Friday, June 09, 2006
A photographer's memoir
reviewed by Andrew Motion at the Guardian: it sounds strikingly well-written, and also includes descriptions of being sent to boarding school at age three and sex with his mother in his late teens. The book is Michael Ward's Mostly Women; looks like Amazon UK only?
William Empson's letters
selected and edited by John Haffenden and reviewed by Matthew Creasy at FT.com:
Two days after she gave birth to a child by her lover, Peter Duval Smith, poet and critic William Empson wrote to his wife:
My dearest Hetta,
Very glad to hear that all went well. I shall come home next Thursday 13th, and will visit you on the Friday (if they allow that, as they presumably do; no doubt Helena will know). Helena wrote and told me how things were going, also that she was improving Jacob's Latin.
Much love, and I am glad you are happy.
William
Two days after she gave birth to a child by her lover, Peter Duval Smith, poet and critic William Empson wrote to his wife:
My dearest Hetta,
Very glad to hear that all went well. I shall come home next Thursday 13th, and will visit you on the Friday (if they allow that, as they presumably do; no doubt Helena will know). Helena wrote and told me how things were going, also that she was improving Jacob's Latin.
Much love, and I am glad you are happy.
William
Lego mash-ups
Michael Chabon on Lego then and now:
By the late nineties, when we bought that first Indian set, abstraction was dead. A full-blown realism reigned supreme in the Legosphere. Legos were sold in kits that enabled one to put together, at fine scales, in detail made possible by a wild array of odd-shaped pieces, precise replicas of Ferrari Formula 1 racers, pirate galleons, jet airplanes. Lego provided not only the standard public-domain play environments supplied to children by toy designers of the past fifty to one hundred years�the Wild West, the middle ages, jungle and farm and city street--but also a line of licensed Star Wars kits, the first of many subsequent ventures into trademarked, conglomerate-owned, pre-imagined environments derived from movies and other media. Instead of the printed booklets I remembered, featuring suggestions for the kinds of things one might want to try to make from his or her box of squares and rectangles, the new kits came encumbered with fat, abstruse, wordless manuals laying out, panel after numbered panel and page after page, the steps that must be followed if one hoped--and after all, why else would you nudge your dad into buying it for you?--to arrive, in the end, at a landspeeder just like Luke Skywalker's (only smaller). Where Lego building had once been an open-ended, exploratory kind, it now had far more in common with puzzle-solving, a process of moving incrementally toward a ideal, pre-established solution.
By the late nineties, when we bought that first Indian set, abstraction was dead. A full-blown realism reigned supreme in the Legosphere. Legos were sold in kits that enabled one to put together, at fine scales, in detail made possible by a wild array of odd-shaped pieces, precise replicas of Ferrari Formula 1 racers, pirate galleons, jet airplanes. Lego provided not only the standard public-domain play environments supplied to children by toy designers of the past fifty to one hundred years�the Wild West, the middle ages, jungle and farm and city street--but also a line of licensed Star Wars kits, the first of many subsequent ventures into trademarked, conglomerate-owned, pre-imagined environments derived from movies and other media. Instead of the printed booklets I remembered, featuring suggestions for the kinds of things one might want to try to make from his or her box of squares and rectangles, the new kits came encumbered with fat, abstruse, wordless manuals laying out, panel after numbered panel and page after page, the steps that must be followed if one hoped--and after all, why else would you nudge your dad into buying it for you?--to arrive, in the end, at a landspeeder just like Luke Skywalker's (only smaller). Where Lego building had once been an open-ended, exploratory kind, it now had far more in common with puzzle-solving, a process of moving incrementally toward a ideal, pre-established solution.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
The spirit of competition
Lionel Shriver on romantic partnership and competition at the Daily Mail. (Link via Return of the Reluctant.) It's the backstory to her excellent novel Double Fault, to be re-released in the US & the UK later this summer. (I've got more to say about the book but won't do so until the short review I wrote a few weeks ago is in print.)
