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ESSAY ON FOOD FOR NIGELLA ISSUE OF STYLIST MAGAZINE - DECEMBER 2011
Publication: Other Articles
Food is all the love you can eat.
Real food, like love, takes time, imagination, passion, good humour, a willingness to learn, and not too much distress over upsets.
Greedy is what we all are when not ruined by diets, disgusting food, air-brushed models, and no time.
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The memories & poems of Ted Hughes
Publication: The Guardian
A poem is a practical act of memory. When most memory is out-sourced to hard drive and smartphone, the poem releases in the reader a private memory-store, prompted but not prescribed by the poem. This is a relief. It is also a remedy for the new modern disease; Alzheimer's. We are forgetting too much. The poem is an oral medicine. Take one in your mouth once a day and read aloud. Repeat prescription.
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WUTHERING HEIGHTS - my take on what Wuthering Heights is really about
Publication: The Times
I read Wuthering Heights when I was sixteen and had just left home. I did not read it as a love story. I thought it was a loss story. Heathcliff loses Cathy. Cathy loses Heathcliff. Edgar Linton loses Cathy, their daughter, his life, and Thrushcross Grange. Hindley loses Wuthering Heights. His son Hareton is dispossessed,
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AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary Dead, edited by Dale Salwak, introduced by Margaret Atwood. Iowa University Press.
Publication: The Times : Books
What would you say to the Dead? What do you say to the Dead?
Death is not the end of the conversation as anyone with a dead friend knows. We go on talking not because we are duped by magical thinking but because there is more to say.
Language is not, as Nietzsche thought, a way of saying what is already dead in our hearts; it is a way of keeping ourselves and others alive.
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Grimm's Fairytales. Taschen
Publication: The Times : Books
Fairy stories are part of our everyday lives. We laugh about kissing the frogs to find the prince. We've all had our share of ugly sisters and big bad wolves. Our bright ideas are like the goose that lays the golden egg. Anybody with the right kind of cat knows that it wears boots.
Animal helpers figure large in fairy tales, as do reversals of fortune; the King becomes a beggar and Cinderella becomes Queen. Puddings multiply, broomsticks fly, the witch gets shoved in the oven, and the right people live happily ever after.
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Here on Earth by Tim Flannery.
Publication: The Times : Books
Climate change, environmental degradation, overpopulation, and war each threaten the future of our life on earth. They are our own man-made Horsemen of the Apocalypse - not sent by a vengeful deity to roll up the world, but a lethal consequence of the greed and stupidity of that species we still call Homo Sapiens.
We are in charge of our own destruction and we will take the planet with us. Earth will find a way to recover - eventually - but all those millions of years later it not likely that humans will get a second chance.
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Essay on Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour.
Publication: The Times
The story goes that Lillian Hellman was a writer in search of a subject when her new lover Dashiell Hammet passed her one of his own research sources - a story of whispering and defamation in a girls'school.
Hammett, who had written the Maltese Falcon, and created the detective Sam Spade, based on his own years working for the investigation agency, Pinkerton's, had a vast and odd collection of true-life unsolved stories. He reckoned Hellman should give up her fiction and try drama - she was already summarising scripts for MGM - a job she disliked, but that gave her a wide insight into how to make a drama work.
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Essay on HBO mini-series MILDRED PIERCE starring Kate Winslet.
Publication: The Times
James M Cain's 1940's novel Mildred Pierce is better known as the 1946 movie that won Joan Crawford an Oscar in the title role.
Classic film noir, its half-lit sets, full-lit close-ups, lop-sided shots and menacing music re-made Cain's story - opening it with a murder and ending with a jail sentence for Mildred's daughter, Veda.
This was more than sensationalism - the censorship code of the time required that wrong was seen to be punished. So if you drop in a murder, you automatically create a simple crime and punishment story. The novel is more complex and upsetting. It is the novel that has been faithfully re-made by Indie director Todd Haynes as a six-hour period drama starring Kate Winslet.
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Guardian booklet on British Woods
Publication: The Guardian
A woodcutter had three sons: One could chop down an oak tree in a day. One could plank the timber in a week. The third son was so small that he just gathered acorns. 'And what is the use of that?' demanded his father. 'You never know when you might need a forest' said the small son.
It takes an oak tree forty or fifty years to let fall its first acorns. The acorns fall before the leaves and the later falling leaves protect the germinating acorns through the winter. An oak can live a thousand years or more - there is one in Sherwood Forest said to have hidden Robin Hood. An oak is more than its timber; an oak is time. Our ancient woodlands connect us to the past. They are living history.
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The King James Bible's language lesson
Publication: The Guardian
My mother taught me to read from the Book of Deuteronomy because it is full of animals - mostly unclean. So while other children had horses, bunnies, kittens and ducks, I had hoopoes, sloths, snakes, rock badgers, rams, swine and shellfish.
Mrs Winterson was in charge of language in our house. Morning and evening she made her way through all 66 books of the King James Bible - Creation to Apocalypse - took a week off for reflection, and started again.
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