1.) Tea or Books? is available on iTunes! I wrangled with it, let me tell you… but now you’ll find us if you search under podcasts, or here. Episode 2 (with new mic!) has been recorded and should appear sometime next week…
2.) I wrote a game for Reading the End podcast! It was such a thrill to hear the two Jennys play it (and you can also listen to it, as part of this episode). The game is based on books which take their titles from quotations, and the gals did great. Seriously, I loved hearing them play the game so much.
I so seldom use the public library that I’ve never managed to join in Library Loot, the weekly everybody-join-in from Claire and Linda. It does inspire guilt in me that I’m not much of a library-goer, because I do want to celebrate libraries and encourage their use – but hundreds of unread books on my shelf discourage me. And, of course, battered old 1930s hardbacks aren’t the easiest things to find in public libraries – though they have proved very useful for my occasional Agatha Christie binges.
BUT today, dear reader, I came away with two books. I headed to Oxford Central Library after work, to see if I could borrow any graphic novels. The Making Of sparked me off wanting to read more, and I thought a try-before-you-buy situation would work well. Ideally I’d be able to browse the shop Peter mentions in the comments to yesterday’s post, Gosh! in London – but… it’s in London.
Oxford Central Library does have two sides of a bookcase devoted to graphic novels, which impressed me a lot. What didn’t impress me so much was the style of the graphic novels they had. Almost all of them were the comic book style that doesn’t appeal to me at all. Nothing remotely similar to the beautifully illustrated, soft and vibrant colours of Evens’ books. But I did grab one book which didn’t scream Batman at me. And it was…
The other book I borrowed isn’t a graphic novel; I found it when checking the Fiction shelf to see if they had any Brecht Evens books there (before I found the designated graphic novel section); I couldn’t resist the title How To Be a Public Author, and started flicking through it. It’s ‘by Francis Plug’, but is actually by Dan Ewen (hence being where Evens would have been) – a witty play on the Booker Prize, apparently. Plug goes about collecting signatures from famous authors, while writing a self-help book himself. It could be terrible, but it could be brilliant… has anybody read it?
Time will tell whether or not I manage to prioritise these books before they’re due back at the library, but… they both look intriguing, certainly, and at least I’ve done my bit for the statistics! Has anybody read either of them?
Not to brag or anything, but I read a graphic novel. I’m pretty sure that makes me the zeitgeist, right? And it was a graphic novel in translation. I couldn’t be more at the forefront of intellectual hipster thought if I tried.
This brings the number of graphic novels I have read to two: the other one was also by Brecht Evens, and I wrote about it about three years ago. As with that one, The Making Of (2013) was a review copy from Jonathan Cape that has somehow spent years on my to-read-really-soon shelf. (This shelf, it seems, is where books go to die; the moment I designate books as must-reads, they lose some of their appeal.) Thankfully, I was lured back towards it this week, and thoroughly delighted in Evens’ work – translated by Laura Watkinson and Michele Hutchinson.
The Making Of is about Peterson, an artist who gets a grant to help out an enthusiastic but disorganised community prepare a great art project. He has to stay in the shed of someone’s mother, and quickly realises that the whole affair is well-meaning but a shambles – from friendly Kristof right down to Dennis, who seldom speaks and contentedly covers (all) surfaces in little swirls.
As in his previous book, each character is a single colour – as is their dialogue – and scenes are often made of superimposed or incomplete shapes. His palette is chiefly green, blue, red, and yellow, and he uses beautifully sort watercolours to get across an often rather poignant or sharp story. For instance, this page seems to me to portray the mingled indignity and dignity of old age far better than many lengthy descriptions:
The story was pretty involving, and certainly better structured than in The Wrong Place, which I seem to remember being a little confusing, but the main reason I loved the book was undoubtedly the art. (The story itself was slightly sleazier than I’d have liked, but still very engaging.) Evens’ way with colour and shape is deeply set in naivety, but it works beautifully. Another example…
I also think Evens is probably a lot cleverer than I was equipped to realise. There was one image which caught my attention. Surely (I thought) it was similar to an image I’d seen on the front cover of a Virago reprint of Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light (for my art education is found in such places). A bit of Googling later, and I discover that the image from the Mitchison book is The Unicorn in Captivity, a medieval tapestry, and Evens’ image is undoubtedly an homage to it. Here they side by side, with Evens’ on the right:
I felt a momentary triumph at noticing this similarity, and then realised… that probably means there are dozens in there that I missed. I spotted one still life that might be a nod to Léger, but is more likely to someone else… I’d love to hear back from any art experts better at identifying these sorts of things!
