Category Archives: books

books, food+drink, history, topographical

Capital Cautions

Indigenous food was ever a trap for the unwary. I came across this during this evening’s reading …

A ‘sallet’ is any vegetable dish, raw or cooked – including a salad, which might come with primroses, daisies or dandelions.

‘Good King Henry’ is not a loyal toast but a sort of spinach with a peppery punch to it.

‘Humbles’ (say ‘umbles’) are entrails, usually of a deer, baked with herbs, spices and suet to make a ‘humble pie’. The contents will include not only the heart, liver and kidneys but also the lungs, guts and spleen.

Brawn is a sort of stiff, meat paste made from the head and fore-parts of a pig. It is considered a great treat, usually reserved for Christmas.

‘Gravey’ is a thick sauce of ground almonds, broth, sugar and ginger and is used to dress rabbit, chicken, eels or oysters.

‘Blancmange’ is remarkable for the absence of any strong spices in its preparation. The ingredients are boiled rice, capon flesh finely shredded with a pin, almond milk and sugar. The surface is usually decorated with blanched almonds. On fish days it may be made into a main dish by the addition of dried haddock, perch or lobster.

Beware of English mustard. It is incredibly hot and, if you are not used to it, should be tried with caution. Londoners use it especially to override the flavour of dried, salted fish.

From: Richard Tames, Shakespeare’s London on 5 Groats a Day

books

Full of Money

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I’ve just finished reading Full of Money by Bill James. Crime fiction is not the sort of thing I would normally read but I started dipping into it out of a sense of duty. Duty because Bill James uses Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time as a pivotal back-plot. But also because James is in real life AJ Tucker one of the earliest to write academically about the Dance sequence. I soon found “dipping in” wasn’t good enough and I had to start at the beginning.

I’m not really one for crime fiction. Why do I want to read about gangsters giving each other “acute lead poisoning” and being pursued by dumb cops? Is this different? Yes, it is. To start with there is no blazing gun battle or consequent “lead poisoning” (except off-stage at the end); not that we know that at the outset. It’s set in late 1990s London. And the only cop who plays a significant role is a senior female Detective Chief Superintendent, though by many measures she’d still rate as foolhardy if not dumb.

The main events of the story – murder and drug dealing on two inner London housing estates – all take place off-stage, the main one even before the book opens; they’re almost a backdrop rather than the raisons d’être of the story. So we have to piece everything together from set of cameos revolving around the DCS, a range of larger and smaller villains, and media types who play out these cameos through a variety of sub-stories. The twists and turns are interesting; the writing is good, and tight; the dialogue civilised and mischievous – all of which kept me turning the pages. Indeed the quotes on the jacket sum it all up rather well:

Engaging reading for mystery fans who like their crime stories gritty, realistic, and unsettling.

James knows how to pick the perfect turn of phrase and uses this gift to evoke dark hilarity, and bring a sense of menace and foreboding even in the midst of seemingly comic situations … [a] brilliant and thoroughly entertaining mix …

A gleeful send-up, by turns sinister and amusing, James is probably the most undervalued Brit writing crime fiction today.

beliefs, books, food+drink, quotes, science

Quotes of the Week

Well if last week was quiet, at least on the amusing & interesting quotes front, this week has seen a glut. So here’s a selection:

I will also continue my preliminary work on Project Be-less-fat. Because I WAS working on that project and that was all going well and good, and then in the last couple of months that all dropped off a bit because there was stress and bother and worry and comfort needing to be had. I do so wish the words “Yes, it’s been dreadful, we’ve been so stressed out the weight’s simply been falling off us” ever fell out of my mouth, but I, my scales, the gym manager and the owner of our local chinese restaurant know this is very very not true. And much as I know in my clever new-brain that exercising stops me feeling sad or anxious, the only thing that I want to do when sad or anxious is curl up under a duvet and sleep, so it’s hard to balance the two.
[Anna at http://littleredboat.co.uk/]

Don’t ever show something is important to you or you feel strongly about something otherwise you will be ridiculed.
Accept all abuse without retaliating.
If someone accuses you of breaking any rules or laws – don’t rise to it and defend yourself – you’ll only end up in the wrong.
Everything you think is insulting is actually humorous and you’re the stupid one for taking it seriously – no good expecting your own comments to be taken as a joke because they won’t be.
[Jilly at http://jillysheep.blogspot.com/ on how to deal with internet trolls]

