Happy Easter!

This year, the Easter Bunny brought me:


- Polish almond chocolates
- pomegranates
- a discussion of electric gherkins and the botanical requisites of "berry" classification
- a slumber party with Paulina
- the discovery of Coburg Lake
- a relaxing picnic at said lake
- many cups of tea
- a five-day weekend
- hours of sunshine
- a hangover
- a delicious breakfast at my old work (including 1 x sexy ristretto)
- piles of washing up
- a Jean Cocteau films
- a Tarot reading
- wild exhiliration, utter contentment and crippling anxiety (though not neccessarily in that order).



How about you?

A beautiful clumsy day.

Just book me a show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival already, because my morning was a comedy of errors.

It's my dad's birthday today, a fact which I had completely neglected last night when I was madly sewing buttons onto a canvas. Shit shit shit, thought I. My dad never makes a fuss over birthdays and if it were up to him they would probably just slip by unnoticed, which is an attitude I've inherited. I mean, it's nice to acknowledge the fact that someone's alive, but isn't it nicer to just be generous and thoughtful on a daily basis instead of concentrating all that attention into praise for the fact that someone was born? Congratulations - you successfully escaped the womb? I digress because I am loopy and tired, but the point is that I had nothing to offer the man who raised me until I had a fuzzy moment of illumination in the shower and decided to take him out to see Carlton lose one night. I mean play. Where am I going with this?

Oh right, he was coming over this morning to drop off a dress that Mum had made for me to wear to Lily and Ryan's wedding*, and so we sat down for a cup of tea and had a chat. It's funny how much I sometimes miss the little things about living at home - snuggling up on the couch, racing my dad for the nine letter word, drinking cups of tea, silly running jokes that don't really go anywhere. I think also in the last years my parents have started to treat my like an adult - a vague, occasionally petulant adult - to the point where I was having coffee with my mum the other day and she said, 'It's so good to take a break from parenting!' Which was nice, but at the same time, I'm still not really used to being an adult yet so if you want to adore and protect me a little while longer that would be fine.

I am wandering all over the place here! Anyway, after my dad left, I went to wrap the watercolour I had done for Lily and Ryan - I'm a bit broke and making things is always a good way to say "it's the thought that counts" - and what did I do but SPILL WATER ALL OVER IT. I spent the next fifteen minutes betwixt stages of dress, trying frantically to dry my hair while simultaneously drying the canvas. In the end I just had to add more purple, so Lily and Ryan, that is why there is so much goddamed purple at the bottom of the painting. Man, I hate purple. I can't think why I even included it except to even out all the yellow. Which is now unbalanced. By all the purple.

Because I didn't have time to dry my hair properly I threw the curling iron on, and promptly burned myself with it. Burning myself reminded me that I had left the kettle on, which had pretty much boiled dry by that stage. Oops! I finished my hair and put on the dress, which turned out to be too short for the slip I had borrowed, and fortunately it was Housemate Bec and her super-fantastic lingerie collection to the rescue. Thanks, Bec. Feeling somewhat calmer I went to touch up my make-up, putting on concealer in the steamed-up bathroom without realising that I still had paint all over my fingers. I had a purple chin. Thank God I had a second look before leaving the house.

Getting dressed I laddered my stockings. Somehow, I cut my foot. And my hand. But then none of that mattered, because I went and met Tilly on the corner and walked to the wedding and the clumsy clumsy day became a beautiful clumsy day.






*I kind of feel a bit uncomfortable writing about the wedding as it was so intimately Ryan's and Lily's that it feels like theirs alone to tell. So I will just mention briefly that it was beautiful - funny and unpretentious and charming, and full of a quiet grace. It made me feel temporarily less cynical. I think everyone felt that way - warmed pehaps; melted slightly by being in the presence of two people who are so genuinely and steadfastly in love - and it felt like their little house was throbbing like a golden heart, illuminated against the eggs-and-bacon ordinariness of a Saturday morning in Brunswick. It made me wonder how many small fragments of beauty play out every day, unseen by most but cherished by a few. It made me feel optimistic about the inherent goodness of the world, but maybe that's just the champagne talking.