The hardback itself is a thing of beauty, incidentally; a lovely shape and feel, which is a relief, as poor production would really let down Evens’ exquisite work. And I really did spend ages just poring over the pages.
When I wrote about Evens’ previous book, I think I asked for graphic novel recommendations. I have been very lax at following them up, but I would still love to hear about any beautiful graphic novels, preferably colourful and not comic strip style…? And, dear reader, do go and seek out The Making Of and The Wrong Place. They’re such delights.
Yes, that’s right: Shirley Jackson Reading Week will be taking place 13-18 July. It sprung from a conversation on Twitter with two very lovely bloggers, Ana/Nymeth of Things Mean A Lot and Jenny of Reading the End, and (some quick messaging and emailing later), dates were decided and Ana has made this beautiful button/badge to accompany the week.
I’m so excited to be co-hosting with these fab ladies, especially since they give me a run for my money on besottedness with Shirley Jackson. The only other author week I’ve co-hosted was Muriel Spark Reading Week, with Harriet Devine, back in 2012 (was it?) and that was really great fun.
So, basically, we’d love you all to join in! Whether you’re after her spooky novels We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House, her brilliant comic apocalypse country house novel The Sundial, her hilarious family memoirs Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons or any of her other works, then we’d love you to get involved.
This post (and posts soon appearing on Jenny and Ana’s blogs) is to spread the word and prepare people – hie thee to a bookshop or library and look forward to July! Do ask any of us if you’d like recommendations for what to read, of course. And feel free to borrow and share Ana’s beautiful button.
Remember how I bought a copy of The Pilgrim Hawk (1940) in the US, all proud of myself for finding a beautiful NYRB Classic? And how it turned out I already had it, also from NYRB, with a different cover? Yep. And NYRB know what they’re doing; I can’t bring myself to part with either of them. But I did decide that it was about time that I actually read the book – especially since it’s only 108 pages long.
Truth be told, that brevity was almost the downfall of Wescott’s novella – because I carried it around at work, reading it for a few moments while waiting for a friend to buy lunch, or on the bus, etc. Basically, I read about 20 pages in 20 separate dip-ins (having read a handful earlier, on holiday), and that isn’t at all the way to treat The Pilgrim Hawk. Structurally, it is actually probably more like a long short story than a novella, and (as such) should be read in one sitting. Thankfully I cottoned onto that, and read the final 70 or so pages that way, at least.
Alwyn Tower narrates the story; he is an American would-be writer, visiting his friend Alex near Paris, when an Irish couple drop by. They are Madeleine and Larry Cullen; he is a little taciturn and embarrassed, while she is moderately vivacious and a little exasperated by her husband. Also with them is the love of her life, for the time being at least: Lucy the hawk.
For one thing, the bird charmed me so that nothing else mattered much. And it served as an embodiment or emblem for me of all the truly interesting subjects of conversation that there very sociable, travelling, sporting people leave out as a rule: illness, poverty, sex, religion, art. Whenever I began to be bored, a solemn glance of its maniacal eyes helped me to stop listening and to think concentratedly of myself instead, or for myself.
