The Book Reporter

Welcome to MusicTown, may I service you?

[20aliens-deactivated20200625]

FRANCE. Paris. 2001 Bruno Barbey

[thebookreporter]

Polly Atkin

Bethany posted this amazing Polly Atkin poem today and it is perfect for the day.  

Colony Collapse Disorder

When I lived in the city I knew where I was, what being there was. I knew I breathed under a film of constant light, that electricity was life. It moved in my body, which I knew was an atom of the city, and kept us twitching in unity. I felt information bloom in my blood. It sang in my cells as though it had always been there. I knew without it I had no structure.

To leave the city was to leave one’s memory. Outside was a garden gone wild. Stars were night-flowers in a mossy dome, opening their dazzling mouths to amaze, spreading exponentially the further from the city I went. I knew nothing. What nothing meant. I feared the dark and the space between things: space needs filling. I’d cry for the city, its order. To be let back in was to regain the future.

Now I live elsewhere the systems reversed. The city is a picture from a book I once read and nothing to do with me. Life is a movement between dirt and sky. I see this clearly. The stars are generators. Without them we’d fail. Going back to the city is to speed myself up to a drawn out buzz that I know is killing me. Going anywhere other than elsewhere is rehearsing this end: the shut-down of travelling energy.

All those years living inside weakened me. Taken away from elsewhere I dim. Friends visit and tell me that elsewhere is death and the sky cannot feed me. Not indefinitely. Their eyes are blown bulbs. They rattle. I smell honey on their skin and know how it is. When they move I hear humming like a swarm at a distance. When they speak I hear their voices, and under the city quietly droning. Polly Atkin

[thebookreporter]

Rules for Visiting in the First 6 Weeks.

One of my best friends obligingly had her baby four days before we leave Upstate NY , so I get to spend this morning seeing him.  I wrote this thing a couple of years ago when everyone I knew was having a baby, and we weren’t. I felt secretive about this when I wrote it, which is so WEIRD, because it’s just like every other thing.  But we were struggling to get pregnant, and that made everything very upside-downish.  The advice still stands, and I’m leaving the ending in because it was what was happening at the time.   

1) Bring food.  Bring soup in plastic containers you can heat up in the microwave, and good bread and butter.  Bring juice: apple juice or elderflower juice.  If you bring wine don’t expect it to be opened.  Most importantly, bring something for the new mother; hand cream or cake or a box-set of the Gilmore Girls or whatever she actually likes.  Bring some tiny item of clothing and say you couldn’t resist it.  Nothing too hard to put on; a hat or booties.  Bring ‘Life After Birth’ by Kate Figes.  Seriously, just bring it.

2) Don’t go in too loud.  Your friends will suddenly be operating on a totally different sound level than they used to.  Whisper-shout “HI!” so they know you’re excited, though.  Go to the mum first and look her in the eyeballs: you will both be worried she’s changed.  She has.  Hug the new dad firmly but don’t hold on too tight because he is tired, and has been doing more cuddling than he’s used to.  Compliment them both on how great they look.

3) Turn your attention to the baby.  It is a very small baby; remark upon this. Say  “Hello” to the baby: the baby will not respond.   Hand over your gifts.  You will be asked if you would like to hold the baby; the correct answer to this question is yes.  Be terrified by how quickly the baby is simply handed to you.  Fumble the baby and swear loudly, then stand frozen to the spot as the baby dangles from your hands.  Be shown how to hold it by the Dad, a man who you once saw do a line of cocaine at 11 am before he went to play soccer.  Bounce up and down slightly, like a professional.  The baby will immediately shit audibly or cry as though you have broken its heart.  Grimace, apologise, hand it back.

4) Make the soup.  Ask your friend how the birth was; be visibly shocked by the answer – you must agree two things now.  One, that it sounds like a particularly scary, appalling birth and two, that it was fine.  Agree with the dad that it sounds like the hospital did a completely shoddy and also brilliant job.  Look again at the baby; its eyes will roll around in its head.  It looks like your friend, and also not like her.  Wonder if you will know it always.  Resolve to protect the baby with your life, if necessary.

