Powysian

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[powysian]

"Notes for a potential reading of John Cowper Powys's PORIUS in 2011."

[powysian]

John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance: A Reader’s Companion W. J. Keith

[myimaginarybrooklyn]

[under-the-volcano]

But I remember how you always used to say that a fresh-caught trout, lying stone dead in a handful of grass, was one of the objects a person would remember most vividly if he had been transported to a different planet and was trying to recall the most characteristic and delicious things in his old earth life.

John Cowper Powys, Ducdame (via panoramicchrestomathy)

[mythologyofblue]

[mythologyofblue]

A bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.

John Cowper Powys (via mythologyofblue)

[powysian]

Rodmoor, 1916. 

Currently on eBay for $40. One of the few remaining JCP novels I've yet to read.

[powysian]

If you and I can see each other freely and often we will be happy. How could we be otherwise? And in our happiness and contentment we will make the people nearest us happy. It does not really matter my being married if it does not interfere with our seeing each other I realize that daily. I am very fond of Gerald, but it has nothing to do with what I feel for you. We meet in some part of the mind where other people never come. in that country smelling of honey and apple blossoms where the people are always young, and trees have their fruit and blossom at all times of the year, we have loved all our lives.

Gamel Woolsey, letter to Llewelyn Powys, 22 November 1930

[powysian]

Contrary to first impressions, tea is really only prominent in two novels: After My Fashion and Wolf Solent. This paper explores why tea drinking is so important in those novels and the relevance to Powys's thinking - as well as what might have brought about an end to its importance so early in the run of Wessex novels.

Drink, drugs and defiance in the novels of John Cowper Powys

[powysian]

One doesn't read Powys so much as enlist in him.

An Irresistible Long-winded Bore - Lawrence Millman, The Atlantic, August 2000

[under-the-volcano]

The two companions found themselves back again at the door at last; the man troubled, anxious, perturbed, his mind abnormally alert to every shape and sound of the external world; the girl drugged, dazed, numbed, but unfathomably happy.

“It’s like death to make love to you,” he muttered when...

[powysian]

Powys Society Conference - Placing John Cowper Powys

For the 2013 Conference we will return once more to The Hand Hotel, Bridge Street, Llangollen. The Conference will start at 4 pm on Friday 16th August and end after lunch on Sunday 18th August 2013.

[powysian]

Instead of returning to his inn he lunched luxuriously in a little tea shop close to the cathedral gates; and here, as he drank cup after cup of beautifully made tea, and watched the indolent unhurried people chatting together in the sunshine and goin in and out of the trim shops, he felt that there was, after all, a certain genius for sheer contentment in the race that had its place, say what one might, in any wise scheme of existence.

John Cowper Powys, After My Fashion

[powysian]

Hugh Thomson sets off to walk through England by ancient pathways from Dorset to Norfolk. His journey is punctuated by encounters with poachers, farmers, artists, hippies and travellers, and is enlivened by reflections on the writings of Thomas Malory, John Cowper Powys, Kenneth Grahame and Shakespeare. Thomson writes about ancient barrows, forts and earthworks; at Stonehenge he cunningly dons a tie and carries a clipboard so he can examine the standing stones at close quarters without being challenged. The book is a delightful ramble through 240 miles of countryside and a meditation on the deep history and the legends of England.

Paperback review: The Green Road into the Trees, By Hugh Thomson - Reviews - Books - The Independent

[powysian]

There's No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books (by Etsy)

[powysian]

A portrait of Gamel Woolsey by Emma Garman, from 2007.

[powysian]

In a short time I felt that I knew Gamel very well without ever having known her. Gerald told me that there had been a mist of melancholy to their relationship. Before they met, they had both given themselves inside out to someone else, and the affairs had left both with scars that never healed. In Gamel's case it was an English writer who was married and who was then famous but now forgotten. Gerald was desperately in love with Dora Carrington, a painter and member of the Bloomsbury group, who passed him over for his best friend from World War One.

GAMEL WOOLSEY: Eyewitness to the Spanish Civil War, by Zalin Grant.