Memo

The Pilgrim's Progress is a Protestant text. It was written by John Bunyan in the late seventeenth century in an environment of intense political and religious turmoil. It is an allegorical text which recounts the spiritual journey of a single pilgrim, imaginatively named Christian. He encounters an evangelist who sets him on the path of deliverance.

It is therefore largely unsuitable to any discussion of World Youth Day.

Authors of headlines and op-eds, please take note. A Christian allegory slightly more appropriate to a discussion of World Youth Day is Dante's Divine Comedy. I suspect that the first section, Inferno, will be on the minds of commuters on Thursday.

Here endeth the lesson.

Comfort

This post has little to say to you if you are:

• Gluten-intolerant
• Carb-phobic
• Reticent about garlic
• Squeamish about chilli
• Vegetarian
• Weaning off deadly nightshades (Weirdos. I'd be very interested to know whether this blog has any readers who genuinely do follow a macrobiotic diet.
  
• Not sold on fennel
• purist about recipe/cuisine adaptation*
  

If you don't tick any of the above boxes, let me commend pasta (shells - see, there go the purists, lost on a Sunday night) with chorizo, fennel and tomato, all cooked up with Blyton-esque lashing of garlic and chilli. Cook crumbled chorizo and sliced fennel in olive oil for a while. Throw in as much garlic and chilli as you can. Chuck in crushed tomatos or passata and red wine. Cook for a while longer. Cook pasta till al dente and drain. Toss into the sauce and cook a bit further. Lots of salt. Dish it up. Bit of pepper. Bit more salt. Parmesan it up. Sit on couch. Eat. Be well in the world.

* Disclosure. The first time I cooked something like this, it came from the River Cafe Blue cookbook. I wish I could say that a nonna or a trattoria was the origin of this for me. Alas, no.

Quizzical

GodDAMN I love Doctor Who's eyebrows. They're so commendably, wonderfully quizzical. I had a terrible crush on the dashing Christopher Eccleston but this puckish, earnest Tennant chap is really growing on me and the supra-ocular hair is why.

Cover stories

You could call me cynical. And you could call me hungover. And both of these designations would be truthful. Still, I a little appalled to discover Jane McGrath's photo on the front cover of the Smage's weekend magazines. It's another excerpt from Glenn's biography about his life with his recently deceased wife. Wimmin's Weekly and Womyn's Day both seem to feature similar stories - which is just what I'd suspect. If anything I suspect about the production cycles of these weekend supplements is true, the story must have been waiting in the editor's office for some time. Jane McGrath dies and the story is good to go.

As uncomfortable as I am with predatory grief exposés and these shameless national grief stories, I don't object to Jane McGrath's high public profile. As far as I can tell, she certainly wasn't a vacuous celeb but a brave and admirable woman who used this considerable public profile to great effect. And her legacy - informing the public about breast cancer and raising money for the cause - is an important one.

If this was all about continuing her advocacy work, then great. What bothers me is this pack of smarmy vultures feasting on the grief, on the terrible sadness of this woman's husband and children. I object to the construction of a national experience of collective mourning around this too. The woman died two weeks ago - and now, her husband's bio hits the shelves and the broadsheets seem to be cashing in. Just sayin'.

(Because this is the internet and because it's Saturday morning and because I really am about to go for a run, I can finish in the lingo of the tubez. Woo.)

Smothering

I saw Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman upstairs at the Belvoir last night. It's a dynamite show and I strongly advise every who can to see it. It's one to outrage the pilgrims, however, and it would be irresponsible for me to fail to add that the play is not only violent and tense but very very cruel. It's a piece which toys with the audience's desires for redemption, transcendence, and readily accessible form in a mighty challenging fashion, not unlike Michael Haneke's Funny Games. Just as it seems like a condemnatory cliché to tag a work Kafkaesque and Beckettian, so does it bode ill to declare a fabulous suite of performances. Difficult roles - a violent middle-aged mentally ill man-child, a violent damaged police officer, a violent damaged girl adamant she is the Messiah - are handled with panache. And the only character who is not violent, just damaged, Damon Herriman's Katurian, is brilliant. Verily, a shock to the system.