5) Wash up the goddamn dishes.  Drink tea.  Sit with the baby on your lap.  Wonder if you will ever have be able to have children. Feel life aquaplaning away from you as the sky darkens.  Touch the little baby nose with your finger, boop!  Talk to your friend about pooping.  Give her inane parenting advice gleaned from anecdotes about people you know because you need to say something. Say at least one completely wrong thing that causes both new parents’ faces to flicker with horror; backtrack immediately then distract them with their baby.

6) Stay no more than an hour and a half.  If asked to stay longer, decline: they do not actually want you to stay for dinner. Wash up your goddamn mug before you leave.  Walk out into the drifts of leaves along the road.  Feel grateful, feel astonished, feel desperate.

[thebookreporter]

Eligible, Dear Emma, A New Direction

Tis the academic season for yard sales and cats on road-trips, and we are leaving Ithaca forever. We are packing up the bike and the KitchenAid and the cookbooks and shipping them home to London, whatever home means now. Ithaca spends so long covered in ice that I forget how much water is around until spring, when the rivers and lakes and gorges and waterfalls spring into life.  I think of the time my friend in London met a delusional hipster carrying a dead goose over his shoulder.

“What’s that?” she said.

“Oh, it’s a goose I found in the canal.” he said.  “Don’t worry, it was already dead.  Perfect for Christmas dinner!”  

“Shall we stay in Ithaca?” I ask Aaron, after I remember this.

We won’t though, because even though London doesn’t feel like anything, there would be no reason to stay in Ithaca except the Farmer’s Market and the Hipster-Goose story.  

In retreat from all this upheaval I bought Curtis Sittenfield’s Eligible and Katie Heaney’s Dear Emma.  They are both Jane Austen reboots – Eligible is Pride and Prejudice set in the Cinncinati suburbs, and Dear Emma is Emma, obviously, where Emma is a college advice-columnist.

Both of these are DOPE ideas, even though I do feel a bit “Well that’s …brave” about anyone stepping to Pride and Prejudice.  But what’s the point, really, of a Jane Austen rewrite? The sense, I suppose, (as when you set a Shakespeare play in East Berlin, snore), that the story itself has things to say about social structures and human relationships that just bloody re-reading the actual book wouldn’t quite do.

Fair.  It’s hard, though, not to care how different the new book is to the old one. The bite of the Mr. Wickhamish character in Eligible is removed, for example, by making him such a totally incorrigible bastard that one never even sees how the Elizabethish character could have liked him at all.  You compare ALL THE TIME, and often it makes the book much harder to like initially.  

But Sittenfield, author of one of my all-time favourite books, American Wife, gets Eligible so, so right.  It’s fluffy and delightful and all the changes she makes make absolute sense in a modern context: Liz and Darcy have sex way before either of them talk about their feelings, for example, and she preserves the moments that are truly special to pride and Prejudice enthusiasts.  Some of this was clearly such fun to write (of course Jane would be a yoga teacher! Of course Mary would be very into bowling!) and Mrs. Bennet works brilliantly as a very silly and reasonably well-meaning country-club social climber.

There’s so much that works in this book, in fact, that I find the addition of a Bachelor-style TV show bafflingly unnecessary.  Maybe I just don’t watch enough The Bachelor.  That assertion has been a not-uncommon theme of my female friendships in America.  Maybe it’s that.  

Dear Emma, on the other hand, could have done with a little extra something.  Perhaps not The Bachelor, sure, but although I basically enjoyed reading it, it didn’t fizz with the nasty energy that it should have, really.  Clueless really can’t be beat, in terms of understanding what Emma’s all about.  And if you miss that energy, you miss Emma, I think. I don’t know why I was so enthusiastic about Sittenfield’s changes, and a little bit glum about Heaney’s. I think I was hoping for a conclusion that never materialised, which was for the Emmaish character to fall in love with her female roommate Logan.  There was something there, I thought.  Has anyone else read it?  Was I alone in that hope?

