Consider this – you go to your local supermarket to buy, among other things, some orange juice. You find the right section where there are several brands to choose from, fresh in the chiller and long-life too – perhaps a hundred-litre packets all told. That’s just your local shop, imagine how many shops there are in your town or city each with a hundred litres of orange juice on sale at any particular time – and remember, this stock is turning over all the time – being bought and then replaced with stock from the store room. Multiply by the number of cities in your country and then by the number of orange juice-drinking countries in the world and you have imagined an ocean of orange juice! Where does it all come from – especially considering it takes eight oranges to make a litre of juice? Are there enough orange trees in the world to account for all this juice?
Of course, if you believe in Solipsism – then you will think that the world only exists because you imagine it into being and of course, you want to have plenty of orange juice wherever you go, so you imagine it into being present in all those thousands of shops worldwide. I am more of a realist and so I know that there must be enough orange trees to provide the juice – I just have no idea where!
Most people have no idea whereall that orange juice comes from either and what about dried mint in all those expensive little jars – you may have holidayed in some sunny spot and seen oranges growing, but when did you ever see a mint farm? These things are Commodities – Soft Commodities in fact – which means they are commodities which are grown as opposed to Hard Commodities like metals which are mined. So this year, I am going to explore the world of Commodities!
Of course, to some people, Commodities as a term, means a form of investment and apparently, if you belong to the stocks and share-owning class, you should, apparently, diversify your share portfolio with commodities for greater stability – though this is well above my pay grade so don’t be expecting any tips! But the essential difference between gambling on stocks and shares and gambling on commodities is that they are subject to different forces of fluctuation – a company might invent a new product and its share value rocket or it might have a product superseded by a rival and plummet. Commodities also go up and down – soft commodities are susceptible to the weather, even shellac – the product of the Lac Fly has good and bad years whilst hard commodities are more predictable.
In case you think that commodities sound rather dry, I am going to include a poem – also with an A to Z progression about each commodity as the last nine months, I have taken to writing poetry in a big way – so a double whammy! A few commodities are missing in the Abercadarian and I will double up on one of the letters and poetry forms.
A Commodity Trader and a Poet contemplating commodities in their own ways…
Whether you come for the poems or the commodities, trust me, there will be amazing facts about gold, amber, pork bellies and yes shellac…
This is my 5th A -Z Challenge and you can find the previous years via the Menu at the top of the page – starting in the fateful year of Covid 2020… 2020 – personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis 2021 – I was trying to complete a sci-fi novel and it advanced me greatly and I finished it shortly afterwards 2022 – I wrote about foods which can be used as an ingredient 2023 – I wrote about phrases we know the meaning of but often, not the origin of – and a s a bonus Cant languages
Over at dVerse Poets PubLaura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft is our host and has asked us to write Ghazal using at least one of the lines by Pablo Neruda from his book of poetry – “The Book of Questions” in which he poses 320 questions and answers in couplet form, and she has asked us to use at least one of the six question lines she has selected. I found all six questions stimulating and linked them in this poem.
Why was I not born mysterious? – Sorrowful Then nations would smite down my enemy furious – angry
Why did I grow up without companions – lonely compadres and friends in this world so curious? – and unloved
And do unshed tears wait in little lakes – weeping lurking to ambush we unwary and drown us? – vulnerable
And Why does Spring once again offer its green clothes – landless springing up in the rubble of our homes mocking us? – homeless
How long do others speak if we have already spoken – quashed one hundred years, pleading, crying and dying in the dust? – and denied
Even hope itself may eventually die – we should be hopeless Isn’t it better never than too late for us? – flattened too.
How long do others speak if we have already spoken? – We still As long as it takes for you to hear us – cry out
And Why does Spring once again offer its green clothes? – bear children Because life must triumph, improbable, delirious – all we can
And do unshed tears wait in little lakes? – don’t hold back Yes but cry them, use them, water the dust – start again
Why did I grow up without companions? – seek new friends Because the world heard only another victim’s fuss – in a world of oppressed
Why was I not born mysterious? – we find other victims in common See the wonderful in the ordinary which is us – our voices raised together
There are no especially deserving winners – give us all our due no one deserves our land over us – “Equality now!”
Equal status and our own statehood – “Never Again!” with nobody ruling over us – “Give us Our Due!”
Borrowing these six Neruda questions – “Now!” the poet, Andrew, seeks to give voice to us…
Dublin to Manchester Once on a plane I found a pair of sunglasses a polarising pair with circular lenses of Matrix cool left by the last occupant missed between flights by the cabin clean up crew I have those glasses still more than twenty years later I’m a keeper.
Teneriffe to Gatwick Once on a plane I had the last moments with my first great love then she asked me to hang back at the checkout because her husband was meeting her and thought she was holidaying alone.
