Cheese dreams

WHO KNEW that it’s a MEDICAL FACT that eating cheese before bed gives you vivid dreams? Everyone but me?

A friend mentioned it on Saturday night when, home from a party, we were munching on some market-bought camembert before bed. I was skeptical. I think I might even have scoffed.

The Culprit

The Culprit

Then, out of bed way too early Sunday morning so we could head down to the coast for a surf, as I was brushing my teeth my dream flooded back. I told her, wide-eyed. She nodded, unfazed, as if to say, Of course, I told you, the cheese does it. As always seems to happen with these things (once you hear something for the first time, you see it everywhere), while I was driving, she was reading out the paper and in Annabel Crabb’s article, there was this metaphor:

The effect on the media consumer is vaguely hallucinogenic; like waking from a turbulent sleep shot through with the sorts of dreams that are ordinarily an indicator of too much cheese before bed.

Where have I been? And cheese is my hands-down favourite food!

So I’ve just googled away. In this article, which details a study of what types of dreams Brits had after consuming different kinds of British cheeses, there is no mention of camembert, but there is a mention that  ‘British brie tended to give women nice dreams’. Well, that’s what my dream was: intensely nice, feel-awesome-happy-wow!

I’m a bit embarrassed to mention whom it involved Read the full post »

The setbacks along the way

failing streetIt’s all good and well posting here when I’m lucky enough to have something published, but I think it’s important — I know I appreciate it as a blog reader — to share disappointments as well.

Last week turned out to be a big one. I had a great start to the week — after meeting with an editor I began the editing process for an essay that will be published later this year, and it was so exciting. I spent Tuesday from 9 am to 9 pm on it, in the zone, shocked each time I saw how much time had gone by because I was so utterly in thrall to the process. (I love, by the way, that Joan Didion writes, in her preface to Slouching towards Bethlehem, that the collection’s essays ‘took more time than perhaps they were worth’. Gives you permission, doesn’t it?) Read the full post »

Hips Don’t Lie

‘Hips Don’t Lie’: an oldie, I know, but it’s a pretty kick-arse example of what can happen when you mash up different songs and styles (instrumentals from Jerry Rivera’s romantic, nostalgic salsa ‘Amores como el nuestro’ and lyrics from Luis Díaz’s merengue ‘Carnaval (Baila en la calle)’, as well as the song’s previous incarnation as Wyclef Jean and R&B singer Claudette Ortiz’s ‘Dance like this’) — not to mention a great example, via the video, of what exactly can be done with a set of hips (for more mind-boggling moves, revisit Shakira’s ‘La tortura‘).

Anyway, the ipod, which was on shuffle while I was throwing together a meal last night, started playing ‘Hips Don’t Lie’. It seemed an age since I’d heard it. At one particular lyric, I was struck by a whole bundle of emotions that culminated in sadness:

Refugees run the seas ’cause we own our own boats

Just listen to how Wyclef Jean sings it — confidently, yet it’s shot through with naiveté and irony. First there’s the surprise and delight at the concept (it’s an original take on the situation, after all), and then the lament at the lack of awareness that such a statement embodies.

It’s an attempt at attributing power and dignity to the powerless, a re-interpretation of the North American ideal of individualism, i.e. the myth of the self-made man, and a nod to capitalism, while at the same time it demonstrates the lack of agency and opportunity for such subaltern people. It’s about viewing the world through the limited field of what you can take charge of, rather than criticising the structures or circumstances that have caused you to be in that situation. This, in the immediate sense, gives a greater feeling of power and autonomy, even if it doesn’t change anything in the long run. There’s a lot going on, then, on a number of levels, in that one line of song. And yet it’s all transmitted to me on an emotional level in no more than the time it takes to hear it. A pretty deft sleight of hand, no?

And, of course, there’s intertextuality going on there, not just in the number of songs that ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ references musically and lyrically, but also the ones it references thematically: it has echoes of Juan Luis Guerra’s ‘Visa para un sueño‘, for example, a merengue that details the bureaucratic process of applying for (and being denied) a visa, and the lengths undertaken afterwards.

It really got me. And it reminded me that there are lessons and brilliance to be found in all art forms, even if you do usually experience that art form in the context of shaking your thing.

Reading moments

solace-open-spaces-coverI had a nice moment just now, one of those times when the books you’ve been reading seem to be communicating with each other, taking up and expanding upon each other’s topics or providing answers to each other’s questions.

It was in the essay collection The Solace of Open Spaces (1985) by Gretel Ehrlich, specifically in the essay titled ‘Just Married’. The collection is about the American West as experienced through living and working on ranches in Wyoming. Writing about her house, which Texan Billy Hunt built in 1913, the narrator throws in this sentence: ‘Gradually, the whole drainage filled up with homesteaders.’ (p. 89)

Growth of the soilAnd there,  right there in the span of one sentence, is another story, itself an entire book, set on the other side of the world: Knut Hamsun’s novel Growth of the Soil  (1917).

The craft responses. Second up: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, translated by Susan Bernofsky

After reading the discussion about reviews vs responses on Devoted Eclectic (which I came to via a Seraglio post), the craft reviews will henceforth be called the craft responses.

