Hand-Sewn Covers:

Needless to say,

Etsy and Books Collide: Penguin's New Hand-Sewn Covers

I'm excited... !! :)

This poem. Today.

This poem. Today. 
That sunshine. Yes.  :)

Awesome. :D

Mills & Boon covers inspire self-portrait project

Sometimes we sit for hours staring at a sea shell.
Other times he'll hold me by the neck in front of
the Pyramids. But there's nothing we like more than
NEARLY kissing each other near some horses.
I always try to look hot in front of him so he doesn't leave me.

http://www.oliandalex.com/mills-boon/

Precursor,

"To find the balance you want, this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have 4 legs instead of 2. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God."

— Elizabeth Gilbert. Eat, Pray, Love.

I want to read this book.
I didn't know that until today but now I do.

"You play; you win." | The Passion

There she meets her husband, who literally steals her heart. After leaving & meeting Henri, they set off to reclaim her heart from her husband’s house. 

I need to revisit The Passion. I read it quickly in my first year to keep up with term & the reading list. I borrowed rather than bought a copy to cut down on costs. It was quickly supplanted by 'Oranges for which I cared a great deal more. Even so, I remember reading of the above adventure. The concept has always moved me. Winterson's metaphor made literal; the lost heart recovered.

Passion, to Winterson, is a love of life, a love both of the defeats and of the victories. Passion is playing at life without pacing oneself. Passion is betting everything on the rounds of life. When Villanelle gives her heart to her wealthy lover, she has exhibited passion. She loses, but because she already is a gambler at life, she is not destroyed; she instead becomes a wiser gambler at life than she was before her loss.

One troubling aspect of Villanelle is the manner in which she describes love. She always seems to speak of someone stealing her heart rather than her giving it to someone. Yet she understands the gamble of playing with her heart. In the middle of the war, she is grateful for the absence left by her heart. Salvadore wishes to exchange hearts with Villanelle yet it has been stolen by another. It seems that she gave it or gambled it, not that it was stolen. She speaks of her desire for someone to steal Henri’s heart, but does not realize that she is the one to whom he has given it already. Why does Villanelle refer to her heart as stolen when it was actually lost in a wager? She speaks that way because she fancies herself as a smart gambler and one who does not lose.

- students.depaul.edu/~jabsher/undergrad/novel/Youplay.doc

Childhood Storybook Memories...

I headed out with a group of friends last night to see The Secret Garden musical on its closing night at Festival Theatre, Edinburgh. Technically speaking, an imaginative & artistic set, well lit & well costumed (thanks to Wimbledon graduate, Francis O'Connor). The performances from the cast in terms of both singing & acting were also top-notch.

It surprised me how much I could recall from my reading of it as a girl as I gave a brief synopsis to my friends beforehand. I cannot remember for the life of me as to who published the book we owned. If I could, I would track it down again & buy it back in a snap as that one of ours was swept away by the tidying ravages of time. The book was beautifully illustrated & I can see the very captions acompanying the images, starting out with "Mary Lennox was a sickly sallow and sour-faced girl."

I think part of my reason for remembering the plot so vividly was my fascination was the precocious "yellow girl" left orphaned in a foreign land & shipped across the world to live on the moors of Yorkshire. That experience of vast stretches of purple grasses was well within my ken as I spent part of my childhood roaming about on the North York Moors. Add to that, the Gothic element (which this production captured so neatly) of waste & disrepair in both building & inhabitants; winding forbidden passages leading to two sour-faced precocious children coming face-to-face with each other; the intrigue of a hidden door into a different world. Ach, no wonder it took hold so well.

