Current Reading

I haven't had much luck lately in chosing books. I keep picking things up and putting them down once I reach the halfway point. Among the latest casualties, Andrea Anshworth's misery memoir Once in a House on Fire and Crocodile Soup, the debut novel by Julia Darling. They were both certainly well-written and, in theory at least, exactly the sort of book I love, but they just didn't grab my attention. So I decided to try something very different, a rambling novel written by an American male. I settled on Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool. So far, so good.

"You keep on rowin', and I'll keep on smilin'."

I've been on a bit of a Mike Leigh kick lately. In the past couple of weeks, I've watched Career Girls and his most recent, Another Year. Both were wonderful, though Career Girls did strain credulity a bit here and there...Some of the flashbacks seemed like scenes from a sketch comedy show. The Young Ones perhaps. Last weekend, I watched this:I was totally, utterly, unreservedly besotted. Sally Hawkins was absolutely marvelous as Poppy, a genuinely optimistic and cheery (yet emphatically not stupid) schoolteacher who enrolls in driving lessons after her bicycle is stolen. She reminded me of Rita Tushingham. Eddie Marsan turned in a startlingly good performance as Scott, Poppy's resolutely anti-happy-go-lucky driving instructor. I loved absolutely everything about this film, including what some might consider its glacial pace. Most of all, I loved this gloriously humane film's underlying seriousness.

RIP Lucy

Oh dear...

"Either I'm desperately unattractive, or you are all lesbians. Bald, pasty man (61) with nervous tick and unclassifiable skin complaint believes it to be the latter but holds out hope for dominant (yet straight) fems at box no. 1075."

"Yes, sir, I can boogie. Man. Academic. 62. Quite possibly gay. Box no. 3631."

From They Call Me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads from the London Review of Books

Hm.

“She closed her eyes, and bunches of roses were printed for an instant, startlingly white upon the darkness, then faded, as the darkness itself paled, the sun from the window coming brilliantly through her lids. Trying to check life itself, she thought, to make some of the hurrying everyday things immprtal, to paint the everyday things with tenderness and intimacy—the dirty café, with its pock-marked mirrors as if they had been shot at, its curtly hat-stands, its stained marble under the yellow light; wet pavements; an old woman yawning. With tenderness and intimacy. With sentimentality, too, she wondered. For was I not guilty of making ugliness charming? An English sadness like a veil over all I pained, until it became ladylike and nostalgic, governessy, utterly lacking in ferocity, brutality, violence. Whereas in the centre of the earth, in the heart of life, in the core of even everyday things, is there not violence, with flames wheeling, turmoil, pain, chaos?”

Elizabeth Taylor, A Wreath of Roses (1949)

RIP Woolly

"Pregnant with calamity"

A couple of days ago I finished reading Marghanita Laski's 1952 (?) novel The Village. One could, I suppose, be forgiven for expecting a twee social comedy ala E.F. Benson, but this was a sharper affair. Opening on the last night of WWII, Laski's novel is a shrewd look at what the war did to England's class structure. More than that though, it is a prescient look at how that class structure would come undone in the years to come. And a rather sweet love story to boot. It also contained the fabulous phrase "pregnant with calamity," used to describe two village gossips, and for that I will be forever grateful.

RIP Misha

A truly wonderful dog.

"Oh you should see my trail of disgrace..."

Pop bliss:

Current Reading

It's very charming, frothy, sweet, and I imagine that when it was first published in 1938, it was slightly risque. It was recently made into a film starring Frances McDormand (oddly perhaps) in the titular role, but I've not seen it yet. I ordered my copy from Amazon, or maybe bought it at Three Lives & Co., but one could otherwise order it directly from Persephone Books, a wonderful publisher specializing in neglected works by women writers. They have a shop in the fabulously named Lamb's Conduit Street. The Guardian ran a nice feature on Persephone founder Nicola Beauman.