Buying books in the 'Tron

I spent from Saturday to Wednesday in Hamilton this week at the LIANZA conference. Conference started early Sunday arvo, but due to the tediousness of air travel between regional centres, me and the rest of the Massey contingent left Saturday lunchtime. However apart a dull two hours in Auckland airport, I can't complain because we really made the most of our time in the Tron before conference.

We went to an Italian restaurant, Adriana's (so good, we went again on Monday night). Then three of us went to the Lido to see Behind the Candelabra. Really good acting, amazing bling-y sets. I did hope that they would show Liberace in his infamous stars and stripes hotpants, but sadly not. Maybe Michael Douglas put his foot down! Rob Lowe was also born for the role of the plastic surgeon/drug dealer.

Sunday morning I walked along the river walkway to the next bridge and back through various pretty parks. Next was the Art Gallery, and the Waikato Museum. The Waikato Museum had an exhibition about the Big Muffin Serious Band! My love for the BMSB is either the zenith or nadir of my fondness for silly music. A punk version of 'Dream a little dream of me', a Scottish take on 'Johnny Be Goode' (Jimmy Be Goode, natch, who plays the ukelele). Love. Lunch at a cafe featured in the museum's coffee exhibition. And we discovered a second-hand bookshop, Browsers, that stays open til 9.30 pm 7 days a week!

So I've been buying books lately. I usually try and avoid this, for both space and money reasons, but I still have a house full of the things. I have a huge urge to buy Doctor Sleep which I'm currently resisting.  (This may not last - everyone seems to be raving about it.) The library does have copies, but I dread to think how many holds are on it. Probably not the 1900+ that are on The Luminaries in Auckland. I bought Inequality: A New Zealand crisis after listening to Max Rashbrooke, one of the authors/editors, give a talk out at Massey. Unbelievably, Massey has had copies on order since July!

At Browsers, I bought 4 books: The Penguin Book of Love Poetry, edited by Jon Stallworthy; Pyrates, by George MacDonald Fraser; The English Monster, by Lloyd Shepherd; and The History of Myddle, by Richard Gough.

Pyrates and The Penguin book of love poetry are replacement books - in both cases I lent them out and lost contact with the borrowers. I haven't read MacDonald Fraser's other books, but Pyrates is hilarious. I first discovered it at the Lower Hutt Public Library as a teen. It's set in the fantasy pirate age of Errol Flynn movies and here is a random quotation:

Avery's head swam, and he could not repress a ruptured squawk as he conned the lead paragraph: "Buccaneering and official naval circles were rocked from truck to keelson last week by the dastardly defection..." there it was, the lying tale of his supposed betrayal...the loss of the crown, Vanity's abduction, the breakfast menu for the fatal day... but not a word of his defiance when they fed him to the sharks.

I'm never lending it again.

Dickens and Cavemen

I have 2 books on the go at present. Well, two that I still recognise a commitment to. The Crabby Cook Cookbook, which is still on the bedside table isn't quite doing it for me as a representative of the recipebook/memoir genre, sadly. (Although I may yet change my mind having looked at her blog). I partly picked it because the author is Jessica Harper, who once starred in a deliriously enjoyable film that mysteriously flopped: The Phantom of the Paradise. A take on The Phantom of the Opera (you guessed? well done you!), Jessica Harper was Phoenix, the beautiful pop singer, coached by lovestruck composer Winslow. Sadly, evil record producer Swan (played by Paul Williams) seduces her, steals Winslow's music, and disfigures Winslow in a horrific record pressing incident. Winslow vows revenge on Swan's decadent new nightclub, the Paradise.