Tonsilized
Hmmm, this may be a bit too X-rated for what is on the whole a mostly PG-13ish or R-rated blog (barring occasional excursions into Heather Lewis, Ken Bruen et al.), but Christopher Hitchens at Vanity Fair on the sex act that's as American as apple pie is worth a read. (Thanks to the New York Observer's guide to highbrow oral sex reportage.)
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Tinned pineapple and glace cherries
It is an absurdity, but this paragraph in Trev Broughton's piece at the TLS on the novelist Elizabeth Taylor's relentless Englishness made my mouth water in nostalgic sympathy:
Food, in Taylor's fictions, becomes a battleground as well as an index of character. When, in A View of the Harbour, the successful novelist and chaotic housewife Beth accuses her husband of belittling her work ('an irritating and rather shameful habit'), she clinches the argument, and confounds her spouse, by adding triumphantly that there is nothing else to eat: 'The junket has not set and there is no cheese'. In a Summer Season's housekeeper, Mrs Meacock, has learnt her culinary skills from an American family: 'it was rare for a dish of meat to go to the dining-room without its rings of tinned pineapples'; she embellishes her glamorous whips, souffles and mousses with ostentatious glace cherries. Her spare time is devoted to compiling an anthology of 'Five Thousand and One Witty and Humorous Sayings': 'such a contented woman', thinks her self-absorbed employer, 'dividing her enthusiasm between puddings and literary work'. Despite the consoling omnipresence of cigarettes, fish and chips, and the 'desultory' biscuits served up to unwanted guests, to read Taylor's fiction is to encounter a vivid cultural history of the post-war English pudding. Julia feeds her sickly son arrowroot mould, but likes to get her recipes from good literature. She accommodates to wartime austerities by serving up baked apples from Villette. A Masonic ladies' night in the 1960s, in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, features a dessert named for the hostess: 'Peches Denise' turns out to be 'half a tinned peach sitting on sherry-soaked sponge cake'. The 1970s see the rise of petits fours and foreign cheese, of cheesecake smuggled in from the delicatessen, of ice cream in the freezer.
I am still fond of making luridly iced cupcakes, and when I was little my very favorite job at my English grandmother's house was decorating the sherry trifle: you blobbed on spoonfuls of whipped cream, then dotted each little mound with a slice of green angelica, a quarter of a glace cherry and two slivers of blanched almond (this was the ritual, sometimes disrupted if one of the ingredients had run short but otherwise impervious to alteration--also kept in the same tin were sugared violets and various other bits and bobs, some of which later ended up at my mother's house, things like the little cardinals and toadstools and so on that you prodded down into the icing-and-marzipan layer on top of a Christmas cake). The idea of these English sweets has me in their thrall, it is not that I actually want to eat them (I really don't like sherry trifle, I don't like custard or sherry and I only like cake insofar as it is an icing delivery system) but that things like iced gems were a once-every-two-years-when-we-went-to-England treat and accordingly quite irresistible though intrinsically rather cardboard/food-coloringy....
Food, in Taylor's fictions, becomes a battleground as well as an index of character. When, in A View of the Harbour, the successful novelist and chaotic housewife Beth accuses her husband of belittling her work ('an irritating and rather shameful habit'), she clinches the argument, and confounds her spouse, by adding triumphantly that there is nothing else to eat: 'The junket has not set and there is no cheese'. In a Summer Season's housekeeper, Mrs Meacock, has learnt her culinary skills from an American family: 'it was rare for a dish of meat to go to the dining-room without its rings of tinned pineapples'; she embellishes her glamorous whips, souffles and mousses with ostentatious glace cherries. Her spare time is devoted to compiling an anthology of 'Five Thousand and One Witty and Humorous Sayings': 'such a contented woman', thinks her self-absorbed employer, 'dividing her enthusiasm between puddings and literary work'. Despite the consoling omnipresence of cigarettes, fish and chips, and the 'desultory' biscuits served up to unwanted guests, to read Taylor's fiction is to encounter a vivid cultural history of the post-war English pudding. Julia feeds her sickly son arrowroot mould, but likes to get her recipes from good literature. She accommodates to wartime austerities by serving up baked apples from Villette. A Masonic ladies' night in the 1960s, in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, features a dessert named for the hostess: 'Peches Denise' turns out to be 'half a tinned peach sitting on sherry-soaked sponge cake'. The 1970s see the rise of petits fours and foreign cheese, of cheesecake smuggled in from the delicatessen, of ice cream in the freezer.
