Paris, Je t'aime

Surprisingly entertaining series of snippets about different arrondissements of Paris, and the people living there. Made by different people too.
More details later.

Vikram Seth, An Equal Music

Loved it. More details later

Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate

A novel in sonnet form, published in 1986, about several people in San Franciso and the area.

We meet John who works in armaments, and his college mate Phil who has given up his high-flying job for reasons of principle, after his wife has left him with their seven-year-old son. There's the Dorati family, wine growers in Sonoma County, and their three grown-up children, Liz the high-powered lawyer, Sue the international cellist, and Ed who is gay, but can't reconcile it with his Christianity.
Then another friend of all of these, Jan the sculptor with her two Siamese cats, Cuff and Link. The story covers love, gay and straight, friendships, families, birth and death and politics.

And California is another living character in the book - the city with its clubs , cafés and galleries, and in contrast, the natural and cultivated world, whales off the coast, gardens, the vineyard.

A brilliant book, easy to read, light in touch, and as sparkling as the San Francisco air.

As soon as I'd finsihed this one, I picked it up and started reading it again, and am enjoying the witty allusions to other poets too. Marvell, and Belloc for starters.

Smith, Betty - A Tree grows in Brooklyn

I've just re-read this book about a girl growing up in early 20th century Brooklyn. Full of details of everyday life.


The tree of Heaven, the sumac, that tough weed of a tree which shoots out suckers everywhere, indestructible. The kind you find growing up from neglected backyards, reaching for the sky.


Interesting thoughts on writing, truth, lies and imagination. I'll copy them in later. And a great story too.

Gently, Teacher explained the difference between a lie and a story. A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn’t tell it like it was; you told it like you thought it should have been.

Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. ‘You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won’t get mixed up.’

It was the best advice Francie ever got. Truth and fancy were so mixed up in her mind – as they are in the mind of every lonely child – that she didn’t know which was which. But Teacher made these things clear to her. From that time on, she wrote little stories about things she saw and felt and did. In time, she got so that she was able to speak the truth with but a slight and instinctive coloring of the facts.

Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence. What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction.

If she hadn’t found this outlet in writing, she might have grown up to be a tremendous liar.

Maeve Binchy - Circle of Friends

Another feelgood - but she certainly makes her characters live in my head, and her plots are well constructed. A picture of the changing society in Ireland, conflicts of old and new, a worldy-wise nun, two very different gold-diggers who come to grief or at least to reality, a decaying aristocratic family with a disowned wayward daughter, and the central friendship between two girls who grow up together in a small town and then Dublin.

Bill Bryson - Made in America

Another re-read. As always with Bryson, very entertaining, even when packed full o' facts. The book takes us through the development of American English from the early colonists to the present day. Well, 1994, when he wrote the book.
Along the way he debunks some of the popular myths of American history. Even Independence Day is celebrated on the 'wrong' day.
Excellent.

Carrington (1995)

The story of (Dora) Carrington, Lytton Strachey and other artists and writers of the early 20th century. Beautiful colours, lots of bed-hopping, and many people making themselves thoroughly miserable for the best of all possible motives. ('I don't believe in jealousy.')
An absorbing and well-told story.

WritersDock Poetry Competition Winners

1st - Sabita Banerji More Gardened Against Than Gardening
2nd - Grace Galton Awakening
3rd - Geoff Lowe Death Comes in Two Parts

You can read the winning entries here.I act as a moderator for WD, but as someone who didn't enter or judge the competition, I'd like to congratulate the winners, and the judging team, and say how much I enjoyed all three poems.

I, Claudius

We finished watching the series on DVD last night - what a lovely lot, those old Roman rulers were! It tends to put our modern sleaze and corruption stories into perspective a little.

Violence? We don't know the half of it.

Books I read at school

Someone on Writers' Dock has started a topic about reading in school, and whether it put us off particular books. Now, ok this is half a century ago, so...

I have very little memory of the books I read at primary school - I was devouring Enid Blyton adventures and the like at that stage, although my father didn't approve. I think we may have been encouraged on an individual basis rather than reading as a class.

At High School, we did read books as a class - I remember Moonfleet, by John Faulkner, which I loved. An adventure yarn with smuggling, treachery, mystery and so on. Mysterious noises in the church vaults during morning service. A cracking yarn.

