I don’t buy presents. Not for anyone at all, but this year I am buying 1 (well strictly 2) for myself.  I am going to buy a copy of The Elegence of the Hedgehog – one in English and one in French.

I’ve wanted to improve my reading French for a while and the back-and-forth of two books is the easiest way for me to do that. I’ve waited until I could find a book that I wouldn’t mind obsessing over for a goodly time and after the first three paragraphs as an introduction to Renée the concierge I knew I had found my book.

Just the first three paragraphs – the young scion who found Marx – Oh! – that was enough. Such a deeply satisfying wit has Mme Barbery and since I am also unmarried, ugly and “plump” (which is a bit of an understatement), I feel I have found my natural place in the universe.

As soon as this last bit of writing is done for this term, I am going somewhere quiet, hole up and read.

This is by the artist Judy Watson Napangardi. She’s an Aboriginal Australian with an intense sense of texture and colour.

BTW hair string (the name of the painting) refers to the culutral practice of using human hair to construct several different kinds of imporant objects which take a part in both every day life and ceremonial practice.

Imagine viewing washing my dishes in such a way! It would definately change the texture of how I view my life.

Hair String

There is an article called “Girls Just Wanna Have Fangs: The unwarranted backlash against fans of the world’s most popular vampire-romance series.” It’s pretty good and interesting in a mildly provocative way.

Essentially what Sady (the author) says is that while “Twilight isn’t a literary masterpiece” the somewhat unrestrained criticism of the books (and the characters, and the authors, and the fans) have little to do with any lack of literary quality and more to do with the fact that it’s a girly girl story.

Here’s a question: how many readers of romance novels are fairly careful to hide what they are reading in public?  How many people do the same when they read Zane Grey?
Read the rest of this entry »

I took the day off work today so I could do a few errands and have some time to myself to just be in the world. I got up late, which in itself is a luxury I rarely manage, dressed in a quiet house (well, as quiet as it gets with three cats and a dog), then got in my car to drive across town for the first errand.

It’s been raining for several days, and was bucketing during the night and early this morning (could hear it through my open bedroom window as I was lying, listening, in the dark), but by the time I left the house the rain had stopped, the wind had picked up and the clouds were starting to be blown apart. As I got in my car there was a blue patch to the north.

The drive is pleasant in the middle of the morning. The traffic is as light as it gets for this region and the wind had cleared the roads of standing water so I could zip right along. I don’t always listen to music as I drive. Most of the time I prefer the relative silence that the car’s space offers. Today, however, I punched the button, and out poured Stravinsky. Normally Stravinsky is not really accessible to me. I like Rite of Spring but mostly I just don’t have enough in common with the music to be able to see through it to the world Stravinsky was creating with the sounds and rhythms. This piece that was playing is from Petrushka and I have to say I was about 20 seconds away from either changing the channel or turning off the radio when I came out of the curve and onto the bridge approach.
Read the rest of this entry »

On Wooster Collective I saw this. Vera’s Flickr photostream is here.

The Art of Vera (via Wooster Collective)

The Women Unbound reading challenge (which Litlove mentions here) is something I have been thinking about since I first came across it. For years, from the time I was quite a small girl, until I was through my second degree, I did a bunch of heavy lifting when it came to feminist reading.  I don’t want to revisit all those books, although I have incorporated what they offered me in my day-to-day thinking about what I can do and what I am.

I don’t choose books based on gender issues any longer. I have narrowed my focus to a rather small subset of what it means to be human that, seems to me anyway, to be prior to what it means for me to be a woman in the world. Not that my gender doesn’t effect how things are for me. It does. Invisibility, condescending assumptions and other such typical things are just a part of what it is to be in this time and place. Having said that I no longer read books based on gender, I most definitely count myself as a feminist. I think any woman who has her own bank account, drives and votes has to recognize herself as a feminist on pain of terrible hypocrisy.

I have noticed that if I am going to read something light, it almost always involves a female protagonist – Olive Kitteridge, for example. Notable exceptions are books by Indian (Native American) authors, Cormac McCarthy and Terry Pratchett (whose novels Night Watch and Monstrous Regiment still make me roll around with laughter. Though, come to think about it Monstrous Regiment is about women pretending to be men so they can fight in the on-going war, with predictably hilarious results – this is Pratchett after all).

So I don’t think I can really say I am going to start reading books to meet the challenge, but what I think I can do is look at what it means to be human and female through art.  That’s why Vera. But you never know, if I run across an interesting fictional woman in a novel or even one in a non-fiction setting, I’ll pop it up here.