So that’s me this week: packing, feeling wistful, eating as many bagels and as much salsa (not together) as possible before I leave the US, wishing books were a bit more lesbian and wondering what on earth London will feel like when I get to call it home again.

[thebookreporter]

Has everyone read Margaret The First?  COR.  I love novels about real people.  I always think I don’t – I mean, what’s the point, just make something up, in theory – but when I think about the genre, if that’s the word for it, I find so many books I adore and recommend that I can’t deny the truth.

For example, Naomi Wood’s Mrs. Hemmingway is about all of Hemmingway’s wives, one after the other.  After The Paris Wife you would have thought I’d had enough of women moping around France while Hemmingway behaved like a prat, But Mrs. Hemmingway is wonderful. It’s partly because Wood is such a lovely writer, spare and clear and entertaining, and partly because she takes what could be a dispiriting subject and uses it to explore (re-invent?) just what these women meant and were capable of and felt.  It’s sort of emotional excavation, and no less necessary for being imaginary.

The current queen of this type of writing is, of course, Hillary Mantel.  The book I always recommend to people that I know they won’t read is A Place of Greater Safety.  I mean, who rushes out to buy “no no really, it’s a 768 page novel about the French Revolution that chronicles the lives of three real men but it’s SO GREAT” just because I said so?  But I just keep bashing on insisting people read it because it is by far her best novel and I read the whole thing during two extra long plane journeys and didn’t really breathe until I had finished and I think it’s a work of genius and MUCH better than Wolf Hall.

Anyway, Margaret the First is a sort of Orlando-ish look at Margaret Cavendish, the 17th century feminist playwright and science fiction writer – it’s a short, full book that slices through time and paints – I choose that word carefully – Margaret’s life from childhood to death.  It’s concerned, almost entirely, with Margaret’s creative life, her need to write and think.  If you’re going to buy it as an ebook, please do buy it from Emily Books who do such great work publishing and promoting exciting writing by women themselves.

[lazulies]

Female artists in their studios

1. Helen Frankenthaler 2. Louise Bourgeois 3. Alice Neel 4. Joan Mitchell 5. Frida Kahlo 6. Georgia O'Keeffe

[thebookreporter]

Pies

It’s been ages since #FF was a thing, but I’m here today to flag a new food blog.  Sort of.  I rode my bike along the sidewalk towards the bookshop today, just really feeling the day: the wet blossoms on the trees and the little specks of green on all the bushes, and the gentle warm rain. I passed Greenstar and smelled its funny smell of spices and all of a sudden I loved Ithaca.  Like really loved it again.  Oh, maybe this happens every late April upstate, but I thought, as I do whenever I leave anywhere, ‘this place is really kind of home.’  

It isn’t!  England is home.  But I remembered the first April I spent here - this memory must be from the same week, nearly, because the purple blossoms were bright on the same trees - and how I decided that one of the things I would do in Ithaca would be to learn how to make pies.  The first pie I ever made was a blueberry pie, and I put baking soda instead of cornstarch in it and it was the kind of foul that makes people spit it out on to the floor the moment it has touched their tongue, really comedy disgusting. I sat on the lino floor of our apartment and and thought about how I had no friends at all in town and I wept copiously, the kind of wonderful crying one can only really do about gone-wrong cake.

I learned how to make pies, anyway, and I made some friends, and now it seems so sad that I’ll be leaving them.  I have a great book club for example!  My book club has lots of lovely women in it, and one of them is my friend Bethany.  This food blog I’m about to tell you about is Bethany’s blog.  In her first post, Bethany describes herself as a baker/cook/musician/writer/vintage enthusiast, which like, you think, whatever, right.  BUT NO.  I met Bethany at a writer’s group, and she is a really good poet.  She’s also a professional baker, a trained pianist and has the most serious dress collection I have ever known. Her blog is young, but I can see how good it’s going to be.  I love reading things Bethany has written, and I love eating her cakes, and it’s about fucking time she put those things together.  