Stanstead to Dublin Once on a plane I contemplated flying to meet a woman I had known only for one chaste night of intimations who then sent me a ticket for a weekend in County Leitrim
Manchester to Heraklion Once on a plane fleeing the pandemic one step ahead of lockdown I looked down on the Alps a wilderness of mountains as far as the eye could see from thirty-five thousand feet and saw not a trace of human life, no villages no roads, no smoke as if already we never existed
A Flight to Anywhere More than once on a plane I wonder about the lives of Air Hostesses or Hosts or Stewards as they are now called whether they joined to see the world and whether they did whether it’s true about the crew parties the god-like officers marriage material or just better advantaged the ordinariness of Ryanair crew the haughty select of Air Aegean each one as from the pages of a 50’s fashion magazine do the ordinary despise the haughty meeting en passant in some airport corridor or do they share a common bond of brother and sisterhood is it just another flight from one take off to another landing once on a plane…
Six Degrees of Separation is an excuse to peruse six favourite books linked to an initial offering by our host KateW and eventually link them back to the beginning. Kate W offers us big themes in her choices and since I have been participating, these have included – being adrift in Time, Friendship, Memory, and Romance. This month we have the autobiographical exposé of the world of chefs, restaurants and bad boys generally – Anthony Bourdin’s Kitchen Confidential…
Full disclosure – I once, briefly but gloriously, ran my own restaurant so this month’s 6 Degrees starter book was one I could really get my teeth into! (There will be lots of food metaphors!) Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” is a Chef’s story from a writer who self evidently writes, but counts himself first, foremost, and still practising – as a Chef. As he puts it – “If I need a favour at four o’clock in the morning, whether it’s a quick loan, a shoulder to cry on, a sleeping pill, bail money, or just someone to pick me up in a car in a bad neighbourhood in the driving rain, I’m definitely not calling up a fellow writer. I’m calling my sous-chef, or my saucier, someone I have worked with over the last twenty-plus years…” He writes about how a fairly obnoxious youth found his way into a profession where eccentricity, excess and general misdemeaning is mixed with skill, sweat and long hours in kitchens that come in many varieties, much like the seven circles of hell. He has a chapter in which he asks what possesses a man in mid-life to want to open a restaurant and whilst I was not quite as ignorant, inexperienced and deluded as the dentist Bourdin gives as an example, there were things I could identify with, although I enjoyed every minute of it and I now know, as Bourdin puts it “what it feels like to attain a childhood dream of running one’s own pirate crew…”. Anthony Bourdin writes clearly and entertainingly and for once I would agree with the blurb on the cover which states “More gripping than a Stephen King novel”
So in this month’s 6 Degrees, I am linking the books that made me a cook, a foodie and eventually, however briefly, a chef… When I left home to go to university, my parents bought me a Sabatier, high carbon-steel, flexible boning knife- something which Bourdin talks about in his chapter on essential equipment. They also bought me two paperback cookery books “The Pauper’s Cookbook” by Jocasta Innes, and “Cooking in a Bedsit” by the journalist Katherine Whitehorn.
Not one of my six but I had to sneak it in…
I should say, that heretofore, my mother had always refused to teach me to cook – unlike my sisters, who “would one day be married and therefore need to cook for their husbands” from which you may deduce that I grew up in the pre-liberation 1970’s – or at least Women’s Lib had not then reached our house! Not that I hadn’t kept my eyes and ears open and picked up some culinary skills just from watching my mother – and not just cooking meals, but bottling fruit, freezing vegetables and making jam. Nevertheless – the two books of recipes (or for any Americans – receipts) were intended to fill the gap in my education and fit the kind of cooking which my parents imagined would be the limit of what my student lifestyle would require. Incidentally, of myself and my two sisters, I was the only one who cooked professionally… What I chiefly remember about “Cooking in a Bedsit”, was not the recipes themselves which were sensible culinary cheats for the impecunious, but the structure of the book whose first section was entitled “Cooking on One Ring” followed by two rings and lastly, for those lucky enough to have access to one – cooking on a stove. There were also, entertainingly, short pieces on “For him Asking Her Round to Eat” and vice versa – the latter including the sage advice to make sure and remove all your drying knickers from the radiators before he gets there… This gave a hint as to the fact that food is not merely fuel, but a part of life and culture and this is also strongly themed in Kitchen Confidential. Jocasta Innes would return in a completely different field, later in my life, with her book Paint Magic which diverted me slightly from my career as a Signwriter to specialist paint finishes such as wood graining and marbling. And as for the Sabatier, well I have used it almost every day of my life since, including at least four food businesses and it has been worn down accordingly…
The thing is, I was slightly insulted by my parent’s offerings, implying that my culinary horizons would rise no higher than pauperdom and that once I had left bedsitter land, I would find a nice wife to do the cooking for me! So I set about building my now extensive collection of cookery and food books (three shelves in the bookcase now) by adding first Elizabeth David’s seminal “Mediterranean Food” closely followed by “The Joy of Chinese Cooking” by Doreen Yen Hung Feng and for international variety – the Penguin book of “Indian Cookery” by Dharamjit Singh. I did practise recipes from all these books, but I soon realised that on my cookery journey, reading recipe books and imbibing the essence of their method, ingredients and presentation, is more important than becoming an Indian, Chinese or Mediterranean cook per se – I was an early adopter of Fusion!
