Who’s heard this one: ‘leave something for Mr Manners’?
Despite my mention of useful Men earlier in the week, this is not he. But I was reminded of this saying at work today, seeing the ‘polite’ remainders that people leave behind.
We’re a very foody office. Although our work has a great Cause, people view it in lots of different ways, and food is one thing that actually draws us together. Add to that people going on work trips/holiday to various interesting places, leftovers from events, and you get a sense of a lot of surveying of food that appears in the office.
Fairly consistently, though, no one seems able to take the final piece of something. This means that you can leave even a large piece of packaging with one tiny bit left, and this excuses you from doing any further tidying up. Today, it reached greater proportions than usual - at one point, the piece left over was half a fruit danish pastry. I ignored it, and had my bowl of soup. When I looked round again, someone had taken the pastry, but left the decorative grape…
I’m aware that in other cultures, if you do finish everything, it suggests you want more, or even that you are not satisfied with something. I’m also aware that we have a small kitchen for c. 60 people, and leaving bits of wrappings about doesn’t leave much space to get your lunch out of the fridge, as well as looking a bit grungy after a while.
So, Mr Manners. I ate your grape. I am the one who throws away your empty packets. But I also put on new pots of coffee, clean worksurfaces and do other socially contributional things. I may upset the food status quo. But I do create space for people to put something new down…and start the whole process again.
December 5th, 2007
Book clubs. Another invention for society that has less reason to get together? Or a great way to encourage people to keep thinking, discussing, and so on?
Your choice. Personally I am fairly happy to have opinions about books without needing to consult others on them. But there is something good about seeing what others think - memories of class discussions in English Lit classes. To be honest, if book clubs had been around when I was in 6th form, that would have saved some of my teenage ‘no one understand what’s important in the world!’ grips. (Or maybe not. Teenagers are fairly robust in their assertion that people don’t understand, even if they do.)
It dawned on me recently that I could write book reviews on the blog as well - a kind of book club of one, if you like. Others write their fairly regular film reviews, or reviews of sermons/tapes etc - why not regular books too?
Facebook of course seeks to capture that discussional interest. You can have virtual bookshelves - and film and music collections too - to show off your favoured artistes. I add a few more books most times I go on - some from ages ago, some that I’ve read more recently, but I quite like seeing pictures of the covers come up, and seeing what others are reading.
Meanwhile, however, I have been back to reading in the bath. Despite my recent posts on the joys of magazine articles, it is not as easy to read them in the bath. Newspapers are a bit big, and likely to disintegrate on contact with water. Books it has to be.
So I picked out “Perfume”, a book made into a film earlier this year. As we’d had a holiday in the south of France this year, not so far from the perfume making centre of Grasse, I wanted to remind myself what it was about.
I read “Perfume” in my teens, I think. I was captivated by the description of how perfume was made, how people worked out what scents were in a particular concoction. It also evokes a particular era in France, and brings to life the teeming masses, the public celebrations, the various occupations that are less well known today (tanners, wet nurses, and so on).
So far, so good. But “Perfume” is also subtitled “The story of a murderer”. Less cheerful. The writer, Patrick Suskind, takes two starting points: a man who has a brilliant ‘nose’ for scent of any kind - and the same man who himself has no personal smell.
Other reviewers have called his work Gothic. You could equally say that he takes these ideas, and pushes them to their logical - and even illogical - conclusions. This is where the book gets its power - there is a Greek tragedy at work in the plot, although one where you also get the sense of choice, of the protagonist having the opportunity to turn back or pursue another course at different stages.
Reading it again this time, I was more aware of the morality around the story. The tale starts with adults’ responses to the character as an infant - their fear of him because of his lack of personal smell, their sense that he is somehow in league with the devil. Easy enough to dismiss, in our more tolerant society. But as those around him perish - and in some cases, Suskind shows how they perish decades later, in a setting they have sought to avoid - there is a growing sense of doom for all who work with him; those who show kindness, those who do not. As this continues through the book, it becomes more and more unsettling.
In other ways, this morality holds sway for the main character, Grenouille, too, even though he does not recognise morality, or at least church jurisdiction. Even when he attains what he sets out to do, it does not give him what he hopes, and the result of this impacts back on him, drives him to a particular end. There is perhaps a more ‘natural’ justice coming out of this macabre tale, despite the way this doesn’t seem the case at the start.
Enough thoughts for now. But perhaps these book reviews will also help in the long slow quest to write more of my own stuff, literature or otherwise. The next question is how brave I feel to share my own creative writing with others. Judging by the place where I’m doing most of it - online - I think I have to answer that with “braver than I have been…”
December 5th, 2007