did you know february is ovarian cancer awareness month??

or that today was teal ribbon day?

according to ovarian cancer australia "One in 70 women will develop ovarian cancer in their lifetime. It could be you, your sister, your mum, your gran or your girlfriend.

Every year in Australia around 1500 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer and more than 850 women will die from the disease."

there is no early detection test or screening for this cancer, so it's really important to be aware of the symptoms

my vegan transition...

my progression from vegetarianism to full-on veganism was a long time in the happening, but as a result of reading a lot of heart-wrenching articles and viewing a plethora of horrific graphics on animal welfare over the past few months i was forced to stop procrastinating - reality could no longer be denied - i couldn't fool myself anymore with the blinkered belief that the organic milk, cheese and free range egg industries meant humanely treated animals compared to the cruelty perpetrated by battery farms, feed lots and the overstocked and under-regulated farming industry in general - nor could i disregard the fact that even if there was some semblance of humane treatment (a rarity, mostly a fallacy!!), in the end the animals are still slaughtered for human consumption.

it's been remarkably easy (for the most part) - i have't had a drastic change in my eating habits - a lot of my menu was already vegan  (you just can't go past a yummy chickpea and/or vegie curry - it just gets served minus the yoghurt dip these days!!) - and animal liberation has been  integral to my personal politics for decades...

but yes, there are some things i miss, like the animal-rennet-free cheeses i enjoyed - and no, soy cheese just doesn't 'cut it' - you would think soy cheese was just that wouldn't you? alas you still have to read the labels because a lot of the soy cheeses contain casein or calcium caseinate, a milk protein used to give the 'cheese' texture!!! i tried the non-dairy 'tofutti' the other day - i could only get the american-style soy slices but that was rather disgusting - maybe the bright orangey colour turned me off a bit when it was melted - maybe the mozzerella slices might be better if i can find them!!! but then it does come from america, home of cheese in a can!!!!! 

surprisingly i found that i quite enjoy a good soy latte - but that depends on the 'barista's' competence - if they make horrible coffee it doesn't matter what 'milk' they use, they're just crap coffee makers!!! and it needs to be hot (when did lukewarm coffee become 'the norm'???) some say it depends on the brand of soy used, but i've had the same brand from different outlets and they've all tasted different - some good, some bad!!! i don't mind the nutty flavour but no, i couldn't just have a glass - i can only have it as a latte!!!! rice milk is not too bad as a replacement in a cup of tea or instant coffee (not as strong as soy!!) and it's quite okay with cereal (oooh, maybe i'm putting more sugar on the cereal though!!!!) - and i've just tried a vanilla soy milk which is quite yummy!!

i'm going to try out a cake recipe this weekend that a work colleague gave me... a very simple recipe - 1 cup flour, 1 cup coconut, 1 cup raw sugar, 1 cup milk (soy, rice - whatever you prefer - you could probably replace some of the liquid with orange, lemon or lime juice for a tangy flavour) and that's it... he adds a whole grated nutmeg nut to his - guess you could also use cinnamon, or mixed spice... hope it turns out as yummy as michael g's!!!!!

unfortunately peoples attitudes are one of the hardest things to deal with - cynicism, sarcasm, being looked on as an absolute weirdo, the belief by some that it's 'just a phase', others who believe it's 'just a diet' - yes, some people do follow vegetarian or vegan dietary practices purely for health reasons, but that doesn't make them vegetarian or vegan, it just means they eat vegetarian or vegan food!!! i am well over hearing the phrase "I used to be vegetarian/vegan but..." i've heard it many times over the years but i'm not sure how people expect me to react to it - am i meant to feel understanding of, or comraderie with, a perceived 'shared experience'? sorry, i don't - all i can say to a comment like that is "if you weren't 'doing it for the animals' you weren't vegetarian or vegan - they're lifestyle choices, not just eating regimes!!!"


these same attitudes have existed much of my vegetarian life so nothing has changed on that front - however people do find vegetarianism easier to comprehend than veganism... perhaps that has something to do with veganism being a philosophy, a way of life, a political stand, a belief in animal liberation...

if you have a vegan friend that you want to share a bottle of wine with, why not try a bottle of  ishtar from balthazar of the barossa vineyard...

i was looking for a bottle to share with a friend and just couldn't go past a wine named after "a Babylonian Goddess of Love and War – the chief goddess in the pantheon of Babylonian Gods and Goddesses"!!

with no mention on the bottle of the fining agents used, i emailed the winery - run by a womon named Anita Bowen - and received a very prompt reply, which read in part...