Lucy is the focal point of their marriage; the meeting place of his exasperation and her distracted attention. Madeleine shows her off, explaining the habits and nature of hawks – how they never mate in captivity; how they periodically still try to escape, even though they come back when let loose to hunt prey – while Larry shows how uninterested he is, and how this obsession is both symptomatic of their disintegrating marriage and a cause of it. Alwyn the narrator, meanwhile, keenly observes their dynamics – and both Wescott’s prose and the conversation of those present suggest ways in which the hawk can be a metaphor. And, cleverly, Wescott then undermines this process through Madeleine’s reaction to it:
She slightly turned her back to him and contemplated Alex and me rather unkindly. It was the careful absence of expression, absence of frown, that you see on a clever lecturer’s face when the irrelevant questioning or heckling begins. There was also a sadness about it which, if I read it aright, I have often felt myself. She did not want us to take her hawk, her dear subject-matter, her hobby and symbol – whatever it meant to her – and turn it this way and that to mean what we liked. It was hers and we were spoiling it. Around her eyes and mouth there were lines of that caricatural weariness which is so peculiar to those who talk too much.
There are only really two moments that could be called dramatic, and both happen towards the end of the short book – one of them off the page. The rest follows a gentle curve of observation and exploration, using the extremely unusual figure of the hawk to highlight and unravel the very ordinary dynamics of a failing marriage. Wescott has the poignancy and nuance of Katherine Mansfield, if not quite her genius.
What makes this novella all the more sophisticated, though, is the moment when Alwyn outs himself as an unreliable narrator. Not a malicious one, or even a deliberately misleading one, but a narrator who cannot help filling in the gaps in his own observations, which cannot be faultlessly complete from an external perspective:
…and cover #2
Half the time, I am afraid, my opinion of people is just guessing; cartooning. Again and again I give way to a kind of inexact and vengeful lyricism; I cannot tell what right I have to be avenged, and I am ashamed of it. Sometimes I entirely doubt my judgement in moral matters; and so long as I propose to be a story-teller, that is the whisper of the devil for me.
This gives an interesting blend of narrator and author – for Wescott is, of course, proposing to be a story-teller – and has created the characters in some form that is not available on the page, if the depiction we see through Alwyn’s eyes is somehow a distortion. This confession gives the whole short work a different feel, and adds a layer to an already rich work.
I bought this novella on at least one of the occasions, perhaps both, partly on the strength of an introduction from Michael Cunningham. The association didn’t let me down. The authors come from the same stable of beautiful writing and close attention to character detail. And The Pilgrim Hawk is, indeed, a lovely, thought-provoking, and exquisitely crafted little book.
Hope you’re enjoying the sunshine this weekend! I’m mourning the fact that my lovely boss has left OUP, and she’s pretty much the most fab boss ever, so we should probably just close OUP and start again. BUT a link, blog post, and book never hurt anybody.
Before I go further, though, the winner of the Cornelia Otis Skinner book Nuts in May is – Rosemary Hopkins! Well done, Rosemary! I’ll be in touch soon. For everybody else – do make sure you track down something by her.
1.)The book – I treated myself to the beautiful In Search of Rex Whistler by Hugh and Mirabel Cecil after reading Lyn’s very persuasive post about it, and (of course) Anna Thomasson’sA Curious Friendship. It’s definitely spoiling myself, but Anna’s book left me super keen to see more of Rex Whistler’s work, and this book has lots of images.
2.) The blog post – you’ve got time to join in Mary Hocking Reading Week! Let Ali explain it all… (Oh, and Sylvia Townsend Reading Week has been extended to a month, so I should manage to at least finish the short story I started.)
3.)The link – I couldn’t really think of a link this week, but the most recent xkcd cartoon is one that gets my full support…
I’m a big fan of the designs of the new Faber Modern Classics – which includes Self-Help (1985) by Lorrie Moore – even if the criteria for selection is a bit unclear. Do Ariel, Look Back in Anger, and The Remains of the Day have anything in common? I shouldn’t have thought so, but I suppose Oxford World’s Classics and Penguin Classics don’t have much in common across the series.