One aspect which Marsha Norman's musical adaptation does not entirely realise is the pivotal role of Ben Weatherstaff, the surly gardener who discovers the children amongst the partially neglected garden and the changes within his character. Initially Ben is angry at finding them there, having quietly continued to nurture the roses but he ends up conspiring in their secret, paving a way back to health & vigour. I remember the moment he introduces them to the Doxology, sung at first by Dickon:

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;

Praise Him, all creatures here below;

Praise Him above, ye Heavenly Host;

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

I think I can recount the moment of the song because of how it initally appears incongruous with the outdoor experience & its curious huddle of people; the garden presenting no established setting of a Sunday. Yet that moment is actually a key one in my mind in terms of creation & new life: the very themes which the novel so readily explores & engages with to bring those broken aspects back to new life through the resolution of the ending.

life has its ‘wuthering’, the painful struggle to get through, but being alive – being ‘wick’ – means that along with the pain you can experience joy, growth and connection.

- Edinburgh Spotlight

Having remembered so vividly, I am now compelled to go back & re-read. Thankfully TSG had already foreseen & embraced that desire of their audience within their marketing strategy of re-printed Penguin classic alongside the programme :)

Thor's backlog

Having been recently reprimanded by my fellow blogger, I hereby list what is left to be read. This excludes the sorry pile of (5) books I'm currently struggling with for various reasons. The most glorious of the five is Dubliners, which I actually quite enjoyed, but have not touched for three years and counting. The most notorious is Firmin, which has a great premise in line with Ratatouille, but requires advanced knowledge of English literature, making it less appropriate for someone who stuck to Tolkien in high school.

The pile pictured, however, is equally promising and depressing. I do not intend to open The Interpretation of Murder again, having found the first two pages needlessly graphic. Mind you, I managed to sit through the whole of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, so am not squeamish to the obsessive extent, I merely found the opening of this book sensationalist of the Daily Mail extent.

Both The Covenant and The Grass is Singing were bought with intent of mood-setting for a holiday in South Africa. Both come with good credentials and some promise - I even started the Grass, but cannot remember much of it to warrant addition to the sorry pile.

The Alchemist came upon recommendation of a former flame, with calls of soul mates emanating from it, but warnings from a closer friend, who in my mind found it too wishy-washy and perfumed in good intentions. It still sounds like a cheap version of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, which still leaves me with the intention to read it. On a beach, slowly working with the sun to increase entropy.

The remainder of the pile, save from Tess, were acquired in a long-lost time of hausse, in 3-for-2 offers and lack of self-control. Engleby is the only one that appeals, although I do not recall any poor reviews of any of the others. Still, the world may be a better place if I offer them to Oxfam rather than waste the few hours I do spend reading on something unwanted.

The David Mitchell is the most promising, not merely because of its stunning cover (which happens to match my flat's interior colour scheme), but with the promise of Dutch seafaring adventure. The sole reason for its grouping with this pile, is to save it from ending up on the sorry pile. I want to give it the full attention it (potentially) deserves. Starting in 2011!

It was on Christmas Eve

After I arrived into Reading, I walked straight to Waterstones to pick up a copy of Keith Richards' Life for my dad.
Worryingly, they had run out, so I took the ace from under my sleeve and asked them to look for my order, as I had asked for this book to be delivered into the store, but had never been given a delivery notice.
Waiting for the elves to find me my book, I was approached by Stephen Benatar, who was there to promote one of his books - he was particularly keen for me to read his book there and then, but I was simply a missile, not about to be distracted or re-directed by other potential Christmas gifts.
I did apologise, even saying "Sir", as he seemed particularly distraught by the lack of Christmas spirit.
The store however rewarded me with my own ordered copy of Life, as well as a book on Orchids I'd ordered that I didn't expect to see this year still.
Now that I'm at my desk, I looked up the sociable writer, and realise it wasn't a (platonic) meet-cute, but simply his (rather admirable and successful) way of self-promotion.
I really ought to get myself a hat, so that I could take it off for him.

Happy 235th Birthday, Jane! :)

" 'Symmetries"

It was, of course, a good choice. 

I'm reading every evening before falling asleep until I recognise I'm no longer taking in the words from the page & draw to a close. 

I'm reading every morning after my alarm goes off; just another page or two before I get up & face the world. 

I don't do that often: it's usually a snatched moment or away from the demands of the day in some enclosed vacuum of time, on a bus or a train journey when it's possible to do very little else. 