I am still fond of making luridly iced cupcakes, and when I was little my very favorite job at my English grandmother's house was decorating the sherry trifle: you blobbed on spoonfuls of whipped cream, then dotted each little mound with a slice of green angelica, a quarter of a glace cherry and two slivers of blanched almond (this was the ritual, sometimes disrupted if one of the ingredients had run short but otherwise impervious to alteration--also kept in the same tin were sugared violets and various other bits and bobs, some of which later ended up at my mother's house, things like the little cardinals and toadstools and so on that you prodded down into the icing-and-marzipan layer on top of a Christmas cake). The idea of these English sweets has me in their thrall, it is not that I actually want to eat them (I really don't like sherry trifle, I don't like custard or sherry and I only like cake insofar as it is an icing delivery system) but that things like iced gems were a once-every-two-years-when-we-went-to-England treat and accordingly quite irresistible though intrinsically rather cardboard/food-coloringy....
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
The human voice
Anne Karpf's new book excerpted at the Guardian:
Apart from humans, birds' vocalisations are vastly more complex and precisely modulated than those of any other animal. Most remarkably, songbirds too learn from experience. Some songbirds even have 'dialects' - defined, localised, particular acoustic features that are culturally transmitted. And songbirds come to use their voices only if they're exposed to the communicative signals of adults of their species. Just as human infants who don't hear the human voice or speech don't develop normal vocal capacities of their own, so songbirds raised in isolation produce abnormal 'isolate' songs.
Apart from humans, birds' vocalisations are vastly more complex and precisely modulated than those of any other animal. Most remarkably, songbirds too learn from experience. Some songbirds even have 'dialects' - defined, localised, particular acoustic features that are culturally transmitted. And songbirds come to use their voices only if they're exposed to the communicative signals of adults of their species. Just as human infants who don't hear the human voice or speech don't develop normal vocal capacities of their own, so songbirds raised in isolation produce abnormal 'isolate' songs.
On Trying to Keep Still
Just finished reading Jenny Diski's latest book, On Trying to Keep Still (UK release only, as far as I can tell); it's not perfect, but it's that something almost better than perfect that her books so often are (intelligent, grumpy, always stimulating, extremely funny, flawed/human--she reminds me very much of Rebecca West).
For some reason Diski's writing creates in me the feeling of a special affinity, though I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it's just one of her talents & all her readers feel like that. In any case this book is just up my alley, travel writing by someone who prefers to stay at home reading in bed (and she goes to visit the Sami people in Lapland, my obsession; even her freezing-coldness--and, worse, her words of scorn for Swedish-tourism-for-rich-people & the ice hotel--cannot stop me from desperately wanting to go to the ice hotel, apparently if you get too cold you can move into a regular heated cabin though I feel that I would never forgive myself for copping out; Diski admits to feeling "a faint flutter of thrill" on these moonlit journeys over ice, although she claims that her sense of adventure is a segment of herself "as thin as a slice of proscuitto" and her description of the awfulness of having to go outside to pee when you are female and spending the night in a nightmarishly frigid and sort-of-open-to-the-air reindeer tent is truly horrifying).
(NB the next book I must read now has been sitting here for a while & has now jumped to top of queue on basis of Diski reindeer scenes, Piers Vitebsky's The Reindeer People.)
Anyway, here are some of my favorite passages from the book, which is a collection of linked essays (of somewhat variable quality--perhaps the one that works best as a self-standing piece is "On anatomy," they're all really rather captivating though) written during Diski's year of trying to keep still and mentally idle, a year in which the search for idleness and stillness nonetheless took her to New Zealand, Lapland and (almost more extreme than the others--two months in a cottage...) the English countryside.
