[For those of you wondering what happened to My Porch scroll down past this post.]

Well maybe you haven’t been wondering, but I sure was. I don’t recall when I first saw the meal service pop up on Facebook or somewhere like that but I was intrigued by it from the start. I love any kind of kit that comes in a box and I like food so how could I not be interested? Although I had no intention of ordering the service, I did check out their website and saw a blog post somewhere about someone trying it out. I was totally impressed by the quality of the graphics, copy, and photography. And according to that blog (the name of which I will never remember) the food was good too. Still, didn’t seem like something I would get for myself no matter how cool it looked. Well, I also liked the fact that the service required actual cooking, that these were not prepared foods.

Still, not for me. Because I looked at Blue Apron’s site, I started to get pop-ups for similar services like Plated and Healthy Somethingorother. But neither of them were compelling enough visually to get me to even click on the links. And then these really cheesy ads started to pop up on cable for another service called Hello Fresh. For some reason I poo-pooed all these other services and was loyal to Blue Apron. I’m a sucker for good packing and marketing and the others just didn’t look as cool. Not to mention the fact that, rightly or wrongly, I considered Blue Apron to be the original and all the others to be copies. And I hate copy cats.

All this loyalty and I hadn’t even tried it.  But then I saw some reference to the fact that each meal was 500-700 calories per person. Bingo. That finally did it. I have been cutting down on calorie intake but am terrible at portion size and control when I cook from scratch. Too much calculating. But here was what promised to be tasty meals, perfectly portioned, and fun to cook. And it turned out to be true. The two-person plan gives you three meals a week. It was indeed lots of fun to cook, the recipes were things I would never attempt on a weeknight, the meals were really damn good, and overall totally satisfying. We liked it so much that I have now ordered a second box for the week, but this time vegetarian recipes. This means six original, often unusual, foreign-inspired meals a week. And the total cost is less than I would spend at Whole Foods in a week not to mention all the rotten produce I throw out when my weekday resolve to cook doesn’t match up with my weekend grocery buying.

Today I got our first vegetarian box with the ingredients for three meals. I am just waiting for John to come home to see which one I should make tonight. And then on Thursday our meat box will show up with three more meals.  Much more I could say, but I will let the pictures do the talking.

I decided recently that I was really tired of the look of my old blogspot blog. I’ve been working on a new blog for work and helping develop a new website and became so dazzled by the possibilities that I began to find My Porch very, very dowdy. For years I’ve been annoyed with the clumsy way Blogger handles text and after seeing what WordPress had to offer and how clean all the text looks, I just couldn’t bear another month with blogspot.

My intention was to just transfer everything from My Porch over but I ran into two challenges. I was trying to figure out how to take my ‘Google juice’ with me. After almost 9 years of blogging I really didn’t want to give up my digital footprint. After much research and even trying to hire someone to migrate my blog to save my Google juice, I just decided I didn’t give a rip. I am going to do a few things to get redirects in place but if they don’t work I guess I will have to start over.

My second challenge was that the title My Porch no longer really worked. I still like the notion of sitting on a porch chatting about books and music and travel and food, but when I put up various banner images on the new blog and none of them were of porches I could barely handle the cognitive dissonance. And then when John brought it up I decided it was a bridge too far. So then I decided to do what I had previously thought unthinkable. I decided to change the name of my blog. Forget the fact that I have been Thomas at My Porch since 2006. Forget that my email address was onmyporch. Forget that my Twitter handle was also My Porch related. It jut seemed like time for a new world order.

So how in the hell did I ever come up with Hogglestock? Since I decided to pay $18 for a domain so that I don’t have a dot wordpress url, I really wanted something that was a single word. After much trying and a little research I discovered that pretty much every word in the English language has been registered as a domain name since about 2006. That would explain why adumbrate.com wasn’t available. Then I thought of choosing a name based on a fictional character. I thought of becoming Mr. Samgrass after the character in Brideshead Revisited. But as much as I love Brideshead I’m not a universal Waugh fan so that seemed a little too specific. Although I must say that the officious partypooper Mr. Samgrass does have more than a few things in common with me.