"... appreciate your enquiry, as I am very aware of dietary issues around wine, given my list of severe food allergies. NO, I don’t use any animal products (fish, milk or egg derived) as I don’t use any fining agents in making my wines. The only addition I make is a minimum amount of sulphur dioxide to prevent oxidization/spoilage..."

no longer sharing life and space with a partner who was a long term alcoholic has definitely changed the way i drink these days - i very rarely buy alcohol to have at home, but if i do it's usually when socialising with friends (that's also rarely these days!) - so it's nice to be able to say when i drink now, it's for the taste and pleasure - not just to 'get pissed,' and not because being pissed is the only way to share time with an alcoholic partner...

variations on a theme...

the origins of valentine's day and its traditions have been blurred over the centuries so it's hard to glean the actual facts as 'history' has constantly been altered by the prevailing 'powers that be' (and as a consquence 'herstory' has been well and truly buried within the annals of time) ... there are variations on the theme but consensus has its origin as a pagan fertility festival... but in honour of which deity?

"The tradition of Valentine's Day is believed to have originated from the pagan customs of the Third Century or Fourth Century B.C., when the Parentalia and Feralia Festivals of Purification were celebrated in Ancient Rome between February 13 and February 18. This was also the time of a Fertility Festival which celebrated a young man's rite of passage and involved animal sacrifices and fertility rituals. February 13, the opening day of the festivals, was dedicated to peace, love and household goods. February 14, the second day of Parentalia was called the Lupercalia... a day some sources believe was dedicated to Juno-Lupa, the She-Wolf." ... read more here... 

ovid wrote “A she-wolf which had given birth to her whelps came, wondrous to tell, to the abandoned twins. She halted and fawned on the tender babes with her tail, and licked into shape their two bodies with her tongue. The she-wolf (lupa) gave her name to the place, and the place gave the name to the Lupacalia. Great is the nurse for the milk that she gave.” from an essay of Lupacalia

this, from an article lupercalia, she-wolf - "The rite began in the cave of the She-Wolf in the city of Rome where legend had it that the founders of the city, Romulus and Remus, had been suckled by the wolf before they were found by a shepherd. The sacred fig tree grew in front of the cave. Vestals brought to the site of the sacrifice the sacred cakes made from the first ears of the last years grain harvest.

Two naked young men presided over the sacrifice of a dog and a goat. With the bloody knife, their foreheads were smeared with blood, then wiped clean with wool dipped in milk. The young men laughed and girded themselves in the skin of the sacrificed goat. Much feasting followed. Finally, using strips of the goat skin, the young men ran, each leading a group of priests, around the base of the hills of Rome, around the ancient sacred boundary of the old city called the pomarium.

During this run, the women of the city would vie for the opportunity to be scourged by the young men as they ran by, some baring their flesh to get the best results of the fertility blessing (you can see why the Christian church tried so hard to get this ritual banned, but it was so popular that it continued for quite some time under the new regime)"...

according to wikipedia the festival derives from "Lupercus .. a god sometimes identified with the Roman god Faunus, who is the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Pan. Lupercus is the god of shepherds. His festival, celebrated on the anniversary of the founding of his temple on February 15, was called the Lupercalia. His priests wore goatskins. The second-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr mentions an image of "the Lycaean god, whom the Greeks call Pan and the Romans Lupercus,"nude save for the girdle of goatskin, which stood in the Lupercal, the cave where Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf. There, on the Ides of February, a goat and a dog were sacrificed, and salt mealcakes prepared by the Vestal Virgins were burnt." ... same festival, different deity (female usurped by male!)


and then this allusion to female sexuality and connection to nature in  She-Wolves, Lupercalia, and Prostitutes - "Etymologically, Luperci, Lupercalia, and Lupercal all relate to the Latin for 'wolf' lupus, as do various Latin words connected with brothels. The Latin for she-wolf was slang for prostitute. The legends say that Romulus and Remus were nursed by a she-wolf in the Lupercal. Servius, a 4th century pagan commentator on Vergil, says that it was in the Lupercal that Mars ravished and impregnated the twins' mother."

Juno-Lupa was only one of the many epithets of  Juno - meaning 'vital force' - a juno is also the term given to the protecting guardian spirit of females.

Juno is the roman counterpart to the greek Hera.

"The month of February was sacred to Juno Februata, the Goddess of the 'fever' (febris in Latin) of love in ancient Pagan Rome. She was also the goddess of women and of marriage. feb 14 was her festival day. At that time, a box was provided from which single men could draw a "billet" -- a small piece of paper on which a woman's name was written. The couple would then form a temporary liaison for the erotic games to follow. They would remain partners for the following 12 months. Sometimes marriages resulted from this practice." ... http://www.religioustolerance.org/valentine1.htm