I could never resist reading on ahead, rather than following whoever was reading in class. I was always two pages or more ahead, with one finger keeping my official page..

We read Hard Times, by Charles Dickens. I wasn't so struck by that at the time.

We read at least one Shakespeare play per year - Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth all stick in my mind. We used to take the parts and read them out.

I don't think we read Jane Austen or the Brontes in school, though I certainly read them at home.

It would have taken more than school to stop me reading as a child. Even the hour at the end of Friday afternoon didn't achieve that. That was when our revered headmistress 'taught' us Religious Studies by reading chunks of the Bible, evidently unaware that some of us eleven-year-olds were wriggling around trying not to wet ourselves.

Just re-read Five Quarters of the Orange, by Joanne Harris. I think this is my favourite of hers. I love the stories where her darker side emerges.

I am reading Friends, Lovers, Chocolate, by Alexander McCall Smith. I like this better than his Mma Ramotswe books about Botswana. He is pretty good at getting inside the head of a modern, intelligent woman.

Light in the Piazza

An odd film, made in 1962, set mainly in Florence. We started to watch it for the scenery, but we continued to watch , in spite of misgivings and being unable to suspend disbelief completely.

Jane Gardam - Old Filth

Just read this - liked it much more than I expected to. Hope to post more on it later.

Kate Long - The Daughter Game

Kate Long's books always keep me reading. I read Swallowing Grandma on a transatlantic flight and it entertained me for the whole journey. I especially enjoy her witty, realistic dialogue, and sharply observed characters.

Her most recent novel, The Daughter Game, doesn't have so many laugh-out-loud moments as the others, but I still picked it up first thing in the morning in preference to my laptop.

The book starts with a scene where the main character, Anna, melts her headmaster with a flamethrower – letting us know that she has a good line in imaginary vengeance, and setting the tone for this lively, warm, and funny though sometimes disturbing book.

Anna is a successful school teacher, but her apparent confidence hides conflicts. She has a history of miscarriages, and is increasingly dissatisfied in her marriage to an ex-teacher who is now a full-time writer. All of the pressures lead her to question everything about her life, from her relationship with her dead mother to her longing for a child.

She has an affair with her brother-in-law, but he wants more from her than she can give. In school a friendship with a promising new female student becomes too intense as Anna sees her as a daughter figure.

Anna’s journey takes us from classroom to staff room, from her middle-class home to a rented caravan to a run-down slum, and I travelled with her all the way.

I have to admit I was rooting for a different ending, but the one in the book makes sense, and I guess it shows I was involved with the characters.

More short notes

I've indulged in something like a reading orgy over the last 2 weeks in Bristol:

The Flamboya Tree - Clara Olink Kelly

Here on Earth - Alice Hoffman


Shuttlecock - Graham Swift.

Talk to the Hand - by Lynne Truss

The Book Thief - I haven't been able to finish this one yet, as it's not mine and I have to leave it behind. I should have started with this one.

Catch-up again

I seem to be reading a lot at the moment, in a not very analytical way.

Daphne du Maurier's House on the Strand for the third time. One of thse slip through time books, this time with the aid of a drug and the added attraction of falling in love with someone who has been dead for 600 years. Same kind of magic as Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley which I read over and over again at the age of 10 or so.



Carol Shields' The Box Garden - a basically upbeat book - Charleen Forrest returns to the house where she was brought up for her widowed mother's wedding to a man she met at the oncology clinic. During the story we learn of her marriage and divorce, her new relationship with an orthodontist, her lovely son, Seth, and her relationship with her sister. She also has a talent for poetry, and writes letters to a mysterious monk, Brother Adam.

I Claudius

Well, in spite of my negative comments a couple of posts ago, I finished it, and intend to look out for Claudius the God. This book makes our modern politics look ethical. Almost.

We still haven't watched the remaining episodes of the DVD.

The Glass-Blowers - Daphne du Maurier

I picked this up in the pile of secondhand books sold for charity at my local Co-op.


It's a fictionalised account of the life of du Maurier's own French ancestors around the time of the French Revolution. Must look up the newish biography of D du M.

The central character is sister to a master-craftsman glass-blower, and married to another. They become involved in the new revolutionary politics, dispossessing the old aristocracy and later end up being attacked in their turn, when the political wheel moved round. An absorbing story, full of warmth, and strong characters. I used to think that such inhumanity to others in times of economic hardship belonged to the dark ages, but now the story has too many resonances with what we see daily in news bulletins.