Flora or Fauna?
Do you mean which would win in a fight, which is better company when I’m lonely, or what do I prefer to spread on my toast?
[Times Eureka science supplement, 08/2010, interview with Prof. Jim al-Khalili]

The formalism of post-selected teleportation closed time curves shows that quantum tunnelling can take place in the absence of a classical path from future to past.
[Times Eureka science supplement, 08/2010, in a snippet on time travel]

Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.
[Fran Lebowitz]

A well-organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves.
[Tony Judt]

Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.
[Edith Sitwell]

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.
[William Shakespeare]

Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.
[Leo Buscaglia]

books

Complete Audio Book of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time

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As most of my readers will know I am the Hon. Secretary (and a founding member) of the Anthony Powell Society. (What do you mean you didn’t know? Where have you been! … What? “Who’s Anthony Powell?” Tut, tut!)

As a part of my duties as a functionary of said Anthony Powell Society I bring all you book lovers, and lovers of audio books, some fantastic news! I knew this was on the way, but it has arrived much sooner than I expected.


Audible have today released a complete, unabridged, audio book of Dance, read by Simon Vance who has an excellent (English) voice and does a lot of audio books – so be sure he’s good! There’s an interview with Simon Vance here.

So far the recordings are available only via Audible’s download facility, which means you have to install their “file manager” on your PC to play what are essentially MP3 files, although they should be able to be ported to your iPod or similar (although I haven’t yet tested this).

The recordings are issued (and are purchased) in four trilogies, with each trilogy containing a separate MP3 file for each book. Beware these are large downloads (average 100MB per file, and there are 12 of them!) unless you have a fast broadband connection.

What is amazing is that the recordings are not expensive. Each trilogy is just $34.95 from www.audible.com or £27.59 from www.audible.co.uk, unless you already subscribe to Audible when they are hugely discounted. When you get to Audible just do a search on “Anthony Powell”. As Audible is an Amazon company expect to see these appear eventually on Amazon. I’m told there will be a CD version available later in the year.

This is an astonishing 80 hours of audio, so clearly I’ve not yet been able to listen to it all, but from the little snippets I have heard the recordings are most excellent.

Extra kudos to Audible as they have given me a free download of the complete four trilogies – Woo! – so I have no excuse not to listen to and review them. Expect a review here in a few weeks time. No even I can’t listen to 80 hours of audio that fast!

Now, where else can you get 80 hours of quality audio for under $140 or £110 ????

books, photography, quotes

Milestones Passed in the Dark

Last night I had a realisation, the way one does, that I must have written quite a few blog posts.  But how many?  Having awoken at stupid o’clock this morning I figured I’d use the time to try to work it out.  Could I even do it?  This weblog has been through at least three different incarnations and the old blogs are no longer online.

Wait!  I have backups.  Do I still have the old files?  No, not on my current PC: well I did trash a lot of old data when I migrated to this machine recently.  So let’s search the archive disks … and …  Lo! we do have the old files, saved in an archive of my PC three before last.  (How sad is that?!)  So I was able to do a count …

“I don’t believe it!”  If I go back to when I started blogging in January 2004 I reckon I’ve written 879 Zen Mischief weblog posts (this will be number 880).  And we can add to this another 134 for the Anthony Powell Society.  That’s a total of 1013 in 6½ years, or three a week.  Not prolific by many blogger’s standards, but prolific enough for me, especially when you add in almost 2000 photos (and that’s just the edited ones!) posted on Flickr since February 2006.

While not everything I write is wholly original (whose writing is?) I’ve covered everything from beer, by way of diversions into naturism, science and Bagpuss, to zen.  Hmmm … not bad!

books, natural history, thoughts

On Wild-Life and Adolescence

I’ve just finished reading My Natural History by Simon Barnes.  Barnes is the award-winning Chief Sports Writer for the Times as well as a great wildlife enthusiast and ornithologist who has travelled the world in search of both sport and wildlife.  He is erudite, as befits one who is so hugely well read, and a fan of Anthony Powell’s Dance, often working Powellian references into his sports writing.

