I could have cats

Irreplaceable

I really like ‘Irreplaceable’. I’ve listened to it eight or nine times in the past day, seeking the answer.

The practised indifference is so vulnerable. Those two lines in the chorus, where the sass slips and Beyoncé’s voice almost cracks:

I could have another you in a minute

Matter fact he’ll be here in a minute, baby

In a minute, in a minute. The words sound like a forced breath. Desperate, even – and not desperate like us needy women gobbling men like cookie dough. This song reflects the desire to appear unaffected. I find it touching.

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Acoustic

Last night I went to Band of Horses’ acoustic show at the Corner. I’d forgotten how much I like Band of Horses. I haven’t listened to them in a while. The songs were mostly from their first two albums, which worked, because I’ve only listened to their third album twice.

This isn’t a review. If blogging has taught me anything, it’s that I can’t write music or economics. It’s important to acknowledge one’s limitations.

There’s music that your leg jumps to and music that your head nods to. Then there’s music that takes its shape as you listen. Like a body you lean your hips into. My favourite kind.

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Nice rack

What do you do when you have four bikes and a small apartment in inner-city Sydney? Ponder no more:

My sister and her boyfriend hired this company to build a custom bike rack in an enclave in their hallway. Yes, yes. My brethren are clever.

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It’s not the end of the world

If someone had asked me why I loved Matilda when I was in primary school, I wouldn’t have had an answer. I could scrounge for something now, maybe, but my answer then was probably simple. Just do. One of the annoying things about growing up is that it’s harder to like stuff. I mean, just like stuff. Whenever I like something now, I feel that I’m expected to explain why, which part, but wasn’t that chapter so…the prose… have you read his other…brilliant.

I miss liking stuff and not having to analyse or justify it, which brings me to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s hard to explain how much I loved Buffy when I was younger. I had the Buffy and Angel chronicles, which I later ditched because we all think we’re too cool for fandom at one time or another. There’s still a Slayer’s Handbook on my shelf somewhere. Buffy also remains a nineties show in my head, even though the latter seasons bled into our century apparent. Back then, I wasn’t downloading shows off the internet. VHS baby, and this being Australia, we had to wait ages for the new episodes to air.

I was scrolling through the contents of this book about Buffy on Google the other day. There were essays on everything: monsters as metaphors; a queer reading of the Buffy/Willow friendship; the significance of Kendra’s ethnicity. It was strange, and not because I’m unaccustomed to reading The Literature, but because it feels so wrong to read Buffy academically. That’s not the way I thought about the show when I was watching it, and you people are killing it with the analysis.

I’m going to run a bit counter to my point here, and explain why I loved Buffy, if you’ll forgive the fits and starts.

A few months ago, I read Twilight, and I would like to state from the outset that I’m not hating on Twilight here. I started reading Twilight with the full awareness that it was a vortex from which I would likely never emerge, and not in a bad way. I expected to be drawn in because it sounded like the books that I loved when I was a teenager, some of which I still read. The strong woman, the mysterious guy, the supernatural. Battles between good and evil, and you weren’t always sure which was which.

Admittedly, I have only read the first Twilight book and skimmed the others. It had me briefly and lost me quickly. I considered reading the second one to appear more legitimate, but I was itching to write this and who has the time? You can turn back now if you like. Choose your own adventure.

Bella is irritating, but it was more than that. Twilight felt like a snow globe. Youth, beauty, immortality: lips frozen in mid-kiss. Trapped in eternal adolescence. Everything is about that guy and don’t get me wrong, that guy matters. He floors you.

Buffy is about that guy, and it’s about being young and it’s big and dramatic like Twilight, but Buffy is also about growing up. It’s about fighting demons and staking vampires, but it’s also about friendship and loyalty and loss. It’s about how sex changes things and people, but not as a parable of virginity. It’s about mess and mistakes and patching holes in the world. And here you are. Sitting in a classroom.

It’s also about strong, deeply emotional female characters who are smoking hot and could kick your ass.

