Kategori: Aardwolf – one hit wonders

In which we feel pointlessness.

Still not sated with all things Irish (probably because the trip was looming large in my mind) I decided to pop down to Tanum and see if I could find a suitable book to bring to read while on the road, preferably one I could easily dump once I’d done with it. I picked up No News at Throat Lake by Lawrence Donegan, and it pretty much fulfilled the purpose.

Donegan escapes city life and goes to live in rural north of Ireland, and relates his trials with humour. However, as the whole thing ends with him chucking it and moving back to the big city, I was left with a feeling that the whole thing was somewhat pointless, and though I’m sure he’d learnt a thing or two about himself, he didn’t really relate it effectively enough for me to feel that the whole experience wasn’t just a complete waste of time.

Luckily, that meant I was not tempted to carry the book home with me – finished it while in Ennis, and left it there, with a bookcrossing label inside.

In which we swear off fast food forever.

Fast Food Nation is a book calculated to make you lose your appetite. On the other hand there is such a lot of talk of hamburgers and fries (and tacos and pizzas) that it’s very difficult not to obsess about food while reading it. A somewhat mixed experience, in that respect.

A somewhat mixed experience in many respects, actually. The book’s adequately well written, not in itself a very compelling read, but once I got into it I found it hard to put it down because I wanted to be done with it and go on to something more pleasant. It seems thoroughly researched, and I can’t really see any reason to doubt the main gist of Schlosser’s argument – that the fast food industry is bad for just about everything: The food’s unhealthy (whenever it isn’t lethal), the workers are unhappy and the effect on the economy as a whole is negative too.

Successful in it’s bid to make you averse to entering a fast food «restaurant» ever again, I still found the book patchy in its arguments. In fact, the whole «feel» was spoiled by just one jarring episode; Schlosser visits a slaughterhouse and gets a guided tour, starting at the «wrong end» in the packaging room and getting progressively closer to where «meat» is still «cattle». This description could have been very effective if he’d left the focus on the knocker, for example – stunning hundreds of cattle a day (up to 400 an hour), every day, must be a pretty terrible sort of job to do, even for the most determined carnivore. But this is where Schlosser slips into sentimentality, he exits the «plant» the way the cattle come in, and spends some time expounding the way the big brown eyes look at him, the way the ramp is designed so that the cattle do not see what’s coming. Now, I eat meat. I would prefer not to have to slaughter the animal myself prior to eating it, but I would if I had to. I have no illusions about the steak or bacon I buy at the supermarket, I know perfectly well that a short while ago this bit of meat was part of a (hopefully) healthy, (hopefully) happy, (definitely) living, breathing animal. Such is life. If it bothered me I would become a vegetarian.

The fact that the system is condusive to mistreatment of the animals, poor conditions for the workers, all sorts of odds and ends ending up in the food (bone, gristle, excrement, glass, what-have-you) and one small sample infected with e-coli 0157:H7 making millions of hamburgers lethal bothers me in the extreme, and the uncovering of all this makes the book interesting reading. The fact that the hamburger I eat was once part of a cow (or more likely hundreds of cows), bothers me not one iota, and the descent into sentimentalism mars what was otherwise a persuasive read.

But it will be a while before I eat at McDonald’s again.

I’m sorry to say that O’Connor went downhill pretty quickly and never quite recovered. There is one hysterically funny episode towards the very end of the book, when he visits Disney World with a group of fellow Irishmen. The guide says «There’s some really good rides here at the Magic Kingdom» and you can probably imagine how it goes from there. Other than that – two pages or so – the rest of the book made me snort occasionally, but didn’t live up to the promise of the first few pages, and so was rather disappointing. I didn’t really learn anything new about Ireland, either, which, in 248 pages is pretty good going. Learning something new about Ireland was obviously not my motivation for reading the book in the first place, but would have been some compensation for the lack of laughs. Oh well.

In which it is necessary to remind the reader of the importance of tissues.