It’s called Pies and Pinups and her first recipe is for grapefruit Olive Oil cake but GET ON IT.  Follow her on twitter here.  It’s all going to be great.  She’s one of the people who made Ithaca feel like home to me, and I’m so glad I’ll be able to read her blog when I’m gone.  

[appalachian-appreciation-deacti]

Happy Birthday, Loretta!

April 14, 1932 Butcher Hollow, Kentucky

[thebookreporter]

Recent Reading: Laurie Lee, Shirley Hazzard, Mervyn Jones

This piece has reminded me that I am supposed, occasionally, to write about books. I don’t know much about anything anymore, but here’s something I remembered this week: My favourite writer is Laurie Lee.  No, I really think he is.  I’m re-reading As I walked Out One Midsummer Morning right now, and it’s…not perfect, but it’s perfect for me.  He isn’t as mathematically an ideal writer as others, nor is he much of a storyteller in theory, but when I read his prose I am most alive, most there.  He is my favourite writer in the way that one has a beloved friend; he is someone I read as a child, and someone I read now as an adult and for the moments that I’m reading him I’m both things at once.  

I haven’t had much luck recently with new books; it’s partly why I’ve stopped writing about books so much, to be honest.  I had a run of reading American women novelists (Jane Smiley’s fantastic and also really terrible series beginning with Some Luck; all of Anne Tyler; more of Mary Lawson), some filthy romance courtesy of twitter recommendations, and FOUR MILLION renditions of Each Peach Pear Plum, but I have felt a bit sad about reading for fun.

This Christmas, though, I finally read two absolute gems. The first was Shirley Hazzard’s Bay of Noon...

...which is a glamorous, lucid and SHORT novel about Naples in the 50s. Hazzard is a writer we should be shouting louder about, one of our great living writers, really, and this book is full of moments of glittering understanding.  It’s hot and sexy and probably completely radical for its time, and it does the thing that Bonjour Tristesse does which is make it look jolly easy to write a fucking brilliant short novel about sexual awakening in the Mediterranean.  It is not at ALL easy, I can tell you from sad, sad experience, so we ought to be grateful for the ones we have.

The second book is Mervyn Jones’s Holding On, about Canning Town before and just after the war, and I was gripped by it.  

I hope I wasn’t just gripped because I’m a bit thrilled by tales of old East London, though there is that (and for that, I highly recommend A Child of the Jago.  I don’t know, I don’t want to sit in gentrified East London being all Behold, the Gritty History of These Streets, but should we just ignore the past? Novels are a good way to think about changes in place - see also Laurie Lee). Holding On is a book about a house, so A++ already, and it follows the life of a street from its construction in the 1800s to the bombing of WWII and the erection of all those enormous high-rise blocks in the 60s. But it’s also about emotional change, and the evolution of a family during the first half of the 20th Century.  Apparently all his other novels are Not Good, but this one is lovely, and has been reissued by Eland.  Read ‘em!  Read them both.  They’re good, and my standards are preposterously high at the moment. 

[thebookreporter]

Annual Family Christmas Quiz Hijacked by Dad’s Current Reading Matter; Family Does Quite Well Under The Circumstances.