So the first one of the books that I am reading is Nicholas Nickleby. By Charles Dickens, but you knew that. I like Victorian literature, and I like Dickens, and Nicholas Nickleby is a fun read. Packed with incident, and including:
1. Outrageous villains like the evil uncle Ralph (boo, hiss) who makes Ebenezer Scrooge look like your grandfather.
2. The expose of contemporary social injustices in the shape of Yorkshire schools, represented by Dotheboys Hall and the loathsome Squeers family.
3. The depiction of early Victorian theatre with the Crummles family, who cast Nicholas as Romeo in a very unusual version of Romeo and Juliet.
4. Not one but two virtuous but imperiled heroines - Nicholas' sister Kate and Nicholas' love-interest Madeline. They are sweet but one can see Miriam Margoyles' point (in Dicken's Women) that they are 'rather icky'.

Writing about this is also making me remember going to the 8+ hour stage version of NN, which came to Wellington sometime in the 1980s or very early 1990s. Particularly the part where Nicholas does play Romeo, which he does like 'a demented typewriter', as a critic once wrote of Richard Briers in the role of Hamlet. (As quoted in No Turn Unstoned: The Worst Ever Theatrical Reviews, compiled by Diana Rigg.)

I'm about a quarter of the way through. Nicholas, having left Dotheboys Hall after thrashing the sadistic Squeers (see photo - Jim Broadbent as Squeers in the 2002 film), is now rooming with Newman Noggs and attempting to teach French to the four Kenwig daughters. I've hit pause on it, to read Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live, by Marlene Zuk. This turned up on the new books shelf at Massey, and while I was the first person in the queue, that also means that I have to get it back by this Friday.

Marlene Zuk is a professor of ecology, evolution, and behaviour at the University of Minnesota, so is well placed to comment on the various popular books recommending dietary and other practices supposedly followed by pre-agricultural hunter/gatherer societies (aka cavemen). Books like The Paleo Diet argue that since the adoption of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, there hasn't been enough time for our bodies to adapt. Or that since we were hunter/gatherers for much longer than we've been farmers, we must be 'better adapted' to the former lifestyle.

Zuk cheerfully points out that this is not true - adaptations can appear and become widespread in a very short space of time. A non-human example she cites is of male crickets in Hawaii who no longer make noise with their wings, an adaptation that became widespread in about 20 cricket generations - about 5 years! She also repeatedly points out that we have very little knowledge of how early humans actually lived; and that there would have been a wide variation in early societies as there are in modern societies (including modern hunter/gatherer societies).

I've finished the section on diet, and have just started the chapter on exercise. I look forward to finding out why I shouldn't worry too much because I can't remember the last time I hunted down a wildebeest or fled a snarling sabre-tooth.

Pacific explorers, odd beliefs, and cycling

I didn't blog at all in July? Well, I assure you I was visiting libraries and reading. However the urge to go back and fill in the gaps is death for any kind of diarying, so most of what I read and borrowed in July will now stay between me and my reading notebook.

I belong to a book circle, which is a WEA book discussion scheme one. I've belonged to it for - at least 10 years? Probably 15? Or more. Ages anyway. The quest for origins: who first discovered and settled New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, by K.R. Howe is our current book, and I very much suspect I will be one of the few people in the group who will have finished it. I started it early because a friend had warned me it was a slow read. Luckily, for me it wasn't.

Howe, who is a History professor at Massey's Albany campus, was approached by Penguin to write the book after a couple of his responses to various breathless media reports about 'shocking new revelations  about the discovery of New Zealand'. The book covers the history of (European) ideas about where Pacific Islanders came from, and most interestingly, why the assumptions behind these ideas, and often the prejudices that these ideas served. One of the main ideas behind several older theories was the idea that cultures didn't change unless under the influence of another culture - usually a superior one. Gosh, I wonder what sort of cultures they had in mind? Howe argues that this sort of thinking is often behind a lot of the more odd-ball ideas that come up today, whereby pre-Tasman visits to NZ are claimed for the Spanish, the Chinese, the Portuguese, the Celts, and for all I know, probably the Inuit!

It's quite an academic book, however I appreciate that. If I'm reading non-fiction I want the nerdy stuff like indexes, bibliographies, and footnotes. In fact, my main complaint about this book is there is a quirky little comment about people once believing people would melt if they crossed the equator. Reference needed, as Wikipedia would say.

