(no subject)

On Thursday, I went to Crow's Nest to visit the enormous American imported food store. It's gone, replaced by an immense organic megastore. So I wandered in there and bought a bunch of stuff. I planned to return with my fridge bag for an assault on their startling fancy cheese selection.

There's an article about the shop in today's Herald, which quotes the shop's manager as saying the shop is an alternative to the traditional "Nimbin nutter muesli shop".

You know what? Fuck you, mate. I'll be back to Crow's Nest - it's near my new shrink - but I'll be going to the "Nimbin nutter muesli shop" across the road from your rich dabbler's emporium. Annabelle's have pretty much the same stuff as you, and a cafe too, with vegan snax, and they've been there for years and years. Until your foodie Borders drives them out of business, they'll have my business and you won't. So neener.

(no subject)

You can draw a sort of diagram of links between my seeing Prisoner of Azkaban earlier this year, and my having just rented the Branagh Much Ado About Nothing. Somewhere in there is the side excursion into Jane Austen via stumbling across a discount copy of Sense and Sensibility. I didn't realise how significant a book Pride and Prejudice was until it came high in a recent poll of ABC listeners, and now it's made the top ten in the Women's Watershed Fiction Poll held by Radio 4. As today's Herald explains, listeners voted for the novel that "has spoken to you on a personal level; it may have changed the way you look at yourself, or simply made you happy to be a woman".

There are some good points made by commentators questioning P&P's value to modern women. Julie Burchill asks how it could make someone "proud to be a woman". This is easy to answer. Women can obviously be proud of Austen's accomplishments as a writer. But we can also be inspired by Elizabeth Bennett's character. She doesn't exactly burn her bra; in fact, she's got a more powerful sense of what's proper and correct than many of the other characters in the novel. But she's unafraid, outspoken, unconventional - think how she horrifies Bingley's sisters by walking all the way to their house and getting mud on her skirt! - and as smart as hell. D'Arcy is a good match for her not because he owns Pemberley, but because he's also intelligent and unafraid of others' judgement. We get to laugh at the other, more "feminine" women in the book, who act like idiots. Even Jane is so sweet and submissive that her boyfriend doesn't even realise she's in love with him!

Amusingly, the news item - originally from the Guardian - bemoans the fact that all the novelists are white. It's a pale list overall, but the number one book was The Colour Purple (soon to be dumped in a hole in Alabama. That reminds me - any Alabamans reading who'd like to donate a copy of SLEEPY to their public library?), and the list includes Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Those Ebay books

Ladeez! Re Canadian postage, bear with me - I'll pop in to the PO on Monday!