On bungee-jumping:
For most of the history of the world, it has been the goal of humanity to attempt to get up into the air and stay there for as long as possible. Up was always the desired direction. The Babel builders wanted the heavens not the depths. Up. The big idea of Daedalus was to fly, not to fall. Up. Icarus may seem to be the patron saint of freefall, but at the time of his maiden flight he was a tragic failure. We looked at the birds with envy, longing to find a way to emulate them, not at the nasty mess under the tree that was all that remained of an incautious monkey that had been trying to make its way amongst the branches of the canopy. Apes were so pleased to get on to solid ground that they stood up on two feet and beame hominids capable of clapping their hands and dancing a jig of happiness. Only the desperate jumped from great heights, and they expected to do it just the once.
From an essay "On taking walks" (which might more aptly have been titled "On not going for walks"):
The exhortation of others works wonders of indolence on me. Fresh air, nature in its season or the adrenalin rush of the inner city, when pressed on me, though I don't doubt their charms and excitements, make me shrink in my chair, wishing the room smaller, the windows shaded, the chair deeper, the door locked. Leave me alone, was, I think, born with me, my invisible twin, before language, when company was nothing but an incoherent threat of alteration. Leave me alone must have been my embryonic remonstration with whom-or-what-ever it may concern about the whole damn bother and dislocation of being born, and it stuck. I was not born idle, I was foetally idle. I can imagine with a clarity far more piercing than memory the dreadful initial interruption that signalled the end of my perfect, timeless, still existence. I like small rooms; I love to float and hate to swim--I am temperamentally suited to uterine life.
Here's an opening salvo from the essay appealingly titled "On spiders and respect for sheep" (this one I totally sympathize with, I always feel like this though I know it's completely irrational):
Being really alone means being free from anticipation. Even to know that something is going to happen, that I am required to do something is an intrusion on the emptiness I am after. What I love to see is an empty diary, pages and pages of nothing planned. A date, an arrangement, is a point in the future when something is required of me. I begin to worry about it days, sometimes weeks ahead. Just a haircut, a hospital visit, a dinner party. Going out. The weight of the thing-that-is-going-to-happen sits on my heart and crushes the present into non-existence. My ability to live in the here and now depends on not having any plans, on there being no expected interruption. I have no other way to do it. How can you be alone, properly alone, if you know someone is going to knock at the door in five hours, or tomorrow morning, or you have to get ready and go out in three days' time? I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future.
That last sentence is amazingly good, isn't it? "I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future." Hmmm....
And I am left with the picture of Diski irritably giving in and sweeping (with a broom, dustpan and brush left int he corner) the autumn leaves off the flags of a "redundant" church in the countryside near that cottage:
I really hoped no one would come in and see me. It was an act of tidiness, but to someone coming through the door I would look like a devout parishioner dusting and arranging the flowers at her local church. It would appear to be an act for God whereas it was actually an act for neatness. Which was bad enough. A human taking a hand in the battle of nature versus indoors. Sweeping away the leaves in this redundant church was an obsessively human act. I wouldn't have wanted it either misunderstood or even simply witnessed. I would not have wanted anyone to think that I was either giving thanks or tidying up. I do so hate the idea of being good.
On an unrelated note, posting will probably be lightish round here in the next couple weeks; I've got a fiendishly huge amount of work-related reading to do, I firmly and puritanically plan on reading very few novels though I expect I will give in once or twice a week and read one anyway. Puritanical discipline will be needed; in fact I've got only twelve weeks or so to write all the rest of my book about breeding & nature & nurture in the eighteenth century and revise the manuscript for a mid-September submission date, which will mean working like a maniac all summer. Fortunately there is really nothing I enjoy more than reading and writing like a maniac; but I expect the blog will suffer. In any case I can't write about the real work stuff as I come to it, it takes the edge off the writing, but I expect I will come across various funny passages that can't get squeezed into the chapter (I've got about 15 eighteenth-century books about horse-breeding, for instance) and that accordingly may make an appearance here if I find them irresistible. So I'm not planning on vanishing, just more short posts with links and fewer long ones like this.