The book I'm currently reading is from Massey Library, and is Cycle space: architecture and urban design in the age of the bicycle, by Steven Fleming. One of the things I appreciate about Palmie is its cycle friendliness. (Well sort of. We still get spluttery letters in the paper complaining about the audacity of cyclists actually using the roads.) We have wide flat roads, and about a year ago the council tarsealed the bridle track that runs along the Manawatu River, which means that for most of my bike commute home I'm cycling along gazing at the river and the meadow, counting how many dogs are out walking with their owners, and in no danger of being hit by a car. Thanks PNCC! Tho' again there were spluttery letters in the paper about bikes being allowed on walkers' rightful territory. Sigh...

Back to Fleming's book! There are vignettes of various cycling cities (Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Sydney, etc), but the bulk of the book is about what the subtitle says. Because he references a lot of buildings and objects and designers its the sort of book that I read wanting Google beside me. Besides the architecture and design side, he also reflects on the class aspects of cars and cycling, and the various romantic cliches of cycling. He's unashamedly pro-cycling and keeps asking why you'd walk when you can bike. Must be rubbing off on me. I had to walk across campus the other day and thought how much quicker (and more fun) it would be if I could just hop on a bike.

Blog hijack!

We interrupt this irregularly scheduled blog to bring you holidays news from Vancouver. I make this point in case this blog becomes a international and long standing success and future readers wonder what on earth happened at this point.

Monday, our first full day here I woke at about 7 and decided to go walking in search of a wool shop and a cookbook shop I'd heard about. The day was overcast and rain was forecast so I grabbed an umbrella. I walked ages (Vancouver street numbers reach the thousands) and...the wool shop was closed. By that time its name - Wet Coast Wools - was prophetic and it was belting down. I took refuge in a cafe with tea and a cinnamon roll. Then I walked ages back looking for Barbara Jo's books for cooks...which was closed! Back across a bridge and again it started pouring. There was supposed to be a mall nearby and while I'm not find of malls, I was pretty sick of the rain. Couldn't spot it, so headed for the Vancouver Public library. Shelter and a place to sit down! I'd been walking for about 3 hours with only a cinnamon roll to sustain me.

By the time David arrived (btw, maps rule, GPS' drool) it was more like 6 hours with only a cinnamon roll to sustain me, so after about another hour(!) of walking we decided to try the place selling poutine we'd seen Sunday night.

Poutine is something else. Like chips? Like gravy? Like cheese? (think of a solid rubbery non melting cheese like halloumi). Put them together, and that is poutine. The place we went to obviously felt this wasn't enough and added onions, green peppers, mushrooms, bacon, and pepperoni (me) and smoked meat (David). It's the sort of thing polar explorers would eat to stop the flesh melting off their bones.

Tuesday, after all the walking (we went out bookshop chasing in the evening - luckily, they were open), I didn't wake until late. More walking! I'd located a wool shop (or yarn store) in gastown called Wool is Not Enough, we walked round and about and all over downtown and eventually caught a bus out to the University of British Columbia.

This was beautiful. I loved my time at Victoria, and Massey is a good place to work and a pretty campus, but UBC is huge! So much green, forest, gardens (tho' we didn't get to the gardens sadly) and - the Museum of Anthropology. I'd been hearing about MOA right from when I first started reading about Vancouver. It has an amazing collection of Musqueam and First Nations art, house posts, totem poles, carvings. Plus the multiversity galleries, which have objects from all around the world (although I don't remember Australia and NZ). They have an online catalogue - go and look at it! Particularly look up 'house dishes' and 'last supper of lucifer'. I was going to post photos but uploading was so slow I thought the computer elves were assembling them pixel by pixel.

We were there in the evening, a sunny evening. Peaceful and awe-inspiring. Also sobering. One of the last things I looked at was a document signed late last century by various First Nation leaders of the North-West Coast (re)asserting their sovereignty. As in New Zealand, treaties with aboriginal peoples have a fairly sorry history.