More on this I hope, when I have time.

I, Claudius

What's to be done about Claudius?

I loved this episode, showing how he developed into a young man. Plenty of comedy too to lighten the darker manipulations of Livia.

I Claudius, continued

I guess Graves deliberately chose a pretty dry style for most of this, as Claudius is supposed to be a historian and an admirer of factual historical accounts. I've also discovered a family tree of the characters - in itself not simple to follow with second and third marriages, step-relationships and so on.
According to the intro, by Barry Unsworth, Livia may not have been as evil as portrayed in the book, though people who got in her way did have a habit of dying conveniently.
We watched the next episode, and my main impression is that people aren't generally very pleasant, especially when political ambitions and wealth enter the equation.

I, Claudius - film and book

Well, it's a TV adaptation from 1976. I think this will keep us occupied for a week or more, since there are around a dozen episodes.

We watched the first couple last night, and I found them much more understandable than the Robert Graves book. The book reads a bit like an academic treatise with bits of gossip intermingled, and the huge number of characters, with their many marriages and interrelationships is difficult to follow. In the TV version with Sian Phillips as evil Livia, and Derek Jacobi as Claw-claw-claudius, things are clearer. So I'm going to read the book alongside the film.

All'aeroporto by Marina Mizzau

This is part of my attempt to keep up my Italian. Ideally I shall read at least a page each day. I'm working my way through a collection of short stories - Italian Women Writing, edited by Sharon Wood.

This is a short story (less than 3 pages) concerning the dilemma of the narrator who has arranged to meet a colleague at the aiport. How is he to recognise the man? Simple. 'Io sono brutissimo.' (I am very ugly). The two pages examine the messages that either recognising the man or not will give. The situation is unresolved at the end.

Of course, holding a placard with his name on it would have solved the quandary, but then there would have been no story.

Catching up

I'm copying down a few notes I made while staying in Tuscany for a week - a quiet cottage, with a few books and no internet connection, except in the office. I have not made any very meaningful comments, here.

Some of the books were there already -

Alexander McCall Smith: The Good Husband of Zebra Drive
No 1 Ladies’ detective agency, with its determinist view of characters – people should be happy as they are and not attempt things that are beyond them.
Problems as her husband Mr J L B Matekoni decides he will investigate a case of an errant husband, and mistakes a photograph for that of his own wife. Then one of his mechanics decides to start a taxi service. Mma Ramotswe’s assistant wants to change her job because she is about to get married.
They investigate thefts from a local office supplier, and only solve it by giving the culprit the keys to the cupboard – he takes the lot. The deaths at the local hospital – the cleaner is turning off the ventilator to plug in her vacuum cleaner.
A general feel-good series, set in Botswana, where McCall Smith spent some time.


Karen Essex – Leonardo’s Swans

Isabelle d’Este, her sister Beatrice, daughters of Ercole d’Este
Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. M. Isabella
Ludovico Sforza of Milan marries Beatrice
There are intrigues involving the French kings etc, and all through this Leonardo is at Milan. Il magistro, who doesn’t eat meat because he doesn’t want his body to be the tomb of another animal, but invents machines of war, never finishes his commissions.
Isabella’s great ambition is to have her portrait painted by Leonardo, though this never happened – there was a drawing, which is now in the Louvre. She also appears as a pregnant muse in the centre of a Mantegna painting – Venus and Apollo on Mount Parnassus, in the Louvre. Soap and sex and history mixed together.

Carol Drinkwater – The Olive Season
An actress and a film producer buy an olive farm in Provence, then get married. She has a miscarriage, and they put all their energy into olive growing. It is full of local characters, such as the Arab gardener, Quashia, the local olive farmer and builder, Rene, the local celebs and minor aristocrats, and the incoming Russian Mafia and a dose of superstition as she employs water-diviners and takes photographs where the subject disappears from the picture, and soon dies. The life-style of jetting off to London, NY, Australia is a little out of my range. Nevertheless, written in a down-to-earth manner, apart from the odd spiritual bits. All in spite of the two MCs not being conventionally ‘religious’.


