a certain type of spontaneity, where a naive character faces an unfamiliar society or other-worldly reality, but faces it from a purely human perspective. Examples -- The Wizard of Oz, The Hobbit, The Hunger Games, Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Left Hand of Darkness, Anansi Boys, and Oryx and Crake come to mind. When I think about Dorothy, Bilbo, Katniss, Alice, Harry, Genly Ai, Charles Nancy, Snowman, and various others, I realize that the journey or life experience of every one of them boils down to an intelligent and resourceful central character facing a variety of new situations and challenges in a totally human way. No matter how strange the fantasy or sci-fi situation was, the authors gave these characters courage, empathy, and curiosity. The reader can join them in discovering their worlds. Not so in The Fifth Season.

While The Fifth Season did have a bizarre society and a non-earthly reality, it had far too much other baggage for my taste. Jemisin's characters possessed so many special powers that they simply were not facing their challenges as human beings, but as some other type of creature. Further, they were very well-informed and educated about the natural history, political history, and social history of their world, not at all naive in the same way as the characters in the books I enjoy the most.

I find the book had just way too much made-up stuff. It distracts from the central challenges of the characters. Their planet is full of seismic upheavals: small tremors, earthquakes, volcanos, tsunamis, and gigantic cracks in the earth. Whole cities are swallowed up. Moreover, there are human-type creatures who can harness these forces or who can trigger them unwittingly. There are other human-type creatures with other powers as well -- too many powers to leave them as really comprehensible individuals.

Their world is very bizarre and unstable, and full of invented technical terms and concepts -- so many of these that the book has an appendix explaining many words like orogene, stillhead, geomest, lorist, and sesuna. (Since these words exist only in this invented world, I'm not going to define them here, even though today could be Wordy Wednesday.) Moreover, this world has a very very complicated history which the characters often discuss -- they learned it in school. There's an appendix with a time line of this history too. For me, this is just too gimmicky.

As always, I look at the way food is used, and here are some examples of how distracting the excess of made-up stuff is, stretching the reader's attention so that the psychological side of things gets overwhelmed (which is probably ok with some readers, it's just the part that I prefer).

Here are some examples of the foods mentioned in The Fifth Season. In the type of book I like, foods evoke pleasure or not, and contribute to the reader's ability to empathize with fictional characters no matter how bizarre their lives. These passages, I feel, demonstrate that the over-use of inventions diminishes the vividness of human experiences:

"You’ve eaten something from your pack: cachebread smeared with salty akaba paste from the jar you stuffed into it a lifetime and a family ago. Akaba keeps well after it’s opened, but not forever, and now that you’ve opened it you’ll have to eat it for the next few meals until it’s gone. That’s okay because you like it." (Kindle Locations 962-964).

"...finding a couple of derminther mela— small melons with a hard shell that burrow underground during a Season, or so the geomests say— and rolling them into the remnants of their fire, which she’s very glad they hadn’t gotten around to smothering yet." (Kindle Locations 1564-1566).

"The station’s buildings hold all the comforts Syen’s been craving: hot water, soft beds, food that isn’t just cachebread and dried meat." (Kindle Locations 1735-1736).

"Room service arrives, bringing a tray of modest but filling local food. Fish is cheap in most Coaster comms, so Syen has treated herself by ordering a temtyr fillet, which is an expensive delicacy back in Yumenes. ... Syenite has a side dish of garlic yams and carmelized silvabees, in addition to her own meal, on a separate smaller plate." (Kindle Locations 1922-1928).

"...people get up for second helpings from the massive pot of spiced shrimp, rice, and smoked sea-bubble that is tonight’s meal." (Kindle Locations 4223-4224).

"... just grabbing a plate of roasted tulifish and braised threeleaf with sweetened barley that must have been stolen from some mainland comm." (Kindle Locations 4422-4423).

Yes, I did find some things to like in this book, but I don't feel that it matches up to my favorites that I mentioned above, or to many others by those same authors. I started with a quote from Roxane Gay that encouraged reading of non-literary fiction. Soon I plan to read something by Roxane Gay herself, though I haven't decided whether to read her fiction or her essays.

Disappointed in Grindlewald

We finally saw it. As you see from this poster, it's been out for over a month. Unfortunately, we found The Crimes of Grindelwald much less amusing and captivating than the earlier "Fantastic Beasts" film. It repeated a lot of the clever stuff without really being as clever the second time. The character development wasn't even close to past films about the Harry Potter wizards.