The beautiful Elizabeth David…
Elizabeth David was credited with revitalising British cuisine after the Second World War by both drawing attention to foreign food traditions but also, then researching and drawing out the best of British food traditions, subjects which had been, respectively, ignored and forgotten. She was also, a bit of a gal – as Wikipedia informs us “Born to an upper-class family, David rebelled against social norms of the day. In the 1930s she studied art in Paris, became an actress, and ran off with a married man with whom she sailed in a small boat to Italy, where their boat was confiscated.” I can only urge you to delve into Elizabeth David, both her books and her life story. Below is an example of her recipe for Tapenade and you will see that this is grownup recipe writing – she gives quantities for the main ingredients – capers and anchovies, but there is no spoon-feeding by detailing everything precisely – if you are a cook, you will understand and use your judgement. Also on these pages, is the recipe for Skordaliá which has remained my go-to dish when catering for mixed vegetarian and carnivores where I want to demonstrate that vegetarian food is far tastier and more interesting than a piece of meat and two veg…
“The Joy of Chinese Cooking” taught me how to think about putting dishes together in a considered way – the uninitiated way many groups at a Chinese restaurant assemble their order by each picking a favourite dish, whilst familiar to Chinese chefs and waiters the world over, must nevertheless fill them with horror every time. A Chinese meal should contain some whole elements such as a fish perhaps, some chopped and stir-fried and some dishes which are “assembled” – meaning elements cooked by different methods and then brought together in one dish. There should be a balance in red and white meat, fish and vegetable dishes – the whole meal being a balanced and considered effort. This book, first published I think, in 1950 (I am writing away from home so I can’t check my copy) has taught many people to cook Chinese home-style food and whilst some might find the recipes a little heavy by today’s standards and health consciousness, that is perhaps the nature of home cooking everywhere… Below is an example of the cultural differences expounded in the book.
If Elizabeth David paints evocative word pictures of the dishes she encountered on her travels, Doreen Yen Hung Feng gives us a description of a whole food culture, sometimes anecdotally, as above, but also with some simple line drawings. Compared to today’s full-page colour photographs which present the recipes in impossible-to-equal perfection (no doubt with the aid of a food stylist and expert food photographer) Doreen’s illustrations are sparse, but her descriptions more than compensate and you will never be left feeling a failure when comparing your attempt with that in the photograph. The Penguin book of “Indian Cookery” is much the same – no pictures but a solid recipe book which has lasted through many editions as you would expect from Penguin the publisher
With “Indian Cookery” by Dharamjit Singh, I entered the pungent world of spices with their complex history and usage. Despite going to university in Birmingham (the city that gave us the diaspora invented Balti – a dish as unknown in India as Chop suey is unknown in China), I did not really go out for Indian meals until I lived in London, post-university and now I live and work in Bradford – Curry Capital of England! However, I did begin to dip my wooden spoon into yet another food culture and my ingredient shelf blossomed with yet more exotic substances. This is a source of friction between my partner and myself, as she is over-faced by the multiplicity of items she has no idea about in our kitchen and it is also a problem because unless you constantly use up your spices, they will stale.
My love affair with ingredients was developed by my next book choice – Tom Stobart’s “Herbs, Spices and Flavourings” which graced my bedside table for many years after university and many’s the time I read a few items of this splendid encyclopaedia of flavour before going to sleep. What I admired was that the author did not merely list the spices and herbs themselves, but delved into the nature of taste itself, the basic areas of taste detected by the tongue before the high notes which are detected in the nose (which is why food tastes of nothing much when our nose is blocked by a cold).
Tom Stobart also includes flavoursome items such as Marmite – that British food item which people famously “love or hate” – and in doing so, he legitimises the use of anything which has flavour for use as an ingredient which for a fusion foodie, encouraged cross-fertilisation of flavours from the different food cultures represented on my compendious ingredient shelf… In the extract above, you can see that below Marmite, Mastic the original chewing gum, is given its botanical name as well as the names by which it is known in various languages – what more could you ask for from an encyclopaedia?
I was torn about my final choice of book because one of the weightiest tomes on my culinary bookshelves is also an encyclopaedia of enormous import which my partner bought for me one Christmas “McGee on Food and Cooking”. It is the bible of the scientific approach to cookery and is credited with inspiring so-called “molecular” chefs such as Heston Blumenthal. For me though, it is simply the go-to book when you need to understand why something works the way it does in cooking, such as how “No Knead” bread works when everyone knows that kneading bread is what develops the gluten that traps bubbles of carbon dioxide (given off by the yeast) and causes bread to rise. Cookery may be an Art or as the Greeks would have it, a Craft but understanding the Science does not destroy the Art anymore than understanding the science of why a sunset is red should take away our appreciation of the beauty of a sunset – quite the opposite! However, if this has not counted as sneaking in a seventh book, I eventually chose Nigel Slater’s “Toast” as my sixth link since it better closes the circle back to “Kitchen Confidential”.