My Natural History is written in Barnes’s light, forthright and eminently readable style.  In 23 short chapters it tells the stories of significant moments in Barnes’s fifty-odd years in all of which he finds a wildlife connexion – many indeed being centred around wildlife.  The tales vary from great achievements (mostly of the wildwood; always understated), through great loves to the occasional disturbing poignancy.  It is short, light, bedtime reading, and no worse for that for it could easily be sub-titled “How to be a Success without any Effort while Remaining Interesting and Human”.

As a example of his insight be writes this apropos his (no, anyone’s) adolescence: 

Does that [an idealistic, youthful vision] sound frightfully adolescent?  Well, so it bloody well should.  We were bloody adolescents.  Why do we sneer at adolescence?  Why, when we look back in maturity at the wild notions and the demented hopes and the illogical beliefs and the ephemeral soul-deep passions of our adolescence, do we feel it our duty to sneer?  Or apologise?  Why do we not instead believe that adolescence is not a cursed but a blessed period of life: a white-water ride down the river of time.  These rapids are not a place to spend a lifetime, but they are an essential transitional process if you wish to be an adult with any kind of life, any kind of passion, any kind of meaning.  True, the stuff we came up with was half-baked: but then neither it nor we had been in the oven for terribly long.  We were celebrating our newness, our rawness, celebrating the irrefragable fact that life was all before us: for us to change, for us to be changed irretrievably by.

books, current affairs, people, science, thoughts

Martin Gardner, RIP

Martin Gardner, scientific skeptic and maths puzzler has died at the age of 95.  Although maybe best known, at least in scientific circles, for his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American, for me he will be remembered for his The Annotated Alice which has gone through several editions and numerous reprints; it remains one of my all-time favourite books.

There are short obits here and here.

And you can find all his books available on Amazon.

books, current affairs, quotes

Interesting Times we Live in!

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Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world too saucy with the gods
Incenses them to send destruction.

[…]

… There is one within,
Besides the things that we have heard and seen,
Recounts most horrid sights seen by the watch.
A lioness hath whelped in the streets;
And graves have yawn’d, and yielded up their dead;
Fierce fiery warriors fight upon the clouds,
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol;
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.

[…]

A common slave – you know him well by sight –
Held up his left hand, which did flame and burn
Like twenty torches join’d, and yet his hand
Not sensible of fire remain’d unscorch’d.
Besides – I ha’ not since put up my sword –
Against the Capitol I met a lion,
Who glaz’d upon me and went surly by
Without annoying me. […]
And yesterday the bird of night did sit
Even at noonday upon the marketplace,
Howling and shrieking. When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say
“These are their reasons; they are natural”:
For I believe they are portentous things

[William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar]

amusements, books, science

Crocheting Robot Mice

I must share the following; it’s from the “Feedback” column of last week’s (17 April) issue of New Scientist.

We are pleased to see that science is well represented among the contenders for the Diagram prize for the oddest book title of the year. The top titles for 2009 were announced last month by UK magazine The Bookseller, which organises the prize.

Overall winner, with 42 per cent of the 4500 public votes cast, was Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes by Diana Taimina. This beat off competition from Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter by David Crompton, Governing Lethal Behaviour in Autonomous Robots by Ronald Arkin and The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease by Ellen Scherl and Maria Dubinski.

The less obviously scientific What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahua? by Tara Jensen-Meyer and Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich by James Yannes came second and third, respectively.

Horace Bent, custodian of the prize at The Bookseller, admitted that his personal favourite had been the spoons book, but went on to acknowledge that: “The public proclivity towards non-Euclidian needlework proved too great for the Third Reich to overcome.”

Philip Stone, the prize administrator, said he thought that “what won it for Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes is that, very simply, the title is completely bonkers.”

The Diagram prize has been running since 1978. Its inaugural winner also had a scientific theme: it was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.

The mind boggles at the mere thought of reading almost any of those titles!

books

Anthony Powell's Dance on the Weblog

In the last few days I’ve discovered a couple of recent, and very gratifying, weblog postings about Anthony Powell’s Dance – which readers will know is “one of my hobbies”.  Rather than post everything again here, I’ll refer those who are interested to my alert on the Anthony Powell News weblog.