Tarragon Tales

I have been nurturing tarragon for over a year since I bought my first small plant in spring. Last summer I could pick only very small amounts, but the plant I nursed then is getting much bigger this year in its earthenware pot. I've also planted three new seedlings directly into the garden bed and they are doing well. Hopefully I will have a bed of tarragon one summer soon.

The plant dies completely away in winter. As autumn comes in and the cold weather begins to accumulate the plant is reduced to sparse sticks with fewer and fewer of shiny green leaves. Then it disappears. This tendency to disappear caused Mark Crick to portray the herb as an 'aristocrat' in his very amusing book The Household Tips of the Great Writers (Granta Books, 2012).

In that book tarragon appears in his parody of Pride and Prejudice. The herb is likened to the aristocrats from Netherfield who disappear to more pleasant climes, Bath perhaps, in the winter months, leaving the poor Barrett girls and their mother bereft in their hopes of finding suitable marriage partners. When it does show up,the herb is praised for its sublime flavours, much loved by cooks, and Crick suggests poached eggs with fresh tarragon as a nice dish. I agree. Eggs poached or boiled and scattered with tarragon are lovely.

I took the recipe one step further  to produce Eggs with tomatoes and tarragon.

Thus: cook up a thick tomato sauce with onions, garlic and tomatoes. You could save a small quantity from any tomato sauce you make for pasta and so on.
Put three or four tablespoons of your thick tomato sauce into a wide pan (I use a frying pan) and heat it through without drying it out.
Create a space in the middle of the sauce and break an egg into it. Continue heating slowly until the egg is cooked to your liking. When almost cooked sprinkle the egg with finely chopped tarragon leaves.

Serve on hot buttered toast.

Flaubert Reading Spree

Keen readers know the joy of mining a deep seam of interest in a topic as we move from one lead to another, books leading on from one to another. I had this experience recently with the French master, Gustave Flaubert. I started by re-reading Madame Bovary, Flaubert's most famous novel. I read it in a new translation by Lydia Davis and it was a revelation. I had read the book many years ago and was swept up then by the strength of the marvellous story, but my new reading brought me to a much greater appreciation of Flaubert's brilliant writing style and I wanted to know more about the author.

Flaubert (1821 - 1880), lived and died more or less on the same piece of ground in and around the French city of Rouen. He spent most of his adult life living quietly with his mother, niece and their various housekeepers in their large house beside the River Seine at Croisset, just outside Rouen. He needed quietness and solitude to compose his great works of literature, but he also, from time to time, bit sharply into the big apple of friendship, love, cosmopolitanism and travel.

While he had a great capacity for friendship and was loved by women, Flaubert hated the idea of marriage or of anything, the career in law that he was expected to enter for instance, that would fix him into the cement of a bourgeois existence . He loathed bourgeois values and views which he contrasted with his own beliefs in the value of art and the life of the artist. 

Those beliefs come out in all his novels where he lampoons human stupidity with great delight while he lingers over the exact description he wants to create. As he wrote of his slow, painstaking way of composing:

'May I die like a dog rather than hurry by a single second a sentence that isn't ripe.' 

Flaubert's letters are an absolute joy to read though not very easy to obtain. Luckily my local regional library still has Volume 1 of the Letters, edited by Francis Steegmuller, a great Flaubert scholar. I am yet to find a copy of Volume 2 and may have to read it in the State Library. However, the letters are full of the most tantalising ideas about art and life with Flaubert's dark, but amused, view of humanity's follies being very apparent.

He was not at all impressed by the idea of 'progress' and indeed his rejection of any such idea is a big theme in his books, including Madame Bovary. He hated the railways that set up during his lifetime, believing that they would only enable people to move around more,meet, and be stupid together.  One can only imagine his disgust at our modern, frantic, moving around. No doubt the advent of tweeting, messaging, and blogging, would have appalled him deeply.

On the bedside table

I have a big stack of books on the bedside table, some read some unread. I'm sorting them out today. This is the list:

Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte. This book has been on the table since mid last year when I finished reading it, inspired by seeing the new film. What a wonderful novel it is.

The Conformist, a novel by the Italian writer Alberto Moravia. First published in 1951, the copy I'm reading is an American paperback published by Steerforth Italia, Vermont, U.S. in 1999. I'm reading this to prepare for viewing the film later this term (The Conformist directed by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1970). I've started on the novel and find it fairly slow-going so far; not a difficult read but rather flat and schematic.