But Winterson invites the luxury of the moment, the prioritising of that particular time spent on that activity as opposed to any other. She draws in her reader, establishes an intimate confidence and in doing so, maintains their interest in plot development. 

 It took me a good chapter or so to find my stride & settle into the story. I recognised some of the conscious rhetoric also deployed in The Passion & wasn't sure if I would take to it. 

    The Passion is deemed so unique and elevated amongst her works that I didn't want to risk a repeat encounter; I wanted something new. It's Winterson's lyricism & metaphor which I love. The post-modernism and meta-narrative is fun & can be cleverly deployed but in terms of defining character, it now belongs in my head to Villanelle who assumes it like a second skin. 

  In the chapter of The Fool, I was struggling to establish which voice out of the two women, Stella & Alice, was speaking. But once into The Tower & the finding of the affair and from then onwards into the three chapters of childhood, the novel just flowed. Beautiful words and fully eloquent passages. 

   I've been passing them across the ocean, borrowing from their nuances & metaphor to lend weight to other words. To try & articulate emotional experiences, which would otherwise be struggling into sense or remain mute, entirely wordless.

 ___

Walk with me ... Walk the seen and the unseen. What can be rendered visible and what cannot.

The wind up at dusk and the leaves in squalls and the birds flying into the wind-backed leaves so that in the lost light I could not say where the leaves stopped and the birds began. I try to distinguish but at crucial moments the space between carefully separated objects collapses and I too am whirled up against my will into the dervish of matter. The difficulty is that every firm step I win out of chaos is a firm step towards . . . more chaos. I throw a rope bridge, haul myself across the gap, and huddled on a little outcrop, safe for now, observe the view. What is the view? Another gap, another stretch of water. (102)

___

.. The riverrun is maverick, there is a high chance of cross-current, a snag of time that returns us without warning to a place we thought we had sailed through long since. 

Anyone to whom this happens clings faithfully to the clock; the hour will pass, we will certainly move on. Then we find the clock is neither raft nor lifebelt. The horological illusion of progress sinks. The past comes with us, like a drag-net of fishes. We tow it down river, people and things, emotion, time's inhabitants, not left on shore way back, but still swimming close by. .. The unconscious, it seems, will not let go of its hoard. The past comes with us and occassionally kidnaps the present, so that the distinctions we depend on for safety, for sanity, disappear. Past. Present. Future. When this happens we are no longer sure who we are, or perhaps we can no longer pretend to be sure who we are. If time is a river then we shall all meet death by water. (104-5)

____

Walk with me. Walk the broken past, named and not. Walk the splintered planks, chaos on both sides, walk the discovered and what cannot be discovered. Walk the uneasy peace we share. Walk with me, through the night, the night air, the breathing particles of other lives. Breathe in, breathe out, steady now, not too fast on gassed lungs. I did not mean my words to poison you. Walk with me, walk it off, the excess fat of misery and fear. Too much to carry around the heart. Walk free. (117-8)

____

I want to feel but with feeling comes pain. I could advise myself to keep out complications and I won't pretend that I have no choice in any of this. I have noticed that the choices seem to be made in advance of what is chosen. The time gap in between the determining will and the determined event is a handy excuse to deny causality. In space-time there is always a lag between prediction and response.., sometimes of seconds, sometimes of years, but we programme events far more than we like to think. (120)

____

'Do you fall in love often?'

Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.

'I'm not in love with you.'

What would it be to love? Would it be the field under rain, the vivid green the grass takes? .. Would it be natural at all? Would it be lucky find or magic trick? Buried treasure of sleight of hand? Would I be the conjuror or the conjured? Would it be a spell or the song I sing? If I am a wound would love be my salve? If I am speechless would love be a mouth? I do not want to declare love on you as of midnight yesterday. I do not want to be captured nor to hold a honeyed gun at your head. I do not want to spend the rest of my life as a volunteer member of the FBI. Where did you go, who did you see, what did you do today dear? I would love you as a bird loves flight, as meat loves salt, as a dog loves chase, as water finds its own level. (126-7)

Winterson, Jeanette. Gut Symmetries. Granta Books: London, 1997