For some reason Diski's writing creates in me the feeling of a special affinity, though I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it's just one of her talents & all her readers feel like that. In any case this book is just up my alley, travel writing by someone who prefers to stay at home reading in bed (and she goes to visit the Sami people in Lapland, my obsession; even her freezing-coldness--and, worse, her words of scorn for Swedish-tourism-for-rich-people & the ice hotel--cannot stop me from desperately wanting to go to the ice hotel, apparently if you get too cold you can move into a regular heated cabin though I feel that I would never forgive myself for copping out; Diski admits to feeling "a faint flutter of thrill" on these moonlit journeys over ice, although she claims that her sense of adventure is a segment of herself "as thin as a slice of proscuitto" and her description of the awfulness of having to go outside to pee when you are female and spending the night in a nightmarishly frigid and sort-of-open-to-the-air reindeer tent is truly horrifying).
(NB the next book I must read now has been sitting here for a while & has now jumped to top of queue on basis of Diski reindeer scenes, Piers Vitebsky's The Reindeer People.)
Anyway, here are some of my favorite passages from the book, which is a collection of linked essays (of somewhat variable quality--perhaps the one that works best as a self-standing piece is "On anatomy," they're all really rather captivating though) written during Diski's year of trying to keep still and mentally idle, a year in which the search for idleness and stillness nonetheless took her to New Zealand, Lapland and (almost more extreme than the others--two months in a cottage...) the English countryside.
On bungee-jumping:
For most of the history of the world, it has been the goal of humanity to attempt to get up into the air and stay there for as long as possible. Up was always the desired direction. The Babel builders wanted the heavens not the depths. Up. The big idea of Daedalus was to fly, not to fall. Up. Icarus may seem to be the patron saint of freefall, but at the time of his maiden flight he was a tragic failure. We looked at the birds with envy, longing to find a way to emulate them, not at the nasty mess under the tree that was all that remained of an incautious monkey that had been trying to make its way amongst the branches of the canopy. Apes were so pleased to get on to solid ground that they stood up on two feet and beame hominids capable of clapping their hands and dancing a jig of happiness. Only the desperate jumped from great heights, and they expected to do it just the once.
From an essay "On taking walks" (which might more aptly have been titled "On not going for walks"):
The exhortation of others works wonders of indolence on me. Fresh air, nature in its season or the adrenalin rush of the inner city, when pressed on me, though I don't doubt their charms and excitements, make me shrink in my chair, wishing the room smaller, the windows shaded, the chair deeper, the door locked. Leave me alone, was, I think, born with me, my invisible twin, before language, when company was nothing but an incoherent threat of alteration. Leave me alone must have been my embryonic remonstration with whom-or-what-ever it may concern about the whole damn bother and dislocation of being born, and it stuck. I was not born idle, I was foetally idle. I can imagine with a clarity far more piercing than memory the dreadful initial interruption that signalled the end of my perfect, timeless, still existence. I like small rooms; I love to float and hate to swim--I am temperamentally suited to uterine life.
Here's an opening salvo from the essay appealingly titled "On spiders and respect for sheep" (this one I totally sympathize with, I always feel like this though I know it's completely irrational):
Being really alone means being free from anticipation. Even to know that something is going to happen, that I am required to do something is an intrusion on the emptiness I am after. What I love to see is an empty diary, pages and pages of nothing planned. A date, an arrangement, is a point in the future when something is required of me. I begin to worry about it days, sometimes weeks ahead. Just a haircut, a hospital visit, a dinner party. Going out. The weight of the thing-that-is-going-to-happen sits on my heart and crushes the present into non-existence. My ability to live in the here and now depends on not having any plans, on there being no expected interruption. I have no other way to do it. How can you be alone, properly alone, if you know someone is going to knock at the door in five hours, or tomorrow morning, or you have to get ready and go out in three days' time? I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future.
That last sentence is amazingly good, isn't it? "I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future." Hmmm....
And I am left with the picture of Diski irritably giving in and sweeping (with a broom, dustpan and brush left int he corner) the autumn leaves off the flags of a "redundant" church in the countryside near that cottage:
I really hoped no one would come in and see me. It was an act of tidiness, but to someone coming through the door I would look like a devout parishioner dusting and arranging the flowers at her local church. It would appear to be an act for God whereas it was actually an act for neatness. Which was bad enough. A human taking a hand in the battle of nature versus indoors. Sweeping away the leaves in this redundant church was an obsessively human act. I wouldn't have wanted it either misunderstood or even simply witnessed. I would not have wanted anyone to think that I was either giving thanks or tidying up. I do so hate the idea of being good.
