Feb. 25th, 2011

emma_in_dream: (Invented in Russia)
I don’t have a coherent argument to make about this book, just some observations.

Firstly, I believe she may bear some responsibility for the English tradition of terrible vegetables. Seriously - carrots 1–3/4 to 2–1/4 hours? How do you have any carrot molecules left at the end?

Secondly, reading this makes me aware of how easy I have things. If I want to make jelly, for instance, I use a safety match and gas to boil the kettle, I add it to a packet of jelly, and I refrigerate. If a Victorian woman wanted to make jelly, she started with chipping bits of a cow’s feet. Seriously. Check out the recipe.

And I like that Mrs Beeton made the radical analogy with a military leader. She wrote: ‘AS WITH THE COMMANDER OF AN ARMY, or the leader of any enterprise, so is it with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path.’ Militant femininity!

I'm also impressed that she fitted so much into such a short life. She died at the age of 28, having had four children (two survived birth), worked as a journalist and editor, and written one of the most widely read books of the Victorian era.

I made her flanc of apples. It tasted great but only after I fiddled with the recipe quite a bit. Her proportions were definitely not right - she called for three quarters of a pint of water to boil the apples in and that simply did not cover the apples. Also I used 7 apples rather than 9 as she called for, on the assumption that our pesticide-grown apples are larger than hers were.

Indeed, as I ate I wondered how the food tasted in the nineteenth century. Were the apples sweeter in the way that old fashioned roses are sweeter smelling? Nineteenth-century authors rave about fruit in a way that we don’t today, perhaps because we have access to a lot more sugar. Can we even begin to experience quotidienne life the way people did a century ago?
emma_in_dream: (Default)
2.11 Pat Lowe and Jimmy Pike, Yinti, Desert Child (1992)

2.12 Pat Lowe and Jimmy Pike, Desert Dog (1997)

2.13 Pat Lowe and Jimmy Pike, Desert Cowboy (2000)

These children's books are told by Pat Lowe and based on the experiences of Jimmy Pike in his childhood as a hunter gatherer in the central desert. He came in from the desert to a station in the 1950s, one of the last groups to do so.

*Yinti, Desert Child* describes his childhood and his first trip in to see relatives on a station in his adolescence. *Desert Dog* is a story about his mother's wonderful hunting dingo, Spinifex, who comes in with him to the station and then runs away back to his mother in the desert. *Desert Cowboy* is is the third part of the biography. It charts Jimmy’s permanent move in to working on stations in the Kimberley. I was particularly interested in how he adjusted from a hunter gatherer life to the whitefeller idea of ‘work’ and ‘pay’ in order to stay on the country.

The books are written by Pat Lowe, who is white, but I have included them here as the illustrations are so integral to the stories. Pat Lowe's introduction says she has sometimes altered Jimmy Pike's stories for ease of understanding. This is always the tricky part of having someone else write for you - but perhaps in this case it was a particularly tight collaboration as they are a married couple.

My two and three quarter year old daughter really liked Jimmy Pike’s illustrations. The bright colours (I think textas?) and straightforward pictures of horses and men and cattle are just right for her. The stories are, of course, far beyond her, being aimed at perhaps seven to ten year olds.

Warnings: Includes the death of natural causes of an old man, the accidental death of a child, a ritual spearing, near death by dehydration, and many mentions of past massacres and killings by whitefellas.
emma_in_dream: (monk)
2.14 Yih-Fen Chou, Mimi Says No, illustrations by Chih-Yuan Chen (2010)

My two and three quarter year old daughter adored this book. She has requested it again and again.

Of course, the subject matter is just right for her. It is about a toddler doggy who wants to do everything by herself while her long-suffering mummy doggy cleans up behind her.

The illustrations are cute and she has been able to describe what is happening (with prompting). It is definitely aimed at the do-it-myself toddler set.
emma_in_dream: (shakespeare)
This book reminds me of Joanna Russ’ dictum that the literature of oppressed people can read like propaganda. People are not interested in allusion, indirection or obscurity when what they have to say is burning.

Unfortunately, the propaganda can be quite dated. Or at least of its time. This play is very definitely reminiscent of the late 1980s - the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the burgeoning land rights movement, and the upsurge in the Aboriginal rights movement in light of the bicentennial celebrations.

It was not a surprise to me to see *Murras* was first performed in 1988 and workshopped in 1987 at the National Black Playwrights Conference. It serves, for me, more as a snapshot of a particular time than as a lasting work of art.
emma_in_dream: (Default)
Pearl has played several games in the last week.

She loved Snails Pace Race but was more interested in playing with the pieces than playing the game.

She very much likes Candy Land, mostly because of the hideous extruded plastic castle that the pieces comes out of. It is simple enough that we have played it successfully. It is a horrible game but I comfort myself with the thought that she is learning to take turns.

The best game is probably Things In My House which is basically a game of bingo with pictures of familiar objects on the cards. It is entirely a game of chance as you pick the cards up to see who scores them. She has won four of the five games we have played to completion which may explain why she enjoys it so much.

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