Bathroom Literature, not Bathroom Reading

Today I head to the Internet for bathroom novels. I am on the quest, because I have almost, finally finished reading Clochemerle (translated in its most recent version as The Scandals of Clochemerle for some reason) by Gabriel Chevallier. I have been reading it in old Penguin edition that was my father's. Why I have been reading this so slowly, I do not know. However, one reason is that if for some reason became a bathroom book, for which my New Yorker usually takes precedence. More pertinent to this exercise is that the novel deals with the ramifications over plans to install a new urinal in the village square of the small French town of Clochemerle (based on the real village of Vaux- en-Beaujolais).

[I do need to put in an aside. Clochemerte is certainly not well known in the United States or, even in France if you believe this blogger. However, it is an entertaining read, and there was what appears to be a fairly memorable 1972 BBC production, which I am looking forward to watching. It could be worth its own essay at some point.]

Among other books that I have read during the long reading of this book was Sanitary Centennial: And Selected Short Stories (Texas Pan American Series) by the Argentinian Fernando Sorrentino. A collection of shorter fiction, the title piece is a novella about an advertising copywriter who is assigned to write stirring hype trumpeting a toilet manufacturer's centennial. Thus, the connection--bathroom facilities.

Curious to know if anyone else has connected these two books and, if so, whether there are others that I should be reading in this "genre" of bathroom fiction, I began my Google search for "sanitary centennial" and clochemerle and, behold, ZERO hits! Enough to get the internet wanderlust moving!!

Hakone Maru II

In response to a comment to my earlier post from a reader about whether there are passenger lists, I looked some more and sure enough one can access passenger list. In particular, I need to find the one for my father's trip, which, according to the UK National Archives, landed in Liverpool on 17 February 1940. Looks like Ancestry.co.uk has all the passenger lists. Also, check out lists here

Food in Literature: Making it Real (Part I-A)

Not ready to head back into the trenches for Part II, but I came across a new blog which would have been a wonderful find when I wrote Food in Literature: Making it Real (Part I) that I had to at least make acknowledgement of it. In Yummy Books, Chef Cara draws on the "connection between eating and reading" that she has always had along with her feeling that "some of the most romantic, most poignant scenes in literature are scenes of cooking and eating" to create blog posts about food scenes and building recipes and photo essays about making those recipes.

Thus, one can find, among other things, "Miss Havisham’s Toasted Almond Cherry Bride Cake" complete with "speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it" and Marcel Proust's "Swann's Ways Madeleines."

Update: November 2012: See "Fictional Foods: No Empty Calories" from Wall St. Journal.

Food in Literature: Making it Real (Part I)

The search begins because of our plan to have a "literary" theme to our neighborhood gourmet club when it is our turn to host. While my only immediate connection to this goes back many years to my reading the Nero Wolfe novels by Rex Stout, our idea would not be focused on just one author, so my Internet wandering begins by wondering how to find more recipes from novels.

My first effort was for "literary recipes". This led me to a series of books which does NOT interest me: cookbooks "inspired" by literature. Thus, one can find Literary Feasts: Recipes from the Classics of Literature by Barbara Scrafford, which "explores the significance of food in literature" by putting together recipes that will replicate a famous meal from a book, The Book Lover's Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Celebrated Works of Literature, and the Passages That Feature Themby Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Jensen (Author), Literary Feasts: Inspired Eating from Classic Fictionby Sean Brand, and The Book Club Cookbookby Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp, which "guides readers in selecting and preparing culinary masterpieces that tie in just right with the literary masterpieces their club is reading".

Before changing searches, however, I did make one interesting connection to an Abe Books blog posting on "Louisa May Alcott’s Apple Slump", which certainly seems to provide an example of what I was looking for. While it is just one lone recipe from one lone author, its inspiration was a new blog "Paper and Salt." But I got disappointed since that blog was a step back to my first search "recreating the favorite recipes of famous authors." Oh well.

Back to a new search. After a detour for Nero Wolfe recipes, which led me to the classic The Nero Wolfe Cookbookwhich I will consider acquring, I went for  "novels with recipes"

and that led me to an Epi-Log blog posting on "The Best Novels with Recipes (Or Novels with the Best Recipes)". At least someone is on the same wavelength, but no systematic effort here, but a source for a number of comments that clearly could be food for thought (ha-ha). But the next hit was  intellectual pay dirt, even if no the Holy Grail:

In the April 9, 2007, issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik wrote about "Cooked Books: Real Food from Fictional Recipes". Here, following a debate that had been going on in TLS (guess that may need to be my next search!) he writes:

There are four kinds of food in books: food that is served by an author to characters who are not expected to taste it; food that is served by an author to characters in order to show who they are; food that an author cooks for characters in order to eat it with them; and, last (and most recent), food that an author cooks for characters but actually serves to the reader.

So, now I know--I have been finding some of the first two or three types, but what I want is type four. As Gopnik spells that one out in further detail: "And then there are writers, ever more numerous, who present on the page not just the result but the whole process—not just what people eat but how they make it, exactly how much garlic is chopped, and how, and when it is placed in the pan." And, he notes, that "Sometimes entire recipes are included in the text, a practice that links Kurt Vonnegut’s “Deadeye Dick” to Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn.” That, my friends, will be the Holy Grail--a collection of "entire recipes" served up "in the text" itself. Gopnik gives a taste of the path--as he tells us of his attempts "to mimic some cooking as it is done in a number of relatively recent novels"--but really just a taste, just enough to continue on ones quest.

But, that will be for another day ... this posting is already too much. So let us call this an appetizer. [I subsequently have written an addendum but have yet to develop a promised Part II!]