I felt as if what I was seeing was FANFIC -- made by a lesser imagination. But with expensive special effects -- lots of explosions and smoke and big twirly things in the sky or under water.  Rowling's Wizards here do a lot of dramatic disappearances in flashes of light and puffs of smoke; they walk on the edges of tall buildings and stuff they were too powerful to bother with in earlier films. But I liked them better when their characters were more nuanced.

The Crimes of Grindelwald left enough loose ends to fill maybe four more films. In fact the ending felt like a cliff hanger in those old time Saturday afternoon movie serials. I'm not as excited about seeing them as I would have been if I liked this one more.

Proust

Marcel Proust's famous multi-volume book, À la recherche du temps perdu, is now known in English by the name In Search of Lost Time; it was originally translated as Remembrance of Things Past. After reading a book about the three Parisian women who inspired one of Proust's characters (blogged here), I decided to tackle this reading challenge -- in translation, of course. The word count for the entire work is 1,267,069 -- according to a google search, that is. Proust's prose is famously dense and difficult to read. He wrote some of the longest sentences I've ever seen. In contrast to this behemoth, for example, the entire Harry Potter series contains 1,084,170 words, and is written at a young person's reading level. 

I started with the first volume, Swann's Way, and took my time, finishing it in several days. In a few places I found it a bit tedious, but mostly I enjoyed reading it and enjoyed Proust's penetrating interest in a variety of human experiences, especially his best-known studies of how memory operates.

You may be aware of the most famous passage in the book, where Proust's narrator and alter-ego dips a madeleine in his tea, and the taste and aroma take him back to his childhood. I suspect that another 1,267,069 words have been written about this famous passage. In fact, one time when we were buying madeleines in a plastic box at Costco, the check-out clerk said something to us about Proust. (OK, Ann Arbor is a pretty intellectual place, but still...)

The fame of Proust's passage: in this recipe from Bon Appétit magazine, the
caption is: "This cookie launched a thousand memories—
and a literary masterpiece—for Marcel Proust."

One of many things that impressed me as I mentioned, is the study of sensory memory experiences in many passages throughout Swann's Way -- not just the famous one. I was fascinated by the constant explorations of memory and its relation to all of the senses, but especially taste and smell. No doubt this continues through the later volumes as well, though I have not read them recently: I did many years ago. I might continue with this reading project, but I'm not sure. 

Because so much has been written about Proust and memory, I decided to simply quote a few of the most striking passages that fascinated me as I read.

"When, before turning to leave the church, I made a genuflection before the altar, I felt suddenly, as I rose again, a bitter-sweet fragrance of almonds steal towards me from the hawthorn-blossom, and I then noticed that on the flowers themselves were little spots of a creamier colour, in which I imagined that this fragrance must lie concealed, as the taste of an almond cake lay in the burned parts, or the sweetness of Mlle. Vinteuil’s cheeks beneath their freckles. Despite the heavy, motionless silence of the hawthorns, these gusts of fragrance came to me like the murmuring of an intense vitality, with which the whole altar was quivering like a roadside hedge explored by living antennae, of which I was reminded by seeing some stamens, almost red in colour, which seemed to have kept the springtime virulence, the irritant power of stinging insects now transmuted into flowers." Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time (Kindle Locations 2087-2093). 

"And for my own part I set a higher value on cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed to tinge it with crushed strawberries. And these flowers had chosen precisely the colour of some edible and delicious thing, or of some exquisite addition to one’s costume for a great festival, which colours, inasmuch as they make plain the reason for their superiority, are those whose beauty is most evident to the eyes of children, and for that reason must always seem more vivid and more natural than any other tints, even after the child’s mind has realised that they offer no gratification to the appetite, and have not been selected by the dressmaker." (Kindle Locations 2585-2590).

"We would sit down among the irises at the water’s edge. In the holiday sky a lazy cloud streamed out to its full length. Now and then, crushed by the burden of idleness, a carp would heave up out of the water, with an anxious gasp. It was time for us to feed. Before starting homewards we would sit for a long time there, eating fruit and bread and chocolate, on the grass, over which came to our ears, horizontal, faint, but solid still and metallic, the sound of the bells of Saint-Hilaire, which had melted not at all in the atmosphere it was so well accustomed to traverse, but, broken piecemeal by the successive palpitation of all their sonorous strokes, throbbed as it brushed the flowers at our feet."(Kindle Locations 3155-3159).

