The continuing doll housie saga

In spite of my dissatisfaction with aspects of the "Sunday Philosophy Club" series, I find myself on the fifth installment. A few times I almost gave up completely on the series.

One thing that's so annoying is that the author holds back from descriptions of sexual acts - it's almost Victorian. Isabel Dalhousie does go on and on about how beautiful her 20-something boyfriend Jamie is, which is great, but the first time they got together, in book 3, she just asks him: "do you want to sleep with me." And then they are shown in the afterglow phase. I don't expect clinical details and even the best writers have written bad sex scenes, but come on, Smith, give us something.

And then there's the fact that Jamie has aged from 23 in book 1 to 29 in book 5, but Dalhousie has remained in her early 40s. Does Smith think nobody would notice, or did he not pay enough attention himself? The guy is hella prolific, I wouldn't be surprised if he misses a bunch of details.

And Dalhousie herself seems like such an old prissy lady - and it's not only because the woman doing the voice work for the audio books sounds like she's pushing 70. Granted the experience being in your early 40s in Edinburgh might be different from being in your early 40s in Manhattan, but still...

But every now and then there will be a moment of awesome in the series that keeps me coming back. That happened in the fourth book - Dalhousie has been throughout the series the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, but in the middle of book 4 she finds out that she's been sacked - a coup by a couple of academics named Lettuce and Dove, with Dove taking over her editorship. After some soul-searching she decides against philosophical resignation and instead takes action - she's filthy rich, so she simply buys the Review of Applied Ethics and sacks Lettuce and Dove. You go, Dalhousie.

The Sunday Philosophy Club

An actor friend, after attending the latest reading of JULIA & BUDDY on Friday (which is  hopefully the last reading before a production) recommended a book series to me, "The Sunday Philosophy Club." The first installment was published in 2004.

Since I was having one of my every-few-months bouts with dry-eye syndrome over the weekend I wanted to avoid spending my usual hours and hours staring at the computer so I downloaded the first two installments as audiobooks and spent the day with my burning eyes closed, listening to the novels.

I have mixed feelings about the novels and the heroine, Isabel Dalhousie. On the one hand I have plenty of affinity for her, being around my age - or was, when the first book was published; an interest in philosophy - she actually is a philosopher with a part-time job as the editor of Review of Applied Ethics. She's also attracted to a younger man, who, when the first book opens, is her niece's ex-boyfriend. A good chunk of the stories are devoted to her various philosophical musings which I enjoy, since many of her observations are pithy, well-reasoned and even sometimes funny. And at one point she slams evolutionary psychology and what's not to like about that?

But she doesn't have to work, living off the fortune she inherited from her mother, and at times she seems like a bit of a ninny, and prissy too. Although part of my assessment of her might be colored by the voice of the audio book reader for the series, which I find irritating.

But then again, on the plus side she lives in Edinburgh, one of only four foreign cities I've visited, which also includes Dublin, London and Montreal and Montreal barely counts because it's Canada and we drove there. And really Dublin doesn't count either because I was there for a job and barely got to see anything outside my hotel room and the office.

Anyway, I have vivid and fond memories of Edinburgh, which I visited with my daughter five years ago to see the Fringe Festival. Various locales, some of which I visited, are described in the novels, which is a nice cozy familiar feeling.

And then there's this - early in the second novel in the series, while Isabel is working in her niece's cheese shop, she observes:

Most people led their lives this way: doing, rather than thinking. They acted, rather than thought about acting; this made philosophy a luxury - the privilege of those who didn't have to spend their time cutting cheese and wrapping bread. From the perspective of the cheese counter, Schopenhauer seemed far away.

Which I found a fascinating coincidence - the passage echoes some lines in my J&B script:

The world has to be maintained. That’s why we get paid. We do something worth getting paid for. Nobody wants to pay actors, trust me. And philosophy professors – hah. Philosophy is not so important when you have a stopped-up toilet. And yet philosophy professors are given so much respect.

And Julia is a philosophy professor specializing in Schopenhaur. The novel passage above is the first time that Schopenhauer is mentioned in the series.