State of Wonder (2011) by the American, Ann Patchett. Boy can she spin a yarn! Great female characters and a terrific story. Can't wait to read more of her books. This book has to be returned to the library.

Also borrowed from the library:

Reading Madame Bovary (2010), a collection of short fiction by Amanda Lohrey. Strong stories with interesting themes. I'm still dipping into this one.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. This famous novel was first published in 1856. I first read it decades ago and I'm looking forward to reading the new translation by Lydia Davis (2010).

Other books I can now return to the shelves are The Acolyte (1972), a novel by Thea Astley and Minitudes (2000) a book of diary entries for the period 1974 - 1997 by Barry Oakley.

Meanwhile I continue to dip into Cold Mountain Poems, the poems of Han Shan in a lovely edition by Shambala Publications.

There, I have cleared up the bedside table muddle. Now there's room for a few more books.

Books into films

Last term I joined a film club in my home town. The club is run by a retired professor of film history who wanted to share her knowledge and promote discussion about films. We meet at the local Neighbourhood Centre and make a small donation to the Centre. Our leader provides us with copies of the films so that we can watch them at home before we meet to discuss them. The films come from a man with a very large film library who copies the film for us onto CDs, purely for purposes of study. It's like a book club but with films, led by a person with special knowledge. It's a wonderful example of sharing and free access to knowledge.

So far we have looked at three films that have their origins in novels or stories. The Servant, a 1963 film directed by Joseph Losey, and starring Dirk Bogarde, was based on a story of the same name by the British writer, Robin Maugham. Babette's Feast (1987) came from a story by the Danish-born Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), and the Hitchcock film, Rebecca, is based on the novel of the same name by Daphne du Maurier.

I read Rebecca prior to watching the film and that reading shaped my response to the film. I disliked the book intensely, was appalled especially by the treatment of female characters - clueless, nameless, female narrator; evil nymphomanic dead Rebecca; vampirish evil Mrs. Danvers etc. I could not see how such a lineup of hideous female characters and their vacuous male counterparts could possibly translate into a good film. While the film redeemed the book in many ways because of its sumptuous mise-en-scene in some sections, such as the encounters between Mrs. Danvers and the young Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca's hallowed bedroom, (with lesbian undertones), or Hitchcock's beautiful framing in many instances, it could not enhance or negate the reactionary sexual politics which tainted the whole conception of both film and book for me.

Each of the participants in the group reacted to the film, and some also to the book, in very different ways from enthralling to cliched, melodramatic, entertaining and disappointing. All these various reactions led to an interesting discussion, especially about whether one can judge the sexual politics of a previous era (Rebecca was made in Hollywood in 1941), and whether the film ought to be seen as a well-made melodrama. No conclusions were reached, but the threads of this discussion and others are bound to be taken up again as the group looks at other films and develops enough common language and experience to be able to cross-reference ideas.

Winter Reading

This is the list of books I read over winter:

My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin.

Nine Gates - Entering the Mind of Poetry - essays by Jane Hirshfield.

Guantanamo, My Journey, by David Hicks.

In the Company of Rilke, by Stephanie Dowrick.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte.

What I read this summer

Summer has come and gone, such as it was. Most people seem to agree that we've been cheated of a long, hot summer here in Victoria and the chill days of autumn, with winter to follow, have come too soon upon us. Books though, never fail, come heat or cold, and what follows is the list of books I've read this summer. With thirteen books on my list that makes it approximately four books each month for December, January and February, or one a week, if you like.

There are many ways one might organise a list like this: perhaps by the order in which they are read which is quite relevant and telling because my choice of books is often dictated by what I've been reading and would like to know more about, or by an author I've enjoyed and want to follow up on. This time I'm going to organise the list by categories, rather as they might go together on a library shelf, but even as I start to do this I see that there are not necessarily strict boundaries between the categories or genres of writing.

LIFE STORIES/AUTOBIOGRAPHY/MEMOIRS/BIOGRAPHY

Sheila Fitzpatrick, My Father's Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood. (Melbourne University Press, 2010, paperback. pp. 260.) Borrowed from Bendigo Library.

