From George Orwell’s (1948) book Nineteen Eighty-Four - I hope nothing else becomes the norm.
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Writing & Books
I’m working on a new all singing, all dancing, online home for the The Book Club For Drunks. As part of this, I commissioned the marvelous Erin Forsyth to make an illustration encapsulating all club’s activities… drinking & reading, ahem. Here’s a tiny preview:
I LOVE IT. From the big brash party skull, right down to the lipstick smeared martini glass and the blank book spines waiting to be filled in. Can’t wait to have the website up and running. Stay tuned!
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I love good writing about food, and Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
“I wanted a place with a Velvet Underground CD that made you nod your head and feel warm with recognition. I wanted the lettuce and the eggs at room temperature … I wanted the tarnished silverware and chipped wedding china from a paladar in Havana, and the canned sardines I ate in that little apartment on Twenty-Ninth Street. The marrow bones my mother made us eat as kids that I grew to crave as an adult. We would have brown butcher paper on the tables, not linen tablecloths, and when you finished your meal, the server would just pull the pen from behind her ear and scribble the bill directly on the paper like [the waitresses in France] had done. We would use jelly jars for wine glasses. There would be no foam and no ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food; just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry.”
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I am a bookish girl, and nothing pleases me more than libraries, notes in margins and the smell of binding glue. But recently I was given the super lovely gift of a Kindle
{My Kindle, snug in its blue case – the device itself powers a light in the case!}
Why I love my Kindle:
- All the hits, for free. I HEART HEART HEART that most of the classics are available for free. Doing some top-level math, the cost of a kindle would be covered by just a tiny stack of Penguin Classics. So far I’ve read Pride & Prejudice, Little Women and Anna Karenina, without trotting down to the library.
- Simply buying digital saves you money. Book prices are at least a few dollars cheaper, and you save on shipping. (Although of course if you buy at Book Depository there is free worldwide shipping.)
- Space (and back) saving. It lets me cut down on the space required to store my belongings. Currently most of my possessions is books… and moving house is painful. Books are heavy! With the Kindle I can store hundreds in my satchel.
- DIY magazines. You can push long articles from the web to your Kindle to read later as a separate ”book”. A Chrome extension gives you this ability with just a click. I am looking forward to making my own awesome magazines to read on flights and more.
- Freedom to connect. I got the 3G model, which seems superfluous in the age of wi-fi. But should I ever make it to the backwaters of Borneo again, I’ll never spend hours searching for an internet café. A 3G Kindle will let me check email and the web (albeit slowly) from anywhere on the planet.
Books I have lined up to read:
- Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by Kate Fox. I did a few anthropology papers at university and loved them, so I ordered this book for a bit of nostalgia. Social anthropology starts at home for Fox; rather than trot off to the Amazon, she looked at her own tribe.
- Here She Comes Now (3 short stories) by Chad Taylor. ‘Here She Comes Now’ is a collection short stories about modern relationships and family tensions, with a focus on dialogue. The author’s 2004 novel, Electric is one of my favourite New Zealand books.
- Do the Work
by Steven Pressfield. A productivity guide aimed at writers, based around the Art Of War. How could I resist?
- Just Kids
by Patti Smith. Just Kids chronicles Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe’s time in New York before they found fame. I’m sure many of you have read this already and you’ll agree, it’s captivating. I am half way through it already and I don’t want it to end.
- The Wasp Factory: A Novel by Iain Banks. I have read some of the science fiction, and rather like his 2003 novel Dead Air. A friend recommend this book to me as “life changing”, and I can’t think of higher praise than that.
I think at this stage the Kindle and I are entering into a long-term relationship, but if I fall in love with a book, or appreciate its design aesthetic, I’ll probably buy a hard copy. Or should I happen to drift into a second-hand bookstore, I’m sure I’ll emerge with a bag full of new-to-me books.
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Artist Agustina Woodgate’s contribution to the O’Miami poetry festival (April 2011) was a Poetry Bomb. This entails creeping around thrift stores, a needle and thread in hand, sewing tiny poems onto tags and seams. It’s a lovely idea – just imagine the delight of purchasing a cool jacket, then discovering a little something extra to make you smile. Agustina is the fortune cookie of vintage!
