April 26th, 2009
Life Magazine
At night I burrow into a pile of blankets and sigh. No more phone calls, emails, demands, must do’s and didn’t do’s. I sigh with anticipation as well, because I know the pleasure that awaits me. Then I reach out my hand, grope for my book and drag my paper companion into my warm and dishevelled bed.
There is a crowd of these books next to the bed, discarded after I’ve had my way with them, or not sufficiently interesting, or eagerly awaiting my attentions or simply too weighty and serious and requiring more than I can give.
The alpha book, as it were, is D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I’m halfway through this and when finished with it each night, I rest it on the plinth of these other books.
Curious as to what books were actually playing the supporting roles, I decided to dismantle the structure and examine the parts.…
Plinth A
Women, A Novel, Charles Bukowski
I was charmed by Bukowski’s poems and coaxed into reading his novels by a dear friend. Perhaps I should have read them earlier in life but was too smitten by Jack Kerouac. And then I moved on to something else. I only have about an eighth of this book to go before finishing, but I have to be in a very particular mood for Bukowski. And quite often that mood has fled by the time I go to bed. He’s a daytime read for me. A long black, a few jitters and an upright chair.
Where Angels Fear to Tread, E.M. Forster
A huge disappointment and I don’t know why it’s still next to the bed. I loved A Passage to India and Howard’s End, but this book was his first and is as awkward and spotty as you would expect. It will be banished to the pile intended for the second hand bookshop.
The Children, Edith Wharton
This book is waiting for an Edith Wharton moment. She is a favourite of mine and this will be my next read, I suspect, after Mellors and Connie have had their way with each other and gone off to live the primal life somewhere.
Plinth B
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
The first paragraph reeled me in and by the end of the second I had to have it. This is an edition that includes Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye. Chandler has followed me around for years, always in the shadows, but when I came upon this edition…I knew it was time.
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Now this is a very big chunk to chew and needs perfect reading conditions. It resides by the bed in the hope that those conditions will again occur. By perfect reading conditions I mean, absolutely nothing happening in one’s life, or only the tedious and the everyday. Preoccupation with problems kills the reading of all but the easiest books. Anna’s marriage and infidelity must take precedence.
Down the side and stacked against the wall within easy reaching distance from the bed lie two more towers.
Tower Small
Daemon, Verity Crowe
This is a self published book by a writer friend who shares my interest in the classical world. Dr. Crowe sent me this book from her abode at the base of the French Alps, a short distance from Mont Blanc. As I have good memories of being on the Italian Monte Bianco I am determined to read Dr. Crowe’s book.
A very scatty reason for reading a book, but no more so than an interesting cover photo – a marketing strategy I have succumbed to. I was so taken with the cover of one book, but bored by its contents, I tore the cover off and pinned it up in my study and put the rest in the recycling.
Little Birds, Anais Nin
This book of erotic short stories is in the pile as a research item. ‘Oh yeah,’ I hear you say. But as a writer who includes sex scenes in her books I have to read how others approach similar material. Anais does it well, and she does it with a true feel for the erotic as opposed to a mechanics manual.
Tower Big
Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
Dear old Edith again. This is one of the saddest of her books, and one that I finished in tears. The House of Mirth, another of her books, produced not only tears but also sobbing and hiccups during the last quarter of the book. There is something about Lily Bart’s fate, and the combination of her naiveté, her prejudices and her resistance that resonates with me. Some would simply put the book down and say ‘silly girl.’
Stalin-In the Court of the Red Tzar, Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Now I’m back at the research book. One of the characters in The Book of Love, William, is of Russian descent and produced in me an acute Russian phase.
Vodka, kasha, pickled mushrooms, and black bread were all consumed while reading the Arkady Renko novels by Martin Cruz Smith. Friends were plied with stroganoff, more vodka and Gregorian chant until the required level of melancholy was achieved.
A Stained White Radiance, Jamie Lee Burke
Read it and plopped it on the pile. A good writer and a story teller. Must reshelve.