1.   The great Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard’s cycle of novels, greeted with acclaim worldwide, is called

a.   My muddle

b.   My struggle

c.   My Beagle

d.   Min Pikk

 2.   In the first book of the cycle, A DEATH IN THE FAMILY, Karl Ove’s hated father falls over while drunk and lies for days in his own waste, because he has broken

a.   The unwritten rule about not drinking indoors

b.   His leg

c.   A priceless Ming vase belonging to his mother

d.   His penis

 3.   In Book 2 of the cycle, A MAN IN LOVE, when Karl Ove’s girlfriend Linda gives birth to their daughter Vanja, the baby slips out into Karl Ove’s arms like

a.   A fish

b.   A turd

c.   A seal

d.   A penis

 4.   In Book 2, when Linda initially rejects Karl Ove, he gets paralytically drunk and cuts

a.   His hair

b.   His face

c.   His lawn

d.   His penis

 5.   When in book 2 Karl Ove is too shy to break down a jammed door and an ex boxer does it effortlessly instead, Karl Ove is in awe of

a.   His muscles

b.   His character

c.   His tattoos

d.   His penis

ANSWERS: All answers b.

[thebookreporter]

26/m/Barts. Now with added lymphoma

“As a patient who will most likely be directly affected by the industrial action planned for next month, I think it’s worth really nailing my colours to the mast. I fully support whatever action the BMA feels justified in taking in the face of this, the latest and most shameless in a series of capricious, underhand attacks on the majesty of the welfare state. What’s more, I think it’s extremely telling that the first junior doctors’ strike in our history will likely take place during the first months of the first Conservative government in 18 years. Like the National Minimum Wage, like tax credits, like the institution of the fucking weekend, the NHS is an achievement to which the Tories can lay absolutely no claim – as with all policies designed to support the many rather than the few, it is the exclusive work of the labour, and Labour, movement.”

John Underwood goes in hard for the NHS this morning, 

[english-idylls]

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, illustrated by Arthur Rackham.

[thebookreporter]

For so many reasons, these are some of my favourite illustrations of all time.  I came across them first when i was in my early-mid twenties and researching a book.  I was wading through all the children’s book illustrators of the time, and I was immediately drawn to these.  Maybe it was the mutable, shiny, lost-in-the-woods nature of that period of time for me.  Anyway. 

[tristrapedia]

My literature classes didn’t help. My professors stressed the importance of approaching a text with detachment, with a critical gaze rather than an emotional one. There wasn’t a place in academia for gushing or ranting. There wasn’t room to simply say, “I loved this and I don’t know why.” One had to use academic jargon. One had to be methodical and thorough. It was like listening to a song and wanting so badly to get up and dance, but instead of dancing, you have to sit there and think about why those sounds made you want to dance and consider the exact mechanics behind the formula of a danceable song. And I didn’t want to fucking do that. I just wanted to dance. I just wanted to read. I just wanted to write. I didn’t want to deconstruct lines of poetry or do a close reading of Faulkner’s usage of semicolons.

Jenny Zhang, ‘The Quiet Importance of Angst-y Art’, Rookie (via tristrapedia)

[anzozi-everywhere]

They say ‘Dear Lolly! What shall we give her for her birthday this year? Perhaps a hot-water bottle. Or what about a nice black lace scarf? Or a new workbox? Her old one is nearly worn out.’ But you say: ‘Come here, my bird! I will give you the dangerous black night to stretch your wings in, and poisonous berries to feed on, and a nest of bones and thorns, perched high up in danger where no one can climb to it.’ That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn for pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure.

Lolly Willowes (via rosy-zozi)

[fastcompany]

[newyorker]

Today’s ruling completes the work of the Windsor decision, which was followed by decisions that brought marriage to thirty-seven states, and of countless small struggles and conversations and commitments. And it is, too, an epilogue to scenes from the AIDS crisis, when partners who were legal strangers were shut out of hospital rooms. With this decision, there’s a different destiny. People like going to weddings, because they know what they mean, and for the chance to witness happiness. And five judges are enough to plan a wedding party.

Amy Davidson, writing on the Supreme Court’s decision that same-sex marriage is a Constitutional right.

Read the full story on newyorker.com.

(via newyorker)

[myszko]

ELENA FERRANTE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES 4EVA