I’ve just swallowed Tony Parsons’ Man and Boy whole. Not literally, obviously, or I’d be in the hospital right now, but in as few hours as is compatible with thorough reading. I read the first few pages (20? 30?) a week or maybe more back and got distracted, but this afternoon I picked it up again, and I couldn’t put it down. This was absolutely not what I was meant to do this afternoon. I was meant to do some work and maybe fix that bunad (17th of May looming larger on the horizon every day), but alas, alack.

So. Man and Boy is a compelling read. I suppose that’s established. It’s not the best book I’ve ever read, the ending, for example, has left me a bit deflated. This is not to say it’s bad, just that it could have been better. Still, I am near enough convinced that I will be reading every other Parsons book I can lay my hands on, so I suppose the publishers will be happy.

I am finishing Simpson’s biography of Douglas Adams at the moment (more of that when I have finished), but it’s a pretty cumbersome volume, and so I brought The Secret World of the Irish Male to read on the bus this morning. By page 5 or so I had already startled my fellow passengers by chortling uncontrollably and I was well and truly hooked. With sentiments such as these:

You never know what’s going to happen in real life either, but some things you can be relatively confident about. The truth will always hurt, half your socks will always disappear in the washing machine and John Bruton in full flight will always be strangely reminiscent of Kermit the Frog in The Muppet Show.

(…)

After a while the police arrived [to remove students from an office they were occupying]. They were quite angry. They said thay would «do whatever was necessary» to get us out. They repeated the phrase a few times. We scoffed, heroically. We’d be here, we said, until all of our demands had been met. They asked us what these demands were. There seemed to be a bit of confusion at this point. Personally, in addition to having Ireland immediately declared a 32 county socialist republic, I wanted to have a regular girlfriend and «Brideshead Revisited» repeated on a Monday night.

How could I be otherwise?

I’ve just glanced at the amazon reviews, by the way, and it’s a long time since I’ve seen a book that people either love or hate, not one «ok, but not very exciting» comment to be seen. It came highly recommended to me, Linda put it into my hands saying «Here. Borrow this. I almost died laughing.» so I will persist in looking forward to the rest of it…

In which we are intellectual, possibly.

I found Sylvia Beach’s autobiography (in the Faber&Faber 1st ed.) at a second-hand bookshop last Saturday, so that’s been my main read this week. In case you don’t know who SB is, I’ll enlighten you. She was an American who came over to Paris after WW1 and sort of never left. She started a bookshop called Shakespeare & Company, to provide the French with a place to get hold of contemporary writing in English and to provide a similar service to the English-speaking writers in more or less voluntary exile in Paris at the time – the so-called «Lost Generation», Joyce, Pund, Hemingway and so on. In the process she also managed to publish Joyce’s «unpublishable» Ulysses (it was banned in the States and the UK already, due to some excerpts that had been published in literary magazines), and as such should get a posthumous medal for outstanding services to humanity.

The book is very interesting in its first half, which is properly autobiographical. Unfortunately, by about half-way through it turns into something so much like pure name-dropping that it gets excessively repetitive. The bookshop was the meeting point for so many intellectuals in Paris at the time, and in order to not leave anyone out, SB gives 1-3 pages to each person, which leaves room for little more than a variation on «X is a very good writer/painter/composer and I very much enjoyed his/her work NN. He/she first came to the shop in 19?? and we went to lunch at such’n’such with Y, Z and Joyce.»

To counter all this intellectualism, I spent a couple of very childish hours rereading the five Ole Alexander books by Norwegian children’s book writer Anne-Cath. Vestly. I haven’t read them since I was a kid, in fact, I don’t suppose I’ve ever actually read them, I probably had them read to me. I also remember occasionally listening in when my parents read them to my brother, who would have been 4-ish, so I’d have been 11-ish. Anyway, they made an excellent movie from the first two books about two years ago, and I’ve been eying the books on the shelf occasinally and thinking I’d reread them. So I did. They’re still brilliant, though a mite too much directed at four- to five-year-olds even for me.