Tuesday, 29 March 2022
Ghosts of loss, death, injury and trauma
Helen Dunmore has been described as "first and last, a poet", but I discovered her through her ghost story, The Greatcoat. Set a few years after World War II, it is unnerving and nightmarish.
Wednesday, 23 March 2022
A limerick for today
I logged on to Facebook this morning
To make a quick check on a posting.
I've sat and I've scrolled
For three hours, all told,
When I could have been limerick writing.
To make a quick check on a posting.
I've sat and I've scrolled
For three hours, all told,
When I could have been limerick writing.
Tuesday, 22 March 2022
Marcel Marceau, miming artist
Source: Chariserin-Flickr Creative Commons |
Here are a few lines about him.
Marcel Marceau, miming artist,
Stripy shirt and whitened face.
He, the art of silence practised;
Pulled on inconspicuous ropes,
Leant on walls that went unnoticed,
Took large bites from fruit unseen,
Struggled in the face of tempests.
Famously, in Mel Brooks' Silent
Movie (nineteen-seventy-six)
Marceau speaks. He says quite clearly,
"Non!"
More stuff
Monday, 21 March 2022
First day of spring
Friday, 4 March 2022
This was not the face in the doorway
Nadifa Mohamed's The Fortune Men was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and praised as an excellent example of historical fiction that explores present day issues, in this case, racism and injustice. But it's more than fiction. The characters are real people whose voices have never been heard, and the story is taken from a real life incident that happened 70 years ago.
Monday, 28 February 2022
A teenage boy with raging hormones
Charles Highway is a "chinless elitist and bratty whey-faced lordling". He's the protagonist of Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers. His saving grace is that he's young, nineteen going on twenty, and if you can remember how awful you were at his age, you'll be able to laugh at the "devious, calculating, self-obsessed" little twit.
Thursday, 24 February 2022
Antigone, Iphis, Electra and more
It was eighteen months after reading a review of Antigone Rising before I bought it. I'd forgotten what had drawn my attention to the book and assumed it was just a general interest in the Greek myths or perhaps a recent book club choice, Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie's modern retelling of Antigone. So it was something of a surprise, a pleasant one, to find it was actually about how those myths are being appropriated by feminists and non-binary people in the 21st century.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Labels
art
(2)
Art & music & misc reviews
(11)
Book reviews
(208)
bookclub
(41)
books
(2)
christmas
(2)
concerts
(2)
creative-writing
(11)
essays
(3)
events
(1)
exhibitions
(3)
fiction
(162)
France
(1)
humour
(1)
Italy
(2)
Japan
(2)
journeys
(9)
limericks
(6)
music
(7)
musings
(3)
My stories
(3)
My verse & poetry
(22)
non-fiction
(39)
photography
(1)
poetry
(4)
restaurants
(2)
Riviera
(1)
Russia
(1)
short-stories
(3)
South Africa
(1)
Sweden
(1)