Introductory note: The craft responses focus not so much on story or themes (which I  summarise at the beginning, just so things don’t get too nitty-gritty without the broader picture), but on the techniques the writers have employed — the nuts and bolts. The inspiration for these posts came about after I read a number of books in quick succession that blew me away not just in terms of story and character, but in terms of form. Form has also been catching my attention lately because I’m currently wrestling with what might one day become a novel manuscript.

The story (lifted from the blurb)

An exquisitely crafted, stealthily chilling story of a house and its inhabitants, and of a country and its ghosts

Visitation has the epic trajectory of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. This impressive achievement is a deeply engaging panorama of German’s troubling 20th-century history.’ Financial Times

‘A powerful novel… in which epic events are contrasted with, and told through, the repetitive, almost rhythmical processes that make up seemingly ordinary lives… Visitation is an important work by a novelist of great talent.’ TLS

(Typing out the above, the editor in me  did an inner fist pump to see the perfect omission of a full stop in that explication. *Sigh of satisfaction*)

The themes

As you can probably tell from the above, this is about the complexity of culpability and explores how victim–perpetrator classifications are rarely clear cut; it’s about silence and refusing to see, about the effect of history on individuals and, ultimately, about the transience of life and living.

The translation

Susan Bernofsky has performed what looks to be an excellent translation. There were many moments where I paused to marvel over the skill inherent in a particular phrase’s translation. I don’t know where the exact difficulties were, but the following, among many others, seemed to me a place where the source text, in its specificity and word play, might have been a challenge: Read the full post »

News from Peru

I just had to share this news item, which I saw last night:

In the Peruvian Amazon, in a place called Contamana (pop. 10,000), a difficult birth left mother and child alive, but there were complications. They needed urgent transportation to Pucallpa (Spanish speakers, that ‘ll’ is pronounced as ‘l’), pop. 200,000, for medical treatment.

It was already 6 pm, so the Pucallpa airport was closed to all aircraft, but by 7.30 pm the hospital staff had secured permission to land there.

Another patient arrived, gravely ill with black jaundice symptoms; he needed urgent medical attention, too.

Pilot Otto France Martínez offered to fly the three patients to the Pucallpa airport. But what to do, now that it was dark and visibility was too poor for take off from the Contamana aerodrome?

The local radio, Feroz, made a call-out to all mototaxi drivers.

(This is a mototaxi:

)

They buzzed down to the aerodrome until there were 300 of them. Their headlights lit the way, and the pilot was able to take off.

Cultural cringe and writing

Fascinating feature over at the Sydney Review of Books today; it’s about the new incarnation of the cultural cringe, as considered through the prism of short story collections. It raises many thought-provoking questions — for example:

What if measuring Australian writing in the mirror of global culture means that we only get back a reflection of other already established traditions?

Indeed. I’m going to re-read it when I get a chance a little later.

Zizek and Google Images

I have a vague, tentative idea for a personal essay that may never eventuate, but was gripped by the need to read philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek before starting. So I googled him (and nearly fell off my chair when I saw how many books he has written; decided to start with Violence). I couldn’t help a chuckle when this was the photo that popped up: Read the full post »

Typewriter collective poetry

On a whim, I bought a typewriter. Not a nice one, just a typewriter. It was ten bucks. It’s been sitting in the living room, and though I’ve rarely seen anyone banging away on it and haven’t pointed it out to anyone, the lines on the paper I slotted into it have gradually grown. Sometimes only after friends had left would I realise there was a new addition, and would chuckle accordingly. I can think of at least 10 different people who have (I think) contributed (and if you’re reading this, hooray to you!), based on which line appeared after whoever had visited.

P1000645

P1000646

Gary Lutz on sentences

Ahh, love this article, ‘The Sentence is a Lonely Place’ by Gary Lutz in The Believer. The analysis, the detail, the exploration of the way in which words arranged in sentences can form ‘a community of sound and shape’. Can’t remember how I came across it, but I saved the link and only just got around to reading it from start to finish.

Here’s something to aspire to: that every sentence have ‘the force and feel of a climax’ and ‘a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude’.

More about what a good sentence looks like:

I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language — the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. I once later tried to define this kind of sentence as “an outcry combining the acoustical elegance of the aphorism with the force and utility of the load-bearing, tractional sentence of more or less conventional narrative.”

Lutz then analyses such phrases as Christine Schutt’s ‘[Life after a certain age is] acutely felt, clearly flat’ and its achievement of ‘lexical inevitability’; Suchtt’s ‘her lips stuck when she licked them to talk’ and the words’ lack of consonantal variation, etc.

I’ve never seen language described with such insight — try to imagine, for example, how to unpack the perfect intricacies of Dianne Williams’s sentence ‘An accident isn’t necessarily ever over.’ or of Sam Lipsyte’s ‘Everybody wanted everything to be gleaming again, or maybe they just wanted their evening back.’ And then read what Lutz has to say about them. He writes so well about how ordinary, even humdrum, words can be organised in such a way that they become, in each other’s company, stellar.

His suggestions? Read the full post »

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