Then I finished my PhD and I had to decide whether I wanted to be an academic. I knew that I wanted the centre of my life to be reading books and having ideas and talking about them with people, but of course I knew from my other three communities that academia wasn’t the only place to do that. At that time, it seemed to me that my two options were:

1. Be an academic; or
2. Be a legal secretary by day and a theorist/novelist by night. (Actually, the plan was to be a legal secretary by night and a theorist/novelist by day: someone once told me that the big law firms in London employ night-shift secretaries, which would have been like my perfect job and is still a road not taken for me, though of course mostly I did audio typing and presumably there will not be jobs in that field for much longer.[YouTube link])

I decided to be an academic for two reasons. The first was that academics have much easier access to the cool stuff – especially in the UK, where university libraries are not open to the public. (Seriously, UKers, in Australia you can just WALK IN OFF THE STREET to any university library, sit down, and read all the books! It is amazing!**) But, basically, if you work at a university you get free access to books, inter-library loans, journal subscriptions, etc, which are hard to access from the outside.

And the second reason, which was really the more important one, was that it struck me that, basically, over my five years at Leeds, almost all the important ideas/conversations/things to read that had come my way had done so in snatched moments in the corridor between one class and the next meeting. (Oh, Ika, I meant to tell you about this book I read about Rome, and that was how I discovered Michel Serres…) Being a lone scholar, working as a legal secretary by day and reading/writing by night, I just wasn’t going to be in the kind of space that would maximise my chances of those random encounters that, in practice, were what shaped my work and my thought.

I really like working in academia, and I’ve had an uncharacteristically easy ride of it. I haven’t been through the post-doc/one-year-teaching-fellow precarious hypermobile can-I-still-live-with-my-girlfriend mill. I got a full-time permanent job at Bristol University within a year of completing my PhD, and by the time I was ready to move on [<--euphemism] I got another full-time permanent job here at Wollongong within about two years of seriously starting to search. Which was nice. [YouTube link]

But academia isn’t, and shouldn’t be, and mustn’t be, the only place where knowledge is produced and shared and transmitted. Most of the fields I’ve been most energized by and enjoy working in the most have been co-produced by people working in the academy and people working outside it: feminism, queer theory, reception theory/fan studies. But those two barriers to intellectual work and community outside the academy still remain: access to books, journals, ideas; and access to communities of thought where random, everyday interactions can occur and spark things.

All of this is preamble to sharing two links with you. One is to the Call for Papers for a book called The Para-Academic Handbook, co-edited by the amazing feminist philosopher Alex Wardrop and the excellent ‘researcher who makes things’ Deborah Withers:

Frustrated by the lack of opportunities to research, create learning experiences or make a basic living within the university on our own terms, para-academics don’t seek out alternative careers in the face of an evaporated future, we just continue to do what we’ve always done: write, research, learn, think, and facilitate that process for others… As the para-academic community grows there is a real need to build supportive networks, share knowledge, ideas and strategies that can allow these types of interventions to become sustainable and flourish. There is a very real need to create spaces of solace, action and creativity.

The other is an interview with the also amazing Eileen Joy, co-director of the ‘para-academic’ punctum books, an open-access and print-on-demand academic publisher:

Given that the University (writ large across many different sorts of institutions – an actual network of site(s) but also an Ideal) ought to be the place where we practice free speech (Foucault’s “fearless speech,” in my view) as well as put into place Derrida’s “university without condition,” it seems to us at punctum that academic/public intellectual writing should be made widely accessible to whoever, wherever, wants to read it… What we need now, in the academy as well as the world, is more, and not less, thought, more, and not less, experimentation, more, and not less, “free play” of ideas.

Read! Write! Enjoy!

*The Barbelith Underground was founded and run by Tom Coates, who was writing ‘don’t-go-to-grad-school’ blog posts back in 2004, n00bs.

**People don’t seem to, though.

Reception, in a word, is a way of talking about books (and other texts) which takes into account the different meanings we make out of them and the different uses we have for them, and which tries to make as visible and sharable as possible the processes by which we come to make meanings out of books. The paper argues that although “talking about books” is an everyday and ordinary experience, which doesn’t require any special expertise beyond literacy (by the way, why not donate to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation?), it’s surprisingly difficult to map the complex, interrelating and often invisible forces and structures, from many different domains of human experience, which make those everyday conversations possible. I write in the paper:

What is in a book – even at the apparently simple or literal level, the level of the events which make up the plot, of what happens in a narrative – is not a simple question, then. It cannot be answered simply with reference to the ‘words on the page’, not only because those words themselves are the end product, not the origin, of interpretative acts, but also because in order to become meaningful, these words need to be interpreted, and they are interpreted according to particular conventions or rules which cannot be extrapolated from the ‘text itself’, from the words on the page: these rules come from outside the text. A lot of what a book is is not in the book, but in its context, or in its readers.

Given that, the central question of the book I’m writing is this:

Anything can mean anything – so why, in practice, doesn’t it? How do we know that Macbeth is not a murder mystery? Who decides which readings are legitimate, which contexts are appropriate and which are inappropriate?

This is the point where talking about books (or talking about talking about books) cannot avoid engaging with history, sociology, politics, and cultural studies. Reading is not an individual act which takes place in the privacy of the reader’s mind: it is a sociocultural system, involving an intricately knotted set of relationships between reader and text, reader and other readers, reader and institution, reader and context(s). Successfully producing and circulating a new reading of a text therefore involves a struggle not so much against the text as against other readers, institutions or disciplines.

The work of producing a new reading involves a struggle not just on the conceptual level, over meaning or interpretation, but also, on the level of institutional and even state power, a struggle over legitimacy and over truth. The right to produce and circulate one’s own meanings – to insist on one’s own truth – is central to the workings of literary studies as a discipline, but its implications go far beyond the boundaries of that discipline, connecting disciplinary and conceptual struggles to broader political projects of resistance. Indeed, many (if not all) contemporary political and legal struggles can be understood as interventions into what words or texts are able, in specific contexts, to mean: must the word ‘marriage’ refer only to a relationship between a man and a woman? Must the word ‘woman’ refer to someone who was assigned female at birth? These are not simply abstract questions of interpretation: they have concrete effects on the legal status, privileges and rights of many people.

What I’m hoping to do on this blog is to talk about the work of producing readings, both theoretically – in posts like this one – and practically, in posts like the one I made a few months ago on the world-building in The Hunger Games. I hope you’ll find it interesting – and I hope people will respond with works and readings of their own.

In April this year, while on research leave in Melbourne, I interviewed for, was offered, and accepted a post in the department of English Literatures at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales. Because of the mismatch between the UK academic year (which runs from October to June) and the Australian academic year (March to, um, November?), I then returned to Bristol for a semester. I’ll finish at Bristol on 25 January, fly out on 29 January, and start at UoW on 1 February 2013.

