Radar: Recent Cultural Picks

Subscribe to Andrew's blog here for weekly updates on his writing.

Cooking the Books, (BBC World Service)

I’ve just finished listening to this series of sub-fifteen minute episodes on famous food writers on the BBC World Service and thoroughly enjoyed every one of them. They range from Savarin, the French 18th Century bon-viveur and cultural commentator, through Marinetti in the 1930s, to MFK Fisher, Alan Davidson the genius behind The Oxford Companion to Food, through to Elizabeth David – who writes a withering put downs of sub-par food like no other – to Canadian Margaret Visser with her essays which are scholarly and witty in equal measure. Hemingway writes of bankruptcy as happening ‘slowly, and then all at once’ and I’d liken that to my interest in food writing, which has developed incrementally over the course of my life, and now has really taken hold. I love the idea of using food as a lens through which to view the modern world, its politics, its quirks, its problems, its beauty. If you too are interested in food, you could do worse than listen to this digestible series about our greatest food writers.

On that subject, I’d read a fantastic review of three books about beer in the Times Literary Supplement this week, by Ian Sansom entitled ‘World in a Pint Glass’. I’m a big fan of the writing of Ian Sansom, whose work I’ve encountered through the TLS over years, but I’ve just recently taken up a digital and print subscription, and I’d almost go as far as to say that his writing is worth the fee alone. He writes with such wit and levity, wearing his obvious scholarliness lightly. His afterthoughts at the back are always entertaining too. His writing is a great advert, in fact, for good critical, academic writing, and how it doesn’t have to be dull, dull, dull, because his articles never are. 

The last thing I want to tell you about this week is an excellent Youtube channel I’ve discovered called D. H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage, which covers the life of the writer, on account of his letter, over the year 1924-25 in short 3-4 minute audio episodes. The project is designed and curated by James Walker, who has clearly spent a long time reading and researching the letters of Lawrence to hand-pick interesting moments and tell the story of the writer’s fascinating life over the course of those two years. The reception of Lawrence’s work over the last century has been turbulent to say the least, attracting passionate advocates and prosecutors. I’d suggest you listen to these, read his work carefully and make your own mind up. For me, while he could have expressed himself more carefully at times, there have also been wild and wilful misinterpretations of his work. He’s a writer I return to, and a writer who lived an authentic, passionate life. He says at one point ‘death does not have to be sad, if one has lived.’ This idea of living a full life is an idea which recurs throughout the episodes and seems to be always at the forefront of his mind. While some will want to accuse Lawrence of all sorts of things, we cannot accuse him of not having lived and been passionate about his work. These episodes present him as someone at odds with the time in which he lived, someone who railed against the ways in which modernity required people to live, someone who worked like a dog, yet blazed his own trail. His love of cooking and self-sufficiency also made me sit up and listen, and maybe we need to go back and think of him as one of our great food writers too.