Not seething

Just a taste from Iain Sinclair's terrific essay on development, the Olympics and London in the LRB.

The scam of scams was always the Olympics: Berlin in 1936 to Beijing in 2008. Engines of regeneration. Orgies of lachrymose nationalism. War by other means. Warrior-athletes watched, from behind dark glasses, by men in suits and uniforms. The pharmaceutical frontline. Rogue Californian chemists running their eye-popping, vein-clustered, vest-stripping robots against degendered state laboratory freaks. Bearded ladies and teenage girls who never have periods. Medals returned by disgraced drug cheats to be passed on to others who weren’t caught, that time. The Millennium Dome fiasco was a low-rent rehearsal. The holy grail for blue-sky thinkers was the sport-transcends-politics Olympiad, the five-hooped golden handcuffs, the smoke rings behind which deals could be done for casinos and malls: with corporate sponsorship, flag-waving and infinitely elastic budgets (any challenge an act of naysaying treason).

It's a cracker, too good to skim through before a day at work. I'll be re-reading it over the weekend as I collect my thoughts about the imminent invasion of Sydney by the pilgrims. I don't drive and I won't be crossing the city to work through the WYD shenanigans so the immediate inconvenience to me will be minimal. As the day of the Pope's arrival approaches, however, I'm increasingly bothered by the spectacle. A bloodless and determined atheism strikes me, for once, as insufficient refuge.

Currant affairs

'They have both been seen as writers who will push boundaries and write about controversial and currant topics.'

Seen by whom?, I always wonder when faced with this rotten locution. And what are the latest controversies in dried fruit circles?

Has the great orange peel in fruit bread dilemma been set to rest?

Does anyone know where I can buy sub-dried plums (as opposed to Angas Park prunes) and thereby recreate the truffled prunes that I ate at the Glebe Point Diner a few weeks ago? They have played a prominent role in my dream life.

Can someone set up a committee to keep banana chips and dried pineapple out of Australian muesli bowls? It's not an unraisinable demand.

Sweet currant or sultana-laden couscous with a salty tagine: for or against?

I could go on, but other great questions of our time are being hacked apart in the pages before me. I have nought but a red pen and a deadline with which to contend with it all.

Advice to a Young Scholar

1. Use the adjective poignant with caution. Ditto unique.
2. The word impact is not a verb.
3. Profligate use of the construction it seems is not helpful to the purposes of scholarly exposition. Ditto it can be seen.
4. Almost is rarely a worthwhile qualification.
5. Everything you have heard about abuse of the passive voice is true.
6. Recount is not a noun. Account and narrative are useful synonyms.
7. Affect can be weighed with better terms than heavy and heavily. And massively.
8. Apostrophes aren't so difficult to use correctly.

Or not.

I refer to Ezra Pound's 'A Few Don'ts for an Imagist' for the following meritorious injunctions:

• Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.
• Go in fear of abstractions.

Pedantry

Oh, I've been neglecting this blog. Things have happened. Time has passed. One of the wheels has undergone a revolution and I'm back at my desk marking take-home exams. If I ever set up a teaching blog (unlikely), I will offer the following as pre-emptive passive aggressive antidotes to the stylistic infelicities so frequently presented by my students.

Firstly, The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

Secondly, Literally, A Web Log.

Other news? I'm sneezing in a febrile fashion which would be amusing, bearable and possibly endearing were I a young damsel skipping through fields of daisies. As an old wench hunched over a desk, the spasms are neither cute nor fun.

One oh four

It's Bloomsday and I'm a binge drinker, Stephen Dedalus is a binge drinker, and Leopold Bloom is a binge drinker. Via LP and Crikey, we're all binge drinkers. If four standard drinks - less than three glasses of wine - qualifies as a binge, I'm in trouble. It strikes me that there's a reality disconnect with the NHMRC here.

And it also strikes me as a little bit bloody unfair. I stop smoking, I stop drinking like a larrikin's moll, I start bloody running, and what happens? The rules change! Back in my day, etc etc. If you're really lucky, it's possible to down four standard drinks in a good martini. I'll see anyone who's interested out the back of the Bayswater for a one-glass binge.