A few things you might already know about me but then again why would you.

1) I wander around when I brush my teeth. I find it almost impossible to brush my teeth in the bathroom. If I am forced to, I will pace like a caged animal. It's as though I forget how to make a brushing motion when I am standing still.

2) It is rare that I am actually reading my book on the tram. Secretly, I am watching you.

3) When I am very nervous, I recite parts of 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' underneath my breath.

4) I cannot remember the last time I wore trousers.

5) In my handbag, there is: a tube of mascara; a pink lipstick; eyeliner; a crumpled up easter egg wrapper; a turquoise comb; some loose change and bobby pins; a strip of Panafen Plus; tampons; my wallet' a notebook; a phone; a pencil; a studio photo of Harold from Neighbours; a pen; and The Four Quartets.

6) I will have a macchiatoni or a ristretto, thank you.

7) I refuse to accept that the international standard spelling of "sulphur" is now "sulfur" and will continue to spell it the old-fashioned way.

8) I am terrible at telling jokes (see a few posts previous). But I am very good at making puns.

9) Last night I dreamed that I was forced to sleep on the floor at a holiday retreat while all the couples there were given beds. This morning I woke up with an extremely sore back. I don't think it was a coincidence.

One-Handed Reading List

I found a little bit of money in my account the other day. There was a book sale at uni. I think you can see where this is going.

While I didn't go all-out bug-fuck crazy - that is, I left the Phaidon coffee table books on the trestle table where they lived after slavering madly over at least five of them - I did come away several kilos heavier in books. And it seems that at the moment I have a one-track literary mind, because apart from a Lester Bangs anthology and a Sylvia Plath volume this is what I bought:

The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis
Crash, J.G. Ballard
The Key, Junichiro Tanizaki
Les Enfants Terribles, Jean Cocteau
Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
The Sexual Life of Catherine M., Catherine Millet
Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, Laura Frost.

I bought the Amis because I remember reading a review that was quite passionate about it. Unfortunately, I can't remember whether the reviewer loved it or hated the book, and now I suspect that perhaps they hated it, but I've always meant to read some Amis at least and this one is quite slim. The others I bought partly because I was in a saucy mood but mostly because I have been giving serious thought recently to a thesis based around sex, subjectivity and the abject in twentieth-century literature, and they seem to get more or less consistantly referenced in the readings I've been doing. (Ho ho, it's one-handed reading because you need the other hand to take notes! It's funny because I mean academic wanking and not wanking in the literal sense!)

I'm not sure that Sex Drives is really going to resolve many ideas for me, since it's based around Sontag's idea of "fascinating fascism", and (from a quick read of the introduction anyway) seems to focus the erotic appeal of fascism as sublimated by the subject - that is, cultural influence on the erotic imaginary - rather than the idea that libidinal urges are repeated at a national level, sublimated themselves as political discourse. That's not really a quibble. It's interesting to read something that approaches the topic in a way I probably never would, and certainly no-one is obliged to go around spouting Freud - it's way more complex than that. But at the moment I tend to believe that the political will of a country is reflective of its inhabitants' psycological nature, and not the other way around.

Anyway, there's an interesting-looking chapter called '"Every woman adores a Fascist": Margeurite Duras, Sylvia Plath, and Feminist Visions of Fascism' which should provide food for thought, particularly as Duras is one of the writers I want to focus on. If my French were better I'd even consider doing a comparative study between Duras and Pauline Reage. I guess the thing I'm getting at, which the French do better that I can, is exploring the link between sex and the broaching of subjective stability - either by the abasement (and therefore transcendence) of the subjective self as in The Story of O, or by sex's explicit (ha!) relationship to the abject and so its temporary abolition of psychological "order". I guess what I'm getting at is something like "jouissance" being translated as "orgasm" in the English version of L'Amant. I am getting at a thesis-length version of that very translation.