So then I thought about trying Trollope. Certainly my favorite Victorian novelist and full of made up names and place names. And then I narrowed it down to three possibilities. Bundlesham, Utterden, and Hogglestock. All are fictional place names in Trollope’s novels and each had its pluses and minuses. I swore Amanda at Fig and Thistle to secrecy and asked for her opinion and John also chimed in before I settled on Hogglestock. For those of you who don’t recognize the name right off the bat, Hogglestock was the name of the parish belonging to the Revd Josiah Crawley in the Barsetshire series. It may be a hideous, depressingly poor place, but the name was too good to pass up and I am definitely a fan of the Barsetshire books.

So here we are. My Porch is a thing of the past (although most of my 1,200 posts and your 9,047 comments are available here) and Hogglestock is a fresh new day. Same content, different look. I hope you continue to like me my blog.

It may take a minute or two to get some of my lists posted on Hogglestock, but fear not they will return.

 
In early March Frances of Nonsuch Book and I went to Baltimore to visit a book “store” where all the books are free. She wrote about it here, so I won’t say too much more. What I am going to show you today is how that excursion threw my already full library into turmoil.

In very short order I began finding books that I knew would be coming home with me.

In the first 60 seconds of looking I came across two great finds.

The result was a big old pile of books. 23 of them and all were free. But this meant I was going to have to find room in my already full library.

The chaos that ensued was I started to organize. Lucy occasionally gave advice and instruction.

I love that Nonsuch Book (no relation to Frances) publishes great forgotten literature. But they make them too squat and wide. They don’t feel real good in the hand and they take up too much shelf space.

Then came the issue of how to organize memoirs, bios, and letters. I didn’t have the guts to intershelve them with fiction by the subject as some on Twitter suggested. I ended up Creating a bio/memoir/letters section. That way I could accommodate the few non-literary subjects in my collection (e.g., Mahler and Rorem).

I’ve got a lot of Mitford. And this picture is even missing one volume.

Because of my recently discovered love of Eric Ambler (note the first picture at top) a friend suggested I might enjoy Helen MacInnes. I haven’t read her yet, but I wasn’t about to pass up all of these on the chance that I will like her.

So far, I have read The Masters in an old Penguin edition and the edition of The Affair shown here. After I found out that Snow’s work falls in a couple different series, I made a conscious decision not to learn more about them. Otherwise I would feel the need to start at the beginning and read them in order.

I’ve read the first of the Ottley books which is included in this Virago omnibus. Plus I couldn’t pass up the cover. The Magnificent Spinster is one of my all time favorites and I already own this edition so I will be having a give away in the near future. Music in the Hills is totally rare her in the US and impossible to find unless you want to pay big bucks. I paid moderately big buck for the same version of Gerald and Elizabeth so this one will part of a give away as well. And the Ambler I have already talked about.

Thinglass / Shutterstock.com

For those of you unlikely to read or enjoy the review of The Misalliance that I just posted (scroll down) I thought I would throw in this bonus post.

You may recall that I decided to keep track of all the London place names that come up in Anita Brookner’s fiction. Her novels are full of London. Not in an overly conspicuous way, but it leaves you no doubt that Brookner is a creature of the city.

Having now finished re-reading six of Brookner’s 24 novels (and working on number seven at the moment), my Gazetteer of Brookner’s London is starting to take shape. I can’t wait to see the list when I’ve finished re-reading all 24. Part of me wants to do this with every book I read that takes place in London but that would be just short of madness.

At some point I will invest the time and/or money into having a map made. But for now it is a list. I know there are London geeks out there who will enjoy looking at it even if you haven’t read Brookner.

