Stockpiling
Apr. 7th, 2020 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustYesterday morning I placed an order with the greengrocer; last night I found my way onto the Ocado website, and placed an order with them. Both will deliver today. As with the previous Ocado order, I was getting anxious at reports about long delays before supplies could be delivered, and then was wrong-footed by the fact that the only deliveries offered were 'next day'. I was tempted to abandon the order, but who knows whether I'll ever get back to the site? Nonetheless, I ordered smaller quantities, and was pickier about substituting for unavailable items, than if I were shopping for a more distant future. Then there are the conflicting reuests not to shop too often, and not to buy too much at one time. Stock up, but don't stockpile ...
steepholm identified this phenomenon as an emotive conjugation (something whose name I had not previously known), and in comments, I tweaked her formulation: I plan ahead; you stockpile; they panic buy. And a degree of snarkiness is justified; inevitably, we are gentler to our own failings than other people's. But it's true, too, that there are no right answers here, only at best an uneasy balance. Bee Wilson, in a very interesring Long Read in the Guardian offers the sequence: He panic buys. You stock up. I tirelessly provide food for my family, She argues, among other things, that if we obey the advice to shop less frequently, or to buy on behalf of vulnerable neighbiours, we inevitably buy more than usual, and that this is enough to disrupt the supermarkets' just-in-time supply chain. (And the moral of this is, support your local shops.)
The one thing I do admit to stockpiling is books. If I see a book that I want, I don't pause to consider whether I already have enough books (enough books? these words do not make sense). Other people, I know, have To Be Read piles: the secondhand bookseller at the market, reducing the price of a water-damaged novel (by Clive James) advised me to add it to the bottom of the pile, and this would be sound advice if it didn't involve tunneling into cardboard boxes, a whole wall of cardboard boxes ... These are strange days, and for once I can feel good about the book mountain. I open a box at random, and pull out something of which I have no recollection, but which looks rather good -
For example, The Sadness of Witches by Janice Elliott. I'd buy any novel by Janice Elliott, without looking inside it, for the pleasure of reading it and being suprised by her. In The Sadness of Witches, a family move from London to a clifftop cottage in Cornwall, which could be the synopsis of - well, 'Aga saga' is deroagatory, but whatever the polite way is of saying that. But in fact, if it reminds me of anything, it's Under Milk Wood: and while it would be misleading to claim it as a fantasy novel, the witches are real witches.
Georges Simenon's Le Client le plus obstiné du monde is a Maigret story, a novella rather than a novel in a little green pamphlet published for English readers, with vocabulary and notes. The customer of the title arrives early one morning - one fine spring morning - in a quiet corner café and, to the annoyance of the waiter, sits there all day, ordering a coffee or a mineral water from time to time, declining to cross the street to the larger, busier café where they would serve him the sandwich he asks for, not available in his café of choice. The day ends with a murder, of course, and Maigret investigates, calling at one café after another, enjoying the beautiful spring weather. That's all, but what more do you need?
Much as I enjoyed this frivolity, perhaps it did leave me wanting something more substantial, because I have started to read Alan Moore's Jerusalem, three volumes of small print. Physically, it's quite a daunting read, but in other respects it is easier going than I had anticipated. I'm not halfway through the first volume yet, after maybe a half dozen sections each following a character around Northampton at different times and in different circumstances: the same territory, then, as his Voice of the Fire, but broader, deeper, in places stranger and never as stylistically challenging as the first section of that earlier book. It's not without its own stylistic challenges: each section is a sort of stream of consciousness of its central character, in their voice, not in dialect but in their phrasing, and there were points where I had to re-read a sentence more than once to see how it hung together. Ask me in two volumes time whether a clearer style would have lost more than it gained. I feel slightly as if I should be making notes, drawing diagrams, following people's movements on the map (there is a very nice map) because paths cross from one section to another, and I'm probably missing connections. But I am enjoying myself, which is the purpose of the exercise.
steepholm identified this phenomenon as an emotive conjugation (something whose name I had not previously known), and in comments, I tweaked her formulation: I plan ahead; you stockpile; they panic buy. And a degree of snarkiness is justified; inevitably, we are gentler to our own failings than other people's. But it's true, too, that there are no right answers here, only at best an uneasy balance. Bee Wilson, in a very interesring Long Read in the Guardian offers the sequence: He panic buys. You stock up. I tirelessly provide food for my family, She argues, among other things, that if we obey the advice to shop less frequently, or to buy on behalf of vulnerable neighbiours, we inevitably buy more than usual, and that this is enough to disrupt the supermarkets' just-in-time supply chain. (And the moral of this is, support your local shops.)The one thing I do admit to stockpiling is books. If I see a book that I want, I don't pause to consider whether I already have enough books (enough books? these words do not make sense). Other people, I know, have To Be Read piles: the secondhand bookseller at the market, reducing the price of a water-damaged novel (by Clive James) advised me to add it to the bottom of the pile, and this would be sound advice if it didn't involve tunneling into cardboard boxes, a whole wall of cardboard boxes ... These are strange days, and for once I can feel good about the book mountain. I open a box at random, and pull out something of which I have no recollection, but which looks rather good -
For example, The Sadness of Witches by Janice Elliott. I'd buy any novel by Janice Elliott, without looking inside it, for the pleasure of reading it and being suprised by her. In The Sadness of Witches, a family move from London to a clifftop cottage in Cornwall, which could be the synopsis of - well, 'Aga saga' is deroagatory, but whatever the polite way is of saying that. But in fact, if it reminds me of anything, it's Under Milk Wood: and while it would be misleading to claim it as a fantasy novel, the witches are real witches.
Georges Simenon's Le Client le plus obstiné du monde is a Maigret story, a novella rather than a novel in a little green pamphlet published for English readers, with vocabulary and notes. The customer of the title arrives early one morning - one fine spring morning - in a quiet corner café and, to the annoyance of the waiter, sits there all day, ordering a coffee or a mineral water from time to time, declining to cross the street to the larger, busier café where they would serve him the sandwich he asks for, not available in his café of choice. The day ends with a murder, of course, and Maigret investigates, calling at one café after another, enjoying the beautiful spring weather. That's all, but what more do you need?
Much as I enjoyed this frivolity, perhaps it did leave me wanting something more substantial, because I have started to read Alan Moore's Jerusalem, three volumes of small print. Physically, it's quite a daunting read, but in other respects it is easier going than I had anticipated. I'm not halfway through the first volume yet, after maybe a half dozen sections each following a character around Northampton at different times and in different circumstances: the same territory, then, as his Voice of the Fire, but broader, deeper, in places stranger and never as stylistically challenging as the first section of that earlier book. It's not without its own stylistic challenges: each section is a sort of stream of consciousness of its central character, in their voice, not in dialect but in their phrasing, and there were points where I had to re-read a sentence more than once to see how it hung together. Ask me in two volumes time whether a clearer style would have lost more than it gained. I feel slightly as if I should be making notes, drawing diagrams, following people's movements on the map (there is a very nice map) because paths cross from one section to another, and I'm probably missing connections. But I am enjoying myself, which is the purpose of the exercise.