I’m very excited about the new job. Wollongong looks like a brilliant university, with a fantastic reputation for teaching. I’m going to have some really interesting colleagues, and the possibility of research and teaching collaborations with Cultural Studies and Creative Writing.

I also want to use the move as a springboard for starting to use this blog a bit differently. You’ll see I’ve changed my ‘About’ page and put up a list of publications: I’m hoping to post a little less randomly, and to use this blog more consistently to think and write about topics connected with reception. (This is not too hard, as basically all topics are connected to reception.) Hence the new URL, and the new look, for a new year, a new job, and a new country.

Happy 2013 to everyone. I hope it’s a good one.

It’s under a fold for length and spoilers (main body is spoiler-free, but footnotes contain minor spoilers for the Hunger Games themselves).

One of the many things I heard about this book before I read it was that it is, in some sense, ‘about’ food. Certainly food functions in it as one of the main markers of the difference between the Capitol and the Districts, and between individual Districts (the cultural differences between the Districts are reflected in their different kinds of bread, for example). (Don’t worry, I’m not going to start in on the bread again. Though I could.) But the way food is acquired in the Capitol just very literally doesn’t make any sense. Here’s a couple of passages, the first from when Katniss is hanging out alone in her fancy quarters in the Capitol (p.92):

I programme the wardrobe for an outfit to my taste. The windows zoom in and out on parts of the city at my command. You need only whisper a type of food from a gigantic menu into a mouthpiece and it appears, hot and steamy, before you in less than a minute.

It’s actually impossible to tell whether this is Star-Trek-style replicator technology (a machine produces whatever food you name), an automated process (voice recognition software triggers a… gigantic vending machine? Which then shoots the food towards you through a… pipe?), or more-or-less room service, with a human bringing Katniss the food, but not registering in the text. If the last option seems unlikely, by the way, there is at least one other place in the text where Katniss does talk about being served food by humans in a way which renders them just as invisible as this. It’s while she’s on the train to the Capitol (p. 67):

The moment I slide into my chair I’m served an enormous platter of food. Eggs, ham, piles of fried potatoes. A tureen of fruit sits in ice to keep it chilled. The basket of rolls they set before me would keep my family going for a week. There’s an elegant glass of orange juice…

So Katniss has a history of concentrating on food to the extent that she blocks out the presence of other people in the room (or at least the presence of the serving staff: Effie Trinket, Peeta and Haymitch are present in the scene above and they’re all described in some detail, while the staff are just ‘they’.).

But I digress. The point of the passage above is simply that it’s unclear whether the Capitol has replicator technology. The passage I really wanted to talk about is this one, when Katniss is having lunch with her stylist, Cinna (p.79):

Cinna… presses a button on the side of the table. The top splits and from below rises a second tabletop that holds our lunch. Chicken and chunks of oranges cooked in a creamy sauce laid on a bed of pearly white grain, tiny green peas and onions, rolls shaped like flowers, and for dessert, a pudding the colour of honey.

I try to imagine assembling this meal myself back home. Chickens are too expensive, but I could make do with a wild turkey. I’d need to shoot a second turkey to trade for an orange. Goat’s milk would have to substitute for cream. We can grow peas in the garden. I’d have to get wild onions from the woods [BECAUSE GROWING ONIONS IN THE GARDEN, OBVIOUSLY, THAT'S JUST CRAZY TALK.]. I don’t recognize the grain… Fancy rolls would mean another trade with the baker, perhaps for two or three squirrels. As for the pudding, I can’t even guess what’s in it. Days of hunting and gathering for this one meal and even then it would be a poor substitute for the Capitol version.

What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by?

And here, at the point where Collins seems most aware of the politics and economics of the distribution of labour, is the moment where she reveals her most profound ignorance – and a large part of the fantasy structure of the book’s economics and politics. Because actually, even though Cinna gets the food at the touch of a button, that’s not how it came into being. Someone grew the peas, picked the wild onions, killed the chicken, grew the orange, shipped them all to the Capitol, traded them to the person who cooked them. Unless they have replicator technology, in which case someone invented the technology, mined the minerals for the replicator, manufactured the replicator, shipped the replicator and installed it in Cinna’s sofa, laboured to produce fuel to power the replicator, dealt with the toxic waste from the old-model replicator that this one replaced. Either way, all those hours that it would have taken you to get this meal together, Katniss – those hours were spent by someone. By lots of someones.

So at exactly the point where we might register the injustices caused by the inequalities between the people who labour to produce food and the people who consume it, instead what we register as an injustice is the fact that some people – even Katniss! – can’t have everything they want at the touch of a button. The invisibilization of labour on which the production of the meal depends, on Cinna’s level of the narrative (to Cinna, the labour which produces the meal is invisible), is repeated, not critiqued, at the authorial/readerly level (it remains just as invisible to us). Notice the question Katniss never asks, a question we (as readers) actually can’t deduce the answer to from the information we’re given: Where did this food come from? Who made it? Who should I thank for it? The only question is: Why can’t I have it without having to work for it?

The thing that’s very clear from the massively wasteful, resource-heavy, high-tech, consumer culture of the Capitol is that the District system (I looked up the wiki too, to see if this would be covered in the later books, but it’s not) would be absolutely insufficient to sustain the Capitol’s lifestyle. There are no mining districts for minerals, other than coal. The power produced by the coal mined from one near-exhausted seam is clearly not enough for the kinds of things we see the Capitol do. The only way this social system can work, I realized, is if my throwaway snarky comment from the last post (the Capitol isn’t dependent on the people of District 13 for power but only forces them to mine to humilate them) is true. There must be a whole shadow economy alongside the District system to enable the Capitol to sustain its lifestyle: there must be a Third World outside Panem on which Panem really depends.

And this, although I’m pretty sure Suzanne Collins doesn’t know it, is the most damning parallel between Panem and the contemporary U.S. – which runs off exactly this kind of ‘shadow’ economy, and off the fantasy that it doesn’t. The Hunger Games reflects a USian fantasy about a self-sufficient country with a hard-working, outdoorsy, frontier-type working-class (or possibly, depending on how you read Katniss’s father’s secret survival knowledge, a wise, in-tune-with-nature indigenous class) – but the fantasized system it constructs both requires and renders invisible the productive labour of a huge class of people whom the book simply fantasizes out of existence.

I will never have the time to do this, but I’d love to do a proper Marxist/Freudian reading of The Hunger Games (and the Harry Potter books too), tracing the exact psychic mechanisms by which the economic realities of late consumer capitalism are deformed, repressed, substituted, denied, split, etc. A social universe which makes no sense to this extent should reveal an awful lot about what we think social systems need, how they work, what they’re for.