I never felt the need to articulate this, and I know it sounds like gush. This is me still thinking about Buffy the way I did when I first watched it. I wonder if people reading the Twilight books as kids or adolescents or young adults or whatever, feel the same way about Twilight. And maybe it isn’t fair for me to say that mine is better than yours.

Buffy is preserved for me, too, which is unconditional love at its most naive but hey, I never promised epiphany. For the record, I loved Matilda because I like the idea that being smart is like having a superpower. I have a soft spot for wonder women.

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The pond

Someone beat me to the comment about this review of the latest edition of harvest, posted on Overland‘s blog today:

…I wondered what I would do if said issue was really, really bad – because I have submitted work to harvest and I want to keep on their good side.

This is the weak ankle of literary criticism. People too wary of offending the journal, or the person they know, or the person who knows the person who knows the editor they want to pitch to or might meet at a launch and friend on Facebook, because we friend these days. I’m not talking about needless criticism here, and I’m not suggesting that it’s easy.

Sometimes I appreciate the literary scene here, and sometimes I feel like it’s a pond. There are other ponds, and elsewhere…I guess it’s a half-explanation for why a lot of the criticism I enjoy is online, and based overseas.

The Overland review was steered in another direction: a response by one of the harvest editors to an article about the death of literary fiction. Question mark. Not an unworthy discussion, but a persistent one. I’d like to hear the other conversation.

Just quietly.

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Cussy

I love a misread word. I was flipping through a magazine tonight and as one page dropped, I read the word ‘cussy’. Win! When I turned the page over, I saw that it was actually ‘cutesy’.

I don’t know why the writer chose cutesy over cussy. I would choose cussy over cutesy any day of the week.

I hope it features in my eulogy: “She was kind and loving, and a little bit cussy.”

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Seen and heard

In primary school, I was a good public speaker. Whenever we had mass, the teachers asked—well, told—me to read from the Bible. I liked the words. Corinthians. Gethsemane. I was proud that I could pronounce them, and that I was chosen to read on-altar when other, less potent, speakers languished in pew-obscurity.

It never occurred to me until later that the Bible is an unusually brutal book for children. Parables of kindness and compassion dancing with nailed palms and suicide and murder turned spectacle. There are a few parallels with fairy tales, I suppose. Hansel and Gretel was a loathsome favourite: what is scarier than parents surrendering their children to the forest? The witch is incidental.

Nevertheless, I didn’t feel self-conscious speaking into a microphone—never felt that I was being scrutinised or marked on pitch and pace. I was a confident speaker, because there’s no judgement in a Catholic church, right? The only person who ever criticised my oration was Sister Elizabeth, but Sister Elizabeth had a harsh word for everyone.

As a child, I often spoke thoughtlessly, until I learned what should and shouldn’t be said. That brisk confidence dissolved; or maybe I didn’t lose confidence so much as develop self-consciousness. With that awareness came a wobbly voice and a prickly cheek. When a drop of your blood colours the words, they change. Somehow entirely yours, yet so much harder to own.

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Scarf

I’d like to thank the job market, for all the spare time I had to knit this scarf. I’d like to thank free-to-air television for ensuring that there was nothing interesting to watch. Finally, I’d like to thank my mum, without whom this scarf would not have been possible.

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Whose reviews: I could have cats investigates

When Seb visited about a month ago, our dinner destination was Hu Tong—a restaurant that people were tumbling out of within days of its opening. We ordered dim sims, which I was never a fan of as a kid. Seb mentioned that dim sims have crept onto the menus of Chinese restaurants, but they’re not available in restaurants in Asia. Our deep-fried contribution to traditional Chinese cuisine.

Hu Tong is pricier than your average Melbourne dumpling castle, but since Cami Shanghai charges corkage for longnecks nowadays, all bets are off. How can one charge corkage for something that doesn’t have a cork? It’s an outrage.