So obviously there's much to recommend this series to me - and when you have to keep your eyes closed there aren't many activity options anyway.

One thing I am sure of - the author, Alexander McCall Smith is gay. I tried to confirm this, but so far have not found anything online, but I'd bet big money on it. I don't think there are any detailed descriptions of young women in the books, and I have no idea what Isabel Dalhousie even looks like - I don't think she's been described yet, and she never looks into a mirror.

But he's gone into detail on how beautiful the young men are - and in fact there is an unusually high percentage of beautiful young men in the books, and the author enjoys putting admiring thoughts in the heads of his female characters. At one point Dalhousie's housekeeper gives detailed instructions to one of the beautiful young men on how he could dress sexier. You would never see this kind of thing from a straight male writer.

So that's another point in favor of the series.

The Sunday Philosophy Club, revisited

I have recently been getting into philosophy in a fairly big way, thanks to attending meetings and reading the work of Massimo Pigliucci and the Stoics. So I decided to re-listen to the audiobook version of The Sunday Philosophy Club, the first installment in the series of that name. The idea of practical ethics that Pigliucci has talks about goes very will with the novels, as the protagonist Isabel Dalhousie is the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. There's even a review of the Sunday Philosophy Club series in the magazine Philosophy Now, to which Pigliucci has contributed.

I mentioned previously that the narrator of the audiobooks of the series had a voice that got on my nerves. Well I discovered that an abridged version of the series is available in the UK, narrated by Phyllis Logan - that's Downton Abbey's Mrs. Hughes. But you can't get that version in the US. *sigh*

One more thing about the series - I don't believe there is ever once a meeting of the Sunday Philosophy Club described in any of the ten novels.

Your cocktail smelt of elderflowers

I just discovered elderflower liqueur, which oddly enough seems to be the new big thing in cocktails, but I discovered it via the Sunday Philosophy Club, the series of books by Alexander McCall Smith. In one installment, Isabel Dalhousie and some neighbors discuss making elderflower cordials, a non-alcoholic beverage. Apparently elderflower cordials are a big thing in Scotland, if Smith is to be believed.

So I became interested in elderflowers and discovered the St. Germain brand of elderflower liqueur - apparently it's quite recent in development and ridiculously artisinal:

Fine artisanal French liqueur made from 100% fresh, handpicked elderflowers. Subtle yet complex flavor that is low in sugar content, roughly half that of other liqueurs. 

The first of its kind, St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur is the creation of Robert Cooper, third generation distiller and former owner of Chambord liqueur. 

Cooper began developing St-Germain in 2001 after watching the surge in popularity of nonalcoholic elderflower cordials in top cocktails accounts in London, Sydney and New York. He knew a liqueur made exclusively from the fresh elderflowers would taste better, be more stable, versatile and truer to the flower’s unique flavor profile than the sugar and water-based cordials. Shortly thereafter, Cooper set out, using his savoir faire of fine liqueurs, particularly ones produced in France, to create St-Germain, the world’s first elderflower liqueur. 

Refusing to settle for cultivated, freeze dried or frozen blossoms, which is what the non-alcoholic cordials use, Cooper discovered that using 100% wild elderflowers, created a superior liqueur. The process of gathering the delicate blossoms for St-Germain is a carefully orchestrated sequence of events, which must be completed during the short three to four day span when the blossoms peak. In the Alps, bohemian farmers handpick the elderflowers and transport them via bicycle to depots, or private homes equipped with scales and special crates where they are meticulously guarded before arriving at the distillery to be used for the production of St-Germain.

Considering that the creation of this liqueur involves hand-picking and bicycle transportation by bohemian Alpine farmers, it's quite a bargain - you can get this massive fancy bottle of the stuff for under $30.

And the liqueur is so new that it's still possible to invent your own cocktail recipes with it, which I did - I invented what I call the Elderflower Citrus Mimosa. The classic brunch mimosa is typically made with champagne, but I actually think that all wines are too grape-y for elderflower liqueur - it's best with citrus fruits.