Nigel Slater recounts in a manner so entertaining that the book was dramatized for TV and the stage, how he became a chef – hence the link back to Anthony Bourdin. His mother was (now) famously, a terrible cook – so terrible that her long-suffering husband and only son, had, often, to ditch her burnt offerings in the bin and resort to the titular toast… After his mother died early, Nigel’s father remarried his cleaning lady, played, fruitily, in the TV drama by Helena Bonham-Carter who was at school in a class between my two sisters – how’s that for degrees of separation! The stepmother was a most excellent cook – in fact, that was part of the attraction for Nigel’s father and it meant that in Nigel’s perception, he found himself in a battle to win his father’s love and attention. The site of the battle was the kitchen as Nigel forced his way into domestic science (cookery) classes which in those days were usually reserved for girls and battle commenced – eventually equipping Nigel Slater to become not only a chef, but a celebrity chef, and like Anthony Bourdin, a chef who writes – both recipe books and his autobiography… So there you have my six (and a bit) choices all of which made me the reasonable cook/ sometime chef/ failed restauranteur I am today. My restaurant was not the first restaurant in which I cooked (I will not say Chef-ed) – that would be The Good Food Shop formerly of Lambs Conduit Street, London, where I blagged my way into cooking at weekends, became a manager/cook and learned a great deal about cooking, business and life – so I was not completely inexperienced when many years later, I opened my own restaurant “Frewin’s” (my middle name). Why did it fail? The obvious answer – not enough customers – was it the food, or the concept ( Café in the daytime, Bistro at night) – I like to think not. That summer it rained non-stop, so no walkers, no tourists and the people of the village went to the big newly revamped gastro pub (with café and massive umbrellas outside) and with copious car parking (of which I had none) and these things cannot always be seen in advance and so I lost my inheritance but as I said before, I enjoyed every moment of it. I hope you can also see why I enjoyed “Kitchen Confidential” so much…
Writing is more popular than ever – on computers, on phones and still some of us do at least some of our writing on paper! Emails and letters, books, blogs, op-eds, texts and the opinions formerly known as Tweets, replies, comments and critiques – many are the forms of the things we write.
I remember when I got my first PC back in 1999 when the internet was young, how my first impression was of wonder and joy at the democracy of it all – thousands of people all over the world were posting stuff about their passions populating the web with information in a thousand silos. Businesses had not yet learned the importance of having a website or how to do that in a really useful and appealing way – but never fear – an army of people was developing to create and fill jobs that had not existed before – coders, web designers, SEO experts, and writing on the web was the same. Writing groups – formerly exclusively in-person, moved online, breaking the limitations of time and geography – I live in Yorkshire, England, but I belong to a writing group on the East Coast of America, five hours difference and an ocean apart and as for cultural differences – well that is an added spice… The army that services writers now includes editors, writing coaches, publishing gurus, writing groups, critique groups and even silent writing groups who write in collective silence in Zoom meetings for the shared and mutual support of conducting an otherwise solitary activity – together!
You may recognise the title of this piece as a reference to the TV series “What We Do in the Shadows” based on a New Zealand film – a mocumentary, comedy-horror drama about vampires living in Staten Island and attempting to match the nature of their lives to the lifestyle of modern America. This seems an apt metaphor for the life of a writer. Recently I have been reading “On Writers and Writing” by Margaret Atwood and one of the early chapters riffs on the dualistic idea of “the writer who writes and the writer who lives”. The difference between the writer in the act or process of writing, and the person who lives, eats, breathes and is seen about town. Atwood then goes on to consider the need to actually make a living if one wants to be a full-time writer, for although the truism is that “A writer is someone who writes!”, many of us are therefore writers but few make a living by writing. Many of us do other jobs – lead other lives and writing is only a part of that life – how big a part depends on our circumstances and our choices, how much time we are prepared to “sacrifice” to the words…
If you aspire to write a book, fiction or non-fiction, then it can take years as a part-timer to pass through the process of, research, writing a first draft, finding critique readers or partners, re-writing second or third drafts and all that before you decide on whatever monumentally difficult path you will select to attempt to get your book published. For a vampire, this might be the equivalent of feasting once in a blue moon, assuming you can even find a suitable victim when the appetite is upon you. Meantime, many people select to write more bite-sized portions – poems or blog posts. Substack is one of the latest forums for trying to make these smaller bites feed the writer sustainably. Launched with great fanfare about how it will make writers, if not rich, then at least not starving, and accompanied by helpful articles aplenty on how to drive readers to your site and convert them to Subscribers – Substack is really just a monetised blog with a subscription rather than an advertising models. And why not – how annoying is it when reading a poem on someone’s blog, to have the flow of poesy interrupted by an ad. for “Unsold Holiday Packages Selling Cheap”! And how much do those bloggers who have succumbed to the temptation in fact make from such monetisation – not much I am guessing?
But to return to the writer – whatever he or she might be writing – what drives them if it is not the elusive pot of gold at the ever-shifting rainbow’s end? Is it as George Mallory, on being asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, replied “Because it is there!” and, in the event, it was to be the death of him… However, climbing Everest and succeeding as a writer, two things that may feel the same, is not just about attaining the summit, it surely has to be about the travelling hopefully, the moment-by-moment achievement of each stage, step by step, word by word. Summiting might be the dream, but there are rewards along the way and one of those, for all writers other than book authors, one of the rewards is feedback – the comment! Indeed, even aspiring writers of books nowadays reveal their journeys online, one chapter at a time, and like Dickens, who admittedly was getting paid to publish his books in serial form, the feedback obtained from fans, friends and followers of one’s blog, can help to shape and steer the course of one’s writing, or for the strictly amateur, merely be the source of gratification that means one is not writing alone and unheard in the shadows but enjoyed and appreciated – hopefully…
The art of getting more comments does not depend solely on the quality of a person’s writing but on how much work they spend publicising it, in the main by visiting other people’s writing and leaving comments with links back to their own sites and this fosters a sense of community in the wilderness that can be the World Wide Web. On the downside, reading lots of other people’s work can be disheartening as well as inspirational, informative and misleading – you need to have a strong sense of self and direction to find and tune your own voice and little wonder that there is a site called The Insecure Writers Support Group! Sometimes, a blog site itself can be small enough to grow a fellowship of friends – the first site I blogged on with a site called “Ripple”, was called Mo’time – a testbed for the ideas of a man who ran a larger Italian blog site and although thousands were signed up, as people do, like gym memberships, the number who followed through and kept up their writing, was much smaller and so a core of connected writers developed online friendship and appreciation in the comments section. Eventually, tragically, Mo’time, and its parent blog, were sold, and the new owners soon terminated the affair. Some of us tried to create and stay connected with new homes but the magic was gone although I still see some of the Mo’timers on Facebook to this day.