A very interesting and moving account of growing up as the daughter of the Melbourne writer Brian Fitzpatrick. Sheila Fitzpatrick went on to become a historian. She is honest and courageous describing both her parents who were complicated people with plenty of human flaws. She's also honest about her own very independent character. The book provides plenty of fascinating social context in Melbourne from the 1950s til the late 1970s including many insights into the politics and career structures in academia.

Christine Wallace, Greer, Untamed Shrew.

I mentioned this book in my last blog entry. It's definitely worth reading for insights into one of Australia's most famous women who still makes people sit up and take notice. It's also interesting for the context of the times when Greer grew up (50s and 60s) and for the approaches to her life that Wallace takes. I purchased the book second-hand.

Jacqueline Kent, An Exacting Heart -The Story of Hephzibah Menuhin. (Viking, 2008. Borrowed from the Bendigo Library.)

Hephzibah Menuhin was an accomplished concert pianist who played all over the world with her famous brother, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Hephzibah left the world stage to marry the Australian heir to the 'Aspro' fortune and went to live in the backblocks of western Victoria. There were two children but eventually the marriage ended when Hephzibah fell in love with another man. She continued with her music throughout her life. Though the life and times described are interesting, this biography lacked a compelling theme and the writing was rather bland.

Cassandra Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley. (University of Queensland Press, 1999) Borrowed from the City Library.

An account of the life of the Australian poet, James McAuley. McAuley fell in with the Catholic conservative movement led by B. A. Santamaria, and also worked in Alf Conlon's intelligence unit during the second world war. Though often admired for his poetry, McAuley was unable to resist the allure of the culture wars. He was the editor of the conservative magazine Quadrant and became professor of English at the University of Tasmania. A great book for anyone interested in the Australian culture wars that still rear their heads from time to time; a book about political intrigue especially within cultural organisations and universities and a portrait of a troubled man.

Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart - A Portrait of Paul Keating PM. (Knopf, 2002,pp. 756) Second-hand hardback.


It's taken me almost a decade to get around to reading this book. But now is a good time to read it if only because of the perspective it offers from the vantage point of a Labour government struggling to survive and get its message across to the electorate, when there is all din and noise on the airwaves and in the media drowning out the positive agendas that the government is trying to put forward. Seen from the Prime Minister's Office, the shouting takes its place as just one more element in the great game of politics. From 1992 until 1996 when the Labour government fell and John Howard became Prime Minister, Don Watson was Paul Keating's speechwriter and one of his political advisors. His account of the period describes Keatings successes and his failures and gives a sense of the complicated man and those who worked around him. It describes Australian society and the wider international context and places the business of politics in a wider historical context across time. Each chapter starts with a quote from a famous writer or activist and these quotes set the tone and focus for the chapter and the events described. In themselves they are something to be pondered and savoured, as is the quote from William Hazlitt that serves as the epigram to the book as a whole, suggesting the struggle that takes place in politics and in everyday life:

Man (sic) is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck
with the difference between what things are and what they might have been.

Watson is a wonderfully clear writer with an ear for the humorous, the ironic, the ridiculous, the serious, the tragic and the most moving in human affairs. The book explains the policy directions and achievements of Keating's time as Prime Minister in clear, detailed and readable prose. It suggests the drama of life on the big stage shaping the 'big picture' that was Keating's perspective in politics. This surely is a 'must read' for anyone interested in contemporary Australian politics, a 'must read' for anyone contemplating entering that arena and a very enjoyable and instructive read for anyone who likes good prose writing.

HISTORY

Two books on the history of one event, the sacking of Sydney Sparkes Orr from the University of Tasmania, Chair of Philosophy in 1956.

The first by W.C.Eddy, Orr, (Jacaranda, 1961) is a big mess of a book that goes on and on insisting on Orr's innocence, but valuable as a historical document and for the detail of reports, hearings, court cases, arguments and so on at the time. To get some perspective on Eddy's harping I read Cassandra Pybus's analysis of the case:

Cassandra Pybus, Gross Moral Turpitude, (William Heinemann, 1993, pp. 238). Secondhand paperback.

Pybus burrows into the character and circumstances of Orr and emerges with a stinking body of human corruption and folly. A good read.

POETRY

Clifford Pannam, Music From a Jade Flute - the Ci Poems of Li Qingzhao. (Hybrid Publishers, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 285). Hardback book borrowed from the Bendigo Library.