I’m struggling to express what I mean here, so here’s a self-contained example which I hope will clarify it, and serve to end this post, which has got too long again.**

One of the things I was struck by when I was reading The Hunger Games was the idea that there should be a District Fourteen where they do all the research and development for all that tech: there’s a throwaway reference to ‘the Capitol’s labs’, but otherwise, again, there’s no sense that in order to have a lot of cutting-edge technology, you have to have a lot of highly educated scientists, engineers, and makers, and provide those people with the resources they need to come up with more technology: laboratories, materials, assistants, cleaners, time to think, a developed system to disseminate and exchange ideas. But there’s absolutely no mention of a university in Panem. So one of the social/economic fantasies that this book is expressing is the idea that it is possible to produce new technologies without a university sector.

This may be true, of course (although Collins doesn’t provide any alternative means of giving people access to the information and training they need to become scientific/technological researchers), but it’s – well, it’s sort of alarming for me as a university lecturer to imagine that most people think the university sector could simply be removed from the social structure without any negative effects, but beyond that, it’s really interesting. It reminded me, too, of J K Rowling’s official statement that there is no wizarding university in the Potterverse.

As someone who’s really invested in the idea of the university, and in the idea that universities have important functions to serve for the societies they’re in, I’m really struck by the fact that two of the most popular and widely-circulated imaginary societies of the last couple of decades completely omit the university,*** as extraneous to their concerns, as unnecessary. What does this mean? What kinds of fantasies about knowledge-production, about education, about the place of research in society, underpin this omission?

And this is a small enough project – unlike a tracing of the whole set of fantasies which underpin The Hunger Games’ throwaway worldbuilding (on what basis has Collins decided what can be left out, and what must be put in?) – for me to envisage doing something about it. When I carried on thinking about it, I realized that where imaginary universes do have universities, they’re very often located in the past. I recently reread Diana Wynne Jones’s The Year of the Griffin, which I wish I could get every first-year university student IN THE WORLD to read, and not only is that a fantasy society (and hence, broadly, imaginatively associated with the mediaeval over the modern, although one of its lead characters is a genetic biologist, so, go figure), but also, the plot is about how the university used to be a fantastic resource for its society until it became completely instrumental to the chief industry of the nation, at which point all the knowledge died out, and we have to recall the Great Founder of the University to put things right in a Return-of-the-King-style classic high-fantasy ending. So a university doubly associated with the past, there. And of course the most popular/famous speculative-fiction representation of a university in recent years must be Pratchett’s Unseen University: again, a quasi-mediaeval world.

So this has spun off completely from The Hunger Games now, to the extent that I might in all seriousness do a special journal article or a book of essays about contemporary representations/constructions of the university, and/or possibly how they’ve changed over time (I don’t know if education/universities are more common in SF from the 1970s and 1980s, or if it’s just that I read more high-minded SF from the 1970s and 1980s and trashier contemporary SF). Would any of you be interested in this (or know anyone who would?) Do you have suggestions for books to read or research already being done on this topic?

*Okay, just quickly: (1) it is a wilderness-survival deal, not a gladiatorial fight to the death as I was promised; (2) I didn’t even learn anything about wilderness survival beyond the classic Katniss gem ‘Water flows downhill’; (3) where are the cameras and why do they not get destroyed by the fireballs, etc; (4) this would be PHENOMENALLY boring to watch; (5) what is the audience’s investment, anyway? The Ancient Romans never altered the rules of a gladiatorial contest because they were following the contestants’ ‘emotional journey’; (6) HOW do you write 200 VERY BORING pages about a gladiatorial fight to the death and never clarify how your protagonist feels about killing or about the system which has forced her into it; (7) if you’re not going to clarify those feelings, could you possibly SPARE US the ‘OMG I don’t know if a BOY likes me, I don’t know if I like a BOY’, which frankly makes me feel a bit sick when I have to cut back and forth between that and teenagers getting eaten by a pack of mutant dogs.

***I typed here “There are lots of other things that are absent in both, of course, like cleaners”, but then I remembered that of course Rowling has the House Elves. I’m not sure I can think offhand of other things that are absent from both universes. Oh – ha, homosexuality, of course. [Yes, yes, Dumbledore, I know.]

I’m about three-and-a-half chapters in to The Hunger Games now, and the main thing that strikes me – apart from the fact that the lead character appears to be a psychopath, which I find a bit peculiar in terms of how and where my sympathies are being solicited/directed – is how fundamentally the universe doesn’t make any sense. I think this is because the author is so profoundly embedded in contemporary urban consumer capitalism that even when she’s writing a book whose major selling point is its depiction of a dystopic future subsistence economy/totalitarian regime… she basically makes it all about shopping.

I found this annoying enough to want to go in fairly slow motion through the opening chapters of the book, trying to figure out exactly where and how the worldbuilding is broken. So that’s what this post is for. I’m going to go through the first few chapters more or less in order, but occasionally refer forwards or backwards when I needed to combine textual details/information to make sense of something (or when I couldn’t help combining textual details/information even though it stopped the text from making any sense whatsoever).

This is a very, very long post, so I’ve put it under a fold:

Without further ado, here’s the opening of the book:

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother… I… see them[:] My little sister, Prim, curled up on her side, cocooned in my mother’s body.

So they all sleep in the same room – because they’re poor, I guess – but they have two separate beds. Because… they’re not that poor? Because there are strong cultural taboos about parents and children being in the same bed, but not against them being in the same room, like in… no other society I’ve ever heard of. Like when you go to a hotel, maybe.

Anyway, Prim usually sleeps in with Katniss, but when she needs comfort, and only then, she goes in with her mother. Because this is easier and more comforting than snuggling in to the person she’s already sleeping with, for some reason.

So eight sentences in, the only thing I have discovered about this universe is that the layout of Katniss’s family home is (a) economically/historically nonsensical and (b) designed to create a constant incestuous competition for who-gets-to-sleep-with-the-beautiful-little-blonde-girl-child.

I tried to drown [our cat] in a bucket when Prim brought him home. Scrawny kitten, belly swollen with worms, crawling with fleas… I had to let him stay. It turned out OK. My mother got rid of the vermin and he’s a born mouser.

Surely the cat got rid of the vermin if he’s a born mouser…? Oh, no, wait, I see. (This turns out to be one of those books where the author doesn’t like repeating nouns and uses irritating circumlocutions instead: I should have realized that when Prim named the cat Buttercup, insisting that his muddy yellow coat matched the bright flower. Later, when Collins is bored of using the word ‘vomit’ we’re going to get the particularly stylish and natural-sounding phrase ‘the slippery vile stuff from his stomach’, too. [p.58])

I swing my legs off the bed and slide into my hunting boots… I pull on trousers, a shirt…

Boots before trousers. Good plan, Katniss. I can see you are very competent and intelligent. Perhaps the trousers are very wide? This seems like a bad choice for trousers when you are going hunting, but what do I know.

On the table, under a wooden bowl to protect it from hungry rats and cats alike, sits a perfect little goat’s cheese wrapped in basil leaves. Prim’s gift to me on reaping day.