Also, when I say subjectivity, I mean I would want to look at both the character's psychological subjectivity as created by the author, and also the language in which sex scenes are written and the critical distance the author/narrator maintains - which I guess is more Lacan than Freud. It would be both. Am I even making sense anymore?

Dear God - this pseudo-intellectual yearning for a theoretical analysis of dirty stories is making me realise how much I've been missing study, and how slack my faculties have become from a few months of inactivity. It's a bit scary, and I think I need to go and read some Kristeva and stop posting my first-year-level observations (there's a lot of tension between the subject and the abject! sex both informs and is informed by politics!) on the internet lest any academics be reading this and laugh at me. You know - as bored academics are wont to do. In the meantime, why don't you go read a dirty novel? It's good for the constitution, you know.

Judaism for Dummies

or: This Seder Felt Strange for Many Reasons.


(So a Catholic, an Anglican and a Jew are about to be knighted, and they all must go and kneel before the Queen. The Catholic goes first, and kneels down before her. He says, "I solemnly do swear my allegience to the Crown, and will remain its humble servant for as long as my days have number". The queen taps him on the shoulders, then the head, and commands him to arise, for he is now a knight.

The Anglican goes next, and kneels before a Queen, and says, "I solemnly do swear my allegience to the Crown, and will remain its humble servant for as long as my days have number". The Queen repeats the process and commands him to arise.

Finally, it's the Jew's turn, but he can't remember the words. His mind goes blank. He kneels down, and begins to mumble under his breath, "Mah nishtanah halailah hazeh, Mikol haleilot..." and the Queen turns to her chancellor, raises her eyebrows and asks, "Why is this knight different from all other knights?")



Why was last night different from all other nights? Because it was the first Seder we'd celebrated since by grandfather passed late last year, and no-one knew what to do.

Seder (the Passover meal) has always been an oddly formal occasion in my family. My grandfather was very, very religiously conservative - probably the most orthodox you could be without, you know, actually being Orthodox - and so high holidays were always celebrated very solemnly. No hymns for us - no lively debate around the dinner table - no banter over the passages of interpretation. The Haggadah was always read in Hebrew. So the Seder for me was always much more grave and mysterious than it was for most people I know.

The table was always presided over my my grandfather, who was deaf and increasingly frail and demented. In between the ceremonial parts of the meal my grandmother would be back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, fretting. I don't think she has ever eaten more than two bites of any Seder meal. Anyway, things followed a pattern, and pattern becomes tradition, and tradition becomes law. We continued to do even the things that are generally just included to distract little kids - like hiding the matzo and demanding a prize for its return - long after all three of us girls were in our teens. In the last few years, as Papa grew increasingly frail, the roles became reversed, with us humouring him and playing along as he pretended not to see the square, flat serviette perched obviously on the mantlepiece, or behind a cushion. His face would break into a grin as we pulled away the cushion with a flourish, and bartered for glinting foil gold coins or lilac-wrapped blocks of Kosher Swiss chocolate.

This year there was none of that. My grandmother had a bossy Hungarian woman in the kitchen fussing over things, but she still didn't eat. No-one shouted and mimed our after-school activities to the head of the table. There was no maror, no potato dunked in salt, no wine to dip our little fingers into. There was no Hebrew, no arguments in Hungarian across the dinner table so that the kids don't understand. In another world my dad would have taken over the ceremony, but he left the shul at seventeen and never looked back. So we decided to just have a quiet dinner - my parents, my sisters, Helen, who my dad has taken to calling the Fourth Daughter, and my nagyi and her sister.

It was pleasant, but breaking with tradition after all those years is still disquieting. Towards the end, in the hospitals wards, the hospice, with the smell of antiseptic and the cheerless painting, the intubation, the drips, the dementia, it seemed better that Papa goe quickly. We couldn't imagine his anguish at conducting the Seder from a hospital bed, and frankly he was so out of touch with reality by the end that I don't think he would have been able to.

