the girl who’s afraid of foxes

Number 28 of 2008! All the 2s and 8s and stuff. Siri I apologise if I have spelt your name wrong; in spite of our long-running literary relationship I still have problems with this. You obviously should have just changed your name to Siri Auster (yes for those who don’t know Siri is Paul Auster’s wife!).

Anyway on to more focused digression, and The Sorrows of an American is a very good book. Aha, you sense some hesitation, right? Nobody says ‘very good’ without there being a but, and this is true. It left me a little disappointed compared with the ridiculously stunning What I Loved (I cannot speak highly enough of this book, it’s probably the best novel I have ever read by a female writer). Hustvedt’s writing is still largely immaculate, but the narrative is a little less stellar, and chops around a bit too much. I’m also still deliberating whether or not the ending left me a little disappointed; the final ’secrets’ seem a little anti-climactic - I know that’s possibly intentional given the context, but it still kinda makes you think ‘oh, is that all it was?’.

The story centres on a Norwegian psychiatrist Erik, who discovers a secret reference in his father’s memoirs shortly after his death. Erik and his sister Inga set about trying to discover what the reference is about, and all the while Inga is caught up in a little saga of her own relating to letters from her dead husband. Erik is also kept busy with the troubles of his new lodger Miranda and her daughter Eglantine (Eggy; the fact that she is called this annoys me no end for some reason!). Everyone’s past begins to catch up with them, unlocking secrets and complications along the way. Casting my aforementioned criticisms aside, it does make a pretty compelling read. And is it just me or has this year been ridiculously disappointing for new fiction so far??

Yay, the sister finally upgraded me to the new version of Wordpress.

Thanks doode

I think I was a little too early with my previous post detailing the landmarks of the Irish property crash, a few weeks back, as the announcement of the closure of Habitat in both Dublin and Galway surely signals that the slowing demand is now feeding through to the retail sector. 60 job losses in the services sector (eh, wasn’t this meant to be the sector of the economy holding things together in the face of adversity?) may only be the tip of the iceberg, with the furniture villages of the subs (think Sandyford et al) surely beginning to feel the chill.

I was always a big fan of Habitat, so if a company with such a high profile brand name were struggling what hope is there for the lesser stores? Perhaps the most elucidatory aspect of the whole story, is that the company had been trying to borrow funds for the past month but the bank turned them down. Obviously this in itself is an indicator that if the drop in consumer spending is affecting your business, you can forget about going to the bank to bail you out, leaving only one alternative: to shut your doors.

Dun Laoghaire Main Street is looking more and more like a ghost town by the day, and I can think of nearly a dozen shops that have closed in the past twelve months, most of which have not been replaced. One of the more recent closures was Minnie Peters (a high end interiors store, more on the classical end of things than Habitat’s urban minimalism). They have actually relocated to a new warehouse-type store in Sandyford, but I can’t help thinking it must have been nudged out that direction by higher rents and a significant drop footfall?

R.I.P. Habitat (a sad day for people with good taste in home furnishings)

Edit: no reference to Habitat is complete without a nod to the genius of Father Ted and ‘Habit-hat’

I’ve got to admit this is actually the first Pinker book I have read so I’m a bit late in getting to the linguistic party. I’m a total nerd though (you’d never have guessed, right?) so reading about how words are formed and how language reflects our thoughts and mental concepts is pretty much right up my street. The great thing is that it’s pretty accessible and very readable for the most part, though for a few chapters in the middle I lost interest a little and consequently wasn’t really paying attention fully to the bits on metaphor and concepts. To be honest I thought they were a bit too detailed for the casual reader like myself, but maybe those who have read a bit more in the topic would get more from them. Also the fact that the book started off with a 9-11 anecdote annoyed me a little (even if it did fit well with the book’s topic).

My favourite chapter was probably the one on how new words are formed (I think it’s chapter 7), and it’s amazing to think of some of the terms there still are not words for as Pinker points out, my favourite being ‘the insomnia caused by waking up with a full bladder but being too tired to get up and go to the bathroom’ But seriously, how words actually originate is something that’s bothered me a little (I mean why is a chair called a chair and not a table, dammit??), so it was good to gain a little insight here. There is also a whole chapter dedicated to profanities, which might be worth saving for a day when you’re particularly angry (trust me, the number of different swear words listed and their origins and meanings is pretty extensive). So maybe it’s not quite as nerdy and intellectual after all :p

Phonosemantics ftw!

These looked pretty cool to me. A modern version of those frames you can get for vinyl albums (which are and always will be cooler than CDs, however needs must and all that). So I decided to give them a shot and they look quite nice (bonus points for guessing the albums! Most of my CDs are resident in the attic due to a shortage of space so I couldn’t pick my favourites :() There are lots of different colours but I resisted the urge to go pink and stuck with white to match my buttermilk painted walls.