She got it from the organic delicatessen round the corner, I expect. Because if she had a goat, and produced goat’s cheese on a regular basis, this wouldn’t be much of a gift, would it? Because they would be eating it all the time, right?

Anyway, off she goes with her goat’s cheese and her enormous trousers (p.5):

Separating the Meadow from the woods, in fact enclosing all of District 12, is a high chain-link fence… it’s supposed to be electrified twenty-four hours a day as a deterrent to the predators that live in the woods… that used to threaten our streets. But since we’re lucky to get two or three hours of electricity in the evening, it’s usually safe to touch.

So who’s in charge of this fence? It encloses all of District 12, as if the Capitol put it up to keep people in, but it’s electrified (everywhere, or only in this section by the woods?) to protect the streets from the predators, so did the District electrify it? Did the Capitol put it up and then the District decided to electrify it? Can you electrify a fence that’s not designed to be electric? If it’s rarely live, how come they don’t have predators on the streets any more?

Oh, look, Collins has thought that bit through, at least (pp.5-6):

Electrified or not, the fence has been successful at keeping the flesh-eaters out of District 12

But… then why electrify it? Especially with an unreliable electricity supply? Hmm. ‘She’s thought that bit through’ might have been a bit of an overstatement.

[In the woods beyond the fence] there’s also food if you know how to find it. My father knew and he taught me some ways before he [died].

But obviously most of the people living in the subsistence economy and dying of starvation (‘Starvation’s not an uncommon fate in District 12′, p.33) have not bothered to figure out how to obtain FREE FOOD, because… they’re stupid? They’re brainwashed by the Capitol’s propaganda? There are such effective measures against going into the woods that most people would prefer to die of starvation than face the consequences of their actions?

Even though trespassing in the woods is illegal and poaching carries the severest of penalties, more people would risk it if they had weapons.

Okay, they won’t go into the woods because they don’t have weapons and they’re scared of predators. But why don’t they have weapons, Katniss? Seeing as you have decided to spend the day explaining the rationale behind everything you see to yourself?

My bow is a rarity, crafted by my father… My father could have made good money selling them, but if the officials found out he would have been publicly executed for inciting a rebellion. Most of the Peacekeepers turn a blind eye to the few of us who hunt because they’re as hungry for fresh meat as anybody is. In fact, they’re among our best customers. But the idea that someone might be arming the Seam would never have been allowed.

This looks like an attempt to fix a plot hole (weapons are banned, but some people have weapons), which just ends up creating more plot holes and hurting my head. Are the ‘Peacekeepers’ and the ‘officials’ the same people? Because the ‘Peacekeepers’ clearly have found out that some of the people of the Seam have weapons, because they buy meat from them. But if the officals found out, they would publicly execute the people with weapons. Or maybe Peacekeepers and officials are the same, and the point Collins is trying to make is that you can use weapons, but not sell them? But why would this be? Or is it that her father is the only person who can make weapons, so if he doesn’t sell them, no-one can have any? Why is her father the only person who knows how to make weapons and what foods are edible? Where did he learn it and why does he keep all this knowledge to himself when his neighbours are starving?

Also, just to note, the Peacekeepers live in the District and are subjected to the same living conditions as the others. That seems like a weird way to run a violently repressive society: usually the overseers get better food.

In the autumn, a few brave souls sneak into the woods to harvest apples. But always in sight of the Meadow. Always close enough to run back to the safety of District 12 if trouble arises.

So people do go into the woods, after all. It seems that the ‘trouble’ that might arise is probably predators in the woods, since staying in sight of the Meadow sounds like an excellent way to get caught by the officials for trespassing in the woods, which, we remember, is illegal. But nobody is worried about this. Any more. Though they were a couple of paragraphs ago.

On another note, it’s a bit of a shame that no-one has thought to save the seeds from their apples and grow their own apple trees, but oh well, you can’t think of everything anything.

Anyway, finally we have escaped from p.6, which is a particular doozy of a page, and Katniss goes on to muse about her tactics for survival in a repressive regime (p.7):

Do my work quietly in school. Make only polite small talk in the public market. Discuss little more than trades in the Hob, which is the black market where I make most of my money.

There’s compulsory schooling for sixteen-year-olds in this subsistence economy? When does Katniss get time to go to school, given that she is hunting every day? Is truancy not punished? If not, why does she go at all?

Also, Suzanne Collins thinks that ‘the black market’ is a place. I wonder what makes it a ‘black’ market? If it’s illegal, how come it manages to continue trading? Or is it another of those things that is VERY ILLEGAL except that the law has never been enforced in the five years that Katniss has been trading there?

She meets up with her friend Gale, who gives her some bread (p.8)

It’s real bakery bread, not the flat, dense loaves we make from our grain rations… I hold the puncture in the crust to my nose, inhaling the fragrance… Fine bread like this is for special occasions.

So they get grain rations, and they mill the grain into flour, and they make it into flatbread at home, but… they don’t have any raising agents? Because the baker is hoarding the sourdough starter and refusing to distribute the yeast? Or it’s too labour-intensive to make crusty bread? Milling flour, okay, but not kneading dough, that would be CRAZY TALK.

Then we get a description of Katniss and Gale, seguing into a discussion of the class structure of the District (p.9):

Straight black hair, olive skin… grey eyes… Most of the families who work the mines resemble one another this way. That’s why my mother and Prim, with their light hair and blue eyes, always look out of place. They are. My mother’s parents were part of the small merchant class that caters to officials, Peacekeepers and the occasional Seam customer. They ran an apothecary shop in the nicer part of District 12. Since almost no-one can afford doctors, apothecaries are our healers.

Let’s take this in order.

(1) There is a racialized component to the class system in the District: in a rhetorical move straight out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1805), the upper classes are blonder and whiter than the working classes, and this secures our sympathy for them even against our own class interests (‘Prim, whom no one can help loving’, p.28).

(2) Peacekeepers are different from officials. So let’s try and figure out the class system here: we have a District containing a small merchant class; a large mining class (the ‘Seam’); officials; and Peacekeepers. Apothecaries are ‘our’ healers, and ‘we’ throughout the book refers to the Seam, but the apothecary shop only occasionally caters to the Seam, and mostly caters to officials and Peacekeepers. (I have no idea how to parse that.) Anyway, officials and Peacekeepers are the apothecary’s main customers, so they can’t be the ‘few’ who can afford doctors, so in addition to the mining class, the merchant class, and the officials, there must also be a tiny aristocracy who can afford doctors. (Who are they? Maybe they’re… the doctors.)

(3) The Seam has no alternative means of healing, because apothecaries ‘are our healers’. Apothecaries must have a lot of specialized knowledge, but they count as merchants and only operate out of a shop. Because if you need it, it must be for sale: God knows small subsistence-level agrarian economies never share knowledge or resources, they just go shopping.

Additionally (pp.9-10):

My father got to know my mother because on his hunts he would sometimes collect medicinal herbs and sell them to her shop to be brewed into remedies.