I bought this one in Radda-n Chianti, when I realised I was running out of reading material.
Anne Tyler –Digging to America
Two families in Baltimore adopt Korean babies and keep in touch as they grow up. The main character (though the viewpoint shifts) is Maryam Yazdan, an Iranian immigrant in her late fifties/early sixties, the ‘grandmother’ of Susan (Sooki), and her relationship with her son, his wife and the child, then later with the other family and in particular Dave, the ‘grandfather’ of Jo-Hin ( the other Korean adopted child). Her difficulties in fitting in either in America, or in Iran even if she were to return. Exile, pride, self-sufficiency – being an outsider. There are also a couple in Vermont, Farah (Maryam’s cousin) and her husband, William – who are more Iranian than the Iranians.

This is a book Harry bought in the airport.
Carolly Erickson – Brief Lives of the English Monarchs
From William the Conqueror to Elizabeth II – well written and researched, easy to read, though I am sure I shall forget all the facts.

Atonement - book and film

Watched the film on 15th April. Very much enjoyed, though the layers (of time and reality) take a bit of getting used to. I am re-reading the book. Watch this space.

Yes, I finished it while on holiday - excellent book with a good strong story, well told, with convincing atmosphere when McEwan depicts inter-war wealthy family life, complete with class differences, and their effect on attitudes. Later the harrowing wartime experiences, of soldiers and nurses are vivid.

All wrapped up in an exploration of the role of a writer of fiction alongside guilt and innocence and self-justification. What is truth?

Jodi Picoult - Plain Truth

A dead premature baby is found hidden in the barn of the Fishers, an Amish family. Eighteen-year-old Katie claims to remember nothing of the birth or her pregnancy, though medical evidence establishes that she is the mother, and circumstantial evidence indicates that she is the likely killer.

Ellie Hathaway, a successful lawyer, is questioning her role as a defense attorney. She believes she has used her skill to allow criminals to evade justice, in the interests of furthering her own career. Ellie has recently become desperate to have a child of her own but has split up with her long-term boyfriend. She is persuaded to defend Katie, and because of the bail conditions imposed finds herself sharing the life of the Fisher family.

As the story unrolls, Picoult examines different value systems, ideas of justice and family relationships. One thing I like about her books is that the choices the characters make are difficult, and the line between good and evil is not entirely clear.

Joanne Harris - The Lollipop Shoes

The darker sequel to Chocolat, The Lollipop Shoes is beautifully written. The ending is happy, but could easily have gone the other way until the very last page.

Three viewpoint characters, Yanne (Vianne from Chocolat), her daughter Annie (formerly Anouk) and the entrancing, amoral, identity-stealing Zozie de l'Alba, who has taken on the alluring magical mantle which Yanne has tried to cast off since leaving her old life. The other characters are varied and alive, from the property tycoon who wants to bring stability to Yanne, at the expense of adventure, to Annie's camera obsessed school friend who helps pinpoint Zozie's strangeness.
My 'grumpy rationalist' side refused to be entirely convinced by the magical signs, symbols and cantrips, but the writing is a sensual delight.

Khaled Hosseini - 1000 Splendid Suns

This is the second book by the author of The Kite Runner. I have not yet seen that film, though I have read the book.

Hosseini's novel covers the miserable lives of two women in Afghanistan, covering the period before the arrival of communism, its overthrow, the jihad, the coming to power of the Taliban. It ends as the Taliban have been removed, and Laila and her childhood love, Tariq, reunited after many years, return to Kabul.
I found the book interesting for its social history, the information about the position of women, and the exploration of the relationship between the two central characters. Mariam the illegitimate child of a rich man from Herat,is married off to Rasheed, a bitter older man and the relationship becomes increasingly oppressive and violent as she fails to give him a child. Twenty years later Laila, the daughter of an educated couple in Kabul, who die in an explosion, becomes Rasheed's wife, in order to cover up her pregnancy by Tariq. The relationship between husband and wife turns sour after the birth of Laila's second child, a boy. Meanwhile the two women change from enemies to close friends.

I would have enjoyed the book much more if Rasheed had not been such an obnoxious individual. The personal violence becomes more horrifying than all the repression going on in the country.

Another aspect that I found unsatisfying is the shift in point of view from Mariam to Laila part of the way through the book. I would have liked to follow Mariam more closely during the intervening years before she and Laila are thrown together.