The one downside is that digipack sleeves don’t fit so I couldn’t include the lovely covers from the new Jimmy Cake and Sun Kil Moon albums. They come in quite a cool box that makes them very giftable too, and there was no postage charge so it worked out at around €25 delivered.

Here’s a pic of them Chez Foxy:

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Thank you Mr Paul Scholes

I’ve been tagged by the always-on-the-cutting-edge Sinead, so it looks like I’ll have to divulge another set of random factoids! So that makes 13 things altogether; there is obviously nothing left unknown about me now.

Here’s how it works:

Link to the person that tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Write six random things about you in a blog post.
Tag six people in your post.
Let each person know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
Let the taggee know your entry is up.

Six random things about me:

1. I absolutely adore chocolate brown corduroy. I will buy *anything* made from this fabric (especially bags!)

2. One of my favourite words (at the moment anyway!) is ‘reciprocation’

3. My favourite punctuation mark is… the semicolon! No wait, not an ellipsis or an exclamation mark, God this is confusing.

4. I’m an atheist. I never went to church growing up so it’s not just that I have latched onto the latest fashionable trend!

5. I’m seriously lacking in the life-skills department: I can’t drive, swim, knit, sew or make flat-pack furniture. The second of these always seems to shock people. Non-swimmers of the world unite, I say.

6. My favourite book is Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

I’ll tag Homespun, A Complete Explanation of Everything and Catherine. I can’t do six, sorry (How I love breaking rules.. :D)

Uh oh. I’m slowing down with my reading, I’ll never hit 100 this year

I’m a big fan of Fisky, and got pretty excited about his new one - a collection of his Comment articles from the Independent (that’s the London Independent by the way). Fisk has a great writing style that makes even the heaviest and most complicated of areas very accessible. He’s pretty much an expert on the Middle East and even though these columns are relatively short (compared with his last book on the Middle East that is, which looks like three phone books stuck together) he manages to deal with some pretty complex arguments. It’s not all about heated political situations however, there are some great personal stories thrown in here too, and lots of Irish references as well (John Banville, Maeve Binchy and Vincent Browne all get a mention among others).

It’s laid out thematically which means that it’s more of a book that you can dip in and out of rather than read all at once. I adopted the latter approach and found some of it a little repetitive as a result, but I can’t blame Fisk for that, given that they are newspaper columns obviously designed to be digested one at a time. They’re great for the train though, you can easily get through four or five columns on a 20 minute journey. Just don’t bring it every day

Robert Fisk ftw!

Last night I met a few people in Doyles for a drink and a friend gave me an uncorrected proof copy of the new Siri Hustvedt which made my week (possibly even my month, aside from the day I found out I got a place on a Masters cource in UCD starting in September). I’ve been waiting for The Sorrow of an American for months now, and will delve into it straight after Stephen Pinker’s Stuff of Thought which I borrowed from work yesterday.

I’ve got to say, I have often been a defender of the soi-disant Rip-off Ireland. You try running a coffee shop where you have to pay ridiculous rents, relatively high wages and insurance costs, and where people often sit around nursing nothing more than a pot of tea for an hour or so. To charge €2 odd for a cup of coffee is not exorbitant in this context, especially if both the service and coffee arebgood. And to be honest, it’s up to the individual to put in a bit of legwork before complaining: there are plenty of decent places that charge reasonable prices in Dublin, there are also ones that don’t, but you can’t tar them all with the same brush.

 What I do object to is the current pricing arrangements in many (all?) of the major retail stores where goods are priced in Sterling as well as euro. Take books for example. I have checked new release titles in three different large book stores, and all are using the £1GBP = €1.50 approximation of the good old days. The books usually carry a date on the back of when they arrived in the store (this is so staff can tell if they are within the time period for returns to the publisher), and they were all dated within the last ten days.

Now I don’t expect for a second that shops will be changing their exchange rate conversions with the latest daily rate, but for the last few weeks the Sterling to euro rate has been between €1.25-1.30. Even if they knocked it down to around the €1.35 it would at least represent a decent compromise. A typical book priced at £7.99 with a 55% discount would cost the retailer £3.60. The shops in question were selling this for around €12, give or take a few cent. £3.60 converts to €4.55 at the moment. Suddenly the gross margin of 55% has increased into 62% pretty effortlessly. Strangely enough, when Sterling appreciates, the increased euro price seems to get passed on straight away. I have noticed that some of the smaller shops are being much fairer on this front: The Exchange Bookshop in Dalkey last week had the new Robert Fisk book (£15) priced at an almost too cheap €17!

Niiiice. Thanks guys.