And the last lines of Swann's Way: 

"The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years." (Kindle Locations 7887-7890). 

J.K.Rowling Strikes Again

I finished reading the latest Cormoran Strike detective tale by Robert Galbraith yesterday. Galbraith, as most people know, is the alter ego of J.K.Rowling, who wanted to start over by using a pseudonym after Harry Potter. She has now published four novels in this series, and I've quite enjoyed them. Dozens of reviews will no doubt be added to those that had already been written before publication, so I'm just going to explore a few things that I really enjoyed in the book.

Lethal White: published last Tuesday.

I love Rowling's sharp eye for detail, for irony, for human weaknesses, and her awareness of how class privilege can create terrible human beings. I love her ear for speech variations, for music (at least in this book where she offers thoughts on listening to pieces as diverse as a Brahms symphony and "Black Trombone" by Serge Gainsbourg), and especially for very odd and wonderfully chosen names of people and places.

Pratt's gentleman's club? Surely, I thought, she made up this wonderful name. No she did not! It's real, and in the acknowledgements, Rowling acknowledges who took her there. However, when Cormoran Strike, in a phone conversation, is invited to meet a client there, his trusty partner Robin says roughly the same thing:

He hung up and returned to the office where Robin was opening and sorting mail. When he told her the upshot of the conversation, she Googled Pratt’s for him.

“I didn’t think places like this still existed,” she said in disbelief, after a minute’s reading off the monitor.  

“Places like what?”  

“It’s a gentleman’s club… very Tory… no women allowed, except as guests of club members at lunchtime… and ‘to avoid confusion,’” Robin read from the Wikipedia page, “‘all male staff members are called George.’”  

“What if they hire a woman?” 

“Apparently they did in the eighties,” said Robin, her expression midway between amusement and disapproval. “They called her Georgina.” (Kindle Locations 1465-1471). 

When he gets to Pratt's (which I Googled too!) he's shown to a dining room by a motherly woman. Through a pass-through he can see a chef carving cold roast beef, and around him:

Here was the very antithesis of the smart restaurants where Strike tailed errant husbands and wives, where the lighting was chosen to complement glass and granite, and sharp-tongued restaurant critics sat like stylish vultures on uncomfortable modern chairs. Pratt’s was dimly lit. Brass picture lights dotted walls papered in dark red, which was largely obscured by stuffed fish in glass cases, hunting prints and political cartoons. In a blue and white tiled niche along one side of the room sat an ancient iron stove. The china plates, the threadbare carpet, the table bearing its homely load of ketchup and mustard all contributed to an ambience of cozy informality, as though a bunch of aristocratic boys had dragged all the things they liked about the grown-up world— its games, its drink and its trophies— down into the basement where Nanny would dole out smiles, comfort and praise." (Kindle Locations 1519-1525). 

His client, Chiswell, a cabinet minister, arrives, a bit late of course:

Once they were seated at the table, which had a stiff, snowy-white tablecloth ... Georgina brought them thick slices of cold roast beef and boiled potatoes. It was English nursery food, plain and unfussy, and none the worse for it. Only when the stewardess had left them in peace, in the dim dining room full of oil paintings and more dead fish, did Chiswell speak again. (Kindle Locations 1552-1555). 

Throughout most of the novel, Strike drinks coffee and beer, eats bacon or deep-fried food -- or tries to abstain in order to control his weight -- and joins friends for Chinese takeout food or a curry. Or this:

Having left in plenty of time, Strike made a detour to a handy McDonald’s for an Egg McMuffin and a large coffee, which he consumed at an unwiped table, surrounded by other early Saturday risers. A young man with a boil on the back of his neck was reading the Independent right ahead of Strike.... (Kindle Locations 5068-5071). 

But the wonderfully named (and completely not made-up) Pratt's sets the scene for the novel where Strike and Robin have to deal with many unbearable aristocrats and their vast sense of entitlement. In fact, everything in the book revolves around how their entitlement forms their attitudes and leads them to the crimes that are being detected. In the Harry Potter books, there are wizard families with the same sense of overpowering aristocratic superiority to the more common wizards. Rowling really knows how to use her powers of observation on these rather deficient human specimens, and it makes for very good reading!