Catherine Edmunds - wormwood, earth and honey

This is a new collection of poems by Catherine Edmunds, who is a long-standing member of Writers' Dock.

Starting from the everyday, these poems turn playfully surreal or dangerous and dark. From formal sonnet and sestina to free verse, her use of language is subtle and skilful. I find more in them with each reading.

This one should appeal to the evil child in each of us.

Here's another one. I remember this clearly from Writers' Dock. Catherine wrote this in 2006, in response to a news item:

over the sea to annan

by

Catherine Edmunds

sixty cows grazing on skinburness marsh

tired of cumbrian grasses

looked over the water, wondering

at the land across the sea

scotland the brave

scotland the bonny

scotland the only five miles away

what do you reckon, girls?

give it a go?

and then as one

they took to the waters

they swam and they swam and they swam and they swam

across the solway firth to the land of annan

ah, the bravery

the sense of adventure

the foolhardiness of cows

five died during the crossing

and several embarrassed themselves

by becoming stranded on sinking mudflats

where kindly firefighters and coastguards

came to their rescue

farmer bowe

has farmed at silloth

for more than forty years

and is

surprised

cattle have grazed on skinburness marsh

for hundreds of years

but this has never happened before

to the best of his knowledge

he will make the trip over the border

and bring his girls back home

he thinks they were spooked by military aircraft

but I wonder

I wonder

maybe they tired of the marshes of silloth

maybe they thought

the grass looks greener and we will away

(singing) speed bonny cow

like a pig on the wing

over the sea to annan

will their milk now have a richness, a wildness

a knowledge of all that might be?

a memory of endeavour, of courage, of strength

of bovine possibility?

Summer People - Marge Piercy

Published in the eighties, and very much of its time - when many people were experimenting with sexual relationships outside marriage or couples. The key relationship in the book is a triangle, between Willie, a sculptor who does construction work to earn money, his wife Susan, a fabric designer, and Dinah, a composer. They have lived on Cape Cod for eleven years, all year round, and their relationship is accepted by the locals.

The book is told from several different points of view, and the chapter headings are simply the name of the PoV person. This annoys me on occasions, especially when it shifts to Susan, the least sympathetic character of the three, and the one who exposes the fault lines in the three-way relationship. She longs for the glitz of New York, as represented by Tyrone the tycoon, one of the 'summer people' of the title.

The them of Jewish identity is explored in the relationship between Dinah and her flute-player lover Iztak.

I may have been aware of more problems in the book than when I first read it about 15 years ago, but I still enjoyed it.

Stuart MacBride - Dying Light

I wondered why I felt so miserable and negative this morning - could be from an overdose of the grit and realism, serial-killers, arsonists, and drug-dealing thugs in this book , along with a reader of crime-thrillers, who isn't quite clever enough to frame her hated neighbour for her cheating husband's murder.

Yes, well-written, yes atmospheric, but somehow I started to feel complicit and a voyeur, and that ain't nice.

Hot Fuzz

Crazy, hilarious, full of over the top violence, referring to various other films on the way. I wouldn't expect it to be my kind of film, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Sheer escapism, in spite of the blood and gore, which was so far out as to meet itself coming back.

Stephen Booth - Blood on the Tongue

I'm a sucker for books set in the Peak District, and for crime novels, so this has to be a winner.

Edendale is apparently based in Hathersage, as seen from Surprise View, but the place has something of the atmosphere of Matlock , to my mind.

The events in this book take place around the Snake Pass and Bleaklow area. Irontongue Hill, (an invented name) is the site of a World War 2 air crash. Investigations of suspicious deaths in the area sixty years later involve the descendants of two of the crew, the only survivor from the crash, and a man who had witnessed the scene as an eight-year-old. There is interesting information on the Polish community, too.
Booth's main police characters Ben Cooper and Diane Fry and the tensions between them hold the story together tightly.

Shrek 3

Oh dear - another film I used as an excuse to doze off in front of the TV. Very sweet, very moral, and not the fault of the film that I couldn't keep my eyes open. We were all puzzled by the fact that Prince Charming looked so much like the 'real' prince, but no plot twist was created from this.

Andrew Kennedy and poems

At Uppingham again. They really bring some high quality performers in here. Both the singer, Andrew Kennedy and his accompanist, Iain Burnside were outstanding. They bounded on the stage like over-enthusiastic puppies, but their music had nothing amateur about it.