Image by Midjourney from a prompt by Andrew Wilson
A few years ago, just as the pandemic was getting into its stride, I discovered, on April 1st, the A to Z Challenge in which bloggers post 26 alphabetically named post on whatever subject they care to choose for the month of April. Not having had time to prepare anything in advance, as old hands do, I wrote about aspects of the unfolding Covid crisis and I have now completed the challenge four times on my latest blog incarnation How Would You Know – that is if you disagree with my characterisation of Substack as a Blog… I revived a name that I had briefly tried on Blogger – Of Cabbages and Kings – a line from the Walrus and the Carpenter in Lewis Carrol’s Alice and Wonderland “The time has come” the Walrus said “ to talk of many things – Of cabbages and Kings…” I have to admit, that so far, I have not put the work in to draw readers to this new venture and I am still posting in the parallel world of WordPress and How Would You Know in part because I have hit a certain wall – to borrow a running metaphor. What I like about the A to Z Challenge, is the enormous breadth of writers and subject matter that coalesces each year and to jump into that pool is like an annual swim and sauna from which I emerge refreshed, invigorated and inspired.
If you are writing a novel, you can sit in your garret writing away, the time for reaching out to readers, way off on the horizon, but once you sit down at the Table of Feedback in the Dining Room of Blogs, then your daily output is reduced by the amount of time you spend promoting your posts by reading and commenting on others, just as the published author’s hours are eaten into by promotional tours and there comes a point, which I feel I have reached, where you must pick and choose carefully, which challenges you are going to respond to or else fall into a bubbling vat of writing for comments and commenting for followers and feedback at the cost of your writing enough of your own, of writing spontaneously, prompt-less and fancy-free…
If a person writes something and does not put it out into the world – does that mean that it has no meaning? That it wasn’t worth doing? Is it only when posthumously discovered that it suddenly acquires worth and meaning? Because at the end of the day, a writer must ask themselves “Why do I write?” is it for art’s sake, for the glory of publishing and acclaim and the money that may follow? Be it as humble as a blog post or as grand as a novel, is it to entertain, inform, to fight injustice, to philosophize through non-fiction or fiction – but I say that if you feel the compulsion to write, if you enjoy doing it, you are on the right track wherever it leads…
So if you are reading this on WordPress, you may visit me at Substack here, and if you are on Substack then How Would You Know is here and you can see the edifice I have constructed over the last years – a mind palace with many rooms if you will, and if you like what you find, write a comment in either place and I promise I will respond to it…
Six Degrees of Separation is an excuse to peruse six favourite books linked to an initial offering by our host KateW and eventually link them back to the beginning. Kate W offers us big themes in her choices and since I have been participating, these have included – being adrift in Time, Friendship, Memory, and Romance. This month we have the biographical Wifedom and the theme for me will be that of wives albeit mainly fictional examples – also, three of the books have been adapted for screen…
I have not read Wifedom (as is usually the case with Kate W’s suggestions) but I would like to after reading what Amazon has to say about the book. – At the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue.
“I’ve always loved Orwell,” Funder writes, “his self-deprecating humour, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on.” So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation.
Eileen O’Shaughnessy married Orwell in 1936. O’Shaughnessy was a writer herself, and her literary brilliance not only shaped Orwell’s work, but her practical common sense saved his life. But why and how, Funder wondered, was she written out of their story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder re-creates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War in London. As she peeks behind the curtain of Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer—and what it is to be a wife.
A breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the twentieth century, Wifedom speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past. Genre-bending and utterly original, it is an ode to the unsung work of women everywhere.
The Aubrey–Maturin series of novels by Patrick O’Brian have been compared to the works of Jane Austen – exhaustively researched plots drawn from the annals of the British Royal Navy and transplanted into Patrick O’Brian’s fictional Master and Commander series, these books are as equally character-driven as they are portrayals of the events of life in the navy during the years of the Napoleonic wars and I urge anyone who fears such books to be too technical or militaristic, to try them. No better example – beyond the two main protagonists Aubrey and Maturin, than the portrait of the eventual wife of Captain Aubrey – Sophie. The life of any sailor’s wife would be hard and full of fear of her husband never returning, long periods of absence, varying financial fortune and many other forms of uncertainty, but in Sophie we have a wife of heroic qualities to match the vicissitudes heaped upon her – a wife who takes charge of Aubrey’s home life every bit as much as he is captain of his ship at sea! The rather battered cover below depicts Sophie’s first appearance in the series of books alongside her future husband…
Another wife heaped with vicissitudes along with her husband, is Raynor Winn in her autobiographical account of how she and her husband, having lost their house and business due to a treacherous friend and having simultaneous with their homelessness, receive a diagnosis of her husband’s terminal illness. They decide that with nowhere else to go and nothing to be done, they will spend the summer walking the coastal path from Somerset to Dorset around Devon and Cornwall. No spoilers but their endurance trial brings unexpected rewards and Raynors’s support of her husband is exemplary… Below is the very beautiful cover designed by Angela Harding.