Diary of an Art Dealer, Rene Gimpel
I picked this 1963 edition up in a second hand bookshop. The back cover informed me that Gimpel had been a great international art dealer and during the period of the diary – 1918 to 1938 - the French, English and American art worlds are scrutinized and ‘many anecdotes revealed.’ How irresistible to one with an art background.
I haven’t read it yet, and have vague hopes of ‘bare all’ anecdotes of Renoir or Mary Cassat wrestling with their creative demons. But a quick browse has revealed perhaps less interesting snippets. For example, Gimpel writes of Proust coming to visit, ‘Proust always felt the cold; even in an overheated room he doesn’t take off his thickly lined overcoat.’
I must be generous and give more time to Monsieur Gimpel, perhaps I’ll find what I’m looking for. He stays by the bed.
The Memory Room, Christopher Koch.
Koch is one of my favourite Australian authors. I’ve read The Year of Living Dangerously a couple of times enjoying his brilliant recreation of the atmosphere surrounding the final moments of the Sukarno regime in Indonesia.
Couples, John Updike
I read this book many years ago during an Updike binge. I loved his Rabbit books and upon finishing them felt that awful sense of loss when you know you have to move on, that there are no more in the series to be read, and you will never, ever read anything good again and may as well read comic books. I found Couples soon after. His writing about sex impressed me at the time, and so when I came upon another copy of the book in a second hand bookshop I bought it and mentally place it on my ‘Writing the Sexual Encounter Research Shelf.’
I don’t need to have these books next to the bed. I do have plenty of bookshelves. But somehow just having the one book I am currently reading feels forlorn and a little cold, a little too organised.
My book stash is far from a chaotic pile littered with old tissues and nail polish bottles and unpaid bills. It’s more a warm and organic outgrowth of my thought processes over the last few months. I know why they are there- because each has come a little closer to my consciousness than those books on the shelves - and they form a small chorus each night to croon me softly to sleep.
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April 18th, 2009
The Yellow Silk Dress
I am busy engaging in the old must-sharpen-pencils-before-I-can-write strategy. Procrastination, as it is commonly known. But as I write on a laptop, I don’t need the pencils. Perhaps I could check my email – there might be something interesting or urgent waiting for me. Or I could look slightly to the left and stare out the window. Or I could look up the meaning of ‘procrastinate’. May as well know the exact meaning of my current state of mind.
I am, according to the Dictionary.com site, deferring action, and delaying until an opportunity is lost. My 1911 copy of the Oxford English dictionary goes one step further and accuses me of being dilatory. I dilated even further when I dug up my trusty 1952 copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, and I discovered that to engage in procrastination could also be described as engaging in Fabian Tactics.
Fabian Tactics? This could lead to some excellent procrastination.
I nipped over to Wikipedia, despite having an ancient set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. To get out of my chair and walk into the living room, pull down the index and find the entry on the Fabian Society, replace the index and find the relevant volume is just too much like hard work, and possibly against the spirit of Fabian Tactics.
The Fabian Society, according to Wikipedia is ‘a British intellectual socialist movement whose purpose is to advance the principles of Social Democracy via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary means’.
So where does the procrastination come in? To be reformist is not deferring action. I was missing something. On reading further I discovered the Fabians to be named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, nicknamed, (beware transposing those letters…) ‘Cunctator,’ meaning The Delayer, whose battle strategy consisted of the guerrilla tactics of harassment rather than direct confrontation on the battle field.
It is true that I am not approaching my writing task in a confrontational way, but nor am I conducting guerrilla warfare with it. The term Fabian Tactics proved not be the definition I was after and I returned to Thesaurus where I discovered I was, by procrastinating, indulging in ‘masterly inactivity’, ‘fribbling’ or – thank you Quintus Fabius, ‘cunctating.’
The opportunity to procrastinate is one to savour. But I went one step further back to the old word ‘leisure,’ yesterday and went to bed for the afternoon with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Be not alarmed, jaded reader, I speak of the newly released Penguin edition in the recognisable orange black and white cover. The covers hark back, (clever Penguin marketing people), to a slower time, a time when choosing a book was not an act decided by a visceral attraction to the cover image.
To pry myself away from the screen and re educate myself in reading has become a compelling obsession for me lately. The screen brings anxiety, brings demands, brings urgency. The book allows me to escape.