I know Brookner is an acquired taste and many will find any number of faults with her content and style, but good God I love her work. She is like Barbara Pym without a sense of humor. I’m up to number six in my chronological re-read of all of Brookner’s 24 novels. Here is my attempt to ‘review’ it. 

You will also find it crossposted over at the International Anita Brookner Day blog.

Just about every relationship in The Misalliance (or A Misalliance in the UK) could be considered a misalliance.

After being left by her husband of twenty years Blanche spends her days wandering the National Gallery and her solitary evenings with a bottle of wine. She spends a fair amount of time in musing on the reasons why her husband left her and the type of woman he left her for, but I never got the feeling that that was the point of this novel. In many ways Blanche seems rather complacent about her husband’s departure, as if it had been her own fault for not being the right kind of woman. That in itself is tragic given that she devoted her married life to becoming the kind of public and private companion that her husband Bertie seemed to want.

While volunteering at the local hospital one day Blanche is drawn to Sally Beamish, a young mother who is there trying to get help for her three-year old daughter Elinor/Nellie who is mute. Blanche is immediately taken with the child, seeing her as a patient, old soul putting up with a flighty mother and an absent father. Indeed she sees Nellie as a kindred spirit and she moves to offer assistance to Sally whose life is a bit of a self-imposed mess. Her husband Paul is off being a factotum for a wealthy American family who have oddly decided to only pay him in one lump sum at the end of an extended trip. By the end of that trip, however, Paul is essentially accused of embezzling funds and is unlikely to get the pay coming to him. This situation never amounts to anything with legal implications but Blanche is coerced into intervening on Paul’s behalf –a man she has never even seen before.

Throughout all of this Blanche’s ex-husband Bertie continues to drop in most evenings ostensibly to see how Blanche is doing. This struck me as Bertie wanting to have it both ways. Why give up the comforts of a trusted, supportive ex-spouse just because you have moved on to a younger, more dynamic wife? Although Blanche looks forward to these meetings and retains an emotional attachment to Bertie, I never got the feeling that they were necessary to her well-being. If anything I felt they might be keeping her from moving forward. Also part of the story is Patrick, a suitor in the days prior to Bertie with whom she has remained friends over the years. She asks for his advice on how to best help Sally and Nellie  and he ends up falling in love with the much younger Sally. Nothing ever comes of it, Sally uses Patrick for support in the same way she uses Blanche, but it is enough for Blanche to see Patrick for what he really is.

Blanche is a bit of a victim of male behavior and privilege, and although she is a bit stuck trying to make sense of it all, I kind of felt like she might be on the cusp of something. Perhaps it’s a recognition that the men in her life are really rather weak and certainly not to be relied upon. Blanche’s decision to leave them all behind and go off traveling for an extended, undefined period is, I suppose, at least partly out of desperation. But I couldn’t help projecting my own wishes for Blanche. This was going to be the moment of her triumph. The moment when she leaves it all behind and discovers who she really is.

And then at the eleventh hour Bertie returns–and seemingly for good. Is this vindication for Blanche and the restoration of her married life? Perhaps, but rather than finding it something to celebrate, I found it no more than a threat to her ultimate happiness. A return to her life in a comfy prison. But Brookner leaves us hanging as to what happens next. My feeling is that if Blanche does take him back it won’t stick.  He may not leave her again but she will realize he isn’t what she wants and this is the real misalliance of the book. Not the first 20 years, not the connection with Sally and Nellie, but what happens after Bertie’s return. His return may delay her self-realization, but it won’t preempt it entirely.

——-

This thought may not be worth much, but it is something I want to memorialize for my own edification. I loved the scenes where Mrs. Duff comes to Blanche’s rescue despite the fact that Blanche has never shown her more than a begrudged politeness. Mrs. Duff’s simple, but helpful assistance when Blanche fell ill seems like the only bit of altruism in the book. Brookner doesn’t make much of it. But she must have had something in mind. I can think of a few things, but I really just mention it because I was warmed by those scenes.