If the three wives portrayed so far have been long-suffering, among other things, Cathy in East of Eden, by John Steinbeck, is the one dishing out the suffering, beginning by running away after burning her parents to death – she is a character of pure evil – described as having a “malformed soul”. Steinbeck regarded East of Eden as his magnum opus even though other books are more famous, Cannery Row (previously covered by me), The Grapes of Wrath and that much studied in school – Of Mice and Men. Despite being made into an iconic film featuring James Dean, I venture to suggest that not so many people have read the epic family saga East of Eden. Indeed the film only deals with part of the story and I wonder if Steinbeck would be disappointed that his magnum opus is not the one that time has accorded that accolade to.
The title East of Eden comes from the fourth chapter of Genesis, verses one through sixteen, which recounts the story of Cain and Abel and the whole book – accused by some of being “moralistic” certainly deals with big themes – good and evil, brotherly rivalry, love and depravity and as always with Steinbeck we are treated to a portrait of the life and times in the Salinas Valley, California. There is a saying about writing that “big themes are dead weights” and whilst this is undoubtedly a weighty novel, it is still a great read from a master, even if not his master work… The cover below makes as sensational a view as it can of the central drama of two brothers torn apart by the inexplicably evil Cathy.
Another painful marriage is depicted in On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan – an author not renowned for being the most cheerful in his writings, the unfolding of this depiction of a virginal couple on honeymoon in an as yet sexually unliberated 1962, is excruciating in the extreme and yet, such is the quality of the writing – you cannot look away… on Chesil Beach has been turned into a film.
Many of the writers I have covered in my 6 Degrees are writers I read long ago but Nicola Griffiths is a new favourite whose canon I am working through in order, from Ammonite (Lesbian science fiction) to her current amazing historical novels featuring Hild, a powerful woman from Britain’s pre-medieval history. Between these wildly divergent books linked only by their themes of strong women and excellent writing, comes the Aud Torvingen series of which Stay is the second book. Aud is not exactly your typical P.I. as she is a woman of independent wealth but in each of the three books she conducts investigations, willingly or unwillingly and (spoiler alert) – she also falls in love in book one and in book two has to deal with the loss and the grief over her lover. Although Aud does not find the happiness of marriage until book three, Stay is a portrait of a wife thwarted and her response by throwing herself into “a series of physical, moral, and emotional challenges that she has been dodging for weeks, months, and years – none of her choices are easy.” What more can we ask from a book…
My last link, slightly tenuously back to Wifedom, is The Fourth Hand by John Irving. It is a tale of a wife who is so dedicated to her husband that – well here is what the Penguin blurb says:- While reporting a story from India, a New York television journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion; millions of TV viewers witness the accident. In Boston, a renowned hand surgeon awaits the opportunity to perform the nation’s first hand transplant. A married woman in Wisconsin wants to give the one-handed reporter her husband’s left hand, that is, after her husband dies. But the husband is alive, relatively young, and healthy… The widow supplies permission for the transplant but then demands visitation rights with the hand – a typical thought experiment of a plot from the masterful John Irving. This is the first of John Irving’s books that I have included in 6 Degeees but once discovered, I devoured his early books such as The World According to Garp and several of his books have been turned into films. I recommend some of his later books too, such as Till I Find You about tattoos and tattoo artists. Irving has repeated elements that crop up in many of his books – bears, hotels, wrestling but however far-fetched some of the things Irving writes about may seem to be, they make you think about life in a clever and enjoyable way – no wonder he occupies half a bookshelf of mine! The link back to Wifedom – the extraordinary connection between and support/dedication of a wife…
I try to ration myself for prompts, perturbed by the idea that I will be swallowed in an endless cycle of call and response, but one that I will not miss each month, is 6 Degrees of Separation. Starting from a given title, each reader of books – no matter when they read them, summons six links to form a chain that finally links from and back to the beginning book.
I confess I do not make enough time for reading books, words bound between covers on paper as opposed to screens, though I always have one novel and at least one non-fiction on the go – however slow. I confess that the Poets Pub is often the guilty party in keeping me from the books though I do not blame or object because beautiful, moving or informative as books are, the pleasure of company and connection are better still.
I’m afraid my To Be Read list rarely coincides with the 6 Degrees prompt and only sometimes am I moved to purchase the recommendation, but recently I fell hook line and sinker for Time Shelter. The book is a metaphorical creation of memory clinics where sufferers from certain kinds of memory loss may steep themselves – full-immersion – in a room recreating an era from their past and get the backroads to their lost memories cleared of debris. A few weeks or months in which a loved one comes to life again is worth so much to relatives grieving the loss of someone who is still alive…
Dear Readers – I bought the book! I have no regrets and I recommend it even to poets – no! especially to poets so they may dive into a novel length metaphorical fiction that explores memory and loss, health and sickness and if that sounds depressing, I assure you that Time Shelter, by Georgi Gospodinov is most entertainingly told – and now your turn to confess – when is the last time you read a fiction by a Bulgarian?