I am also about to re engage in an old technology – writing a letter with pen and paper. A novel and charming idea. Imagine the freedom, to squiggle and draw, to scrawl when I want and to do perfect modified cursive if I want. To sketch a little picture next to my words and to not have to master thirty computer programs in order to do so. One drawback. Once written, it can’t be changed. No going back and editing, no cut and paste, no second chances. Get it right first time or not at all.
My father spent the second half of his working life in a position that required him to write long, detailed legal decisions. Despite his assistants and staff all using computers, he would write his decisions in longhand. When asked by me, completely bemused by how he did it without Word, he replied, that he thought about each sentence before he wrote it.
I raised my eyebrows and nodded slowly. Simple question, simple answer.
To write and get it right first time is a challenging concept. My father used an A4 notepad and ballpoint pen and worked on a desk free of clutter. He never used correcting fluid and prided himself on the evenness of his handwriting. (You can imagine what our family dinners were like.)
My handwriting lurches from hastily scrawled printing to illegible and all variations in between. And it deteriorates the more I use a keyboard. When I write handwritten notes my hand grips the pen in an unsteady way, like an accident victim learning to walk again.
I have read, where I don’t know, that writers working on computers tend to become more ‘wordy.’ One would expect from that observation that handwriting a book favoured an economy of style, and yet to read a nineteenth century novel is to experience ‘wordy’ sometimes to exasperating excess.
Did Anthony Trollope cunctate when faced with writing Barchester Towers at 200,372* words? To produce a manuscript of 85, 000 words I have written perhaps 200,000. I whittle away, replace, add a bit, cut, cut more, cut another chunk, until I am satisfied, and it is a long process despite the ease computers lend to writing. Whereas Trollope might have had to get it right first time - by gaslight with pen, nib and notebook. And yet I, with all my modern tools, am still dilating and cunctating. But Trollope’s readers had the leisure for his lengthy books, and my readers, like me, can only steal fragments of leisure in between answering phones, emails, social networking messages, twittering, exhaustion and those gorgeous moments where they allow themselves to cunctate.
Women Reading, E.F. Aman-Jean
*The Victorian Literary Studies Archive: Concordances website
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April 8th, 2009
John William Waterhouse
“Slowly, she began to engage with the pictures, recognizing the imagery from Classical myths, and the paintings of English painter, John William Waterhouse. In lavish, decorative drapery, his figures portrayed the stories of Orpheus, Circe and Ulysses. And there was poor old Ophelia, holding a dressful of flowers, her eyes pink from crying, ready to hurl herself into the stream, to get away from all the awful men in her life.
She didn’t hear William come back from the bedroom, and had no idea how long he had stood at the doorway watching her, as she sang to herself, while turning pages.”
Circe, John William Waterhouse
“Startled, she rolled over and sat up, then slumped back down as she noted his unsmiling face. She returned to the book, examining a picture of Circe in her red dress. The drapery and jeweled belt fascinated her, if only one could dress like that these days.
‘Good sleep?’ she asked, without looking at him, but she could feel him looking at her.
‘Can I join you?’
She turned her head and looked in astonishment, and he smiled at her. His shirt was rumpled and his hair all messy. She swallowed as she took in his deliciously sleepy appearance. Of course he could join her on the floor, any time he cared to. But she resisted making a quip about them and floors
‘I like looking at pictures.’
She gestured with her arm, ‘My floor is your floor.’
Their shoulders touched as she turned the page.
‘I love this one,’ she said. ‘I used to have a poster of it in my bedroom as a teenager. Hylas and the nymphs.’
‘Why did you like it?’
‘Is that a trick question from an ex academic? Because I can only give you my untrained, tainted by culture, immediate response.’
She stared at him warily. His face was so close, she could see the pores in his skin, smell his sleepy scent. Too close, making her uneasy, he’d push her away in a minute.
‘I don’t mind, I’m not an academic any more. I don’t care whether it’s correct to like, or dislike, something.’
‘I like it because it’s pretty.’ She gasped in mock horror and clamped her hand over her mouth. ‘Don’t tell anyone I said that.’