Anyway, even if the selection of titles is a bit bizarre (and, sadly, the quality of the paperback doesn’t quite live up to the design), this is still a really intriguing new series. Thanks for sending me this book, Faber! Self-Help had been on my radar for a while, so I thought I’d pick it up to celebrate its 30th anniversary. (I’m kinda terrified every time something celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, because yours truly will be doing the same thing come November…) Oh, and Moore was younger than me when this was published.
Things I didn’t know about Self-Help #1: it’s short stories. I’d assumed, being a shallow type, that it was a self help book, or at least personal essays. The line between short stories and personal essays might be rather slim, of course: every protagonist in Self-Help is more or the less the same person. Their names change and their families and situations change a bit, but they are all intelligent, self-deprecating, introspective, wry young American women. Basically, they’re all (one assumes) Lorrie Moore.
And that kinda works. I’m not a fan of the exclusively-write-about-what-you-know school (A.L. Kennedy responds to this advice brilliantly, which I quoted when I reviewed On Writing) but here it seems ok; the stories come together to form a single snapshot of a certain sort of person at a specific time.
And the stories themselves? The tone is often self-help style, as the title suggest. For example…
Make attempts at a less restrictive arrangement. Watch them sputter and deflate like balloons. He will ask you to move in. Do so hesitantly, with ambivalence. Clarify: rents are high, nothing long-range, love and all that, hon, but it’s footloose. Lay out the rules with much elocution. Stress openness, non-exclusivity. Make room in his closet, but don’t rearrange the furniture.
The first one, ‘How to Be an Other Woman’, is perhaps most representative of the collection as a whole; many of the stories deal with unsatisfying or disintegrating relationships, and this story does exactly what it says: it’s a sombre look at the mechanics of being ‘the other woman’, looking brazenly at the situation without any attempt to find either a moral or a silver lining. It’s also probably my second favourite story in the collection.
My absolute favourite was ‘How To Become A Writer’, because – it’s about being a failing writer. It’s a bit melancholy, but rings true with anybody who feels like there is a writer inside of them somewhere… without, somehow, feeling self-indulgent on Moore’s part, perhaps because of the wit and (again) self-deprecation:
Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them. You. however, have not yet reached this stage of literary criticism. You stiffen and say “I do not,” the same way you said it when someone in the fourth grade accused you of really liking oboe lessons and your parents really weren’t just making you take them.
All things considered, there is a lot to like in Self-Help – but it does feel a bit like a writing student trying an extended experiment. It’s clearly a first book, and I’d be interested to see how Moore’s writing developed – particularly when she started considering perspectives other than her own life. As, I’m sure, she did…?
In the early days of discovering authors for myself, it seemed like every one I stumbled upon turned into a lifelong favourite. I still have massive devotion to A.A. Milne, E.M. Delafield, Richmal Crompton, Stephen Leacock, The L-Shaped Room (because, let’s be fair, it’s that book; not Lynne Reid Banks in general) etc. There were so few duds. And these sorts of epiphanies come so infrequently now that I’ve started wondering: is it just the glitter of the new? Or even the opportunity to blitz through an author’s work, when there aren’t teetering tbr piles (real and imaginary) of pressing reads?
Well, thank you Cornelia Otis Skinner, for coming along and proving me wrong. Consider me devoted.
I read Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, which she wrote with Emily Kimbrough, after Danielle lent it to me. I absolutely loved it, and kept an eye out for the authors ever since – but they are tough to come across in the UK. I did manage to read Popcorn by Cornelia Otis Skinner, which I wholeheartedly adored – and brought five of her books back with me from the US. That included a duplicate of Nuts in May – which I’m going to write about today, and offer as a giveaway to people in the UK, who will also have a tough job tracking her down. (Btw, in the US, they’re available cheaply online, so… have at!)