What is a spy if not a cursed liar Who for love puts hand in fiercest fire But not the love given to a sweet woman The love of country is inhuman.
We watched a French, great tragedy conclude Where agents of The Bureau were deluded Believing they could steer their star-crossed fate Clinging to the happy ending till too late.
For once your life is built on falsehood complex The web you weave the fates will always vex And you must pay for secrets stolen, finally No matter how handlers and bosses rally
The cause of saving hapless agents’ lives Is hard on lovers, colleagues, friends and wives All pawns in what is known as the Great Game The spy is destined for a life without fame
And if their life of infamy be revealed Be sure the fates no happiness will deal.
This poem was written in response to a challenge from Posted by Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in Poetry Forms on dVerse – The Poet’s Pub, to write a Heroic Sonnet in iambic pentameter – you can read about it here.
My partner and I have been binge-watching a five-series drama made by the French company Canal called The Bureau. Since the French are famed for their interest in love, this drama, whilst being a cracking, edge-of-your-seat tale of the life of spies, also examines the philosophical implications for the loves of those who make their living by living a lie – can they find happiness? Since the poem might be spoiler enough, I will say no more…
This is the first time I have attempted a Sonnet in Iambic Pentameter – something I vaguely remember being taught in school but had to resort to Wikpedia for the finer points, including all the exceptions to the rules which make lines memorable – I hope I have done it justice. I guess that we many of us have this poetry form flowing through our veins with so many great poets and playwrights having embraced the form.
During the month of April this year, whilst participating in the A to Z Challenge, I was privileged to encounter the work of Misky whose blog It’s Still Life, showcases two distinct things, poetry written by Misky and illustrated using Generative Artwork created by Misky using the Midjourney AI app. So amazing were these images to someone who is in part, a visual artist, that it inspired me to make an exploration of Generative AI for myself. At the same time, AI has been hitting the headlines big time and mainly for its use in text generation and the impact it might have on jobs and since writing is another thing that I do in my day job, I was also intrigued to see whether AI might be of any use in a company such as I work for. (I am the gradually retiring General Manager of a food manufacturing company). It has been a fascinating voyage of discovery and to cap it all, lying awake at 4 o’clock this morning, I found myself listening to “The Conversation” on the BBC World Service and what should be the topic, but AI with special reference to the involvement of women. So – mind on fire, I am going to draw this series together, although I freely acknowledge I have but dipped my toe in the waters of AI and I may return to the topic in the future…
To recap the three articles I have already written:- In the first one, I tried out ChatGPT to see what it research and write about one of the topics from my A to Z and immediately encountered the phenomena of AI hallucination – the ability, in fact tendency of AI to make things up. I also “showcased” my first attempts at visual collaboration with the Midjourney bot . In the second report, I compared ChatGPT to Writesonic which produces more lengthy articles – testing them against a typical (for me) work assignment. In the third report, I looked at the most controversial assertion about AI – that AI might in the future, eliminate human beings – Terminator-style and referenced articles that thoroughly refute the need to worry about that particular outcome – go re-assure yourselves! However, there are many things about our present and future use of AI that do bear looking at and these were raised in the episode of “The Conversation” that woke me up this morning. The programme, presented by a woman, featured two women working in the field of AI, one a philosopher and one an expert in data analysis and as well as the general concerns that need addressing about AI, they highlighted the general lack of representation of women in the field of AI – only one CEO, qualifying women failing to get jobs in the industry and so on. They did however point out that one of the changes to AI itself in recent times, has been the accessibility of use – no longer do you need to have a degree in computer programming – you could make your first interaction with ChatGPT in the same time it would take you to query something on Google. Which brings me back to Misky…
Misky was not only the inspiration for my (deepish?) dive into AI, but was extremely helpful and encouraging to me at the outset, itself a reflection of how women tend to be more collaborative, good team players – a fact which the contributors to “The Conversation” suggested is a good reason for women to me more involved in AI companies, in reviewing the implications and in forming the regulation which is undoubtedly necessary around AI. A few days ago, I was delighted to meet Misky face-to-face on a Zoom call after many text interactions online and one of the things that she shared in our too-brief call, was that she had had some push-back from certain readers of her blog, about the use of AI images. I would like to talk to her more about these issues, but the participants in “The Conversation” raised the issue of how artists, whose work has been studied by AI to create new images “in the style of”, are being short-changed. You may have been wondering about the image at the top of this post – I created in Midjourney by prompting it to “imagine” Knaresborough railway viaduct “in the style of Hokusai” – a master of Japanese woodblock prints. I have used this subject as my test piece for exploring what Midjourney can do as you will see in the previous post. Now Hokusai is long dead and so the issue of compensation is hardly an issue, but another group of more recent artists might object. I am working on a spoof post – “How to Make a Body” a tale of human reproduction in the style of an Internet recipe ad although, like Misky, the writing is all my own, I wanted an illustration to fit with the tone of the piece and prompted Midjourney to “imagine” a woman in a hospital bed, holding her newborn baby and with her husband leaning in “in the style of a Ladybird book cover”. For those of you who may not be familiar with Ladybird books, they were written for children starting in the 1940’s and running until the 1980’s and they feature a distinct style of illustration.
