Suicides and drug deaths, that is my life now. People found lying in their beds, or sitting in front of their television sets, whatever programme they were watching playing into the void. My world is accidents just waiting to happen. Car crashes. Sometimes even murder. With a hammer. Or tights around the neck. Or a knife that glitters . . . All of these have happened in Edinburgh. A very safe city, tourists washing in and washing out.
This arrived today: I have 5 days, so hopefully I will finish On Time for book group discussion!
https://borderlessbookclub.com/programme
Allie gave a weak laugh. 'Well, that went well.'
'He didn't give us the sack. And he didn't throw the typewriter out of the window.'
'What are you talking about?'
'When Raymond Blackwood admitted screwing a gangster's wife to get the inside track, Angus was so enraged he threw Raymond's typewriter out of the window. Missed a pensioner's dog by inches.'
Allie giggled. 'That's not funny, Danny.'
They encouraged my reading and studying from an early age. I liked Enid Blyton's Sunny Stories and Miss Blyton's oeuvre in general; I didn't have an elevated literary world. I joined a library; in those days, local councils put money into libraries and the Oxford City Library was magnificent. I used to get through about six books a week. I loved stories set in girls' schools, I think I read nearly all fifty-seven of the Chalet School series...
How the ear that is drawn before the hand has accumulated any knowledge, before the artist has weighed and considered what it is doing.... will always be a flaw. Precisely because it is a flaw, or imperfection, it will vary from miniaturist to miniaturist. That is, it amounts to a signature..... this method... is known by many khans, shahs and sultans who fund book arts workshops as the 'courtesan method.'
Furthermore, it is kept secret...
Mummy was extremely house-proud, and she did all the housework in the nude. It was a tad discomforting for our maids and au pair girls, but she liked to get it done, then have a bath.
From Belfast Transport Museum via artuk.org
The reason we don't like anything innovative is that there is truly nothing new worth liking.
'If I'd seen a single sign of any cockiness I wouldn't have left her, and in fact I did hesitate, but she assured me she'd be fine and she'd be home in time for dinner."
Amaia looked at her watch. In Aunt Engrasi's house they ate supper at around eleven.
?? Culture shock. I'd have eaten my arm off by that point.
One day, when we were having lunch, he said to me, out of the blue: "It doesn't matter how many times a person gets married, if you outlive your partner, you are going to end up living alone. Loneliness is one of life's flavours that everyone tastes a little of; it's nothing to make a fuss about."
I am trying a new reading app.
It is annoying me greatly (no patience).
Photo by Galen Crout via Unsplash
This British doctor believed that a person's life after they retire can be divided into three stages: last pleasure-seeking, preparing for death, and the onset of death. The last pleasure-seeking stage represents the last period of time a retired person can move about freely, inside and outside the home. It is the most splendid of the latter stages of life...
It's not only for money and favor that we kneel before our work from morning to evening, continuing by candlelight through the night to the point of blindness and sacrifice ourselves for pictures and books, it's to escape the prattle of others, to escape community...
Ottoman Miniature Painters (Wikipedia)
That's a bit better then!
(Thanks @Bookwomble : I had been editing the language in the public book info instead of the personal bit. Harumph.)
Original photo: Ali Elliot, Unsplash.
I watched, from the shoulder of Morrone, the Cairngorm mass eddy and sink and rise (as it seemed) like a tossed wreck on a yellow sea. Sky and the wrack of precipice and overhang were confounded together. Now a spar, now a mast, just recognisable as buttress or cornice, tossed for a moment in the boiling sea of cloud.
But this isn't right, and I can't work out how to fix it!
(I track books read in translation separately to try and encourage me to read more)
www.librarything.com/stats
Have got sidetracked from reading by the charts feature in LT.
Many of the neighbours eventually removed their bathtubs and placed them in front of their flats, where they served as water storage and washing bowls.....Desire lingered by her door when she saw a mai ruwa who sold water in metal gallons walking towards her neighbour's flat in hurried steps. Water splashed from the two tilted metal gallons in his cart.
Have now ticked off two from my (been there a long while) "currently reading" list.
pickDetailed look (in a mere 200 pages) at Heaney's life and work.
The wall is in Dublin, based on his last words (to his wife).
(Not my picture)
I love Fforde's footnotes.
Ojo was an area of narrow streets that crossed each other's path forming a crucifix wherever they met. Many of these streets were lined with cars and the spaces between were filled with traders and their wares. The place was a vibrant open market where you never knew what you could find. Brown, rusted, caved-in roofs of the igloo-like houses filled the landscape like giant art installations.
