Observation Journal — Food as Magic and other quibbles

In this observation journal spread, I was working out some recent feelings about food as magic (vs food in magic).

Made a new multi-ribbon bookmark for the journals

Food thoughts

I can’t remember specifically why, but magical food had been bothering me. I must have read a rash of enchanted-food stories around about then. Some of which were great! if you wrote one of them I probably loved it! But there were some patterns which didn’t appeal to me personally.

For some reason, while I love food in stories about magic, I’m extremely picky about food-as-magic, food-magic, literalisation of Proust, etc. It’s weirdly personal and unhygienic, and intimate, and extremely decadent, and in a romance it competes with other elements with the same issues.

Also it makes me feel inadequate and afraid for cakes. I’m still stressed about that episode of Tremontaine, in which food was not magic (good!) but was elaborately-constructed and in peril (I can’t handle it! I can’t watch cake decorating shows where they have to deliver the cake!).

But I do like food IN fantasy, and books generally — good plain food and comically bad food and food as simple decadence and food as care and competence, and food fights, and knowing the cake will survive to be eaten. (I can even forgive cake destruction if it’s early and an inciting incident and heavily flagged). “Lots of food and lots of fighting” as someone (Norman Lindsay? the internet is not helping) said of children’s books.

One of the funnier things to me, looking back through this, is the clear formative fingerprints of various stories. Good plain food is certainly a reference to Narnia and other post-WWII children’s books (although in that regard can I draw your attention to the existence of this Anthony-Bourdain-in-Narnia fan fiction?) — and indeed earlier books, with bland nursery food and the Bastables stabbing a pudding to death with their forks. “Why am I so annoyed by men who make omelettes?” is traced back to Sabrina (the 1995 movie). And lovely as Chocolat is, the food fight in Hook for some reason filled the spot in my heart the subtly-magical chocolate might have taken. (Inconsistently, I am quite okay with magic food in Alice in Wonderland and The Magic Faraway Tree but I suspect that’s because the food isn’t any weirder than anything else that’s going on).

Almost-immediate edit: I am now thinking of all the magical food I do like. I think there’s some similarity to how I feel about historical settings and very-near-future astronaut stories, which is that the non-magical version is already so interesting that my tastes incline towards it, unless the context or writing is doing the work to pull me away. Maybe.

Observation journal thoughts

This is one of those journal pages looking for patterns in things that had been interesting or bothering me. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for here, so it’s a very loose collection of thoughts. You can see me finding the boundaries of my likes and objections as I work through them — noting a dislike of a certain type of decadence, and then realising I liked other ways of showing decadence, which started up a list of things I do like.

However, recently, I’ve started reading a few books that I ought to like, but which manage to land just outside what I do like. So I’ve been more deliberately feeling for the boundaries of tropes and motifs in this way, and trying to find out if there’s any common features to that dividing line.

It’s an interesting exercise. It’s useful to know what I like, so that I can steer towards it, and I enjoy refining those definitions. But finding out what I don’t like is useful too — not just for avoiding it, but for the challenge of working out how I could (for example) write food as magic in other ways, and trick myself into liking it.

Trying to write on the sofa with a bad back.

Writing/Art exercise

1. Think of your favourite genre, and five things you love in it (tropes or images or motifs or poses — written or drawn). Maybe it’s magical food and books about writers with writers block, and enchanted portals that get closed forever, and the erosion of once-beautiful buildings, and the inner lives of serial killers — you do you.
2. Pick one of those. What are some versions you have seen and love? What are the important aspects? Are there any patterns to what you like about it?
3. Are there examples of it that haven’t worked for you, or can you imagine an example that wouldn’t work for you?
   – For example, I like food in fantasy, and I like books about hilariously horrible writers, and magical portals, and beautiful buildings, and crimes being solved — but it takes a lot to make me like the versions listed in paragraph 1 above!
   – For artists: Later in the journal I try this with images, too. It’s a little easy to mock women on cliffs wearing shawls and staring into the distance, but if they can see something approaching, or there’s a sense of urgency, like she’s just run up the cliff, or she’s doing more than just clutching her shawl mournfully, I will happily plunge back into that particular angst.
4. Just feeling out the edges of things you like can be useful. But if you want to go further, pick one of those versions you don’t like, and see if you could push it further, and how far you would have to go to make it charm you again.
   – For example, I like flamboyant over-the-top caricatures of writers. I tend not to like books about writers with writers block. I might like a book about a writer with writers block, looking for their muse, if they were only pretending to be a blocked writer and were just trying to infiltrate a literary festival in order to commit dreadful crimes. Or even better, if they were actually an undercover detective infiltrating bohemian society in order to thwart a murderer!
   – And while I now quite want to read or write this, I’ve also learned (or emphasised) that I like characters being consciously and flamboyantly unlikeable for Reasons, and ridiculous secrets, and exposes of literary foibles, and unlikely Rube-Goldberg detective plots, if the characters are sufficiently outrageous.
5. Do a quick paragraph or pencil sketch, to catch the idea, and so that, if necessary, you can say you did write or draw something today.

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