When we were young and he was babysitting, he would sneak us chocolate wafers. He worked in the schmatte trade and could fold a shirt beautifully. He refused to talk about Hungary or the war until he had Holocaust flashbacks two years ago, last Seder, and we found out that his sister died at Auschwitz with her children. My sister is named after her, although my father didn't realise at the time. When he rang to say it was a baby girl, Papa cried. He worked in the Kodak factory after immigrating, almost every day, for a year. He always called my dad's friends by their full names. His pants had creases down the front, precise. He would poke us in the back to make us sit up straight and gave us horsie bites that left bruises. He didn't know his own strength. I miss him.

Papa died on Rosh Hashanah - the Jewish New Year. He was in a coma but I'd like to believe he'd been holding on in order to go out with a little symbolism. Patterns make tradition, and you break with law, and traditions become memories. This Seder felt strange. For many reasons.

Ouch

I started this morning crying in the changerooms at Myer, found myself attending a ridiculous anti-bullying and harrassment seminar at lunchtime, and then ended up hiccoughing on the last tram home.

All in all, an utterly inglorious day.

The Goddamn Japanese eggplant salad.

So since Tuesday I've been craving this vaguely Japanese eggplant salad like crazy. I bought most of the ingredients at the supermarket on the way home, and then realised that I had forgotten the miso and tofu, so the eggplant went back in the fridge. Wednesday and Thursday I was out, and then on Friday, when I went assemble the salad, the eggplant had mysteriously vanished from the fridge. Foiled again!

By yesterday afternoon I couldn't stand it no more, and so, armed with all the neccessary ingredients, I began to cook.

The thing is, by that stage cooking the salad had become much, much more important than eating the salad. Now, for me there's a fairly simple corollary between cooking and stress. Namely, I get itchy baking fingers when something is going wrong in my life. I spent a blissful evening making a hundred cup-cakes for a party recently, and come exam time I am usually to be found in the kitchen, wreathed with steam from the oven, fingers burned, mixing batch after batch of biscuit mix, mashing bananas into a pulp for bread.

But this was the first time I have ever craved the making of an Asian salad. The baking/stress corollary is fairly straightforward, but what does it mean that I suddenly felt compelled to slice an eggplant into paper-thin slices? Why did I need to boil dried seaweed until it felt pliant and gelantinous? Why, for the love of God, was the highlight of my day seeing thick, spongy tofu become soft and slippery in its miso-and-mushroomy blanket of broth?

I don't know. I just don't know. So I made the goddamn Japanese eggplant salad, and I had three bites of it, and then I went to a friend's for dinner.

Anyway, if you ever develop this specific compulision, here is what to do:

1) Put some dried seaweed and shitake mushrooms in a pot of warm water and bring to the boil. When I did this yesterday, I added some shitake mushroom stock, but I have no idea how such an item appeared in my cupboard to begin with or where you'd go about purchasing it. It's blatantly unneccessary, anyway - just the mushrooms will do.

2) Cut a shiny purple eggplant and a few waxy potatoes into very thin slices. Cut the slices into slices. Set aside.

3) Crush a shitload of garlic with the back of a knife and dice. Chop up an onion, trying not to cry. Add half a not-too-hot chilli, also diced, and for the love of God do not touch your eyes after you've chopped it up, or then you'll really have something to cry about.

4) Saute* the garlic, onion and chilli until the onion is caramelised, and then add the eggplant and potato.

*Imagine this word with an acute accent. An accute accent that I can't figure out how to make on this computer.

5) Drain the seaweed and shitake broth into a bowl, keeping the re-hydrated seaweed and shitake mushrooms. Add in some miso, mirin, and soy, and then add it to the eggplant/potato mix with a ladle, spoonful by spoonful, as with a risotto. Keep doing this until the eggplant is mushy and the potato is just cooked through.

6) Turn down the heat and add cubes of spongy tofu. Boil up some noodles in a seperate pot - I like sesame noodles, because of the texture, but soba would work - and then drain them in the same colander as the seaweed and mushrooms. Add to the pan, toss, then let cool before transferring salad from pan to bowl and letting cool in the fridge.




Ta da! It's your free Sunday recipe/exploration of my quirks and neuroses. It's a Goddamn Japanese eggplant salad. Enjoy!