Rachel, Rachel, Whereforth Art Thou? Cardholder Services Isn't Good Enough For You

I don't know if you have ever gotten a call from Rachel, but many of us have. Even many of us who have registered our phone numbers on the Do Not Call list. But, she is one persistent telephoner, this "Rachel from Cardholder Services." Not answering, hanging up, etc., doesn't take much effort, but inquiring minds wonder, what is in it for Rachel? What does SHE get out of her constant  phone calls? Always assuring us that nothing is wrong, but that she would be happy to help lower our credit card rates.

Well, inquiring minds must wander to the Internet and, when they do, they will find fellow wonderers galore! A Google phrase search for "rachel from cardholder services" brings up over 19,000 hits, while a search for "rachel at cardholder services" yields another 8,000 plus, although just searching for cardholder services complaints will bring you millions! [Note "rachel with cardholder services" is a meager 1,000 hits; "rachel of" is less than 2,000; and ] But, whether Rachel is FROM or AT Cardholder Services, her Internet followers are often full of anger, trying to learn how to get rid of her. Many people claim to know her telephone number (those not in the dark ages without caller ID), only to find out that she has many of them.

So, can we learn anything from a random sampling of these hits?

The LA Times tries to be helpful with a serious article on "How to stop telemarketing calls from 'Rachel'". I am not sure that belittling her by setting her name off in single quotes is all the helpful! 

On Facebook, she probably has no friends, but that doesn't stop others from yelling at her: see, for example, "Shut Down Rachel from Cardholder Services".


Others take personal action, with Brent Jones writing Rachel an open letter, asking her not call him anymore. But we don't know that she reads, only that she calls!
 
Frank Michels has risen about the fray and tried to seek a real personal relationship. However, in his account of "My Date with Rachel from Cardholder Services" there is humor, no true love.

More important, what does Rachel really want?

According to Randall Hoth with the Wisconsin Better Business Bureau: “We know it’s just a random, robotic call, to try to establish that this phone number is a real, active phone number.” Hoth says those numbers can be compiled into lists that can then in turn be sold to telemarketers. If that is true, then not answering may not help one at all, since getting to an answering machine would serve the same value.

Another article has an FTC official stating:

James Davis of the FTC's midwest region said the "Rachel message" is actually an audio file that has been popular with illegal telemarketers for some time. He adds that the credit card interest rate reduction "service" sold by the telemarketers can cost hundreds of dollars and is often ineffective — or something the consumer can do for himself for free by contacting a credit card company directly. "


The Rachel message has been used by a lot of different dialers and a lot of different boiler rooms," Davis said. "It's very effective in getting people to press 1 and get transferred to the boiler room. One of the misperceptions about this kind of conduct is that there is some monolithic entity out there named 'Card Services' or 'Cardholder Services' that's responsible for all the calls when in fact it's multiple different people or entities engaged in different conduct in different places."

But, I will conclude with the following screed from YouTube!

My Father Travels on the Hakone Maru in 1940: My Internet Travels From 1921 to 1943

Unlike my other internet wanderings and wonderings, the following will not flow from stream of consciousness. Rather, it presents some of my fascinating discoveries after cleaning up some memories my father put down in 1994. Specifically, these track his escape from Europe after World War II began and his travels from Italy (where he had been at university) to the United States, highlighted by several months in jail in limbo in Lisbon. For this wandering, the important point is how he got from Italy to Portugal:

Being stranded in Trieste where we did not know anyone was a serious predicament. We had wasted precious resources on the trip, lost time and parted with some of our belongings. We made the rounds of shipping agents and talked with all sorts of persons in the port. I cannot remember precise details - but somehow we learned that Japanese freighters passed through Naples on their way from the Orient to England and that they might offer an escape route. The information seemed reliable enough to justify the trip by train to Naples where, sure enough, we ascertained that the "Hakone Maru," a Jap half-freighter, was scheduled for arrival from Singapore in early February with final destination Liverpool and intermediate stops at Marseilles, Gibraltar and Casablanca.

Dad writes about his travel on this ship and concerns the ship's purser had with taking several German refugees, but my immediate goal was to see what else I could find out about the ship, and find out I did. My immediate objective to find some pictures was easy:

But looking for more, I found more. See after the jump:

How Tall is Harvey the Invisible Rabbit?

Inquiring minds wanted to know, so the quickest route to an answer is, of course, Google, and the quickest answer, of course, is Wikipedia, which describes Harvey as "a six-foot, three-and-one-half-inch tall rabbit." Now the movie was based on a play by Mary Chase, and Wikipedia says Harvey was the same height as in the movie, but according to AnswersUniverse, Chase has the rabbit at "six feet, one and a half inches tall" and that the movie rabbit was taller, to match Jimmy Stewart's height.While I could not find the play on line, an online study guide backs this up and describes Harvey as "a six foot one-and-a-half inch tall white rabbit." Accordingly, I have now edited Wikipedia to correct that.

However unfortunately further inquiring minds in this household demanded to know whether that was with ears or without! Thus, further wandering began, and no answers appeared. However, those searching for Harvey will find:

• Steven Spielberg once pursued doing a new version of Harvey, but that projcect was abandoned in 2009, but in that story Harvey is said to be six and a half feet tall.
• Harvey has both a Facebook page and a Twitter account, but neither with much activity.
• Harvey placed only eighth on the list of the Top 10 Bunnies in the movies.
• Harvey has turned religious and there is a website devoted to his apocryphal writings
• Harvey ran a "'Rock Era' Songs Tournament" in which the winning song was "Jailhouse Rock" by Elvis Presley.
• Harvey has been adopted commercially in various places, including becoming visible and 26' tall in Aloha, Oregon, but was retired as a representative of Harvey Software, where his ears once represented " DOS shell that sat in the background as an invisible helper."

Oh well, as for whether to include the ears or not, I think the telling answer is that noone has answered the question What do you measure a rabbits height in?