Reading etc.

I quite enjoyed the interview with the Chapman brothers in last week’s Observer. Rudeness can be so entertaining.

I was incensed, however, by an article about Amy Winehouse. She said “I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist, but I don’t like girls pretending to be stupid because it’s easier.” Why is it people say “I’m not a feminist” in the same way that they say “I’m not a racist”. Their comments make it clear that they are feminists and, unlike being a racist, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that; so why do people think that there is? Does Ms. Winehouse mean “I don’t believe in equal pay for equal work, I don’t believe that women and men are equally capable and I don’t believe that women should have the same rights as men”? When she says “I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist”, that is, surely, the message she conveys. I am a feminist and so is anyone with the slightest bit of sense. Perhaps this is where Ms. Winehouse’s problem lies.

Any other feminists out there?

My mother and I emerged from the parents’ house on Sunday morning to go to mass.  It was pouring rain which made the fact that some yobs had walked on the roof of my parents’ car and put a dent in it which created a large gap between the roof and the sun roof that little bit more annoying.  Somewhat to my surprise, the guards came when we called them and said that they had arrested a mob which was rampaging around the area.  This is the second time that I have seen the guards on a trip home.  I am beginning to think that my parents live in a more dangerous part of town than I had realised.

 

At mass, the priest gave a sermon about divorce.  Divorce was only introduced in Ireland in 1995 and we’re all still getting used to it.  Some of us more quickly than others, it appears.  The divorce rate is 33% the priest told us.  He said that in his 20 years as a priest he had only seen unhappiness and misery when people split up.  So far, so catholic.  And a marriage is for life.  Continuing catholic.  Even though this is the case and he knows that there will be people who disagree with him, he believes that people should be allowed to have their second union blessed by a priest in a church.  I nearly fell out of my pew.  Doubtless his defrocking papers are in the post.  We also prayed for people who had died during the week including a man who would have had his birthday next week.  I think we were all expecting the priest to say his 100^th birthday but he said “his 21^st birthday”.  He died in a traffic accident last week and he was lying in the side chapel. 

 

After mass, we repaired to the scout hall where they were having a book sale.  It was a great book sale.  Lots of old Nevil Shutes and Dorothy L. Sayers and theology primers (“An Introduction to the new Mass”).   We ran into my favourite aunt who told us that she had brought four boxes to the sale and was busy buying more back.  I bought some myself.  My father once said to me “books are the ruination of this house”.  I was appalled but I am beginning to see what he means.  My parents’ house is falling down with books – I am reminded of the C.S. Lewis quote where he describes himself as follows: I am the product … of endless books.  There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not”.  When I was a teenager, my father was always tying up piles of books with string to go to the Oxfam shop and I would unpick the knots and take out any I considered worthy of saving.  Now I see that he was right.  Our own flat in Brussels is chock full of books.  I am reluctant to get rid of most of them.  There are the ones I will read again.  There are the ones that I may read again.  There are the ones that I read with great difficulty over many weeks or possibly even months which I am reluctant to remove from the shelves because, if people are to judge me by my books, I would, hypocritically, rather that they judged me by these rather than my set of Georgette Heyers (which definitely fall into the first category along with Terry Pratchett, the Narnia books and Cold Comfort Farm).    And then there are the ones I am going to read.  Yes, really, when I get a moment.

 

Book sale notwithstanding, probably my best moment all weekend came when I bought cake at the French cake shop with my mother.  We’ll have a mille feuille, I said and the French woman behind the counter said “you pronounce that really well”.  My heart swelled with pride, it nearly made up for the time my husband and a French waiter fell about the place laughing at my pronounciation of this most difficult collection of French vowels.  Mind you, every one in Cork says milly filly so the competition isn’t exactly fierce.

And the winner is…

The panel* was very impressed with the level of all the entries, and congratulates  all who took part. Candidates might have scored higher marks for mentioning the Iraq war or the works of Jacques Derrida, but this did not detract from the generally high standard. Sadly, there can only be one winner, so here are the comments in reverse order.

In third place, Daddy’s Little Demon. A good piece which captured much of the LRB’s style – but failed somehow to convey the smugness of the original. For future reference, name-checking Derrida or Lacan would have carried more marks than Maslow, who is now seen as very pre-post-modern.

In second place, Disgruntled. The piece showed great self-confidence but was too short for the panel to judge whether the tone could be sustained over a longer composition. Also, although the use of the word “bildungsroman” greatly impressed the panel, a true LRB author could never begin a German noun with a lower-case letter: the pedantic urge would be too strong.

In first place, Heather. A fluid piece, effortlessly using many LRB favourites (like “signifier and signified” and “cultural paradigm”)  and most accurately capturing the spirit of the original. It may be asked whether Heather, like Disgruntled, should lose marks for spelling “zeitgeist” without a capital. However, the New Oxford Dictionary of English still treats “Bildungsroman” as a German word (with capital) while “zeitgeist” has now been naturalised long enough to be spelled without a capital. Therefore, the use of the word in an actual LRB article would spark a fruitful exchange of correspondence between lexicographers, Germanists and assorted pedants, which could spread over several subsequent issues of the Review. It can therefore be seen as the icing on the cake of this audacious effort.

The winner is Heather.

*Mr Waffle – who took a break from cleaning up vomit to write this – more of which anon.