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Anna Karenina. This is going to sound ridiculous, but I always got the plot of this book mixed up with the life of one Anna Karina.
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Currently cracking into Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. It’s the next read at Book Club For Drunks, and I look forward to gleefully yakking about it with my tipsy comrades.
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…When you get a new notebook, rip out the first few pages, stamp on it, get dirt on the edges. This is an exercise an art-teacher friend of mine makes her students do with their sketchbooks. It is to say: this sketchbook is not holy. It is not being created to be shown in the Louvre. It is a place of work and practise, where a lot of mistakes will be made.
{A great tip for writers and artists from acalthla on Ask Metafilter,
pristine moleskine photo by Sean McGrath.}
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And This Is You
You wake up rooms. When you walk in the door, everything cheers. Welcome! Whatever you look at swoons in the glow of your attention: people, tables, memories, spoons. Yes. Even spoons. The spoon you ate your soup with was instantly in love, lived only to serve you, to be with your hand, to touch your lips—it’s still, to this very day, writing poems that mourn your loss. Everything aches for your lively gaze. The whole room is tense, trembling, waiting to arise in your view. The menu sings. The smug table mocks the others. Your glass of wine gasps with every single sip. And the floor—the wooden floor’s past and future cohere with meaning in the event of propping your stance, your walk, and the booth in which you sit. It recalls its origins, built by cursing men with swinging hammers, aware of its inevitable demolition, all unquestionably justified by the presence of your feet. And the people, men and women alike, see you and forget themselves. They are ghosts with no memories. They can’t look you in the eye. They feel like weeping and can’t say why. The flickering candle is humbled, silent, content to merely light the way.
Don’t wonder who this is about. It’s about you. You wake up rooms.
[From the BHJ, photo from here]
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Do Top 100 Books polls and charts agree on a set of classics? Information is Beautiful’s David McCandless scraped the results of over 15 notable book polls, readers surveys and top 100′s, from Oprah to some high-faulting lists. The cloud shows the consensus on what we must read. I always find it interesting how War and Peace still persists in these lists, despite the fact I am yet to meet anyone who’s read the thing. Get access to the full analysis here.
While the data is pretty cool in a cloud, I would love to see someone make a more vibrant graphic with the information. A book spine bar chart? Something to do with issues & rubber stamps? It could be a nice wee project.
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My friend Leon recommended A Confederacy of Dunces to me. Which amuses me no end – the main character has a very similar hat to his. It was written by John Kennedy Toole and published in 1980, 11 years after the author’s suicide. It’s a chewy sort of book, full of awful characters and unpleasant medical upsets – valve strains and the like. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s good, but not pleasant. Will persevere.
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Summer lets me zip through books at the speed of light. Post-festivities and pre-work, all you’ve got is a lot of time to sink back into the beanbag, sip ginger beer and flip through the pages.
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Photo by Tomáš Petrů
It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them. “Books” includes novels, poetry, text books, works of reference, sociological treatises and much else, and length and price do not correspond to one another, especially if one habitually buys books second-hand. You may spend ten shillings on a poem of 500 lines, and you may spend sixpence on a dictionary which you consult at odd moments over a period of twenty years. There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost, in terms of money, may be the same in each case.
From George Orwell’s rather grand Books v. Cigarettes essay. (This will come as a surprise to you all but…) I think the value lies in books. I love dipping in and out of favourite passages, and turning to people far more knowledgeable than I for advice. Books are definitely my vice. If only there were enough hours in the day to read all the ones I buy. Read the entire text here.
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The posters for the four books we’ve read so far at Book Club For Drunks! This is a mostly-monthly book club I host for people who enjoy the fine combination of reading and drinking. As this combination sometimes impairs memories, we provide notes for each meeting detailing the author’s life, cocktail recipes, how the book starts and key liquor infused quotes. (If you’re interested in reading a PDF of these notes please email me.)
Up next is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novel, The Great Gatsby:
F. S. F.’s a bit of a babe, don’t you think?
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