Self is always happy when she can participate in Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge!
Rose Bowl Parade, 1 January 2019
Straw Angels, December 2018
Reading, December 2018
Stay tuned, dear blog reader. Stay tuned.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: PAIRS
January 15, 2019 at 2:34 pm (Books, Flowers, Holidays, Links, Personal Bookshelf, television, Women Writers)
Tags: Cee Neuner, Christmas, exhibits, history, reading lists, Redwood City, Russian writers
Anna Karenina: Introduction by Gary Saul Morson
January 8, 2019 at 6:36 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, plans)
Tags: decisions, history, novel, reading lists, Russia, Russian literature, Russian writers
Self making mincemeat of her reading list.
First, she abandoned all six books of My Struggle after reading just one page of Book One.
Then, she stopped reading Barracoon at the first page of the narrative proper, she just couldn’t agree with the decision Hurston made to write him as he appeared, not as he truly was: a grown man, a man who had endured unimaginable suffering.
Today, she put aside her copy of If On a Winter’s Night a Travel.
What does she want? What is she looking for?
Hopefully it’s Anna Karenina.
From the Introduction:
The lovers live in a realm beyond good and evil. After all, good and evil depend on choice, and where fate governs, choice is out of the question. No matter how much pain the lovers cause, one cannot condemn them . . .
That is the story Anna imagines she is living. As one of her friends observes, she resembles a heroine from a romance . . . As Anna Karenina imagines herself into the novels she reads, such readers imagine themselves as Anna or Vronsky . . . Anna feels that fate has marked her out for a special destiny, perhaps tragic but surely exaulted.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Calvino: Reader and Other Reader Meet Cute
January 8, 2019 at 3:02 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Surprises)
Tags: Italian writers, novel, reading lists, translation
- But something has changed since yesterday. Your reading is no longer solitary: you think of the Other Reader, who, at this same moment, is also opening the book; and there, the novel to be read is superimposed by a possible novel to be lived, the continuation of your story with her, or better still, the beginning of a possible story. This is how you have changed since yesterday, you who insisted you preferred a book, something solid, which lies before you, easily defined, enjoyed without risks, to a real-life experience, always elusive, discontinuous, debated.
Self knew it; she knew she shouldn’t have read forward.
SPOILER:
The Reader attacks the book with a paper knife and penetrates to the heart of the book.
lol
lol
lol
Too precious by half.
Onward!
Stay tuned.
New Year, New Issues: Prairie Schooner and Calyx
January 7, 2019 at 12:14 am (Artists and Writers, Filipino Writers, Personal Bookshelf, Publishers, Recommended, Sundays, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Calyx Press, causes, Just published, Literary Magazines, medicine, news, politics
Just Arrived: Sunday, 6 January 2019
SPREAD THE WORD.
Gary Kamiya: The “Tenderloin” District, San Francisco
January 1, 2019 at 3:19 pm (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, destinations, Links, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: California history, discoveries, essays, history, San Francisco
- What is remarkable about the Tenderloin is that it has remained physically unchanged for more than 80 years. It is a time capsule. The same progressive forces that have kept out ‘progress’ and inadvertently created a Museum of Depravity, have also created a Museum of the Lost City, a vanished world memorialized in the neighborhood’s extraordinary collection of residential hotels. There are hundreds of these historic SROs in the Tenderloin, the largest number in the world. The SROs are the reason that in 2008, the Uptown Tenderloin was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, the 24th San Francisco neighborhood to be so listed.
— Gary Kamiya, “Adventures in the Skin Trade”
Rachel Cusk Sentence of the Day: KUDOS, p. 135
December 31, 2018 at 9:29 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: English writers, favorites, Mondays, novel, reading lists
Been reading Kudos since 18 December. Bought her hardbound copy from the London Review Bookshop. The cover had big, black, bold letters against a pristine white background. This very minute, the book sits on her lap, and the white background has acquired a greyish tinge.
p. 135:
That tribe was one to which nearly all the men in this country belonged, and it defined itself through a fear of women combined with an utter dependence on them; and so despite her best efforts it was only a matter of time, she realised, before her son’s questions about right and wrong found their answer in the low-level bigotry with which he was surrounded and to which everything was encouraging him to submit.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Which Way Photo Challenge, Part 2
December 31, 2018 at 6:11 pm (Books, destinations, Links, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: England, fantasy, inspiration, London, Mondays, Oxford, Philip Pullman, pilgrimage
Much thanks to sonofabeach96 for the prompt, which sent self back to her archive of photographs, taken during her most recent trip:
London Alley, 20 November 2018
Rainy Night, London, 20 November 2018
Wolvercote, the Ruins of Godstow Abbey in the distance, 16 November 2018: Philip Pullman’s LA BELLE SAUVAGE led self here. (When’s Book 2, The Secret Commonwealth, coming out? Been waiting a long, long time!)
Kudos, p. 55: A Hamster
December 26, 2018 at 8:17 am (Books, Family, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Surprises, The Economist, Women Writers)
Tags: book lists, humor, novel, pets
Whenever mice or hamsters enter a story — any story — self’s satisfaction quotient goes up 300%.
It happened in Dave Sedaris’s piece on how hard he had to try to kill a mouse (Self isn’t sure which collection contained the piece, she thinks it might have been Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim)
It happened in Dead Letters by Caite Dolan-Leach. Self was on the fence about this novel until she got to the section where twins Ava and Zelda adopt a small clutch of baby mice. That’s when she realized the book was a gem.
It’s happening in Kudos. Oh JOY! The hamster page is 55:
The solid fact of the hamster made all the difference. She could describe them petting it and fawning over it while its imprisonment got increasingly on Linda’s nerves, and the way it solidified their bond so that Linda felt left out. What kind of love was this, that needed the love object domesticated and locked up? And if there was love being handed out, why wasn’t she getting any? It occurred to Linda that since their daughter had found a satisfactory companion in the hamster, her husband might have taken the opportunity to round that situation out by returning his attention to his wife, yet the opposite was the case: he could leave the child alone less than ever. Every time she went near the cage he would leap to his feet to join her, until Linda wondered whether he was actually jealous of the hamster and was only pretending to love it as a way of keeping hold of her.
The Economist really messed up by not mentioning the hamster passage in their review of Kudos.
Stay tuned.
Writing is Process: KUDOS, p. 54
December 23, 2018 at 3:19 am (Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Surprises, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: favorites, novel, reading lists, Saturday, writing process
The narrator has an interesting conversation with a fellow writer:
- “. . . every day, when he sat down to write, he would think of an object that didn’t mean anything to him and would set himself the task of including it somewhere in that day’s work. She asked him for examples and he said that in the past few days he had chosen a lawnmower, a fancy wristwatch, a cello and a caged parrot. The cello was the only one that hadn’t worked, he said, because he had forgotten when he chose it that his parents had tried to make him learn the cello when he was a child.”
Love it.
Stay tuned.
More Hilarity in KUDOS
December 22, 2018 at 5:49 am (Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Fridays, humor, novel, reading lists, writing process
At home she generally avoided doing housework . . . because those kinds of chores made her feel so unimportant that she wouldn’t have been able to write anything afterwards.
— Kudos, p. 51
