Bad Garlic

 During the last several years we have found what seems a high proportion of bad garlic. I consider garlic bad when it gets old enough to have shrunk in from the paper, so that its cloves take on a rubbery texture. I consider it worse when the clove is turning brown, worst when it has started to mold. We tend to use some garlic every week, so it is not as if we are letting a head sit for a month to molder.

This is not a failure in a single source. We buy garlic at the farmers market and at the grocery store. Both seem to sell us inferior garlic sometimes.

It seems to me that it was once less usual to find garlic gone bad. My recollection is of firm heads of garlic in the kitchen, ropes of garlic at friends' houses that looked firm. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps those ropes were in poor shape, and I discarded as much garlic then as I would now.

Lost

 In the chapter "Writing" of Reading and Writing, Robertson Davies wrote

The worst thing that can happen to a writer is to draw in upon himself and his work until he knows nobody except other writers; he is then reduced to the literary desperation of writing a book about a man who is writing a book, and when he does that we know he is finished.

On St. Patrick's Day 2006, near the Gallery Place Metro, someone from Solas Nua offered me the choice of one of two or three books by Irish authors, and I chose the novel There Is a House by Kieron Connolly.  I took it home, looked at it, and put in on the bookshelf. It stayed there a good while.

Recently I noticed it and thought that I might as well read it: it is about 200 pages long, and the pages are not large. I have read it, and think that in part it is subject to Davies's criticism. The theme of the narrator's writer's block is varied if not improved by chapters of convalescence from alcoholic benders. 

Having said that, I will say that I don't believe that Connolly knew only other writers, though I can imagine that this might be easier in Ireland than in some other countries (and might not imply an especially narrow circle of acquaintances). I will also say that if Solas Nua were to appear suddenly next week and offer me another choice of books, I might take one of Connolly's if one were in the mix.

Tangible Reality

 Last week, the New York Times Arts and Leisure section gave about 3/4 of a page to an excerpt from a book that concerns Joan Didion, the Mansons, etc. I read the excerpt distractedly, until I came to a sentence beginning "Reality was barely tangible in the summer of 1969..." That stopped me.

Just above my left ankle there is a scar from a mishap in the late summer of 1969. The reality that contributed to the wound was certainly tangible enough. There are plenty of other tangible encounters I remember from that summer that left no scar but were sufficiently pleasant, unpleasant, or in any case significant, to stay in the memory. I imagine that most humans born by 1963 can say the same.

If in place of  "barely tangible" the author wrote "multiform and confusing", I could understand the sentence. As it stands, I can't.