The Elderflower Citrus Mimosa

• 1 part elderflower liqueur
• 2 parts fresh grapefruit juice
• 2 parts club soda
• splash of orange juice

Serve over ice in a cocktail glass.

Delicious! And when people look at you quizzically when you mention "elderflowers" you can point out that they come from the same plant as elderberries, you know, as in "your father smelt of elderberries." If they don't get that reference they don't deserve any elderflower liqueur type drinks.

Sunday Philosophy Club #14

I've had an off-again, on-again relationship with the Sunday Philosophy Club, the series written by Alexander McCall Smith, best known for The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, now on its 23rd installment.

A few times I've vowed to stop listening to SPC - I always consume it via audio book - because of the Men are from Mars gender essentialism that crops up too often. In fact it crops up in this latest installment. *

But I keep coming back. 

Partly I suppose because I am interested in philosophy - that is why an actor friend told me about the series in the first place - because I was working on a play that had a philosopher character who was a devotee of Arthur Schopenhauer. 

That's been my most successful play so far, in my non-impressive theater career. I think my latest play, LE CHAT NOIR (currently being translated into French), is better, but who knows whenever that will see the light of day. 

Matt DeCapua portrays Schopenhauer 
in a dream sequence from
  JULIA & BUDDY

In between the thirteenth and fourteenth installments of SPC, I briefly explored The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, both in audio book form and the regrettably short-lived, one-season-only television series.

The concept behind the Ladies Detective Agency series is truly original and I really enjoyed the television series. But to my surprise I got bored during the first Ladies Detective book and stopped listening.

This recent installment of the SPC saga, The Sweet Remnants of Summer, has an unsurprising name - every book in the series is set during the summer. 

Even more notable is the temporal laxity of the series. The first book was published in 2004, and the protagonist, Isabel Dalhousie, was said to be in her early 40s (I was the same age at the time) and Jamie, her niece's ex-boyfriend back then, in his early 20s. The series doesn't normally reference current events so the fact that Isabel doesn't seem to age isn't noticeable - until this latest installment. The book mentions the Scottish independence movement, but really that could be almost any time. But at one point, Isabel mentions Pope Francis, although not by name, who became pope in 2013. So the series is now set at least nine years after it began - assuming the first book was set the same year it was published and not retroactively moved into the future.

So if it began in 2004, Isabel is now at least in her early fifties, but age hasn't seemed to have had any impact on her and nobody seems to think it surprising that she has two children around kindergarten age. But then, she got pregnant twice, in her early-mid 40s with no trouble at all, at an age when many women need help from fertility drugs.

Unlike Precious Ramotswe, the protagonist of Ladies Detective Agency, whose appearance is constantly discussed, and even referenced in a title, "Tea Time for the Traditionally Built," Isabel's appearance is never described. Is she supposed to be a brain in a vat, imagining her perfect placid life with her handsome young husband in Edinburgh?

Anyway, one thing I liked about this installment of SPC is that it treats the characters of Jamie and Isabel's housekeeper Grace differently than in previous ones. Although the point of view of the series has always been third-person omniscient, it has stuck closely to Isabel's point of view, with only occasional brief descriptions of the inner thoughts of other people (and one very memorable time, a fox.) But for this book, we get long passages of Jamie's and Grace's points of view, including a very amusing segment in which Grace imagines the personal lives of Aristotle and Kant. It really opened things up, I thought.

The plots of the SPC are never exciting, and very little changes, especially after the early days of the series when the Isabel-Jamie relationship evolved from friendship to marriage. In this book the most exciting plot point was that Isabel's oldest son has been biting people. But it's not about the plots, but rather Isabel's flights into philosophical thought, which are sometimes funny, even laugh out loud funny on a few occasions. In fact, if the plots did become more exciting, it would feel like a betrayal. I've come to expect placid, non-consequential plots set in an idyllic Edinburgh summer, spiced with the occasional philosophy.

And there has yet to be a meeting of this so-called Philosophy Club - on any day of the week. If there ever was a meeting, that would be a huge deal.

* Even worse, this book makes a positive reference to the dreadful, misogynist, Islamaphobic Richard Dawkins.