"With the advent of Christianity, priests attempted to replace such ancient heathen practices. In the Fifth Century A.D., the Church resolved to abolish this pagan celebration by creating its own holiday around the same date and selecting a saint who was remembered for his devotion to love. In A.D. 496, Pope Gelasius outlawed the Lupercian Festival, but cleverly retained the Juno Februata lottery. However, in order to lend the festivities Christian meaning and eliminate the pagan overtones, the drawing of saints' names were substituted for the names of unmarried girls. The names were placed into an urn or box and then young people (both male and female) drew a name from the container. During year which followed, the youths and maidens were supposed to emulate the life of the Saint whose name they had drawn. It took some time for this new tradition to garner popularity" ... http://www.novareinna.com/festive/valentine.html

 

it's been fascinating reading, and i do like the 'she-wolf' representation - of course i can't pass up the opportunity of adding another lovely wolf graphic!

before i finish, i have to acknowledge another celebration today - chinese new year - based on the lunisolar calendar - with 2010 being the year of the tiger...

but with as few as 3,200 surviving in the wild it's not looking good for the survival of these magnificent creatures by the next year of the tiger in 2022... read about their plight here 

happy  lunar  new  year,   cheers... 

genius, eccentric, or something darker??

j d salinger, author of "catcher in the rye" died this week, aged 91.

was he a good writer, an insightful visionary, a mesmerising storyteller? never having read, nor been inspired to even 'pick up' any of his works, I can't say...  some call  'catcher in the rye'  a classic in the teen angst / coming of age genre - it apparently typifies teenage alienation and rebellion in the 50s - but  salinger was 32  when he wrote 'catcher' in 1951 - hardly a teenager - and it was actually published for an adult audience...  apparently it still has a following (i suspect being on school curricula over the years has kept it in the public eye - along with its intermittent controversy) - looks like alienation and rebellion  are part of teenage cultures across the generations, regardless of the era - what a surprise...

so is it a classic or not? what 'makes' a classic? now that's subjective - i believe that, just like beauty, it's 'in the eye of the beholder', or should that be 'in the imagination of the reader'!

salinger had apparently been a recluse for the last 50-odd years... and from what i've read it appears he was a very dominating, controlling and manipulative personality who had a 'penchant'  for much younger girls / women - all the females in his life were years, some decades, his junior!!!

the following excerpts come from an article at  the daily mail online, entitled  "Why did J.D. Salinger spend the last 60 years hiding in a shed writing love notes to teenage girls?" by Anne de Courcy

"Along with this quest for total seclusion went a predilection for teenage girls - not so much a Lolita syndrome as an urge to discover innocence and then mould it to the shape he wished."

i can't find any age for his first wife but he was 26 - they met when he was sent to germany to interrogate nazis at the end of the war - "There, he fell in love with a girl called Sylvie - later believed to be a former Nazi official - whom he married and, after eight months, divorced."  he later described her as 'an evil woman who bewitched me'.

he was 34 when he met his second wife - "At a party, he met a young student, Claire Douglas, the 18-year-old half-sister of a British aristocrat.

Soon she moved in, and in 1955, when Claire was 20 and Salinger 36, they married. But as Salinger's desire for solitude increased, he made her burn all her papers and cut off all contact with her friends and family.

Claire, who had tried desperately to please him, found herself plunged into an isolation she had never sought. But when she became pregnant Salinger cut off all contact with the outside world and from the fourth month of her pregnancy, she saw no one whatsoever." Claire finally divorced him in 1967.

in 1972 "he saw a picture of a young writer, Joyce Maynard, on the cover of the New York Times Magazine with the headline An 18-Year- Old Looks Back On Life. Soon, Joyce was receiving fan letters from him.

Intrigued, she wrote back - and soon gave up her degree course at Yale University to live with him in New Hampshire - she was 19, he was 53." that relationship lasted 9 months.

in 1981, at 62 "he began a relationship with the 36-year-old actress Elaine Joyce, again initiated by letter. This lasted for several years, until he met Colleen O'Neill, the director of the annual town fair, who was 40 years his junior. They married in the late Eighties."

having 'fled the literary world in 1953', according to an article in the new york times "... Mr. Salinger’s privacy was punctured in 1998 and again in 2000 with the publication of memoirs by, first, Joyce Maynard ... and then his daughter, Margaret. Some critics complained that both women were trying to exploit and profit from their history with Mr. Salinger, and Mr. Salinger’s son, Matthew, wrote in a letter to The New York Observer that his sister had “a troubled mind,” and that he didn’t recognize the man portrayed in her account. Both books nevertheless added a creepy, Howard Hughesish element to the Salinger legend.

Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, Ms. Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for dinner). Ms. Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added a long list of other enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box." (according to wikipedia you can also add an adherence to macrobiotics, the teachings of Edgar Cayce, fasting, vomiting to remove impurities, megadoses of Vitamin C, and "speaking in tongues" (or Charismatic glossolalia) to the list!)

i also found the article J D Salinger's women written by Paul Alexander (journalist and author of "Salinger: a biography") worth the read too... "The winsome, uncanny girls of Salinger’s fiction have real-life counterparts. They’ve always kept the secrets of this country’s most famous recluse. Till Joyce Maynard changed her mind."

and this?? it's an orgone box based on wilhelm reich's controversial 'orgone therapy' (also known as orgasmotherapy) - a wanker's wonderland? - you wouldn't want to be claustrophobic!!

it was popular amongst some of the 'beat generation' such as kerouac and burroughs too... hmmm... kerouac, born in 1922, died an alcoholic at 47 in 1969 - burroughs, born in 1914, was an opiate addict - "a condition that marked the last fifty years of his life" - he died in 1997...

were they radicals, or bohemians - maybe they were just hedonistic manipulators of the social change that was taking place?

so what do you think? was salinger genius, eccentric, or something much darker?

let's recap - manipulative, controlling, domineering - his obsession with and stalking of younger women was definitely disturbing - was he a pedophile? probably - did his writing 'imitate' his life then?

from an online magazine called secrets of the city "... there's an all too obvious theme of pedophilia in Salinger's work. You've got Holden's strange obsession with his younger sister. The most arresting scene in "Zooey" is when the title character looks out the window at a schoolgirl playing with her dog. Whatever plot "Bananafish" has is centered on Seymour's encounter with a young girl who's "wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years." In "For Esmé - With Love and Squalor," a soldier makes promises to a haughty thirteen-year-old girl whom he describes too often as a 'young woman.'

ohhh, and you'd have to agree that anyone who drinks their own piss, masturbates in a closet sized 'box' and 'speaks in tongues' is definitely somewhat odd, weird, strange - sick even!!!

i lean towards the 'something darker' concept - and  i'm far more inclined to read his daughter margaret's memoir  'dream  catcher'  or joyce maynard's 'at home in the world' than any of his books... 

 

i didn't mean this post to be so long or majorly about salinger... it was going to be about me dad... i was originally reflecting on salinger's age and pondering how close to that age my father would be if he'd still been alive, but then i did a bit of research about him out of curiosity, and you all know how absorbing that can be - it's been fascinating reading the articles i came across...

i recently read larry the librarian's post 'larry's dad' which made me think some more about my father and then i realised that january is the anniversary of his death - he died in 1976 in his mid-50s (my age now!!!), 3 months before my 21st birthday - took me a long time to forgive him for that one - but unfortunately there aren't many photos of him...

 

that's roy a couple of years before he died, and this is me in 1975 - just a few months before he died - with my niece rebbecca only a few months old - and yes, that's an 'afro' - that's what perms looked like in those days!!

you know, even after 34 years (he's been dead longer than i actually 'knew' him!!!) i still find myself missing him sometimes...

the new 'call to arms'???

apparently 'australia day' 2010 is all about barbecues and eskys...

we're being encouraged to 'man your eskys' and 'bbq like you've never bbq'd before' - and from the graphics on the posters apparently we should eat a lot of animal fat, flesh and gristle, and men should drink heaps (and, as is the 'aussie way', all byo of course)!!!! oooh, and notice everyone is white - some just more suntanned than others (skin cancer - another 'aussie custom')!!! and we should all look to the sky for some reason - what's heading our way???

such responsible advertising - eat and drink to excess - and then what? get in your car and drive home?? or maybe the message is - party hard because tomorrow you die - from all that animal fat clogging the arteries and - if you're male - if the fat doesn't kill you alcohol poisoning just might - and, failing all else, melanoma will get ya!!!! -

very  retro style posters aren't they - reminiscent of the style of propaganda posters put out during wartime...

and does it mean if you're not white, don't eat animal and don't drink, you're not a 'real aussie' because that's how australians party... does that make vegos, vegans, non-caucasians and non-drinkers unwelcome, unwanted aliens perhaps!!!!

rather than 'australia day' isn't a better description of the british invasion and its attempted genocide 'survival day' or 'invasion day', or perhaps on january 26 we should celebrate indigenous culture?

i came across this graphic in an article at dailyhistory.net and couldn't resist using it...

        and the rest is 'history' - they wanted everything!

even the debate over the australian flag is still raging... why the hell does it still incorporate the union jack - isn't it about time we cut the british colonial umbilical cord?? shouldn't we acknowledge the past and incorporate an indigenous symbol in the flag?

perhaps one of these designs - created for a competition by ausflag a few years ago - people are still submitting designs -  you can view them here (but you have to scroll right down the page!!)

although this beautiful quilting  fabric from the onestop fabric shop called 'awesome australia' totally epitomizes the country as far as i'm concerned and would make a wonderful flag - if we have to have one - it's a lovely depiction of australian flora, fauna and the indigenous art style - how much more 'australian' could you get - it's unmistakably australian - it gets my vote!!!

anyway, whatever you've got planned, whether you celebrate the day, ponder on the past or just relax and have a lazy day, enjoy the public holiday, and i'll enjoy the rest of my week off!!!!