In recent years, a series of spoof books in the Ladybird style and aimed at those who had grown up with the original series, have been vert successful, for example…
I had no idea whether Midjourney would be able to fulfil my prompt, there are lists of artists’ styles you can use with Midjourney but I hadn’t seen this one – I was not disappointed!
I am keeping my powder dry as to the final image I chose but this first set of four (Midjourney shows off by producing not one, but four attempts in under sixty seconds) – which was done to the prompt of “A new mother in a hospital bed with her husband leaning in as she holds their new baby in the style of a Ladybird Book Cover” has misunderstood my intention and the mother is holding a magazine rather than a baby – though the graphic style is very Ladybird book-like. I acknowledge that I am still only a beginner in my use of prompts with all the forms of AI I have tried so far and there is undoubtedly an “art” to getting it right which is why I said “I created in Midjourney”. Although I am a competent watercolourist, screen-printer and other forms of illustrative art, I could not produce images such as the above and certainly not in sixty seconds. So, how much of this creation is my prompt, how much is the brilliant programming behind Midjourney and how much is owed to the various artists who could produce the illustrations of the Ladybird books? I cannot begin to answer that question but it does raise an issue which needs considering in formulating regulation around the use of AI. Meanwhile, like Misky and I, jump in and have a go and get a feel for yourself of the answer to the god-like feeling of creating with an AI tool…
Much of the debate around the consequences of the rise of AI, is around its impact on jobs and the potential losses and gains. As I described in my first report, the development of computer spreadsheets swept away the lowly positions in Accountancy but opened up many more jobs at the high end of the profession and although this might be the hope for AI, that it liberates us from the menial and allows us to create new roles – roles which might be beyond the capability of AI to imagine, at present, it is not just the menial tasks that are being threatened by bots like ChatGPT, but some roles higher up in various industries. Having said that, given the tendency of AI’s to hallucinate, I wouldn’t trust an AI’s writing without an experienced human checking the output of any writing before sending it out! Also, when you are a creative individual yourself, then trying to get AIs to produce exactly what you have in mind is tricky. In my 2021 A to Z challenge, I was trying to complete a science-fiction novel and the exercise gave me enough momentum to indeed finish it a few months later. Then I set about creating a book cover for it – to feature the final denouement – a tense scene set in a space-elevator on the edge of space. I prepared the background view by Photoshopping some NASA photographs looking the length of the Red Sea towards Palestine, painted in a great river estuary as per my planet, and then superimposed some 3D elements which I drew up in AutoCAD and finally added the title and my name. You can see this below, however, I felt that the result was not quite up to the standard of artwork commissioned by big sci-fi publishers and imagined that in the unlikely event of the novel being published, an improved version of the cover would be substituted for my “sketch”.
Back to today, and naturally, I thought it would be a good test of Midjourney to see whether it could be used to produce a better version of my cover. Well, the first attempts were brilliant style-wise, but nothing like the image I wanted and many attempts followed to no avail…
My prompt read “space lift arriving at 300 miles above Earth like planet over Sahara like region array of cargo containers spread out in one layer small spaceship approaching“Midjourney couldn’t understand Space lift and I had to change lift to elevator, it couldn’t understand “array of cargo containers” but it did have all the sci-fi style I wanted. So then I decided to create a space view background without the lift and substitute it into my own cover illustration. Bingo!
Still I hanker for the crisply detailed images of the elevator that Midjourney is capable of if only I could prompt it correctly – so a work in progress… What this exercise does show, is that it is possible to use AI for the things it can do better in combination with human talent.
In Conclusion…
This exploration of AI has felt like a marathon and it is just one person’s experience and I am really only at the beginning of my exploration, I’m sure I will find both text and image-generative bots to be of use in my future work and play. I urge you all to experiment for yourselves, form your own judgements (and please share your results by linking in the comments), join the debate over the regulation of AI, and explore other artists, in particular, Misky, who began this journey…
Lady in Read – such a great pun – and it truly reflects Vidya’s approach to her blog – it might be described as Fusion – “Lady in Red” is a western song by Chris de Burgh and it has featured in several films and both Vidya’s avatar and blog banner show her in a red dress but in the content she goes further. For example, in this year’s A to Z (she is a veteran participant), she wrote poems about people and places from India and particularly Karnatka where she grew up. However, Vidya writes prompted by many blogging challenges including NaPoWriMo which was also running in April and rather than do two separate posts, Vidya gives us a mash-up or fusion. so in My Heart Beats for Harihar, her H post, Vidya writes a poem celebrating the town she grew up in as a Sea Shanty – the NaPoWriMo prompt! To have followed Vidya’s A to Z is to take a deep dive into Indian/Karnatka culture but served up with a fusion twist seasoned with a great deal of humour…
Vidya also explored using AI for both images to illustrate some posts and also to generate ideas for post titles and you can read about her assessment of her experiments in her Reflections Post.