On an unrelated note, posting will probably be lightish round here in the next couple weeks; I've got a fiendishly huge amount of work-related reading to do, I firmly and puritanically plan on reading very few novels though I expect I will give in once or twice a week and read one anyway. Puritanical discipline will be needed; in fact I've got only twelve weeks or so to write all the rest of my book about breeding & nature & nurture in the eighteenth century and revise the manuscript for a mid-September submission date, which will mean working like a maniac all summer. Fortunately there is really nothing I enjoy more than reading and writing like a maniac; but I expect the blog will suffer. In any case I can't write about the real work stuff as I come to it, it takes the edge off the writing, but I expect I will come across various funny passages that can't get squeezed into the chapter (I've got about 15 eighteenth-century books about horse-breeding, for instance) and that accordingly may make an appearance here if I find them irresistible. So I'm not planning on vanishing, just more short posts with links and fewer long ones like this.
Monday, June 05, 2006
Robert Birnbaum interviews Lawrence Weschler
(surely one of the most interesting & offbeat thinkers around?) at The Morning News. (Thanks to TEV for the link.)
Friday, June 02, 2006
The early 1970s vibe
is beautifully strong in Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, which I have been wanting to read for many months now & seized upon with delight when I could finally obtain it through my beloved Borrow Direct (the original edition is out of print, but that link on the title is a new one that will be published this August, and a good thing too, it's a most delightful book).
I did find myself--not annoyed exactly--but a bit worried about the density of literary allusions in the first fifty pages or so, it happens that I am the dream reader for a novel like this since I have a lifelong obsession with Shakespeare and Keats and the ballad of Tam Lin and T. S. Eliot and Lewis Carroll and so forth, in sum pretty much exactly the same books that are so lovingly invoked here. There is something potentially insidery about writing in allusions, though, and I am not sure it is really likely that we find other people with whom we can speak this way--the novel also invokes another old favorite of mine, Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, a book which opened up to me in childhood an infinitely appealing and at that point virtually inaccessible world of adult literary life but which came to seem as I reread it in adulthood (I do still ritually reread it every couple years, I love it to this day) to make some annoying assumptions about everyone interesting sharing the exact same literary tastes, it's all a bit cozy and elitist.
However it was not long in this case before I gave myself over to the book's manifest pleasures; I loved it, in spite of potential flaws like pages-long descriptions of a student production of The Revenger's Tragedy (which sent me into a nostalgic reliving of my own experience of acting in that play in college, I was Lussurioso....), and both the sensibility and the narrative voice are extraordinarily appealing.
It cannot perhaps supersede my most-favorite Diana Wynne Jones novel Fire and Hemlock as best Tam Lin reimagining (I must have read that book twenty times, it's another annualish reread--oh, and I've got another favorite Tam Lin reworking, a wonderful novel that I had again and again as a child from the public library & rediscovered five years ago with great delight at the children's bookstore, The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope--when I was nine or ten I thought this the perfect book, and I must say it still pretty much fits the bill).
But on the other hand this one has all sorts of other virtues as well, including its being a great campus novel (set in a college very similar to Carleton, in Minnesota): it reminded me quite a bit of another novel I liked a lot, Matt Ruff's Fool on the Hill. And it made me want to go and reread all sorts of things alluded to here, Hamlet for one which I have been thinking of a lot recently (what was that, the thing I read/heard that made me want to read Hamlet? Oh, those talks at the humanities center in April....) but also something I have not looked at since I was a demented bookfiendish high-school student, Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not For Burning. Which as soon as it stops torrentially raining I am going to go and get from the library.
I saw a good play last night too, John B. Keane's The Field at the Irish Rep. First play I've seen since September, what a relief to be back in New York--of course they have plays in Cambridge/Boston, I know this is quite irrational, but it's a question of the theater-going habit and the theater-going companions and I like how it works for me here much better....