Skinner is a humorous essayist who reminded me a lot of Delafield and Diary of a Provincial Lady – which, if you know me well, you’ll realise can hardly be bettered as a compliment. Essentially, her books are masterpieces of self-deprecation. If that’s your cup of tea – and I live for it – you’ll find Nuts in May hilarious. Skinner (or her essay persona, at least) takes us through various aspects of her life, and activities she has attempted, and gives extremely amusing portrayals of how horribly everything goes wrong. Small stakes, of course: the worst that happens (and it repeatedly happens) is embarrassment or awkwardness. Take, for example, this (longish) excerpt from the chapter most redolent of the Provincial Lady, ‘Ordeal for Sons’, wherein Skinner visits her son at boarding school. (Incidentally, subscribers to the New Yorker can apparently read the whole article in its original glory. And I daresay that’s true for other Skinner essays.)
I set forth with my child who, the moment we get to territory totally unfamiliar to me, again disappeared. I wandered on aimlessly, passing stray professors and groups of boys who looked at me as if they wondered if my attendant knew I was loose. Some of the mink-coat mothers also passed and we bestowed on one another that sickly smile which can be taken for recognition or pure imbecility. After a time, my offspring hove in sight armed with skates and a stick and told me to follow him. Hockey was being played on a pond some hundred yards beyond us and the people I had passed were all heading for the barrier, which seemed to be the vantage place for watching the game. Once arrived at the pond, however, my son started leading me off in an oblique direction. When I shyly asked the reason, he said he didn’t want me near the barrier… that I might get in the way, or fall down, or otherwise make myself conspicuous. His method of making me inconspicuous was to station me off on a remote and windy promontory. A strange, solitary figure, silhouetted against the snow, I felt like the picture of Napoleon overlooking Moscow. I could hardly see what was going on, much less make out which of the distant swirling figures was my child, which, perhaps, was just as well as it saved me the anguish of seeing him make a goal on his own side which counted some sort of colossal penalty and made him a pariah for the remainder of the game. On my forthcoming visit I am told the sport will be boat racing and I suppose by way of making me inconspicuous, I shall be placed behind a tree.
Oh, Cornelia. You and me are going to be best buds, I can tell. I mean, sure, I wish you had learnt more about paragraph lengths (this lady loves a long para) but I shan’t fault-find too much, as you’re so darn hilarious.
While her family shows up in quite a few sections (notably when her son believes he has discovered dinosaur bones, and they lug their find to the New York Museum of Natural History), Cornelia Otis Skinner’s name loomed largest as an actress, apparently. It’s a rich vein for anecdotes and amusing stories: she writes wittily about being demanded to appear in unpaid productions, the anguish of opening nights (for one’s friends and family), and the sort of person who comes backstage after a play. More unexpectedly, she writes a section about meeting the Pope. The only section that didn’t win me over was a spoof of John Steinbeck.
I’m at the risk of typing the whole thing out, so I shall just reiterate that she has that rare touch – to make stories entirely about herself and her situation (which is unashamedly middle-class) somehow hilariously identifiable, and light without being disposable. She is frivolous, but great frivolity takes enormous talent.
So, that giveaway part. As I say, I’m afraid it’s UK only – because Skinner’s work is tricky to find over here, and I feel like we Brits deserve a chance to get to know her. To be in with a chance of winning, just let me know your favourite American writer in the comment section, and I’ll do the draw on Saturday 6 June. I’m hoping to nab some suggestions along the way.
Hope you’re having a fantastic weekend! I’ve had a super busy week, and am enjoying sitting down and doing nothing for a bit. If you’re doing the same, amuse myself yourself with a book, a link, and a blog post.
1.)The book – isn’t new at all, but I bought it in Oxfam yesterday, and it was a fun example of the sort of quirky book waiting out there if you hunt… The Adventures of Gabriel in his Search for Mr Shaw by W.R. Mathews. It’s about the Angel Gabriel trying to find George Bernard Shaw, and meeting several interloper-doppelgänger. Because… why not?
3.)The blog post – Lyn at I Prefer Reading is doing a great series of looking at individual shelves from her bookcases, and what do bibliophiles love more than having a shufti at other people’s books? The second post is here; yes, I chose it because Miss Hargreaves is there. And The L-Shaped Room, which I’m currently massively enthused about making EVERYBODY read.