The xiaolongbao make the front page at Hu Tong, and rightfully so. Georgia took a cooking class when she went to Hong Kong recently, and she learnt how to make xiaolongbao. Highly technical, I’m told. I have no knowledge of regional Chinese cuisine and to the initiated, I’m sure it’s dreadfully parochial to also comment on dim sims of all dishes—a Western construct!—but they are delicious. My friend Brad said it’s because you don’t expect dim sims to taste that good.

I read this review of Hu Tong the other day, and I remember noticing a funny thing when I booked a reservation. I had to Google Hu Tong for the phone number and there were restaurant reviews on the site. Several of them detail Hu Tong’s alleged bad service. Here’s part of a review by ‘JCLG’:

HuTong is the kind of place where I would walk in, smell some nice food, feel my stomach rumbling with the anticipation of a decent meal (xiao long bao..mmm) and, upon meeting the wait staff there, feel like they have somehow managed to use their service to turn any food you might try into cardboard…

Now, this review was posted on Eatability on 22 November, 2009. It was also posted here, strangely enough, on 22 November 2009. And what have we here? Scroll down about seven reviews and you’ll find almost the exact same comment, trimmed, under the name ‘JC’ and also posted on 22 Novermber 2009.

Here is a snippet from another review by ‘Jerri’, posted on Tummyrumbles on March 28th, 2010 at 1.21pm:

This is the worst restaurant ever! Being Chinese myself, I’d hate to tell people to not ever go to that place, but I have to because this place has no service, the staff is so rude…

Etc. You can find the same review posted here on March 28th, 2010 at 1.16pm: about five minutes before the aforementioned review was posted.

There are a number of reruns like this on different websites. Is it likely that someone would post several identical reviews on different food blogs and websites? Are they that passionate about xiaolongbao? It seems more calculated than that, and I wonder if there could be a similar issue with the verification of positive online reviews.

If you like eating out enough to trawl through food blogs, read reviews and write a 600-word blog post peddling amateur conspiracy theories, then I recommend you visit the restaurant and try for yourself.

For the record, the service at Hu Tong was great.

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The great teacher

Midway through high school, I fell sick and missed a bunch of classes. I studied pretty hard in high school, so I managed to catch up, but I struggled with maths. I never thought I was particularly good at maths, but they put me in the advanced class and I only needed to miss a few classes, a few theories, and nothing clicked. I lagged behind for a whole term.

My brother briefly became my maths tutor. My brother has remarkable patience when explaining a concept, or teaching someone how to do something. If I didn’t understand how he had solved an equation, he’d find another way and, slowly, I would understand.

Except with the unit circle, but we all have our crosses to bear.

My brother finished his Dip. Ed. last year and he’s already decided what he wants to teach. He’s spending this year working a casual job, instead of going straight into a school. He’s combing the textbooks for the subjects he wants to teach, making notes, devising lesson plans. Whenever I come across an article like this, I send it to him. He always reads them. A pragmatic guy, my brother.

Hence, I can easily imagine his annoyance at this nonsense phrase:

Those who can’t do, teach.

He should be annoyed. It’s patronising. The teaching profession is often classified as the lazy alternative to an actual career. I do know people who have admitted to pursuing teaching for want of another vocation, so I can see where that attitude partly comes from. Even so, my brother’s decision to be a teacher has nothing to with a shortage of other options.

The truth is that plenty of people can’t teach; or, rather, can’t teach well. Think about how many great teachers you’ve had over the course of your life. There aren’t many that I can count. Teaching isn’t just classrooms, either: it’s marking assignments, sketching lesson plans. It’s excursions, extra-curriculars, finding ways to teach kids with learning difficulties, behavioural problems and medical conditions that drag them away from school. To see it reduced to a snide stereotype is dispiriting.

Anwyn Crawford (who I follow on the interwebs, but don’t know personally, so it feels weird to first-name) pointed out to me on Twitter that critics are treated with similar condescension: that, supposedly, those who don’t succeed at being artists or writers choose to criticise other peoples’ art/writing instead. Bollocks. It’s a cheap way of dismissing criticism as the preserve of the never-was.

Perhaps that’s why great critics, like great teachers, are harder to come by.

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