Ain't like the old days when his ma and uncle Stephen were warring with each other,' she'd said. 'Hangings? A baron'd come galloping up - didn't matter which side he was on, didn't matter which side you was on - he'd hang you just for scratching your arse.'
Quite right, too,' Adelia had said: 'a nasty habit.' The two of them were beginning to get on well.
Photo: wikipedia image of Canterbury Cathedral.
Picked up this historical crime as a bit of a distraction.
The stuff about memory and trauma was beautifully done.
The endless obsessive relationship stuff: I could quite happily have lived without.
Anyhow, 1 down from my books I want to clear from my "currently reading" shelf.
Two chapters to go in On Seamus Heaney.
Progress!
When you didn't see and hold the body of a dead child you couldn't understand that they were gone, she told him, and unlike her the relatives of people who'd gone missing were forced as a result to live their lives in a kind of suspended state, unable to accept that their sons or husbands or brothers were dead, knowing there was a chance they might be alive in some unnamed cell somewhere.
I am really good at starting new books.
Some books I want to move off my "currently reading" category by the end of the month.
The Racial Laws might well fizzle out and amount to nothing in the end. Lots of people thought so. Could they really all be wrong?
Quick visit to Manchester's Central Library yesterday. Took in their lovely little exhibition area, promoting some highlights of their special collections.
Here's the display showcasing their Elizabeth Gaskell papers. Always struck when you can see the "real" things these writers touched.
(Also some great campaign materials, from Manchester's long record of protest. Worth a look.)
What a beautiful object! And how amazing it survived.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-59181714
She ran into a pop-up sale of second hand books by the Yakoyo canteen.
I'll come back for this one later," she said, pointing to Nawal Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero. The bookseller nodded. There was a distant look in his eyes, and she felt he would have already sold it when she returned. It made her sad. On the days she got a good price for books, from authors she loved, she walked with a bounce...
She used to be curious about the people who sat alone in pubs and cafes...
so-soFinally finished this one. (Mostly) grim reading.
...if women aren't in books, they may as well never have existed.
From review by Julie M Johnson
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-mirror-and-the-palette-jennifer-higgie-bo...
2 of 2 posts re the ads featured in TLS' two articles on recent books exploring women artists. This book I have on the shelf to read and it looks really good.
Seems like no one told Yale's art history publishers though.
If you 'follow the money', not a great sign.
(And even more pointed: the authors...)
Section in the TLS on two new books about women artists (1/2)
Check out the ads from Brepolis. Any women artists featured?
Penguin Modern Library "Torchbearers" series. Tempting.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/D74/modern-library-torchbearers/
Switching between this and A Passage North.
Not really sold on either, not sure why.
The cumulative effect of years of being subject to these gazes was that women who lived in the capital had learned to curb the movement of their own eyes to remarkable degrees, restricting their gazes in public spaces to areas where their eyes couldn't be intercepted.... though she herself made a conscious effort not to constrain her vision, Anjum added, to let her eyes move as freely as she wanted...
Book haul.
pickHirahara uses a murder mystery to frame her story of a Japanese-American family forced to relocate to Chicago in WW2. Lots of fascinating period detail, but light on the suspense.
There was a hole in the air where the Ninth Avenue el used to run. That disappeared thing. His father had taken him here once or twice on one of his mysterious errands, when he was little. Carney still thought he heard the train sometimes, rumbling behind the music and haggling of the street.
Diane Mayhew, James thought, was unhinged. She was pointing a gun at him and asking him for decorating hints. It occurred to James that most of the women in Savannah he had contact with were, on some level, slightly deranged. Look at Marian, his sister-in-law. And Denise Cahoon. And Merijoy Rucker.
It could be hormones, he decided. Or maybe just the humidity...
The book will get him killed, Fletcher warned. Caesar hid Travels into Several Remote Nations in the dirt under the schoolhouse, wrapped in two swatches of burlap. Wait a little longer until we can make the preparations for your escape, the shopkeeper said. Then you can have any book you want. But if he didn't read, he was a slave. Before the book the only thing to read was what came written on a bag of rice.
No slave had ever keeled over dead at a spinning wheel or been butchered for a tangle. But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it. Certainly not the white monsters on the other side of the exhibit at that very moment, pushing their greasy snouts against the window, sneering and hooting. Truth was a changing display in a shop window...alluring and ever out of reach.
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