I’ve been reading quite a lot of non-fiction at the moment – I’m in one of those moods where fiction isn’t working as well as it should be – and I decided to extend that to films too.
I haven’t watched a lot of documentaries, but one of my all-time favourite films is a documentary (Life in a Day, which I wrote about here), and I’ve really enjoyed others like Stories We Tell and The September Issue. So I looked through an article on the best documentaries available on Netflix in the UK (this article, since you ask) and settled on a couple: Catfish and Bill Cunningham New York. Both were well-worth watching, but I’m not sure I have all that much to say about Catfish. All of my thoughts about it would hinge on whether or not it’s fake, and the internet jury seems to have remained out on that one. If any of y’all know the answer, lemme know.
But I did want to bring Bill Cunningham New York to your attention, if you don’t know about it, because it turned out to be rather lovely. It came out in 2010, when Bill Cunningham was 81 and still working full-time as the photographer for two pages in the New York Times – ‘On the Street’ (street fashion) and ‘Evening Hours’ (charity social events). With admirable restraint on the part of the director, Richard Press, the film largely skews towards looking at the former – which gives rather less opportunity for gratuitous shots of socialites, but is clearly where Cunningham’s passion lies.
I hadn’t heard of Cunningham before seeing his name in this list, but he is so extraordinary that a novelist would have to event him if he didn’t exist. For decades he has cycled the streets of New York, taking photos of everyday women, men, and dogs, and bringing together pictorial features on a certain trend that he sees a lot of – whether that be a colour, a style, or even people walking gingerly through piles of snow. He doesn’t use a digital camera, and still takes his films into a shop to be developed. His old-fashioned nature extends to manners: he believes all the people he photographs to be beautiful, and is horrified at the idea of using street photography to criticise others – indeed, he has resigned from magazines when they re-wrote his copy to mock.
You might expect Cunningham to be an aesthete himself. No such thing. He wears the same style of blue smock everyday – a cheap workman’s outfit. His apartment, in Carnegie Hall at the time of filming, is filled with ugly filing cabinets, with a bed lying alongside them. Cunningham’s one joy is other people and the clothes they wear.
Press’ documentary is not quite a hagiography, but it is refreshingly willing to allows its subject to be good. Only one prurient moment, asking about Cunningham’s relationships (he has had none) feels out of kilter with the tone of the piece; most of the time, the film looks at Cunningham’s unique work and place in the fashion industry. Interviewees include Anna Wintour (fun fact for fact fans: I lived next door to her son at Magdalen), Iris Apfel (soon to get her own documentary), and lots of people I hadn’t heard of from the fashion industry. Oh, and his neighbour – Editta Sherman, then a 96 year old photographer (who has since died, at the age of 101), who spent most of her time of film putting on hats and pouting at the camera or complaining that the documentary wasn’t about her instead. And she definitely warranted one.
The film is certainly celebratory, and it is rare to see somebody so completely nice and contented on film. At the same time, he remains rather distant from most people, and his past is still something of a mystery that the film didn’t exert much energy into uncovering. We see one or two snapshots of his youth, but hear very little about father or mother, or even how he sustains himself considering he refuses to accept money for jobs: he has a horror of being ‘owned’. A sub-plot (as it were) about Carnegie Hall residents being evicted is intriguing, but not particularly concluded – and certainly isn’t exploited in the sensationalist way it might have been in some hands.
Yet, somehow, a documentary that isn’t invasively curious about its subject works unexpectedly well. Bill Cunningham New York is interested in the man’s legacy and contribution to fashion and photography, and in one moment in time. It is rather joyful to watch, with enough poignancy to avoid being mawkish. I’d heartily recommend it.
And, now I’m on a documentary spree, I’d love some more recommendations. I’m intending to watch Actress, Finding Vivian Maier, Dear Mr Watterson, and Life Itself at some point…