This is a beautifully produced book that features Li Qingzhao's poems, translated by Pannam, who also writes about the historical context in which each poem was written, the poetic references and traditions they draw on, and the challenges of translation.

Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband - a fictional essay in 29 tangos. (Vintage, 2001, paperback, pp. 147) Borrowed from City Library.

My first reading of the Canadian poet, Anne Carson. The poems sketch out the progress of a passionate and tumultuous relationship. At its nadir the wife of the beautiful husband is bereft:

A cold ship

moves out of harbour somewhere inside the wife
and slides off toward the gray horizon

not a bird not a breath in sight.

Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard, Poems. (Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2007, paperback).

This book was loaned to me by a friend who bought it from Square Books, a bookshop in Oxford, Mississippi. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the book explores a personal and national history in America's Deep South.

NOVELS

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood. (Bloomsbury, 2009) Hardback borrowed from the Bendigo Library.

A post-apocalyptic world of corruption, social decay, environmental destruction and the struggle to survive a very messy endtime. Atwood's heroes use herbal lore and gritty skills to make their way in a dangerous environment.

Ian McEwan, Solar. (Jonathan Cape, 2010) Borrowed from a friend.

Here the threat of environmental destruction also serves as the background to the novel. In this case we see the corrupt heart of a man who struggles to make a big name for himself (and a lot of money) in the world of new technology meant to 'save' the planet. My first go at the popular McEwan, and one that I liked a lot. I laughed out loud many times at McEwan's descriptions of the mad things people get up to.

CRIME

Kerstin Ekman, Blackwater. (Vintage, 1996) Secondhand paperback.

This crime novel was translated from the Swedish. I first read it years ago when it first appeared in English and I was keen to read it again. A gruesome murder takes place in a wilderness setting where communities of loggers and hippies exist side by side in an uneasy balance. Red herrings multiply as Ekman trawls the landscape describing family power structures and community tensions.

Looking back on my summer reading today, on International Women's Day, I think I can say that I've held up my end for reading women writers, but the men were pretty good too.

Alpine book trail

Last month I made a trip to the alpine country in Victoria's northeast, lovely country where the Ovens and King rivers flow - and, most recently, overflow into a flood. An area of luscious river valleys and high mountains like Mount Buffalo and Mount Hotham.

There's a book trail that extends through the area along an arc from Kilmore in the south to Rutherglen up north, to Beechworth, Myrtleford and Bright in the east and sweeping down to the southeast to Bairnsdale near the coast in Gippsland. Bookshops in these and other towns have joined together to put out a brochure that lists their locations, descriptions of stock and contact details. See www.alpinebooktrail.com

I visited some of these shops and made a few purchases: in Euroa I called in at Euroa Fine Books which is run by the well-known bookseller, Kenneth Hince OAM. What a lovely bookshop it is, located in Euroa's main street. Across the road is The Already Read Bookshop which is operated by members of the Friends of the Euroa Library; proceeds from that shop go to support the library. In Beechworth, the Quercus Bookshop is also run by volunteers to support the Beechworth Neighbourhood Centre.

Although I was keen to visit Bibliomania in Myrtleford, I only managed a look through the windows as its opening times were restricted. Luckily the small but well-stocked Books at Bright was open and I found a book I was interested in there.

In Bright I found the book, Orr, by W. H. C. Eddy. It is a very odd book that details the many law suits and events that surrounded the case of Sydney Sparks Orr, the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania from 1952 until he was dismissed in 1956. The book, published in 1961 by Jacaranda , features a lurid yellow jacket with an outline map of Tasmania surrounding a big red question mark. The cover suggests revelation and scandal and the author argues that Orr was the innocent victim of a conspiracy against him. The case caused an uproar in academic circles at the time and a ban was imposed on jobs in philosophy at the university. Eddy goes on at great length (apparently assisted by Orr according to a recent study of the case), but the book is certainly an interesting historical document pertaining to the history of universities in Australia in the 1950s.

In Euroa I picked up Greer: untamed shrew by Christine Wallace, a biography of Germaine Greer. It's an interesting read that details events in this famous writer's life into the 1990s. Greer emerges as a complicated figure who Wallace sees as more of a individualist than a feminist.

The work of another of our great women writers, Christina Stead, came my way at the Beechworth bookshop. I found a hardback edition of The Man Who Loved Children which is one of my favourite books, one that I intend to read again now I have a sturdy volume I can look into.