Ah. Once again the solution to all plot holes is Katniss’s father’s secret knowledge. I hate to tell you this, Katniss, but your father was a class traitor. Now he’s not just hoarding his ability to make weapons, but medicinal herbs, which obviously you would sell to the merchant class rather than keep within the Seam. Many, indeed, are the mediaeval herbaries which advise you to (1) gather the medicinal herbs at full moon with a silver knife, then (2) sell them to a tiny professional class who will price them out of your range, and (3) die of fever. If only there were some way to share goods and resources outwith a consumer-based monetary system! But alas, SUCH A THING HAS NEVER EXISTED AND NEVER COULD EXIST.

Later, we get a series of flashbacks to the period after Katniss’ father’s death, in which we learn that after five months the remaining family members reached the point where ‘for three days, we’d had nothing but boiled water with some old dried mint leaves I’d found at the back of a cupboard’ (p.35). It’s not until she sees a dandelion in bloom that she suddenly remembers that she has known all along where, and how, to get free food: dandelions, katniss roots, rabbits, eggs, ‘greens’ (which Prim gathers without even having to go into the woods), fish. So even the family which appears to be hoarding the SECRET KNOWLEDGE of how to survive on the FREE FOOD which is abundant all around everyone in the District doesn’t think of doing so for five months. Because… in a small agrarian community of starvation-level poverty, where people are frequently found starving to death in the streets, obviously you would not avail yourself of FREE FOOD, or tell other people how to get the FREE FOOD because that is such arcane and secret knowledge.

Anyway, back to the present day, and Katniss’s attempts to provide for her family (p.11):

With both of us hunting daily, there are still nights when game has to be swapped for lard or shoelaces or wool, still nights when we go to bed with our stomachs growling.

(1) Katniss is hunting daily. When is she going to school?

(2) It is a shame that Katniss does not know that shoelaces can be made of leather, eg from the HIDES of GAME, and that lard is pig fat and could perhaps be obtained from the GAME she has caught, if this includes wild pigs. Then she would not need to go to bed hungry because she had swapped a carcass which would provide several months’ food, leather (for shoelaces and many other things), and lard, for… some shoelaces and lard. THINK IT THROUGH, KATNISS.

(Has Suzanne Collins never read the Little House books, btw? This is where I am getting all my ‘survival in a harsh landscape’ knowledge from.)

Katniss and Gale go fishing, then trading (p.13):

The black market’s still fairly busy. We easily trade six of the fish for good bread, the other two for salt.

So in addition to the public bakery, there’s a black-market bakery? Individual families don’t have raising agents, or the time to knead bread/let it rise, or a good enough oven to make ‘good bread’, or something, and there is a public bakery which sells ‘good bread’, but it’s still worth someone’s while to set up another, black-market bakery? HOW DOES THIS WORK???

Anyway, Katniss and Gale go and sell strawberries to the mayor and encounter his daughter, Madge (pp.13-14):

The mayor’s daughter… is in my year at school… Since neither of us really has a group of friends, we seem to end up together a lot at school. Eating lunch, sitting next to each other at assemblies, partnering for sports activities.

So Katniss is somehow going to school regularly as well as hunting daily. School is not class-based, since the Seam go in with the mayor’s children, but it is age-based: children are taught in year cohorts. There are assemblies, lunch periods (where students do not go home), and compulsory sports. School attendance is compulsory up to at least the age of 16, and possibly beyond. It’s… really quite like a contemporary USian urban school, isn’t it?

Later we hear about the school curriculum (p.50):

Besides basic reading and maths, most of our instruction is coal-related. Except for the weekly lecture on the history of Panem [their country]. It’s mostly a lot of blather about what we owe the Capitol.

This seems to be an attempt to show that school is (to coin a phrase) an ideological state apparatus. Except that (1) the usual way you sneak ideology into teaching is through basic reading (‘Peter likes to run! Jane likes to tidy up!’) and maths (‘If Peter runs at 60mph, and Jane totters along at 1mph in her lovely shoes, how long will it take Peter to catch Jane?’), and (2) if the school is designed to keep the Seam children in their place, (a) why are they going there rather than working in the mines, which seems a better way to learn about coal, and (b) why are the children of the merchant/official classes going through the same curriculum?

Also, we now have to add ‘teachers’ in to the professional demographic of the District, which is growing rapidly.

And now, it is time to head into town for the Reaping ceremony (pp.19-20):

At one o’clock, we head for the square. Attendance is mandatory unless you are on death’s door. This evening, officials will come around and check to see if this is the case. If not, you’ll be imprisoned.

Thank God it’s impossible to fake illness. Also, we now have to add ‘prison guards’ in to the District’s professions. And blimey, ‘officials’ get paid a lot of money for really menial jobs, don’t they?

The square’s surrounded by shops, and on public market days… it has a holiday feel to it… The square’s quite large, but not enough to hold District 12′s population of about eight thousand.

Shopping is surprisingly central to the economy of this poor mining district. A baker’s, an apothecary, and enough other shops to surround a square that doesn’t quite hold 8000 people. Do they only open on public market days, or are there also market stalls in the square on public market days? This ‘small merchant class’ is starting to look quite big.

Latecomers are directed to the adjacent streets, where they can watch the event on screens as it’s televised live by the state.

Televised BY MAGIC, obviously, as the District is lucky to get two or three hours of electricity in the evenings, and we already know it isn’t on at the moment because Katniss just checked the fence.

we… focus our attention on the temporary stage that is set up before the Justice Building.

There are 8000 people in this District and they have their own Justice Building. I suppose that’s where all the public executions take place, except for how they don’t because everyone is too scared to break the law except Katniss and she is selling meat to all the officials. So the Justice Building must just be full of officials twirling round on their office chairs and making paper-clip chains and collecting their pay cheques.

Okay! Now we finally get a description of the CENTRAL MECHANISM by which this society works: the Hunger Games! My hopes, as you can imagine, are VERY HIGH (p.22):

The twenty-four tributes [a boy and a girl from each District] will be imprisoned in a vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland.

So… it’s a different arena every year? How does that work in terms of the Capitol’s control of territory? Or is it the same arena every year, but they manipulate the weather? That seems like a big ask for a country that is reliant on COAL for fuel. COAL FROM A NEAR-EXHAUSTED SEAM, mined by about THREE THOUSAND STARVING PEOPLE [8000 people is probably 5000 adults, of which I would imagine they need 2000 to be merchants, teachers, doctors, officials, Peacekeepers, prison guards, etc]. Or maybe they don’t actually need the coal, because they have infinite energy resources, and they just make the District 12 people mine coal in order to humiliate them?

To make it humiliating as well as torturous, the Capitol requires us to treat the Hunger Games as a festivity, a sporting event pitting every district against the others.