I generally find baritones easier on the ear than tenors, but this one could convince me. The songs, from around 1900-1930 were varied, although I would have liked to see the words - I can never disentangle words from music when something is sung. AE Housman's poems with their contrast between lyrical pastoralism and the horror of war.

I'm still in the process of seeking some of the words out, and I shall need to find the songs too.

La Vie en Rose

Absorbing story of Edith Piaf's life. Superb visually -reminded me of various painters A lot of the inside scenes had the dark colours and lighting effects of Degas, Cezanne, Van Gogh , even the poster colours of Toulouse Lautrec. I'm thinking of the scene where Titine and the child Edith are wearing clown-style lipstick. A few beach scenes rather like Monet's Normandy paintings.

Edith herself had a wretched background. She was abandoned by her mother, dumped on her grandmother who ran a brothel, torn away from there by her father who was a circus acrobat and contortionist. She started her career as a singer on the Paris streets. She had a daughter who died of meningitis. As she became famous and successful, she continued to abuse alcohol and drugs. The love of her life, boxer Marcel Cerdan, died in a plane crash. In the end she seemed totally trapped by her role as the suffering star.

Marion Cotillard acted the part superbly, bringing out the pathos and the self-centred arrogance.
I did start to lose concentration during the long deathbed scene with flashbacks, but it's a film I could easily watch again.

The Englishman who went up a hill..

Well, here's another film I didn't manage to stay awake for. It isn't the film's fault. It's simply that when I sit down in front of the TV, my brain seems to think that if I'm not tapping at a keyboard, or doing something more active, then it's a good time to switch right off.

I rather enjoyed the scenery, and the locals, and the whole set up, but it's going to go on my list of films to finish watching. Like Breakfast at Tiffany's, I guess. Oh dear.

Catching up with myself.

Edith Sitwell - I found a book by her in the cottage at Melmerby. The Queens and the Hive. Read only a tiny bit though.

Old Curiosity Shop - I have now finished reading. Take it slowly and don't rush to follow the plot seems to be the key. Enjoy the diversions, the characters and the scenes.

Tiffany's - of course I shall have to re-read the book now - Truman Capote.
Seems I need a wander round the local and not-so-local secondhand book shops, or possibly just search online. Though that's less interesting.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Oh, the annoyingness of Holly Golightly in this film. So pretty, so impulsive, so unwilling to let her free spirit be tied down.

At the end I rather wanted her to go lightly into her lonely future, but instead all was well, and she was reunited with the soggy ginger cat she'd pushed out into the rain, and with her reliable writer Paul.

I confess I need to watch this sometime when I am not drifting off to sleep after a three hour drive earlier in the day.

Edith Sitwell

As a child, I remember seeing her name on books, along with those of her brothers Sacheverel and Osbert, but I didn't read them.
Today we listened to a CD of English songs, and some of the songs have words by Edith Sitwell. They're playful and witty, and have whetted my appetite to find more about her, and the rest of the family.

Madam Mouse trots,
Gray in the black night!
Madam Mouse trots:
Furred is the light.
The elephant-trunks
Trumpet from the sea....
Gray in the black night
The mouse trots free.
Hoarse as a dog's bark
The heavy leaves are furled....
The cat's in his cradle,
All's well with the World!

Paul Verlaine's version:

Dame souris trotte
Noire dans le gris du soir ,
Dame souris trotte ,
Grise dans le noir .

On sonne la cloche :
Dormez les bons prisonniers ,
On sonne la cloche ,
Faut que vous dormiez .

Un nuage passe ,
Il fait noir comme en un four ,
Un nuage passe ,
Tiens le petit jour !

Dame souris trotte ,
Rose dans les rayons bleus ,
Dame souris trotte ,
Debout paresseux !

Quite different, but clearly the first two lines inspired her poem.

Quentins - Maeve Binchy

Maeve Binchy is an ideal feelgood read - she has lively believable characters who get themselves into some remarkable tangles, emotional and financial in this book. All ends extremely well here, after adventures which take the main character, Ella, to Spain and New York.

Ella's ill-fated affair with a married man, a confidence trickster who reduces her parents and others to penury and then fakes his own death is the main plot. Ella finally confronts her conscience on this when she discovers he is still alive, and he claims his feelings for her were genuine.

