It so perchanced that over the last week I was reading two books about poets - Frances Bingham's Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life and Alison Lurie's memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson, Familiar Spirits.
There were moments, reading about the ongoing draaaama of Ackland's life, that I was somewhat reminded of this passage in Cold ( Read more... )

What I read
Finally finished Fuckology, with a sense of duty dispatched.
Read another Elswyth Thane, The Light Heart (1947), which comes immediately before Kissing Kin and I'm not sure I ever read before back in the day. Runs from the accession of Edward VII to middle of WW1. A bit more reflective of attitudes, manners and assumptions of the day, ( Read more... )

I can't find it on The Guardian website, but there is an essay in the printed Review section by Lara Feigel (of the rather unsatisfactory book on Doris Lessing) about the Great DH Lawrence Revival.
(She just happens to be writing a book about him...)
But Y O Y?
This is someone who is not exactly obscure - books in print and I daresay on uni EngLit ( Read more... )

Meanwhile: on perhaps same old, same old themes:
Okay, I dissent a little from the 'forgotten' in the title here when one discovers in the text that there are several biographies of her and she was involved with a number of famous names and presumably figures in theirs, but 'erased' in the history of this particular tarot desk, yeah: Meet the ( Read more... )

What I read
Poets and the Peacock Dinner was really rather good, in that micro-historical way where the author has taken some apparently minor odd incident and used it to reflect upon larger issues it involved. I'm not sure I agree with all the conclusions, such as they were, but it was a fun journey, and there were delights along the way. I ( Read more... )

(Actually, for reasons given, I don't think this quite reaches an apogee of the Hardyesque, but still).
Came across this, cited as a supporting example in a discussion of the early C20th literary culture of making awards and giving dinners to literary figures.
The Royal Society of Literature awarded Thomas Hardy its Gold Medal on the occasion of ( Read more... )

Or at least, the impression one has gathered from the subsequent literature that a lot of the experience of the Western Front was being cooped up in small spaces in an emotional state that combined terror and pervasive tedium?
Okay, this is an analogy I wouldn't want to push too far, but I'm wondering whether as a cataclysmic event outside people's ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Ancestral Night: v good. I think it holds up on its own, but it's clearly in dialogue with/riffing off quite a lot of previous sf and its themes/tropes/expectations, as well tipping a hat to Victorian novels.
Read Lucasta Miller, L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated "female ( Read more... )

Dept of, there was never that golden age, srsly:
If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?
Civility among people who disagree with one another.
Not so much 'Don't Mock' in Frankie Howerd voice, as gloomy sardonic laughter, directed at St Vincent in the Q&A in today's Guardian Weekend.
Dept of, actually this is not ( Read more... )

Take it away, Edna! Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!
Give back my book and take my kiss instead.
Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,
“What a big book for such a little head!”
Come, I will show you now my newest hat,
And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!
Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that.
I never again shall tell you what ( Read more... )