The gift of fear

I don't have a photo here because honestly, think about the type of book about which people say "don't judge a book by its cover". The book is blue, minus its dust jacket, about 15 years old, and has ancient Sellotape, library labels and barcode on the cover and that's it. Not pretty.

It's called The gift of fear, and is by Gavin De Becker. I requested it via Bonus+ (of which more anon), because it is constantly recommended by Carolyn Hax, a Washington post advice columnist  I have just discovered. It is about violence and how to recognise it, particularly through 'the gift of fear' - our intuition that something is wrong. He argues that this intuition is usually fed by things we've noticed but not consciously recognised.

He covers things like violent employees, domestic abuse, assassinations, and attackers. He argues against the idea of senseless, unpredictable violence - it is usually predictable (if you can recognise the signs) and sense-filled (in the attacker's mind anyway). Some of the cases he cites of people ignoring signs are truly unbelievable, such as the wife who believed that her husband's violence came out of 'nowhere', but maybe the fact that his first wife died as a result of his beatings might have been a sign!

The author survived a violent childhood and now runs a firm that works with government, firms, and individuals to predict , prevent and deal with violence. Sound fascinating? It is. 

Oh and bonus+? It's an arrangement Massey has with over 10 Aussie uni libraries that means staff and students can borrow their books for free. I love it. Access to several million more books? Priceless.

Food, fantasy, and ... envy?

Yesterday was Library book due day for these books. Apart from the White Palace, which I renewed because I'm still reading it. Those Romanovs, phew. That was a good loan, I enjoyed and read all of the books (not always a given, a lot of books I borrow from the library I don't get round to), and Lost Cat in particular was a monster hit. I gave it to DC to read, him being even more of a cat sook than I am, and a techie to boot. He LOVED it - showed it to friends, posted it on Facebook. I'm thinking of getting him a t-shirt "Go and read Lost cat, by Caroline Paul".

Anyway, so this week's batch, clearly I got stuck in the cooking section. Because we're off on holiday in a week, I didn't want novels in case I was still in the middle of one when we left. And I admit to being influenced by a friend's new blog Life lived lavishly, in which cooking plays a very large role. Rilka's feasts is probably the most direct influence (Rilka has Eastern European ancestry as well - Bulgarian in this case). It's a mixture of recipes and memoir, and should be wonderful. Mma Ramotswe's Cookbook: nourishment for the traditionally built goes to Botswana for its recipes, and is of course tied to the Alexander McCall Smith's No 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels. Lots of great photos. I've just opened it to a page with a recipe called Fat cakes. They look yummy but sadly I won't be making them because they're deep fried. I'm scared of deep frying, and figure that with so many places selling you deep fried food, why bother learning yourself. I know it's not a good argument.

Moving on, Get cooking is by Mollie Katzen, and I'm very fond of Mollie Katzen. The Moosewood Cookbook, and the Enchanted Broccoli Forest were probably the first cookbooks I ever bought, and they still get a lot of use. Interestingly, Get cooking isn't a vegetarian cookbook - there's even a drawing of a roast chook on the cover! The Complete Food Makeover caught my eye, although I have mixed feelings about it. Its got pretty pictures, but I have to do an eye-roll whenever I see low-fat cottage cheese mentioned. If standard cottage cheese was the most high fat thing in my diet, I'd be "hanging off a charm bracelet", in the words of Erma Bombeck.

I suspect Style me vintage: tea parties (more pretty pictures! and a soupcon of social history), BBC Good Food, and Cherry cake and ginger beer were grabbed in reaction. That cake on Good Food's cover looks seriously scrummy, and I'm hosting my book circle tomorrow evening. Cherry cake and ginger beer I've read before, and adore it. It's recipes based on the food mentioned in classic English children's books - like Enid Blyton, Swallows and Amazons, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It even has a recipe for pickled limes a la Little Women. I worked with children's literature for 13 years at the National Library, and still regularly re-read my favourite books from my childhood.