She has learned from her mistakes. I guess this is one of the factors that contributes to the books making me feel good.

It's woven around the story of how a run down cafe becomes one of the top restaurants in Dublin. Plans to film the story are the motor for Ella's trip to NYC, but they are eventually abandoned because the owners and everyone else involved prefer not to face the disruption that fame would bring.

The Old Curiosity Shop - the book

I have started reading this, and find I have to allow myself to slow down and take in the scenes.
I normally tear through books, but with Dickens I can't. I have to read slowly and accept that there'll be side-tracks and cameos, and odd characters who are there for the sake of it, and as part of the background.

If I don't read it in this way, I miss the humour and I lose the plot. So I'm making myself take it at a much gentler pace.

Broken Skin by Stuart MacBride

A little light relief from the more serious reading?


Gruesome crime writing, involving two main plotlines - one a local celeb footballer who rapes and disfigures women, and the other involving sadomasochism. All set in Aberdeen, with strongly drawn police characters. Logan McRae, his girlfriend Jackie Watson and their superiors Insch, a fat guy constantly eating and trying to lose half his body weight, while directing G & S in his spare time, and Steel a lesbian tough gal. Not to forget 'Spanky' Rickards, who provides a useful insight and intro into the bondage scene. Dark humour too.


I read this one in a couple of days.

Reading The Old Curisoity Shop

I have begun to read The Old Curisoity Shop. I always have to slow down a bit to read Dickens. My first question is - who is the 'I' character in the book?

But Dickens then removes him anyway, and does the 19th Century ominscient author - nothing surprising about that - it's just no longer fashionable, I guess.

Quilp is even more obnoxious in the book than he was in the TV adaptation - his treatment of Mrs Quilp in particular. I am unsure how she got herself into the invidious position.

Affluenza by Oliver James

Is this too sweeping as a crit of modern American style capitalism? Decsribed by James as 'Selfish Capitalism'.
His thesis - in modern US influenced societies too many of us are infected by the 'affluenza virus', measuring everything in terms of material acquisitions, and aspiring to the lifestyle of the wealthiest. This aspiration is encouraged by TV programmes where most people are wealthy highly successful celebrities, and further fostered by the offer of instant fame and riches through such programmes as X-factor, Big Brother etc where 'ordinary' people can access the life-style of the super-rich - and what's more we all think 'we deserve it'.
As a result too many of us spend our time feeling thoroughly depressed, since we haven't got these trappings and possessions. We are then vulnerable to the blandishments of the advertisers, who, through the products they encourage us to buy, lead us to believe we will gain the life-style.
He contrasts the Anglo world with Denmark, which, he claims, is far less under the influence of aspirations to excessive affluence.
I have only begun reading this today. More to follow, no doubt.

As a postscript to this post - I haven't finished reading it yet. I feel he is trying too hard to fit the ideas around the meataphor of an illness, with his talk of virus and immunity etc.
He makes an interesting point that those who 'suffer' from it are more likely to take things as they are as 'given' and unchangeable - for example sexual roles are more polarised. Maybe I should read it earlier in the day. To be fair he gives a lot of examples from lots of different countries.

Simone de Beauvoir 1908- 1986

Simone de Beauvoir was born on January 9th, 1908.
Do a Guardian quiz on her life and work:

One of her best-known books is The Second Sex, published in 1947. In this she examines the role of women, and claims that many of the social differences between the sexes arise from nurture rather than nature.
She is also, ironically for a feminist, known as the life-long companion of Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philospher.
Some things she said which appeal to me:
'Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.'
'When in doubt, always say yes to life.'

The photograph below comes from an article in the Guardian:


In 2006 a footbridge over the River Seine was named after her. It leads to the Bibliotheque Nationale.



I saw Simone
I tried to write this from the perspective of myself aged 21 or 22, not very self-confident, too inlcined to hero-worship.
I have edited it slightly today, from the first version written in March 2005.


In 1969
I saw her
in the Bib Nat
wearing the turban
she favoured.

Small,
insignificant,
making notes.

She was there,
writing
and
I was there,
reading
what she wrote
years before.

Did I get up
from my place
and go to her?


Hello, you won’t know me.
I wanted to be you
when I grew up.

No. I sat still,
looked sideways.

What could I say
that she hadn’t heard
A million times before?


I left her alone
with her work
and fame
undisturbed.