I did find myself--not annoyed exactly--but a bit worried about the density of literary allusions in the first fifty pages or so, it happens that I am the dream reader for a novel like this since I have a lifelong obsession with Shakespeare and Keats and the ballad of Tam Lin and T. S. Eliot and Lewis Carroll and so forth, in sum pretty much exactly the same books that are so lovingly invoked here. There is something potentially insidery about writing in allusions, though, and I am not sure it is really likely that we find other people with whom we can speak this way--the novel also invokes another old favorite of mine, Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, a book which opened up to me in childhood an infinitely appealing and at that point virtually inaccessible world of adult literary life but which came to seem as I reread it in adulthood (I do still ritually reread it every couple years, I love it to this day) to make some annoying assumptions about everyone interesting sharing the exact same literary tastes, it's all a bit cozy and elitist.
However it was not long in this case before I gave myself over to the book's manifest pleasures; I loved it, in spite of potential flaws like pages-long descriptions of a student production of The Revenger's Tragedy (which sent me into a nostalgic reliving of my own experience of acting in that play in college, I was Lussurioso....), and both the sensibility and the narrative voice are extraordinarily appealing.
It cannot perhaps supersede my most-favorite Diana Wynne Jones novel Fire and Hemlock as best Tam Lin reimagining (I must have read that book twenty times, it's another annualish reread--oh, and I've got another favorite Tam Lin reworking, a wonderful novel that I had again and again as a child from the public library & rediscovered five years ago with great delight at the children's bookstore, The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope--when I was nine or ten I thought this the perfect book, and I must say it still pretty much fits the bill).
But on the other hand this one has all sorts of other virtues as well, including its being a great campus novel (set in a college very similar to Carleton, in Minnesota): it reminded me quite a bit of another novel I liked a lot, Matt Ruff's Fool on the Hill. And it made me want to go and reread all sorts of things alluded to here, Hamlet for one which I have been thinking of a lot recently (what was that, the thing I read/heard that made me want to read Hamlet? Oh, those talks at the humanities center in April....) but also something I have not looked at since I was a demented bookfiendish high-school student, Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not For Burning. Which as soon as it stops torrentially raining I am going to go and get from the library.
I saw a good play last night too, John B. Keane's The Field at the Irish Rep. First play I've seen since September, what a relief to be back in New York--of course they have plays in Cambridge/Boston, I know this is quite irrational, but it's a question of the theater-going habit and the theater-going companions and I like how it works for me here much better....
Can I just say
that this op-ed by an English professor who happens to be a member of Opus Dei is a very peculiar little piece of writing? My favorite sentence: "I've even made a point of wearing shorts around so that people can see that the thigh band, the cilice, leaves no marks."
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Thoroughly debauched, almost medieval
Alexandra Jacobs takes on Bill Buford's portrait of Mario Batali, at the NY Observer.
On the topic of things medieval, I must commend your attention (if you have not already looked at it, and of course only if you like this sort of stuff) to the fact that Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog and it's very, very funny. I have no clue as to the identity of its perpetrator, but the fact that Light Reading appears on the blogroll (Rotulus bloggorum) has caused at least one medievalist of my acquaintance to send me a desperate plea for clues....
On the topic of things medieval, I must commend your attention (if you have not already looked at it, and of course only if you like this sort of stuff) to the fact that Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog and it's very, very funny. I have no clue as to the identity of its perpetrator, but the fact that Light Reading appears on the blogroll (Rotulus bloggorum) has caused at least one medievalist of my acquaintance to send me a desperate plea for clues....
Lisa Allardice interviews Sarah Waters
at the Guardian. I bought The Night Watch in one of those book-spending-sprees this spring but it then suffered from the mad library-book push; I must move it to the top of the TBR pile, I am curious among other things as to how this Orange Prize will go & it is always enjoyable to have an informed opinion. I've actually only read Mantel and Zadie Smith on that list, but in my (regular old not-informed) opinion it should really be between Mantel and Waters this time round. It will be a great injustice if Zadie Smith wins.
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