Leaving aside the fact that ‘torturous’ is not a word, and ‘tortuous’ means ‘twisty’, I’m not really sure how a state can require its peasantry to treat something as a festivity. It can ideologically manipulate them into thinking of something which is against their own interests as a festivity – eg First Communions or weddings – or it can require the peasantry to watch something, as with the vidscreens in 1984 that you can’t turn off, but no central state has ever really been able to compel its population to take a particular attitude to something.

Later, by the way, when Katniss has left the District, she wonders what her mother and sister have been doing:

Did they watch the recap of the day’s events on the battered old TV that sits on the table against the wall?, p.65

So one of the signs of poverty in this subsistence economy where TV-watching is compulsory (or I thought it was, but maybe not?) is having a ‘battered old TV’. Which may or may not work, depending on whether this is one of the evenings on which they are lucky enough to get two or three hours of electricity. I just think that if TV-watching is your CENTRAL FORM OF SOCIAL CONTROL, and you are a totalitarian regime, you would probably do better to go the 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 route and instal standard screens in everyone’s house, and ALSO make sure that, you know, they WORK.

But okay, never mind, the Capitol has chosen not to go that route, but just to rely on the idea that starving workers will spend money on TV sets and continue to watch regularly even when the service is entirely unreliable. So we need to add in ‘TV shop’ to the public market, and ‘small electrical repairs’ to the available trades. I’m also now a bit confused about why, since the houses must all be supplied with electricity, no-one seems to have any other electrical devices.

Okay, I’m going to have to stop taking it quite so slowly here, or we will all go crazy. But here’s just a few more key passages, in terms of trying to figure out the social/economic organization of this universe.

First, another flashback to the period after Katniss’s father’s death (p.32):

The district had given us a small amount of money as compensation for his death, enough to cover one month of grieving, after which time my mother would be expected to get a job.

A job? So this is a wage-based economy, it turns out. But what kind of job can Katniss’s mother do? Working in a shop? They all seem to be family-owned. Mining? Small electrical repairs? Stenographer in the Justice Building?

In any case, it doesn’t signify: she doesn’t get a job, because she’s too depressed (p.33):

If it had become known that my mother could no longer care for us, the district would have taken us away from her and placed us in the community home.

… because friends, relatives, and neighbours would not have stepped in, obviously, possibly as revenge for Katniss’s father hoarding all the food and medicine and/or selling it to the merchant class, but most likely because there are no extended families or informal support networks in this small semi-rural subsistence economy. And because the District is large enough, with a population of five thousand adults, to have its own community home for the orphans, just as it has its own Justice Building. Presumably when there aren’t any orphans, the people who run it just sit sadly in the community home, occasionally paying a child off the street to come in and ask for more gruel so they can refuse them.

Finally, just before Katniss figures out how to get the FREE FOOD, while she’s still trying to get food by shopping (p.34):

I had been in town, trying to trade some threadbare old baby clothes of Prim’s in the public market, but there were no takers. Although I had been to the Hob on several occasions with my father, I was too frightened to venture into that rough, gritty place alone.

I really don’t understand the difference between the public market and the Hob (except that one is more pleasant to be in, because it’s outdoors), given that you trade the same goods in the same way in both of them.

Also, Katniss, I have to say, I think it would have been a better idea to trade in some of your mother’s beautiful and expensive dresses, rather than the threadbare baby clothes. (p.17: ‘my mother wears a fine dress from her apothecary days… My mother has laid out one of her own lovely dresses for me… with matching shoes’; p.41 ‘I know velvet because my mother has a dress with a collar made of the stuff’). This, plus the thing where you put your boots on before your trousers and then trade in ‘a carcass full of lard, shoelaces, meat and other goodies’ for ‘some lard and shoelaces’, is not really making me think you will do well in the forthcoming tests of your intelligence and resourcefulness.

In short, I can’t make any sense of the social or economic conditions in which Katniss is living. From the publicity around the books and the film, and the fact that the country they live in is called Panem, which must be an allusion to the Latin phrase panem et circenses (‘bread and circuses’),*** it seems like Collins wants us to understand that she’s writing about a totalitarian state where the central urban power (the Capitol) exerts control over the people of District 12 through controlling the food supply and through spectacular entertainment (the Hunger Games). But a society that worked like that wouldn’t look like this one. In particular, we’re given no social/economic explanation for why the people of the District don’t avail themselves of the free food that’s growing all around them and/or share their knowledge about how to get free food, or for why the Hunger Games are watched by everyone (or, indeed, even how, given that, again, THERE IS NO RELIABLE ELECTRICITY SUPPLY.)

On a different sort of level, one of the major pleasures of dystopian/utopian fiction for me is its immersiveness; the pleasure of finding oneself in a different world, and in particular the pleasure of the fit between the outer and the inner landscapes. 1984 is a bit of a clunky example, but nonetheless a telling one: think of the way that the poverty of Winston Smith’s imagination, the narrowness of what he’s capable of dreaming or feeling, is echoed by the deliberate impoverishment of language in Newspeak and the cold, hard, joyless physical world that surrounds him. The Hunger Games doesn’t have any of that: descriptions are minimal, and although Katniss spends a lot of time going ‘Ooh, this chocolate is delicious, this couch is made of velvet, I’ve never eaten so much rich food before’, there’s no heft to the world, either physically or emotionally. And here’s where I just think I’m going to give up on The Hunger Games and treat myself to a reread of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Let’s just end this saga with a direct comparison between the two. Here’s Katniss on her first night on the luxurious train taking her to the Capitol, and Shevek on her first night on the luxurious spaceship taking him to Urras.

Katniss:

We are each given our own chambers that have a bedroom, a dressing area and a private bathroom with hot and cold running water. We don’t have hot water at home, unless we boil it. There are drawers filled with fine clothes… I peel off my mother’s blue dress and take a hot shower. I’ve never had a shower before. It’s like being in summer rain, only warmer. I dress in a dark green shirt and trousers.

Shevek:

The blank walls were full of surprises, all ready to reveal themselves at a touch on the panel: washstand, shitstool, mirror, desk, chair, closet, shelves. There were several completely mysterious electrical devices connected with the washstand, and the water valve did not cut off when you released the faucet, but kept pouring out until shut off – a sign, Shevek thought, either of great faith in human nature, or of great quantities of hot water. Assuming the latter, he washed all over, and finding no towel, dried himself with one of the mysterious devices, which emitted a pleasant tickling blast of warm air. Not finding his own clothes, he put back on those he had found himself wearing when he woke up: loose tied trousers and a shapeless tunic, both bright yellow with small blue spots. He looked at himself in the mirror. He thought the effect unfortunate.

Unlike Katniss, Shevek doesn’t automatically know how to operate things he has never seen before, or what to call them; unlike Shevek, Katniss does not speculate about the differences between the Capitol’s and the District’s way of doing things, or try and reach conclusions about what she should do from the way things work, but seems to take for granted that the Capitol’s things are self-evidently good and normal, and the District is simply deprived of them.

