JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

We like Delimondo corned beef. Good meat, no fuss, plain packaging.

Last week while many parts of the city were underwater we tramped to the neighborhood supermarket for supplies and found that everyone had had the same idea. Every shopping cart and basket was in use and there were long queues at the cashiers. The shoppers were stocking up on toilet paper, instant noodles, canned sardines. There was a panic-buying run on corned beef.

How did corned beef become a staple of the Filipino diet? We think it started in World War II, when American soldiers handed out cans of corned beef from their rations. (During the Napoleonic Wars the British soldiers lived on corned beef.) Maybe earlier, during the American Occupation and Commonwealth periods.

In the Philippines corned beef is served as breakfast, merienda, lunch, merienda, dinner, and midnight snack. If you prick us, corned beef comes out. The number of local and imported corned beef brands on the market boggles the mind. We still remember our childhood shock at discovering that not all corned beef came out of a can.

Emotional Weather Report in the Philippine Star, 12 August 2012

Charm is often a suspect quality in fiction, a trick to cover up the hollowness of the work or distract the reader from its triteness. Beautiful Ruins, a novel by Jess Walter, is so unrelentingly charming that I had to keep my guard up lest it make off with my wallet.

The opening is terrific: in a tiny village on the coast of Italy in 1962, a young man looks up from his daydreams to see a beautiful woman coming towards him on a boat. She’s a bit player from the famously chaotic set of the movie Cleopatra, and she tells him she is dying. We think we know what’s going to happen, but the author skillfully steers us away from our own expectations.
(more…)

Happy Birthday, Matthias Eomer Octavian Federer-Urban! Today he will take your questions on any and all topics. Post your questions in Comments. They will be answered in the Jessica Rules the Universe podcast, which premieres next week.

A new episode will be posted every week. Our regular co-host is comic book writer and Trese creator Budjette Tan. We’ll ask Mat the first question: Why is he called Budjette?

Mat: It is a combination of his parents’ nicknames. Next question.

Three Novels of New York: The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, with an Introduction by Jonathan Franzen. Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, Php899 at National Bookstores

On the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton’s birth, at least three new novels have reimagined her work for the contemporary audience.

We have not yet read Victoria Patterson’s This Vacant Paradise and Claire McMillan’s The Gilded Age, two modern takes on Wharton’s The House of Mirth. We are reading The Innocents by Francesca Segal, practically a remake of The Age of Innocence. It is interesting to note that all three are debut novels, presumably homages to their common literary ancestor.

The Innocents by Francesca Segal, hardcover, Php995 at National Bookstores.

For Wharton fans (and admirers of Martin Scorsese’s wonderful screen version), the main pleasure of reading Segal’s novel is in identifying the 21st century equivalents of the characters and situations in The Age of Innocence. Segal has found a close parallel to claustrophobic old New York society in the tightly-knit Jewish community of Temple Fortune in present-day North West London.

Newland Archer, the young lawyer engaged to the sweet and entirely conventional May Welland, is now Adam Newman, a young lawyer who has just gotten engaged to the sweet and entirely conventional Rachel Gilbert. The Ellen Olenska who turns their safe and predictable existence on its head is Rachel’s cousin Ellie Schneider, recently expelled from Columbia University, New York for appearing in a scandalous movie (From Columbia? Really?). Ellie, like Ellen, has the knack for picking unsuitable men, making foolish decisions, and offending the “right-thinking”.

The strong-willed matriarch Mrs Mingott is now Ziva Schneider, a survivor of the Holocaust who has rebuilt her life in London; the van der Luydens at the top of the social food chain are now the philanthropic Sabahs. As its title suggests, The Innocents is so faithful to the plot points (Aha! the married guy) and narrative arc (She’s going to agree to an earlier wedding in 5, 4, 3…) of The Age of Innocence that it is impossible to read it without thinking of Wharton’s novel. And while Segal’s novel is engaging, witty and often funny, you can’t help but ask why you’re reading this when you could be reading the source.

The main difference between the two books is that Wharton exposes and satirizes the cold savagery of the New York upper class, while Segal embraces the warmth and generosity of the London Jewish community. One goes for the jugular, the other gives you a hug. (Nothing wrong with that if what you want is a hug.)

You know that killer line in The Age of Innocence? “It seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, some one had guessed and pitied…And that it should have been his wife moved him indescribably.” When you come to that line in the book (or in the movie), it’s as if someone’s piling rocks on your chest. That emotion, even if it’s not exactly pleasant, that’s what we look for in novels. The Innocents is an enjoyable read; The Age of Innocence moves us indescribably.

Gems from the 2012 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest “honoring” the worst openings to novels that haven’t been written. Because if they have been written, we’d be clamoring to read them. If you can’t be good, be terrible. Die, mediocrity, die!

As an ornithologist, George was fascinated by the fact that urine and feces mix in birds’ rectums to form a unified, homogeneous slurry that is expelled through defecation, although eying Greta’s face, and sensing the reaction of the congregation, he immediately realized he should have used a different analogy to describe their relationship in his wedding vows. — David Pepper

She slinked through my door wearing a dress that looked like it had been painted on … not with good paint, like Behr or Sherwin-Williams, but with that watered-down stuff that bubbles up right away if you don’t prime the surface before you slap it on, and – just like that cheap paint – the dress needed two more coats to cover her. — Sue Fondrie

The blood seeped out of the body like bad peach juice from a peach that had been left on one side so long the bottom became rotten while it still looked fine on the top but had started to attract fruit flies, and this had the same effect, but with regular flies, that is not say there weren’t some fruit flies around because, after all, this was Miami. — Howard Eugene Whitright

And the big winner:

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting. — Cathy Bryant

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

Have you observed how easily children can manipulate their parents? We’re talking about children between the ages of 4 and 10 whose parents have jobs. They sense that their parents are guilty about not being around to watch all their milk teeth fall out or take them to ballet class or praise them for every B+ they ever get in school, and they cash in on this guilt. Literally.

When they’re in a toy store, computer/electronics store or video arcade, they expect their parents to buy everything they point to, and if the adults refuse there’s hell to pay. Many parents, already frazzled from work, will cough up the money just to make the kids stop sulking, screaming and throwing those tantrums they know to be effective. The adults end up bribing their kids for a peaceful weekend.

Meanwhile the kids grow up thinking that all they have to do to get what they want is act up. Why not, when they’re rewarded for being bratty. The notion of saving up/working to get what you want never takes hold, and they don’t learn about the value of money. How do we know these things when we don’t have kids? Well we have seen them in action and used their tactics successfully.

How do you teach kids about money? Theoretically, by having a serious conversation about financial responsibility. Be strong. And let them read the Oishi Peso Smart series—books written and illustrated for the youngest readers, with lessons about money that they can appreciate.

Here’s one that’s especially relevant in these days of climate change: Making Paper Boats With Papa.

Click on images to enlarge.

Read the book:

Read the Oishi Peso Smart Series online.