Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.
— Alain Robbe-Grillet, born in 1922
“Coaches have to watch for what they don’t want to see and listen to what they don’t want to hear.”
~ American John Madden
Coaching quotes of real note ... Of course, true hotness lies within, but how do you get someone to discover your inner hottie if you lack come-hither hips or piercing, symmetrical eyes? A red shirt, a glass of wine, and a little curry could be a good start. During a meeting with Thai university administrators, a senior academic colleague of David Reid of Carlingford "referred several times to the need to move parts of a proposal 'to the back burner' while other elements needed 'keeping on the boil'." Over coffee later the bemused Thais asked David: "Why does your boss talk so much about cooking?"
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Frauds Investigating the Frauds – Gov. Stacey Abrams Edition. “The same crowd that has just spent three years telling us that Boris and Natasha swayed an American election using Facebook is now incredulous that the infinitely more powerful — and blatantly liberal — Google could pull this off.”
Every Penny a Vote LRB. “[T]he notion that neoliberals were, by and large, moderate in tone and inclined to compromise, only to lose their way in the 1970s and 1980s, is chimerical. The foundational intellectual work was radical, and took place before the Second World War.”
How much truth to tell is a perennial issue in authorship, whether the book is fiction or not. Jessica White treads a careful line in her hybrid memoir Hearing Maud, a journey for a voice. In tracing the life of Maud Praed, deaf daughter of the Australian author Rosa Praed, (see my review) White sees with clarity the difficult decisions that her own parents had to make about what’s best for their child and how the child in later life may question the wisdom of the decisions that were made.
We were standing on fresh snow. A frozen river lay before us, and farther ahead, beautifully lit, rose the Kremlin. The snow covered the battlements of the wall along with the slopes and ledges of the towers. And soaring above it all, like outlandish air balloons, were the domes of the cathedral… It was cold. Behind us, cars passed from time to time. We stood in silence. ‘You’re right,’ Max said, It’s not right to barf here.’ ‘Yes. You know, Sanya, we’re already used to this view. Postcards, posters, TV. From childhood — the Kremlin, the Kremlin! And here it is! Imagine how amazing it must be for some Japanese or Australian to see it. (p.147) ~The Hemingway Game
With the world holding its breath over the Hong Kong protests, Birgit Vanderbeke’s The Mussel Feast has a contemporary resonance that she probably didn’t expect when she wrote it in 1990. There were ‘velvet revolutions’ all over the globe, but the Tiananmen Square massacre had snuffed out the brief hope of democracy in China.
‘I wrote this book in August 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I wanted to understand how revolutions start. It seemed logical to use the figure of a tyrannical father and turn the story into a German family saga.’
So in this brief novella of only 105 pages in the‘Turning Point Series’ published by Peirene Pressthe author depicts the process by which a family bullied into years of submission finds the courage to rebel. The occasion for the mussel feast is a long-anticipated promotion for father, who has been away on his usual business trip and will be expecting his favourite meal, that actually, his wife doesn’t like at all. She says so, on the quiet to her daughter, but she would never dare articulate her own desires to her husband, because that is not what happens in what he calls a ‘proper family’.
Though the fact that everything has changed is acknowledged, the narration begins tentatively, as the daughter traces back the events of this remarkable night. The catalyst for change is father’s unexpectedly extended absence: there is a break in the routine and he is not at home to enforce his rule at the expected time. Mother, brother and sister are in the habit of relaxing a bit when he’s away, but they are always constrained in what they say and do because of his impending return. Performing their compulsory roles, they ‘blab’ to him about each other in a domestic version of East German Stasi surveillance; none of them are capable of resisting the pressure to inform on each other when he demands it. (As the story progresses, we learn that he enforces his demands with punishments that include shocking violence).
So, with the mussels and potatoes all prepped, the family, are adopting their ‘modes’ in anticipation of father’s return. Mother who has a full-time job but still does all the domestic labour, has a number of modes and wifey mode entails the hasty application of some liptstick to her after-work face.
Luckily I never regarded my ultimate aim in life as being to switch to wifey mode at half past five every evening. I didn’t like it when Mum switched; I found it embarrassing, and when we did it, too. I preferred us when my father was away on business. You see we all had to switch for my father, to become a proper family, as he called it, because he hadn’t had a family, but he had developed the most detailed notions of what a proper family should be like, and could be extremely sensitive if you undermined these notions.
But now, as it was already seven o’clock and he still hadn’t arrived, my father was undermining his own notions. Mum’s after-work face seemed a complete waste of time, and the mussels started making that noise in the pot again. My brother was the only one of us who was still looking forward to his mussels and chips. Mum and I had lost our appetites and were both edgy. It was the waiting. If my father had come back at six we wouldn’t have noticed how silly and pointless it was for us to switch, Mum to wifey mode, we to child mode. Shortly after seven Mum said, I do hope nothing’s happened; and out of pure spite I retorted, what if it has, because all of sudden my father was a spoilsport in my eyes, or to be more precise, a mood wrecker. (p.22)
Crucially, this flash of rebellion is shared. At first, only tentatively:
Mum looked at me, not as horrified as I’d expected, but with her head to one side, and then she smiled and said, well, we’ll see, and she didn’t sound as if she’d find it surprising or even terrible if he didn’t come home. (p.22-23)
In all the revolutions that have occurred over my lifetime, from the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia to the People Power Revolution in the Philippines and the Arab Spring,there must have been brief moments like this when people braved surveillance and betrayal to articulate the forbidden. From those first tentative moments of trust, movements grew in strength, culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Fall of the Berlin Wall amongst other remarkable non-violent revolutions. (Not all of them succeeded, of course. The Middle East continues to oppress its citizens in ways the rest of us would never tolerate).
As the narrator’s courage grows and the truth unfolds, readers of The Mussel Feast can see the multiple ways in which a domestic dictatorship operates. As a record of the overthrow of domestic tyranny and violence, the book is also a metaphor for a chilling bigger picture, offering not just hope but also, surprisingly, flashes of laugh-out-loud laughter as the edifice falls.
I’ve had this book since I read the review at Jacqui Wine’s Journal in 2014 but it’s also been reviewed by almost everyone I know, including some who comment on how long it took for this perceptive book to be translated into English, so I am hanging my head in shame at how long I’ve taken to read it when it took only just over an hour to read!
This is in the classic vein of central European writing, that feeling of being full on, comma after comma, giving an almost breathless feel to the narrative and […] making you feel the tension at the table, the shadow of this father falls off the page over you as the reader.
Author: Brigit Vanderbeke Title: The Mussel Feast (Das Muschelessen)Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch Publisher: ‘Turning Point’ Series, Peirene Press, 2013, first published 1990, 105 pages ISBN: 9781908670083 Source: Personal copy
With the world holding its breath over the Hong Kong protests, Birgit Vanderbeke’s The Mussel Feast has a contemporary resonance that she probably didn’t expect when she wrote it in 1990. There were ‘velvet revolutions’ all over the globe, but the Tiananmen Square massacre had snuffed out the brief hope of democracy in China.