Katniss on clothes and cleaning:

[in the morning] I put the green outfit back on since it’s not really dirty, just slightly crumpled from spending the night on the floor.

Shevek on clothes and cleaning:

He was putting on his old clothes, and as he pulled the shirt over his head he saw the doctor stuff the blue and yellow ‘sleeping clothes’ into the ‘trash’ bin. Shevek paused, the collar still over his nose. He emerged fully, knelt, and opened the bin. It was empty.

‘The clothes are burned?’ [the doctor has previously used the 'trash bin' for some paper, and explained that the paper is incinerated]

‘Oh, those are cheap pyjamas, service issue – wear ‘em and throw ‘em away. It costs less than cleaning.’

‘It costs less,’ Shevek repeated meditatively. He said the words the way a paleontologist looks at a fossil, the fossil that dates a whole stratum.

In the Le Guin passage, through the concrete details of behaviour and spaceship design we – and Shevek – begin to understand the ways in which different socio-economic systems give rise to different expectations, different value systems, different behaviours. In the Collins passage, we see that a girl raised in an agrarian subsistence economy who can barely afford to eat, let alone buy clothes, is marked out as particularly thrifty because she wears the same clothes the day after she put them on for a couple of hours to sit and eat dinner in.

Katniss on beds:

I just strip off my shirt and trousers and climb into bed in my underwear. The sheets are made of soft, silky fabric. A thick, fluffy quilt gives immediate warmth…

Shevek on beds:

When first aboard the ship, in those long hours of fever and despair, he had been distracted, sometimes pleased and sometimes irritated, by a grossly simple sensation: the softness of the bed. Though only a bunk, its mattress gave under his weight with caressing suppleness. It yielded to him, yielded to him so insistently that he was, still, always conscious of it while falling asleep. Both the pleasure and the irritation it produced in him were decidedly erotic. There was also the hot-air-nozzle-towel device: the same kind of effect. A tickling. And the design of the furniture in the officers’ lounge, the smooth plastic curves into which stubborn wood and steel had been forced, the smoothness and delicacy of surfaces and textures: were these not also faintly, pervasively erotic?

Now, I may be particularly aggrieved here because before I read The Hunger Games someone on the internet told me that it was incredibly well written, full of sensuous detail and immersive pleasures. And I immediately thought of the above passage from Le Guin (which is one of the great, life-changing, close-to-the-heart moments in my internal library) and set my expectations accordingly. And they turned out to mean that it contained sentences like ‘The sheets are made of soft, silky fabric’ and ‘A thick, fluffy quilt gives immediate warmth’.

Because, you see, The Hunger Games is selling itself as a book about the way social, political, and economic organization affects the way we see the world, the experiences we have and the stories we can tell… and so far the first four chapters have told me:

* that pretty blonde girl-children are universally lovable and must be protected at all costs;
* that poor people are literally too stupid to live (apart from the special ones with secret skills – oddly, these secret skills are in fact common survival skills for poor people; they’re only ‘secret’ from rich/privileged urban dwellers); and
* that hot showers and fluffy quilts are nice.

So I can’t help feeling somehow short-changed.

*my favourite internet acronym, partly because of the semicolon: ‘too long, didn’t read’

***for grammar geeks, the reason it has to be an allusion to this specific phrase is that panem is in the accusative case in this phrase, because the phrase is only part of a longer sentence in which ‘bread and circuses’ are the object of a verb. If you were just naming a country ‘Bread’, you would use the nominative case, panis.

But this is just to post a link to the Call for Papers for Sarah Annes Brown’s and Berit Åström’s June conference on allusions and echoes: everything that is interesting, from Chaucer to fanfiction. So pleased that fanfic is finally starting to talk to Classics and to other literary scholars/comparative literature people who are interested in rewriting and allusion and intertextuality and all those good things. I can’t go, because I’ll still be in Melbourne, but I hope some friends of the text will make it.

Last Thursday, J. and I celebrated our ninth anniversary* by having dinner at Attica, which we last went to in 2009. Since then it has (FINALLY) got three hats (the top rating) in the Age Good Food Guide, and shown up 53rd in the San Pellegrino Top 100 Restaurants list (the second-highest ranked restaurant in Australia). It is also pretty much my favourite restaurant in the world. We had the eight-course vegetarian tasting menu, and (SPOILER): it was gorgeous.

[I have put this under a fold now!]

First of all: bread.

(Sorry, I forgot to rotate the photo before I uploaded it.) Rye sourdough, with rich yellow Jersey-style butter – unsalted, with pink salt on the side – and also with smoked emulsified olive oil with black salt on top (that’s the other little dish in the photo). Absolutely beautiful bread, elastic and chewy with a fantastic crunch. J. fell in love with the olive oil (so good!), but I alternated it with the butter (so classic!).

Then! Our first pre-starter. It came to us looking like this:

and when we opened it up we found this:

Walnut puree, with snow peas (and tiny flowers). As so often, the pre-starters were one of my favourite things – I suppose it makes sense to showcase your style at the very start, it’s sort of a little advert or mnemonic for the whole meal? Anyway, this was just beautiful: the peas were incredibly fresh and crunchy, and the walnut puree was subtle but rich, and did you see how they are in little walnut shells? With little flowers?

The second starter was

flash-fried shiitake mushrooms in … some special kind of crumb, which I didn’t write down, with a mushroom leaf on top. (This is one of those things that some people can taste and some people can’t, apparently: J says the leaf tasted of mushroom, but to me it was just a pleasant sort of, well, leafy taste). This was completely different from the first pre-starter, but just as good: intensely mushroomy, amazingly crisp, salty and good.

And then on to the actual eight courses of the menu! (Captions will be what the menu actually reads, then descriptions under the photos.)

First starter: Textured Cauliflower with Horseradish.

We had this last time we were here and it was one of my most vivid memories from three years ago. And it was even better than I remembered. Apparently there is cauliflower in here somewhere, but I didn’t recognize it, which is good because I abhor cauliflower. Anyway, also in there is: grated apple; goji berries; dehydrated coconut; verjuice ice; and puffed rice. And then over the top is horseradish ‘snow’. It is in the shape of a volcano in New Zealand (the chef, Ben Shewry, is from NZ), and it’s an amazing montage of flavours and textures and temperatures. The verjuice ice is sharp and cold, and the powdered horseradish melts on your tongue.

Starter 2: Leek, Lovage, Mustard Oil

Steamed baby leeks with lovage puree and little mouthfuls of mozzarella. The lovage is a very up-front taste, but it fades very fast and then the full sweetness and freshness of the leek comes through it, and the mozzarella holds it all together. This was so good.