And finally, Envy. Palmie library uses the dewey decimal system but arranges its non-fiction in a series of living rooms, where quite disparate dewey ranges may appear. For example, the Health living room will include books from the 100s (emotions, self-esteem), the 300s (relationships), and the 600s (medicine, nutrition, grooming). Very well set up for browsing. The Beliefs (philosophy and religion, plus UFOs etc) living room is right next to the Cooking living room, so I was walking past it as I was leaving. This little book was facing out on the end of the shelf. The blurb says "Writing in a conversational, erudite, self-deprecating style that wears its learning lightly, Epstein takes us on a stimulating tour of the many faces of envy."An extended essay, a literary form I enjoy. (There's something pompous about that statement, but never mind.) Essays are like good speeches - they are written to educate but also to persuade - to present a point of view. Even if you don't agree with the conclusions, they are often illuminating and thought provoking.

I also have to confess that the subject spoke to me. Envy is probably the deadly sin I consider myself most prone to. It goes hand in hand I think with a lack of self confidence, which I also suffer from at times (along with the rest of the world, of course). Like all sins, it does have it's place: if I'm feeling envious, what is that saying about me and my life? Does it mean that I'm bored with something in my life? Does it mean that there is a need (or want) in my life that I need to address? If those are legitimate, then do something about it, otherwise remind yourself 1) of all that you do have, 2) that you shouldn't compare your inside with someone else's outside, 3) envy is not going to make you any happier. Choose the mix of these that best suits the situation!

Knit and spin

This title comes doesn't come from the public library, or the university library, but from the library of the Manawatu Spinners and Weavers Guild. I joined the group last year, having been a knitter practically for ever and having got more and more curious about spinning. I'd bought a spindle a few years before and learnt how to use it at Handmade. I wasn't sure whether our already bulging at the seams house would cope with a spinning wheel, but a friend at church had been encouraging me to go along to the Guild's Thursday group, so eventually I did.

And so glad I did! It's a great group of people doing lots of different and interesting things with fibre, and they seemed to think that what I did with fibre was different and interesting as well. Trying things was easy in a group - making Dorset buttons, felting, spinning alpaca, spinning raw merino, and there are lots of people around to show me how to do things, like grease a spinning wheel (I did buy a second hand one through the Guild).

It's also very close to where I live. I live on the outskirts of town, and okay that town is Palmerston North, so nowhere is very far from anywhere, but my dream life is where everything is within walking distance. My first flat was in Tinakori Road and I loved being so central. Work was 3 minutes away, the central railway station and bus terminal 5 mins, the Botanical Gardens were just up the road, I went to church on the Terrace, we had a dairy next door! Loved it. Rangiora Hall is not quite evening walking there and back distance, but I can bike it in about 5 minutes, so that's good enough for me. Even when I take the car (yeah, tough to take a spinning wheel on a bike), I like the 'just popping out' feeling.

After I'd gone to the Thursday group a couple of times, I thought to look in the storage room. Oh. My. Shelves of wool, spun and unspun, bags of fleece, bits of spinning wheels and other paraphernalia, and books and magazines (! LOVE magazines. Even love the ads in magazines) galore. Knitting, spinning, crochet, weaving, you name it. Happy sigh.

This is the first thing I've actually borrowed from the library, and it looks a good un. Interweave Knit and Spin, from the amazing Interweave Press, who I credit with dragging my knitting out of the 1980s.  It's aimed at experienced knitters just getting into spinning, so it's perfect for me. I've already read the article about washing wool fleeces (hmm, I wonder where I'd store them?).

In other library book news, I've finished reading Needles and pearls, the indulgent chick lit read which now has me wanting to re-read the sequel (and then I'll probably want to re-read the first one - sigh), and am now reading Margaret Atwood on SciFi. V. good (natch) - perhaps I should also re-read Oryx and Crake.