‘I’ll keep it a secret until I die.’
‘Look at their sweet faces,’ she said, ‘And their pale skin. They had nothing better to do than place flowers in their hair and swim among the water lilies. What a life.’
‘And that appeals to you?’
‘As a teenager, I suppose anything that reeks of indolence is appealing. But no, it was the aesthetic, all these Edwardian paintings attracted me; I used to trail around antique markets with my girlfriends on a Saturday, buying old dresses and bags. We’d read poetry in the afternoon and imagine our lives to be infinitely tragic. I had nothing more tragic in those days than Sports Day, or having to walk home from my friend’s house, instead of getting a lift.’
William rolled onto his side, hand propping up his head, watching her as she turned the pages.
‘Now I feel like her, the Lady of Shallot,’ she said, pointing at the woman about to hurl herself to her death. ‘Now I understand.’
‘She killed herself for unrequited love.’
‘Yes, for the knight, Lancelot.’
‘You’re a Romantic, Lily.’
‘And you William? Who are you?’”
John William Waterhouse
“He flicked through the pages, stopped briefly at Ulysses, struggling with the siren song, but went back to Hylas and his innocent nymphs.
‘They pulled him in, you know. The nymphs pulled him in and he drowned. That picture represents male fear.’
‘Let’s not go there,‘ she smiled. ‘I don’t want you to be horrible to me again.’
‘He drowned in a sensual world of big eyes and white skin.’
‘But he wants to do it, you can tell,’ she murmured, glancing at him and looking back at the picture. ‘He wants to hurl himself in and get amongst all that girl flesh.’
William stood up. ‘It’s a big seller that poster, all of his paintings are,’ he said, ‘They make it all seem so simple.’
‘Myths are, aren’t they?’
‘What?’
‘Simple.’
‘I don’t think so. Anyway, enough of this.’”
Extract from The Book of Love by Phillipa Fioretti, to be published by Hachette Australia in April 2010
John William Waterhouse
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April 7th, 2009
Horst P. Horst
Toni Frissell, Vogue
Flickr
Nancy Kwan
Jean Moral
Slip of a Girl
Black bra and step ins
Clara Bow
Jean Moral
Grace
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April 3rd, 2009
My children choose artichokes every time. Unfortunately for them artichokes in Australia are very seasonal and very expensive. Their favourite dish is ravioli stuffed with artichoke, but it’s the sort of epic dish that I start making and halfway through think, ‘What have I done?’
I trim and braise the artichokes in garlic, olive oil and a bit of stock, and when tender I scoop them out and chop up the tender hearts and small leaves. Then comes the tedious job of scraping the flesh off the leaves with a sharp knife. An hour or so later I have my bowl of artichoke pulp.
By this stage I’ve had enough, all I want to do is hurl them in the compost, return the eggs to the chook shed and go lie down in a darkened room. But I have to keep going.
I mix a bit of Parmesan into the pulp and put aside, and then start making the pasta with eggs and flour. I knead and scrape and feed the dough through the pasta machine, again and again and again. Several hours later I have two trays of artichoke-stuffed, handmade ravioli, a throbbing headache and a strong aversion to all things artichoke.
I serve them with a little more artichoke, olive oil and Parmesan, and a heaped glass of Semillon. Soon the artichokes are nothing but a memory. But I’ve forgiven them by now for being such an arduous vegetable to prepare, because who ever cooked a plate of frozen peas to celebrate a birthday or mark a holiday?
Hostaria Giggetto al Portico d
Rome in the spring is awash with artichokes. Wooden boxes of them are scattered around the Campo de’ Fiori, and they are featured on most restaurants – particularly in the old Jewish quarter near the Portico d’ Ottavia.
One of the best ways to eat an artichoke is prepared as Carciofi alla Giudea. The artichoke is opened slightly and fried in olive oil until tender and the edges of the leaves are a crisp brown, and served simply with pepper and salt. If ever you are in Rome in the spring this is a dish worth risking your life for. And you will risk it – every time you cross the road.
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Exploring the Bedside Book Stash
for a good feed ...