Middle course 1: A simple dish of Potato cooked in the earth it was grown

We had this before when we were here, but I don’t remember the little pool the potato is sitting in now: it’s smoked goat’s curd with coffee and coconut husk ash, garnished with flash-fried salt bush leaves. The tastes of the goat’s curd and bush leaves were amazing, strong but complementary and really well-balanced, but I wasn’t sure about how it went with the immense simplicity of The Potato (which was also gorgeous, but subtle – I mean, it’s a potato). Having said that, after I finished the dish I was left with the taste of potato in my mouth, thinking ‘Wow, usually I don’t think potatoes taste of anything but they really, really do and they are delicious’, so possibly it needs the goat’s curd/bush leaves to bring it out by contrast? In my memory, the 2009 version of this dish was literally just a potato, but I suspect I may be wrong there.

Middle dish 2: Tomato, Smoked Sesame, Eleven Basils

Oh, God, this might have been the best course. That’s a long strip of compressed (?) capsicum, and then sitting on it are skinned Black Russian cherry tomatoes, and then just the inside seedy bits of other tomatoes. And little dollops of smoked black sesame seeds. And tiny tiny basil leaves from Attica’s garden. And hazelnuts roasted in spice. And goat’s curd. So there’s a sort of classic Italian basil/tomato/mozzarella salad in there, with a nice Italian pepper, but then hazelnuts and sesame seeds too. Which is sort of typical of Attica’s style, I think – Heston Blumenthal (who’s sort of our default comparison because we watch his TV programme and also we ate at the Fat Duck this year) would have had to be a bit more conceptual or wittier about doing a ‘take’ on the classic salad, and I’m not sure the hazelnut and sesame would have got in there – they’re just there, I would guess, because Ben Shewry (Attica’s chef) thought they would taste good. AND THEY REALLY DO. So in this way, the food here really reminds me of one of my other favourite restaurants, Cafe Maitreya in Bristol (voted the best vegetarian restaurant in the UK several times). The thing with Cafe Maitreya is – well, the food is really fresh and often foraged, which they have in common with Attica, but also, they don’t have a typical ‘shape’ to their dishes (often vegetarian restaurants do either variations on a meat-and-two-veg-style shape, or serve nothing but stew-type shapes). It seems as though Cafe M come up with their dishes by thinking through which ingredients will work together, and designing a whole dish around that. Whereas Heston Blumenthal either tries to do a version of an existing dish, or thinks scientifically in terms of flavour combinations, almost isolated from the actual ingredients themselves. So I think it was around this point in the meal that we decided that Attica is like a combination of the very sincere, ingredient-based, fresh, vegetarian style of Cafe Maitreya with the advanced techniques of Heston Blumenthal (there were all kinds of things we were eating that you couldn’t do with just your basic ‘chop, saute, roast, serve’, home-style techniques/equipment). Hence, basically, our perfect restaurant. (I said this to our incredibly lovely waitperson at the end of the meal and she said yes, she thought the style was ‘heartfelt’ and ‘very well thought-through’, which is exactly right. In fact I’m going to go and make that my title!)

First main: Kumara, Purslane, Pyengana

Kumara is a Maori word for sweet potato, so that is a slab of sweet potato roasted in a salt crust. It’s on a bed of almond-and-garlic bits (technical language deserting me as the meal moves on: in a minute I’m going to stop remembering to take photographs, too) with a warm egg yolk and broccolini buds, and then it’s sauced at the table with a Pyengana cheddar sauce. It’s incredibly, incredibly rich and so delicious – okay, maybe this one was my favourite dish. So many strong flavours, but not competing at all.

Sadly, it filled me up so much that I could only manage a couple of mouthfuls of the second main (this always happens to me on tasting menus: I used to think it was because most meat-based restaurants worry that they can’t possibly be feeding the vegetarians enough and therefore overdo it on the vegetarian mains, but these mains were tiny and it still happened, so it must just be me. I get a bit emotionally overwhelmed at about this point, also.) And I forgot to take a photo of it! Sorry!

Second main: Mushrooms, Mulled Wine, Pearl Onions

[No photo, but you can see a picture of the meat version of this dish in this review, which also has better photos of the cauliflower and potato dishes. It shows the cos lettuce stems & onion slices really well.]

Portobello mushrooms heaped with red grains made of mulled wine and blackberries somehow, with chervil and dill on top, and a little pool of parsnip puree nearby. Then long spear-type things of pickled cos lettuce and halved salad onions. So pretty, and so delicious, and I really appreciated the sharp/vinegary tastes after the richness of the previous main.

And then! Dessert! I forgot to take a photo of the first dessert again: it was also beautiful, and worked as a palate-cleanser, too, instead of there being a pre-dessert. So it was sweet but also savoury-ish. The menu lists it as ‘Raisins, Whey, Hazelnut’, but what it was was beautiful green grapes and pale brown half-raisined grapes (from their garden again, I think), with sheep’s-milk whey and cubes of pale/translucent hazelnut puree, and yarrow. Anyway, it woke me up enough to remember to take a photo of the next and final course:

Dessert 2: Native Fruits of Australia

From the top: quandong; lemon aspen; candied rosella petals; muntree; bush currants; desert limes. Sitting on honey custard & bush currant ice, with a little circle of sheep’s-milk yoghurt flavoured with eucalyptus.

So many different tastes, none of which I had ever tasted before (native Australian fruits are not something you see all over the place here); sharp and tart, balanced by the subtle sweetness of the yoghurt and the custard and the ice. Just beautiful. And it was really nice not to end the meal with a chocolate-based desert, which almost every fancy place I’ve ever been to has done – they’ve often been brilliant, but chocolate never really feels very subtle, so it’s sort of like being hit with this rich, obvious, sweetness after a very thoughtfully balanced menu. A few little chocolates with coffee is a different matter, as is:

Post-desert: ‘pukeko eggs’

Little white chocolate eggs! Filled with salted caramel! Butterscotchy! In a nest!

We had them with mint tea, then rolled satiatedly home THE END.

So, in conclusion, all the good things they say about Attica and Ben Shewry are true, and one day we will take U & M there in return for the many beautiful evenings at Midsummer House and Alimentum, and it will be great.

*INORITE?

Anyway, last night I went to H&H again to the launch of the BanQuet2012 Anthologies, anthologies of erotic writing by queer women and queer men. I was standing in for my friend Kate Harrad of (among other places) Fausterella, who had a story in the women’s anthology (about pianos, apparently. I haven’t read it yet – I couldn’t fight my way through the horde of Melbourne hipsters at the bar to buy a copy!) It was a fantastic event, really well-chaired by the energetic (and, um, phenomenally beautiful) publishers Carson and Dettori, who kept us moving along through the readings at a cracking pace and did an excellent job of introducing the readers and the narratives, so we didn’t get lost. The readings themselves were variable – the skill sets for ‘writing good erotica’ and ‘performing to a packed house’, as anyone who’s in slash fandom knows, are not overlapping, and not all erotic writing translates from the page to the voice – but Kath Duncan‘s poem ‘Butch Cock’, which opened the night, was particularly great.

Here’s a little slideshow of images from the night: